Scary-looking fish found on a Texas beach after Hurricane Harvey is identified as a fangtooth snake-eel with the help of social media

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The mystery of an eyeless fanged sea monster washed ashore by Hurricane Harvey has been solved by social media.



Preeti Desai, a science communicator, found the sinister-looking fish on a beach in Texas City after the storm, and asked Twitter users to help identify it.

It was variously identified as “that thing” from the film Tremors, to Disney’s Dr Finkelstein in eel form until Desai’s photographs were passed to Dr Kenneth Tighe, a biologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Dr Tighe identified it as the fangtooth snake-eel but warned that a precise identification was difficult without the tip of its tail. It could possibly be one of another two species belonging to the family of garden and conger eels.

The fangtooth snake-eel is less than a metre long and is usually tucked away in burrows in the ocean between 30 and 90 metres deep. It may have been dislodged from its usual habitat by the rough weather.

The eel’s scientific name Aplatophis chauliodus roughly translates as “terrible serpent”.

But its apparent eyelessness is simply because its small eyes have decomposed during its time dead in the water.