Once I thought I could make more slime than anyone in the world. When I was a teenager I had hay fever from plants and house dust and worst of all book dust though I loved books. I spent days sitting in class blowing my nose. I produced litres of, let’s call it slime but you know what I mean. I was really embarrassed by it. There’s a creature that lives at the very bottom of the oceans that makes my slime producing ability look as small as David must have looked to Goliath. It’s called the Hagfish.
We can easily get a horrible picture of the Hagfish in our minds. It is long like an eel or a snake and can twist around really well because it has got no bones. Hagfish eat the dead bodies of other fish that die and sink to the bottom. Eew! Can you imagine a group of hagfish eating a dead whale or even a person who is buried at sea? Not a nice picture. Another habit of hagfish that we find very unpleasant is that they often eat a carcass from inside it. They get in through the mouth or some other opening. Very few people have seen hagfish in their natural home as it is too deep for divers unless they are in a special deep water vehicle. Some of the people who have seen them saw a dead creature looking as if it was alive. It seemed to be wriggling and bulging. After a while they realized it was full of hagfish moving inside it. Yuck!
I can imagine a really scary movie about hagfish that are affected by chemicals or radiation and start chasing swimmers. Even Jaws wouldn’t be as terrifying. In the movie they would be pretty long but the biggest kinds are not much over a metre long and most are little squiggly things. Let us remember that everything on this planet has its place and it is actually quite wonderful that hagfish can exist and live at the bottom of the oceans where it is freezing cold and really, really dark and most creatures would die from the pressure. Well the places most hagfish live are so deep there isn’t much light there anyway so it uses other senses so well it wouldn’t be concerned about being blind at all, so they have no real eyes.
Remember my hay fever? Why did I tell you about that? It is because the strangest thing of all about the hagfish is that it can make more slime than any other creature. It has slime glands all over its body. The hagfish can ooze slime out so fast that if another fish tries to eat the hagfish it can choke on the slime. Well, at least the slime can clog the gills which are the part of the fish that let it breathe under water. In fact, I can really sympathise with hagfish because its slime can be so thick it coats the creature all over and it is probably the only fish that has learned to sneeze to get rid of it all. The other crazy thing a hagfish does to get its own slime off it is tie itself in a knot and then slip the knot all down it to scrape away the slime. For me, slime was an embarrassment, but for the hagfish it is the most amazing protection and maybe it also helps it to slip around inside a dead thing it is eating from the inside.
You’re not going to believe this. Wait for it. Scientists are trying to find ways of using hagfish slime to help people. They are wondering about using it in cooking instead of the white bits of eggs. A meringue is a kind of cake made with a lot of egg white mixed with sugar. Can you imagine walking in your favourite cake shop one day and buying a Hagfish Meringue, or even worse, a Slime Meringue!. They would have to invent a more attractive name, like Mermaid’s Meringue. There are some ideas about it being used in medicine to clog up bits of people that are bleeding and make the bleeding stop.
Now I’ve told you, you can go and tell all your friends about one of the yuckiest creatures on the planet but in the end I would be really happy if you tell them that even the hagfish is special and its slime is a special ability. They won’t believe you when you tell them about it but when someone makes the Movies, ‘Hagfish’, ‘Hagfish 2′ and the rest, you can say, ‘I told you so.’