LOS ANGELES – By most accounts, hagfish are repulsive bottom feeders that slime their predators, have rows of teeth on their tongues and feed on the innards of rotting fish by penetrating any orifice.
Dress them up on a plate in South Korea, however, the marine maggot becomes an instant aphrodisiac.
An overseas appetite for the so-called slime eel is leading to a rise in West Coast nettings as struggling fisherman cast about for a niche that will replace dwindling stocks of once-plentiful prize fish.
“The average person would be disgusted just by looking at them,” said Mark Crossland, a state Fish and Game Department warden. “The product is difficult to deal with and handle – it’s a little eel that once it gets stressed it excretes this slime.”
The goopy mess is a small price to pay for fishermen facing stricter regulations at sea for salmon and larger fish. The constant hunt for a new catch has led them a little lower on the seafood chain – to a fish that’s so primitive there is even debate about whether it is really a fish at all.
Resembling a cross between a snake and an eel, the 300 million-year-old hagfish have no jaws and only one nostril. Essentially blind, hagfish dwell in the dark below 1,000 feet.
In the late 1980s, the West Coast hagfish industry went from boom to bust when it was discovered that the Pacific variation was edible but the skin wasn’t strong enough to make quality eel skin belts and shoes in South Korea. The East Coast operation, which sells both the hagfish flesh and skins, peaked in 2000 with about 7 million pounds of hagfish but fell to about 1.7 million pounds in 2005.
The West Coast industry, meanwhile, has been making a gradual comeback. Washington, Oregon and California last year reported 1.1 million pounds of hagfish caught with revenues of more than $600,000. California’s catch jumped from nothing to 150,000 pounds in the past four years.
“This fishery is creeping back because some of the other fisheries have gotten so limited,” Crossland said.
In April, California officials encountered a fishing boat near Morro Bay carrying more than 15,000 pounds – approximately 45,000 writhing hagfish – that were to be loaded on jumbo jets live and flown to South Korea.
The crew of the Washington-based Marlin II were cited for not keeping a log, fishing without permits and having illegal traps the size of wine barrels. The Santa Barbara district attorney’s office is now reviewing the case to determine whether to bring criminal charges.
Peter Chu, who was poised to buy the hagfish from the Marlin II, said the fishermen made a mistake.
Chu, owner of Atlantic Korean Trading Inc. in the Northern California coastal city of Eureka, said the fish sells for as much as $20 a pound in South Korea, where he estimates the nation’s total consumption is about 9 million pounds a year.
Hagfish has a modest following among older Korean men who savor it as an appetizer broiled in sesame oil and sprinkled with salt accompanied by a shot of liquor.
“There’s a myth there that it’s an aphrodisiac. It gives you energy like Viagra,” Chu said. “It’s like oysters here.”
Fisherman Mark Tognazzini, who dabbled in hagfish in the early 1990s, understands the lure of fishing for the scavenger, calling it one of the least expensive fisheries to get started in. They are caught in five-gallon barrels fitted with trap doors and baited with rotting fish.
The hagfish’s predators include whales, seabirds and seals. There are currently no catch limits for hagfish, and the species is in no immediate danger.
But with the increasing interest in hagfish, Tognazzini said they should be regulated because they don’t reproduce quickly and are an important part of the marine ecosystem. Still, he recognizes one of the obvious challenges in protecting them.
“I believe they’re really important to the health of the ocean, 100 times more than the sea otter. If you didn’t have buzzards on the mainland eating dead squirrels and other animals, you’d have a mess,” he said. “The thing is they’re not cute – they don’t hit people’s hearts.”
If looks alone weren’t enough of a turnoff, hagfish are also notoriously sensitive to temperature and when agitated they vomit and secrete a protein that reacts with seawater to create a thick mucus.
A single 14-inch animal can turn a five gallon bucket of seawater into a pool of goo in a matter of moments, said Eddie Kisfaludy, a biological collector with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. While the slime distracts predators, it also has the unfortunate drawback of occasionally suffocating the hagfish.
“They’re definitely more interesting than maggots but then all these researchers who work on fruit flies will probably argue with me,” Kisfaludy said.
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