Читать книгу Extreme Nature - Mark Carwardine - Страница 40

NAME	hagfish Myxini species
LOCATION	worldwide
ABILITY	drenching predators in mucus by the bucketful

© Peter Batson/imagequest3d.com

This is an eel-like animal, 0.5–1m long (20–33 in), without fins, jaws, scales, a backbone or much in the way of eyes. Though not a true fish, it does have gills and excels in a fish-like trait – producing slime. For fish, a thin slime coating is a way of regulating the salt and gas balance between their bodies and the water, repelling parasites and maintaining speed. But for a hagfish, slime is also a weapon.

Its lifestyle is pretty basic, even a little squalid: it lives on the sea-bottom, usually at around 1,200m (4,000ft), where it eats anything it can overcome or scavenge. When it finds a suitable victim, it slithers into it, usually by way of its mouth, and then uses its toothed tongue to rip the animal to pieces from the inside out.

That’s nothing, however, compared to what it does when it’s threatened. Glands all along its sides exude a slime concentrate that reacts with seawater to create a cloud of mucus goo hundreds of times larger than the original secretions. It’s very tough goo, too – reinforced by thousands of long, thin, strong fibres – and the offending predator or unlucky passer-by becomes stuck in it and suffocates. The hagfish itself would suffer a similar fate, except that it has a way of extricating itself: it ties itself into a knot and slips the knot down the length of its body, squeezing free in the process.