From the Vault: Jumping Fish

episodes that have been inspired by vacations. We would go out into the world, we relax a little bit, we learned something, and then we come back and we want a podcast on it. And this in this case, I said, a less podcast about jumping fish. Trust me, it's more interesting than it sounds, and it is. We never end up doing like the science of Margarita's No, wait a minute, I think maybe you went on vacation and then we

did the science of cocktails. We did right, well, um, I don't know if that was vacation related, but it was. It was certainly based on interest in cocktails. Well, that was a Christmas gift inspired when I received books about cocktails for Christmas, and then I was like, hey, let's do an episode on this. Well, the jumping Fish episode turned out to be a lot more interesting of a topic than I might have expected going in, So I thought this one was a lot of fun and we

are happy to bring it back to you. This originally aired Thursday, July sixteen, and here it is again for your listening pleasure. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. So, Robert, I know that recently you were on vacation somewhere. I was, Yeah, I went down to Florida with the family, and on the way back up we stopped at this place called Wakola Springs. Cooling

Springs State Park in Florida near Tallahassee. Ended up just being really delightful. What's this place like? Basically, what you have here is just an enormous spring, Okay, like a

geological spring. Water coming out of the ground. Yeah, water coming out of the ground, water coming out of just enormous caverns that are under the water here, really clear water and it maintains a constant temperature of around sixty nine or seventy degrees so when winter comes it's a haven for manatees, and especially manatees, but other creatures too that that did want that constant temperature. Um. Interestingly enough, they filmed a few scenes from the creature from the

from the Black Lagoon there, Yeah, particularly the creatures layer. Uh. You get to pass by that if you take these boat tours uh, and that's really the main reason. Ago. You can swim there, but you can, but you get to go in these these really cool boat tours where you get to see all of these crazy estuary um uh species doing their thing, all the diving birds, gators, gators laying in the sun by the dozens, get to see manatees, and you also get to see these uh

these mullets, the fish mullet, not the hairstyle. You probably saw some of those. Yeah, I think I did see see a traditional um hairstyle mullet here there, But but yeah, these are the fish and they're just leaping out of the water. It's like it's you look around, you expect to see like a Disney princess waiting around like that's how active the wildlife is here. And uh, but but it really makes you think, like, why are these creatures,

why of these fish jumping out of the water. If you're like me and you didn't have a lot of preconceived notions, or you hadn't researched it before, you might think, oh, well, there's all sorts of animals around here, they're gators in the water. They're probably jumping out of the water to escape predators. Right, Yeah, that makes pretty easy sense. A lot of the maneuvering you'd see and the fish, especially a prey species, would be fleeing behavior. And yet it

turns out there's more to it than that. And uh, not only with the with mullets, but with other species of ish as well. And that's the reason we're having this episode discuss some of the mystery, some of the theories, uh, some of the at times myths surrounding leaping fish, fish that actually throw themselves out of the water, out of their their habitat, their aquatic habitat, into this strange, alien world of gases and vapors. Yeah, when you think about it,

it is so weird. Um, it's hard for us to imagine what it's like crossing this boundary between worlds from the water up into the land of gas into the atmosphere. Because it's not exactly like a terrestrial animal diving into the water, because when you jump out of the water, the water is your natural environment. Gravity is always going to be pulling you back down into this watery world. Plus there's just so much more going on underwater than

there is going on in the air. I mean, on the land is one thing, but you know, think about what most of the air above the water is like. It's just it's a void. Under the water is another ecosystem. Leaping into the air is almost as if terrestrial animals could briefly leap into outer space. Yeah, or at least me, It makes me think of the part in Phantasm where they go through like the stargate into the barren world

with the dwarves or hauling stuff around. It is like it's like zipping out of your world into another and then coming back into your your world, perhaps in a different location, making it kind of kind of like that teleport that the raiding character does in the first couple of Mortal Kombat games. You know, it's great, Yeah, what does he say? When he teleports or does he have one? Um? I have something he says when he does the Superman, but I don't remember if he says anything when he teleports.

But maybe he should. He just grins and as lightning come out of his eyes. What he should do? I hope someday somebody goes back to the first Mortal Kombat game and dubs in Christopher Lambert's lines from the movie. Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot that he played the first one. But back to leaping fish. Yeah, So, Robert, knowing your inquisitive nature, I bet you asked somebody at

the park about the mullet jumping behavior, didn't you. I did, and the park ranger was very insightful and all this and mentioned that they're a handful of theories here, okay, um, and the idea that they're escaping predators is not one of them. So one is that they may jump to dislodge parasites, and certainly, aquatic life is full of many strange parasite removal strategies, including allowing cleaner organisms to crawl into your body? Right? Um? Wait, what allowing cleaner you've seen?

I see you mean? Um, an organism that does cleaning, not a relatively cleaner organisms, no, no no, no, yeah, I'm talking like allowing a small shrimp to climb into your gills or your mouth in order to eat these things. Um, even at times, even allowing creatures from the air to come down and feast on your parasites. I believe it's the sunfish that does that allows all of certain birds

to help remove its parasites. That's fantastic. Now can you imagine if every time we got like a guinea worm or something like that, we could just leap into outer space to try. Well, that sounds kind of ridiculous and and indeed that's go one of the criticisms against this theory um broadly speaking concerning fish, because you see that thrown out a lot with with jumping fish. Oh, it's

a parasite removal strategy. But critics of this theory will point out that, hey, parasites, once they get in you, they have ways of lodging themselves where they want to be, just merely that the frantic leaping through the air is not going to dislodge them. Well, then what are the

other theories? Well, the crazier theory and this is one that I find really interesting is that mullets spend a lot of their time in waters that are low and dissolved oxygen, and so they may exit the water in order to clear their gills and expose themselves to higher levels of oxygen. So that that really blew my mind the idea that essentially the fish is coming out of the water to breathe and then returned. But fish breathe,

I know, but but it's this is one of the theories. Um. They also may jump during spawning season to break over their eggs acts in preparation for the spawn, and marine biologist Dr Grant Gilmore thinks it may come down to their sometimes dark habitats. They may jump in these cases to let others in the school know where they are, so in this case it would be a form of communication or social signaling, which comes up later in this episode with some of the other jumping fish, we talk

about some of the more ferocious ones. Alright, so for the rest of this episode, we're gonna be looking at some of these some of the most interesting fish jumping behaviors around the world. And I want to say that I found this topic way more interesting than I expected to. Yeah, first, I was like Okay, what is there to say about fish jumping? They jump? But but fish jumping can be very strange, can be a danger, can be a nuisance,

can be very money. Uh, and the reasons why they do it are more mysterious in some cases than I would have guessed. But okay, so I guess we should start broadly. What do we know about in general why fish jump? Well, oh, and start one more thing, I should say, we should specify you all out there. You know the difference between a fish and a mammal. So you've seen dolphins jump playing in the waves or at a dolphin show, or uh, maybe just playing echo of

the dolphin. We're not talking about mammals today. This is gonna be a fish focused episode. Yeah. I mean there's even a gliding squid that propels itself out of the ocean by shooting out a jet of water at high a high pressure water jet. We're not gonna get into that either. Well, if there's enough demand, will save other

leaping um sea life for other episodes. But yeah, I think a good place to start is just to sort of go back to this idea that okay, fish jump out of the water to escape predators and acknowledge that yes, this actually is a strategy with some creatures, for instance, killie fish. Now they're roughly one thousand, two hundred and seventy different species of killy fish, and most are fully

aquatic with no obvious morphological specializations for terrestrial locomotion. Locomotion individuals from several different species have been observed moving across land though via a tail flip behavior that generates a terrestrial jump. But wait a minute, so this isn't just jumping into the air. This is jumping onto a dry land surface. Yeah, it's essentially it's getting due to too dangerous in the water, I gotta jump out and and then flop back in. And they do. They do this

to escape predators or occasionally apparently pour water conditions. Okay, so in our outer space analogy, this is more like, instead of just briefly leaping into outer space, if things got really hairy wherever you were, you could jump onto the moon for a minute and then jump back down somewhere on Earth. Yeah, or taking like you know, a proposed space tourism flight that just sends you into low

orbit and then brings you back down. Huh, be that kind of thing I think, uh, but indeed kind of like Raiden's teleport where he's blinking out of this world, I guess going to some godland and then coming back

into the picture somewhere else. And this is interesting because too, because that the aquatic amphibious distinction is a key because it's one thing for saying, air breathing walking catfish for mud skippers or lungfish to behave in this baby this way because they've taken things to the next level, right bordering on you know, creature from the Black Lagoon or bloodwaters of doctor Z territory. But aquatic fish that just

seems crazy, right, Um? So yeah, the tail flip flings him out of the water through the air several body lengths sometimes out of the water and onto the bank, and then they have to flip to get back in. Sounds dangerous though, I mean, if you you're a fish, you flip out of the water and then you rapidly twist your body around to try to flip back into

the water. I mean, you've only got a very limited amount of time, they're right, right, yeah, because if you because the big risks here are that you're going to you're gonna you could dry out or gets sixty eight. So and and you know, of course also banking on the idea that there are no um terrestrial predators on the water bank. So that's the killie fish. Yeah, what else do we have take us to the next the next level here with our leaping aquatic creatures. Well, I

want to talk Robert about an Asian carponado. Oh sounds good, okay, so stop me. If you've seen this video, this YouTube video before, You've got two passengers sitting in a boat there in twin seats, facing off the stern of a fishing boat with an outboard motor. Is this guy father to no? No, this is a grainy YouTube, okaysing to set to some slick new metal riffs. Now, the boat appears to be sitting in like a river or a lake.

It's opaque fresh water, and each of the two passengers sitting facing off the back of the boat are holding a compound hunting bow with a knocked arrow, and the driver then throttles up the engine. The boat starts to move in these lines of why churning wake peel out the back of the boat and you can see the

waves coming out. And as this happens, dozens of fish or maybe hundreds of fish begin to leap out of the water into the air by the looks of it, sometimes flying above the heads of the passengers and they arc over the boat. Sometimes they fly right into somebody's neck and slap them on the face if fish hits you in the back or it lands flopping in the driver's lap, And as you would expect based on the setup, the passengers try to shoot the fish with their arrows

as they leap through the air. And other similar videos you might scratch the bow and arrow and feature just nets people trying to catch the fish with nets or shooting at them with shotguns, trying to hit him with baseball bats or maybe a modified baseball bat with nails in it, uh pitchforks, et cetera. I might add that in the very first video I watched that I mentioned, the one with the compound bow, it was sort of this fish human collision super cut with with the new

metal background mu zick. It looks pretty dangerous, especially because there are sometimes other boats in the water down range of the bow fishers. So we are not recommending this behavior. Yeah, it sounds sounds a bit reckless, but what's going on here? Why why are these hundreds of fish flying through the air to be shot of? I need a better metaphor than like fish in a barrel, like like fish in

outer space. Uh. Well, the video identifies these very unfortunate vaulting fish as Asian carp, and I can't confirm the identification through all the graininess. But but this would make sense because some species of so called Asian carp are known for this bizarre frenzy jumping behavior in the presence of boats. So what are Asian carpet? Asian carp is not one species, but it's a common group name applied to several species of carp native to East and Southeast Asia,

including waterways of Siberia, China, and Vietnam. And these species would be bighead carp, black carp, grass carp, and silver carp. So carp belonged to the freshwater fish family known as Cyprinids, and before the Asian carp were introduced a couple of decades ago, there there were already carp in North America

that were considered kind of a benign nuisance species. But several species now known as Asian carp were introduced the United States in the nineteen sixties and seventies, and originally they were contained. They were contained in southern aquaculture and sewage treatment enclosures, I think in Arkansas. Originally I saw and so the idea was that these imported carp would help control contaminants in these areas. For example, they'd swim around and eat algae out of ponds that were being

used as fish farms, like for catfish farming. But flooding events, of course, often connect waters that are not apparently connected, and so flooding allowed these non native species to escape their farms and enclosures and spread into natural waterways around the Mississippi Watershed, and now they're all over the place. They're spread all over freshwater fisheries in the Midwest and beyond there in the Mississippi, they're in the Illinois River.

And a lot of people are worried about these and consider them UH an invasive species since they can represent a threat to native wildlife. They reproduce quickly, they grow quickly, they supposedly degrade the quality of aquatic environments, and they tend to outcompete other fish UH and I've seen estimates that they can some of these species consume about twenty of their own body weight every day, but they don't

necessarily prey on other fish. Instead, they're mostly plankton and algae feeders, which still is a big problem because that's the bottom of the food chain, right, that's what everything has to eat in order to work its way up the food chain and get that energy to survive. So they're causing problems for every organism everywhere along the line.

So why do they jump, Well, the big head carp in the silver carp can both jump, but it's the silver carp in particular that's just notorious for frequent lee, having these frenzies where they leap out of the water all over the place. And the commonly accepted explanation for why they do it is pretty simple. It's the main one that came to your mind when you were thinking

about the mullet. First. It's that they're scared. They're leaping out of the water as an escape mechanism, triggered by a threatening stimulus like the roar of a boat motor. So somebody revs up their engine, they get their their arrows knocked, and the fish here that sound and they start leaping all over the place. And once one starts leaping, all of them start leaping. So that sounds like a

pretty funny situation. And I will admit seeing these images of fish just flapping all over the place through the air, slapping people in the back of the head, leaving a big, slimy streak across somebody's like chin and throw because they slap up under there. It sounds funny, but when you think about what it's actually like to be in the

middle of it, it can get kind of scary. Because the big head and silver carp were known to jump about three meters or about feet vertically out of the water about six meters or twenty feet horizontally across the surface. Uh silver carp tend to weigh up to about twenty pounds. Big head carp commonly wigh up about twice that, but in rare cases, these fish can reportedly grow very large, up to around a hundred pounds. So think of like a hundred pound object flying at you out of the water,

especially if you're moving at a rapid speed. Also, just do the quick new tony in physics in your head. That can be a heavy impact. Now. I found one survey of people who used the Illinois River in two thousand ten and two thousand eleven. And it was a small sample size, so don't read too much into this, but it found this was hilarious to me. Sixty five of residents from these Illinois River sites who used the

river had seen Asian carp jump. Okay, but of those people who had seen a carp jump, almost three quarters of them had been hit by a car um And so if you've seen a carp jump, chances are a carp has slim ammed into you. Nine percent of them sustained injuries and reported uh sustained watercraft damage from the Asian carp. And there's just one example I want to give of the kinds of injuries these things can cause.

I found a kt v I local news story from St. Louis from last year August, and it tells the story of this guy named Jordan Fiedler who got his face messed up real bad by some Asian carp while inner tubing along a channel in the Mississippi. So, according to the story, his father was driving the boat and he was riding in an inner tube behind it, and then the fish start leap and they jump up all over the place, and one hits him in the face and a quote he gave his quote, I knew something was wrong.

I felt my nose and it was way over here. So uh, the impact fractured his nose, It dented his forehead, shattered bones in his eye sockets and above his eyebrow. Uh, and he had to undergo a three and a half hour surgery to install a piece of mesh and cruise to fix the shape of his skull. So this is no small injury. This is This is a devastating fish impact. If nobody has made a Jaws style movie about carp yet, about the leaping carp I think they should. This is

the real Sharknado, except it's not a shark. This is Carponado. Well hopefully, I'm really hoping someone will take this whole episode as inspiration and maybe it'll be an overall just jumping fish horror movie. All the various examples we throw out here, it's the fish version of the birds. Maybe, yeah, the fishes. Uh, the fish. Weirdly, though as mundane as Carpon may seem, they actually also have a mythological significance. I bet you didn't think that we'd wrap some some

mythology into this episode. But it's I really yeah, I didn't even think about it, and normally I'm I'm all about finding it. I didn't even think to look. Well, apparently the jumping ability of carp has a cultural and

slight mythological significance in Chinese tradition. So there's a story in Chinese mythology of carp swimming upstream and that if a carp swimming upstream is able to jump over a waterfall that's known as the dragon gate, that carp will transform into a dragon, and with that comes all of

the symbolic uplift that applies. Right, you know, the dragon is a is a majestic regal creature associated with power and with with grandeur and and with the the the imperial authority basically and flight, yes, and fly there you go. So apparently the expression of quote a carp that jumps over the dragon gate commonly signifies a person who accomplishes some feet that leads to like a sudden improvement in life status, such as passing exams at university or acquiring

some coveted government position. It's like if you get a major life upgrade due to some some achievement of yours. You're a carp who has jumped the dragon gate and hopefully not smashed anybody's face on the way. Alright, what everyone, keep that nith in mind, because I feel like we're going to get back to some of these ideas with

some of our later examples. We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna look at salmon, We're gonna look at swordfish, we're gonna look at sturgeons, and ultimately the flying fish itself. All right, we're back. Okay. So before the break, we were talking about the mythological symbology of carp swimming upstream trying to leap over that waterfall and turn into a mighty dragon. But of course carp are not the only fish that struggle mightily to

progress upstream against the current, even leaping over rapids and waterfalls. Yeah. Indeed, what is one of the most iconic images of leaping fish, like a perfect like nature documentary image. It's the salmon. It's the salmon going up stream to spawn, leaping over the rapids, and a bear just grabbing that, you know what I mean. Yeah, indeed, that's the bare version of the people trying to hit a carp with a baseball bat with nails in it. It's just the bear's claws

wiping in the same amount as it flies over the rapids. Yeah, this is uh so, so let's break down exactly what's happening here, um, because it's it's pretty amazing. It's easy to take it for granted when you've seen it so many times. But salmon has been their early lives in freshwater rivers, and then they swim out to sea to the salt water to feed and grow. But when spawning time comes, they engage in what we cause salmon run

and what grizzly bears of course called like a seafood buffet, right. Uh. They so the fish travel upstream to their natal spawning grounds, they spawn, and then they die, and then the nutrients in their bodies washed downstream to the estuaries. So it's you know, it's it's kind of an elegant um practice here, but making it upstream is quite a journey, especially when you're having to deal with rapids and waterfalls. Um, you know,

no dragon gates, but still some significant challenges there. Uh. And so they leap out of the water, they jump sometimes up to twelve ft or three point six five meters. Now not only they have to contend not only the bears, but also man. Humans have have shown a tremendous ability, of course, to alter natural waterways, to install dams, bridges, what have you. Oh, yeah, this is actually figured into people trying to control the spread of carp like silver carp,

the jumping carp in American waterways. So you've got these carp moving slowly upstream, and to prevent them from spreading even further, some people have said, well, we need to construct barriers of some kind, But these have to be some pretty tall barriers, right because these things can you know, jump tin tin feet high and twenty feet long, So that would have to be a serious barrier to prevent the carp from progressing. Yeah, and then what do you

do about other creatures that have a natural right? Are you gonna install like a border guard to keep the carp out but make sure the right creatures moved through. I don't know, it's tough. I saw one solution that was literally an electrified fence in the water, where people installed little devices that put electrical current in the river to prevent the carp from swimming by. Well, you know with the with the salmon in the case of dams

and other structures. Uh, they actually we actually sometimes create the fish ladders or fish ways to help them out, and these these can be quite interesting because sometimes they essentially look like nothing more than a series of buckets they can splash and jump in and out of to actually make it over whatever the obstacle is. Yeah, a

watery staircase sorts. But it's a cool idea because because as as we pointed out, like, not only is it important for the for the salmon to actually reach their destination, but it actually, you know, their ultimate death up there ends up having playing an important role in the overall ecology of the river. Isn't this also why the salmon cannon was invented. Yes, I believe it was to help help the salmon get upstream. I don't remember whatever became

of that. Yeah, I don't know if that became a standard or if that was just kind of a flash in the pan Alright, So one thing that comes to my mind is that, of course a carp can jump out of the water hit you in the face, and that can cause some injury. But there are also fish much bigger than carp that do jump, that's right, and

that some of them jump with tremendous speed. Um. I'm thinking, of course about the mighty swordfish, which is uh, it's it's a scientific name is zay FEUs gladius, which basically is just the word sword repeated in two different languages. So like, basically, we're so excited about swordfish looking like a human murder weapon that we just call them sword sword. It's like a little kid. Yeah. And of course they're just uh, it's a it's basically just a a bill.

They are bill fish. There there are other billfish with with bills that resemble swords. Others resemble bills. Sometimes they look like saws. Uh. They're a number of different species. Um. And interestingly, enough evidence seems to support the theory that the pointy end is more about speed than anything. So it's not a weapon. It's more of an aerodynamic design. Right.

There's actually a weak point in the skull where the sword meets the skull, and it prevents them from being a proper javelin, like if they if they were to hit something too great a speed, it would just snap. And the weak point is due to a lubricating gland

that reduces drag and increases speed. Like it basically pumps out oil um it like spreads out through vessels, pumps out this this lubricant that lubricates the sword and the whole in the thing's whole head that allows it to just sort of slip through the water a little bit faster.

So before the swordfish races, they're sitting there looping up their swords essentially and there you know, I think there are still some arguments that it may to certain degrees have you know, have have some sort of defensive capability as well, especially if you're talking about a slashing as opposed to a full on like um uh, you know,

ramming speed type of a stabbing maneuver. There might be a second area use or yeah, sort of you use it in a pinch, yeah, because it's certainly it's certainly is a it certainly can be dangerous, as we'll discuss here. But the speeds the big thing and and indeed sword of fish are generally ranked like the third fastest fish. They're only surpassed by the black marlin and the sailfish,

both of which are are other types of billfish swordfish. Um. The estimates vary on all these and people will get into fights over exact speeds, but generally you're looking at the black marlin. It clocked around possibly eighty miles per hour away. Yeah, ye kilometers per hour. Uh, that's like twice as fast as your average boat can go. Yeah. But but then again, these are these a creatures that are living in the open water. They they're dealing with with a lot of the vast distances, so they have

room to build up that speed. Um, sailfish sixty nine miles per hour ten and the swordfish comes in at a You know, I'm more concerned of sixty miles per hour kilometers per hour. But again, people will argue back and forth on these stats. No, that's still amazingly fast considering the water. I mean, when you think about moving through water, all the friction that's that's there, I mean, that's crazy. And they've evolved to deal with that friction about it just about as well as any sea animal

is going to manage. Of course, they're also known to use that intense speed to hurl themselves completely out of the water. Now why one of the one of the things about swordfish in particulars that they're rare creatures they're elusive creatures and that they don't do well in captivity, so it's it's hard to really study them in their ways.

But they are susceptible, like everything else, to parasites. So there is a theory that they may be trying to dislodge parasites, uh in particular parasites um in particular that the paper I was looking at mentioned remoras, which are of course sucker fish that feed on other parents that feed on ectoparasites. So essentially these things might be bothering them at the very least, they're they're they're screwing with

their streamlined body right there. They're messing up their speed potentially, So perhaps they're jumping out trying to dislodge those remoras, or if they have a fisherman's like a sports fisherman's hook in them, well that's something they are probably trying to dislodge as well. Yeah, and that's certainly the iconic scene, right somebody gets a sword fish on the hook and it's leaping out of the water. Yeah. Well, I mean

you can see that at a much lower level. Just imagine you've probably seen footage of a bass fisher or something like that. With a bass on the line and it jumps out of the water. Yeah, okay, Well, I know the question on everybody's mind here. Has anybody ever been impaled by a swordfish by the sword the sword sword? Yes, indeed they have. Um, Now it's it's a rare occurrence, just as these human interactions with swordfish are already kind of a rare thing. Right, Um, you know, people fish

for them, but still they're elusive. So this isn't something to get really worked up about, right, You're you're probably gonna be putting yourself in the position to to have the outside chance of this occurring. But as of two thousand seven, there were no recorded attacks. And I put that in quotes because these are not creatures that eat humans or would have seemed seemingly attack humans. Any incidents

seemed to have been more or less accidental. But as of two thousand seven, there were no no recorded attacks that it actually resulted in death, though the paper in question swordfish attack death by penetrating head injury, did outline one such incident. And then in two thousand fifteen, a deep sea fishing charter captain in Hawaii was fatally stabbed in the chest by one while trying to capture it

with a spear gun. So basically it thrashed around after the spear hit the fish, and then it managed to skewer him in the chest and killed him. So it's a rare occurrence. But with a with a sword like that, with a large fish flopping around, uh, jumping out of the water, if you're close to it, yes, you run the risk of being run through, right, But even in this one incident mentioned here, it sounds like this guy was kind of I don't want to say he was

asking for it. He put him Basically, he just put himself in in close proximity to a large sharp fish, and there's gonna you're rolling the die when that happens. Right, You don't wrestle with a unicorn exactly. But then again, of course there are other very large fish that jump

as well. The In fact, as we saw with the carp example, you don't need a spike or a sword sword in order to do some damage when you run into somebody, right, all you need is a high powered recreation vessel and uh and and a hundred pound carp perhaps, But what if it was even bigger? What if you were talking instead of a hundred pound carp What if you were talking about say, Florida's Gulf sturgeon, which if you've ever seen a sturgeon in aquarium, these they look

like an armored tank or something. You know, they're they're rather intimidating, and then they get huge. They can come in it at the Florida Sturgeon gould. Sturgeon in particular can come in at eight ft long two point five meters in, up to two hundred pounds or in weight. And yes, they sometimes jump out of the water up to six feet out of the water and occasionally that We're not only talking the risk of injury here. There there have been lethal occurrences of sturgeon impacts. Oh man, well,

I got to hear about that in a second. But this is weird to me because maybe I assume sturgeon must be able to move fast. Uh, if this is the case, but I've never seen a sturgeon move quickly. I've seen sturgeon and aquariums and they always seem incredibly chilled out and very languid fish just just hanging there, I mean, barely moving at all. Yeah, it is I have to admit that too. Like seeing them in aquariums are always really interesting, kind of intimidating, but very still.

But yeah, they jump. In two thousand fifteen, in fact, one one of these jumping sturgeons actually killed a five year old girl when it leapt out of water into her family's fishing boat, and it also injured her mother and her brother as well. In two thousand seven, nine people were injured in a collision with a sturgeon resultant, and this was in Florida, resulting in warning signs that

were posted to encourage slower motor boat and jet ski speeds. So, yeah, you have a two hundred pound fish flying out of the water up to six ft out of the water, and then you have a motor boat, you know, moving at high speeds as well. That's where these possibilities present themselves. Okay, but fish this big, why do they jump out of the water. Well, it's remained a bit of a mystery, but we have a few familiar theories as well as

one that's kind of new here for our discussion here. So, first of all, all species of sturgeon will jump at times. The gold sturgeon is known to jump at two different times of the year in the rivers during July and August and early in the offshore feeding period. So one theory is they do it to escape predators. But that's a big it's a big exactly, it's kind of a lame theory because the larger sturgeon do not have predators. Um.

Another theory is that they do it for fun. And this is when I see mentioned with dolphins, and maybe we'll save that one for another another discussion. Well, I don't want to be unfairly prejudiced against the UH. I don't know the intellectual capabilities of fish, because, as we learned with our birds episode, sometimes you underestimate what other

animal minds are capable of. But I tend to think of play as something that's more associated with more complex mammalian nervous systems, which is why it makes sense with with dolphins. You know, kind of intelligent mammals. Fish, I don't know, are they mentally complex enough to play? Yeah? I mean plus, it's also it comes down to economics.

I was reading some thoughts on this from biologist Ken Sulak, and he pointed out that the jumping, especially for a massive sturgeon, it's an energy expenditure, so there has to be a trade off and behavioral importance beyond mere fun um. He actually theorizes that this is a form of communication with sturgeons. So there when they jump out and and and splash, it creates a distinct sound, slapping noise, but they also um announced that they also create a small

sound before and after um the jump. It's kind of like they produced kind of like clicks and drumming noises, So it's kind of a clicker, a drumming noise, the jump, the splash another sound, and he thinks that they might be announcing their presence in position to the larger groups. So it's like the mooing of a cow, which which I think is an interesting theory. Well, this, this does, this communication theory plays into something that I'm going to

mention later, especially when we talk about sharks. Yes, and we'll get to sharks in a minute, but before we do, we have another potentially dangerous, perhaps even more worrisome for half our listeners fish to contend with. So you may have heard this story. A man is walking in the jungles of the Amazon and he realizes that, oh man, I had so much coffee this morning. I need to evacuate some urine. Okay, So he wades knee deep into the waters of the river, and he un zips and

begins to relieve himself into the water. Question why does he wade into the water before he urine? I had that same question, but this is how the story goes. Okay, So for a few seconds this activity proceeds as normal, But then, to his horror, he sees a tiny, barely perceptible shape leap from the surface of the water into

his urethra. Oh okay. In an alternate version of the story, it uh supposedly swims up the column of his urine stream and into his urethra, and then once inside there it spreads this collection of barbed spines like an umbrella opening inside your urethra, and just lodges itself there and begins to feast on the flesh. And eventually he has to he either dies or he has to undergo a really, really undesirable surgery to get it removed. Well, that's horrible.

I think we've all heard versions of this before, right you. You may remember a version of this from some dialogue between Eric Stolts and John Voight in the movie Anaconda. Okay, I I vaguely remember that. I tend to remember the gross out moments of that film more. But yes, oh, I mostly remember John Void's accent. What is his accent supposed to be? It's like a cross between South American and and Count Dracula. That's great, But but is this

story really true? Does anything like this happen? Can a tiny fish jump out of the water and into somebody's urethra or swim up your urine stream into your urethra? Uh? Well, the fish allegedly described in this story as agreed by most authorities to be in fact, the Vandelia sarosa, which is a type of parasitic catfish, also known as a vampire catfish, but it's commonly known in the sort of legendary literature as the candaru. These are the facts about Vandelia.

So Vandelia's this tiny parasitic catfish, usually about an inch or two inches, you know, two and a half to five centimeters long, nearly invisible in the water, especially when it hasn't fed recently. Uh. And it occupies the tropical freshwater rivers of South America Amazon River basin. And it drinks the blood of other fish, so it's regular emo

is it. You're you're a goldfish or something like that swimming around in the river, and the kandaroo or the vandelia scientifically swims into into your gills and anchors itself there with spines that line it's gill covers, and then it drinks your blood becomes engorged, and then it swims away to the bottom to burrow in and digest the

bottom of the waterway. Right. Uh. And so when it enters the gills of the host fish, it bites at an order artery, ventrall or dorsal, and it doesn't need to suck because actually the host's blood pressure just pumps blood into the candaroo's mouth. So instead of blood sucking, this animal is more like when you hook the lip of a balloon over a water faucet and then turn the water on to make a water balloon, is just

letting itself fill up. Okay, So the idea here is that if it preyed on humans, obviously, swimming into someone's p hole is not it's it's design. This would be it would be like a like a port tape worm getting lost and winding up in your brain. This doesn't need that to happen, but it occurs accidentally, right that this is a mistake for this animal. If if this is true and uh, and it's a it's a fatal mistake for the animal and sometimes for the person according

to the story. So those are the facts that just reported. Now, there are also a bunch of claims that are commonly reported as fact, and these include that the kangaroo can swim up the urethra of a person or mammal that might urinate in the water, so that the less unbelievable version is that mammals weighed fully into the water and begin to urinate once under the water, and the candaroo swims up one of their orifices, the urethro or the

vagina or the anus. Uh. It's commonly reported that this fish is attracted to the flow of urine, maybe because it's chemically similar to some chemicals that would come out of the gills of its host fish. More on that in a bit. And then once instide, once inside you, it gets stuck, can't escape, dies, obstructs the path of the urethra, you can't pee, and it has to get removed by surgery. Classical stories of this include lots of accounts of penile amputation. So you can see why this

causes extreme distress for people getting into these waters. Yeah, and I can also see why a lot of this is sort of hinged on just creating a cringe e hert tail to share with with visitors. Say, oh, the officials swim up your pee hole and then we'll have to cut your penis off, you know. So it's it's easy to see it as nothing more than that. Yeah. So there are two questions here. Number one is the general one to kinderu actually swim up people's urethras? Uh?

And if so, do they perform this even more crazy sounding feat of either jumping from the water this jumping fish tie in here, which isn't as crazy based on what we've been discussing. Lots of fish jumps, so it seems possible. Now, could it jump with such a degree of accuracy that it jumps straight into your urethra that's kind of tough to imagine, or the even crazier one that it swims up the stream of your urine. I got some doubts about that. But are there any medical

cases of this? And in the cases of the medical literature, well, there's one major report in the modern day that people refer to. So in a euro genital surgeon named n Or some odd who was working in Amazonia in Brazil,

reportedly extracted a dead Kinderu from patient's penis. And according to the report of the patient's story, the patient was standing thigh deep in the water, urinating into the water with his penis above the water, and he reported that the fish jumped out of the water, swam up the stream of his urine and into his urethra. Now, I I, as I alluded to earlier, I'm really suspicious about the

physics of the swimming up the urine stream. Yeah, it's It also makes me wonder if he did have something lodged in his in his uh urethra like he own, maybe he only became aware of it when he urinated and this and he just happened to be standing in the water and he just made the assumption that, oh,

that's when it entered. Yeah, so we only have this second or I guess third hand report in this case, so it's hard to know exactly what happened, But imagine the idea, like physically, just try to think of the fluid mechanics of swimming up a stream of urine. It would be kind of like if you had imagine a really good swimmer, like an Olympic swimmer, in a pool, and then you stand on the roof of a house over the pool and aim a fire hose at them and say, okay, swim up the stream of the fire hose.

To me, uh, that just it doesn't seem to make any sense. It would be like swimming up a waterfall, where salmon do not swim up a waterfall, but they can jump. They can jump over right, So I can believe it's much more likely that a fish simply jumped out of the water and in this one in a million chance kind of way, happened to jump straight into this guy's unfortunate urethra, which we should say does expand during urination. So it kind of opens the possibility there,

both figuratively and I guess literally. So according to a BBC story I read on the candaroo legend um, the American marine scientists Steven Spot met with some od the surgeon who supposedly removed the candyo from the guy. He met with this guy in to investigate, and he was shown pictures and video of the extraction. So a real surgery definitely took place. Some something was actually removed from this guy's urethra. Uh, and there was a preserved specimen

of the fish itself. But Spot wasn't entirely convinced for a few reasons. One was, um, the physical mechanical problem I just mentioned in the patient's story. The other was the preserved specimen was a lot bigger than you'd expect a kinderu to grow, which in one other source I read it was more than five inches long and almost half an inch wide, can you. And also it was bigger than the thing we'd expect to find in your urethra.

That also makes the story all the more horrific to envision. Yeah. Uh. And then the specimen also, according to Spot, did not show signs of having been lodged or removed as described. For example, it didn't have snipped off spines or anything. Uh. Then again Spot reported he didn't entirely dismiss the account either. At this point, many elements appear unlikely, but it's hard

hard to know what really happened. Um. But as a side note, this sort of raises the question of Candio entering the urethra and and other body orifice is more generally right. So this has been widely reported as fact all throughout the literature, both scientific and popular, for a couple hundred years now, but a few critical writers have pointed out these accounts are kind of weird, like that they're almost always vague and second hand. It happened to

somebody that I heard of somewhere up the river. Some guy in the next village had a candio swim or jump into his penis and and get lodged there um And also supposedly one of the explanations for this that the kanderu are attracted to the chemicals commonly found in human urine, such as urea that has been tested and

found to be completely without merit. So Steven Spot, along with the guy mentioned earlier, along with colleagues Paulo Petrie and Jensen Zonon, published results of an experiment in two thousand one that found that Vandelia, these these parasitic catfishes under lab conditions just didn't care about the chemical attractants in the water at all. They were not interested in ammonia, amino acids, fresh fish slime, or human urine. No response, they just didn't care. Instead, they seemed to hunt for

hosts such as Amazon goldfish mostly by sight. They saw them, said, those look like some good gills. I'm going to them. And uh, and fortunately somebody has actually tried to figure

out if there's anything to all these stories. Uh. There's a paper in the Journal of Travel Medicine in by erme Guard Bauer called Kandaru a little fish with bad habits need travel health professionals worry a review and so in this paper the least scandal as possible headline, I know, but Bauer essentially concluded that there there's probably nothing to these stories. Uh, there's they So there was an extensive review of all the available literature, and there's just not

strong evidence that these fish pose a threat to humans. Instead, the record sort of indicates that these attacks are they're just always hearsay. The same stories get repeated over and over as if they're fact. And Bauer concludes by saying, you know, considering the range of this fish, it's all over the place, and and how how horrifying their habit is supposed to be, it seems like wouldn't we be hearing about this more often in the modern day, wouldn't

we be encountering stories of this happening. Uh, and and there's almost nothing. There's just like that that those old stories that have been repeated for decades, and then there's this one disputable case. Yeah. I mean, the only counter argument I can think of is that since it's like a penile injury, that it would be underreported out of shame or embarrassment. But not if you factor in like the severity of the supposed severity of the infection. You know.

I feel like this is the kind of thing that if there were a confirmed case where somebody went to a hospital and this was you know, became part of the medical literature, this would be this would be all over I f L science and everything, you know what I mean, everybody would be like, oh my god, I gotta fish up his penis. We've got to report the heck out of this. Yeah, And we just don't see that.

Now that being said, there are plenty of other things that can harm your privates if you go waiting around in you know, Amazonian rivers. And in fact that as part of the explanation is that many of these stories may be sort of garblings because a lot of them come from you know, colonial periods in the Amazon and stuff like that where there were language barriers between the people reporting the stories and then the and then the

people writing them down and publishing them. So, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of room for legend and error. Yeah. Plus, I mean, if anyone out there, if you've ever had a U t I. Yournary urinary track infection, you you know that it can feel like a tiny barbed fish has slam in side chiefs. So I could see where where such uncomfortable scenarios could lend them selves to creative interpretations. Okay, so what do we think on that Candaru leaping into your urethra? Not impossible,

but seems unlikely. Let's get into sharks, because I think we've all seen these stunning images some photoshopped of great white sharks leaping over the Golden Gate Bridge and leaping out of Yeah, leaping over bridges, or at least managing to get their entire bodies out of the water in a way that just terrifies us because you look and you say, well, that's a monster of the water. But it is not allowed out of the water, It is not allowed up here in the air because that just

messes with with all of the guidelines that governed my safety. Yeah, I thought I was supposed to be safe in this boat. Well, in keeping with our theme of fish leaping at people in their watercraft, did you know that sometimes even great white sharks leap into boats entirely into Yeah. So in this case, as with others, this is not a situation of attempted predatory behavior towards the humans on the boat. It's not an attack. Uh, it's just very unfortunate coincidence.

One example of this kind of story July two thousand eleven, I found a National Geographic news story covering one of these events. So in July two thousand eleven, there's a research vessel off Seal Island, off the coast of South Africa. And if you've seen videos of great white sharks jumping into the air out of the water, very likely that video came from around Seal Island in South Africa. This is one of the most famous places in the world

to see this behavior among white sharks. So there's a research vessel in the waters out near this place, and a roughly five kilogram or half ton great white shark jumps into the boat operated by these marine researchers, and it's in the boat. It's stuck on the deck beneath the walls in the boat, so thrashing around. Everybody had to get the heck away from it and try to figure out how to help it get back into the water so it wouldn't die. Robert, for your benefit, I

have a picture here. It's just a shark in the boat. That is a big shark. This is not if you're if you're picturing like just a juvenile, small little aquarium shark. Huge shark. Uh. So, of course they couldn't get the shark out of the boat by hand. Uh. And so they attempted to drag it out with a rope and that failed, and then they so eventually they had to drive the boat back to the harbor, and they tried to lift it out of the boat with a crane, which was dangerous to do, but the shark was going

to die, so they had to try it. Uh. And they so they lowered it back into the water. But shark may be confused or injured from this, stranded itself on a harbor beach nearby. They attempted to push it back into the water by hand, and that failed, So eventually they tied the animal to the side of a boat and drove it out to sea, and half an hour after that, the sharks swam away. It swam away

and seemed to recover. It slapped its tail. So nobody knows what happened after that, if it eventually went on to live and be okay, or if it was injured and if it died. They're just not sure. But I hope that sharks out there right now, uh, longing for seal flesh, trying to eat live right. So, So, when a shark leaps out of the water, this is known

as breaching. And to use specific terminology that I love from one study that I read, when a shark leaps vertically or near vertically out of the water, so it's coming up from below vertically into the air with a head up position, this is known as a polarist breach. Oh, I love that. That's so good. That's a good band name. Uh So why do shark's breach? Why why do they

come up out of the water like? Well, based on a lot of my research that concerns uh like nineteen eighties Italian shark films that came out in the wake of jaws. They do it to make a boat explode, right, Yeah, to smash about, And no, that is not why they do it. They they're There are two main kinds of breaching. There may be other minor behavior, but the two main kinds that you'll read about most often are predatory breaching and what's known as natural breaching. So predatory breaching, it's

all there in the name. The shark is in the pursuit of prey. There's a seal, you know, pinnaped there that's a nice, fatty, delicious, energy rich meal swimming along near the surface of the water. And in these breaches, the shark moves rapidly up from below, bites as it shoots up into the air, and then slams back down

into the water. And a lot of cases there it'll shoot up from below, hit the seal, bite it, and then release it, and then wait for the seal to bleed out and die and come back and finish it.

This is Yeah. I was reading a paper about this the other day in preparation for this episode, and I found that interesting because I really had not research actual shark predatory behavior much and the idea that they wound and then allow the the prey to bleed and then come back for it is interesting because because you know, nobody wants to get slapped by a seal, including a

great white shark. You know, the shark is has to be cautious, like a prey can injure it if it's fighting around with it while the prey is still strong, so it wants to avoid that. In fact, one of the papers I read about this by an author named r Aiden Martin who has written on great white breaching a good bit. They actually put together a shark hunting decision tree, so it has it's like a flow chart where you know what, depending on what happens, do you

move to this next thing or this next thing? Uh? And so it includes like the initial attack and then do you catch or do you wait and pursue? Do you quote process? I love that at some point the shark begins to process the seal um and we don't mean thinking about the seal here either. No, this is sort of working on it right right, butchering with its mouth with basically, So, so why does it do this? What? Why is the great white shark attacking the seal in

this way? Why didn't it just swim up from behind and bite it. Uh. Well, think think about how this plays out in practice, like what the conditions are for the predator and for the prey looking up from the deep water below. The shark has more ability to see a seal near the surface than the seal does to

see a shark. So the seal is illuminated by the sky, and these attacks take place more often in low light conditions, when there's less penetration of water of the water column by the light in the sky, like if the sun's at an angle. So you're a shark, you know several you know, meters down below the water, and you're looking up. You can see your prey, but it's less likely to see you, especially because of your your dorsal coloring, the dark coloring on the top of you. And so why

is this element of surprise so crucial? Well, when you look at the body composition of a white shark versus a seal um according to one study I read between ninety four and of a white sharks, muscle is composed of what's known as white muscle, and this is this is sprinting muscle. It's capable of rapid contraction, but it has very low stamina and a pin up head like a seal, on the other hand, can go the distance

it's capable of sustaining long term evasive tactics. So the longer the attack goes on, the better that the less chance a shark has of catching the seal and getting it um. So the sharks are better at sprinting the marathon seals can can keep evading, so a sudden surprise attack greatly increases the shark's chance of success. And this is why this rocketing up from below which leads to

breaching UH is so common. Well, that makes perfect sense from the from a hunting standpoint, and according to a paper on the on the physics of this process, so the shark usually starts UH down deep in the water, a place where the bottom depth is between twenty six and thirty meters and UH in these cases, the entire attack you know, leaping up from the bottom after they begin their strikes to u to the seal is about two to two and a half seconds, so it just

doesn't give the seal much time at all to react. And then, of course, at the speed it takes to hit the seal from below that fast, the sharks still propelled upwards and it's going out of the water. Um. And in these cases, the shark attacks are successful about forty percent of the time, which is not a bad hunting success. Right. But then there's this other kind of breaching image. That's what that's the predatory breaching, jumping out

of the water to kill. There's also what's known as natural breaching, when the shark breaches for no obvious reason, there's no predatory attack or anything, um, no bait on the surface that it's being coaxed to the surface with. Right, So why what what's going on here? Well, according to one theory, sharks have these well developed McCay no receptors and chemo receptors and electro receptors. They have all you know, receptive sensing organs that we don't have at that kind

of level. So it's been hypothesized that tail slap, so that's one type of slapping behavior, and then breaching jumping out of the water and splashing down are communicative. They they're allowing sharks to communicate between one another through agonistic behaviors. That's not you know, fighting displays. I'm tough, this is my food. You better get away because I could fight

you for it. And it's true that lots of fishes do use sound as a communication channel, and so it's hypothesized that these behaviors like tail slapping and breaching jumping out of the water and splashing down could exploit this kind of mechano reception. This this sound sensitive ability of fish to communicate between the sharks. And when you think about it, a shark jumping out of the water and splashing down is not necessarily a bad signifier of fitness.

That's like, the bigger you are and the stronger you are, the harder of a splashdown you can make. Yeah, it's certainly, I mean, it makes a statement to us and we're not even sharks. Yeah. And one reason to think this is a good explanation is that this natural breaching often seems to happen with sharks in the presence of other sharks, not just hanging out by themselves. Now, this is interesting. We're talking about this breaching behavior that's taking place, uh

specifically the predatory breaching behavior. It's taking place in the presence of these seals. You brought up an interesting um tidbit yesterday about the recent shark move movie The Shallows in which the shark tries to eat like lively about about what what does it mean when we see a movie shark breaching like this in seemingly tropical waters. Oh? Yeah, yeah, this was interesting. I believe I read this. Now, this isn't in my notes. I'm just trying to recall from memory.

But I recalled that I read this, I think, on Smithsonian where they were reviewing the trailer of the film. But they spoke to a marine biologist who had some knowledge of shark behaviors and said, Okay, look at how the shark's acting in the trailer for this movie. Is this basically accurate? Uh? And I recall what the the expert said was, well, it looks like this movie is supposed to take place in tropical waters, and yet you see the shark when it attacks this guy leaps out

of the water. That's breaching behavior, which is not necessarily something you'd be likely to see in tropical waters, because the places you really see it are are like in South Africa, where they have these, uh, these prey like seals that they have to attack in this manner in

order to maximize their success rate at catching them. In tropical waters, sharks probably have access to fish that are much more slow moving and easier to catch, and they just they don't have to resort to these breaching behaviors in order to catch meals, so that they The expert they talked to rated that as not quite. It's so plausible. But from a cinematic standpoint, nothing is more terrifying than the shark coming out of its habitat into our habitat

in order to especially to eat us. It's the inherent perversity of the land shark. It is all right, Well, at this point we really have only one sort of leaping jumping fish to consider, and that is, of course the so called flying fish, right, because the distinction between jumping and flying may seem very clear to you, right, you know, uh, kangaroos jump and birds fly and and these are not all that similar behaviors, but the dividing

line between them, I don't know, is it really just time? Well, yeah, you can certainly bog yourself down in in um definitions of flight, to be clear. With with the flying fish, we are talking about a gliding but sometimes kind of a hydroplaning, where they're just where the tail is still in contact with the water. UM so it's not powered flight, it's not true flight, so we're not talking about piranha to the spawning here right right, and then there are

certainly no feathers involved. But um, it's interesting to put this in, you know, to sort of top off this discussion of all these leaping and jumping behaviors, because gliding fish might seem like the the evolutionary pinnacle of jumping fish, right. But but the interesting thing here is that there's nothing

new at all. In two thousand twelve, paleontologists found a near complete skeleton from the Tree Driassic period that's two to two forty two million years ago, UM, and near complete skeleton boasted all the key attributes of the modern flying fish, well developed pectorial fin and a forked, asymmetrical tail. And even this form seemed to have evolved independently from the sixty four known species of flying fish we find

today in all the world's ocean independence. So it's not like an ancestor of them, like a cousin of them that's now not here, right. It developed this gliding technique on its own. Um. So it's interesting to to realize that that gliding fish have evolved in the past separately, they've died, had died out and uh, and we have a fairly successful model of it today in the in these sixty four known species of flying fish and um and again, they don't necessarily fly as much as they glide,

but they can, they can really glide. So then what what would the difference be between a fish that glides and a fish that actually quote flies. Well, again, this is an area where where individuals can get into discussions and disagreements over what defines flight. But essentially it's a difference between powered flight and gliding. All right, So is it is the creature flapping its wings in order to sustain itself in the air or is it merely sort

of falling with grace? Right? Uh, hang glider versus an airplane exactly, because we see plenty of gliding creatures and it generally means in order to glide, you need to either fall from something high such as a tree, which is why we see so many um you know, tree based gliders of boreal gliders, or it needs to be able to jump up high enough to glide a little bit. And that's what we see with gliding or flying fish

um and they can, they can really glide. They can glide and or hydroplane distances of hundred feet or four hundred meters in thirty seconds, with maximum flight speeds of up to forty five miles per hour or seventy two kilometers per hour, which is pretty impressive. I feel like we've all seen like splendid videos of this taking place.

It's it's pretty impressive. So, since these fish are small, I imagine they're not breaching to uh to inflict predatory damage on a seal or something like no, no, no, these are These are generally plankton eaters, and pretty much everybody agrees that they jump and glide to escape. There are many many enemies in the sea. Yea, yet another

evasive maneuver right now. There have been some that are proposed that this has to do with energy conservation, like the running or porpoising that is observed in marine mammals such as penguins or dolphins, but it really doesn't pan out when you crunch all the factors, including the oxygen debt of takeoff, and biologist John Davenport did just this sort of crunching in his paper How and Why Do Flying Fish Fly? Which is a certainly a good in depth reread if you really want to get into the

the economics and physics of this. Another theory sees all of this is a means to move from a food or plankton poor area to a food rich area, thus making the energy expenditure worth it. Essentially kind of like rate and teleporting during a fight to get behind an opponent. You're not in a good position for your food, teleport to the the to the positive position via flight. But there's not a lot of it's to back that up.

So why why would the flying or gliding in that case be better than just swimming to the food rich area. I just have to go back to the raid and analogy there. It's just the the it's in the realm of water. It is more like an instant appearance as opposed to a journey too. But again, so you can pretty much don't worry too much about that theory because pretty much everybody is still in agreeans this is about

escaping predators. Now, in escaping those predators, flying fish that were gliding fish, they don't flap their wings to gain lift um. They propel through the air water interface. I like that terminology at a shallow angle unfurl their large lateral fins and then rapidly beat their tail in the water prior to actual lift off. And it's interesting too that they have to be a certain size before they

can actually pull this off. The smaller flying fish, before they have attained appropriate size, they can't actually pull this off. They're limited to simple leaps with their fins held against the body by surface tension. Huh yeah, okay, Well, so flying fish, you might say, in this case is kind of a misnomer. Then yes, it's they're they're gliding fish that we have jumping fish, we have longer jumping fish,

we have gliding fish. But I wonder why no fish with the ability to maintain sustained flight, Because if you imagine the the evolution of flight in its many forms, Uh, it's commonly hypothesized that flight organs began with gliding organs. You know, organisms had had maybe movements or or gliding organs that would help them coast from one tree to another or help them escape a predator faster. And overtime, these organs developed until they were able to create powered

sustained flight like birds. So why haven't fish gone there? Why are there no fish? Birds? I know you can't help but think about this, especially when you look at you jumping and then gliding, Why not flying? Why why have they not taken that next step? And then indeed is that step even possible? Right? Because as as you pointed out, so many of these examples of flight that we have UM and certainly there are not that many.

You can ultimately kind of look as at flight as a is a rare adaptation, even though it has been tremendously successful for the organisms that have achieved it. Because as vertebrates go, we've we've only seen three takes on flight. We've seen UH pedero sarin flight, We've seen avian flight, and we've seen you know, bat flight and UH and fish. So far as we know, unless there's some sort of fossil out there that we've got to uncover, they've never crossed the threshold UH and UH and and and all.

When you take an all biology, you have a single extinct lineage and three extant clades birds, bats and the and and UH and also insects. But even in these three extant examples of of vertebrate flight, they are examples of convergent evolution, not that like the pterosaurs the birds and the bats didn't evolve from each other. They all independently achieved the mechanisms of flight. That's right, they exploit the same physical properties, but they're all different solutions to

the same problem. I was looking at this book by David Alexander and Stephen Vogel titled Nature's Flyers, Birds, Insects, and the Biomechanics of Flight, and they put it into context like this quote. Although such convergent features may make two animals appear quite similar, the adaptations are only superficially similar and have fundamental differences. Fish or cold blooded, scaly animals with gills, but proporpoises are warm blooded, smooth skinned

breathers of air. The point being that these are both not flight based. But these are both sea creatures with similar forms at first glance, but there of course very different organisms. It continues, hummingbirds and bumblebees have almost identical wing beat patterns, but hummingbird wings are made of bone, muscle, and feathers. Bee wings or may of of pleaated membranes

supported by stiff, hollow veins. And they point out to that technological evolution has produced several areas of convergence between flying animals and flying machines. Quote, the convergences were not intentional copies of mechanisms used by animals, but technological solutions to common challenges faced by all flyers. So this would seem to indicate that there's no inherent reason you couldn't expect fish to evolve mechanisms like a bird's wings or

like an insect's swings. Uh, they would just be you know, fishire. Basically, they would be evolved from the equipment available to fish anatomy. Well, the one place that my mind immediately meant went was all right, so almost it seems like all these other examples are our land creatures that that take to gliding. So maybe dwelling on the land is an essential prerequisite too to the sort of gliding that evolves into flight. Yeah, that could certainly like do you need or runway in

order to evolve flight? A solid runway or or a high place to jump off of it? Can you just not really ever evolutionarily justify the the evolution of propelled flight mechanisms if you always have to start from underwater, right, And and maybe that does hold true of vertebrates. But then according to biologists Jim Martin. The possible exception is with insects. Flapping gills could have evolved into flight capable wings as an aquatic in an aquatic environment, according to Martin,

so insects may have an out there. But maybe this prerequisite holds true with vertebrates. But the thing is, when you start asking this question, you also have to take it outside of fish too, because we could also say asked the same thing about other gliding organisms, gliding snakes, lizards, the gliding squid, various gliding arboreal mammals, including lemurs. Why

are there no flying lemurs? Because certain they're they're in the position where they're they're leaping out of trees, they're gliding a little white Does that not developed into flight? I guess the simplest explanation to me would would just be a guess, but it would be that there's just not enough incentive for it, Like maybe there's just no clear advantage survival or reproduction advantage to fish remaining in the air for longer than it takes to glide a

short distance. Because you know, when you think about it, what really happens in the air. I mean, birds use the air to traverse between different locations of feeding and breeding and stuff like that. I suppose fish could do the same thing, but I don't know would they be more would they be more open to bird predation if they were to fly around in the air all the time? Would? I mean, it could just be that there's not enough

reason for them to have this trade. Yeah, because yeah, because when you do one thing to say, all right, why why don't the flying fish just become a true flying organism? But you also have to provide the reason for it, like how is that going to work? Is it? Is it really a benefit that's going to play out an evolution? And uh, so far the answer seems to be no. Now, I do have to mention that this this larger question of why I do some lineages evolve

into the sky and there's not? It remains something of a mystery, and scientists have even looked to underlying molecular mechanisms in this whole there's a whole study of biological uh periodicity that gets into this. It gets a really really deep and complex but and and uh and has a lot of a lot of parallels in in molecular concerns, So it's uh so, so it ends up being a deeper question than just why don't fish actually fly? But why does do any numbers? Yeah, one more thing I

probably should say. It's may have been too obvious for us to mention, but of course there is the impediment of breathing. Oh yes, a show gills. But but certainly we have land again right to the the mud skippers and the walking catfish, this and earlier forms of lungfish. So that alone doesn't seem like it would be a um, you know, an eliminating factor, but it would certainly still be a concern because they are venturing outside of their realm. Yeah,

all right, So there you have it. Um. Now, we only covered some of the jumping fish out there in the world, so we may have missed some examples that you're particularly fond of, or some just examples you've seen in real life and have some stories related to. Yeah, and one thing I do think we should make clear is that Robert, you and I were not trying to be alarmists about fish jumping. We have we have covered several stories of fish jumping into boats, fish jumping into people,

and injuries that have been sustained on those accounts. But I think these events are exceedingly rare overall, so you really don't need to be like super worried about getting killed by jumping fish. Right, But certainly if there's a science, ain't telling you not to to drive too fast on the water because they are leaping sturgeon, I would acknowledge that sign and remember that, yes, individuals have been injured or killed, so be cautious on or the sturgeon are

under the sturgeon indeed. All right, So, hey, if you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's what we will find all of our podcast episodes, as well as links out to various social media accounts such as you know, Twitter, Tumbler, Facebook, and hey, if you follow us on Facebook, make sure you you click it so that we show up in

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