The HAG Fish and the Defense System

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The word mucus comes up between 10 to 15 times in the remainder of this episode. This is unlike anything else found in nature. An individual HAG fish may have 20,000 kilometers of fiber in its body at any one time. And what's so unique about these fibers is that they're packaged into 15 centimeter fiber lengths and coiled into 150 micron cell.

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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Theme song by Nick Thorburn

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