Three meters (10 ft) of pale eel covered in black polygons, filling a ledge with its head out and its mouth working. The gaping is breathing, not threat - a moray has to pump water over its gills by opening and closing its jaws, and the sight has given the family a reputation it does not deserve.
What it does deserve credit for is teamwork. Morays of this genus hunt with groupers, and the arrangement is real cooperation rather than opportunism: the grouper approaches a moray's hole and signals with a head shake, the two hunt together, and prey driven out of a crevice by the eel meets the grouper in open water, while prey fleeing the grouper meets the eel in the crevice. Both catch more than either does alone. It is one of the few documented cases of cooperative hunting between species outside mammals and birds.
Behind the jaws sits a second set of them. Pharyngeal jaws in the throat launch forward, grip the prey and drag it back - an animal that cannot suck food in the way most fish do, so it built a ratchet instead.
It hunts at night for fish and octopus. Bites happen to hands in holes and to spearfishermen; large individuals in some regions carry ciguatoxins.
The genus. Gymnothorax Bloch 1795 - gymnós (bare or naked) + thṓrax (breast or chest). ETYFish
- pale body covered in dense black polygonal spots, honeycomb-like
- spots larger toward the tail, smaller and denser on the head
- very large - the biggest moray most divers here will see
- length up to 3 m
Why it's threatened
There are no major threats known to this species.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
