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Hagfish, despite being named by a scientist who was clearly not a fan, are some pretty interesting fish.
Also known as slime eels (seriously, do you have to dunk on them this hard, biologists), they slither around the ocean floor, searching for food using sensory tentacles that surround their mouths. Once they find prey, they can enter the victim through their mouths, before eviscerating them from the inside. They can also perform this same feat by entering their prey through the gills or anus.
Mainly consuming smaller, live and injured prey, they have been known to scavenge on larger carcasses including sharks and whales.
As well as being the only known animal to have a skull (made of cartilage) but no spine, they also have a weird and wonderful defense mechanism, which is where things start to get slimy.
When threatened, or trying to prevent other fish from taking their prey, hagfish can produce copious amounts of slime. The goop is created when seawater interacts with two different ingredients secreted by the eels' slime glands: mucin vesicles, which rapidly swell and burst in seawater, forming a gloopy net of mucus strands, and threads that are rich in a type of fiber called an intermediate filament.
The strands of slime threads are 100 times thinner than a human hair but 10 times stronger than nylon, and they could be used in everything from protective clothing to bungee cords in the future.
Any predator could end up with a mouthful of this goop, rather than a delicious monster worm. In order to escape from their own slime, hagfish tie themselves into knots and then push off their own body like a springboard.
They can also use this knotting technique to escape from the body cavities of their prey. Yeah OK, maybe they deserve their names a little.
In short, hagfish slime is both really cool, and something you very much don't want in your car, which was unfortunate for this driver in Oregon, who found themselves in front of a truck transporting 3,400 kilograms (7,500 pounds) of them.
In 2017, Oregon State Police explained in a post titled "Slime Eel Crash on Highway 101" that a Mitsubishi truck (seen some distance from the slime-covered cars in the photos) was transferring the fish up the highway.
When the vehicle was flagged to stop by a traffic cop, the driver, Salvatore Tragale, attempted to stop. Unfortunately, the transfer of weight caused one of the containers to come loose, slide onto the road, and tip over. The other containers soon followed suit, and separated from the bed of the truck, spilling onto the highway.
When one of the loose containers struck a car, it caused a pile-up of cars behind it. The cars were covered in eels, starting with the one at the front driven by Kim Randall, 64, the unlucky recipient of the most fish.
Understandably, the hagfish's defense mechanism kicked in and they excreted slime all over the car and a big stretch of road.
