The ribbon eel also has a scruffy yellow goatee on its lower jaw, which stores all its taste buds. The ribbon eel’s elongated, leaflike “nostrils,” set on each side of its snout, help it detect food scurrying by in the low visibility on the ocean floor. In the span of a month, these females mate, lay eggs, and die, making it exquisitely rare to see even a single female in the wild. Ribbon eels are all born jet black males-they are protandric, changing to female only when necessary to reproduce.
The female is entirely yellow and over a meter long. The male ribbon eel’s elongated dorsal fin is a screamy chartreuse-yellow and its belly is an attention-grabbing cobalt. The wiggle of its body-the undulation to end all undulations-is like my own tongue, excited to tell my husband all the minutiae of a day spent alone with our three-year-old and our infant son, Jasper last baby. When this colorful eel, hidden behind coral, detects a guppy swimming nearby and wants to chase down its next snack, it simply unspools itself, as if a piece of ribbon candy has unfolded and softened in the sea.
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