A garden eel ringed in black and white, in colonies on current-swept sand.
A garden eel reaching about 50 cm, most of which stays underground. The exposed part is white, crossed by broad dark rings that continue onto the head, and the pattern is the character that separates it from the spotted garden eel on the same ground: that species is finely speckled with three large black blotches, this one is banded from the snout back. The eye is large and the snout short and blunt.
Colonies sit on open sand where a little current runs, each animal in a mucus-lined vertical tube with the front third of the body held up into the flow. Feeding is on zooplankton carried past, taken one item at a time with a short strike and a return to the same posture. The whole colony reacts together to an approach, sinking in a wave that runs ahead of a diver, and a colony that has been crossed once takes some minutes to come back up.
Recorded on sand slopes in Indonesia and neighbouring waters. Because the eels withdraw before a diver arrives, most photographs are made with a long lens from a fixed position at the edge of the colony, and the exposed length in a frame is a fair measure of how little disturbance there has been. Depth records run from about 10 m down.
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.
