Silently slinking through tight corridors between the branches of corals, moray eels spook fish, squid and divers alike. Fish and squid more so, of course, as they may well become the next meal for the voracious predators. Unlike other eels and bony fishes, morays consume large prey whole and with a minimum of jostling — the tight space around them would never allow such freedom of movement. They accomplish the task by gripping their victims with a second pair of pharyngeal jaws in their throat. Rita Mehta of the University of California, Davis documents the throaty jaws and the feeding process play-by-play in the May issue of Journal of Morphology. This mode of feasting is novel, she says, and energy efficient. In the action shots shown here, Mehta shows the moray eel, Muraena retifera, gulping down a tasty morsel in less than a second. Drawings on the right illustrate how the second pair of jaws (colored red) in the eel’s throat move forward into the mouth as prey is captured.

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