A very small moray of shallow rubble, easily missed and usually found by turning attention to a single hole.
To about 17 cm, which makes it one of the smallest morays anywhere and the smallest on this site. Tiny and slender with a short broad conical snout and jaws of about equal length. Brown with star-shaped whitish blotches, and a white tail tip that is hard and pointed. The fins are reduced to ridges near the tail.
The rear nostril sits as a hole directly above the eye, paired with a large pore, which gives a double-opening look. The needle-tooth moray, the other small eastern Pacific moray, has its rear nostril above the front of the eye and reaches nearly three times the length, so size alone usually settles it.
Nought to about sixty metres on rock, eating worms, snails, bivalves and crustaceans. Nothing else about its behaviour has been published. Harmless, and too small to injure anyone.
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.
