AquaCon: Aquatic Connection

brsis:

lets talk about this fella here a moment

this baby is a ribbon eel, part of a group of fish called the moray eels. moray eels are basically hilarious because they are always ****ing delighted (they can’t actually close their mouths so basically they’re grinning from ear to ear every moment of their lives).

wait i hear you say, if they can’t close their mouths how do they eat. pharyngeal jaws, my friend, pharyngeal jaws. don’t know what those are?

have you ever seen alien?

i shit you not, moray eels have a second set of teeth in the back of their throats that are spring loaded to jump out and grab things that swim into their mouths.

now if that wasn’t awesome enough, the ribbon eel is the only protandric moray. that means that although this little fella is clearly, by his colouring, a young adult male, give him a long enough lifespan and he’ll get bigger, turn yellow-brown, and become female.

that’s right, this is a species made entirely of young pretty men and powerful older women.

also if you put them into captivity they stop eating and die within about a month. the ribbon eel lives to be free~

If I may add to this: these eels are also black when they’re juveniles. They go from the black juveniles to the the blue and yellow male adults you see in the gif above, then to the yellow or yellow-green females as they get older. Fascinating species. (And we carry them! Click here and scroll down a little to see a photo of the black juvenile.)

They don’t die in captivity when properly taken care of. They can actually have quite the lifespan in a well-maintained aquarium environment. We hand-feed many of ours. They do very well as long as you know what you’re doing. Really a species reserved for the advanced aquarist, though.

(via becomingcrystalclear)