Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #8: HAGFISH with Tim Winegard

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

Who doesn't love a floppy, slime-filled, hot dog shaped creature of the deep sea? On this Smologies (It's like if Ologies were more Smol) we return to our conversation with Tim Winegard, a professional hagfishologist (YES IT'S A WORD) at Chapman University, and he dishes on the world's slimiest treasures. You're gonna learn about things like why you don't always need a spine and how special ketchup is and, of course, lots and lots about mucus.Also in case you didn't know, Smologies is indeed an abbreviated, de-filthed episode of Ologies for when you only have 20 minutes to learn something interesting about the thing your date said they're into in their profile you've got kids with you in the car who are definitely going to repeat the curse word they learned from their ol' GrandfatherWard all through fingerpainting class.The uncut, adult version of Hagfishology plus research linksMORE Smologies episodesA donation went to The Ocean Exploration TrustSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Zeke Thomas Rodrigues & Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Steven Ray MorrisSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hi. It's your uncle's army buddy who makes superb banana bread. Allie Ward, I am back with another episode of oligies. Smologies, rather. What is smologies? If you're listening to this and you're like, is this a regular episode of oligies? It's not.

We took full episodes of our regular oligies podcast, Not Safe for Kids, and we whittled them down and we shaped them up to make these pocket-sized, classroom-friendly edits of some of your favorite past episodes. So if you haven't listened to the original full-length episode of hagfishology and you don't mind the occasional salacious detail and a lot of talk about mucus

and swear words, go back, listen to that one, adults. That is in the link in the show notes, but if you have only about 20 or so minutes and you need a G-rated version that's suitable for all ages, you're in the right place, stick around. Okay, hagfishology. I did not make that word up for this episode, I swear. The term had been used before in 2013

as part of a biology graduate student seminar. It was published, I found it, and included a talk called Adventures in Hagfishology, sulfate transport and extra brachial mechanisms of ion regulation in Pacific Hadfish by Alex Clifford. So I did not make it up, the term hagfish itself, though, was first documented in 1611, and I wish it had a better story,

but it just had to do with its face, hagfish, plain and simple. So what is it, though? What is a hagfish? Okay, so it's an eel-shaped, jawless slime factory of a marine fish whose skin kind of fits like a loose sock. And hagfish have been classified as vertebrates

that appear to have lost their spine. What? I know. Okay, but even that classification is not without a little controversy. But did I mention the slime? Oh, the slime. And you're probably wondering why I spent a whole episode on this grayish hot dog fish of the deep sea,

and that is, that's a fair question. I get it. Well, it's because I saw this news article in The Atlantic that profiled a traffic accident in 2017 where a truck transporting 7,500 pounds of hagfish and their slime tipped over on an Oregon highway and blanketed both cars and the highway with this road slick that few people

had ever experienced before. Hagfish slime ever since then has been front and center in my mind. I needed to know more. So I did a brief Google search for the world's foremost experts in hagfish, and I met today'sologist. So he hails from Canada.

He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in zoology from the University of Guilf in Ontario where he was first introduced to hagfish by hagfish master, Dr. Douglas Fudge. And at the time of this interview, he was a research associate at Chapman University along with Dr. Fudge. And in this episode, he helps us navigate

what defines a craniot? Why hagfish are deep sea specialists? They're barely functioning eyesight, but super sensitive snoots. How no one has seen a baby hagfish. They're infrequent dietary habits and why hagfish intentionally tie themselves in knots. And of course, all about the slime.

So prepare your cranial cavities and notochords for a deep sea dwelling conversation with zoological enthusiast and professional hagfishologist, Tim Weingard. What is a hagfish for someone who's never seen or touched one? So I guess the best way to describe them is they're a benthic deep sea dweller. 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 are about 300 feet. So side note, this all just jumps between metric and US. Why are we still not metric measurements? So what they are is a jawless, primitive, eel-like creature. I'm hesitant to call them a fish, even though it's in their name,

because they aren't necessarily a traditional fish. 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 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 really highly organized

cephalized, which means essentially head-focused creatures. So head fish 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 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? All right, so we have an idea of what they are, but I have so many questions as to their life and how they're socialized. 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 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.

Wow, that is quite the diet. But apparently they also play a role in keeping the deep sea ecosystem flourishing. Thanks. 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 a hagfish in 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. Okay, so not just scavenging, but maybe even a nutrition regulator of the deep sea. Okay, but aside from eating, scavenging,

keeping nutrients in check, what do hagfish do with their time? Do they have any hobbies? Do they knit tube sweaters for themselves? It seems so chilly down there. 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 nostrils 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 coy a lot a bit more because they're just spending a lot more time on the surface

as opposed to within the substrate. And how are they making baby hagfish? Nobody knows. What? 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. No hagfish stork is doing a deep dive to deliver a slimy bundle of joy. So for now, it just remains a mystery for us to ruminate on. By the way, ruminate means to chew on,

which on that note, back to their diets. How often do hagfish eat? Are they just swimming around the abyss in a constant search for snacks? Are there drive-thrus down there, swim-thrus? I think their low metabolism, 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? What? Yeah, yeah, they eat a lot when they eat, but they don't eat frequently. Wow, what do you feed them in captivity? They get a bit of a mixture.

There's shrimp and squid and beef. 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 onto something without jaws, right? So they can pull at it and get like some resistance. Okay, so we've learned that they don't have a proper jaw, but when they do eat, in the wild at least, they are down to yum it up on things like

delicious, ripe, decaying whales. You know how if you drop cheese on the floor, your dog rushes over to clean it up for you? Hagfish do that for the ocean. Only they bore a hole in something dead and they devour it from the inside out. Good for them. It's resourceful.

Now, what are some of the other parts that make up these delightful creatures? 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 do have a head, right? So they have barbels at the end of the head, which are essentially they're chemical sensing devices, right?

So 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 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 sea water 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. 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 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. Rudimentary eyes, but super, super sensitive snoots. Got it.

They definitely have adapted to their environments over the last 300 million years or so. They've had some time to work it out amazingly. So essentially, there are these creatinous teeth or the same material that makes up our fingernails, makes up their rasp, which they use to actually essentially sand tissue off of a carcass or to slurp up a little worm that they're after.

But all of this hag anatomy is just the potato skins, the jalapeno poppers appetizer before we get to the main course because now it's time for slime, a lot of it. 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. 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 energy expensive for them? Yeah, the fibers are made up of protein, which in general is quite expensive to make. 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 exudate, 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. Oh my God. Like they would never be caught without slime, ever. Wow, amazing, beautiful slime machines.

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 unfurl. I mean, admit it, you love Hagfish. You love them now, don't you? Okay, but how big or how small can they get?

Have they become bigger over time or have they gotten smaller in recent eras? Do they keep growing the older they get? 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, but. 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? A hundred year old, possibly, jawless, slimy tube of whale eating charisma. That is what a Hagfish is. And I could ask questions for a hundred more years, but onto your questions, patrons.

But first we make a donation every episode, and this week we're gonna send some cash to the Ocean Exploration Trust, which is a nonprofit established to explore the world oceans and seek out new discoveries in the fields of geology and biology, maritime history, archeology, and chemistry. And the Ocean Exploration Trust owns and operates the exploration vessel Nautilus.

And you can see their expeditions via Nautilus live on YouTube, which are wonderful. I love them so much. I'm gonna link on my website at alleyword.com slash Smologies slash Hagfish. Shout out to the Nautilus crew. I love you guys. Onto your Patreon questions.

And a lot of you were definitely on the same page when it came to these eel-like creatures of the deep. So here we go. A few people, including Amber and Jonathan Mead, as well as Kelsey LeBou, Franchina Martinez, Megan Metcalf, Jessica Beard, Amanda Blackburn, Hannah Lease, Kimberly Fajaro, Katie Kelly-Hankin, Dominica Deck,

and Trent Hoppe asked this next one. Amber and Jonathan Mead wanna 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 in the sense that it can maybe be used as a biological filter, right? That if it blocks the flow of water and traps water,

you can maybe use it as an actual filter material. There's 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. Yeah. And as well that it's difficult to store the slime. 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 essentially will somewhat dissolve away. Colin Elijah wants to know, where do they fall in the food chain? Do other animals want to even eat something that's limey? But yeah, but if you're a mammal, a sea mammal, you can chomp on it. But where do they fall in the food chain?

Yeah, I would say, I wouldn't say that they form the bottom of the food chain, but I wouldn't say that they're necessarily the top either. 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 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? But yeah, in terms of where they fall, like they are preyed upon, but they're also a predator. So I think they're gonna be somewhere in the middle, in terms of the zones of animals out there. Okay, so CRISPR asks this next one, but so did Jack, Amanda Niren, Lonnie Bauer, Sonja Carpellevich, Bonnie Joyce,

Emilia Blakeman, Kitty Halverson, Vaughn Svedson, Zoe Jane, Haley Everson, Erica Ho-Honka, Danny Q, and Shalina. They all asked some form of this hungry question. CRISPR wants to know, will hagfish sushi ever trend? Ooh, while hagfish are eaten in Korea and probably elsewhere in Southeast Asia, 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.

Eric Bauer wants to know, have you ever tried eating their slime? No, but I know people have and that it is a part of recipes. Sarah wants to know, hagfish slime, a solid or a liquid, is it a non-Newtonian fluid? It is a non-Newtonian fluid.

What is a non-Newtonian fluid? I'm glad you asked. Okay, so a non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that doesn't follow Newton's law of viscosity. It says that in non-Newtonian fluids, so that thickness can change when under force to be either more liquid or it can be more solid. So, okay, ketchup, for example,

becomes runnier when you shake it up. So, ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid. Can you believe that? Just think, you're never gonna eat a hot dog the same. Well, now for various reasons. Also, custard, honey, toothpaste, paint, blood, shampoo, all non-Newtonian fluids. 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. Wow. And you'll be left with nothing. Well, nothing but it a bit of. Yukis and fiber. Don't you wanna be their friends though? Travis DeMella 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 got lots of friends. I think that 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, 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 at least filming them in captivity to better understand

how they interact with each other over the days and weeks of 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 the whole competition that we see in a lot of other animals may be such an energy waster for a hagfish that they just don't do it. So many big slippery questions that we don't know. Now, as we chew our way out of this delicious carcass of an episode, I always wanna know what makes anologist love their job.

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 its 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 there's more unanswered questions and answered questions. And I think that's good for any scientific field, right?

You wanna think you have a good idea of what's going on, but the more you know, the more you know you don't know. Well said. But again, what we do know, these slime generating mysteries of the deep are delightful. We know that. We learned that hagfish have been around for more than 300 million years.

They eat only every few months and they're technically jawless, but still have two rows of tooth-like structures made of keratin. They are the great recyclers of the ocean floor. They have a skull made out of cartilage, are somehow neither a vertebrate or an invertebrate and they have a powerful snoot,

but some questionable eyesight. And they're probably the world's greatest producers of slime. And if you're like, I need to do a deep dive into the literature about what we do know about these my new favorite creatures who I will never run into. Well, Tim says that there's two hagfish bibles out there. There's the biology of hagfish and hagfish biology.

And I really hope that the authors of those are friends. Okay, of course, there's also our full, not safe for kids hagfishology episode. It's very colorful and very detailed. Do dive in if you are not around children. So to find out more about Tim Weingard, you can Google the Douglas Fudge Lab at Chapman University where you can stay up to date on all their latest research

as he's not on social media. But we also wanna thank him though. Thank you, hagfishologists. Tim Weingard. Thank you to New Smologites for joining us. New episodes are out about every two weeks or thereabouts. And there's links to the full Juicy R rated episode

available at alleyward.com. Or in the show notes, there's a full list of links and a list of credits for this episode because we like to keep things small around here. And if you listen to the end of the show, I give a piece of advice. And this week it's that there's this thing called a my critter catcher.

They are not a sponsor of the show at all. I just think it's neat. And it's this contraption that helps you really gently pick up bugs or critters. And it's really great if you ever see a spider and you wanna locate it outside. There's no chasing or squishing. It's just this long arm to keep your distance.

And you can pick it up very sweetly with soft brussels and say, okay, going for a ride now and deposit it outside. Just in case that helps anyone. It's called my critter catcher. I think that it's just a nice thing. Okay, until next time, Smologites. Bye-bye.

I'll see you. I'll see you. I'll see you.