No scales... no bones... no jaw… No problem!

The hagfish has slime… and plenty of it.

It’s survived for more than 300  million years by sliming its enemies.

Hello gorgeous.

This circle here, looks like  a mouth?

That’s its nostril… Yeah you heard me, just one.

It’s excellent at sniffing out dead stuff to eat.

And that’s a good thing because  instead of eyes like ours,   the hagfish has a pair of simple,  light-sensing organs under its skin.

If you think these pointy things  are teeth, you are very wrong.

They’re called barbels, which help it smell.

The hagfish keeps its teeth -- these  dentures from hell -- well-hidden.

To go with that handsome  face, it's got skin for days.

Hanging off its body like a baggy  onesie, which, along with the slime,   makes the hagfish nearly impossible to bite into.

Researchers get to see hagfish happenings by  dropping cameras with bait in the deep sea.

When a shark attacks, the  hagfish remains unbothered.

Its vital organs shimmy out of  harm’s way inside its roomy wrapper,   giving it just enough time  to deploy its slime blast.

That slime flows from glands  running along the sides of its body.

When combined with seawater,  the mixture swells up to   10,000 times its original volume  in less than half a second.

The slime is made of mucus, but it’s no ordinary  snot.

It’s chock full of special protein threads   that look like balls of yarn under a microscope.

Once they hit seawater, those  proteins unspool without tangling.

Hagfish are almost exclusively scavengers,  eating dead things that fall to the seafloor,   when they can find ‘em.

Ooo!

Dead whale!

Sometimes they have to go months without food.

They wait patiently behind rocks or  curled up like slimy cinnamon rolls.

When a meal finally arrives,  they slide right on in.

And they’ll slime any competing fish   who might be hoping for a bite, sometimes  clogging the fish’s gills and killing it!

Even a hagfish could suffocate  in a hagfish’s slime.

So they tie themselves in knots, sliding  their own slime right off their bodies.

Ah, all clean.

Ready, at any moment, to unleash a suffocating  cyclone of slime – again and again.