Hideous hagfish gets lots of attention

OFF JEFFREYS LEDGE IN THE GULF OF MAINE -- It was a fisherman's nightmare that slithered out of the Cambrian ooze when trilobites ruled the world.

Now a group of researchers from the University of New Hampshire are trying to unravel the slimy mysteries of the hagfish, one of the sea's oldest and oddest creatures.

"We know almost nothing about them -- how long they live, their populations, or their reproduction. No one has found a fertilized hagfish egg in the last 100 years," said Stacia Sower, who heads the research project, funded by the New Hampshire National Sea Grant program. The federal program finances university research and cooperative extension projects dealing with marine issues.

As stocks of other fish have dwindled, the strange hagfish have become one of New England's newest fisheries. They are caught for their hide, which is used to make "eelskin" wallets, and for their flesh, which is said to taste like clams.

Hagfish ooze

Virtually blind and eel-like with small tentacles around its jawless mouth and pincerlike teeth on its tongue, the hagfish is the world's oldest vertebrate with habits to match its unlovely appearance.

When annoyed, it exudes gobs of slime from hundreds of ducts lining its naked pink body -- not discreet smears, but bucket-filling blobs and clumps of sticky, fibrous goo -- in amounts massive enough to suffocate the unfortunate fish that tries to eat it.

It also slips into the mouths and other openings of dead and dying fish and eats them from the inside out. Gill netters talk with disgust of hauling up seemingly normal fish, only to find a hollow shell with a squirming hagfish inside.

When the slime is too much for even the hagfish, it scrapes off the ooze by tying itself into a knot and then passing the knot along its supple 30-inch body.

The hagfish is capable of such unique gymnastics because it doesn't have a real backbone, but an elastic, rudimentary notochord and a cartilaginous brain case that places it somewhere on the evolutionary ladder between the invertebrates and first bony fish.

Has five hearts

Five hearts beat in its body -- one pumps blood to its brain, others to its gullet and other organs -- but its circulatory system is so primitive that when held head-up its blood visibly pools in its tail. Holding a hagfish is unpleasantly like grasping a badly stuffed, biting and slimy sausage.

The hagfish, which lives more than 325 feet down and spends most of its time burrowing in the muddy bottom, doesn't give up its secrets easily to researchers.

Still, Sower and her colleagues have developed some clues, including a hormonal trigger that can stimulate breeding and have experimented with it on hagfish both in the laboratory and in cages on the sea bottom.

"Our aim is to learn enough about its habits to help the fishermen develop a sustainable fishery," Sower said.

Sower's research area is the cold, choppy waters off Jeffrys Ledge in the Gulf of Maine, about 20 miles off Portsmouth, where she and her assistants lower pickle barrels with funnel-shaped openings cut in them that allow the hagfish in, but not out.

After an hour on the bottom, the barrel, baited with herring, is raised.

"It's looking good," said Mickie Powell, Sower's assistant, as the barrel cleared the waves and torrents of slime oozed from all the openings.

When the top is removed, the herring are gone, replaced by hundreds of outraged hagfish.

"It's like that scene in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,'"said graduate student Scott Kavanaugh. "You know, the one where Harrison Ford says, 'I hate snakes.'"