A recent-ish article on Wired provided a pocket guide to the under-appreciated hagfish, a difficult to classify eel-like fish with no spine (but a skull). I’ve seen two in my life – the one above, at Shark Alley (we followed it, hoping to see a showdown with a cowshark), and one lying calmly on the deck of the Aster wreck in Hout Bay. They are found abundantly in the deep ocean where they seek out whale falls with their keen sense of smell. They can’t see much.
When disturbed, they secrete copious quantities of slime – enough to fill a standard sized bucket in a few minutes. The slime fouls up the gills of whatever predator (a shark? perhaps!) is attacking them.
How, then, does the hagfish keep from suffocating itself? They have “beautiful, almost balloon-shaped gills, and so that really restricts anything getting into them,” said Bucking. The hagfish pumps water through a series of small holes into pouches, where “there’s all these channels and chambers that spread the water out and put it in contact with blood so they can exchange oxygen.” It can also clear the slime off its body with the same technique it uses to feed, tying itself in a knot and passing itself through it.
Read the rest of the article here. I promise you it’s fascinating.
