No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime (The Atlantic)
At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel. Naturalists can tell the two apart because hagfish, unlike other fish, lack backbones (and, also, jaws). For everyone else, there’s an even easier method. “Look at the hand holding the fish,” the marine biologist Andrew Thaler once noted. “Is it completely covered in slime? Then, it’s a hagfish.” [ed. See also: The name is hagfish but you can call it a ‘slime eel’: Meet a fledgling Alaska fishery (ADN).]
