---
title: Bayer’s Moray (Enchelycore bayeri)
scientific_name: Enchelycore bayeri
common_name: Bayer’s Moray
taxon: Moray eel
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-25T18:09:27.782Z
updated: 2026-08-17T22:47:38.589Z
tags: Bayer’s Moray, Enchelycore bayeri, Moray eel, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/moray-eel/bayers-moray
---

# Bayer’s Moray (*Enchelycore bayeri*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Moray eel (*Muraenidae*)
- **Size:** up to 70 cm
- **Depth:** 1-64 m
- **Diet:** Piscivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Rare
- **Habitat:** Reef and rocky ground, deep in crevices
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner
- **Hazard:** Dangerous
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- jaws strongly curved, so the mouth never fully closes and the teeth stay in view
- long, slender, needle-like teeth, several rows of them
- dark body, often with pale flecking on the head
- up to 70 cm

Its mouth does not shut. The jaws in this genus are bowed outward like a pair of calipers, so even at rest they meet only at the tip and the teeth stay permanently exposed - long, thin, backward-raked needles in several rows, including a row down the roof of the mouth.

That is not a defect. A moray that eats fish has one problem above all others: holding onto something slippery and thrashing in a space too tight to maneuver. Curved jaws that cannot close mean the teeth are already in position at every angle, and prey that touches them is caught before the bite finishes. The trade is that the animal wears its weapons in the open.

It makes this a moray to leave alone. FishBase classes the species as traumatogenic, meaning capable of a serious injury, which for a seventy-centimeter eel means a hand that went where it should not have.

It is genuinely rare here and it goes deeper than most, recorded past sixty meters, so encounters are few and almost always a head in a crack with a mouthful of visible teeth.

## Also known as

- **English:** Bowmouth Moray, Bayer's Moray, Hookjaw Moray
- **French:** Murène de Bayer
- **Spanish:** Morena de Bayer
- **Czech:** muréna Bayerova
- **Japanese:** ヤシャウツボ, Yashautsubo

## Scientific synonyms

- *Gymnothorax bayeri* Schultz, 1953

## Range

Republic of Mauritius

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/moray-eel/bayers-moray)*
*Updated: August 17, 2026*