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A snake eel fighting for its life sparked an “alien” movement by bursting from the stomach of a heron that had just swallowed it whole, according to photos taken by an amateur photographer in Delaware.
The photos show the snake eel, its head hanging in the air, as the heron – surprisingly indifferent – soars ahead.
The unusual event drew a lot of attention among local predators, said Sam Davis, an engineer from Maryland who took the photos on the Delaware shore. Several juveniles Eagles and one Fox were following the heron, perhaps hoping to grab a meal in case the heron or snake eel didn’t, he said.
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When Davis first spotted the bizarre flight, he thought a snake or eel had bitten the heron’s neck. Davis was about 75 meters to 100 meters (68 to 91 meters) from the animals, but he had a telephoto lens for long-distance photography, and so he took pictures watching the heron fly and even land in the water with it. the eel is still attached to it. “The heron didn’t seem to act very differently,” Davis told Live Science. “He was in the water and was flying around.”
During this time, the eel arched its body, “so I guess she was still alive at some point,” he said.
It wasn’t until Davis got home and edited the photos that he realized that the snake eel wasn’t biting the heron. After enlarging the photos, “I could see the eel, you could see its eyes,” he said. “He was actually coming out the other end” – head first.
The photos show “a pretty incredible 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 heron and eel encounter. snake.” it’s either very rare or very rarely seen in any 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 in the family Ophichthidae), detailing how snake eels can dig themselves into the guts of fish. that feed on them. “But in general, they don’t go very far,” he told Live Science in an email. When swallowed, fish eels can use their hard heads or tails to exit the digestive tract, but are usually found 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 escape, ”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 learned what happened to the heron and snake eel pictured 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 with the snake eel hanging below.
According to Pogonoski, “the heron may have survived, it didn’t seem too embarrassed, but would depend on the wound healing and the ability to avoid infection.”
As for the snake eel, it “would only have survived if it had fallen above or very close to water with a salinity it could normally tolerate,” he said.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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