What to know when your car is melted by 7,500 pounds of slime eels | Hacker News Reader

What to know when your car is melted by 7,500 pounds of slime eels

theverge.com

42 pointsxbmcuser27 comments

A truck, carrying live Pacific hagfish, spilled the cargo in a 5-car collision. Hagfish produce slime to escape danger, and thus slimed the cars onto which they landed. There was no melting involved.

Thanks for the clarification, I read the article expecting to find something about corrosive properties of the slime but couldn't understand why it wasn't even mentioned.

A bit frustrating that they used the word "melting".

s/melting by/covered with/

Its Verge, it comes with the territory.

Maybe it was supposed to be "melded with"? It's apparently hard to remove.

To be fair the car "looks" melted, but unsure if that's just from the weight of the fish or if they have something in the slime that did it.

The FAQ linked to from the verge is a much better source:

http://www.southernfriedscience.com/your-car-has-just-been-c...

Well this is embarrassing I was actually posting it to Reddit pressed the wrong app

Looks like an unexpected success then. You've got everyone talking about melting, melded, slimed and how they would correct the title or article.

> And it turns out, the eel-like creatures are not, in fact, eels. They’re Pacific hagfish — primitive jawless fish

>It’s the main defense mechanism for the toothy, bottom-feeding invertebrates

AFAIK, They can't be invertebrates if they are a type of fish.

EDIT: It appears they are certainly Chordates, but is some controversy over which sub-branch of Chordates they actually belong to. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnatha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclostomata

The statement is not as non-sensical as it sounds. Hagfish are actually quite interesting evolutionarily. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagfish .

Article has an update as well:

Correction: This story initially identified hagfish as invertebrates because they don’t have vertebrae. Verge commenter bennyfactor pointed out that hagfish are in fact considered “odd” or “degenerate” vertebrates. He’s correct, and the story has been updated.

Non-AMP link: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15969674/slime-eels-hagfi...

Melt also means "covered in slime or liquid"? English is not my first language.

Not that I've ever heard. This is just a weird headline.

Not generally, no, although I am reminded of a style of melted-cheese-coated sandwiches called "melts".

In that context it's the cheese that's being melted, not the sandwich. Melting implies some kind of state change from solid to liquid (or semi-liquid), which is in fact the case in a melt sandwich where the cheese is melting. In this case the slime was already in a liquid state so there's no change taking place and it would therefore be incorrect to refer to it as melting. It DOES look kind of like the car was melted because of the accident damage combined with being covered in slime, which is I guess what the title is alluding to.

Nothing is so small that Hacker News cannot overthink it, not even a cheese sandwich.

The crashed car in the picture looks like it was melted by slime.

"Anti-shark spray" has got to be a Batman reference, hasn't it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn-ZXgXQeGY

https://www.sharktecdefense.com/products/instant-release-sha...

I don't think the article ever really answers the question that it posed in the subtitle: does insurance cover hagfish slime?

Invoking Betteridge's law of headlines, I'm guessing not?

It should be covered by comprehensive coverage, but probably not by collision.

Depending on the state, the truck owner's insurance is going to be paying. It falls under the same laws for construction vehicles hauling dirt that drop a rock on your windshield.

From the linked FAQ:

    Do you think my insurance will cover me?

    This may technically count as an Act of Cod.

So apparently not, but if your car is destroyed in a collision with a truck and then covered in slime, it may be possible to argue that it was a normal accident and the car was destroyed before the hagfish attacked.

http://www.southernfriedscience.com/your-car-has-just-been-c...

The video of them squirming around on the ground in the goop is nightmare fuel

Headline is typical Verge clickbait

So wait... Your hovercraft actually can get full of eels? Whoa!

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