Blind ocean creature with jawless mouth discovered off Bahamas. See creepy new species
In an era of exploration and discovery, some creatures may be better left alone in the unknown pockets of the planet.
Take the hagfish.
The slimy, fleshy fish that appears eel-like is straight out of your nightmares — and a new species was just discovered.
During a re-examination of hagfish specimens collected off the coast of southern Grand Bahama Island from 1981, researchers noticed one looked different, according to a study published May 30 in the journal Ichthyology & Herpetology.
Unlike other known species, this female hagfish had “five pairs of gill pouches and gill apertures,” according to the study.
The gill pouches were “well spaced and arranged in a nearly straight line,” researchers said, different from the crowded gill pouches seen on other hagfish.
The fish also had four or five “branchial slime pores,” according to the study, double what other species have.
The roughly foot-long sea creature is a new species, and was named Eptatretus bahamensis after its home in the Bahamas.
The five-gilled hagfish was originally described as “light pinkish tan, with the ventral side only slightly lighter,” in previous research, according to the study.
The species also has “no eyespots,” meaning it navigates the sea floor of the Caribbean blind, researchers said.
Hagfish don’t have jaws, according to the Ocean Conservancy, and instead shoot their teeth out from their bodies as they feed on dead and decaying animals lying on the bottom of the ocean.
“They use their teeth-like mouth rakes made of keratin to scrape tissue from the carcasses (of dead animals),” the conservancy says. “But they don’t even need to do that to get their fill — they can absorb nutrients directly through their skin.”
But what they might best be known for is their slime.
Hagfish release a sticky liquid from the “slime pores” that run the length of their bodies, The Atlantic reported, and just a teaspoon of the liquid can expand 10,000 times in half a second.
In 2017, a truck carrying hagfish was involved in a crash in Oregon, coating a nearby vehicle in thick, milky white slime and sending the fish slipping down the road.
The new species is one of 25 species of hagfish found in the western Atlantic, researchers said in the study.
Other species have been identified in the Gulf of Mexico, off the northern coast of Colombia and Venezuela and down the eastern coast of South America, according to the study.
The new species was found off Grand Bahama Island, one of the northernmost islands in the archipelago nation of the Bahamas off the east coast of Florida.
This story was originally published June 6, 2024 at 2:03 PM with the headline "Blind ocean creature with jawless mouth discovered off Bahamas. See creepy new species."
