Saturday, November 22, 2008

Chained up!

This little cracker is a chainlink moray. Unlike most morays its a crustacean and mollusk eater, a member of a small group known as pebbletooth morays.

chainlink

I found this one this morning which was the first time anyone I know has spotted one here although they are quite a widespread species.

2 comments:

Lucy Corrander said...

What sort of size is it?

Lucy

tai haku said...

Lucy
All the pebbletoothed morays stay fairly small. I'm not sure with chainlinks but snowflake eels (the most common of the genus) tend to top out at a max of about 3 feet. I had a pet one once and in spite of his getting far too many treats he didn't grow particularly quickly or large.

In any event they are much smaller than the typical moray eels you see (about 15 of which can be found somewhere on the blog) which belong to the Gymnothorax genus