ABOVE: Hagfish slime © ISTOCK.COM, FFENNEMA
Hagfish are notorious for their defensive slime, which can swell from a small secretion to a carload of goo in a fraction of a second. The slime is made up of a winding web of fibrous protein threads that trap the surrounding seawater, thus transforming it into a malicious mucus that suffocates the gills and jaws of attacking predators.
The biology of this slime has long fascinated materials scientists and evolutionary biologists alike, including Yu Zeng, an evolutionary biologist at Chapman University in California. Zeng and his colleagues decided to focus on the gland cells that produce the fish’s slick substance, and in their September 20 paper in Current Biology, they find that these slime cells differ in size and produce differently sized threads depending on the size of the hagfish, with larger hagfish possessing much larger thread-producing cells than would be expected based ...
