Oh, hi. It's your uncle's army buddy who makes superb banana bread. Alley Ward, I am back with another episode of

Oligies, Smaller Gs, rather. What is Smaller Gs? If you're listening to this and you're like, is this a regular episode of Oligies?

It's not. We took full episodes of our regular Oligies 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 mucus 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 20 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 2013 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 break-eal mechanisms of ion regulation in Pacific Catfish by Alex Clifford.

So I did not make it up. The term Hagfish itself, though, was first documented in 1611, 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 appear 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

2017 where a truck transporting 7,500 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.

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