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

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

A long snout. Hundreds of teeth. Scales that could slice you. What is a gar and 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. Follow Dr. Solomon David at Twitter.com/SolomonRDavid and Instagram.com/solomon.r.david Dr. Solomon David’s website: https://solomondavid.net/ A donation went to Ranger Rick at https://rangerrick.org/, part of NWF.org Sponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/garology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's your internet dad. It's Alli Ward. This is a podcast called Allergies, 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 Garn 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 slash allergies. If you have been wanting to join that special tree house with us, it's a dollar a month, but it lets you submit questions to theologists.

Also thank you to the people who leave reviews and who rate and subscribe the shows, keeping up in the charts. Some days I'm a sad creep and your reviews always cheer me up. So I read them all, everyone, and I prove it by picking a new one. And this time it's from someone called Alli Reel,

who wrote, I am but a soft pretzel. The podcast, my pot of cheese fondue. Alli's allergies inspires me to use my meat computer differently while still feeding my child like wonder for the world. Thank you for that. If you leave a review, I read it with my eyes. That's the deal, that's the truth.

Okay, you ready for cars? Let me answer that for you. No, you're not ready. This is a most loathed fish with an otherworldly face, but is it an armored creature of the deep out to drag people under the surface of lakes and rivers and rip them apart? Or is it a gentle giant who's slime you would caress?

We're gonna ask a garaologist, one of the world's top garaologists, in fact. So garaologist, 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 freshwater fish.

It has a long, sharp snout, like a crocodile, with teeth just coming every which way, like sprouts of grass. And the gar, in garlic, by the way, also comes from spear because the cloves can be sharp. Can you eat gar with garlic? We're gonna find out. Now, this garaologist 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's an assistant professor at Nicholls State University. He got his bachelor's 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 him. He's also, though, a ruthless pun maker, one of the finest in the game. And so to celebrate gar puns, and there are many, you're 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 waiters and let's get deep to discover the wonderful world of gar, including a backstory that predates the T-Rex, the barges sent out to destroy them, the slime, the scales, the poisons, river monsters, pets, boops, the hundreds upon hundreds of teeth, and one illustration that changed the course of history with an absolute joy of a human specimen,

garologist Dr. Solomon David. Oh, wait, you went away. Are you still there? Ooh, okay. We're having some couple audio issues. Are you back? Are you still there? Ah, I 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, 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, snooted gar of various sizes in the flesh, almost. And you're not kidding, you do have seven of your friends behind you. You know, they're right behind me. So you get some added guests in the background

and everything. Seven slender beasts glided by behind him, kind of like alive baseball bats with 500 teeth each. But I have a gar gancho enlist 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 do 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 gars? Oh gosh. And I think, I feel like expert might be, you know,

sure maybe now it might be an expert in it, but that's just cause like there's so much just nobody's really bothered to worry about with these fish. So it's a, I've been interested in them since I was a kid, but then I would say like 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 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 underappreciated, you know, underdog animals for sure. Like I always liked snakes and bugs and, you know, sort of the things deemed creatures, if you will.

And so yeah, that, 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, but are not limited to gars. So members of the family Lepus Astiidae, they're semi-close relatives, the bofens. So there's really only one species that's formally described right now that's extant.

So his Gar Lab at Louisiana's Nicholls State University focuses on the migratory ecology of a few different types of fish, but screw those fish. I want to talk Gar. Give me the Gar. I'm here for a tender love of the river beasts. And what exactly is a Gar?

I did not know that they existed until I saw your Twitter with a picture holding on it. And I was like, that is a rubber prop that cannot be real. What is this thing? Is it a crocodile? Is it a fish? What are they?

Can you describe what they look like for people who are not familiar with the wonders of Gar? So I like to tell people, you know, picture an alligator or a crocodile with fins instead of legs, and that's a Gar. So you 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 Gar. Alligator, fins instead of legs. Where did you get interested in fish? In fish. I was born in Washington state, lived there for a few years. My dad would take me to the Stila Guamish River,

which is one of the rivers near, kind of like the Seattle coast, a little bit further inland. And I remember like chucking rocks into the water. So that was my first memory, like connection with the water. So like, I was kind of born in the summer, like the sign for the town had fish on it. But one of the questions I feel like

that has been valuable to me is like sort of telling the story of how I got interested in them, which I feel like could, you know, be useful to others too. The magazine, the Nature Magazine Ranger Rick is what got me arrested in Gar. So when I was a kid, I flipped through the magazine, I saw this article about this animal that had fins instead of legs,

looked like a fish with fins instead of legs, it was alligator Gar. So I saw that as a kid, and it kind of got emblazoned on the back of my mind. That 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's office?

Like, what was that moment like seeing this alligator Gar? Oh my gosh. So I had 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. There were these old issues. And so I was flipping through them then, and I turned to the page, and actually caught my interest first of these, this illustration, these two little soft shell turtles, because that was a turtle person then. I like turtles.

And so I saw that, like I zoomed out to see like, wait, what is this? And, you know, I thought it was really cool. I'm like, what is a Gar? And it was actually called Mississippi King, and it was about a pond in Louisiana. So it's kind of interesting. Right now, I like live near a pond in Louisiana,

you know, where there's gars in there and stuff. And so it was almost like a foreshadowing sort of thing. And yeah, so I was really excited then. My advisor in undergrad, he was into gars. So by then I kind of forgot about them. He's like, I was taking a theology, and he's like, gars are this really, you know, cool fish. I think they're cool.

I'm like, wait a minute, I know what those are. And so that kind of started me back into them. And then from there on expanded, to maybe take some turns following a sinuosity of a river, maybe I'll see where I'm at right now. But that's, I would say, where the fish interest started. Is it weird for you to have seven Gar right behind you all the time when you work on them?

Or what happens in your brain and your heart when you look at a Gar? Is it just heart-eye emojis? Yeah, I would say so. I'd say it's weird if I didn't have Gar near me, like all the time. Like if I'm in my office, there's Gar's there. There's some really preserved specimens.

The ones at home are the live specimens here. And so I'd say they're not, they're never too far off from where I'm at. I guess I just have a real fascination with these organisms. And so anytime I look at them, I'm like really just excited about them, even if it's fish that I've seen, you know, for a long time. We've got fish that I've had for like 10 years or so.

What are they eating behind you? Like what do you toss in there? They shrimp. So I give them frozen shrimp. It helps sort of quell the aggression that they might have in the wild. Every now and then I would give them maybe some feeder fish that I load with extra vitamins and minerals and that sort.

But really it's just frozen fish. So we 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. Only these are well, you know,

nicely contained in an aquatic box. 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's up, we're out there.

When the river's lower out there, but we use different techniques depending on what the water levels are. What kind of gar, but do you wear when you're working? And that depends too. Like if we're mucking around like in the water, then it might be waders or, you know, muck boots or something like that.

And something that will, you can try to wash because it's going to get covered in gar slime. I mean, there's fish slime and then there's gar fish slime and they are almost like two different categories all together. One of them does not come out. No, okay. Tell me everything.

Because I didn't even know that they had slime. I thought that they had thick scales. Okay. Anatomy of a gar dish. What's happening? Sure. So they've got this elongate body, which is considered to be more of the sort of ancient fishes

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 like called Ganoid scales. They're actually made up of a compound that's similar to enamel in our teeth.

So they're super tough. Native Americans in some places would make arrowheads out of the scales. Some folks still make a jewelry out of them. Early settlers would use like the, they'd cover the blades on their plows with them. So in essence, the scales are really tough. DOD has done studies to look at them

as sort of a bio inspired, you know, armor and everything. The armor is there. Okay, did I spend an hour on Etsy looking up brooches made of gar scales? Maybe. So imagine a flower, but made of like glossy 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, ooh, 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. Elegant. So they've got these tough scales, but you're right. The slime is there. It's this coating that's exuded from Uke's cells on the fish, but they just have so much of it.

And we have to preserve fish for, you know, different reasons. And so, you know, we have a group that we have to take back and we use for other types of like, internal analysis, that sort of stuff. Dead guards seem to produce even more slime than live guards. It's a lot of slime. If we could just harness that sliminess into something else,

maybe that'll be one of our next projects. 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 where it's mostly water, but slime filaments? I would say it's not similar to hagfish in that way. They don't use it as defense like hagfishes would,

but both types of slime are, you know, primarily water based though. It's almost like just a superficial sliviness to them that, you know, reminds me of hagfish. And I think I posted a video of like lifting up a guard that been preserved for a while or at least was frozen and thawed and just like the slime just drips down. The students really seem to get into that

in the biology of fish's class. That's one of the first dissections we do as guards so they can see what it's like. Yes, I look this up and it looked like a fish emerging from behind a curtain of mucus or wearing a cape made of snot. It's as gross as you think it is. What do those smell like? Yeah, that's another thing.

They, you know, some fish have somewhat of a pleasant smell to them. I used to work on Lake Whitefish, which is found on the Great Lakes. They actually smell like cucumbers. And so that's actually a decent smell. Guards, 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, yeah. Sounds like the worst, like wine tasting notes. I mean, pungent nose and a swampy body.

I agree. What about, who eats them? Who eats it? So as long as you're not a vegetarian, I feel like everybody should or at least try it. It's great. So folks in the South tend to eat it more than people up north thinking about the United States.

There are different countries in Central America. Gar is a popular food fish. In certain parts of Mexico, it's just as popular as salmon is in Pacific Northwest. So you can get gar empanadas, tamales, you can get it on a grill. In the South here in Louisiana, they actually make gar balls,

which is basically just taking the meat and putting it into almost like meatballs. They prepare it in a bunch of different ways. I've had gar. It's actually really good. It's one of those things where like the appearance of the fish might make somebody like, I'm not eating that.

There's just no way. But you know, if you look at a Patagonian tooth fish, which is Chilean sea bass. Chilean sea bass, I believe. Which at this point, probably not necessarily eating them anyway. We look at them, not the most appetizing looking fish. So I feel like that's just 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, gars, 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. 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, respiring fish can survive because they actually breathe air. Wait, what?

Fish breathe air? But I digress, we'll come back to that. But alligators will eat gars. Those just swallow them whole. Cormorants, there's a lot of pictures online of cormorants and other similar type birds or shaped birds eating gars. I kind of ask for that

because I get into that whole birds versus fish argument all the time. And so people send me pictures of birds eating gars, but gars will turn the table. They will eat birds. I have not seen that in real life, but I've heard from reputable sources that they do do that.

Oh my goodness, he ate a bird. It's predator prey. There's a balance to it. And you mentioned they breathe air, NBD. It's a fish that breathes air and has been around since the Jurassic, when did gars come on the scene? Sure.

So the family Lepus Asteidae, it diverged and branched off around 157 million years ago. So that's late Jurassic period. So they're older than Tyrannosaurus rex and they've been around longer than they have too. So a lot of our favorite dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period,

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

and they were found in North America, South America, Africa, India, Europe, basically worldwide. They had a panjic distribution. And yeah, things like air breathing helped them survive for this long. They kind of found a body plan that works and they've stuck with it for millions of years.

What is that body plan? Do they have swim bladders? You mentioned that in your biology of fish classes. It's one of the first things you dissect. Do you slip in the gar early because they're the coolest and you want people to fall in love with fish also? Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Like I mean, given that class is biology of fishes, but like with all the, you know, 30,000 some, you know, described fish species. Yeah, I like them to focus on, you know, the handful that I really like, but you know, I'll introduce them to the others too. I'm like, there's these seven species and then there's like, you know, 30,000 other ones too.

Plus we always have them on hand 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 plan, they've got that elongate body. They've got the long jaws with lots of teeth, which helps them, you know, capture prey effectively. That gas bladder 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 a gulp 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. Cause they live in a lot of these slower moving water areas, the bayous sort of backwaters of rivers and streams. Not that some guards don't live in rivers and streams, or fast moving water.

But they live in these areas where the water's moving slower. And also where the water might be warmer. Warmer water tends to hold less oxygen. And so they've got to find somewhere else to get their oxygen from. Otherwise they can't stay there. So they just go to the surface, they take a gulp

and they can kind of go about 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 and the higher pitched boiling water, which has more bubbles and it breaks apart more than cold water when it splashes.

And do they have gills as well? They do. So they can breathe through their gills. They're considered to be facultative air breathers, which basically means they can do both. They don't really have to breathe air unless certain conditions are met. So they basically are air breathing almost all the time.

If they have the right mix of cool water and low activity, then they can just use their gills. And they tend to be freshwater or brackish, right? Yes, they're mainly found in freshwater. They have to reproduce in freshwater. We've seen cases where there are eggs in brackish water, but they can venture out into full saltwater. So there's alligator gars, spotted gars,

long nose gars have been found off the Gulf coast in full saltwater. The Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans, they've got an alligator guard. I think it's a couple of them in full saltwater. So you can see them swimming with sharks and sea turtles and tarpon. It's actually really cool.

I just go there and I just stare at that tag for the duration whenever I'm there. Do they know who you are? Are they like, that's a famous car scientist? I don't know. I think they know that they're famous. And I'm just the fanboy up there trying to take a bunch of pictures.

And my wife usually just wander the other exhibits and kind of leave me there and everything. So yeah, definitely one of my favorites. Does your wife share your enthusiasm for fish? I think by proxy and also, I think she does have a genuine interest in them. We met when we were both working at 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 kind of started things off for us. And we'd meet, we'd go through the exhibits and I'd go, I'm just showing my favorite fish.

So it was like the guards and both in the one fish. I completely ignored the penguins of course and any of the other organisms there. Oh, thank you penguins. So I think that enthusiasm kind of carried over. And the last toast in our wedding was to the garfish. We held up this little figurine and said, if it wasn't for this fish,

we wouldn't have met each other or anything like that. And so I, you know, she tolerates it, but also supports it. And I think, you know, deep down, she appreciates those fish too. Oh, how can you not? I mean, the garfish brought you together. I mean, that is amazing.

For our wedding, instead of escort cards, we had little gar figurines that were called escort guards. And that was a surprise to me. It wasn't me, she came up with the idea. I saw it on our wedding day. And so it's really been infused with, you know, our lives, definitely my life at, you know, virtually, you know, any level.

You could not have picked a better partner. I mean, come on to talk about being the one. I can serve myself extremely lucky. What about gar and movies? Have they found their way into popular culture at all? Sure, you know, popular culture, maybe to an extent, not to the extent of, you know, jaws with the sharks or anything like with alligators.

There's no 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 sort of one of his breakout roles as this alien that would collect trophies throughout the galaxy and he 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 gar skull, the man. Somebody pointed that out to me along the way. So I thought like, gar's are seriously cool animals because these aliens are coming from all over the galaxy

to like, you know, hunt for these. So that's an example I use in class and in some presentations. There was another movie called, if you know who weird Al Yankovic is, he does a lot of spoofs and everything like that. His old 80s movie, UHF, had a lot of satire making fun of a bunch of different shows.

One of the shows is Wheel of Fish and one of the fish on the wheels was a gar and so somebody sent me that picture. Wheel of Fish. All Yankovics everywhere, I love you. They're even in the creature from the Black Lagoon. So I don't always see it, but people will see it. And if they know that I'm obsessed with cars,

they'll send this stuff to me. So I like that I received that sort of, you know, information. Okay, gar flim 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 gars are, you know, taking over lakes and rivers. If you see a lot of gar, then it's bad for the other fish. And they're, you know, important components of native ecosystems.

They're predators that are needed to maintain balance, kind of like wolves in Yellowstone are maintaining, you know, proper balance there. So usually if you have a healthy population of gars, you have a healthy overall ecosystem. Why aren't people just eating more gar? Why are people going after like the trophy fish when you're like, that's pretty good eating over here?

I mean, it is, right? We've got algae or gar as they can get over eight feet long. So there's a lot of meat on those fish. Not that I'd recommend going after the biggest fish, but if you've ever prepared fish before, a lot of times they'll use a filet knife to filet the fish, right? With gar, you need to use tin snips

to get through the hide. 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 wanna even hear it 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 enamel. Imagine sawing through a blanket made of teeth. Oh, speaking of saws, I asked Solomon, if after you were done eating the meat, could you use a gar mouth as a saw for anything? And he was like, 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 headcount for science reasons, they might electro fish,

which is applying a current underwater, which attracts the fishies to the anode and then it stuns them. And if this sounds like shooting fish in a barrel, it pretty much would be, which is why it's considered poaching in many states. But more on this in a bit. Now, you can also use a drone like Solomon did

on a recent expedition with the Nature Conservancy's Matt Miller. And so we use drones to actually take the line away from the boat and we bait it with chunks of carp. And so you've got this chopped carp on a fishing line that's flown by a drone 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're able to land a fair number of fish and was all catching 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 drone fishing. We're using like the sort of futuristic technology to fish for this ancient fish. It was an interesting sort of parallel there. How old is a six foot or eight foot alligator 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 a hundred years. So a seven foot alligator guard could be 40 to 50 years old. It could be a hundred years old. We're finding out that the way that we age them, we're finding those techniques. And so we're finding out that all 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 what we're learning. And how are you actually dating them? Are there rings in their scales or something? Yeah, so for some fish, you can use the scales. For others, you can use some of the fin rays and they have what we call annual eye like rings on a tree.

But with a lot of fish, guards included, we get the best estimates from something called an otolith or an ear stone, which is in the head. Allie, please, please tell me what a fish ear stone 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 as you count those rings, you can get a good estimate of how old those fish are. And nowadays you need really high tech methods to already 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 lightning round? Sounds good. Are you ready? Okay, but before we do, we toss some dollars at a good cause in the name of theologist. And 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 Schaert, 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 Vilkegard, Ashley Aroncio, Felix Sassal, and Ellen Skelton all had questions about our changing planet. Oh my gosh, okay, number one, because we were supposed to record this, I think like September 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 Ada. We had, I think, a record five or six named storms, this, you know, that might have been hurricanes this year. So lots of 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, we're probably gonna see their ranges contract in a lot of areas, whereas warm water fish will probably see range expansions there. Gars are warm water fish, they'll probably do better in some areas, but climate change is gonna affect habitat,

it's gonna affect all kinds of things. So climate change is most likely gonna be bad for everybody, it's just gonna be, you know, problematic in different ways. Right now, gars are doing okay, but habitat loss is probably the biggest threat to gars. And habitat loss that caused by just human development and building?

Yeah, whenever we're, you know, damning rivers or cutting off floodplains from their, you know, river systems or cutting the fish off from spawning grounds, removing vegetation in some places, which is what gars need to reproduce, that can be problematic. So really habitat loss is the big thing and that can be exacerbated by invasive species,

by climate change, you know, again, like you mentioned, anthropogenic inputs too. Ooh, okay. 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 while they bite you?

No, they're not gonna bite you. The only way you're really gonna get bitten by a gar, you know, maybe even just slightly intentionally, is if you're messing around with one on the boat, like let's say you're an angler and you're trying to, you know, dislodge a hook or get them out of the net or that sort of thing, that's really it.

They're not gonna 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 call them perch down here, they will come and they will get bite you. Now they don't really have the teeth that gars do, but some of the fish that we think aren't aggressive,

actually are aggressive. They're just not really gonna do any harm or anything. Okay, more Patreon questions. Julie McDonald, wanna know, do fish feel pain? I know this is kind of a silly question, but I've heard conflicting accounts of it and would like to hear from the source. Do fish feel pain?

So I don't know if I'm 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 visibly experience. So we anesthetize them, we're quick to get them out of the nets. Safety of the animals is definitely a priority. So I would say that fish do feel pain. Now, how they feel pain,

I am not a fish 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 antithetical 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 Snedden, a university of Liverpool researcher and a director of bio veterinary 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 these slimy guys love getting caught,

it's a pretty fishy claim. Now, okay, if you like vengeance though, you're gonna love this question on the minds of many, including patrons Calvin Dowling, Raiden Markham, Hannah Quist, Jamie Kishimoto, Chris Brewer, Morgan Alexandra Coburn, Elora Smith, Jess Swan, Rachel Moore, Aviva Elizabeth, and Allison Torrey.

So many people, this is probably the biggest question I got. Want to know what is up with their toxic eggs? What is their life cycle like? How are they doing it? How many babies do they make? How big are their eggs? What's going on? The eggs, so first of all, there's no gar caviar,

so no gar-v-r, if you will. There are so many gar in here today. Don't try it. I mean, not that they don't have eggs, it's just you shouldn't try to eat them. So gar eggs are weird. They are toxic to humans. They're toxic to mammals.

They're toxic to birds. They're toxic to a lot of different invertebrates, but they're not toxic to fish. So it's kind of a weird gap in the, you know, toxic bingo card. Like if you're going to have poisonous eggs, you'd think you'd want it to be poisonous to the animals that are kind of, you know, in the same area.

So essentially, that seems like, you know, a weird sort of thing, but part of our working theory is, and there's other folks at Nicholl State University working on this as well, Dr. Garrett LaFleur's lab, is looking at gar egg toxicity and trying to figure out what are the proteins?

Is it bacterial-based? You know, what are some of the details there? But from an evolutionary perspective, we're thinking that, you know, gar is living in this water that is going to be low oxygen. It's relatively warm. It's relatively shallow, especially where they're laying their eggs. So you're probably not going to have a whole lot

of other predatory or egg predator fish out there, but what you do have is crustaceans. Down here in Louisiana, we got crawfish around. I say crawfish because I'm speaking for Louisiana, but it's crayfish to everybody else. And you've got a lot of, you know, wading birds, herons, everything that, you know, I want gar is to have the revenge back on.

So it would be toxic to those bird predators. It would be toxic to the invertebrates there. It would be toxic to other mammals. And so that's one of my working theories as to 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 I'll read about somebody

who caught a gar and they decided to, you know, try to make gar caviar and they ate the eggs. So even when they're inside the fish, they don't have to be laid in order to be toxic. But also what we found out is that even the larvae are toxic for a little bit too. So they're actually poisonous to predators. That kind of, that toxicity shrinks as they get older

and older, but for those first, you know, maybe several days to a week or so, the larvae are also toxic. Ooh, and do their predators learn that pretty quickly early on? Like, are they able to eat an egg and like barf it up and be like, never again, or do they just, do their predators straight up die if they eat them?

And it's just sort of instinctual 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, you know, died from eating gar eggs, thankfully, but they have gotten violently ill. But invertebrates seem to get sick and they die.

It seems like birds, they'll get sick from it and they'll die off too. So I don't know if they live long enough to tell their friends, you know, cough, cough, don't eat this. I think it's a pretty high level of toxicity. And the way they lay their eggs is that there's usually, it's gonna be in groups and in clusters

so there might be an amount that they're ingesting. I couldn't speak to the learning curve beyond humans. Humans now know we have the internet to try to spread that information, don't eat gar eggs. Don't do it, don't do it. So tempting. It's like the forbidden foods. It's the tide pod of the ancient fish world.

It really kind of is. So don't eat it unless you're excited to have violent gastrointestinal distress and maybe death. So don't. Now this question was also asked by quite a few patrons including Claire Meyer, Margaret Ray, 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,

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

No relation to gari. It's not even spelled exactly the same way, but they've got these long snouts. They specifically feed on fish. They side swipe with it and they open it very quickly to grasp on that fish. So different gar species have different lengths of snouts. Usually depending on what they're eating,

the long nose gar primarily eats other fish. So it's got a long and skinny snout. Alligator gar will eat fish, but it'll eat a lot of other types of animals. Even they'll even scavenge. So they've got a shorter snout and a wider snout. A little, it allows them to eat some different things. Now, as far as the maybe sexual dimorphism

across the snouts, they believe that some female spotted gars have longer snouts than male spotted gars, but we found this varies in population and it probably varies with the locality and even across species. So there's no great way to show that, longer sell means female, shorter sell means male,

but bigger gars tend to have bigger snout. And Alonda Cole wants to know, do gar have electromagnetic sensory organs? And if so, what are the primary functions of it? You mentioned electrophishing. And I was like, what? What is electrophishing? Do they have any magnets in their face?

Sure. So electrophishing is, you know, to be simple, it's not what gars do. So they don't have, they don't have electoreceptors. They do have taste buds on their snout though. So I have watched them a little poke around with their snout and like, you know, look around for food, almost like a little long snouted dog looking for food.

We get to see that in the aquarium and you can see that in the wild too. You'll see their tails stick straight up out of the water and they're like headstanding. 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. And electrosensing tends to be more prevalent in aquatic species, including dolphins, since the dissolved metals in 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 floresse and alien greenish glow under ultraviolet light, which was a discovery recently made when Dr. Paula Spath-Annick 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, electrophishing is a technique that we do in fisheries where we run a weak 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. Whatever. 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. And you know what you mentioned

when they go up to gulp air, does that not make them more visible to predators? It does. And so gars will do it relatively quickly, but if you're a gar 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 big alligator gar, it's only a major predator. Maybe a big alligator, but they'll usually go for smaller prey, but it's really humid. Now, gars also exhibit what we call synchronized respiration. So if one gar goes up for air,

oftentimes another gar will go for air, another gar will go for air. We think this might have evolved because if other gar see that it's safe to go for air, then they'll go for air in about the same time. So that works for gars versus almost any other animal and not so much versus humans. Ah, right now somewhere, there's a bunch of gar

asking each other, are you going? I mean, I'd go if you go. We can ride together if you want, but I mean just one gulp and then I have to go. Oh my God, I have to get up early. Okay, Miranda Panda wants to know, are there any fish who have evolved from this fish? And reversely, is there any way of knowing

what they evolved from or have they just been around too long to tell? Like, what's their backstory and who's evolved from them? Yeah, I would say gars have been doing their own thing the way sort of phylogenetically, the Tree of Life is sort of branched off. They kind of went off on their branch and they branched off from the rest

of the Rayfin fishes 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 gars. 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 gar species that's present today that splits into two different species. We also think that there's some unknown sort of cryptic species out there. People just haven't seen any gars enough that we're pretty sure that there's other

gar species out there besides the seven that we know. What's seven of those? I'm gonna 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 printy spotted gar. There's the Florida gar,

which looks a lot like a spotted gar, but it's Floridian, which means that it's wearing denim cutoffs in January and maybe has a bedazzled license plate holder. There's the tropical gar, which is a popular menu item in Central America. It's eaten like we enjoy salmon here. Just hold the row.

There's the short nose gar, which snoot-wise it's kind of closer in proportions to a dolphin than a swordfish. It's also a common pet. Let's not forget about the alligator gar, 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, Janella Lindauer, Jennifer Stone, Meggy Bender and... Oh, Rich Bassin now 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. 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. Somebody was bitten by something and it turns out usually that it wasn't the fish. In the case of Gar's, 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 were left by that time. Like, we can't sit with you and listen to you. That wasn't the right name for that fish and that wasn't the right thing. But I think overall bringing it to sort of public view has been net beneficial for that.

So I think overall he's done a great job with it. I just like watching people catch big fish any. Yeah. I believe I've seen enough to clear the Gar's name. You've got that, yeah. It's time to return the specimen to the wild and reflect on other possible suspects. Do people ever wrestle 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. Alligator Gar's are actually pretty chill once you get them out 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 fish, whether it's a small Gar or 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. So they kind of chill out and then we, you know,

take our measurements and get them back into the water and everybody's happy. Sometimes I feel this way when I scroll on Twitter for too long. So I just have someone put a wet towel over my head and I just sit there blinking in the dark. Peace at last. Nothing exists.

Now, a lot of folks, including patrons Miranda Panda, Ava Schaefer, Linda Mattson, Susan Kennan, Anna Valerie, Janelle Shane, Michael Hamm, Jennifer Lewis, Adam Weaver, Natalie Bates, Orion McSmith, Lydia Zimmerman, Sadie Baker and Allegra Sundstrom wanted to know more about their evolution, the fossil record and essentially their history,

presumably to write more nuanced fanfic about Gar. So many people want to know more about their long backstory. Like Margaret Ray says, how did they survive the KT asteroid impact that took out the dinos? Daniel 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 good. Just we're just gonna stop the mutations now. And Sean Washington eggs, 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. Let's start with that one. So first of all, they didn't stop evolving. They are very slowly evolving compared to other organisms. So every organism that's alive today is considered to be technically a modern organism. We're living in modern times. It's alive today.

It's had the span of time to evolve. Gars just tend to evolve at slower rates. Basically, all animals are still evolving. So populations are changing. Natural 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 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 their first exam question. So depending on future students are listening to this

and how they get a freebie out of this. But 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 way back when or in the fossil record. What we like to use to sort of adjust that is they look like that, at least as far as external appearance,

but they've been evolving over this entire 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 seal a canth as a primitive fish. A gar is a primitive fish.

It's not necessarily the exact terminology that's correct. But if I were to say they're non-tilio-stacked and not dirigions, you lose people by the second syllable of that sort of string. So I like living fossil. I think you can use it if you use it in the right way. A seal a canth 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 bycatch, 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, hot dog, what in the boy howdy is this?

And then made a sketch of it, which looks kind of like a police sketch of a seal a canth. I'm not gonna lie to you. And confirmed that this thing in this guy's net was the not extinct lobed fish that was the predecessor essentially to terrestrial tetrapods. This was a big deal.

Like the natural science equivalent of someone on a telenovela who is long dead showing up on a doorstep and everyone being like, boom, boom, boom, they're alive. You fleshy finned bitch, I love you. Willa Rowan, first time question asker who loves a seal a canth. No, they are not a close relative of Gars, sorry.

But also seal a canth 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 Juan both wanted to know what their brains are like, how do they compare intelligence wise to other sea creatures? How do you even measure or quantify that? Yeah, I would say that they're smarter

than we might give them credit for. I mean, I think fish overall are smarter than what we, you know, the pop culture has given them credit for. Like I think Science Friday dispelled the rumor of like, you know, you have the memory span of a goldfish or, you know, goldfish can remember quite a bit and they can live for a long time too.

Gars also, they can recognize individual people. We've seen that with pet fish and that sort of thing, so they're pretty smart. Now, I've never seen a head to head Gars versus octopus, you know, brain teaser, you know, contest or anything like that. I think there's plenty of sea organisms out there that are smarter than Gars, but I think, you know,

they're still pretty smart. I think most animals are surprised with how intelligent they are. You know, and if people are falling in love with Gars also, Patron Terry Goss wants to know, I've seen Gars in Aquaria all my life. Is this a suitable habitat? It seems too small, but they're pond lake fish, no?

Also points, Terry, for saying Aquaria and not Aquariums. I know you can say both, but Aquaria just is like, ooh, that is the plural, isn't it? So pet Gars, can it, you obviously are a Gars expert. So you're making it work and they're living the life. But if someone wanted to have a pet Gars, 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, robust 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 ponds. Having raised Gars for 20 years, I can tell you we start them off in a small tank, we move them to a bigger tank, we move them to a little bigger tank. But yeah, for the average Aquarium hobbyist or fish keeper, not exactly ideal,

unless you have plans for a pond or some sort of larger housing for them. Larger Aquaria, if you will. Aquaria, yes. Claire Meyer has kind of a technical question here. Wants to know what happens if you boop a Gars snoot? That's a good question. You can do it, but I would not advise it.

They move at lightning speed with their jaws. It's usually me 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 her face clear of a Gars snoot unless there's a pane of glass in between. The Earl of Gramelkin had the same question.

So now they both know, but Earl of Gramelkin 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 Indo-Pacific and throughout the Pacific Ocean and other places too. It's the larger group called needle fishes or balana formies. They have green bones. So not Gars like Lepus d'Astinae. So these Gars don't have green bones,

but if you go to Australia where they call them Garfish, it's the type of needlefish, they have green bones. So yes, a case of mistaken identity. That other Garfish is the Garpike or the sea needle and their bones are in fact green because of a bile substance called billiverdon, which is also what turns some bruises a remarkable shade of avocado.

Okay, so Julia Bledorf and Hannah Quist had similar questions. Julia says, I only just Googled what a Gar is and my only question is what did I do to deserve this nightmare fish and why does nature hate me personally? And Hannah Quist wants to know, why are they so freaking cute?

So where do you fall on the looking at Gar? I'm gonna guess you're more on the Hannah less on the Julia. Yeah, you know, I just think they look cool no matter what. But what I do tell people is, and you can see this now that there is Gar Twitter out there. So there's a lot of pictures,

all they do is search for it. A lot of the pictures you see of 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 derpiest fish you've ever seen. Like blobfish doesn't look like a blobfish, right?

And they brought them up from the depths and they look all weird like that. But a Gar when you look at him head on, they look that derpy and stuff. Okay, it was not easy to find a head on photo as Googling Gar head on, it'll get you a lot of pictures of just plain Gar heads before they were decapitated.

But I finally found a quarter shot and y'all that overbite, those big unblinking eyes, that cute cluelessness, this thing 100% belongs in a Simpsons episode. So, you know, maybe it looks cute, maybe it looks fearsome, that sort of thing. So I think as with anything, it's a matter of perspective. They're 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. Allegra Sunstrom wants to know,

is the plural Gar or Gar's embarrassing? The answer to the question is yes. My advisor went back and forth with this when I was in grad school. So technically back then, American Fishery Society, who sets a lot of those rules for fish, said that the plural of Gar is Gar's, but now they change rules and say,

you know what, it's whatever you feel like. So Gar can be plural, Gar's can be plural, it can be a bunch of different species of Gar's, it can be multiple, you know, the same species. Gar, Gar's, it's whatever you're feeling like that particular day. Gar's, some call them ugly trash fish river monsters, but we call them ancient, patient,

boopable, long boy, sweetie peaties. Tam Tran wants to know, can Gar's crawl on land? Short answer is no, they can't crawl on land, but they can survive on land probably for, you know, at least a couple of hours. There's stories myself, including when I was in grad school, a Gar jumps out of a tank, it can survive for a long time out of the water.

If they're kept wet, they can survive for, you know, an even longer period of time. They're pretty durable. So they can survive on land, but they're not, they're not going anywhere. I like to think of someone in a prehistoric landscape telling a Gar, you're perfect, never change. And the Gar was like, okay.

Skylar El Prim wants to know, do they shed their scales? They do not. Some fish, it's easy for the scales to kind of come off and they very quickly regrow them. Gar's, it's this interlocking sort of chain mail. So they don't tend to shed them, but if they are damaged, they will grow back. Gar's 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 on what they can do and what they can survive. They can be very tough. Ooh, Vespa Clerks heard a rumor that Gar are bulletproof. Is that even remotely true?

Maybe. The thought is that small caliber weapons do deflect off of them. So maybe at the right angle, that's one of my advisors that told me back in the day, they used to use this 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 bio-inspired armor. So, you know, there's something there. Shout out to all the biomimicry experts out there,

including listener Krista Avampato 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 I'd come, 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. Like, rapidly go through and I searched 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 guards back in the day. And the next morning when I woke up, they said, you know, is this the issue? And everything like that.

So they sent me that picture and I was like, oh my gosh. They sent me a copy of the article and I got in touch with them. And yeah, this year I was able to write sort of my own, you know, guardacle, 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 wood duck. So 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 Rick 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 gonna see those and, you know, get interested on their own with, you know, 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 oligies Instagram. And if anyone knows the article's author, Joanne Chipwood, say hello. She became a hospice nurse and has written several books on the topic, including my gift myself, a step-by-step guide to becoming a hospice volunteer. She also wrote a book titled,

A Horse Called Maynace. So thank you, Joanne. We all love gars and Ranger Rick because of you and horses and to a lesser extent Maynace. It's been cool being involved with Ranger Rick. So I've gotten to know the editors and we're gonna 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 that's there. I copy it, I sort it everywhere so we'd never get lost in it too. So it's not going anywhere. You're gonna have to send me a picture of that

so that I can put it up on the Instagram. It's interesting how those memories can really like ignite something where you just have such such an affinity or such an obsession with that kind of creature in 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 garrologist is just the worst? Yeah, I would say, you know, it's probably a conservationist dilemma too, depending on what you're studying. But Gar's had this reputation. We've tried to improve it over the years.

Like there's a lot of other people involved with this Matt Miller from Nature Conservancy, Dr. At least for our nickel state, that are really pushing Gar research, showing that they have value, that they're important components and 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 Gar as there's piles of dead fish because people don't see value in them. And so they'll put them into dumpsters, they get dumped into landfills or turn into fertilizer killed by the hundreds.

There was actually a thing called an electric Gar destroyer that used to be used decades ago because people thought that they were just trash fish. They were bad for the environment. So we try to improve that. But I think, you know, waking up to that, but I think, you know, as environmentalists, conservationists, it's an uphill battle no matter what we do.

But I think it's just important that we keep doing what we're doing. So I'd say if anything sucked, it's that, but it also keeps me going. Oh, PS, if you need to know what an electric Gar 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. That you want to keep fighting for Gar, for them to be appreciated? Yes, for sure. So, you know, showing that they're valuable members

of the ecosystem, they have value to humans as far as ecosystem services. And like I said, there's new research where we're learning more about the human genome through Gar species now, because of their genome organization. So it's not just what they're doing out in the values for, is it's what they can do at a genomic level too.

Cool. Are there, is there something genomically similar like to humans in a way that's surprising? There is. So a good friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Ingo Brot, she sequenced the spotted Gar genome. And what they found is that the Gar genome is organized more closely to the human

and other tetrapod genome than it is to telios fish, which are considered more modern fish. So there's a little fish called the zebra fish, which is sort of our aquatic lab rat, using all kinds of genetic and genomics research. But it's got some differences that make it hard to compare back to the human genome.

Even though it's like a lab rat, we use it to compare to other organisms, right? Because the Gar can serve as a go-between, we can compare the human to the Gar genome and the Gar genome to the zebra fish genome. And it helps us understand more about the human to zebra fish comparison. And therefore it's sort of like this extra translator,

sort of in a rosetta stone or a bridge. So, genomically, we can now learn more about the evolution and development of human disease by, you know, with some help from the Gar. So using this sort of primitive fish is actually helping us literally too. I don't think it'll ever replace zebra fish, but I mean, they're way cooler than zebra fish.

Now the zebra fish people are gonna have me. But I think it works hand in hand. So I think it works alongside zebra fish, along fruit flies, alongside a lot of other organisms. So, but now we've got this once-hated 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 snoots 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 mean, you know, I feel like I've got to do a sort of a cop-out. It's like, it's the big picture, I think, you know?

I think just the look of them. Like, you know, I think alligators and crocodiles are cool, but they're this fish that has these long jaws. It's a swimming dinosaur. It's just this sort of relic of ancient times that is still alive today. So that sort of primitive look overall. I just think they're awesome.

And so that's what makes me want to just share about them to everybody else. What are your plans in terms of science communication for Gar's? Do you want to write like 10 books about Gar's, pitch a feature about Gar's? What is your ultimate dream? Oh my gosh, you know, books, books would be great. I think, you know, the Range Rick article to me

was the publication I'm most proud of. Like, that's going up on my wall, too. But to me, that's like, you know, probably going to have a wider reach than anything I put in the scientific paper and everything. But also, we came down to Nichols State here in Tippett, Louisiana, and started Gar Lab. And so I think it's training future scientists

and using the platform on social media and also as a professional to, you know, spread the word of Gar, if you will. And so show that, you know, they're valuable for all these reasons and they're really cool animals. I think they show that diversity is important. So you need even the creatures that look like this that might look a little bit fearsome,

maybe a little too slimy, maybe they got poisonous eggs, but they're important parts of biodiversity and we need biodiversity in order to function as an ecosystem, as a planet. If you had one tip to give someone who is getting into science communication, what do you think that would be? Because you're so good at it.

You know, I've learned from others. And so I would say, learn from others that have come before you, but don't try to replicate or be what anyone else is. There's already, you know, one of my favorite episodes of yours was the Bill and I episode. There's already a David Attenborough. There's already a Bill and I out there.

Don't try to be them. Stick with what you're doing, but work on the techniques to share that and to show how that has a value. And you can add your own diversity to that. I would be 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 just, I hold you in such high regard. And I really appreciate it. Thanks to you, Ally. I so appreciate you doing this and I'm so glad we didn't ever hurt Jane today.

Me too. I was still looking out the window. It's still there behind me, so. So ask smart people fishy questions because, you know what, there've 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 psychom 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 True Ranger Rick and the sponsors of the show. You can put oligies merch on your actual body or walls or friends body at oligiesmerge.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast You Are That for managing merch. Thank you, Erin Talbert for adminning the oligies podcast Facebook group.

Thank you, Emily White and all of the oligies 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 that they are kid and your grandpa's safe and those are at the same link. Thank you, Noelle Dilworth, who schedules the oligists. And thank you to co-quarantiner Jarrett Sleeper for assisted editing. And of course, to all around gray guy, Steven Raifend 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 alleyward with one L, say hello, oligies is at oligies at Twitter and Instagram. I forgot to say that earlier. If you listen to the end, you get a secret. And this week, I feel that I should tell you that Jarrett sometimes pretends to be Jack White,

riffing garage rock to just ordinary situations. And about six months ago, I asked him if I had a spider bite on my ass. And this week, he got an iPad with GarageBand. And like 15 minutes later, he had created this opus, which will forever haunt and delight us all. Enjoy. Got a red bump on the bump.

A little red bump on the bump. Thank you and good night, bye-bye. Hack-a-dermatology. Homiology, cryptozoology, letology, nanotechnology, meteorology, nephrology, nephrology, seriology, cellulogy. To the chime.