Orange and white banded garden eel, standing in loose colonies on deep sand.
To about 40 cm and roughly a centimetre thick, of which perhaps the upper third stands clear of the burrow at any time. Bright orange to yellow with clean white bands, a blunt snout and a large eye, which makes it unmistakable: the spotted garden eel Heteroconger hassi, the only other garden eel likely on the same slopes, is pale grey with fine black speckling and larger blotches. Colonies of the two are usually separate.
Open sand exposed to current, recorded from about 18 to 75 m and most often seen around 30 — deeper than the spotted garden eel, and depth rather than rarity is the practical constraint on seeing one. Each eel holds a permanent burrow lined with mucus and feeds on plankton carried past it, leaning out into the flow and withdrawing as a diver crosses the colony. Colony size ranges from a few animals to well over a thousand. Spawning is into the water column and the larvae settle to dig their own burrows. Getting close enough for a photograph means going down onto the sand at the edge of the colony and staying there while the nearest eels come back up, which takes several minutes and does not always work.
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.
