hagfish
Noun
Meaning
eellike cyclostome having a tongue with horny teeth in a round mouth surrounded by eight tentacles; feeds on dead or trapped fishes by boring into their bodies
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A hagfish can remove the excess slime, which can suffocate it in a matter of minutes, by tying its own body into an overhand knot, then sliding the knot from its head down to the tail.
In the hagfish, the pouches connect with the pharynx internally and a separate tube which has no respiratory tissue (the pharyngocutaneous duct) develops beneath the pharynx proper, expelling ingested debris by closing a valve at its anterior end.
Differences between hagfish species provide another example of adaptation to deep-sea pressure through specialized protein adaptations.
Lampreys have only two semicircular canals, with the horizontal canal being absent, while hagfish have only a single, vertical, canal.
Often dubbed “slime eels” or “snot snakes,” hagfish might be homely scavenging bottom feeders, but they have at least one superpower: A single five-ounce hagfish can churn out one liter of the sticky concoction in less than a second.
Molecular analysis since 1992 has suggested that the hagfish are most closely related to lampreys, citation and so also are vertebrates in a monophyletic sense.