By Jennie Buzaglo

WEYMOUTH Sea Life Adventure Park has launched its display of a new creepy creature - just in time for Halloween.

Hagfish are long, eel shaped, slime-producing marine fish with four hearts and no jaw or backbone.

To catch food, they have to resort to unconventional methods due to their undeveloped rudimentary eyes which make it impossible for them to focus on anything.

This leaves them with only their senses of smell and touch to find food.

The gruesome yet fascinating fish are opportunistic scavengers who only eat other fish which are dead or dying by removing their insides first.

The Weymouth aquarium is the only Sea Life centre in the UK with Hagfish on display, and the odd-looking fish are already being compared to the creatures from Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Instead of a jaw, they have a pair of dental plates with four sets of hollow, horizontal, comb-like teeth made of keratin – the same substance that our hair and nails are made of.

Arguably one of the most unusual parts about them is that they can produce bucket loads of slime because of the 100 slime glands they have all over their body.

Being able to produce this much slime benefits Hagfish as they can use it to clog their predators’ gills which eventually deters them.

Hagfish have remained the same since they first came about 300 million years ago.

They’ve kept many of their prehistoric adaptations, like a kind of ‘dinosaur fish’, currently making them Weymouth’s most weird but wonderful creature.

This Halloween, Sea Life has other ‘Ascarium’ half term events which includes getting the chance to meet Zara the Sea Witch.

The park is open every day from 10am-5pm with last entry at 4pm.