This is a Mediterranean animal, and finding one here is an event. It has been reported from Nuweiba, in the Gulf of Aqaba, with a photograph to back it up, and that is about the extent of it.
How it got here is the interesting part. Traffic through the Suez Canal (🇪🇬 Egypt) runs overwhelmingly northward: hundreds of 🌊 Red Sea species have established themselves in the Mediterranean and are called Lessepsian migrants. A handful move the other way, against the flow, and get called anti-Lessepsian. There are very few of them, because the Mediterranean fauna is poorly equipped for a sea this warm and this salty, and a Mediterranean moray turning up on the Sinai coast is exactly the kind of record that ends up in a footnote.
At home it is a large, common, heavily built moray of rocky bottom, up to a meter and a half and fifteen kilograms, dark with fine yellow marbling. It has been eaten since antiquity - the Romans kept them in coastal ponds - and it is still sold in Mediterranean markets.
The toxin is worth knowing about and is widely got wrong. Eel blood carries a protein poison, and moray skin mucus is unpleasant in its own right, so a bite from one of these gets infected and inflamed out of proportion to its size. Nothing is injected. Cooking destroys the blood toxin entirely, which is why the fish has been on the table for two thousand years.
- dark gray to brown, finely marbled with pale yellow speckling
- speckling densest on the head and around the gill opening
- pale ring around the eye
- no pectoral fins; the dorsal fin runs from behind the head to the tail
- up to 150 cm
