Hagfish Slime Cells Tailored to Deter Predation

The Scientist spoke with Chapman University’s Yu Zeng about his lab’s finding that the slime-producing cells of the slippery marine fish vary with the creature’s size, which may be an adaptation to thwart different predators.

Written byChloe Tenn

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Chloe Tenn
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Chloe Tenn is a graduate of North Carolina State University, where she studied neurobiology, English, and forensic science. Fascinated by the intersection of science and society, she has written for organizations such as NC Sea Grant and the Smithsonian. Chloe also works as a freelancer with AZoNetwork, where she ghostwrites content for biotechnology, pharmaceutical, food, energy, and environmental companies. She recently completed her MSc Science Communication from the University of Manchester, where she researched how online communication impacts disease stigma. You can check out more of her work here.
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