That's a Moray!

Today's post is inspired by this YouTube video: a woman 'befriending' a moray eel.

The footage is amazing.  The eel is longer than she is, yet she is able to pet it, even scratch its head.  In turn, the eel winds around her, brushing against her suit with seeming affection.  Valerie Taylor, the diver in the clip, has named her undersea fan 'Honey.'

Valerie claims to be 'great friends' with Honey, a spotted moray eel dwelling in a reef of Indonesia.  Could that be true?  As a large predator, the moray eel must be capable of considerable intelligence.  But friendship?  This episode of Cryptic Mysteries...

Just instinct, or is that amore?

For a tricky question like this, Dean Martin is a good start but more may be necessary.  In this case, we must decide what constitutes a friend, specifically a friend who is an animal.  I'll dip into a few facets, covering the life and habits of spotted morays along the way, and at the end of the post I'll lump in some more things and compare the common perception of friendship with whatever Valerie and Honey seem to have going on.

Let's start with one of the most important aspects of friendship, the unwillingness to cause harm.

Hurt the ones you love?

The idea is simple: friends are not supposed to brutally maim each other.  There are many cases of lions, tigers, bears, sharks, and alligators behaving violently with humans, so I would not try to cuddle up to one of these species if I found it in the wild.  Other people feel differently.

But realistically, the difference between Kevin rolling around with his lions and me playing with my roommate's cat is this: if my cat gets a bit too excited, I could be bitten, and would probably wind up at the doctor's office to keep off infection.  If Kevin gets bitten, he might have to go to a doctor, and the doctor might refer him to the coroner.  A house cat makes a good friend (although a self-centered, saucy friend) partly because that species is not known for its ability to kill humans, either on purpose or on accident.

So how likely is Valerie to be seriously injured by Honey the moray eel?

Pic from MarineBio

Moray Mouth: The Thumbcracker

At first glance, it's hard to believe that this watchful, soft-faced eel has a second set of extendable jaws and needles for teeth.  Offer it a bite of fish or nibble of hot dog, and both facts might become painfully obvious.  Here's the sad story of a man who just couldn't get the hot dogs out of the plastic bag fast enough.  Attack footage included.  It's a bit graphic, but I still give it a thumb up.

The diver wasn't bitten once, but twice by his friend Emma.  In 2007, researchers discovered that moray eels pack a double bite.  The first bite is from the needling teeth that pierce the flesh and lock the eel on.  The second bite is from second pair of jaws that are ejected from the lower throat into the mouth.  These second jaws grab the prey item and pull it into the eel's throat.  Here's what that looks like:

Oops.  I mean:

Photo credit Waiving Entropy and Nature

That's still not a whole lot better, right?  Moray eels are big animals with spring-loaded double mouths.  Investing in a bare-fingered relationship with these animals requires either the ignorance of an amateur or a willingness to accept that you may leave the ocean bleeding substantially more than when you entered it.  Conservatively speaking, moray eels are not the best species to get chummy with.

Hanging Out

Let's say you were born with twelve fingers and don't mind the risk.  Well, another important part of friendship is hanging out, also called chillin' or goofing off.  You can play ball with a dog or balance fruit on your cat, but it's hard to do any of that with nothing but a gulping face in a craggy reef.  Fortunately, spotted moray eels are curious and approachable.  John Liddiard gives an excellent account of the food-poor, boundary-rich relationship a colleague had with a local giant moray, which would swim up to meet him when he called it.

Hugues Vitry is pictured here with a giant moray eel he's known 25+ years.  Remarkably, he hasn't given the eel a silly name, and this may partway explain how Vitry has managed to keep all his fingers.  He calls the eel with a distinctive grunt, making it swim from its own territory to meet him, theoretically making the interaction safer for the human.

Morays: It's not all about you

When they aren't biting off fingers or snuggling like golden retrievers, moray eels lead their own lives.  The majority of morays dwell in the world's tropical, reefy waters.  During the day they hide out in a convenient crevice, while at night they hunt down smaller fish and octopus.  Unlike their food sources, moray eels breathe with an exaggerated gasping expression, which forces oxygen-rich water through their gills.  At first glance, however, it looks as though they are practicing to bite you.  Here is a honeycomb moray at home, breathing suspiciously at the camera:

Source

Moray eels don't like to share holes, but they will, if space is limited.  This photo of two white eyed moray eels brough to you from UKDivers.

Despite what you might think from the moray's penchant for holes, they are not ambush predators.  During the night they swim free, catching prey with hair-trigger double jaws.  Reportedly, reef fishes will harass a roaming moray in the evening, even cozying up to the eel's mouth.  Theoretically, the fish are trying to 'annoy' the eel into swimming off before it starts to snack on the reef dwellers.  Realistically, it seems like a suicide strategy.

A moray cruising the reef.  Pic from Bruce and Jackie's Dive Trips

In his National Geographic photo entry, Douglas Kahle captures a green moray with a prickly customer.  Eventually, the moray conceded defeat, leaving the victorious puffer with an inflated sense of victory.

Like dogs and cats, morays eat, rest, and reproduce, but unlike those familiar pets, morays are not prudes when it come to physical sexual characteristics.  Some morays start male and swap to female, while other species are happy to remain both sexes their entire lives.  When mating, the male and female twist around each other.  Occasionally, the male will bite the female's neck to keep her close.  They release their gametes into the water, and the fertilized eggs eventually hatch into tiny larva.

The Birmingham aquarium encourages its happy couple.

A couple of zebra eels caught in the act.  For viewers sensitive to sexual material, 'the act' is, in this case, very similar to tangling shoe laces.

Disregarded by their parents, the larva can float free for up to ten months, sometimes drifting hundreds of miles.  Without this migration, the California coast would likely have no morays, since the Pacific ocean is too cold for the eels to reproduce.  Morays found off California coastlines are actually mature larval migrants from Baja California, where the water is warm enough to mate.  Once established, moray eels can live as long as thirty years.  In human terms, that's long enough to drink, vote, drive, and make at least one serious life mistake.

Although their itinerant babies are quite the travelers, morays have other striking adaptations.  You might have noticed that morays seem to have little tubes poking out of their nostrils.  Basically, those little protrusions are super-nostrils.

Most fish get their sense of smell from four nostrils, properly called nares.  They have two on each side of the face, but all four tend to be pretty close together.  Moray eels have tubed nares that are farther apart than those of most fish, giving the moray an olfactory advantage over other fish.

A photo by Tim Laman captures the giant nares of the ribbon eel, a type of moray.

Moray Mores

Basically, morays are curious, intelligent, long-lived creatures that WILL take your finger off if they feel like it.  It is easy to find stories cringe-worthy dismemberment, but there are also abundant stories of human-moray merry-making.  Personally, I would never go as far as Valerie, naming an eel and wearing it like a feather boa, but if I were with an experienced diver who knew a mild-mannered eel, I might try to give it a pet.  This scenario assumes that I am wearing mesh gloves and don't smell like hot dogs.

There are around two hundred species of moray in many colors and sizes.  The giant moray would burst a bathtub at thirteen feet long, but a handful of the smaller species are kept by enthusiasts in saltwater aquariums.  Here are a few species of eye-catching morays, with picture sources given in parentheses.

A giant moray eel at home (UKDivers.net)

Spotted Moray, max size around four feet (snorkelstj.com)

A green moray, max length eight feet (Baltimore National Aquarium)

Dragon eel for sale to hobbyists, retail price $900 per eel, max size thirty inches (alibaba.com)

Fangtooth Moray, max size four feet (Philippe Guillaume)

Snowflake Moray, max size twelve inches, retails for $30 (Steve Dunleavy)

In January 2014, moray eels bred in captivity for the first time.  This is a larva from that clutch, laid by a black ribbon eel at the Zoo Vienna Schönbrunn in Austria.  This larva is just one centimeter long.  (zooborns.com)

The proud parents of the Austria larva, a couple of ribbon eels.  They are the first moray eel couple to breed in captivity.  In Austria, there's amore!  (zooborns.com)

Sources and Additional Info

• Oceana: Spotted Moray
• National Geographic: Alien Jaws
• Huffington Post: Moray Eel and Diver Friends
• MarineBio: Spotted Moray Eels
• Divernet: Mauritius
• Monterey Bay Aquarium: Moray Eel
• UKDivers.net: Moray Eel
• Australian Museum: Green Moray