Intrepid divers have taken to the water to hand-feed a shoal of moray eels at Blue Planet Aquarium, Cheshire Oaks.
The aquarium is looking after a group of eight leopard moray eels, each measuring close to a metre in length.
At the moment, the eels are in a special holding tank which adjoins the giant Caribbean Reef display and divers are training the tropical eels to feed from their hands.
Blue Planet Aquarium’s dive officer Matt Martin said: “We need the morays to get used to the experience of being hand-fed by divers before they are released in to the main display area.
“Hand-feeding allows us to monitor the eels and ensure they are getting enough to eat and are fit and healthy. These particular eels came from the Blue Reef Aquarium in Portsmouth and they are not used to this type of interaction with divers, but they seem to be fast learners and are adapting well.”
Leopard morays, which get their name from the fact they are covered in spots, are found extensively throughout the Indo-Pacific oceans from Hawaii to Japan.
Moray eels have poor vision which may be partly responsible for them earning their fearsome reputation.
Matt said: “Morays are generally quite shy and secretive creatures that spend much of their time hiding inside crevices among the coral reefs.”
“The fish often look threatening as they open and close their mouths in a menacing way, but this is just the way they breathe.
“However they do have razor-sharp teeth and have to be handled with extreme care as they are capable of inflicting nasty bites.
“This has led to incidents with divers who hand-feed them, particularly on the Great Barrier Reef, receiving serious bites.
“Moray eels use their teeth to eat crustaceans and are more than capable of biting off a finger or other stray digit, mistaking it for food. We take no chances and tend to stick feed our morays from a safe distance.”
Unlike most other fish, moray eels don’t have scales. So to protect themselves against scrapes and parasites, they ooze a slimy coating of mucus over their thick muscular bodies.
