Hagfish
Another ancient creature living among us is the Hagfish. These primitive creatures live at extraordinary depths in the Pacific Ocean off the coasts of Oregon, California and Washington. They’re also known as ‘slime eels’ because of the copious amounts of slimy, fibrous mucous they produce as a way to deter predators. While these creatures are notoriously slimy, they are not eels but fish, albeit strange ones indeed.
Hagfish have no jaws and their mouths are round and full of sharp, keratinous teeth. Lamprey are the only other jawless fish known to science. Like the horseshoe crab, Hagfish have been around a very long time, from 100 MYA to 300 MYA, and have survived many extinctions.
Predators have learned to avoid the hagfish due to its prolific mucous production. When threatened, the hagfish releases a dense, slimy and fibrous mucous to protect it. This mucous can actually clog the gills of a fish and lead to suffocation. In seawater, the mucous can expand up to 10,000 times in less than a second. It’s so durable that there’s now research into using the hagfish’s mucous as an alternative to spider silk in applications such as body armor.
I once came upon a fishing boat unloading a catch of hagfish on the Oregon coast. It was a huge operation with a crane lifting a net full of hagfish from the boat’s hold. The crane swung the net over one of eight large bins, its payload sagging as it lowered the catch. I was curious, having never seen fish like this before, and stepped closer.
Several men with long rubber gloves worked the container as the net unfurled the catch. They tried to spread the fish out as the mucous dangled and clung to the men’s rubber gloves. It was an astonishing thing to see as one of the men explained that these fish had to be kept alive for transport to their final destination. And where were they headed? South Korea and Japan. Apparently, hagfish were considered a delicacy in both countries, a fact I found hard to fathom as I took in this three-foot square bin brimming with wriggling, snot-covered eel-like fish. Must be in the preparation, I thought to myself.
Then, a man who turned out to be a hagfish broker introduced himself and explained the process further. These hagfish would go from the ocean depths to a Korean or Japanese plate in less than 24 hours. The broker had trucks lined up just beyond the pier waiting to drive these bins to Seattle where they would then be loaded onto a transport plane for a non-stop flight to South Korea and Japan. The point being, he told me, was to keep the fish alive the whole time as that was how chefs and restaurant patrons wanted them.
As for their own dietary peculiarities, hagfish are hardly persnickety or delicate in their sensibilities. They like snarfing up sea worms but are also fond of targeting dying and injured sea creatures much larger than themselves. In a tactic I can only describe as ‘ghoulish’, hagfish will enter the body of a weakened creature and eat their way out. They’re also known to be scavengers and have an ability to absorb organic matter through the skin and gills, a feature that helps them survive sporadic feedings.
