Hundreds of meters deep in the dark of the ocean, a shark glides toward what seems like a meal. It’s kind of ugly, eel-like and not particularly meaty, but still probably food. So the shark strikes.

This is where the interaction of biology and physics gets mysterious — just as the shark finds its dinner interrupted by a cloud of protective slime that appeared out of nowhere around an otherwise placid hagfish.

Jean-Luc Thiffeault, a University of Wisconsin–Madison math professor, and collaborators Randy Ewoldt and Gaurav Chaudhary of the University of Illinois have modeled the hagfish’s gag-inducing defense mechanism mathematically, publishing their work in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Links to other articles about this:

News.wisc.edu:  https://news.wisc.edu/unraveling-threads-of-bizarre-hagfishs-explosive-slime/

Newsweek:  https://www.newsweek.com/hagfish-slime-explodes-choke-predator-deploy-military-synthetic-version-1292112

New Scientist:  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/how-hagfish-launch-slime-missiles-swell-10000-times-size

Science Mag:  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/how-hagfish-launch-slime-missiles-swell-10000-times-size

Ars Technica:  https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/its-the-drag-that-helps-the-humble-hagfish-slime-predators-so-quickly/

Popular Science:  https://www.popsci.com/hagfish-slime-expands

Technology.org:  https://www.technology.org/2019/01/18/unraveling-threads-of-bizarre-hagfishs-explosive-slime/