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Not even a smart car can handle eel slime!

What a eewy gooey mess!  Hard to imagine the scene last week on an Oregon highway would actually have been delicacies in another country!  A truck carrying a load of hagfish (slimy eels) overturned and slimed the entire roadway!  The photos looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.  Just gross!  The motorists caught up in this slimy mess probably had used other words to describe the scene.  Look at these photos!  I especially feel for the owner of the smart car and the emergency service personnel that worked the scene.  They say hagfish release the slime when stressed.  I’m going out on a limb and say they were pretty stressed!

“In a truly sci-fi scenario, thousands of mucus-spewing hagfish—destined for dinner plates in Asia—coated a road in Oregon.”

“No, this isn’t a scene from the set of Ghostbusters. On July 14, a truck carrying thousands of fish wrecked on Oregon’s highway, covering the road and at least one car in slime and creating surely one of the most bizarre traffic jams in history.”

“The culprit? Hagfish, deep-sea scavengers that look a bit like eels and are capable of generating massive amounts of anti-predator mucus at a moment’s notice. The Pacific Northwest is home to several hagfish fisheries that supply the fish to many Asian countries, including South Korea, where it is a prized dish.”

“Just how inconvenient is hagfish slime? Well, the Oregon Department of Transportation is currently using a small bulldozer to remove the muck from the middle of the road.”

Continued Reading 

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