But try to lift your hand out, and it’s as if the bucket’s contents are now attached to you. “It doesn’t feel like much at first, as if a spider has built a web underwater,” says Douglas Fudge of Chapman University. Reach in, and every move of your hand will drag the water with it. And in less than half a second, that little amount will expand by 10,000 times-enough to fill a sizable bucket.
Typically, a hagfish will release less than a teaspoon of gunk from the 100 or so slime glands that line its flanks.
The animals were destined for South Korea, where they are eaten as a delicacy, but instead, they were strewn across a stretch of Highway 101, covering the road (and at least one unfortunate car) in slime. On July 14, 2017, a truck full of hagfish overturned on an Oregon highway. They slime when attacked or simply when stressed. Hagfish produce slime the way humans produce opinions-readily, swiftly, defensively, and prodigiously.
“Is it completely covered in slime? Then, it’s a hagfish.” “Look at the hand holding the fish,” the marine biologist Andrew Thaler once noted. For everyone else, there’s an even easier method. Naturalists can tell the two apart because hagfish, unlike other fish, lack backbones (and, also, jaws). At first glance, the hagfish-a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail-looks very much like an eel.
