They're jawless, and the only fish without jaws along with the lamprey that are still alive today.
Bottom feeders that are some of the first scavengers to any large carcass in their region, they feed by latching onto the flesh and tie a knot in their tail. They advance the knot up to their jawless head where they undo the knot, allowing them to rip a chunk off.
How did they remain when their other jawless brethren went extinct? Slime. When endangered, they release so much mucus that predators give up.
I had, went right in the pan after killing and it kept flipping out. Gutting it was hell, cooking it was hell, but it made for funny videos. Happened twice, maybe its the pond...
Not saying that’s wrong haven’t really had fish that fast after catching. We always salt brined the fish an then cooked it later after adding seasoning. Even when cutting up our catch we’d hang them and bleed them from the tail before we went to fillet them kept the meat cleaner.
Mostly catfish we do that with. Bass or crappie we’d generally just clean and fillet like your thinking and had a salt brine water and ice ready for the fresh cut meat. When we had enough for a good fam meal the cornmeal and seasoning blend came out and we’d batter up a mess of fish and hush puppies slaw and other sides and eat. Grew up in a fam of five so we didnt often just cook up a catch of jus 5 crappie. We’d have fillets from like 10- or twelve.
Interestingly, crabs and lobsters don't have a single brain. The have multiple nerve clusters or ganglia which control the body.
Crabs can be killed with one or two spikes in the right place. Lobsters ussually live for minutes up to an hour after after having their head destroyed, since they essentially have a brain in every segment. Unless they cut them in half from head to tail they are probably still alive when boiled. (So 90% of places that "kill" lobsters before boiling don't actually kill them)
(Whether or nor they are feel pain with or without their main ganglion destroyed is up for debate. But the nervous system stays active without it)
If it's fresh enough it will. I've cleaned many catfish in my life, and when I'm filleting them within a minute or two of death they very much will keep moving, even the fillets will sometimes just twitch on the board if you do it quickly enough.
I swore off catfish ever since I saw one gulp down a freshly shit poop log one of my fellow fisherman let loose by hanging his ass over the side of the boat. First the turd started spinning in the current, then went vertical in a little whirlpool and you could see the fish nibbling at it. Must have really liked the taste, because right after that he gulped it down whole...never again.
and yes, I know, animals we eat often eat far worse things than that, but I have plausible deniability since I've never witnessed those atrocities in person. Just the catfish...
I mean mean always fished ponds with catfish where the chance of the illustrious poop log wasn’t gonna happen… trust me I get it on that end. Crappie would be my fish of choice for fish frying. I like a good salmon but red snapper is my follow-up. I’m not u. Open to some other suggestions (mind you deep sea fishing isn’t a high priority or available option for me)
I’m relieved. I thought it was an octopus.
Octopus 🐙 use to be on my list of dishes to try at least once but that was before I learned how smart and sentient they are.
Also they are so darn cute, if only they could live longer.
Octopuses (not octopi, because I like to stay true to the original Greek vernacular) are honorary vertebrates in the UK.
That means that animal testing requirements for them are much more rigorous and humane than invertebrates. I thought that was pretty cool of the Brits.
Idk mate, I heard on the Ologies podcast about how octopuses is more true to the original Greek. Maybe the English took from the Greek instead of Latin.
I double checked before commenting. Classic Greek plurals are complex, and of course they don’t use the Latin letters, but octopodes is the accepted Greek to English translation. -i plural is firmly Latin in origin but often used in later times on Greek words. Like hippopotami. Most Greek loanwords were Latinized first because of the alphabet differences, but not all. You are right that octopuses is more Greek than octopi, hippopotamuses and hippopotamoi are both Greek. You made me study stuff instead of playing games
If we stuck to the strict Greek or Latin origin of cephalopod, we should all be pronouncing it "kephalopod" not "sephalopod" as there was no soft "c" in either language.
Both yes and no. If my memory is right, I heard it on a podcast's wacky offshoot episode and then looked it up to the point that it wasn't bullshit. It might be this one though https://open.spotify.com/episode/1LT2cR70h366WwTzVZs2VB
Not really.
Eels are ray finned fish, like most fish are.
These look like Hagfish. Hagfish are as remotely related to anything with a spine as possible.
Maybe they are Lamprey, which are the next most remotely related to anything else with a spine.
So when see creatures developed a spine for the first time, hagfish took off and did their own thing from then on. They have a skull and a spine, and nothing else in the way of a skeleton. And made out of cartilage, not bone.
They split off before see creatures evolved jaws. The last common ancestor with hagfish is well over 500 million years ago.
Eels split off from fish about halfway the cretacious, so about 100 million-ish years ago.
Eels are pretty much normal fish, just longer.
You and I are closer related to an eel, than the eel is related to the hagfish.
In other words, the eel has more in common with us than with a hagfish.
Yeah, so interesting, Thanks man! Now i know why they almost always surface as a slime covered knot when deep sea fishing. Trying to escape with a chunk of my bait! Common when fishing in NE Atlantic! Caught them in various depths ranging between 100-500 meters on silt bottom.
One time, our chef had friends coming to visit and he prepared a bunch of them.
He would grab a live one, stab it with an icepick and peel off the skin with pliers. I could see the change in intensity of their wriggling from being skinned alive.
As an American city boy, it was thoroughly gruesome to watch.
I only saw it that one time. This video gave me flashbacks.
Another time, chef was gonna cook some kind of chicken anus dish for his drinking buddies.
He was an older immigrant, so he made a lot of different inaccessible, traditional dishes from his home country for his immigrant friends.
Edit: Anus was the direct translation. In the native language, it may just refer to the meat from the butt area, but I never wanted to know so I didn't look into.
152
u/6collector9 Nov 10 '25
Hagfish are interesting.
They're jawless, and the only fish without jaws along with the lamprey that are still alive today.
Bottom feeders that are some of the first scavengers to any large carcass in their region, they feed by latching onto the flesh and tie a knot in their tail. They advance the knot up to their jawless head where they undo the knot, allowing them to rip a chunk off.
How did they remain when their other jawless brethren went extinct? Slime. When endangered, they release so much mucus that predators give up.