Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Bull Shark Attack - What's the Spanish Word for Shark?

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

The story of a shark attack that takes place down in Cancun, Mexico. This is an inspiring tale of a woman who was strong enough to survive and go onto share her experience with a bull shark with the rest of the world, helping many others find the strength to live their best life. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, welcome back to Tooth and Claw. On today's episode, we're talking about another shark attack. We hope you enjoy it and learn a little something from it. Oh, and just as a quick little self-plug, we actually just put up our first t-shirt for sale over at our storefront, designed by our friend Robin Banks. You can find that at www.com. That's our storefront. And as always, feel free to leave us a review and rating over at Apple Podcasts.

It really is a huge help for us. We've seen tons of people are discovering our show since so many of you have taken the time to do that for us, and we will forever be grateful to you. All right, that's enough sweet talking. Let's get to the show. Okay, we're here. We're here doing the podcast. Here we are. It's just you. It's just me. Bringing the energy. Bringing the energy on a morning podcast recording session with two of my best friends in the whole wide world. That doesn't count. I'm your brother. Well, not all brothers are friends, Jeff. Okay.

Would you say I'm a top 10 friend? Oh, yeah. Like MySpace, would I be top eight? You'd be top five, dude. Hey, Mike. Well, my space is tricky because you have to have like a couple hot chicks on your top eight. You have to, yeah. So then it's really like your best like three guy friends.

Right. You'd probably, you'd make the cut, Mike. Oh, nice. Even with that stipulation. As a hot chick or as one of my guy friends. Nice. Wes, I got a question for you. Okay.

Do the animals, like, how good are they sensing when a forest fire is close to them? I think they're pretty good at it. Like right next to them. I think they're really good at that. I think they know when that's happening. I am always kind of surprised how many animals get burned up in forest fires, though. Are there any animals that, like, can survive when the fire goes over them, like bugs or something? Yeah, there's probably stuff that lives underground.

that survives it. But I think everything above ground pretty much gets burned up. But they're pretty good at running away before it gets there? What, bugs? No, just like deer and bears and stuff. I think, you know, whenever there's a big one, there's always some animals that get burned. And I think it's ones that just get really confused and go the wrong way or something.

I don't think they're just like standing there and then the fire just burns them. And they're like, oh, shoot. I think they like make a mistake. But I don't know, it's a good question I mean, yeah, I think they just kind of get panicked And go the wrong way And sometimes the fire is just faster than them Yeah, I mean sometimes people get burned up in them too

And we're pretty smart usually, so Yeah, we do like send people To parachute into them though, too Totally, but like just non-smoke jumpers Get burned sometimes too Yeah That's a great question though, Jeff Thanks, I should have made it a listener question

Well, you know, it's a host question question. You guys ready to talk about sharks? Always. Cool. I want to do a quick, you know, it's been a little while since we've done this, but let's do a quick podcast mission statement. I thought you were going to say since the last time we've said, I love you. No, oh, we can do that too. I love you guys. Love you, too, Wes. I love you guys. So really this podcast. That should be a mission statement. That we love each other. This podcast is about animal attacks. but we're trying to do it from a very animal-centric position. We're telling stories about people,

and we obviously care about, you know, what's happening to these people, and it's awful when this kind of stuff happens. But our main goal is to talk about the animals, how people can avoid future problems with that specific animal, and also just, like, learning about the animals so that you can better appreciate them and not be afraid of them when you're out in the woods

or in the ocean or whatever it might be. So really what we're trying to do is educate people through the storytelling to help them have more confidence, not to necessarily be more afraid of the animal. And that's kind of a fine line to walk. I guarantee there are people that hear these stories that it might make them more afraid, but that's not our goal. Our goal is to give you the information you need to feel more confident when you're outside or when you're around these different kind of animals. That's what we want. And hopefully that's working for some of you. And if it is, let us know in our reviews on Apple Podcast.

Yeah, I was going to say, it's been really cool. We've gotten some feedback from people who have had bear encounters and other things. They've said, I remembered what they said in tooth and claw. So I knew not to run and I had my bear spray ready. Totally. And it's like really cool to hear people tell us that they had a bear who was like acting aggressive towards them and they were prepared because they listened to this podcast. It's truly like the best compliment we can get, like more so than anything else. So, yeah, we're really happy you guys are listening.

We love all our listeners. Someone said that they were prepared to grab the bear cub and hold it over the cliff like I had suggested in one of our grizzly bear episodes. Yeah, don't do that. Remember anything, pretty much just listen to what I say when it comes to the safety stuff. All right. So we are not, we're talking about sharks today. They're probably, I think of all the animals we talk about, sharks are the group of animals that people have the most fear over, like instilled fear that they can't really shake.

Myself included, like of all of our animals, they're the ones. Like when I'm out in the open ocean by myself, I start thinking about sharks. I don't necessarily do that in the woods or anything with bears and mountain lions. But when I'm bobbing around in the ocean, sharks pop into my head almost every time. snakes and spiders might give them a run for their money on that. That's true. They more like give people the willies than anything. But I think as far as real fear of like dying, it might be sharks.

But who knows? You might be right. Anyway, today we're going to talk about bull sharks, which are shark species that are really infamous for attacks. There are a lot of attacks from bull sharks all over the world. But we're going to talk about a specific attack that happened in Cancun, Mexico. So are you guys ready for the story? Me Gusta Mexico.

Tambien me gusta. If there's anywhere I'd want to get attacked, it'd be in Cancun, because at least it'd be beautiful. Yeah, sure. You know? Yeah. Does that make it better? I don't know. Yeah, probably.

At least you're not cold when you're out on the beach, like, bleeding out. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's give you a lot. Would you want to get attacked in like a garbage dump or something? Maybe. Really? At least then I'm not like, oh, man, I could be at the beach.

right now if I like wasn't just bit by a shark. But you are at the beach. Well, not, but then your vacation gets cut short and you're all sad. So you'd rather be in a garbage dump. Attacked by a shark. I'll have to think about it. Garbage dumps are cool though. You can find a lot of free stuff.

I got a cool TV once. All right, this episode's already off the rails. All right. So this attack happened on January 31st, 2011. It happened to 39-year-old Nicole Moore. So Nicole was staying at the Grand Park Royal Cancun Carib in Cancun, Mexico with some friends from an exercise class. They all exercised together. They're really active people. And they had traveled for Orangeville, Ontario, which is a small town a bit north of Toronto. And they went to Mexico just to kind of get out of the cold,

enjoy some beautiful white sand beaches, the crystal clear blue water. If you've ever been to the Yucatan Peninsula, if you've been to Cancun or Cozum or any of those places to loom, you know just how beautiful it is there. It's a wonderful part of the world. So Nicole and the group had just finished playing some beach volleyball, and her friends, after they finished up, they decided they'd go back into the hotel, shower off, get cleaned up. But she was like, hey, I'm on the beach, the ocean's right there. I'm just going to go jump in the ocean to cool off. So she's walking towards the water. She's feeling the cool breeze of the ocean. She's probably just having, you know, a really amazing time in Cancun, but what she doesn't realize is that her life is about to change very drastically.

So, just offshore, there's two large bull sharks, and they're patrolling the shallow water looking for fish, maybe even a sea turtle. And as they're patrolling this water and hunting around for fish and food, two male staff members of the resort, and I'm unclear whether these guys were out patrolling or if they're just kind of out having fun, but they're out on wave runners, and they noticed these two large sharks. So they turned their wave runners toward the sharks in attempt to scare them off. So they're kind of buzzing them with their wave runners.

And this worked with one of the sharks and it bolted for deeper water, but the other one turned and swam toward the shore. So Nicole is enjoying this water and as she's swimming around, she's probably like waist deep. She looks out towards the horizon and she sees these two Mexican guys on wave runners

and they're waving their arms and they're yelling in her direction. And initially she thinks, oh, these guys are just kind of having fun and messing around and they're not really looking at me. But then she sees that they're focused on her and they're waving their arms and they're yelling and they're yelling something in Spanish that she couldn't understand. And that word is Tiberon.

Oh, nice. Yeah, Jeff, you speak some Spanish. You know what Tiberon means. Shack. Yep, chack. Shacks. Shacks. I mean, I feel like I would assume that I don't know what I would think if I didn't know,

understand what they were saying, but I saw them doing that. And they were decent ways away and she could kind of just hear that word. It's not. And like, she didn't even know if they were upset yet or not. Well, and the thing is she's only in waste deep water. Exactly. If I'm in like waste deep water, I'm not thinking about sharks yet. When you, if you're in a beautiful Caribbean place like that and you run out in the water, you don't think about it.

You know, you're just out in the water. It feels very safe. I think about it if I, like, swim out like 30 feet, you know? No, you don't. I've seen you do that and you don't think of it. Well, I think about it. Don't care. All right.

So, these guys are yelling Tiberon at her. She starts to realize something's wrong. And she turns to wade back through this waist deep water when she feels a bump from behind. So instantly, she realizes what the warnings had been about, and she knows what's happening. And then she feels teeth sink into the flesh of her left thigh. And they go all the way in and scrape against her femur bone. She then watches in horrors, the water all around her turns bright red, and a big bull shark rips over a foot of skin and flesh from her leg.

Sounds kind of beautiful. Just all the water turning red. Red, the crystal blue water turning red slowly. You got to be careful with that too, because that blood will attract sharks. All right. So a little bit about sharks, bull sharks. Females are roughly eight feet long. They weigh about 300 pounds.

Males are slightly smaller with these sharks. The longest bull shark ever recorded was about 13 feet long, and then the heaviest was around 900 pounds. They have a 1,300 PSI bite force, which with Great Whites, they haven't really ever measured it accurately, but they guess it could be around 4,000 PSI. But apparently for like stuff that's been accurately measured, for fish that are cartilaginous, I'm probably saying that wrong, but fish that have cartilage instead of bone, bull sharks have pound for pound the highest PSI bite force. of fish. Of cartilage. I can't say the word. But fish that have cartilage.

Yeah, I think that's it. Instead of bone skeletons. So like sharks, rays, skates, sawfish, all of those are cartilages. So they got a pretty strong bite. They got a bite. Yeah. So as I mentioned, they have cartilage instead of bone for their skeletons. If she bit it back, it wouldn't really care.

Probably not. Yeah. Probably not. They go through tens of thousands. Like on the tip of the dorsal thing. Maybe. Yeah, sure. Whoa, shark fins, that's not, we don't eat that.

We're not eating. You don't want anyone biting that. That's a good point. All right. So they go through tens of thousands of teeth in their lifetime. And when we did our great white episode, and I believe our Oceanic White Tip episode as well, we mentioned this. And I wasn't totally clear on the process there.

And I got some more clarification. And essentially, they have like a groove in their jaw where teeth are just constantly growing. and they move up into their gums as needed. So it's almost like this little conveyor belt of teeth. And our teeth are rooted into our jaws. Like we have pretty much like roots on your teeth that go all the way into your jawbone. They don't have that. So they're pretty much loose in their gums.

And that's why they lose a lot of teeth. But it's also why they can produce so many. So they can go through tens of thousands of teeth in their life. Do you think it bothers them to lose teeth? Like does it hurt? I don't think so. I don't think it hurts like it does for us just again because we have so many roots and nerves and stuff. I think for them they just kind of pop out.

But that's a good question. Yeah. So why are they called bull sharks? What's the tie there? From what I read, it's mostly because they're stocky looking and they have this broad nose and then they have a really aggressive behavior. So people call them bull sharks because bowls are aggressive and kind of stocky and whatnot. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I gathered. It's a little unclear still, but as far as I know, that was the main reason.

So they have, we've talked about this with their other shark species. They have electroreceptors called Ampulade a Lorenzini. Those Ampulated Lorenzini can detect electrical fields of their prey. Go ahead if you guys want to make the Ampulated Lorenzini joking. And I know you both do. So bad. You're just thinking about my olive guy to the joke again. They also have lateral lines, which, you know,

almost all fish have, and lateral lines pick up different frequencies in the water. So, for example, if there's like struggling prey or something, they can pick up that frequency of struggling prey. Oh, interesting. Like all sharks, they're just really built for being predators. I mean, they have all these different senses. They have an amazing sense of smell, too, with their olfaction, like, where they can pick up the tiniest bits of blood in the water and follow that.

Yeah, I'm actually looking at a picture right now. Their nose looks like it's built for smelling. It's got like, it actually kind of does look like a bull snout almost with like the, you know. You can kind of imagine a septum piercing like you see in cartoon bulls. Yeah, that'd be sweet. And if you want to, if you want to hear more about like how well they can pick up different scents, it's similar to gray whites and we talk a lot about that in our gray white episode. So go ahead and listen to that.

But for now, we're not going to get too bogged down in that part of your biology. That sensory thing where they sense prey moving around. That's why you're not supposed to like splash much when you see a shark. Yeah, so both of those amputated Lorenzini which pick up electrical fields and then the lateral line which picks up different like frequencies in the water. Those are, yeah, those really, especially the lateral line and, well, especially the amputated Lorenzi, both of them. If you're splashing around in the water and making a lot of noise, they know that you're

struggling and that to them is like, oh, this is easy prey. Okay. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump. At Ralph's, you can enjoy more ways to save and more rewards every time you shop. So it's always easy to save big every day with savings and rewards. Ralph's SoCal for over 150 years.

Savings may vary by state. Fuel restrictions apply. Seasite for details. So one of the coolest things about bull sharks is that they are found throughout warm coastal waters in the world, but they're also found in freshwater, which means they're deodromis. I might be pronouncing that wrong too, but it pretty much means fish that can exist in both fresh and salt water. So bull sharks inhabit a large number of rivers and lakes throughout the world, including the Mississippi River, the Ganges River, the Ganges River, the Zambesiezy River, the Tigris River, and Lake Nicaragua. So guess how far- mentioning a Huckleberry Finn,

encountering a bull shark in this little Mississippi trip. It's not impossible. Guess how far up the Mississippi they've been found? Oh, all the way? Where does it go to the Arctic? I don't think so. No. The headwaters of the Mississippi are in like Michigan or Minnesota,

one of those M states. They've made it to the top? No, so they've been found 700 miles up the Mississippi in Alton, Illinois. Which is much further than I would have guessed. I would have thought they would be found in like Louisiana or something, but they've made it all the way up to Illinois. And then in the Amazon River, they've made it 2,500 miles all the way up to Iquitos Peru. So they pretty much swam the entire distance of Brazil.

That's incredible. Yeah. So people like in the Mississippi River need to worry about shark attacks? Not really. So that's the thing is they are, they're, they're, they're, one of the big three, which means they're responsible for a lot of attacks. Them, white sharks, tiger sharks are the three big ones. Great whites have done the most. Then I believe tiger sharks have a slight edge on bull sharks and then bull sharks, but they hardly ever attack in freshwater. It's

incredibly rare. My big three is Great whites, Tiger sharks, and White tip sharks. Because I count all the shipwreck attacks. Yes. And there is some, there is some, uh, little bit. bit of debate over that. Big three. Whether or not, you know, these Oceanic White Tip attacks on people and shipwrecks should count. But as far as the international shark attack file, which is kind of what they use for shark attacks, they don't count those.

That's the big three. Yeah. So the big three are great whites, which have 333 total attacks in that shark attack file, tiger sharks, which have 131, and bull sharks, which have 117. There are a lot of shark attacks that. happen where they don't know the species, and there's a good chance that a lot of those are bull sharks. So it's likely higher than what we're hearing here.

That's surprising that megaladons didn't make the big three. It's not surprising because they're extinct. What? Yep. Yeah. No, they're just below the surface. They're in the very deep ocean, and they can't get out because of that atmospheric pressure, or not atmospheric, but the pressure down below.

If you watch the movie, it explains it all. See, okay, that makes sense, yeah. The Jason State the movie? Yeah. Okay. I got to watch that again. Anyway, it's pretty cool that they don't just, like, go into freshwater. They actually live in freshwater sometimes.

I know it's really cool. So I was in Guatemala a lot, but everyone, I met people from Nicaragua, and they would always brag about how they have sharks in the lake Nicaragua. And I was like, what? Yeah. That can't be right. And those ones just live there full time. That's crazy.

Have you guys seen Shark Nato? No, I saw the clip in Shark Nato 3 with Conan O'Brien where he's like yelling at a, it's a great clip. He's just yelling for like one straight minute and then gets eaten by a shark. Okay. Anyway, Shark Nato is about like sharks getting, you know, they're in a tornado getting sucked out of the ocean and they get thrown out on land. And it's actually not too far from the truth. because sometimes when huge storms show up, like big cyclones and hurricanes and floods and stuff, bull sharks will show up in really crazy places, like people's backyards, flooded streets.

There's some really crazy photos of bull sharks in Australia in like this guy's garden and stuff. It's pretty wild. So it's actually like... So Shark Neda could happen. Based on true events. Uh-huh. All right. They should put that at the start of the movie, like in Fargo.

Yeah, based on... So as far as attacks, though, with bull sharks, they are pretty aggressive in territorial sharks, and they do hunt in shallow coastal waters. So that's the main reason why they are responsible for so many attacks on people. And that's exactly what is happening to Nicole here. She's in shallow coastal water, and she's dealing with a very aggressive territorial shark. All right, so let's get back to our story. So Nicole had just barely been bitten in the leg by this bull shark,

and it ripped over a foot of flesh and skin from her leg. She felt no pain, but she knew she had to get out of the water, and her left leg is completely useless at this point. So she, instead of trying to kick with her feet or walk out, she tries to swim with her arms. And when she does that, the shark circles around, rushes forward again, and grabs her left arm and its jaws, and completely shreds her flesh,

and it starts trying to pull her underwater by that arm. Oh, man. So she's a mother of two. Seems like that should hurt. Yeah, yeah. Maybe, yeah, she probably felt this one. She's a mother of two and she instantly starts thinking about her children and realizing if she doesn't act, she, it's very well, you know, that she could die on that beach.

So she raises her right arm, she clenches her fist and brings it down super hard on the snout of the shark, starts punching it and causes it to immediately swim off. Oh, wow. Yeah, so she's really, I mean, and as we mentioned, like, she's very active. This is a tough person. She's got a good punch. Yeah, and so she hits it pretty hard from what I gathered. She's now on the edge of consciousness.

She's motionless from, like, the devastation of her wounds. She can hardly move. And then also just the total trauma and shock of this attack. So one of these guys that was on the wave runner comes up to her. He locks fingertips with her, grabs her by her good arm, and actually, like, just toes her into the shore, leaving a trail of blood the entire way. So wait, that was the end of the, the shark punch worked? Yeah, it worked.

Whoa. That's pretty cool. I think this guy and the Wave Runner showed up pretty quickly after as well. Okay. And I'm going to tell you why I think that in a little bit. Well, if there's anything we've learned from tooth and claw, just any animal attack you got, just punch him in the face. If you're actually being attacked by some animals that does work,

you don't want to do that with the grizzly bear. If you remember our story just a couple episodes ago of the guy that punched the grizzly bear in the face. Like a rat snake? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Spider or rattlesnake. The spider would probably work. So this guy beaches his wave runner and he drags Nicole up onto the shore where she's finally able to get a good look at her wounds and she had some medical experience and

she knew that she was in trouble. She knew that she had to maintain consciousness and that she had to get help. So she yells at this small crowd that's gathering around her and she's pleading with them to talk to her and to help keep her awake because she doesn't want to pass out. As she's laying in the sand, this part was just gnarly to me. Each heartbeat, she could feel her heart beating, and each heartbeat caused a severed artery in her leg to spurt blood over a foot up into the air and splash down onto the sand. So as she's laying there and her heart's beating, she's watching blood just squirting out of her leg onto the sand. And it's going a foot up in the air.

That would be weird to watch. Like your own body do that. Yeah. I mean, I had a friend come over the other day, Trav. Shout out to Trav. Where is this going? He tried to, I have like a cyst in my wrist right now and he tried to like pop it and when he did that he's a doctor I like almost passed out because like he shot all the stuff in my arm and I felt my something inside of my wrist pop and I'm kind of I guess I'm not great with that stuff. I've never had problems before and so I don't know how people who are like watching their artery spurting blood into the sand managed to stay conscious. It's crazy to me. Like you guys. gotta be pretty tough, but I don't really have problems with blood, I guess.

So you think that you pretty much, what happened yesterday was pretty equivalent to what's happening. Well, this is a while ago. No, I'm saying that like, I'm saying a stupid little thing like having a cyst pop inside of my wrist, like made me, made my brain like break enough to where it was like, hey, maybe you should just pass out for this, you know? Mm. And it's not like, I popped a pimple once so it's really passed out.

Yeah. And, no, but maybe it's like watching your. artery, spurt blood. Yeah, maybe. I don't think so. Anyway. I listened to a story about this guy I know who had a cyst get popped. It made me want to just...

Are we talking about passing out or just falling asleep? It was popped inside of my wrist. That's the weird thing. Like, I couldn't see it and I felt it explode inside my wrist. Anyway, doesn't matter. It wasn't like it scared me. Just for some reason I got, I don't know, lightheaded. Okay.

Yeah. Let's get back. No, you're strong, Wes. You're a strong guy. All right. So, an American tourist was nearby. She had lost a ton of blood at this point. Like, she had lost a bunch of blood in the water. Now she's still losing it on the beach.

You bleed out quick when you have a severed artery. And she was actually having a hard time breathing because that blood is recycling a lot of, or is moving a lot of oxygen through your body. So she was actually having a hard time bleeding because she had lost so much blood. So this American tourist who was nearby actually put his hands. over the severed artery and kept them there the entire time she was on the beach, doing as best to keep some steady pressure and to prevent further blood loss, which very well could have saved her life.

Two young nurses also showed up, and they asked if anyone had something that could be used for a tourniquet, and a Canadian tourist ripped the string from his shorts, and they tied that around her upper arm, because her arm is also totally mangled. She's teetering on the edge of consciousness, and she hears a bystander say, she's going to die, you don't lose that amount of blood and not die.

So there's like a real pessimistic bystandard. That's a peanut gallery for the ages. Yeah. I'm so mad at that. Got mad at him. He's like, what do I say? What'd I say? If I heard someone say that, I'd be like, what the hell, man?

Anyway, she's thinking about her kid. She's thinking about her husband. The rest of her family, as she passes, you know, she passes out, slips into unconscious. just as she hears the sirens arriving from the ambulance. She's rushed to the hospital. Her body's actually starting to shut down as they arrive to the hospital. She's no longer breathing on her own. Her organs are shutting down.

And they do an eight-hour operation, this Mexican hospital staff, to put an artificial bloodline that'll pump blood directly to her heart. So that's the first thing they have to do is just get her blood flowing again. So one crazy thing about this story, and this was something I said I was going to come back to, someone went out in the water and they found this footlong piece of flesh and skin that the shark had torn off. And that's what makes me think that that guy on the wave runner probably came back in pretty quick because bull sharks, when they feel threatened, they'll regurgitate what they just ate as an attempt to distract whatever predator might be coming in to kill them. So my thought is that the shark was meaning to take a bite out of her and eater,

but it didn't have time to actually eat it and it spit it out as it swam away. It could have also been her... The case it's like the Great White, and then the Great White would eat that meat instead of the shark. Yeah, or like another bigger bull shark or something. That also could have been her hitting it on the nose that caused it to do that. But it could be one of those things. Anyway, someone finds this like huge chunk of flesh and skin, and they rush it to the hospital. Her friend gets it and rushes it to the hospital.

And the doctor has to attempt to reattach this flesh, this doctor in Cancun. But they don't, for whatever reason, they don't attach. a vein to that flesh and and it really it's already like been a while since the shark bit it off so it's already starting to die and kind of go bad and uh she her shredded arm is also starting to turn a little bit black so her husband jay he had arrived in this hospital he had heard what happened he flew out and he saw that nico was like completely in agony from the pain and the treatments and everything and six days later he finally gets like the go-ahead to take her to Toronto where she's going to be treated by like renowned plastic surgeons and some really

great doctors so these doctors in Toronto when they remove the bandages from that piece of flesh that had been attached and they didn't attach the vein they were like overwhelmed by the smell of the rotting flesh and they found sand and dried salt from salt water and everything in this wound like a bunch of sand yeah I was going to ask you that Probably sucks to get bit by a shark because you just get dragged onto the sand afterwards and all your wounds are like filled up with sand. Yeah. And like who knows what the, you know, I don't want to point fingers at this, this crew,

this hospital crew that worked on her in Mexico because they likely saved her life by putting in that bloodline or they for sure saved her life. But as far as cleaning this wound, they didn't do the best job because you really need to get any kind of debris out. Like any sand, anything can. cause an infection and unfortunately they didn't do that. They did save her life and she credits them with that, but then she also thinks that maybe some of the complications she suffered

were from them not cleaning it out quite as well. So these doctors had to remove that chunk of skin and flesh, and then they used gallons of saline solution to wash out the leftover sand and debris. I was going to be surprised if the chunk of skin worked. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I agree. So a few days later, they're also like, they had to cut a bunch of dead tissue away from her arm, and they realized there's no blood supply to her hand or fingers too.

And so that is also starting to die. A few days later, she has another operation where they took tissue from her right leg, and they placed out on her left femur where she had the big bite. And the doctors felt like that operation went well. But usually you have about 48 hours for one of those graphs to really work. And if it doesn't work in that time, they think that it's. it's probably not going to work. And they thought that it was going to work because after 48 hours, everything looked fine. And they kept checking on and things looked good. But then after about six days,

circulation finally stopped in that graft. And they saw that it was starting to die. And they made the difficult decision to just remove the graft. And she was just going to have this big kind of gaping hole in her leg forever. So she was pretty devastated. She was really hoping that would work. But then all this outpouring of support from her friends and her family and her community, really helped her feel a lot better. And throughout this whole ordeal, her doctors mentioned over and over again just how tough and positive she actually was

because it's a pretty bummed deal. Like you get part of your leg ripped away, your arms totally shredded, you have like some weird medical complications didn't necessarily need to happen. You've been in the hospital for a long time. It'd be hard to stay positive during that. And apparently Nicole was like a real trooper.

Nice job, Nicole. Yeah, good job, Nicole. Are your ad campaigns, lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline. That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard, confessions. My boss asks for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had. Impressions.

Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, turns sick conditions apply. A few weeks later, she gets some more bad news. There's still no circulation in her arm.

She's cut from her beach volleyball team. Yeah. No circulation in her arm. Doctors aren't able to save it, and they actually have to amputate her arm. So a few weeks later, on March 25th, it had been almost two months since she'd been attacked. She was finally discharged from the hospital. She had a large hole in her leg, a stump for her left arm, and she still had months of painful physical therapy ahead of her. but she was finally able to go home after two months.

Nicole had to undergo a bunch more surgeries. She still has phantom pain in her arm that prevents her from wearing a prosthetic. It just hurts too much when she puts it on. But she's very active and she moonlights as a motivational speaker, which is cool. We've had a few people now that we've talked about that ended up being motivational speakers. She actually also, she created a community online for people that are dealing with the trauma of shark attacks. And she's been, the coolest thing to me is that she's actually been,

been in like a really strong voice for shark conservation. She doesn't hate sharks. Um, I think after her attack, the Mexican government there tried to kill a bunch of sharks in that area. And she was like horrified by that. And she's been on a bunch of shows and stuff telling people about her encounter and why we shouldn't necessarily blame sharks and sharks are just doing what they do. So she's really, I mean, I really think Nicole's very inspirational in a lot of different ways. All right. So that's actually our story. I really liked this one. I thought it was interesting. Cancun and Mexico are actually not high, you don't have a high probability of being attacked by a shark there. Kintana Roo, which is like the state that

Cancun's in, has only had eight shark attacks on the shark attack file since 1907. So there's really not that many. It's really not a common place for shark attacks. And I believe hers is like the only one where someone lost a limb or whatever. So, okay, do you guys have any questions about the story? I was going to ask you, you think there'd be a good idea to do like the running of the bulls with bull sharks in water? The swimming of the bulls? Yeah, you got to swim away from them. I don't know. Probably not.

No. Mike, do you have questions? I'll say no to that too. Oh, you're asking for questions. No. You did a good job. You covered all the base. Hey, thanks, bud.

All my curiosities were dispelled. All right. Well, let's rank this on our ouchy scale. Jeff, do you want to go first? Yeah, I'm going to give it, I'm going to give it a nine. A nine. Whoa. Yeah.

Do you care to explain yourself? Sure. Well, whenever, like, you get an injury that you don't feel right away, those ones are, like, the really bad ones. I agree. It's like your body doesn't even know how much pain dissend you yet, you know? Right. And then she almost died. She watched herself squirting blood, so that's like the traumatic part of it.

And it still hurts her years later because of the phantom pain. The phantom pain is what pushes it from like an eight to nine for me. And just like two months in the hospital, that's a long time to just be getting surgeries. Yeah, a hospital in Cancun though. No, she's only there for like five days. And then she's mostly in the hospital in Toronto. She got salt water and sand in the wound. It hurts to get sand.

So that would hurts. Yeah. Yeah. And salt water. Mike, what do you think? Yeah, so I was going to go with a nine for all the same reasons. But what pushes it up personally from an eight to a nine to me is I hate when you're at the beach and you're all wet and then you get in sand. And you're just all sandy.

That's really uncomfortable. That's a whole ouchy point for you. Yeah. All right. I was actually, I was going to say like seven, seven and a half. But I think Jeff convinced me to do an eight or maybe even an eight and a half. I think you're right. Her ordeal lasted a long time.

It's ongoing. Like she's still filling pain, which isn't typical for our people. So, you know, I might even, I might even bump it up to a nine. She lost an arm. I sold you. Yeah, you really did. Another thing that convinced me, too, to go to a nine is that there was just such peaks and valleys of hopes and then lost and then getting those hopes dashed, like your skin is back. but they didn't do it right.

I don't know. It just seems like a psychological battle at a certain point, even almost as much as a physical one. Yeah. You know, that kind of story would make someone a really good motivational speaker. Yeah. So how many ouchies for the shark? Like maybe a half-ouchy or one outchie.

For getting hit in the nose? Yeah. And then it threw out. Well, I was just thinking, like, if I was eating pizza and someone punched me in the nose, Yeah. I don't think I would spit out the pizza, would I? What if it was like a threat and you thought maybe you were about to be eaten by something that wanted that pizza more than you? Then I would probably spit it out.

Okay. Yeah, I think a gut punch would be more likely to do it than that. Yeah. Right. But we'll have someone punched you in the nose and you had like a mouth full of food. Do you think you would swallow or spit it out? I probably would fall out. I wouldn't like spit it out, but I don't think I'd swallow either.

That's a good question. It would just fall out. You don't open your mouth, right? When you get punched in the face, I don't know. Maybe. All right. No, I guess. That's a really good question.

It is a good question. Maybe we should start doing ouchies for our animals, too. I'm going to give it two. Let's get into our category. So we've done a couple shark episodes already, so I wasn't just going to do our typical pop culture category. So rather than just picking your favorite pop culture shark from history, what I'm going to do this time is your favorite show that jumped the shark.

So for those of you have never heard the term jump the shark before, it pretty much means like when a show just totally goes off the rails or like gets into a plot line that just like makes no sense whatsoever. And it originated with happy days when the Fonz was like water skiing and they literally like jumped over a shark. And people thought it was so stupid. And the show was bad from there on out that they call that jumping the shark. So I want you guys to pick a show that you watched that you feel like just completely jump the shark.

And I'll go first just so you guys can have an idea of what I'm looking for. I almost embarrassingly for a while watched the show True Blood, which was on HBO. It's like a vampire show that was mostly just like an easy excuse for like a lot of gratuitous sex scenes. And I like enjoyed that show for a little while. And then there was a season where they got into like this weird fairy subplot. and things got real weird and real mystical and super dumb. And it really jumped the shark for me. Like, I hated that show after that.

So that's my example. You'll do vampires but not fairies. It just was too much. It went too far. True Blood sounds like the kind of show a shark would really like. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. The first three, like the first two or three seasons of True Blood are great,

especially the first season. After that, terrible show. Still worth watching or no? Watch the first season. Okay. Yeah, I'll put it down. Put it on my list. Why don't you guys go next?

At the same time? All right. Three, two. After I count down from three. So I'm going to go with a movie franchise. I'm going with Fast and the Furious. I recently watched the ninth one. It's just bonkers.

Yeah. Like cars, somehow you can fall like 100 feet as long as you land on a moving car. Yeah. And then it like doesn't hurt at all. Yeah, it's like waiting on a mattress. What do you think the moment was though in the franchise that really just was like, okay, we've gone too far now?

Probably when Paul Walker died. Yeah. I feel like they were all good when Paul Walker was in him. Six had some problems with like the airport where the runway was just like 10 miles long. Yeah. It's just like what's happening? It was like 500 miles long. Yeah. But seven I liked a lot, even though it was like kind of ridiculous.

But for me, eight and nine were the only ones where I just didn't really like care that much about the movie. Okay. And Hobbs and Schott. I liked nine. I didn't like eight at all. Me and Mike saw nine together. He got like dog piled by 20 people and just got up and tore the whole building down. Yeah, he's a superhero at this point. Incredible. Power of family. Yeah, that's mine. And Dexter kind of did when he said. I started dating his sister.

That's an honorable mention. Mike? So I've been re-watching MASH. Nice. I know. We'll get a lot of people. Wow. All our MASH friend fans out of 80-year-olds.

I have like this whole list of movies I've told Mike to watch. And he's rewatching MASH. It's a good show, okay? There's a reason why. I think the series finale is still like the most watched television event ever, I think. Yeah. So MASH kind of had more of a gradual jumping of the shark, but I think the one moment that really sticks out to me is when Radar leaves the show. That's probably not going to mean anything to anybody except for the one MASH fan out there, but that person knows what I'm talking about.

For all of our 80-plus octogenarians out there. Octogenarian listeners, you finally got your MASH reference. Hit me up in the DMs. I'm always ready to talk about MASH. Okay. All right. So our next category is going to be our cage match. For the sake of time, let's just, let's forego our introduction. I think at this point everyone knows what our cage match is.

And let's just do our cage match, animal v. animal, just our animals that live in water. Let's go, baby. Yeah. Go, go. So bull sharks. Best fight I'm guessing is alligator. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that's probably our best fight.

Them and alligators. and Oceanic White Tips, I think, would be our best fights. It depends. Like, if we're looking at, like, our biggest bull shark versus biggest alligator, I'd probably give a slight edge. I don't know. That's a good fight. Yeah, I don't know.

I will say Nile crocodiles have been known to kill bull sharks. Saltwater crocodiles have been known to kill bull sharks. Oh, yeah. Great white sharks can kill bull sharks. Orcas could definitely kill bull sharks. So they lose all those battles. A hippo could definitely kill a bull shark. They lose that one.

Jaguize. can. I've seen that. Yeah, have you? I saw a jaguar pull a shark out of a river. Really? In person? Yeah. No, it's like a video. Okay. Well, then it was probably a bull shark. Probably a little baby one though. Yeah, that's pretty small. Yeah. Anyway, there are, some of our animals can kill bull sharks, are marine animals. We haven't even done jaguars yet, so. Let's say, what about a polar bear versus bull shark in the water? I would probably give it to the bull shark, just because the polar bear doesn't have any way to get

leverage in the water, really. But I don't know, that's a tough one. But they do kill animals underwater, right? They do. That's a tough one. I don't know. Yeah. That's a good, and they are marine mammals,

so we should put them in the marine systems. It kind of changes it up a bit. Yeah, it does. That could go either way, I think. Turns out bull sharks aren't as tough as they'd like to have us think. They're pretty tough sharks. It's just that we've done some pretty tough marine animals. Okay, so let's do our, do you guys want to do our bet category?

Yeah. Okay. Bet number. These make me so nervous. I'm going to go 30 seconds. I'm going to put the number at 15. What is it? What am I naming?

Types of shark. Okay, so I'm going to bet that Wes can name. So the number is 14 and a half. 14 and a half. Okay, yeah. So I'm gonna, I've got confidence in Wes. He's let me down once, but that can't happen twice. Okay, so, and you owe me how much right now?

Like $15 or something. $10. Yeah. Okay, tell me when. Ready, set, go. Great White shark, salmon shark, Maco shark, tiger shark, bull shark, oceanic shark, oceanic white tip shark, gray reef shark, Caribbean reef shark, whale shark, basking shark, megamouse shark, dogfish

Wabagong shark Nurse shark Carpet shark Yes Let me think Dusky shark Bronze Whaler shark Galapago shark

Man there's so many sharks Blacktip shark Nice Holy cow We'll count the last one So that's 19 Good job Mike

I think Wabagong and Carpet shark might be the same shark But I'm not sure Okay Okay Well I think you made up Wabagon. No, Wabon's like a weird Australian shark that has all these big ways from the mouth.

All right. Jeff, you're up five bucks on Mike in the bets. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd. But too often, life gets busy. Or the price holds you back. Price line is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip.

Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. book on hilton.com or the hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected when you want savings not surprises it matters where you stay hilton for the stay let's do what would you what would you guys do what would mike and jeff do if you were attacked by a shark in waste deep water a bull shark in cancun mexico um yeah i'd probably well i speak spanish so first of all if someone's yelling tibaron me, I'm gonna just get out of that water. So that's how you're doing it? That's probably, yeah.

You're learning Spanish and then, okay. Yeah. Well, you know Spanish. And then I would just bonk it on the head before it bites me. Okay. Yeah. So here's my line of thinking. I would bleed on purpose, you know?

So the sharks coming at me. You cut your hand? So you know it's coming. Right, so you're not surprised. That's my first line of thinking. And then since it's a bull shark, I'm just going to pretend like I'm a matador, you know, just kind of dodge to the side whenever it comes at me. You can do like the red blood instead of, because you're already bleeding.

Exactly. Just kind of make it look like a, you know, you'd like stand right next to the blood square that you made. Right. All right. I'm just going to tell you what you should actually do. Jeff, yours is pretty good this time. like no Spanish and listen to people yelling at you. Mike, yours not so good.

You're not fast enough to dodge it probably. So I've actually, I've freedove with bull sharks before in Florida. The water that we dove in was really clear. And that was the thing that you need to have to actually get in the water with those kind of sharks, is clear water. And that's because they really do prefer to hunt in more murky water. It allows them to get much closer to their prey with those different senses and organs. that we mentioned, whereas the prey won't necessarily see them coming.

So by the time they actually launch their attack, they're really close. So the main thing you want to do is avoid being in a situation where you could get attacked by a bull shark. So you don't want to be in murky water. You don't want to swim in like early morning or late evening or at night because again they can use that darkness as good cover for them to hunt. So you want to avoid murky water, you want to avoid swimming in the dark. And you want to avoid places where like you have rivers and

out into the ocean because that also changes the water clarity and it brings a lot of food into those areas too. So avoid that. Avoid any kind of like carcass in the water that draws a lot of sharks and then also like pay attention. Avoid a carcass in the water? Yeah like if there's like a dead whale or something in the water. And then also pay attention to science. Like look when you get to the beach look and see if they've been seeing sharks and just and just be like very vigilant because you don't want to take any extra chances. If you actually are in the water and and you have a shark coming toward you. If you're like snorkeling or underwater,

the things to do are to make sure that you keep your eyes on that shark, keep forward facing with it, and if possible, keep something between you and the shark. So if you have any kind of pole or long object that you can keep in between you guys, the shark's probably not going to rush in and bite you. But really just keeping faced, like facing the shark, if it does come in,

you're going to reach your hand down and kind of push it away from you as it's coming in to inspect you. if you actually are in the water and you get bit by a shark, the main things to do are not to panic. The more you flap around in the water and splash and stuff, the more it's going to trigger it to want to come back in and continue attacking you. The thing to do is to go for either the eyes or the gills.

Now, she hit it on the nose. That can work too. But what some shark experts say is that if you go for the nose, there's a good chance that you could get bit again because they're pretty quick at reacting and they might bite your hand when you go for their nose. their eyes and their gills are a little bit safer to go for and a little bit more sensitive too. So if you can, try poking their eyes or going for their gills if you're actually being attacked.

It's probably different to where she was like kind of halfway out of the water. Uh-huh. So you can like hammer down a punch a lot harder. When you're underwater, you can't really punch very hard. But you could grab their gills and really rip on those. Right. So that's a good point. If you have the leverage, then you could probably hit it.

but otherwise you don't really have that. So really, she did great. I mean, she did what she could do aside from, like, not knowing Spanish and not knowing what those guys were trying to do. And I kind of, like, I don't want to point fingers, but there is a good chance in this attack that those guys who were out on the wave runners might have been, like, kind of almost harassing these sharks.

And I don't think they were doing it on purpose. I think they're trying to get him to leave. But they might have been pissing these sharks off, and the one decided to leave, and the other one went inshore. and this could have been just an attack where the shark was like feeling territorial, feeling like it was being harassed and decided to like attack something out of that. Well, it seems like for sure had they not tried to scare them off with the wave runners, you went to got attack. Almost for sure. It's hard to say, but I do think that's like a big part of this is that there's a decent chance that that shark was just feeling very defensive and attacked her out of that. So let's go to our listener questions.

All right. Seems like a good idea to, if you're going on a beach vacation somewhere, just learn the word for shark. Yeah, it's not a bad idea. That's what I'm going to plan on doing. Yeah. These guys could have done better like charades. They could have been like put their hand on their head or been like, rah, with their fingers or something, you know. To indicate the shark claws.

Or like, you guys can't see me, but. The munch. He was doing a munch with his fingers. All right. So we got a lot of Patreon questions. Cool. So this is from Ellis, and it says, how come Mike was a coward and chose a normal-looking anime character

to represent him on your all's new merch site instead of choosing a big-titty anime girl to be his picture? So first of all, I'm not a coward. Anyways, it's probably best that I'm not, even though, I don't know. I don't want to pretend to be anything that I'm not. Yeah. And a very generic anonymous anime boy is probably about his spot on a portrayal of me as we can get. Yeah. It's pretty good.

I'm the one that put that up there. And I think my actual Google term was generic brown-haired anime boy. Even though you're more blonde than brown-haired, I guess. But anyway, that was- That's perfect. Yeah. All right. Next one is from Madison.

And she says, okay, I have two questions. Would you rather be permanently drunk, but no one knows it, or you're completely sober, but everyone always thinks that you're drunk? Jeff, I think you should answer that question. Yeah, so most people, not most people, but a lot of people think I'm high, especially on the podcast, like hearing my voice. A lot of my friends when they first met you two were like, is your little brother high all the time? Yeah. And I never am. So it doesn't, it's not too bad.

So I'd probably choose, you know, being sober, but everyone thinks I'm drunk. Yeah, it would be miserable, we'd be drunk all the time. I should gather up all the messages I have from friends who I tell to listen to this podcast. And they're like, yeah, it's really good. What's wrong with Jeff? Someone said that Jeff sounds like Jerry Lewis, which was really funny to me. Who's Jerry Lewis? He's like a famous actor slash singer, but I listened to his voice that you guys do kind of have a similar voice.

Anyway. All right. So from Jessica. As someone who has worked with wildlife, including raptors and other predators, I was always told not to look them in the eye, as they can perceive that as a challenge. Yet West says to maintain eye contact with bears if I were to encounter one, along with other good tips. So they don't perceive that as a threat? Question mark? Is it just certain animals that that applies to?

Thanks. Yeah. With bears, it's not a big thing. It's not, you shouldn't necessarily be thinking about that when you're being encountered, like when you have a bear encounter. The things you should be thinking about are grouping up, backing away and getting your bear spray out. Don't worry about eye contact. Don't worry about any of the other stuff. But there are certain animals like, for example, wolves, mountain lions, some of the more like predatory animals, where eye contact is actually a good thing.

If you're focusing on them and you have that eye contact, they know that you can see them. They don't think that you're like prey that they can sneak up on at that. point and it's a good thing to do. I've read before with mountain lines, especially once you break eye contact or you turn or something, that's when sometimes that predatory response is triggered in them. So it's good to maintain eye contact with some of those animals. Typically though, that's like that's pretty far down the list of things that you should be worried about. The main things that you should be worried about with bears again is getting your bear spray out. If you have it with any other animal too using that bear spray but eye contact's like lower on your list of priorities of stuff

to worry about so uh for anyone out there who's like me kind of generally ignorant and uneducated when it comes to wildlife raptor is a term you can use for predatory birds yeah birds of prey our listener isn't work well maybe she's working at Jurassic park yeah she's not but yeah so raptor isn't the dinosaur in this context i had a raptor conservation job at hawk watch where i was doing like Eagles and hawks and all sorts stuff. Yeah. It's a really cool sounding job title. Yeah. Raptor conservationist. One tip too is don't

stare west directly in the eyes for too long. Yeah, don't ever do that. I get mad. He loses it. He's strong. This is from Luke. Saw this question once that I'd be curious to hear your answer on. What animal, given human intelligence, would

most easily take over the world? I was thinking ants. Love the podcast. Yeah, I think ants. Like ants are some other, or like spiders. Probably spiders. There's so many spiders out there. Ants weigh, the total number of ants weigh like seven times more than the total amount of humans.

Yeah, there's a ton of ants. And I think spiders outweighs too. And spiders kill ants. So I'm going to say spiders. I'm going to go with crows. Okay. That's a shot in the dark. Or like sparrows.

I don't know. Okay. Just because they could get us from the air or maybe rats. I'm saying some sort of insect or arachnid personally. Just because there are so many. Yeah, we can crush them. I think I would kill eight times my body amount in ants pretty easily. But what if they're smarter than us and they can build force fields and stuff?

I mean, ants are pretty smart for their size. Can we build force fields? No, but they're smarter than us, so they'll be able to. Oh, smarter than us. I don't remember. Is it smarter? No, they're human intelligence. Oh, okay.

Because I feel like if I was an aunt, it's like, okay, like I'm a smart aunt, but I'm still tiny and can't do anything. It's kind of like, it's like when I watch a horror movie about a haunted doll, and it's just like, I'm just not afraid of this doll. I could just swing it by its little feet into the wall. That's probably what I'd feel like if I met a smart aunt. Yeah. I'm going to change my answer to monkeys because they have fingers and they could just develop a nuclear bomb and blow us up. I feel like if they're just as smart as us, too, all they're going to do is watch TV and hang out. They're not actually going to attack us.

They're just going to contribute to climate change. Anyway. Well, there you go. That's how the KLS. Climate change. Fossil fuel extraction. Okay. So from Alex, what is the best solution?

for places like California National Parks where Bearsbury is prohibited. I'm going to Yosemimi for the first time and our goal is to avoid the crowds. Did I say it wrong? Why are you laughing? Just a chef's kiss whenever you say Yosemite. I just love it.

Say it. Say it for me. Yosemite. Yosemity. I thought the tea is silent. No, Yosemite. Okay. Yosemite.

There you go. Yosemite. Yosemite. Some people save that way. That's how it looks. Some people say it that way. All right. So their goals to avoid crowds and go on earlier hikes.

The trails seem pretty toverse, but without bearspray, what are other options? Honestly, so I think California National Parks, I think the reason they haven't allowed bear spray in some of them is because they've had people misunderstand and think that it's bear repellent, not bear spray. And so they, like, spray their kids with it or they spray their tent with it or something like that, thinking that it's going to keep bears away, which is actually the inverse. Like if you spray it on the ground and stuff, sometimes bears will come and like roll in it and stuff. It only works as like an aerosolized deterrent of bears. It'll stop a bear from attacking you if it like inhales it and stuff. As far as those national parks are concerned,

they don't allow it. I would bring it anyway. Just put it in your pack or something when you're coming in the gate and then hike with it or whatever. Can you order it online? Yeah, you can buy it at like Costco. You can buy it at lots of different places. places. Can you in California though? If it's legal? Yeah, they sell it. It's legal in California. It's just not legal in their national parks. So bring it in the park and use it still, especially if you're doing backcountry. Their bears aren't different from other bears. They're more habituated to people maybe. They could still attack you. You still want to have some kind of deterrent. Yeah, we had a listener who had like a scary camping experience. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's worth it just to have

it. And I don't know why they don't allow people, but I think you should have it. Okay. So this one's from Melissa. I'd like to hear about your scariest animal encounters. I mean, mine's just the bear den that was like a tunnel. Yeah, I think that's mine too. Mike says this fire ants. We've done it a lot in the episode, so we won't go too far into it. Am I right, Mike?

Was it your fire ants, your dad kicking fire ants on you? You laugh about it, but let me tell you. All right, so from Taryn. Never be the same. Hey, guys, I would like. like to know what your favorite collective noun for a species is. Litter of kittens, pack of wolves, pot of whales. Mine's kind of clear.

I think a lot of people like this one, but I like murder, murder of crows. I think that's a good one. That one stands out. Yeah. What's owls are like a parliament of owls? Oh, yeah. That's a cool one. Yeah.

He listed prickle of porcupines. I don't know that one. Yeah. One that's always stuck out to me is a group of albatross are called a rookery. Oh, yeah. A lot of seabirds. It's called a rookery. But a group of rooks is called a building.

So I just think that's kind of funny. It's not just a rookery of rooks. Okay. All right. So this one is from Lisa. Listening to y'all talk about terrible ways to die in Yellowstone prompted a question in my head. How would you all like to die via animal attack so that your funeral, whenever anyone mentions the cause of death everyone falls into fits of giggling because it's so absurd so

like what animal attack would be the funniest way to die yeah huh like me like being sit on by an elephant that's pretty funny like if it just sat on you and killed you yeah that might be my answer being sit on by an elephant i'm going to say just getting like electrocuted by a squirrel they like gnaw through a telephone wire or something and it just falls on me and kills me I think they bite all the way through or if I like slip on a like step on a squirrel where I'm about to go down some stairs and it trips me and I fall. It's like a final destination. Die by a squirrel somehow.

Does it count as an animal attack if you like choke to death on a chicken sandwich? Or a beetle. I don't think so. Sure. joke to death on a beetle. Yeah, that one. Like when a fly, when a fly flies into your, like, throat. Oh, yeah.

Like when you're on a, yeah. If it's just like a big old beetle. That's a pretty good one. I'd laugh if you died that way. I hope you would. Oh, man. I hope people laugh at the way I die. All right.

One more Patreon question from Gracie. If you guys could have any sidekick from pop culture, real life or anything, Who, what would you choose? She chose Marion Pippin. That's two sidekicks. Well, she broke her own rules. She broke her own rule. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm going to do the dad and Invincible. Okay. She's like, he's a bad dude and he has like Superman's powers. But if he's on my side, then like I'm in great shape. But he's like on his sun's side and he almost kills him. That's true. That's a bad choice, bro. I'm going to go with Marvin the paranoid android from Hitchhiker's Guide.

He's got the brain a size of a planet. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. So, yeah, I think he'd be pretty helpful. Okay, I'm having a hard time with this one. Maybe Groot. Oh, yeah. Yeah, just like he could give me fruit. He loved those treat powers.

Yeah, he gave me fruit whenever I want it. I just want tree powers. I like, I'd like Chubaca if I could speak Wookie. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. Jeff, you got an answer? answer? I'll do Superman because

Who's gonna mess with you? Okay. Superman relegated to the sidekick. That's the shit. It's gonna blow to the ego. I know, it's pretty cool. That's true. Yeah. You know. So from prod dig,

yeat. Favorite animal from a video game, not including Smash Bros. Huh. But, I mean, Smash Bros. are from other video games, so I'm going to count it if you do do smash roast. Okay. I want to go last. I don't, I'm going to have to think about this one for a second.

I'm going with, uh, Bulbosaur, who's not in Smash Bros. Okay. But I just really like Bulbosur. He's always my choice in the Game Boy Pokemon game. Did you go, did you go Charmander Bulbysore or Squirtle most? Squirtle. I'm part of the, part of the Squirtle squad. Who's your pick for the, here's Mike? Yeah, so there's a really weird niche era of video. games back in like the late. I'm not surprised that this is what you're doing. Back in the late 90s, 3D platformers were really popular. And everybody had like a little mascot for their studio.

And so I don't know. I like the chameleon, little chameleon guy from chameleon twist. He's got this tongue that he can like swing around little poles on. I think that's pretty cool. Maybe him. Or Buck Bumble. He's a bee. No one knows what you're talking about.

You guys know how I feel about bees. These are dope You love these I'm gonna say the Battle Toads I love that one of my all-time favorite games I think I'm one of the ten people on the earth Who's beat in the game Battle Todes See Jeff told me that a long time ago

That you beat it and I couldn't believe it I still I don't think I do I played it so much I memorized like every little like up-down thing That you have to do I beat Battletoad That's maybe the most impressive thing you've ever done I did it

I put a lot of hours into that game Freaking impossible. Do you have more? Yeah, one more from Calummoor 3. Which animal would you each choose to represent your personality? I'd probably pick a raccoon. Oh, that's what I was about to say. Yeah, I think raccoons are like...

Yeah, because you're always... Whenever I sit down, the first thing you do is come over and dig in my pockets and pull out my keys and start playing with them. So that does fit you pretty well. That's a good... I guess I'd do that sometimes. No, more just because they're like a little bit mischievous. They like, they can live in the wild, but they can also live in cities. They're like playful.

I like raccoons. I'm big fan of raccoons. I would say a bear, but I'm probably not a bear. I think I'm more of a raccoon. How about you guys? I'll go with a rattlesnake. Really? I just kind of keep to myself, you know.

I like to sunbathe, and if anyone tries to pick me up, I start biting. Okay. All right. Interesting answer. Mike. So I'm going to go with a manatee. I always resonate on a very fundamental level whenever I see them kind of just lazily drifting through the water. That fits because you love swimming and you love cows. Exactly. Sea cow. And you love eating grass.

I love those guys. They're so cool. You love getting hit by boats. Yeah, great questions, guys. Thanks so much. Thanks to all of our patrons. Your questions get priority. So we're answering patron questions first. That's what we do here on this here podcast. So our next two, our last two categories,

how are we messing things up for them? As we've mentioned before on our shark episodes, we are fundamentally messing things up for sharks. They are an extremely persecuted species. The main thing is the shark fin trade, which tens of millions of sharks every year are being killed for shark fin soup. They're killed as bycatch in other fishing industries. They're killed out of fear.

There's a lot of ways that sharks are being killed. Some estimates think that we're losing up to 100 million sharks a year, which is just a number that's hard to wrap your head around. Like just in the time that you guys have been listening to this podcast, we've lost tens of thousands of sharks. So it is wild. At this rate, we will not have sharks much longer. The main things, don't eat shark fin soup ever.

If you ever see a petition where a certain country is deciding whether or not to ban shark fin soup, make sure you make your voice heard. Vote for people that care about these kind of issues. They're huge issues. Like this is an alpha predator. This is an animal that's extremely important to its ecosystem. And if you pull it out of that ecosystem, it changes a lot. Things go haywire.

And so you don't, you can't remove something like that. We need sharks. Global warming's going to help them out, though. It's not. Global warming is going to help out very few animals. They'll have more territory since there'll be less land and more ocean. No, because as the, don't listen to Jeff on this one. Global warming is also leading to the acidification of the ocean. It's killing coral reef.

It's killing a lot of the food sources that sharks feed on. It's not a good thing for them. That's another huge problem facing every species on Earth. but sharks are in very immediate danger of going extinct just through fishing. Yeah, I watched C-Speercy on Netflix. And like I know documentaries aren't perfect, but it really stuck with me. So I made a goal to only eat fish three times a year. That's great.

And it's hard. Yeah. But I think I'm already at two silent. I got one more like fish meal for the year. Yeah. I personally like about 10 years. ago stopped eating seafood after learning about overfishing and how big of a problem it is. There are ways that you can do it sustainably.

There are fisheries out there that are doing it right. If you're very well informed, you can eat seafood in a sustainable way. But there's not a sustainable way to eat shark. It's really hard. Yeah. There's not a good way to eat shark. There's no shark out there that's sustainable. Don't eat it.

Don't ever eat shark. I don't think I want to live in a world without sharks. I neither do I. I'm serious. I really don't. Sharks are so cool. a much less cool world. I would have a really hard time.

So yeah, that's another thing. If we get rid of sharks, you're going to lose me and Mike, too. Jeff will be around. All right. He's everyone's favorite. He's go, I go. Yeah. All right.

So finally, do we like this animal? Let's give them our claw ratings. I'll go first. Our sharks are getting 10 claws from me. Unless it's maybe like a nurse shark or a more boring shark. Bull sharks are getting 10 claws. They're a 10 claw animal for me. I love bull sharks.

I've swam with them. They're beautiful. They're amazing. animals. Sharks, I'm absolutely obsessed with sharks in general. Ten claws. Ten claw animal. I'm going to give them nine. All sharks are at least getting a nine claw rating from me. I think my ten claw rating is only going to apply to my top ten animals. And bull sharks fall probably, I mean, they're outside of top ten. Yeah, you guys are probably being a little more precious with your ten claw ratings and I don't blame me. No, it's fine. Yeah, I'm actually going to give

Bull sharks six. And I like them a lot. Doesn't sound like it. They're not even in my top five favorite sharks. Like I'd go whale shark, number one, great white, number two, hammerhead, three, white tip, four. Yeah, those are all ten claw animals for me, though, all of them. Right. But like, I'm a little more stingy with my rating is the only thing.

It's fair. Like, I love bull sharks. I'm not saying like, like, just the way I'm grading it is. different than the way you are. Yeah. But I'm going to rank it probably 208 overall. Okay. With six claws, I'm confused.

Six isn't bad. It's not good. The way I rate. Yeah, it's not great. So is it above average? I mean, I'm doing my claws just on animals from tooth and claw that we're going to, I think we're going to cut. Do you think we're going to get up to episode 206?

I hope so. No, but I'm just saying, compared to the other animals we've talked about, I don't like bull sharks as much. Okay. No need to get defensive. I am defensive. Like a bullsharks. You guys are acting like I don't like bullsharks.

It sounds like you don't. All right. Okay. I'm literally saying I do. That's it for bull sharks. We're for sure going to have more bull shark episodes. They are again like one of the big three. So we're going to be talking about them.

I think they're an amazing shark. I think they're really cool. We all do. Yeah. I think Nicole Moore is really impressive in the way that she handled all of this crazy attack. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? I think our listeners are great. Oh, wow.

Top take. All of them? What if one of them's a murder? Yeah. Yeah. What if one of them murdered a kid today? Statistically, I don't like that listener. If they're just a listener now, if a murderer is a patron, I think I still like it.

Yeah. I'll go for it. Sure. All of you who have bought shirts, thanks so much. We're really happy with how those shirts turned out. We're really excited to see them out in the wild. So thanks again, guys, for buying shirts. They're still available for sale.

If you guys are interested, it's just tooth and clawpod.com. And there's some shirts up there. We're about to have some new shirts from our friend Justice. They did a great job on those shirts, too. So we're excited to launch those. and yeah thanks again guys honestly we like we like talking about animals

all right that's how we end it we like talking about animals we sure do all right see you guys bye hey looks like you made it to the end of the episode very cool now's the time when we get to shout out

all of our new patrons by name it's just our way of showing appreciation for all you new subscribers We hope you enjoy all of the perks that come along with it. So, let's get started. Thank you so much to Tess, Seth, Hannah, AJ, JPS Dawson, Jenna, Maggie, Kate, Brooke, Akshara, Katie, Yovan, Gil, Josh, Luke, Jeanette, Allie, Katie, Katie, Brandon, Emily, Charles, Gabriella, Alex, Nina, Taryn, Melanie, Kimberly, Chloe, Marissa, Barrage, Noelani and Ryan, Maria, R. Julie Hanks, Megan Hanks, Nate, Robert, Katie, Emily, Jennifer, another Jennifer, Jennifer, too, we'll call you, Emily, Lisa, Kate, Isabel, Karina, Ty, Maddie, Korah, Nisti, Amanda, Adele,

Ali, Amalie, Amanda, and Daisy. Thank you so much, that was a long list and I couldn't be happier that it was as long as it was. You guys are the best. We will catch you all in the Patreon DMs. We love talking to you guys there. And we hope you enjoy all the bonus content that we have in store waiting for you guys. We do, really do try to make it worth your while. So thanks again. And we'll see you in the next one. See ya.