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According to photos taken by an amateur photographer in Delaware, a snake eel fighting for its life made an “alien” move by exploding from the stomach of a heron that had just swallowed it whole.
The photos show the snake eel, its head dangling in mid-air, while the surprisingly indifferent heron flies forward.
The unusual event attracted a lot of attention among local predators, said Sam Davis, a Maryland engineer who took the photos on the Delaware coast. Several young people Eagles it’s at Fox we were following the heron, perhaps hoping to catch up a meal in case the heron or snake eel didn’t make it, he said.
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When Davis first noticed the bizarre flight, he thought a snake or eel had bitten the heron’s neck. Davis was about 75 yards to 100 yards (68 to 91 meters) away from the animals, but he had a telephoto lens for long-range photography, and so he took photos while watching the heron fly and even the eel still attached to it. . “The heron didn’t seem to be acting very differently,” Davis told Live Science. “It was in the water and was flying around.”
Meanwhile, the eel was arching its body, “so I guess it was still alive at some point,” he said.
It wasn’t until Davis got home and edited the photos that he realized the snake eel wasn’t biting the heron. After zooming in on the photos, “I could see the eel, you could see its eyes,” he said. “It was actually coming out the other side” – head first.
The photos show “a rather surprising sight,” said John Pogonoski, an ichthyologist with the Australian National Fish Collection at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), who was not involved in the encounter with the heron and the snake eel. ” this is either very rare or very rare in a bird species, at least as far as I know. “
Earlier this year, Pogonoski and his colleagues published a study in the journal Memoirs of the Queensland Museum on snake eels (a fish from the Ophichthidae family), detailing how snake eels can burrow from the guts of fish that prey on them. . “But they don’t usually get very far,” he told Live Science in an email. Once ingested, eels can use their hard head or tail to exit the digestive tract, but they usually end up in the predator’s body cavity, muscle tissue, or swim bladder. Once trapped, snake eels often “become” mummified “or” encysted “. [closed up in a cyst] and die rather than run away, “he said.
In one case, “a co-author of the article once discovered a live snake eel inside a fish that he caught when he cleaned the fish to eat it,” Pogonoski said.
Davis never knew what happened to the heron and snake eel photographed in Delaware in 2011 (he uploaded the photos to a wildlife site just a few months ago). When it left the shore, the heron was still flying around with the snake eel hanging under it.
According to Pogonoski, “the heron may have survived, he didn’t seem too disturbed, but it would have depended on how well the wound was healed and if he was able to avoid an infection.”
As for the snake eel, “it would only survive if it fell or was very close to water with a salinity it would normally tolerate,” he said.
Originally published in Live Science.
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