Ever thought about putting slimy fish grime on your flesh wound to help it heal?
Probably not.
Neither did Grace Niewijk until she saw an Animal Planet show about hagfish. When attacked or agitated, the long, eel-like fish produces a milky mucus that enables it to slip out of the grasp of predators. Its known predators include some species of birds and other fish.
Hagfish, it turns out, can produce a lot of slime, which happens to be very absorbent.
The slime also has spider-web-like silk threads. Niewijk, a student at Oak Park and River Forest High School, decided to create her class science project using hagfish slime. The senior created an antibacterial bandage from the mucus. The creatures are consumed as food in some parts of the world, and its skin is used for clothing accessories like belts and wallets.
Niewijk’s year-long school project landed her and eight other OPRF science students in the Midwest Research Competition on April 11. With a focus on “Positive Impact Investigatory Design,” students’ projects are based on how they can impact the world around them. Niewijk, 17, won the competition.
She started her project last fall and wrapped it up, so to speak, early this spring.
“This is, by far, the most time-intensive thing I have ever done,” she said.
She had 10 hagfish to work with, and the slimy creatures didn’t come cheap. Niewijk paid a total of $280 for the fish, including shipping costs to get them to Oak Park from Washington State.
“One of the hardest things was getting the fish because in the Midwest there’s no one fishing for hagfish because there are no oceans here, and most people who fish for hagfish are freezing them immediately and shipping them to Korea, which is where they are eaten and made into leather and stuff. So it was really hard to find a supplier of live hagfish who was willing to ship a very small quantity to some kid in Illinois,” she said with a laugh.
For her bandage, Niewijk isolated the silk threads to make fabric patches. She didn’t test the bandage on humans due to very strict health and safety protocols at the high school. Instead, she tested her samples using sheep’s blood, to see how absorbent the bandages were. She also tested how well her bandage fights antimicrobial bacteria.
Niewijk said her experiment was very successful. She found that her bandage would be able to prevent maceration — permanent damage to surrounding tissues due to excessive moisture. That, in turn, would make a wound environment much less hospital for bacteria to develop.
While they look like eels, hagfish are actually a species of fish, Niewijk explained. Hagfish uses its slime to deter most predators. Its absorbent properties, for instance, can disable other fish predators by getting into their gills. Hagfish have a skull but no vertebral column, the only known animal with such a feature. Along with making large amounts of slime, they can also curl up into a ball to ward off predators.
While some people might be freaked out by them, Niewijk said, she isn’t. For one thing, they don’t have that “fish smell,” She kept her fish and conducted her experiments at school. She hopes to one day bring her bandage to mass market.
“It’s really funny how many people in our class were truly grossed out by their own projects. I really wasn’t bothered by it,” said Niewijk, who plans to attend Yale University after graduating this June.
“Keeping fish was a new experience for me.”