4 min read

I had an amazing diving experience tonight. I was invited to join an Advanced Open Water class for their night dive at Tyee, the most well known local dive spot. This spot has an easy to find Wolf Eel den with a mature breeding pair who were known to be sitting on eggs. I hadn’t visited them in a while, and had my camera handy, so I really wanted to check in and see how they were doing.

Shirley was the instructor, and I arranged with her that as part of the dive plan after we reached the turn around point if I had an abundance of air (I knew I would) I’d break off from the group, descend an additional ~20ft to the Wolf Eel den and snap a few pics.

All went according to plan, visibility wasn’t great as it’s the time of year where everything is spawning and water is just rife with tiny new organisms.

Here’s my approach to the den:

Approach to the den

The female was there, and initially didn’t seem too bothered by my presence. These particular individuals see divers on a daily basis. Then I noticed she was exhibiting some behaviour I hadn’t seen before, it looked like she was eating and spitting out small juvenile fish. I was in the midst of a huge mass of them so I didn’t think much of it at first. As I watched though, it became clearer that she wasn’t targeting the little fish, there were actually tiny eels coming out of her mouth - I was there mid-hatching!

It’s much clearer in the second video:

Mom interacting with hatchlings

After a couple of minutes she retreated back into the den as you see at the end of the second video. There is a rear entrance to the den, so I went around to the left to check it out to see if there was anything interesting going there. I could see the tail of the male hanging out of that entrance, but otherwise nothing else was happening. I assumed the show was over, and like an idiot, turned off my camera… That’s when the real show began. I came back around to the right, back to the front of the den in the direction of the ascent/exit. As I did, the male shot out of the front, turned around and went head-first into the back of the den. For a few seconds I could see the entire length of his body wiggling in the opening to the den, and I had no idea what he was doing. Then suddenly he whipped around and charged right for me. He stopped a few inches from my mask and seemingly vomited. I was very surprised and a little bit frozen in confusion. He whipped around and repeated the action, head in the den for a few seconds, then charging right for my face before vomiting. It was on the second pass that I realized it wasn’t vomit. He was actually spitting eggs and hatchlings in my face in a *very* aggressive manner. That’s when I turned and booked it out of there. This is an individual who is normally very docile, I’d obviously unintentionally angered him to the point where he was throwing his newborn children at me! As much as I was curious to see what would happen, it was probably best not to hang around any longer.

It was a unique, exciting, and slightly scary experience, and I’m kicking myself for not capturing the males aggressive behaviour on video. I’ve done some cursory googling to see if I could find any other references to this type of behaviour, to know whether it was normal or if my interpretation of the situation was correct and I can’t find anything. Anyone knowledgeable in such an area please feel free to fill me in.