creature of the ocean bottom, a hagfish grows to about 17 inches long, and yet, in mere minutes, it can fill seven buckets with slime—so much slime it can slip from almost any predator’s grip. The hagfish would be in danger of suffocating on its own mucus, except it has learned, like a person with a cold, to blow it out its nose. But sometimes it produces too much slime for even a hagfish to tolerate, and for this occasion, it has devised a nifty trick: the animal wraps its tail around its body like a knot and slides the knot forward, clearing the slime.
