By Susan Milius
Scientists have now figured out the recipe for what might be the most repulsive slime this side of a movie screen; the goo released by annoyed hagfish. Too bad knowing the recipe isn’t enough to control the stuff.
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When seized by a predator, or even just agitated, the Atlantic hagfish and its relatives release an odd substance that instantly reacts with seawater to become a huge slippery mass of goo. A hagfish can bloop out a liter or so in less than a second, says marine biologist Douglas Fudge of the University of Guelph in Canada.
“It’s hard to exaggerate about hagfish slime,” Fudge says. Glands in the fish spurt out a mix of little disc-shaped containers, or vesicles, and skeins of wound-up protein fiber that’s finer than spider silk. On contact with seawater, the vesicles burst. At the same time, the skeins unwind, a single cell’s filament stretching as long as 10 centimeters. The slime mix traps remarkable amounts of seawater and quickly swells.