The 7,500 Pounds of Hagfish That Slimed Five Cars and Closed a Highway

What happened?

The crash happened on July 13, 2017, near milepost 131 on U.S. Highway 101 just north of Depoe Bay, on the central Oregon coast. Salvatore J. Tragale, 59, of Lincoln City, was driving a 1993 Mitsubishi truck northbound with 13 containers holding roughly 7,500 pounds of live hagfish. Ahead of him, an Oregon Department of Transportation crew was clearing debris from a landslide that had come down a few days earlier, and an ODOT flagger had stopped northbound traffic.

Tragale couldn’t stop in time. The shift in weight sent one container off the bed and across the highway into oncoming traffic, where it struck a Nissan driven by 64-year-old Kim Randall of Arizona. That car was shoved back into a Honda CR-V, which hit a Ford Focus, which hit a Ford F-150. Five vehicles were involved. Randall sustained minor injuries; nobody else was hurt.

Then the hagfish went to work. Hagfish respond to being grabbed, squeezed, or generally manhandled by releasing slime from glands that run in rows down both sides of the body — and thousands of them had just been thrown down a highway. The road, the guardrail, and several cars disappeared under a layer of pale gel.

The cleanup was remarkably orderly. Because the crash happened inside an active work zone, ODOT already had an excavator on site, and the crew used it to push hagfish off the roadway. The Depoe Bay Fire District emptied its 4,000 gallons of water onto the pavement, then ran back to the station for more. One lane was moving within about two hours, and the highway was fully open within four. Jon Barnard of ODOT later told the National Operations Center of Excellence that while there had never been an incident quite like it, routine incident-response training handled it fine.

The shipment, state police said, had been bound for Korea for consumption — less strange than it sounds, since hagfish are a genuine delicacy in South Korea and Charleston, Oregon, has been a main West Coast exporter for decades. In the early 1990s the trade was mostly leather instead: the “eelskin” wallets and boots of that era were often hagfish.

Why was it strange?

Traffic incidents involving spilled cargo are routine. What made this one a national story is that the cargo fought back, and that it did so with a substance no engineer has been able to match.

Hagfish slime is not mucus in the ordinary sense. It is a two-part system, deployed cold, that goes from a few teaspoons of concentrate to a mass big enough to fill a bucket in less than half a second — an expansion of up to about 10,000 times its original volume. The resulting material is roughly 99.996% seawater by weight, with the remaining fraction split between mucin (long, sugar-coated proteins that hold water) and protein threads. It is, as far as researchers can tell, the most dilute hydrogel known.

It is also the reason the road stayed slippery. A gel that is essentially all water still behaves like a gel, which is a strange thing to encounter under a car tire.

What did scientists learn?

The two halves of the slime come from two kinds of cell packed inside the hagfish’s slime glands.

The first, gland mucous cells, release vesicles — tiny membrane-wrapped packets — of mucin that swell on contact with seawater. The second, gland thread cells, are the extraordinary ones. Each holds a single protein thread about 15 centimeters long, wound into a tidy coil roughly 150 micrometers across, about the width of two human hairs. Hit it with seawater and the coil unspools like a released spring, no muscle or pumping required. Do this several thousand times at once and the threads knit into a network that the swelling mucin turns into a water-trapping mesh.

The chemistry matters. A 2018 study in Scientific Reports found the process depends on seawater’s specific ionic makeup: without dissolved salts the coils unravel in a tangled, useless clump, and with salt but no calcium or magnesium the network collapses instead of expanding. Only the divalent cations naturally present in seawater — Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ — produce the fully open, water-holding gel. Hagfish slime is not simply “wet mucus.” It is a chemical trigger that only fires properly in the ocean.

As for what it’s for: in 2011, researchers led by Vincent Zintzen at New Zealand’s Te Papa museum published the first video evidence, captured on baited deep-sea cameras. When a seal shark or a wreckfish bit down on a hagfish, the hagfish fired slime into the predator’s mouth in under 0.4 seconds. The gel clogged the attacker’s gills, and the predator gagged, let go, and left. The same footage also caught hagfish actively hunting live fish — behavior nobody in the family had documented before.

How does it affect us today?

A fiber that packs 15 centimeters of high-strength protein into a cell smaller than a grain of salt, deploys instantly, and needs nothing but water is exactly what materials scientists want. Hagfish thread is often compared to spider silk.

The U.S. Navy has taken it seriously. At the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division, biochemist Josh Kogot and materials engineer Ryan Kincer produced synthetic versions of the Pacific hagfish’s alpha and gamma thread proteins by expressing them in E. coli bacteria and purifying the result. Their reported interest list runs from ballistics protection and firefighting to anti-fouling coatings, diver protection, and — the entry that gets all the headlines — a non-lethal shark deterrent.

None of it is a finished product yet. The hard part isn’t making the proteins; it’s reproducing the packing and the split-second release that the gland thread cell does for free.

Fun fact

A hagfish has to get out of its own slime, and it does this by tying itself into a simple overhand knot and sliding the knot from head to tail, squeegeeing itself clean. It will also sneeze — a sharp muscular contraction that clears gel from its single nostril.

Sources

• Zintzen, V. et al., “Hagfish predatory behaviour and slime defence mechanism,” Scientific Reports 1, 131 (2011).
• Böni, L. et al., “Effect of ionic strength and seawater cations on hagfish slime formation,” Scientific Reports 8, 9867 (2018).
• National Operations Center of Excellence, “Hagfish Cleanup in Oregon Relies on Planning and Collaboration” (interview with ODOT’s Jon Barnard, August 2, 2017).
• BBC News, “Truck full of hagfish and slime overturns on US highway” (July 14, 2017).
• Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division, via “Navy sees benefits of fish slime for ballistics protection,” Military Times (January 26, 2017).