Sometimes it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the hagfish comes up for discussion, though at least one person thinks that I may be, and I quote, “vastly over-estimating the market saturation of hagfish blogging.” Perhaps it’s a holdover from that one seminar talk I went to when I was in undergrad given by a professor who researched (among other things) the properties of hagfish slime. While he was talking my friend drew a quick sketch of Hagman, the hagfish superhero, and we all snickered loudly in the back row. Hagman then sporadically came up in conversation for weeks afterward, and still makes me snicker several years later.
Hagman fights for truth, justice, and the Stanley Cup.
There’s a good reason that hagfish are one of those creatures that gets a disproportionate amount of cultural presence, and that’s because they’re weird and gross. They’re marine invertebrates, living mostly at great depth in the ocean, burrowing into dead whale carcasses and other rotten corpses and eating their way out. They have no bones or jaws, but intimidating rings of scaly teeth. And when they’re attacked or startled, they produce a cloud of slime, tie themselves in a knot, shimmy out of the slime cloud that’s now engulfed the attacker, and escape.
That’s an impressive trick, disgusting table manners or no.
Hagfish slime is astounding. The mucus the hagfish produces is a milky white goo, and while it doesn’t produce much mucus at any one time, a small amount of mucus quickly turns a large container of water into a large mass of slime.
