Hagfish: A beastly appetite but a knack for snackin’
To anyone with a fantasy of bathing in a big vat of nacho cheese (and who hasn’t indulged in that dream from time to time?), meet the hagfish, your new hero. It may not be pretty and its meals of choice would make most retch, but it hasn’t survived 500 million years on its looks.
When a juicy whale corpse comes to its final resting place on the sea floor, the hagfish goes into action, performing a slime job on its prey that would make Marc Summers cringe and other creatures wouldn’t touch if you double dared them (and would suffocate if they did). It’s at that point things get really interesting.
Noticing their proclivity for burrowing into the decaying carcasses to dine on them -- and realizing that a "soup of nutrients" like proteins and carbohydrates was likely forming inside the rotting animals – [the team from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand] ran tests on hagfish skin. Turns out the scavengers were absorbing nutrients across the entire surface of their bodies while at the same time munching with their mouths.
All right, so nacho cheese might not be a soup of nutrients, but it’s bound to taste a lot better.
Full story at Onearth.
Photo credit: Gerald and Buff Corsi © California Academy of Sciences
