Diet & Prey. Analysis of stomach contents has shown that these fish will prey on dead whales, fish, sharks, birds, and more. These fish are commonly viewed as a nuisance to fishermen, both as slimy bycatch and because they will prey on captured fish before they are pulled to the surface. Unlike the slime produced by different animals, hagfish slime accommodates quite a few threadlike fibers, which in all probability give it mechanical power. For that purpose they are considered by Korean men to be interchangeable with eels, an unrelated animal with a similarly phallic shape but remarkably different taste and texture. As the reproductive fee of the hagfish is low, overfishing might have drastic results on the populations of these very attention-grabbing animals, despite the fact that they've existed on Earth, unchanged, for a lot of hundreds of thousands of years. The slime usually keeps these fish from being useful as food, but the inshore hagfish is eaten in Korea. Worms and crustaceans are the only live prey that they can consume, but they eat a wide variety of carrion. The rasps of the hagfish will also be used to catch marine invertebrates, reminiscent of polychaete worms, which seem to make up the majority of its weight loss program. As the hagfish has no jaws, it can't chunk chunks from the carcasses it finds. They are almost completely blind and, as University of British Columbia researcher Carol Bucking describes: Most species are nocturnal, which means that they are more active at night. CTRL + SPACE for auto-complete. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Animals.NET aim to promote interest in nature and animals among children, as well as raise their awareness in conservation and environmental protection. Hagfish are chewy, with a softer spinal cord that runs through their back, and have a mild taste, with an unpleasant aftertaste. Hagfish are a type of non-vertebrate chordate--not a true fish, but not a true invertebrate. Along with lampreys, hagfish are jawless; they are the sister group to jawed vertebrates, and living hagfish remain similar to hagfish from around 300 million years ago. When feeding on carcasses they tie themselves into knots to rip open the tough outer flesh before eating the animal from the inside … Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It is also important to keep them with non-aggressive fish species so they do not produce extra slime from being attacked. The Atlantic hagfish and Pacific hagfish live in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (respectively).