i went diving a few days ago and encountered some good boys ™ that i knew you would appreciate. both of the green morays were like 6 feet long and very angery, but the spotted moray was more shy – @rrecollection
Look at those beautiful boys™ !! I’m so jealous! I would love to go diving!
I love the face on the spotted guy he’s like “HhhMmmMMmmmmm… 8/ ?”
Morays are awesome fish. They aren’t aggressive fish, not really, they won’t go at you unless you get close to them and threaten their space. If you watch ‘em from a distance, they don’t mind you.
See those lil guys on the second eel? Neon gobies! They perch on larger fish sometimes, and occasionally exhibit cleaning behaviors where they pick parasites off of said larger fish. Any saltwater fish with blue and back lengthwise stripes is either a cleaner fish (see: cleaner wrasse), a part-time cleaner, or impersonating a cleaner.
I would REALLY not suggest hand-feeding an eel that big. A guy did that off a dive tour boat and lost his thumb because the eel got ahold of the thumb instead of the food. They aren’t aggressive, but they can do a lot of damage by mistake. It’s not a good idea to teach them that food is available near you.
They do, however, enjoy petting. I wouldn’t hug one, just in case they object, and definitely don’t go and try to touch a random one, but moray eels aren’t aggressive animals. They defend their holes from intruders, and that’s about it.
Eels have gills mostly protected under skin, with only small holes as outlets, as opposed to the plate-cover gills on most fish. They have to move their mouth in a large motion to fill the gills with water. The gif above is an excellent demonstration- see how the sides of her neck appear to widen as her gills fill with water? It’s then blown out a bit further back. The motion does look like gasping as compared to other fish, but they’re fine! That’s just Eel Physics.
update: thanks to a tumblr user who sadly dropped off the comments before I could catch their name, these are very likely new zealand longfin eels! Here is artist Stephanie Bowman feeding some more eel friends and talking about them:
These aren’t salamanders, they only have two limbs and don’t have fingers on those limbs.
They aren’t sirens because they don’t have external gills.
I don’t think they’re amphiumas because those limbs look like fins, not tiny arms.
Electric eels (not actually eels) are lighter and have pitted skin.
I don’t think they’re lungfish, most lungfish have four limbs and all are solitary. You’d be hard-pressed to find that many lungfish in one section of river. I’m also not sure whether lungfish are quite that vigorous about getting to food.
So, yes, I’d say they’re eels! I’m surprised they didn’t try to eat the duck, freshwater eels can take down impressively large prey.
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