Speaker 1: Hey, I'm welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and Jerry's here for Dave. So this is
Speaker 1: short Stuff as usual. Let's go. So can I tell
Speaker 1: you my inspiration for this was? I was I was
Speaker 1: at the lake the other day. We we got to
Speaker 1: a lake here in Georgia. I'm not gonna name it
Speaker 1: because I don't want to be stalked, okay, like no name,
Speaker 1: like no name. Uh And I was at the lake
Speaker 1: the other day doing a project and I was very hot,
Speaker 1: because it's very hot in Georgia right now, and I
Speaker 1: went to jump in to cool down. And right as
Speaker 1: I was going to take a leap off the dock,
Speaker 1: I saw a very large, like a two and a
Speaker 1: half foot garfish kind of treacle towards the surface. And
Speaker 1: I I've seen him before out there occasionally, but it
Speaker 1: just scare the life out of me because it is
Speaker 1: a terrifying looking fish. If you don't know what a
Speaker 1: garfish looks like, just do a little uhm search and
Speaker 1: they have these long, very sharp toothed snouts and they
Speaker 1: are terrifying if you It looks like something that you
Speaker 1: would find in a river in South America. And not
Speaker 1: the one that you would jump into a lake in Georgia. Right.
Speaker 1: And also, um, you travel back in time fifty million
Speaker 1: years too, because they definitely look prehistoric for sure. Oh
Speaker 1: absolutely uh. And this is specifically about the alligator gar.
Speaker 1: And this comes from our old friends at House Stuff
Speaker 1: Works in Michelle Konstantinovski. Great name, very nice, but the
Speaker 1: alligator gar is super old, right, Yeah. They think they
Speaker 1: found fossils as old as a hundred million years old,
Speaker 1: not just fifty um. And they actually the reason that
Speaker 1: it's called an alligator gars because it has a long
Speaker 1: snout too, but rather than being pointed like most other gar,
Speaker 1: it's flattened, giving it kind of like a shovel like
Speaker 1: appearance or actually like an alligator snout. And the Latin
Speaker 1: name for it is attracto status spatula. And that's right, spatula.
Speaker 1: It's the spatula fish is another way to put it.
Speaker 1: And it I mean it really does look like an
Speaker 1: alligator snout when you see a picture of these things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are huge. There um seven living species of of gar,
Speaker 1: and the alligator gar is the largest by far. Uh.
Speaker 1: The other way you can tell a diff is they
Speaker 1: have two rows of teeth alligator gar on the upper
Speaker 1: jaw instead of just the one row of teeth of
Speaker 1: the regular gar. And I think their head is a
Speaker 1: bit wider, yeah, And I think normally there um something
Speaker 1: like about a hundred and sixty pounds too, maybe six
Speaker 1: ft long, which is enormous for a fish. Um. But
Speaker 1: they have been I guess found up to three fifty
Speaker 1: pounds and ten ft long, which is even more enormous.
Speaker 1: I think the record, at least in Texas is three
Speaker 1: and two pounds. That was back in And the reason
Speaker 1: we bring up Texas because a YouTuber named hating More
Speaker 1: he's a conservationist, posted a video on his channel wildlife
Speaker 1: Um last May because he caught one of these things
Speaker 1: and it was eight ft long and probably about three
Speaker 1: hundred pounds. Did you watch that video? I did not.
Speaker 1: It is a very large fish and uh he likened
Speaker 1: it to um kind of hanging onto the end of
Speaker 1: a car that's trying to roll down a driveway. I
Speaker 1: don't see how you bring in a fish like this
Speaker 1: that that's that heavy, But he knew what he was doing,
Speaker 1: and it's it's just enormous, man. It's I think at
Speaker 1: the end he had that. Uh you know, he obviously
Speaker 1: released it, but he was kind of um measuring it
Speaker 1: and showing it off for the camera, and this thing
Speaker 1: just like whipped around to sort of wriggle and just
Speaker 1: like just it's so strong. It just knocks this guy
Speaker 1: over and then swims away. And he's like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I guess I I was gonna let it go, but
Speaker 1: apparently that just happened now, right, Good for him for
Speaker 1: letting it go, or at least planning to. You know, Well,
Speaker 1: you do let them go because apparently they're not good
Speaker 1: for eating. Uh. They for a couple of reasons. They
Speaker 1: don't taste great. Uh. And they are covered with these
Speaker 1: uh it's almost like an armored scale. Uh. They're called
Speaker 1: annoid scales, and it's like that um sort of um
Speaker 1: like an armor you would see on a dinosaur basically, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're very dinosaur like. And yeah, and the the even
Speaker 1: if you can dress them or I should say clean
Speaker 1: them to eat, like the meat that you get off of,
Speaker 1: it's not going to be very good. And if you
Speaker 1: find any row or fish eggs in a guar, you
Speaker 1: want to leave those alone because they're toxic no matter
Speaker 1: what gar species you're dealing with. So yeah, not really
Speaker 1: a delicacy in any way, shape or form. Should we
Speaker 1: take a break, I say, we take a break and
Speaker 1: then we'll come back and talk more about alligator car
Speaker 1: so um, chuck. I found out some pretty interesting stuff
Speaker 1: about them. That an alligator gar is a an opportunistic
Speaker 1: eater and it will eat basically anything. I saw that.
Speaker 1: They'll eat deer and raccoons if they get a chance.
Speaker 1: They'll eat waterfowl, turtles, crabs, other fish. Um. But one
Speaker 1: of the ways that they catch some of these things,
Speaker 1: especially some of the harder to harder to catch ones, um,
Speaker 1: they play dead. They ambush their prey by playing debt.
Speaker 1: They'll float and make another fisher, a raccoon or something
Speaker 1: that's going to swim past, think that it's dead. Then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden it grabs it out of the
Speaker 1: water and that thing is dead. And uh, they do
Speaker 1: eat all those things, and they have those huge alligator
Speaker 1: like mouths and teeth, so they're super scary, but apparently
Speaker 1: they're they're not gonna come after you. Um. I was
Speaker 1: just being a little, uh, a little baby boy the
Speaker 1: other day when I got scared and wouldn't jump in.
Speaker 1: If I would have jumped in, this thing would have
Speaker 1: scattered and gone far away. It wouldn't have said, you know,
Speaker 1: human arm must eat. Uh. They're they're just not going
Speaker 1: to come after you, so you don't need to fear.
Speaker 1: I think there's never been on record a case of
Speaker 1: I'll get her guard attacking somebody, right right, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what I've seen as well. But I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: if you had seen a gar that was floating, you
Speaker 1: would have wanted to steer clear that one, because maybe
Speaker 1: it wasn't ambush your arm. You know, you said that
Speaker 1: you saw him in your lake. I'm taking it that
Speaker 1: your No name lake is freshwater, right, I know it's
Speaker 1: a saltwater lake in the middle of Georgia. You never know. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's some saltiness in Georgia for sure. Uh. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's freshwater. Uh. And they're they're only in North America,
Speaker 1: which is pretty surprising. Yeah, but they used to be
Speaker 1: Remember we said that their fossils have been data back
Speaker 1: to a hundred million years. They used to be found
Speaker 1: all over the place. But yeah, now they're only in
Speaker 1: North America. There are freshwater species and they tend to
Speaker 1: like um, parts of like bodies of water with poor oxygen,
Speaker 1: so like um, say like maybe a cove where you'd
Speaker 1: launch a boat, um, or a backwater of a river
Speaker 1: that's kind of outside of the turbulence, or even swamps
Speaker 1: or bayous. And one reason they can survive in these
Speaker 1: kind of lower oxygen environments is they have an air
Speaker 1: bladder that not only helps them float, it also distributes
Speaker 1: oxygen to their blood. Uh slowly but surely, so they
Speaker 1: don't have to take in that much oxygen because they
Speaker 1: can hold a bunch at once. Yeah. And I think
Speaker 1: it's I think they're in Central America too. I just
Speaker 1: want to put that on the record. So let's say
Speaker 1: the Americas, but not South America. Men, these these alligator
Speaker 1: are are really tough to pin down. I think North
Speaker 1: and Central America because I did seek something about Costa Rica, uh,
Speaker 1: which is okay, So the America's okay. Um. So people
Speaker 1: just because you don't eat them, people still do fish
Speaker 1: for them, like this guy. I think they are sort
Speaker 1: of um. There are a lot of regulations in place
Speaker 1: because they are really slow to to reach the age
Speaker 1: where they can make little gar um. They spawn in
Speaker 1: very specialized areas, so they're very ripe for over fishing
Speaker 1: and for you know, like shrinking of species. But um,
Speaker 1: for that reason, they're highly highly regulated and you're basically,
Speaker 1: at least in Florida and I think a lot of
Speaker 1: other places, you're only going to be given a permit
Speaker 1: to fish for these things if it's scientific research or
Speaker 1: you're working in like managing the species or something like that.
Speaker 1: I tittered earlier, by the way, I want to say,
Speaker 1: at an inappropriate time, but it was because you said
Speaker 1: they're ripe for over fishing, and I just thought of
Speaker 1: a ripe car and that sounds so gross. They're scary looking. Uh.
Speaker 1: Early on though that, like you know, early earlier humans
Speaker 1: would fish for them and do all sorts of things
Speaker 1: that arm are like those armor like scales, those gonoid scales.
Speaker 1: They made jewelry out of them and tools and things
Speaker 1: like that because they're really tough. And I think they
Speaker 1: would use their their skin for products and the skin
Speaker 1: oil for different things. Yeah, who knows, what, do you
Speaker 1: have anything else? I don't have anything else. I think
Speaker 1: we've talked alligator alligator car to death. Well, I guess
Speaker 1: the last thing we should mention is is that they
Speaker 1: um even though they do our opportunistic eaters. I think
Speaker 1: there used to be an idea that they would devastate
Speaker 1: other fish populations, and that's apparently not the case. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. So they were over fished because they were
Speaker 1: considered a nuisance fish. So they were trying to protect
Speaker 1: the fish that they wanted by fishing the car alligator
Speaker 1: car out. But it turns out they were wrong. I
Speaker 1: do have one more thing. Okay, the name gar for
Speaker 1: these fishes comes from the Anglo Saxon word for spear.
Speaker 1: That is good. And I've got one more thing. I
Speaker 1: cannot help but think of a gar fish without thinking
Speaker 1: of the great great documentary Vernon Florida, my favorite documentary
Speaker 1: of all time, but the great Errol Morris and uh,
Speaker 1: one of the characters, the guy that talks like this,
Speaker 1: He talks about swimming in the river and oh, you
Speaker 1: come u up on one of those garfish. You're a
Speaker 1: better lookout brother. Really. And I saw that movie in college, right,
Speaker 1: I didn't know what a garfish was. And it it was
Speaker 1: many years later that I saw a guar and I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, I get it now, I gotta see
Speaker 1: that movie. It's just there's nothing like it. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: you got anything else? I think, Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1: I got nothing else? All right, Well, that means everybody's
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