An eel with a pair of internal jaws was discovered

A new study, recently published in the journal "Nature", reveals that even in nature there is a creature that uses an extra pair of jaws in order to kill its prey

Noam Levithan and Yonat Ashhar, "Galileo"

The alien in the "Eighth Passenger" movie series has a pair of jaws located in the muzzle, in addition to the fearsome jaws in his mouth. When it attacks, this alien is able to move its jaws out of its mouth in order to kill its prey, usually a crew member other than Sigourney Weaver. A new study, recently published in the journal "Nature", reveals that there is also a creature in nature that uses a similar tactic to capture its prey: this creature is the moray eel, some species of which reach a length of about three meters.

Many fish swallow their prey by sucking; Some of them expand the cavity of their mouths and thus create a pressure difference that causes water and food to be sucked into them. Others catch their prey in their mouths and only then create a suction effect that moves the prey from the mouth to the esophagus.

Many gorse fish have a pair of jaws in their throat with limited movement, the pharyngeal jaws, which help in the swallowing process - either in filtering food from the water or in crushing and grinding the food.
But the Moors ran into a problem.

instead of sucking food into the pharyngeal jaws

More than 200 species of moray eels live in tropical waters, often in holes in rocks or coral reefs. The moraines are inside the rock or reef and only their heads stick out, a sight familiar to many divers.

Their body structure - which is adapted to this environment - is too narrow and long to allow the creation of a negative pressure sufficient to swallow the prey, which is usually relatively large fish and other large creatures, such as octopuses and squids. In morons, therefore, the pharyngeal jaws play an additional and more dramatic role.

With the help of high-speed video and X-ray photographs, Mehta and Peter Wainwright of the University of California, Davis, discovered that instead of sucking food into the pharyngeal jaws, the morons capture the food with the help of their oral jaws (the "normal" jaws) whose teeth are curved towards the morons' throat. in a structure that prevents the prey from escaping from their mouths.

At this stage the pharyngeal jaws - which also have curved teeth - leave their place behind the skull, move into the oral cavity and capture the prey. Once the prey is captured in the pharyngeal jaws, the oral jaws release their grip and the pharyngeal jaws pull it into the esophagus, for swallowing. That is, the pharyngeal jaws of the morons do not wait without movement until the prey reaches them, but help in capturing the prey in addition to helping in swallowing it. As soon as the moray eel manages to catch, even partially, prey in its mouth, the jaws of the pharynx move into the oral cavity and deliver another bite that ensures that the prey will be swallowed - as well as the moray eel's place as a super predator in the coral reefs.

This discovery, of internal jaws that help in capturing prey, represents a type of discoveries that almost do not exist today - a discovery of a phenomenon that exists in nature and that no one has seen until now through observation alone, without the stages accepted in today's science, of developing theories and testing them.