The Red Sea garden eel, in colonies of hundreds on open sand, and approachable only from the bottom over several minutes.
To about 84 cm on a single source. This entry has to be honest: no colour or appearance description exists in the standard references, and no depth range has been published, so this page cannot describe what the animal looks like. In life it is a plain greyish-brown garden eel.
The spotted garden eel shares Red Sea sand and is white with dense black spots and two large black blotches, so a plain unspotted garden eel here is this one.
The behaviour, by contrast, is the best documented of any garden eel on this site, and it is directly useful. Flight-initiation distance was measured at Eilat at 3.5 metres at a quiet site and 3.2 metres at a busy one, falling to between 2.1 and 2.8 metres during a eutrophication event when feeding took priority over retreating. Groups of fifteen to twenty withdraw together as a diver comes on. That is the number to work with: inside about three metres the colony is gone.
Before spawning, pairs move to adjacent burrows, males fight rivals, and the spawning entwinement can last nine hours or more. Listed as Data Deficient.
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.
