Hagfish are hilarious. I know you never thought of it that way. But National Geographic has a video from the New Zealand Natural History Museum, showing various predatory fish choking on the mouthfuls of slime generated when they grab a hagfish, and it's pretty funny, see

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/animals-news/new-zealand-hagfish-slime-vin/

When I was in school, we learned that hagfish and lamprey eels made a single class of related organisms, the Petromyzontiformes or jawless fishes. Indeed, hagfish have a bony, rasping, two-part tongue that functions like jaws, used to catch polychaete worms and to tear at deep-sea carrion. Turns out that they are primitively jawless. Until a single 300 million year old fossil was discovered, we thought hagfish had secondarily developed their jawless structure. No, turns out they come that way evolutionarily. They are the only organism known to have a cartilaginous skull and no vertebrae—they are actually invertebrate chordates, like the sea squirts and amphioxus [1]. Hagfish are about as long as your arm, and far more disgusting [2]:

First pic immediately above is of Gene Helfman, with whom I learned ichthyology at UGA, holding up a little hagfish slime. See, that’s the thing about hagfish. Their primary characteristic is the ability to produce bucketloads of proteinaceous slime. It’s possible that mucilage and other animal protein glues might be replaced, if some nutty “natural products” entrepreneur pipes up, by packaged hagfish slime. It would be green and sustainable—hagfish don’t need to eat for months at a time, and over that period can produce enormous amounts of mucous. Although, now that I think of it, such an entrepreneurial endeavor would presumably leave us with large quantities of horse, donkey, dog and cat carcasses to process where they now go into the retorts at Elmer’s glue factories.

Anyway. My primary residual problem at the moment (well, discounting not being able to eat, drink, or talk and having been surgically reconstructed in cosmetically unattractive fashion) is mucous production. The slab of chest muscle and arm epidermis that the surgeons used to separate the airway from the gastrointestinal tract in my oral cavity continues to irritate, and that generates boatloads of slime. 

I gather that this problem is expected to go away at some point. I’m not sure what that point is, though. I’m now many months out from the last radiation and chemotherapy treatments. You’d think I’d be healthy by now. But I believe the key issue is the arm skin that they pulled inside to build the partition. Apparently, the hairs that were on my arm are still visible at the surgery site inside. Dr. H says that they couldn’t use muscle alone (without the skin) because the muscle tissue would get too flabby. The epidermis has cellular toughness that helps it hold up in its new role as throat component. Dr. H also says that eventually, the (former) arm skin will transform itself into a supple and effective barrier that will help keep me from chronic pneumonia associated with leakage of liquids down the airway into my bronchi and lungs. But for now, I have to put up with constant production of hagfish-like levels of excess mucous. 

At least I can cough it out and into paper towels for disposal. Most people in my condition have to use a mechanical suction apparatus to slurp the stuff out of the bronchi on an ongoing basis. Indeed, last time I left the hospital, I was held up a day while the suction pump was being delivered from the medical supplier. Doctors weren’t comfortable sending me home without the means to suction sloppy gunk out of my airway as needed. 

But, in fact, I have never used the suction gear. Coughing seems to work just fine for me. I do, when I travel, make sure I take the (rather heavy and cumbersome) suction kit with me just in case. But hopefully I will avoid the requirement for its use. It’s humiliating enough to be in my condition without the added discomfort of having to slide long rubber cannulae down my throat and into my bronchi and pumping up extracellular excretions. 

As always, I thank you for being here for me. Next week I’m going to Amherst to receive the AEHS Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor which I’m more than proud to be awarded. After that, I start cooking for Thanksgiving. Given that I didn’t expect to be alive to see this Thanksgiving, it’s going to be The Best Thanksgiving Ever. Followed by the winter holidays. Which I’m glad to get another shot at as well. My love to you and yours. Talk to you next week!

Notes

[1] http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/basalfish/myxini.html

[2] http://www.whaletimes.org/hagfish.htm