Hagfishology (HAGFISH) with Tim Winegard

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Oh hey, it's your uncle's army buddy who makes superb banana bread. Ali Ward back with another episode of Ologies. First off, I know you you're either like a fuck with a hagfish 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

If I've ever heard it put that way, but 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 ologists. Like there are people have used that word before, So yeah, it's a thing hagfishlge or run with it? 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. 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 one hundred meters in depth or about three hundred feet right.

So side note this allog just jumps between metric and us y 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 would 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 augers 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 three hundred and fifty million years, but they're likely over five hundred 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 were defined as crane its, which means that they have a cranium surrounding their but they have no calcification of anything in their body, so it's all cartilage. Right,

Right. PS. 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 as a tinted 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. It isn't a skull. It's like a cartilage rib cage around their brain lump. And in the hagfish world there has been decades of heated

Through fossil evidence, of which there's only two. 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 read the paper, but they would be there, they'd.

Be in museums, right. There's only two of them known. Well. 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 nineteen ninety one, and the other is from Lebanon and was acquired in twenty thirteen by a private fossil collecting company.

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, but I think it's more in the Yeah, it could be right in that three hundred and fifty million, four hundred and fifty million year range.

And going back a little bit less far than that. Your history when you were just a tiny tot Canadia, did you always love poking around lakes and forests? What was going on?

Oh?

Yeah, for sure. My mom always used to say that she needed to distract me. She just said, she just says 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 crawley 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?

That would have been yeah, in university, and you know, I guess the opportunities to study tropical butterflies were limited in Canada. So yeah, that's sort of what happened. I think it was right around two thousand and seven. Yeah, through meeting Doug and getting introduced to hagfish and then started being brought into the fold as it was, into the into the world a hagfish, there's sort of no

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 the slime to inform human made alternatives. And his master's work was looking at how we can use these fifteen centimeter long threads that spring forth from the hagfish as a fiber source and get away from petrochemical base 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 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 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 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 one hundred meters of depth, so there is called the inshore hagfish, which is found in Japan. But other than that,

Deep.

That's deep, so sigde note remember the Toothology episode with Sarah McNulty about marine snow that's soft, steady underwater dusting of pooh and flesh chunks. While a dead whale is like a marine blizzard, and hagfish love a snow day.

We know where, 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.

Wow.

Right, low temperatures, low oxygen, So maybe the bacterial decos composition 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

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

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 their 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 since 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.

Never will, right.

So, 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 do 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, say, following the herd type thing. I think their low metabolism it suits them well to possibly go a year or more without feed even in captivity, we typically only feed them every three to six months.

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 and sometimes other random large fish that we come across in our work. I think we fed them in Opa, which is a very interesting interesting fish.

Okay, so quick aside researching Opa. Opah got a lot of hits on Oprah. 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 oprah, it has a warm heart.

We feed them a diversity of stuff, hopefully trying to get them the right nutritional requirements they 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 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 to 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 exactly and get like some resistance. Have you ever seen a hagfish eating in 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 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, beella.

And to go into a whale in which oxygen concentrations could be quite low. Bacterial levels high all this other stuff. They're perfectly at home, may feed there for months on.

End, for months just gorging, and then be like am I and then go hang out for a year.

Yeah.

Wow, that's so efficient. I have to say that's 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 withstood the test of one hundreds of millions of years, right, that they're typically generalists right there. 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 to withstanding 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 wet page there. Also at lunch, he mentioned that the hagfish traps are like buckets with a few conical ports that

That's 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 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 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 haggfish live.

So, and can you run me through some body parts of a hag fish?

Yeah, so I guess if you're to have a hagfish out on the table. They they do have a head, right, So they have barbles at the end of the head, which are essential they're chemical sensing devices, right they have the catfish, Yeah, catfish have barbles 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

So seawater gets snorgled through their face snoop, 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 dee boned 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

So eyes we're off that had them lost them baller, Now, what is happening with that mouth? First of all, it has these whisky flesh dangles that look kind of like a tiny handlebar mustache made out of little dix. But don't go looking for jaws here, no, no, sir. They have what Tim calls a muscular appendage inside their mouth, and it juts out this little paddle of hard, jagged spikes,

So essentially there are these caratinous teeth or the same you know, the same material that makes up our fingernails makes up their 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 then when you look at the rest of them, 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 Ologies or the first twelve seconds of this one, you know I don't

And then as you move into the rest of the body, you'll notice along the ventral side that they have about one hundred to one hundred and fifty slime gland openings right, so they're literally covered head to tail with these glands that produce their defa slime. So whether they're bit on the head or on the tail. They can in a fraction of a second, like less than one hundred milliseconds, produce copious quantities of this fiber reinforced slime.

Which is astounding. It's 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 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 and 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 twenty thousand kilometers of fiber in its body at any one time. And what's so unique about these fibers is that they're packaged into fifteen centimeter fiber lengths, but that's coiled into one hundred and fifty micron cell, so like a little bit more than a tenth of a millimeter. They pack fifteen centimeters of thread into.

So to put that in perspective, the threads that make up this water trapping slime network are ten million times longer than they are wide, and they are somehow neatly coiled like a skin of yarn into a tiny cell capsule, ready to be ejected and unfurled. Now, more on how that works in a minute. But ad 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, Laida, do they have to go sit and produce more? Is it 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 sight specificity. Right, If you bite it on the tail, it may only release exitate, 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

Yeah, what happens when these fibers hit water?

Yeah, so that's something that's really interesting to us. So it's a two component slime. It's released by what's called holocrimes secretion, which means that the cells are actually having their membrane 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

So instant replay. The hagfish takes the offense defense ejects tiny coiled balls of the exitit, getting their little membrane covers stripped. As a exit, the threads hit the water at xpand trapping more water in a net of microfiber threads expanding ten thousand times its size. Slime predator offense retreats down for the count. Hagfish remains the champion of the deep or in timswords.

To simplify what I just said, I guess the mix least 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 fiber until it forms this fully formed slime ball, which is capable of fully clogging the gills of a ten 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 they're 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 get screwed, and so that slime will just clog their actual respiration exactly like I'm.

Out, 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 slimed, 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

And so how much of this slime is actually water and how much is the fiber protein.

So when the exit it's released into seawater and fully sets up, it's over ninety nine percent seawater. So essentially, hagfish slime can be formed in any container. It'll conform to the shape of almost anything. We did at 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 Ilwalt, told the Atlantics at Yong that hagfish slime is one of the softest materials ever measured, and quote, jello is between ten thousand and one hundred thousand 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 ten thousand times tougher than purel apparently.

Speed with which this slime sets up interests people because whatever is happening, and 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. 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 gel networks would be 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 thirty to fifty micrones 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 fifty to one hundred microns in diameter. A red blood cell is five microns across. The human eye can't see much smaller than around forty microns, So yes, hagfish silk would be luxurious as hell. It'd probably make the softest T shirt. Well, would you have to do to get it from a like a puddle of two 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 PI shirt 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 backstory or any any thoughts on that.

Well, 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 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. 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.

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 sneezed on it. There are bulldozers scooping up slime eels as they're called by the hundreds. They're hosing off the road with apparently five thousand gallons of water and then just letting them

It was ugly and Aaron 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, Yeah, just covered. 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, right, I think that maybe all slimes have you know, but maybe not all their slimes.

Yeah.

No, yeah, like with hagfish slime, maybe we call it a slime because it's a two part system, whereas.

Something like a snail.

That leaves a trail it's really just okay, maybe that's what it is.

But I guess you call it snail slime too. Yeah, I'm gonna look at it. I'm going to 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 thing, you know what I mean, So different routes, 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 does it involve? What are

Well, my work right now is looking at whether or not hagfish slime can be used 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 reduce water flow in ways that we can essentially harness it as

Yeah. How do you think hagfish are portrayed in the media.

I think people love to hate them, I think, yeah, which is sort of sad to me as well. 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

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 tagfish can be a good hagfish.

I wonder if the other hagfish, You're like, why does he always get picked? And He's like, I don't know, man, I'm just cool. To cool to kick it. Just an update. My new life motto is a relaxed tagfish 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,

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 four thousand feet, you need such a huge amount of rope to get down there that it limits say how many traps you can have down

Yeah.

So there are some really unique deep sea technologies that are making this stuff possible now that maybe wasn't you know, ten twenty 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 the slime coming from? How have they lived for so long? So quick check in. I searched hagfish myths and I did see the Google auto filled with the most frequent questions asked, which included are hagfish poisonous? What? No? Can a hagfish bite a human? No,

Or oh I think so okay, Yeah, I would say that really grosses people out. But the reality is, like in the slime itself. It's not sticky, it's not toxic, it's you know, like it's actually really fun to play with it is. I would say that, you know, and I would I would challenge anyone to meet a hagfish and to see their slime and not be as intrigued as I am. Right, it's you literally are sometimes left speechless and and in wonder.

Yes, have you ever seen any hagfish in a movie or TV show?

I think there have been some hagfish cartoons. There was a band called Hagfish. Really, it's like a punk punk band called Hagfish.

What did you think of them? I've never listened to them. I should. You're gonna come up on their Google alert. It's gonna be like, oh man, that's about the fish again. Yeah. The band Hagfish emerged in nineteen ninety one, broke up in two thousand and one, 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 Tricksy Delight, their name itself means

You know, we're already seeing like some of these hagfish are four to six feet long. Others are absolutely tiny, like, you know, ten centimeters. I'm sorry, I keep jumping between the two systems.

Fun and you and we just don't know how old they get, no, because nothing calcifies theer's no 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 this line that they have, you know, yeah, they could they could live decades, They could live over one hundred years. Who knows.

They're such quiet badasses. Yeah, that's what I love about them. We're just like, oh, I'm sorry, did you want to mess with me? Because it's just like, damn hagfitch. Can I ask you Patreon questions? Yes, for sure? Oh my gosh, I got a lot of questions from listeners. That's good, Okay, So before we get to Patreon questions, a few words

Like imagine the place where you can escape for a day, get immersed in a world of rooms, inspiration and expertise, where you can lay in luxury accommodations and kids cam fees from ninety five sets. Tickets are free to everyone and include all the attractions you've just imagined a day out at the Kia Pikia the Wonderful every Day.

Okay, we're back now. The first question was also asked by patron Shaya 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. Are a good question.

Sorry. In terms of the word hagfish, I'm not sure, but obviously you know, if I were to take a more of a random gus at it, it has something to do with their looks.

Right.

Oh, I'm just going to go ahead and gas So side note. Patron Carla Kennedy asked, are we sure they were supposed to be named hag and not gagfish? Typos happen? Shrug emoji? Wow, wow Carla? Where is the respect for a slimy jallous 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 sixteen eleven and it just comes from their face because they thought they were not cute. Sometimes

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 you know, if it blocks the flow of water and traps water, you can maybe use 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, and as well that it's difficult to store the slime, right, so the way that the hagfish stores it inside of their glands is

You're one of the.

Most charismatic people I've ever met, right, And we see that it's reactivity to see water, 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 forul a hagfish line?

It eventually if it's in water, it will collapse. The network does collapse down, and it essentially will somewhat dissolve away. The component is dissolvable. But we've never followed it over really long periods like days or weeks. Typically for most of our work, we're interested in the really really short timescale stuff. If we were to use hagfish line 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 line, that would be hydrating as hell. Can you imagine just to just hagfish to lay on your face? Just like I mean, that's essentially what a sheet mask is. Colin Elijah wants to know where do they fall in the food chain? You know, do other animals want to even eat something that slimy? But yeah, but 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 yeah, 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.

In the middle in terms of the you know, the zones of animals out there, Oh, I love that they're like hagfish party only. Okay, So chrisper asked this next one, but so did Jack Aman and Iron, Lannie Bauer, Sonya Karpelovich, Bonnie Joyce, Amelia Blakeman, Kitty Halberson, Von Spedsen, Zoe Jane Haley Everson, Erica ho Honkah, Danny Q, and Selina. They all ask some form of this hungry question. Chris Burer wants to know will hagfish sushi ever trend?

Oh? Well, 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 Bahanca wants to know have you ever tried eating their slime?

No? But 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 seawater.

Seawater Does it do the same thing in fresh water 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 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.

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? Super interesting.

That's 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 death 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,

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 lime 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

Oh my gosh. So it's kind of like a really good net for water exactly right, which is sort of why earlier I say it'd be interesting to apply it to, you know, something like an.

Oil spill and see how it worked at mopping up the water with the oil component in it.

Oh my gosh, that's so fascinating. 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 lamp prey, right, So okay, yeah, so they're sort of grouped together with hagfish because they're a jawless creature that 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 it was more complex that actually somewhat simplified in time, So.

They may have just gone on back.

That's fascinating.

Let's see. Suki Holly wants to know. Since hagfishes are creatures in the deep, did 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 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

There's such slimy badasses. Yeah, I'm voning 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. Okay, I'm gonna ask one more question from a patron and then we'll wrap up. Travis Damella 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. 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. 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 at least filming them in captivity to

Yeah, just maybe they don't care. Yeah, maybe he fish, you're friendly. So there is there a need for more hag phishologists.

I think there's a need for a lot more people to study what's happening in the oceans.

Yeah.

I think it's one of the you know, in many ways that Antarctica and space or 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 ROVs 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.

Hagg fision, 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 interests. And like we've seen this with people that are now in their nineties 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 hagfit. Yeah, all the puns.

Now.

Is there anything I always asked 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 think nothing wrong with the hagfish. But I think in terms of science in general, 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

Now, Yeah, you have like a copy in your glove compartment. Yeah, I got one here for you now.

Yeah.

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 that the primary frustration is also the primary driver.

Is your favorite thing about your job? What's your favoriteing 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. And I think that's a good problem that scientists have. M 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 and gross questions, because how else in the world would you discover that hagfishes are handsome drifters and seventeenth century witches who live in a timeshare with Bigfoot and the Holy Grail, and they help impotent men have