Sam Davis, a 58-year-old engineer from Maryland, shared on Instagram a photo capturing the rare moment a snake eel punctured a blue heron’s throat to escape while the bird was flying in mid-air.

Snake eels float from the throat of a heron flying in the air. Photo: Sam Davis.

Davis said he took this photo at an animal shelter. At first he thought the heron had been bitten on the neck by a snake or eel. But when he got home and edited the photo, he realized it was an eel coming out of the heron’s throat.

People at the shelter were also extremely surprised when they saw the above image and said they had never seen anything similar before.

Snake eels are a family of eels that can grow up to 2.1 meters or more in length. The highlight of this fish is its sharp tail that accounts for more than half of its body length. This tail is used for burrowing. Snake eels live most of their lives in caves, beneath the soft sand on the seabed.

If swallowed by a predator, they will use the tip of their extremely hard tail to break through the stomach wall of the enemy to get out.

This “escape” process of snake eels seems strange and scary, but studies show that the behavior of snake eels is not uncommon in the animal world.