Creepy Critters - The Hagfish

The hagfish, also known as a snot eel, is without a doubt the slimiest, slipperiest scavenger of the deep. Hagfish fall into the class of fish called agnatha, meaning jawless. As the name suggests, they lack jaws, but have two rows of sharp little teeth, perfect for taking a circular bite out of flesh. They use these formidable little chompers not only to eat the carcasses that fall to the bottom of the sea, but also to latch onto dying animals. They love to eat things from the inside out, worming their way into dead bodies before bursting forth in all their fattened slimy glory.

Each hagfish can generate up to 5 gallons of slime individually. Photo credit
dirtsailor2003 at Flickr.

They are also incredibly good at squeezing through tight spaces too. Some researchers found that hagfish can squeeze into places that are half of their body width. How do they achieve it? Their skin is not tightly attached to their muscles, meaning they can actually redistribute the blood in their bodies to make one portion of their body slimmer while another expands!

What makes the hagfish most famous, however, is why it is often called a snot eel. When touched or grabbed by a predator, the hagfish secretes a thick white mucus out of over 100 glands on its body. One hagfish can produce a little more than 5 gallons of mucus at once. This serves as a pretty good deterrent for other fish that try to eat them; the mucus clogs up their gills and makes it hard to breath, choking them a level of slime old school Nickelodeon would be proud of.

If the slime isn't enough, hagfish can physically tie themselves into knots since they lack a spinal column (you can see the not if you jump to about 1:00 in the video below, taken from Nautilus Live footage).

I am a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and whenever I see these fish and the way they can choke things with mucus, I can't help thinking of the horrid Queller demon from season 5. The awful thing crawls over people at night, clogging up their throats with slime as it leers over them with teeth of a lamprey, the hagfish's close cousin. If you don't believe me, look at the slime, look at these teeth, and then look up the Queller. It's the stuff of nightmares, and that's why these slimy fishes make it into my lineup of creepy critters.

The teeth of a lamprey, also an agnathan related to hagfish. Photo from Wikipedia.