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Oh hey, it's your Internet dad, It's Ali Ward. This is a podcast called Ologies, wherein you will think I don't think I care about this topic, and then you will later google that topic when you're supposed to be doing actual work and tell people weird facts and maybe have a dream about the topic later. I dreamed about car last night. So let's get into it. Okay, First off, thank you for making this show a thing. Thanks to everyone at Patreon dot com. Slash Ologies.
If you have been wanting to join.
That special treehouse with us, it's a dollar a month, but it lets you submit questions to the ologists. Also, thank you to the people who leave reviews and who rate and subscribe the shows keeping up in the charts. Some days I'm a sad creep, and your reviews always cheer me up. So I read them all everyone, and I prove it by picking a new one. And this time it's from someone called Ali Reel, who wrote I Am but a Soft Pretzel, the podcast My Pot of
Cheese Fondu. Ali's ologies inspires me to use my meat computer differently while still feeding my childlike wonder for the world.
Thank you for that. If you leave a review, I read it with my eyes.
That's the deal, that's the truth. Okay, you're ready for cars? Let me answer that for you. No, you're not ready. This is a most loathed fish with an otherworldly face. But is it an armored creature of the deep out to drag people under the surface of lakes and rivers and rip them apart? Or is it a gentle giant whose slime you would caress. We're gonna ask a grologist,
one of the world's top grologists. In fact, so garrologist not a common word In all of my digging, I was only able to find it referenced one time in one book.
But what even is a gar? Okay? So a gar?
The word comes from Old High Germanic for spear, and this is primarily a freshwater fish. It has a long, sharp snout like a crocodile with teeth just come in every which way like sprouts of grass. And the gar in garlic, by the way, also comes from spear because the cloves can be sharp. Can you eat gar with garlic?
We're gonna find out now. This garlogist is truly an expert and a very impassioned one, and has amassed tens of thousands of social media followers for being a gar champion for engaging in birds versus fish battles, and he is an assistant professor at Nicols State University.
He got his bachelors from Ohio Northern University and a master's and a PhD from University of Michigan and Arbor studying aquatic ecology. And he's also one of the most truly beloved scientists I know. Everyone who knows this episode has been in the works has nothing but glowing things to say about it. He's also though a ruthless.
Pun maker, one of the finest in the game. And so to celebrate Gar puns, and there are many, you're going to just hear a soft, subtle.
Chime to alert you, so you could blink, you.
Can nod and say yes, yes, perhaps do a tiny imperceptible butt dance on the bus. Now, this episode has been in the making for months and months, but it got preempted by two hurricanes and various other scheduling hellscapes, and we finally connected, and then something was not happening right with the recording portal I usually use.
But we made it work.
So climb into hip waiters and let's get deep to discover the wonderful world of Gar, including a backstory that predates the t Rex, the barges sent out to destroy them, the slime, the scales, the poisons, river monsters, pets, boops, the hundreds upon hundreds of teeth, and one illustration that changed the course of history with an absolute joy of a human specimen, garologist doctor Solomon David.
Oh wait, you went away? Are you still there? Oh? Okay, we're having some a couple audio issues. Are you back?
Oh?
Are you still there?
Oh?
I lost you again. No, oh my gosh, you went away again.
Okay, after twenty five solid minutes of technical hiccups in this remote recording software we use, we just switched. We went over to Zoom because this interview was not not happening.
Now.
Is zoom the best in terms of audio? No, but gar is happening, and it's happening now. And also now it was video. So behind Solomon, I got to see a four foot tank filled with a live, long snouted gar of various sizes in the flesh almost And.
You're not kidding. You do have seven of your friends behind me.
You know they're right, They're right behind me, So you get some added guests in the background and everything.
Seven slender beasts glided by behind him, kind of like a live baseball bats with five hundred teeth each. But I have a gargantuan list of questions to ask him, so let's dive right in.
So my name is Solomon David and my pronouns are he and.
Him, and you are a garologist.
Yes, I think we're inaugurating, if you will, that term with this podcast. And do you google it? And it looks like it hasn't really been used for anything else as far as I can.
Tell, So, how long have you been an expert in guard?
Oh? Gosh? And I think I feel like expert might be you know, sure, maybe now it might be an expert in it, but that's just because like there's so much that just nobody's really bothered to worry about with these fish. So it's a I've been interested in them since I was a kid, but then I would say, like it was around grad school when I really got into them, and you know, they started taking over my life, if you will, So I would say, maybe grad school
is starting to work on them. So I don't know, I guess that makes maybe twenty years something like that.
I think that means. I think that makes you an expert twenty years of studying a fish. I think you're an expert in the fish. And I saw one of your early papers was titled so that we got underdog fish? So have you ever have you always been into maybe the least glamorous fish and puns? Is that something that's just been part of your part of your branding for a long time.
The Van diagram of dad jokes and puns is like overlap. But yes, as far as like the underappreciated, you know, underdog animals for sure, Like I was liked snakes and bugs and you know, sort of the things deemed creatures if you will. And so yeah, that leaked over into fish.
And what type of fish do you study in the lab?
So the lab is called gar lab. We are focus on or not limited to gars. So members of the family Lapisastia day there are semi close relatives that bof end So there's really only one species that's formally described right now, that's extent.
So his gar lab at Louisiana's Nickels State University focuses on the migratory ecology of a few different types of fish. Let's screw those fish. I want to talk gar. Give me the gar. I'm here for a tender love of the river beasts.
And what exactly is a gar? I did not know that they existed until I saw your Twitter with a picture holding on it. I was like, that is a rubber prop that cannot be real. What is this thing? Is it a crocodile? Is it a fish? What are they? Can you describe what they look like for people who are not familiar with the wonders of gars?
So I like to tell people, you know, picture an alligator or a crocodile with fins instead of legs, and that's a gar. So you turned the tail of an alligator into a paddle. But really, I mean, if you're looking for the you know, basic visualization, that's that's what it is. They've got this sort of primitive, ancient look to them, long snout, lots of teeth. That's a gar alligator, fins instead of legs.
Where did you get interested in fish?
In? Fish? Was born in Washington State, lived there for a few years. My dad would take me to the still Aguamish River, which is one of the rivers near kind of like the Seattle Coast, a little bit further inland, and I remember like chucking rocks into the water. So that was my first memory of like connection with the water. So like, I was kind of born in this town where like the sound the sign for the town had
fish on it. But one of the questions I feel like that has been valuable to me is like sort of telling the story of how I got interested in them, which I feel like, could you know, be useful to others too. The magazine, the nature magazine Ranger Rick is what got me interested in gar. So when I was a kid, I flipped through the magazine. I saw this article about this animal that had fins instead of legs. Looked like, you know, fish with fin instead of license
alligator gar. So I saw that as a kid, and it kind of got emblazoned on the back of my mind, that guys, alligator gar baby.
Can you describe that moment, like were you a subscriber to Ranger Rick or did you pick it up on a dentist's office, Like what was that moment like seeing this alligator gar?
Oh my gosh. So I just moved to Ohio from North Dakota, and the neighborhood kids there saw that I was interested in creatures, like all the creepy crawlers above, snakes, that sort of thing. So they gave me a bunch of back issues of Ranger Rick. So I never had a subscription back then, there were these old issues, and so I was slipping through them then and I turned to the page and actually caught my interest first of these this illustration, these two little softshell turtles, because that
was a turtle person. Then I like turtles, and so I saw that, like I zoomed up to see, like, wait, what is this? And you know, I thought it was really cool. I'm like, what is a gar? And it was actually called Mississippi King and it was about a pond in Louisiana. So it's kind of interesting right now, I like, live near a pond in Louisiana, you know where there's gars in there and stuff, and so it was almost like a foreshadowing sort of thing. And yeah,
so I was really excited. Then my advisor in undergrad who was into gars, so by then I'd kind of forgotten about them. He's like, I was taking a theology and he's like, gars are this really? You know, cool fish? I think they're cool. I'm like, wait a minute, I know what those are. And so that kind of started me back into them, and then from there on expanded to maybe took some turns following the sinuosity of a river,
maybe to where I'm at right now. But that's I would say where the fish interests started.
Is it weird for you to have seven gar right behind you all the time when you work on them? Or what happens in your brain and your heart when you look at a gar? Is it just heart eye emojis?
Yeah?
I would say, So, I would say it's weird if I didn't have gar near me like all the time. Like if I'm in my office, there's gars there. Those I deserve specimens. The ones at home are the live specimens here, and so I'd say they're not. They're never too far off from where I'm at. I guess I just have a real fascination with these organisms, and so anytime I look at them, I'm like, really just excited about them, even if it's fish that I've seen, you know,
for for a long time. You've got fish that I've had for like ten years, or.
What are they eating behind you? Like, what do you toss in there?
They eat shrimp, So I go the frozen shrimp. It helps sort of quell the aggression that they might have in the wild. Every now and then I would give them maybe some feeder fish that I load with extra vitamins and minerals and that sing, but really it's just frozen fish. So you try to calm them down because there's different species and there have to make sure everybody gets along. They've got different growth rates, are more aggressive
than others. It's like dealing with a bunch of children all these are well, you know, nicely contained in and a quadet box.
What is your field season? Like, what is your yearly rhythm do you spend like summers and the field and then you're dealing with a lot of data. What's it like for you?
The rhythm down here is usually syncd up with the river, with the Mississippi River and some of the rivers that are connected with it. So we have like this sort of floodplain inundation season when the water goes up and then as it starts to come down, and so we kind of monitor populations at various points during that time. We kind of go with the flow almost literally, it's when the river's up, we're out there. When the river's low,
we're out there. But we use different techniques depending on what the water levels are.
What kind of gar but do you wear when you're working.
And that depends too, Like if we're mucking around like in the water, then it might be waiters or you know, muck boots or something like that, and something that will you can try to wash because it's going to get covered in gar'slime. I mean there's fish slime and then there's garfishlime, and they are almost like two different categories all together. One of them does not come out.
No, Okay, tell me everything, because I didn't even know that they had slime. I thought that they had thick scales. Okay, anatomy of a gar dish, what's happening?
Sure, So they've got this elongate body, which is considered to be more of the sort of ancient fishes are considered the quote unquote primitive fishes, Those earlier diverging fishes tend to have more elong gate bodies, and so gars kind of fall in with that. They're covered with these diamond shaped armored scales. They're called ganoid scales. They're actually made up of a compound that's similar to enamel in our teeth, so they're super tough. Native Americans in some
places would make arrowheads out in the scales. Some folks still make a jewelry out of them. Early settlers would use like they'd cover the blades on their plows with them, So, in essence, the scales are really tough. Doda has done studies to look at them. Are sort of a bioinspired you know, armor and everything. The garmer is there.
Okay, did I spend an hour on Etsy looking up broaches made of gar scales. Maybe, so imagine a flat but made of like glossy cream colored jagged teeth, each one acting as a pedal am I kind of considering purchasing one. Perhaps also just imagine wearing it and people saying, oh, what an intriguing statement piece.
What is that?
And then you just say, Oh, it's interlocking body armor from a fish that's been around longer than dinosaurs and.
Has a face like a saw.
It'll cut you if you touch it.
I look it. So they've got these tough scales, but you're right, the slime is there. It's this coating. It's exuded from yucus cells on the fish. But they just have so much of it, and we have to preserve fish for you know, different reasons, and so you know, we have a group that we have to take back and used for other types of like internal analysis, that sort of stuff. Dead guars seem to produce even more
slime than live guars. It's a lot of slime. If we could just harness that sliminess into something else, maybe that'll be one of our next projects and maybe we'll inspire somebody look at that too.
Do you have any idea if that slime is similar to hagfish slime in the way that it's tossed out and it absorbs water to where it's mostly water but slime filaments.
I would say it's not similar hagfish in that way. They don't use it as a defense like hagfish as would. But both types of slime were, you know, primarily water based, though it's almost like just a superficial sliminess to them that you know, reminds me of hagfish. And I think I posted a video of like lifting up a gar that been preserved for a wild or at least was frozen in thought, and it's just like the slime drips down.
The students really seem to get into that in the in the Biology of Fishes class, that's one of the first dis sections we do is gar so they can see what it's like.
Yes, I look this up and it looked like a fish emerging from behind a curtain of mucus or wearing a cape made of snot it's as gross as you think it is.
What are those smell like?
Yeah, that's another thing they know. Some fish have somewhat of a pleasant smellton I used to work on Lake whitefish, which is found over the Great Lakes. They actually smell like cucumbers, and so that's actually a decent smell. Gars. It's it's like a pungent, swampy type smell. It's it's hard to describe, but it's it's unique to them, and certain species are even smellier than others. And it doesn't really come out. You just sort of learned to live
with it in the field gear that you have. It's pungent.
It's pungent, pungent and swampy. It sounds like the worst like wine tasting notes, a pungent nose and a swampy body.
I agree.
What about who eats them?
Who eats go as long as they're not a vegetarian. I feel like everybody should or at least try it. It's great. So folks in the South tend to eat it more than people up north. Thinking about the United States here different countries. In Central America, gar is a popular food fish in certain parts of Mexico. It's just as popular as salmon is in the Pacific Northwest, so you can get gar and banadas to Molli's. You can
get it on a grill. In the South, here in Louisiana, they actually make gar balls, which is basically just taking the meat and putting into like almost like meatballs. They prepare it in a bunch of different ways. I've had gar. It's actually really good. It's one of those things like the appearance of the fish might make somebody like, I'm
not eating that. There's just no way. But you know, if you look at a Patagonian toothfish, which is you know, Chilean sea bass sea about salt at this point, probably not the should eating them anyway if you look at them, not the most appetizing looking fish. So I feel like that's just another category where they've where they've got a bad reputation. But gar is actually pretty delicious and people have been eating them for hundreds of years.
I actually met which animals predate on gar gars. But I was quite happy to take this globe trotting culture cuisine tour.
I loved it.
But what about non humans who dares feast on the beast?
What about animals? I mean, we have at least nets and hooks, But if I were an animal in the wild, would I just be like that thing's got tooth scales all over it and a bucket of slime. I'm out, it's out of my leak. Is that how they persisted so long? Unchanged?
Yeah?
I mean the armor definitely helps. They live in these areas that maybe not not a lot of other more conventionally, let's say, were aspiring fish can survive because they actually breathe air.
Wait, what fish breathe air?
But I digress. We'll come back of that. But alligators will eat gars. Those just swallow the whole cormorants. There's a lot of pictures online of cormorants and other similar type birds or shape birds eating gars. I kind of ask for that because I get into that whole birds versus fish argument all the time, and so people send me pictures of birds eating gars. But gars will, you know,
turn the table. They will eat birds. I have not seen that in real life, but I have heard from reputable sources that they do do that.
Oh my goodness, it's predator prey.
There's a balance to it.
And you mentioned they breathe air. NBD. It's a fish that breathes air and has been around since the Jurassic or when did gars come on the scene.
Sure, So the family Lepisasdiada it diverged and branched off around one hundred and fifty seven million years ago, so that's late Jurassic period. So they're older than Turannosaurus rex and they've been around longer than they have too, So a lot of our favorite dinosaurs from the Catatious period, like, they're even older than that, so they've been around for a while. Gars used to be a much more diverse
group than they are now. Right now, we have seven extant species that are all found within North America, Central America, and Cuba. There used to be many more species and they were found in North America, South America, Africa, India, Europe, basically worldwide. They had a panchac distribution and yeah, things like air breathing helped them survive for this long. They kind of found a body plan that works and they've stuck with it for millions of years.
What is that body plan? Do they have swim bladders? You mentioned that in your Biology of Fish classes. It's one of the first things you dissect. Do You slip in the gar early because they're the coolest and you want people to fall in love with fish also, Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Like I mean, given that classes Biology of fishes, but like with all the you know, thirty thousand some you know described fish species. Yeah, I like them to focus on, you know, the handful that I really like, but you know, to introduce them to the others too. I'm like, there's these seven species and then there's like, you know, thirty thousand other ones. Toolus, we always have them on hands because of our research, so you know, we've got them
in the freezer. But if you look at them internally, as far as that body plan, they've got that elongate body, they've got the long jaws with lots of teeth, which helps them you know, capture prey effectively. That gas ladder looks like a lung on the inside. It runs like the length of the dorsal side of the fish. So when you dissect them, it looks like along it's highly vascularized. It's like a big balloon. And yeah, they have to go up and they've got to gulp for air relatively
frequently in order to function. They basically are an air.
Breathing fish, so they're they're not just using the air that they're gulping for buoyancy, they're actually using it for rest duration.
That's correct, Yeah, because they live in a lot of these slower moving water areas, the bayous sort of backwaters of rivers and streams. Not that some guars don't live in rivers and streams are fast moving water, but they live in these areas where the water's moving slower and also where the water might be warmer. Warmer water tends to hold less oxygen, and so they've got to find somewhere else to get their oxygen from otherwise they can't
stay it. So they just go to the surface. They take a gulf, and they can kind of bob.
Out their business, their business being looking like a Tim Burton sketch covered in slime and scale. Now about this air gulping. Why does warmer water have less oxygen? Okay, so, in short, warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen because warm water means the molecules are raging at a faster moving mash pit. All that bumming around means that the oxygen gas can get tossed out of the mix. Now, if you swear you can hear the temperature of boiling water,
you are not wrong or delusional. So a paper with the delightfully long title why can you hear a difference between pouring hot and cold water an investigation of temperature
dependence in psychoacoustics. This came out in twenty eighteen and it studied this effect and essentially scientists think our brains are just very hip to the lower pitched sounds of more viscous water being poured in the higher pitched boiling water which has more bubbles and it breaks apart more than cold water when it splashes.
And do they have gills as well?
They do, so they can breathe through their gills. They're considered to be facultative air breathers, which facally means they can do both. They don't really have to breathe air unless certain conditions are met, so they basically are air breathing almost all the time. If they have the right mix of cool water and low activity, then they can just use their gills.
And they tend to be fresh water or brackish right.
Yes, they're mainly found in fresh water. They have to reproduce in fresh water. We've seen cases where there are eggs and brackish water, but they can venture out into full salt water. So there's alligator guards, spotted guars. Long those guars have been found off the Gulf Coast in full salt water. The Autumn Aquarium in New Orleans, they've got an alligator guard. I think it's a couple of them in full saltwater, so you can see them swimming
with sharks and sea turtles and tarpain. It's actually really cool. I just go there and I just stare at that tank for you know, the duration whenever I'm there.
Do they know who you are? Are they like, that's a famous gar scientist.
I don't know. I think they know that they're famous, and I'm just the fanboy up there trying to take a bunch of pictures. And my wife usually just wandered the other exhibits and kind of leave me there and everything. So yeah, definitely one of my favorites.
Does your wife share your enthusiasm for fish?
I think by proxy, and also I think she does have a genuine interest in them. We met when we were both working at Shedd Aquarium, so you know that's a place with a lot of fish by default. So we both worked there and I was the researcher there and she was working in fundraising, and so that's how we met. So really the fish kind of started things off or is and we meet, We go through the exhibits and I go, I'd just show my favorite fish. It was like the guards, the bow fing, the one fish.
I completely ignored the penguins, of course, and any of the other organisms there. So I think that enthusiasm kind of carried over. And the last toast in our wedding was to the garfish. She held up this little figurine and said, if it wasn't for this fish, we wouldn't have met each other or anything like that. And so I you know, she she tolerates it, but also supports it, and I think you know, deep down she appreciates those fish too.
Oh how can you not. I mean, the garfish brought you together. I mean that is amazing.
For our wedding, instead of escort cards, we had little gar figurines that were called escort guards. And that was a surprise to me. It wasn't me. She came up with the idea. I saw it on our wedding day, and so it's really been infused with you know, our lives. Definitely my life at you know, virtually you know, any love, you.
Could not have picked a better partner. I mean, come on to talk about it, Lucky, What about gar and movies? Have they found their way into popular culture at all?
Sure, you know popular culture maybe to an extent, not to the extent of you know, Jaws with the sharks or anything like with alligators. There's no krawl you know, movie or anything like that, but they are there. So if you're familiar with the movie Predator, which was Arnold Schwarzeger's sort of one of his breakout roles, is this alien that would collect trophies throughout the galaxy, and you would actually try to collect humans too, because they're considered
one of the best prey. What hell are you? They had necklaces with these skulls of their sort of trophies, and it just so happens that one of the skulls is a gar skull. The band somebody pointed that out to me along the way, so I thought, like, Gars are seriously cool animals, because these aliens are coming from all over the galaxy to like, you know, hunt for these So that wasn't That's an example I use in class and in some presentations. There was another movie called
If you Know Who Weird Al Yankovic is. He does a lot of spoofs and everything like that. His old eighties movie UHF had a lot of satire making fun of a bunch of different shows. One of the shows is Wheel of Fish, and one of the fish on the wheels was a gar. And so somebody sent me that picture.
Paul Yankovic's Everywhere I Love You.
They're even in the Creature from the Black Lagoon. So I don't always see it, but people will see it, and if they know that I'm obsessed with gars, will send this stuff to me. So I like that I received that sort of you know information.
Okay, gar flim flamm. What is a myth that you are would love to bust about gar?
Oh?
Gosh? So probably the myth that they are bad for sport fish populations. They're damaging the ecosystems. That's that's one of the big myths is that they're bad for fish that we traditionally cared about for cared about more like a bass or walleye or some of the other sportfish. We think that these gars are you know, taking over lakes and rivers, that if you see a lot of gar,
then it's bad for the other fish. And they're you know, important components of native ecosystems, there are predators that are needed to maintain balance, kind of like wolves in Yellowstone are maintaining you know, proper balance there. So usually if you have a healthy population of guars, you have a healthy overall ecosystem.
Oh, why aren't people just eating more gar? Why aren't people going after like the trophy fish when you're like, it was pretty good eating over here?
I mean it is right. We've got alligator guars that can get over eight feet long, so there's a lot of meat on those fish. Not that i'd recommend going after the biggest fish, but if you've ever prepared fish before, a lot of times they'll use a filet knife to you know, fillet the fish right with guards, you need to use tin snips to get through the high so you need some extra equipment to process a gar. But it's worth it, is what I would say.
Did I watch a bunch of fish cleaning videos for this episode for you? You know I did?
Oh god, it's pretty tough pair of scissors and we want to you can hear it crunching as it cut.
And yes, anglers use yard too or medical trauma scissors to chew through these. Ganoine scales, which are indeed really similar to tooth enamel. Imagine sawing through a blanket made of teeth. Oh, speaking of saws, I asked Solomon if after you were done eating the meat, could you use a gar mouth as a saw for anything? And he was like, eh, No, they're really better at grasping than they are cutting.
So now we know.
Also, anglers have called these gritters garbage fish, but they're starting to accept that they're pretty good eating. And some fisher people suggest baiting a hook with carpeads. But when scientists need to get a headcount for science reasons, they might electro fish, which is applying a current underwater which attracts the fishies to the anode and then it stuns them. And if this sounds like shooting fish in a barrel, it pretty much would be, which is why it's considered
poaching in many states. But more on this in a bit.
Now.
You can also use a drone, like Solomon did on a recent expedition with the Nature Conservancies Matt Miller.
And so we use drones to actually take the line away from the boat and we bait it with chunks of carp And so you've got this chopped carp on a fishing line that's flown by a drone four hundred feet away. So basically looking at a flying fish ad go through the air and then you tug on it and it'll drop the line and you kind of set your lines around the boat that way. So we were able to land to fair number fish and it was
all catch and release that way and stuff. We've got the biggest fish that I've ever landed, and that was between eighty to one hundred pounds is a six foot long alligator guard, which is on the average side for those fish, but it was really exciting. Yeah, so we were drone fishing. We're using like this sort of futuristic technology to fish for this ancient fish. It was an interesting sort of parallel there.
How old is a six foot or eight foot alligator gar.
It's hard to say. Alligator gars grow fast early in life and they tend to slow down, but they can live for over a high undred years. So a seven foot aligiger guard could be forty to fifty years old, it could be one hundred years old. We're finding out that the way that we age them, we're finding those techniques and so we're finding out that all gars are actually much older than we originally thought they were. Back when I was in grad school, we thought that some
species only lived about ten years old. We've now learned that they can live for probably over thirty years. So that's, you know, a significant increase in what we're learning.
How are you actually dating that? Are there rings in their scales or something? What's going on?
Yeah, So for some fish you can use the scales. For others you can use some of the fin rays, and they have what we call annuli, like rings on a tree, but with a lot of fish gars included. We get the best estimates from something called an odolith or an earstone, which is in the head.
Allie, please please tell me what a fish earstone looks like. Okay, okay, calm down, tucking and imagine something just a few millimeters in length that can come in all shapes, usually characteristic to a certain speed. Cheese, and they look like teeny tiny apple fritters, or if you put a very small chicken nugget in your pants pocket and sat on it for a seven hour train ride.
But the texture of a rock treasure.
And so if we take those out and we look at those, we kind of grind them down. We can see the rings there, and if you count those rings, you can get a good estimate of how old those fish are. And nowadays you need really high tech methods in order to get the best estimate that we can. But now we're finding out is that fish that we thought maybe ten years old might be thirty years old, fish that we thought we're sixty might be who knows, seventy eighty. You know, fish can live for over one
hundred years. As far as cars are going.
What bad asses? Seriously? Okay, I have so many questions from patrons. Can I lightning round sounds good? Are you ready? Okay?
But before we do, we toss some dollars at a good cause in the name of theologist and doctor Solomon David pointed our money canon toward Ranger Rick magazine, which is a part of the National Wildlife Federation.
So hello to.
All the rangers out there, including Hannah Shardt, the editor of Ranger Rick. The donation was made possible by sponsors of the show, which I will quickly tell you about and give you some discounts.
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Okay, all your questions regarding this fish, Okay, So first up, Charlotte Folkcard, Ashley Aeroncio, Felix Sasal and Ellen Skelton all had questions about our changing planet.
Oh my gosh. Okay number one, because we were supposed to record this. I think like September third, right around which hurricane was it that preempted that?
Gosh? I lost track. Honestly, we had Ata and I don't know, maybe there was Zeta. Yeah. I think a record five or six named storms this you know that might have been hurricanes this year. So lots lots of hurricanes are.
The gar surviving climate change.
Okay, it seems to be. Yeah, No, that's that's a great question. Some fish are going to be more affected by climate change than others. Fish that depend on cold water, cold temperatures, We're probably going to see their ranges contract in a lot of areas, whereas warmwater fish will probably see range expansions there. Gars are warmwater fish, they'll probably do better in some areas. But climate change is going to affect habitat. It's gonna affect all kinds of things.
So climate change is most likely going to be bad for everybody. It's just going to be you know, problematic in different ways. Right now, gars are doing okay, but habitat loss is probably the biggest threat to guars.
And habitat loss that caused by just human development and build.
Yeah, whenever we're you know, damming rivers or cutting off floodplains from their you know, river systems, we're cutting the fish off from spawning grounds, removing vegetation in some places, which is what gars need to reproduce. That can be problematic. So really, habitat losses is the big thing, and that can be exacerbated by invasive species, by climate change. You know again, like you mentioned anthropogenic inputs too.
Okay. Hanavon wants to know what's with the gar with the sharp teeth. My friend from Alabama is always talking about trying not to get bit while swimming. Does that happen? Will they bite you?
No, they're not going to bite you. Oh. The only way you're really going to get bitten by a gar, you know, maybe even just slightly intentionally, is if you're messing around with one on the boat, like let's say you're an angler and you're trying to you know, dislodge a hook or get them out of the net or that sort of thing. That's really it. They're not going to come after you and attack.
Okay, if you're swimming in Alabama, will other fish bite you?
I can't speak for other fish, you know, really sunfish they call them perch down here, they will come in. They will knit that you. Now, they don't really have the teeth that guars do. But they're some of the fish that we think are and aggressive actually are aggressive. They're just not really going to do any harm or anything.
Okay. More Patreon questions. Julie McDonald want to know do fish feel pain? I know this is kind of a silly question, but I've heard conflicting accounts of it and would like to hear from the source. Do fish feel pain?
So I don't know if I'm with the source because you have to go to the fish for that, But there is a lot of research being done on fish and pain. I would probably summarize it in that fish feel pain. It's not exactly in the way that we do. I'm not a fish pain expert. What we do do with our research is that we make sure that when we're handling the fish, if they are experiencing any sort of pain, it's the most minimal version that they could
feasibly experience, so we anesthetize them. We're quick to get them out of the nets. Safety of the animals is definitely a priority. So I would say that fish do feel pain, now how they feel pain? I am not a fish neural biologists, so I couldn't tell much more specific than that.
Okay, quick aside. I looked into this because I do feel like the shrug fish don't feel pain seems entirely anathetical to, say, evolution and avoiding dangers, but it's a pretty convenient justification for choosing the fish dish on a wedding menu instead of the veggie option, of which I
was frequently guilty before all weddings happened on a screen. So, according to doctor Lynn Snedden, a University of Liverpool researcher and a director of bioveterinary science, Doctor Snedden is the global authority on fish pain, and she says they probably do indeed feel pain. They express physical symptoms when injected with an acid, and those symptoms subside when they're administered morphine afterward. And the research finds that our aquatic friends
may feel pain strikingly similar to that of mammals. Also, doctor Snedden has a website called The Fish Indicators of Stress and Health acronym FISH. So if someone says these slimy guys love getting caught, it's pretty fishy claim. Now, okay,
if you like vengeance, though, you're gonna love. This question on the minds of many, including patrons Calvin Doling, Raden, Markham, Hannaquist, Jamie Kishimoto, Chris Brewer, Morgan, Alexander Coburn, Laura Smith, just Want, Rachel Moore, Aviva Elizabeth and Alison Tory.
So many people. This is probably the biggest question I got want to know what is up with their toxic eggs. What is their life cycle? Like, how are they doing it, how many babies do they make, how big are their eggs, what's going.
On the eggs? So, first of all, there's no gar caviar, So no garvr if.
You will, there are so many gorn here to.
Try it. I mean not that they don't have eggs's just you shouldn't try to eat them. So gar eggs are weird. They are toxic to humans, they're toxic to mammals, they're toxic to birds, they're toxic to a lot of different invertebrates, but they're not toxic to fish. So it's kind of a weird gap in the you know, toxic bingo card, Like if you're gonna have poisonous eggs, you think you want it to be poisonous to the animals that are kind of you know, in the same area.
So O Sensibly, that seems like, you know, a weird sort of thing. But part of our working theory is and there's other folks at Nickels State University working on this as well. Doctor garylett Fleur's lab is looking at gar egg toxicity and trying to figure out what are the proteins. Is a bacterial based you know, what are some of the details there. But from an evolutionary perspective, we're thinking that you know, gars live in this water that is going to be low oxygen, it's relatively warm,
it's relatively shallow, especially where they're laying their eggs. So you're probably not going to have a whole lot of other predatory or egg predator fish out there. But what you do have is crustaceans. Down to Louisiana, we got crawfish around. I say crawfish because I'm speaking for Louisiana, but it's crayfish and everybody else. And you've got a lot of you know, waiting birds, herons, everything that you know.
I want gars to have the revenge back on. So it would be toxic to those bird predators, would be toxic to the invertebrates. There be toxic to other mammals. And so that's one of my working theories is do why that toxicity is there but not to fish. So the eggs are toxic, they're toxic even inside the fish.
So every now and then we'll read about somebody who caught a gar and they decided to you know, try to make gar caviar, and they ate the eggs, so even when they're inside the fish, they don't have to be laid in order to be toxic. But also what we found out is that even the larvae are toxic for a little bit too, so they're actually poisonous to predators.
That kind of that toxicity shrinks as they get older and older, but for those first you know, maybe several days to a week or so, the larvae are also toxic.
Ooh, and do their predators learn that pretty quickly early on? Like are they able to eat an egg and like barf it up and be like never again, or do they just do their predators straight up die if they eat them, and it's just sort of instinctual avoid them.
I think there's a fair amount of research that's still out there to be done on that. Because humans have learned they've gotten sick. I don't think anyone has actually, you know, died from eating gar eggs, thankfully, but they have gotten violently ill. But invertebrates seem to get sick and they die. It seems like birds they'll get sick from it and they'll die off too. So I don't know if they live long enough to tell their friends, you know, cough cough, don't eat this. I think it's
a pretty high level of toxicity. And the way they lay their eggs is that there's usually it's going to be in groups and in clusters, so that it might be an amount that they're ingesting. I couldn't speak to the learning curve beyond humans. Humans now know. We have the Internet to try to spread that information. Don't eat gar.
Eggs, don't do it. Don't do it so tempting. It's like the forbidden foods. It's the tide pod of the ancient fish world.
It really kind of is.
So don't eat it unless you're excited to have violent gastro intestinal distress and maybe death.
So don't now.
This question was also asked by quite a few of you patrons, including Claire Meyer, Margaret Ray, Liz rope Key and honestly it's a little nosy.
Katie wants to know what is the ecological niche for their long snouts, like, what's the most likely reason they evolve like that? And Nicole Cohen says, I catch gar all the time with my dad, and I always wonder what determines the bill length. Does the length have any status to the fish or is it just how the fish is? Like some humans are taller than others, so why do they have these really long bills? And how different are those between individuals of the same species.
So great questions As far as the long bills, I think you can loosely make an argument for convergent evolution. If you look at crocodiles and alligators, they've got those long snout slots of teeth. Guards don't have the same biting power that crocodiles and alligators do, but to a similar sort of principle where they use that long snout as sort of a range extension to go after prey. If you're familiar with this other it's a fish eating crocodile called a garia, no relations to guards. It's not
even spelled exactly the same way. But they've got these long snouts. They specifically feed on fish. They side swipe with it, and they open it very quickly to grasp on that fish. So different gar species have different lengths of snouts, usually depending on what they're eating. The long nose gar primarily eats other fish, so it's got a long and skinny snout. All your gar will eat fish, but it'll eat a lot of other types of animals.
Even they'll even scavenge. So they've got a shorter snout and a wider snout a little it allows them to eat some different things. Now, as far as the maybe sexual dimorphism across the snouts, they believe that some female spotygars have longer snouts than male spot of gars, But we found this berries with population and it probably varies with the locality and even across species, so there's no great way to show that. You know, longer snout means female,
shorter snout means male. But bigger gars tend to have bigger snout.
And Alandakole wants to know do gar have electromagnetic sensory organs and if so, what are the primary functions of it. You mentioned electro fishing, and I was like, well, what is electro fishing? Do they have any It's in their face?
Sure, so electric fishing is you know, to be simple, it's not what gars do. So they don't have they don't have electroceptors. They do have taste buds on their snout though, so I have watched a little poke around with their snout like you know, look around for food, almost like a little long snouted dog looking for food. We get to see that in the aquarium and you can see that in the wild too. You'll see their tails stick straight up out of the water and they're
like head standing. They can sniff out food, but they aren't electrosensitive in that like a paddlefish would be, or like a sturgeon would be.
Wait, sturgeons are electro sensing.
It's true.
I looked it up, and this is similar to how sharks go about locating prey. And electrosensing tends to be more prevalent in aquatic species, including dolphins, since the dissolved metals and water conduct electricity better than air, but it's also seen for some reason in terrestrials like echidnas and bees and platypuses and platypusses. It was recently found fluoresce and a greenish glow under ultraviolet light, which was a
discovery recently made when doctor Paula. Spaith Anik and some other researchers at Chicago's Field Museum held a small quiet rave and invited a drawer full of preserved monotreams. So yes these egg laying mammals are the animal equivalent of psychedelic posters you buy at a bob shop. But back to electricity in your fish face.
Now. Electric fishing is a technique that we do in fisheries where we run a week current through the water and fish within a certain vicinity of that current are drawn towards that electrical field, and if they're really close and they get stunned and we can net them up, we put them in the boat, we can tag them, measure them, and within seconds they'll come to and then we can release them back and they kind of go about their business. So it's a good way of sampling
a population. If you need to get a large number of fish with a minimal amount of sort of contact.
Times you know you mentioned when they go up to gulp air. Does that not make them more visible to predators?
It does, and so gars will do it relatively quickly. But if your gar of a certain size, once they reach in all sizes, there's really not many other predators that are going to frighten them. Alligators can eat certain large gars, but a big alligator gar it's only a major, you know, predator, maybe a big alligator, but they'll usually
go for smaller prey, but it's really human now. Gars also exhibit what we call synchronized respiration, So if one gar goes up for air, oftentimes another gar will go for air. Another gar will go for air. We think this might have evolved because if other gars see that it's safe to go for air, then they'll go for air at about the same time. So that works for gars versus almost any other animal, not so much versus humans.
Oh, right now, somewhere there's a bunch of gar asking each other are you going?
I mean i'd go. If you go, we can ride together if you want. But I mean, just one goal and then I have to I have to get up early. Okay. Miranda Panda wants to know are there any fish who have evolved from this fish? And reversely, is there any way of knowing what they evolved from or have they just been around too long to tell? Like what's their backstory and who's evolved from them?
Yeah? I would say gars have been doing their own thing the way sort of phylogenetically, the tree of life has sort of branched off. They kind of went off on their branch, and they branched off from the rest of the ray finned fish's group again about one hundred and fifty seven million years ago, and they've been kind of doing their thing and haven't changed it since then, So I wouldn't say there's other fish that have sort
of evolved from Gars. Now. Evolutions sort of an ongoing process, so even within populations, we see that they're changing with things like climate, with different sort of mutations that might pop up, so over time might get a gar species that's present today that splits into two different species. We also think that there's some unknown sort of cryptic species.
The people just haven't steady gars enough that we're pretty sure that there's other gar species out there besides the seven that we know.
What seven are those, I'm going to run down a who's who of society gar, at least the discovered species. There's the long nosegar, which has the most redundant of the gar names. Then there's the leopard printy spotted gar. There's the Florida gar, which looks a lot like a spotted gar, but it's Floridian, which means that it's wearing denim cutoffs in January and maybe has a bedazzled license plate holder. There's the tropical gar, which is a popular
menu item in Central America. It's eaten like we enjoy salmon.
Here, just hold the row.
There's the short nose gar, which snoop wise, it's kind of closer in proportions to a dolphin than a swordfish. It's also a common pet. Oh, let's not forget about the alligator gar, a river giant that can reach eight feet in length and three hundred pounds of scaly chunk. And then moving on lastly, the most rare of the seven cuban gar, which is a freshwater species. It can also inhabit brackish water as well, but sadly it's not a saltwater species, as then we could call it the Cuban seagar.
I'm a monster.
And speaking of this, next question about a certain show was asked by patrons Kendall Burnell, Janella Lindauer, Jennifer Stone, Meggie Bender, and oh Rich Pastinew wants to know if you've seen any of Jeremy Wade's shows like River Monsters or Dark Waters, and if so, what's your opinion.
God don't bite pieces off their prey. They only eat what they can swallow whole. This puts humans off the menu.
The great question. I think Jeremy Wade has done a great job for science communication of these sort of river monster type fish. I think it's done a great job of getting away maybe from them being called monsters. The show is called River Monsters. You might think these are these threatening organisms. They're really bad. They present these sort of sensationalized accounts of this sort of crime that's been committed, somebody who's bitten by something, and you know, it turns
out usually that it wasn't the fish. In the case of Gars, it ends up that was the case. Although I did spend a lot of time yelling at the TV when that first River Monsters episode came on. All my roommates had left by that time, are like, we can't sit with you and listen to you to it. That wasn't the right name for that fish, and that wasn't the right thing. But I think overall bringing it to sort of public view has been beneficial for that, So I think overall he's done a great job with it.
I just like watching people catch being fish anyway.
Yeah, I believe I've seen enough to clear the guard's name. You've got that. Yeah, it's time to return the specimen to the wild and reflect on other possible suspects.
Do people ever wrestle guard You know, they.
Might wrestle them when you get them to the boat, but not like they're wrestling alligators or anything like that. Alligator guards are actually pretty chill once you get them onto the boat. Like they realize I'm huge and there's really not much you can do to me. So I mean, especially what if you're doing catch and release or whatever and that sort of thing. But like, they'll usually kind of sit there. When we get on fish, whether it's a small gar a large gar, we put a wet
towel over their eyes, so that calms them down. That's the case with a lot of different organisms, and so they kind of chill out and then we you know, take our measurements and get them back into the water and everybody's happy.
Oh.
Sometimes I feel this way when I scroll on Twitter for too long, so I just have someone put a wet towel over my head and I just sit there blinking in the dark. Piece at last, nothing exists now.
A lot of folks, including patrons Miranda Panda, Ava Schaeffer, Linda Matson, Susan Kennon and a Valerie, Janelle Shane, Michael Hanby, Jennifer Lewis, Adam Weaver, Natalie Bates, Ryan mcsmith, Lydia Zimmerman, Sadie Baker, and the Legra Sunstorm wanted to know more about their evolution, the fossil record, and essentially their history, presumably to write more nuanced fanfic about gar So many people want to know more about their long backstory, like
Margaret Ray says, how did they survive the kt asteroid impact that took out the dinos? Daniel Donald and wants to know since it appeared that they stopped evolving around the late Jurassic, what is it about their niche that made them say.
Okay, we're good, just we're just going to stop the mutations now. And Shaan Washington eggs please please please, one hundred thousand percent debunk the living fossil fallacy? What is that living fossil fallacy? And why did they stop evolving?
So many questions there. Oh, now let me start with that one. So, first of all, they didn't stop evolving. They are very slowly evolving compared to other organisms. So every organism that's alive today is considered to be technically a modern organism. We're living in modern times. It's alive today, it's had the span of time to evolve. Gars just tend to evolve at slower rates. Basically, all animals are still evolving, so populations are changing, natural selections taking place
on individuals. So I would put out there that evolution is an ongoing process. It hasn't stopped for gars. It's just that they're already slow at doing it. So we might see more changes, but it's probably at a timescale that we you know, won't be able to observe very effectively at least moving forward. Now getting to the living fossil question, this is something that I have my students answer as the first exam question. So I finding future students are listening to this and now they get they
get a freeb out of this. But it's why was Darwin's idea of a living fossil technically incorrect? But the idea is there. So he said, living fossils were kind of like organisms that are alive today that look the same as they were you know, way back when or in the fossil record. What we like to use to sort of adjust that is they look like that at least as far as external appearance. But they've been evolving over this entire entire period of time. So from a
science communication perspective, I like the term living fossil. You just have to use the right caveats with it when you're explaining it to somebody. It's almost like saying primitive fish. People tend to know or steal a cant as a primitive fish. A gar is a primitive fish. It's not necessarily the exact terminology that's correct. But if I were to say they're none too staffed in Otorigians, you lose people by the second syllable first. So I like living fossil.
I think you can use it if you use in the right one.
Acilacanth side note is an ancient nubby lobed fish, and everyone thought they were extinct for sixty five million years until nineteen thirty eight when a South African fisher person called up a museum and was like, hey, in case you want to look at my trash fish bycatch, come down to the pier. There's a weird one in here, and biologist Marjorie Courteney Latimer hopped into a taxi to the pier and was like, hot dog, what in the
born home is this? And then made a sketch of it which looks kind of like a police sketch of Acila canth I'm not gonna lie to you, and confirmed that this thing in this guy's net was the not extinct lobed fish that was the predecessor essentially to terrestrial tetrapods. This was a big deal, like the natural science equivalent of someone on a telenovela who is long dead showing up on a doorstep and everyone being like, but they're alive, you fleshy finned bitch. I love you, Willa rowan first
time question asker who loves a Cela Camp. No, they are not a close relative of gars. Sorry, but also, selacans are said to have just a speck of brain matter amid a big old lump of fat, which also feels like me many days.
Speaking of Stephanie Birhertes and just one both wanted to know what their brains are like, just wanted to know how do they compare intelligence wise to other sea creatures. How do you even measure or quantify that?
Yeah, I would say that they're smarter than we might give them credit for. I mean, I think fish overall are smarter than what we you know, the pop culture has given them credit for. Like I think Science Friday dispelled the rumor of like, you know, you have the memory span of a goldfish or you know, goldfish, you remember quite a bit. They can live for a long time too. Gars Also they can recognize individual people. We've seen that with pet fish and that sort of thing.
So they're they're pretty smart. Now, I've never seen a head to head gar versus octopus, you know, brain teaser, you know, contest or anything like that. I think there's plenty of sea organisms out there that are smarter than gars. But I think, you know, they're still pretty smart. I think most animals are surprising with how intelligent.
They you know, and if people are falling in love with gar Also, patron Terry Goss wants to know, I've seen gar in aquaria all my life. Is this a suitable habitat? It seems too small? But they're pond lakefish. No also points Terry for saying aquaria and not aquariums. I know you can say both, but aquaria just is like, ooh, that is the plural, isn't it?
So?
Pet Gar Ken it. You obviously are a gar expert, so you're making it work and they're living the life. But if someone wanted to have a pet gar, is it a hard thing to do?
Yeah, I would say there's certain things that make them easy to keep because they breathe air, so they're you know, very you know, robust fish. They're very durable fish, and they can easily be trained to eat nonline food like frozen trip. But they get big. That's that's the biggest In most cases, that's the only thing. So as these fish yet big. I've got lab space for them, We've got ponds they can go into, you've got other homes. Having raised gars for twenty years, I can tell you
we start them off in a small tank. We move in a bigger tank. Moved a little bit bigger tank. But yeah, for the average aquarium hobbyist or fish keeper, not exactly ideal unless you have plans for a pond or some sort of larger housing for them, larger aquaria if you.
Will, aquaria. Yes. Claire Meyer has kind of a technical question here, wants to know what happens if you boop a gar snow.
That's a good question. You can do it, but I would not advise it. They move at lightning speed with their jaws. It's usually side to side, so I wouldn't recommend it. They might open their mouth, they might keep it closed. You just never know. I would keep your face clear of a gar snow if there's a paine and glass in between.
The Earl of Gramlican had the same questions, and now they both know. But Earl of Gramlekin also asks. Wikipedia says they have green bones.
What is this?
Is that true?
So they yes and no on it being true. That's a common name issue. So there's a fish called a garfish mainly around the Indo Pacific, the Pacific Ocean and other places too. It's the larger group called needlefishes or ballaniformes. They have green bone, so not gars like lepisastenic, so these gars don't have green bones. But if you go to Australia where they call them garfish, it's the type of needlefish they have green bones.
So yes, a case of mistaken identity. That other garfish is the gar pike or the sea needle, and their bones are in fact green because of a bile substance called biliverdin, which is also what turns some bruises a remarkable shade of avocado.
Okay, so Julia Flood and Hannaquist had similar questions. Julia says, I only just googled what a gar is, and my only question is what did I do to deserve this nightmare fish? And why does nature hate me? Personally? And Hannah Quist wants to know why are they so fricking cute? So where do you fall on the looking at gar? I'm going to guess you're more on the Hannah, less on the Julia.
Yeah, you know, I just think they look cool no matter what. But what I do tell people is, and you can see this now that there is gar twitter out there, so there's a lot of pictures that search for it. A lot of the pictures you see with gar from the side view, you see those teeth and you see that long snout. They look really fearsome. I would challenge people to turn them so they're looking at you head on, and they look like the dirtiest fish
you've ever seen, Like blobfish. Doesn't look like a blobfish, right, And they brought them up from the depths and they look all weird like that. But a gar when you look at them head on, they look that dirty and stuff.
Okay, it was not easy to find a head on photo, as googling gar head on, it'll get you a lot of pictures of just plain gar heads before they were decapitated. But I finally found a quarterer shot and y'all that overbite, those big unblinking eyes, that cute cluelessness.
This thing one belongs in a Simpsons episode.
So you know, maybe it looks cut, maybe it looks fearsome, and that sort of things. So I think, as with anything, it's a matter of perspective. They're valuable predators to native ecosystems. They're useful even now in biomedical research we're finding and so they've got a lot of use for us, but also use in nature. So you know, fearsome or you know, cute. I think they're they're valuable and cool fish. But I challenge them to do the lateral look and the head on look, and you'll see both sides.
Allegra Sunstorm wants to know, is the plural gar or gars embarrassing?
The answer the question is yes, my advisor, I went back and forth with this when I was in grad school, so technically, back then American Fishery Society, who sets a lot of those rules for fish, said that the plural of gar is gars. But now they change the rules. Say you know what, it's whatever you feel like. So gar can be plural. Gars can be plural. It can be a bunch of different species of gars and be multiple,
you know, the same species gargars. That's whatever you're feeling like that particular day.
Gars.
Some call them ugly trash fish, river monsters, but we call them ancient, patient, boopable, long boy.
Sweetie peaties. Tam Tran wants to know can guars crawl on land?
Short answer is no, they can't crawl on land, but they can survive on land, probably for you know, at least a couple of hours. There's stories myself, including when I was in grad school. A guar jumps out of a tank. It can survive for a long time out of the out of the water. If they're kept bet they can survive for you know, an even longer period of time. They're pretty durable, so they can survive on land, but they're not they're not going anywhere.
I like to think of someone in a prehistoric landscape telling a gar, you're perfect never change, and the gar was like, Okay, gyler l Prim wants to know. Do they shed their scales?
They do not. Some fish, it's easy for the scales to kind of come off, and they very quickly regrow them. Gars it's it's interline sort of chain mail. So they don't tend to shed them. But if they are damaged, they will grow back. Guars will regenerate their fins. They'll regenerate like the bases of their fins. They're really just you know, I wouldn't say quite indestructible, but they're they're pretty cool on what they can do and what they can survive.
They very tough. That's but Clerk's heard a rumor that are are bulletproof. Is that even remotely true?
Maybe the thought is that small caliber weapons do deflect off of them, so maybe at the right angle. That's one of my advisors that told me back in the day they used to use a sort of a form of body armor, and so I don't know if that was straight up bulletproof. But while they're on the fish, I have heard anecdotal stories about them being resistant to
small caliber weapons. So maybe not bulletproof. But again, like I said, the engineers are looking at those scales and that sort of those biological properties as sort of a bioinspired armor. So you know, if there's there's something.
There, shout out all the biomimicry experts out there, including listener Christa Avanpado of New York Special hugs to her right now as she tells cancer what's what?
Sam Kilgore has a great question, have you ever kissed one on the snoop?
You know, I'm trying to think, maybe not on the snoop, Maybe you know, maybe just on the cheek, just on the cheek. So probably as close as I.
Com it's pretty close. It's snoot adjacent.
Yeah, yeah, okay, so maybe he has not kissed one on the snoot. But as someone who loves nothing more than reuniting with lost treasures, I had to ask did he ever find that Ranger Rick article? And he said he spent a long time looking for this obscure, backdated magazine that changed his life.
I mean, it was this image he.
Saw cut a watery path to his life's work, to his bride, to his reign as the.
King of fish Puns. And he searched in vain.
Like rapidously go through my search online, my parents search for them, my parents, my friends search for them. And it wasn't until I tweeted at Ranger Rick one day and said, look, Ranger Rick got me into Gars back in the day. And the next morning when I woke up, they said, you know, is this the issue and everything like that. So they sent me that picture and I
was like, oh my gosh. They sent me a copy of the article and I got, you know, in touch with them, and yeah, this year I was able to write sort of my own you know article if you will, in Ranger Rick. So it was kind of a cool full circle story with that.
What was it like when you saw that picture again after not having seen it for so long? Was it just as he remembered it?
Yeah, I mean the turtles were there, like it was just like it was just it was in my head. It was actually trying to eat this wood ducks. It was like the original birds versus Fish for me too. So I mean it was like I had it in my head, but I had not seen it for you know, twenty some years, and it turned out it was from a nineteen eighty three issue too, so I'm not that old from nineteen eighty three to be when I was a kid. But that shows how old those issues were,
and I looked it up on Wikipedia. Range Rick still has a big circulation with those back issues. Like pole donate them to libraries and other places, so I'd encourage people to do the same, because you never know who's going to see those and you know, get interested on their own with you know who knows what out of.
Major If you're sitting next to a stack of vintage Ranger Rick issues and screaming at me to just tell you the date, it was April nineteen eighty three, pages thirty eight and thirty nine. And yes, of course I will post this image on the ologies Instagram, and if anyone knows the article's author, Joanne Chipwood, say hello. She became a hospice nurse and has written several books on the topic, including My Gift Myself, a step by step guide to becoming a hospice volunteer. She also wrote a
book titled A Horse called Mayonnaise. So thank you, Joanne. We all love Gars and Ranger Rick because of you and horses and to a lesser extent, Mayonnaise.
It's been cool being involved with range dirics I've gotten to know the editors and we're going to be working on some other stories and stuff, so to me, it's really like an opportunity to do some science communication back in that direction. But yeah, I've got the actual issue hanging in my and everything. It's there. I copied it, I sort it everywhere so would never get lost in the two So it's not going anywhere.
You're gonna have to send me a picture of that so that I can well put it up on the Instagram. It's interesting how those memories can really like ignite something where you just have such such an affinity or such an obsession with that kind of creature at that moment. So I love when that happens. Okay, but among all of your love for gar Zeh, there must be something that sucks, Like what about your research or your life as a garologist is just the worst?
Yeah, I would say, you know, it's probably a conservationist dilemma too, depending on what you're studying. But Gars have this reputation. We've tried to improve it over the years. Like there's a lot of other people involved with this. Matt Miller from Nature Conservancy, after at Leastarr and Nickel state that are really pushing gar research showing that they have value, that they're important, you know, components and ecosis. So that's something that's extremely important. I try to do that.
But you know, there isn't maybe a week that goes byword. There isn't some sort of bow fishing pictures or article that comes out where people are just shooting guards. There's piles of dead fish because people don't see value in them, and so they'll put them into dumpsters, they get dumped into landfills or turn into fertilizer, killed by the hundreds. There was actually a thing called an electric guard destroyer that used to be used decades ago because people thought
that they were just trash fish. They were bad for the environment. So we try to improve that. But I think, you know, waking up to that. But I think you know, as environmentalists conservationists, it's an uphill battle no matter what we do. But we I think it's just important that we keep doing what we're doing. So I'd say, if anything sucked, it's that. But it also keeps me.
Going, oh, ps, if you need to know what an electric guard destroyer vessel from the nineteen thirties looks like, just imagine a barge equipped with state of the art for then electricity controlled the waters mercilessly targeting Gar and is essentially the death Star helmed by garth Rader. That does not deserve a twinkle. Don't let me have it.
That you want to keep fighting for gar for them to be appreciated, Yes, for.
Sure, so you know, showing that they're valuable members of the ecosystem. They have value to humans as far as ecosystem services. And like I said, there's new research where we're learning more about the human genome through gar species now because of their genome organization. So it's not just what they're doing out in the values for us, it's what they can do at a genomic level too.
There is there something genomically similar like to humans in a way that's surprising.
There is. So a good friend and colleague of mind, doctor Ingo Brosch, He sequenced the spotted guar genome and what they found is that the gar genome is organized more closely to the human and you know, other tetrapod genome than it is to teleos fish, which are considered are more modern fish. So there's a little fish called the zebra fish which is sort of our aquatic labrat, used in all kinds of genetic and genomics research, but it's got some differences that make it hard to compare
back to the human genome. Even though it's like a labrat, we use it to compare it to other organisms, right, because the gar can serve as a go between. We can compare the human to the GAR genome and the guarding home to the zebra fish genome, and it helps us understand more about the human to zebra fish comparison. And therefore it's sort of like this extra translator, sort
of in a Rosetta stone or a bridge. So genomically we can now learn more about the evolution development of human disease by you know, with some help from the GAR. So using this sort of primitive fish is actually helping us literally too. I don't think it'll ever replace zebrafish, but I mean they're way cooler than zebrafish. Now the zebra fish people are going to have me, but I think it works hand in hand. So I think it works alongside zebrafish, along fruit flies, alongside a lot of
other organisms. But now we've got this once heated organism that actually has some additional utility, which is great. They have intrinsic value on their own, but I you know, it helps that, you know, we can see some additional value.
And between their boopable snoots and their dirty head on look, and they're like amazing ability to survive. There's obviously a lot to love about a gar. But what is it that you just love the most?
Oh my gosh, you know, I feel like I've got to it's I've got to do sort of a kapa. It's like, it's it's the big picture, I think, you know, I think just the look of them, Like, you know, I think aligators and crocodiles are cool, but they're this fish that has these long jaws. It's this it's a swimming dinosaur. Of It's just this sort of relative of ancient times that is still alive today. So that's sort
of primitive look. Overall. I think I just think they're awesome, and so that's what makes me want to just share about them to everybody else.
What are your plans in terms of science communication for guars? Do you want to write like ten books about gar? Our pitch a feature about gars? What is your ultimate dream?
Oh my gosh, you know, books, books, would be great. I think, you know, the range Rick article to me was the publication I'm most proud of, Like that's going up on my wall too, But to me, that's like, you know, probably gonna have a wider reach than anything
I put into scientific paper and everything. But also we came down to Nickels State here in Thibodeau, Louisiana, and I started GAR Lab, and so I think it's training future scientists and using the platform on social media and also as a professional to you know, spread the word of gar if you will, and so show that you know, they're valuable for all these reasons. And they're really cool animals.
I think they show that diversity is important. So you need even the creatures that look like this that might look a little bit fearsome, maybe a little too slimy, maybe they got poisonous eggs, but they're important parts of biodiversity, and we need biodiversity in order to function as an ecosystem, as a planet.
If you had one tip to give someone who is getting into science communication, what do you think that would be? Because you're so good at.
It, I you know, I've learned from others, and so I would say learn from others that have come before you, But don't try to replicate or be what anyone else is. There's already you know, one of my favorite episodes of yours was the Bill and I episode. There's already a David Attenborough. There's already a Bill and I out there. Don't try to be them. Stick with your what you're doing, but be work on the techniques to share that and to show how that has a value, and you can
add your own diversity to that. I would be you know, we're miss fight and say, you know, I didn't see people like me in nature programs or in the fields that I'm in, but now I feel like this is an opportunity to do that moving forward.
This is such good advice. I just I hold you in such high regard and I really see where I so appreciate you doing this, and I'm so glad we didn't never hurt Kane Today.
Me too, I'm still looking out the window. It's still their mind to.
So ask smart people fishy questions, because you know what, there have been bulletproof toothy snoop nosed ancient babies gliding under the water for longer than the dinosaurs. Just when you think the drugs have worn off, you realize that
life on Earth is just a kaleidoscope of weird. So to get Morgar and some really great sodcom in your life, you can follow it on Twitter at Solomon R. David and on Instagram Solomon dot r dot David and his website is Solomon David dot net and there are links to all of those in the show notes, as well as to arranger Rick and the sponsors of the show. You can put Ologies merch on your actual body, war
walls or friend's body at ologiesmarch dot com. Thank you Shannenfelds and Bondi Dutch of the podcast You are that for managing merch. Thank you Aaron Talbert for admitting in the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Thank you Emily White and all of the Ologies podcast transcribers for making sure that transcripts are available for deaf and hard of hearing folks.
Those are available for free to anyone that wants them on our website, and there's a link in the show notes Caleb patten Bleep's episode so that they are a kid and your grandpa safe and those are at the same link. Thank you Noel Dilworth who schedules theologists, and thank you to co quarantiner Jarrett Sleeper for assisted editing, and of course to all around great guy Steven Ray Find Morris, lead editor.
Who puts all the pieces together each week.
Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. He is in a band called Islands. You can follow me at ali Ward with one L say hello ologies is at ologies, at Twitter.
At Instagram. I forgot to say that earlier. If you listen to the end, you get a secret.
And this week I feel that I should tell you that Jarrett sometimes pretends to be Jack White riffing garage rock to just ordinary situations. And about six months ago I asked him if I had a spider bite on my ass, And this week he got an iPad with garage band and like fifteen minutes later he had created this opus which will forever haunt and delight us all joy.
Thank you.
Packidermatology, homeology or do zoology, lithology, unology, meteorology, patology, technology, seriology.
Semology to the chime.
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