A small shallow-water moray, pale with dark blotches, living in rubble rather than reef.
One of the smallest morays in the region, reaching about 30 cm, pale brown to yellowish with a series of irregular darker brown blotches along the body that sometimes join into broad bars. The head is short, the snout blunt and the eye small, and the whole animal is slender enough to be taken for a large blenny at first sight. The teeth are short and conical rather than the long fangs of the larger species.
It lives in rubble, dead coral and the loose ground of reef flats, usually with the body entirely inside the substrate and only the head at a hole. It is out on the surface after dark, working between stones for small crustaceans and fish. Because the animal is so small, a head at a hole in rubble is easily passed over, and most records come from night dives or from divers already stopped over something else on the same patch.
Recorded through the Indo-Pacific in shallow water, mostly inside 15 m and often in the first few metres, including in surge and in tide pools. On muck sites it belongs to the rubble margins rather than to open sand.
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.
