Dark brown covered in small yellow spots, with a yellow tail tip. Small, out by day more than most morays, and often in a sponge or a coral head.
To about 70 cm. Small and stubby for a moray, compressed at the rear, with a short blunt snout and the eye over or slightly behind the middle of the mouth. Dark brown with numerous yellow dots, smallest on the head and largest and running together towards the tail, and the tail tip always pale, usually deep yellow in life. It is strongly polymorphic: reversed dark-on-pale, reticulated and blotched forms all occur.
The green and purplemouth morays share this reef and both have elongate pointed snouts and reach far greater sizes. Short-snouted, stubby, and yellow-tailed is this fish.
Nought to sixty metres, usually the top thirty-five, on coral reef and rocky shoreline. It is one of the few morays active during the day, and FishBase notes it sometimes hunts alongside other predators, though that is not elaborated anywhere.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
