How Can Hagfish Produce Slime 400 Times Their Volume? Everything to Know About Eel-Like Creature

Hagfish can produce slime a hundred times more than its volume. Also, there are a lot of misconceptions about its slime.

What Is a Hagfish?

A hagfish is a tubular animal resembling an eel with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail. However, unlike other fish, it lacks backbones and jaws.

Also, it's easy to distinguish from eels by simply looking at the hand holding it. According to Andrew Thaler, a marine biologist, if the hands are covered with slime, the person is having a hagfish.

Per Douglas Fudge of Chapman University, its slime is not as sticky as most expect and can easily be wiped off. Also, they barely feel like they are there.

Hagfishes, sometimes called slime eels or slime hags, generate much mucus. Slime from a disturbed 2-foot-long hagfish may fill a 5-gallon pail.

However, a hagfish stuck in its slime will choke to death. They make a knot in its tail and move it forward until the slime is pulled off to get rid of it.

Although hagfishes are nocturnal predators of small invertebrates, they are best recognized for their ability to scavenge by entering dead or dying fish through their burrows and eating the victim from the inside.

They don't need to have a massive tank of slime stored inside of them that is always ready to burst because they can create a bucketful of slime almost instantly. They avoid this by not containing the slime in its finished form within their bodies.

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How Hagfish Produce Too Much Slime?

The three primary ingredients of hagfish slime are seawater, mucins, and slime threads. According to the data, Hagfish slime is 99.996% seawater, 0.0015% mucin, and 0.002% threads.

Hagfish slime makes up about 3-4% of their body weight. Approximately 2.2 grams of a 60-gram hagfish would be slime; the remaining 73 milligrams would comprise equal parts mucin and slime thread, with the remaining weight being water. This slime precursor grows and quickly mixes with the surrounding water when the fish excrete it.

Hogfish slime is significantly more diluted than other animals' mucus discharges. Hagfishes could only generate 12 milliliters of slime if the concentration of mucins were the same as that of mammalian mucus. However, because of their low mucin concentration, hagfish can produce 400 times their volume of slime. For instance, a Pacific hagfish (Eptatretus stoutii) might produce roughly 24 liters.

Hagfish need only release 40 milligrams of mucus and protein to make one liter of slime, which is 1,000 times less dry than human saliva. This explains why the slime feels so incorporeal even though it is solid and elastic enough to coat a hand.

A truck carrying hagfish overturned on a highway in Oregon on July 14, 2017. The creatures were supposed to be served as a delicacy in South Korea, but instead, they were scattered all over a section of Highway 101, covering the roadway.

Hagfishes that are under stress release slime. They employ their capacity to create slime in self-defense.

Hagfishes being attacked will shoot slime out of that area of their body. They force sharks to release their jaws by injecting slime directly into their mouths and gills when they attempt to bite.

The predator's eventual fate -whether the slime suffocates them or dissolves -is uncertain. On the other hand, the hagfish appears to be unharmed and is free to continue with its day.

However, hagfish only slime when they feel threatened, which begs how these fragile critters might withstand a shark bite. Their squishy build is the answer.

Hagfish skin fits around the animal like a very loose sock and is only attached in a few spots, in contrast to the skin of most other fish, which fits tightly "like spandex." Researchers have discovered that because of their loose, scarcely connected epidermis, vital bodily components can easily slide out of the way of piercing teeth, shielding them from severe harm.

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