Cream eel in rows of large black spots, hunting in the open over sand by day.
To about a metre, cream to pale yellow with rows of large round black spots. The number of rows changes as the eel grows, which is worth knowing because it makes small and large animals look like different fish: one row along the upper side below about 25 cm, alternating midline and upper-side spots between roughly 30 and 50 cm, and several upper rows plus smaller spots on the underside in large adults. The confusion is with the banded snake eel Myrichthys colubrinus, which shares the genus, the ground and the habit of hunting in the open — there the marks are broad bands that encircle the body, here they are discrete spots. The tail ends in a hard blunt point rather than a fin.
Sand, rubble and seagrass from the shallows to about 30 m. It is one of the few snake eels regularly seen moving across open sediment rather than lying buried, nosing into the sand after small fishes and crustaceans, and it will keep going past a diver who stays low and still. Alarmed, it drives the tail into the sediment and reverses out of sight in a few seconds. Widespread across the Indo-Pacific and into the Red Sea.
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.
