The lovely hagfish!

Forget sugarplums and heart-shaped candies, now there’s a real holiday for kids and it’s Hagfish Day!

Celebrate the anniversary of the 5th Hagfish Day Celebration with us!!! Five years of exotic, unusual…okay ugly ocean animals.
WhaleTimes created Hagfish Day (in 2009) to celebrate the beauty of ugly. Hagfish are the perfect example. These deep-sea scavengers ooze slime buckets of slime. They also play an important role in their ecosystem. WhaleTimes believes repugnant and slightly revolting animals like hagfish make great role models for highlighting conservation concerns for all marine animals.
“Sometimes it seems as if ecological causes are popularity contests that exclude the less attractive and less well-known, though equally vulnerable, creatures,” said WhaleTimes Director Ruth Musgrave. “There are species in peril that kids never hear about.”

We hope to have the bios of this year’s Hagfish Day stars up soon. (That darn hacking thing has added a wrinkle to our timeline!) This year’s stars are a combination of unusual, endangered, and beauty challenged.
How do you celebrate Hagfish Day? Classrooms, individuals and families can participate by making hagfish slime, writing a Haiku, vote for your favorite Ugly Beauty, make and send a Happy Hagfish Day bouquet to a friend, or simply learn more about the Hagfish Day stars and the scientists who study them. It’s sure to be a good slime!
More to come….