It should be no surprise to readers that I'm a huge fan of marine scientist, scibling, and friend Jennifer Jacquet. In many ways, I consider her my scienceblogging counterpart on the west coast. Last Saturday, we shared the Framing Science panel with Chris and even managed to have some fun in Durham over the weekend too.
So naturally I read Shifting Baselines and couldn't help but notice her post yesterday on the the slimy hagfishery off the coast of Maine. You see, the last talk I gave during graduate school was at an emerging fisheries meetup in Halifax, Nova Scotia where there were lots of interesting talks on hagfish. Your resident blogger was the only speaker on the ever charismatic sea cucumber. Go figure.
Anyway, those slime eels (myxine glutinosa) made a great big impression on me that I know I'll never forget and Jennifer's post reminds me why. Imagine a critter covered with special glands that emit a sticky slime made up of mucous. It's unique from other natural slime secretions because it's reinforced with tiny fibers making it strong and hard to remove. The slime reacts with sea water and just take a look...
And that's only the beginning:
They are sometime called the nastiest little creature in the sea. It's a scaleless fish with soft skin and thick barbels on the end of their mouth. They have no jaws and no bones. The hagfish's skeleton is made up entirely of cartilage. They have very poorly developed eyes located just under the skin and are almost blind. Hagfish feed by attaching themselves to passing fish. They bore inside an unsuspecting host. Once inside, the hagfish will actually eat the fish's flesh with a specialized rasping tongue. It literally eats its victim from the inside out.
Kind of makes one worry about the state of oceans when we're actually targeting this species for commercial harvest as traditionally fished stocks are depleted.
Once, fishermen looked at the slime eel -- an eyeless creature also known as the hagfish -- with disgust. They would haul up a healthy-looking cod from the deep only to find its body stuffed with foot-and-a-half-long slime eels busily eating the fish from the inside out.But now, as strict new regulations drive New England fishermen away from their most lucrative catches, the malodorous slime eels are becoming the great wet hope for some on Gloucester's depressed waterfront.
Talk about shifting baselines...
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Saw those little fellers on Dirty Jobs this week. Disgusting looking critters. Mike Rowe was on a commercial vessel that pulled them up from around 600 feet and then sold them to processors who sold them to Korea where they are, apparently, a delicacy.
On Talk.Origins, one poster explained his disbelief in Darwinism because one doesn't see every stage of the evolution of the eye in living creatures.
He was positive that no living creature has "unfocused" vision.
I should have told him to try to bring his eye charts to slime eels, test if the bunch of them is myopic.
I doubt the results would change his convictions, any way it turns out.
I was actually a participant in a lively Roomie and boss discussion about hagfish last night on the DC Metro - ironically on the way to eat raw oysters. said Boss had seen the Dirty Jobs show and brought it up, so to speak. Seems their skin is also occassionally showing up in eel skin wallets . . . but I digress. Their real economic benefit would be if we could find a use for the slime, like curing cancer or shutting up politicians . . . oops, too many hours watching policital debates I guess.
It is ashame that they are being targeted, but is it any real surprise? Commercial fishermen are really sort of darwinesque in their appproach to the world - they keep looking for the next resource to keep themselves "alive", much like a top level predator tries to survive when his preferred prey disappears. I suppose a large part of the problem is that we call the field "fisheries management: instead of "fisherman management" but I'm not sure a name change would really have any effect.
are all women in marine science smokin hot?! jebus!
is that stuff Ice-Nine?
cool video! i can't believe people eat those things.
"are all women in marine science smokin hot?!"
no. just the ones chris mooney knows.
The trend towards "eating down the food chain" is a red flag for the havoc we have wrecked on the marine ecosystem and is indicative of how we as a species stubbornly cling to certain ways of life, regardless of the devastation they bring.
Now taking bets on how long before we are reduced to licking algae and kelp off rocks...
Great post, Sheril! Our haggard little hagfish also make their way into accessories. All those eelskin handbags and clutches you see are actually hagfish masquerading as eelskin (apparently hagfish skin had less marketability--go figure).