Nearly a meter and a half of eel, and almost nobody has seen one.
This is the largest of the burrowing morays, and the shape tells you where it lives. A normal moray is flattened from the side, especially toward the tail, because it swims in open water between holes. This one is round in section for its whole length, like a rope, with the fins reduced to ridges you can barely see. That is the body of an animal that does not swim between crevices so much as move through the inside of the reef, forcing through gaps in rubble and dead coral where no flattened fish could go.
The consequence is that the reef has an interior, and it is inhabited. Below the surface everyone looks at, there is a connected volume of holes and channels with its own fauna, and these eels hunt in it: small fish and crustaceans taken in places that have no opening large enough for a diver to see through.
It is patterned like its name, pale under large dark blotches, and the records that exist come mostly from broken rubble and from chemical collecting stations rather than from anyone actually watching one.
The genus. Scuticaria Jordan & Snyder 1901 - -aria (pertaining to scutica). ETYFish
- very long and round in cross-section, like a length of rope rather than a flattened eel
- pale body under large dark blotches, tiger-like
- fins reduced to almost nothing; the tail ends bluntly
- up to 140 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
