• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Watch An Eel Escape “Alien”-Style From The Stomach Of A Dark Sleeper Fish

September 10, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Few people can imagine a worse death that being swallowed alive by some monstrous creature, but that is the reality for many of Earth’s critters. Fortunately, in the case of Japanese eels, being swallowed alive doesn’t have to mean certain death, and they’ve been recorded performing a rather impressive escape tactic. 

Advertisement

Japanese eels (Anguilla japonica) are the frequent prey of a nocturnal carnivorous predatory fish species known as dark sleepers (Odontobutis obscura). These dark sleepers are around 25 centimeters long (9.8 inches), roughly double the size of a Japanese eel. 

While you might think the eels would be at a serious disadvantage, they’ve come up with a rather ingenious technique for escaping from the digestive tract of their predators. Using an X-ray video system, the eels were seen circling round and round within the body of a dark sleeper before attempting to swim tail-first back up the esophagus of the fish and clean out of the gill clefts. 

“We have discovered a unique defensive tactic of juvenile Japanese eels using an X-ray video system: they escape from the predator’s stomach by moving back up the digestive tract towards the gills after being captured by the predatory fish,” said Yuuki Kawabata of Nagasaki University in Japan in a statement. “This study is the first to observe the behavioral patterns and escape processes of prey within the digestive tract of predators.”

The team watched 32 individual eels be captured by the dark sleepers. Thirteen of those made it so that their tails emerged from the gills of the fish, with nine of the eels managing to fully escape from inside the dark sleeper after being swallowed. The team think that the ability to free the tail through the gills is the crucial first step to the eel being able to pull its head out and completely free itself. Two of the eels swallowed aimed for the other exit, but were not successful in escaping the body of the fish. 



Advertisement

“The most surprising moment in this study was when we observed the first footage of eels escaping by going back up the digestive tract toward the gill of the predatory fish,” Kawabata says. “At the beginning of the experiment, we speculated that eels would escape directly from the predator’s mouth to the gill. However, contrary to our expectations, witnessing the eels’ desperate escape from the predator’s stomach to the gills was truly astonishing for us.”

On average, the eels that did escape were able to do so in around 56 seconds. The team believe this speed could be a response to the harsh acidic and anaerobic conditions that the eels experience within the body of the dark sleepers. The eels that did not survive being swallowed ceased movement after 211.9 seconds inside the digestive tract. 

The researchers believe this is the first time any footage has been captured of any prey within the digestive system of its predator. 

The study is published in Current Biology.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Tennis – Kerber sails through to set up battle of former champions
  2. Canadians rush to early polls in election, mail-in ballots underwhelm
  3. This “Masterpiece Of Ancient Egyptian Art” Once Hung In A Lavish Palace
  4. Brain Tumors Are Cognitive Parasites – How Brain Cancer Hijacks Neural Circuits And Causes Cognitive Decline

Source Link: Watch An Eel Escape "Alien"-Style From The Stomach Of A Dark Sleeper Fish

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version