Monster Monday
October 19, 2015

A hagfish protruding from a sponge (Credit: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program)

The eel-like hagfish is a common but rarely seen sea creature that could have been dreamt up by H. P. Lovecraft, the 1900′s writer of horror stories. This fish is quite possibly the most grotesque of all deep-sea creatures. Nearly eyeless, hagfish have a round, jawless mouth surrounded by short barbels (fleshy whiskerlike growths) that they use to sense food. Its tongue-like radula has rows of sharp, horny spines. The hagfish uses the spines to bore into and scrape away the flesh of dead or dying animals. When hagfish come across a big carcass, such as a whale, they burrow into it and eat from the inside out, until all that remains of the whale is an empty skin.

One peculiar habit gives rise to a common nickname for hagfish: the snot eel. When disturbed, the hagfish defends itself by producing incredible amounts of sticky, gooey slime. Any predator that tries to bite a hagfish will be left with a mouthful of slime that chokes their gills. The Atlantic hagfish produces enough slime to fill a bucket in one minute. When the predator has fled, the hagfish wipes the slime off itself by tying its body in a knot that it then slips through.

Hagfish are very common in oceans throughout the world. As horrible as they are, hagfish are important scavengers that help rid the ocean floor of dead and decaying matter. Meals can be hard to come by in the deep sea, and hagfish have the ability to absorb nutrients directly through their skin in addition to through their mouth. This adaptation, thought to be unique among all fish, helps hagfish make the most of infrequent carcasses when they find them.