If you eat by shoving your entire writhing body into your meals, your dinner companions are probably going to leave. But your lack of table manners does open up a valuable opportunity that refined diners miss out on. You are literally surrounded by food. You’re slathered in carbohydates, fats, proteins and more. Rather than swallowing them, it would be very efficient if you could absorb these nutrients straight through your skin. And that’s exactly what a gruesome sea creature called the hagfish can do. Its entire body is like a simple gut.

Hagfish look like slimy eels, but they’re actually very different. They don’t have any jaws or a proper backbone (although they’re traditionally grouped within the back-boned ‘vertebrates’). If