How hagfish choke their predators with slime

Hagfish are pretty disgusting creatures , but some oftheir most offensive qualities also make them pretty fascinating . Consider , for object lesson , what is perhaps the hagfish ’s most hideous feature : the thick slime that it exudes whenever it is endanger or raise up . Just a teaspoonful is enough toturn a beaker of fluid water into a mucilaginous mass of goop ; so you could reckon what happenswhen it unload a whole mess of the stuffinto its surrounding waters .

But what is this sludge for , precisely ? For years scientists have assumed that the ooze serves a defensive purpose , but nobody had ever seen the muck deploy in a natural place setting . Now , a squad of researcher in New Zealand have caught the Hagfish ’s defensive maneuver in action . Not Exactly Rocket Science‘s Ed Yong writes :

The hagfish in the videos are attack by shark , conger eel , Polyprion americanus and more . In less than half a second , the predator ’s mouth and gills are filled with slime . It leaves , gagging and convulsing , gook hanging in long wisps from its school principal . Even voracious seal sharks turn tail . The cameras did n’t follow the fleeing predators , so Zintzen does n’t know if they finally died or if the ooze dissolved aside . Either mode , the hagfish , uninjured and oblivious , just carried on alimentation . Its defense lawyers is so effective that it can totally snub the fact that a shark just tried to bite it .