Meet Dr. Douglas Fudge
The beautiful hagfish.
Douglas Fudge is a Professor at Chapman University (Biological Sciences, Schmid College of Science and Technology). He studies predator defense, feeding, and locomotion of hagfish and other animals. His research investigates the adaptive advantages of hagfish slime, how it’s produced, and its structure. This information can inspire technological innovations.
Dr. Fudge,
Welcome back! It’s been 12 years since you first joined WhaleTimes for Hagfish Day! We are so honored to talk to you again. You’ve been very busy studying hagfish and making discoveries! But first…
What was your first thought 17 years ago when you heard that hagfish finally got their own holiday?
DF: What took so long?
You’ve been studying hagfish for many years. What makes them so fascinating?
DF: The slime. Did I mention the slime? But there is so much more to this unique fish. Hagfish can tie themselves in knots. They can pass their body through their own knot to wipe off or remove the slime. They use knot-tying to gain leverage when feeding on carcasses. What else? A shark can bite a hagfish but not injure the hagfish’s organs because of its loose skin. Hagfish are supremely good at detecting dead things that fall to the ocean floor. I could go on!
Do you think a hagfish is cooler than a killer whale?
DF: Killer whales are cool, but can they themselves into knots? Can a killer whale suffocate a shark? Can a killer whale produce a mass of slime over 100 times larger than itself?
Hagfish have so many unique adaptations to find food and survive, why aren’t they more common?
DF: They are fairly common, but they tend to live deeper than most people can get with SCUBA or even with fishing gear. Most species are found deeper than 100 meters, with some living as deep as 3,000 meters.. There are a few exceptions – off the coast of Japan and New Zealand, hagfish have been known to show themselves in water as shallow as 10 meters.
What is going on with their teeth? Sometimes you can see them. Sometimes you cannot.
DF: The teeth stay hidden until the hagfish begins to eat. Contraction of a small protractor muscle everts or causes their jagged teeth to stick out, and they press their teeth against the food. Then a powerful dental muscle pulls with great force and causes the teeth to retract. As that happens, it pulls or bites off a chunk of food.
When WhaleTimes first created Hagfish Day 17 years ago, few people knew, admired, or realized the importance of hagfish. Today, more people than ever know about them and even appreciate them. It would seem much of that is due to your significant research.
DF: Those of us who champion and work with hagfish have had some success in raising awareness of these animals. If I did an internet search when I first started working with hagfish, a punk band called ‘Hagfish’ always came up first. Now a long list of articles and sites about hagfish pops up first. Today, if you ask random people if they’ve heard of hagfish, a surprisingly large number have. I think that’s new in the last few years.
For future “hagfish-ologists” (we made up that term), do you study hagfish from shore, a ship, a sub?
DF: When I first started studying them, it was in a university lab. I was investigating the makeup of slime. Lately, I’ve been getting more interested in the whole animal, hagfish biology, behavior, and biodiversity. This means more time on boats, out at sea, looking for hagfish.
Some recent research took me out on boats in the Galapagos. We were doing a study on slime and wanted to look at the diversity of hagfish. We wanted to look at their genes to get more insight into how they make the slime. When strategizing this research, I came across a paper that talked about four hagfish species found in a small area in the Galapagos in 1999. That seemed like a great place to investigate hagfish diversity. That’s where we went and ended up catching six species and four of them were new to science!
Six species? Four new to science? Can you tell different species apart just by looking?
DF: Fortunately, we had two of the world’s top hagfish *taxonomists with us. They could tell immediately from looking that these were new or different species. (*Someone who studies/identifies animal groups and classifies them by adaptations, DNA, etc.)
During the research cruise, every time we brought up brown hagfish, a handful of white ones would be in the mix. We thought it might have been a mutation of the brown species. Then we pulled up another trap that had 60 white hagfish. It turns out it’s not a rare mutation. They’re a new species! We call it the ghost hagfish (Myxine phantasma).
Ghost hagfish? Cool. Besides the color and hanging out with the other species, is there anything else unusual about ghost hagfish?
DF: Yes. Young ghost hagfish are transparent! They have zero pigment in their skin. We could clearly see a beating heart, gills, blood flowing, and the slime glands. It almost looks as if they don’t have skin. In the deep, there are a lot of transparent animals, and this is thought to help them hide from predators. However, this only works if most of your body is transparent – having transparent skin and opaque organs doesn’t make an animal harder to see. So we have no idea if the lack of pigment in this species has any advantages for the hagfish. Transparency comes at a cost. Currently, there’s no reasonable explanation anyone can come up with on how this is an advantage for young ghost hagfish.
Speaking of new species…Congratulations! We hear there’s a hagfish species that’s named after you! Are people lining up for your autograph? How does it make you feel?
DF: No, no one is lining up, yet. But I am tickled there’s a hagfish named after me. I would love to “meet” this hagfish in the wild someday.
Will a hagfish ever be named after WhaleTimes Hagfish Day?
DF: I’ve had the pleasure of naming hagfish after mentors who were important to me, and a supporter. Who knows, maybe someday. (WhaleTimes editor note: We’re pretty sure he was just being nice. Oh well, we can dream.)
Do you have any other new findings about hagfish?
DF: We just published a paper on the metabolic rate of Atlantic hagfish (Myxine glutinosa). Hagfish are excellent at waiting between meals. Our study confirms that they have a low metabolic rate. This fits with their low-energy lifestyle with long periods of not eating. Then when a carcass falls, they ramp it up and take advantage of the fresh (so to speak) food.
What do you want people to learn/discover while they celebrate Hagfish Day?
DF: I think the most important lesson of Hagfish Day is that it’s not just the cute marine mammals and cephalopods that deserve our attention and protection. Hagfishes have been on this planet for several hundred million years and there is much we can learn from them.
How does increased and larger scale fishing deeper in the ocean impact hagfish?
DF: Hagfish have been notoriously overfished. Many populations are declining due to overfishing for both food and leather (marketed as “eelskin”). Hagfish are slow to reproduce and easy to catch with baited traps, so it is all too easy to wipe them out.
How can I help hagfish?
DF: It’s refreshing to get this question (it’s not one I get very often). I asked our resident hagfish and overwhelmingly they said burial at sea. But if you’re not ready for that, you can support marine conservation efforts. Support initiatives that regulate the harvest of hagfishes, most of which are currently unprotected. Encourage governments to put limits on trawling, which can be destructive to hagfish habitat. And support the establishment of marine protected areas, which is good for hagfish and all ocean species.
Thank you Dr. Fudge for your time and sharing your remarkable research!!!
Are you a future hagfish-ologist? Follow Dr. Fudge’s research and discoveries:
- Comparative Biomaterials Lab at Chapman University: https://sites.chapman.edu/fudge/
- Hagfishes and Slime: https://sites.chapman.edu/fudge/hagfishes-and-slime/
- New study shows mechanisms of Hagfish burrowing into deep sea sediment (https://news.chapman.edu/2024/06/17/new-study-shows-mechanisms-of-hagfish-burrowing-into-deep-sea-sediment/)
Back to the Hagfish Day celebration