White with black snowflake blotches, blunt teeth, and it hunts crabs in the shallows.
A moray to about 100 cm, white to cream with two rows of large black blotches down the body, each blotch broken by smaller yellow spots so that the pattern reads as a snowflake rather than a bar. The head is short and blunt, the nostrils tubular and conspicuous, and the eye is set well forward. No other moray here carries this pattern.
The teeth are the point of interest: instead of the recurved fangs of a fish-eating moray, this species has blunt, pebble-like molars used to crush crabs and shrimps, which make up nearly all of its diet. It hunts in very shallow water — often in less than a metre, sometimes with the back out of the water in a surge pool — and is active by day as well as at night, which is unusual for the family. Recorded from the intertidal to about 30 m on rubble and rock. Untroubled by divers, and one of the easier morays to photograph out of its hole, because it goes out looking for food rather than waiting.
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.
