HAG Fish: A Water Trapping Slime Network

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The threads that make up this water trapping slime network are 10 million times longer than they are wide. They are somehow neatly coiled like a skein of yarn into a tiny cell capsule ready to be ejected and unfurled. Mora on how that works in a minute, but a minute, you love HAG fish. How are they coiling this? What is their gooey witchcraft?

Hagfish: these floppy hot dogs of the deep sea deserve our undying respect. Tim Winegard is a professional hagfishologist (YES IT'S A WORD) at Chapman University, and he dishes on the world's slimiest treasures. Prepare to hear about swift escapes, spellbinding clots of slime, patchy backstories, aphrodisiacs, outlasting extinction events, why you don't always need a spine, eating your way out of a dead whale, and -- like a slippery messiah -- turning water to slime. Also Alie confronts her fear of m*cus.

Comparative Biomaterials Lab at Chapman University: https://sites.chapman.edu/fudge/

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This week's donation went to the Wildlife Research Station: https://www.algonquinwrs.ca

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Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris

Theme song by Nick Thorburn

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