Gentle Giant

This is a huge male wolf eel towards the end of his life. His head must have been about 1 ft tall, and the body maybe 6-7 ft long! He definitely looks a lot scarier and meaner than the younger wolf eels, but this is not the case! Wolf eels are gentle, shy, slow and sedentary, the opposite of how ferocious they look, and this old guy was no exception. If you look into his mouth past the front teeth, you'll see a thick, bony plate on the roof of his mouth. And he has something similar on the bottom of his mouth too (included a few photos to show from different angles). This allows this amazing animal to do the unthinkable - grab whole sea urchins, crush them in his mouth, and then swallow them, without sustaining any injury. Other favourite foods include crabs and shellfish... must be nice having built-in shell crackers in your mouth. What a cool fish! And yes, despite their name, wolf eels are fish, not eels. They just happen to be really long, eel-shaped fish who fill the ecological niche of an eel in our waters. But you can tell they are a fish because they have pectoral fins, unlike true eels (such as morays). So what was this guy doing out of his hole? Hard to tell, but running across him is a sad story. On the very last dive of my most recent Port Hardy trip, after fighting with the current a lot at depth, I decided to come up into the shallows and drift along the wall. As I cruised along, I spotted this huge guy out in the open. It was very surprising as he would normally be in his den, and he was only in about 10-15 ft of water, while normally they are found a lot deeper. In fact, I let out a gasp of surprise when I saw him. I swam over to take some photos, approaching slowly and carefully as I didn't want to scare him off. He just looked at me, opening and closing his mouth regularly (to keep water flowing over his gills). After I took some photos, I noticed something seemed off. There were some swells from waves overhead, and he was moving back and forth with them. But then he got rolled over, onto his side, and then upside down. Not good, not good at all. I am not sure why he was out in the open at such a shallow depth, but something was wrong with him. I think maybe he was just very old, maybe disoriented and catching his breath? Anyway, he eventually righted himself, and then swam down to about 80 ft, where he basically ran into another diver. I followed along behind to see where he was going to go. After sitting still for a bit, he picked himself up and undulated down past 100 ft. The deeper he got, the better he looked. I turned and left him at about 90 ft as I didn't have a ton of air left. I didn't take any photos after the shallows but it was cool to see him getting his bearings and then swimming strongly into the deep. I hope he is OK but I think he was probably reaching the end of his (estimated) 25 year life-span? So, a bittersweet final encounter of the trip. Amazing to see such a beautiful animal out in the open, but sad that he seemed to be approaching the end of his life. Hopefully, he still has some more energy to make a couple more sets of super cute babies, and he was out on a bachelor crawl (that was the theory of the diver he ran into)!