Sharks versus rapidly expanding snot.
they’ve been doing what they do best: secretin’ goo and slippin’ away.
These boneless fish are much-studied and much-reviled for their ability to release a stringy, sticky slime that expands quickly to choke predators and clog up gills. They also haveBiologists are still trying to work out exactly how their famous slime works, though, since it’s something of an engineering marvel. The goop expands rapidly to fill a predator’s mouth, but until recently experts weren’t sure how.
Researchers wanted to figure out what makes the skeins expand so much faster under duress. They hypothesized that the movement of the surrounding water—which would be more agitated during a shark attack—helped trigger the uncoiling process, so they started taking a closer look at the skeins under a microscope. Each roll has a loose end, and if you pull on that thread you can unwind the whole thing. But if there’s drag on the skein from water moving around it can all happen much faster.
The researchers think this all suggests water flow is a necessary part of the equation. So although other factors—like interactions with the mucus component of slime or the salinity of the water—may also impact the speed, it’s the drag that really accelerates expansion. All of this ingenious evolutionary design has helped hagfish survive mostly as-is for hundreds of millions of years, however revolting they may be to us mammals.Sara is an associate editor at PopSci where she writes about everything from vaccine hesitancy to extreme animal sex. She got a master's degree in science journalism at NYU's Science Health and Environmental Reporting Program, as well as another one in data visualization from the University of Girona.
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