A flat carpet shark fringed with skin flaps, lying under a table coral all day.
To about 125 cm, flattened, mottled in brown and cream in a broken network pattern, with a fringe of branched skin flaps around the whole head that breaks up its outline against the substrate. It is unmistakable when found and nearly invisible until then.
It lies motionless under table corals and in cave mouths through the day, taking fish that come within range in a fast strike, and moves at night. Within the six destinations covered here it is a Papua New Guinea animal; it is not recorded from the Indonesian and Philippine muck destinations. Bites on divers are documented and are associated with people standing on or grabbing the animal, and with a diver’s fins entering the strike zone in front of the head — the practical caution is not to settle beside a table coral without looking under it. Recorded from about 3 to 35 m.
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.