The ‘Eel’ - teXt FILES by Kevin G. Belmonte (PHILSTAR.COM INC.)

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to shop for vegetables and plants at Sidcor. This is a weekly tiangge along EDSA near Cubao where vendors from the provinces and the city congregate each morning to sell their wares. There are normally quite a number of good finds there, particularly different Philippine flora; a lot of great bargains to be had. I’m a plant lover, but that’s another story for another time.

This particular Sunday morning, there was a vendor selling aquarium fishes. This hit a "need" for the family, as we were determined to purchase some new pets for the kids. Rose Anne, my wife, was particularly motivated to buy a new pet. Anyway, while we were perusing this vendor’s offerings, the seller brought out what he described as an eel. The animal was in a plastic bag filled with water. It was a little under two feet in length, had brown and cream bands across its body, a small head, and looked quite sluggish. "It makes a good pet and eats pelletized fish food (the kind you feed your tropical fish). It doesn’t bite, and you can even take it out of the water and let it crawl in your arm," said the seller. I should have suspected something fishy here already, but I guess my mind was pretty slow that morning. Besides, my wife and kids were quite thrilled to add an eel to the family aquarium. So we bought the "eel," some aquarium fish, and a pack of the pelletized fish feed. When we got home, we put the "eel" into the aquarium tank which contained a gold fish and some other tropical fish, popped in a few fish pellets, and didn’t think anything more of the animal.

A few evenings later, while we were putting our kids to sleep (the aquarium is located in one of the kids’ rooms), my wife noticed the "eel" sticking its upper body out of the tank. "Hey, what’s going on here," I thought to myself. Eels can’t breathe outside air, since they’re suppose to have gills, just like other fish. Well, the "eel" did not just stick its head out of the tank, but it proceeded to "slither" out and onto the floor. Now I was getting really nervous but excited about all this. I began to think to myself, "this isn’t an eel, it’s a snake!" Now I’ve always been fascinated with reptiles since I was a child. When we were newly married, I told Rose Anne that I wanted to have an insect and reptile room in the Chicago apartment, maybe even have a tarantula and a snake or two, non-poisonous, of course. "NO WAY," was her emphatic response, and that was the end of that.

But now, here was this creature which she herself had purchased thinking it was a harmless eel. When I managed to recapture the animal, which was by now slithering clumsily on the floor, I remember thinking while I handled the animal en route back to the tank, "this animal is scaly, aren’t eels suppose to be slimy?" When the animal was back in the tank, I finally observed it more carefully and noticed a smallish forked tongue sticking out of its mouth from time to time. I also noticed the animal was actually putting its nostrils above the water’s surface every few minutes, like it was breathing air. But what kind of snake was it? Was it poisonous or not? I remembered from National Geographic or some similar source that sea snakes were the most venomous of all snakes. I remembered one datapoint: one bite from a particular species of sea snake located in Australasia could kill up to 52 men.

I rushed to the computer, perspiration over my brow. I accessed the Internet, went straight to the Google search engine at Philstar.com (in the opinion of many, it’s the best Internet search engine around), and typed in "aquatic snakes." The search returned a few thousand websites. But I accessed the first few. I came across a website on Asian Aquatic Snakes and its creator, a Ph.D. at the Field Museum of Natural History which I have visited many times, having been a Chicago resident for eight years. I looked through the site and, in a matter of minutes, came face-to-face with a picture of our "eel." Its scientific name is Acrochordus granulatus, in English, the Little File Snake, endemic to the waters around Palawan, Malaysia and Indonesia. It lives almost wholly in brackish water, eats mainly fish, with an occasional frog, is nocturnal in habit (hence, its sluggishness when we acquired it during the day and hyper-activity during that fateful evening) and is non-poisonous. It would never have eaten the recommended fish pellets even if it was dying of hunger!

Whew! But I had to get an expert opinion to confirm the info, so I e-mailed the Ph.D. in the Field Museum. This was around 10:30 p.m. Manila time. Amazingly, in a matter of 30 minutes, I got a detailed response back from Dr. Voris. I e-mailed him again with further questions, and in 10 minutes, I got his expert responses. Fortunately, it was morning Chicago time, and Dr. Voris was at his office in the Museum. The Internet is truly powerful; you can connect with people and information sources across the world almost instantly, and find out details that even the very detailed Encyclopedia Britannica would not have been able to confirm for me, even in a few hours or even days of research. It is really changing our lives.

I finally broke my suspicions to Rose Anne: "It’s a snake, some kind of aquatic snake, but it’s not poisonous." My wife and I looked at our "eel" again for a few minutes. The kids were, by now, fast asleep. I wonder what my wife was thinking. I know what was going through my mind: "Oh boy, our very own pet snake! Yippee!" The next day, the aquarium tank was one goldfish short. I noticed a very slight bulge in our "eel’s" mid-section.