- Typically, a hagfish will release less than a teaspoon of gunk from the 100 or so slime glands that line its flanks. And in less than half a second, that little amount will expand by 10,000 times—enough to fill a sizable bucket. Reach in, and every move of your hand will drag the water with it. “It doesn’t feel like much at first, as if a spider has built a web underwater,” says Douglas Fudge of Chapman University. But try to lift your hand out, and it’s as if the bucket’s contents are now attached to you.
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The slime also “has a very strange sensation of not quite being there,” says Fudge. It consists of two main components—mucus and protein threads. The threads spread out and entangle one another, creating a fast-expanding net that traps both mucus and water. Astonishingly, to create a liter of slime, a hagfish has to release only 40 milligrams of mucus and protein—1,000 times less dry material than human saliva contains. That’s why the slime, though strong and elastic enough to coat a hand, feels so incorporeal.
So if you want to fish for lobster commercially in California, you can expect to pay about $100-150k for the permit. They're damn near hereditary. Also, about that lucrative. I've heard of fishermen sitting on one or two of them (in addition to their own) to keep them out of the hands of competitors. Yeah. It's worth a couple hundred thousand dollars to reduce the number of people competing for your catch. If you want to fish for hagfish commercially in California, you can expect to pay $140 a year. Nobody wants them. Thus, a friend of mine determined that he was going to make his fortune trapping hagfish for export to Japan and Korea. That whole "live catch" thing is nice an'all but hagfish are a bitch to ship. Far better to freeze them immediately and launch 'em via container where they're converted to "eelskin leather." The price differential between lobster and hagfish is a factor of a thousand because nobody wants to fish for hagfish. The slime, I hear, is completely unreal. And lobsters are no walk in the park. My buddy gave up after a season.
I have been thinking about that. I have a suspicion that we are going to be studying mechanisms like the one that is theorized in the article more and more as time goes on as* we are looking for microscopic solutions to microscopic problems. In the Formic Wars (Part of the Ender's Game-Verse) a lot of time is spent discussing alien ship construction. Humans use macro-processes at all stages from raw mineral rich rock to refined metal product to final finished product (ploughshares, guns, spaceships). The Formics by comparison use micro-processes right up until the very end of their construction process. Spoiler Basically they use small worms and bacteria to extract and chemically refine pure minerals from raw rock, a micro-animal akin to a coral polyp to extrude and shape minerals into the desired shape. This is a super abridged version of the more nuanced process but that's the gist of it. Essentially you seed an asteroid with these bad boys and come back a few months later to to pick up the hull and essential components of your new starship. Slap an engine in it, fill it up with atmosphere and a crew and away you go. So this is the far-fantasy science fiction example. With a bit less creativity I could imagine somehow playing with the chemistry of the different protein fibers that the hagfish cells produce and changing the properties of the mucus. Change its conductivity or thermal properties, make it even stickier or completely free-flowing or use it as a carrier for some other chemical or microbe, I'm just spitballing. Just learning more about this one nasty lil slimy fish and asking the five year olds question of 'Why is it so slimy?' in a thorough way might end up teaching us a ton about biochemical engineering.