This is totally wicked.
Groupers Use Gestures to Recruit Morays For Hunting Team-UpsThe giant moray eel can grow to three metres in length and bites its prey with two sets of jaws—the obvious ones and a second set in its throat that can be launched forward like Hollywood’s Alien. It’s not a creature to be trifled with. But the coral grouper not only seeks out giant morays, but actively rouses them by vigorously shaking its body. The move is a call to arms that tells the moray to join the grouper in a hunt.
The two fish cooperate to flush out their prey. The grouper’s bursts of speed make it deadly in open water, while the moray’s sinuous body can flush out prey in cracks and crevices. When they hunt at the same time, prey fish have nowhere to flee.
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The team also found that another reef fish—the coral trout—uses the same signal to team up with octopuses! The partners have the same set of complementary skills as the grouper and moray—the trout chases exposed prey and the octopus grabs hidden ones.
If this really is a referential gesture, that’s an important discovery. Such gestures are part and parcel of human life, but the only animals that seem to use them are intelligent ones, like chimps and other great apes, ravens, dolphins, and domestic dogs. In fact, the discovery of gestures in ravens was taken as further evidence of their impressive mental abilities.
But Vail and Bshary believe that intelligence is a red herring. The grouper and trout use gestures, and while they may be more intelligent than we give them credit for, it’s very unlikely that they rival apes. Instead, they evolved to use gestures simply because they benefit from coordinated cooperation with other species. Their gestures are driven by needs not smarts. They remind us once again that complex behaviour doesn’t necessarily imply complex minds.
Also this, about morays:
Moray eels attack with second pair of ‘Alien-style’ jawsIn the Alien movies, the eponymous monster killed shipmates and marines with a fearsome set of double jaws. That may have been science fiction but science fact isn’t too far off. In our planet’s tropical oceans, moray eels use a ballistic set of second jaws to catch their prey.
These ‘pharyngeal jaws’ are housed in the eel’s throat. When the main jaws close on an unlucky fish, the second set launches forward into the mouth, snags the prey with terrifying, backward-pointing teeth and drags it back into the throat. In fractions of a second, the prey is bitten twice and swallowed.
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The moray’s large head houses powerful jaw-closing muscles that deliver formidable bites. The sharp long teeth of the main jaws are excellent for gripping so that even if the eel sinks just a few of these in, its prey is trapped. The teeth on the pharyngeal jaws are designed to drag the prey further in. They are terrifying in appearance (below), recurved, sharp and backward-pointing, like a bird of prey’s talons. With adaptations like these, the eel has no need for suction feeding.
Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West.
Topic: Grouper and moray eel tag team