Ocean Watch

A Mississippi community college teacher e-mailed me that while one of her students, Sarah, was helping in the Katrina flood cleanup, something bit her. A man caught the creature, and the teacher sent me its picture, hoping I'd know what it was. The caption said, "Sarah's snake."

Before I even opened the file, I knew it wasn't a sea snake. These creatures don't live in the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean or Atlantic. Sea snakes are found only in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

I imagined Sarah's snake to be some skinny little land snake that got washed to a place it didn't want to be, but I was wrong. The creature was at least 4 feet long and so thick the man holding it couldn't close his hands around it. The stout, roundish body also had a dorsal fin running down its entire back and a familiar-looking head. The animal was a conger eel.

Conger eels are well known in Hawaii, but they also swim in oceans throughout the world, from shallow sand patches to depths of 1,600 feet. The size of these eels varies greatly. Hawaii's smallest conger grows to about 15 inches long. Our largest, the mustache conger, reaches 4.5 feet.

That's a pipsqueak, though, compared with its European cousin, Conger conger. This fish can tip the scales at 130 pounds and measure 12 feet in length.

The American conger, which ranges from Massachusetts to southern Florida, and in the Gulf of Mexico westward to Mississippi, weighs 10 to 20 pounds and grows 5 to 7 feet long.

People in Hawaii often call conger eels white eels. Like morays, they hunt for small fish and crustaceans at night. Unlike morays, though, congers have tiny teeth. I've never heard of a conger eel bite here, but I don't doubt a big conger floundering in murky floodwaters would snap at a hand or foot that got too close.

Hawaii's recent floods also displaced another aquatic creature. Carmen, a third-grade teacher in Makawao, Maui, wrote that during the heavy rain, she found shrimplike creatures swimming in the dog bowl and some even hopping around the carpet. After finding my column on opae kalaole, native mountain shrimp, she's convinced that's what they are.

Carmen wonders if these little shrimp might have come from dormant eggs that survived in the dirt until the rain reached them. I don't think so. A mountain shrimp's life cycle occurs in the water.

Female opae kalaole carry about 3,000 eggs on their legs year-round. Agitation, such as sloshing around in a researcher's bucket, strong aeration in a tank or maybe fast-moving water in a downpour, causes mature eggs on Mom's legs to hatch.

Once in streams, the tiny shrimp wash to the ocean, grow for several months, then climb up the stream to start the cycle again. Carmen's shrimp likely got washed from their streams in the storms.

We humans had a hard time with recent floods, but when conger eels in Mississippi and mountain shrimp in Hawaii get lost, you know the storms were bad. Blue skies never looked so good.