Pacific Hagfish - Eptatretus stouti

Some people might think this is the ugliest fish in the world. Others find its habit of exuding masses of slime when disturbed rather disgusting. In fact, these fish will literally create buckets of slime if you pick them up with your hands. It's where they get the name "slime eels".

But hagfish, Eptatretus stouti, are actually very interesting fish, primarily because they exhibit features of some of the most primitive ancestral fish that likely lived about 480 million years ago. Ancestral fish, similar to our modern hagfish, were probablly the ancestors to all other modern vertebrate animals, including us.

Hagfish perform an important ecological function in deep coastal waters. If a carcass of a large animal falls to the bottom, it is quickly invaded by hagfish which enter the body and eat it from the inside out.

For a visual overview of the Chordates, get our program Branches on the Tree of Life: Chordates. The DVD includes an extensive collection of still images for use in lectures, reviews and discussions, and as images in the classroom or lab to show the diversity of this group.