Every moray on this reef began life as something that looks nothing like an eel.
Moray eggs hatch into a leptocephalus: a flat, transparent, leaf-shaped larva with a tiny head and a body like a sliver of glass, so clear that print can be read through it. It has almost no muscle and it does not hunt in any ordinary sense - it absorbs dissolved organic matter and drifts, sometimes for many months, carried by currents across whole ocean basins. That drift is why a forty-centimeter eel living in one hole in one reef can belong to a species spread from Africa to Polynesia.
When it finally settles, the larva shrinks. It loses water and body depth, reorganizes into a small eel, and takes up residence in rubble, and from that point on it may never travel more than a few meters again.
This one is among the smaller morays here, under forty centimeters, brown with a fine pale net over the back half of the body that gets denser toward the tail. It lives shallow, in rubble and reef, and it is seen about as often as anything that spends its life inside rock.
The genus. Gymnothorax Bloch 1795 - gymnós (bare or naked) + thṓrax (breast or chest). ETYFish
- small brown moray with a fine pale network over the rear body and tail
- network densest on the tail, giving the latticed look the name refers to
- short blunt head
- up to 39 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no major threats known to this species, although it may be affected by habitat loss in some parts of its range.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
