They sink the recurved teeth of one side into the prey while moving the other side forward. Instead, muscles and ligaments connect them. The bones of left and right side of their jaws are not rigid.
Snakes like pythons that eat enormous meals have elastic jaws. This eel behaviour is reminiscent of constriction in snakes. The loops are tightened and the eel quickly draw its head backward through them, resulting in the facilitation of the prey item being swallowed whole, or decapacitation, or removal of a piece of the prey, which is then consumed.”
#Wolf eel detached head series#
The “knotting behaviour is a complex series of movements in which the eel, in a backward motion, moves the tail under the middle of its body to form a loop, passes the tail back up and over the body, down through that loop to form a second loop, as the tail again passes up and over the body. Miller of Michigan University described this behaviour for the first time in 1987. Seven species tie knots in their bodies to either compress prey or pin it while they take bite-sized morsels. Other creatures with a similar body shape such as the amphibious caecilians that live underground also use the same tactic. One species, the American eel, rotated as many as 14 times per second. They grab a mouthful and spin their bodies rapidly along their lengths until the piece comes detached. If this isn’t successful, they perform what crocodile people call a ‘ death roll‘. Without razor-sharp, cutting teeth to tear off chunks of flesh, they jerk and shake their heads to rip pieces off.
Their long tubular bodies pose a challenge when they hunt large prey. At night, many of these snake-like creatures sniff out fish and crustaceans hiding among rock crevices. Moray eels are a large group of 200 species. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.
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