Pale with bold dark blotches, hunting over Galapagos sand mostly at dusk and after dark.
To about 74 cm. Elongate and cylindrical with a short conical snout and blunt molar-like teeth in several rows. Yellowish to white with large black or dark grey oval spots in a giraffe pattern, the chin and throat spotted, and a pale — not white — margin to the dorsal fin.
The Clarion snake eel is the pair and that fin margin is the character: distinctly white there, pale here, and its spots are smaller and more numerous.
Nought to sixty metres over rock, rubble, sand and gravel. It is sometimes seen in daylight searching under rocks and in crevices, and lies completely buried when inactive.
One name flag. Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes and FishBase both treat Myrichthys tigrinus as a synonym of Myrichthys xysturus, and the STRI database carries the species only under that name. This entry has been corrected to M. xysturus and the old name kept as a synonym.
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.
