#slime image

[poguniversity]

Funniest configuration of posters in my apartment

[taffywabbit]

what's that buny brewing...?

[its-stimsca]

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA

Don’t stop talking about Palestine.

🍉 🇵🇸 🍉 / 🇵🇸 🍉 🇵🇸 / 🍉 🇵🇸 🍉

Here are a few GoFundMes vetted by Project Watermelon that are far from their goals, and have received no donations in several days.

Please consider donating or sharing. If everyone who interacts with this post donates even five dollars, it could make a massive difference for these families. Thank you.

[thegoodmorningman]

If you have a minute, let me run something "by you".

[scribbyizhere]

does anybody feel Zesty abt ldr Sun?? oh hey yeah not me pffft nah. spirals

love death and rollerskates by @spadillelicious

[neon-glowing-rainbow-stims]

🪼🟣 ~ Jellyfish brains ~ 🟢🪼 (pilotslime)

(Credit if you use!!!) (kofi)

[itslilacokay]

weeks(?) old doodles i found that idk if i sent to blog yet

[myxomycota]

makes me sad how many people accuse my slime mold posts of being AI even though i list the species and link to the photographer/source like sometimes beauty is real guys. sometimes its real.

[soft-stims]

Clowncore Transmasc stimboard for anon

x x x - x x - x x x

[bethanythebogwitch]

Wet Beast Wednesday: hagfish

After taking last week off for mental exhaustion I have returned! And what better way to mark my return than with a shitload (or perhaps a highway load) of slime? Today I'm returning to the agnathan trenches to dredge up one of two living groups of jawless fish. I covered lampreys before, so now it's hagfish time. These ooey gooey critters are both fascinating and kinda gross. Now get ready, because it's time for slime.

(Image: a hagfish in profile. It is a long, brown, eel-like animal with a fin encircling the tail and a small head with no visible eyes or mouth. End ID)

Hagfish, also known as slime eels, are approximately 76 members of the class Myxini. In addition to the living species, hagfish have been preserved in the fossil record, letting us track their evolution through history. Hagfish are one of two living groups of agnathans, commonly known as jawless fish, with the other being the lampreys. As the name suggests, jawless fish are vertebrates without hinged jaws. Way back when bones were the cool new thing in town, agnathans represented the entirety of the vertebrates and were extremely diverse, but the evolution of jawed fish resulted in them getting largely outcompeted, leading to all lineages but the hagfish and lampreys going extinct. Genetic studies indicate that hagfish and lampreys are more closely related to each other than either group is to any other vertebrate. Because they are the only jawless fish left, hagfish and lampreys are of interest to scientists studying the evolution of vertebrates.

(Image: a hagfish coiled up, under orange light. The head is visible, featuring small sensory barbels and a large hole that resembles a mouth but is actually the nostril. End ID)

Hagfish are eel-shaped animals that range in length from a few centimeters to over a meter in the largest species, Eptatretus goliath. They have no scales, flattened tails that bear the only fin, and simple, eyeless heads. The heads bear sensory barbels, a single nostril, and the mouth. The mouth has two pairs of rasping plates that normally sit within the mouth, but can be everted to face outwards. The plates can grab food and pull it into the mouth to be swallowed. Hagfish do not have true eyes, but they do have eyespots that can sense light and dark. Interestingly, their fossil ancestors did appear to have fully-developed eyes that reduced in complexity until the present state. Likewise, ancestral hagfish had a true vertebral column made of cartilage, but modern hagfish only have remnants of their ancestor's vertebrae. Hagfish skin is very loosely connected to the internal body, only attached along the spine and slime glands. This makes the skin very flexible and harder for predators to grab. A third of the blood is contained between the skin and body and is pumped around with the heart as well as a few additional pumps that act as auxiliary hearts. Hagfish have some of the lowest blood pressure of any vertebrate and the highest blood volume to body mass ration of any chordate. Hagfish are also the only vertebrates that do not osmoregulate, meaning they cannot regulate the amount of salt in their bodies. Changes in salinity, especially moving to a lower salinity environment, are very dangerous to hagfish. Hagfish skeletons barely qualify, consisting of only a skull, notochord, and fin rays, all made of cartilage. The gills are internal. Water enters through the mouth and is forced over 5-16 internal gill pouches, then ejected through pores in the side of the body.

(Image: a closeup of a hagfish head with the rasping plates everted. The plates are mounted on pink tissue around the pharynx. there are two plates on either side of the pharyx which look like rows of small, sharp teeth. End ID)

That's all well and good, but you're here because of the slime. The hagfish's main defense is to create lots and lots of slippery slime. The slime helps them slip away from predators. If a fish tries to eat a hagfish, the slime can clog up its gills, forcing the fish to either release the hagfish or suffocate. A common factoid is that a single hagfish can turn a 5-gallon bucket of water into slime in seconds. To produce the slime, the hagfish releases threads made of special proteins into the water from glands on its skin. These proteins react with seawater to create a matrix of trapped water held together by filaments similar to keratin. The slime matrix can expand 10,000 times its original size in 0.4 seconds of exposure to seawater. The slime is quite durable and resistant to breaking and dissolving in water. After sliming, hagfish have been seen wrapping their bodies into an overhand knot and running themselves through the loop to scrape the slime off of themselves. Its possible that the slime also impairs the hagfish's ability to use it's gills and it needs to do the know to get the slime off and breathe again.

(Image: a person reaching into a holding tank full of hagfish and pulling out an armload of thick, viscous, white slime. End ID)

(Video: a hagfish in the wild demonstrating its knotting behavior. This one is going in the opposite direction usually seen: tail-to-head instead of head-to-tail. End ID)

Hagfish are found in most of the oceans, with range varying based on species. They are benthic animals that rarely swim far above the seafloor. Some species dig burrows to shelter in while others will shelter under rocks and other structures to avoid predators. While lying on the sediment, some hagfish species will coil up while others will lie straight. Hagfish are carnivorous and feed with a combination of hunting and scavenging. A large portion of the hagfish diet consists of polychaete worms and other known prey species include small crustaceans and echinoderms. Some species have been known to hunt burrowing fish, possibly by clogging up the burrows with slime to suffocate the prey. If you've seen a documentary about deep-sea fish you probably know about hagfish scavenging. Using their large nostril and sensitive sense of smell, hagfish can sense carcasses from long distances and are often some of the first scavengers to arrive at a new body. They use their rasping plates to pull bits of meat off of the carcass. A similar behavior to the slime-cleaning knots is seen when scavenging, but in reverse, going from tail to head instead of the other way around. This grants the hagfish additional mechanical advantage, allowing it to rip off larger chunks of food. Hagfish will burrow into larger corpses, possibly to get access to a food source with less competition than the outside of the body. Hagfish act as part of the deep ocean's cleaning crew, consuming corpses before they can decay and release potentially harmful chemicals into the water or act as sources of disease. Unlike any other living chordate, the food a hagfish swallows is encased in a permeable membrane during digestion. Hagfish can also absorbed dissolved nutrients through their skin. Hagfish have a very slow metabolism and ones in captivity have been observed going for up to 7 months between meals.

(Image: several hagfish feeing on the body of a fish. The hagfish have their heads on the fish's body and one hagfish is entering the fish's mouth. End ID)

Hagfish reproduction is still something of an enigma as so many of them live in the deep sea, making it difficult to observe them reproducing. It has been observed that females seem to outnumber males, with the exact ration varying depending on species. In some species, the sex ratio is almost even, while in others, there are 7 females to each male. however, it should be noted that females mature sexually faster than males and it has been suggested that this is responsible for the apparent skewed ratio. Hagfish eggs have tufts at the end that cause them to get stuck to each other like velcro. It has been suggested that eggs are laid in clusters possibly in burrows, beneath rocks, or protected with slime. Some species seem to have a mating season and seasonally migrate. Hagfish have only a single ovary or testicle (the latter of which has been described as unusually small by scientists and bullies in the deep-sea locker room) and they have no specialized reproductive tract. Instead, gametes are released into the main body cavity and must find their way to the anus to leave the body. Hagfish embryology is poorly understood, though it has been reported from studies of Eptatretus stoutii (Pacific hagfish) that the eggs can take up to 11 months to hatch. Hagfish have no larval stage, unlike lampreys and bony fish.

(Image: a group of 9 hagfish eggs in a plastic tub. The eggs are ovoid and dark yellow, with tufts of fibers at each end. End ID)

The conservation status and needs of most hagfish species is hard to discern because of the depths they inhabit. Threats to them include bycatch, as hagfish are often caught during deep-sea dredges. It is alos possible the chemical pollutants may be passed to hagfish through scavenging. There is a commercial fishery for hagfish, which is largest off of the west coast of the Americas. Hagfish are eaten as a delicacy in Korea and less commonly eaten in Japan. Most of the hagfish fishery goes to Korean food markets. Hagfish skin is also values as a durable leather and often marketed as "eel leather" or "yuppie skin". Study of the slime and the highly durable threads that produce it indicates they could be used to create very strong materials, similarly to spider silk. Research is currently being undertaken to find uses for hagfish slime and threads.

Once again, these cards show up in my posts (Image the Weird n' Wild Creatures card for hagfish, featuring an exaggerated drawing on a hagfish. End ID)

[dollarstoreartsupplies]

diversity win!! your undead child murdered by a singing zombie alien parasite is gay!!! happy lesbian visibility week!!

old versions of this drawing from a million years ago, and also only like,,, a thousand years ago, below cut:

[maskeddiany]

Revived the fixation I had in middleschool hi

[theslimeologist]

Something about the new slimes in SR2 always kind of bothered me.. they're all animal slimes that have been introduced so far, animal slimes with many possible appendages that can clip into or replace other slime's appendage traits. "How bad could it be?" I asked myself- and drew out this chart.

Most of the SR2 slimes have more traits and features than 85% of every other slime in SR1. It feels overwhelming to say the least.

[codgod]

oh yeah here’s some stuff i drew last night that i forgot about

[newtid]

vampire slime only mildly based on @wizard-council-bureaucrat's poll

(featuring the butch werewolf from the last poll. they are besties)

i wasn't really as focused on the poll results this time round, instead just trying to figure out how to make a vampire slime work

while i WAS tempted to make a creature that you all could thirst over, i decided to just make a guy

the original poll: https://www.tumblr.com/wizard-council-bureaucrat/735923012083351552

[shrimpwizards]

The Charler slimescicle cinematic universe...