A moray protects his traditions
(vore, digestion)
 
 
Draco had lived inside his shipwreck for a couple of years now and grown both in size and fondness of his new home. Just like his cave he had inhabited previously, the old bridge now had a noticeable pile of teeth, bone fragments, half digested shells and all kinds of difficult to impossible to digest items piled up just in front of the little gap he always snuck into to rest and sleep off his meals. The wreck was not just a wonderful hideout that barred out any shark big enough to look at a nearly three meter long moray eel and think about eating him, it was also a magnet for his food. Dark corners and random boxes everywhere around it were often teeming with lobsters and other crustaceans which he happily hunted down just like the larger groupers which flocked and passed through the wreck on the look for smaller fish which mistake it for safe cover. It was almost as if this sunken ship was a little ecosystem on its own with a very active food chain and everything.
His inner calendar told the eel that pretty soon, his indigestible trophy pile was going to get a new layer rich with pointy little shark teeth, just like in previous summers. The blacktip shark pupping season was right around the corner, meaning weeks of feeding on the roughly half meter long newborn sharks which lost the fight for the limited spots in the reef top sanctuary, followed by a second helping of larger ones a few months later once they started to explore deeper waters. But whether it was the day old desperate or the month old well fed kind of blacktip pup, it had turned out they loved flocking to Draco’s wreck, thus turning into one of the reasons why his growth had picked up again since he moved. Of course he too had to deal with competitors. Other eels had come across this place and tried to compete with or fight him for it. Many left with nasty bite marks all over their bodies, more still left through Draco’s digestive tract. He had remained the uncontested “captain” of his wreck and now it was once more time for him to enjoy the spoils of his hard work.
 
He had to hide well for a few days, smelling, hearing and occasionally seeing shadows of passing blacktip sharks. Massive, pregnant females used the wreck as a navigation beacon and a spot to get a quick meal in before giving birth. With the good sense to not go out and compete with empty stomached, over two meter long reef sharks, Draco merely hid and waited while hearing and smelling how the females shredded and or devoured various fish and lobsters which he would have loved so much to consume himself. But he knew better than to endanger himself without need. He would just take back the lost calories -and then some- in the form of their offspring.
Just as in previous years, he started to smell the freshly born little sharks. The shadows of the big adults vanished, as they retreated to deeper waters where they would resume being the bane of large schooling fish while Draco was once more restored as the unquestioned pinnacle of the local food chain. At least during the day when the sand tiger sharks were resting. By now he had adapted a hunting method based on a years old memory of when he had been forced to explore and forage more actively rather than lazily ambushing his prey. He had learned that acting as if his wonderful spot in the wreck was vacant helped his food to think that it was up for grabs, allowing him to hunt and feed with a home advantage when he returned, with or without creatures already populating his belly. So, once he felt it was safe, he set out one day to find and consume inexperienced, ill oriented blacktip pups, before the goliath groupers got all the easy ones.
 
Draco slithered out of his shipwreck, leaving through some of the small openings it had. He passed by a few smaller fish and crabs on his way, not bothering to stick his head in tight places to get such tiny prey this time. He was after the easy to catch surplus shark pups and maybe one of their fellow predators, should opportunities present themselves. But in his mind he was already imagining his throat pleasantly scratched by sharp dermal denticles and hundreds of tiny needle teeth pooling at the bottom of his hungry stomach.
He entered the somewhat yellowy morning light and made his way up the gentle slope towards the top of the reef. This was where the blacktips birthed their pups and where blacktips birthed their pups and the newborn sharks now fought over the best feeding grounds and hiding spots in their nursery. Since he was no heron and no reptile, he had no chance of getting them there, even though he was pretty good at getting into tight places. The swell of the shallows scared him. Instead he focussed his attention and appetite on those which would doubtlessly be displaced by their fellows and had to look elsewhere. Some would figure out to circle around the island, running a gauntlet of coastal predators and fellow sharklets but -hopefully very- many would find happy and accommodating stomachs like Draco’s to stay in. In any case he had room for ten or more of them, since the slim pups stacked nicely in his big, long, stretchy stomach. But the hard part was not to accommodate but rather to find and catch them before anything else did.
 
 As he slowly got used to the light, the moray still relied on his sense of smell for the most part to find his way around the reef. His eyesight was poor but his sense of smell even more acute than that of the little sharks he was going after. However it was a bit tricky right now since their scent came from all over the shallows and Draco already saw an unusual amount of activity and excitement among other larger reef predators. He was not the only moray with a sweet tooth for blacktip pups and the groupers all came from their hiding spots and assumed their ambush positions around rocks, over holes in the coral or near ledges as they usually would around dusk, when most of the hunting on the reef took place.
Luckily, since his anticipated prey was half a meter long and over one and a half kilos a piece, Draco had only a handful of competitors to worry about. Already he could hear the occasional splashing of the little sharks trying or failing to escape particularly big and greedy seabirds or some reptile or another. Still, the moray was eager and capable of showing the pups that the shallows was the better home.
After a while one of those scents grew more potent and whenever the swell pushed water over his nostrils, he managed to trace a lone individual. The descent of the first sharklets into the reef propper had begun. He homed in on the scent, staying low to the ground to blend in with algae covered rocks as the silhouette of his prey. He made a small detour to deliver a warning bite to a juvenile goliath grouper who had the same idea that he had, potentially delivering a crippling infection to the fish who should know better. Groupers were a dicy subject for Draco. The little colourful ones were great snacking while the bigger darker kinds varied from meals to competition to some of the few creatures he still rightfully feared. This one got the memo and looked for breakfast elsewhere, leaving Draco alone with the exploring shark pup. To it he was the first eel it ever saw. To him it was close to the one hundredth blacktip pup he hunted. And most of those ended up adding to his noodly frame.
Oblivious to him and seemingly dazzled by all the smells, colours and scents rushing on on the little pup after a year in its mother’s uterus, the blacktip simply passed over Draco. The eel could not have asked for a more collaborative prey and swiftly angled his jaws upwards, launching his open jaws at his unsuspecting prey. In the last second the shark picked up on him, probably receiving a strong signal from its electroreceptors by this point. But it was too late. Its tail thrashed in the water but all the good it did was to make Draco sink his teeth into its flanks right behind the head instead of grabbing its face. His jaws had pushed up and pierced the soft little pectoral fins and he felt how his prey’s clenching muscles helped driving his teeth inside even deeper. The little shark was utterly caught. Then Draco’s pharyngeal jaws emerged from his dark hungry gullet and grabbed hold of the struggling shark pup. When he released his outer jaws, the wonderful smell of fresh meat and blood drifted to his nostrils and as soon as his second pair of jaws pulled, the pup was getting lined up with his long sleek gullet. A flicking tail stuck from his busy maw, bloody puffy were pumped out of his Breathing holes as Draco consumed his prey. Again and again his main jaws took hold of the prey for a half second as his pharyngeal jaws reset. Then the shark was casually dragged further down and the process repeated until the twitching caudal fin of the first blacktip pup was so deeply inside his pharyngeal jaws could no longer reach it. That was when Draco swallowed and bent his body into a slithering S-shape much like a feeding python. He kneaded the shark into his empty stomach where it was met with a soft, acidic embrace. The pup hardly struggled, merely twitched, probably utterly overloaded with electrical fields and smells from all directions, allowing Draco to leave his stomach to its task of digesting the shark while he carried on his own: consuming more of them.
 
With a very pleasant presence inside his stomach, Draco turned and resumed his hunt, not even waiting for this shark pup to die before looking for yet another one to feed on. Over a decade of experience convinced him he only had around 3 days of easy feeding before things turned back to normal again and he wanted to make the best of it, meaning a big layer of fat on his flanks. He flushed his maw of any blood and slithered between corals and rocks, looking for the next blacktip pup. He passed by a few smaller fish hiding from his prey among other things. Under normal circumstances he would have hunted these fish but he was focussed on the sharks now, being a bit picky for once.
During the next one and a half hours, Draco managed to wring one from a smaller moray which had caught a pup and then struggled to get its gnawing jaws over the squirming shark’s head. Draco then just grabbed the prey sideways and folded it in half, greedily dragging it into his ravenous gullet and it was more dumb luck than anything else which allowed the startled smaller moray to escape rather than being slurped down alongside its catch. From there Draco continued, now feeling a bit of firm resistance in his belly whenever he bent more sharply. His stomach was filling up nicely but he could fit way more than this.
Another pup ended up deciding to explore a cave right in front of him and the old moray gleefully joined the shark inside, pinning it against the back wall with his massive snake-like body and then being the only one to leave the cave again.
 
With a great but exhausting hunt concluded and three little sharklets stewing in his heavily acid drooling stomach, Draco turned back towards his wreck to rest and digest, daydreaming of his trophy pile getting coated in fresh shark teeth as his stomach worked over today's filling and the ones yet to come. When he slithered into his hideout he realised the little pups had not found it yet, but that was just a matter of a day or two. He would get his home delivery eventually. At the very latest in half a year when the more successful blacktips left their nursery and explored the reef. These will be more aware and harder to catch but also significantly more filling when he did manage to snag one. But for now, he curled around the helm, rested his head on a big crumbly pile of indigestibles his ravenous appetite had built up over time and let his stomach work on those tough little shark pups. He was able to sleep peacefully through the rest of the day as well as the dark and dangerous night during which various species of adult sharks rose from the depths to do the heavy lifting in the blacktips’ natural selection process. And that of various species of fish which tried to prey on them. Meanwhile a certain eel ws safely holed up deep inside a difficult to navigate wreck.
 
 
Draco woke up the following day feeling happy, full of energy and hungry. There still was a noticeable presence in his belly but an even bigger one meandering through his winding guts, getting assimilated into and feeling his body. It was downright poetic how these sharks supplied him with the nutrients his body needed to hunt down and devour their littermates. But after finding nearly nothing edible inside his ship and entering the bright reef once more, he was in for a big disappointment.
 
He actually found a blacktip pup sooner than yesterday, but while his stomach had already reduced the three he had caught into a thick paste with a few firm protrusions and thus had a lot of room for more he was not too excited. The little pup was agitated, nervous and swimming with considerable speed. He saw it change direction frequently, sticking to shadows where it became essentially invisible to the eel. Something had riled it up so much its instincts to flee and hide kicked in. Draco swam up the gently sloping reef to look for more cooperative elasmobranch snacks. The sinusoid motions of his elongated tail were very soothing and helpful to his busy intestines which were sifting through the pulped remnants of yesterday’s sharks. Their tough skin did not help him much but even when tiny these creatures were surprisingly muscular and -once digested- allowed the eel to expend a lot of energy looking for their tasty brethren. But even though he soon wore out his muscles, Draco found none. Out of habit he still passed by some crabs, a small lobster and some hiding fish since he was laser focussed on the shark pups, but they were all just rushing about, frightened and or excited. The newborn sharks never noticed, until they were grabbed and promptly swallowed, how easy they made it for the barracudas which had arrived at the reef probably just for them. It was a spectacle for sure, watching the agile arrow shaped fish dart after the pups which were hopelessly outmatched in open water. Draco knew these fish had really earned this feast since they, unlike him, had to run the gauntlet of these snackable pups’ ravenous mothers on their way in. But still he felt just two things: envy and appetite. There was still too much gritty mass being churned in his stomach to call him hungry but that was changing more and more with every roiling wave of peristalsis washing over his insides and with every sharp bend his body took.
 
In the end Draco returned to his wreck to rest. Exhausted, slightly peckish and mightily annoyed. With how big, old and experienced he was he had gotten used to these blacktip pupping seasons being a buffet for him but when his stomach finally decided it was done with its contents only a measly trickle of hollowed out teeth fell from his retching maw, hardly changing the look of his pile at all. It was around that time, as he wondered if he should risk a night hunt, when he got an idea of why exactly the pups were so hard to get, at least for him.
Draco did not have ears sensitive in the weird high pitched range of dolphin calls, but when one bumps into the algae covered glass panels of the large windshield behind him, he definitely heard it. He turned his head, wishing there was no glass in between him and the nuisance so he could bite them. He saw a beak and then a belly pressing through the algae, drawing wavy patterns in the muck and creating a kind of viewport. A few seconds later he saw a juvenile common dolphin around a meter in length getting bored already. It bounced off the glass with another thunderous boom inside the wreck and swam up, breaking off a piece of coral from the ship and started tossing that thing around and swam after it. Draco saw whole schools of fish evading the prancing dolphin and as he watched the mammal chase after the fish with glee without even trying to eat one, he slowly figured out why today’s hunt had been such a disappointment. Once he recovered more of this strength, he grumpily concluded that he should just save his strength and forage inside his wreck as if it was just any ordinary time of the year and tomorrow he would embark on a long journey across the island head to hopefully find a reef with some leftover blacktip shark pups to eat and no juvenile dolphin scattering them off Draco’s menu for mere entertainment.
If he could sigh and grumble, Draco would do both. Even though there were still three little sharklets on their way through his guts, his stomach was essentially empty and tired or not, the eel lived in a big marine life aggregator. So he slithered out of his hiding spot and started to look behind pipes and in cracks and behind crates. That was where he eventually found a flat and wide looking kind of lobster and decided this was going to be his second prize, seeing he did not get what he wanted out on the reef. He pushed himself between the crate and the rusty old ship hull as best he could, but of course the crustacean was rather reluctant to let itself be consumed. The barnacles growing on the metal hull were scraping his skin through his thick slime layer, but Draco was too fed up, too angry to give up. He endured a little bit of pain and eventually moved the old metal box a little, leaving the lobster exposed and him free to inflict death upon it. With a cathartic crunch his needle teeth cracked through its shell and allowed him to eat something at least.
His pharyngeal jaws did just the same to the desperately struggling animal and dragged it backwards into his gaping jaws while he slithered back out of the gap he had created. He paused for a few seconds, yanking his meal down his gullet in an awkward pose, breaking a few brittle limbs before the lobster even arrived in his hungry stomach. Once it was there, he felt a lot better. While less nutritious, the crustacean was more massive than one of the shark pups he was currently after and he could appreciate the mass in his midsection, knowing full well it was going to melt pretty soon. At least it kept him from becoming actually hungry as he rested and recovered. Tomorrow was going to be better. At least he had a plan to make it more… fulfilling.
 
 
Over night Draco’s stomach effortlessly liquefied the lobster’s soft insides and only left a bleached, leathery husk which would in due time pass as well. Maybe some remnants of its pincers will make it out when he voided his stomach of indigestibles at some point, but for the most part he had already forgotten what could well have been his ten thousandth crustacean prey. For all intents and purposes his stomach was empty when he moved from his shady hideout in the morning and slithered through the bridge of his shipwreck. There were more enticing smells around him now. He could already tell some of the blacktips were near and it excited him to wager yesterday’s meal’s nutrition on a little search.
Once he entered the slightly more illuminated hold with the large cut in its hull, he spotted one. A pup barely half a meter long was swimming with stern but slightly uncoordinated motions. It was clearly distressed as had all the others he had seen but been unable to catch the day before. Draco accelerated, eager to put the little thing out of its misery and -infinitely more importantly- into his stomach. The moray formed a tight S, almost like a snake about to pounce as he drifted through the water and then lunged at the shark, jaws agape and ready to suggest the freshly emptied lobster husk in his belly as a new hideout for it. But the little creature noticed him just in the nick of time and darted away with the speed its kind used to terrify him with. His jaws snapped shut, only managing to grip the utmost tip of its caudal fin. He got a taste of the shark’s skin but when his pharyngeal jaws shot forwards to pull the prey inside, the thin skin ripped and the shark escaped leaving a tiny trail of blood as if to taunt him as it escaped through a narrow cut in the ship’s hull. Draco was furious and he would be looking for that particular shark in the near future. He was old enough to make grudges fast and well fed and strong enough to afford having them. But his stomach was empty still.
 
The moray had no idea how generously things were about to change. His hearing was not the best but he recognised the ear piercing thrills of the dolphin which had rammed into his windshield earlier. The pest had found a way into his wreck and tried to make it his playground now. The eel was always weary of dolphins, knowing them to be smart, fast, strong and prone to killing for entertainment alone. Through their unpredictable nature they might even be more terrifying than most sharks, now that he knew how to avoid those, or was simply too big to be an enticing prey to risk getting bitten by.
But this one was alone. Barely able to fit his girthy, roughly meter long body through the gaps in the hull. Draco watched him from a shady hiding spot, ramming into crates, eating a crab or two, then plucking the shears off a lobster without actually eating it and continuing to rampage through his home. Now he knew what had gotten into the shark pups and why them, Draco and all the other ambush predators counting on the former, were having a bad time. Inevitably the dolphin discovered him too and started to play a game of “Bite the big thing and see what happens.” The mammal seemed to find great joy in letting his teeth slip off Draco’s slime coated skin and resumed pestering until something clicked in the eel. He realised something. The adult dolphins are not in this ship. They would not fit through the holes to begin with. But this juvenile might just fit through the hole between Draco’s jaws.
 
The dolphin’s tune changed from nauseous chirps into the wonderful music of terrified prey that knew it was caught when Draco turned the tables on him. He latched his jaws onto the dolphin’s head and even if he had not caught the critter’s blowhole in his bite, his dozens of needle like, backwards hooked teeth were doing vastly better at grabbing slick prey than the dolphin’s dull pegs. He could scream all he wanted, at the very least that pocket bull was getting a gnawing he would not forget as long as he lived and Draco was determined to ensure this span could be conveniently measured in minutes. The eel used his home advantage and decade of experience to wrestle the dolphin against a wall, cornering him between rusted metal and his writhing hungry coils. In a strange way this felt a lot like eating shark pups when he had been a third of his current size. But Draco had no time for nostalgia, he had a new prey species to claim.
Just like with any other roughly fish shaped prey, he used his twin jaw sets to more or less walk his way towards the prey’s head without ever letting go completely. The young dolphin was terrified and wasted a lot of air in his writhing struggles. But all the same the eel’s maw excited his field of view for one eerie seconds before they advanced and utterly engulfed it.
As soon as Draco’s pharyngeal jaws introduced the sleek dolphin head to his readily expanding throat, he could swallow as usual, just with a lot more effort involved. His jaws took turns hooking into the thickly blubber padded dolphin skin and occasionally forcing his girth into Draco’s throat took so much force his teeth raked through the soft fat, creating narrow gashes. These made his prey cry out in pain and filled his maw with a delicious bloody taste. It was different from anything he ever had before but he could instantly tell that dolphins were extraordinarily dense in calories, making them highly desirable guests to any stomach. On top of that, every little wound would help his digestive juices infiltrate the mammal’s flesh for easier digestion. If he managed to consume the entire dolphin.
 
It turned out it took minutes to swallow the entire thing and unlike any fish or shark that troublesome to devour, the dolphin kept fighting instead of suffocating. Draco had to let go of his wrestling stance eventually, simply because he needed to straighten his body out to fit the huge meal inside. By the time the rostrum of his anticipated calorie bomb poked into his stomach, half of his tail was still squirming heavily and outside Draco’s advancing jaws. This caused the interlocked pair to drift through the ship in a strange dance as hunger and death struggled against desperation and survival.
Eventually this brought them back to the bridge and that is when Draco realised the juvenile’s screams had been heard and answered. Six black eyes belonging to three adult common dolphins stared through the windshield where the bull he was in the middle of swallowing had scraped all the muck away. They were there, impotently staring and lamenting their podmate’s well deserved demise, doubtlessly after failing to enter the wreck. Draco had initially picked this hard to enter ship as defence against sand tiger sharks, but he did not mind it worked against dolphins too. He continued to consume the dolphin with probably his parents as audience, walking his jaws over the descending body. The adult dolphins were noisy and kept banging against the windshield but failed to break through. It was clear they would kill him if they could but that just added to the mountain of spite with which he consumed their brethren.
Draco was elated to feel his stomach bulging, his jaws closing more and more as the vanishing tail tapered down. Eventually he used skin shredding force once more to fold the sturdy fluke into a pair of fleshy rolls and then -he could not tell if it was on purpose or not- faced the gawking dolphin pod and swallowed. They all saw their younger podmate being engulfed by Draco's closing throat and the faintly squirming bulge settling neatly in his belly. Draco was exhausted, his jaws, throat and swimming muscles all sore. His stomach stuffed front to back as he felt the dolphin pulverising the lobster shell and probably getting well acquainted with some stray shark teeth as he sank down behind the helm, just out of view from the shocked adult dolphins and settled down for a very well deserved and twice as necessary digestive nap.
 
The eel’s body was deformed greatly and the dolphin even had to bend in an odd way to fit in the limited length of his stomach. The whole situation was far from comfortable but still Draco drifted into an exhausted slumber rather quickly, listening to the noises coming from his suffocating prey, the stomach already busy digesting him and the other dolphins dealing with the plain reality of their offspring being fish food now. Before he fell asleep, he even thanked the blacktip pup that escaped him for luring that little bull to his hungry jaws. Accomplished and stuffed, his consciousness drifted away and his stomach eagerly took control of his entire metabolism.
The walls of his overstuffed digestive chamber were stretched too far to provide any meaningful churning but the strong acids they secreted did their job anyway. The flesh eating liquids seeped into the hundreds of cuts and scratches the prey had sustained on his way in, aiding in the softening of his rubbery skin and the underlying blubber before he was even dead. Then there was a firm spasm, the dolphin’s blowhole opened in a frantic urge to breathe. The cetacean knew that if he was not getting any air now, he would die. In his panic he chose to ignore that he was already marinating in moray eel digestive juices. So all he got out of his breath was a glass full of stomach juices which eagerly burnt his fragile, oxygen deprived lungs as Draco’s stomach ensured that breathing was not going to be an option after all. After that the dolphin fell still and there was nothing more to it as time passed and the moray claimed his food.
 
Overnight the acids did a lot of work softening and melting the dolphin. The many bitemarks swelled where the acrid juices infiltrated soft tissue, the wounds grew wider, the skin softened and eventually reached a consistency between bar soap that had been soaking overnight and cream cheese. The dolphin’s eyes and tongue fared even worse. While little gas bubbles still formed on his teeth as the dense material reacted with the acids, his eyes were simply liquefied and the tongue shrank, falling to the bottom of the digesting phin’s maw, one layer at a time. Occasionally a few gas bubbles escaped the sleeping eel’s maw, most of which had travelled inside via his prey’s lungs but some were products of chemical reactions.
By the time morning dawned, Draco had essentially skinned the dolphin. He yawned and looked at the massive swelling still occupying his stomach, even though his peristalsis had restarted and commenced pumping liquefied cetacean back towards the upper side of his stomach, where the fleshy paste took a turn and entered his intestine right next to the exit of his throat. Most of the chyme was melted skin and blubber, but a portion of it was the dead bull’s wicked brain which had been oozing from his laid bare eye sockets for the past few hours as well as the big concentrated blob of fat which used to be the dolphin’s melon. But his stomach was still working on that densely nutritious chunk. Even though he was stuffed and suffered considerable muscle soreness, Draco felt an urge to move. He slithered around his helm a few times, bending the parts of his body which allowed such extravagance in a sinusoidal way which greatly helped his stiffly filled stomach and busy intestines moving their contents around and passing the dolphin along.
 
After a few laps the eel went back to sleep. There was just nothing to do. His body had everything it needed to keep running for at least two weeks. He was going to miss the rest of shark pup season and as atypical it was for him, he was happy for it in this particular case. A fat cetacean falling apart in his stomach was much better than little sharks he’d had to find, catch and swallow first, after all.
Once he drifted back to sleep, his stomach resumed producing acids at full speed, this time along with some firm peristaltic churning since there was finally some room being freed up on account of the liters of former cetacean oozing through Draco’s slowly filling intestine. Once all the fatty blubber was gone and the dense musculature of the dolphin exposed, things went a bit quicker. From time to time the eel had to wake up and lift off his soon to be expanded trophy pile in order to release lobster and the first batch of fully digested dolphin back into the ocean. He was hard coded not to sully his hiding spot where he spent most of his time and sucked water through his gills but in any case he made some bottom feeders inside the wreck very happy. Overworked as his digestive tract was with its current occupant, it had not been particularly thorough in sifting through the chyme and some of the released mass was still reasonably nutritious, benefitting plankton and shrimps. But all Draco cared about was releasing the pressure in his guts and returning to sleep, to digestion, now that his guts had room for more liquid goodness.
 
This cycle repeated a few times over the span of two days. But on the dawn of the third Draco, now considerably fatter, released the final cetacean remnants from his belly when he opened his maw above his trophy pile and retched. Usually he released some shark teeth, some mangled remnants of lobster shears or the odd fishbone or two. But after processing an entire dolphin, there was a torrent of acid pitted vertebrae, nearly melted ribs and splinters of a collapsed skull, some still with matted teeth in them, piling up on top of older debris. These were the crown jewels of his pile now and a vivid reminder that in the ocean, especially with morays, things that do fit, will get digested, if the opportunity presents itself.