Radiolab - Red Herring

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

It was the early '80s, the height of the Cold War, when something strange began happening off the coast of Sweden. The navy reported a mysterious sound deep below the surface of the ocean. Again, and again, and again they would hear it near their secret military bases, in their harbors, and up and down the Swedish coastline. After thorough analysis the navy was certain. The sound was an invasion into their waters, an act of war, the opening salvos of a possible nuclear annihilation. Or was it? Today, Annie McEwen pulls us down into a deep-sea mystery, one of international intrigue that asks you to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, your deepest beliefs could be as solid as...air. Special thanks to Ben Wilson, Ola Tunander, Hans Gordon, Andreas Timmelstad, Klaus Helmersen, and Meg Bolz. LATERAL CUTS - Atomic Artifacts (https://radiolab.org/podcast/atomic-artifacts) Neither Confirm Nor Deny (https://radiolab.org/podcast/confirm-nor-deny) EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Annie McEwin with help from - Magnus Ormstadt Produced by - Annie McEwin, Matt Kielty, Sarah Qari Original music and sound design contributed by - Jeremy Bloom Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, it's Lulu. This is Radio Lab and it's summer. In the past, there has been hot girl summer. There's been hot VAC summer. This summer arguably is kind of turning into hot diarrhea, summer, the one that no one wanted. But we here at Radio Lab are offering you something different, which we are calling Cold War summer, or I'm calling it that because we just realize this will be our third story that involves the Cold War in a month. This one is really special. We're bubbling it up from the archives. It's a tale of espionage. It's a real who done it. That involves submarines,

periscopes, hydrophones, a bunker. And I didn't see the answer coming. Enough out of me. Let's jump into this tale. It comes from the archives. It was reported by Annie McEwen. And it is called Red Herring.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-S-6.

See? Rewind. Hello, I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radio Lab. And today, boom, boom. Oh, hello. Hi, a story from producer Annie McEwen from her bathroom. I'm actually like straddling the bathtub here.

So good thing I did yoga last night. I do think our thing is like underwater mysteries from the 90s. Yes. Okay, so today I have a story. It's like a Tom Clancy, international, underwater spy thriller with a little spicy science thrown in. All right. I am grabbing my popcorn. Take me away. Yeah. Okay. Let's begin with. Yeah, okay. Thank you, Magnus. Magnus. No problem. Yeah. How do you pronounce your last name? It depends on where you come from. So most Americans would say Valberg or Walberg or something like that. Yeah. What do you say? Well, that's also depends. In Sweden, is Valbury. Oh, wow. But in Denmark, it becomes a bit more like Vailbao or something. Wow. Yeah.

Okay. Anyway, Magnus is an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, where he studies underwater sound. Yeah. So let's start off in 1981. Yes. Let's go back to that time. Yeah, so that's a defining year. How old were you? I was 13 years old. 13. I was living in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Okay. And it was an extreme. extremely tense period. Because in Stockholm... You know, we have the Baltic Sea right in front of us. There was only about 140 miles of water separating Sweden from... The Soviet Union.

And Magnus said to him and a lot of other Swedes, there was just this fear of what was on the other side of the water. I remember this still in the school. You know, you had a map. You could see all the details of the Western Europe. Small towns, all these roads, the colors of different countries. And then across the Baltic... It was just white.

There was just nothing. And that was Soviet Union. We didn't really know even what was there. Just this mysterious nothingness. Yeah. And not very far away. Now, Magnus says it's important to know... Sweden was this kind of island politically, because Sweden was neutral.

But because of a lot of this mystery, a fear of communism, there was always this sense that one of their greatest threats was the Soviet Union. We heard about it all the time. We were even practicing a little bit in school. And we were really living in a time when we were worrying about a nuclear war almost daily. So, 1981, the defining year, it's late October. Sort of when it gets really dark here, you know, and cold and damp. It's about four in the morning, pitch black.

A fisherman leaves his home, gets in his boat and heads off to check his nets. Sweden has this like super long coastline that's filled with these really complex inlets. Full of islands. There are rocks like granite islands everywhere. And just as the sun is starting to come up, this fisherman makes his way into one of these rocky inlets. And all of a sudden, out of the darkness, looming up out of the water right in front of them. There's this big Russian sub standing there. It's huge. It's like this long, almost bullet, dark bullet. in the water, and it is like towering out of the sea. Just sitting there.

It's insane. What was it doing there? Exactly. What was it doing there? The fishermen called the Navy. And we all woke up to the news. Soviet submarine beached on Sweden's shores. It's a huge story, like all the papers write about it.

And everyone is like, what on earth is going on? So the military comes down at their helicopters circling overhead, many, any boats. But at this time, Sweden was, people would also say we were incredible naive because we didn't have any wars for, you know, the last war was like 18. Oh, you're soft. It was like, yeah, it was like Napoleon wars. We didn't really, were involved in anything.

So Magnus said the military sent some guys out to the submarine. And, you know, we kind of knocked on the door of the sub. Wait, they knocked on the side of the sub. I don't know if they knocked, but, you know, they kind of asked kindly, can we come in and have a look? And they said, no, no, of course not. And then they said, oh, okay, sorry about that. But there were some clever physicists.

They parked a small boat beside of the sub. And through some clever measurements, they could measure that there were nuclear, you know, weapons inside. Oh, scary. You know, we have this defining moments for a nation. In the States, you have like the Kennedy murder, the 9-11th and, you know, and this is one of those for Swedes. And people started immediately to say, hey, this is one. war. Like, we are in war. And eventually, because, again, maybe we were too soft. What happened is that the commander of the Soviet sub told the Swedish military that all of

their navigation instruments on board had malfunctioned all at once. Sort of, sorry, we navigated wrongly. You know, we lost our way. We ran ashore. Like, we made a mistake. Yeah. So the Swedish military sent a bunch of ships out to the sub, pulled it off the bottom, and they, you know, returned it to international waters and it left. Okay. And for a 13-year-old Magnus. It was super weird because you could see that adults and the politicians, everyone, were completely, how to say, like, taken with their pants down, right?

It was like, what? Like, no one could, of course, explain this. So the Navy, of course, they got a lot of money, so they became more vigilant. They had to now start to see if they could, you know, could they protect the Swedish coasts? And, you know, it's not an easy thing to do. It's a huge coastline over a thousand miles. So how do you, like, patrol that? And an obvious way to do that is with sound.

Forget ships and sonar. Sounds propagate very well on the water. We're just going to listen for the subs. Yeah. Does that mean they, like, they hung hydrophones on buoys out in the water all along the coast? Like just a whole bunch of them? Well, not everywhere, of course. But he started to listen into this more carefully after this.

All the politicians promised us that now we have bought all these gears and now we are ready to tackle this problem and, you know, no problem. And, you know, then we went into sleep again. And then in October 82, we had the next wake-up call. This time in this big harbor. Very close to Stockholm. Right outside of a Swedish naval base. People started to see periscopes. One after another, after another.

after another, after another. Popping up out of the water. And the Swedish military was like... We have detected them, and we have them. So this time, the Swedes send in a bunch of ships. With nets? These big metal nets that they use to block the exits of the harbor, so there's no way a big sub can get out.

And then they send in a bunch of helicopters that have hydrophones, and they dip those hydrophones into the water. And they start listening for submarines. And before long, one of those hydrophones would pick up the unmistakable sound of a Soviet sub. And what does that sound like? I'm going to get to that. But what happened is when the Swedes heard this sound, they would drop a bomb from the helicopter. They would hit the water, sink down to a predetermined depth.

And then big explosion. And the helicopters and the ships, they would just wait to see if the explosion would damage or scare one of these Soviet subs up to the surface. And so they waited and waited and nothing. No Soviet sub emerged, not even a piece of one. And the Swedish military kept this up for a month, chasing down subs, they hear, dropping bombs, and by the end of the month, nothing comes of it. they don't capture a single submarine. What? I know.

Isn't they crazy? Did they just, did they somehow get out of the barricade? They don't know. They don't know. I mean, I guess they could even be down there today. They could have hurt the sub, the sub fell, the sub, you know, filled with water. Like, they could be down at the bottom of the harbor. I guess these are just, this is just a huge harbor.

And they just couldn't really find any evidence of any Soviet sub. Yeah. It just ended in nothing. And then things started to get more and more bizarre. So through the 1980s, every half a year, every year, we would have these submarine chases. All of a sudden, somewhere on the coast, the military would give an alarm. Oh, there is a sub. And then you would have these helicopters, bombs, nothing.

Really? And then six months would pass once it was right outside the royal castle in Stockholm. So were people getting, like, annoyed? Like, come on. Crying wolf a little bit? Or are people still very afraid? I think, you know, the Cold War is still going on. Magnus said there was just this fear.

The bear is coming. You know, the Russian Bay is coming. We just have to spend more money to find them. Were they still seeing periscopes? Yeah. The whole 80s or what were they hearing and seeing? So they started to ask people, if anyone sees something, you should report it. Call this number, call the Swedish military.

And they got tons of calls. Many thousands of observations. But then the problem is, it's just like in a, on a crime scene, if you ask people to say what they saw, it's a long structure sticking up from the water. So is that a periscope or is it a boat? It could be a small whale. It could be a sub, but who knows? So what the Swedish military did is they came up with this ranking system for observations. On one end, you had rank six. Six is, we cannot tell. No one knows. Could be anything. Okay. And then you have like rank one is a definite sub. Definitely a sub.

Okay. Now, the thing is, for a rank one, definitely a Soviet sub, pretty much every time in the report, it said... We heard the typical sound. The typical sound. We heard a typical sound. What is the typical sound? So the typical sound is basically when, like, when the Swedes were sure that they were encountering a Soviet sub, those hydrophones in the water would always pick up this particular sound. It was called the typical sound because it was believed to be.

be the sound that, you know, just like a typical Soviet sub would make. Huh. And so anytime the Swedish military encountered that sound. It was automatically giving a one. It meant that encounter was 100% a sub. And then the... Oh, sorry, go. And do we know what that sounds like?

Well, not yet. Because it's classified. Yeah. No one could listen to this sound and no one could know what it was. But all the hydrophones were picking up this... They were picking up the typical sound. For years. Yeah.

The Swedish military... kept hearing the secret Soviet sub-sound in their waters. So then the strange thing happens right. In 1989, everything is changing. Thousands and thousands of West Germans come to make the point that the wall has suddenly become irrelevant. The Iron Curtain falls, the Berlin Wall falls. You know, everything opened up and all of a sudden, over one night, basically, the world had changed for us. Changes which are sweeping across this continent.

It's something unreal for me. All these places that had been almost impossible to go to were all open. It's as if that white, blank space on the map was starting to actually get some color and shapes and names. But while all of this is going on, something very weird is happening. Because the Swedish military is continuing to report hearing the sounds of Russian submarines invading their waters. 20, 30 incidents every year.

And Magnus said by 1994... At that time, we had the Prime Minister Carl Bilt, and he got so upset about this. He wrote a very angry letter to Boris Yeltsin saying, now you really have to stop. Now you have created your own country, and the first thing you do is to try to occupy Sweden. We're sick of this.

Stop. But Boris Yeltsin's like, I don't know what you're talking about. talking about. Yeltsin said, well, we are of course not there. You can see all our subs are on land. What are you talking about? You're crazy. He denies everything. So as this whole mystery is unfolding, Magnus is watching from the sidelines. And by 1996, you know, at that time I was a university student. He's studying underwater biological sounds. Oh. And I got a job in the fishery department, because my mentor, he was sort of the, he was called Hawken Westerberg. He still is. He's still around.

Yeah, let's hope so. That's Hawken. Retired busiagnographer and fisheries biologist. I started with telemetry acoustic tracking in the 70s. And he was one of the few in Sweden who really was an authority on underwater biological sounds. And one day, Magnus is standing in Hawkins' office. I was quite fresh on my job. When the phone on Hawkins' desk rings.

He was not there, and I just took his phone. Oh, you just answered. the phone on his desk? Yeah, yeah, but we had a very, we had a very collegial relationship. Yeah. And on the other end of the line, it's the Royal Swedish Navy calling. They said they wanted to talk to my boss, of course. But then because he wasn't there, they started to talk to me.

And they said, well, they are forming this committee. This top secret government investigation. And they would like me and my boss to be part of that. So they say yes. There's a background check. Yeah, and cleared by the secret police. They were very secretive. And then he and Hocken are on a train to Stockholm.

To this huge naval base, it's just like in a James Bond movie. You have a whole submarine base inside the rocks. Wait, what? You can sort of open the rocks and you go in there with your boats and you can have a huge... How do you open the rocks? Inside. Yeah, I don't know. You have some big...

Rock doors or something like that. Yeah, yeah, something like that. What? So we went in there and, you know... So Magnus. and Hawken, who are not totally sure why they're there, are winding their way through this military base. Long tunnels. Two Navy captains were our liaisons.

Yeah. And eventually... You come into this meeting room with all these electronic, you know, gadgets. A lot of recording equipment. They have a world map, and they can follow the whole world from in there. Kind of like mission control at NASA. It was super exciting. Finally, they take their seats at a long table.

And sitting there around the table are a bunch of other academic types like them. But there were also some very high-ranked military people. So it was really like a wow moment for me. And we were sitting down there and then they said, well, ladies and gentlemen, you are the first civil people who are listened to this sound. The typical sound, this famous sound. So now we will actually play the typical sound for you. So it's been top secret for the last...

15 years. For 15 years? Yeah, no one outside the military was able or allowed to listen to it. Wow. So were you excited? Extremely, of course. This was like, wow. Now, what Magnus said he expected to hear was something like...

Bing. Bing. You know, what he'd heard in the movies. You know these movies when they sit around the sob. So I were thinking, it must be something like that, right? But then, one of the Navy officers turns to a... tape recorder and hits play. And this is what comes out.

Huh. God, is it, are they picking up voices? Or like, radio static? Huh, so that's always what it sounds like. Yeah, this is the sound they've been recording every year since that first sub showed up. It's intriguing. It sounds a bit like a few Donald Ducks at a very long distance. What?

What do you mean? Well, you know, like Donald Ducks is kind of his voice. If you imagine you had like 10 Donald Ducks and they would be maybe like 100 meters away or so. I think it would be something like that. And it also sounds a bit like an old shoe that kind of gets like a, e-on, e-on. Oh, yeah. It has this kind of squeaky part to it. And then we're sitting there with all these generals and they're playing this sound.

Did you look around the room at the table of scientists and military? Well, everyone is sitting there. And, you know, all these professors, they were kind of stiff upper lips. So they were just sitting there and listening kind of carefully. But my boss, he's more like, he's a very relaxed guy, you know. I think we looked at each other with a very confused gaze. But we were kind of keeping a stiff face also. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cool, cool. Got to play cool. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So after they played the sound, the naval officers turned to the scientists and say basically, Okay, now that you've heard the typical sound, we'd like each of you to try to figure out who or what is making it. To get to the bottom of what this typical sound was about. And even in that moment sitting at the table,

Hawkin and Magnus turned to each other, and they don't say anything, but they're both thinking... This is very strange. This is definitely not the sound. Don't, don't, don't. After the break, Magnus and Hawkin follow their intuition deep into a cloud of mystery. And they get to the bottom of it. Oh, they get right up close to the bottom of.

The mystery. Radio Lab will be back in just a second. Stay with us. Radio Lab, Lulu, Annie, Military. The crisis trying to be averted by biologists. So after the meeting, Magnus and Hawken are standing outside. Just standing there having a cigarette. Talking about the sound.

It sounds a bit like a popping sound. The sound when you fry bacon. And both of them thought that this must be a biological sound. But what? And then I remember saying to Hawken air bubbles. This sounds like air bubbles. If you think of a scuba diver who gets a hole pinched in his pipes. one of his pipes, God forbid, like an air bubble stream coming out of a host.

It sounds a bit like that. So their question is like, which animal releases air under the water? And we had kind of this hunch. Yeah, yeah. Now, incredibly, you can actually find this hunch in New York City. But it helps have a car and a friend. So I called up producer Matt Kilty, who's a friend with a car. You have a bucket.

And I also brought a large bucket. What a ridiculous bucket. Okay, so I only told Matt we were driving to the Hudson River. That was it. Okay, so we're taking the bridge. We drove through Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge. Okay, so now that we... Is this the cup holder?

It's my one cup holder. Drove up Manhattan, up to the riverfront. We can sneak. And look for parking... Now there's a fire hydder right there. For a while. I know if I could park. A long while.

It's a red light. How many fire hydards do you need on one block? Matt, it's a red light. Oh my God. That's a fire hydterter. spot. We're on Riverside. We're on Riverside drive.

Okay, let's go up there. There's no parking anytime. This is not going to work here. Well, how long are we going to be here? I don't. I don't even know what we're doing. I'm looking for parking. What are you?

Can you just, what are you looking for? What was a hunch? Yes. Okay, so we got down to like the rocky shoreline of the Hudson River. There is a piece of a dead fish. That might be a whole fish. Where we found it. Herring.

A herring fish. I think that evening we were like, let's try herring. Oh my gosh, can we get down there? So for reasons that will become clear very soon, I tried to buy herring, but you can't buy fresh herring in New York City in December. And so I dragged Matt out to the Hudson River because I had read in an article that herringfish have been washing up dead on the shores of the Hudson. And nobody really knows why. It could be pollution, it could be water temperature, but still unclear exactly why that happened. And you know what you're looking at.

Looking for it? Like, what exactly does a herring look like? Oh, okay. Yeah. How am I going to pick it up? That is the question. I picked up this dead one we found. I guess I'll just put my hands around it. Oh. And... Very slippery. Whoa.

Herring are... Very big. I don't know, maybe 10 inches. Big dead fish. Shiny. Wow. They are the silver of the oceans because there are all these reflections from their scales. They just kind of look like if a kid drew a fish, it would be this fish.

Yeah. But the really important thing about a herring. The whole reason why Magnus and Huckin had this hunch is because of what is going on inside of a herring. Now, Lulu, I know you've written a whole book about why fish should not be called fish, but have you ever wondered how does a fish just float around in the water? Um, I don't think I have actually wondered that. Let me go ahead and tell you. So it turns out in most fish, they have this thing called,

A swim bladder. The swim bladder. The swim bladder, which is basically this tiny sack. Filled with gas that regulates the fish's buoyancy. Similar to the buoyancy tank of a submarine. So if you're a fish and you want to go up or down in the water column, you do this by either pulling air into your swim bladder sack or pushing it out. And most fish do this through their bloodstream and their gills,

which means it's quiet. silent, like basically invisible. But not the herring. The herring is different. Yeah, the herring is special because they have a canal straight from the swim bladder to the anal opening. So when a herring needs to get air out of its swim bladder, it basically pushes it through this canal, out its butt, into the water.

And Magnus says when this happens... You will have this sort of small string of air bubbles. Which he had a hunch might just say, like bubbles coming out of a hose underwater. Yeah. So his guess is like this submarine sound is actually just bubbles that come out their butt. Uh-huh. So his guess is fish farts.

Yeah. Okay. Technically these are not farts because they do not come from like digestive gases. Okay. But this makes me feel better. I feel like I can continue to engage with this story. Oh, are you like anti-farch or something? I'm just very grossed out by them.

Yeah. Like I just, are you not? No. Well, I mean, no. Why are you? It's like, even saying the word makes me like, I'm like, I don't want to be in this space even linguistically, let alone aromatically. This is like, wow, that's so interesting. But how are you not?

Because they're the funniest thing in the world, because they're, they're, uh, they're, uh, A thing we all do. If we can't, that's upsetting. They make you feel better immediately. Like, even animals, like, find them funny kind of. I don't know. They're just, they're wonderful. They make you feel better immediately. They connect us all. Okay. I, I, um, you're, I'm, I, I just appreciate the meaning you draw while also being simultaneously relieved. These are not actual farts. Carry on. Okay. So, Hawken and Magnus. They now had their fish fart theory. But now they needed to figure out, did the fish fart actually sound like the submarine sound? And we approached that rather cruebly.

Basically, Magnus went to a fish shop. Bought a couple of herrings. They were dead. Went to the lab? Rigged up the hydrophone. Okay. And then Magnus took this herring, submerged it underwater. And I squeezed it.

It's so weird to squeeze a fish, though. It's very weird. But I squeezed it pretty hard. I don't think anything's coming out. And he just kept squeezing. It was like kind of... Oh! What is...

It's... I made it poop. It was like a really big blur of, you know, hearing poo and things coming out. I'm sorry, Feechiege. So then... You want to squeeze one? Hawken tried. You should get this feeling. It's a weird feeling.

Maybe this will be the lucky. I got the magic touch. I got them fart fingers. He put the herring in the water. Squeeze. Gentle, gently squeezing. Gently. Gently.

Gentle. And then... Oh! Bubbles. Such bubbles. It was a tiny little bubble. Okay, that's good. You do have furred fingers.

And then you would hear this kind of very airy, poppy sound. This kind of the perfect typical sound we thought. Turns out they thought wrong. Because when they look at the recording of the fish fart, compared to the recording of the subsound, They just, they don't really match. Absolutely not. This is just becoming very depressing.

But I mean, this is a dead fish in an aquarium. So then they went out into a bay with this little tube. Connected to a vacuum pump. Oh no. Managed to get a wild herring in there, got it a fart. Yeah. That sound didn't match. No.

But then they had this thought. We need to get more realistic here. We need to get out into the wild. Because herring aren't solo fish. They travel together in schools. These schools can be huge, like a square kilometer. Like sometimes we're talking billions of fish all traveling together. And so they thought, if we're right about this, the sound we're looking for isn't the sound of one fish farting.

It's the sound of a lot of fish farting. Oh. Like a lot, a lot. Yes. And, you know, we were working for the fishery science in Sweden. So we knew a lot of fishermen. And they would tell us, when herring goes into a net, they get stressed. And the net starts boiling, they said.

Whoa. So Magnus follows this clue onto a boat and out to a fishing trap. Beneath him in the shadow of the boat, he could see thousands of herring, just swimming around down there. I put the hydrophone in the water and victory. The typical sound. Yeah. Yeah. The whole box was just singing of these sounds. It was just incredible. It was just this cacophony of hearing.

Wow. Their findings were harder for some members of the Navy than others to accept. I mean, there were people that their whole career was chasing submarines. But finally, in 1999, it became official. The typical sound that had haunted the Swedish Navy for over a decade was not made by Soviet submarines. Instead, for over a decade, the Swedish Navy had been straining their ears

to hear the sound of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of herring, all farting together. Okay. So that was the end of the typical sound. Man, I just can't believe like you guys so quickly had all these ideas, but why did the end?

the military not think for 15 years? Like, are there no scientists in the military that would have any of your experience? Or like, why was it? Yeah, so I think they didn't have the know-how. And the other thing is this whole thing of the military having this culture that you keep things secret, which means that it's very hard to have like an open, and it's very top-down. So it's very hard to have an open discussion about like a scientific discussion going on around these topics. I mean, now I make it sound like they're very different from the rest of us. But in a way, there are just human beings. And you can easily wind yourself up in the in some kind of explanation.

If you have a few authorities telling you how things are, you can easily start to collect evidence that that must be how it was. Magnus told me that the Swedish military actually used sonar to investigate this sound. And what they saw on the screen in front of them was that sound coming from an object, and then they would watch that object split apart.

Divided into two. Oh. And then divided into four. And then it could go back into one again. again. Whoa. And now we can guess that what they were probably seeing was a school of herrings, splitting apart, splitting apart again. But at the time, this was a Soviet sub. So they must have thought these subs are like super high tech. Exactly. They had people investigating. How can it be that Russia can build a sub that can sort of be decomposed into two and to four and then back

no way. You have like military scientists sitting and trying to build a model of a Russian and sub that can sort of disintegrate into four. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. That is amazing. I think this is something to look after all in our times, that you can always laugh at it and say how wrong they were, but I wonder what people will think about us in 20 years. Oh, totally.

I think about that all the time. Yeah, yeah. Like, what is the fish fart of today? Exactly. There's just one more little thing that I take away from this story. Because as I was doing research, I learned that herring have just been fished forever. Yeah.

Like really fished. All these, it's going to even countries. They were built on herring, basically. Right. It's been what people have been eating and fishing for for thousands of years. Right. And not just that. Like cities have been founded on it.

Cultures have been founded on it. Yeah. Millions have been made. And these fish have just been like running for their lives for millennia. Yeah. And it's like in this one moment or in this one decade or period of time, like herrings just got back at humans in some way and like sort of gave them a wild Jase, you know?

And just for once they had the power in the upper hand. They played an important part of a country's foreign policy. Yeah. It's almost like in the end, this story is just a very long-winded fart joke on us humans. Yeah, exactly. It is. That's what it is. When did?

See what you did there, McEwen. This very long-winded fart joke was bravely reported by Annie McEwan. And beautifully produced by Matt Kilty, Annie McEwan and Sarkari, with sound design by Jeremy Bloom. Reporting and translation help from Magnus Ormstad, huge thanks to Ben Wilson, who's done his own fascinating research into the herring, Toots, and to Ola Tunander, Hans Gordon, Andreas Timelstad, Klaus, Helmerson, and Meg Bowles.

Catch you on the flip for. Friends, may your sanity stay intact and your wind broken. Bye. Lettif Nasser. Sorin Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nainasambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgalker, Alex Nissen, Sarah Kari,

Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogatz, Anisa Vizza, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby-Santis and Maya Applebee Milamid. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelia Mercado, and Sophie Samayi. Leadership support for Radio Lab's Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Thank you.