00:00Hagfish are seriously freaky fish.
00:05They can be found squirming about on the seafloor, and they have a pretty disgusting superpower.
00:13Now they're also known as the sly meal, and this is because they can make copious amounts
00:18of mucus, so much so they can use it in attack and defense.
00:24Let me show you.
00:26So hagfish, or sly meal, like to feed on corpses that they find at the bottom of the ocean,
00:34and they're not the only scavengers there.
00:36And so the long, juicy-looking hagfish is a particularly tasty treat when you first
00:41see it, and this is where their slime comes into play.
00:46The hagfish can jet slime almost instantly from its body, which will then coat the gills
00:54of any potential predator.
00:57With the gills all slimed up, they can't breathe.
01:01The animal, the predator, starts to suffocate, and it will spit the hagfish back out, and
01:06then quickly tries to clear its throat before it itself dies.
01:11Very, very clever.
01:14When it comes to feeding, hagfish have an unusual approach.
01:18They don't have jaws, but they do have tooth-like structures, evolved to butcher a carcass into
01:25bite-sized pieces.
01:28Nice.
01:29Tiny marine worms make up a large part of their diet, but sometimes the opportunistic
01:35hagfish has an appetite for something a bit bigger.
01:39Remote-operated vehicles, ROVs, have spotted them invading the burrows of other fish in
01:46search of a tasty victim.
01:48Now, don't forget, the hagfish can't chew.
01:52It can't deliver that killing blow like a lion or a tiger.
01:56So how did it do it?
01:57How did it finish off its fishy meal?
02:00Well, it puts those slime glands into overdrive, and it fills the burrow up with thick, gloopy
02:08snot, suffocating the hapless fish.
02:13It's pretty grim, but put it this way, be glad you never have to go around to the hagfish's
02:18house for your dinner.
02:20Oh, sticky.
02:24Ah, sticky.
02:27Ah.
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