A small plain moray of shallow rubble, usually seen only as a head in a hole.
To about 47 cm. Slender and moderately elongate, compressed at the rear, with a short conical snout and the eye over the middle of the jaws. Brown with a mottled pattern that is usually visible, and a white to yellowish tail tip. The teeth are sharp and conical in two rows along the jaws.
The hardtail moray is the other small moray here: it stops at 17 cm and carries star-shaped white blotches rather than mottling.
One to about eighty metres on rock and coral, solitary in crevices and rarely seen, eating snails, bivalves, worms, crustaceans and cephalopods. The two standard sources disagree sharply on its depth, one giving 14 metres and the other 84.
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.
