Pharaoh's Moray

Morays spend their lives alone in a hole, which raises an obvious question about how there come to be more of them.

The answer is the one event that breaks the pattern. At spawning, two morays leave their holes, rise into open water, and wrap around each other with their heads up and mouths gaping, sometimes for an hour, releasing eggs and sperm into the water as they go. It is the only time these animals are seen entwined and out in the open, it happens at dusk in warm months, and divers who have watched it describe it as the strangest thing they have seen on a reef. The fertilized eggs drift off and hatch into transparent larvae; the adults go back to their separate crevices.

This species is a small shallow-water moray, brown with pale speckling, under half a meter long. The name promises more than the animal delivers: it is named for the pharaohs because it was described from this coast, not because of any grandeur, and the figure of a meter and a bit that circulates for it appears to have come from a larger relative.