Hemiscyllium henryi

The Triton epaulette shark, Hemiscyllium henryi, is a small bamboo shark from the reefs of western New Guinea. It belongs to a genus of nine closely similar walking sharks that live only around New Guinea and northern Australia, and it was described scientifically in 2008. It is a slender, pale grey-brown shark with a white underside, short barbels and a small mouth below the eyes. Its markings set it apart: small scattered spots on the head, body and fins, and an irregular, often doubled dark ocellus behind the head ringed by a faint pale halo. Males and unsexed animals average about 78 cm in length and females about 82 cm. It is nocturnal, resting by day and moving at night, partly by walking over the seabed on its paired fins, to hunt crustaceans, cephalopods, shelled mollusks and small bottom fish on coral reefs, rubble and seagrass flats at depths of roughly 3 to 30 metres. It lays eggs on or near the seabed. It is known from the southern Bird's Head region and Triton Bay of West Papua, Indonesia, and the IUCN lists it as Vulnerable.