Enlarge / A Sixgill Hagfish (Eptatretus hexatrema) in False Bay, South Africa. (credit: Peter Southwood/CC BY-SA 4.0) The humble hagfish is an ugly, gray, eel-like creature best known for its ability to unleash a cloud of sticky slime onto unsuspecting predators, clogging the gills and suffocating said predators. That's why it's affectionately known as a "snot snake." Hagfish also love to burrow into the deep-sea sediment, but scientists have been unable to observe precisely how they do so because the murky sediment obscures the view.