From The Briny Deep

From across the Atlantic, Hooting Yard podcast listener and aquatic ecologist Darell Slotton writes with important news from the briny deep:

Hagfish are spectacularly disgusting, being sea bottom, naked-looking, smooth, pink eels with a battery of dodgy looking tendrils around the mouth. They burrow enthusiastically into and through carcasses that fall to the bottom, until they are hollowed out. The sight of a carcass bulging frenetically in the dim undersea light, with a dozen of these lovelies inside, is… something. On top of that, if you keep hagfish in an aquarium and reach in to pick them up, they instantly exude a chemical that mixes with seawater to produce a huge ball of snot all around them, which you are left holding as they slip away.

hagfish.gif

 

Hagfish diagram from Bigelow and Schroeder, 1948, p. 34.

5 thoughts on “From The Briny Deep

  1. Never before have I been a fan of anything.
    But I ask Hooting Yard to please make a page on Facebook as to give people like me the opportunity to become fans.

  2. Dirk : I briefly joined Facebook some while ago but rapidly came to the conclusion that it wasn’t my kind of place. So the chances of me setting up a Hooting Yard Facebook page are precisely nil. There is of course no reason why you couldn’t set up your own fan site should you so wish, and I’d be honoured if you did so.

  3. I too find myself repelled by Facebook – as if by a mystical force.

    I wonder if astute Hooting Yard readers who have made a study of mystical forces might be able to state which of the the many mystical forces that run rampant through our land might have been responsible for my extended absence from said website.

    Respectfully

    Tristan

  4. Shuddery
    Having made an extensive, not to say exhaustive study of mystical forces, I am compelled to the conclusion that you are being repelled by Facebook not by concerns of taste, but by the unfathomable machinations of Malenkwe, the legless spider-god of impotent rage. The same machinations which were responsible for the precocious abilities of footballing ace Rodney Marsh in the 1960s and 70s. It is a little-known fact that, thanks to some unaccountable discretion of the press, Marsh’s inability to complete a sentence without screaming the name of his currant-like overlord never became public knowledge.
    Trenery

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