Haggfish play an important role in that bottom composition turnover, right? So when things do fall into the deep, there's low oxygen. 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. They have a tendency to coil either right or left more than the other way. There are only maybe five or six common species for people to have in captivity. Nobody has ever witnessed hagfish breeding.
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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