They both equally protect their eggs and only one at a time leaves the cave to feed. Later, they coil around them and use her body to shape the eggs into a neat sphere roughly the size of a grapefruit, the male then coils around her to add an extra layer of protection. The male puts his head against the female's abdomen and wraps around her, while she extrudes the eggs (she can lay up to 10,000 at a time) which he then fertilizes. They reproduce from October until the end of winter starting from when they are around seven years old. They have a monogamous relationship and tend to mate for life and live in the same cave. The lifespan of this species is about 20 years. Males have large lips and a protuberance on the superior part of the head. It has no pelvic fins, nor a lateral line. It only has one dorsal fin, that extends from the head to the end of the body, with 228 to 250 flexible fishbones without soft radius. In the anal fin, it has no rays and 233 radials. They possess powerful jaws with which they crush their prey: canine teeth in the front and molars in the posterior portion of the mouth. Once older they turn grey, brown greyish or dark olive. Younger wolf eels are orange with big dark spots in the posterior part of the body. The animal can grow up to 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) in length and 18.4 kg (41 lb) in weight. ocellatus differs from true eels, as they have paired gill slits and pectoral fins. Wolf eel at the Dallas Children's Aquarium Description Ī.

The specific name ocellatus means “ocellated”, a reference to the eye like spots, or ocelli, on the dorsal fin and body. The Wolf eel’s genus name Anarrhichthys combines the wolffish genus Anarhichas, as this taxon has a similar head shape to the wolffishes, and ichthys, which means “fish”. This is one of two genera in the family Anarhichadidae, the other being Anarhichas. It is the only species in the monotypic genus Anarrichthys, which was also described by Ayres in 1855.

The wolf eel was first formally described in 1855 by the American physician and ichthyologist William Orville Ayres with the type locality given as San Francisco Bay in California. It is the only species in the monotypic genus Anarrhichthys. Despite its common name and resemblance, it is not a true eel. The wolf eel ( Anarrhichthys ocellatus) is a species of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Anarhichadidae, the wolf fishes.

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