Ep. 793: The Mysteries of Gar Fish

00:00:08
Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, you can’t predict.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. All right, Join today by Solomon David, the gar guy who has a Garassic Park sticker. See, I was sitting here thinking you were a big Jurassic Park fan.

00:00:51
Speaker 3: I mean that too as well, But.

00:00:53
Speaker 4: Then I realized it’s Garassic Park.

00:00:55
Speaker 3: Why not vote Steve.

00:00:56
Speaker 2: We’re gonna get into that. We’re gonna get into That’s gonna be my first quest, but I don’t want to ask it yet. Solomon David is an aquatic ecologist an assistant professor, works on fish biodiversity, conservation, science, communication, and runs the Garlab. It’s like a colloquial term. Garlab focuses on the ecology of migratory and ancient fishes and how that research can help us better understand and conserve aquatic ecosystems. Additional projects involve conservation of Great Lakes migratory fishes. I’m assuming you mean the native ones. Yeah, Yeah, ancient sport fish e g. Guards, bowfins. We’re gonna talk about what that means. Insert We’re gonna talk about terms rough fish, trash fish, how those terms aren’t really doing the best. They’re doing a little bit of a disservice to some fish species. I’m going to call for you know what, you know what Brody does, the indefensible law thing. I’m going to call for a new law, and I’m gonna tell you why people think it’s a bad idea, and then I’m going to refute that and explain why it’s actually not, why it’s good. It’ll be how could people tell the difference? And I’ll say between a game and that’s what will happen. And I’ll say, I don’t know, how can we How can they tell the difference on ducks? Why is that? Okay, That’s what I’m going to use on them. People. No one knows what I’m talking about.

00:02:28
Speaker 5: Ex I know exactly what you’re talking about.

00:02:30
Speaker 2: You know where I’m going with this. So I’m going with this. Oh, here’s a good one. A gar. A gar comes into a bar. Bartender says, why the long face classic? I didn’t make that up. It’s in my note. Is that your joke?

00:02:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, I kind of you made that up. Yeah, for the moviet.

00:02:53
Speaker 6: Other people of its crowdsourcing too, so you know, people do the punts for me these days.

00:02:58
Speaker 3: But started off artisanal.

00:03:01
Speaker 2: I’m holding in my hand an alligator guard. We’re gonna talk about alligator guards too. And I read the thing that Krinn put down. I had no idea about. Don’t answer this yet, you can answer like a little.

00:03:12
Speaker 5: Bit, all right.

00:03:13
Speaker 2: I had no idea that alligator guys were uping louis or up in Illinois.

00:03:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, they’re trying to bring them back they used to be.

00:03:20
Speaker 2: Had no idea. I think of that as like strictly like East Texas, Louisiana, no idea.

00:03:29
Speaker 7: That’s almost an ice fishing state.

00:03:31
Speaker 8: And they even go further than Illinois.

00:03:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, we’re gonna talk about that. I didn’t know any of that. We’re gonna talk a little bit about buffalo, not the animal, the fish. We’re gonna talk about the fish. Buffalo. Here’s what, here’s what, here’s how this whole thing came to be. There was an article like, I can’t you know, I can’t police everything that happens. I can’t police everything. Now a little bit, I’m gonna complain about you fair enough. I’m gonna praise you and complain about it.

00:04:03
Speaker 3: Sounds about right.

00:04:06
Speaker 4: There was an article on.

00:04:07
Speaker 2: Our website on the meeater dot com and it was a bowfishing article and it use terms like rough fish as a catch all, which as a catch all like, and we were using that like. We didn’t say trash fish as a kid. We used rough fish meaning non game fish, unregulated fish. So if you had if I was going to categorize and I think most people in the country would understand I’m tom about here. If I was going to categorize fish like in the most basic general terms would be uh, someone might be familiar with this lingo game fish okay, which would be like regulated fish that people sport fish for. Then there’d be a fish that they don’t really have a word for, but it’s like the no touch fish in my area stir okay, grown up Michigan and be like, no one would call a sturgeon a rough fish, but they’re not a game fish. They’re like no touch fish. And then rough fish would mean any fish that there’s no regulatory structure in place, no close season, no bag limit, and method of take would be least regulated. And that’s kind of what you would use the term for. It didn’t mean you didn’t want it, It didn’t mean you didn’t eat it.

00:05:26
Speaker 4: It just meant like.

00:05:29
Speaker 2: Wide open shad.

00:05:33
Speaker 7: Cart, you want to hear the orders.

00:05:35
Speaker 2: One of the rough fish term hell yes man.

00:05:38
Speaker 9: Originated in mid to late eighth nineteenth century commercial fishing practices to describe less valuable fish that were rough dressed, gutted but non flayed, and often discarded from river boats to reduce weight and prevent spoilage.

00:05:54
Speaker 4: Go back to the rough dress that’s great.

00:05:56
Speaker 7: Yeah, gutted but not filaid.

00:06:00
Speaker 2: That’s whe that comes from.

00:06:02
Speaker 7: And then it I’ll buy that.

00:06:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was thinking about that this morning. Well, it wasn’t showering.

00:06:09
Speaker 7: I thought it was like I thought it was a term that came from like English.

00:06:15
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean they’ve got a term over there. I mean they used rough fish in a different context. It’s not as negative as it here.

00:06:22
Speaker 3: What’s that?

00:06:23
Speaker 2: Oh, they use they use it, Yeah, but they fish for they like name their cart Yeah yeah, yeah, well carper native departs of Europe too, so you know.

00:06:30
Speaker 6: But yeah, it’s like with the here when they had the river boats, and they had the fully dressed fish, so that was full aid, the fish that had higher value, and then you’ve got the rough dressed fish, which I said, the guts taken out.

00:06:41
Speaker 3: And then when they had to make it, you know, to market in time.

00:06:45
Speaker 6: And navigate shallow waters and hot summers, they had to discard some of the catch and so they ditched the rough dressed fish first and they kept the you know, the fully dressed fish.

00:06:59
Speaker 2: Where was that?

00:06:59
Speaker 7: Oh?

00:07:00
Speaker 4: So we had this article.

00:07:01
Speaker 2: Come out and and and uh Solomon uh took a front. He wrote a mean email.

00:07:11
Speaker 3: The email.

00:07:13
Speaker 2: He wrote a mean email, being like, you’re just contributing to the negativity. You’re taking away from fish conservation, not respecting fish right your email.

00:07:30
Speaker 6: It’s a I mean, that’s all go to hell and die. That was in the post script that was in PS.

00:07:35
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that’s how he ended it. I hope you go to Helen die. And he offered to.

00:07:42
Speaker 2: He said, sometime we should get together and talk about some of these issues. Now I trust I haven’t looked by trust. You wrote very flattering nice emails when we publish things like gar recipes. Yeah yeah, okay, we didn’t dig those up. But no, And in all fairness, uh, in all fairness, Solomon David, the guard guy, wrote in saying talking about a lot of his work doing with native fish that get from from the perspective of like guys that grow up bowfish and guys that grow up whatever they get, a lot of these fragile native fish get kind of rolled into this category of trash fish or this category of rough fish. And we have these very loose regulatory structures, and people think they’re out doing the world of favor by getting carp like non native carp out of a system or whatever. They think they’re doing the world of favor. And meanwhile they are also unknowingly or knowingly laying waste to like pretty sensitive native fish and throwing them up on the bank and thinking that they’re somehow helping it the world out. And it’s like, uh, people, it’s time for people to get a little more of a nuanced perspective of what fish are in their waterways. And I would argue it’s time to get a little smarter about how we regulate these things. Let’s start out. There’s a lot of folks here, so we’re gonna take turns asking questions. Let’s start out by what what help tell people what the gar lab is?

00:09:21
Speaker 5: Right?

00:09:21
Speaker 2: And within that I got that, there’s a second question. Aren’t you making the same mistake because you’re saying gar lab, but you’re talking about stuff besides gar right, so you’re lumping everybody into a GAR.

00:09:32
Speaker 6: Well, Steve, if you look at the Big ten conference, are we more than ten teams?

00:09:37
Speaker 2: Now?

00:09:38
Speaker 3: It’s more of a name? You know, Well, you’re a Michigan, right, you know we’re.

00:09:44
Speaker 6: Now like, yeah, yeah, it’s not ten, it’s like eighteen teams now, so stupid, you know.

00:09:51
Speaker 2: It’s more than we were straight honest, Yeah, you knew that.

00:09:56
Speaker 5: I knew that ten years. I didn’t know how many exactly I knew the Big ten was.

00:10:01
Speaker 9: I went to Penn State, which was the first school that made the Big ten more than ten teams.

00:10:07
Speaker 8: There’s also a conference called the Big twelve. That’s not twelve types.

00:10:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ll look it up.

00:10:18
Speaker 6: Yeah, sure, So Big ten started with ten. Gar Labs started with guard But you know, now we’re expanding there’s a lot of non game native fish that you know, we want to work on, but.

00:10:27
Speaker 4: It started out working on guard.

00:10:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that’s still the flagship group.

00:10:31
Speaker 2: Yeah. So talk about the scope of the Gar.

00:10:34
Speaker 6: Lab, right, So we want to use these sort of native, non game fish, these underappreciated fish to answer questions about ecology, evolution, sustainable managements, just informing our understanding of conservation of aquatic ecosystems and also increasing our knowledge and also sort of sharing the value of freshwater biodiversity. So it’s kind of a multifaceted thing. We use a small group of fish. I mean, there’s only seven species of Gars, which is why we figured we had.

00:11:02
Speaker 3: To expand now.

00:11:03
Speaker 6: But in order to show that, you know, you can look at things like fisheries management, conservation, uh, native fish angling and consumption from just looking at some of these species.

00:11:15
Speaker 3: People who working on trout and walleye for ages. That stuff is being done. It’s been done.

00:11:19
Speaker 2: So this is kind of a lot of money there. Yeah.

00:11:21
Speaker 6: Yeah, there’s there’s a lot more money there than there isn’t Garn Boffen.

00:11:24
Speaker 2: Funding funding on Gar and Boff and work’s got to be a bit oh for sure, for sure.

00:11:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, trying to get by.

00:11:31
Speaker 2: There’s no like gar fishermen of of Michigan. Yeah.

00:11:36
Speaker 9: Yeah, but I feel like alligator gar have a good thing going.

00:11:40
Speaker 2: Now.

00:11:41
Speaker 3: That’s that’s one of that’s kind of been improving for sure.

00:11:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a that’s become a destination fish. Yeah.

00:11:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, all over the world, Texas and Louisiana.

00:11:49
Speaker 2: Oh seven gar. Let’s play a game, all right, you can’t play Okay, all right?

00:11:55
Speaker 8: Alligator gar spot like short nose, long nose.

00:11:59
Speaker 4: Oh, we got alligator spotted.

00:12:02
Speaker 8: Short long nose. I just ran out Florida Cuba. I can’t think of what the last.

00:12:09
Speaker 2: I don’t know about.

00:12:10
Speaker 8: Florida and Cuba are Florida and Cuba one.

00:12:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, Florida gar and Cuban gar.

00:12:14
Speaker 8: Yeah, I don’t know what the last one.

00:12:16
Speaker 6: There’s one that runs from Mexico all the way down to Costa Rica. So you might call that range. What kind of range?

00:12:22
Speaker 3: Got temporary trol you got?

00:12:24
Speaker 7: You got tropical?

00:12:26
Speaker 3: Tropical? Yeah, tropical, yep, tropical gar.

00:12:29
Speaker 9: Do any of the none of the other ones get close to the size of this.

00:12:33
Speaker 2: No, yep.

00:12:33
Speaker 6: Even as far as what we know in the fossils, alligator gar a is still the.

00:12:36
Speaker 10: Biggest and then short nose compared to long nose, Like how many inches off are away from the max?

00:12:43
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean short noses they max out around maybe thirty six inches. Long noses can get up to sixty inches sixty Yeah.

00:12:52
Speaker 4: That’s our gar.

00:12:53
Speaker 9: What percentage of that long noses is?

00:12:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the long nose.

00:12:57
Speaker 6: The nose makes up you know, quite a significant amount that, So i’d say, you know, it’s it’s not twenty five percent, but it might be like ten or fifteen percent. Yeah, decent size. But even a short nose gar has a long nose, So it’s all relative.

00:13:09
Speaker 5: Right.

00:13:09
Speaker 2: I want to get into what makes gar garden, why they’re why they’re special in what they do. But let’s let’s just pasture this whole. Let’s let’s talk about some terminology for me. Trash fish, rough fish, non game fish. Right, like in the sort of do you do you have any idea and it doesn’t matter what state you draw from in the regulatory structure, like.

00:13:35
Speaker 4: How did that come to be? Do you understand?

00:13:37
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:13:38
Speaker 2: Like like like take Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, whatever, Like how did it come to be that they that they create the categorization?

00:13:48
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, you know, we just we value some fish more than other fish, And so I think, yeah, I got to look at when you think about historical perspective, it depends on where you’re starting your history, right, So when you’re thinking about maybe modern fisheries management, what’s been going on for the past I don’t know, fifty hundred years, we’re looking at largemouth bass and trout and salmon. Those fish are valued because those are considered sport fish. People like to eat them, maybe a significant portion of the population likes to eat them. But there are other fish like suckers and gars and bowfins that were eaten by indigenous peoples for a long time before that.

00:14:25
Speaker 9: What about like colonial a Maria recons or you know, not even that, did they have a different view of those fish or like, yeah, what we’d call rough fish?

00:14:35
Speaker 6: Yeah, for sure, I think it’s it gets kind of foggy, you know, it is more of a colonial perspective when you think about the fish that we value now, especially if you look at a European influence, like they’ve got trout over there, they’ve got fish that are kind of like perch, fish that are kind of like walleye and even walley took a little bit of time before people saw those as a game fish, so that definitely had an influence, whereas these other fish, people hadn’t seen a gar before before they came to North America, and they’re looking this like what, we can’t filly this like you would a walleye or a trout. You got to use some sort of hatchet or you know, ten snips now to do that. So those other fish kind of fell by the wayside, and we value these, you know, the bass, the trout, the salmon more and that just kind of got wrapped up into fisheries management. So it started, like we talked about with let’s, you know, fully address some of these fish that are considered valuable and some of these other fish might be less valuable. So we’re just gonna take the guts out and if we got to get rid of some of them, then we will. And you know, you kind of follow the money. That’s where you know, we valued them. We didn’t value others. And you know, we did research that looked at even the science behind these We’ve got way more research on steelhead and largemouth bass and chinook salmon than we do on even some of the sturgeon or the suckers. So we like to think that science can attempt to be objective, but we got to follow where the money is. Right, We’ve got way more money to look at these game fish, and now we’re trying to play some ketch up here. So that’s been going on, you know, hundred years back, two hundred years back, when you’re thinking about what was historically valued by different peoples and what is now being valued, and now we’re just trying to make it a little bit more you know, inclusive as far as biodiversity is considered, Like why not you know, take care of all the fish from a holistic ecosystem perspective, because when you do that, that’s good for everybody when you think about waterways, water quality, habitat, that sort of thing.

00:16:23
Speaker 2: Do you see if you ever visited with any archaeologists on this issue, do you see much evidence of Native American use of again, to define our terms, Native American use of gar? Absolutely, suckers, I know that, But like Native American use of gar and bowfin her dogfish.

00:16:46
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, I mean you can look at even early illustrations, you know, when we had you know, colonial explorers coming in, I mean they sketch those out there are some early documentation of indigenous people is actually sharing those fish, and there was some I can’t think of the reference right now, but some of the colonists actually thought that, like, wow, this fish actually is pretty good. But that switched or you know that, we moved away from that pretty quickly. But as far as archaeology, yeah, you find arrowheads that were made out of gar scales. I mean, you look at a big alligator guard.

00:17:14
Speaker 3: They can use that. Those scales are basically made out of tooth enamel.

00:17:17
Speaker 6: So that’s the hardest, you know, substance that our bodies produced, so it’s not like other fish. So yeah, they’ve been part of human culture here in North America for a long time. And what about both in though both in as a food fish for sure. Yeah, even you know that’s a rough one.

00:17:31
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you know it can be. It can be.

00:17:34
Speaker 2: I eat gars, no problem, Yeah, I like them.

00:17:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, both and s tough.

00:17:37
Speaker 6: Really, I look at Louisiana for six years. We ate them all the time down there. Folks down there eat them. I was able to try them, but people fish for them alongside the roads. The big cane poles flip them across the road. When they’re getting them out of the bodyos. But you can drive down the road and you can see shoepick patties on the signs, So they call them shoe pick down there, which is kind of a French and Indigenous name for him. So it’s a very popular food fish down because.

00:18:00
Speaker 2: The yeah, they’re just like they just they have like an over I find relative to other fish, they have an overpowering flavor. Well.

00:18:15
Speaker 6: They also they do turn to mush pretty fast, so they call them cotton cotton fish because you know, they got a bunch of different names, but because that flesh turns to mush because they got these enzymes and just start breaking it down. So when I was down in Louisiana for the one of my first times down there, went with a couple of professors there, they you know, cook up anything.

00:18:34
Speaker 3: Shout out to quent and fond and who can do this.

00:18:36
Speaker 6: They got boffin put them in a bucket their air breathers so they can survive the trip, you know, from where we were back home to their place. One of them got the fryer going. The other one took the bowfin out of the back of the truck.

00:18:48
Speaker 3: Still alive.

00:18:48
Speaker 6: Because it can breathe there wax the head on the back of the you know, on the tailgate, and then immediately starts flaying that and then takes that flay and throws into the fryer.

00:18:56
Speaker 3: And that’s basically what you have to do. You have to basically process.

00:18:59
Speaker 6: Them as as quickly as you can after you’ve you know, dispatched the fish.

00:19:03
Speaker 3: Otherwise it just.

00:19:04
Speaker 6: Starts turning into goo. You can’t throw that filet in a freezer or anything like that. And it was delicious, it was yeah hmm, try that. Yeah, I recommend it.

00:19:13
Speaker 4: Why don’t live in.

00:19:14
Speaker 2: Both in country more? But we grew up in it, you know.

00:19:16
Speaker 6: Yeah, Michigan, Minnesota’s got both, and I mean you don’t all you got short nose gar out here though.

00:19:20
Speaker 7: So are they?

00:19:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can’t get excited about short nois not to disparage them.

00:19:25
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, like along those guards, yeah.

00:19:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, along in those gars like you can see like along those guards and impressive fishes. Yeah. Yeah.

00:19:32
Speaker 9: Are both end kind of self contained as far as like it’s just them.

00:19:35
Speaker 7: They don’t have other relatives.

00:19:38
Speaker 6: There used to be way more and then recently as part of a study where we actually split them into two species. So but then I know, a hundred years ago they thought there were maybe ten of them, and then they’re getting back to how understudy these fish are. Scientists back then said, nope, there’s not ten, there’s just one with no evidence whatsoever, like, yeah, ten’s too many, so we’re going to condense that down. And then over the year we found evidence from their morphology like their shape and their genetics that there’s actually evidence for two species.

00:20:06
Speaker 3: And they’re both pretty similar.

00:20:07
Speaker 6: But one’s more on the Atlantic coast down to Florida, and when’s from Michigan, Minnesota all the way down to Louisiana. So we are still finding out new stuff about bofen from what you can you know, eat, you can fish from on the fly. They fight really hard to and yeah, now there’s two species instead of one.

00:20:22
Speaker 5: How old are those species of gar?

00:20:24
Speaker 6: They go, Gars go back to Jurassic era, Jurassic period stuff, so one hundred and fifty million years for gars. That’s for the family like long nose gar, short nose gar, they’re about two and a half to five million years old.

00:20:36
Speaker 5: And how much have they changed since then?

00:20:39
Speaker 6: Very little, very little. So if you’re to look at a fossil garb and looked at a living guard. They basically look the same.

00:20:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. Same, That’s a question I had, and I want to spend some more time on that. People will point out like, well, let me start with one that’s annoying. People will say that’s an ice age relic. I’m like, you’re an ice age like mice er. Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean it’s like a dumb thing to say, like humans are around during the ice age. Yeah yeah, like everything the name something that’s not an ice age relative. It’s not like as a bunch of new species emerged since the ice Age. Yeah yeah, so that’s dumb. But people will say that’s from the dinosaurs. Yeah, Like what what does that mean when we say the fish is ancient?

00:21:25
Speaker 4: What do we mean that it’s ancient? Like is a walleye is not?

00:21:29
Speaker 5: Yeah?

00:21:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know what I mean, Like, help me understand the relative quality here?

00:21:32
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.

00:21:33
Speaker 6: So some fish, you know, and some organisms change at a faster rate than other organisms. So when we think about mutation, mutations what leads to evolutions. So organisms changing over time, but some of them change slow, some of them change fast, while I change faster. There was that group of modern fish we’re kind of lumping together called tea lass, so walileye perch swordfish to another all part of that group haven’t been around as long as sturgeons and gars. And that brings in this idea of a living fossil, which sounds kind of paradoxical, right.

00:22:01
Speaker 2: That’s that’s the one.

00:22:03
Speaker 4: I’m talking about living fossil term. What the hell people mean?

00:22:06
Speaker 6: Yeah, And so I feel like most people can kind of get an idea of what that means, but evolutionary biologists hate that term. They’re going to, well, actually that all the time because they’d be like, well, that means that these animals haven’t been evolving or anything like that. Like everything’s evolving constantly, as your DNA is replicating past from one generation the next, but some change slower than others. And so if you were to look at a gar in the fossil record, looking the same as what the shape of a gar looks like now, they have a very slow evolutionary rate. So you go back to the drastic period, they look basically the same as they do now. If we’re to look at something that might be Walleye’s early ancestors, they’re going to look different than.

00:22:43
Speaker 3: What a walleye.

00:22:44
Speaker 2: They’re not going to recognize them.

00:22:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, you’re not going to recognize them as much.

00:22:46
Speaker 2: But I could be standing there, like at the same time when there’s a at the same time when there’s a Trannosaurus Rex on the planet. Yeah, I could be staying there in my flashlight, yeah, shining into a marsh.

00:22:57
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I’d be like, holy a gar Yeah yeah, yeah. It does the same basic whereas look what happened to t Rex. I mean their pickens are the you know.

00:23:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, chickens.

00:23:07
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:23:08
Speaker 8: I’ve dug around for fossils in the Green River formation in Wyoming, found a lot of different fish there. Most of what you’re getting are extinct species of herring and shad. But sometimes you’ll come across a gar scale that looks just like a gar scale today. You also come across paddlefish, these are fifty million year old fossils. You’ll come across skates that look like our skates today. But there’s like a handful of fish that when you see it, it’s it’s just identical to what you would catch today. And that’s fifty million years old.

00:23:37
Speaker 4: And at that time there was not a bluegill.

00:23:43
Speaker 6: There might have been bluegill like fish, but definitely not bluegill like we know them today.

00:23:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, sun he’s spawning off them.

00:23:49
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:23:50
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:23:51
Speaker 3: The dock probably wasn’t there either, But you know.

00:23:54
Speaker 2: Uh, they’re a bone fish gar all the things we’re talking about, our bone cartilaginous fish.

00:24:01
Speaker 7: Yeah.

00:24:01
Speaker 6: Yeah, sturgeon and paddlefish are primarily cartilaginous fish. But that’s different from like the sharks and the raisin skates. So you’re all in that bony fish branch.

00:24:14
Speaker 2: Can you real quick just because you know all this like I know, it’s not it’s not we’re here talk about what I ascott a question? Yeah, can you explain the fish to have like the nodo cord?

00:24:27
Speaker 6: Yeah, like talk about that, yeah, explain to people. Yeah, I mean notochords kind of an early it goes along with your vertebral column, the spinal cord. So some early animals, when you think about the lancelets of chordates, they had, they had a note achord, but they didn’t have a true vertebral column. So for a while, there was this idea that hagfish and lambreys didn’t have what would consider be vertebrae. So we didn’t consider them vertebrates. We consider them a little bit off from that. But now the new research going back to the.

00:24:59
Speaker 3: Fossil records suggest that hagfish and lamp ray are also vertebrates.

00:25:03
Speaker 6: So the note achord sort of thing is an you know, early structure, but now we’re we’re kind of past that. So some fish, let’s say, when you do talk about notochordscars. When they’re little, they’ve got a notochord that turns into extends like a filament off the back side of the tail, and they use that like little helicopter rotor. So when they’re little, they move like little sticks.

00:25:21
Speaker 3: Through the water.

00:25:21
Speaker 4: That’s the notochord.

00:25:22
Speaker 6: Yeah, but it’s basically an extension of the notochord, and as they get older that reduces down. They don’t keep that longer than their first year because eventually the physics of water changes.

00:25:31
Speaker 5: Right.

00:25:32
Speaker 6: You kind of think of it as moving with a little propeller. You’re moving a little animal through there. As they get bigger and bigger, that doesn’t you can’t propel that through that anymore. And by then their scale is hard and they’re able to eat fish, but they move their pectrol fins beating back and forth really rapid. Least I’ve every got a chance. I think we got some video we can send you too. But they move that little notochord, that extension like a film it there. So a lot of those early fish you can see them both in even in pike they have a little one. They don’t use it the same way gars do, but you will see a little bit of a note achord extension. So you see that in early development of a lot of vertebrates. But eventually that kind of goes by the wayside, and you know, gets kind of overpowered by a lot of other structures.

00:26:10
Speaker 2: One of the more impressive things I’ve seen is I was with my friend Kevin Murphy and we’re fishing calfish. But here comes a big paddlefish and got hit by a boat prop kind of half dead, so I shot it with my bow. I mean it was already a mass.

00:26:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was fresh when he caught it, And.

00:26:30
Speaker 2: That was a noise.

00:26:31
Speaker 4: Pulling that note chord out to that was unbelievable site.

00:26:34
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, and.

00:26:35
Speaker 7: It looks way longer.

00:26:36
Speaker 2: Just draw it out. You seen that before, Yeah, yeah, it’ll.

00:26:40
Speaker 8: Come out like five times longer than the fish was.

00:26:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was an unbelievable site, and that made me think that that was like a very different kind of thing.

00:26:48
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, they you’re also you know, you could be pulling the spine like out of your pulling that spinal cord out of the actual spinal calm. I’d have to, you know, look into that for with the paddlefish and the sturgeon, they’re very similar.

00:27:00
Speaker 3: But yeah, how long was that? Would you say?

00:27:03
Speaker 2: Oh man, we got it on video? Long?

00:27:06
Speaker 3: How did it taste though?

00:27:08
Speaker 5: Fish?

00:27:09
Speaker 2: Man? When you trim them up, When you trim them up, they’re good, but you gotta trim them carefully. It’s like shark and stuff, like, you gotta trim it all that red, all that red. The fat’s not good. You gotta get the fat off. I think when you trim them up, they’re good.

00:27:21
Speaker 3: I’ve had sturgeon, I haven’t had paddle fish.

00:27:23
Speaker 4: Now, shovel nose surgeon. That’s not a good fish.

00:27:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, they’re they’re pretty spiny.

00:27:27
Speaker 2: You know. The yield is low. Yeah. Yeah, like you clean it, there’s nothing left. You feel bad you killed the thing in the first place, and then you fry it up and it’s not good. Yeah. Yeah, that’s been my finding.

00:27:36
Speaker 6: They form a white sturgeon though those are yeah, yeah, that’s a real good fish.

00:27:41
Speaker 2: Uh okay, we’re all let’s talk about these ones for a minute, because he’s the big Like how alligator are are becoming fashionable?

00:27:59
Speaker 4: You would, yeah, I agree, Like your work is complete.

00:28:04
Speaker 2: On alligator guard. And I recently saw that they’re making it. I think who was it, what state was trying to make it that you can’t shoot an alligator gar with a boone anymore?

00:28:12
Speaker 3: Oh?

00:28:12
Speaker 4: Really, huh we’re pushing for it.

00:28:14
Speaker 2: Huh. And I remember being like, oh, brother a little bit.

00:28:18
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I think they’ve definitely had a reputation improvement. You think about shows like River Monsters that came out, you know, almost twenty years ago now, Jeremy Wade going out there. I remember yelling at the TV when that episode was on because like, picture isn’t right, that’s not the right thing. But you know, overall, I think that was a win because you’ve got these big river fish that people weren’t paying attention to, and you had this idea of the habitat’s important. You can go and catch these fish. They’re not you know, monsters that are eating people or anything. Like that, so I think that the reputation has definitely improved. We went fishing down in Texas with a Bubba Bedrie, you know, number one guar guide in the world. He you know, took Jeremy Wade out and he used to be a bowfisher, and he realized that, you know, over the years, these big fish were going away. He wasn’t seeing nearly as many as they were out there, and he realized, you know, if his livelihood is going to depend on these fish, he’s got to put him back.

00:29:11
Speaker 3: And then, you know, now they’re even more.

00:29:13
Speaker 6: Valuable because people are coming from all over the world to fish for them, catch them, and then also release them.

00:29:18
Speaker 2: Yeah. One of my buddies in Michigan went down to Texas to for a catch and release alligator.

00:29:24
Speaker 6: Gar Yeah, yep, that’s that’s what most people do now. I would say the majority are doing that. I mean, there’s still people at harvestom. They’ve got a one fish per day limit that Texas Parks and Wildlife has put in. They’ve got probably some of the most conservation oriented regulations in Texas. You say that the job is done, I don’t think, you know, neuro joking, but the job isn’t done. You look next door in Louisiana also arguably one of the healthiest gator gar populations in the world. There’s no regulations on them, so you can shoot as many as you want. And the thing is these are giant fish. We work with the fish rodeos there and we.

00:29:55
Speaker 2: Shoo as many as you want. You can choose as many of these as you want.

00:29:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there’s still limit.

00:30:00
Speaker 9: Yeah, how long if someone’s killing say one hundred pound alligator gun, which is not nearly how as big as they get, but one hundred pound er, Say, how long does it take to replace that fish if someone kills one?

00:30:13
Speaker 3: It depends on where you’re coming from Texas.

00:30:16
Speaker 6: There’s different populations in the Trinity River versus coastal population.

00:30:19
Speaker 3: So I’ve had students work on this.

00:30:20
Speaker 6: When I was down in Louisiana, I’d lived there for six years, and so those coastal populations have access to different kinds of food, right, and gars can live in full salt water. You’ll find them with bull sharks and sea turtles, you know, way off the golf there, so they have access to food, but they can also go into fresh water.

00:30:35
Speaker 3: They mainly need the freshwater to.

00:30:37
Speaker 8: Spawn or off the golf where you find them.

00:30:39
Speaker 3: I mean you can find them.

00:30:40
Speaker 6: Miles off the golf really yeah. Yeah, you go to the aquarium, the Autumn Aquarium in New Orleans. They’ve got them at sea turtles and tarpin of course, and then all kinds of sharks, sand bar sharks.

00:30:48
Speaker 8: What are they doing out there?

00:30:49
Speaker 3: Is there like a motivation can forage out there?

00:30:51
Speaker 6: I mean, it’s other food that they can go after, so, you know, if they can tolerate it, which all gars can tolerate.

00:30:57
Speaker 3: Saltwater for the most part. Long noses you can find miles off the coat too, so highly adaptive.

00:31:03
Speaker 6: And you know, I think some of the latest research suggests that guards probably originated in salt water made their under fresh water.

00:31:08
Speaker 2: But is that right?

00:31:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, that sort of paleontology gets flip flopped all the time.

00:31:11
Speaker 5: Can they live in salt their whole life?

00:31:13
Speaker 3: They can’t.

00:31:13
Speaker 6: They theoretically could, but they couldn’t reproduce. They need that fresh water for reproduction. Alligator gars in particular need submerged terrestrial vegetation to spawn on, so they need that big flood pulse. And you don’t get those big floods every year, so they have to take advantage. Think about the flood nineteen twenty seven.

00:31:31
Speaker 2: I think he needs he needs a dry land plant that happens to be underwater to spawn.

00:31:39
Speaker 6: Typically, and a lot of the rivers in the floodplains where they spawn, they basically are spawning on submerged terrestrial vegetation.

00:31:46
Speaker 2: Because to dry out for a while or what is it.

00:31:48
Speaker 6: It’s just that’s kind of indicative of the floodplain being submerged for a decent amount of time. Those eggs hatch, They hatch in like maybe a day or two, depending on water conditions and temperature, and.

00:31:58
Speaker 3: Then they’ll move out within that season.

00:32:00
Speaker 6: But we’ve had alligator guards they hatch out about, you know, less than half an inch long within a month, month and a half. They can be twelve inches long within their first season. Yeah, they grow fast.

00:32:11
Speaker 9: Yeah, I want to get back to the age thing. Yeah, like in the Trinity River in Texas, how old there is one hundred pounder?

00:32:19
Speaker 7: This is like a multipart question.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, how old is it?

00:32:24
Speaker 9: Have you seen like the average size of these things shrinking? And then and then like how do they deal with eating a chunk of dead cart with a treble hook that goes way down its throat, like and you cut, if you cut the line, does that thing do just fine?

00:32:39
Speaker 5: Right? Right?

00:32:40
Speaker 3: That is a serious questions.

00:32:45
Speaker 2: I get it.

00:32:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, get them in while you can.

00:32:48
Speaker 6: Yeah, So, like one hundred pound fish might be something like, you know, five feet six feet long.

00:32:53
Speaker 3: It depends so more.

00:32:54
Speaker 6: We mainly go by length because depending you know, if it’s a gravid female, it’s way way more. You could be looking at a gravid’s that means got lots of eggs.

00:33:02
Speaker 7: Have you ever heard of that for egg wagon?

00:33:05
Speaker 4: Yeah, there you go, that’s what gravid means.

00:33:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s what gravid means.

00:33:08
Speaker 2: Never heard that word. I didn’t hear that word before.

00:33:10
Speaker 8: I worked at a fish Yeah, that’s work with Solomon for a decade.

00:33:14
Speaker 2: That’s right. For a minute, you heard that word brody yep, doubt so.

00:33:20
Speaker 6: Yeah, So you know, we go by lengths more than weight. But that could be twenty years old, it could be forty years old.

00:33:26
Speaker 7: And that you’re not talking like a hundred year old.

00:33:28
Speaker 3: It could be so.

00:33:30
Speaker 6: Males, if you got an alligator guard that’s over six feet long, that’s typically going to be a female. Males don’t tend to get that big, so you could get males that live for that long. But if you’re talking just six foot fish that we don’t know what the sex of it is twenty forty, but if it’s an old male, it could be sixty eighty.

00:33:46
Speaker 3: We know they can live for over one hundred years.

00:33:49
Speaker 2: I thought you’re gonna have saying a lot older.

00:33:52
Speaker 6: We don’t know when you said they can hit twelve inches how fast within a month and a half. But if they’re fed, they can reach two feet within that first growing season. They can get big fast. Yeah, they get huge. Even long nose gars can reach about We got some out of Minnesota about fifteen inches long that were born, you know, hatched out this year, and they hatch out in May. You know, Michigan, Minnesota, it doesn’t stay warm that long, so I would have hatched out in May. We caught one in August and it was already about fifteen inches long.

00:34:23
Speaker 9: And then does it slow way down after their first year.

00:34:26
Speaker 6: In sort of temperate regions it slows down a bit because of winter. But what we found in our work is that they’ve actually evolved a faster growth rate in the north than they are in the South, but they live a shorter time in the South. If you’re looking at fish that are from the north versus the South, alligator gars is a little bit different. So they can live a long time, and they grow super fast because they’re eating fish. Gars switch to eating fish faster than any other North American fish, faster than musky, faster than pike, faster than fast.

00:34:52
Speaker 3: They also like to eat each other. A good gar shaped you know, fish to eat is another gar.

00:34:57
Speaker 2: Got it?

00:34:57
Speaker 5: What are they eating on that first day of life?

00:35:00
Speaker 6: Yolk sack stuff, So I mean that’s they’ve got the yolk, which is also somewhat poisonous. So gar eggs are poisonous. You’re not going to find people making gar caviars. So if you ever prepping that, I might have heard that, Yeah forget it. Yeah it’s pretty toxic. So they’re they’re toxic for you know, the first few days, and then once they absorbed that yolk sack, then they’re eating plankton. So usually like you know, daphnia, that sort oft of a zooplankton. But what we found is what might actually lead to the gars, alligator gar growing so big in their first year is that their gills are a little bit different than long nose gars and short nose gars. They actually have a filtration aspect to their gills. And we actually found an alligator gar that was about this big down Louisiana and its stomach was full of plankton, and so like balen Way, just yeah, exactly, it’s like imagine like a great white shark eating krill, which is what you’re looking at, because you don’t think of an alligator gar as a as a film theater.

00:35:50
Speaker 2: And so my students, how’s it getting from because that’s like feeding into his blood stream.

00:35:54
Speaker 4: How’s it getting like he’s like raking it out?

00:35:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then it somehow is getting as esophagus.

00:36:01
Speaker 6: Yeah, yep, just like you know, paddlefish are filter feeders, right, So alligator gars and the cuban and tropical gar have gill rakers that work kind of like a sieve, and so they can actually filter out the plankton and that goes down their esophagus, like you said, whereas long nose and short nosed gars, we got spoted gars the same day. The gill rakers are very different. Nothing in their stomach, but we didn’t know what it was. We had this frozen fish, and my students brought it up to me. It’s like, we don’t know what this is in the stomach because I’m always doing paperwork. So I tell the students and they’re doing dissection, let me know if you find anything cool. We found half a giant rat in a bofend once. We found all kinds of stuff, but they said, we found some in the stomach.

00:36:34
Speaker 3: We don’t know what it is.

00:36:35
Speaker 6: It looks like a popsicle, and so I’m like, well, there’s a frozen fish. So I said, let’s take a look at it. We dissected it and I was they’re chopping it up. I’m like, this looks really weird. Reminds me of some fish food I used to feed to fish at home. I have gars and aquariums at home too, And so Ransom water over it and started like melting into these particles and that this is really weird. It’s bright orange too. I’m kind of like Kriller crotenoid organisms orange. And so we liked under the microscope and it was all copa pods and the stomach was all of this. And so up until then it only been anecdotal, you know, stories about them, maybe filter feeding in Mexico and other places. So we think being able to take advantage of those other food types allows them to grow that big. I’m thinking about whales, right, they’re getting that big, you know, eating those smaller food items.

00:37:16
Speaker 3: So not only are they eating shad and mullet.

00:37:18
Speaker 6: But they’re actually able to eat these other fish too. So there’s a lot left to be discovered about these fish.

00:37:23
Speaker 2: Well that’s pretty crazy.

00:37:24
Speaker 9: So how do they deal with like as far as mortality and stuff with a great big rusty because when people are fishing for them, they’re letting them chew on that chunk of dead bait for a minute, then they’re in.

00:37:38
Speaker 3: I don’t know, usually they try to retrieve it.

00:37:40
Speaker 6: I know that a lot of anglers now are trying to use just circle hooks or jay hooks as opposed to the treble hooks. There’s even when I included a picture of this, they come up with a gar saver rig which actually has a bar so the gar can’t actually take it down into its stomach.

00:37:56
Speaker 3: Oh, really keeps it in the jaws.

00:37:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:37:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s like a crossbar.

00:37:59
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:37:59
Speaker 6: So that way it allows the you know, hook to get stuck in the jaws, which are easy to retrieve, but it doesn’t go all the way down to the stomach, because yeah, you could gut hook a fish and that could be you know, problematic.

00:38:10
Speaker 3: It’s it’s hard to say.

00:38:11
Speaker 6: We know so little about these fish that even looking at catch and release mortality with the hooks like that is understudied. We know it’s you know, less mortality than you know, bowfishing or bowfish catch and release, which does exist.

00:38:22
Speaker 4: But so that exists, Yeah, yeah.

00:38:26
Speaker 2: But it exists, but it doesn’t exist where they’re picturing that it’s going to live to be shot.

00:38:30
Speaker 4: Another day, believe it or not.

00:38:32
Speaker 6: In eight states catch and release bowfishing. Shoot and release bowfishing is legal.

00:38:37
Speaker 2: And that’s not that just de burdens them to deal with, right.

00:38:43
Speaker 6: Well, that’s when there’s been conversations about changing that regulation, like let’s make shoot and release bowfishing not legal, which seems reasonable. Would you shoot and release the you know, a deer duck or something like that and just kind of leave it behind.

00:38:57
Speaker 3: The argument is that all those fish are okay.

00:39:00
Speaker 7: Because they’re just so tough, like they just hard.

00:39:02
Speaker 6: To you know anecdotic like, oh, you know, I’ve shot a bunch of fish you know, and I’m paraphrasing, overnight the next day we shot maybe one hundred two hundred fish suckers are and the next day there weren’t any of them around, So they must have been fine or they all sunk.

00:39:15
Speaker 2: To the most people they get shot by a gun don’t die, right, right, But it’s not like it’s not like when you shoot people. It’s not like a shoot and release. Yeah, what you’re not thinking of it that way, right, and so like, yeah, chances are that’s weird. Yeah, I don’t think that the shooter is thinking a bit like that. I think the shooters like, oh sweet, I don’t need to even deal with it, right, Yeah, it’s a it’s they shake it off the air up there.

00:39:42
Speaker 3: And then they kind of leave it.

00:39:43
Speaker 6: But then they’ve done studies to look at shoot and release mortality where they’ve you know, shot them and looked at them. Depending on where the you know, animal gets shot, that depends on how it’s going to survive, how long it’s going to survive. Within twenty four hours, if it’s in the head or the spine, that fish is dead, sure, but even after that, if it’s somewhere else. It was over fifty percent, you know, seventy two hours later, So that’s one of that’s.

00:40:04
Speaker 4: True, but that’s true of like most not on my yeah, most deer.

00:40:09
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, well okay, Spencer, what percent of deer that aren’t this is impossible to answer.

00:40:17
Speaker 4: Yeah, what percent of.

00:40:19
Speaker 2: Deer that aren’t recovered archery shot white tails that aren’t recovered? What percent do you think.

00:40:25
Speaker 8: Die that aren’t recovered? What percent die in like the next couple of days. I would say fifty percent. By like the end of that following winter, probably another ten or twenty percent, So that leaves like thirty percent to survive for the next hunting season.

00:40:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, just to guess. My only point being, I think that anyone that acts like they’re shooting that air under that fish as a way of letting it go is being cute with themselves.

00:40:51
Speaker 10: Yeah.

00:40:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree, it’s like absurd, and I think that’s what you know you.

00:40:56
Speaker 4: Said about everything. But hey, sometimes you hit a duck and it doesn’t die. Yeah, this is no different than that.

00:41:01
Speaker 2: Well, no, it’s different.

00:41:02
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:41:03
Speaker 6: Well, ducks are managed, right, deer managed, So that’s part of the reason why we’re looking why not just manage these populations put a limit on it, you know, as opposed to shoot a thousand and then there’s you know, what are you doing with them?

00:41:13
Speaker 3: If you’re eating a thousand gar? Like, my hat’s off to you.

00:41:16
Speaker 6: But even as much as I like eating gar, I’m not eating a thousand car But not to not to digress too much from that.

00:41:22
Speaker 2: No, no, are you question good?

00:41:25
Speaker 5: Okay?

00:41:26
Speaker 2: I think so I.

00:41:29
Speaker 7: Could go on all day.

00:41:30
Speaker 2: I was thinking of a different parallel. I was trying to think of this morning. I was trying to think of different parallels in the bird world and bird management. We’ve accounted like, we’ve accounted for all birds in bird management because we have the migratory and song bird treat like. We have a couple non native.

00:41:50
Speaker 4: We have a handful of non native deleterious English sparrows, European starlings, Colombo Olivia, the street pigeon.

00:41:59
Speaker 7: You can kill as many as you want, but no one does.

00:42:03
Speaker 2: Collared dove. Okay, we have a handful of like Dela teers, so like very much deleterious non native.

00:42:11
Speaker 4: We have all our game birds. We don’t have loose ends in the bird world. But then I start thinking in the mammal world, we have a lot of loose ends in the mammal world, where you have there’s a host of like non game species that are some of them are desired, Like most states will run a possums, Most states are gonna run skunks. Most states are gonna run short tail, long tail, least weasel, non game. Those are all native animals.

00:42:41
Speaker 2: Right, So there’s a parallel there where you just have this kind of like loosey goosey configuration and.

00:42:47
Speaker 7: It varies by state.

00:42:50
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, like there’s animals here that would be fur bearers and other like highly regulated.

00:42:55
Speaker 2: Yeah they run they run red Fox in this state. They run Red Fox is an on game, no close season, no bag limit. They’re tightly regulated in other states. So it’s like, so with birds, we’ve kind of like sort of made every bird has its area of regulatory structure. With animals, we don’t, and with fish we definitely don’t like. And with fish, I think the problem is with fish is we don’t even have there’s not even like a native non native distinction like you would think a state would say, ah, well, this gets so complicated because in my notes, you know what I wrote my notes bowfishing conundrum and the Ranella solution a nice part of the problem. Part of the problem is in a lot of the big bowfishing states, they made it a long time ago that you can’t hunt the good eating fish everybody to hunt. They’re not good eating fish. In South America, they bowfish. Like I’ve been out, both fished South America. You’re after the best fish in the in the river. Because they bothfish the really good ones. So they’ve boxed dudes in and like, you can’t bothfish this. You can’t both fish that. You can’t both fish this. So it is putting a lot of emphasis on these other things. But I do think it’s ridiculous to me that a state agency wouldn’t come in and say, if they’re gonna be like that and they’re not gonna let you both fish the good stuff, a state agency see would come and say, non native deleterious fish are open all the time, and there’s a you can there’s no close season, there’s no bag limit, and there’s a very loose method of take structure. Native fish have bag limits. Yeah, But like they’re what they’re gonna say is people can’t tell the difference.

00:44:53
Speaker 5: Right.

00:44:53
Speaker 2: This is when I was talking about this earlier. They’re gonna like, well, how could you expect someone to tell a cart from a buffalo. I’d be like, I don’t know. How can you expect them to tell a pit a wigeon from a gadwin exactly, from a mautland from a wood duck? Right? How can you? Like, you you’re obligated to tell all kinds of shit? How can you tell a deer’s antler is over or under three inches long? I don’t know, Like you figure it out.

00:45:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.

00:45:19
Speaker 6: That’s what we’d like to do, is just let’s get some at least attempt at some equal application of that onto fish. And I will say that Minnesota very recently, in twenty twenty four, enacted the most comprehensive Native Fish Conservation Bill and put it into law where they did one of the first things.

00:45:34
Speaker 3: Are you the lobbyist on that, you know, I’m one of the advocates for it.

00:45:38
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I did that even from down in Louisiana before I had any inklings of coming up to Minnesota. But so they did separate common carp from the other native non game fish. That was one of the first things they did, because they call him now native rough fish, which are like it’s the least worst name because he’s still got the rough fish.

00:45:54
Speaker 4: But at least.

00:45:57
Speaker 2: Where it came from.

00:45:58
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, yeah, And I’m not I’m not worried about the names much as now that we can get the work done. So if we’ve got the separation there, I’m not as concerned at least on some level, with the naming so much as we’ve got a category that separates the common carp the other invasive carp from our buffalo, our gars are boffins. And it’s allowing us to then have restitution values. So if you have wanton waste, there’s a penalty for walleye and bass. I think it’s like something like thirty bucks a walleye if you have, you know, want and waste for walleye and a lot of the game fish. So even if they had like a negligible amount for you know, buffalo or bofen or gar, I mean that would start racking up.

00:46:36
Speaker 2: Sure.

00:46:36
Speaker 6: So we’ve got some regulation there and we’re going in the right direction. And so Minnesota’s kind of leading the charge with that. I’ve got colleagues in Michigan that want to do the same thing. Wisconsin. We’ve got colleagues in Oklahoma. So I do think it’s something that’s going to start catching on. We know that it’s already catching on. And these native fish have been here for you know, longer than we have. So I think if we can get past the sort of human construct of this game fish, this is the valuable one and this is not the valuable one. And just look at a base level, let’s apply what we do to duck.

00:47:07
Speaker 3: Hunting to fish. You have to be able to tell the difference.

00:47:10
Speaker 6: Like, sure, a buffalo, you know, looks similar to a carp i’ll, i’ll, you know, agree with that, but we hear from both fishers. Well, it takes a lot of skill that you know, you know, over a company excuse me, a comb accommodate for the refractive index of water. Right, so you already have to pay a lot of attention. How about we apply that to just look, does it have barballs? Is the scale type different? What does the dorsal fin look like? Apply that and then also just these wanton waste limits, like I mean, is there really a reason to shoot a thousand gar, hundreds and hundreds of buffalo if you’re not eating them? You look at the you know, North American model for wildlife conservation. That third, you know point there of like not a frivolous use for you know, killing the animal.

00:47:48
Speaker 3: And I’ve had buffalo ribs of at garave at bofen.

00:47:50
Speaker 6: Hopefully you try that sometime soon, but there are uses for that, right, So it’s sort of an eat what you kill and be able to identify it.

00:47:56
Speaker 2: I won’t be clear. I’ve tried it, yeah, yeah, but I think I might I might have waited too long.

00:48:00
Speaker 9: Right, Is there a lot of evidence for non native species like common carp, Asian carp impacting or other non natives, non native game fish like impacting these native rough fish species.

00:48:15
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean the the non native Well yeah, so we can take that as the the invasive fish, right, I mean because you can. Non native is a pretty you know, interesting term, you know. Right, you look in the Great Lakes Range and we’ve got steelhead, we got shinok sanmar but those aren’t invasives, right, yeah, it’s like, yeah, so carp and you know, like so common carp and the invasive carp like the silver carp and the big head carp, especially the silver in the big head they eat planktons, so they’re actually attacking the food web at the bottom of the food web, and that’s what all the little fish, whether they’re game fish or other native fish, they need to eat to grow, and so they are actually you know, opening up for a potential trophic cascade from basically the bottom up. So they are problematic and they reproduce very fast. They get really big, really fast. Common carp they you know, they stir up the water, they remove vegetation, and they’re super durable fish. So, I mean, those are problems that we’ve let in and we can’t eradicate those. It’s all about control there. So they do affect the native fish. Now on the other end of the big mouth buffalo is a plank tivorous fish. It’s one of our biggest plank divors. They actually compete with the silver carp and the big head carp. So, you know, as we work on controlling for invasive pieces, but also just bolstering and maybe protecting some of those native fish. Maybe if if it’s just limits, you’re actually creating more resilient system to buffer against those invasive pieces.

00:49:31
Speaker 9: So there’s no like advantage either like carp or I mean, gar aren’t taking advantage of all these little Asian carp.

00:49:39
Speaker 2: They are. They are.

00:49:40
Speaker 6: There’s been a study down I think it was out of Indiana or Illinois which actually showed that shorten noes gar were one of the few native predators are actually we’re selecting for invasive carps. So they were eating the silver carp in the big head carp. The thing is those are top predators, right. There’s not going to be enough gars to eat all of the invasive car so it helps. It’s a nice story when you got a native fish that can help you out against invasive fish.

00:50:02
Speaker 3: Whitefish like whitefish.

00:50:03
Speaker 6: And like michigan eat zebra muscles, but they’re not going to solve the zebra muscle problem. There was a story, you know, that came up back in twenty sixteen where that really was starting to rehab the gator gar reputation was like a way to control invasive carp was alligator gars. And this gets to them restocking them in Illinois. It’s like, well, we get the alligator gars, that’s going to be our silver bullet. There was nowhere near enough alligator gars there never will be to control for the silver carp. And those of us that were you know, interviewed for the story that said like, eh, you should probably pump the brakes on that. That was kind of left out of that story because the AP ran with it. It went everywhere Washington Post, La Times, and they eventually had to do retractions along with the Illinois DNR that had to walk it back. Illinois d and rn’t realized that this is not the story we want to tell, like this is what the science says, So you know.

00:50:47
Speaker 2: We kept that kind they kept run away with like these books, like guys will do a book like or I’d eat nothing, but I eat nothing but non native species. As a conservationist, it’s like, well, you’re not gonna eat your way out of it, right right, Yeah, yeah.

00:51:03
Speaker 7: Man.

00:51:05
Speaker 8: Gar are also, in my observations, pretty inefficient predators, at least short nose and long nose. I used to have to take care of them at our aquarium at the fish Atry Aquarium, And when you dump minnows into like a gar tank, they’ll roll up next to the minnow and then they’ll like do a very sudden swipe in them and it would be like fifty percent of the time they would get their meno. Now, a bass does not miss like that. A walleye doesn’t miss like that, but like long nose gar especially, we’re very bad at catching a healthy manuow.

00:51:35
Speaker 2: Or it’s because he doesn’t have the suction. Yeah, he’s he’s just like his mouth, he doesn’t create a vacuum.

00:51:40
Speaker 8: It seemed as though he was guessing often where his like rostrum was gonna end.

00:51:45
Speaker 3: It’s just not fair. Go ahead, yeah, yeah.

00:51:47
Speaker 8: Do you see that with alligator gar You like that thing is not very good at catching like an adult fish.

00:51:52
Speaker 6: Well, first, I’d say if they weren’t good at catching fish, they wouldn’t be around for you know, one hundred and fifty millionars.

00:51:57
Speaker 3: So clear they’re doing some.

00:51:58
Speaker 6: But I agree with you captive situations and we see this in aquariums and and hatter in our tanks in the lab there. You know, it’s like the t rex and Jurassic Park. It doesn’t want to be fed at once to hunt, and so, like you get used to captivity and so they realize like they don’t have to you know, connect every single time. Alongo’s got a lot of range. They might be used to, you know, you know, going after fish in the open water, and so it’s a little bit different dynamics than if you’re in a rounded tank or a raceway and you got all those fish that can kind of navigate a little bit better.

00:52:28
Speaker 3: So I will agree they do miss.

00:52:30
Speaker 6: But you know, you watch a wildlife documentary, the cheetah doesn’t catch the gazelle every time either, So yeah, take like.

00:52:36
Speaker 2: A little baby human and lock it up with and then a couple of years later you like, oh, I don’t see these things not that smart.

00:52:42
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:52:43
Speaker 8: My takeaway from watching gar feed was that they’re picking on not the healthy individual, right, which is.

00:52:48
Speaker 3: What predators would do in the wild anyway, right.

00:52:50
Speaker 6: But gars in captivity actually have smaller teeth than the gars in the wild, So when we catch them out of the wild, they got bigger teeth, which makes sense, right, So if you’re not using you know that, you know what you’re white put energy into sort of you know, generating or growing bigger teeth.

00:53:03
Speaker 9: Do they scavenge at all? Or is it mostly because I mean for these guys a lot of dead baits?

00:53:09
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, yeah, cater gars will scavenge. Spotted gars, short nosecars. They’ll feed off the bottom. You’ll see them even in Indiana and Illinois. They’ll go basically a headstand with the tails are sticking out of the water. So whether they eating crawfish or whether they’re scavenging, long nose gars more feeding on fish and whatever they can get down.

00:53:26
Speaker 3: They’re more active feeders.

00:53:27
Speaker 6: It’s like they’d be trying to like using four steps, and we already know that you don’t have confidence in their ability to eat anyway, so they’re not gonna be able to pick stuff out the bottom.

00:53:35
Speaker 2: I come from a long line of bowl fisherman.

00:53:37
Speaker 4: My father was a bowl fisherman.

00:53:39
Speaker 2: That’s about the extent of it.

00:53:41
Speaker 4: That is a long line bullfish. Yeah, yeah, it is, but he was bullfish.

00:53:46
Speaker 2: Back. When you take a Folger’s coffee can, okay, okay, picture you gotta recurve bow. You take a Foldger’s coffee can, take a tin snip, and first off, you cut the end off it so you got a cylinder. Now, okay, you take it tin snip and make two flanges that you can hose. Clamp the flanges to your bow above and below the rest. Then you wrap the line around the folders can, pass the arrow through the can so that when you shoot, the arrow goes through the can and pulls the line out, that’s all.

00:54:20
Speaker 3: That’s impressive.

00:54:21
Speaker 2: I’m only setting this up to be that a multi generational bowfisherman. I often find myself criticizing my own kind o, my own brethren, my own bowfishing brethren, who are like, oh, we’re doing the world of favor, you know. And I was like, listen, it’s fine to go bowfish carp. That’s fine. You’re not heard anything. You’re not helping anything. Like you cannot mechanically remove fish, remove carp from the Great Lakes or whatever watershed, Like, you can’t mechanically remove them to a point where you have made any difference. We one time had a guy on the podcast. We had an expert on USGS guy about Burmese pythons. He explained, like all this snake rodeo, this, and that doesn’t matter, like when they wind up doing the work on the pythons and how many are there, how many you’re catching that whole world. He’s like, knock yourself out, have a good time, it don’t matter. After that, I was in Florida and the guy’s telling me Richard Martinez tell me his buddy, oh he hates you. I’m like, I hear this often and I’m like kind of like anxious to hear what he hates me about. He hates me because that guy said that he’s a d he’s a snake catcher. He hates me because that guy said that, and I didn’t challenge him. But it’s like some things don’t matter. Shooting cart and the great legs, you are not helping anything. You’re not hurting anything. You’re not helping anything.

00:56:04
Speaker 9: So it’s not like coyote hunters when it’s like shoot a coyote, save a fawn.

00:56:07
Speaker 7: It’s not like shoot a carp save a whatever.

00:56:11
Speaker 2: Kyotes has been proven to be effective if it’s done in a spatially in a temporally and spatially advantageous set of circumstances. So you’re not going to get there. Bowfishing carp you’re not helping anyone, now, are they? If you’re bowfishing gar? Is it also a drop in the bucket, Like you’re not actually having population level impacts on gar, just like you’re not having population level impacts on.

00:56:46
Speaker 4: Carp Or is it different?

00:56:48
Speaker 3: I would say it’s different.

00:56:50
Speaker 6: You look at where they are in the food web, right, I mean, carp are pretty omnivorous, they’re eating you know, stuff off the bottom, vegetation, sometimes bugs, whereas gars are more on your sort of predator apex predator level. Right, there’s way fewer gars than there are carp So sure you maybe be doing a drop in the bucket with carp.

00:57:07
Speaker 3: And there’s other ways.

00:57:08
Speaker 6: We work with the organizations out in Minnesota that do carp removals on the inland lakes and they actually do make a difference. But that’s like massive carp traps and everything. So you’re right shooting the carp. You can feel good about it, you want to. Part of what we want to say is like if you want to shoot something, you know, shoot carp shooting basis past you shoot as many as you want. There aren’t limits on those as far as I know. Definitely in Minnesota Michigan. Those places just dispose of them properly. But you know, shoot as many as you want there.

00:57:33
Speaker 4: That’s aesthetically sure.

00:57:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:57:35
Speaker 6: And so you know, but the gars, there’s fewer of them, there’s fewer of the bowfin. Those are your predatory fish. And so when you do sort of take out a large number of these predatory animals that also live for a long time, I know we have disrespect for the short nosed gar, but even they can live for fifty years so and we just found that from our work down in Mississippi. So if the sort of latitudinal differences mean anything, we expect that probably live longer in Montana and in Minnesota than they do down south. If they lived for fifty years down to mississippi’s probably even older up here. And I would take an aside to say, I’m really impressed with the Montana’s doing. They’ve got a five gar limit. You have to get a guard card now as of this year to get short notse cars.

00:58:15
Speaker 3: So I thought that was pretty cool. Got in touch with the fishing wileife fie.

00:58:18
Speaker 2: The hell’s getting after short nosey? You know it’s you know, no clue how long nose car.

00:58:24
Speaker 6: That’s I’m glad you’re impressed with That was my first fish actually on the Miskigan River in Michigan.

00:58:30
Speaker 2: I know.

00:58:31
Speaker 3: I did my master’s thesis on the Mskeigan River.

00:58:33
Speaker 2: It’s a boat. We did a bowfishing episode I filmed on the Miskegan River in which we messed around with both.

00:58:39
Speaker 3: Oh really nice.

00:58:40
Speaker 7: I thought, didn’t you shoot a gard?

00:58:42
Speaker 2: You shot gar?

00:58:43
Speaker 4: We shot Yeah, suckers.

00:58:46
Speaker 6: Yeah, we worked on all those fishes on the Miskeigan on Thesigan. Yeah yeah, two thousand and one to two thousand and five, probably is out there all the time.

00:58:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We stayed at the old Coast Guard station out on the you know Mona Lakes.

00:59:00
Speaker 4: Really yeah yeah yeah, yep, more Skegan play.

00:59:04
Speaker 3: Yeah’s a paper mill there, you know.

00:59:07
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that’s something. My girlfriend’s dad was a mill ray at that paper I want to see him in the Tough Band contest one time.

00:59:13
Speaker 3: Oh wow.

00:59:14
Speaker 6: It’s one of the only spots you can find chinook salmon and long nose gars in the same river system with the buffalo. And that was only what It’s one of the few places you can see chinook salmon and long nose bars in the same river systems.

00:59:25
Speaker 2: So oh man, we used to hunt that flat for docks, but those are in base of yeah right, yeah, exactly.

00:59:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, let’s let’s let’s do that for me.

00:59:34
Speaker 2: Let’s play that game for because if you look up like if you look up, let let’s say take a turn like weed when you look up weed in a dictionary, but we just means like a non desirable right, it’s a non desirable plan, So we say something that’s like, here’s where gets a little tricky. If you take a fish and you deliberately introduce it usually doesn’t carry the non it’s not.

01:00:00
Speaker 7: They can’t retroactively call it invasive.

01:00:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, like does it carry invasive because invasive implies not desirable. But I was reading this book. There’s a really good book called Fishing in the Great Lakes. It’s a history of commercial fishing in the Great Lakes, and it talks about it’s funny because the due’s name. There’s this ichthyologist named Seth Green. It’s hard to look them up because of the other dude. But they were working to as they were collapsing all the native fisheries in the Great Lakes from over harvest and then rafting all those logs and all the spawning grounds. So the bark falls off and you got like thirteen feet of bark laying over the spawning habitat as they’re destroying all the native fish. They’re in there introducing karp deliberately thinking that people are going to appreciate them as a food fish, the same way they’re appreciated in Europe and appreciated in Asia. So there you get like, Okay, so it was deliberately introduced, there was budget for it. We now regard them as della tearious like whatever. Yeah, so does all these like terminologies No one says, like salmon in the Great Lakes are absolutely not native Walleye and the rivers here and then the lakes.

01:01:12
Speaker 4: Here are not native, but they’re not.

01:01:16
Speaker 7: Like in basive.

01:01:17
Speaker 4: No, people don’t call some people.

01:01:19
Speaker 9: Some people will try to, right, I mean you’ll hear people try to call brown trout.

01:01:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do that just to be yeah, I do that too, and I tease pheasants too. Yeah, yeah, I tease brown trout, rainbow trout, pheasants. But just to clarify the terminology, Yeah, it’s all perspective.

01:01:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, so introduced versus invasive.

01:01:40
Speaker 6: That’s a tricky thing, you know, And uh so, yeah, we’ve got to introduced some on it’s I think, getting back to Brody’s question, like those introduced some on it are problematic in some parts of the Eastern United States. You’ve got you know, even the the next category there’s like non game made of fish, like the shiners and the darters and the minnows. They’re problematic for some of those nest building areas, they take up.

01:01:59
Speaker 3: Space, they eat the fish there, the native species.

01:02:01
Speaker 9: So have you guys done any like reintroductions of these native fish in places where maybe they were wiped out or they’re just not doing well.

01:02:10
Speaker 6: There’s a group called Conservation Fisheries down in Tennessee that’s doing that, and so they’re doing that with like different types of mad Toms, darters and not.

01:02:19
Speaker 2: Guard.

01:02:20
Speaker 3: Well that gets back to Illinois and the alligator gar who.

01:02:24
Speaker 6: All had alligator gar who well, oh went all the way up into Illinois.

01:02:28
Speaker 4: So it was all the Mississippi Missouri systems.

01:02:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:02:31
Speaker 6: Yeah, And so the damming and the leveing and the eradication efforts. So sure, I mean the looking at them as sort of trash fish and problematic was a problem, but so was the dams and the levees and the modification cutting them off from those floodplain habitats where they can’t get to that terrestrial vegetation they need to despawn. And so now a big effort is not only to introduce some of those you know populations to try to recharge those, but also to reconnect the river with its floodplain habitat. And that is research that we’re working on with Nature Can Servancy, US Fish and Wildlife Service to make those connections between the river and the floodplaine because that’s good for.

01:03:06
Speaker 3: The gars, it’s good for other fish, it’s good for water birds.

01:03:09
Speaker 6: We see thousands of these wood storks down there, all kinds of different animals, but we’re using the gars is kind of an indicator of that because they do migrate onto the floodplane. So we’ve kind of used to try to get some money for the grants, is to show that you can use gars as indicators of this restoration efficacy. If you reconnect that river with the floodplane. The use are fish that move on to them. So do we see the fish moving on there? Do we see those twelve inch young of the year popping out in a month and a half and so far we’ve seen that success there and we do see tons of crappy there, a lot of other animals as well taking advantage of those habitats.

01:03:42
Speaker 2: So you’ll put a.

01:03:43
Speaker 4: Tag on a gar and you’ll see him travel out into that stuff.

01:03:45
Speaker 3: We’re tagging some of them with Fish and Wiley Service. They’re pit tag.

01:03:48
Speaker 6: They’ve got an external tag too, but we’re also using a fin clip where we look at a chemical signature where we can actually look at we catch you out of the river, do you have a river signature?

01:03:57
Speaker 3: Do we catch you on the floodplane? Do we see a floodplain signature?

01:03:59
Speaker 6: And we can look at that by looking at carbon and nitrogen just from the fin clip. At least that’s a non lethal way of doing it. So that’s been helpful and that’s ongoing research. We’re going there in October to do that.

01:04:10
Speaker 2: So they went up that system into Illinois. Yeah, and now how far up are they?

01:04:15
Speaker 6: They’re still up in Illinois. I think Hennepin and Hopper Lakes or some lakes up there. They seem to be doing well there because I guess there’s like a nuclear plant or something, so it keeps it a bit warmer. Some of those fish are growing decent, but they don’t mature until they’re about five to eleven years old, depending on males or females. And we expect those ones further north they’re going to take longer to mature.

01:04:33
Speaker 3: We see that in other gar spie.

01:04:34
Speaker 7: Are they are they protected like up in the northern extreme.

01:04:37
Speaker 6: Of their Ragin’s that’s a great question. I think they’re working towards protecting them because that was the issue and we had that maybe five five years ago where bofish are actually shot one of the restocked, you know, one of the little guys that made it to be decent size, and luckily, you know, she reported it, and you know, we’re able to see like, well, this might actually be kind of an issue where we might want to protect those fish. But you have to be able to identify the fish as well, and that’s tricky with with gars, I get it, but at least being able to you know, then you need some sort of maybe blanket protection or maybe a harvest limit.

01:05:09
Speaker 3: Right that we are not, I.

01:05:10
Speaker 2: Would be very careful just as advice. Yeah, I wouldn’t use the word protection because you’re gonna you’re gonna generate too much social friction. I would if I was in your shoes, just long line of bow fishermen, if I was, if I was in your shoes, I would be talking about I would be talking about putting a regulatory structure in place, because people are gonna they’re gonna hear protection and their head’s gonna go in a certain direction. But a regulatory structure the same way, like the same way, all the other stuff the same way, all the birds and everything like.

01:05:58
Speaker 6: No, I agree with you, and that’s the language we use anyway. You know, I think it depends on the audience we’re talking to as well, but yeah, it’s definitely more regulation and management, and even from our perspective, it’s informing management. Right, we’re doing the science and we you know, been lucky to work with Minnesota. DNR has been very receptive to you know, non game native fish conservation and management because they don’t have the data. So we go out there and we have that expertise coming off of six years in Louisiana and also several years in Michigan, where to find these fish, where to catch them, how to extract the otel.

01:06:28
Speaker 3: It’s what kind of data we can get from them.

01:06:30
Speaker 6: Because you know, everybody’s strapped for resources, whether you’re a state, federal, that sort of thing.

01:06:34
Speaker 3: So that’s been helpful.

01:06:35
Speaker 6: But we can help again inform that management, give recommendations that you know, might help improve that sort of regulatory structure.

01:06:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think an achievable goal would be that you would that you would help fishermen, help them understand that that we have this category we use to categorize fish. It’s not that’s not a great category, and that we should understand that there are these problematic invasive fish that people brought from far away that we wish weren’t in the systems. We have these fish that have always been here, right, and we should make sure they’re always here. And so we draw a distinction between these and these and with gars. And I don’t know what the number is with gars is like you’re allowed two or five a night or whatever the hell, just like you’re allowed two or five bass a day whatever, And like just start kind of creating this idea that it’s not all that these fish aren’t damaging to the eco, that they’re not all damaging to the ecosystems, you know, and that like the buffalo is like a big sucker that used to be a very soft after commercial fish and it shouldn’t be ditched like cart.

01:07:48
Speaker 9: Is there any like examples of there being like bounties on alligator gar other Did that ever happen?

01:07:55
Speaker 3: I don’t think not. In recent history.

01:07:58
Speaker 6: You go back to the nineteen thirties, Texas Parks and Wildlife had the electrical gar destroyer that they made to just they thought that I think they were taken out. I want to say it was waterbirds or something. And so you know, they basically raned this rig that was supposed to kill.

01:08:14
Speaker 3: All the gars.

01:08:15
Speaker 4: Ye use the term the gar war, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:08:19
Speaker 6: So Matt Miller is the director of Science Communications for the Nature Conservancy, good friend of mine, and he wrote this book Fishing through the Apocalypse, which is great about fishing and conservation, and he brought up like this gar wars idea but using that broadly not just gars, but other non game native fish and even non game isn’t you know that’s relative as well to look at just kind of providing some respect for these fish again looking at the North American model of wildlife conservation where we’re looking at, you know, having the best science available and then also not hunting these animals or using them for frivolous purposes. So if you’re going to shoot, if you’re going to kill it, eat it, and you know they taste delicious. I think with that also we’ve got the opportunity to reach the next generation, which is important if we want to preserve that hunting and fishing and show that there’s value. So there’s two directions I want to go with that, But there’s opportunity, right, So you go to a spot that may not be the best for rainbow trout or walleye or bass, but a lot of these habitats have plenty of gars, bowfens, suckers. So there’s opportunity for fishing that people may not have if they don’t have a boat to go after walleye or to go after bass. So we’re trying to introduce other opportunities for fishing again to look at, you know, both conservation and management and just better stewardship of our natural resource, but to conserve that recreational way of life. And so if we don’t do that, that’s going to start slipping away.

01:09:40
Speaker 2: You know.

01:09:40
Speaker 6: We can go on and on about how people are you know, on screens more than outside. And one of the ways that we’ve done that is working with the anglers, whether they’re bowfishers or whether they’re you know, catching release or hooking line anglers. We did this with a bowfen and my lab just a couple months ago.

01:09:57
Speaker 3: This summer.

01:09:57
Speaker 6: We’re a bunch of anglers that know how to catch bofen and some of them never caught them before. But they got together and I said, hey, can you catch us some bowfriend that we can use for our research. And I brought my research team with me and these are all you know, undergrads and grad students. They also were able to catch both and they really had a blast. Like some of them, they’re from Minnesota. They were able to fish walleye and fish bluegill, but they never caught bouf in before and they really got into that. And then the anglers got to learn about, well, if you’re going to help us out, here’s what we want as far as a measurement and a photograph and a fin clip. So really building that relationship with the anglers, and we’re doing that with the bowfishers too, looking at where are these lakes where you might be doing some bowfishing tournaments. Can we at least use the carcasses to get the data to look at the age structure of those fish. So we’re definitely not looking to end bowfishing or to you know, to to stop that sort of recreational aspect, but we’re looking to can we manage it sustainably to where we can have the fish and the water doing their jobs. As you know, Ecosystem Services balancing you know, predator prey populations, but then also you can go there and you can shoot the fish hopefully eat them sustainably, so you know, kind of everybody wins, and so far that’s we’ve made progress with that, even with a lot of the boatfishers.

01:11:08
Speaker 4: Have you guys seen.

01:11:11
Speaker 2: Besides alligator gar getting extirpated from native range, have you seen any other fish that people categorize as a rough fish?

01:11:20
Speaker 5: Hell?

01:11:20
Speaker 4: There are there any records of other fish being extirpated.

01:11:23
Speaker 6: That’s a good question. I think there’s plenty. I mean, you’ve got the spotted guar in Michigan, so that’s considered a species of concern. Now it’s not endangered or threatened. It is considered endangered in Pennsylvania, So there are places of state by state, there’s places where you might consider a spotted guard to be protected, and in other states it’s just we don’t know enough about them.

01:11:43
Speaker 3: But now we know that they can live for over forty years, so we’ve lagged so far behind.

01:11:47
Speaker 6: So I think that’s a great question where we’ve seen them extirpated. Quite honestly, we don’t have enough data in a lot of places to tell are they still here are they gone?

01:11:56
Speaker 3: Why might they have you know gone?

01:11:58
Speaker 6: We like to say, like we’re about one hundred years behind what we know about trout and salmon and walleye. We don’t have to take one hundred years to catch up on that. So what we’re trying to do is use those methods that you’ve all learned about from managing smallmouth bass, largemouth pass. How do we apply that to these data deficient species. So again working together to more sustainable management with that stuff. So honestly, we don’t know we could be losing populations and not know it because we aren’t accounting for the harvest.

01:12:23
Speaker 2: Of those fish. You know. That brings up a really interesting a cology point that my brother Danny raised to me. He’s with US Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska that works on salmon, and.

01:12:34
Speaker 4: We’re talking about I brought this up before.

01:12:39
Speaker 2: We’re talking about difference between the Lower forty eight and Alaska in terms of we’re speaking about fisheries, but you could almost apply it to like conservation in general, where he was just like, not in a publication form, just talking casually. He was saying that, like the Lower forty eight is kind of like in recovery mode, right, Like conservation in lower forty eight is like largely about recovery, he said. In Alaska and big parts of Alaska, we’re still in the descriptive phase. We’re still trying to be like what’s here? Right, there’s salmon runs that like people know. It’s like people don’t don’t know. I mean, people have been utilizing the salmon runs for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, but no one’s put their arms around it yet. No one’s been like, Okay, what does it look like in twenty twenty what does the run look like in twenty twenty one? You know what I mean? Like measuring, trying to put some kind of number around, like what is here? So a lot of the work they’ll they’ll do work of just trying to describe what’s here, which makes the recovery mode it lets you track change over time. But what were you say about gar almost like contradicts that, because if you look, there probably are things down here that we haven’t done the discovery mode on because we just disregarded it or lumped it into some goofy classification to the point where you might later say, we don’t know where they lived. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of old people talk about seeing them, but like, I don’t know how accurate is that. Can’t find one now, you know, because no one ever measured it, right, right, Yeah.

01:14:21
Speaker 3: No, I think that’s a that’s a great analogy.

01:14:24
Speaker 6: I think we’re very much still in the discovery phase, but also in a recovery phase too, because we don’t know where they’ve been, you know, overfished or where.

01:14:32
Speaker 3: It’s a combination.

01:14:32
Speaker 6: Again, it’s not just harvest, but it’s you know, the modification of those habits, shaits. So I think we’re playing catch up and you know, we’re just trying to you know, make the best that we can. And sort of that’s why sort of encouraging.

01:14:45
Speaker 3: The value of these native species.

01:14:48
Speaker 6: To sort of then promote our ability to research them, to get multiple stakeholders involved, whether it’s the beau fishers, the hook and line anglers, the state and federal agencies.

01:14:57
Speaker 3: And I think there is momentum towards that.

01:15:00
Speaker 6: And to do that, we want to communicate effectively and want to build those relationships, not you know, shooting people down with like you shouldn’t be doing this or this should be stopped. And that’s a big part of our sort of science communication.

01:15:11
Speaker 5: Aspect of it.

01:15:12
Speaker 6: So we appreciate the work that you all do for that because I think we need a multifaceted approach to make that happen before we, you know, lose what we didn’t even know we had.

01:15:21
Speaker 8: No do you know examples of other parts of the world that are being wrecked by our native rough fish the way carp are like disturbing our waterways, like over in Germany the short head red horses right just ripping up their creeks or something like that.

01:15:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, well, you know it’s funny you mentioned. So there’s two parts of that.

01:15:42
Speaker 6: Yes, our fish are wrecking plenty of habitats in other places, but it’s not our native rough fish. It’s our game fish, you know, largemouth bass, steelhead, bluegill, I mean, rainbow Trout’s one of the most widely distributed species.

01:15:56
Speaker 3: Of fish in the world.

01:15:57
Speaker 6: I know, you know fishermen the go down to Argentina to fish for steelhead. I’m like, what, I would rather find out what fish are actually there and then you know, go for those. So it’s mainly our game fish because you know, we like to take the fish that we like and take them to other places. Now, as far as gars go, they have been introduced not on purpose, relatively speaking, through the aquarium trade. And so in some places where they’ve released them. There’s a couple parts of India, there’s parts of Southeast Asia where they’ve.

01:16:27
Speaker 3: They’ve made their way into waterways.

01:16:29
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you can go. Dudes in Southeast Asia are buying garsh here, turn loose in their aquarium and then dumping them.

01:16:35
Speaker 3: They’re mainly want to keep them their aquarium.

01:16:37
Speaker 6: But then when they get too big, because believe or not, you know, as you know, I mean, alligator gars get big, so it’s a big aquarium fish. They’re super popular gars. And then they’ve got arijuanas down there too.

01:16:49
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:16:51
Speaker 4: That’s a boatfish.

01:16:51
Speaker 5: Yeah.

01:16:52
Speaker 8: How are our guar doing in those other places?

01:16:55
Speaker 6: In most places, they’re not doing great because they don’t have enough to sort of create a system population and self sustake population. But there are a couple spots I’ve seen it in India through videos sent me where they have spawned. Now, sure that could be problematic, but it’s probably something that’s still controlled. I mean, you know, I know, I feel like you know, I also feel like you know, who better to take care of alligator gars in India than an Indian dude you could send out there.

01:17:20
Speaker 3: So maybe it’s just job security. We’ll see, but yeah, I think.

01:17:24
Speaker 6: But in other places they’ve kind of tracked alligator gars have been released. There was I think a moat around as some.

01:17:30
Speaker 3: Sort of pas palace or castle in.

01:17:32
Speaker 6: Japan where an alligator gar was released, and so they had, like I know, their version of fish and wildlife trying to catch this gar out of there for a while.

01:17:39
Speaker 3: And so you’ll hear stories they put it in there to keep intruders out. I know, right, Yeah, it’s not gonna I’m not gonna work that way.

01:17:45
Speaker 9: Is there actually is there, Like I’m sure people have been bitten by mistake, like in muddy Water, right, Like, is there claims of them ever attacking.

01:17:54
Speaker 6: There’s like very very few records of even the mistaken identity. I think there is something that happened a couple of years ago go there was I think a woman in Texas or Louisiana had stepped near an alligator gar and got tagged by it. But that was it and there wasn’t It was pretty foggy details around that, but other than that, gars aren’t. They definitely are not attacking people. They’re very gape limited, so even a fish like that can get this exactly. That was probably about a five foot long fish, you know, give or take maybe four and a half five feet. But you look at that that mouth isn’t you know, it’s not going to fit anything further down that.

01:18:25
Speaker 3: Much as far as I mean it can open wide up.

01:18:28
Speaker 6: And down, but that throat doesn’t open up very much. So they’re very gape limited, so they’re not gonna you know, they can’t swallow a person or anything like that.

01:18:34
Speaker 3: Even a big alligator.

01:18:36
Speaker 6: The biggest one we’ve caught in our research is eight feet one inch long, just a couple of inches off of the known, you know, world record fish. But we did pull a three foot long carp out of the stomach of that fish. I’ve got a picture of my student who, yeah, it was and it was mostly not mostly it was partially digested to where it was just a lump of flesh.

01:18:55
Speaker 7: Like someone’s like house poodle or something.

01:18:57
Speaker 3: I mean, it’s it’s kick your dogs on leashes, I guess.

01:19:04
Speaker 8: But you know, hower gator gar doing in Mexico.

01:19:07
Speaker 3: They’re doing well in Mexico. They’re native in Mexico.

01:19:10
Speaker 6: And in Mexico you’ve got the alligator gar and the tropical gar, which are big time food fish down there. So you go to the Tabasco region, Tabasco State in Mexico, which they there was a gar conference there. Believe it or not, they do happen in twenty twelve. Tropical gar stuff was, you know, in the little shops there. They were in the restaurants. We had tropical gar and banadas to Molly’s. We roasted them to where they were just gutted, but you can put them on the grill and then the scales just flake right off. So those tropic gars on the grill were probably about, you know, maybe foot and a half long, but they get to three and a half four feet long as well, so they’re looking there, but not as long as you know, but they’re fatter than the longer that’s a stouter fish because that’s related to the alligator.

01:19:52
Speaker 3: Gar long noses.

01:19:52
Speaker 6: They’re in a different genus, so they’re the skinnier gars like your short nose and your spot in but it’s as important of a food fish there as salmon are in the Pacific Northwest, so not only have they depleted the wild populations in some places, then they’re aquaculturing them to restore those wild populations. So Cuba and parts of Mexico are actually good templates for gar aquaculture and restoration. Everything we know, like through Fish and Wildlife Service, not everything, but the starting to what we know came from those places where people are already culturing those fish to try to restore alligator gar bring them back in certain population.

01:20:24
Speaker 7: So they’re not the term rough fish down there.

01:20:26
Speaker 3: No, No, it’s a big good fish.

01:20:28
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

01:20:30
Speaker 8: You spend a lot of time working in Minnesota at the edge of the Mississippi Watershed, and in twenty seventeen there was an American eel caught at Cottonwood Lake in Minnesota, which was thirty miles off of the Mississippi River. Even so, like it has the potential to collect some fish that are far away from what you’d consider to be their home up there. What are some of the unique things you’ve caught Minnesota?

01:20:53
Speaker 3: Gotcha in Minnesota so far?

01:20:55
Speaker 6: I mean, we’re still focusing a lot on the gars and the bowfins because the you know, the DNR typically isn’t paying attention in them the same way they’re paying attention to the walleye and the bass.

01:21:04
Speaker 3: So I feel like that’s some of our unique fish.

01:21:06
Speaker 6: We do get the blue sucker, which you know is found all the way down in Texas too, But that’s a pretty unique fish. They look kind of like a shark, kind of a grayish looking if you had a shark version of a sucker, that’s what they look like.

01:21:16
Speaker 4: Familiar with fish they get.

01:21:19
Speaker 6: You know, probably not quite three feet long, but I mean you’re yeah, decent size and there’s.

01:21:23
Speaker 8: Deeply blue, especially when they’re spawning. Yeah, they have a tall dorsal fin on.

01:21:28
Speaker 2: Right.

01:21:28
Speaker 8: They’re threatened in South Dakota. We used to raise them at the hatchery.

01:21:31
Speaker 6: Yeah, very cool fish and uh you know they stay in the midwater, sort of midwater in midstream. A lot of some ichthyologists and also angers call me a unicorn fish because it’s very difficult to catch them because it’s a sucker. So you got a fish for them, right, They got that ventral mouth.

01:21:44
Speaker 2: Never heard of that one.

01:21:45
Speaker 6: Yeah, Yeah, so blue sucker, we can you know, you come up to Minnesota, we could probably show you some. So they’re putting trackers in some of them to find out where they go. So DNR is doing that. They’ve done that with some of the long nosed gars, so it’s finding out where some of those fish are moving as well tracking the invasive carp where they’re going.

01:22:00
Speaker 3: I’m trying to think as far as unique stuff we did find.

01:22:02
Speaker 6: You know through some of those bofen that half of a large rat in the stomach, which shows that bof and will eat just about anything. The I tell the students, just like with the plankton, to let me know when there’s something interesting you find in the stomach. And so I I was coming back to the lab and showing somebod of the lab and I said, do you find anything interesting? I said, oh, yeah, we found a rat in the stomach. And I’m like, well, where is it? I said, you know, I need to see a picture or find it. It was already in like the carcass bin and stuff. I’m like, you’re gonna have to fish that out of here so we.

01:22:29
Speaker 7: Can get your muskrat.

01:22:33
Speaker 6: I mean it was the only post your end of it. So I mean I I couldn’t tell you. I’ll send you the picture. Maybe you can gain idea.

01:22:39
Speaker 8: Yeah, you did say what are the little bumps that some suckers get when they’re spawning. Blue blue suckers would really get those on there, tubercles.

01:22:47
Speaker 6: Tubercles, Yeah, yeah, so they got the spawning tubercles on them, and so on buffalo.

01:22:51
Speaker 3: We’ll get those two a lot of yeah.

01:22:53
Speaker 5: Yeah.

01:22:55
Speaker 6: So there’s there’s a lot of interesting fisher I haven’t seen any eels there yet. When we’re down in Louisiana, sw eels all the time, So I think that’s what’s been interesting is having stayed and worked in Louisiana for six years. Now being in Minnesota, we’re just following the Mississippi River further up to the top. But that’s also what some of our research is doing is looking at those gar and buffalo populations down south. We’ve learned about their life history, some of the population structure, and we can look at gars in Buffalo up north and then compare northern and southern populations. One of the things we want to do is like, can we start forecasting about climate change how that might change things? Right, Because we’ve got fish that are adapted to a warmer climate down south that we know about, how might the ones in the north start potentially changing but then you know, you’ve got your cold water fish are can be affected by that as well. But you know, we don’t have walleye way down south. So that’s why the gars and the bofins and the buffalo can be useful for that kind of research as well. So again we’re trying to use them as sort of these multifaceted tools to tackle management, conservation, even climate science.

01:23:53
Speaker 2: What are these northern gars doing under the ice? Like, I’ve never in my life even heard of someone catching one through the ice.

01:24:02
Speaker 6: Yeah, it happens. I’ve got a couple of pictures that people have sent me. It’s still on my bucket list to get a gar through the ice.

01:24:07
Speaker 4: So you’ve heard of people getting hit.

01:24:09
Speaker 3: Oh they’re just.

01:24:09
Speaker 6: They’re just kind of chilling under there, no pun intended. But there’s places in Iowa where I’ve got video of that too, where the guy cut you know, made as a you know, cut through the ice drop the can ice hole and it’s just his ice hole there, and then just a bunch of short nosed gars just hanging out below there, like I mean.

01:24:26
Speaker 3: Probably fifty or sixteen in a round. Yeah, just you know, kind of.

01:24:30
Speaker 6: Slowly waving their fins but you know, metabolism slows down, They’re still going to eat, but they’re congregating there. And they also are air breathers, but when the water is that cold, as long as they find well oxygen water, they don’t have to go up for air there. But so they’re there both in or there under the ice too. So that’s still still on the list to check out.

01:24:48
Speaker 2: Can I ask you snap and turtle question? Sure?

01:24:50
Speaker 3: I was into turtles before I was into gars.

01:24:52
Speaker 2: Actually, so okay, years ago, I was at the National Trappers Association convention in Iowa, and I went to a lecture by a turtle trapper. Okay, can’t there his name is. He had a like a thing hanging from he had like a necklace that was like a pouch made out of a big old turtle foot, big time in the turtles, turtle trapper, but he got into raisin turtles. He was saying, and I’ve told people, I’ve told people this a thousand times that this is true. He was saying that a turtle in the winter, so it’s iceed over, like you know, Norman comes up and sticks his head out of the water and gets a gold but everything’s locked and ice.

01:25:31
Speaker 3: He was saying, I think I know where this is going.

01:25:33
Speaker 2: Is it true?

01:25:34
Speaker 3: Yes, it is if you’re talking about clerical respiration.

01:25:37
Speaker 2: Well, I’m talking about this.

01:25:40
Speaker 4: He was saying that that turtle can go down in the muck.

01:25:43
Speaker 2: He can burrow down in the muck and push himself up and it sends bubbles of methane out of the muck. He says he’s seen this in a wetsuit. It sends methane bubbles by disturbing the muck and it goes up to the ice. Like he was saying that somehow like the CO two can leach through the ice. Huh. And then he’ll wait and eventually he’ll go up and sip. He’ll go up and sip that bubble. Huh.

01:26:13
Speaker 4: He says he’s watched it.

01:26:15
Speaker 3: That’s That’s not what I thought.

01:26:16
Speaker 6: With the clerical respiration, that’s where they just basically breed through their butts and stuff.

01:26:20
Speaker 3: So that’s how they get gas exchange there.

01:26:22
Speaker 6: But I’ve not heard about the methane bubble and blow the ice surface, and then what was the advantage there?

01:26:28
Speaker 3: It would just you get some sort of conversion picture.

01:26:30
Speaker 2: You stir the muck up, all that gas comes out. Ye, somehow he was explaining, and then you talk like I was hoping you can help me. He’s explaining that that certain like some gas goes through the ice. I don’t get it. Yeah, but if it waits, he’ll eventually go up and he’ll sip that bubble. Uh huh. To what end he can’t stick his head out of the water.

01:26:55
Speaker 3: I mean, there’s got to be some sort of organic chemistry. Yeah, he was saying.

01:26:59
Speaker 4: By the I know, but that’s why I got to listen to what I’m talking about.

01:27:02
Speaker 2: He was saying that, like, by that bubble sitting there for some period of time goes through some transformation. How does how is that? How is that stupid? Do you think like a methane bubble will just live there chemically stable for the rest of its life.

01:27:19
Speaker 9: I don’t know, Like, okay, bubble turns into exactly right.

01:27:27
Speaker 2: I don’t know. Maybe we need to have a gas expert.

01:27:30
Speaker 5: Yeah, some googling going on.

01:27:34
Speaker 3: You never heard this, Yeah, I’m not. I’ve not heard that.

01:27:36
Speaker 2: He was talking about raising turtles and eventually got so into it that he was observing them with a wetsuit in the winter, trying to understand winter behavior and he’s talking about them in his mind, deliberately stirring the bottom and then going up and sipping the bubbles.

01:27:59
Speaker 7: So if you’re calling them, I’m not it’s not meane, they’re kicking off.

01:28:03
Speaker 10: Maybe it’s than can be converted into oxygen and other chemicals like carbon dioxide and water through oxidation, which is often a highly exothermic reaction that requires high temperatures or catalysts.

01:28:17
Speaker 2: Or ice.

01:28:20
Speaker 3: Or yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe the turtle’s doing something.

01:28:26
Speaker 2: I never heard that one. Yeah, no, I’m not.

01:28:28
Speaker 1: You’re not heard that.

01:28:28
Speaker 3: But you know they’re surviving somehow.

01:28:30
Speaker 2: So it’s just one of the things that like sticks in your head your whole life, and you just wind up telling everybody about it.

01:28:36
Speaker 3: Oh, I know, I got But is that yeah.

01:28:41
Speaker 10: Here inertness of methane. Methane is a very stable and inert molecule, and breaking the strong carbon hydrogen bonds requires significant energy input or specific catalysts.

01:28:57
Speaker 2: Is there a chance that he’s that that is there? It’s like when you when you stir in the bottom up. Look, you know, you walk like you duck hunt every step, like bubbles come out of there. Is there a chance there’s oxygen high.

01:29:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s the thing. I’m like, it may not.

01:29:10
Speaker 6: He might be talking about methane, because that’s what he knows. But you’re probably stirring up all kinds of other gas or byproducts of that, you know, of the bacteria and all the muck on the bottom.

01:29:19
Speaker 3: So I think the story holds. It just may not be methane that I might have made.

01:29:24
Speaker 6: So that sounds legit, then, I mean, if you’ve got your own editions of the story, I can’t.

01:29:29
Speaker 2: I know I didn’t make up. What I know I didn’t make up is him talking about turtles, Yeah, disturbing the bottom in his mind. And I remember, and I’m the bubbles would come up. He talked about that. He explained something that he thinks happens, but I don’t remember what, and then the turtles would sip it.

01:29:51
Speaker 4: That part sounds We were trying to get that turtle expert on the show Krinn might have been before your time, and we wound up getting a kid.

01:30:01
Speaker 2: We didn’t get his kid.

01:30:02
Speaker 4: We couldn’t get the old man.

01:30:04
Speaker 10: We could have got that probably wouldn’t have gotten teld me the kids said, I like turtles, you do we need it? Do we need to revisit.

01:30:11
Speaker 2: Well, there’s two things that have evaded us. A neanderthal expert, I know, I’m I haven’t pitched that on THEO Von’s show and got that. One guy reached out a neanderthal expert, and someone who’s real good on turtles, like real good and.

01:30:26
Speaker 3: Understands that I can get you some rex too.

01:30:30
Speaker 6: Yeah, like real good, especially snapping turtles, even alligator snapping turtles.

01:30:38
Speaker 10: Okay, okay, I’m talking to a neanderthal guy at some point, hopefully.

01:30:50
Speaker 2: I’m not going to ask you nanderthal question. So they’re active and they feed. Yeah, and then let’s take an alligator guard. How many eggs is he kicking out?

01:31:00
Speaker 3: I mean hundreds of thousands, she’s kicking out, you know, sorry?

01:31:04
Speaker 2: Right?

01:31:05
Speaker 4: And then how are those getting fertilized?

01:31:06
Speaker 2: What happens?

01:31:07
Speaker 6: It’s external fertilization, so you know, you get you have what you call polyandrees. That’s more males than females. You might have one or two females, it’s usually one big female and a bunch of males look kind of cluster together. And that’s also usually over terrestrial vegetation. So they need that flood pulse to do that, so they’re creating.

01:31:23
Speaker 2: A cloud of milk. Yeah, and she’s laying her eggs and they’re just fertilizing by being in the color.

01:31:28
Speaker 6: The eggs as they are being laid are very sticky, so they actually adhere to that vegetation, so it’s not necessarily broadcasts and it’s just going into the water column. It’s basically attached to that veu she’s applying them.

01:31:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:31:41
Speaker 6: Yeah, and then you know with that spawning though, and part of our other research is that we found down in Texas and other places, long nose gars, your apparent favorite gar, get into that mix and you get hybrids between long nose an alligator long alligators. Yeah, yeah, so you get an alligator gar that’s got a longer snout kind of nickname crocodile gars, you know, because it’s a little bit longer snout action there.

01:32:04
Speaker 3: But that’s across genera.

01:32:05
Speaker 6: So you’ve got two species of gar that are producing hybrids, which happens in fish. But not only are they two different species, they’re two different genera that diverged about one hundred million years ago, so they split from each other a long time ago.

01:32:20
Speaker 4: And are their offspring sexually viable.

01:32:22
Speaker 3: That’s the thing.

01:32:23
Speaker 6: So that’s what makes it also, you know, unique or relatively unique, is that their offspring are fertile.

01:32:29
Speaker 3: So you’ve got these two species that.

01:32:31
Speaker 6: Can produce fertile offspring that split over one hundred million years ago. The next closest organisms that can do that is two species of ferns that split sixty five million years ago. So what that suggests to us is that their DNA is that compatible over splitting that long ago. So their evolutionary rates being that slow, and that goes into some of the work we’ve done looking at gars actually have the slowest rates of molecular evolution of any vertebrate with a job. So you rule out your lamp rays and your hagfish slower the next closest to sturgeons, but they are changing slower than seala, cants, lungfish, to titars, crocodilians, sharks, any of those things. So with that hybridization, though, that suggests to us that their DNA is that compatible, So something might be maintaining that compatibility the DNA, something might be correcting it. So you know, evolution happens by mutations, right, so something a couple base pairs change, so changes, you might get something that’s advantageous or deleterious whatever. With gars, it seems like that DNA code has been staying pretty consistent for millions and millions of years, and what we hypothesize that there might be something like a DNA repair mechanism that when a mutation pops up, it’s correcting that mutation, just setting back to what it’s supposed to be. So think of like a game of telephone where you’ve got message on both ends. One’s very different at the end of it from the beginning, right, think of almost a perfect game of telephone where something’s correcting it over and over and over again. So one of the things we’re looking at is like, can we isolate or identify with these potential DNA repair mechanisms could be because think about even in human health, how many diseases are based on out of control DNA replication or damage to DNA, whether you’re thinking about things like even in skin cancer other types like that. So that’s very far off in the future, but that hybridization between alligator gars and long nose gars or actually any gar species can hybridize is a potential biomedical value as well.

01:34:23
Speaker 2: So what prevents it from becoming a Why hasn’t it just become a unispecies.

01:34:28
Speaker 3: Right exactly? That’s a great question.

01:34:30
Speaker 6: So we kind of joke that like either there’s one species of gar or there’s maybe a hundred species of cars. But you think about with dog breeds, right, dogs all one species, but look at all the variation there. Gars are just changing at such a different rate relative to our way of thinking that you know, to them, maybe they are one species. They’re just slight variations on a basic blueprint. We don’t know what that is, but that’s just another area of research we’re looking into.

01:34:55
Speaker 3: But that adds value to these fish.

01:34:57
Speaker 6: You take buffalo, I know you all Alec Lackman on one of the previous shows with fishing and stuff. The buffalo can live for over one hundred years. We know that, but since then, since twenty nineteen when you’re O were talking to.

01:35:09
Speaker 4: Him, Bultiple Soccer could live on hundred years.

01:35:11
Speaker 3: Rofolo socucer live over one hundred years.

01:35:13
Speaker 8: Ones at Minnesota.

01:35:14
Speaker 6: One’s in Minnesota, you know, Saskatchewan, one hundred and twenty five years.

01:35:17
Speaker 3: There’s one.

01:35:18
Speaker 6: So buffalo story I can tell you is that some of the buffalo. During World War One, they wanted to you know, ship more meat products, food products overseas, and so they wanted people stateside to eat less meat because they need all those resources to go towards the war efforts. So they wanted to encourage people to eat more fish. And so in order to get people to eat more fish, they’re building all these new reservoirs in the southwestern United States, the you know, Roosevelt Reservoir down southwest, and so some states, including Iowa, shipped a bunch of game fish, including some non game fish like buffalo, over down to the Apache Lake down in Roosevelt Reservoir that area around nineteen seventeen. Some of those fish are still alive today, No, and they’ve gone back and looked at some of the offspring, which are from born around the nineteen twenties, still alive today, and they’ve done all kinds of aging with the otol its radiocarbon dating. So sure those are introduced species there, but we introduce them, but some anglers go there. They know them by the different spot patterns and stuff. But what they’ve also been able to find looking at their physiology, their health has actually improved with old age, their immune system function, sin essence, the sort of DNA breakdown that we all.

01:36:29
Speaker 3: Have as we get older, they don’t show that. So you’ve got these.

01:36:32
Speaker 6: Native rough fish like gars that they’ve got this DNA that’s been staying coherent for millions and millions of years. Potentially with the DNA repair mechanism. You’ve got buffalo which actually are improving with age. You’re trying eighty year old one hundred year old fish just kicking as just yeah, yeah, So you know there’s a lot to about these Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:36:51
Speaker 3: You know, combined the two you can live forever and get better with age.

01:36:54
Speaker 7: You know, I got an angling question.

01:36:58
Speaker 9: Sure, maybe not for alligator gar because they have a you know, they have a degree of popular popularity for fishermen. But the other species, if if one was wanting to set a world record, our gar one of those species that just kind of get ignored.

01:37:14
Speaker 7: And there’s a bunch of like open line class records.

01:37:18
Speaker 10: Yeah.

01:37:18
Speaker 6: Yeah, even in Minnesota, they’ve got catch and release records that are open to a bunch of non game native fish. I think the bof in one was just set this past summer. It was like a thirty one incher.

01:37:27
Speaker 4: Yeah, because no dudes would ever put in for it.

01:37:30
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, you know, not as much anyway, but yeah, down south you get some big long nose guards. We actually got the biggest long nose I’d ever seen with my students out at Nicols State when I was on Louisiana. It was a sixty incher and later that summer, I think somewhere else in Lousing they got a sixty five inches.

01:37:44
Speaker 3: But that is right along the records.

01:37:46
Speaker 9: Because for those guys, some fishermen that just look for unfilled Yeah, yeah, nine class world records.

01:37:51
Speaker 6: That’s a good spot to go for, you know, the line classes, the difference size overall.

01:37:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that’s that’s worth you know, going after.

01:37:59
Speaker 6: I would say, if you do shoot it, find a way to get us the odolfth because we want to we want to age that fish.

01:38:04
Speaker 5: So they got some.

01:38:05
Speaker 7: Skulls getting their odolith. That’s got to be a process.

01:38:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, to this skull I can’t stop messing with.

01:38:10
Speaker 6: You have to use a hammer and a chisel for alligator gars. I mean, it’s just and we’re working with skulls that are huge too.

01:38:15
Speaker 9: It’s like, what are your buddy up up at the shack when he was chopping open those yellow eyes to get their lift.

01:38:22
Speaker 7: That was work.

01:38:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a it’s messy business.

01:38:24
Speaker 2: But let’s do this skull the school is amazing.

01:38:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s with some formalde hyde. You probably get maybe maybe some that’s good. That’s good.

01:38:32
Speaker 2: So you did what Now we get the skulls.

01:38:34
Speaker 3: So we got it from Aligator gar Rodeo down to Louisiana.

01:38:38
Speaker 2: So that that was great.

01:38:39
Speaker 3: It’s another opportunity to work with stakeholders there.

01:38:41
Speaker 4: Well, they shoot twenty two because they.

01:38:43
Speaker 6: Jug line for him first. So when you get the fish and it’s live, they want to find ways to dispatch the dark knight.

01:38:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:38:49
Speaker 6: Yeah, I’m always curious as to how they’re doing that on a boat and not misfiring and hitting the bottom of the boat or something. But they use the twenty shoot edge of the boat, I guess, so I’ve never seen it. We get them where they bring them in.

01:38:59
Speaker 3: So but you know, oh, you got to figure you got these big fish.

01:39:01
Speaker 6: You’re not usually hanging a big that kind of gar you might hang over the edge of the boat, but for hanging the head of a six foot or seven foot over the edge of your boat, you might.

01:39:09
Speaker 9: I told you earlier I’ve got a lying cod head do But like the general public can’t just get their hands.

01:39:17
Speaker 2: Did you buy from aldehyde like a jugger from albehinde?

01:39:20
Speaker 3: That’s a good question. I can buy from Aldie, but I don’t know. I think.

01:39:25
Speaker 8: It once and yet, Yeah, what don’t they want people to have from.

01:39:28
Speaker 6: A I mean it’s a it’s a carcinogen. I mean, so you take your guard’s head fresh off the gar, yeah, and then you do what we Well, those we eventually put on ice. We could storm for a bit, we saw them out, and then I once we thaw them, we pry the jaws open, usually wedge something in there, because you know, the natural state of the gar isn’t with the jaws wide open like that, And then we put them in a fromaldehyde bath for like maybe two three days, depending on the size of the fish.

01:39:51
Speaker 3: And then we take it out.

01:39:52
Speaker 6: We put in a cooler with water, and we just change that water bath a few times and we just let it air dry.

01:39:57
Speaker 3: But you can do that with a regular fishing.

01:40:00
Speaker 2: You could set nail like.

01:40:03
Speaker 7: I’ve salted pike cats and let them drive.

01:40:05
Speaker 6: But that looks that would work way better than piping because pike are still they got a lot of flesh, you know, along the skull, whereas a gar skull.

01:40:12
Speaker 3: I mean that’s yeah.

01:40:15
Speaker 10: We may have to communicate with Montana State University. So purchasing a jug of formaldehyde solution requires a specialized chemical supplier. It’s not available for purchase at retail stores and is regulated by the e p A and OSHA due to health risk, including cancer. We need to demonstrate a legitimate use, so you might need to. Yeah, like anyone at m s U, get some contacts there you go, well trade in formaldehyde.

01:40:42
Speaker 2: I was gonna bring this up with your cren. You still have those tuna heads in that freezer. You need to deal with them or get your formal I.

01:40:52
Speaker 10: Thought Alec got some and made made soup with them.

01:40:55
Speaker 7: Are the collars attached? Yeah, I take I.

01:40:59
Speaker 5: Don’t think no.

01:41:00
Speaker 2: Is it just the head. We’ve also got those, we cleaned them up.

01:41:03
Speaker 10: We’ve also got those fetuses in there too.

01:41:07
Speaker 6: This is a work art, I mean, you know, hope you all appreciate that. You know, we couldn’t bring a big one in the suitcase or anything. Show me a big one work you know, it was with your hands what’s a big one.

01:41:16
Speaker 3: When you’re looking at how about that big?

01:41:18
Speaker 2: Really?

01:41:18
Speaker 3: I think we had some pictures in there. I’ll send them to you.

01:41:20
Speaker 6: But that eight footer has a was a pretty big skull. It got trapped in the nets, so that one had unfortunately died. But we’re able to get the otolitz I was fifty six years old. But there you’re looking at a eight foot long fish that was fifty six It could have easily been one hundred. When they get that big, they aren’t growing, you know, very much each year. But this is out of the coastal Louisiana. So we had six footers that were twenty years old. I want to say we probably had a six and a half footer. There might have been, you know, twenty twenty one.

01:41:48
Speaker 3: So they get they get big.

01:41:50
Speaker 6: But that’s where working with the rodeo was very helpful because we could get all the data we wanted.

01:41:55
Speaker 3: They let us just have at it. They were cutting the heads off for us.

01:41:57
Speaker 6: They’re getting, as you know, any of the samples of the muscle tissue, the fins, and then they also clean them.

01:42:04
Speaker 5: There.

01:42:04
Speaker 6: It was at a bar is at Manny’s Bar on the Mara Para off Lake marpod Amy River and people come from all over that general region and they’d be eating this fried alligator gar.

01:42:13
Speaker 2: They make gar balls, which like hush. That’s why I like Cajun’s man, those Cajun doozy everything.

01:42:18
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, but gar’s good. They got the big backstraps.

01:42:21
Speaker 6: And the thing is they invited us back year after year because they wanted to know what we were finding out, and we wanted to you know, work with them and share that info with them too. So you’ve got multiple stakeholders. We weren’t there to say, like you got to stop doing this. We’re there to like learn about the resource. How can we figure out about the health of the population. We’ve been invited back every year. I couldn’t make it this year because coming down from Minnesota is a little bit tougher, But next year we plan on going back down there. So if everyone to, you know, send somebody to jump in on a gator gar.

01:42:47
Speaker 2: Rodeo, you know, we’ll be there.

01:42:48
Speaker 6: But I think that’s a good opportunity to again work with stakeholders, work with the people that are using the resource for different purposes.

01:42:57
Speaker 2: Uh, it’s my last question for you. They might have more. You know when you have like like Trout Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Olk Foundation. Right, Uh, they put tons of money into habitat where they put tons of money into research. Who like, like who out there? What what NGOs are put any money into into GAR? Right?

01:43:26
Speaker 6: As far as the definite enngy of nobody, I think we’re we’re lucky that we can try to go after grants from different organizations. Minnesota has a lottery tax that goes into their Environmental and Natural Resources Trust Fund, and so we apply for that. We’ve been lucky to get support from the state. Then to look at these native rough fish that’s been extremely beneficial, and a few other states have you know, stuff like that too.

01:43:50
Speaker 4: But there’s no GAR enthusiastic group.

01:43:52
Speaker 3: I mean, you’re you’re looking at it, Steve, I mean, you know, it’s a you know.

01:43:56
Speaker 6: And then there’s a Native Fish for Tomorrow, which is a nonprofit group that is promoting.

01:44:00
Speaker 3: The value of these fish. But we’re all going to cobble together out of Minnesota as well.

01:44:03
Speaker 4: Native Fish yep.

01:44:05
Speaker 6: So Tyler Winter is one of their main spokespersons. He also had a response to that article, but again promoting eating the fish, fishing for the fish. But again that’s advocacy. I mean through the grants that we’re getting, we’re partnering with them to provide them funding. So we’re kind of trying to get what money we can to work on that stuff. But doing things like this, the work you all do gets that message out more about the value of these fish. But again being able to convince it was the National Fish and Wilife Foundation. They support our work down on the Mississippi River flood Plain in Mississippi, working with Nature Conservancy, US Fishing Wildlife. So it’s a bunch of partners usually coming together. So I’ve been kind of selling the idea of like we can use gar to answer these questions or to get this type of restoration. But it really is advocating for the species and then trying to fund the funds to or find the funds to back that research and then show that these are again valuable organisms.

01:44:57
Speaker 2: Because it’s the new fountain of youth, right right, Yeah, figure out a couple of the little trips.

01:45:01
Speaker 6: I will say that the biomedical value of the fish has bolstered that value. Spotted gar actually out of Michigan is where we looked at that comparing them, and also in Louisiana, the gar genome is actually organized closer to the human genome than it is to.

01:45:16
Speaker 3: Other fish like your walleye and your trout.

01:45:19
Speaker 6: So because of that sort of ancient lineage, they’ve got a lot of stuff that’s in common with you know, other sides of the evolutionary tree.

01:45:25
Speaker 2: Do got one more question, all right? What is the toxin that’s in those eggs?

01:45:29
Speaker 6: That is a great question. We’ve been trying to answer that for well over a decade. We think it might be sequestered from bacteria, but we don’t know exactly. There’s actually current work being done at Nicols State and at LSU on that right now. We did some preliminary work on that a few years ago, so we think it comes from bacteria mainly in the eggs. And what’s also unique about that toxin is it’s toxic to birds, to mammals, to arthropods like crayfish and crickets, but it’s not toxic to fish. So really, why you’re a fish but you have, you know, eggs that aren’t toxic to the other animals that are there.

01:46:03
Speaker 2: So suck that.

01:46:05
Speaker 6: I’ve got videos of bluegill eating long nosed gar eggs as the long nose are laying them. So that kind of brings kind of full circle to like this game fish and non game fish. You’re actually supporting these giant bluegill. And what we think is because gars evolutionarily would I mean, they live in these warm waters, right, they breathe air. So most of your regular traditionally respiring fish like bluegill and you know bass, aren’t going to live in those low oxygen waters. But you do have a lot of crawfish, you have a lot of water birds, you got a lot of camels. So it’ll kill the crawfish, you’ll kill the birds.

01:46:35
Speaker 2: It’ll you know, have you ever given have you ever actually given it to a mouse and seen him die there?

01:46:39
Speaker 3: I haven’t given it to him. There are experiments that have been done.

01:46:41
Speaker 6: They’ve given it to turtles too, where it’s like slow down the heart rate, and so they have none experiments with those eggs.

01:46:48
Speaker 3: With yeah, yeah, it depends on how much you’re consuming with that stuff.

01:46:53
Speaker 2: But like quicker days later with crayfish.

01:46:55
Speaker 6: It’s pretty quick, like they basically see them eating them and they just slow down and they just stop.

01:47:00
Speaker 9: What in parts of the country like now, like or the Cajuns are eating these things?

01:47:05
Speaker 7: Is that like a no?

01:47:06
Speaker 6: Like people know Oh yeah, yeah, it’s a you know, they know how to clean them there. But and it’s it’s available on the thing called the internet, right, but you’ll still see.

01:47:14
Speaker 3: Pop up every few years.

01:47:16
Speaker 6: These people got violently ill from eating a bunch of gar eating the row. Yeah, they thought maybe I’m gonna try to eat these because you know, you get a big long nose guard.

01:47:24
Speaker 3: There’s a lot of eggs in there. You can eat both in caviar. They make that. They call it Cajun caviar. I’ve heard it’s not as good, you know.

01:47:31
Speaker 2: You know I’ve heard of that too. I forgot about that.

01:47:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you can’t do that with the guards. So I mean, you’re not going to die, You’re gonna have Yeah.

01:47:39
Speaker 2: We’re trying to get a caviar specialist.

01:47:41
Speaker 3: Nice specialist. You can double up.

01:47:49
Speaker 4: I got one question, are you from the north?

01:47:55
Speaker 8: I got I got two comments from earlier. We were talking about the native range of an alligator guard. The US g S says it goes following the Ohio River almost to West Virginia. What and then the Mississippi almost to Iowa, so like deep into the Midwest.

01:48:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, seriously, they’re trying to bring them back in Kentucky.

01:48:10
Speaker 6: They have found them in parts of Ohio and Indiana along the Ohio River, so they think that the one that was I think found in Indiana is part of restoration either in Ohio and Kentucky.

01:48:20
Speaker 3: But yeah, they’re parts. They’re in the Ohio River.

01:48:22
Speaker 2: Are they maybe just not getting like five six seven feet long? So people just aren’t like noticing.

01:48:27
Speaker 6: That they had big ones down in Horseshoe Lake in Illinois, Like I want to say, it was like it was like early nineteen hundred’s that biggest one that they got like towards the end of their run before they’re fully extirpated, was like a five or six foot long fish.

01:48:38
Speaker 3: So they get big.

01:48:39
Speaker 2: I had just no idea.

01:48:41
Speaker 6: We’ve actually found gars in the north get bigger like long term maximum size than the fish in the south. Like that’s looking at spotted gars. So they’ve got the growth rate that has to be able to compensate for winter. But we do find on average they live longer and they can get bigger. Alligator gar we just don’t know enough because we wiped them out from the north, so we’ll have to see.

01:48:58
Speaker 5: It’s almost like deer.

01:49:00
Speaker 7: Yeah.

01:49:03
Speaker 8: Other comment was, Steve, you were asking about traditional use of gar. When I would give tours at the hatchery and we would get to the gar section and try to make people think they were cool. Some native tribes would use their scales for currency or jewelry, and then some of the early white settlers would line the front of their plows with gar skin because it could break through tough dirt. So there’s some historical use. It’s super tough question, Solomon. What is like an aquarium you really like as a native rough fish man where you walk in You’re like, no way, they have a quailed back, they have a river carpsucker.

01:49:37
Speaker 5: Yeah.

01:49:38
Speaker 6: Yeah, I would say the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanoogat does an amazing job with freshwater fish. They’ve got a whole building it’s all freshwater. They built another one that’s marine, which I think is cool. But I was there for a conference last year. I visited the aquarium three times during that conference, only went to the freshwater one. They loved to feed the gars down there too, So shout Tennessee Aquarium. Shout Aquarium is a postdoc there and so they’ve we had a good fresh water set up to Tennessee’s better. But shed does have some of my gars that I had in grad school that I couldn’t rehome when I moved to Chicago. So if you go to Shad Aquarium you see any gars, most of those are mine from grad.

01:50:12
Speaker 3: School, you know, over ten years ago.

01:50:13
Speaker 8: No good And I sent him peddlefish to the shah Yah about a death way back in the day. Yeah, in Minnesota. That’s sort of like ground zero for these wakeboard studies or wakeboat studies. Have you followed these at all?

01:50:27
Speaker 2: I’ve not.

01:50:28
Speaker 6: I just know it’s a it’s a topic that’s come up when you know they’re looking at new management.

01:50:32
Speaker 3: That’s you know, we got to look into it.

01:50:34
Speaker 4: Well, that’s both they weigh them all down with ballast and then make the big waves.

01:50:37
Speaker 8: Destroy the shore line you surf on them. Well, they’re now like putting cameras underwater and seeing what it does to the bottom of the lake. And it appears to be like pretty devastating, like a bomb went off.

01:50:48
Speaker 7: I love it if they got rid of those things.

01:50:50
Speaker 8: Yeah, I was going to see if you have any thoughts on what those do to rough fish.

01:50:54
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think whenever you’re taking out habitat like that, that’s problematic, And especially since a lot of the native rough fish lake then your shore habitat. So when you’re scouring out the bottom increasing turbidity, that’s bad for the plants. And even if they’re not in your shore, you’re creating that wave action that’s going to have stronger impacts also on the shore when you’ve got that vegetation. So I think I mean, again not being an expert on that myself, but I would say if it’s damaging the habitat is or describing them, that’s going to be problematic for a lot of these fish.

01:51:21
Speaker 2: Can you imagine can you just imagine the conversation, oh God, in the board enthusiast community when someone says, hey, man, you can’t do that anymore because.

01:51:34
Speaker 5: Of the guard.

01:51:37
Speaker 2: Set me up.

01:51:37
Speaker 3: You’re setting me up.

01:51:40
Speaker 2: No, I’d be like, yeah, you can’t do anymore because the guard.

01:51:42
Speaker 7: They just make my boat bounce around a lot when.

01:51:44
Speaker 2: I’m perch fishing.

01:51:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, they would be just like, oh my goodness, gracious.

01:51:51
Speaker 7: I don’t think they’re listening to this show.

01:51:53
Speaker 4: No, I don’t think they are in Franklin.

01:51:57
Speaker 2: This is my message to the wakeboard. Good community.

01:51:59
Speaker 8: Have you delivered a message?

01:52:02
Speaker 7: Is your first?

01:52:06
Speaker 4: I need to refine my message.

01:52:08
Speaker 2: My message is I’m on the lake bottom side.

01:52:11
Speaker 4: I think, man, who else got a question?

01:52:19
Speaker 7: Do they regrow their teeth their whole lives?

01:52:22
Speaker 6: That is a great question. I think they can grow teeth, but it’s not like sharks. So we were, yeah, we were at this rodeo and the little kid, you know, parents brought them up to us as we’re processing these fish. And I’m there with the persona chocol Bardy, curator of fishes at LSU S and our boath there he’s Nick the all just I’m you know, gar person there little kid asks can I have one of the teeth? And so I’m like sure, And so we take the pliers and we go to pull the tooth out of this jaw and it’s like really hard to get out of there, and we pulled it out and it just goes down almost like a volcano underneath the water, like and you know, we pulled that out.

01:52:56
Speaker 3: We’re looking at it.

01:52:57
Speaker 6: Me and persona boath we’ve been studying fish for most of our lives. We’re just like huh, Like we just we had no idea that that’s what it looked at. And you know, we gave it to the kid. It made his day, right, and his little brother came up like, I want a tooth too, So then we were starting pulling teeth out of these things. So they do have an interesting structure there, and they do have something called dentine or place of dentine around those teeth, which is similar to the you know, some of the developmental tooth parts that we have as well. So there’s a lot of things from the fish that are kind of connected to us.

01:53:26
Speaker 9: Yeah, because it seems like with those real long ones over time, like fifty years, they’d get broken and need.

01:53:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, with some of the big fish they get they get broken.

01:53:35
Speaker 6: But in Michigan, when we’d be doing our spotted guar work, we we would get what we call the crocodile effect, where you’d get gars where the teeth have grown from the bottom jaw and pierced the top of the.

01:53:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, so he’s got tooth holes in his jaw.

01:53:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well those some of those are nostrils.

01:53:50
Speaker 6: Yeah, I actually know you’re right there, those two where you can see the open hole going all the way down. Those are the tooth holes for those lower fangs down there.

01:53:56
Speaker 10: Yeah, think piranhas are like rows of teeth in there.

01:53:59
Speaker 6: Like, yeah, they got they got a lot of teeth, you know, and they don’t have a lot of bite force them, so they’re more about you know, they grasp and hold and then swallow the food as opposed to piranhas and sharks, which are more of a cutting plane. Barracudas as well, but again, you know, you look at those teeth, that’s gonna be you know, intimidating. So there’s a you know, an aesthetic to them as well when you think about, you know, getting people interested in them.

01:54:21
Speaker 8: Alongside trout and walleye pass besides humans, what else are killing alligator gars?

01:54:27
Speaker 6: Alligators to an extent, depending on the size, Once a gator gar is full size, nothing’s really messing with it. Waterbirds will eat gars as well, other fish, other gars will eat them. I mean that’s not you know, we find both in inside of bofen too, So typically it’s.

01:54:43
Speaker 3: Gonna be other predatory fish. But usually like a bass or a.

01:54:47
Speaker 6: Walleye, they’re not gonna be able to take them down once they get to once they get to decent sides. Nothing’s getting through those scales really either.

01:54:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:54:53
Speaker 4: You mentioned being of Indian descent, you’re born in the US.

01:54:55
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I was born in Washington State of Arlington Water, Washington, kind of farmtown.

01:55:01
Speaker 2: Out far fish as a kid.

01:55:03
Speaker 3: I did you know? That’s what I was going to ask.

01:55:05
Speaker 6: He’s like, how we all got started fishing. I got started fishing, you know, mainly on non game fish. So I lived in Washington and the North Dakota for eight years as a kid, and then Ohio is where I grew up. Cut creek chubs out of some random creek and we’d tie like ball up a piece of bread on a hook and then catch them that way. But I remember catching some perch in North Dakota going out fishing. That was one of the first fish I remember catching. The state capitol had a big Northern pike taxidermy there. I remember looking down the mouth of that and thinking those teeth are really cool. And I was into dinosaurs as well, so always getting outside. My dad would take me to the Stillguamish River in Washington State, so like we chuck rocks in there. So there was that connection to the water. So I enjoy fishing. I’m not good at fishing. My buddy Tyler Winter takes me out so you can take me. He can get me like, where’s the gar spot, where’s the boat in spot?

01:55:52
Speaker 3: So I can do that.

01:55:52
Speaker 6: He takes my kids out. They’ve caught red horse and you know, some other non game fish. Of course, my kids know gars, they’ve known that for their whole lot. But I do think that’s an important part of like, you know, getting kids out into nature, getting them outdoors, and so that’s also what we want to do. I would be remiss if I didn’t say, like, my introduction to gars was through Ranger Rick magazine, which is through the National Wildlife Federation. Y. Yeah, so I got it from my kids too, and so I mean that’s what got me started. And you know I thought they were cool. But you know, now we look at that is that’s an opportunity to introduce kids to the outdoors. I’m also just getting them outdoors. So again, I like getting my kids out fishing and then you know, helping them maybe reel it in. But I’m not a great angler. I like to you know, count on folks like you all for that in grad school. I’m also not a hunter, but I am a consumer, so I just wasn’t good at getting up early in the morning.

01:56:39
Speaker 3: So they go out hunting, you know, for duck and deer, but I would eat all the food they brought back. We’d have game night and do that.

01:56:44
Speaker 6: So I’m I’m a participant on some level, but I do recognize the importance. Married nine years as of just a week.

01:56:52
Speaker 2: And a half ago, same burst.

01:56:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, we met at shatt Aquarium. So she she was a great writer. She’s not a fish person, but she is bought into the gar you know, the the whole gar thing. At our wedding.

01:57:06
Speaker 6: Instead of escort cards, you know, got the name tags or the table, she made escort guards, which are gar figurines with the name tags. I did not know about it at all, So you know, she has all for She’s got the gar earrings. And so again we’ve got some you know, fish connections.

01:57:20
Speaker 7: To park on your honeymoon, I know, right, you know, if.

01:57:23
Speaker 3: It existed, we would do that, Brody. So you know that’s where the DNA is really going. We’re trying to bring back guars, but then it’ll just look the same as what we have now. So it’s gonna yea yeah, yeah, millions of dollars. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it’s a gar Yeah.

01:57:41
Speaker 4: All right, well thanks for coming on the show.

01:57:43
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me tell people how to find your work if they want to come find her, if they want to send you a weird specimens or whatever.

01:57:49
Speaker 6: Yeah, if they look up a garlab, garlab dot org. If you just look up gar lab, you’ll find us. And we’re on the social media platforms, the garlab on Instagram and on all the major platforms there. So if you look up garlab you’ll find us. There’s not that many of them. I think there’s there’s just one so far. Come until we expand further, like the big test.

01:58:07
Speaker 2: So they can get a hold and send an email, yes, say one time.

01:58:11
Speaker 6: Yeah, tell us the stories if you know, spots from them, if you get a big gar like, we’re interested in that. It is again a broad spanning effort, and so we want contributions from the general public place.

01:58:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, let us know. I’m always up for gar stories.

01:58:27
Speaker 4: Garlab org. Yep, garlab dot or Is that simple?

01:58:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep, that’s simple. There was a lot a competition for it.

01:58:33
Speaker 4: Step when he did a keyword search, Yeah yeah.

01:58:37
Speaker 8: Yeah, can I say one last thing. Yeah, we used to do touch tanks at the hand tree a lot. The most popular fish were always garu. They like really appeal to children. There’s something like a very basic level we just love about garfish. Yeah, and they handle touch tanks super well.

01:58:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:58:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:58:53
Speaker 8: A lot of fish can’t handle that stress. Gar can, So they’re great for like introducing kids to cool prehistoric rough fish.

01:59:00
Speaker 6: One of my favorite pictures that I’ve seen of kids interacting with gars is one that Spencer took from that hatchery.

01:59:05
Speaker 3: So I’ve used that before in outreach activities, but it’s like these kids reaching and touching that long nose gars. So I think that’s uh, they don’t.

01:59:13
Speaker 6: They don’t see it as weird, they don’t see as trash. So I think that’s that’s hope for the next generation.

01:59:18
Speaker 4: You know what we didn’t get into is cleaning them ten snips.

01:59:22
Speaker 3: Ten snips is good.

01:59:24
Speaker 2: That’s one of our books, isn’t it, Brody? Peeling them and you know, pulling their little.

01:59:29
Speaker 3: Back straps out save the head for us?

01:59:32
Speaker 2: Maybe well from now on, once we get our once we get a jugger from Albert, all right, it’s all thanks a lot man, all right, Thanks for having