A round-bodied moray with a blunt snout and heavy dark blotches, deep in rock and rarely fully out.
To about 140 cm, and it does not look like a moray. The body is very elongate, cylindrical and semi-rigid, the head short, the eyes small, both nostrils tubular, and the tail very short with a blunt skin-covered tip. Pale yellowish-grey to russet brown with yellow-edged black blotches and spots of varying size, and the snout and jaw speckled with black.
The snake eels on the same sand are the confusion and the tail tip settles it: hard and sharply pointed on a snake eel, blunt and skin-covered here.
Nought to twenty-five metres on sand, rubble and between rocks. Extremely secretive and usually only seen at night.
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.
