Barred brown and cream from snout to tail, with a mouth full of crushing plates.
A heavy-bodied moray to about 150 cm, banded from snout to tail in fifty to eighty narrow rings of cream to yellow on a dark chocolate ground — a pattern no other moray in the region carries, and one that holds from a small juvenile to a large adult. The snout is short and blunt, the body thick relative to its length, and the eye is small. It is the only member of its genus.
The teeth are the reason for the shape. Instead of the recurved fangs of a fish-eating moray it has low, blunt, pebble-like plates on the jaws and on the roof of the mouth, used to crush crabs, shrimps and urchins; the diet is almost entirely hard-shelled invertebrates. Nocturnal, and by day it is deep in a crevice with at most the head showing, often with the body wedged in so firmly that it will not withdraw further. Recorded from the shallows to about 40 m across the Indo-Pacific and into the eastern Pacific. The snowflake moray shares the crushing dentition and the shallow-water, crab-eating habit and is separated on the blotched rather than banded pattern.
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.
