Mediterranean moray
Muraena helena
— Where the name comes from
Muraena is from the Greek mýraina, the name of the fish; helena recalls perhaps Helen, or a Hellenic origin. The Romans were greedy for it and kept it in tanks, the murenaria: some of the most famous — and cruellest — stories of ancient gastronomy attach to the moray.
— Facts
- Group
- Fish · Actinopterygii · Chondrichthyes
- Order
- Eels
- Habitat
- Rocky bottoms, crevices and underwater dens
- Range
- The Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic
- Size
- 1–1.5 m
- Diet
- Carnivore — fish, octopus, crustaceans
- Lifespan
- Up to 10 years and more
— Characteristics
- 01
It has a second set of jaws in the throat, the pharyngeal jaws, which shoot forward to drag prey in.
- 02
It opens and closes its mouth constantly not as a threat but to drive water over its gills.
- 03
The mucus covering its bare skin protects it from scraping inside rocky dens.
— What sets it apart
The moray has two pairs of jaws. Besides the outer ones, hidden in its throat it keeps a second set — the pharyngeal jaws — which shoots literally forward into the mouth to grip prey and haul it into the oesophagus, as in the film Alien. It is the only animal known to use mobile jaws in the throat to capture food, not merely to swallow it. Living in narrow dens, where it cannot create suction by gaping, it has evolved a second inner mouth to do the job.
