---
title: Zebra Moray (Gymnomuraena zebra)
scientific_name: Gymnomuraena zebra
common_name: Zebra Moray
taxon: Moray eel
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-25T18:07:45.376Z
updated: 2026-08-17T21:06:27.298Z
tags: Zebra Moray, Gymnomuraena zebra, Moray eel, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/moray-eel/zebra-moray
---

# Zebra Moray (*Gymnomuraena zebra*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Moray eel (*Muraenidae*)
- **Size:** 150 cm
- **Depth:** 3-50 m
- **Diet:** Durophage
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Reef and rubble, deep inside crevices by day
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- dark brown to black with dozens of narrow white to yellow rings around the body
- rings continue right onto the head, unlike any other moray here
- blunt rounded snout with no visible fangs
- up to 150 cm

Open a moray's mouth and you expect fangs. This one has pebbles.

The zebra moray gave up the family's long recurved teeth entirely and replaced them with low, blunt, rounded plates, packed across the jaws and the roof of the mouth like a cobbled floor. It is a crushing mill, and it exists because this eel does not chase fish. It eats crabs, and it deals with them the way a hammer deals with a nut: take hold, crush the shell, work out the contents. The bite that makes other morays dangerous is simply not present here.

Everything else follows from that. It is slow, it is placid, it spends the day jammed so far into a crevice that most sightings are of a striped tail, and it hunts at night by pushing its head into holes and feeling for shells.

The pattern is the best in the family: dozens of narrow pale rings on near-black, running the whole length and continuing onto the head, where every other banded moray here goes plain. There is nothing else it can be confused with.

At a meter and a half it is also one of the larger morays on this coast, which makes the harmlessness slightly comic.

## Also known as

- **English:** zebra moray, Reticulated Moray, Zebra Eel
- **Arabic:** Abu Jineh, Asfan, Nashuj
- **French:** Murène Zébrée, Murène zèbre, Murène-zèbre
- **Italian:** Murena zebra
- **German:** Zebramuräne
- **Spanish:** morena cebra, Morena Zebra, Zebra
- **Portuguese:** Moréia-zebra
- **Swedish:** zebramuräna
- **Czech:** muréna zebrovaná
- **Japanese:** ゼブラウツボ, Zeburautsubo
- **Chinese:** 斑馬裸海鯙, 斑馬裸鯙, 条纹裸海鳝
- **Russian:** Гимномурена
- **DA:** Zebramuræne
- **SW:** Mkunga-chui
- **TAH:** puhi
- **TGL:** Ahas-dagat, Igat, Malibanos

## Scientific synonyms

- *Echidna zebra* (Shaw, 1797)
- *Gymnomuraena fasciata* Kaup, 1856
- *Gymnothorax zebra* Shaw, 1797
- *Muraena molendinaris* Bennett, 1833
- *Muraena zebra* (Shaw, 1797)
- *Poecilophis zebra* (Shaw, 1797)

## Range

Federal Republic of Somalia, Indian Ocean, Madagascar, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/moray-eel/zebra-moray)*
*Updated: August 17, 2026*