A moray with long hooked jaws that do not close, so the teeth are always showing. It is not aggressive.
To about 92 cm, and unmistakable. The snout is long and narrow and the jaws are slender and strongly arched, so the mouth cannot close and the teeth are permanently exposed — conical and sharp with alternating large fangs. There are elongate ruffled pores along the upper lip and a large eye set at the midpoint of the mouth. Colour is uniform brown to grey with no markings.
Nothing else on this rock has that jaw, so no further separation is needed. A plain brown moray with a gaping mouth full of teeth is this one.
Two to forty metres on rock, in holes and dark recesses by day and out in the open at night. FishBase calls it harmless, and it is, but the gape here is not respiration or threat: the jaws simply do not meet.
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.
