October 16, 2021: Hagfish
Image courtesy of NOAA Ocean Exploration, 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration. Download larger version (jpg, 1.8 MB).
Happy Hagfish Day! While perhaps not the prettiest of fish in the ocean, as scavengers of the deep, hagfish serve an important function in the marine ecosystem, cleaning the ocean floor and recycling nutrients. Hagfish Day, which happens on the third Wednesday in October, was created to celebrate the beauty of ugly.
We saw this lovely hagfish during a 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration dive off the Atlantic coast of Florida.