Ologies with Alie Ward - Hagfishology (HAGFISH) with Tim Winegard

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

Hagfish: these floppy hot dogs of the deep sea deserve our undying respect. Tim Winegard is a professional hagfishologist (YES IT'S A WORD) at Chapman University, and he dishes on the world's slimiest treasures. Prepare to hear about swift escapes, spellbinding clots of slime, patchy backstories, aphrodisiacs, outlasting extinction events, why you don't always need a spine, eating your way out of a dead whale, and -- like a slippery messiah -- turning water to slime. Also Alie confronts her fear of m*cus.Comparative Biomaterials Lab at Chapman University: https://sites.chapman.edu/fudge/Sponsors: TrueandCo.com/ologies (code: ologies), TakeCareof.com (code: Ologies50), amazon.com/popchips (code: 20Ologies)This week's donation went to the Wildlife Research Station: https://www.algonquinwrs.caMore links at alieward.com/ologies/hagfishologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesFollow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's your uncle's army buddy who makes superb banana bread alleyward back with another episode of oligies First off, I know you you're either like Or you're like, ah, yes Hagfish but an hour of hagfish. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Here's a secret you need to know. We are all hagfish We're shy sometimes, but we have friends. We have preferences. We can make do we have hidden talents Sometimes people underestimate us until they realize our superpowers and then they stand back and they marvel and by marvel I mean listen to a whole episode about hagfish But before we dive into the deep sea

Of this slimy hour Let's first by tradition thank all the folks on patreon.com slash oligies who make these episodes possible We'll hear some of their hagfish queries later and to all the folks buying oligies merch at the link in the show notes And sporting it and of course to all of you kind souls who have rated and subscribed to the pod And also left you reviews for old dadward, which I read By lantern light with a tear in my eye such as this week gen bagels Just wrote ali I hope you really do read every review because I want you to know that the world is a better place because you're in it

I don't deserve that That's too nice. Don't make me cry case up hd Which I guess I'm realizing just now is ksu PhD so sorry says here's the tip don't cherry pick the episodes you think you'll be interested in just binge them all They're all delightful. Thanks case up hd. Okay hagfish Hagfish, okay first off You're gonna have to wait to hear how hagfish got its name Sorry, it was a common patreon question. We're gonna address it later. This is as clickbaity as I get

Secondly, yes, the term hagfish ology has been used before I did not make it up A 2013 biology graduate student seminar schedule included the talk quote adventures in hagfish ology sulfate transport an extra brink eel mechanisms of ion regulation in pacific hagfish by alex cliford so hagfish ology The title's a jit haters So this episode exists because a science journalist edyong wrote an article for the atlantic in january with the headline No one is prepared for hagfish slime and he was so right it included photos from a 2017 traffic accident in oregon in which 7500 pounds of hagfish tipped over on a windy foresty highway and slicked the roads and the cars

In incomprehensible amounts of slime I immediately started googling hagfish scientists I had a few on the list and I was thrilled to see that they were based in southern california They were on my spreadsheet a few weeks ago. My friend wildlife educator mallory lincey Who is amazing went to the same lab and I messaged char and I was like I've been wanting to do an episode on this How are they the next day my phone rang? It was a hagfish ologist just using the phone like it was 1997 It's so charming. So we met a few days later on a street corner in your Chapman campus in orange county

And he has a bright smile kind of surfer-esque Golden hair and a ruddy beard and we drove around looking for parking because again, this is southern california And then we hit the lab and he showed me gurgling chili saltwater tanks filled with a few dozen soft pinkish purplish gray floppy hot dogs with mouths And then he let me cradle one in my open palm and it felt like a very floppy hot dog Like if god put a face on an intestine and just stopped there Were these specimens slimy not really until this ologist urged me to annoy one

Give it a little pinch. He coaxed milliseconds later It seemed my hand was drenched in a thick veil of elephant snot. I was transfixed So hagfish are disgusting and they deserve our respect So this ologist as you will hear from the dulcet tones of his canadian accent hails from the north and he got his bachelors and masters studying zoology at the university of guelph Whilst there he happened to take an invertebrate zoology class with hagfish master Dr. Douglas fudge with whom he now works as a research associate at Chapman So prepare to hear about swift escapes

Outlasting extinction events the mysteries of the deep why you I guess don't always need a spine Eating your way out of a dead thing Disappearing without a trace and like a slippery messiah converting water into slime with human delight and professional hagfish ologist Tim Weingart So And now I don't know if you know this but you are technically a hagfish ologist Uh, I don't know if I've ever heard it put that way, but uh, I've probably won a few. Yeah I looked it up to see if there was a

Like a more latin sounding name Yeah, and the term that's been used the most to describe what you study is literally hagfish ologist Like there are people have used that word before so It's a thing hagfish or run with it What is a hagfish for someone who's never seen or touched one? So, um, I guess the best way to describe them is there Uh A benthic Deep-sea dweller, right? So essentially all hagfish

share That in common they all live along the bottom substrate of the oceans and the majority of them below 100 meters in depth They're about 300 feet, right So side note this all just jumps between metric and us. Why are we still not metric measurements? So I don't have to convert it. Thank freaking god. So what they are is a jawless primitive Eel-like creature, right? I'm hesitant to call them a fish even though it's in their name Because they aren't necessarily a traditional fish, right? They they lack scales. They lack jaws They lack eyes. They lack what we are traditionally referred to as fins

So they're in many ways a very Primitive version of uh of a modern-day fish, right? They're thought to have diverged at around the same time that vertebrates popped up On the evolutionary spectrum. So these suckers are old Old my god. You're so old. Yeah, how many millions of years do you think? So there's fossil evidence up to 350 million years, but they're likely over 500 million years old Wow. Yeah, so among some of the first

Like really highly organized Cephalized, which means essentially like head focused creatures So hagfish for a long time are defined as craniots, which means that they have a cranium surrounding their brain But they have no calcification of anything in their body. So it's all cartilage, right? So they do have a notochord They have many of these features that are very vertebrate in a way But lacking calcification Lacking gills lacking jaws all these other features place them in a in a much more

And I even hesitate to say primitive, but I guess they are primitive features Even though hagfish themselves are obviously as ancient as they are. They're also very modern, right? Like the hagfish we see today We really don't know How much they relate to the hagfish of the past, right? P.s. If you're like notochord, I got you. So a notochord is by definition a cartilaginous skeletal rod Supporting the body you had one you had one is a teeny tiny embryo

So it's like a backbone in that it gives support and structure, but it's not a backbone in that it's not bony segmented vertebrae Oh, and the hagfish has a brain case that isn't a skull It's like a cartilage rib cage around the brain lump and in the hagfish world There has been decades of heated dramatic That's how I like to imagine it debate on whether hagfish never developed a backbone or If they had one and then just devolved the other way gradually get rid of the sucker Oh, and their eyes and the skull

So kind of like a handsome lanky drifter who's also slimy and eats corpses Their backstory is still a mystery through fossil evidence of which there's only two Uh, it makes it a bit of a limited jump in terms of what you can say. There's two fossils of hagfish Yeah, soft-bodied creatures don't fossilize well, right? So when they do die and end up in the bottom sediment Their tissues are so similar to everything else around them that they don't end up distinct Like other animals with calcium or real bones in their body do who's got those two fossils Where are they? That's a good question. One of them was just

discovered and published by a group in alberta And then the other one that's a good question It's been quite a while since I I read the paper, but they would be there. They'd be in museums, right? There's only two of them known so y'all I spent so long trying to find out where these two fossils are And I can tell you that one was discovered in mason creek illinois I think around 1991 and the other is from lebanon and was acquired in 2013 by a private fossil collecting company but I earnestly just spent Probably two hours trying to figure out if I could just go on a road trip and see a hagfish fossil in person

And the lack of information on their whereabouts has led me to believe that they're both kept in a subterranean vault With the holy grail or they're just like kicking it like ballers in a timeshare with bigfoot. So precious Yeah, super precious and like I was saying very rare, right? But as we uncover more fossil beds, there are particular Fossilization conditions that lend themselves preserving soft bodied animals better I think there was just a big deposit found in china actually in the last couple of weeks that has a lot of soft bodied creatures Um, but I think it's more in the yeah, it could be right in that 350 million 450 million year range And going back a little bit less far than that your history When you were just a tiny tot

Canadian Did you always love poking around lakes and Forests what was going on? Oh, yeah for sure. Um My mom always used to say that she needed to distract me. She just said she just say she saw something in that puddle And I'd be pretty consumed for quite a while Honestly, I don't think there's a time when I didn't like science in some way Right, like I wanted microscopes when I was six and You know brought home every creepy crawly I could find

And you know, actually I collected butterflies my original plan as a child was to be an entomologist. Really? Yeah Yeah, so I collected, you know large numbers of butterflies from all over the world wherever we went And then where did you flutter away from them and into hagfish tank? Oh, I think that would have been yeah in university when you know, I guess the opportunities to study tropical butterflies were limited in Canada It's butterfly time. So, uh, yeah, that's sort of what happened. I think it was right around 2007 Yeah through meeting Doug and getting introduced to hagfish and then Sort of being brought into the fold as it was into the into the world to hagfish There's sort of no end of amazement. That's what's kept me here that almost any question you can ask about hagfish

There likely isn't a concrete answer. And so when Doug said hey come on back Study some hagfish with me. What was your response to that? Oh, I think it took a bit of prodding. I think because I really did enjoy the wildlife research station and living out in the woods there, but You know, obviously we're sitting here in beautiful sunny southern, california, which didn't hurt Have you ever heard a more canadian sentence? I really did enjoy The wildlife research station and living out in the woods there and tim says he loves doing applied research on these critters figuring out how to use a slime to inform human made

alternatives and his master's work was looking at how we can use these 15 centimeter long threads that spring forth from the hagfish as a fiber source And get away from petrochemical based fibers like acrylic and nylon and polyester So although he misses the wilderness trading his parka for board shorts wasn't all that tough So I think that my my heart's always been into hagfish. So in some ways it maybe didn't take too much, but Yeah, I think that the right projects the right people all sort of lend themselves to to a good time in science And so explain to me what the life of a hagfish is like. Where are they living? What are they eating? Who are they hanging out with? What's going on down there? Oh, I think we all wish we knew

so What we do know is that uh, they're very sensitive to temperature and light, right? So they're a deep sea specialist They seek out cold water. There is maybe only one species that's found inside of 100 meters of depth So there is called the inshore hagfish, which is found in japan But other than that, they're all very deep sea They feed on a variety of not only small tube worms and other invertebrates But also scavenge large windfalls of whales and seals and sea lions and big fish that fall down into the ocean deep

That's deep So side note remember the toothology episode with sarah mcnulty about marine snow that's soft Steady underwater dusting of poo and flesh chunks while a dead whale Is like a marine blizzard and hagfish love a snow day We know or at least we think that they play an important role in that bottom composition turnover, right? So when things do fall into the deep, there's low oxygen There are conditions that can lend themselves preserving something like a whale for years, right low temperatures low oxygen So maybe the bacterial decomposition is not as prevalent like there would be bacterial decomposition

But I think there's a place for hagfish and actually cleaning up the bottom in that way And then spreading the nutrients around right so as they feed they'll obviously leave go back to their burrows Or go back to where they're living and bring nutrients with them And essentially help spread nutrients in an otherwise very very desert like deep sea environment Smell it find it munch it poop it spread it We were looking in the tank and some of them are all coiled up. Some of them are just hanging out in a tube What's their day-to-day life like in terms of what we know about where they live Some have a tendency to be in more muddy sandy bottoms those ones those species are typical burrowers

They'll actually live in burrows in the mud And typically sit there with just their nostril sticking out Catching you know looking for whiffs of whale or seals But the other ones do spend time on rocky bottoms And I think those are the species that tend to coil up a bit more Because they're just spending a lot more time on the surface as opposed to within the substrate But uh, yeah, there's been interesting work as well showing that there's handedness that hagfish have handedness They have a tendency to coil either right or left more than the other way, right?

So they have a preference. I think in captivity There's probably only maybe five or six common species for people to have in captivity There are a number of species that do not do well at all So they're really hard to to keep uh in artificial environments essentially I think partially because It's really hard to replicate the pressure that they're used to living in We can replicate temperature and salinity and pH and all these other Environmental parameters, but it's really hard to recreate being

You know a mile below the surface of the ocean And how are they making baby hagfish? Nobody knows Yeah, so nobody has ever witnessed hagfish breeding. Wow And nobody has ever had Hagfish successfully breed in captivity even unseen to produce fertile eggs So we have hagfish laying eggs in captivity all the time, but they're presumably unfertilized Because they never develop

Wow, right. So this is something that i'm really interested in as well is that is there seasonality in the deep sea Even though it's dark and cold all year Are they more attuned to those deep sea conditions and maybe sense The difference in lunar phases. Do they have a migration? Are they always in the same place all the time? And I think that they are moving throughout the season But it's just not a lot is known about it because it's so hard to follow these things into the deep all right a lot of the technology that's used for

Tracking fish and other stuff Isn't that either the size scale that could be used in hagfish or is just The fish need to come to the surface to get data pings and hagfish never will right right so that yeah they're really tough to follow and We've got A new underwater video rig that we're going to use to try and at least peer into their lives a little bit Would you think that they would be following the whales in case a whale Does bite the dust and falls down?

I think whales are typically undergoing such large migrations that hagfish wouldn't be like say following the herd type thing I think their low metabolism You know, it suits them well to possibly go a year or more without feeding Even in captivity, we typically only feed them every three to six months. What? Yeah, yeah, they they they eat a lot when they eat, but they don't eat frequently Wow, what do you feed them in captivity? Um, they get a bit of a mixture. There's shrimp and squid uh, and beef and Sometimes other random large fish that we come across in our work. I think we fed them an opa

which is a very interesting Interesting fish Okay, so quick aside researching opa opah got a lot of hits on opra. It's a different thing and opa is a big silvery round fish It's also called a moonfish looks like a moon and an opa are one of the rare endothermic fishes Which means like opra it has a warm heart We feed them a diversity of stuff Hopefully trying to get them the right

Nutritional requirements they need but again, it's something that is not really well understood and something that we're looking to do more on Is gathering gut contents From hagfish. Yeah, would you just drop like a pot roast in the tank and they go nuts on it? Essentially, yeah, what does that look like? Uh, like it's a bit of a feeding frenzy. Yeah that they're all going at it It's really interesting as well though because they lack appendages and they don't have a jaw The way if it is actually like say a big pot roast They actually tie themselves into knots that they slide against the pot roast to actually Tug on it. Oh my god. Yeah, so they tie the same knots to rid themselves of slime

But they have a very unique way of actually latching on to something without jaws, right? So they can pull at it and get like a some resistance. Have you ever seen a hagfish eating at a whale? Only in film. I've never seen it in real life. I would love to Do they go into the whale and then burrow out? Yeah, they they are definitely spending a lot of time inside the whale A recent study was published actually showing that they can absorb amino acids across their skin Right so They you know part of their low metabolism their ability to deal with low oxygen all of these unique adaptations

Really allow them to live that lifestyle It's not a lifestyle choice fella and to go into a whale in which oxygen concentrations could be quite low Bacterial levels high all this other stuff. They're they're perfectly at home may may feed there for months on end For months just gorging And then be like bye. Bye. And then go hang out for a year. Yeah. Wow. That's so efficient I have to say that's good good for them that it's like take on a lot of cargo and then just kick it for a bit And I think we see that with anything that's We stood the test of hundreds of millions of years, right that they're typically generalists, right? They're

You know Something like a crocodile, right can eat anything can go Months and months without eating like they just there's certain life history characteristics that lend themselves towithstanding mass extinctions and All of the climatic changes that impact very niche specific species, right? So after this interview tim and I went and we ate tacos and I realized later that despite Flinging around wet loaves of hagfish mucus in the lab earlier neither one of us washed our hands But we also had a spirited discussion about the importance of a diverse microbiome

So I think we're on the same like so what page there also at lunch He mentioned that the hagfish traps are like buckets with a few conical ports that funnel the hagfish in So they can't get out But what do they use to lure them into the bucket turns out hagfish Love the smell of big mammal bones and fat So they toss a fleshy beef bone in there and I was like do they get to eat it? And he's like nah that would mess up their gut content data So the beef bones are in a mesh bag

Meaning that the hagfish smell it find it but can't munch it poop it or spread it The hagfish have been catfished and they tend to eat the bigger things like if a whale a sea lion Is that kind of what their bread and butter is is oh man, there's a big whale. It's big and dead floating down here Thanksgiving what's happening? Yeah, I think that's the That's the the real train of thought that we're on is essentially that A lot of their features a lot of their adaptations would lend themselves to really capitalizing on those big whale falls or or big mammal falls They have very low metabolisms if you compared them to a vertebrate

They'd have one of the lowest metabolisms of any vertebrate really right. So yeah, they they live slow So there's that right there's uh, you know, we've observed Them absolutely gorging at these deep sea sites, right? So they just you know, they fill their guts to the point that there may be many times their original mass Well, I was hungry. So to be able to do that as well Makes you think that this is that's the predominantly what they're doing But we also see that they do feed on some sort of tube worms and these other invertebrates that are found in the sediment in which the hagfish live so

And can you run me through some body parts of a hagfish? Yeah, so I guess if you're to have a hagfish out on the table They have they do have a head, right? So they have barbels at the end of the head, which are essentially their chemical sensing Devices right they have a catfish Yeah, catfish have barbels as well, right? So yeah, they'd be packed with what we call chemosensory cells That would be picking up things like the the sense of dead or decaying fish, right or a whale So they start with those they have a very large intake aperture for their gill system

So seawater gets Snorkeled through their face snoot and then that water is expelled through these breathing holes on the side So they're kind of like a slimy water flute that someone sewed from a deep-owned baby Anyway, they smell like champs It also feeds into a sack right very close to their brain So they have probably an incredible ability to detect very saint or very faint smells Which makes sense, right if they're potentially hundreds of meters from something that fell or maybe even further, right? So they have very primitive eyes if you look at a lot of the hagfish

They don't have the type of eyes that we would normally associate with the fish There's actually don't even protrude through the skin. So there's a transparent layer of skin that covers a very rudimentary eye That was likely more developed at one time, but was just not selected for and they essentially lost its full functionality So eyes were off that had him lost him Baller now what is happening with that mouth? First of all, it has these Whiskered flesh dangles that look kind of like a tiny handlebar mustache made out of little dicks But don't go looking for jaws here. No noser They have what tim calls a muscular appendage inside their mouth and it

Juts out this little paddle of hard jagged spikes kind of like a snail's tongue So imagine if your tongue had rows and rows of those things in parking lots That'll pop your tires if you drive the wrong way on them. So yeah hagfish They deserve our respect. So essentially, uh, there are these correctness teeth or the same You know the same material that makes up our fingernails makes up their their their rasp, which they use to actually um, essentially sand Tissue off of a carcass or to slurp up a little worm that they're after

But then when you look at the rest of them, they they vary a little bit in terms of their gill apertures that water flows out of The more burrowing specialist hagfish will have reduced numbers of gill openings in which the water flows out of again Water flute now all of this is just the tater skins the jalapeno poppers Appetizers before we get to the main course because here here's where things get slimy Now if you've listened to previous episodes of oligies or the first 12 seconds of this one You know, I don't censor language

The fuck is a hagfish most science podcasts bleep out questionable swear words But I embrace raw emotion and freedom of adult expression in science communication In this podcast at least with the exception of the word Mucus, it's too gross. It comes up between 10 to 15 times in the remainder of this episode. So when you hear a faint chime Please know it's just replacing the word mucus Please feel free to take a glug of your beverage in front of you and do a tiny imperceptible butt dance to celebrate the absence of this word And then as you move into the rest of the body

You'll notice along the ventral side that they have about 100 to 150 slime gland openings, right? So they're literally covered head to tail with these glands that produce their defensive slime So whether they're bit on the head or on the tail they can in a fraction of a second like less than 100 milliseconds Produce copious quantities of this fiber reinforced slime Mm-hmm, which is Astounding Like for something that is maybe not as advanced as some other vertebrates This is a defense system that is still very much mysterious in terms of how it how it works, right?

I think yeah, so if everything else about the hagfish We would call primitive. This is highly derived, right? This is unlike anything else found in nature We know of a lot of mucuses. We know of a lot of natural fiber sources like silkworm silks or spider silks But hagfish threads that are found in their slime are not only comparative to spider silks in terms of their mechanical properties That they're incredibly tough But they produce this stuff in prodigious quantities. This cannot be overstated Like an individual hagfish may have 20,000 kilometers of fiber

In it in its body at any one time and what's so unique about these fibers is that they're packaged into 15 centimeter Fiber lengths, but that's coiled into 150 micron cell So like you know a little bit more than a tenth of a millimeter They pack 15 centimeters of thread into So to put that in perspective the threads that make up this water trapping slime network Are 10 million times longer than they are wide and they are somehow Neatly coiled like a skein of yarn into a tiny cell capsule ready to be ejected and unfurled Now more on how that works in a minute, but a minute you love hagfish

How are they coiling this? What is their gooey witchcraft? You're intrigued So that process in and of itself has been something that has really intrigued us for quite some time And is it hard for them to make more of it if they slime someone and they're like bye-bye later Do they have to go sit and produce more is that is that um Energy expensive for them. Uh, yeah, the fibers are made up of protein, which in general is quite expensive to make Um, but one of the unique things that the hagfish does by having so many slime glands is that it never deploys them all at once Right, so they do have some site

Specificity right if you bite it on the tail it may only release Exadata is what we call the condensed slime essentially It may only release a few glands worth like two or three glands on either side of its body Which is enough to produce a gallon of form slime So like they would never be caught without slime ever Right, they just have so much on board and there's some indication as well that they can't actually release All of this slime from a single gland because they likely retain the immature Cell components, uh, which would otherwise maybe be released but not function as they should

Yeah, what happens when these fibers hit water? Yeah, so that's something that's really interesting to us. Uh, so it's a two-component slime It's released by what's called holocrine secretion Which means that the cells are actually having their membranes stripped off of them as they pass through the pore of the slime gland Wow, right So it narrows down to a tiny opening that strips the cells of their membranes So when they're released to seawater, they're exposed to an entirely new environment, right water

There's an interaction with the seawater. There's essentially the solubilization of proteins that help maintain these fibers in their coiled up state But what happens is that the seawater very rapidly bursts the Vascicles that are released they shear out into these long strands which essentially transmit forces of mixing down to the thread bundles So instant replay the hagfish takes the offense defense ejects tiny coiled balls of the accident Getting their little membrane covers stripped as they exit the threads hit the water and expand trapping more water in a net of microfiber threads expanding 10

thousand times its size Slime predator offense retreats down for the count hagfish remains the champion of the deep Or in tim's words to simplify what I just said, I guess um the m**** is released Really vigorous mixing that's created by either the hagfish trying to escape or the predator trying to eat the hagfish Further expands this network of m**** and fiber until it forms this fully formed slime ball Which is capable of uh, like fully clogging the gills of a 10 foot shark, right?

We've never seen a successful predation On a hagfish by any gill breathing predator So we see sea lions birds Porpoises all successful hagfish predators because their breathing mechanisms are separated from their eating mechanism Essentially just like us right like we can breathe and eat at the same time Whereas most gill breathing fish can't they're breathing All the time and that is what exposes them to the slime So you got gills you got screwed and so that slime will just clog

Their actual respiration exactly like I'm out it shuts the water flow from going across their gills And we actually don't know what happens to them because all of the video work that's been done Has happened with wild free living animals when the sharks or the fish get slime They quickly leave the video frame and we actually don't know whether they actually die Or whether any of these animals can get the slime off their gills It just gets wrapped around everything with the thousands of you know with miles and miles of fiber It's very easy for it to just get wrapped around things and stay there Man and so how much of this slime is actually water and how much is the fiber protein?

So when the exodus released into seawater and fully sets up is over 99 percent seawater So essentially hagfish slime can be formed in any container. It'll conform to the shape of almost anything Uh, we did a study that showed that it's actually one of the softest materials known to man. It's very deformable So side note this study was concentration independent mechanics and structure of hagfish slime And one of the paper's authors randy illwald told the atlantic's edyong that hagfish slime is one of the softest materials ever measured and quote Jello is between 10,000 and 100,000 times stiffer than hagfish slime I have touched it and it is some soft

Silky business and then I went and touched nachos because I'm 10,000 times tougher than purel apparently But when it's put into elongational flow or stretched That's when the fibers and their reinforcement properties start to be felt because they're actually Incredibly strong when you stretch them. What do you think? Are some applications of Hagfish slime are people looking at this being like? Well, I think so It's such a unique mechanism. I think first of all the speed with which the slime sets up

interests people because Whatever is happening and we're we've been trying to figure this out for years Happens so quickly that it's likely one of the fastest reactions That we know of right this is it's so incredibly fast That I think how we could learn how to not only maybe bundle things but unbundle or uncoil things And also how we develop rapidly expanding Jell networks would be a an interesting application, right? The fibers themselves, I've always been interested in actually using for textile, right?

They're very very fine. They're a micron in diameter So even when you think of microfiber clothing, which is so soft that stuff's like 30 to 50 microns in diameter So it's much finer So let's get some scale for microns real quick a micron is one Millionth of a meter and a human hair is around 50 to 100 microns in diameter A red blood cell is five microns across the human eye can't see much smaller than around 40 microns So yes, hagfish silk would be luxurious as hell. It would probably make the softest t-shirt What would you have to do to get it from like a puddle of to like a loom?

Would you have to dry it out? I think that you'd probably want to isolate The thread bundles and then work with them on their own But I think the biggest challenge right now is that it is such a narrow fiber That any of the equipment that's used right now to spin textiles is not built at a scale that could handle it Yeah, and now there's a picture that went around the internet That made everyone question What the deal was with hagfish this photo of a car that got into an accident and it was carrying a ton of hagfish and there was slime

Everywhere. Yeah, it is all around us. Can you give me any any backstory or any any thoughts on that? Well, I there is a commercial hagfish fishery So hagfish Are used as food products in places like korea. They're eaten but also for Quite a few years their their skin was used to make eel skin leather products So if anybody has something that's called eel skin leather, it's actually probably hagfish So they made belts and wallets and handbags and still do to this day

Um, so it's likely that that transport had a bunch of hagfish that were going to market And when it got into the accident it stressed the hagfish out and they started producing slime So this happened on the coast of oregon near depot bay and the photos are Bananas it looks like these giant earthworms covered in silvery ectoplasm on a two-lane highway Covering the whole thing. They're slithering toward the gutter a four-car pile-up looks like a giant Sneased on it. There are bulldozers Scooping up slime eels as they're called by the hundreds. They're hosin off the road with apparently five Thousand gallons of water and then just letting them die there on the shoulder and hagfish

Quite frankly deserve more respect. The local cbs affiliate was on the scene Had no choice but to get out and I was walking in it and it was ugly And erin butler had a near miss with all that fish on the ground. It was still moving I mean, it was there was liquid eels. Yeah hagfish. Yeah, can you imagine if we did that when we were just stressed out? Like i'm having a day guys. Oh, yeah Is there a difference between slime? Well, I think that's a good question I'm not sure how much slime is maybe a technical term. Okay, right? I think that maybe all slimes have Okay, you know, but maybe not all their slimes

Yeah, no, um, yeah, like with hagfish slime, maybe we call it a slime because it's a two-part System, uh-huh, whereas something like a snail that leaves a trail. It's it's really just Okay, um Maybe that's what it is, but I guess you call it snail slime too. Yeah, I'm gonna look at it. I'm gonna figure that out. Yeah, sure Okay, I looked into this distinction and the m word is made by membranes and slime is derived from the root word For sticky mud or marsh, but it now also means Ding, you know what I mean? So different roots, but technically now interchangeable terms

So just in case you need that information in your everyday life your day-to-day work with hagfish. What is it involved? What are you looking at? What's the process? Well, my work right now is looking at whether or not hagfish slime can be used um to essentially block the flow Of water around different objects, right? So You know a boat propeller or A great system or how we can use its natural tendency to clog and and reduce water flow

In ways that we can essentially harness it as a useful thing for people One idea might be that maybe you can mix it into an oil slick And bind the water and the oil into it and then remove it that way, right? Like that's not something we're currently working on But I always had that interest in that it mops up water So well that I'd be interested to see what it could do You know with potential contamination and waterways and other things. Yeah How do you think hagfish are uh portrayed in the media?

I think people love to hate them. I think yeah, which is sort of sad to me as well. Um, I think that Like anything in the ocean it's not on our radar a lot, right? So once we move off of land into the sea, it's quite literally another world And when you move from the shallow seas into the deep sea, it's like outer space, right? Um, so I think that You know as humans we tend to look at things that have features that are similar to ours, right? If they have big eyes, they're cute, you know, we we look for those features

And I think hagfish pretty much lack everything that we can associate with So that that probably lends it to like, you know seeming like an ugly worm like eel like creature Um But I I'd say that the more you work with them the cuter they become and you know, your respect level definitely goes up Do you have favorite hagfish in the tank? Are you like what's up, buddy? I think so. Yeah, like they do have they do have different skin features Just like we do that you can use to identify individuals And I also think that they have personality, right that some are naturally more relaxed than others and

Depending on what you're wanting to do with them, you know, a relaxed hagfish can be a good hagfish I wonder if the other hagfish are like, why does he always get picked? He's like, I don't know man. I'm just cool to cool to kick it with Just an update my new life motto is a relaxed hagfish can be a good hagfish Also, tim says hagfish do have a reason to be uptight Scientists aren't sure what effect overfishing or rising ocean temperatures will have on their populations Plastic is of course another issue tim says we all know it's on the surfaces of the ocean But he wonders where it's ending up in the deep sea as well And what organisms are ingesting it and what that'll mean for the future of the hagfish

And he's about to embark on an expedition to the Galapagos He's great at trapping and is tinkering with new observation cameras to deploy Folks on his research team refer to him as the hagfish wrangler. How deep are you able to do research? um, I think A lot of the limitations are because you have like say if we're dropping traps You typically will have a rope that has to go the whole depth, right? So if you're in 4 000 feet You need such a huge amount of rope to get down there that it limits say how many traps you can have down at once

So we're experimenting with some line less trapping methods that actually use corrosable links That are made of magnesium that corrode in seawater at a known rate so that you can drop Traps and and our camera equipment into say, you know, like 6 000 feet of water And have them float back to the surface once the link corrodes Yeah, so there are some really unique deep sea technologies that are making this stuff possible now that maybe wasn't You know 10 20 years ago. Yeah, this is all start. It's just ramping up. Yeah Such an exciting field of research I feel like so many eyes are on hagfish to be like, what is happening with hagfish? Where is slime coming from?

How have they lived for so long? So quick check in I searched hagfish myths and I did see that google auto filled with the most frequent questions asked Which included are hagfish poisonous? What no can a hagfish bite a human? No, they don't even have a jaw However, if you wound up on the ocean floor Not alive it might smell you find you munchy poop you spread you but at that point You would have way bigger problems than the hagfish now I kept searching for more flim flam and I found that in korea Hagfish is an aphrodisiac and a fertility food

Its shape might have something to do with that I also came upon a smithsonian article that said according to common hagfish mythology They can fill a five gallon bucket with the stuff in mere minutes And that is a myth because people it takes seconds and it could fill a barrel Is there any flim flam about hagfish that you would want to debunk any myths that you feel like need to Oh hagfish myths you should throw one my way. What what what have you heard? What are they up to? Oh, I I haven't heard I haven't heard a lot of Faulty gossip about a hagfish. Yeah

Maybe maybe that they're I mean they're opportunist, but that's the beauty of them. Yeah, but um Do you think anyone Do you think people are grossed out by them because of the factor or oh, I think so, okay? Yeah, I would say that really grosses people out, but The reality is like the in the slime itself. It's not sticky. Yeah, it's not toxic. It's You know like it's actually really fun to play with it is Um, I would say that you know and I would I would challenge anyone to meet a hagfish And to see their slime and and not be as intrigued as I am right

It's you you literally are sometimes left speechless and in and in wonder Yes, have you ever seen any hagfish in a movie or a tv show? I think there have been some hagfish cartoons There was a band called hagfish really like a punk Punk band called hagfish. What'd you think of them? I I've never listened to them. I should Gonna come up on their google alerts are gonna be like, oh man, that's about the fish again. Yeah The band hagfish emerged in 1991 Broke up in 2001 and had an energetic neopunk style descended from the descendants Now one of their most revered studio albums is called

Rocks your lame ass and according to music journalist Trixie Delight Their name itself means nothing to the band personally. It was simply chosen randomly from a dictionary. Here's what they sound like P. S. They wore suits and had sideburns and opened for the reverend horton heat and made a few other albums So hagfish kind of made it big but how big can hagfish make it? You know, we're already seeing like some of these hagfish are four to six feet long Others are absolutely tiny like, you know, 10 centimeters. I'm sorry. I keep jumping between the two systems And you and we just don't know how old they get no because nothing calcifies. There's nothing to There's such a mystery and so that's one of those things that a lot of fish

Are indeterminate growers, right? Like they technically have the potential to grow Forever, right? But in the deep sea, especially with such a strong defense Mechanism like the slime that they have, you know, yeah, they could they could live decades. They could live over a hundred years Who knows? They're such quiet badasses Yeah, that's what I love about them. Yeah, we're just like, oh, I'm sorry. Did you want to mess with me? It's just like damn hagfish. Um, can I ask you patreon questions? Yes, okay. Oh my gosh Uh, I got a lot of questions from listeners. That's good Okay, so before we get to patreon questions a few words from sponsors of the show

They make it possible for me to give a donation each week to a charity of theologist choosing And this week tim asked that it go to his canadian woodsy science home away from home the wildlife research station And since its inception in 1944 the wildlife research station has been providing access and logistical support for university and government researchers It's situated on lake saskatchewan in the alagonquin provincial park and operates as a non-for-profit organization It's been instrumental in these really uniquely long running research projects on wildlife from flies to small mammals and turtles and birds and more So a link to that non-profit will be in the show notes and up at alley war dot com slash oligies slash hagfish ology Okay, some things I like

Okay, we're back now the first question was also asked by patron shea gadard Sydney brown wants to know where did hagfish get their name and what's the biggest hagfish ever found? Oh, that's a good name. Uh, good question. Sorry in terms of the the the word hagfish I'm not sure but obviously, you know, if I were to take a more of a random guess at it It's has something to do with their looks, right? You know, I'm just gonna go ahead and guess So side note patron karla kennedy asked are we sure they were supposed to be named hag and not gagfish typos happen shrug emoji. Wow

Wow Karla, where is the respect for a slimy Jawless sausage with a tiny dick mustache and I'm sorry. I made everyone wait this far to hear the etymology of hagfish But okay, so the term was first recorded in 1611 And it just comes from their face Because they thought they were not cute. Sometimes the most obvious answer is Insultingly the right one, but but Though hag means technically now a repulsive old woman according to the dictionary that word is derived

From the word for which which Given the magic spell it can cast in the form of a phlegm net Isn't so off base and the reason why that word meant which That became the word hag is because it came from a term for a hedge rider As in a supernatural woman who rode the hedges between the safe normal village and then the wild outer lands So Hagfish spellbinding Rule breaking living in the darkness and making alchemy of a whale carcass turning it into magic

Nutrient poo now on the topic of Collology and how women are judged by toxic beauty standards a few people including amber and jonathan mead as well as Kelsey libou Franchina Martinez Megan Metcalfe Jessica Beard Amanda Blackburn Hannah Lease Kimberly Fajaro

Katie Kelly Hankin Dominica Deck and Trent Hopp asked this next one amber and jonathan mead want to know are there any medical or cosmetic uses for hagfish slime? I think there's definitely an interest in the cosmetic field As well as in the medical field Um In the sense that it can maybe be used as a biological filter Right that you know if it blocks the flow of water and traps water You can maybe use it as an actual filter material. Um, there is

Interest in using it as a food product as well as like an egg replacement. I've seen hagfish slime itself turn up in recipes Really? Yeah Yeah, so I think that there's people for a long time have been looking to use it for different things I think partially what's limited it is the availability of hagfish like they're just not super common on land And uh As well that It's difficult to store the slime Right, so the way that the hagfish stores it

Inside of their glands is not really well understood. We under we know the chemicals that are there We know sort of the environmental conditions inside the gland But how they function is not really well known and we've had a hard time replicating it so I think that's another one of the challenges to Mainstream use of hagfish material is that you need to be able to maintain its really Charismatic properties over time. You're one of the most charismatic people I've ever met, right? And we see that there it's reactivity to see water Um, it's the rate at which it responds and everything changes as we store it

Oh, so yeah, what happens if you have a mason jar full of hagfish slime? It eventually If it's in water it will collapse the network does collapse down and it It essentially will somewhat dissolve away the component is dissolvable But we've never followed it over really long periods like days or weeks Um, typically for most of our work, we're interested in the really really short time scale stuff If we were to use hagfish slime for Medical purposes or cosmetic or anything we need to either figure out how to replicate it or how to store it in really meaningful ways I feel like if you had a sheet mask that was just hagfish slime

That would be Hydrating as hell. Can you imagine just to just get a hagfish to lay on your face? Just like I mean, that's essentially what a sheet mask is. Um Colin Elijah wants to know where do they fall in the food chain? Um, you know, do other animals want to even eat something that's slimy? But yeah, but if you if you're a mammal a sea mammal you can Chomp on it. Yeah, but where do they fall in the food chain? Yeah, I would say, um

Yeah, I wouldn't say that they form the bottom of the food chain Okay, but I wouldn't say that they're necessarily the top either um You know, there's a lot of really active predators even in the deep like there's big active shark species There's big fish species That would probably be the dominant predator down there But I think that because they have such a strong defense mechanism Which could also be viewed as sort of a competitive thing. So as they're feeding at a carcass, they do release bits of slime

Right and that's sort of what one of my ideas too is whether or not they actually use it to compete around a carcass, right? So hagfish can all deal with the slime, but nothing else can right? Um, but yeah in terms of where they fall Like they are preyed upon but they're also a predator So I think they're going to be somewhere in the middle in terms of the you know, the zones of of animals out there I love that they're like hagfish party only Okay, so crisper asks this next one, but so did jack, eman and iron Lonnie bower, sonia carpellevich

Bonnie Joyce, emilia blakeman, kitty helverson, von sphedson, zoey jane, hailey everson Erica, ho honka, danny q and shalina. They all asked some form of this hungry question Chris burr wants to know will hagfish sushi ever trend? Oh, uh, while hagfish are eaten in korea, uh, and probably elsewhere in southeast asia Um, they're barbecued typically. Okay. Yeah. Have you ever eaten it? I have never eaten it. I Think the more time you spend with stuff the more you Sense its distinct smell and the more that it would probably taste like they smell Okay

Um, eric bahanka wants to know have you ever tried eating their slime? No, but I I know people have and that it is a part of recipes Egg replacement, but again, I don't think the slime would taste like much it probably tastes like sea water sea water Does it do the same thing in fresh water? Uh, less vigorously Really? Yeah. So what is it about the salinity that activates those threads? Well, that's one of the things that we're trying to figure out like whether it's active exchanges that go on Um with ions associated with the or the threads

whether It's a temperature related thing that the slime tends to set up better in cold water than warm water Um, so like it's a fairly it's a fairly complex problem. I guess so we've been going at it from a lot of different angles and You know, we have a fairly good idea of the parameters that result in good slime formation But the actual chemical basis for it all is still out there Which is so exciting. Is it exciting to be the forefront of this research? It's super interesting Everything we do day to day for the most part has never been done. So that gets me excited Okay, heads up spoiler alert this next question may deal with non-Newtonian fluids

So I thought I'd drop a def here now and I'm going to read this part right off of wikipedia Because I didn't want to get it wrong But a non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow newton's law of viscosity It says in non-Newtonian fluids viscosity can change when under force to be either more liquid Or it can be more solid. So ketchup for example becomes runnier when it's shaken. Thus Ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid. I just learned that right now. It also says custard honey toothpaste paint Blood and shampoo are all non-Newtonian fluids. It also sounds like just a delicious smoothie

Just toss them all in a blender. Sarah wants to know is hagfish slime a solid or a liquid? Is it a non-Newtonian fluid? It is a non-Newtonian fluid Really? so Yeah, hagfish slime is Composed it does have solid components to it

But because it essentially we call it viscous entrapment. So hagfish slime doesn't bind to water at all Right, it essentially creates channels that are really narrow That work on the surface tension of water to trap it and slow its flow Right, so it essentially slows water flow to a point that it creates the slime But if you hold that slime out of water all that water will drip out eventually And you'll be left with nothing but a bit of and fiber Oh my gosh, so it's kind of like a really good net for water Exactly, right, which is sort of why earlier I was saying it'd be interesting to apply it to you know

Something like an oil spill and see how it how it worked at mopping up the water with the oil component in it Oh my gosh, that's so fascinating um Lara taffer wants to know do hagfish have any close relatives to any land animals? Land animals, I don't think so their closest relative that's still living is the lamprey Right, so okay. Yeah, so they're They're sort of grouped together with hagfish because they're a jawless creature. They're you know primitive eel like body But I think there's now

You know the jury's out about whether or not hagfish actually started out much more vertebrate like and then lost Those vertebrate like features. Wow, right so that what we're seeing Is essentially something that was more complex that actually somewhat simplified in time. So they may have Just gone on back. That's fascinating. Um, let's see Suki holly wants to know since hagfishes are creatures of the deep do they get the bends when scientists bring them up to the lab to study? It's a super good question So a lot of hagfish how or sorry a lot of fish have what's called an air bladder

which Actually fills with air to provide buoyancy for them so they can fill it and empty it to adjust How you know where they are in the water column? Hagfish don't have an air bladder. So when we bring them up, they're actually totally fine Right. So a lot of fish. Yeah, it's a it's a good question because most fish that you would bring up from that depth They're dead by the time they hit the surface Because their swim bladder actually ruptures and like causes severe damage to the fish itself Hagfish don't have that problem, which is one of the reasons we can even study them

Right because we'd have a really hard time bringing them up hagfish have Seemingly no problem coming to uh, you know ambient pressure at the surface There's such slimy badasses. Yeah, I'm voting for hagfish for president. Is that weird? I'm like so in awe of them. I feel like hagfish is gonna Absolutely save the world. Um Okay, I'm gonna ask one more question from a patron and then we'll wrap up travestamela wants to know What are their social lives like do they relate to one another and where do they sleep? I think that's another great question. So I think hagfish have a very vibrant social life

I think that they we see them living in burrows together. We don't know about their relationship to each other But they seem To like to pack together. They do like to be together in congregations Um, you know where you find one hagfish you find more right So whether or not that has to do with the environment being really conducive to hagfish or whether or not they actually seek out A social group. We don't know. We're actually working on uh, At least filming them in captivity to better understand how they interact with each other

you know over the days and weeks of You know Circling around these tanks and with very limited hiding spots, right? We provide them with habitat to hide in But we're interested in how they may be compete for that habitat Like are there dominant hagfish and subordinate hagfish? Or are they sort of devoid of that altogether, right? Which is also a possibility that You know the whole competition that we see in a lot of other animals Maybe such an energy waster for a hagfish that they just don't do it

Yeah, just maybe they don't care. Yeah, maybe hagfish are friendly Uh, do you so there is there a need for more hag fishologists? I think there is a need for a lot more people to study what's happening in the oceans I think it's one of the you know in many ways that Antarctica and space are these like crazy frontiers, right? I think the deep ocean is one of the last unexplored frontiers on the planet Almost, you know, a lot of these missions that have gone down To video and find new species almost every time they deploy these rov's or deep sea submersibles They find new species. I know that we get very excited when undergraduates come into the lab

And we get to introduce them to hagfish and you know spread the wonder for sure But I think that it is one of those things that most Biologists that ever come across them are permanently Interested right they never lose their interest and like we've seen this with people that are now in their 90s That love talking hagfish because they maybe worked with them for one year You know decades and decades and decades ago, but it was one of the most interesting things they ever did You just get caught in a slimy web of love for hagfish. Yeah All the puns

No, is there anything I always ask us at the very end Is there something about your job that sucks something that frustrates you? What's the worst part about your job or hagfish? Oh, I I think nothing wrong with the hagfish, but I think in terms of science in general You there's a lot of failure, right? Like when you're doing projects, you're doing experiments In science, you never know what's right. You only ever find out what's likely wrong Right So I think that would be the most frustrating thing is that you have to

You know have pretty thick skin in a way. I guess to to deal with You know, especially going up against questions or developing Experiments and apparatus that have maybe never been used or designed before right like there's no Hagfish 101 book that we can really turn to to figure some stuff out, right? So, you know, there's a good body of literature on hagfish. We do have what we consider the hagfish bible, right? Really, what is it? It's called the biology of hagfish and there's been I think three iterations of it now Yeah, so you have like a copy in your glove compartment. What at all? Yeah, I've got one here for you

I texted him later and asked what was the hagfish bible and he said there are two there's The biology of hagfish and hagfish biology. I hope the authors are friends I'd say that's it, but I think that's part of the fun too. I'd say the the the primary frustration is also the primary driver Yeah, like what is your favorite thing about your job? What's your favorite thing about hagfish or your job or what you do? I think that's it's discovery. I think it's like you're saying earlier. It's being on the forefront of something it's being like literally looking into the abyss like how Did natural selection act upon this? What does this mean in terms of how hagfish relate to each other?

How did they relate to vertebrates and other fish? And I think that that's something that just keeps us endlessly intrigued because You know, there's more unanswered questions and answered questions And I think that's good for any scientific field, right? Like you want to think you have a good idea of what's going on But the more, you know the more, you know, you don't know right? I think that's a good problem that scientists have Yeah, and so that keeps you going a lot. Oh, yeah for sure. Oh great. Oh, thank you so much for doing this I'm just so charmed by hagfish. It's awesome So remember to ask smart people real stupid gross questions because how

Else in the world would you discover that hagfishes are handsome drifters and 17th century witches Who live in a timeshare with bigfoot and the holy grail? And they help impotent men have long-awaited children and they deserve our respect Some of those might not be true, but they are an inspiration for military defense They could change the way we use fibers. They're pretty chill. And yes, they deserve our respect Now tim weingart is not on social media God bless this canadian hag fishologist But you can google the douglas fudge lab at Chapman university to learn more about what they're researching

So many great resources. We are oligies on twitter and instagram I'm ali ward with one l on both and more links from the show notes And they're up at ali ward.com slash oligies slash hagfish oligy You can get merch through that site or through oligies merch.com Thank you. Shannon feltas and bonnie dutch for managing all that Thank you. Hannah lipo and erin talbert for adminning the wonderful facebook group to interns harry kim and kaleb patin to jared sleeper of mind jam media for assistant editing and of course To the mysterious slime witch steven ray morris who edits all the pieces together and also hosts the kitty podcast

Percast and the dino centric one see Jurassic right and the theme song was written by nick thorburn of the band islands He also did the theme song for serial fun trivia also before the secret I want to say a quick belated happy birthday to my dear friend mica also happy birthday to steven ray morris Whose birthday is on wednesday of this week happy birthday to kathryn burns who has a birthday this week Also to my niece olivia happy birthday to boob haver bra buyer good friend calleen whose birthday is this week So many april birthdays. I love you all um if you stick around until the end of the episode You know I tell you a secret and this one it's pretty straightforward It's pretty topical the reason that

I took the lab tour and you didn't hear it is because there was One button that I accidentally pressed on my zoom and it switched over the mics So that the onboard mics weren't picking anything up So It was just 32 minutes of static boom. I'm sorry bummer great episode anyway another secret is that I had a dream that I had a live stream and No one showed up to watch it and I was wearing like dirty grease spotted Leggings that were made by ferrari and I was like, oh, these are my good leggings. I really messed these up

Anyway, no one watched my live stream and I thought ward. What are you doing? Nobody wants this stuff. Anyway, I woke up and was like, well At least ferrari doesn't make leggings. Okay. Bye. Bye Homiology cryptozoology letology Meteorology So these are actually hagfish nicknamed slime yield and get that nickname because you can see here They secrete slime whenever they're under stress making the cleanup that much more difficult