i have had many urges…. but i have never booped her
luckily she’s a timid sweetheart and probably would just hide if i ever tried to boop her.
she’s only ever bitten me once! It hurt quite a bit but she doesn’t have anywhere close to the power needed to take off a finger.
Moray eels don’t crunch or slice. They have sharp, backward-pointing, needle-like teeth, meant to grab and hold until their pharyngeal jaws (tiny secret Alien-style throat jaws) can dart out, grab the food, and pull it down their throat.
It’s a similar idea to a snake- the bite is gonna hurt, and it’s gonna be hard to get all the teeth out of yourself if they don’t let go, but it’ll just be puncture marks without any real serious damage. It has to be a huge moray to cause any severe damage. One of multiple reasons why morays aren’t dangerous, that and their lack of aggression. If you don’t poke one in the face or stick your hand in one’s burrow, you won’t get bit.
that is true for most morays! however snowflakes evolved to eat mostly crustaceans and so they actually have small, cone-shaped teeth for crushing the exoskeletons of crabs and shrimp!
you can see her teeth alright in this gif
Ooh, cool! I haven’t seen snowflake teeth up close, just some others. Green morays in aquariums and something in Hawaii I didn’t manage to ID.
Yeah, that could probably do some serious damage if it was in the mouth of something much bigger. A smaller eel like Noodle, I’d think maybe some bruising if she hung on or bit down hard. Did she draw blood at all?
i have had many urges…. but i have never booped her
luckily she’s a timid sweetheart and probably would just hide if i ever tried to boop her.
she’s only ever bitten me once! It hurt quite a bit but she doesn’t have anywhere close to the power needed to take off a finger.
Moray eels don’t crunch or slice. They have sharp, backward-pointing, needle-like teeth, meant to grab and hold until their pharyngeal jaws (tiny secret Alien-style throat jaws) can dart out, grab the food, and pull it down their throat.
It’s a similar idea to a snake- the bite is gonna hurt, and it’s gonna be hard to get all the teeth out of yourself if they don’t let go, but it’ll just be puncture marks without any real serious damage. It has to be a huge moray to cause any severe damage. One of multiple reasons why morays aren’t dangerous, that and their lack of aggression. If you don’t poke one in the face or stick your hand in one’s burrow, you won’t get bit.
friendly reminder that, if you take proper care of your eels and keep them in a big tank with lots of hiding places, they will never feel the need to hide in the sand
instead, they’ll either sit at the front of the tank and wait for you to walk in the room, or they’ll all noodle out of the woodwork they were napping in when they find out you’re there
eels will only bury in the sand if they’re scared or threatened and have nowhere else to hide. thanks for coming to my ted talk
This goes for all sneaky fish prone to hiding. All fish will hide sometimes, but every fish in the world will be much more confident if they have enough cover. The more cover they have, the safer they feel, and the more you see them.
Moray eels very frequently sit in their holes, that’s just what they do, but even they will stick more of their bodies out and come out more when they feel safe.
friendly reminder that, if you take proper care of your eels and keep them in a big tank with lots of hiding places, they will never feel the need to hide in the sand
instead, they’ll either sit at the front of the tank and wait for you to walk in the room, or they’ll all noodle out of the woodwork they were napping in when they find out you’re there
eels will only bury in the sand if they’re scared or threatened and have nowhere else to hide. thanks for coming to my ted talk
It’s true for the salty variety too! More hiding places means you actually get to see their cute little faces more!
The marine eels and other members of the superorder Elopomorpha have a leptocephalus larval stage, which are flat and transparent. This group is quite diverse, containing 801 species in 24 orders, 24 families and 156 genera (super diverse).
Leptocephali have compressed bodies that contain jelly-like substances on the inside, with a thin layer of muscle with visible myomeres on the outside, a simple tube as a gut, dorsal and anal fins, but they lack pelvic fins. They also don’t have any red blood cells (most likely is respiration by passive diffusion), which they only begin produce when the change into the juvenile glass eel stage. Appears to feed on marine snow, tiny free-floating particles in the ocean.
This large size leptocephalus must be a species of Muraenidae (moray eels), and probably the larva of a long thin ribbon eel, which is metamorphosing, and is entering shallow water to finish metamorphosis into a young eel, in Bali, Indonesia.
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