Featured Image Credit: Ron Newsome/US Navy
Hagfish are commonly regarded as gross and slimy bottom-dwellers— and we totally get it. Unless you’re a sucker for their creepy mouths and wiggling worm-ish movements… then on the ranking for cutest fish, they would definitely NOT anyone’s list.
But the Navy is finding a better use for them… this biomaterial that they use as a defense mechanism when they’re attacked or provoked by a predator is super resilient. It’s very useful to clog the gills of a hag-hunting fish in order to save itself from being eaten, among other things, this slime is gross, but interesting in its formation.
There are two components to the hagfish specialty slime that are contained inside vesicles along their bodies. The first is a fine, fibrous protein thread that is coiled away, 12 nanometers in width but sometimes up to 15 centimeters in length— meaning there’s a lot of it. Bleh. There is also a mucus component in their bodies as well— but just these materials aren’t what makes it into that slime.
It turns into slime when the self-created ingredients are coiled into threads, combined with the mucus and expelled quickly into SEA WATER. After it’s released, it can expand up to 10,000 times its initial size, and can eventually dissolve harmlessly.
This knowledge is what biochemist Dr. Josh Kogot and Materials Engineer Dr. Ryan Kincer have utilized in the making of a synthetic version of hagfish slime. By comparing their own synthetic version of the material with the authentic material from a hagfish, they confirmed the successful recreation after combining purified alpha and gamma proteins made from E.coli bacteria.
The opportunities to use the slime for assisting the military are seemingly endless. “The [slime] may be used for ballistics protection, firefighting, anti-fouling, diver protection, or anti-shark spray,” said Kogot. “Our goal is to produce a substance that can act as non-lethal and non-kinetic defense to protect the warfighter.”
The team behind the so-far successful project are researching and working now to increase the scale of the slime produced as well as improving the protein assembly. They’re being supported by the Navy Innovative Science and Engineering (NISE) funding and the Office of Naval Research Code 32, ocean battlespace sensing department.
This is an exciting prospect because unlike synthetic petroleum-based products— using a nonrenewable resource— the slime and its ingredients are renewable and natural resources that could replace a number of different things.