Feisty Moray Bites

"There are times when life imitates art. Then there are times when life imitates science fiction," the Loom's Carl Zimmer writes in todays' The New York Times article on the jaws of moray eels. And there are times when the jaws that belong to that life latch down on your left ring finger and you shriek in pain, as I did when a baby jeweled moray eel bit me while exploring a Galapagos tidepool. Read all about the moray's feisty bite here. The article is better than the real thing.

More like this

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. In the Alien movies, the eponymous monster killed shipmates and marines with a fearsome set of double jaws. That may have been science fiction but science fact isn't too far off. In our planet's tropical…
The bloggers here at Scienceblogs all have other professional lives--professors, doctors, software engineers, and so on. My own line of work as a science writer can make blogging a bit awkward every now and then. Take, for instance, an article I wrote for tomorrow's New York Times about moray eels…
Because this is Shifting Baselines, where we recognize the need for a historical perspective to understand the 'baseline' and what is deemed 'pristine', it seems fitting to give a brief history of Carnival of the Blue. The brainchild of Mark Powell at Blogfish, Carnival of the Blue is an ocean…
The vertebrate jaw is a product of evolution — we have a serially repeated array of pharyngeal structures as embryos (and fish retain them in all their bony glory as gill arches), and the anterior most arch is modified during our development to form the jaws. The fact that they're serially…

Another cool trait of the moray bite...if the object is just too big to chomp on whole, the eel can tie its tail into a knot and move the knot up its body, and using this as leverage pull its head through the knot, taking a chunk of finger flesh along with it.