Ologies with Alie Ward - Garology (LONG CUTE ANCIENT PATIENT BOOPABLE NIGHTMARE FISH) Encore for GAR WEEK with Solomon David

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

November 6-12 is GAR WEEK! What is a gar, you ask? Picture: A long snout. Hundreds of teeth. Scales that could slice you. Should we fear it? Should we hug it? One of the world’s most passionate and knowledgeable experts on this ancient, mysterious fish joins to make you fall in love with these slimy longbois. Dr. Solomon David is affable, charming, enthusiastic and absolutely shameless when it comes to fish puns. Slip into some hip waders and jump in the muck to learn all about a creature that -- despite decades of mudslinging -- is not a gar-bage fish. Also: why gar caviar is a hella bad idea.Visit Dr. Solomon David’s website and follow him on Twitter and InstagramA donation went to Ranger Rick, part of the National Wildlife FederationMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Ichthyology (FISH), Oceanology Encore (THE OCEAN), Benthopelagic Nematology (DEEP SEA WORMS), Teuthology (SQUID)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, stickers, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris, and Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio ProductionsTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Y'all, it is gar-weak. Were you aware of that? It's gar-weak. It's a week about a weird fish, a whole week of it. The internet's going bonkers for it. And I don't want you to be left behind for this celebratory time. Also, this week was my birthday, so I took a day off to have a stranger rub me for money. And also for eating carrot cake with double the frosting.

And our beloved editor, Mercedes-Mateland, has been saddled with bronchitis. So all signs pointed to an easy week for us to get ahead for next week. So either listen to this encore again, because I guarantee there's a lot of weird stuff about gars you forgot? Or listen for the first time and flood your coworkers with gar facts and let the gar memes begin.

Join the party. It's Gar week. This is a great episode. It's widely beloved. You're about to see why. Also, you can listen to the end for an updated secret. Okay. Oh, hey, it's your internet dad. It's Ali Ward. This is a podcast called Allegis, wherein you will think, I don't think I care about this topic, and then you will later google that topic when you're supposed to be doing actual work and tell people weird facts and maybe have a dream about the topic later. I dreamed about car last night, so let's get into it.

Okay, first off, thank you for making this show a thing. Thanks to everyone at patreon.com slashologies. If you have been wanting to join, that special treehouse with us, it's a dollar a month. But it lets you submit questions to theologist. Also thank you to the people who leave reviews and who rate and subscribe to shows, keeping up in the charts. Some days I'm a sad creep and your reviews always cheer me up, so I read them all. Everyone, and I prove it by picking a new one.

And this time, it's from someone called Ali Reel, who wrote, I am but a soft pretzel. The podcast, my pot of cheese fondue. Ali's allergies inspires me to use my meat computer differently, while still feeding my child, like, wonderful the world. Thank you for that. If you leave a review, I read it with my eyes. That's the deal. That's the truth. Okay, you ready for cars? Let me answer that for you. No, you're not ready. This is a most loaded fish with an otherworldly face. But is it an armored creature of the deep out to drag people under the surface of lakes and rivers and apart, or is it a gentle giant who's slime you would caress? We're going to ask a gaurologist. One of the world's top gaurologists, in fact, so gaurologist, not a common word, in all of my digging,

I was only able to find it referenced one time in one book, but what even is a gar? Okay, so a gar, the word comes from old hydromanic for spear, and this is primarily a fresh water fish. It has a long sharp snout, like a crocodile, with teeth just coming every which way, like sprouts a grass. And the gar, in garlic, by the way, also comes from spear because the cloves can be sharp. Can you eat gar with garlic? We're going to find out. Now, this garologist is truly an expert and a very impassioned one and has amassed tens of thousands of social media followers

for being a gar champion for engaging in birds versus fish battles and he is an assistant professor at Nickel State University. He got his bachelors from Ohio, Northern University, and a master's and a PhD from University of Michigan, in Arbor, studying aquatic ecology, and he's also one of the most truly beloved scientists I know. Everyone who knows this episode has been in the works has nothing but glowing things to say about it. He's also though a ruthless pun maker, one of the finest in the game, and so to celebrate Garpons, and there are many. You're gonna just hear a soft subtle chime to alert you, so you can blink, you can nod and say yes, yes. Perhaps do a tiny imperceptible butt dance on the bus. Now, this episode has been in the making for months and months, but it got preempted by two hurricanes

and various other scheduling hellscapes, and we finally connected. And then something was not happening right with the recording portal I usually use, but we made it work. So climb into hip-waters and let's get deep to discover the wonderful world of GAR, including a backstory that predates the T-Rex, the Barges, sent out to destroy them, the slime, the scales, the poisons, river monsters, pets, boops, the hundreds upon hundreds of teeth, and one illustration that changed the course of history with an absolute joy of a human specimen, Oh wait you went away. Are you still there?

Oh okay we're having some. A couple audio issues. Oh are you back? Oh I did you still there? I lost you again. No. Oh my gosh you back? Oh, are you still there? Ah, lost you again. No, oh my gosh, you went away again. Okay, after 25 solid minutes of technical hiccups in this remote recording software we use,

we just switched, we went over to Zoom because this interview was not happening. Now, is Zoom the best in terms of audio? No, but Gar is happening and it's happening now and also now it was video so behind Solomon I got to see a four-foot tank filled with alive Long-sneuted Gar of various sizes in the flesh almost and you're not kidding You do have seven of your friends behind you know they're right they're right behind me

So you get some added guests in the background and everyday Seven slender beasts glided by behind, kind of like a live baseball bats with 500 teeth each. But I have a gargantuan list of questions to ask him. So let's dive right in. So my name is Solomon David and my pronouns are he and him. And you are a garologist.

Yes. I think we're inaugurating, if you will, that term with this podcast. I did Google it and it looks like it hasn't really been used for anything else as far as I can tell. So how long have you been an expert in guards? Oh gosh. And I think I feel like expert might be, you know, sure, maybe now it might be an expert. And that's just because like there's so much

that just nobody's really bothered to worry about with these things. So it's a, I've been interested in them since I was a kid, but then I would say like, was around grad school when I really got into them. And, you know, they started taking over my life, if you will. So I would say maybe grad school starting to work on them. So I don't know, I guess that makes maybe my life, if you will. So, um, I would say maybe grad school starting to work on them. So, I don't know, I guess that makes maybe 20 years, something like that.

I think that makes you an expert. 20 years of studying a fish, I think you're an expert in the fish. And I saw one of your early papers was titled, so then we got underdog fish. So, have you ever, have you always been into maybe the least glamorous fish and puns? Is that something that's just been part of your part of your branding for a long time? The Venn diagram of dad jokes and puns is like overlap. But yes, as far as like the under appreciated, you know, underdog animals for sure. Like I always liked snakes and bugs and you know know sort of the things deemed creatures if you will. And so yeah, that leaked over into fish.

And what type of fish do you study in the lab? So the lab is called gar lab. We focus on, they're not limited to gar, so members of the family lapis osteo-de. There's some of my close relatives, the both ends, so there's really only one species that's formally described right now that's a stand. So his gar lab at Louisiana's Nickel State University focuses on the migratory ecology of a few different types of fish, but screw those fish. I want to talk Garg, give me the Garg, I'm here for a tender love of the river beasts. And what exactly is a gar? I did not know that they existed until I saw your Twitter with a picture holding one, and I was like,

that is a rubber prop that cannot be real. What is this thing? Is there a crocodile? Is there a fish? What are they? Can you describe what they look like for people who are not familiar with the wonders of garts? So I like to tell people, you know,

picture an alligator or a crocodile with fins instead of legs and that's a guard. You turn the tail of an alligator into a paddle, but really, I mean, if you're looking for the, you know, basic visualization, that's what it is. They've got this sort of primitive ancient look to them, long snout, lots of teeth, that's a guard. Aligator, fins, and so on. Where did you get interested in fish?

In fish. There's water washing in state with there for a few years. My dad would take me to the still of Womish River, which is one of the rivers near kind of like the Seattle coast, still a little bit further inland, and I remember like trucking rocks into the water. So that was my first memory like connection with the water. So like, that's kind of born in the summer like the sound, the sign for the town had fish on it. But one of the questions I feel like that has been valuable to me is like sort of telling the story of how I got interested in them, which I feel like could you know be useful to others too. The magazine, the nature magazine Ranger Rick is what got you arrested in Garth. So when I was a kid, I flipped through the magazine, I saw this article about this out of animal

that had fins instead of legs. It looked like a fish with fins instead of like those alligator Garth. So I saw that as a kid and it kind of got glazed on the back of my mind. The heck guy's alligator Gar, baby. Can you describe that moment, like were you a subscriber to Ranger Rick

or did you pick it up in a dentist office? Like what was that moment like seeing this alligator gar? Oh my gosh. So I just moved to Ohio from North Dakota and the neighborhood kids there saw that I was interested in creatures like all the creepy crawlers the bugs, snakes, that sort of thing. So they gave me a bunch of back issues of Ranger Rick. So I never had a subscription back then. They were these old issues and so I was slipping through them then and I turned to the page and actually got my interest first

in this illustration, these two little soft shell turtles because that was a turtle person then. I like turtles. And so I saw that and I zoomed out to see like, wait, what is this? And I thought it was really cool. I'm like, what is a gar,

and it was actually called Mississippi King and it was about a pond in Louisiana. So it's kind of interesting right now. I like to live near a pond in Louisiana, where there's gars in there and stuff. It was almost like a foreshadowing sort of thing. Yes, I was really excited then. My advisor in undergrad, who was into gars, is by then I kind of forgotten about them. He's like, I was taking it to theology, and he's like, gars are this really cool fish.

I think they're cool. I'm like, wait a minute, I know what those are. And so that kind of started me back into them. And then from there on, expanded to maybe take some turns following the sinuosity of a river, maybe you have to work right now. But that's how it's where the fish interest started.

Is it weird for you to have seven gars right behind you all the time when you work on them or what happens in your brain and your heart when you look at a guard? Is it just heart I emojis? Yeah, I would say so. I'd say it's weird if I didn't have guard near me like all the time.

Like if I'm in my office, there's guards there. Those are really preserved specimens. The ones at home are the live specimens here. And so I say they're never too far off from where I'm at. I guess I just have the real fascination with these organisms. And so anytime I look at them, I'm like really just excited about them. Even if it's fish that I've seen, you know, for a long time, I've got fish that I've had for like 10 years or What are they eating behind you? Like what do you toss in there? They shrimp. What are the shrimp? So? What are you tossing there? They shrimp.

What are the shrimp? So I go and frozen shrimp. It helps sort of quell the aggression that they might have in the wild. Every now and then I would give them maybe some feeder fish that I low with extra vitamins and minerals in that. So I bet really it's just frozen fish. So you try to calm them down

because there's different species in there. So I have to make sure everybody gets along. They've got different growth rates, are more aggressive than others. It's like dealing with a bunch of children, all these are well, you know, nicely contained in it. What is often so? What is your field season? Like, what is your yearly rhythm? Do you spend like summers in the field and then you're dealing with a lot of data? What's it like for you? The rhythm down here is usually synced up with the river, with the Mississippi River and some of the rivers that are connected with it. So we have like this sort of flood plain

inundation season when the water goes up and then as it starts to come down and so we kind of monitor populations at various points during that time. We kind of go with the flow almost literally. It's when the river is up, right there, when the river's low, we're out there, but we use different techniques depending on what the water levels are. What kind of garbage do you wear when you're working? And that depends too. Like if we're mucking around like in the water, then it might be waders or muck boots or something like that. And something that will you can try to wash because it's going to get covered in

gar slime. I mean, there can try to watch because it's going to get covered in gar slime. I mean, there's fish slime and then there's gar fish slime and they are almost like two different categories altogether. It's one of them does not come out. No, okay. Tell me everything because I didn't even know that they had slime. I thought that they had thick scales. Okay.

Anatomy of a gar dish. What's happening? Sure. So they've got this elongate body, which is considered to be more of the sort of ancient fishes or considered the quote-unquote primitive fishes. Those earlier diverging fishes tend to have more elongate bodies. And so, gar is kind of falling with that. They're covered with these diamond shaped armored scales, they're called gang-wade scales. They're covered with these diamond shaped armored scales, like called Ganyway scales. They're actually made up of a compound that's similar to a nail in our teeth. So they're super tough. Native Americans in some places would make arrowheads out in the scales. Some folks still make a jewelry out of them.

Early settlers are used like they cover the blades on their plows with them. So in essence the scales are really tough. Diod, D is done studies, look at them, the bio-inspired armor and everything. The armor is there. Okay, did I spend an hour on Etsy looking up broaches, made of gar scales? Maybe. So imagine a flower, but made of glossy, cream cream colored jagged teeth. Each one acting as a petal. Am I kind of considering purchasing one? Perhaps.

Also, just imagine wearing it and people saying, oh, what an intriguing statement piece. What is that? And then you just say, oh, it's interlocking body armor from a fish that's been around longer than dinosaurs and has a face like a saw. It'll cut you if you touch it. I like it.

So they've got these tough scales, but you're right. The slime is there. It's this coating. It's exuded from you guys' cells on the fish, but they just have so much of it. And we have to preserve fish for different reasons. And so we have a group that we have to take back and we use for other types of like internal analysis,

that sort of stuff. Deadgars seem to produce even more slime than livegars. It's a lot of slime. If we get just hardest that slimyness into something else, maybe that'll be one of our next projects and maybe we'll inspire somebody to look at that too. Do you have any idea if that slime is similar to hagfish slime in the way that it's tossed out and absorbs water to words mostly water but slime filaments? I would say it's not some water hagfish in that way. They don't use it as a defense like hagfishes would but both types of slime were primarily water-based though. It's almost like just a superficial

slidiness to them that reminds me of hagfish. I think I posted a video of like lifting up a gar that had been preserved for a while. Or at least was frozen in thought. And it's just like the slimes just drips down. The students really seem to get into that and the biology of fish is class. And that's from the first deceptions we do as a gar

so they can see what it's like. Yes, I look this up. And it look like a fish emerging from behind a curtain of mucus, or wearing a cape made of snot. It's as gross as you think it is. What do those smell like? Yeah, that's another thing. They have some fish have somewhat of a pleasant smell to them. I used to work on lake white fish, which is starting with the great lakes. They actually smell like cucumbers. And so that's actually a decent smell. Gar's, it's like a pungent swampy type smell.

It's hard to describe, but it's unique to them. And certain species are even smellier than others. And it doesn't really come out. You just sort of learn to live with it in the field gear that you have. It's pungent. It's pungent, pungent and swampy. Yeah. Sounds like like the worst like wine

tasting notes. I think it's got a pungent nose and a swampy body. I agree. What about who eats them? Who eats it? So as long as they're not a vegetarian, I feel like everybody should or at least try it. It's great. So folks in the South tend to eat it more than people up in North thinking about the United States here. Different countries in Central America, garas and popular food fish in certain parts of Mexico, it's just as popular as salmon is in Pacific Northwest. So you can get gar empanadas, tamales,

you can get it on a grill. In the South here, we see how they actually make gar balls, which is basically just taking the meat and putting it into almost like meat balls. They prepare it in a bunch of different ways. I've had gar, it's actually really good. It's one of those things that the appearance of the fish might make somebody like, I'm not eating that.

There's just no way. But if you look at a pategonian toothfish, which is Chilean sea bass, at this point, probably not sure you're eating them anyway, you look them, not the most appetizing looking fish. So I feel like this is another category where they've got a bad reputation. But, Gar is actually pretty delicious and people have been eating them for hundreds of years. I actually met which animals predate on Gar, Gar's,

but I was quite happy to take this globetrotting culture cuisine tour. I loved it. But what about non-humans? Who dares feast on the beast? What about animals? I mean, we have at least nets and hooks, but if I were an animal in the wild, would I just be like, that thing's got tooth scales all over it and a bucket of slime? I'm out. It's out of my league. Is that how they've persisted so long unchanged? Yeah, I mean, the armor definitely helps.

They live in these areas that maybe not a lot of other, more conventionally, let's say, were sparring fish and survive because they actually breathe air. Wait, what? Fish breathe air? But I digress, we'll come back to that. But all you eaters will eat guards.

Those just swallow them whole. Cormorants, there's a lot of pictures online of Cormorants and other similar type birds or shape birds eating gars. I kind of ask for that because I get into that whole bird's versus fish argument all the time. People send me pictures of birds eating gars. But gars will, you know, turn the table. They will eat perverts. I have not seen that in real life, but I've heard from

reputable sources that they do do that. Oh my goodness, the eye to bird. It's predator prey. There's a balance to it. And you mentioned they breathe air, and BD, it's a fish that breathes air and has been around since the Jurassic or when did cars come on the scene? Sure. so the family lepacized the FDA, it diverged and branched off around 157 million years ago, so that's late Jurassic period. So they're older than Durantosaurus rats, and they've been around longer than they have too. So a lot of our favorite dinosaurs

from the Cateces spirit, like they're even older than that. So they've been around for a while. Garis used to be a much more diverse group than they are now. Right now we have seven extant species that are all found within North America, Central America and Cuba. There used to be many more species and they were found in North America, South America,

Africa, India, Europe, basically worldwide. They had a pancheic distribution. And yeah, things like everything helped them survive for this long. They kind of found a body plan that works and they stuck with it for millions of years. What is that body plan? Do they have swim bladders? You mentioned that in your biology of fish classes. It's one of the first things you dissect. Do you slip in the gar early because they're the coolest and you want people to fall in love with fish also? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like I mean, given that class as biology of fish, it was a bit like with all the, you know,

30,000 some, you know, describe fish species. Yeah, I like them to focus on, you know, the handful that I really like, but you know, I did use them to the others too. I'm like, there's these seven species, and then there's like, you know, 30,000 of them on suit. Plus we always have them on hands because of our research.

So, you know, I've got them in the freezer. But if you look at them internally, as far as that body plant, they've got that elongate body, they've got the long jaws with lots of teeth, which helps them, you know, capture prey effectively. That gas letter looks like a lung on the inside. It runs like the length of the dorsal side of the fish. So when you dissect them, it looks like a lung. It's highly vascularized.

It's like a big balloon. And yeah, they have to go up and they've got it gulped for air relatively frequently in order to function. They basically are an air breathing fish. So they're not just using the air that they're gulping for buoyancy, they're actually using it for respiration? That's correct, yeah. Because they live in a lot of these slow-removing water the bi-use, sort of backwaters of rivers and streams, not that some guards don't live in rivers and streams are fast moving water. But they live in these areas where the water is moving slower, and also where the water might be warmer.

Warm water tends to hold less oxygen, and so they've got to find somewhere else to get their oxygen from otherwise they can't stay there. So they just go to the surface, they take a gulp and they can kind of go about their business. Their business being looking like a Tim Burton sketch covered in slime and scale. Now about this air gulping. Why does warmer water have less oxygen? Okay, so in short, warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen because warm water means the molecules are raging at a faster moving mosh pit. All that bumping around means that the oxygen gas can get tossed out of the mix. Now, if you swear you can hear the temperature

of boiling water, you are not wrong or delusional. So a paper with the delightfully long title, why can you hear a difference between pouring hot and cold water and investigation of temperature dependence in psychoacoustics. This came out in 2018 and it studied this effect and essentially scientists think our brains are just very hip to the lower pitched sounds of more viscous water being poured in the higher pitched boiling water, which has more bubbles and it breaks apart more than cold water when it splashes.

And do they have gills as well? They do. So they can breathe through their gills. They're considered to be facultative air breeders, which basically means they can do both. They don't really have to breathe air on the certain conditions or met. So they basically are air breathing almost all the time. If they have the right mixes, cool water and low activity, then they can just use their gills.

And they tend to be fresh water or brackish, right? Yes, they're mainly found in fresh water. They have to reproduce in fresh water. We've seen cases where there are eggs and brackish water, but they can venture out into full salt water. So there's alligator guards, spotted guards, long news guards have been found off the Gulf Coast in full salt water. The Audemont Aquarium in New Orleans, they've got an alligator guard. I think it's a couple of Coast in full salt water. The Ottoman aquarium in New Orleans,

they've got an alligator guard. I think it's a couple of them in full salt waters. You can see them swimming with sharks and sea turtles and tarping. It's actually like, well, I just go there and I just stare at that tag for the duration when I run there. Do they know who you are?

Are they like, that's a famous car scientist? He's there. I don't know. I think they know that they're famous. And I'm just a fanboy up there trying to take a bunch of pictures and my wife Luzer's wanted the other exhibits and kind of leave me there and everything so yeah definitely my favorites. Does your wife share your enthusiasm for fish? I think my proxy and also I think she does have a genuine interest in them. We met when we were both working at Shed Aquarium,

so that's a place with a lot of fish by default. A lot of fish. So we both worked there, and I was a researcher there, and she was working in fundraising. And so that's how we met. So really the fish started things off for us. And we go through the exhibits, and I go, I'm just sure my favorite fish.

So it was like the garrison, both in the one fish. I completely ignored the penguins, of course, and any of the other organisms there. Wow, thank you, penguins. So I think that enthusiasm kind of carried over. And the last toast in our wedding was to the garr fish. You held up this little figurine and said, if it wasn't for this fish, we wouldn't have met each other

and anything like that. And so she tolerates it, but also supports it. And I think deep down she appreciates those fish. Oh, how can you not? I mean, the Garfish brought you together. I mean, that is amazing. For a wedding instead of escort cards, we have little Garfigurians that are called escort guards.

And that was surprising me. It wasn't me. She came up with the idea I saw it on our wedding day. And so it's really been infused with, you know, our lives, definitely my life at, you know, virtually, you know, any love. You could not have picked a better partner. I mean, come on. Talk about being so lucky. What about Gar in movies? Have they found their way into popular culture at all? Sure, you know, and movies, have they found their way into popular culture at all? Sure, you know, popular culture may be two and a set, not an eight set of, you know, jaws with the sharks or anything like with algators. There's no crawl, you know, movie or anything

like that. But they are there. So if you're familiar with the movie predator, which was Arnold Schwarzenegger's story, one of his breakout roles is a salient that would collect trophies throughout the galaxy, and you would actually try to collect humans too, because they were considered one of the best prey. What the hell are you? They had necklaces with these skulls of their sort of trophies and it just so happens that one of the skulls is a garce skull of the man. Somebody pointed it out to me along the way. So I thought like, gars are seriously cool animals because these aliens are coming from all over the galaxy to like, you know, hunt for these.

So that was, that's an example I use in class and in some presentations. There was another movie called, if you know who weird Ali Yankevic is, we just let it spoof, Semana Gat. His old 80s movie, UHF had a lot of satire making front of a bunch of different shows. One of the shows is Neil of Fish and one of the fish on the wheels was a gar and so

something something that picture. All Yankeviks everywhere. I love you. They're even in the creature from the black we're doing so I don't always see it but people will see it and if they know that I'm obsessed with Garzil's send the stuff to me. So I like that I received that sort of you know information. Okay, garflin flam. What is a myth that you would love to bust about gar? Oh gosh. So probably the myth that they are bad for sport fish populations, they're damaging the ecosystems, that's one of

the big myths is that they're bad for fish that we traditionally cared about more like bass or walleye or some of the other sport fish. We think that these cars are taking over lakes and rivers. If you see a lot of garbage, it's bad for the other fish. They're important components of native ecosystems. There are predators that are needed to maintain balance. It's kind of like wolves in yellow stone or maintaining proper balance there. So usually if you have a healthy population of guards,

you have a healthy overall ecosystem. Oh, why aren't people just eating more guard? Why aren't people going after like the trophy fish when you're like, that's a pretty good eating over here? I mean, it is, right? We've got out here guards that can get over eight feet long. So there's a lot of meat on those fish.

Not that I'd recommend going after the biggest fish, but if you've ever prepared fish before, a lot of times you'll use a filet knife to, you know, filet a fish, right? With Garry's needed use tin snips to get through the high. So you need some extra equipment to process a gar, but it's worth it is what I would say. Did I watch a bunch of fish cleaning videos for this episode for you? You know I did. And I've got pretty tough pair of scissors. And we want to get in here crunching as it cuts. And yes, anglers use yard tools or medical trauma scissors to chew through these ganoine scales, which are indeed really similar to tooth

the mammal. Imagine soying through a blanket made of teeth. Oh, speaking of sauce, I asked Solomon if after you were done eating the meat, could you use a garmouth as a saw for anything? And he was like, eh, no. They're really better at grasping than they are cutting. So now we know. Also, anglers have called these critters garbage fish.

But they're starting to accept that they're pretty good eating and some fisher people suggest baiting a hook with carp heads. But when scientists need to get a head count for science reasons, they might electro-fish, which is applying a current underwater, which attracts the fishes to the anode, and then it stuns them. And if this sounds like shooting fish in a barrel, it pretty much would be, which is why it's considered poaching in many states, but more on this in a bit. Now you can also use a drone, like Solomon did on a recent expedition with the Nature Conservancy

and Matt Miller. And so we used drones to actually take the line away from the boat and we baited it with chunks of carp. And so you've got this chopped carp on a fishing line that's flown by a drone 400 feet away. So basically looking at a flying fish head, go through the air and then you tug on it and it'll drop the line and you kind of set your lines around the boat that way. So we have a land-to-fair number of fish and it was all catch and release that way and stuff. We got the biggest fish that I've ever landed and that was between 80 to 100 pounds

as a six foot long alligator guard, which is on the average side for those fish. But it was really exciting. Yeah, so we were doing fishing. We were using like the sort of futuristic technology to fish for this ancient fish. So it's a interesting sort of parallel there. How old is a six foot or eight foot alligator guard? It's hard to say alligator

guards grow fast early in life and they tend to slow down, but they can live for over 100 years. So a seven foot alligator guard could be 40 to 50 years old. It could be 100 years old. We're be 100 years old. We're finding out that the way that we age them,

we're finding those techniques. And so we're finding out that all guards are actually much older than we originally thought they were. Back when I was in grad school, we thought that some species only lived about 10 years old. We've now learned that they can live for probably over 30 years. So that's a significant increase in relearning. And how are you actually dating them?

Are there rings in their scales or something? What's going on? Yes, so for some fish, you can use the scales. Um, for others, you can use some of the fin rays and they have what we call annual eye like rings on a tree. Um, but with a lot of fish, scars included, we get the best estimates from something called an otolive or an eerstarsome which is in the head. Allie, please please tell me what a fish earsome looks like. Okay, okay, calm down. Tuck in and imagine something just a few millimeters in length that can come in all shapes,

usually characteristic to a certain species. And they look like teeny tiny apple fritters. Or if you put a very small chicken nugget in your pants pocket and sat on it for a seven hour train ride. But the texture of a rock, a treasure. And so if we take those out and look at those, we kind of grind them down. We can see the rings there. And if you count those rings, you can get an estimate of how old those fish are. And nowadays you need really high-tech methods in where you get the best estimate that we can.

But now what we're finding out is that fish that we thought maybe 10 years old might be 30 years old, fish that we thought were 60 might be who knows, 70, 80 fish can live for over 100 years as far as cars are going. What bad asses? Seriously. Okay, I have so many questions from Patrons.

Can I lightening around? Sounds good. Are you ready? Okay, but before we do, we toss some dollars at a good cause in the name of theologist and Dr. Solomon David pointed our money cannon toward Ranger Rick magazine, which is a part of the National Wildlife Federation. So hello to all the Rangers out there, including Hannah Shart, the editor of Ranger Rick. The donation was made possible by sponsors of the show, which I will quickly tell you about, and give you some discounts. Okay, all your questions regarding this fish.

Okay, so first up, Charlotte Fulkegard, Ashley Aroncio, Felix Isal, and Ellen Skeleton, all had questions about our changing planet. Oh my gosh, okay, number one, because we were supposed to record this, I think like September 3rd right around which hurricane was it that preempted this? Oh gosh, I lost track, honestly. We had ADA and I don't know, maybe there was data. Yeah, I think a record five or six names, storms this, you know, that might have been

hurricanes this year. So lots of floods, hurricanes. Are the gar surviving climate change okay? It seems to be, yeah, no, that's a great question. Some fish are gonna be more affected by climate change than others. Fish that depend on cold water, cold temperatures were probably gonna see their ranges contract in a lot of areas, whereas more water fish

will probably see range expansions there. Garrs of water, fish, they'll probably do better in some areas, but climate change is going to affect habitat. It's going to affect all kinds of things. So climate change is most likely going to be bad for everybody. It's just going to be problematic in different ways. Right now, cars are doing okay, but habitat loss is probably the biggest threat to cars.

Mm-hmm. And habitat loss caused by just human development and building? Yeah, whenever we're, you know, damning rivers or cutting off flood plains from their, you know, river systems, or cutting the fish off from spawning rounds, removing vegetation, in some places, which is what guards need to reproduce. That can be problematic. So really, habitat loss is the big thing. And that can be exacerbated by invasive species, by climate change, you know, again, like you mentioned anthropogenic and puts it to. Mm hmm. Okay. Um, Hannah Vaughn wants to know, what's with the

gar with the sharp teeth? My friend from Alabama is always talking about trying not to get bit while swimming. Does that happen? Will they bite you? No, they're not going to bite you. Okay. The only way you're really going to get bitten by a guard, you know, maybe even just slightly intentionally, is if you're messing around with one on the boat, like, wait, let's say you're an angler and you're trying to, you know, dislodge the hook or get them out of the net or that sort of thing, that's really it. They're not going to come after you and attack you. Okay. If you're swimming in Alabama, will other fish bite you? I can't speak for other fish.

You know, really sunfish, they come perched down here. They will come in, they will get back you. Now, they don't really have the teeth that guards do, but there's some of the fish that we think are in aggressive, actually are aggressive. They're just not really going to do any harm or anything. Okay, more patron questions.

Julie McDonald's want to know, do fish feel pain? I know this is kind of a silly question, but I've heard conflicting accounts of it. And would like to hear from the source, do fish feel pain? I know this is kind of a silly question, but I've heard conflicting accounts of it. And would like to hear from the source, do fish feel pain? So I don't know if I'm the source, because you have to go to the fish for that, but there is a lot of research being done on fish and pain. I would probably summarize it in that fish feel pain.

It's not exactly in the way that we do. I'm not a fish pain expert. What we do do with our research is that we make sure that when we're handling the fish, if they are experiencing any sort of pain, it's the most minimal version that they could be easily experienced. So we anesthetize them, we're quick to get them out of the nets, safety of the animals is definitely a priority.

So I would say that fish do feel pain now. How do they feel pain? I am not a fish neurobiologist. So I couldn't tell you much more specific than that. Okay, quick aside, I looked into this because I do feel like the shrug, fish don't feel pain, seems entirely anithetical to say evolution and avoiding dangers.

But it's a pretty convenient justification for choosing the fish dish on a wedding menu instead of the veggie option, of which I was frequently guilty before all weddings happened on a screen. So according to Dr. Lynn Sneddon, a University of Liverpool researcher and a director of bio-vectionary science, Dr. Snedden is the global authority on fish pain. And she says they probably do indeed feel pain. They express physical symptoms when injected with an acid, and those symptoms subside when they're administered morphine afterward. And the research finds that our aquatic friends may feel pain strikingly similar to that of mammals. Also, Dr. Snedden has a website called The Fish Indicators of Stress and Health.

acronym FISH. So if someone says you're slimy guys love getting caught, it's pretty fishy claim. Now, okay, if you like vengeance, though, you're gonna love this question. On the minds of many, including patrons, Calvin Dallin, Raiden Markham, Hannah Quist, Jamie Kishimoto, Chris Brewer, Morgan Alexander Coburn, Laura Smith, Jess Swan, Rachel Moore, Aviva Elizabeth, and Allison Torrey. So many people is probably the biggest question I got. Want to know what is up with their toxic eggs? What is their life cycle? Like how are they doing it? How many babies do they make? How big are their eggs? What's going on? The eggs. So first of all, there's no gar caviar.

So no garviare, if you will. There's so many gaurin here today. I'm not going to have them. Don't try it. I mean, they don't have eggs, just you shouldn't try to eat them. So gaurins are weird. They are toxic to humans. They're toxic to mammals. They're toxic to mammals, they're toxic to birds, they're

toxic to a lot of different invertebrates, but they're not toxic to fish. So it's kind of a weird gap in the toxic bingo cart. Like if you're going to have poisonous eggs, you think you want it to be poisonous to the animals that are kind of in the same area. So a sense of way that seems like a weird sort of thing. But part of our working theory is, and there's other folks at the Niko State University working on this as well, Dr. Garilett Flurs lab is looking at gar egg toxicity. And trying to figure out what are the proteins and the bacterial base, what are some of the details there?

But from an evolutionary perspective, we're thinking that, you know, garros live in this water that is gonna be low oxygen, it's relatively warm, it's relatively shallow, especially where they're laying their eggs. So you're probably not gonna have a whole lot of other predatory or egg predator fish out there, but what you do have is crustaceans.

Down here in Louisiana we got crawfish around, I say crawfish because I'm speaking for Louisiana, but it's crayfish everybody else and you've got a lot of you know waiting birds herons everything that you know I'm like Garza the revenge back on so it would be toxic to those bird predators it would be toxic to the inverter bricks there be toxic to other mammals and so that's one of my working theories as do why that toxicity is there but not to fish. So the eggs are toxic, they're toxic even inside the fish. So every now and then we'll read about some of you who caught a

gar and they've started to, you know, try to make gar caviar and they ate the eggs. So even when they're inside the fish, they don't have to be laid in order to be toxic. But also what we found out is that even the larvae are toxic for a little bit too. So they're actually poisonous to predators. That kind of, that toxicity shrinks as they get older and older. But for those first, you know, maybe several days to a week or so, the larvae are also toxic. Ooh, and do their predators learn that

pretty quickly early on? Like, are they able to eat an egg and like barf it up and be like, never again, or do they just, do their predators straight up die if they eat them? And it's just sort of instinctual to avoid them. I think there's a fair amount of research that's still out there to be done on that because humans have learned they've gotten sick. I don't think anyone has actually died from eating garlic, thankfully, but they have gotten violently ill. But invertebrates seem to get sick and they die. It seems like birds, they'll get sick from it

and they'll die off too. So I don't know if they live long enough to tell their friends, you know, cough cough, don't eat this. I think it's a pretty high level of toxicity. And the way they lay their eggs is that there's usually big scissor being groups and clusters so that might be an amount that they're ingesting.

I couldn't speak to the learning curve beyond humans. Humans now know we have the internet to try to spread that information, don't eat garbage. Don't do it, don't do it. So tempting. It's like the forbidden foods. It's the tide pod of the ancient fish broth. It really kind of is.

So don't eat it unless you're excited to have violent gastro and intestinal distress and maybe death. So don't. Now this question was also asked by quite a few of you patrons including Claire Meyer, Margaret Reh, Liz Ropeke, and honestly it's a little nosy. Katie wants to know what is the ecological niche for their long snouts? Like what's the most likely reason they evolve like that? And Nicole Cohen says, I catch Gar all the time with my dad and I always wonder what determines the bill length. Does the length have any status to the fish? Or is it just how the fish is like some humans are taller than others? So why do they have these really long bills and how different are those between individuals of the same species? So great questions. As far as the long bills, I think you can loosely make an argument for convergent evolution. If you look at crocodiles and alligators,

I've got those long snouts, lots of teeth. Gar is going to have the same biting power that crocodiles and alligators do, but it's similar sort of principle, where they use that long snout as sort of a range extension to go after prey. If you're familiar with this other, it's a fish eating crocodile called a gari.

No relation to gari isn't said, it even spelled exactly the same way, but they've got these long snouts. They specifically feed on fish. They side swipe with it, and they open it very quickly to grasp on that fish. So different gari species have different lengths of snouts, usually depending on what they're eating. The long-nosed garrr primarily eats other fish, so it's got a long and skinny snout. Out of your garrr will eat fish, but it'll eat a lot of other types of animals, even they'll even scavenge. So they've got a shorter snout and a skinny snout, alligator, garb will eat fish, but it'll eat a lot of other types of animals, even they'll even scavenge. So they've got a shorter snout and a wider snout,

a little, it allows them to eat some different things. Now, as far as the maybe sexual dimorphism across the snouts, they believe that some female spotty guards have longer snouts than male spotty guards, but we found this varies with population and it probably varies with the locality and even across species. So there's no great way to show that you know longer salveens, female, shorter salveens, male, but bigger gars tend to have bigger salve. And a lot of coal wants to know do garr have

electromagnetic sensory organs and if so what are the primary functions of it? You mentioned electrofishing, and I was like, what is electrofishing? Do they have any magnets in their face? Sure, so electrofishing is, to be simple, it's not what guards do, so they don't have electroreceptors. They do have taste buds on their snout, though. So I have watched a little poke around with their snout, and like, look around for food,

almost like a little long-snowed dog looking for food. We get to see that in the aquarium, and you can see that in the wild too. You'll see their tails stick straight about in the water, and they're like head standing. They can sniff out food, but they aren't electrosensitive in that, like, a paddlefish would be, or like, a sturgeon would be.

Wait, sturgeons are electrosensing? It's true, I looked it up. And this is similar to how sharks go about locating prey. An electro-sensing tends to be more prevalent in aquatic species, including dolphins, since the dissolved metals and water conduct electricity better than air. But it's also seen for some reason in terrestrials, like echidnas, and bees, and platypuses, and platypuses, it was recently found floresce, an alien greenish glow under ultraviolet light, which

was a discovery recently made when Dr. Paula Spathaneck and some other researchers at Chicago's Field Museum held a small quiet rave and invited a drawer full of preserved monotremes. So yes, these egg-laying mammals are the animal equivalent of psychedelic posters you buy at a bong shop. But back to electricity in your fish face. Now, electric fishing is a technique that we do in fisheries, where we run a week current through the water and fish within a certain vicinity

of that current are drawn towards that electrical field. And if they're really close and they get stunned and we can net them up, we put them in the boat, we can tag them, measure them, and within seconds they'll come to. And then we can release them back and they kind of go about their business. So it's a good way of sampling a population

if you need to get a large number of fish with a minimal amount of sort of contact time. You know you mentioned when they go up to gop air, does that not make them more visible to predators? It does and so, gars will do it relatively quickly but if you're a garr of a certain size, once they reach adult sizes, there's really not many other predators that are going to threaten them. Alligators can eat certain large gars but a a big alligator gaur, it's only a major predator,

maybe a big alligator, but they'll usually go for smaller prey, but it's really human. Now, gaur is also exhibit what we call synchronized respiration. So if one gaur goes up for air, oftentimes another gaur will go for air, oftentimes another gargos for air, another gargos for air. We think this might have evolved because if other gar see that it's safe to go for air, then they'll go for air at about the same time. So that works for gargos versus almost any other animal and not so much versus humans. Oh, right now somewhere there's a bunch of gar asking each other, are you going? I mean, I go, if you go? I mean I go if you go we can ride together if you want but I mean just one gope and then I have to go oh my

go have to get a burly. Okay Miranda Panda wants to know are there any fish who have evolved from this fish and reversely is there any way of knowing what they evolved from or have they just been around too long to tell like what's their backstory and who's evolved from them? Yeah, I would say, Garzim and doing their own thing, the way sort of phylogenically, the Tree of Life is sort of branched off,

they kind of went off on their branch and they branched off from the rest of the Ray Finn Fish's group, again, about 157 million years ago, and they've been kind of doing their thing and haven't changed it since then. So I wouldn't say there's other fish that have sort of evolved from cars. Now, evolution is sort of an ongoing process. So even within populations, we see that they're changing with things like climate, with

different sort of mutations that might pop up. So over time, might get a car species that's present today that splits into two different species. We also think that there's some that splits into two different species. We also think that there's some unknown cryptic species out there. People just haven't said any gar is enough that we're pretty sure that there's other gar species out there besides the seven that we know. What's seven or those?

I'm going to run down a who's who of society gar, at least the discovered species. There's the long nose gar, which has the most redundant of the gar names. Then there's the leopard-printee spotted gar. There's the Florida gar, which looks a lot like a spotted gar, but it's Floridian, which means that it's wearing denim cutoffs in January. And maybe has a bedazzled license plate holder. There's the tropical gar, which is a popular menu item in Central America. It's eaten like we enjoy salmon here.

Just hold the row. There's the short nose gar, which snoot-wise, it's eaten like we enjoy salmon here. Just hold the row. There's the short nose guard, which snoot wise, it's kind of closer in proportions to a dolphin than a swordfish. It's also a common pet. Oh, let's not forget about the alligator guard, a river giant that can reach eight feet in length and 300 pounds of scaly chunk. And then moving on, lastly, the most rare of the seven, the Cuban Gar, which is a freshwater species. It can also inhabit brackish water as well, but sadly, it's not a saltwater species. As then, we could call it the Cuban Sea Gar.

I'm a monster. And speaking of this next question about a certain show was asked by patrons Kendall Bernal, Janela Lindauer, Jennifer Stone, Maggie Bender, and... Oh, Rich Passenna wants to know if you've seen any of Jeremy Wade's shows like River Monsters or Dark Waters and if so, what's your opinion? Gar don't bite pieces off their prey. They only eat what they can swallow whole. This puts humans off the menu.

The great question. I think Jeremy Wade has done a great job for science, communication of these sort of river monster type fish. I think he's done a great job of getting away maybe from them being called monsters. The show is called River Monsters. You might think these are these threatening organisms. They're really bad. They present these sort of sensationalized accounts of this sort of crime that's been committed. Some of you is bitten by something and it turns out usually that it wasn't the fish.

In the case of bars, it ends up that that was the case. Although I did spend a lot of time yelling at the TV when that first River Monsters episode came on, all my roommates was left by that time or like we can't sit with you and listen to you. That was the right name for that fish and that wasn't the right thing, but I think overall bringing it to sort of public view has been net beneficial for that. So I think overall he's done a great job with it. I just like watching people catch big fish, honey.

I believe I've seen enough to clear the guy's name. You've got that, yeah? It's time to return the specimen to the wild and reflect on other possible suspects. Do people have a wrestle gar? You know, they might wrestle them when you get them to the boat, but not like they're wrestling alligators or anything like that. Alligators, guards are actually pretty chill. Once you get them up onto the boat,

like they realize I'm huge and there's really not much you can do to me. So I mean, especially if you're doing a catch and release or whatever and that sort of thing, but like they'll usually kind of sit there. When we get on fish, whether it's a small gar, a large gar, we put a wet towel over their eyes so that calms them down.

That's the case with a lot of different organisms. And so they kind of chill out and then we take our measurements and get them back into the water and everybody's happy. Oh, sometimes I feel this way when I scroll on Twitter for too long. So I just have someone put a wet towel over my head and I just sit there blanking in the dark piece. At last, nothing exists. Now, a lot of folks, including patrons Miranda Panda, Eva Schaefer, Linda Mattson, Susan Kenon, Anna Valerade, Janelle Shane, Michael Hanby, Jennifer Lewis, Adam Weaver, Natalie Bates, Orion McSmith, Lydia Zimmerman, Sadie Baker, and the Legris Unsturm wanted to know more about their evolution, the fossil record, and essentially their

history, presumably to write more nuanced fanfic about Gar. So many people want to know more about their long backstory, like Margaret Rae says, how did they survive the KT asteroid impact that took out the dinos? Daniel Donaldson wants to know since it appeared that they stopped evolving around the late Jurassic, what is it about their niche that made them say, okay, we're just going to stop the mutations now. And Sean Washington bags, please, please, please 100,000% debunk the living fossil fallacy.

What is that living fossil fallacy and why did they stop evolving? So many questions there. I know. I'm going to start with that one. So the first of all, they didn't stop evolving. They are very slowly evolving compared to other organisms. So every organism that's alive today is considered to be technically a modern organism. We're living in modern times. It's alive today. It's had this span of time

to evolve. Garves just tend to evolve at slower rates. Basically, all animals are still evolving. So populations are changing natural selection is taking place on the individual. So I would put out there that evolution is an ongoing process. It hasn't stopped for gars. It's just that they're already slow at doing it. So we might see more changes, but it's probably at a time scale that we, you know, won't be able to observe very effectively, at least moving forward. Now, getting to the living fossil question, this is something that I have my students answer as the first exam question. So if any future students are listening to this and how they get, they get a freebie out of this. But it's why was Darwin's idea of a living fossil

technically incorrect, but the idea is there. So he said living fossils were kind of like organisms that are alive today that look the same as they were, you know, way back land or in the fossil record. We like to use this sort of adjust that is they look like that at least as far as external appearance, but they've been evolving over this entire period of time. So from a science communication perspective, I like the term living fossil. You just have to use the right caveats with it when you're explaining it to somebody. It's almost like saying primitive fish.

People tend to know, or a seal of can does a primitive fish. A gar is a primitive fish. It's not necessary the exact terminology that's correct, but if I were to say they're non-tilioced, acting operagians, you can lose people by the second syllable of that first syllable. So I like living fossil. I think you can use it if you use in the right one. Acylocanth, side note, is an ancient nubby-lobed fish, and everyone thought they were extinct for 65 million years until 1938, when a South African Fisher person called up a museum and was like, hey, in case you want to look at my trash fish by catch, come down to the pier. There's a weird one in here, and biologist Marjorie

Courtney Latimer hopped into a taxi to the pier and was like, dog. What in the boy? How do you? Is this? And then made a sketch of it, which looks kind of like a police sketch of a sealant can't. I'm not gonna lie to you. And confirmed that this thing in this guy's net was the not extinct lobed fish that was the predecessor essentially to terrestrial tetrapods. This was a big deal. Like the natural science equivalent of someone on a telenovela who is long dead, showing up on a doorstep, and everyone being like, BUBBUBBUM! They're alive! You fleshy fint bitch, I love you! Willa Rowan, first time question asker who loves a seal of can't? No, they are not

a close relative of gars, sorry, but also seal oficance are said to have just a speck of brain matter amid a big ol' lump of fat, which also feels like me many days. Speaking of. Stephanie Berherty's and Jess Wan both wanted to know what their brains are like, Jess wanted to know how do they compare intelligence-wise to other sea creatures. How do you even measure or quantify that? Yeah, I would say that they're smarter than we might give them credit for. I mean, I think fish overall are smarter than what we,

the pop culture has given them credit for. I think science Friday dispelled a rumor of like, you know, you have the memory span of a goldfish. Sure, you know, goldfish can remember quite a bit. They can live for a long time too. Garth also, they can recognize individual people. We've seen that with pet fish and that's her thing So they're they're pretty smart now. I've never seen a head-to-head guard versus octopus, you know

brain teaser, you know contest or anything like that I think there's plenty of sea organisms out there that are smarter than gars, but I think you know They're still pretty smart. I think most animals is surprising with how intelligent they are Mm-hmm, you know and if people are falling in love with gar also, um, patron Terry Goss wants to know, I've seen gar in Aquaria all my life. Is this a suitable habitat? It seems too small, but they're pond lakefish, no? Also points Terry for saying Aquaria and not Aquariums.

I know you can say both, but Aquaria just is like, oh, that is the plural, isn't it? So pet gar, can it? you obviously are a gaur expert? So you're making it work and they're living the life. But if someone wanted to have a pet gaur, is that a hard thing to do? Yeah, I would say there's certain things that make them easy to keep because they breathe air so they're, you know, very, you know, from bus fish, they're very durable fish, and they can easily be trained to eat non-life food, like frozen shrimp, but they get big. That's the biggest thing. In most cases, that's the only thing.

So as these fish get big, I've got lab space for them, we've got ponds they can go into. We've got other homes having raised scars for 20 years. I can tell you, we start them off in a small tank and move them to a bigger tank, move them a little bit, bigger tank, but yeah, for the average aquarium hobbyist or fish keeper, not exactly ideal unless you have plans for a pond or some sort of larger housing for them. Larger aquarium, if you will. Aquarium, yes. Claire Meyer has kind of a technical

question here. I'm wants to know what happens if you boot a garth new. That's a good question. You can do it, but I would not advise it. They move at lightning speed with their jaws, it's using my side to side. So I wouldn't recommend it. They might open their mouth, they might keep it closed. You just never know. I would keep your face clear of a garth new. Okay. There's a pain in glass and change. The Earl of Grammolkin had the same question. So now they both know. But Earl of Grahamlkin had the same question, so now they both know, but Earl of Grahamlkin also asks, Wikipedia says they have green bones? What is this? Is that true? They have green bones? Yes and no, on it being true. That's a common name issue, so there's a fish called a garfish, mainly around the end of Pacific and through Pacific Ocean,

and other places too. It's the larger group called needle fishes or balloniformes. They have green bones. So not gars like lepacis, osteoidate. So these gars don't have green bones. But if you go to Australia where they call them garfish, it's the type of needle fish they have green bones. So yes, a case of mistaken identity. That other garfish is the gar pike or the sea needle, and their

bones are in fact green because of a bile substance called biliverdin, which is also what turns some bruises, a remarkable shade of avocado. Okay, so Julia Blitterf and Hannahquist had similar questions. Julia says, I only just googled what a gar is, and my question is, what did I do to deserve this nightmare fish and why does nature hate me personally? Hannah Quist wants to know, why are they so freaking cute? So, where do you fall on the looking at gar? I'm going to guess you're more on the Hannah less on the Julia. Yeah, you know, I just think they look cool no matter what but what I do tell people is and you can see this now that there is Gar Twitter out there so a lot of pictures all these

Well, I'm the picture you see with Gar from the side view you see those teeth and you see that long staff They look really fearsome. I would challenge people to turn them so they're looking at you head on and they look like the dirtiest fish you've ever seen Like, the blobfish doesn't look like a blobfish, right? And they brought them up from the depth and they look all weird like that. But in the car when you look at them head on, they look that dirt being so. Okay, it was not easy to find a head on photo as googling gar head on. It'll get you a lot of pictures of just plain gar heads before they were decapitated. But I finally found a quarter shot.

And y'all, that overbite, those big, unblinking eyes, that cute cluelessness, this thing 100% belongs in a Simpson's episode. So, you know, maybe it looks cute, maybe it looks fierce on that sort of thing. So I think, as with anything, it's a matter of perspective, or valuable predators, the native ecosystems, they're useful even now in biomedical research we're finding.

And so they've got a lot of use for us, but also use in nature. So, you know, fearsome or, you know, cute. I think they're valuable and cool fish. But I challenge them to do the lateral look and the head on look and you'll see both sides. So. but I challenge him to do the lateral look and the head on look and you'll see both sides.

Allegra Sunström wants to know, is the plural gar or gars embarrassing? The answer to the question is yes. My advice when I went back and forth that this one I was in grad school. So technically back then, an American Fishery Society who sets a lot of those rules for fish said that the plural of garr is garr is, but now they change rules and say, you know what, it's whatever you feel like. So, garr can be plural, garr is can be plural, it can be a bunch of different species of garr is can be multiple, you know, the same species, garr of garr is whatever you're feeling like that, in particular, days. Garr's, some call them ugly trash fish river monsters, but we call them ancient, patient, boop-o-poo-long-boy,

sweetie-pedies. Tam Trin wants to know, can guards crawl on land? Short answer is no. They can't crawl on land, but they can survive on land, probably for at least a couple hours. There's stories myself, including when I was in grad school, a guard jumps out of a tank, they can survive for a long time out of the water. If they're kept, they can survive for even you know, an even longer period of time,

they're pretty durable, so they can survive on them, but they're not going anywhere. I like to think of someone in a prehistoric landscape telling a guard, you're perfect, never change, and the guard was like, okay, Skylar L. Prim wants to know, did they shed their scales? They do not. Some fish, it's easy for the scales to kind of come off and they very quickly regrow them. Garves, it's interlocking sort of chainmail. So they don't tend to shed them, but if they are damaged, they will grow back. Garves will regenerate their fins, they'll regenerate like the bases of their fins. They're really just, you know, I wouldn't say quite indestructible,

but they're pretty cool and what they can do and what they can survive. They can be very tough. Ooh, Vespa Clerks heard a rumor that's gar are bullet proof. Is that even remotely true? Maybe. The thought is that small caliber weapons do deflect off of them. So maybe at the right angle,

that's one of my advisors that told me back in the day, they used to be used as sort of a form of body armor. And so I don't know if that was straight up bulletproof, but while they're on the fish, I have heard anecdotal stories about them being resistant to small caliber weapons. So maybe not bulletproof, but again, like I said, the engineers are looking at those scales

and that sort of those biological properties as sort of a bioinspired armor. So, you know, if there's something there. Shout out to all the bio-immigri experts out there, including listener, Krista Avampotto of New York, special hugs to her right now, as she tells Cancer What's What. Sam Kilgore has a great question.

Have you ever kissed one on the snoot? You know, I'm trying to think, maybe not on the snoot, maybe, you know, just on the cheek, just on the cheek. So that's probably as close as that comment. So it's pretty close. It's snoot adjacent. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So maybe he has not kissed one on the snoot, but as someone who loves nothing more than reuniting with lost treasures, I had to ask, did he ever find that Ranger Rick article? And he said he spent a long time looking for this obscure backdated magazine that changed his life. I mean, it was this image he saw cut a watery path to his life's work, to his bride, to his reign as the king of fish puns and he searched in vain. I'm like, rap and see go through my search online, my parents searched for them,

my parents, my friends searched for them, and it wasn't until I tweeted at Ranger Rick one day and said, look, Ranger Rick got me into gars back in the day. And the next morning when I woke up, they said, you know, is this the issue whenever I got that? So they sent me that picture and I was like, oh my gosh, they sent me a copy of the article and I got, you know, in touch with them.

And yeah, this year I was able to write sort of my own, you know, article, if you will, in Ranger Rick. So it was kind of a cool, full circle story with that. What was it like when you saw that picture again after not having seen it for so long? Was it just as you remembered it? Yeah, I mean, the turtles were there. Like it was just like it was just, it was in my head. It was actually trying to eat this woodducks. It was like the original birds versus fish for me too. So I mean it was like I had

it in my head, but I had not seen it for you know 20 some years. And it turned out it was from a 1983 issue too. So I'm not I'm not that old from 1983 to be when I was a kid, but that shows how old those issues were. And I looked it up on Wikipedia, Ranger Ricks still has a big circulation with those back issues. Like people donate them to libraries and other places. So I'd encourage people to do the same because you never know who's going to see those and get interested on their own with who knows what out of nature. If you're sitting next to a stack of vintage Ranger Rick issues and screaming at me to just

tell you the date, It was April 1983, Pages 38 and 39, and yes of course I will post this image on the Oligis Instagram. And if anyone knows the articles author Joanne Chipwood say hello, she became a hospice nurse and has written several books on the topic, including My Gift Myself, a step-by-step guide to becoming a hospice volunteer. She also wrote a book titled A Horse Called Maynays. So thank you Joanne. We all love cars and Ranger Rick because of you

and horses and to a lesser extent Maynays. It's been cool being involved with Ranger Ricks. I've gotten to know the editors and we're going to be working on some other stories and stuff so to me it's really like an opportunity to do some science communication back in that direction. And, but yeah, I've got the actual issue hanging in my office and everything. It's there. I copied it. I sorted everywhere so we'd never get lost even too. So, it's echoed anyway. You're gonna have to send me a picture of that so that I can, like, you put it up on the Instagram. It's interesting how those memories can really ignite something where you just have such a

affinity or such an obsession with that kind of creature at that moment. So I love when that happens. Okay, but among all of your love for Gar, there must be something that sucks. Like what about your research or your life as a gyroologist is just the worst. Yeah, I would say, you know, it's probably a conservationist dilemma too depending on what you're studying, but gars have this reputation. We've

tried to improve it over the years. Like there's a lot of other people involved with this mat Miller from Nature Conservancy after Lisa R and Nickel State that are really pushing our research showing that they have value that they're important, you know, component of ecosystems.

So that's something that's extremely important. I try to do that, but, you know, there isn't maybe a week that goes by where there isn't some sort of bow fishing pictures or article that comes out where people are just shooting guards, there's piles of dead fish because people don't see value in them. And so they'll put them in a dumpster

as they get dumped into landfills or turn into fertilizer, killed by the hundreds. fish because people don't see value in them and so they'll put them into dumpsters, they get dumped into landfills or turn into fertilizer, killed by the hundreds. There was actually a thing called an electric guard destroyer that used to be used decades ago because people thought that they were just trash fish, they were bad for the environment. So we try to improve that, but I think waking up to that, but I think, you know, as environmentalist, conservationist, it's an uphill battle no matter what we do, but we, I think, you know, as environmentalist conservationists, it's an uphill battle no matter what we do, but we, I think it's just important that we keep doing what we're doing. So I'd say if anything sucks, it's that, but it also keeps me going.

Oh, yes, if you need to know what an electric garter destroyer vessel from the 1930s looks like, just imagine a barge equipped with state-of-the-art for then electricity. It patrolled the waters mercilessly targeting Gar, and is essentially the death star, helmed by Garth Raider. That does not deserve a twinkle, don't let me have it. You want to keep fighting for Gar, for them to be appreciated? Yes, for sure.

So, you know, showing that there are valuable members of the ecosystem, they have value to humans as far as ecosystem services. And like so there's new research where we're learning more about the human genome through Garceses now because of their genome organization. So it's not just what they're doing out in the virus for, it's what they can do at a genomic level too. Are there, these are something genomically similar like to humans in a way that's surprising?

There is. So a good friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Ingo Brosh, he sequenced the spotted gargineum. And what they found is that the gargineum is organized more closely to the human and you know, other tetrapod genome than it is to tealiosfish, which we consider are more modern fish. So there's a little fish called the zebrafish, which is sort of our aquatic labyrinth, using all kinds of genetic and genomic research. But it's got some differences that make it hard to compare back to the human genome.

Even though it's like a lab rat, we use it to compare to other organisms, right? Because the gargons are as a go-between, we can compare the human to the gar genome and the gar genome to the zebrafish genome and helps us understand more about the human to zebrafish comparison and therefore it's sort of like this extra translator sort of in a rosetta-stone or a bridge. So, genomically, we can now learn more about the evolution development of human disease by, you know, what's some help from the gar, so using this sort of primitive fish is actually helping us

literally too. I don't think it'll ever replace zebrafish, but I mean, they're way cooler than zebrafish. Now, those zebrafish people are gonna have me, but so, but I think it works hand in hand, so I think it works alongside zebrafish, along fruit flies, along side a lot of other organisms. But now we've got this once heated organism that actually has some additional utility, which is great. They have intrinsic value on their own, but it helps that we can see some additional value. And between their boobable snutes and their derpy head-on look and their amazing ability to survive.

There's obviously a lot to love about a gar. But what is it that you just love the most? Oh my gosh. I feel like I've got to do sort of a cap up. It's the big picture, I think. I think just the look of them. I think alligators and crocodiles are cool, but they're this fish that has these long

jaws. It's this, it's the swimming dinosaur. It's just this sort of relic of ancient times that is still alive today. So that's sort of primitive look overall. I think I just think they're awesome. And so that's what makes you want to just share about them to everybody else. What are your plans in terms of science communication for guys? Do you want to write like 10 books about them, everybody else. What are your plans in terms of science communication for guys? Do you want to write like 10 books about cars, pitch a feature about cars?

What is your ultimate dream? Oh my gosh, you know, books, books would be great. I think, you know, the Ranger Rick article to me was the publication I'm most proud of. Like that's going up on my wall too. But to me, that's like, you know, probably gonna have a wider reach than anything. I put in a scientific paper and everything

But also we came down to Nichols State here in Tivitol, Louisiana and started Garlab And so I think it's training future scientists and using the platform on social media and also as professional to you know spread the word of Gar if you will and so And so show that they're valuable for all these reasons and they're really cool animals. I think they show that diversity is important. So you need even the creatures that look like this that might look a little bit fearsome, maybe a little too slimy, may they got poisonous eggs,

but they're important parts of biodiversity. And we need biodiversity in order to function as an ecosystem, as a planet. If you had one tip to give someone who is getting into science communication, what do you think that would be? Because you're so good at it. I've learned from others, and so I would say learn from others that have come before you, but don't try to replicate or be what anyone else is.

There's already, one of my favorite episodes of yours was the Bill and I episode. There's already a David Adembro, there's already a Bill and I out there. Don't try to be them. Stay with you or what you're doing, but be work on the techniques to share that and to show how it has a value. And you can add your own diversity to that. I would be, you know, remiss if I didn't say, you know, I didn't see people like me in nature programs or in the fields that I'm in, but now I feel like this is an opportunity to do that moving forward. This is such good advice. I hold you in such high regard. I really appreciate you doing this and I'm so glad we didn't have her again today. Me too. I was still looking out the window. I was still learning my pizza.

So ask smart people fishy questions because you know what, there have been bulletproof, toothy, snoot-nosed, ancient babies gliding under the water for longer than the dinosaurs. Just when you think the drugs have worn off, you realize that life on Earth is just a kaleidoscope of weird. So to get more gar and some really great sci-com in your life you can follow on Twitter at SolomonRDavid and on Instagram, Solomon.R.David and his website is SolomonDavid.net and there are links to all of those in the show notes as well as to Ranger Rick and the sponsors of the show you can put Oligies merch on your actual body or walls or

friends body at oligeesmurch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch, of the podcast. You are that for managing merch. Thank you, Aaron Talbert, for admitting the oligee's podcast Facebook group. Thank you, Emily White, and all of the oligee's podcast transcribers for making sure that transcripts are available for deaf and hard of hearing folks. Those are available for free to anyone that wants them on our website. And there's a link in the show notes. Caleb Patton bleeps episodes so they are kid and your grandpa safe. And those are at the same link. Thank you Noel Dilworth, who schedules the oligists. And thank you to co-quarantiner Jarrett Sleeper for assisted editing. And of course, to all around great guy, Stephen Rayfiend Morris,

lead editor who puts all the pieces together each week, Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music, he is in a band called Islands, you can follow me at Allie Ward with one L, say hello, allegies is at, allegies at Twitter and Instagram, I forgot to say that earlier, if you listen to the end, you get a secret. All right, and the November 2023 updated secret is that I am sorry for last week's secret. If you haven't listened to it at the end of neuro parasitology about nature zombies, you're in for a ride.

Got a lot of comments about it. Also, another secret is one of the best feelings in the world I experienced this last night is when you're falling asleep on the couch, maybe during a movie or during a party because you're just like, hmm, getting snoozy. And I'm around people who don't mind if I fall asleep on the couch during this. But the best feeling is when someone comes and puts a blanket on you. Or when you get to do that to someone else and you're like, oh, this can feel so good

for them. And I'm sure there's got to be a word in another language for the verb of either getting a blank of put on you when you're on the couch falling asleep or doing it to someone else. I don't know what it is. Hit me up if you know. Alright, and here's the old secret, the 2020 secret, which I forgot. I told you, and it's a little embarrassing, but it's also a good one. Okay. And this week, I feel that I should tell you that Jared sometimes pretends to be Jack White, we're thing garage rock to just ordinary situations. And about six months ago, I asked him

if I had a spider bite on my ass. And this week, he got an iPad with garage band and like 15 minutes later, he had created this opus, which will forever haunt and delight us all. Enjoy. Go to the world, fuck the world. This is the world, fuck the world. Thank you and good night, provide.

Hackadermythology, homiology, ortho-zoology, litology, dance, technology, meteorology, nomenal-ephatology, nephology, seriology,

homosology. to the chime.