I recently discovered a small moray eel living secretly in my 120g reef tank. he must have come on a piece of live rock i bought. i must have had him for about 4 or 5 years and i never knew it. recently he decided to show himself, what a surprise. now i know where all my gobies and shrimp have been going. over the past few weeks ive been trying to catch him, it was a long process but with a little persistance and luck i did it and did not have to drain the tank and start chizzeling open rocks (as ive heard some people in my situation had to do). this is how i caught him:
-i fed him a small piece of frozen silverside at about 2 am every friday for 2 weeks (he is almost completely nocturnal)
-now he had a taste for the bait i would use in my trap
-then i built a trap
-built it myself and it worked great, very proud of it
-the trap is a pvc pipe, capped at one end with a trap-door on the other. the trap-door snaps shut when i pull a string. there is also a string with bait tied on that runs from the front and out a hole in the back. i placed it in the sand close to the burrow he was in. he smelled the bait almost right away. when he got close to the bait i would pull it a lil deeper inside then once half his body was in the trap i let him bit on then i pulled it all the way to the back and snapped the door shut.
-success right? nope a lump of algae had prevented the door from closing all the way and he got away.
-luckily he was very hungry so i set the trap again, this time i scooped the sand away from the enterance so the front inch was not touching the sand.
did the same thing again and it worked perfectly.
-this was all done during day-time. he was very hungry, because i did not feed him the week before so he hadnt eaten much for 2 weeks. this was because the week before i tried to trap him unsuccessfuly: i placed the trap near his burrow at 2am but i wasnt watching the bait close enough, after i set the trap i looked around in the tank for like a minute and when i looked back he had dragged the bait to the front of his burrow and was doing the "aligator death roll" trying to rip it off the string.
-when i caught him i put him in a large bucket with some small live rocks and an airstone and lid while i set up a temporary tank
-hes about 7 inches long,right now hes in a 50g tank with some LR. i also picked up a piece of plexiglas that i cut to tightly seal off the top, eels are masters at escaping.
-pretty cool eh?!
heres some more pics of the trap:
holes drilled in trap door so it shuts faster
Elastic bands on both sides snap it shut
bamboo release pin with a long string tied on holds door open
bait is tied to a string which runs into the trap and out a very small hole in the back so i can pull it in as he gets closer
