A flattened carpet shark with a fringed mouth, lying still on rock or in a cave mouth and easily stepped on.
To about 3 m, flattened, mottled in brown and cream with pale ringed spots, and fringed with branched skin lobes around the mouth that break up the outline of the head. It lies still on rock, under ledges and against jetty pylons, and it is one of the animals most often stepped on rather than seen.
It is a shark, it has a wide mouth full of long backward-pointing teeth, and it bites when trodden on, grabbed or pulled by the tail. The jaws are hard to release and the bite has to be treated as a serious wound. It does not hunt divers and it does not chase; the incidents on record follow contact. On jetty and shore dives in New South Wales, look at the ledge before putting a hand in it and look at the bottom before standing on it.
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.