Hagfish named after discoverer

Some explorers dream of having a distant star , an elusive tropical bird, or a snow-capped mountain peak named after them. Bruce Strickrott, who pilots the submarine Alvin, has a different sort of bragging right .

Last week, he found out that a slime-covered eyeless creature of the deep, known for wriggling inside whales and devouring their innards, will bear his name.

Behold the latest species of hagfish, the Eptatretus strickrotti .

"I'm pretty blown away, actually," Stickrott, 42, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "That's probably my claim to fame for the rest of my existence."

Strickrott, who works for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discovered the hagfish in March 2005, while plumbing the inky depths of the Pacific south of Easter Island.

Maneuvering Alvin at a depth of 7,218 feet, he vacuumed the 18-inch critter into a canister known as the "slurp gun."

Scientists later confirmed that the fish was a new member of the hagfish family and one of the deepest-dwelling of its kind.

W. Joe Jones of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute , who documented the discovery in the February issue of the journal Biological Bulletin , said Strickrott's dexterity in capturing the fish made him the obvious choice when it came time to pick out a name.

"I was like, 'Man, this guy has skills and deserves recognition,' " Jones told the magazine Oceanus. "The naming was a way to express our gratitude."

Strickrott, who has logged more than 1,600 hours and 200 dives in Alvin since becoming a pilot 10 years ago, said his family and friends have had a subdued reaction to his scientific claim to fame.

Only a sister-in-law who is a scientist is "really jazzed about it," he said.

But he is humbled by the christening of his very own species.

"A lot of scientists spend their careers doing this and never get that , much less the guy driving the submarine," Stickrott said .