Ribbon eels are mainly content to stay in the same reef hole or coral heap for years, poking their heads out with their mouths ecstatically open as if to say, Wow—look at this spectacular place I call home! Really it’s just drawing water over its gills to help it breathe, though, and that’s how it spends most of its days, most of its brilliant, flat body tucked away. In conditions like these, ribbon eels thrive and live up to twenty years. But the biggest threat to ribbon eels is the home aquarium trade because they don’t survive long in captivity. Inside a tank, they soon stop eating, a
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