Joel Kontinen
Hagfish have their skills enumerated in two science publications. First, PNAS published the study by Tetsuto Miyashita and colleagues. This study brings to mind living fossils of the Hagfish. He thinks that it might be 500 million years old.
“Scientists recently discovered a rare and important hagfish fossil that includes traces of preserved slime dating to 100 million years ago,” Mindy Weisberger writes on Live Science.
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A view days before that Royal Society Interface published also a study on the hagfish’ intelligent design:
“When the hagfish create this slime, they do so in an incredibly efficient way in that the amount of material they put into the water grows in a volume by a factor of up to 10,000 to make the final slimy gel,” Randy Ewoldt, associate professor of mechanical science and engineering at Illinois Ewoldt explained. ‘The volumetric increase is astounding and as far as I know untouched by anything else in nature or anything we’ve done as engineers’.
“What the team discovered was that the hagfish threads, 100 times thinner than a human hair and initially wound up like a skein of yarn, can unravel in the blink of an eye due to fluid flow. In doing so, it can go from a size of about 0.1 millimeter to 10 centimeters in length, or a water incorporation in a magnitude of 10,000:1. ”
This is what the us navy wants to do.
Sources:
Koon, Mike. 2019. Illinois team helping to unravel the mysteries of the hagfish's slimy defense. Illinois College of Engineering (22 January).
Weisberger, Mindy. 100-Million-Year-Old Hagfish Complete with Slime Kit Discovered Live Science (21 January).
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