A pale snake eel densely marbled in brown, with no pectoral fins at all.
A snake eel to about 85 cm, cream to pale yellow over the whole body with a dense irregular marbling of dark brown that runs from the snout to the tail and breaks into finer spotting on the head. The body is slender and round in section, the snout short, and the dorsal fin begins on the head, well in front of the gill opening. Callechelys has no pectoral fins, which is the separation from the Myrichthys and Ophichthus snake eels that share the same sand and have their own entries.
Most of the animal is normally underground. What shows is the head and a few centimetres of neck held up out of the sediment, turning slowly, with the mouth opening and closing on the respiratory current. The eel backs into sand tail first, using a hardened tail tip, and can disappear from a fully exposed position in a few seconds. Feeding is on small fish and crustaceans taken at close range, mostly at night.
Recorded through the Indo-Pacific on open sand and silt from the shallows to about 40 m. A head at the surface of the sediment is easily read as a worm tube or a piece of debris, and most records come from divers working slowly across open ground rather than from any targeted search.
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.
