Hagfish are eel-like creatures
Gina Kelly/Alamy
Hagfish produce copious amounts of mucus when attacked and smother predators’ gills with their sticky webs. Scientists believe that mucus plays a key role in hagfish mucus’ amazing clogging abilities, with fibrous threads keeping the mucus from washing away.
The eel-like hagfish releases strands of fibrous protein and bundles of mucus from glands along its body within half a second of being stimulated. Threads spread out in complex tangles and combine with mucus, turning seawater into a thick mucus.
“With spider-like fibers running throughout, this strength and toughness is absolutely shocking and surprising,” said Douglas Fudge of Chapman University in California. “Slime is amazing”
To test the clogging power of hagfish (Heptatletus stouti) Slime, Fudge and his colleagues built a custom slime sieve. The slower the flow, the greater the clogging force.
Next, we compared the mucus excretion rate of hagfish with various concentrations of three other common thickeners. Psyllium husk, xanthan gum and polyethylene oxide (PEO). For its weight, the hagfish slime was two to three orders of magnitude better at clogging him than its competitors. Approximately 35 milligrams of slime per liter of water caused the greatest clogging.
“The shocking result was [other thickeners] It doesn’t even come close to what hagfish slime does in terms of performance,” Fudge says. “From 1 in 100 he can get the same clogging performance as other materials by using 1 in 1000 hagfish slime.”
When the team removed the threads from the slime in the lab, they were surprised that the clogging ability was retained. do slimes have strings?
In a similar follow-up experiment, the team washed slime-only hagfish slime with seawater. When they tried again with a slime containing both slime and string, the slime got stuck for more than a dozen flashes of seawater: “The string holds the slime in place and prevents the slime from escaping.” I think it’s there to prevent it,” he says Fudge.
“It’s amazing how well the mucus clogs without the string,” said Sarah Shorno of the University of Guelph, Canada. “It’s great, high-quality science.”
Fudge hopes these insights into hagfish mucus will bring scientists closer to developing synthetic alternatives to super-strong mucus that could be used in bandages, clothing, and military defense.
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