The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 793: The Mysteries of Gar Fish

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Solomon David AKA "The Gar Guy," Spencer Neuharth, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics: The GarLab; the whole "rough fish"/"trash fish" thing; defining non-game fish; a bow fishing conundrum; the gar wars; seven different species of gar, the record alligator gar; an ancient fish, gar native range; use of gar armor; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right, joined today by Solomon David, the Gar- Guy, who has a Gar-A-R-Sic park sticker. See, I was sitting here thinking you were a big Jurassic Park fan. I mean, I'm in that too, as well. But then I realized this gar-assic park. Why not both, Steve? We're going to get into that. We're going to get into, that's going to be my first question, but I don't want to ask it yet. Solomon David is an aquatic ecologist and assistant professor, works on fish biodiversity, conservation, science, communication, and runs the gar lab. It's like a colloquial term.

Gar lab focuses on the ecology of migratory. in ancient fishes and how that research can help us better understand and conserve aquatic ecosystems. Additional projects involve conservation of Great Lakes, migratory fishes. I'm assuming you mean the native ones. Yeah, yeah.

Ancient sport fish, e.g. Garz, bow fins. We're going to talk about what that means. Insert, we're going to talk about terms. Rough fish, trash fish, how those terms aren't really doing the best they're doing a little bit of a disservice to some fish species

I'm going to call for you know what Brody does the indefensible law thing I'm going to call for a new law and I'm going to tell you why people think it's a bad idea and then I'm going to refute that and explain why it's actually not why it's good

it'll be how could people tell the difference and I'll say between a game and that's what'll happen and I'll say I don't know how can they tell the difference on ducks why was that okay that's not going to use on them people no one knows what I'm talking about you because I haven't said it I know exactly what you're

talking about you know what I'm going with this it's a fish so I'm going with this yeah oh here's a good one a gar a gar comes into a bar bartender says why the long face classic I didn't make that up it's in my notes is that your joke yeah I kind of you made that up yeah for the most Sure. Other people of, it's crowdsourcing too. So, you know, people do the puns for me these days. But got it. Start it off artisanal. I'm holding in my hand of alligator gar. We're going to talk about alligator gars too. And I read the thing that Corinne put down, I had no idea about. Don't answer this yet. You can answer like a little bit. All right. I had no idea that alligator gars were up in Louisiana, or up in Illinois. Yeah. They're trying to bring them back. They used to be. I had no idea. Yeah. I think of that is like, strictly like east Texas Louisiana no idea that's almost an ice fishing state

and they even go further than Illinois yeah we're gonna talk about that I didn't know any of that um we're gonna talk a little bit about Buffalo not the animal the fish yep we're talking about the fish buffalo here's what here's what here's how this whole thing came to be there was an article like I can't you know I can't police everything that happens.

I can't please everything that happens. Now, a little bit, I'm going to complain about you. Fair enough. I'm going to praise you and complain about it. Sounds about right. There was an article on our website on the meat eater.com and it was a bowfishing article and it used

terms like roughfish as a catch-all. Which as a catch-all, like, and we were using that, like, we didn't say trash fish as a kid. We used rough fish meaning non-game fish unregulated fish

so if you had if I was going to categorize and I think most people in the country would understand I'm talking about here if I was going to categorize fish like in the most basic general terms would be someone might be familiar with this lingo game fish

which would be like regulated fish that people sport fish for then there'd be a fish that they don't really have a word for but it's like the no touch fish um in my area is sturgeon okay

growing up in Michigan and be like no one would call a sturgeon a rough fish but they're not a game fish they're like a no touch fish um and then rough fish would mean any fish that there's no regulatory structure in place no close season

no bag limit and method of take would be least regulated and that's kind of what you would use the term for it didn't mean you didn't want it it didn't mean you didn't eat it it just meant like wide open shad cart you want to hear the origin of the rough fish term hell yes man originated in mid to late eight 19th century commercial fishing practices to describe less valuable fish that were rough dressed gutted but not flayed and often discarded from river boats to reduce weight and prevent spoilage.

Go back to the rough dress. That's great. Yeah, gutted, but not filleted. That's what that comes from? And then it evolved into... I'll buy that. I was thinking about that this morning. Well, I wasn't showering. I thought it was like... I thought it was a term that came from, like, England.

Yeah, I mean, they've got a term over there. I mean, they use rough fish in a different context. It's not as sort of... Sort of negative as it here. What's that? Oh, they use it. Yeah, but they fish for, they like name their carp. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, carp are native to parts of Europe too. So, you know, but yeah, it's like with the here when they had the riverboats and they had the fully dressed fish. So that was fillet, the fish that had higher value. And then you've got the rough dressed fish, which just had the guts taken out. And then when they had to make it, you know, to market in time and navigate shallow waters and hot summers, they had to discard some of the catch. And so they ditch the rough-dressed fish.

That's first to go. And they kept the, you know, the fully-dressed fish. Where was that? Oh. So we had this article come out. And Solomon took a front. He wrote a mean email. I don't think the email was that mean.

You wrote a mean email being like, you're just contributing to the negativity. you're taken away from fish conservation not respecting fish right I'm on your side mean email it's a

I hope you all go to hell and die that was in the post script that was the PS yeah yeah that's how he ended I hope you go to hell and die and he offered he said sometime we should get together

and talk about some of these issues now I trust I haven't looked by trust you wrote very flattering nice emails when we publish things like gar recipes yeah yeah okay we didn't dig those up but no in all fairness uh in all fairness um solomon david the gar guy wrote in saying uh talking about a lot of his work doing with native fish that get from from the perspective of like guys that grow up bow fishing guys that grow up whatever that they get a lot of these fragile native fish get kind of rolled into this category of trash fish or this

category of rough fish. And we have these very loose regulatory structures. And people think they're out doing the world of favor by getting carp, like non-native carp out of a system or whatever. They think they're doing the world of favor. And meanwhile, they are also unknowingly or knowingly laying waste to like pretty sensitive native fish and throwing them up on the bank and thinking that they're somehow helping it the world out and it's like uh people it's time for people to get a little bit more of a nuanced perspective of what fish are in their waterways and i would argue it's time to get a little smarter about how we regulate these things um let's start out there's a lot of folks here, so we're going to take turns asking questions.

Let's start out by what, tell people what the Gar Lab is. Right. And within that there's a second question. All right. Aren't you making the same mistake? Because you're saying Gar Lab, but you're talking about stuff besides Gar. Right. So you're lumping everybody into a gar. Well,

Steve, if you look at the Big Ten Conference, are we more than ten teams now? It's more of a name. You've already lost. You know? Well, you're Michigan, right? You know, we're Now, like 18 teams. Yeah, yeah, it's not 10. It's like 18 teams now.

Sure. So, you know, it's more than eight. Did you know that, Seth? Straight honest. Yeah. You knew that. I knew that. I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.

10 years. I didn't know how many exactly, but I knew the Big 10 was more than 10. I went to Penn State, which was the first school that made the Big 10 more than 10 teams. There's also a conference called the Big 12. That's not 12 teams. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I'll look at a lot. later. I don't know if I buy it. I don't know if I believe it. You know, so Big Ten starter with 10, Gar Lab starter with Gar. No, I understand. That's a good point. Now we're expanding. Okay. There's a lot of non-game native fish that, you know, we want to work on. But it started out working on Gar. Yeah, yeah. That's still the flagship group. Yeah. So talk about the scope of the Gar Lab. Right. So we want to use these sort of native non-game fish, these underappreciated fish to answer questions about ecology, evolution, sustainable management, just informing our understanding

of conservation of aquatic ecosystems and also increasing our knowledge and also sort of sharing the value of freshwater biodiversity. So it's kind of a multifaceted thing. We use a small group of fish. I mean, there's only seven species of cars, which is why we figured we had to expand now. But in order to show that, you know, you can look at things like fisheries management, conservation, native fish angling and consumption from just looking at some of these species. People are working on trout and walleye for ages.

That stuff is being done. It's been done. So this is kind of our niche. And there's a lot of money there than there is in Gar and Boffin. Funding on Gar and Boffin works got to be a bitch, man. Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah.

We're trying to get by. There's no like Gar fishermen of Michigan, you know, organization. Yeah, but I feel like Alligator Gar. have a good PR thing going now That's one that's kind of been improving For sure, yeah Yeah, yeah That's become a destination fish

Yeah, yeah All over the world, Texas and Louisiana Oh, Mississippi Seven Gar, let's play a game All right You can't play Okay Mm-hmm

All right alligator gar Spotted Oh, I could Short nose, long nose Oh slow down We got alligator spotted Short nose long nose Yeah I just ran out

Florida Just got it Cuba can't think of what the last one would be. I don't know about Florida and Cuba. Are Florida and Cuba one? Yeah, Florida Gar and Cuban Gar. Yeah. I don't know what the last one. There's one that runs from Mexico all the way down to Costa Rica. So you might call that range, what kind of range. Mesoamerican. You got temperate. You got sub and you got tropical? Tropical. Tropical. Yeah, tropical gar. Yep, tropical gar. Do any of the, none of the other ones get close to the size of this?

No, yep. Even as far as what we know in the fossils, Alligator Gar is still the biggest. Yeah. And then short nose compared to long nose like how many inches off are we from the max yeah i mean short noses they max out around maybe 36 inches uh long noses can get up to 60 inches that's a good good yeah that's our gar what percentage that long nose is is yeah yeah the long nose the nose makes up you know quite a significant amount of that so i'd say you know it's not it's not 25 but it might be like 10 or 15 percent yeah decent size but even the short nose gar has a long nose so It's all relative, right? I want to get into what makes Gar-Gar and why they're special and what they do,

but let's just pass with this whole, let's talk about some terminology for a minute. Trash fish, rough fish, non-game fish, right? Like, in the sort of, do you have any idea, and it doesn't matter what state you draw from? In the regulatory structure, like, how did that come to be? Do you understand? Yeah, yeah. Like, like, take Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, whatever, like, how did it come to be that they, that they create the categorization? Yeah, well, you know, we just, we value some fish more than other fish.

And so I think, yeah, got to look at when you think about historical perspective, it depends on where you're starting your history, right? So when you're thinking about maybe modern fisheries management, what's been going on for the past, I don't know, 50, 100 years, we're looking at largemouth bass. And trout and salmon, those fish are valued because those are considered sport fish. People like to eat them. Maybe a significant portion of the population likes to eat them. But there are other fish like suckers and gars and bofins that were eaten by indigenous peoples for a long time before that. What about what about like colonial Americans or, you know, not even that? Did they have a different view of those fish or like what we'd call rough fish?

Yeah, for sure. I think it gets kind of foggy. You know, it is more of a colonial perspective when you think about the fish that we value now, especially if you look at a European influence, like they've got trout over there. They've got fish that are kind of like perch, fish that are kind of like walleye. And even walleye took a little bit of time before people saw those as a game fish. So that definitely had an influence. Whereas these other fish, people hadn't seen a gar before, before they came to North America. And they're looking at this like, what? We can't filet this like you would a walleye or a trout. You got to use some sort of hatchet or, you know, tin snips now to do that. um so those other fish kind of fell by the wayside and we value these you know the bass the trout the salmon more and that just kind of got wrapped up into fisheries management so it started like we talked about with let's you know fully dress some of these fish that are considered valuable and some of these other fish might be less valuable so we're just going to take the guts out and if we got to get rid of some of them that we will and you know it you kind of follow the money that's where

you know we valued them we didn't value others and now we did research uh that look at even the science behind these. We've got way more research on steelhead and largemouth bass and Chinook salmon than we do on even some of the sturgeon or the suckers. So we like to think that science can attempt to be objective, but we've got to follow where the money is, right? We've got way more money to look at these game fish, and now we're trying to play some catch-up here. So that's been going on, you know, 100 years back, 200 years back when you're thinking about what was historically valued by different peoples and what is now being valued. just trying to make it a little bit more, you know, inclusive as far as biodiversity is considered.

Like, why not, why not, you know, take care of all the fish from a holistic ecosystem perspective? Because when you do that, that's good for everybody. When you think about waterways, water quality, habitat, that sort of thing. Do you see, I don't know if you ever visited with any archaeologists on this issue, do you see much evidence of Native American use of again to define our terms

Native American use of Gar absolutely suckers I know that but like Native American use of Gar and Bofin or dogfish Oh yeah I mean you can look at even early illustrations you know when we had you know colonial explorers coming in I mean they sketch those out

there are some early documentation of indigenous people is actually sharing those fish. And there was some, I can't think of the reference right now, but some of the colonists actually thought, like, wow, this fish actually is pretty good. But that switched, or, you know, that we moved away from that pretty quickly. But as far as archaeology, yeah, you find arrowheads that were made out of gar scales. I mean, you look at a big alligator gar, they can use that.

Those scales are basically made out a tooth enamel. So that's the hardest, you know, substance that our, you know, bodies produced. So it's not like other fish. So, yeah, they've been part of human culture here in North America for a long time. What about both in, though? Boffin has a food fish for sure Yeah, even, you know That's a rough one

Oh yeah, you know It can be, it can be I eat gar's no problem Yeah, I like them Yeah Bofin's tough Really? Yeah

I lived in Louisiana for six years We ate them all the time down there Folks down there eat them I was able to try them But people fish for them Alongside the roads The big cane poles Flip them across the road

When they're getting them out of the bayous But you can drive down the road And you can see shoe pick patties On the signs So they call them shoe pick down there Which is kind of a French and indigenous name them. So it's a very popular food fish

down. You don't like them because why? They're mushy or something? What is it? They turn? Yeah. They're just like brownish or they? What's their? Just they have a like over, I find relative to other fish, they have an overpowering flavor. Yeah. Well, they also, they do turn to mush pretty fast. So they call them cotton fish. Do it? Because, you know, they got a bunch of different names. But because

that flesh turns to mush because they got these enzymes to just start breaking it down. So when I was down to in Louisiana for one of my first times down there, went with a couple professors there. They'd cook up anything. Shout out to Quentin Fondon who can do this. They got boffin, put them in a bucket. They're air breathers so they can survive the trip, you know, from where we were back home to their place. One of them got the friar going. The other one took the boffin out of the back of the truck, still alive because it can breathe there. Wax the head on the back of the, you know, on the tailgate, and then immediately starts fillet that and then takes that filet and throws into the

fryer. And that's basically what you have to do. You have to basically process them as quickly as you can after you've, you know, dispatched the fish. Otherwise, it just starts turning into goo. You can't throw that fillet in a freezer or anything like that. And it was delicious. It was. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. I'm going to have to try that. Yeah. I recommend it. Well, I don't live in Bofin country anymore, but we grew up in it, you know. Yeah. Michigan, Minnesota's got both in them. I mean, you don't know. You got short nose gar out here, though. So, you know. Are they there? But yeah, I can't get excited about short nosers. Not to disparage them. Yeah, yeah. Like a Along those gar, that's a fish.

Yeah, yeah. Along those gar is like, you can see, like, along those gar is an impressive fish. Yeah, yeah. Are both in kind of self-contained as far as, like, it's just them. They don't have other relatives a lot. There used to be way more. And then recently, I was part of a study where we actually split them into two species. So, but then, I know, 100 years ago, they thought there were maybe 10 of them.

And then they're getting back to how understudy these fish are. So I just back then said, nope, there's not 10, there's just one with no evidence whatsoever. Like, you know, it tends too many, so we're going to condense that down. And then over the years, we found evidence from their morphology, like their shape and their genetics, that there's actually evidence for two species. And they're both pretty similar, but one's more on the Atlantic coast down to Florida and one's from Michigan, Minnesota, all the way down to Louisiana. So we are still finding out new stuff about Bofin from what you can, you know, eat. You can fish from on the fly. They fight really hard, too.

And, yeah, now there's two species instead of one. How old are those species of Gar? They go, uh, gars go back to Jurassic era types, Jurassic period stuff. So 150 million years for gars, that's for the family. Like long nose gar, short nose gar, they're about two and a half to five million years old. And how much has, have they changed since then? Very little, very little. So if you're to look at a fossil gar and looked at a living guard, they basically looked the same.

Yep, same. That was a question I had. I want to spend some more time on that. People will point out, like, well, let me start with one that. annoying people will say that's an ice age relic I'm like you're an ice age like mice or night yeah yeah yeah it's like a dumb thing to say right like humans are around during the ice age yeah yeah like everything every the name something that's not an ice age relic it's not like it's a bunch of new species emerged

since the ice age yeah yeah so that's dumb but people will say that's from the dinosaurs yeah like what what does that mean when we say the fish is ancient? What do we mean that it's ancient? Like is a walleye's not? Yeah, yeah. Do you I mean? Like, help me understand the relative quality here. Yeah, yeah. So some fish, you know, and some organisms change at a faster rate than other organisms. So when we think about mutation, mutation is what leads to evolution. So organisms changing over time. But some of them change slow. Some of them change fast. Wally change faster. There was that group of modern fish, we kind of lump them together called telias. So walleye, perch, swordfish, tuna. They're all part of that

group haven't been around as long as sturgeons and gars. And that brings in this idea of a living fossil, which sounds kind of paradoxical, right? That's a good term. That's the one I'm talking about the living fossil term. What the hell do people mean? Yeah. And so I feel like most people can kind of get an idea of what that means, but evolutionary biologists hate that term. They're going to well, actually, that all the time. Because they'll be like, well, that means that these animals haven't been evolving or anything like that. Like, everything's evolving constantly as your DNA is replicating past from one generation of the next. But so, change slower than others.

And so if you were to look at a gar in the fossil record, looking the same as what the shape of a gar looks like now, they have a very slow evolutionary rate. So you go back to the Jurassic period, they look basically the same as they do now. If we're to look at something that might be walleye's early

ancestors, they're going to look different than what a walleye looks like now. Yeah, you're not going to recognize them as much. But I could be standing there, like, at the same time when there's a, at the same time when there's a Tyrannosaurus Rex on the planet, I could be staying there at my flashlight. Yeah.

Shining into a marsh. Yeah. And I'd be like, holy shit a gar! Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It looks the same as it does now. Yeah, right. Whereas look what happened to T-Rex.

I mean, they're pigeons or the, you know. Yeah. Chickens. Yeah. Yeah. I've dug around for fossils in the Green River formation in Wyoming. Found a lot of different fish there. Most of what you're getting are extinct species of herring and shad.

Okay. But sometimes you'll come across a gar scale that looks just like a gar scale today. You'll also come up. across paddlefish. These are 50 million-year-old fossils. You'll come across skates that look like our skates today. But there's like a handful of fish that when you see it, it's just identical to what you would catch today.

And that's 50 million years old. And at that time, there was not a bluegill. There might have been bluegill like fish, but definitely not bluegill like we know them today. No son, he's spawned him off the end of my mom's dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The dock probably wasn't there either, but, you know. They're a boned fish, all the things we're talking about are bones, no cartilaginous fish.

Yeah, yeah. Sturgeon and paddlefish are primarily cartilaginous fish, but that's different from like the sharks and the raisins skate. So you're all in that bony fish branch. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you real quick, just because you know all this, um, like I know it's not, it's not we're here talking about, but I's got a question. Yeah. Can you explain?

the fish to have like the nodocord yeah like talk about that yeah so explain to that to people yeah I mean note accords kind of an early it goes along with your vertebral column and the spinal cord so some early animals when you think about the lancelts or chordates they had

they had a note accord but they didn't have a true vertebral column so for a while there was this idea that hagfish and lampreys didn't have what we consider be vertebrae so we We didn't consider them vertebrates. We consider them a little bit off from that.

But now the new research, going back to the fossil record, suggests that hagfish and lamprey are also vertebrates. So the noticord sort of thing is an early structure, but now we're kind of past that. So some fish, let's say, when you do talk about noticord scars, when they're little, they've got a notacord that extends like a filament off the backside of the tail, and they use that little helicopter rotor.

So when they're little, they move like little sticks through the water. That's the noticord weapon around? It's basically an extension of, the Notacord. And as they get older, that reduces down, they don't keep that longer than their first year. Because eventually the physics of water changes, right? You kind of think of it as moving with a little propeller, you're moving a little animal through there. As they get bigger and bigger, that doesn't, you can't propel that through that anymore. And by then, their scales hard and they're able to eat fish. But they move their pectoral fins, beating back and forth

really rapidly. So if ever get the chance, I think we got some video we can send you too, but they move that little Notacord, that extension, like a filament there. So a lot of those early fish. You can see them both in, even in Pike. They have a little one. They don't use it the same way Gar's do, but you will see a little bit of a note accord extension. So you see that in early development of a lot of vertebrates, but eventually that kind of goes by the wayside and, you know, gets kind of overpowered by a lot of other structures. One of the more impressive things I've seen is I was with my friend Kevin Murphy and we're fishing catfish, but here comes a big paddlefish that got hit by a boat prop, kind of half dead.

so I shot it with my bow I mean it was already a mess it was fresh when he caught it and that was a noise pulling that note cord out dude that was unbelievable sight yeah yeah yeah

and it looks way longer just draw it out right had you seen that before yeah yeah it'll come out like five times longer than the fish was yeah yeah that was an unbelievable sight and that made me think that that was like a very different kind of thing yeah

I mean they you're also you know it could be pulling the spine, like out of, you're pulling that spinal cord out of the actual spinal column. I'd have to, you know, look into that for, with the paddlefish and the sturgeon, they're very similar, but, uh, yeah, how long was that, would you say? Oh, man, we got it on video. How did it taste, though? Paddlefish? Paddlefish?

Man, when you trim them up, when you trim them up, they're good, but you got to trim them carefully. It's like shark and stuff. Like, you got to trim it. All that red, all that red. The fat's not good. You got to get the fat off, I think. When you trim them up, they're good.

Nice. I've had sturgeon. I haven't had paddlefish. Now, shovel nose sturgeon, that's not a good fish to eat. Yeah, they're pretty spiny, you know. Yeah, yeah. The yield is low. Yeah, yeah.

Like, you clean it. There's nothing left. You feel bad that you killed a thing in the first place. And then you fry it up and it's not good. Yeah, yeah. That's been my finding. They farm white sturgeon, though. Those are good.

Yeah, yeah. That's a real good fish. Okay. We're all, um, let's talk about these ones for a minute. Because he's the big, like, how alligator gar are becoming fashionable. Would you agree? Yeah, I agree. Like, your work is complete on alligator gar.

And I even recently saw that they're making it, I think, who was it? What state was trying to make it that you can't shoot an alligator gar with a bow anymore? Oh, really? Huh. Or pushing for it. Huh. And I remember being like, oh, brother. A little bit.

Yeah. Yeah. I think they've definitely had a reputation improvement. You think about shows like river monsters that came out, you know, almost 20 years ago now, Jeremy Wade going out there. I remember yelling at the TV when that episode was on because like, ah, picture isn't right. That's not the right thing. But, you know, overall, I think that was a win because you've got these big riverfish that people weren't paying attention to. And you had this idea of the habitat's important.

You can go and catch these fish. They're not, you know, monsters that are eating people or anything like that. So I think that the reputation has definitely improved. We went fishing down in Texas with Bubba Bedri, you know, number one Garguide in the world. He, you know, took Jeremy Wade out, and he used to be a bowfisher. And he realized that, you know, over the years, these big fish were going away.

He wasn't seeing nearly as many as they were out there. And he realized, you know, if his livelihood is going to depend on these fish, he's got to put him back. And then, you know, now they're even more available because people are coming from all over the world to fish for them, catch them, and then also release them. One of my buddies in Michigan went down to Texas for a catch and release alligator gar. Yeah, that's what most people do now.

I would say the majority are doing that. I mean, there's still people that harvest them. They've got a one fish per day limit that Texas Parks and Wildlife has put in. They've got probably some of the most conservation-oriented regulations in Texas. You say that the job is done. I don't think, you know, never joking, but the job isn't done. You look next door in Louisiana, also arguably one of the healthiest Gator Gar populations in the world. There's no regulations on them.

So you can shoot as many as you want. And the thing is, these are giant fish. We work with the fish rodeos there. And we learn a lot of them. You can shoot as many of these as you want. Yeah. Yeah. There's no limit.

How long, if someone's killing, say, a hundred pound alligator guard, which is not nearly as big as they get, but a hundred pound or say, how long does it take to replace that fish if someone kills one? It depends on where you're coming from. Texas, there's different populations in the Trinity River. versus coastal population. So I've had students work on this when I was down in Louisiana.

I lived there for six years. And so those coastal populations have access to different kinds of food, right? And Garz can live in full salt water. You'll find them with bull sharks and sea turtles, you know, way off the Gulf there. So they have access to food,

but they can also go into freshwater. They mainly need the freshwater to spawn. How far off the Gulf where you find them? I mean, you can find them miles off the golf. No, really? Yeah, yeah. You go to the Aquarium, the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans.

They've got them with sea turtles, and tarpon, of course, and then all kinds of sharks. Sandbar sharks. What are they doing out there? Is there like a motivation? They can forage out there. I mean, it's other food that they can go after.

So, you know, if they can tolerate it, which all gars can tolerate salt water for the most part. Longnows, you can find miles off the coast too. So highly adaptive. And, you know, I think some of the latest research suggests that gars probably originated in salt water made their under freshwater. Is that right? Yeah, that sort of paleontology gets flip-flopped all the time. Can they live in salt their whole life? They can't.

They theoretically could, but they couldn't reproduce. They need that fresh water. for reproduction. Alligator guards in particular need submerged terrestrial vegetation to spawn on. So they need that big flood pulse and you don't get those big floods every year. So they have to take advantage. You think about the flood in 1927. He needs a dry land plant

that happens to be underwater to spawn. Typically, in a lot of the rivers in the flood plans where they spawn, they basically are spawning on submerged terrestrial vegetation. They aren't because he needs his egg to dry out for a while or What is it? It's just, that's kind of indicative of the floodplain being submerged for a decent amount of time.

Those eggs hatch, they hatch in like maybe a day or two, depending on water conditions and temperature. And then they'll move out within that season. But we've had alligator garas. They hatch out about, you know, less than half an inch long. Within a month, month and a half, they can be 12 inches long. Within their first season, yeah, they grow fast. So, yeah, I want to get back to the age thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. Like, in the Trinity River in Texas, how old is a, hundred pound or this is like a multi-part question sure yeah um how old is it um have you seen like the average size of these things shrinking and then and then like how do they deal with eaten a chunk of dead cart with a treble hook that goes way down its throat like and you cut if you cut the line does that thing do just fine right you write that is a series of questions Is it? Staling in like cordwood?

Like you go out of these tangency, yeah, I get it, yeah. Get him in while you can. Yeah, so like a hundred pound fish might be something like, you know, five feet, six feet long. It depends. So more, we mainly go by length because depending, you know, if it's a gravid female, it's going to weigh, way more. But you could be looking at 20s. Gravid, so that means got lots of eggs. You ever heard of that for?

Egg wagon. Yeah. That's what gravid means. Yep, that's what gravid means. Never heard that word. You didn't hear that word before. I worked at a fish hatch. Yeah, that's right.

I've worked with Solomon for a decade. That's right. For a minute. You heard that word, Brody? Yep. Doubted. So, yeah, so, you know, we go by lengths more than weight. But that could be 20 years old.

It could be 40 years old. And the thing is that... But you're not talking, like, a hundred-year-old fish. It could be. So males, if you got an alligator gar that's over six feet long, that's typically going to be a female. Males don't tend to get that big. So you could get males that live for that long,

but if you're talking just six-foot fish, that we don't know what the sex of it is, 20, 40, but if it's an old male, it could be 60, 80. We know they can live for over 100 years. I thought you're going to want up saying a lot older. But when you said they can hit 12 inches, how fast? Within a month and a half. What? But if they're fed properly, they can reach two feet within that first growing season.

They can get big, fast. Yeah, they get huge. Even long nose scars can reach about, we got some out of Minnesota about 15 inches long that were born, you know, hatched out this year. And they hatch out in May, you know, Michigan, Minnesota, it doesn't stay warm that long. So I was, would have hatched out in May, we caught one in August, and it was already about 15 inches long. And then does it slow way down after their first year? In sort of temperate regions, it slows down a bit because of winter.

But what we found in our work is that they've actually evolved a faster growth rate in the north than they are in the south. But they live a shorter time in the south. if you're looking at fish that are from the north versus the south. Alligator gar is a little bit different. So they can live a long time and they grow super fast because they're eating fish. Gars switch to eating fish faster than any other North

American fish. Faster than musky, faster than pike, faster than bass. They also like to eat each other. A good gar-shaped, you know, fish to eat is another gar. Got it. What are they eating on that first day of life? Yoke sack stuff. So, I mean, they've got the yolk, which is also somewhat poisonous. So gar eggs are poisonous. you're not going to find people making gar caviars. So if you ever prepping that...

I think I might have heard that, but I forgot it. Yeah, it's pretty toxic. So they're toxic for, you know, the first few days. And then once they absorb that yolk sack, then they're eating plankton. So usually, like, you know, Daphnea, that sort of soup plankton. But what we found is what might actually lead to the gar's alligator gar growing so big in their first year is that their gills are a little bit different than long-nosed gars and short-nosed gars. They actually have a filtration aspect to their gills.

And we actually found an alligator gar those. about this big down Louisiana and its stomach was full of plankton and so you're eating like a baleen way just yeah exactly it's like imagine like a great white shark eating krill which is what you're looking at because you don't think of an alligator gar as a as a filter feeder and so my students how's it getting from because that's like feeding into his bloodstream how's it getting like he's like raking it out yeah and it somehow is getting down as esophagus yeah yeah just like you know paddlefish are filter feeders right so alligator gars and the Cuban and tropical gar have gill rakers that work kind of like a sieve and so they can actually

filter out the plankton and that goes down their esophagus like you said whereas long nose and short nose garas we got spotted gars the same day the gill rakers are very different nothing in their stomach but we didn't know what it was we had this frozen fish and my students brought it up to me it's like we don't know what this is in the stomach because i'm always doing paperwork so i tell the students when they're doing dissection let me know if you find anything cool we found half a giant rat and a both in ones we found all kinds of stuff but they said we found some in the stomach we don't know what it is. It looks like a popsicle. And so I'm like, well, there's a frozen fish. So I said, let's take a look at it. We dissected it and I was, they were chopping it up. I'm like,

this looks really weird. It reminds me of some fish food I used to feed to fish at home. I have garzen aquariums at home too. And so we ran some water over it and started like melting into these particles. I thought this is really weird. It's bright orange too. I'm kind of like krill or crotenoid organisms. Like an orange popsicle. And so we looked under the microscope and it was all copepods and the stomach was full of this. And so up until then it had only been anecdotal, you know, stories about them maybe filter feeding in Mexico and other places. So we think being able to take advantage

of those other food types allows them to grow that big. I mean, think about whales, right? They're getting that big, you know, eating those smaller food items. So not only are they eating shad and mullet, but they're actually able to eat these other fish, too. So there's a lot left to be discovered about these fish. Wow, that's pretty crazy. So how do they

deal with, like, as far as mortality and stuff, with a great big rusty, because when people are fishing for them, they're letting them chew on that chunk of dead bait for a minute. Then they just cut in the leader? I don't know.

Usually they try to retrieve it. I know that a lot of anglers now are trying to use just circle hooks or j hooks as opposed to the treble hooks. There is even, when I included a picture of this, they come up with a gar saver rig, which actually has a bar, so the gar can't actually take it down into its

stomach. Oh, really? Like a crossbar? Yeah, yeah, it's like a crossbar. Yeah. So that way it allows the hook to get stuck in the jaws, which are easy to retrieve, but it doesn't go all the way down in the stomach. Because, yeah, you could gut hook a fish, and that could be problematic. It's hard to say, we know so little about

these fish that even looking at catch and release mortality with the hooks like that is understudied. We know it's, you know, less mortality than, you know, bowfishing or bowfish catch and release, which does exist, but so. That exists? Yeah, yeah. But it exists, but it doesn't exist

where they're picturing that it's going to live to be shot another day. Believe it or not, in eight states catch and release bow fishing shoot and release bow fishing is legal and that's not

that that just de burdens them with needing to deal right they don't think that it's living well that's

when there's been conversations about changing that regulation like let's make shoot and release bow fishing not legal

which seems reasonable would you shoot and release a you know a deer duck or something like that and just kind

to leave it behind the argument is that well those fish are okay because they're just so tough like they just

hard to Or, you know, anecdotal like, oh, you know, I've shot a bunch of fish, you know, and I'm paraphrasing. Overnight, the next day we shot maybe 100, 200 fish, suckers, gar. And the next day, there weren't any of them around. So they must have been fine. They all, like, or they all sunk to the bottom. Well, most people, they get shot by a gun, don't die. Right, right.

But it's not like, it's not like a, when you shoot people, it's not like a shoot and release. Yeah. You're not thinking of it that way. Right. And so, like, yeah, chances are. That's weird. I don't think that the shooter is thinking of it like that. I think the shooter's like, oh, sweet, I don't need to even deal with it.

Right. Yeah, it's a, it's, it's, it's, it's shake it off the arrow. They shake it off the arrow and then they kind of leave it. But then they've done studies to look at shoot and release mortality where they've, you know, shot them and looked at them. Depending on where the, you know, animal gets shot, that depends on how it's going to survive, how long it's going to survive. Within 24 hours, if it's in the head or the spine, that fish is dead. Sure. But even after that, if it's somewhere else, it was over 50%, you know, 72 hours later.

so that's true but that's true of like most deer not I don't know about most yeah most deer yeah well okay Spencer what percent of deer that aren't this is impossible to answer yeah what percent of deer that aren't recovered archery shot white tails that aren't recovered what percent do you think die that aren't recovered what percent die um in like the next couple days I would say 50% by like the end of that following winter probably another 10 or 20% so that leaves like 30% to survive for the next hunting season yeah just a guess my only point being I think that anyone that acts like they're shooting at air on to that fish as a way of letting it go is being cute

with themselves yeah yeah no I agree it's like absurd and I think that's what you know not to go too far out everything but hey sometimes you hit a duck and it doesn't die yeah this is no different than that. I'm like, well, no, it's different. Yeah. Well, ducks are managed, right? And deer managed. So that's part of the reason why we're looking, why not just manage these populations? Put a limit on it, you know, as opposed to shoot a thousand and then there's, you know,

what are you doing with them? If you're eating a thousand gar, like, my hat's off to you. But even as much as I like eating gar, I'm not even a thousand car. But not to digress too much from the... No, no. Are your questions... I'm good. I'm caught out. Okay. I think so. I'll think of more.

I can go on all day. I was thinking a different parallel. I was trying to think of this morning. I was trying to think of different parallels. In the bird world, in bird management, we've accounted, like, we've accounted for all birds in bird management. Because we have the Migratorian songbird tree. Like, we have a couple non-native, we have a handful of non-native deleterious. English sparrows, European starlings, Columba, the street pigeon.

Which you can kill as many as you want, but no one does. Collared dove. We have a handful of, like, deleterious. So, like, very much deleterious non-native. We have all our game birds. We don't have loose ends in the bird world. But then I start thinking, in the mammal world, we have a lot of loose ends in the mammal world.

Where you have, there's a host of, like, non-game species. that are some of them are desired like most states will run opossums most states are going to run skunks most states are going to run short tail long tail leased weasel non game those are all native animals right so there's a parallel there where you just have this kind of like lucy goosey configuration and it varies by state oh yeah like there's animals here that would be fur bearers and other like highly regulated yeah they run they run red foxes in this state they run red fox is a non-game no close season no bag limit they're tightly regulated in other states so it's like so with birds we've we've kind of like sort of made every bird has its area of regulatory structure with animals we don't and with fish we definitely don't yeah like and with fish i think the problem is with fish is we don't even have there's not even like a native non-native distinction

like you would think a state would say well this gets so complicated because I in my notes you know what I wrote in my notes bow fishing conundrum and the Rinella solution

Ah nice part of the problem part of the problem is in a lot of the big bow fishing states they made it a long time ago that you can't hunt the good eating fish. So it drives

everybody to hunt the not good eating fish. In South America, they bowfish. Like, I've been out bo-fix in South America. You're after the best fish in the river. Because they bow-fish the really good ones. So they've boxed dudes in. And, like, you can't bo-fish this. You can't bo-fish

that. You can't bo-fish this. So it has putting a lot of emphasis on these other things. But I do think it's ridiculous to me that a state agency wouldn't come in and say, if they're going to be like that, they're not going to let you bowfish the good stuff, a state agency would see would come

and say, non-native deleterious fish are open all the time. And there's a, you can, there's no close season, there's no bag limit, and there's a very loose method of take structure. Native fish have bag limits.

Yeah. But like what they're going to say is people can't tell the difference. Right. This is when I was talking about this earlier, they're going to like, well, how could you expect someone to tell? a cart from a buffalo. I'd be like, I don't know. How can you expect them to tell a

widgeon from a gadwall? Exactly. From a mallard, from a wood duck. Right? How can you, like, you're obligated to tell all kinds of shit. How can you tell a deer's antler is over or under three inches long? I don't know. Like, you figure it out.

Yeah, exactly. That's what we'd like to do is just let's get some, at least attempt at some equal application of that on to fish. And I will say that Minnesota very recently in 2024 enacted the most comprehensive native fish conservation bill put it into law where they did one of the first things are you the lobbyist on that? You know, I'm one of the advocates for it. Yeah, yeah. I did that even from down in Louisiana before I had any inklings of coming up to Minnesota. But so they did separate common carp from the other native non-game fish. That was one of the first things they did because they call them now native rough fish, which are like it's the least worst name because he still got the rough fish, but at least. Yeah, but that's That's fine. What do you like to call? Not that Brody told me where it came from. Yeah, yeah.

And I'm not worried about the name so much as now that we can get the work done. So if we've got the separation there, I'm not as concerned, at least on some level, with the naming so much as we've got a category that separates the common carp, the other invasive carp from our buffalo, our gars, our boffins. And it's allowing us to then have restitution values. So if you have want and waste, there's a penalty for walleye and bass. I think it's like something like 30 bucks of walleye. if you have, you know, want and waste for walleye and a lot of the game fish.

So even if they had like a negligible amount for, you know, Buffalo or Bofin or Gar, I mean, that would start racking up. Sure. So we've got some regulation there and we're going in the right direction. And so Minnesota's kind of leading the charge with that. I've got colleagues in Michigan that want to do the same thing. Wisconsin, we've got colleagues in Oklahoma. So I do think it's something that's going to start catching on. We know that it's already catching on.

And these native fish have been here for, you know, longer than we have. So I think if we can get past this sort of human construct of this game fish, this is the valuable one, and this is not the valuable one. And just look at a base level, let's apply what we do to duck hunting to fish. You have to be able to tell the difference. Like, sure, a buffalo, you know, looks similar to a carp. I'll, you know, agree with that. But we hear from both fishers, well, it takes a lot of skill to, you know, over accommodate, excuse me, accommodate for,

the refractive index of water, right? So you already have to pay a lot of attention. How about we apply that to just look? Does it have barbels? Is the scale type different? What does the dorsal fin look like? Apply that. And then also just these wanton waste limits. Like, I mean, is there really a reason to shoot a thousand gar,

hundreds and hundreds of buffalo? If we're not eating them, you look at the North American model for wildlife conservation, that third, you know, point there of like not a frivolous use for, you know, killing the animal. And I've had buffalo ribs. I've had gar. I've had boffin. hopefully you try that sometime soon, but there are uses for that, right?

So it's sort of an eat what you kill and be able to identify it. I won't be clear. I've tried it. Yeah, yeah. But I think I might have waited too long. Right, right. Is there, um, is there a lot of evidence for non-native species like common carp, Asian carp impacting or other non-natives, non-native game fish, like impacting these native rough fish species?

Yeah, I mean, the, the non-native, well, yeah, so we can take that as the invasive fish, right? I mean, because you can, non-native is a pretty, you know, interesting term, you know, right? You look in the Great Lakes region. We got steelhead. We got Chinook salmon. But those aren't invasive. Some people call them invasive. Right.

Yeah, right. It's like, yeah. So carp and, you know, like so common carp and the invasive carp like the silver carp and the big head, especially the silver and the big head, they eat plankton. So they're actually attacking the food web at the bottom of the food web. And that's what all the little fish, whether they're game fish or other native fish, they need to eat to grow. And so they are actually, you know, opening up for a potential.

trophic cascade from basically the bottom up. So they are problematic, and they reproduce very fast. They get really big, really fast. Common carp, they stir up the water, they remove vegetation, and they're super durable fish. So, I mean, those are problems that we've let in, and we can't eradicate those. It's all about control there. So they do affect the native fish.

Now, on the other end, the Big Mouth Buffalo is a planktivorous fish. It's one of our biggest planktivores. They actually compete with the silver carp and the big head carp. So, you know, as we work on controlling for invasive species, but also just bolstering and maybe protecting some of those native fish, maybe if it's just limits, you're actually creating a more resilient system to buffer against those invasive species. So there's no like advantage either like carp or I mean gar aren't taking advantage of all these little Asian carp that are swimming around? They are, they are. There's been a study down, I think it was out of Indiana or Illinois, which actually showed that Shortnosed Gar were one of the few native predators or actually were selecting four. invasive carps. They're eating the silver carp and the big head carb. The thing is, those are top predators, right? There's not going to be enough gars to eat all of the invasive carp. So it helps. It's a nice story when you got a native fish that can help you out against invasive fish. White fish, Lake white fish in Lake Michigan, eat zebra mussels, but they're not going to solve the zebra muscle problem. There was a story, you know, that came up back in 2016 where that really was starting to rehab the gator gar reputation was like a way to control invasive carp was alligator gars. And this gets to, them restocking them in Illinois.

It's like, well, we get the alligator gars, that's going to be our silver bullet. There is nowhere near enough alligator gars. There never will be to control for the silver carb. And those of us that were, you know, interviewed for the story that said like, eh, you should probably pump the brakes on that. That was kind of left out of that story because the AP ran with it. It went everywhere, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and they eventually had to do retractions along with Illinois DNR that had to walk it back.

Illinois DNR realized that this is not the story we want to tell, like this is what the science says. So, you know, we have to be controlled. run away. They do. They do. They don't. They're going to run away with like these books like, guys will do a book like, well, I eat nothing but I eat nothing but non-native species as a conservationist. It's like, buddy, you're not going to eat your way out of this.

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Join me as we track the truth through tangled cover and cold case files. where every trail tells a story, and every story leaves its own trail of blood. Blood trails, listen now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Gar are also, in my observations, pretty inefficient predators, at least short nose and long nose. I used to have to take care of them at the fish hatchery aquarium. And when you dump minnows into like a gar tank, they'll roll up next to the minnow. and then they'll like do a very sudden swipe at them

and it would be like 50% of the time they would get their minnow now a bast is not miss like that a walleye doesn't miss like that but like long nose gar especially we're very bad at catching a healthy minnow I wonder if it's because he doesn't have the suction yeah he's just like when he opens his mouth he doesn't create a vacuum

it seemed as though he was guessing often where his like rostrum was gonna end up this is just not fair at all go go ahead yeah do you see that with alligator gar Are you like, that thing is not very good at catching, like, an adult fish. Well, first, I'd say, if they weren't good at catching fish, they wouldn't be around for, you know, 150 million years. So, clear, they're doing some. But I agree with you.

In captive situations, and we see this in aquariums and in hatchery, in our tanks in the lab, they're, you know, it's like the T-Rex and Jurassic Park. It doesn't want to be fed. It wants to hunt. And so, like, you get used to captivity. And so they realize, like, they don't have to, you know, connect every single time. along those got a lot of range, they might be used to, you know, going after fish in the open water.

And so it's a little bit different dynamics than if you're in a rounded tank or a raceway and you got all those fish that can kind of navigate a little bit better. So I will agree, they do miss, but you know, you watch a wildlife documentary, the Cheetah doesn't catch the gazelle every time either. Take like a little baby human

and lock it up in the room. And then a couple years later, be like, I don't see these things not that smart. My takeaway from watching bar feed was that they're picking on not the healthy individuals. Right, which is what predators would do in the wild anyway, right? But gars in captivity actually have smaller teeth than the

gars in the wild. So when we catch them out of the wild they got bigger teeth, which makes sense, right? So if you're not using, you know, that, you know, which your white put energy into sort of generating or growing bigger teeth. Do they scavenge at all or is it mostly? Because I mean, for these guys, a lot of dead baits get to use.

Gator gars will scavenge, spotted gars, short-nosed gars, they'll feed off the bottom. You'll see them even in Indiana and Illinois, they'll go, basically a headstand with the tails are sticking out of the water. So whether they're eating crawfish or whether they're scavenging, long-nose gar is more feeding on fish and whatever they can get down. They're more active

feeders. It's like, they'd be trying to like use in force apps, and we already know that you don't have confidence in their ability to eat anyway, so they're not going to be able to pick off stuff out the bottom. I come from a long line of bow fishermen. My father was a bow fisherman. That's about the extent of it. That is a long line. It is for boo fish.

It's a long line. Yeah, yeah, it is. But he was bowfishing back when you would take a Folger's coffee can. Okay. Okay. Picture you got a recurve bow. You take a Folgers coffee can, take a tin snip. And first off, you cut the end off it. So you got a cylinder now. Okay.

And you take a tin snip and make two flanges. Okay. That you can hose clamp the flanges to your bow above and below the rest. Then you wrap the line around the Folgers can, pass the arrow through the can. So that when you shoot, the arrow goes through the can and pulls the line out. That's old school bowfishing. That's impressive. I'm only setting this up to be that a multi-generational bow fisherman, I often find myself criticizing my own kind.

Okay. My own brethren, my own bo fishing brethren, who are like, oh, we're doing the world of favor. You know. And I was like, listen, it's, it's fine to go bowfish carp. That's fine. You're not hurting anything. You're not helping anything. Like, you cannot mechanically remove fish, remove carp from the Great Lakes or whatever watershed.

Like, you can't mechanically remove them to a point where you have made any difference. We one time had a guy on the podcast. we had an expert on USGS guy about Burmese pythons on the Everglades. He explained like all this snake rodeo

this and that doesn't matter. Like when they wind up doing the work on the pythons and how many are there, how many you're catching, that whole world, he's like,

knock yourself out, have a good time. It don't matter. After that, I was in Florida and a guy's telling me Richard Martinez, tell me his buddy.

Oh, he hates you. I'm like, I hear this often And I'm always like kind of like anxious To hear what he hates me about He hates me because that guy said that He's a roadie. He's a snake catcher He hates me because that guy said that

And I didn't challenge him But it's like Some things don't matter Shooting carp And the Great Lakes You are not helping anything You're not hurting anything You're not helping anything

So it's not like coyote hunters When it's like shoot a coyote save a fawn It's not like shoot a carp a whatever yeah coyotes it's been proven to be effective if it's done in a locally yeah in a temporally and spatially and spatially advantageous set of circumstances so you're not going to get there bowfishing carp you're not helping anyone yeah now are they if you're bo fishing gar is it also a drop in the bucket like you're not actually having population level

impacts on gar just like you're not having population level impacts on carp or is it different? I would say it's different. You look at where they are on the food web, right? I mean, carp are pretty omnivorous. They're eating, you know, stuff off the bottom vegetation, sometimes

bugs, whereas gars are more on your sort of predator, apex predator level, right? There's way fewer gars than there are carp. So sure, you may be doing a drop in the bucket with carp And there's other ways, we work with organizations out in Minnesota that do carp removals on the inland lakes, and they actually do make a difference, but that's like massive carp traps and everything. So you're right. Shooting the carp, you can feel good about it. You want to, part of what we want to say is like, if you want to shoot something, you know, shoot carp, shoot invasive species. Shoot as many as you want. Shoot as many species. Shoot as many species. Yeah. We'll talk about that. And so, you know, but the gars, there's fewer of them.

There's fewer of the boffin. Those are your predatory fish. And so when you do sort of take out a large number of these predatory animals that also live for a long time, I know we have disrespect for the short-nosed gar, but even they can live for 50 years. So, and we just found that from our work down in Mississippi. So if the sort of latitude and old differences mean anything, we expect they probably live longer in Montana and in Minnesota than they do down south.

So they live for 50 years down in Mississippi. it's probably even older up here. And I would take an aside to say, I'm really impressed with Montana's doing. They've got a five-gar limit. You have to get a gar card now as of this year to get short-nosed gars. So I thought that was pretty cool.

Got in touch with the fish in wildlife on that. Who the hell's getting after short-nosed-gall? You know? No clue. A long-nose-gar, that's fish. I'm glad you're impressed. That was my first fish, actually, in the Muskegon River in Michigan.

I know you're on Misskegonne. I did my master's thesis on the Muskegan River. It's a new way. We did a bow fish in every. episode filmed on the Muskegan River in which we messed around with Boffin. Oh really nice. I thought didn't you shoot a gar we shot Gar we shot Boffin? Yeah. Suckers. Yeah, we worked on all those fish on the Muskegon. On the Muskegon River. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2001 to 2005 probably is out there all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We stayed at that old Coast Guard station out on the, you know, Mona Lake was out there. Did you really? Yeah, yeah. Muskegon river. I knew well, yeah, yep, yep. More Skeegan, please. That's what you always say. Paper mill there, you know. Oh, yeah. My old girlfriend's dad was a miller at that paper mill.

I went to see him in the tough band contest one time. Oh, wow. It's one of the only spots. You can find Chinook salmon and long-nosed gars in the same river system. Love that. Along with the Buffalo. That was the only what? It's one of the few places.

You can see Chinook salmon and long-nosed cars in the same river system. That's great. Oh, man. We used to hunt that flat for dogs. Yeah, but those are in base of Chinooks. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Well, let's do that for me.

Let's play that game for that. Because if you look up, like, if you look up, let's say you take a term like weed, when you look up weed in a dictionary. A weed just means like a non-desirable. Sure. Right. It's a non-desirable plan. Right. So when we say something that's like, here's where it gets a little tricky.

If you take a fish and you deliberately introduce it, it usually doesn't carry the non, it's not native. Right. You can't retroactively call it invasive kind of thing. Yeah. Like doesn't carry invasive because of it. invasive implies not desirable. But I was reading this book. There's a really good book called Fishing the Great Lakes.

It's a history of commercial fishing in the Great Lakes. And it talks about, it's funny because the dude's name, there's this ichthyologist named Seth Green. It's hard to look them up because of the other dude. But they were working to, as they were collapsing all the native fisheries in the Great Lakes, from over harvest, and then rafting all those logs and all the spawning grounds of the bark. falls off and you got like 13 feet of bark laying over the spawning habitat as they're destroying all the native fish they're in there introducing carp deliberately thinking that people are going to appreciate them as a food fish the same way they're appreciated in europe yeah and appreciated in asia so there you get like okay so it was deliberately introduced there was budget for it we now regard them as deleterious like whatever yeah so does all these like terminologies no

one says like salmon in the great lakes are absolutely not native walleye and the rivers here and in the lakes here are not native but they're not like invasive no people don't call some people some people will try to right i mean you'll hear people try to call brown trout yeah yeah i do that just to be yeah i do that too and i tease pheasants too yeah yeah i tease pheasants. A tease brown trout, rainbow trout, pheasants. But just to clarify the terminology. Yeah. It's all perspective. Yeah. So introduced

versus invasive, that's a tricky thing, you know. And so yeah, we've got introduced some on it. I think getting back to Brody's question, like those introduced some monies are problematic in some parts of the eastern United States. You've got, you know, even the next category, those like non-game native fish, like the shiners and the darters and the minnows,

they're problematic for some of those nest building areas. They take up space. They eat the fish there, the native species. So, Have you guys done any, like, reintroductions of these native fish in places where maybe they're wiped out or they're just not doing well? There's a group called conservation fisheries down in Tennessee that's doing that. And so they're doing that with, like, different types of mad tom's, darters. But not like the bit like gar. Not gar.

Well, that gets back to Illinois and the alligator gar. So they are trying to read. Who all had alligator gar? Who all? Oh, went all the way up into Illinois. So it was all the Mississippi, Missouri system. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so the damming and the levying and the eradication efforts. So sure, I mean, looking at them as sort of trash fish and problematic was a problem, but so was the dams and the levies and the modification, cutting them off from those floodplain habitats where they can't get to that terrestrial vegetation that they need to spawn. And so now a big effort is not only to introduce some of those, you know, populations to try to recharge those, but also to reconnect the river with its floodplain habitat. And that is research that we're working on with Nature Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

life service to make those connections between the river and the floodplain because that's good for the gars is good for other fish it's good for water birds we see thousands of these wood storks down there all kinds of different animals but we're using the gars as kind of an indicator of that because they do migrate onto the floodplain so we've kind of used to try to get some money for the grants is to show that you can use gars as indicators of this restoration efficacy if you reconnect that river with the floodplain these are fish that move on to them so do we see the fish moving on there Do we see those 12-inch young of the year popping out in, you know, a month and a half? And so far, we've seen that success there.

And we do see tons of croppy there. A lot of other animals as well taking advantage of those habitats. So you'll put a tag on a gar and you'll see him travel out into that stuff. We're tagging some of them with the fish and wildlife service. They're pit tag. They've got an external tag too. But we're also using a fin clip where we look at a chemical signature where we can actually look at, we catch you out of the river. Do you have a river signature?

Do you catch you on the floodplain? Do we see a floodplain signature? And we can look at that by looking at carbon and nitrogen just from the fin clip. And at least that's a non-lethal way of doing it. So that's been helpful. And that's ongoing research. We're going there in October to do that. So they went up that system into Illinois.

Yeah. And now how far up are they? They're still up in Illinois. I think Hennepin and Hopper Lakes or some lakes up there. They seem to be doing well there because I guess there's like a nuclear plant or something. So it keeps it a bit warmer. Some of those fish are growing decent. But they don't mature until they're about five to 11 years old, depending on male.

are females and we expect those ones further north are going to take longer to mature we see that in other gar species are they are they protected like up in the northern extreme of their range that's that's a great question i think they're working towards protecting them because that was the issue um and we had that maybe five five years ago where bow fisher actually shot one of the restocked you know one of the little guys that made it to be decent size um and luckily you know she reported it and uh you know we're able to see like well this might actually be kind of an issue um where we might want to protect those fish but you have to be able to identify the fish as well.

And that's tricky with with gars. I get it. But at least being able to, you know, then you need some sort of maybe blanket protection or maybe a harvest limit, right? That way you're not taking out all of them. I would be very careful just as a advice. Yeah. I wouldn't use the word protection.

Yeah. Because you're going to, you're going to generate too much social friction. Sure. I would, uh, if I was in your shoes, just long line of bow fishermen. Yeah. If I was, if I was in your shoes. I would be talking about I would be talking about

putting a regulatory structure in place because people are going to, they're going to hear protection and their heads are going to go in a certain direction but a regulatory structure manage, regulate, the same way

like the same way all the other stuff, the same way all the birds, everything like. No, I agree with you. That's the language we use anyway. You know, I think it depends on the audience we're talking to as well. But, yeah, it's definitely more regulation and management. And even from our perspective, it's informing management, right?

We're doing the science, and we, you know, been lucky to work with Minnesota DNR has been very receptive to, you know, non-game native fish conservation and management because they don't have the data. So we go out there and we have that expertise coming off of six years in Louisiana and also several years in Michigan, where to find these fish, where to catch them, how to extract the odolets, what kind of. data we can get from them because, you know, everybody's strapped for resources, whether you're state, federal, that sort of thing. So that's been helpful, but we can help, again, inform that management, give recommendations that, you know, might help improve that sort of regulatory structure. Yeah, I think an achievable goal would be that you would, that you would help fishermen, help them understand that we have this category we use to categorize fish that's not a great category and that we should understand that there are these problematic

invasive fish that people brought from far away that we wish weren't in the systems we have these fish that have always been here right and we should make sure they're always here and so we draw a distinction yeah between these and these and with gars and i don't know what the number is with gars is like you're allowed two or five a night or whatever to hell just like you're allowed two or five bass a day whatever and like just start kind of creating this idea that it's not all that these fish aren't damaging to the eco that they're not all damaging to the ecosystems you know yeah and like buffalo is like a big sucker that used to be a very sought after commercial fish and it shouldn't be ditched like carp yeah is there any like uh examples

of there being like bounties on alligator gar other guys Did that ever happen? I don't think not in recent history. You go back to the 1930s, Texas Parks and Wildlife had the electrical gar destroyer that they made to just, they thought that I think they were taken out, I want to say it was water birds or something. And so, you know, they basically ran this rig that was supposed to, you know, kill all the gars. Yeah, you use the term the gar war. Yeah, yeah. So Matt Miller is the director of science communications for the nature conservancy, a good friend of mine.

And he wrote this book, Fishing Through the Apocalypse, which is great about fishing and conservation. And he brought up like this Gar Wars idea. But using that broadly, not just Gar's but other non-game native fish. And even non-game isn't, you know, that's relative as well. So look at just kind of providing some respect for these fish. Again, looking at the North American model of wildlife conservation where we're looking at, you know, having the best science available. and then also not hunting these animals or using them for frivolous purposes.

So if you're going to shoot, if you're going to kill it, eat it. And they taste delicious. I think with that also we've got the opportunity to reach the next generation, which is important. If we want to preserve that hunting and fishing and show that there's value,

so there's two directions I want to go with that, but there's opportunity, right? So you go to a spot that may not be the best for rainbow trout or walleye or bass, but a lot of these habitats have plenty of gars, offens, suckers, so there's opportunity for fishing that people may not have if they don't have a boat to go after walleye or to go after bass.

So we're trying to introduce other opportunities for fishing, again, to look at, you know, both conservation and management and just better stewardship of our natural resource, but to conserve that recreational way of life. And so if we don't do that, that's going to start slipping away. You know, we can go on and on about how people are, you know, on screens more than outside. And one of the ways that we've done that is working with the anglers, whether they're bowfishers or whether they're, you know, catch and release or hook and line anglers, we did this with bofen and my lab just a couple months ago this summer. We're a bunch of anglers that know how to catch bofen. Some of them never caught them before, but they got together and I said, hey, can you catch us some boffin that we can use for our research?

And I brought my research team with me, and these are all, you know, undergrads and grad students. They also were able to catch boffin. They really had a blast. Like some of them, they're from Minnesota. They were able to fish walleye and fish bluegill, but they never caught boffin before, and they really got into that. And then the anglers got to learn about,

well, if you're going to help us out, here's what we want as far as a measurement and a photograph and a fin clip. So really building that relationship with the anglers. And we're doing that with the bowfishers too, looking at where are these lakes, where you might be doing some bo fishing tournaments, can we at least use the carcasses to get the data

to look at the age structure of those fish? So we're definitely not looking to end bow fishing or to stop that sort of recreational aspect. But we're looking to, can we manage it sustainably to where we can have the fish in the water, doing their jobs as ecosystem services, balancing predator prey populations, but then also you can go there

and you can shoot the fish, hopefully eat them sustainably. So, you know, kind of everybody wins. And so far, we've made progress with that, even with a lot of the boatfishers. Have you guys seen, besides alligator gar getting extirpated

from native range have you seen any other fish that people categorize as a rough fish are there any records of other fish being extirpated that's a good question I think there's plenty

I mean you've got the spotted gar in Michigan so that's considered a species of concern now it's not endangered or threatened it is considered endangered in Pennsylvania so there are places state by state there's places

where you might consider a spotted guard to be protected and in other states it's just we don't know enough about them but now we know that they can live for over 40 years so we've lagged so far behind so i think that's a great question where we've seen them extirpated quite honestly we don't have enough data in a lot of places to tell are they still here are they gone why might they have you know gone we like to say like we're about a hundred years behind what we know about trout and salmon and walleye we don't have to take a hundred years to catch up on that so we're trying to do is use those methods that you've all, you know, learned about for managing smallmouth bass, large mouth bass. How do we apply that

to these data deficient species? So again, working together to more sustainable management with that stuff. So honestly, we don't know. We could be losing populations and not know it because we aren't accounting for the harvest of those fish. You know, that that brings up a really interesting ecology point that my brother Danny raised to me. He's, he's with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska. Works on salmon. And we were talking about I brought this up before. We're talking about the difference between the lower 48 and Alaska in terms of,

we're speaking about fisheries, but you could almost apply it to like conservation in general, where he was just like not in a publication form, we're just talking casually. He was saying that like the lower 48 is kind of like in recovery mode.

Right? Like conservation and lower 48 is like largely about recovery. He said in Alaska, in big parts of Alaska, we're still in the descriptive face. We're still trying to be like, what's here? Yeah. Right? There's salmon runs that like people know.

It's like people don't know. I mean, people have been utilizing the salmon runs for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. But no one's put their arms around it yet. No one's been like, okay, what does it look like in 2020? What does the run look like in 2021? You know what I mean? Like measuring, trying to put some kind of, number around like what is here right so a lot of the work they'll do work of just trying to

describe what's here yeah which makes the recovery mode it lets you track change over time what we're saying about gar almost like contradicts that because if you look there probably are things down here that we haven't done the discovery mode on because we just disregarded it or lumped it into some goofy classification to the point where you might later say um we don't know where they lived yeah but yeah there's a lot of old people talk about seeing them but like i don't know yeah how accurate is that can't find one now you know because no one ever measured it right right yeah no i think that's uh that's a great analogy i think we're very much still in the discovery phase but also in a recovery phase too because we don't

know where they've been you know overfished or where it's a combination again it's not just harvest, but it's, you know, the modification of those habitats. So I think we're playing catch up and, you know, we're just trying to, you know, make the best that we can. And sort of encouraging the value of these native species to sort of then promote our ability to research them to get multiple stakeholders involved, whether it's the bowfishers, the hook and line anglers, the state and federal agencies. And I think there is momentum towards that. And to do that, we want to communicate effectively and want to build those. relationships, not, you know, shooting people down with, like, you shouldn't be doing this or

this should be stopped. And that's a big part of our sort of science communication aspect of it. So we appreciate the work that you all do for that because I think we need a multifaceted approach to make that happen before we, you know, lose what we didn't even know we had. Yeah. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt, just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries

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but it's not our native rough fish it's our game fish um you know large mouth bass steelhead bluegill i mean uh rainbow trout's one of the most widely distributed species of fish in the world. I know, you know, fishermen that go down to Argentina to fish for steelhead. I'm like, what, I would rather find out what fish are actually there and then, you know, go for those. So it's mainly our game fish because, you know, we like to take the fish that we like and take them to other places. Now, as far as Gars go, they have been introduced, not on purpose, relatively speaking, through the aquarium trade. And so in some places where they've released them, there's a couple parts of India, there's parts of Southeast Asia, where we're,

They've made their way into waterways. Oh, yeah, you can go... Hold on, man, dudes in Southeast Asia are buying Gar from here to turn loose in their aquarium and then dumping them? They're mainly wanting to keep them their aquarium, but then when they get too big, because, believe or not, you know, I mean, alligator gars get big. So it's a big aquarium fish. They're super popular.

Gar's, and then they've got aruanas down there, too. That's a badass. That's a good fish, so. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a boat fishing fish. And how are our Gar doing in those other places? In most places, they're not doing great. because they don't have enough to sort of create a sustainable population, self-sustaining population.

But there are a couple spots. I've seen it in India through video sent me where they have spawned. Now, sure, that could be problematic, but it's probably something that's still controllable. Are you cheering for them? I mean, you know, I know, I feel like, you know, I also feel like, you know, who better to take care of alligator guards in India than an Indian dude you can send out of it. So maybe it's just job security. We'll see. But, yeah, I think, but in other places, they've kind of tracked, uh, al-average.

Alligator garers have been released. There was, I think, a moat around some sort of palace or castle in Japan where an alligator gar was released. And so they had, like, I don't know, their version of Fish and Wildlife trying to catch this gar out of there for a while. And so you'll hear stories. But they put it in there to keep intruders out of something. I know, right? Yeah, it's not going to work that way. Is there, actually, is there, like, I'm sure people have been bitten by mistake.

Yeah. Like in muddy water. Right. Like, is there claims of them ever attacking? There was like very, very few records of even the mistaken identity. I think there was something that happened a couple years ago. There was, I think, a woman in Texas or Louisiana had stepped near an alligator gar and got tagged by it. But that was it.

And there wasn't, it was pretty foggy details around that. But other than that, gars aren't, they definitely are not attacking people. They're very gap limited. So even a fish like that. I was going to say, how big can he get this guy I'm holding? Exactly. That was probably about a five foot long fish, you know, give or take, maybe four and a half, five feet. But you look at that.

That mouth isn't, you know, it's not going to. fit anything further down that throat. That's as far as it can open there. I mean, it can open wide up and down, but that throat doesn't open up very much. So they're very gap limited. So they're not going to, you know, they can't swallow a person or anything like that. Even a big alligator, the biggest one we've caught in our research was eight feet one inch long. Just a couple inches off of the known, you know, world record fish. Um, but we did pull a three foot long carp out of the stomach of that fish. Um, I've got a three foot carp down. Yeah, it was, and it was mostly diet, not mostly, it was partially digested to where it was just a lump of flesh.

So they could get someone's like house poodle or something. I mean, it's, it's possible. Brody's trying to pump up, no. Kick your dogs on leases, I guess, but you know, yeah. How are Gator Gar doing in Mexico? They're doing well in Mexico. They're native in Mexico. And in Mexico, you've got the alligator gar and the tropical gar, which are big time food fish down there. So you go to the Tabasco region, a Tabasco State in Mexico, which there was

a gar conference there, believe it or not, they do happen. In 2012, tropical gar stuff was, you know, in the little shops there. They were in the restaurants. We had tropical gar impanadas, tamales. We roasted them to where they were just gutted, but you can put them on the grill, and then the scales just flake right off. How big are they?

Those tropical gars on the grill were probably about, you know, maybe foot and a half long, but they get to three and a half, four feet long as well. So they're looking there. Not as long as, you know, but they're fatter than the longer. That's a stouter fish, because that's related to the alligator gar. Long noses are in a different genus.

So they're the skinnier gar, it's like your short nose and you're spotted. But it's as important of a food fish there as salmon are in the Pacific Northwest. So not only if they depleted the wild populations in some places, then they're aquaculturing them to restore those wild populations. So Cuba and parts of Mexico are actually good templates for gar aquaculture and restoration. Everything we know, like through fish and wildlife service, not everything, but the starting to what we know came from those places. where people are already culturing those fish to try to restore alligator gar, bring them back in certain populations.

So they're not using the term rough fish down there. No, no. That's fish. It's a big food fish. Yeah, yeah.

Huh. You spend a lot of time working in Minnesota at the edge of the Mississippi watershed. And in 2017, there was an American eel caught. It caught in Wood Lake in Minnesota, which was 30 miles off of the Mississippi River even. So, like,

it has the potential to collect some fish that are far away from what you'd consider to like be their home up there. What are some of the unique things you've caught in Minnesota? Gotcha. In Minnesota so far, I mean, we're still focusing a lot on the gars and the bofins because the, you know, the DNR typically isn't paying attention in the same way that they're paying attention to the walleye and the bass. So I feel like that's some of our unique fish. We do get the blue sucker, which, you know, is found all the way down in Texas

too, but that's a pretty unique fish. They look kind of like a shark, kind of a grayish-looking. If you had a shark version of a sucker, that's what they look like. I'm not familiar with that fish. How big is it? Um, they get, you know, probably quite three feet long, but I mean, you're looking at decent size fish. And they're deeply blue, especially when they're spawning. Yeah. They have a tall dorsal fin on them. Right. They're threatened in South Dakota. We used to raise them at the hatchery. Yeah, very cool fish. And, uh, you know, they stay in the midwater, sort of midwater and midstream. Um, a lot of some ichthyologists and also angers call me

unicorn fish because it's very difficult to catch them because it's a sucker. So you got a fish form, right? They got that ventral mouth. I never heard of that one. Yeah. Yeah. So blue sucker. We can, you know, you come up to Minnesota. We can, we can, you know, you come up to Minnesota. We can probably show you some. So they're putting trackers in some of them to find out where they go. So D&R is doing that. They've done that with some of the long-nosed gars. So it's finding out where some of those fish are moving as well, tracking the invasive

carp where they're going, I'm trying to think, as far as unique stuff, we did find, you know, through some of those bofen, that half of a large rat in the stomach, which shows that boffin will eat just about anything. I tell the students, just like with the plankton, to let me know when there's something interesting you find in the stomach. And so I was coming back to the lab and showing somebody to the lab. And I said, did you find anything interesting? They said, yeah, we found a rat in the stomach.

And I'm like, well, where is it? I said, you know, I need to see a picture or find it. It was already in like the carcass bin and stuff. I'm like, you're going to have to fish that out of here so we can see that. Those bophins are getting your muskrat. You sure it wasn't a muskrat? I mean, it was the only posterior end of it. So, I mean, I couldn't tell you.

The tail? I'll send you the picture. Maybe you can, you an idea. Yeah, you did have a tail. What are the little bumps that some suckers get when they're spawning? I think blue suckers would really get those on there. Tubercles, tubercles, yeah, yeah. So they got the spawning tubercles on them.

And so Buffalo will get those two. Some chums. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of interesting fisher. I haven't seen any eels there yet. When we're down in Louisiana, we saw eels all the time. So I think that's what's been interesting is having stayed and worked in Louisiana for six years, now being in Minnesota, we're just following the Mississippi River further up to the top.

But that's also what some of our research is doing is looking at those gar and buffalo populations down south. We've learned about their life history, some of the population structure, and we can look at Garz and Buffalo up north and then compare northern and southern populations. One of the things we want to do is, like, can we start forecasting about climate change, how that might change things, right? Because we've got fish that are adapted to a warmer climate down south that we know about, how might the ones in the north start potentially changing? But then, you know, you've got your cold water fish are going to be affected by that as well. But, you know, we don't have walleye way down south. So that's why the Garz and the bofins and the

Buffalo can be useful for that kind of research as well. So again, we're trying to use them as sort of these multifaceted tools to tackle management, conservation, even climate science. What are these northern gars doing under the ice? Like, I've never in my life even heard of someone catching one through the ice. Yeah, it happens. I've got a couple pictures that people have sent me. It's still on my bucket list to get a gar through the ice.

So you've heard of people getting a hit in the ice? They're just kind of chilling under there, no pun intended. But there's places in Iowa where I've got video of that, too, where the guy cut, you know, made his, you know, cut through the ice, dropped the camera down. And it's just this ice hole there. And then just a bunch of short-nosed gars just hanging out below there. Like, I mean, probably 50 or 60. Moving around. Yeah, just, you know, kind of slowly waving their fins.

But, you know, metabolism slows down. They're still going to eat. But they're congregating there. And they also are air breathers. But when the water's that cold, as long as they find well-oxygenated water, they don't have to go. up for air there. But so they're there, both in or they're

under the ice too. So that's still still on the list to check out. Can I ask you a snap and turtle question? Sure. I was into turtles before I was into gars

actually, so. Okay. Years ago, I was at the National Trappers Association Convention in Iowa. And I went to a lecture by a turtle trapper.

Okay. Okay. I remember his name is. He had a, like, a thing hanging from, he had like a necklace that was like a pouch made out of a big old turtle

foot. Okay. Big time in turtles Turtle Trapper But he got into raising turtles He was saying And I've told people I've told people this a thousand times

That this is true He was saying that a turtle In the winter So it's iced over Like you know Normally he comes up and sticks his head out of the water And gets a gulp Yeah

But everything's locked in ice He was saying I think I know where this is going Is it true? Yes it is If you're talking about cloical respiration Well I'm talking about this He was saying that that

turtle can go down in the muck he can burrow down in the muck and push himself up and it sends bubbles of methane out of the muck he says he's seen this in the wetsuit it sends methane bubbles by disturbing the muck and it goes up to the ice and like he was saying that somehow like the co2 can leach through the ice huh and then he'll wait and eventually he'll go up and sip He'll go up and sip that bubble. Huh. He says he's watched it. That's not what I thought with the clinical respiration.

That's where they just basically breed through their butts and stuff. So that's how they get gas exchange there. But I've not heard about the methane bubble. I tell people, like it's true. And then what was the ice surface? And then what was the advantage there? It would just, you get some sort of conversion. Picture you stir the muck up, all that gas comes up.

Somehow, he was explaining, and I was hoping you could help me. he's explaining that certain like some gas goes through the ice I don't get it but if it waits he'll eventually go up and he'll sip that bubble

to what end is he because he's got to breathe he can't stick his head out of the water I mean there's got to be some sort of organic chemistry situation but it's methane right yeah yeah yeah there's no oxygen by the I know but that's why you got to listen to what I'm talking about

he was saying that like that bubble sitting there for some period of time goes through some transformation How is that stupid? How is that stupid? You think like a methane bubble will just live there chemically stable for the rest of its life?

I don't know. Okay. I don't make a methane bubble turns into oxygen. Exactly right. I don't know. Maybe we need to have a gas expert on the show. Some Googling going on.

You never heard this. Yeah, I've not heard that. He was talking about. about raisin turtles and eventually got so into it that he was observing them with a wetsuit in the winter trying to understand winter behavior and he's talking about them in his mind deliberately stirring the bottom and then going up and sipping the bubbles yeah so if you're calling him a liar i'm not called well maybe it's not methane they're kicking up maybe it's i don't methane can be converted into oxygen

and other chemicals like carbon dioxide and water through oxidation which is often a highly exothermic reaction that requires high temperatures or catalyst or ice or a turtle yeah yeah exactly maybe the turtles doing something

never heard that one yeah no I'm not I've not heard that one but you know they're surviving somehow so it's just one of them things that like sticks in your head your whole life And you just wind up telling everybody about it. Oh, I know. I got a new toll story. Eventually, you're like, but is that true?

Here, inertness of methane. Methane is a very stable and inert molecule. And breaking the strong carbon hydrogen bonds requires significant energy input or specific catalyst. Like setting it on fire. Usually applied to term. Is there a chance that he's, that that, is there a chance? Like, when you're stirring the bottom up,

like, you know, when you're walking, like you duck hunting, Every step, like bubbles coming out of here. Is there a chance there's oxygen hiding down there? Yeah, that's the thing. I'm like, it may not, he might be talking about methane because that's what he knows, but you're probably stirring up all kinds of other gas or byproducts of that, you know, of the bacteria and all the muck on the bottom. So I think the story holds, it just may not be methane.

But I might have made up that part. That sounds legit. I mean, if you've got your own additions to the story, I can't judge that. What I know I didn't make up, what I know I didn't make up is him talking about turtles. disturbing the bottom in his mind and I remember and the bubbles would come up he talked about

that he explains something that he thinks happens but I don't remember what and then the turtles would sip it that part sounds remember we were trying to get that sample turtle expert on the show Cren

was that a few years ago? It might have been before your time and we wound up getting his kid we didn't get his kid we couldn't get the man, we could have got the kid. Oh, that probably wasn't me. I probably wouldn't have gotten a kid.

Tell me the kid said I like turtles. Do we need to revisit? Well, there's two things that have evaded us. A Neanderthal expert. I know. I haven't pitched that on Theo Vons show and got that one guy reached out. A Neanderthal expert and someone who's real good on turtles. Like real good.

And understands that what I'm talking about. I can get you some wrecks too. Yeah. Like real good on turtles. Yeah. Especially like snapping. turtles, even alligator snapping turtles

that comic snappers. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm talking to a Neanderthal guy at some point, hopefully. How good are you on Neanderthals?

You must be really old. I'm not going to ask you a Neanderthal a question. So they're active and they feed. Yeah. Yeah. And then let's take

an alligator gar. How many eggs is he kicking out? I mean, hundreds of thousands. She's kicking out. Sorry. Right. And then how are those getting fertilized? What happens?

It's external fertilization. So, you know, you get, you have what you call polyandry, so that's more males than females. You might have one or two females, but usually one big female and a bunch of males that kind of cluster together.

And that's also usually over terrestrial vegetation. So they need that flood pulse to do that. So they're creating a cloud of milk. Yeah. And she's laying her eggs and they're just fertilizing by being in the cloud.

The eggs, as they are being laid, are very sticky. So they actually adhere to that vegetation. So it's not necessarily broadcasts and it's just going into the water column. It's basically attaching to that vegetation. She's applying them. Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, with that

spawning, though, and part of our other research is that we found down in Texas and other places long nose gars, your apparent favorite gar, get into that mix and you get hybrids between longnose and alligator guys. Long alligators. Yeah, yeah. So you get an alligator gar that's got a longer snout, kind of nickname

crocodile gars, you know, because it's a little bit longer snout action there. But that's across genera. So you've got two species of gar that are producing hybrids, which happens in fish. But not only are they two different species, they're two different genera that diverged about 100 million years ago. So they split from each other a long time ago. And are their offspring sexually viable?

That's the thing. So that's what makes it also, you know, unique, or relatively unique, is that their offspring are fertile. So you've got these two species that can produce fertile offspring that's, you know, that's, split over a hundred million years ago, the next closest organisms that can do that is two species of ferns that split 65 million years ago. So what that suggests to us is that their DNA

is that compatible over splitting that long ago. So their evolutionary rates being that slow, and that goes into some of the work we've done looking at, Garz actually have the slowest rates of molecular evolution of any vertebrate with a jaw. So you rule out your lamp rays and your hagfish. The next

closest sturgeons, but they are changing slower than cilicants, longfish, to atars, crocodilians, sharks, any of those things. So with that hybridization, though, that suggests it was that their DNA is that compatible. So something might be maintaining that compatibility of the DNA, something might be correcting it. So, you know, evolution happens by mutations, right?

So something, a couple base pairs change, so it changes. You might get something that's advantageous or deleterious, whatever. With GARS, it seems like that DNA code has been staying pretty consistent for millions and millions of years. And what we hypothesize that there might be something

like a DNA repair mechanism that when a mutation pops up, it's correcting that mutation, just setting back to what it's supposed to be. So you think of like a game of telephone where you've got message on both ends, one's very different at the end of it from the beginning, right?

Think of almost a perfect game of telephone where something's correcting it over and over and over again. So one of the things we're looking at is like, can we isolate or identify what these potential DNA repair mechanisms could be? Because think about even in human health,

how many diseases are based on out-of-control DNA replication or damage to DNA, whether you're thinking about things like even skin cancer, other types like that. So that's very far off in the future, but that hybridization between alligator gars and long-nose gars or actually any garr species can hybridize is a potential biomedical value as well. So what prevents it from becoming a, why hasn't it just become a uni species? Right, exactly. That's a great question. So we kind of joke that either there's one species of gar or there's maybe a hundred species of cars.

But you think about it with dog breeds, right? Dogs all one species, but look at all the variation there. Gars are just changing at such a different rate relative to our way of thinking that, you know, to them maybe they are one species. They're just slight variations on a basic blueprint. We don't know what that is. But that's just another area of research we're looking into, but that adds value to these fish. You take Buffalo. I know you all had Alec Lackman on one of the previous shows with fishing and stuff.

The Buffalo can live for over 100 years. We know that. But since then, since 2019, when you all were talking to them. The Buffalo Soccer can live 100 years? Buffalo soccer can live over 100 years. Once in Minnesota. One's in Minnesota. Really?

In Saskatchewan, 125 years. No. There's one. So Buffalo story I can tell you is that some of the Buffalo during World War I, they wanted to, you know, ship more meat products, food products, overseas. And so they wanted people stateside to eat less meat because they need all those resources to go towards a war effort. So they want to encourage people to

eat more fish. And so in order to get people to eat more fish, they're building all these new reservoirs in the southwestern United States, the Roosevelt Reservoir down southwest. And so some states, including Iowa, shipped a bunch of game fish, including some non-game fish like Buffalo, over

down to the Apache Lake, down in Roosevelt Reservoir, that area, around 1917. some of those fish are still alive today. No way. And they've gone back and looked at some of the offspring, which were from born around the 1920s, still alive today. Wow.

And they've done all kinds of aging with the odilids, radiocarbon dating. So, sure, those are introduced species there, but we introduce them. But some anglers go there. They know them by the different spot patterns and stuff. But what they've also been able to find, looking at their physiology, their health has actually improved with old age. Their immune system function. Cinescence, the sort of DNA breakdown that we all have as we get older, they don't show that.

So you've got these native rough fish like gars that they've got this DNA that's been staying coherent for millions of millions of years, potentially with the DNA repair mechanism. You've got buffalo, which actually are improving with age. You're talking 80-year-old, 100-year-old fish. Just kicking ass. Just, yeah, yeah. So, you know, there's a lot to learn about these fish. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, combine the two.

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Listen now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I got an angling question Maybe not for alligator gar Because they have a you know They have a degree of popularity for fishermen But the other species If one was wanting to set a world record Or gar one of those species that just kind of get ignored

And there's a bunch of like open line class Records Yeah even in Minnesota they've got catch and release records That are open to a bunch of non-game native fish I think the boffin one was just set this past summer. It was like a 31-incher. Because no dudes had ever put in for it. Yeah, I mean, you know, not as much anyway.

But yeah, down south, you get some big long-nose guards. We actually got the biggest long-n nose I'd ever seen with my students out at Nickel State when I was down in Louisiana was a 60-incher. And later that summer, I think somewhere else in Louisiana, they got a 65-inch, but that is right along the records. Because there's some fishermen that just look for unfil, like, line-class world records. That's a good spot to go for, you know, the line classes. the different size overall, yeah. And that's worth, you know, going after. I would say if you do shoot it, find a way to get us the odolith because we want to, we want to age that fish.

They got some skulls getting their odilift. That's got to be a process. Yeah, yeah. I can't stop messing with this thing. You have to use a hammer and a chisel for alligator gars. I mean, it's just, and we're working with skulls that are huge, too. It's like what are your buddy up up at the shack when he was chopping open those yellow eyes to get their odolift. That was work.

Yeah, it's a, it's, it's. messy business. How should do this skull? This school's amazing. Yeah, that's with some formaldehyde. You probably get maybe, maybe some. That's good. That's good. So you did what now? We get the skull, so we got it from alligator gar rodeo down to Louisiana. So that was great. It's another opportunity to work with stakeholders there. Why did they shoot it with 22? Because they jug line for them first. So when you get the fish and it's alive, they want to find ways to dispatch the gar quickly. Yeah, yeah. I'm always curious as to how they're doing that on a boat and not misfiring and hitting the bottom of

a boat or something, but they use the 22. Shoot over the edge of the boat. I guess so. I've never seen it. We get them when they bring them in. So, but you know, you got to figure you got these big fish, you're not usually hanging a big, that kind of gar you might hang over the edge of the boat, but if you're hanging the head of a six foot or seven foot or over the edge of your boat, you might be losing that. I told you

earlier, I've got a lingot head that I want to do, but like, the general public can't just get their hands on for my next question. Could you buy from aldehyde? Like a jugger from al-aid? That's a good question. I can buy from aldehydei, but I don't know, I think... Type up buying a joke.

I looked into it once and you get out Amazon. Why don't they want people to have formaldehyde? I mean, it's a carcinogen. I mean... So you take the gar's head

fresh off the gar. Yeah. And then you do what? Well, those we eventually put on ice so we could storm for a bit. We thaw them out. And then once we thaw them,

we pry the jaws open, usually wedge something in there because, you know, the natural state of the gar isn't with the jaws wide open like that. And then we put them in a formaldehyde bath for like maybe two or three days

depending on the size of the fish. And then we take it out. We put in a cooler with water and we just change. that water bath a few times and we just let air dry. But you can do that with a regular fish you could set it outside. You could drive a nail with this

thing. Yeah, I've got like I've salted Pike heads and let them dry but that looks. That would work way better than Pike too. Yeah, because Pike are still, they got a lot of flesh you know along the skull. Whereas the Gar skull, I mean, that's, you know, say the skull. Can you buy that something? We may have to communicate with Montana State

University. So purchasing a jug of formaldehyde solution requires a specialized chemical supplier. It's not available for purchase at retail stores and is regulated by the EPA and OSHA due to health risk including cancer. We need to demonstrate a legitimate use.

We need a dealer. So we might need to yeah, like anyone at MSU, get some contacts there. There you go. Well. Trade in formaldehyde. I was going to bring this up with you, Cren. Is that illegal? You're, you still have those tuna heads in that freezer. You need to deal with them or get

your formaldehyde? I thought, I thought, Alec got some and made soup with them. Are the collars attached? Yeah? I'd take one. I don't think they're all. No, is it just the head? We've also got those.

We cleaned them up. We've also got those fetuses in there, too. This is a work art. I mean, you know, hope you all appreciate that, you know. We couldn't bring a big one in the suitcase or anything. Show me a big one. With your hands. What's a big one?

You're looking at about that big. Really? I think we had some pictures in there. I'll send them to you. but that eight footer was a pretty big skull. It got trapped in the net, so that one had unfortunately died, but we were able to get the odlets.

I was 56 years old. But there you're looking at an eight foot long fish that was 56, it could have easily been 100. When they get that big, they aren't growing, you know, very much each year. But this is out of the coastal Louisiana. So we had six footers that were 20 years old.

I want to say we probably had a six and a half footer that might have been, you know, 20, 21. So they get big, But that's where working with the rodeo was very helpful because we could get all the data we wanted. They let us just have at it. They were cutting the heads off for us. They were getting us, you know, any of the samples of the muscle tissue, the fins. And then they also cleaned them there.

It was at a bar. It was at Mani's bar on the Maripa, off Lake Maripa, the Amit River. People come from all over that general region. And they'd be eaten this fried alligator gar. They make gar balls, which are like hush puppies. Dude, man. That's why I like Cajuns, man. Those Cajun duzied everything. I mean, you know, but Gar's good.

they got the big backstraps and the thing is they invited us back year after year because they wanted to know what we were finding out and we wanted to you know work with them and share that info with them too so you've got multiple stakeholders we weren't there to say like you got to stop doing this we're there to like learn about the resource how can we figure out about the health of the population we've been invited back every year i couldn't make it this year because coming down from minnesota is a little bit tougher but next year we plan on going back down there so if ever wanted you know send somebody to jumping on a Gator Guard rodeo,

you know, we'll be there, but I think that's a good opportunity to, again, work with stakeholders, work with the people that are using the resource for different purposes. This is my last question for you. They might have more. You know, when you have, like, trout unlimited,

ducks unlimited, Rocky Mountain Oak Foundation, right? They put tons of money into habitat work. They put tons of money into research. who like who out there what NGOs put any money into

into Gar? Right. As far as a definite NGO nobody I think we're lucky that we can try to go after grants from different organizations. Minnesota has a lottery tax that goes into their environmental and natural resources trust fund and so we apply for that. We've been lucky to get support from the state then to look at these native rough fish.

been extremely beneficial. And a few other states have, you know, stuff like that, too. But there's no gar enthusiast group. I mean, you're looking at it, Steve. I mean, you know, it's, you know, and then there's a native fish for tomorrow, which is a nonprofit group that is promoting the value of these fish. But we're all kind of cobbled together. They're out of Minnesota as well.

Native fish for tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. So Tyler Winter is one of their main spokespersons. He also had a response to that article. But again, promoting eating the fish, fishing for the. fish. But again, that's advocacy. I mean, through the grants that we're getting, we're partnering with them to provide them funding. So we're kind of trying to get what money we can to work on that stuff. But doing things like this, the work you all do gets that message out more about the value of these fish. But again, being able to convince it was the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. They support our work down on the Mississippi River floodplain in Mississippi. Working with Nature Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife. So it's a bunch of partners usually coming together. So I've been kind of selling the idea of like, we can use Gar to answer these questions or to get at this type of restoration.

But it really is advocating for the species and then trying to fund the funds to or find the funds to back that research and then show that these are, again, valuable organisms. Yeah, because it's the new fountain of youth. Right, right, yeah. Once you figure out a couple of them little tricks. I will say that the biomedical value of the fish has bolstered that value. Spot of Gar actually out of Michigan is where we looked at that, comparing them and also in Louisiana. of the Gar genome is actually organized closer to the human genome than it is to other fish, like your walleye and your trout.

So because of that sort of ancient lineage, they've got a lot of stuff that's in common with, you know, other sides of the evolutionary tree. I do got one more question. All right. What is the toxin that's in those eggs? That is a great question. We've been trying to answer that for well over a decade. We think it might be sequestered from bacteria, but we don't know exactly. There's actually current work being done at Nichol State and at LSU on that right now.

We did some preliminary work on that a few years ago. So we think it comes from bacteria, mainly in the eggs. And what's also unique about that toxin is it's toxic to birds, to mammals, to arthropods, like crayfish and crickets. But it's not toxic to fish. So why, if you're a fish, would you have, you know, eggs that aren't toxic to the other animals that are there? So Bluegill can suck that. I've got videos of Bluegill eating long-nosed gar eggs as the long-nose are laying them. So that kind of brings kind of full circle to like this game fish and non-game fish.

You're actually supporting these giant bluegill. And what we think is because Gar's evolutionarily would, I mean, they live in these warm waters, right? They breathe air. So most of your regular traditionally respiring fish like bluegill and, you know, bass aren't going to live in those low oxygen waters. But you do have a lot of crawfish. You have a lot of water birds. You got a lot of small mammals there. So it'll kill the crawfish.

It'll kill the birds. Have you ever given it? Have you ever actually given it to a mouse and seen him die? I haven't given it to them. There are experiments that have been done. They've given it to turtles, too, or it's, like, slow down the heart rate. And so they have done experiments with those eggs. It's fatal how much later.

With depending on how much you're consuming with that stuff. Yeah, yeah, it depends on how much you're consuming with that stuff. But, like, quick or days later? With crayfish, it's pretty quick. Like, they basically, you'll see them eating them, and they just slow down and they just stop. What? In parts of the country, like, down, like, or the Cajuns are eating these things. Is that, like, a no, like, people know not.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a, you know, they know how to clean them there. And it's, it's available on the thing called the internet, right? But you'll still see pop up every few years. These people got violently ill from eating a bunch of gar eggs. From eating the row. From eating the row. Yeah. They thought, maybe I'm going to try to eat these. Because, you know, you get a big long-nose gar. There's a lot of eggs in there. You can eat boffin caviar. They make that. They call it Cajun Caviar. I've heard it's not as good. You know, not surprisingly. I've heard of it's not as good. You know, not surprisingly. I've heard of that, too. I've heard of that. I've heard of that both in caviar. Yeah. we're trying to get a caviar specialist nice methane specialist yeah yeah yeah it's gonna be a short episode

I got one question are you from the north I got I got two comments from earlier we were talking about the native range of an alligator guard the USGS says it goes following the Ohio River almost to West Virginia and then the Mississippi almost to Iowa so like deep into the Midwest

Yeah, yeah. Seriously? They're trying to bring them back in Kentucky. They have found them in parts of Ohio and Indiana along the Ohio River. So they think that the one that was, I think, found in Indiana as part of restoration, either in Ohio or in Kentucky. But yeah, they're in parts, they're in the Ohio River. Are they maybe just not getting like five, six, seven feet long? So people just aren't like noticing them? They had big ones down in Horseshoe Lake in Illinois. Like I want to say it was like, it was like early 1900s. That biggest one that they got like towards the end of their run before they were fully extirpated was like a five or six foot long. fish. So they get big. I have just no idea. We've actually found gars in the north get bigger like long term maximum size than the fish in the south. Like that's looking at spotted gars. So they've got the growth rate that has to be able to compensate for winter, but we do find on average they live longer and they can get bigger. Alligator gar, we just don't know enough because we wiped them out from the north. So we'll have to see. It's almost like deer. Yeah. Other comment was Steve, you were asking about traditional use of gar when I would give tours at the hatching, we would get to the gar section and try to make

people think they were cool. Some native tribes would use their scales for currency or jewelry, and then some of the early white settlers would line the front of their plows with gar skin because it could break through tough dirt. So there's some historical use. It's super tough. Question

Solomon, what is like an aquarium you really like as a native rough fish man where you walk in you're like, no way, they have a trash fish man. They have a river carp sucker. Yeah, I would say the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga does an amazing job with freshwater fish. They've got a whole building that's all freshwater. They built another one that's marine, which I think is cool.

But I was there for a conference last year. I visited the aquarium three times during that conference. Wow. Only went to the freshwater one. They let me feed the gars down there, too. So shout at Tennessee Aquarium. Shet Aquarium, I was a postdoc there. And so they've got a good freshwater set up too.

Tennessee's better. But Shed does have some of my gars that I had in grad school that I couldn't re-home when I moved to Chicago. So if you go to Shet Aquarium, you see any gars, most of those are mine from grad school, you know, over 10 years ago. No kidding. And I sent him paddlefish to the Shet Aquarium. About a decade ago. Way back in the day, yeah. In Minnesota, that's sort of like ground zero for these wakeboard studies or wakeboat studies.

Have you followed these at all? I've not. I just know it's a topic that's come up when, you know, they're looking at new management that's, you know, we got to look into it. Oh, that's those boats, they weigh them all down with ballast and then make the big waves. the shoreline. You surf on them. Well, they're now like putting cameras under water and seeing what it does to the bottom of the lake. And it appears to be like pretty devastating. Like a bomb went off. Oh, I'd love it if they got rid of those things. I was going to see if you had any thoughts on what those do to roughfish. Yeah, I think whenever you're taking out habitat like that,

that's problematic. And especially since a lot of the native roughfish like the near shore habitats. So when you're scouring out the bottom, increasing turbidity, that's bad for the plants. And even if they're not near shore, you're creating that wave action that's going to have stronger impacts also on the shore when you've got that vegetation. So I think, I mean, again, not being an expert on that myself, but I would say if it's damaging the habitat as or describing them, that's going to be problematic for a lot of these fish. Can you imagine? Can you just imagine the conversation? Oh, God. In the wakeboard enthusiast community, when someone says, hey, man, you can't do that anymore because of the gar you're setting me up you're setting me up no i'd be like yeah you can't do

anymore because the gar they just make my boat bounce around a lot when i'm perj fishing yeah yeah they would be just like oh my goodness gracious i don't think they're listening to this show no i don't think they are and frankly oh there'll be something that i listen to the this is my message to the wakeboard and doze community have you delivered a message before or not is this is your first I need to refine my message. My message is I'm on the lake bottom side of things. Man, who else got a question? Do they regrow their teeth their whole lives?

That is a great question. I think they can grow teeth, but it's not like sharks. So we were, yeah, we were at this rodeo. And the little kid, you know, parents brought them up to us as we were processing these fish. And I'm there with Prasanta Chakabardi, a curator of fishes at LSU. So he and are both there. He's an ecologist. I'm, you know, a gar person there.

A little kid asked, can I have one of the teeth? And so I'm like, sure. And so we take the pliers and we go to pull the tooth out of this jaw. And it's like really hard to get out of there. And we pulled it out. And it just goes down almost like a volcano underneath the water. Like, and you know, we pull that out. We're looking at it.

Me and Prasanta boat, we've been studying fish for most of our lives. And we're just like, I'm like, huh. like we just we had no idea that that's what it looked at and you know we gave it to the kid it made his day right and his little brother came up like i want a tooth too so then we were starting pulling teeth out of these things um so they do have an interesting structure there and they do have something called dentine or placidentine around those teeth which is similar to the you know some of the uh developmental tooth parts that we have as well so there's a lot of things from the fish that are kind of connected to us as well because it seems like with those real long ones over time like 50 years they'd get broken

With some of the big fish, they get broken, but in Michigan, when we'd be doing our spotted gar work, we would get what we'd call the crocodile effect, where you'd get gars where the teeth have grown from the bottom jaw and pierced the top of the jaw. Oh, you can see that all right. Yeah. He's got tooth holes in his jaw. Yeah, well, those, some of those are nostrils. That's out there. Actually, no, you're right. Those two where you can see the open hole going all the way down.

Those are the tooth holes for those lower fangs down there. It's like piranhas are like rows of teeth in there. Yeah, they got a lot of teeth. the teeth, you know, and they don't have a lot of bite force them, so they're more about, you know, they grasp and hold and then swallow the food as opposed to piranhas and sharks, which are more of a cutting plane barracudas as well. But again, you know, you look at those teeth, that's going to be, you know, intimidating. So there's a, you know, an aesthetic to them as well when you think about, you know, getting people interested in them alongside trout and walleye and bass.

Besides humans, what else are killing alligator gars? Alligators to an extent, depending on the size. Once a gator garer, is full size, nothing's really messing with it. Waterbirds will eat gars as well. Other fish, other gars will eat them. I mean, that's not, you know, we find boffin inside of boffin, too. So typically it's going to be other predatory fish, but usually like a bass or a wally, they're not going to be able to take them down once they get to, once they get to decent size.

Nothing's getting through those scales really either. Yeah. You mentioned being of Indian descent. You're born in the U.S. Yeah, yeah. Where were you born? I was born in Washington State, Arlington, Washington, kind of farm, town out far out of Seattle. Did you fish as a kid? I did. That's what I was going to ask is

how we all got started fishing. I got started fishing, you know, mainly on non-game fish. So I lived in Washington and the North Dakota for eight years as a kid. And then Ohio is where I grew up, caught creek chubs out of some random creek and we'd tie like ball up a piece of bread on a hook and then catch them that way. But I remember catching some perch in North Dakota going out fishing. That was one of the first fish I remember catching. The state capital had a big northern pike taxidermy there. I remember looking down. the mouth of that and thinking those teeth are really cool. And I was into dinosaurs as well.

So always getting outside, my dad would take me to the Stillagwamish River in Washington State. So, like, we'd chuck rocks in there. So there was that connection to the water. So I enjoy fishing. I'm not good at fishing. My buddy Tyler Winter takes me out. So he can take me, he can get me, like, where's the gar spot? Where's the boffin spot?

So I can do that. It takes my kids out. They've caught red horse and, you know, some other non-game fish. Of course, my kids know gars. They've known that for their whole lives. But I do think that's an important part of, like, you know, getting kids out into nature, getting them outdoors. And so that's also what we want to do. I would be remiss if I didn't say, like, my introduction to Garz was through Ranger Rick magazine, which is through the National Wildlife Federation.

Yeah, we used to get that when I was good, man. Yeah, I got it from my kids too. And so, I mean, that's what got me started. And, you know, I thought they were cool. But, you know, now we look at that as that's an opportunity to introduce kids to the outdoors. I'm also just getting them outdoors. So, again, I like getting my kids out fishing and then, you know, helping them maybe reel it in. but I'm not a great angler.

I like to count on folks like you all for that. In grad school, I'm also not a hunter, but I am a consumer. So I just wasn't good at getting up early in the morning. So they go hunting for duck and deer, but I would eat all the food they brought back. We'd have game night and do that. So I'm a participant on some level, but I do recognize the importance. How long have you been married? Nine years as of just a week and a half ago.

Same purse. We met at Shed Aquarium. So she was a great writer. She's not a fish person, but she is bought into the gar, you know, the whole gar thing. At our wedding, instead of escort cards, you know, got the name tags or the table, she made escort guards, which are gar figurines with the name tags them. I did not know about it at all. So, you know, she is all for it.

She's got the gar earrings. And so, again, we've got some, you know, fish connections there. Did you guys go to Garrasic Park on your honeymoon? I know, right? You know, if it existed, we would do that, Brody. So, you know, that's where the DNA is really going. We're trying to bring back gars. but then it'll just look the same as what we have now.

So it's going to... Yeah, that'd be real bummed out. Millions of dollars in grand money. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's a gar. Yeah. All right, well, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. Tell people how to find your work if they want to come find or if they want to send you weird specimens or whatever. Yeah, if they look up garlab, garlab.org. If you look at Garlab, you'll find us. And we're on the social media platforms, the garlab on Instagram and on all the major platforms there. So if you look up Gar Lab, you'll find us. There's not that many of them. I think there's just one so far until we expand further like the Big Ten. So they can get a hold

you and send an email and say, one time I. Yeah. Tell us the stories. If you know spots for them, if you get a big Gar. Like, we're interested in that. It is, again, a broad spanning effort. And so we want contributions from the general public. If you catch a gar in a freak place? Yeah, yeah. Let us know. I'm always up for Gar Stories. All right. Garlab org? Yep. Garlab.org? Is that simple?

Yeah, yeah, that's simple. There was a lot of competition for it, Steve. Yeah. When he did a keyword search on GarLab, it was clean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I say one last thing? Yeah. We used to do touch tanks at the hatchery a lot.

The most popular fish were always Gar. They, like, really appeal to children. There's something like a very basic level. We just love about garfish. Yeah. And they handle touch tanks super well. Yeah, yeah. A lot of fish can handle that stress.

Gar can. so they're great for like introducing kids to cool prehistoric rough fish one of my favorite pictures that I've seen of kids interacting with gars is one that Spencer took from that hatchery so I've used that before in outreach activities but it's like these kids reaching and touching that long nose gar so I think that's uh they don't they don't see it as weird they don't see it as trash I think that's that's hope for the next generation okay you know we didn't get into is cleaning them tin snips yeah tin snips is good that's one of our books

isn't it brodie you know peeling them and all that you know pulling their little back straps out save the head

for us maybe well for now on once we get our once we get a jugger from out of the hiding that's all I'm going to do all right thanks a lot man

all right thanks for having yeah thank you This season on Blood Trails, each story begins with a hunter stepping into the wild, but not all of them come back. I'm Jordan Sillers, a journalist with over a decade of experience investigating stories about hunting, fishing, guns, and crime. join me as we track the truth through tangled cover and cold case files where every trail tells a story and every story leaves its own trail of blood blood trails listen now on spotify this is an iHeart podcast