The body colour is creamy white with blotches of grey and a pair of longitudinal brown or greenish stripes.

The spicules (microscopic calcareous structures that project through the skin) are a mixture of anchors and perforated plates with large holes.

Its range extends from the Red Sea and Madagascar to Hawaii and Easter Island, and includes Indonesia, the Philippines, northern Australia and New Caledonia.

It emerges at night, crawling along using its anchor spicules for adhesion, and extending its tentacles onto the sediment which sticks to them; food particles are passed to the mouth where they are scraped off.

The sea cucumber selects the more nutritious particles it finds and consumes several times its bodyweight each day.