Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #20: FISHES with Chris Thacker

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Ichthyology is not easy to say, but fish are easy to love. Dr. Chris Thacker will get you so thrilled to stare into a pond or look up pictures of silvery sea serpent-looking fish friends. Hilariously charming fish expert and LA County Natural History Museum Curator of Ichthyology, Dr. Thacker took Alie to a basement full of several million jars of fish to chat about the worst fish husbands, the weirdest mating behaviors, the scariest fish, the nicest fish, the tiniest fish, how they breathe, how you can help reverse global warming, and whether you should pee in wetsuits. I love her so much and so will you. (For the adult version, the full-length episode is linked below.)Follow Dr. Chris Thacker on TwitterFull-length (not classroom-friendly) episode + tons of science linksA donation went to: SeafoodWatch.orgWondercon: Friday March 24, 6pm panelMore Smologies episodes!Other full-length episodes you may enjoy: Oceanology (OCEANS), Cnidariology (CORALS), Environmental Toxicology (POISONS), Selachimorphology (SHARKS), Elasmobranchology (MORE SHARK STORIES)Sponsors of OlogiesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaMade possible by work from Noel Dilworth, Susan Hale, Kelly R. Dwyer, Emily White, & Erin TalbertSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hello. It's your eccentric aunt and your internet dad, Ellie Ward. We're back with an episode of Smologies. So, Smologies are these classic oligies episodes, but we cut them down and make them shorter and we edit them for language so that they are kid safe and classroom appropriate and parents don't yell at me. Now, if you've never listened to the full version of this episode about fish and you're not around impressionable ears, it's linked right in the show notes for grown-ups,

the longer one, it's there for you, go straight to that. But if you're down for a family-friendly shorter version, this episode of Smologies is for you. Also, quickly, before I get into it, I am going to be at Wendercon in Anaheim. Ever heard of Wendercon? It's in Anaheim. It's on Friday, March 24th. I'll be there leading a panel. That's Friday, March 24th, 2023, 6 p.m. Friday, a panel about climate change and art with my friends

from the organization Functional Magic, who make these awesome collectible climate solutions, gig posters. And I've interviewed my friend Andy Hall, who started the organization before. I'll link that in the show notes too. But they donate proceeds to rainforest charities. So I'll be there if you're at Wendercon.

Come to our panel Friday at 6 p.m. and say hi. Okay, now, ichthyology, Smologies. Ooh, this is a good one. So I was giddy to talk face-to-face about fish. First, the etymology of ichthyology. Pretty straightforward, ichthys means fish in Greek. It also sounds like a cat sneezing, like ichthys. Do it, do it right now, ichthys, right?

Whatever. Okay, so this all just let me into the bowels of a natural history museum. To the very basement where she walked me through Florida ceiling gray metal shelves filled with jars of fish suspended in these amber chunky liquids past these articulated fish skeletons. Apparently the collection at the museum

is over five million specimens of just fish, which weigh a lot of pounds. So they gotta put them on the bottom floor because they're so heavy. That's the thing with museums. What you see on display is the tiniest fraction of what they really have. So much is kept in the back in libraries

and warehouses is like a catalog for research. So we pulled up some chairs in this little library and thisologist, honestly, she has the regal presence of Robin Wright, but she has the timing of a comedian and she has the obsessive fish knowledge of a savant. And I just could not get over her. I couldn't get over her, it was like you're amazing. So you'll learn about the touching relationship

between a fish and a shrimp that I wanna write a quiet indie movie about what seafood you should not eat and how you can save the planet. You and me. So we cover a lot of ground and by ground, I mean ocean. So let's dive in with ichthyologist, Dr. Chris Vacker. So you are an ichthyologist. So you are an ichthyologist.

That's right, I study fish. How long have you been an ichthyologist? Since birth. Yeah, since ever. Chris has worked at the Natural History Museum of LA County for almost 20 years and she's been studying a specific group of little fishies for almost 25 years.

That is a long-term relationship with fish. The fish that I work on are called gobies and they are a group of reef fishes and stream fishes. They're found all around the world. Gobies are so fascinating and variable. They do anything, like any evolutionary thing you wanna study, a gobie is doing it pretty much. Let's back up and can you tell me what a fish is?

Okay, a fish is a vertebrate, which means it has a bony skeleton with a backbone. It's a vertebrate that lives in the water. That's about, well, that's about it, although it obviously doesn't include some water living vertebrates like whales. Fishes breathe water, they don't have lungs. The bony fishes are part of a clade

called axonopterigii. Okay, what was that word? Actonopterigii, which means ray finned fishes. It kinda sounds like the first line of a camp song, like the sequel to John Jangle, Jim Berheimer-Schmidt, right? Okay, back to it. Which describes some characters of the way the fins are arranged, some kind of details of the bones,

but basically they're a vertebrate animal in the water. That's not a whale. That's not a whaler at all often, right? Or a seal. Okay. Or a snake. Right. Or a human being with a scuba.

Or a human being, exactly. You know what I mean. Or your dog at the beach. Your dog at the beach, exactly. As soon as you have a backbone in the water, you become a fish. Well, I would like to think so. So this is a very, I mean, going back to like

when you were a kid and you were marveling at the tank, this is such a basic question, but how do fish breathe? It is, that's not a basic question, that's complicated. Gasses, so they need oxygen, they're like us. They need oxygen to run their cells. They absorb oxygen from the water, but that's more difficult than absorbing oxygen from the air. Although remember, our lungs are wet.

Like air, we also absorb oxygen from water. It's just a thin scrim of water inside a lung. Hey, heads up, you got moist lungs. Now you know. But fishes have a very frilly, complicated, blood-enriched gill sort of filament, looks like feathers, like a filament. Well, you've seen them on an axolotl.

So an axolotl is a great word. It's also a type of salamander and it's lungs. They look like frills on the side of its head. Kind of like it's wearing two feathery fans where our ears would be. It's majestic, it's slimy, it's glamorous. Axolotls are amazing. Well, fish have that kind of thing, but on the inside.

Yeah. Just inside the head. And the purpose of that is to exchange, have a lot of surface area exchange with water and oxygen diffuses from the water into the blood. Okay, so then what is the deal with a fish bladder? Okay, so you mean a swim bladder? Swim bladder. Yeah. Fishes have swim bladders.

Well, not all, but most of them. And those are for regulating buoyancy. Because remember, fishes live in sort of 3D. They move side to side, they move forward and back, but they also move up and down. Oh, yeah. You know, compared to the fishes, we're sort of just like in flat land.

Like we move like just in a few directions, but fish are actually basically always flying. Underwater, never wearing pants, flying without ever falling. I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. Like fish have the best lives. They have the best lives. They also have swim bladders,

which fill with gas and floats them up and down. Kind of like a functional whoopee cushion. Most of the time. And there are also some types of fishes that can actually gulp air and put it into their swim bladders. But obviously that's not gonna work for a fish that lives, you know, 100 feet below surface.

So there's two different kinds. Okay. Saltwater fish, freshwater fish. I think we don't think about it until it comes time to have perhaps one as a pet. And you're like, oh, if you have a saltwater aquarium, you are a millionaire. It's a whole different thing.

Yeah, if you have a bowl of the fish in it, that costs a dollar. What is the difference in how they live and how they breathe and exist? The difference in how they, it has to do with Osmo, what's called Osmo regulation, which is the regulation of salt basically in your body and outside your body.

So the kidney, you know, pumps salt one way or the other. Freshwater fishes live in a situation where they've got too much salt relative to the freshwater around them. Saltwater fishes have less salt than the water around them. So they just have to be careful with their kidneys. Some of them go back and forth.

What? Oh yeah, well salmon, right? Salmon go down, they go up the river, they have their babies, they wash back down, they live some time in the ocean, they switch back, lots of gobies do this too. Really? Yes.

How do they do that? They're kidneys, that's how. Wow, you know, I never knew, I always thought like once they got to a brackish zone, they'd be like, I'm out of here, this sucks. Some do. Okay. Yeah.

I've seen salmon spawning in a stream and I've always wondered like clearly that makes them so vulnerable to predation. If you wanted sashimi, it was just like any of them. Well, I mean, you've seen the bears. Yeah. Just scooping them, just scooping them up, just watch them go by, grabbing them one by one.

There's a lot of them. Yeah, and some of them make it and some of them don't. But a lot of them make it. And also, you know, the ones that do make it, they'll have hundreds and thousands of eggs. And so that's kind of how fishes deal most of the time with the lottery of having children, is that they have a whole bunch

and just hope that some survive. Right, they're like, bye, good luck, see ya. Yeah, have fun. Yeah. Okay, okay, bye. Good luck and farewell. When it comes to the little guys, you study a lot of little guys,

you showed me some cool specimens. Is that also a numbers game? Are they kind of lower on the food chain, right? It's kind of a, it's a value laden term. It's a value laden term. Sorry, sorry. Yes. They are.

They are food for a lot of other things, it's true. Yeah, and there's a lot of them. There's a lot of them. So the larger group that they're a part of is maybe 20, say, 2,500 species. And the total number of bony fishes is like 25,000. So that little more. So that's 10% of fishes right there.

How many fish species have been identified? Like I said, 25,000, 26,000 in that ballpark. Yeah. There's more all the time. People are finding more all the time. And there's more out there we don't know about. I mean, there might be 50,000 out there that we just haven't, we haven't gotten them yet.

And you just walked me through the collections. You have five million specimens here. What's the craziest fish you've ever seen, IRL? Something called a hula fish. What is it? Okay. A hula fish is a small reef fish that lives in Australia and it is only found in Australia.

And I'd never heard of it. I'd never seen it. And this is just like a couple of years ago, I'm sending fish all this time and I'm down in a aquarium in Sydney and I saw this fish in a tank and I had no idea what it was. Like no idea.

And that's a weird feeling, right? Given, you know, what I do. And I just stared and stared and stared and it was like I was five again, looking at this tank going, how is this possible? What is this alien thing? Yeah, hula fish, freaky looking. And it looks like nothing.

It's a little, it's got blue and white stripes, but it moves in a very sinuous way, like a hula dancer, hence the name. And that's where they got it, clearly. Exactly. I saw a video on the hula fish does have moves. Do you have a favorite fish? I have several favorite fish.

Have you ever seen a wahoo? It's beautiful. It's beautiful. A wahoo is kind of like a tuna. It's a great big silvery pelagic fish and it's just spectacular. It looks like a torpedo. It's like a silvery torpedo.

I really like monthskippers. I like shrimp gobies. Some of the shrimp gobies I work on are just beautiful, the very delicate, you know, colorful fishes and they do all kinds of weird things. Yeah, what's their relationship with a shrimp? Shrimp gobies live with shrimp in burrows. The shrimp builds the burrow

and the gobie lives with the shrimp. So it's a symbiotic relationship, like a mutualistic relationship. They help each other. Oh my God, they're like Bert and Ernie. They are, and gobies actually do this a lot. There's gobies that live in sponges and sea urchins and, you know, all kinds of different places.

They like, they're friendly. They like to participate in mutualisms. And a gobie and a shrimp will, the gobie is actually the watchdog. So the shrimp is blind. Stop! This is a great story. The shrimp is blind.

This is nature, this is evolution. This is just all, this is our world we live. This is a planet we live on. That's crazy. With these things, which just kind of like, just blows my mind. This is fishes, I think about fishes every day with that sort of tone.

Like this is on our planet with us or these creatures. So shrimps and gobies. The shrimp is blind. The gobie watches, sits on the bottom and watches and is a guard dog. The little shrimp builds the burrow and takes care of the burrow. And they are in touch with each other.

They communicate via a tactile communication system, a touch system. What? The antennae of the shrimp are very long and the antennae of the shrimp as the shrimp, you know, scrumples around and works, it keeps in contact with the gobie's body. And the gobie will flick its tail or move

or dart back and forth to let the shrimp know what's going on. If there's danger, if he can come out. No way. 100% true. I'm sure people ask you this day in and day out. Do you eat fish? Yes, I do eat fish.

Okay. For fish, I always recommend, and it's serious. I mean, this is one, again, one of those things we gotta watch out for with the ocean. Don't eat most kinds of wild caught tuna. Do not eat orange ruffy. For your convenience, you can go to seafoodwatch.org. And the Monterey Bay Aquarium has a list

and it's always changing, they're always updating it. But a lot of farmed fishes find to eat. It's done responsibly, ecologically conscious. And you can also check and see if it's, if the seafood that you're buying is MSC certified, Marine Stewardship Council certified. Oh, okay, I didn't know about that. I read one story about how there's some,

oh God, now I can't remember. There's some fish who holds her eggs in her mouth. Oh yeah, Cardinal Fish. Cardinal Fish do it, Jawfish do it, it's fantastic. They will go, Cichlids, Cichlids is what you might know from Aquaria will sometimes do it. It's just a way to keep the eggs safe. We don't judge.

I mean, but the main thing with fishes, you've got to make a lot of babies hope they survive. Exactly, exactly. And the idea is that the lower the amount of care that you put into your babies, the more you've got to have. So like if you're just going to blow them out to the wind, like a seed or a fish egg into the water,

you've got to have a bunch of them. If you're going to take care of them, you might have fewer. And if a mouth breeder is just going to have a couple hundred, whereas a spawner, a broadcast spawner might have a couple thousand. A broadcast spawner? Broadcast spawner, broadcasting to you. Is that just like holding eggs out of a moving car?

You just see, it's like you salt the fields just everywhere. Although sharks have those cool sacks. Yeah, sharks have some lay eggs like that and some actually have live young. And some fish have live young too. They have a few live young, but it's rare. And sharks are fish. Sharks are fish.

I have so many questions from listeners. Oh, absolutely. Can I rapid fire? Please. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show.

Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. And this week we'll donate to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program, which helps consumers and businesses make choices for a healthy ocean. And they protect the ocean now and for the future

through trusted seafood recommendations and collaboration with businesses and governments and consumers and partners worldwide. You can learn more at seafoodwatch.org. And thank you to sponsors for helping us make that donation. Okay, let's get back to it. Okay, your questions.

Greg wants to know, how has climate change affected fish species and fish populations across the world? And how are plastic and other pollution affecting fish biology and health? Number one, fishes are moving. Like we will see things off the coast of California. We never used to see

because they came from warmer waters to the south. So the fishes that can move or are moving in response to climate change. What is plastic? Very, very bad. The number one thing that I would say to people when they say to me, what can I do sort of for the planet and for the oceans

is watch it with your plastic. Keep your plastic. Like if you are using plastic, fine, but recycle it. Don't, you know, don't let it get into the ocean. Be careful what you let into the waterways. I went to Hawaii. I got to go for a job and I got to see. I know I was mostly in hotels and in donut shops.

It was a weird job, but I walked by the marina and it looked like a beautiful aquarium and then like a Doritos bag just floated by and I was like, this is a picture of dystopia. What have we done? Plastic is very bad and it bugs me. It bugs me like emotionally.

Like it upsets me. So yes, please, please people be careful with your plastic. Just recycle it. It's not even that hard. Just recycle it. Just recycle it. That's all I ask. We have full length episodes on oceanology

and discard anthropology, which is all about garbage, environmental toxicology. Those are linked in the show notes, but here is some ocean advice for you now. You can carry a reusable bottle. We use a bunch of bottles all the time. You can say no to plastic straws. Say no to disposable cutlery.

You can avoid things with microbeads and carry a shopping bag. Look at that, boom. You're already a better person. Better than you were 15 seconds ago. We did it. Yay. Okay, Brian Edge wants to know,

have the populations of any species changed for the better since orgs like Monterey Bay Aquarium, Seafood Watch have come around? Absolutely, yes. Absolutely, and one of the beautiful things about the ocean and working with fish and thinking about fisheries and climate change and whatever and even horrible, scary things

like coral bleaching is that if we take action, the problem, it will help. The problem will get better. Fisheries are rebounding that have been protected. So it's definitely worth it. Is there a hope for coral reefs? Yes, okay. 100% yes.

Oh, good. Yes, it is a failure of will. It is not a failure. It's not that we don't know what to do. What we need to do is watch it with the carbon emissions. It's just that we don't have the will to do it. But if we were to take care and cut that down, we would see some recovery in the coral reefs.

I have no doubt. You never hear about the ozone hole anymore. Remember that? Yeah, and that's because CFC's got banned and it helped and boom, problem solved. Good to know. That's actually, that gives me a lot of hope. We have a full length and a kid's safe

Smology's episode on Nidereology on coral reefs and that will be linked in the show notes too. Jenna, Kaola's Kel, I say her name wrong. Every time I read it, I'm sorry, Jenna. Okay, this is a, I once heard this when I was 12 thing but can fish not feel pain or do they just have short memories? This is a common misconception

and the answer is of course they feel pain. Of course they feel pain. Fish, you have to feel pain. Otherwise, when a predator starts running at you, you wouldn't feel it and you just get eaten. So yes, they do feel pain. How are their memories? Well, probably not that great.

Okay. But I mean, let's just, you know what? Let's just not hurt fish. All right. Yeah. Don't make them feel pain. Don't make them feel pain. Why do they need to feel pain?

What kind of brains do they have? Brains like ours, but simpler, but the same basic, the same basic, you know, road map, the same basic nerve, same basic vertebrate brain. So they can feel pain. I'm sorry, fish. Mike Melchior wants to know, do fish sleep? They do.

They do? They do. Yeah. You sometimes parrot fish will kind of, you'll see them on the bottom at night. They like wrap themselves in this bubble of mucus. Oh God. Just tucking in.

It's nice and cozy and just lovely. And yeah, they'll, you know, they doze off. I wonder if they dream. They must, right? They must. Some big, you know, big pelagic fishes, they'll just, you know, obviously they don't go down to the bottom to sleep,

but they'll just, you know, they'll doze off a little bit at a time. They'll sleep in little bursts. Yeah. I bet they have so many shark nightmares. Oh man. I wonder, right? I wonder what that must be like.

Elsbeth Haye wants to know, what kinds of fish are the most ethical, oh, to keep his pets? I love my beta fish, but whenever I'm in a pet store and see all the betas and their tiny cups, I feel sad. I want to take them all home. Should I contribute to that market?

Or should I get a different kind of fish next time? Are beta raising captivity? Excellent question. And thank you for being so, you know, so responsible. Yeah, beta fish are raising captivity. Go ahead and have as many as you like. Okay. Our beta was the best beta he's ever seen.

Yeah. Do you have any advice for someone who is, who is trying to be an ectheologist? Yeah, learn, take a lot of biology classes, you know, go take as much organism biology as you can and get out in the ocean as much as you can and swim and dive, learn to dive. If you want to be a professional marine biologist,

learn how to dive. Get good at it. Oh. I have never been diving, but I have someone who's a listener who offered to take me diving. It's amazing. Okay, should I go?

Yeah, you should totally go. Yeah, oh yeah. It's amazing. But if you need, there's, if you need to work, you know, doing it for work, you gotta really, like a take. You gotta study it. You gotta mean it.

Yeah, yeah, you gotta study it. But just, but it's wonderful. Definitely go diving. What do you love about your job? What's the best, best, best, best? The best, best, best, best part. And there are so many. It is a great job.

It's just figuring these things out. I love learning about the fish. I love figuring out their evolution. I love figuring out how the evolution of fishes corresponds to the evolution of the planet and through geologic time. I love the work I do, popularizing science. I love the people I work with.

It's a blast. Thank you so much for doing this. Oh, you're so welcome. My pleasure, my pleasure. Enjoy. Yay, Gobi's. How obsessed with her are you? Right?

I'm like fully. So ask smart people fishy questions because look at how contagious that love for fishes is. So Dr. Chris Thacker is now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and Sea Center and remains a favorite guest of mine. You can follow Dr. Thacker at Thackfish on Instagram and Twitter.

And you can find more Smologies episodes at alleywar.com slash Smologies. We have several dozen now. They're also linked in the show notes. And thank you to Mercedes Maitland and Seek Rodriguez Thomas for working so hard on these. We like to keep things small around here so the rest of the credits are in the show notes.

But if you stick around until the end, I give you a piece of advice. And this week's is that if you take a camera on a phone and you use the slow motion setting and you film yourself or your friend or your grandpa or your mom making this noise with your mouth. You know when you flap your lips?

Take a slow motion video of that. It's hilarious. I've never seen anything funnier. Okay, have fun with that. And until next time, Smologites. Bye-bye. Smologies. Smologies?

Smologies? Smologies? Smologies.