The white-ring garden eel (''Heteroconger canabus''), also known as the Cape garden eel in

Mexico Mexico ( Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guate ...

, is an eel in the family

Congridae The Congridae are the family of conger and garden eels. Congers are valuable and often large food fishes, while garden eels live in colonies, all protruding from the sea floor after the manner of plants in a garden (thus the name). The family i ...

(conger/garden eels).''Heteroconger canabus''
at www.fishbase.org. It was described by Garry I. McTaggart-Cowan and Richard Heinrich Rosenblatt in 1974, originally under the genus '' Taenioconger''.Cowan, G. I. M. and R. H. Rosenblatt, 1974 (28 Mar.) ef. 12''Taenioconger canabus, a new heterocongrin eel (Pisces: Congridae) from Baja California, with a comparison of a closely related species.'' Copeia 1974 (no. 1): 55-60. It is a marine,

tropical The tropics are the regions of Earth surrounding the Equator. They are defined in latitude by the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere at N and the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere at S. The tropics are also referred to ...

eel which is known from the

Gulf of California The Gulf of California ( es, Golfo de California), also known as the Sea of Cortés (''Mar de Cortés'') or Sea of Cortez, or less commonly as the Vermilion Sea (''Mar Bermejo''), is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean that separates the Baja C ...

, in the eastern central

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the contine ...

. It is known to dwell at a depth of , and inhabits sand sediments near

reef A reef is a ridge or shoal of rock, coral or similar relatively stable material, lying beneath the surface of a natural body of water. Many reefs result from natural, abiotic component, abiotic processes—deposition (geology), deposition of ...

s, where it forms burrows in nonmigratory colonies. Males can reach a maximum

total length Fish measurement is the measuring of individual fish and various parts of their anatomies. These data are used in many areas of ichthyology, including taxonomy and fisheries biology. Overall length * Standard length (SL) is the length of a fish ...

of . The white-ring garden eel's diet consists of

zooplankton Zooplankton are the animal component of the planktonic community ("zoo" comes from the Greek word for ''animal''). Plankton are aquatic organisms that are unable to swim effectively against currents, and consequently drift or are carried along by ...

. It is currently listed as Data Deficient at the

IUCN redlist The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biolog ...

due to dispute over its taxonomy, although it notes that if valid, the species may be under threat as a result of inhabiting an intrareef region in a range restricted to 1,000 km².''Heteroconger canabus''
at the

References

Heteroconger Taxa named by Richard Heinrich Rosenblatt Fish described in 1974 {{Anguilliformes-stub