Chub Rock Wreck
Fifty feet down on an old Bahamian wreck, a thirteen-year-old learns what a moray eel is, and what it isn’t.
Updated October 1, 2026
Years later, I opened a copy of the leading diving magazine of the day, back when it still had the sport mostly to itself. More people were buying their own regulators and B.C.s every season, and the magazine had begun to read like a brochure for the southern Caribbean. Its owners held a share in a Cozumel dive hotel, and Cozumel, the magazine kept telling us, was the best diving in the world.
By then the market had caught on, and the magazine had grown a little more sensational to keep up. On one page was a story by Eddie. He had tried to ride on the back of a sand shark, a fish known for its passiveness, and the shark had turned around and taken a chunk out of his thigh.
I knew Eddie. And reading his story, I was back on the Sea Queen near Chub Rock, thirteen years old, with an eight-foot green moray and the day Eddie and Cathy and I went down to the old sunken steamer.
The Steamer at Chub Rock
I was thirteen and still working toward my scuba certification. Eddie and Cathy lived in the water, seven days a week, and that day we plunged off the Sea Queen to visit the wreck and grab some shots for a dive shop promotion.
The steamer lay about fifty feet down, furred with sponge and coral. Eddie took off toward the shallow end of the wreck to look for rays. Cathy and I stayed with the eel.
She lived in the wreck, and she had learned what divers carried. Cathy brought ballyhoo, the little needle-nosed baitfish, in a plastic case, and the moray came out of the steel to meet her.
The eel was restless, and her skin was shining bright green. We were ecstatic. The moray wrapped herself around Cathy, eight feet of muscle sliding over her shoulders and tank, while Cathy pulled ballyhoo from the case one at a time.
Green Blood
Then the eel missed. She mistook Cathy’s face for the ballyhoo.
She clamped down around Cathy’s face and would not let go. She contorted her jaws and writhed, then rotated, rapidly, again and again, shaking Cathy’s head like a doll.
The first color to disappear underwater is red. By fifty feet it is nearly gone, and what is left of the light turns blood a deep, unreal green. Green blood was everywhere. Cathy screamed through her regulator. She lashed at the eel and struck at her gut.
I went for Eddie at the far end of the wreck. When we came back, Cathy was free, and the three of us made our way topside.
On deck, we opened the antibiotics, and Cathy stitched her face. In a few months she had healed, and she and Eddie were back to diving seven days a week.
A few years later, the eel was speared by a fisherman.
A Second Set of Jaws
For years I carried that afternoon around as a story about a monster. It took me a long time to understand that it was a story about food.
The green moray, Gymnothorax funebris, is the largest moray of the tropical Atlantic, reaching about eight feet. It is not really green. Its skin is dark, and the green is a coat of mucus that protects it as it slides through coral and steel. It is mostly a night hunter, patrolling the reef after dark and spending its days tucked into a crevice with its head out, mouth working open and shut as it pushes water over its gills. That gaping mouth is breathing, not menace.
What the mouth hides is stranger. In 2007, biologists Rita Mehta and Peter Wainwright showed that morays carry a second set of jaws in their throats. When a moray bites, these pharyngeal jaws launch forward into the mouth, seize the prey, and drag it back toward the gullet, more like a snake swallowing than a fish feeding. Morays don’t need suction. They grab, and they ratchet.
Their teeth curve backward, toward the throat. Anything that pulls away only drives the teeth deeper, which is why divers bitten by morays describe the same thing Cathy went through: you cannot pull free. You have to make the eel let go.
On the reef, that grip makes the moray a superb partner. In the Red Sea, researchers led by Redouan Bshary watched roving groupers swim to a resting giant moray and shake their heads at it, a signal that means come hunting. The moray slides into the cracks where the grouper can’t follow, and whatever bolts out into open water, the grouper takes. It is one of the few known cases of two species of fish coordinating a hunt.
Morays hunt mostly by smell. A diver with ballyhoo in her hands and the oil of it on her mask smells, to a moray, exactly like dinner.
The Fishponds of Vedius Pollio
People have feared morays for as long as they have kept them. Wealthy Romans raised them in saltwater ponds, fattened them for the table, and some made pets of them.
The most famous moray pond belonged to Publius Vedius Pollio, a rich friend of the emperor Augustus. Seneca and Cassius Dio both tell the story. At a dinner Vedius gave for Augustus, a slave dropped and broke a crystal cup, and Vedius ordered him thrown to the morays. The boy broke free, fell at the emperor’s feet, and begged to die any other way. Augustus was so disgusted that he had every crystal cup in the house brought out and smashed, and ordered the pond filled in.
Old English translations call Vedius’s fish lampreys, but the Latin word is muraena. Only a moray is big enough, and carnivorous enough, to make the threat real. Whether Vedius ever actually fed anyone to his eels, we don’t know. The Romans believed he could, and for two thousand years that has been enough.
The Feeding Years
The truth is less mythic and more ordinary. Almost every serious moray bite on record happened because someone was holding food.
By the 1980s and 1990s, hand-feeding was part of the show on dive boats across the Caribbean and the Pacific. Divers fed morays, groupers, barracuda and sharks for the paying guests, and the fish learned to come to the sound of a boat. In 1992, emergency physicians writing in the Annals of Emergency Medicine described three moray bites to the hand and warned that the wounds carry Vibrio and Pseudomonas, bacteria from the eel’s mouth and the sea, which is exactly why we reached for the antibiotics on the Sea Queen.
In 2001, Florida banned divers from feeding fish. The state listed moray eels first among the species made more dangerous by hand-feeding.
The bites kept coming anyway. In 2004, doctors reported a diver off Varadero, Cuba, who was seized by a green moray about five feet long and nearly lost his right arm. In 2018, an Australian dive instructor feeding a moray had his thumb bitten off, and the eel swam away with it. That same summer, a woman in the water off Kuhio Beach in Waikiki was bitten on the foot by a moray she first took for a shark.
And in May 2022, Captain Spencer Slate, a longtime Key Largo dive operator, was running his “Creature Feature” dive on Pleasure Reef for twenty-one guests when a green moray bit him just above his chain-mail glove and nearly severed his wrist. He spent a month in intensive care and lost two fingers. That fall, when the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary proposed ending fish feeding from dive boats, Slate argued against it. “No customers have been bit,” he said. “The only ones bitten have been us.”
He was right about that. The bitten are almost always the feeders.
What the Eel Wanted
I think about that moray more than I think about almost any animal I have seen since. She was not a monster. She was a big night hunter with poor eyes and a sharp nose, living in a sunken ship, who had been taught that people came carrying fish. One afternoon a face smelled like the fish, and she did what eight feet of moray does.
Cathy forgave her faster than I did. She was back in the water within months.
The eel didn’t get to forgive anyone. A fisherman found her in the wreck, where we had taught her to wait for us, and speared her.
Every time I read about another diver who reached into a moray’s world with food in his hand, I am thirteen again, fifty feet down off Chub Rock, swimming as fast as I can toward the far end of the wreck, the water around me turning green.
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