Hitchhiker Eel ID please

[Duker]

That is totally awesome hitchiker. When i was unpacking LR at progressive quite a few years ago now, me and Gareth actually found a dwarf golden eel in one of the LR pieces, it was dead unfortunatly. But it does happen...cool hitchikers!

[iishanreef]

i checked out the golden dwarf morays they had at my LFS ($160 each, or $400 for a pair) they were light yellow but aside from that i noticed two distict differences: they had blue eyes as mentioned before, and the also had a vertical black stripe across the eye. as you can see in my pic there is no black stripe. attached is a pic of the golden dwarf they had at myLFS

[Delphinus]

Beautiful - which LFS is that? (Not that I could afford them anyhow but my curiousity gets the better of me - I loooove these eels.. )

I still sorta think it is a golden dwarf. I wish I could find more info about the blue eyes, I know they are the only ones to have blue eyes but that doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't any without blue eyes.

It just seems to me that any other eel after 4-5 years would be bigger. And despite the lack of blue eyes he just looks exactly like how mine did at first (I've had mine probably around 3-4 years now).

One thing that has me unsure though is that usually (maybe this isn't 100% but usually) golden dwarves come out of Hawaii. If he was a hitchhiker on rock, that rock didn't come from Hawaii. So it would be interesting to see what their range is. Or maybe he was an escapee from a tank at a LFS and managed to get into a rock holding tank or something. Man, if this guy could talk, what a story he'd have.

One possible other guess though is the ghost eel or white ribbon eel (Pseudechidna brummeri) and I understand their range includes Indonesia and for sure a lot of rock come from there. So it could be that. (Although I'm liking the "escaped at LFS into rock tank" theory the more I think about it ). But when I look at pictures of them, even the yellow ones don't look quite that colour that yours is and they just have other features that look different. http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2004/9/fish1

There is a yellow moray eel too, that I think comes from South America that probably looks very similar to the golden dwarf when small but they get big like 70cm. http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/p...23&pcatid=1423

[Delphinus]

If you happen to get a positive ID on a different forum please post back the findings here. I'm very interested to hear what others think as well.

If you ever want to sell him, please let me know, I'll make sure he gets a good home!!!

[iishanreef]

my LFS is JL aquatics in Burnaby BC. what my be a possibility is that the blue eyes with black stripe go along with the yellow colour, so maybe the darker golden morays do not have this. unfortunatly i forget where the rock, which i suspect he came with, was from; it was this beautiful 15-20 very porous rock in a small tank with nothing else that i got from a small FS in north vancouver. they do not usually carry anything too exotic(they are sort of a beginner type store) like eels, but apparently they have VERY good taste in LR.

[daniella3d]

wow, hard to beleive that this heel survived a trip on probably semi-dry liverock for hours and hours, without water...

[Delphinus]

J&L! Haha I was wondering. That's not exactly next door to Bowen Island though, no? Or is it not too bad to hop on a ferry and head into town? Man I check their N&N page every day. I wish they would put stuff like this on there from time to time!

I'm going to take a closer look at mine's eyes. I don't really remember him having much of a black stripe.

[iishanreef]

Originally Posted by daniella3d

wow, hard to beleive that this heel survived a trip on probably semi-dry liverock for hours and hours, without water...

it is amazing isnt it, ive heard that eels are able to be out of water for short periods, in the wild they can crawl between tide-pools to hunt trapped fish