Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back.
Speaker 1: It is Saturday. It is time to go into the
Speaker 1: vault for a classic Stuff to Blow your Mind episode.
Speaker 1: This one is going to be an episode we did
Speaker 1: on jumping and flying fish after Robert saw some leaping
Speaker 1: mullets in Florida. Yeah. I believe it was the coolest springs.
Speaker 1: This is one of several episodes that ended up being
Speaker 1: in Well, really, I think both of us have had
Speaker 1: episodes that have been inspired by vacations. We would go
Speaker 1: out into the world, we relax a little bit, we
Speaker 1: learned something, and then we come back and we want
Speaker 1: a podcast on it. And this in this case, I said,
Speaker 1: a less podcast about jumping fish. Trust me, it's more
Speaker 1: interesting than it sounds, and it is. We never end
Speaker 1: up doing like the science of Margarita's No, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I think maybe you went on vacation and then we
Speaker 1: did the science of cocktails. We did right, well, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that was vacation related, but it was.
Speaker 1: It was certainly based on interest in cocktails. Well, that
Speaker 1: was a Christmas gift inspired when I received books about
Speaker 1: cocktails for Christmas, and then I was like, hey, let's
Speaker 1: do an episode on this. Well, the jumping Fish episode
Speaker 1: turned out to be a lot more interesting of a
Speaker 1: topic than I might have expected going in, So I
Speaker 1: thought this one was a lot of fun and we
Speaker 1: are happy to bring it back to you. This originally
Speaker 1: aired Thursday, July sixteen, and here it is again for
Speaker 1: your listening pleasure. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. So, Robert, I know that recently you
Speaker 1: were on vacation somewhere. I was, Yeah, I went down
Speaker 1: to Florida with the family, and on the way back
Speaker 1: up we stopped at this place called Wakola Springs. Cooling
Speaker 1: Springs State Park in Florida near Tallahassee. Ended up just
Speaker 1: being really delightful. What's this place like? Basically, what you
Speaker 1: have here is just an enormous spring, Okay, like a
Speaker 1: geological spring. Water coming out of the ground. Yeah, water
Speaker 1: coming out of the ground, water coming out of just
Speaker 1: enormous caverns that are under the water here, really clear
Speaker 1: water and it maintains a constant temperature of around sixty
Speaker 1: nine or seventy degrees so when winter comes it's a
Speaker 1: haven for manatees, and especially manatees, but other creatures too
Speaker 1: that that did want that constant temperature. Um. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: they filmed a few scenes from the creature from the
Speaker 1: from the Black Lagoon there, Yeah, particularly the creatures layer. Uh.
Speaker 1: You get to pass by that if you take these
Speaker 1: boat tours uh, and that's really the main reason. Ago.
Speaker 1: You can swim there, but you can, but you get
Speaker 1: to go in these these really cool boat tours where
Speaker 1: you get to see all of these crazy estuary um
Speaker 1: uh species doing their thing, all the diving birds, gators,
Speaker 1: gators laying in the sun by the dozens, get to
Speaker 1: see manatees, and you also get to see these uh
Speaker 1: these mullets, the fish mullet, not the hairstyle. You probably
Speaker 1: saw some of those. Yeah, I think I did see
Speaker 1: see a traditional um hairstyle mullet here there, But but yeah,
Speaker 1: these are the fish and they're just leaping out of
Speaker 1: the water. It's like it's you look around, you expect
Speaker 1: to see like a Disney princess waiting around like that's
Speaker 1: how active the wildlife is here. And uh, but but
Speaker 1: it really makes you think, like, why are these creatures,
Speaker 1: why of these fish jumping out of the water. If
Speaker 1: you're like me and you didn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: preconceived notions, or you hadn't researched it before, you might think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of animals around here, they're gators in
Speaker 1: the water. They're probably jumping out of the water to
Speaker 1: escape predators. Right, Yeah, that makes pretty easy sense. A
Speaker 1: lot of the maneuvering you'd see and the fish, especially
Speaker 1: a prey species, would be fleeing behavior. And yet it
Speaker 1: turns out there's more to it than that. And uh,
Speaker 1: not only with the with mullets, but with other species
Speaker 1: of ish as well. And that's the reason we're having
Speaker 1: this episode discuss some of the mystery, some of the theories, uh,
Speaker 1: some of the at times myths surrounding leaping fish, fish
Speaker 1: that actually throw themselves out of the water, out of
Speaker 1: their their habitat, their aquatic habitat, into this strange, alien
Speaker 1: world of gases and vapors. Yeah, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: it is so weird. Um, it's hard for us to
Speaker 1: imagine what it's like crossing this boundary between worlds from
Speaker 1: the water up into the land of gas into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Because it's not exactly like a terrestrial animal diving into
Speaker 1: the water, because when you jump out of the water,
Speaker 1: the water is your natural environment. Gravity is always going
Speaker 1: to be pulling you back down into this watery world.
Speaker 1: Plus there's just so much more going on underwater than
Speaker 1: there is going on in the air. I mean, on
Speaker 1: the land is one thing, but you know, think about
Speaker 1: what most of the air above the water is like.
Speaker 1: It's just it's a void. Under the water is another ecosystem.
Speaker 1: Leaping into the air is almost as if terrestrial animals
Speaker 1: could briefly leap into outer space. Yeah, or at least me,
Speaker 1: It makes me think of the part in Phantasm where
Speaker 1: they go through like the stargate into the barren world
Speaker 1: with the dwarves or hauling stuff around. It is like
Speaker 1: it's like zipping out of your world into another and
Speaker 1: then coming back into your your world, perhaps in a
Speaker 1: different location, making it kind of kind of like that
Speaker 1: teleport that the raiding character does in the first couple
Speaker 1: of Mortal Kombat games. You know, it's great, Yeah, what
Speaker 1: does he say? When he teleports or does he have one? Um?
Speaker 1: I have something he says when he does the Superman,
Speaker 1: but I don't remember if he says anything when he teleports.
Speaker 1: But maybe he should. He just grins and as lightning
Speaker 1: come out of his eyes. What he should do? I
Speaker 1: hope someday somebody goes back to the first Mortal Kombat
Speaker 1: game and dubs in Christopher Lambert's lines from the movie.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot that he played the
Speaker 1: first one. But back to leaping fish. Yeah, So, Robert,
Speaker 1: knowing your inquisitive nature, I bet you asked somebody at
Speaker 1: the park about the mullet jumping behavior, didn't you. I did,
Speaker 1: and the park ranger was very insightful and all this
Speaker 1: and mentioned that they're a handful of theories here, okay, um,
Speaker 1: and the idea that they're escaping predators is not one
Speaker 1: of them. So one is that they may jump to
Speaker 1: dislodge parasites, and certainly, aquatic life is full of many
Speaker 1: strange parasite removal strategies, including allowing cleaner organisms to crawl
Speaker 1: into your body? Right? Um? Wait, what allowing cleaner you've seen?
Speaker 1: I see you mean? Um, an organism that does cleaning,
Speaker 1: not a relatively cleaner organisms, no, no no, no, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: talking like allowing a small shrimp to climb into your
Speaker 1: gills or your mouth in order to eat these things. Um,
Speaker 1: even at times, even allowing creatures from the air to
Speaker 1: come down and feast on your parasites. I believe it's
Speaker 1: the sunfish that does that allows all of certain birds
Speaker 1: to help remove its parasites. That's fantastic. Now can you
Speaker 1: imagine if every time we got like a guinea worm
Speaker 1: or something like that, we could just leap into outer
Speaker 1: space to try. Well, that sounds kind of ridiculous and
Speaker 1: and indeed that's go one of the criticisms against this
Speaker 1: theory um broadly speaking concerning fish, because you see that
Speaker 1: thrown out a lot with with jumping fish. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: a parasite removal strategy. But critics of this theory will
Speaker 1: point out that, hey, parasites, once they get in you,
Speaker 1: they have ways of lodging themselves where they want to be,
Speaker 1: just merely that the frantic leaping through the air is
Speaker 1: not going to dislodge them. Well, then what are the
Speaker 1: other theories? Well, the crazier theory and this is one
Speaker 1: that I find really interesting is that mullets spend a
Speaker 1: lot of their time in waters that are low and
Speaker 1: dissolved oxygen, and so they may exit the water in
Speaker 1: order to clear their gills and expose themselves to higher
Speaker 1: levels of oxygen. So that that really blew my mind
Speaker 1: the idea that essentially the fish is coming out of
Speaker 1: the water to breathe and then returned. But fish breathe,
Speaker 1: I know, but but it's this is one of the theories. Um.
Speaker 1: They also may jump during spawning season to break over
Speaker 1: their eggs acts in preparation for the spawn, and marine
Speaker 1: biologist Dr Grant Gilmore thinks it may come down to
Speaker 1: their sometimes dark habitats. They may jump in these cases
Speaker 1: to let others in the school know where they are,
Speaker 1: so in this case it would be a form of
Speaker 1: communication or social signaling, which comes up later in this
Speaker 1: episode with some of the other jumping fish, we talk
Speaker 1: about some of the more ferocious ones. Alright, so for
Speaker 1: the rest of this episode, we're gonna be looking at
Speaker 1: some of these some of the most interesting fish jumping
Speaker 1: behaviors around the world. And I want to say that
Speaker 1: I found this topic way more interesting than I expected to. Yeah, first,
Speaker 1: I was like Okay, what is there to say about
Speaker 1: fish jumping? They jump? But but fish jumping can be
Speaker 1: very strange, can be a danger, can be a nuisance,
Speaker 1: can be very money. Uh, and the reasons why they
Speaker 1: do it are more mysterious in some cases than I
Speaker 1: would have guessed. But okay, so I guess we should
Speaker 1: start broadly. What do we know about in general why
Speaker 1: fish jump? Well, oh, and start one more thing, I
Speaker 1: should say, we should specify you all out there. You
Speaker 1: know the difference between a fish and a mammal. So
Speaker 1: you've seen dolphins jump playing in the waves or at
Speaker 1: a dolphin show, or uh, maybe just playing echo of
Speaker 1: the dolphin. We're not talking about mammals today. This is
Speaker 1: gonna be a fish focused episode. Yeah. I mean there's
Speaker 1: even a gliding squid that propels itself out of the
Speaker 1: ocean by shooting out a jet of water at high
Speaker 1: a high pressure water jet. We're not gonna get into
Speaker 1: that either. Well, if there's enough demand, will save other
Speaker 1: leaping um sea life for other episodes. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think a good place to start is just to sort
Speaker 1: of go back to this idea that okay, fish jump
Speaker 1: out of the water to escape predators and acknowledge that yes,
Speaker 1: this actually is a strategy with some creatures, for instance,
Speaker 1: killie fish. Now they're roughly one thousand, two hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy different species of killy fish, and most are fully
Speaker 1: aquatic with no obvious morphological specializations for terrestrial locomotion. Locomotion
Speaker 1: individuals from several different species have been observed moving across
Speaker 1: land though via a tail flip behavior that generates a
Speaker 1: terrestrial jump. But wait a minute, so this isn't just
Speaker 1: jumping into the air. This is jumping onto a dry
Speaker 1: land surface. Yeah, it's essentially it's getting due to too
Speaker 1: dangerous in the water, I gotta jump out and and
Speaker 1: then flop back in. And they do. They do this
Speaker 1: to escape predators or occasionally apparently pour water conditions. Okay,
Speaker 1: so in our outer space analogy, this is more like,
Speaker 1: instead of just briefly leaping into outer space, if things
Speaker 1: got really hairy wherever you were, you could jump onto
Speaker 1: the moon for a minute and then jump back down
Speaker 1: somewhere on Earth. Yeah, or taking like you know, a
Speaker 1: proposed space tourism flight that just sends you into low
Speaker 1: orbit and then brings you back down. Huh, be that
Speaker 1: kind of thing I think, uh, but indeed kind of
Speaker 1: like Raiden's teleport where he's blinking out of this world,
Speaker 1: I guess going to some godland and then coming back
Speaker 1: into the picture somewhere else. And this is interesting because too,
Speaker 1: because that the aquatic amphibious distinction is a key because
Speaker 1: it's one thing for saying, air breathing walking catfish for
Speaker 1: mud skippers or lungfish to behave in this baby this
Speaker 1: way because they've taken things to the next level, right
Speaker 1: bordering on you know, creature from the Black Lagoon or
Speaker 1: bloodwaters of doctor Z territory. But aquatic fish that just
Speaker 1: seems crazy, right, Um? So yeah, the tail flip flings
Speaker 1: him out of the water through the air several body
Speaker 1: lengths sometimes out of the water and onto the bank,
Speaker 1: and then they have to flip to get back in.
Speaker 1: Sounds dangerous though, I mean, if you you're a fish,
Speaker 1: you flip out of the water and then you rapidly
Speaker 1: twist your body around to try to flip back into
Speaker 1: the water. I mean, you've only got a very limited
Speaker 1: amount of time, they're right, right, yeah, because if you
Speaker 1: because the big risks here are that you're going to
Speaker 1: you're gonna you could dry out or gets sixty eight.
Speaker 1: So and and you know, of course also banking on
Speaker 1: the idea that there are no um terrestrial predators on
Speaker 1: the water bank. So that's the killie fish. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: else do we have take us to the next the
Speaker 1: next level here with our leaping aquatic creatures. Well, I
Speaker 1: want to talk Robert about an Asian carponado. Oh sounds good, okay,
Speaker 1: so stop me. If you've seen this video, this YouTube
Speaker 1: video before, You've got two passengers sitting in a boat
Speaker 1: there in twin seats, facing off the stern of a
Speaker 1: fishing boat with an outboard motor. Is this guy father
Speaker 1: to no? No, this is a grainy YouTube, okaysing to
Speaker 1: set to some slick new metal riffs. Now, the boat
Speaker 1: appears to be sitting in like a river or a lake.
Speaker 1: It's opaque fresh water, and each of the two passengers
Speaker 1: sitting facing off the back of the boat are holding
Speaker 1: a compound hunting bow with a knocked arrow, and the
Speaker 1: driver then throttles up the engine. The boat starts to
Speaker 1: move in these lines of why churning wake peel out
Speaker 1: the back of the boat and you can see the
Speaker 1: waves coming out. And as this happens, dozens of fish
Speaker 1: or maybe hundreds of fish begin to leap out of
Speaker 1: the water into the air by the looks of it,
Speaker 1: sometimes flying above the heads of the passengers and they
Speaker 1: arc over the boat. Sometimes they fly right into somebody's
Speaker 1: neck and slap them on the face if fish hits
Speaker 1: you in the back or it lands flopping in the
Speaker 1: driver's lap, And as you would expect based on the setup,
Speaker 1: the passengers try to shoot the fish with their arrows
Speaker 1: as they leap through the air. And other similar videos
Speaker 1: you might scratch the bow and arrow and feature just
Speaker 1: nets people trying to catch the fish with nets or
Speaker 1: shooting at them with shotguns, trying to hit him with
Speaker 1: baseball bats or maybe a modified baseball bat with nails
Speaker 1: in it, uh pitchforks, et cetera. I might add that
Speaker 1: in the very first video I watched that I mentioned,
Speaker 1: the one with the compound bow, it was sort of
Speaker 1: this fish human collision super cut with with the new
Speaker 1: metal background mu zick. It looks pretty dangerous, especially because
Speaker 1: there are sometimes other boats in the water down range
Speaker 1: of the bow fishers. So we are not recommending this behavior. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds sounds a bit reckless, but what's going on here?
Speaker 1: Why why are these hundreds of fish flying through the
Speaker 1: air to be shot of? I need a better metaphor
Speaker 1: than like fish in a barrel, like like fish in
Speaker 1: outer space. Uh. Well, the video identifies these very unfortunate
Speaker 1: vaulting fish as Asian carp, and I can't confirm the
Speaker 1: identification through all the graininess. But but this would make
Speaker 1: sense because some species of so called Asian carp are
Speaker 1: known for this bizarre frenzy jumping behavior in the presence
Speaker 1: of boats. So what are Asian carpet? Asian carp is
Speaker 1: not one species, but it's a common group name applied
Speaker 1: to several species of carp native to East and Southeast Asia,
Speaker 1: including waterways of Siberia, China, and Vietnam. And these species
Speaker 1: would be bighead carp, black carp, grass carp, and silver carp.
Speaker 1: So carp belonged to the freshwater fish family known as Cyprinids,
Speaker 1: and before the Asian carp were introduced a couple of
Speaker 1: decades ago, there there were already carp in North America
Speaker 1: that were considered kind of a benign nuisance species. But
Speaker 1: several species now known as Asian carp were introduced the
Speaker 1: United States in the nineteen sixties and seventies, and originally
Speaker 1: they were contained. They were contained in southern aquaculture and
Speaker 1: sewage treatment enclosures, I think in Arkansas. Originally I saw
Speaker 1: and so the idea was that these imported carp would
Speaker 1: help control contaminants in these areas. For example, they'd swim
Speaker 1: around and eat algae out of ponds that were being
Speaker 1: used as fish farms, like for catfish farming. But flooding events,
Speaker 1: of course, often connect waters that are not apparently connected,
Speaker 1: and so flooding allowed these non native species to escape
Speaker 1: their farms and enclosures and spread into natural waterways around
Speaker 1: the Mississippi Watershed, and now they're all over the place.
Speaker 1: They're spread all over freshwater fisheries in the Midwest and
Speaker 1: beyond there in the Mississippi, they're in the Illinois River.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people are worried about these and
Speaker 1: consider them UH an invasive species since they can represent
Speaker 1: a threat to native wildlife. They reproduce quickly, they grow quickly,
Speaker 1: they supposedly degrade the quality of aquatic environments, and they
Speaker 1: tend to outcompete other fish UH and I've seen estimates
Speaker 1: that they can some of these species consume about twenty
Speaker 1: of their own body weight every day, but they don't
Speaker 1: necessarily prey on other fish. Instead, they're mostly plankton and
Speaker 1: algae feeders, which still is a big problem because that's
Speaker 1: the bottom of the food chain, right, that's what everything
Speaker 1: has to eat in order to work its way up
Speaker 1: the food chain and get that energy to survive. So
Speaker 1: they're causing problems for every organism everywhere along the line.
Speaker 1: So why do they jump, Well, the big head carp
Speaker 1: in the silver carp can both jump, but it's the
Speaker 1: silver carp in particular that's just notorious for frequent lee,
Speaker 1: having these frenzies where they leap out of the water
Speaker 1: all over the place. And the commonly accepted explanation for
Speaker 1: why they do it is pretty simple. It's the main
Speaker 1: one that came to your mind when you were thinking
Speaker 1: about the mullet. First. It's that they're scared. They're leaping
Speaker 1: out of the water as an escape mechanism, triggered by
Speaker 1: a threatening stimulus like the roar of a boat motor.
Speaker 1: So somebody revs up their engine, they get their their
Speaker 1: arrows knocked, and the fish here that sound and they
Speaker 1: start leaping all over the place. And once one starts leaping,
Speaker 1: all of them start leaping. So that sounds like a
Speaker 1: pretty funny situation. And I will admit seeing these images
Speaker 1: of fish just flapping all over the place through the air,
Speaker 1: slapping people in the back of the head, leaving a big,
Speaker 1: slimy streak across somebody's like chin and throw because they
Speaker 1: slap up under there. It sounds funny, but when you
Speaker 1: think about what it's actually like to be in the
Speaker 1: middle of it, it can get kind of scary. Because
Speaker 1: the big head and silver carp were known to jump
Speaker 1: about three meters or about feet vertically out of the
Speaker 1: water about six meters or twenty feet horizontally across the surface.
Speaker 1: Uh silver carp tend to weigh up to about twenty pounds.
Speaker 1: Big head carp commonly wigh up about twice that, but
Speaker 1: in rare cases, these fish can reportedly grow very large,
Speaker 1: up to around a hundred pounds. So think of like
Speaker 1: a hundred pound object flying at you out of the water,
Speaker 1: especially if you're moving at a rapid speed. Also, just
Speaker 1: do the quick new tony in physics in your head.
Speaker 1: That can be a heavy impact. Now. I found one
Speaker 1: survey of people who used the Illinois River in two
Speaker 1: thousand ten and two thousand eleven. And it was a
Speaker 1: small sample size, so don't read too much into this,
Speaker 1: but it found this was hilarious to me. Sixty five
Speaker 1: of residents from these Illinois River sites who used the
Speaker 1: river had seen Asian carp jump. Okay, but of those
Speaker 1: people who had seen a carp jump, almost three quarters
Speaker 1: of them had been hit by a car um And
Speaker 1: so if you've seen a carp jump, chances are a
Speaker 1: carp has slim ammed into you. Nine percent of them
Speaker 1: sustained injuries and reported uh sustained watercraft damage from the
Speaker 1: Asian carp. And there's just one example I want to
Speaker 1: give of the kinds of injuries these things can cause.
Speaker 1: I found a kt v I local news story from St.
Speaker 1: Louis from last year August, and it tells the story
Speaker 1: of this guy named Jordan Fiedler who got his face
Speaker 1: messed up real bad by some Asian carp while inner
Speaker 1: tubing along a channel in the Mississippi. So, according to
Speaker 1: the story, his father was driving the boat and he
Speaker 1: was riding in an inner tube behind it, and then
Speaker 1: the fish start leap and they jump up all over
Speaker 1: the place, and one hits him in the face and
Speaker 1: a quote he gave his quote, I knew something was wrong.
Speaker 1: I felt my nose and it was way over here.
Speaker 1: So uh, the impact fractured his nose, It dented his forehead,
Speaker 1: shattered bones in his eye sockets and above his eyebrow. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he had to undergo a three and a half
Speaker 1: hour surgery to install a piece of mesh and cruise
Speaker 1: to fix the shape of his skull. So this is
Speaker 1: no small injury. This is This is a devastating fish impact.
Speaker 1: If nobody has made a Jaws style movie about carp yet,
Speaker 1: about the leaping carp I think they should. This is
Speaker 1: the real Sharknado, except it's not a shark. This is Carponado.
Speaker 1: Well hopefully, I'm really hoping someone will take this whole
Speaker 1: episode as inspiration and maybe it'll be an overall just
Speaker 1: jumping fish horror movie. All the various examples we throw
Speaker 1: out here, it's the fish version of the birds. Maybe, yeah,
Speaker 1: the fishes. Uh, the fish. Weirdly, though as mundane as
Speaker 1: Carpon may seem, they actually also have a mythological significance.
Speaker 1: I bet you didn't think that we'd wrap some some
Speaker 1: mythology into this episode. But it's I really yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't even think about it, and normally I'm I'm all
Speaker 1: about finding it. I didn't even think to look. Well,
Speaker 1: apparently the jumping ability of carp has a cultural and
Speaker 1: slight mythological significance in Chinese tradition. So there's a story
Speaker 1: in Chinese mythology of carp swimming upstream and that if
Speaker 1: a carp swimming upstream is able to jump over a
Speaker 1: waterfall that's known as the dragon gate, that carp will
Speaker 1: transform into a dragon, and with that comes all of
Speaker 1: the symbolic uplift that applies. Right, you know, the dragon
Speaker 1: is a is a majestic regal creature associated with power
Speaker 1: and with with grandeur and and with the the the
Speaker 1: imperial authority basically and flight, yes, and fly there you go.
Speaker 1: So apparently the expression of quote a carp that jumps
Speaker 1: over the dragon gate commonly signifies a person who accomplishes
Speaker 1: some feet that leads to like a sudden improvement in
Speaker 1: life status, such as passing exams at university or acquiring
Speaker 1: some coveted government position. It's like if you get a
Speaker 1: major life upgrade due to some some achievement of yours.
Speaker 1: You're a carp who has jumped the dragon gate and
Speaker 1: hopefully not smashed anybody's face on the way. Alright, what everyone,
Speaker 1: keep that nith in mind, because I feel like we're
Speaker 1: going to get back to some of these ideas with
Speaker 1: some of our later examples. We're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're gonna look at salmon,
Speaker 1: We're gonna look at swordfish, we're gonna look at sturgeons,
Speaker 1: and ultimately the flying fish itself. All right, we're back. Okay.
Speaker 1: So before the break, we were talking about the mythological
Speaker 1: symbology of carp swimming upstream trying to leap over that
Speaker 1: waterfall and turn into a mighty dragon. But of course
Speaker 1: carp are not the only fish that struggle mightily to
Speaker 1: progress upstream against the current, even leaping over rapids and waterfalls. Yeah. Indeed,
Speaker 1: what is one of the most iconic images of leaping fish,
Speaker 1: like a perfect like nature documentary image. It's the salmon.
Speaker 1: It's the salmon going up stream to spawn, leaping over
Speaker 1: the rapids, and a bear just grabbing that, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. Yeah, indeed, that's the bare version of
Speaker 1: the people trying to hit a carp with a baseball
Speaker 1: bat with nails in it. It's just the bear's claws
Speaker 1: wiping in the same amount as it flies over the rapids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is uh so, so let's break down exactly what's
Speaker 1: happening here, um, because it's it's pretty amazing. It's easy
Speaker 1: to take it for granted when you've seen it so
Speaker 1: many times. But salmon has been their early lives in
Speaker 1: freshwater rivers, and then they swim out to sea to
Speaker 1: the salt water to feed and grow. But when spawning
Speaker 1: time comes, they engage in what we cause salmon run
Speaker 1: and what grizzly bears of course called like a seafood buffet, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: They so the fish travel upstream to their natal spawning grounds,
Speaker 1: they spawn, and then they die, and then the nutrients
Speaker 1: in their bodies washed downstream to the estuaries. So it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's kind of an elegant um practice here,
Speaker 1: but making it upstream is quite a journey, especially when
Speaker 1: you're having to deal with rapids and waterfalls. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: no dragon gates, but still some significant challenges there. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so they leap out of the water, they jump
Speaker 1: sometimes up to twelve ft or three point six five meters.
Speaker 1: Now not only they have to contend not only the bears,
Speaker 1: but also man. Humans have have shown a tremendous ability,
Speaker 1: of course, to alter natural waterways, to install dams, bridges,
Speaker 1: what have you. Oh, yeah, this is actually figured into
Speaker 1: people trying to control the spread of carp like silver carp,
Speaker 1: the jumping carp in American waterways. So you've got these
Speaker 1: carp moving slowly upstream, and to prevent them from spreading
Speaker 1: even further, some people have said, well, we need to
Speaker 1: construct barriers of some kind, But these have to be
Speaker 1: some pretty tall barriers, right because these things can you know,
Speaker 1: jump tin tin feet high and twenty feet long, So
Speaker 1: that would have to be a serious barrier to prevent
Speaker 1: the carp from progressing. Yeah, and then what do you
Speaker 1: do about other creatures that have a natural right? Are
Speaker 1: you gonna install like a border guard to keep the
Speaker 1: carp out but make sure the right creatures moved through.
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's tough. I saw one solution that
Speaker 1: was literally an electrified fence in the water, where people
Speaker 1: installed little devices that put electrical current in the river
Speaker 1: to prevent the carp from swimming by. Well, you know
Speaker 1: with the with the salmon in the case of dams
Speaker 1: and other structures. Uh, they actually we actually sometimes create
Speaker 1: the fish ladders or fish ways to help them out,
Speaker 1: and these these can be quite interesting because sometimes they
Speaker 1: essentially look like nothing more than a series of buckets
Speaker 1: they can splash and jump in and out of to
Speaker 1: actually make it over whatever the obstacle is. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: watery staircase sorts. But it's a cool idea because because
Speaker 1: as as we pointed out, like, not only is it
Speaker 1: important for the for the salmon to actually reach their destination,
Speaker 1: but it actually, you know, their ultimate death up there
Speaker 1: ends up having playing an important role in the overall
Speaker 1: ecology of the river. Isn't this also why the salmon
Speaker 1: cannon was invented. Yes, I believe it was to help
Speaker 1: help the salmon get upstream. I don't remember whatever became
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah, I don't know if that became a
Speaker 1: standard or if that was just kind of a flash
Speaker 1: in the pan Alright, So one thing that comes to
Speaker 1: my mind is that, of course a carp can jump
Speaker 1: out of the water hit you in the face, and
Speaker 1: that can cause some injury. But there are also fish
Speaker 1: much bigger than carp that do jump, that's right, and
Speaker 1: that some of them jump with tremendous speed. Um. I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: of course about the mighty swordfish, which is uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's a scientific name is zay FEUs gladius, which basically
Speaker 1: is just the word sword repeated in two different languages.
Speaker 1: So like, basically, we're so excited about swordfish looking like
Speaker 1: a human murder weapon that we just call them sword sword.
Speaker 1: It's like a little kid. Yeah. And of course they're
Speaker 1: just uh, it's a it's basically just a a bill.
Speaker 1: They are bill fish. There there are other billfish with
Speaker 1: with bills that resemble swords. Others resemble bills. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: look like saws. Uh. They're a number of different species. Um.
Speaker 1: And interestingly, enough evidence seems to support the theory that
Speaker 1: the pointy end is more about speed than anything. So
Speaker 1: it's not a weapon. It's more of an aerodynamic design. Right.
Speaker 1: There's actually a weak point in the skull where the
Speaker 1: sword meets the skull, and it prevents them from being
Speaker 1: a proper javelin, like if they if they were to
Speaker 1: hit something too great a speed, it would just snap.
Speaker 1: And the weak point is due to a lubricating gland
Speaker 1: that reduces drag and increases speed. Like it basically pumps
Speaker 1: out oil um it like spreads out through vessels, pumps
Speaker 1: out this this lubricant that lubricates the sword and the
Speaker 1: whole in the thing's whole head that allows it to
Speaker 1: just sort of slip through the water a little bit faster.
Speaker 1: So before the swordfish races, they're sitting there looping up
Speaker 1: their swords essentially and there you know, I think there
Speaker 1: are still some arguments that it may to certain degrees
Speaker 1: have you know, have have some sort of defensive capability
Speaker 1: as well, especially if you're talking about a slashing as
Speaker 1: opposed to a full on like um uh, you know,
Speaker 1: ramming speed type of a stabbing maneuver. There might be
Speaker 1: a second area use or yeah, sort of you use
Speaker 1: it in a pinch, yeah, because it's certainly it's certainly
Speaker 1: is a it certainly can be dangerous, as we'll discuss here.
Speaker 1: But the speeds the big thing and and indeed sword
Speaker 1: of fish are generally ranked like the third fastest fish.
Speaker 1: They're only surpassed by the black marlin and the sailfish,
Speaker 1: both of which are are other types of billfish swordfish. Um.
Speaker 1: The estimates vary on all these and people will get
Speaker 1: into fights over exact speeds, but generally you're looking at
Speaker 1: the black marlin. It clocked around possibly eighty miles per
Speaker 1: hour away. Yeah, ye kilometers per hour. Uh, that's like
Speaker 1: twice as fast as your average boat can go. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but then again, these are these a creatures that
Speaker 1: are living in the open water. They they're dealing with
Speaker 1: with a lot of the vast distances, so they have
Speaker 1: room to build up that speed. Um, sailfish sixty nine
Speaker 1: miles per hour ten and the swordfish comes in at
Speaker 1: a You know, I'm more concerned of sixty miles per
Speaker 1: hour kilometers per hour. But again, people will argue back
Speaker 1: and forth on these stats. No, that's still amazingly fast
Speaker 1: considering the water. I mean, when you think about moving
Speaker 1: through water, all the friction that's that's there, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. And they've evolved to deal with that friction
Speaker 1: about it just about as well as any sea animal
Speaker 1: is going to manage. Of course, they're also known to
Speaker 1: use that intense speed to hurl themselves completely out of
Speaker 1: the water. Now why one of the one of the
Speaker 1: things about swordfish in particulars that they're rare creatures they're
Speaker 1: elusive creatures and that they don't do well in captivity,
Speaker 1: so it's it's hard to really study them in their ways.
Speaker 1: But they are susceptible, like everything else, to parasites. So
Speaker 1: there is a theory that they may be trying to
Speaker 1: dislodge parasites, uh in particular parasites um in particular that
Speaker 1: the paper I was looking at mentioned remoras, which are
Speaker 1: of course sucker fish that feed on other parents that
Speaker 1: feed on ectoparasites. So essentially these things might be bothering
Speaker 1: them at the very least, they're they're they're screwing with
Speaker 1: their streamlined body right there. They're messing up their speed potentially,
Speaker 1: So perhaps they're jumping out trying to dislodge those remoras,
Speaker 1: or if they have a fisherman's like a sports fisherman's
Speaker 1: hook in them, well that's something they are probably trying
Speaker 1: to dislodge as well. Yeah, and that's certainly the iconic scene,
Speaker 1: right somebody gets a sword fish on the hook and
Speaker 1: it's leaping out of the water. Yeah. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: you can see that at a much lower level. Just
Speaker 1: imagine you've probably seen footage of a bass fisher or
Speaker 1: something like that. With a bass on the line and
Speaker 1: it jumps out of the water. Yeah, okay, Well, I
Speaker 1: know the question on everybody's mind here. Has anybody ever
Speaker 1: been impaled by a swordfish by the sword the sword sword? Yes,
Speaker 1: indeed they have. Um, Now it's it's a rare occurrence,
Speaker 1: just as these human interactions with swordfish are already kind
Speaker 1: of a rare thing. Right, Um, you know, people fish
Speaker 1: for them, but still they're elusive. So this isn't something
Speaker 1: to get really worked up about, right, You're you're probably
Speaker 1: gonna be putting yourself in the position to to have
Speaker 1: the outside chance of this occurring. But as of two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, there were no recorded attacks. And I put
Speaker 1: that in quotes because these are not creatures that eat
Speaker 1: humans or would have seemed seemingly attack humans. Any incidents
Speaker 1: seemed to have been more or less accidental. But as
Speaker 1: of two thousand seven, there were no no recorded attacks
Speaker 1: that it actually resulted in death, though the paper in
Speaker 1: question swordfish attack death by penetrating head injury, did outline
Speaker 1: one such incident. And then in two thousand fifteen, a
Speaker 1: deep sea fishing charter captain in Hawaii was fatally stabbed
Speaker 1: in the chest by one while trying to capture it
Speaker 1: with a spear gun. So basically it thrashed around after
Speaker 1: the spear hit the fish, and then it managed to
Speaker 1: skewer him in the chest and killed him. So it's
Speaker 1: a rare occurrence. But with a with a sword like that,
Speaker 1: with a large fish flopping around, uh, jumping out of
Speaker 1: the water, if you're close to it, yes, you run
Speaker 1: the risk of being run through, right, But even in
Speaker 1: this one incident mentioned here, it sounds like this guy
Speaker 1: was kind of I don't want to say he was
Speaker 1: asking for it. He put him Basically, he just put
Speaker 1: himself in in close proximity to a large sharp fish,
Speaker 1: and there's gonna you're rolling the die when that happens. Right,
Speaker 1: You don't wrestle with a unicorn exactly. But then again,
Speaker 1: of course there are other very large fish that jump
Speaker 1: as well. The In fact, as we saw with the
Speaker 1: carp example, you don't need a spike or a sword
Speaker 1: sword in order to do some damage when you run
Speaker 1: into somebody, right, all you need is a high powered
Speaker 1: recreation vessel and uh and and a hundred pound carp perhaps,
Speaker 1: But what if it was even bigger? What if you
Speaker 1: were talking instead of a hundred pound carp What if
Speaker 1: you were talking about say, Florida's Gulf sturgeon, which if
Speaker 1: you've ever seen a sturgeon in aquarium, these they look
Speaker 1: like an armored tank or something. You know, they're they're
Speaker 1: rather intimidating, and then they get huge. They can come
Speaker 1: in it at the Florida Sturgeon gould. Sturgeon in particular
Speaker 1: can come in at eight ft long two point five
Speaker 1: meters in, up to two hundred pounds or in weight.
Speaker 1: And yes, they sometimes jump out of the water up
Speaker 1: to six feet out of the water and occasionally that
Speaker 1: We're not only talking the risk of injury here. There
Speaker 1: there have been lethal occurrences of sturgeon impacts. Oh man, well,
Speaker 1: I got to hear about that in a second. But
Speaker 1: this is weird to me because maybe I assume sturgeon
Speaker 1: must be able to move fast. Uh, if this is
Speaker 1: the case, but I've never seen a sturgeon move quickly.
Speaker 1: I've seen sturgeon and aquariums and they always seem incredibly
Speaker 1: chilled out and very languid fish just just hanging there,
Speaker 1: I mean, barely moving at all. Yeah, it is I
Speaker 1: have to admit that too. Like seeing them in aquariums
Speaker 1: are always really interesting, kind of intimidating, but very still.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they jump. In two thousand fifteen, in fact,
Speaker 1: one one of these jumping sturgeons actually killed a five
Speaker 1: year old girl when it leapt out of water into
Speaker 1: her family's fishing boat, and it also injured her mother
Speaker 1: and her brother as well. In two thousand seven, nine
Speaker 1: people were injured in a collision with a sturgeon resultant,
Speaker 1: and this was in Florida, resulting in warning signs that
Speaker 1: were posted to encourage slower motor boat and jet ski speeds. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have a two hundred pound fish flying out of
Speaker 1: the water up to six ft out of the water,
Speaker 1: and then you have a motor boat, you know, moving
Speaker 1: at high speeds as well. That's where these possibilities present themselves. Okay,
Speaker 1: but fish this big, why do they jump out of
Speaker 1: the water. Well, it's remained a bit of a mystery,
Speaker 1: but we have a few familiar theories as well as
Speaker 1: one that's kind of new here for our discussion here. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, all species of sturgeon will jump at times.
Speaker 1: The gold sturgeon is known to jump at two different
Speaker 1: times of the year in the rivers during July and
Speaker 1: August and early in the offshore feeding period. So one
Speaker 1: theory is they do it to escape predators. But that's
Speaker 1: a big it's a big exactly, it's kind of a
Speaker 1: lame theory because the larger sturgeon do not have predators. Um.
Speaker 1: Another theory is that they do it for fun. And
Speaker 1: this is when I see mentioned with dolphins, and maybe
Speaker 1: we'll save that one for another another discussion. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't want to be unfairly prejudiced against the UH. I
Speaker 1: don't know the intellectual capabilities of fish, because, as we
Speaker 1: learned with our birds episode, sometimes you underestimate what other
Speaker 1: animal minds are capable of. But I tend to think
Speaker 1: of play as something that's more associated with more complex
Speaker 1: mammalian nervous systems, which is why it makes sense with
Speaker 1: with dolphins. You know, kind of intelligent mammals. Fish, I
Speaker 1: don't know, are they mentally complex enough to play? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean plus, it's also it comes down to economics.
Speaker 1: I was reading some thoughts on this from biologist Ken Sulak,
Speaker 1: and he pointed out that the jumping, especially for a
Speaker 1: massive sturgeon, it's an energy expenditure, so there has to
Speaker 1: be a trade off and behavioral importance beyond mere fun um.
Speaker 1: He actually theorizes that this is a form of communication
Speaker 1: with sturgeons. So there when they jump out and and
Speaker 1: and splash, it creates a distinct sound, slapping noise, but
Speaker 1: they also um announced that they also create a small
Speaker 1: sound before and after um the jump. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like they produced kind of like clicks and drumming noises,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of a clicker, a drumming noise, the jump,
Speaker 1: the splash another sound, and he thinks that they might
Speaker 1: be announcing their presence in position to the larger groups.
Speaker 1: So it's like the mooing of a cow, which which
Speaker 1: I think is an interesting theory. Well, this, this does,
Speaker 1: this communication theory plays into something that I'm going to
Speaker 1: mention later, especially when we talk about sharks. Yes, and
Speaker 1: we'll get to sharks in a minute, but before we do,
Speaker 1: we have another potentially dangerous, perhaps even more worrisome for
Speaker 1: half our listeners fish to contend with. So you may
Speaker 1: have heard this story. A man is walking in the
Speaker 1: jungles of the Amazon and he realizes that, oh man,
Speaker 1: I had so much coffee this morning. I need to
Speaker 1: evacuate some urine. Okay, So he wades knee deep into
Speaker 1: the waters of the river, and he un zips and
Speaker 1: begins to relieve himself into the water. Question why does
Speaker 1: he wade into the water before he urine? I had
Speaker 1: that same question, but this is how the story goes. Okay,
Speaker 1: So for a few seconds this activity proceeds as normal,
Speaker 1: But then, to his horror, he sees a tiny, barely
Speaker 1: perceptible shape leap from the surface of the water into
Speaker 1: his urethra. Oh okay. In an alternate version of the story,
Speaker 1: it uh supposedly swims up the column of his urine
Speaker 1: stream and into his urethra, and then once inside there
Speaker 1: it spreads this collection of barbed spines like an umbrella
Speaker 1: opening inside your urethra, and just lodges itself there and
Speaker 1: begins to feast on the flesh. And eventually he has
Speaker 1: to he either dies or he has to undergo a really,
Speaker 1: really undesirable surgery to get it removed. Well, that's horrible.
Speaker 1: I think we've all heard versions of this before, right you.
Speaker 1: You may remember a version of this from some dialogue
Speaker 1: between Eric Stolts and John Voight in the movie Anaconda. Okay,
Speaker 1: I I vaguely remember that. I tend to remember the
Speaker 1: gross out moments of that film more. But yes, oh,
Speaker 1: I mostly remember John Void's accent. What is his accent
Speaker 1: supposed to be? It's like a cross between South American
Speaker 1: and and Count Dracula. That's great, But but is this
Speaker 1: story really true? Does anything like this happen? Can a
Speaker 1: tiny fish jump out of the water and into somebody's
Speaker 1: urethra or swim up your urine stream into your urethra? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: the fish allegedly described in this story as agreed by
Speaker 1: most authorities to be in fact, the Vandelia sarosa, which
Speaker 1: is a type of parasitic catfish, also known as a
Speaker 1: vampire catfish, but it's commonly known in the sort of
Speaker 1: legendary literature as the candaru. These are the facts about Vandelia.
Speaker 1: So Vandelia's this tiny parasitic catfish, usually about an inch
Speaker 1: or two inches, you know, two and a half to
Speaker 1: five centimeters long, nearly invisible in the water, especially when
Speaker 1: it hasn't fed recently. Uh. And it occupies the tropical
Speaker 1: freshwater rivers of South America Amazon River basin. And it
Speaker 1: drinks the blood of other fish, so it's regular emo
Speaker 1: is it. You're you're a goldfish or something like that
Speaker 1: swimming around in the river, and the kandaroo or the
Speaker 1: vandelia scientifically swims into into your gills and anchors itself
Speaker 1: there with spines that line it's gill covers, and then
Speaker 1: it drinks your blood becomes engorged, and then it swims
Speaker 1: away to the bottom to burrow in and digest the
Speaker 1: bottom of the waterway. Right. Uh. And so when it
Speaker 1: enters the gills of the host fish, it bites at
Speaker 1: an order artery, ventrall or dorsal, and it doesn't need
Speaker 1: to suck because actually the host's blood pressure just pumps
Speaker 1: blood into the candaroo's mouth. So instead of blood sucking,
Speaker 1: this animal is more like when you hook the lip
Speaker 1: of a balloon over a water faucet and then turn
Speaker 1: the water on to make a water balloon, is just
Speaker 1: letting itself fill up. Okay, So the idea here is
Speaker 1: that if it preyed on humans, obviously, swimming into someone's
Speaker 1: p hole is not it's it's design. This would be
Speaker 1: it would be like a like a port tape worm
Speaker 1: getting lost and winding up in your brain. This doesn't
Speaker 1: need that to happen, but it occurs accidentally, right that
Speaker 1: this is a mistake for this animal. If if this
Speaker 1: is true and uh, and it's a it's a fatal
Speaker 1: mistake for the animal and sometimes for the person according
Speaker 1: to the story. So those are the facts that just reported. Now,
Speaker 1: there are also a bunch of claims that are commonly
Speaker 1: reported as fact, and these include that the kangaroo can
Speaker 1: swim up the urethra of a person or mammal that
Speaker 1: might urinate in the water, so that the less unbelievable
Speaker 1: version is that mammals weighed fully into the water and
Speaker 1: begin to urinate once under the water, and the candaroo
Speaker 1: swims up one of their orifices, the urethro or the
Speaker 1: vagina or the anus. Uh. It's commonly reported that this
Speaker 1: fish is attracted to the flow of urine, maybe because
Speaker 1: it's chemically similar to some chemicals that would come out
Speaker 1: of the gills of its host fish. More on that
Speaker 1: in a bit. And then once instide, once inside you,
Speaker 1: it gets stuck, can't escape, dies, obstructs the path of
Speaker 1: the urethra, you can't pee, and it has to get
Speaker 1: removed by surgery. Classical stories of this include lots of
Speaker 1: accounts of penile amputation. So you can see why this
Speaker 1: causes extreme distress for people getting into these waters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I can also see why a lot of this
Speaker 1: is sort of hinged on just creating a cringe e
Speaker 1: hert tail to share with with visitors. Say, oh, the
Speaker 1: officials swim up your pee hole and then we'll have
Speaker 1: to cut your penis off, you know. So it's it's
Speaker 1: easy to see it as nothing more than that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there are two questions here. Number one is the
Speaker 1: general one to kinderu actually swim up people's urethras? Uh?
Speaker 1: And if so, do they perform this even more crazy
Speaker 1: sounding feat of either jumping from the water this jumping
Speaker 1: fish tie in here, which isn't as crazy based on
Speaker 1: what we've been discussing. Lots of fish jumps, so it
Speaker 1: seems possible. Now, could it jump with such a degree
Speaker 1: of accuracy that it jumps straight into your urethra that's
Speaker 1: kind of tough to imagine, or the even crazier one
Speaker 1: that it swims up the stream of your urine. I
Speaker 1: got some doubts about that. But are there any medical
Speaker 1: cases of this? And in the cases of the medical literature, well,
Speaker 1: there's one major report in the modern day that people
Speaker 1: refer to. So in a euro genital surgeon named n
Speaker 1: Or some odd who was working in Amazonia in Brazil,
Speaker 1: reportedly extracted a dead Kinderu from patient's penis. And according
Speaker 1: to the report of the patient's story, the patient was
Speaker 1: standing thigh deep in the water, urinating into the water
Speaker 1: with his penis above the water, and he reported that
Speaker 1: the fish jumped out of the water, swam up the
Speaker 1: stream of his urine and into his urethra. Now, I I,
Speaker 1: as I alluded to earlier, I'm really suspicious about the
Speaker 1: physics of the swimming up the urine stream. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: It also makes me wonder if he did have something
Speaker 1: lodged in his in his uh urethra like he own,
Speaker 1: maybe he only became aware of it when he urinated
Speaker 1: and this and he just happened to be standing in
Speaker 1: the water and he just made the assumption that, oh,
Speaker 1: that's when it entered. Yeah, so we only have this
Speaker 1: second or I guess third hand report in this case,
Speaker 1: so it's hard to know exactly what happened, But imagine
Speaker 1: the idea, like physically, just try to think of the
Speaker 1: fluid mechanics of swimming up a stream of urine. It
Speaker 1: would be kind of like if you had imagine a
Speaker 1: really good swimmer, like an Olympic swimmer, in a pool,
Speaker 1: and then you stand on the roof of a house
Speaker 1: over the pool and aim a fire hose at them
Speaker 1: and say, okay, swim up the stream of the fire hose.
Speaker 1: To me, uh, that just it doesn't seem to make
Speaker 1: any sense. It would be like swimming up a waterfall,
Speaker 1: where salmon do not swim up a waterfall, but they
Speaker 1: can jump. They can jump over right, So I can
Speaker 1: believe it's much more likely that a fish simply jumped
Speaker 1: out of the water and in this one in a
Speaker 1: million chance kind of way, happened to jump straight into
Speaker 1: this guy's unfortunate urethra, which we should say does expand
Speaker 1: during urination. So it kind of opens the possibility there,
Speaker 1: both figuratively and I guess literally. So according to a
Speaker 1: BBC story I read on the candaroo legend um, the
Speaker 1: American marine scientists Steven Spot met with some od the
Speaker 1: surgeon who supposedly removed the candyo from the guy. He
Speaker 1: met with this guy in to investigate, and he was
Speaker 1: shown pictures and video of the extraction. So a real
Speaker 1: surgery definitely took place. Some something was actually removed from
Speaker 1: this guy's urethra. Uh, and there was a preserved specimen
Speaker 1: of the fish itself. But Spot wasn't entirely convinced for
Speaker 1: a few reasons. One was, um, the physical mechanical problem
Speaker 1: I just mentioned in the patient's story. The other was
Speaker 1: the preserved specimen was a lot bigger than you'd expect
Speaker 1: a kinderu to grow, which in one other source I
Speaker 1: read it was more than five inches long and almost
Speaker 1: half an inch wide, can you. And also it was
Speaker 1: bigger than the thing we'd expect to find in your urethra.
Speaker 1: That also makes the story all the more horrific to envision. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then the specimen also, according to Spot, did not
Speaker 1: show signs of having been lodged or removed as described.
Speaker 1: For example, it didn't have snipped off spines or anything. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then again Spot reported he didn't entirely dismiss the account either.
Speaker 1: At this point, many elements appear unlikely, but it's hard
Speaker 1: hard to know what really happened. Um. But as a
Speaker 1: side note, this sort of raises the question of Candio
Speaker 1: entering the urethra and and other body orifice is more
Speaker 1: generally right. So this has been widely reported as fact
Speaker 1: all throughout the literature, both scientific and popular, for a
Speaker 1: couple hundred years now, but a few critical writers have
Speaker 1: pointed out these accounts are kind of weird, like that
Speaker 1: they're almost always vague and second hand. It happened to
Speaker 1: somebody that I heard of somewhere up the river. Some
Speaker 1: guy in the next village had a candio swim or
Speaker 1: jump into his penis and and get lodged there um
Speaker 1: And also supposedly one of the explanations for this that
Speaker 1: the kanderu are attracted to the chemicals commonly found in
Speaker 1: human urine, such as urea that has been tested and
Speaker 1: found to be completely without merit. So Steven Spot, along
Speaker 1: with the guy mentioned earlier, along with colleagues Paulo Petrie
Speaker 1: and Jensen Zonon, published results of an experiment in two
Speaker 1: thousand one that found that Vandelia, these these parasitic catfishes
Speaker 1: under lab conditions just didn't care about the chemical attractants
Speaker 1: in the water at all. They were not interested in ammonia,
Speaker 1: amino acids, fresh fish slime, or human urine. No response,
Speaker 1: they just didn't care. Instead, they seemed to hunt for
Speaker 1: hosts such as Amazon goldfish mostly by sight. They saw them, said,
Speaker 1: those look like some good gills. I'm going to them.
Speaker 1: And uh, and fortunately somebody has actually tried to figure
Speaker 1: out if there's anything to all these stories. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: a paper in the Journal of Travel Medicine in by
Speaker 1: erme Guard Bauer called Kandaru a little fish with bad
Speaker 1: habits need travel health professionals worry a review and so
Speaker 1: in this paper the least scandal as possible headline, I know,
Speaker 1: but Bauer essentially concluded that there there's probably nothing to
Speaker 1: these stories. Uh, there's they So there was an extensive
Speaker 1: review of all the available literature, and there's just not
Speaker 1: strong evidence that these fish pose a threat to humans. Instead,
Speaker 1: the record sort of indicates that these attacks are they're
Speaker 1: just always hearsay. The same stories get repeated over and
Speaker 1: over as if they're fact. And Bauer concludes by saying,
Speaker 1: you know, considering the range of this fish, it's all
Speaker 1: over the place, and and how how horrifying their habit
Speaker 1: is supposed to be, it seems like wouldn't we be
Speaker 1: hearing about this more often in the modern day, wouldn't
Speaker 1: we be encountering stories of this happening. Uh, and and
Speaker 1: there's almost nothing. There's just like that that those old
Speaker 1: stories that have been repeated for decades, and then there's
Speaker 1: this one disputable case. Yeah. I mean, the only counter
Speaker 1: argument I can think of is that since it's like
Speaker 1: a penile injury, that it would be underreported out of
Speaker 1: shame or embarrassment. But not if you factor in like
Speaker 1: the severity of the supposed severity of the infection. You know.
Speaker 1: I feel like this is the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: if there were a confirmed case where somebody went to
Speaker 1: a hospital and this was you know, became part of
Speaker 1: the medical literature, this would be this would be all
Speaker 1: over I f L science and everything, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, everybody would be like, oh my god, I
Speaker 1: gotta fish up his penis. We've got to report the
Speaker 1: heck out of this. Yeah, And we just don't see that.
Speaker 1: Now that being said, there are plenty of other things
Speaker 1: that can harm your privates if you go waiting around
Speaker 1: in you know, Amazonian rivers. And in fact that as
Speaker 1: part of the explanation is that many of these stories
Speaker 1: may be sort of garblings because a lot of them
Speaker 1: come from you know, colonial periods in the Amazon and
Speaker 1: stuff like that where there were language barriers between the
Speaker 1: people reporting the stories and then the and then the
Speaker 1: people writing them down and publishing them. So, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I feel like there's a lot of room for legend
Speaker 1: and error. Yeah. Plus, I mean, if anyone out there,
Speaker 1: if you've ever had a U t I. Yournary urinary
Speaker 1: track infection, you you know that it can feel like
Speaker 1: a tiny barbed fish has slam in side chiefs. So
Speaker 1: I could see where where such uncomfortable scenarios could lend
Speaker 1: them selves to creative interpretations. Okay, so what do we
Speaker 1: think on that Candaru leaping into your urethra? Not impossible,
Speaker 1: but seems unlikely. Let's get into sharks, because I think
Speaker 1: we've all seen these stunning images some photoshopped of great
Speaker 1: white sharks leaping over the Golden Gate Bridge and leaping
Speaker 1: out of Yeah, leaping over bridges, or at least managing
Speaker 1: to get their entire bodies out of the water in
Speaker 1: a way that just terrifies us because you look and
Speaker 1: you say, well, that's a monster of the water. But
Speaker 1: it is not allowed out of the water, It is
Speaker 1: not allowed up here in the air because that just
Speaker 1: messes with with all of the guidelines that governed my safety. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought I was supposed to be safe in this boat. Well,
Speaker 1: in keeping with our theme of fish leaping at people
Speaker 1: in their watercraft, did you know that sometimes even great
Speaker 1: white sharks leap into boats entirely into Yeah. So in
Speaker 1: this case, as with others, this is not a situation
Speaker 1: of attempted predatory behavior towards the humans on the boat.
Speaker 1: It's not an attack. Uh, it's just very unfortunate coincidence.
Speaker 1: One example of this kind of story July two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: I found a National Geographic news story covering one of
Speaker 1: these events. So in July two thousand eleven, there's a
Speaker 1: research vessel off Seal Island, off the coast of South Africa.
Speaker 1: And if you've seen videos of great white sharks jumping
Speaker 1: into the air out of the water, very likely that
Speaker 1: video came from around Seal Island in South Africa. This
Speaker 1: is one of the most famous places in the world
Speaker 1: to see this behavior among white sharks. So there's a
Speaker 1: research vessel in the waters out near this place, and
Speaker 1: a roughly five kilogram or half ton great white shark
Speaker 1: jumps into the boat operated by these marine researchers, and
Speaker 1: it's in the boat. It's stuck on the deck beneath
Speaker 1: the walls in the boat, so thrashing around. Everybody had
Speaker 1: to get the heck away from it and try to
Speaker 1: figure out how to help it get back into the
Speaker 1: water so it wouldn't die. Robert, for your benefit, I
Speaker 1: have a picture here. It's just a shark in the boat.
Speaker 1: That is a big shark. This is not if you're
Speaker 1: if you're picturing like just a juvenile, small little aquarium shark.
Speaker 1: Huge shark. Uh. So, of course they couldn't get the
Speaker 1: shark out of the boat by hand. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: they attempted to drag it out with a rope and
Speaker 1: that failed, and then they so eventually they had to
Speaker 1: drive the boat back to the harbor, and they tried
Speaker 1: to lift it out of the boat with a crane,
Speaker 1: which was dangerous to do, but the shark was going
Speaker 1: to die, so they had to try it. Uh. And
Speaker 1: they so they lowered it back into the water. But
Speaker 1: shark may be confused or injured from this, stranded itself
Speaker 1: on a harbor beach nearby. They attempted to push it
Speaker 1: back into the water by hand, and that failed, So
Speaker 1: eventually they tied the animal to the side of a
Speaker 1: boat and drove it out to sea, and half an
Speaker 1: hour after that, the sharks swam away. It swam away
Speaker 1: and seemed to recover. It slapped its tail. So nobody
Speaker 1: knows what happened after that, if it eventually went on
Speaker 1: to live and be okay, or if it was injured
Speaker 1: and if it died. They're just not sure. But I
Speaker 1: hope that sharks out there right now, uh, longing for
Speaker 1: seal flesh, trying to eat live right. So, So, when
Speaker 1: a shark leaps out of the water, this is known
Speaker 1: as breaching. And to use specific terminology that I love
Speaker 1: from one study that I read, when a shark leaps
Speaker 1: vertically or near vertically out of the water, so it's
Speaker 1: coming up from below vertically into the air with a
Speaker 1: head up position, this is known as a polarist breach. Oh,
Speaker 1: I love that. That's so good. That's a good band name.
Speaker 1: Uh So why do shark's breach? Why why do they
Speaker 1: come up out of the water like? Well, based on
Speaker 1: a lot of my research that concerns uh like nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties Italian shark films that came out in the wake
Speaker 1: of jaws. They do it to make a boat explode, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to smash about, And no, that is not why they
Speaker 1: do it. They they're There are two main kinds of breaching.
Speaker 1: There may be other minor behavior, but the two main
Speaker 1: kinds that you'll read about most often are predatory breaching
Speaker 1: and what's known as natural breaching. So predatory breaching, it's
Speaker 1: all there in the name. The shark is in the
Speaker 1: pursuit of prey. There's a seal, you know, pinnaped there
Speaker 1: that's a nice, fatty, delicious, energy rich meal swimming along
Speaker 1: near the surface of the water. And in these breaches,
Speaker 1: the shark moves rapidly up from below, bites as it
Speaker 1: shoots up into the air, and then slams back down
Speaker 1: into the water. And a lot of cases there it'll
Speaker 1: shoot up from below, hit the seal, bite it, and
Speaker 1: then release it, and then wait for the seal to
Speaker 1: bleed out and die and come back and finish it.
Speaker 1: This is Yeah. I was reading a paper about this
Speaker 1: the other day in preparation for this episode, and I
Speaker 1: found that interesting because I really had not research actual
Speaker 1: shark predatory behavior much and the idea that they wound
Speaker 1: and then allow the the prey to bleed and then
Speaker 1: come back for it is interesting because because you know,
Speaker 1: nobody wants to get slapped by a seal, including a
Speaker 1: great white shark. You know, the shark is has to
Speaker 1: be cautious, like a prey can injure it if it's
Speaker 1: fighting around with it while the prey is still strong,
Speaker 1: so it wants to avoid that. In fact, one of
Speaker 1: the papers I read about this by an author named
Speaker 1: r Aiden Martin who has written on great white breaching
Speaker 1: a good bit. They actually put together a shark hunting
Speaker 1: decision tree, so it has it's like a flow chart
Speaker 1: where you know what, depending on what happens, do you
Speaker 1: move to this next thing or this next thing? Uh?
Speaker 1: And so it includes like the initial attack and then
Speaker 1: do you catch or do you wait and pursue? Do
Speaker 1: you quote process? I love that at some point the
Speaker 1: shark begins to process the seal um and we don't
Speaker 1: mean thinking about the seal here either. No, this is
Speaker 1: sort of working on it right right, butchering with its
Speaker 1: mouth with basically, So, so why does it do this? What?
Speaker 1: Why is the great white shark attacking the seal in
Speaker 1: this way? Why didn't it just swim up from behind
Speaker 1: and bite it. Uh. Well, think think about how this
Speaker 1: plays out in practice, like what the conditions are for
Speaker 1: the predator and for the prey looking up from the
Speaker 1: deep water below. The shark has more ability to see
Speaker 1: a seal near the surface than the seal does to
Speaker 1: see a shark. So the seal is illuminated by the sky,
Speaker 1: and these attacks take place more often in low light conditions,
Speaker 1: when there's less penetration of water of the water column
Speaker 1: by the light in the sky, like if the sun's
Speaker 1: at an angle. So you're a shark, you know several
Speaker 1: you know, meters down below the water, and you're looking up.
Speaker 1: You can see your prey, but it's less likely to
Speaker 1: see you, especially because of your your dorsal coloring, the
Speaker 1: dark coloring on the top of you. And so why
Speaker 1: is this element of surprise so crucial? Well, when you
Speaker 1: look at the body composition of a white shark versus
Speaker 1: a seal um according to one study I read between
Speaker 1: ninety four and of a white sharks, muscle is composed
Speaker 1: of what's known as white muscle, and this is this
Speaker 1: is sprinting muscle. It's capable of rapid contraction, but it
Speaker 1: has very low stamina and a pin up head like
Speaker 1: a seal, on the other hand, can go the distance
Speaker 1: it's capable of sustaining long term evasive tactics. So the
Speaker 1: longer the attack goes on, the better that the less
Speaker 1: chance a shark has of catching the seal and getting
Speaker 1: it um. So the sharks are better at sprinting the
Speaker 1: marathon seals can can keep evading, so a sudden surprise
Speaker 1: attack greatly increases the shark's chance of success. And this
Speaker 1: is why this rocketing up from below which leads to
Speaker 1: breaching UH is so common. Well, that makes perfect sense
Speaker 1: from the from a hunting standpoint, and according to a
Speaker 1: paper on the on the physics of this process, so
Speaker 1: the shark usually starts UH down deep in the water,
Speaker 1: a place where the bottom depth is between twenty six
Speaker 1: and thirty meters and UH in these cases, the entire
Speaker 1: attack you know, leaping up from the bottom after they
Speaker 1: begin their strikes to u to the seal is about
Speaker 1: two to two and a half seconds, so it just
Speaker 1: doesn't give the seal much time at all to react.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, at the speed it takes to
Speaker 1: hit the seal from below that fast, the sharks still
Speaker 1: propelled upwards and it's going out of the water. Um.
Speaker 1: And in these cases, the shark attacks are successful about
Speaker 1: forty percent of the time, which is not a bad
Speaker 1: hunting success. Right. But then there's this other kind of
Speaker 1: breaching image. That's what that's the predatory breaching, jumping out
Speaker 1: of the water to kill. There's also what's known as
Speaker 1: natural breaching, when the shark breaches for no obvious reason,
Speaker 1: there's no predatory attack or anything, um, no bait on
Speaker 1: the surface that it's being coaxed to the surface with. Right,
Speaker 1: So why what what's going on here? Well, according to
Speaker 1: one theory, sharks have these well developed McCay no receptors
Speaker 1: and chemo receptors and electro receptors. They have all you know,
Speaker 1: receptive sensing organs that we don't have at that kind
Speaker 1: of level. So it's been hypothesized that tail slap, so
Speaker 1: that's one type of slapping behavior, and then breaching jumping
Speaker 1: out of the water and splashing down are communicative. They
Speaker 1: they're allowing sharks to communicate between one another through agonistic behaviors.
Speaker 1: That's not you know, fighting displays. I'm tough, this is
Speaker 1: my food. You better get away because I could fight
Speaker 1: you for it. And it's true that lots of fishes
Speaker 1: do use sound as a communication channel, and so it's
Speaker 1: hypothesized that these behaviors like tail slapping and breaching jumping
Speaker 1: out of the water and splashing down could exploit this
Speaker 1: kind of mechano reception. This this sound sensitive ability of
Speaker 1: fish to communicate between the sharks. And when you think
Speaker 1: about it, a shark jumping out of the water and
Speaker 1: splashing down is not necessarily a bad signifier of fitness.
Speaker 1: That's like, the bigger you are and the stronger you are,
Speaker 1: the harder of a splashdown you can make. Yeah, it's certainly,
Speaker 1: I mean, it makes a statement to us and we're
Speaker 1: not even sharks. Yeah. And one reason to think this
Speaker 1: is a good explanation is that this natural breaching often
Speaker 1: seems to happen with sharks in the presence of other sharks,
Speaker 1: not just hanging out by themselves. Now, this is interesting.
Speaker 1: We're talking about this breaching behavior that's taking place, uh
Speaker 1: specifically the predatory breaching behavior. It's taking place in the
Speaker 1: presence of these seals. You brought up an interesting um
Speaker 1: tidbit yesterday about the recent shark move movie The Shallows
Speaker 1: in which the shark tries to eat like lively about
Speaker 1: about what what does it mean when we see a
Speaker 1: movie shark breaching like this in seemingly tropical waters. Oh? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this was interesting. I believe I read this. Now, this
Speaker 1: isn't in my notes. I'm just trying to recall from memory.
Speaker 1: But I recalled that I read this, I think, on
Speaker 1: Smithsonian where they were reviewing the trailer of the film.
Speaker 1: But they spoke to a marine biologist who had some
Speaker 1: knowledge of shark behaviors and said, Okay, look at how
Speaker 1: the shark's acting in the trailer for this movie. Is
Speaker 1: this basically accurate? Uh? And I recall what the the
Speaker 1: expert said was, well, it looks like this movie is
Speaker 1: supposed to take place in tropical waters, and yet you
Speaker 1: see the shark when it attacks this guy leaps out
Speaker 1: of the water. That's breaching behavior, which is not necessarily
Speaker 1: something you'd be likely to see in tropical waters, because
Speaker 1: the places you really see it are are like in
Speaker 1: South Africa, where they have these, uh, these prey like
Speaker 1: seals that they have to attack in this manner in
Speaker 1: order to maximize their success rate at catching them. In
Speaker 1: tropical waters, sharks probably have access to fish that are
Speaker 1: much more slow moving and easier to catch, and they
Speaker 1: just they don't have to resort to these breaching behaviors
Speaker 1: in order to catch meals, so that they The expert
Speaker 1: they talked to rated that as not quite. It's so plausible.
Speaker 1: But from a cinematic standpoint, nothing is more terrifying than
Speaker 1: the shark coming out of its habitat into our habitat
Speaker 1: in order to especially to eat us. It's the inherent
Speaker 1: perversity of the land shark. It is all right, Well,
Speaker 1: at this point we really have only one sort of
Speaker 1: leaping jumping fish to consider, and that is, of course
Speaker 1: the so called flying fish, right, because the distinction between
Speaker 1: jumping and flying may seem very clear to you, right,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, kangaroos jump and birds fly and and
Speaker 1: these are not all that similar behaviors, but the dividing
Speaker 1: line between them, I don't know, is it really just time? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can certainly bog yourself down in in um definitions
Speaker 1: of flight, to be clear. With with the flying fish,
Speaker 1: we are talking about a gliding but sometimes kind of
Speaker 1: a hydroplaning, where they're just where the tail is still
Speaker 1: in contact with the water. UM so it's not powered flight,
Speaker 1: it's not true flight, so we're not talking about piranha
Speaker 1: to the spawning here right right, and then there are
Speaker 1: certainly no feathers involved. But um, it's interesting to put
Speaker 1: this in, you know, to sort of top off this
Speaker 1: discussion of all these leaping and jumping behaviors, because gliding
Speaker 1: fish might seem like the the evolutionary pinnacle of jumping fish, right.
Speaker 1: But but the interesting thing here is that there's nothing
Speaker 1: new at all. In two thousand twelve, paleontologists found a
Speaker 1: near complete skeleton from the Tree Driassic period that's two
Speaker 1: to two forty two million years ago, UM, and near
Speaker 1: complete skeleton boasted all the key attributes of the modern
Speaker 1: flying fish, well developed pectorial fin and a forked, asymmetrical tail.
Speaker 1: And even this form seemed to have evolved independently from
Speaker 1: the sixty four known species of flying fish we find
Speaker 1: today in all the world's ocean independence. So it's not
Speaker 1: like an ancestor of them, like a cousin of them
Speaker 1: that's now not here, right. It developed this gliding technique
Speaker 1: on its own. Um. So it's interesting to to realize
Speaker 1: that that gliding fish have evolved in the past separately,
Speaker 1: they've died, had died out and uh, and we have
Speaker 1: a fairly successful model of it today in the in
Speaker 1: these sixty four known species of flying fish and um
Speaker 1: and again, they don't necessarily fly as much as they glide,
Speaker 1: but they can, they can really glide. So then what
Speaker 1: what would the difference be between a fish that glides
Speaker 1: and a fish that actually quote flies. Well, again, this
Speaker 1: is an area where where individuals can get into discussions
Speaker 1: and disagreements over what defines flight. But essentially it's a
Speaker 1: difference between powered flight and gliding. All right, So is
Speaker 1: it is the creature flapping its wings in order to
Speaker 1: sustain itself in the air or is it merely sort
Speaker 1: of falling with grace? Right? Uh, hang glider versus an
Speaker 1: airplane exactly, because we see plenty of gliding creatures and
Speaker 1: it generally means in order to glide, you need to
Speaker 1: either fall from something high such as a tree, which
Speaker 1: is why we see so many um you know, tree
Speaker 1: based gliders of boreal gliders, or it needs to be
Speaker 1: able to jump up high enough to glide a little bit.
Speaker 1: And that's what we see with gliding or flying fish
Speaker 1: um and they can, they can really glide. They can
Speaker 1: glide and or hydroplane distances of hundred feet or four
Speaker 1: hundred meters in thirty seconds, with maximum flight speeds of
Speaker 1: up to forty five miles per hour or seventy two
Speaker 1: kilometers per hour, which is pretty impressive. I feel like
Speaker 1: we've all seen like splendid videos of this taking place.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty impressive. So, since these fish are small,
Speaker 1: I imagine they're not breaching to uh to inflict predatory
Speaker 1: damage on a seal or something like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: these are These are generally plankton eaters, and pretty much
Speaker 1: everybody agrees that they jump and glide to escape. There
Speaker 1: are many many enemies in the sea. Yea, yet another
Speaker 1: evasive maneuver right now. There have been some that are
Speaker 1: proposed that this has to do with energy conservation, like
Speaker 1: the running or porpoising that is observed in marine mammals
Speaker 1: such as penguins or dolphins, but it really doesn't pan
Speaker 1: out when you crunch all the factors, including the oxygen
Speaker 1: debt of takeoff, and biologist John Davenport did just this
Speaker 1: sort of crunching in his paper How and Why Do
Speaker 1: Flying Fish Fly? Which is a certainly a good in
Speaker 1: depth reread if you really want to get into the
Speaker 1: the economics and physics of this. Another theory sees all
Speaker 1: of this is a means to move from a food
Speaker 1: or plankton poor area to a food rich area, thus
Speaker 1: making the energy expenditure worth it. Essentially kind of like
Speaker 1: rate and teleporting during a fight to get behind an opponent.
Speaker 1: You're not in a good position for your food, teleport
Speaker 1: to the the to the positive position via flight. But
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of it's to back that up.
Speaker 1: So why why would the flying or gliding in that
Speaker 1: case be better than just swimming to the food rich area.
Speaker 1: I just have to go back to the raid and
Speaker 1: analogy there. It's just the the it's in the realm
Speaker 1: of water. It is more like an instant appearance as
Speaker 1: opposed to a journey too. But again, so you can
Speaker 1: pretty much don't worry too much about that theory because
Speaker 1: pretty much everybody is still in agreeans this is about
Speaker 1: escaping predators. Now, in escaping those predators, flying fish that
Speaker 1: were gliding fish, they don't flap their wings to gain
Speaker 1: lift um. They propel through the air water interface. I
Speaker 1: like that terminology at a shallow angle unfurl their large
Speaker 1: lateral fins and then rapidly beat their tail in the
Speaker 1: water prior to actual lift off. And it's interesting too
Speaker 1: that they have to be a certain size before they
Speaker 1: can actually pull this off. The smaller flying fish, before
Speaker 1: they have attained appropriate size, they can't actually pull this off.
Speaker 1: They're limited to simple leaps with their fins held against
Speaker 1: the body by surface tension. Huh yeah, okay, Well, so
Speaker 1: flying fish, you might say, in this case is kind
Speaker 1: of a misnomer. Then yes, it's they're they're gliding fish
Speaker 1: that we have jumping fish, we have longer jumping fish,
Speaker 1: we have gliding fish. But I wonder why no fish
Speaker 1: with the ability to maintain sustained flight, Because if you
Speaker 1: imagine the the evolution of flight in its many forms, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's commonly hypothesized that flight organs began with gliding organs.
Speaker 1: You know, organisms had had maybe movements or or gliding
Speaker 1: organs that would help them coast from one tree to
Speaker 1: another or help them escape a predator faster. And overtime,
Speaker 1: these organs developed until they were able to create powered
Speaker 1: sustained flight like birds. So why haven't fish gone there?
Speaker 1: Why are there no fish? Birds? I know you can't
Speaker 1: help but think about this, especially when you look at
Speaker 1: you jumping and then gliding, Why not flying? Why why
Speaker 1: have they not taken that next step? And then indeed
Speaker 1: is that step even possible? Right? Because as as you
Speaker 1: pointed out, so many of these examples of flight that
Speaker 1: we have UM and certainly there are not that many.
Speaker 1: You can ultimately kind of look as at flight as
Speaker 1: a is a rare adaptation, even though it has been
Speaker 1: tremendously successful for the organisms that have achieved it. Because
Speaker 1: as vertebrates go, we've we've only seen three takes on flight.
Speaker 1: We've seen UH pedero sarin flight, We've seen avian flight,
Speaker 1: and we've seen you know, bat flight and UH and fish.
Speaker 1: So far as we know, unless there's some sort of
Speaker 1: fossil out there that we've got to uncover, they've never
Speaker 1: crossed the threshold UH and UH and and and all.
Speaker 1: When you take an all biology, you have a single
Speaker 1: extinct lineage and three extant clades birds, bats and the
Speaker 1: and and UH and also insects. But even in these
Speaker 1: three extant examples of of vertebrate flight, they are examples
Speaker 1: of convergent evolution, not that like the pterosaurs the birds
Speaker 1: and the bats didn't evolve from each other. They all
Speaker 1: independently achieved the mechanisms of flight. That's right, they exploit
Speaker 1: the same physical properties, but they're all different solutions to
Speaker 1: the same problem. I was looking at this book by
Speaker 1: David Alexander and Stephen Vogel titled Nature's Flyers, Birds, Insects,
Speaker 1: and the Biomechanics of Flight, and they put it into
Speaker 1: context like this quote. Although such convergent features may make
Speaker 1: two animals appear quite similar, the adaptations are only superficially
Speaker 1: similar and have fundamental differences. Fish or cold blooded, scaly
Speaker 1: animals with gills, but proporpoises are warm blooded, smooth skinned
Speaker 1: breathers of air. The point being that these are both
Speaker 1: not flight based. But these are both sea creatures with
Speaker 1: similar forms at first glance, but there of course very
Speaker 1: different organisms. It continues, hummingbirds and bumblebees have almost identical
Speaker 1: wing beat patterns, but hummingbird wings are made of bone, muscle,
Speaker 1: and feathers. Bee wings or may of of pleaated membranes
Speaker 1: supported by stiff, hollow veins. And they point out to
Speaker 1: that technological evolution has produced several areas of convergence between
Speaker 1: flying animals and flying machines. Quote, the convergences were not
Speaker 1: intentional copies of mechanisms used by animals, but technological solutions
Speaker 1: to common challenges faced by all flyers. So this would
Speaker 1: seem to indicate that there's no inherent reason you couldn't
Speaker 1: expect fish to evolve mechanisms like a bird's wings or
Speaker 1: like an insect's swings. Uh, they would just be you know, fishire. Basically,
Speaker 1: they would be evolved from the equipment available to fish anatomy. Well,
Speaker 1: the one place that my mind immediately meant went was
Speaker 1: all right, so almost it seems like all these other
Speaker 1: examples are our land creatures that that take to gliding.
Speaker 1: So maybe dwelling on the land is an essential prerequisite
Speaker 1: too to the sort of gliding that evolves into flight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that could certainly like do you need or runway in
Speaker 1: order to evolve flight? A solid runway or or a
Speaker 1: high place to jump off of it? Can you just
Speaker 1: not really ever evolutionarily justify the the evolution of propelled
Speaker 1: flight mechanisms if you always have to start from underwater, right,
Speaker 1: And and maybe that does hold true of vertebrates. But
Speaker 1: then according to biologists Jim Martin. The possible exception is
Speaker 1: with insects. Flapping gills could have evolved into flight capable
Speaker 1: wings as an aquatic in an aquatic environment, according to Martin,
Speaker 1: so insects may have an out there. But maybe this
Speaker 1: prerequisite holds true with vertebrates. But the thing is, when
Speaker 1: you start asking this question, you also have to take
Speaker 1: it outside of fish too, because we could also say
Speaker 1: asked the same thing about other gliding organisms, gliding snakes, lizards,
Speaker 1: the gliding squid, various gliding arboreal mammals, including lemurs. Why
Speaker 1: are there no flying lemurs? Because certain they're they're in
Speaker 1: the position where they're they're leaping out of trees, they're
Speaker 1: gliding a little white Does that not developed into flight?
Speaker 1: I guess the simplest explanation to me would would just
Speaker 1: be a guess, but it would be that there's just
Speaker 1: not enough incentive for it, Like maybe there's just no
Speaker 1: clear advantage survival or reproduction advantage to fish remaining in
Speaker 1: the air for longer than it takes to glide a
Speaker 1: short distance. Because you know, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: what really happens in the air. I mean, birds use
Speaker 1: the air to traverse between different locations of feeding and
Speaker 1: breeding and stuff like that. I suppose fish could do
Speaker 1: the same thing, but I don't know would they be
Speaker 1: more would they be more open to bird predation if
Speaker 1: they were to fly around in the air all the time? Would?
Speaker 1: I mean, it could just be that there's not enough
Speaker 1: reason for them to have this trade. Yeah, because yeah,
Speaker 1: because when you do one thing to say, all right,
Speaker 1: why why don't the flying fish just become a true
Speaker 1: flying organism? But you also have to provide the reason
Speaker 1: for it, like how is that going to work? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it really a benefit that's going to play out
Speaker 1: an evolution? And uh, so far the answer seems to
Speaker 1: be no. Now, I do have to mention that this
Speaker 1: this larger question of why I do some lineages evolve
Speaker 1: into the sky and there's not? It remains something of
Speaker 1: a mystery, and scientists have even looked to underlying molecular
Speaker 1: mechanisms in this whole there's a whole study of biological
Speaker 1: uh periodicity that gets into this. It gets a really
Speaker 1: really deep and complex but and and uh and has
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of parallels in in molecular concerns,
Speaker 1: So it's uh so, so it ends up being a
Speaker 1: deeper question than just why don't fish actually fly? But
Speaker 1: why does do any numbers? Yeah, one more thing I
Speaker 1: probably should say. It's may have been too obvious for
Speaker 1: us to mention, but of course there is the impediment
Speaker 1: of breathing. Oh yes, a show gills. But but certainly
Speaker 1: we have land again right to the the mud skippers
Speaker 1: and the walking catfish, this and earlier forms of lungfish.
Speaker 1: So that alone doesn't seem like it would be a um,
Speaker 1: you know, an eliminating factor, but it would certainly still
Speaker 1: be a concern because they are venturing outside of their realm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, So there you have it. Um. Now, we
Speaker 1: only covered some of the jumping fish out there in
Speaker 1: the world, so we may have missed some examples that
Speaker 1: you're particularly fond of, or some just examples you've seen
Speaker 1: in real life and have some stories related to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and one thing I do think we should make clear
Speaker 1: is that Robert, you and I were not trying to
Speaker 1: be alarmists about fish jumping. We have we have covered
Speaker 1: several stories of fish jumping into boats, fish jumping into people,
Speaker 1: and injuries that have been sustained on those accounts. But
Speaker 1: I think these events are exceedingly rare overall, so you
Speaker 1: really don't need to be like super worried about getting
Speaker 1: killed by jumping fish. Right, But certainly if there's a science,
Speaker 1: ain't telling you not to to drive too fast on
Speaker 1: the water because they are leaping sturgeon, I would acknowledge
Speaker 1: that sign and remember that, yes, individuals have been injured
Speaker 1: or killed, so be cautious on or the sturgeon are
Speaker 1: under the sturgeon indeed. All right, So, hey, if you
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