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So you want to go up this road here and get to a roundabit. You take a left and then you go past the Murphy's house, you know, to Murphy's their young lad, Sean.
I think he's over in London. Now, oh yeah.
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Oh it's your uncle's army buddy who makes superb banana bread, Ali Ward. I am back with another episode of Ologies Smologies rather what Assmologies. If you're listening to this and you're like, is this a regular episode of Ologies, it's not. We took full episodes of our regular Ologies 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 muchus 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 twenty 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 out for this episode. I swear the term had been used before. In twenty thirteen, 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 Branchial Mechanisms of ion regulation in Pacific Hagfish by Alex Clifford. So I did not make it up. The term hagfish itself, though, was first documented in sixteen eleven, 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 it here 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 twenty seventeen where a truck transporting seventy five hundred 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's
ologist So. He hails from Canada. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in zoology from the University of Guelp in Ontario, where he was first introduced to hagfish by hagfish master doctor Douglas Fudge, and at the time of this interview he was a research associate at Chaplin University along with doctor Fudge, and in this episode, he helps us navigate what defines a craniate, 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 U cranial cavities and notochords for a deep sea dwelling. Conversation with zoological enthusiast and professional hagfishologist Tim Wineguard. 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 all just jumps between metric and us y are we still not metric measurements?
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 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 is 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 brain. But they have no calcification of anything their body, so it's all cartilage, right, So they do have a note accord.
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 one hundred 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.
Wow.
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.
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 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.
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 on fertilized 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 throughs down there? Swim throughs?
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 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 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. Okay, so we've learned that they don't have a proper job. 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 rush is 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 barbles at the end of the head, which are essentially their 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
with those. They have a very large intake aperture for their gill system.
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. 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 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. Theirs 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 snoops got it. So they definitely have adapted to their environments over the last three hundred million years or so, they've had some time to work it out amazingly.
So essentially there are these carratinous 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 all of this hag anatomy is just the potato skins that 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 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 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 one hundred 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, bybee Laida, do they have to go to 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 hayfish 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 glandsworth 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.
Wow, amazing beautiful slime machines. 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 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, ten centimeters. I'm sorry I keep jumping between the two systems, but 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 this line that they have, you know, yeah, they could, they could live decades, they could live over one hundred years.
Who knows, one hundred year old possibly jawless, slimy tube of whale eating charisma. That is what a hagfish is. And I could ask questions for one hundred more years. But onto your questions, patrons. But first, we make a donation every episode, and this week we're going to send some cash to the Ocean Exploration Trust, which is a nonprofit established to explore the world's oceans and seek out new discoveries in the fields of geology and biology, maritime history, archaeology,
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 going to link on my website at aliword dot com slash smologies, slash hagfish, shout out to the Nautilus crew.
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War Rushian and rather than lumbering around a glacier avoiding polar bears, you're on a lake, driving the speedboat three thousand kilos of mollusk, munching magnificence, feeling the wind in your whiskers and the sun on your big blubbery face. That's the kind of smoothness you feel. With ninety nine point nine percent broadband reliability available nationwide Virgin Media, it's playtime subject to availability.
Tass, he's apply for broadband reliability se Virgin Media dot I E forwards lash proof.
Mum, why do they call it Scottish cheese?
It's cottage cheese, honey.
And I'm not sure.
Did dogs in other countries speak different languages?
Yeah?
I think so. When when we get there, well, we've got to fix the car first, but there's someone coming to help us.
Is it the man from Geneva?
Not Geneva, he's from a Viva.
Oh, there's a van now.
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I love you guys, on to 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 Leboo, French, Gina Martinez, Megan Metcalf, Jessica Beard, a Man of Blackburn, Hannah Lese, Kimberliefa Harrow, Katie Kelly Hanken, Dominica Deck, and Trent High.
As this next one, Amber and Jonathan Meade 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, 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. Yeah, and as well that it's difficult to store the slime.
Oh so yeah, what happens if you have a mason jar for the hagfish line.
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? 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, okay, 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 does 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, h 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 going to be somewhere in the middle in terms of the you know, the zones of animals out there.
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 Hohnka, Danny Q, and Selina. They all ask some form of this hungry question. Chris Burer 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 Bahanco 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. Is 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.
Could you believe that?
Just think you're never going to 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 entrapman. 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 laugh with nothing.
Well, thing but a bit of yukis and fiber. Don't you want to be their friends?
Though?
Travis Damela 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.
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 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 maybe 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.
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 want to know what makes anologists 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 it's discovery. I think it's, like you were 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 is this mean? In terms of how hagfish relate to each other, how do 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.
Haha, 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 three hundred million years. They eat only every few months, and they're technically jallous, but still have two rows of tooth like structures made of keraten. 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. 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 hagfish Ology episode. It's very colorful and very detailed. Do dive in if you are not around children. So to find out more about Tim Wineguard, 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 want to thank him though. Thank you hagfishologist Tim Weiningardt. Thank you to newsmologites 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 alleywar dot com or in the show notes. There's a full list of links and 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 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 want to 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.
Pology.
Virgin Media broadband is smooth. How smooth you ask? Well, Imagine you're a big old Walruss.
And rather than lumbering around a glacier avoiding polar bears, you're on a lake, driving a speedboat three thousand kilos of mollusk, munching magnificence, feeling the wind in your whiskers and the sun on your big blubbery face.
That's the kind of smoothness you feel.
With ninety nine point nine broadband reliability available nationwide, Virgin Media.
It's playtime subject to location availability.
Teasinc's apply for broadband reliability see Virgin Media Dot I E Forward slashproof.
So you want to go up this road here and get to the roundabout and you take a left and then you go past the Murphy's house. You know the Murphy's their young lad, Sean. I think he's out for in London now.
Oh yeah.
FBD doesn't stand for frustratingly bad directions. FBD stands for support. We support van drivers in Ireland with up to seventy five percent off new van policies.
FBD Insurance Support. It's what we do. Can't miss it.
Once you pass there, a little terrier was starting to chase yet and once he gives up, you should be there. Seventy five percent off based on five years No claims discount in terms and conditions apply. Underwritten by FBD Insurance Plc. FBD Insurance Group Limited, trading as FBD Insurance, is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.