JoltVib

On Thursday afternoon, a photograph of a car trailing a massive stream of snot and also possibly eels began appearing on Twitter. It was a horror show — and the people had questions. Like, what in the world happened? And does insurance cover slime damage?

The car sliming happened in Oregon on Thursday afternoon, the result of a five car-crash that tipped over a truck transporting 7,500 pounds of the eel-like creatures. It turns out, the creatures are not, in fact, eels. They’re Pacific hagfish — primitive jawless fish that are sometimes called slime eels for the mind-boggling quantities of goo they produce when they feel threatened — like, say, when they’re unexpectedly sloshed over an Oregon roadway, dousing nearby cars. Gesundheit.

It won’t be an easy job. Hagfish goo is a thick, sticky mucus that clogs the gills of a hungry predator. It’s the main defense mechanism for the toothy, bottom-feeding creatures. They typically can be found scavenging for carcasses on the sea floor. They also can apparently tie their bodies into knots to escape predators — and to extract themselves from their own goo.

The mucus is made up of two main ingredients: a sugar-coated protein called mucin, and coiled-up spools of thread that are kind of like spider silk. When a hagfish feels threatened, it releases a mixture of the mucin and the thread, which unravels to create a kind of elastic, slimy mesh. Combined with seawater, the slime can apparently expand to 10,000 times the volume it started at.

The US Navy is a big fan of hagfish slime. Navy scientists, like materials engineer Ryan Kincer, are trying to synthetically re-create its fibrous threads to use in bulletproof vests. It could also be leveraged for “firefighting, anti-fouling, diver protection, or anti-shark spray," Kincer said in a news release. “The possibilities are endless.”

For these hagfish in Oregon, though, it looks like they’ve hit the end of the road.

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