Ep. 793: The Mysteries of Gar Fish

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Solomon David AKA "The Gar Guy," https://www.instagram.com/solomon.r.david/?hl=en Spencer Neuharth https://www.instagram.com/spencerneuharth/?hl=en, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/?hl=en, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/. Topics: The GarLab https://solomondavid.net/; the whole "rough fish"/"trash fish" thing; defining non-game fish; a bow fishing conundrum; the gar wars; seven different species of gar, the record alligator gar; an ancient fish, gar native range; use of gar armor; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Steven Rinella?

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• 1:15Steven Rinella?

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• 2:00Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  You can't predict anything.

• 2:11Steven Rinella?

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• 2:34Steven Rinella?

  All right, joined today by Solomon David, the gar guy, who has a Jurassic Park sticker. See, I was sitting here thinking you were a big Jurassic Park fan.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm that too, as well.

• 2:44Steven Rinella?

  But then I realized it's gar assic park.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Why not both, Steve?

• 2:47Steven Rinella?

  We're gonna get into that. We're gonna get into, um, that's gonna be my first question, but I don't want to ask it yet. Uh, Solomon David is a aquatic ecologist and assistant professor, um, works on fish biodiversity, conservation, science communication, and runs the gar lab.

• 3:09Steven Rinella?

  It's like a colloquial term. Gar lab focuses on the ecology of migratory and ancient fishes, and how that research can help us better understand and conserve aquatic ecosystems. Additional projects involve conservation of Great Lakes migratory fishes. I'm assuming you mean the, the native ones?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:28Steven Rinella?

  Um, ancient sport fish, e.g. gars, bowfinns, we're gonna talk about what that means. Um, insert, uh, we're gonna talk about terms.

• 3:40Steven Rinella?

  Rough fish, trash fish, uh, how those terms aren't really doing the best, they're doing a little bit of a disservice to some fish species.

• 3:49Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna call for, you know, you know how Brody does the indefensible law thing? I'm gonna call for a new law, and I'm gonna tell you why people think it's a bad idea, and then I'm gonna refute that and explain why it's actually not.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 4:02Steven Rinella?

  Why it's good.

• 4:04Steven Rinella?

  It'll be, how could people tell the difference? And I'll say. Between a game and. That's what'll happen. And I'll say, I don't know, how can we, how can they tell the difference on ducks? Why is that? Okay. That's what I'm gonna use on them people. Hmm. No one knows what I'm talking about yet, because I haven't said it. I know exactly what you're talking about. You know where I'm going with this? It's a fish? So I'm going with this. Yeah. Uh, oh, here's a good one. A gar, a gar comes into a bar. Hmm. Bartender says, why the long face?

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Classic.

• 4:37Steven Rinella?

  I didn't make that up. It's in my notes. Is that your joke?

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I kinda.

• 4:42Steven Rinella?

  You made that up?

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, for the most part. Other people have, it's crowdsourcing too, so, you know, people do the puns for me these days, but.

• 4:50Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Started off artisanal.

• 4:52Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I'm holding in my hand an alligator gar. We're gonna talk about alligator gars too. And I, I read a thing that Corinne put down that I had no idea about. Don't answer this yet. You can answer it like a little bit.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 5:04Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I had no idea that alligator gars were up in Louisiana, or up in Illinois.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're, uh, trying to bring them back. They used to be.

• 5:11Steven Rinella?

  I had no idea.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:13Steven Rinella?

  I think of that as like strictly like East Texas, Louisiana. No idea. That's almost an ice fishing state. And they even go further than Illinois. Yeah, we're gonna talk about that. I didn't know any of that. Um, we're gonna talk a little bit about buffalo. The, not the animal, the fish.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 5:32Steven Rinella?

  We're gonna talk about the fish buffalo. Here's what, here's what, here's how this whole thing came to be. There was an article, like, I can't, you know, I, I, I can't police everything that happens. I can't police everything that happens. Now, a little bit, I'm gonna complain about you.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Fair enough.

• 5:52Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna praise you and complain about you.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Sounds about right.

• 5:57Steven Rinella?

  There was an article on our website, on themeat eater dot com, and it was a bow fishing article and it used terms like rough fish.

• 6:06Steven Rinella?

  As a catch all, which as a catch all, like, and we were using that, like, we didn't say trash fish as a kid. We used rough fish, meaning non game fish, unregulated fish. So if you had, if I was going to categorize, and I think most people in the country would understand I'm talking about here. If I was going to categorize fish. Like in the most basic, general terms. Would be, uh, someone might be familiar with this lingo. Game fish, okay, which would be like regulated fish that people sport fish for.

• 6:43Steven Rinella?

  Then there'd be a fish that they don't really have a word for, but it's like the no touch fish.

• 6:49Steven Rinella?

  Um, in my area, sturgeon. Okay, growing up in Michigan, be like, no one would call a sturgeon a rough fish, but they're not a game fish. They're like a no touch fish. Um, and then rough fish would mean any fish that there's no regulatory structure in place. No close season, no bag limit, and method of take would be least regulated. And that's kind of what you would use the term for. It didn't mean you didn't want it. It didn't mean you didn't eat it. It just meant like. Wide open. Shad. Cart.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  You want to hear the origin of, uh, the rough fish term?

• 7:28Steven Rinella?

  Hell, yes, man.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  Originated in mid to late eight, uh, 19th century, commercial fishing practices to describe less valuable fish that were rough dressed. Gutted but not filleted and often discarded from riverboats to reduce weight and prevent spoilage.

• 7:45Steven Rinella?

  Go, go back to the rough dress. That's great.

• 7:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, gutted but not filleted.

• 7:51Steven Rinella?

  That's what that comes from?

• 7:53Speaker 05

  And then it evolved into.

• 7:55Steven Rinella?

  I'll buy that.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:56Steven Rinella?

  I was thinking about that this morning.

• 7:59Steven Rinella?

  While I wasn't showering.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  I thought it was like, uh. I thought it was a term that came from like, England.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they've got a term over there. I mean, they use rough fish in a different context. It's not as negative as it here. What's that?

• 8:13Steven Rinella?

  What, oh, they use, they use it. Yeah, but they fish for, they like name their carp.

• 8:18Speaker 04

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

• 8:43Steven Rinella?

  That's first to go.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  And they kept the, you know, the fully dressed fish.

• 8:47Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 8:50Steven Rinella?

  Where was that? Oh. So we had this article come out and, and, and, uh, Solomon, uh, took a front. He wrote a mean email.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  I think the email was that mean.

• 9:04Steven Rinella?

  He wrote a mean email being like, you're just contributing

• 9:09Steven Rinella?

  to the negativity. You're taking away from fish conservation. Not respecting fish.

• 9:18Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 9:18Speaker 05

  I'm on your side.

• 9:19Steven Rinella?

  Mean email.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  It's a, I mean, that's a decent paraphrase.

• 9:22Steven Rinella?

  I hope you all go to hell and die.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  That was in the postscript. That was in the PS. Yeah, yeah.

• 9:28Steven Rinella?

  That's how he ended it. I hope you go to hell and die. And he offered, he said, sometime we should get together and talk about some of these issues. Now, I trust, I haven't looked, but I trust you wrote very flattering, nice emails when we publish things like gar recipes.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I didn't, we didn't dig those up, but. No, in all fairness, uh, in all fairness,

• 9:52Steven Rinella?

  um, Solomon David, the gar guy, wrote in saying, uh, talking about a lot of his work doing with.

• 10:01Steven Rinella?

  Native fish that get from, from the perspective of like guys that grow up bowfishing, guys that grow up whatever, that they get a lot of these fragile native fish get kind of rolled into this category of trash fish or this category of rough fish. And we have these very loose regulatory structures and people think they're out doing the world a favor by getting carp, like non-native carp out of a system or whatever. They think they're doing the world a favor. And meanwhile, they are also unknowingly or knowingly laying waste to like pretty sensitive native fish and throwing them up on the bank and thinking that they're somehow helping

• 10:46Steven Rinella?

  it the world out. And it's like, uh, it, it, people, it's time for people to get a little bit more of a nuanced perspective of what fish are in their waterways. And I would argue it's time to get a little smarter about how we regulate these things. Um, let's start out, there's a lot of folks here, so we're gonna take turns asking questions. Let's start out by what, what, uh, tell, tell people what the gar lab is.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:13Steven Rinella?

  And within that, I got, there's a second question.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  All right.

• 11:16Steven Rinella?

  Aren't you making the same mistake? Because you're saying gar lab, but you're talking about stuff besides gar.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:21Steven Rinella?

  So you're lumping everybody into a gar.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Well, Steve, if you look at the Big Ten Conference.

• 11:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Are we more than 10 teams now? It's, it's more of a name. You've already lost. You know? Well, you're, you're Michigan, right? You know, we're now like 18 teams. Yeah, yeah, it's not 10, it's like 18 teams now.

• 11:39Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  So.

• 11:41Steven Rinella?

  Stupid.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  You know, we've got a, it's more than a, we work on.

• 11:43Steven Rinella?

  Did you know that Seth? Straight honest.

• 11:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:46Steven Rinella?

  You knew that.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  I knew that.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  It has been like 10 years.

• 11:49Speaker 06

  I didn't know how many exactly, but I knew the Big Ten was.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  I was, I went to Penn State, which was the first school that made the Big Ten more than 10 teams.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  There's also a conference called the Big 12. It's not 12 teams.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:02Speaker 06

  Huh. Yeah.

• 12:05Steven Rinella?

  I'll look it up later. I don't know if I buy it. I don't know if I believe it for sure.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  So Big Ten started with ten, gar lab started with gar.

• 12:12Steven Rinella?

  No, I understand. That's a good point.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  But you know, now we're expanding.

• 12:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  There's a lot of non-game native fish that, you know, we want to work on.

• 12:18Steven Rinella?

  But it started out working on gar.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. That's still the flagship group, yeah.

• 12:23Steven Rinella?

  That, uh, so, so talk about the scope of the gar lab.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Right. So we want to use these sort of native, non-game fish, these, uh, underappreciated fish to answer questions about ecology, evolution, uh, sustainable management, just informing our understanding of conservation of aquatic ecosystems and also increasing our knowledge and also sort of sharing the value of freshwater biodiversity. So it's kind of a multifaceted thing. We use a small group of fish. I mean, there's only seven species of gar, which is why we figured we had to expand now. Uh, but, uh, in order to show that, you know, you can look at things like fisheries management, conservation, uh, native fish angling and consumption from just looking at some of these species. Uh, people have been working on trout and walleye for ages. That stuff is being done. It's been done. So this is

• 13:11Speaker 04

  kind of our niche.

• 13:12Steven Rinella?

  There's a lot of money there.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. There's a, there's a lot more money there than there is in gar and bofin.

• 13:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, funding, funding on gar and bofin works gotta be a bitch, man.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah.

• 13:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's no like.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  We're trying to get by.

• 13:22Steven Rinella?

  There's no like gar fishermen of, of Michigan.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  You know.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I feel like alligator gar have a good PR thing going now.

• 13:32Speaker 04

  That's, that's one that's kind of been improving for sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 13:35Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's a, that's become a destination fish.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. All over the world, Texas and Louisiana.

• 13:40Steven Rinella?

  Uh, seven gar. Let's play a game.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  All right.

• 13:44Steven Rinella?

  You can't play.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 13:45Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  All right.

• 13:46Steven Rinella?

  Alligator gar. Spotted.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I could. Short nose, long nose.

• 13:50Steven Rinella?

  Hold on, hold on. We got alligator spotted.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Short nose, long nose.

• 13:54Steven Rinella?

  See, I just ran out.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Florida.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  That's got it.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Cuba.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  I can't think of what the last.

• 14:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I didn't know about Florida and Cuba.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  I didn't hear.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  A Florida and Cuba one?

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, Florida gar and Cuban gar, yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  I don't know what the last one.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  There's one that runs from Mexico all the way down to Costa Rica. So you might call that range, what kind of range?

• 14:13Steven Rinella?

  Mezzo-American.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  You got temperate, you got sub, and you got.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  Tropical?

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Tropical, yeah, tropical gar.

• 14:19Steven Rinella?

  Tropical gar?

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Yep, tropical gar.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  Do any of the, none of the other ones get close to the size of this?

• 14:24Speaker 04

  No, yep. Even as far as what we know in the fossils, alligator gar is still the biggest, yep.

• 14:29Speaker 07

  And then short nose compared to long nose, like, how many inches off are we from the max?

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, short noses, they max out around maybe thirty-six inches. Uh, long noses can get up to sixty inches, a little bit more, sixty-five, yeah.

• 14:43Steven Rinella?

  That's our gar.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  What percentage of that long nose is, is?

• 14:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, the long nose, the nose makes up, you know, quite a significant amount of that. So I'd say, you know, it's not, it's not twenty-five percent, but it might be like ten or fifteen percent, yeah. Decent size. But even a short nose gar has a long nose, so it's all relative, right?

• 15:01Steven Rinella?

  I want to get into what makes gar gar and why they're, why they're special and what they do, but let's, let's just pass through this whole, let's, let's talk about some terminology for a minute.

• 15:12Steven Rinella?

  Trash fish, rough fish, non-game fish, right? What, like, in the sort of, do you, do you have any idea, and it doesn't matter what state you draw from, in the regulatory structure, like,

• 15:27Steven Rinella?

  how did that come to be? Do you understand?

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:29Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, like, take Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, whatever, like, how did it come to be that they, that they create the categorization?

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, you know, we just, we value some fish more than other fish. And so I think, yeah, you gotta look at, when you think about historical perspective, it depends on where you're starting your history, right? So when you're thinking about maybe modern fisheries management, what's been going on for the past, I don't know, fifty, hundred years, uh, we're looking at large mouth bass and trout and salmon. Those fish are valued because those are considered sport fish. People like to eat them. Um, maybe a significant portion of the population likes to eat them. But there are other fish like suckers and gars and boffins that were eaten by indigenous peoples for a long time before that.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  What about, what about like colonial Americans or, you know, not even that? Did they have a different view of those fish or, like, what we'd call?

• 16:25Steven Rinella?

  Rough fish?

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. I think it's, it gets kind of foggy. Um, you know, it, it is more of a colonial perspective when you think about the fish that we value now, um, especially if you look at a European influence, like they've got trout over there. They've got fish that are kind of like perch, uh, fish that are kind of like walleye. And even walleye took a little bit of time before people saw those as a game fish. So that definitely had an influence, whereas these other fish, people hadn't seen a gar before, before they came to North America. And they're looking at this like, what? We can't fillet this like you would a walleye or a trout? You gotta use some sort of hatchet or, you know, tin snips now to do that. Um, so those other fish kind of fell by the wayside and we value these, you know, the bass, the trout, the salmon more. And that just kind of got wrapped up into fisheries management.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  So it started like we talked about with, let's, you know, uh, fully dress some of these fish that are considered valuable. And some of these other fish might be less valuable. So we're just gonna take the guts out. And if we gotta get rid of some of them, then we will. And, you know, it, it, you kind of follow the money. That's where, you know, we valued them, we didn't value others. And, you know, we did research, uh, that looked at, um, even the science behind these. We've got way more research on steelhead and largemouth bass and chinook salmon than we do on even some of the sturgeon or the suckers. So, um, we like to think that science can attempt to be objective, but we gotta follow where the money is, right? We've got way more money to look at these game fish. And now we're trying to play some catch up here. So that's been going on, you know, a hundred years

• 17:51Speaker 04

  back, 200 years back, when you're thinking about what was historically valued by different peoples and what is now being valued. And now we're just trying to make it a little bit more, you know, inclusive as far as biodiversity is concerned. Like, why not, why not, you know, take care of all the fish from a holistic ecosystem perspective? Cause when you do that, that's good for everybody. When you think about waterways, water quality, uh, habitat, that sort of thing.

• 18:14Steven Rinella?

  Do you see, uh, have you ever visited with any archaeologists, um, on this issue? Do you see much evidence of? Uh, Native American use of, again to define our terms, Native American use of gar. Absolutely suckers, I know that, but like, Native American use of gar and bofin or dogfish.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I mean, you can look at even early illustrations, uh, you know, when we had, uh, you know, colonial explorers coming in, I mean, they, they sketched those out. There are some early documentation of indigenous peoples actually sharing those fish. And there was some, I, I can't think of the reference right now, but some of the colonists actually thought like, wow, this fish actually is pretty good. But that switched, or, you know, that, we moved away from that pretty quickly. But as far as archaeology, yeah, you find, uh, arrowheads that were made out of gar scales. I mean, you look at a big alligator gar, they can use that, those scales are basically made out of tooth enamel. So that's the hardest, you know, substance that our, you know, bodies produce. So it's not like other fish. So yeah, they've been part of human culture here in North America for a long time.

• 19:17Steven Rinella?

  What about bofin though?

• 19:19Speaker 04

  Bofin as a food fish for sure. Um, yeah, even, you know.

• 19:22Steven Rinella?

  That's a rough one.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, you know, it's a, it can be, it can be.

• 19:25Steven Rinella?

  I eat guards, no problem.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:26Steven Rinella?

  I like them.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:27Steven Rinella?

  Bofin's tough.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Really?

• 19:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Um, I lived in Louisiana for six years, we ate them all the time down there. Folks down there eat them, I was able to try them, but people fish for them alongside the roads, the big cane poles.

• 19:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Flip them across the road, um, when they're getting them out of the bayous. But you can drive down the road and you can see shoe pick patties on the signs. So they call them shoe pick down there, which is kind of a French and indigenous name for them. So it's a very popular food fish down.

• 19:50Steven Rinella?

  You don't like them because why, they're mushy or something?

• 19:53Speaker 07

  What is it?

• 19:54Steven Rinella?

  They turn, yeah, they're like, they're just like.

• 19:57Speaker 07

  Brownish or they, what's their?

• 19:59Steven Rinella?

  Just a, they have a, like a over, I, I find relative to other fish, they have an overpowering flavor.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, they also, they, they do turn to mush pretty fast, so they call them cotton fi- uh, cottonfish.

• 20:11Steven Rinella?

  Do they?

• 20:11Speaker 04

  Um, because, you know, they got a bunch of different names, but because that flesh turns to mush, because they got these enzymes, they just start breaking it down. So when I was down in Louisiana for the, one of my first times down there, um, went with a couple of professors there, they, you know, cook up anything, uh, shout out to Quentin Font, who can do this. Um, they got bofin, put them in a bucket, they're air breathers, so they can survive the trip, you know, from where we were back home to their place. Um, one of them got the fryer going. The other one took the bofin out of the, uh, back of the truck. Um, still alive because it can breathe there.

• 20:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Wax the head on the back of the, you know, on the tailgate and then immediately starts filleting that and then takes that filet and throws into the fryer. And that's basically what you have to do. You have to basically process them as quickly as you can after you've, you know, dispatched the fish. Otherwise it just starts turning into goo. You can't throw that filet in a freezer or anything like that. And it was delicious. It was great. Yeah. Yeah.

• 21:02Steven Rinella?

  Huh. Have to try that.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I recommend it.

• 21:05Steven Rinella?

  Well, I don't live in bofin country anymore, but we grew up in it, you know?

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, Michigan, Minnesota's got bofin. I mean, you don't all, you got short nosed gar out here though, so.

• 21:12Steven Rinella?

  Are they there? Yeah, I can't get excited about short nosers. Not to disparage them, but like along those gar, that's a fish.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:19Steven Rinella?

  Along those gar is like, you can see, like along those gar is an impressive fish.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 05

  Are bofin kind of self-contained as far as like, it's just them? They don't have other relatives a lot?

• 21:29Speaker 04

  There used to be way more. Um, and then recently I was part of a study where we actually split them into two species. So, um, but then, I don't know, a hundred years ago, they thought there were maybe 10 of them and then they're getting back to how understudied these fish are. Scientists back then said, nope, there's not 10, there's just one with no evidence whatsoever. Like, you know, 10's too many. So we're going to condense that down. Um, and then over the years, we found evidence from their morphology, like their shape and their genetics, that there's actually evidence for two species. Um, and they're both pretty similar, but one's more on the Atlantic coast down to Florida and one's from Michigan, Minnesota, all the way down to Louisiana. So we are still finding out new stuff about bofin from what you can, you know, eat. You can fish from on the fly. They fight really hard too. Um, and yeah, now there's two species instead of one.

• 22:14Steven Rinella?

  How old are those species of gar?

• 22:16Speaker 04

  They go, uh, gars go back to Jurassic era types, Jurassic period stuff. So 150 million years for gars. Uh, that's for the family, like long nosed gar, short nosed gar. They're about two and a half to five million years old.

• 22:27Steven Rinella?

  And how, how much has, have they changed since then?

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Very little, very little. So if you were to look at a fossil gar and looked at a living gar, they basically look the same. Yep, same.

• 22:37Steven Rinella?

  That's, that was a question I had. And I want to spend some more time on that. People will point out, like, uh, well, let me start with one that's annoying. People will say, that's an Ice Age relic. I'm like, you're an Ice Age relic. Like mice are not.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:54Steven Rinella?

  Do you mean it's like a dumb thing to say?

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:56Steven Rinella?

  Like, humans were around during the Ice Age.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:58Steven Rinella?

  Like, everything, the name something that's not an Ice Age relic.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:02Steven Rinella?

  It's not like there's a bunch, bunch of new species emerged since the Ice Age.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:06Steven Rinella?

  So that's dumb. But people will say, that's from the dinosaurs.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:12Steven Rinella?

  Like, what, what does that mean? When we say the fish is ancient, what do we mean that it's ancient? Like, like, is a, a walleye's not?

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:20Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, help me understand the relative quality here.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So, some fish, you know, and some organisms change at a faster rate than other organisms. So, when we think about mutation, mutation's what leads to evolution. So organisms changing over time. But some of them change slow, some of them change fast. Walleye change faster. There was that group of modern fish, we kind of lump them together called telas. So walleye, perch, swordfish, tuna, they're all part of that group. Haven't been around as long as sturgeons and gars. And that brings in this idea of a living fossil, which sounds kind of paradoxical, right?

• 23:52Steven Rinella?

  That's, that's a good term.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Are you alive, are you dead?

• 23:54Steven Rinella?

  That's the one I'm talking about, the living fossil term. Like, what the hell do people mean?

• 23:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so I, I feel like most people can kind of get an idea of what that means. But evolutionary biologists hate that term. They're gonna well actually that all the time. Cause they're gonna be like, well, that means that these animals haven't been evolving or anything like that. Like, everything's evolving constantly as your DNA is replicating, passing from one generation to the next. But some change slower than others. And so if you were to look at a gar in the fossil record, looking the same as what the shape of a gar looks like now, they have a very slow evolutionary rate.

• 24:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  So, you go back to the Jurassic period, they look basically the same as they do now. If we were to look at something that might be walleye's early ancestors, they're gonna look different than what a walleye looks like now.

• 24:35Steven Rinella?

  You're not gonna recognize them.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're not gonna recognize them as much.

• 24:38Steven Rinella?

  But I could be standing there, like, at the same time when there's a, at the same time when there's a Tyrannosaurus Rex on the planet.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:44Steven Rinella?

  I could be standing there with my flashlight.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:47Steven Rinella?

  Shining into a marsh.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:48Steven Rinella?

  And I'd be like, holy shit, a gar!

• 24:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Yep.

• 24:51Steven Rinella?

  That looks the same as it does now. The same basic group.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Whereas look what happened to T-Rex. I mean, they're pigeons or the, you know.

• 24:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, chickens.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  I've dug around for fossils in the Green River Formation in Wyoming. Um, found a lot of different fish there. Most of what you're getting are extinct species of, um, herring and shad.

• 25:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 25:09Speaker 03

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

• 25:28Steven Rinella?

  And at that time, there was not a bluegill.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  There might've been bluegill like fish, but definitely not bluegill like we know them.

• 25:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Today, yeah.

• 25:38Steven Rinella?

  No sun, he's spawning off the end of my mom's dock.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The dock probably wasn't there either, but you know.

• 25:45Steven Rinella?

  Uh, they, they're a boned fish.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:49Steven Rinella?

  Gar, all the things we're talking about are bones. No cartilaginous fish.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Sturgeon and, uh, paddlefish are primarily cartilaginous fish, but that's different from like the sharks and the rays and skates. So you're all in that bony fish, uh, branch.

• 26:05Speaker 08

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• 26:32Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. Mole Tree Cellular Trail Cameras help you locate, pattern,

• 27:16Steven Rinella?

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• 28:01Steven Rinella?

  and can switch from photos to HD video and upload immediately, giving you maximum detail of your target buck. Receive images straight to your phone and monitor battery life from the Mole Tree app so you avoid spooking deer and only need to go to your hunting spot when it's time to hunt. You've done the work and watched his every move. Now, go notch your tag. Check out Mole Tree at moletree.com. Can you, real quick, just because you know all this,

• 28:35Steven Rinella?

  like, I know it's not, it's not, we're here to talk about, but I just got a question.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:38Steven Rinella?

  Can you explain the fish that have, like, the notochord?

• 28:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:42Steven Rinella?

  Like, talk about that.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:44Steven Rinella?

  Explain that to people.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, notochord's kind of an early, it goes along with your vertebral column and spinal cord. So, some early animals, when you think about the lancelets or chordates, they had, they had a notochord, but they didn't have a true vertebral column. So, for a while, there was this idea that hagfish and lampreys didn't have what we consider to be vertebrae. So, we didn't consider them vertebrates. We considered them a little bit off from that. But now, the new research, going back to the fossil records, suggests that hagfish and lamprey are also vertebrates. So, the notochord sort of thing is an, you know, early structure, but now, we're kind of... We're kind of past that. So some fish, let's say, when you do talk about notochords, gars,

• 29:26Speaker 04

  when they're little, they've got a notochord that turns into, extends like a filament off the backside of the tail, and they use that like a little helicopter rotor. So when they're little, they move like little sticks through the water.

• 29:35Steven Rinella?

  That's the notochord whipping around?

• 29:37Speaker 04

  It's basically an extension of the notochord. And as they get older, that reduces down. They don't keep that longer than their first year, because eventually the physics of water changes, right? You kind of think of it as moving with a little propeller, you're moving a little animal through there. As they get bigger and bigger, that doesn't, you can't propel that through that anymore. And by then, their scales hard and they're able to eat fish. But they move their pectoral fins, beating back and forth really rapidly. So if you ever get the chance, I think we got some video we can send you too, but they move that little notochord, that extension, like a filament there. So a lot of those early fish, you can see them both in, even in Pike, they have a little one, they don't use it the same way gars do, but you will see a little bit of a notochord extension. So you see that in early development of a lot of vertebrates, but eventually that kind of goes by the wayside

• 30:19Speaker 04

  and, you know, gets kind of overpowered by a lot of other structures.

• 30:24Steven Rinella?

  One of the more impressive things I've seen is, I was with my friend Kevin Murphy, and we're fishing catfish, but here comes a big paddlefish that got hit by a boat prop, kind of half dead. So I shot it with my bow. I mean, it was already a mess.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:39Steven Rinella?

  It was fresh. When he caught it and

• 30:44Steven Rinella?

  that was a noise pulling that notochord out, too. That was unbelievable sight.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  And it looks way longer.

• 30:50Steven Rinella?

  Just draw it out. Have you seen that before?

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, it'll come out like five times longer than the fish was.

• 30:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That was an unbelievable sight. And that made me think that that was like a very different kind of thing.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, they, you're also, you know, it could be pulling the spine, like out of, you're pulling that spinal cord out of the actual spinal column. I'd have to, you know, look into that for, with the paddlefish and the sturgeon, they're very similar. But, yeah. How long was that, would you say?

• 31:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh man, we got it on video. It was long.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  How'd it taste though? Paddlefish.

• 31:22Steven Rinella?

  Paddlefish?

• 31:23Speaker 04

  The middle chord.

• 31:23Steven Rinella?

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

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Nice. I've had sturgeon, I haven't had paddlefish.

• 31:37Steven Rinella?

  Now, shovel nose sturgeon, that's not a good fish to eat.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're, they're pretty spiny, you know.

• 31:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the yield is low.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:43Steven Rinella?

  Like you clean it, there's nothing left. You feel bad that you killed the thing in the first place. And then you fry it up and it's not good.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:49Steven Rinella?

  That's been my finding.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  They farm, uh, white sturgeon though. Those are good. Yeah, yeah.

• 31:53Steven Rinella?

  That's a real good fish. Uh.

• 31:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay, we're all, um.

• 32:02Steven Rinella?

  Let's talk about these ones for a minute, because these are the, the big, like, how alligator gar.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 32:08Steven Rinella?

  Are

• 32:11Steven Rinella?

  becoming fashionable.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:13Steven Rinella?

  Would you agree?

• 32:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree.

• 32:15Steven Rinella?

  Like, your work is complete.

• 32:18Steven Rinella?

  On alligator gar. And I even recently saw that they're making it, I think, who was it? What state was trying to make it that you can't shoot an alligator gar with a bow anymore?

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Oh, really? Huh.

• 32:27Steven Rinella?

  Or pushing for it.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 32:28Steven Rinella?

  And I remember being like, oh brother, a little bit.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, I think, uh, they've definitely had a reputation improvement. Uh, you think about, uh, shows like River Monsters that came out, you know, almost 20 years ago now. Jeremy Wade going out there. I remember yelling at the TV when that episode was on. Cause like, ah, picture isn't right, or that's not the right thing. But, you know, overall, I think that was a win because you've got these big river fish that people weren't paying attention to. And you had this idea of the habitat's important. You can go and catch these fish. They're not, you know, monsters that are eating people or anything like that. Um, so I think that the, uh, uh, reputation has definitely improved. Um, we went fishing down in Texas with, uh, Bubba Bedry, uh, you know, number one gar guide in the world. Um, he, you know, took Jeremy Wade out and, uh, he used to be a bow fisher.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  And he realized that, you know, over the years, these big fish were going away. He wasn't seeing nearly as many as they were out there. And he realized, you know, if his livelihood is going to depend on these fish, he's got to put them back. And then, you know, now they're even more valuable. Because people are coming from all over the world to fish for them, catch them, and then also release them.

• 33:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, one of my buddies in Michigan went down to Texas to for a catch and release alligator gar.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yep, that's that's what most people do now. I would say the majority are doing that. I mean, there's still people that harvest them. They've got a one fish per day limit that Texas Parks and Wildlife has put in. They've got probably some of the most conservation oriented regulations in Texas. You say that the job is done. I don't think, you know, you're joking, but the job isn't done. You look next door in Louisiana, also arguably one of the healthiest gator gar populations in the world. There's no regulations on them. So you can shoot as many as you want. And the thing is, these are giant fish. We work with the fish rodeos there and we.

• 34:10Steven Rinella?

  Shoot as many as you want. You can shoot as many of these as you want.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  I got a question. How long, if someone's killing, say, a hundred pound alligator gar, which is not nearly as big as they get, but a hundred pound or say, how long does it take to replace that fish if someone kills one?

• 34:27Speaker 04

  It depends on where you're coming from. Texas, there's different populations in the Trinity River versus coastal populations. So I've had students work on this when I was down in Louisiana. I lived there for six years. And so those coastal populations have access to different kinds of food, right? And gar's can live in full saltwater. You'll find them with bull sharks and sea turtles, you know, way off the Gulf there. So they have access to food, but they can also go into freshwater. They mainly need the freshwater to spawn.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  How far off the Gulf where you find them?

• 34:53Speaker 04

  I mean, you can find them miles off the Gulf.

• 34:54Steven Rinella?

  No, really?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. You go to the aquarium, the Ottermont Aquarium in New Orleans, they've got them with sea turtles and tarpon, of course, and then all kinds of sharks, sandbar sharks.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  What are they doing out there? Is there like a motivation?

• 35:04Speaker 04

  They can forage out there. I mean, it's other other food that they can go after. So, you know, they can tolerate it, which all gar's can tolerate saltwater for the most part. Long nose, you can find miles off the coast too. So. So highly adaptive. And, you know, I think some of the latest research suggests that gar's probably originated in saltwater, made their way into freshwater, but.

• 35:22Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that that sort of paleontology gets flip flopped all the time.

• 35:25Steven Rinella?

  Can they live in salt their whole life?

• 35:27Speaker 04

  They can't. They theoretically could, but they couldn't reproduce. They need that freshwater for reproduction. Alligator guards in particular need submerged terrestrial vegetation to spawn on. So they need that big flood pulse and you don't get those big floods every year. So they have to take advantage. Think about the flood in 1927.

• 35:45Steven Rinella?

  He needs a, he needs a dry land plant.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  That happens to be underwater to spawn.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Typically, in a lot of the rivers in the flood plains where they spawn, they basically are spawning on submerged terrestrial vegetation. They aren't usually using.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Because he needs his egg to dry out for a while or what is it?

• 36:02Speaker 04

  It's just, that's kind of indicative of the flood plain being submerged for a decent amount of time. Those eggs hatch, they hatch in like maybe a day or two. Um, depending on water conditions and temperature and then they'll move out within that season. Um, but we've had alligator guards, they hatch out about, you know, less than half an inch long within a month, month and a half, they can be 12 inches long within their first season. Yeah, they, they grow fast. Um, and.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I want to get back to the age thing. Like how old, how old is it like in the Trinity River in Texas? How old is a hundred pounder? This is like a multi-part question.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Sure. Yep.

• 36:35Speaker 05

  Um, how old is it? Um, have you seen like the average size of these things shrinking? And then, and then like, how do they deal with eating a chunk of dead carp with a treble hook that goes way down its throat? Like, and you cut, if you cut the line, does that thing do just fine?

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Right. You're right. That is a series of questions.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  I keep going off of these tangents. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Um, get them in while you can. Um, yeah. So like a hundred pound fish might be something like, you know, five feet, six feet long. It depends. So more, we mainly go by length because depending, you know, if it's a gravid female, it's going to weigh way more.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Um, but you could be looking at 20s. Gravid. So that means got lots of eggs.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  You ever heard of that before?

• 37:18Speaker 05

  Egg wagon.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  That's what gravid means?

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Yep. That's what gravid means.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Never heard that word. You didn't hear that word before.

• 37:24Steven Rinella?

  I worked at a fish hatchery. I've worked with Solomon for a decade.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  For a minute. You heard that word, Brody?

• 37:31Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  So yeah, so you know, we go by lengths more than weight, uh, but that could be 20 years old. It could be 40 years old. Um, and the thing is.

• 37:40Speaker 05

  You're not talking like a hundred year old fish?

• 37:42Speaker 04

  It could be. So males, if you got an alligator gar that's over six feet long, that's typically going to be a female. Males don't tend to get that big. Um, so you could get males that live for that long, but if you're talking just six foot fish that we don't know what the sex of it is, 20, 40, but if it's an old male, it could be 60, 80. We know they can live for over a hundred years.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  I thought you were going to wind up saying a lot older. But when you said they can hit 12 inches, how fast?

• 38:08Speaker 04

  Um, within a month and a half.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  What?

• 38:11Speaker 04

  But if they're fed properly, they can reach two feet within that first growing season. They can get big, fast. Yeah, they get huge. Even long-nosed gars can reach about, we got some out of Minnesota, about 15 inches long, uh, that were born, you know, hatched out this year. And they hatch out in May, you know, Michigan, Minnesota, it doesn't stay warm that long. So that was, would have hatched out in May, we caught one in August, and it was already about 15 inches long. And then does it slow way down after their first year? Um, in sort of temperate regions, it slows down a bit because of winter, but what we found in our work is that they've actually evolved a faster growth rate in the north than they are in the south. Oh. Um, but they live a shorter time in the south. If you're looking at fish that are from the north versus the south.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Alligator gars is a little bit different, but, uh, so they can live a long time and they grow super fast, um, and, cause they're eating fish. Gars switch to eating fish faster than any other North American fish. Faster than muskie, faster than pike, faster than bass. They also like to eat each other. A good gar-shaped, you know, fish to eat is another gar. Got it.

• 39:11Steven Rinella?

  What are they eating on that first day of life?

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Um, yolk sac stuff, so, I mean, that's, they've got the yolk, which is also, uh, somewhat poisonous, so gar eggs are poisonous. You're not going to find people making gar caviar, so if you're ever prepping that. I think I might have heard that, but I forgot it. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty toxic. Um, so they're, they're toxic for, you know, the first few days, and then once they absorb that yolk sac, then they're eating plankton. So usually like, you know, daphnia, that sort of stuff, zooplankton. But what we found is what might actually lead to the gars, alligator gar growing so big in their first year, is that their gills are a little bit different than long-nosed gars and short-nosed gars. They actually have a filtration aspect to their gills, and we actually found an alligator gar that was about this big down Louisiana, and its, uh, stomach was full of plankton, and so.

• 39:55Steven Rinella?

  He was eating like a baleen whale.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, imagine like a great white shark eating krill, is, which is what you're looking at, because you don't think of an alligator gar as a, as a filter feeder. And so my students brought it in.

• 40:05Steven Rinella?

  How's it getting from, because that's like feeding into his bloodstream. How's it getting?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Like he's like raking it out?

• 40:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  And then it somehow is getting down his esophagus?

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Just like, you know, paddlefish are filter feeders, right? So alligator gars and the Cuban and tropical gar have gill rakers that work kind of like a sieve. And so they can actually filter out the plankton and that goes down their esophagus, like you said. Whereas long nose and short nose gars, we got spotted gars the same day, the gill rakers are very different. Nothing in their stomach. But we didn't know what it was. We had this frozen fish and my students brought it up to me. It's like, we don't know what this is in the stomach because I'm always doing paperwork. So I tell the students when they're doing dissections, let me know if you find anything cool. We found half a giant rat in a bofin once. We found all kinds of stuff. Uh, but they said, we found some in the stomach. We don't know what it is. It looks like a popsicle. And so I'm like, well, this is frozen fish. So I said, all right, let's take a look at it. We dissected it and I was, they were chopping it up. I'm like, this looks really weird.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  It reminds me of some fish food I used to feed to fish at home. I have gars and aquariums at home too. And so ran some water over it and it started like melting into these particles. I thought, this is really weird. It's bright orange too. Kind of like krill or crotanoid organisms would be.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Like an orange popsicle.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  And so we looked under the microscope and it was all copepods and the stomach was full of this. And so up until then, it'd only been anecdotal, you know, stories about them maybe filter feeding in Mexico and other places. So we think being able to take advantage of those other food types allows them to grow that big. I mean, think about whales, right? They're getting that big, you know, eating those smaller food items. So not only are they eating shad and mullet, but they're actually able to eat these other fish too. So there's a lot left to be discovered about these fish.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Wow, that's pretty crazy.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  So how do they deal with, like as far as mortality and stuff with a great big rusty? Cause when people are fishing for them, they're letting them chew on that chunk of dead bait for a minute.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Then they're just cutting the leader?

• 41:52Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 41:53Speaker 04

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

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 42:10Speaker 04

  It keeps it in the jaws. Yeah, yeah. It's like a crossbar. Yeah. So that way it allows the, you know, hook to get stuck in the jaws, which are easy to retrieve. Uh, but it doesn't go all the way down the stomach because yeah, you could gut hook a fish and that could be, you know, problematic. It's it's hard to say. We know so little about these fish that even looking at catch and release mortality with the hooks like that is understudied. We know it's, you know, less mortality than, you know, bowfishing or bowfish catch and release, which does exist, but so.

• 42:38Steven Rinella?

  That that exists?

• 42:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:40Steven Rinella?

  But it exists, but it doesn't exist where they're picturing that it's going to live to be shot another day.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  Um, believe it or not, in in eight states, catch and release bowfishing, shoot and release bowfishing is legal.

• 42:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but that's not that. That just de-birdens them with needing to deal.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 42:56Steven Rinella?

  They don't think that it's living.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Well, that's when there's been, uh, conversations about changing that regulation. Like, let's make shoot and release bowfishing not legal, which seems reasonable. Um, would you shoot and release, uh, you know, a deer, a duck, or something like that, and just kind of leave it behind? Um, the argument is that, well, those fish are okay.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  Because they're just so tough, like, they just hard to kill?

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Or, you know, anecdotal, like, oh, you know, I've shot a bunch of fish, you know, and I'm paraphrasing, overnight, the next day, we shot maybe a hundred, two hundred fish suckers gar, and the next day, there weren't any of them around, so they must have been fine. They all went, or they all sunk to the bottom.

• 43:30Steven Rinella?

  People that get shot by a gun don't die.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 43:35Steven Rinella?

  But it's not like, it's not like, uh, when you shoot people, it's not like a shoot and release.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:40Steven Rinella?

  What you're, you're not thinking of it that way.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  Right, and so.

• 43:43Steven Rinella?

  But like, yeah, chances are.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:46Steven Rinella?

  That's weird.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:47Steven Rinella?

  I don't think that the shooter is thinking of it like that. I think the shooter's like, oh, sweet, I don't need to even deal with it.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, it's a, it's.

• 43:53Steven Rinella?

  And they shake it off the arrow.

• 43:55Speaker 04

  They shake it off the arrow, and then they kind of leave it. But then, they've done studies to look at shoot and release mortality, where they've, you know, shot them and looked at them. Depending on where the, you know, animal gets shot, that depends on how it's going to survive, how long it's going to survive. Within 24 hours, if it's in the head or the spine, that fish is dead.

• 44:10Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 44:11Speaker 04

  But even after that, if it's somewhere else, it was over 50%, you know, 72 hours later. So, that's one of the things.

• 44:18Steven Rinella?

  But that's true, but that's true of like, most, no, I don't know about most, yeah, most deer.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:23Steven Rinella?

  Well, okay.

• 44:26Steven Rinella?

  Spencer. What percent of deer that aren't, this is impossible to answer.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:32Steven Rinella?

  What percent of deer that aren't recovered? Archery shot whitetails that aren't recovered, what percent do you think die?

• 44:40Speaker 03

  That aren't recovered, what percent die? Um, in like the next couple of days, I would say 50%. By like the end of that following winter, probably another 10 or 20%. So that leaves like 30% to survive for the next hunting season.

• 44:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Just a guess.

• 44:58Steven Rinella?

  My only point being, I think that anyone that acts like they're shooting at air under that fish as a way of letting it go is being cute with themselves.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. No, I, I agree.

• 45:07Steven Rinella?

  It's like absurd.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  And I think that's what, you know, not to go too far.

• 45:10Steven Rinella?

  You say about everything, but hey, sometimes you hit a duck and it doesn't die.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:14Steven Rinella?

  This is no different than that.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:15Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, well, no, it's different.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, ducks are managed, right? Deer are managed. So that's part of the reason why we're looking, why not just manage these populations? Put a limit on it, you know, as opposed to shoot a thousand and then there's, you know, what are you doing with them? If you're eating a thousand gar, like my hat's off to you, but even as much as I like eating gar, I'm not eating a thousand gar. But not to, not to digress too much from the.

• 45:36Steven Rinella?

  No, no. Are, are, are your questions?

• 45:38Speaker 05

  I'm good. I'm caught up. I think so. I'll think of more. I could go on all day.

• 45:44Steven Rinella?

  I was thinking a different parallel. I was trying to think of this morning, I was trying to think of different parallels.

• 45:50Steven Rinella?

  In, in the bird world. In bird management, we've accounted, like we've accounted for all birds in bird management. Cause we have the migratory and songbird treaty. Like we have a couple non-native, we have a handful of non-native deleterious. English sparrows, European starlings, Columbola, the street pigeon.

• 46:13Speaker 05

  Which you can kill as many as you want, but no one does.

• 46:16Steven Rinella?

  Collared dove. Okay. We have a handful of like deleterious, so like very much deleterious, non-native.

• 46:25Steven Rinella?

  We have all our game birds. We don't have loose ends in the bird world. But then I start thinking in the mammal world, we have a lot of loose ends in the mammal world. Where you have, um, there's a host of like non-game species. That are, some of them are desired, like most states will run opossums. Most states are gonna run skunks. Most states are gonna run short-tailed, long-tailed, leashed weasel. Non-game, those are all native animals, right? So there's a parallel there where you just have this kind of like loosey-goosey configuration.

• 47:01Speaker 05

  And it varies by state.

• 47:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 05

  Like, there's animals here that would be fur bearers and other, like, highly regulated.

• 47:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they run, they run red fox. In this state, they run red fox as a non-game. No close season, no bag limit. They're tightly regulated in other states. So it's like, so with birds, we've, we've kind of like, sort of made every bird has its area of regulatory structure. With animals, we don't. And with fish, we definitely don't.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:34Steven Rinella?

  Like, and with fish, I think the problem is with fish is we don't even have,

• 47:40Steven Rinella?

  there's not even like a native, non-native distinction.

• 47:45Steven Rinella?

  Like, you would think a state would say,

• 47:49Steven Rinella?

  uh, well, this gets so complicated. Cause I, in my notes, you know what I wrote in my notes? Bowfishing conundrum and the Rinella solution.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Ah, nice.

• 48:00Steven Rinella?

  Part of the problem, part of the problem is in a lot of the big bowfishing states, they made it a long time ago that you can't hunt the good eating fish.

• 48:13Steven Rinella?

  So it drives everybody to hunt the not good eating fish. In South America, they bowfish. Like, I've been out bowfishing in South America. You're after the best fish in the, in the river. Cause they, they bowfish the really good ones. So they've boxed dudes in. And like, you can't bowfish this, you can't bowfish that, you can't bowfish this. So it is putting a lot of emphasis on these other things. But I do think it's ridiculous to me that a state agency wouldn't come in and say, if, if they're gonna be like that, and they're not gonna let you bowfish the good stuff, a state agency would come and say, non-native deleterious fish are open all the time.

• 48:53Steven Rinella?

  And there's a, you can, there's no close season, there's no bag limit, and there's a very loose method of take structure. Native fish have bag limits.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:03Steven Rinella?

  But like, they're, what they're gonna say is people can't tell the difference.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:07Steven Rinella?

  This is what I was talking about this earlier, they're gonna like, well, how could you expect someone to tell a carp from a buffalo?

• 49:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 49:12Steven Rinella?

  I'd be like, I don't know. How can you expect them to tell a pit, a widgeon from a gadwall?

• 49:18Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 49:18Steven Rinella?

  From a mallard, from a wood duck?

• 49:20Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 49:21Steven Rinella?

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

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. Exactly. That's what we would like to do, is just, let's get some, at least attempt at some equal application of that onto fish. And I will say that Minnesota, very recently in 2024, enacted the most comprehensive native fish conservation bill, um, put it into law, where they did, one of the first things-

• 49:48Steven Rinella?

  Are you the lobbyist on that?

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, I'm one of the advocates for it, yeah, yeah. Um, I did that even from down in Louisiana before I had any influence of coming up to Minnesota, but, uh, um, so they did separate common carp from the other native non-game fish. That was one of the first things they did, because they call them now native rough fish, which are like, it's the least worst name, because you still got the rough fish, but at least-

• 50:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but that's fine. Not that I know where, not that Brody told me where it came from, I don't know.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, and I'm not, I'm not worried about the name so much as now that we can get the work done. So, if we've got the separation there, I'm not as concerned, at least on some level, with the naming so much as we've got a category that separates the common carp, the other invasive carp, from our buffalo, our gars, our boffins, and it's allowing us to then have restitution values. So, if you have wanton waste, there's a penalty for walleye and bass. I think it's like, something like 30 bucks a walleye, if you have, you know, wanton waste for, for walleye and a lot of the game fish. So even if they had like- A negligible amount for buffalo or bofin or gar, I mean, that would start racking up.

• 50:50Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  So, we've got some regulation there and we're going in the right direction. And so Minnesota's kind of leading the charge with that. I've got colleagues in Michigan that want to do the same thing. Wisconsin, we've got colleagues in Oklahoma. So I do think it's something that's going to start catching on. We know that it's already catching on. And these native fish have been here for, you know, longer than we have. So I think if we can get past the sort of human construct of this game fish, this is the valuable one and this is not the valuable one. And just look at a base level, let's apply what we do to duck hunting to fish. You have to be able to tell the difference. Like, sure, a buffalo, you know, looks similar to a carp. I'll, you know, agree with that. But we hear from both fishers, well, it takes a lot of skill to, you know, you know, over

• 51:33Speaker 04

  accom- excuse me, accommodate for the refractive index of water, right? So you already have to pay a lot of attention. How about we apply that to just look, does it have barbels? Is the scale type different? What does the dorsal fin look like? Apply that. And then also just these wanton waste limits. Like, I mean, is there really a reason to shoot a thousand gar or hundreds and hundreds of buffalo if you're not eating them? You look at the, you know, North American Model for Wildlife Conservation, that third, you know, point there of like, not a frivolous use for, you know, killing the animal. And I've had buffalo ribs, I've had gar, I've had bofin. Hopefully you try that sometime soon. But there are uses for that, right? So it's sort of an eat what you kill and be able to identify it.

• 52:10Steven Rinella?

  I want to be clear, I've tried it.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:11Steven Rinella?

  But I think I might have waited.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  Didn't like it, yeah.

• 52:13Steven Rinella?

  I might have waited too long.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 52:14Speaker 05

  Is there, um, is there a lot of evidence for non-native species like common carp, Asian carp impacting, or other non-natives, non-native game fish, like impacting these native rough fish species?

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the, the non-native, um, well, yeah, so we can take that as the invasive fish, right? I mean, because you can, non-native is a pretty, you know, interesting term, you know, right? You look in the Great Lakes region, we've got steelhead, we've got shenixan, but those aren't invasive.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  Some people call them invasive.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 52:44Speaker 05

  It's like...

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. So carp and, you know, like, so common carp and the invasive carp, like the silver carp and the, uh, the big head carp, especially the silver and the big head, they eat plankton. So they're actually attacking the food web at the bottom of the food web. And that's what all the little fish, whether they're game fish or other native fish, they need to eat to grow. And so they are actually, you know, opening up for a potential trophic cascade from basically the bottom up. So they are problematic and they reproduce very fast. They get really big really fast. Common carp, they, you know, they stir up the water, they remove vegetation, and they're super durable fish. So, I mean, those are problems that we've let in, and we can't eradicate those. It's all about control there. So, they do affect the native fish. Now, on the other end, the big mouth buffalo is a plankton virus fish. It's one of our biggest planktivores.

• 53:29Speaker 04

  They actually compete with the silver carp and the big head carp. So, you know, as we work on controlling for invasive species, but also just bolstering and maybe protecting some of those native fish, maybe if it's just limits, you're actually creating a more resilient system to buffer against those invasive species.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  So, there's no, like, advantage either, like, carp, or, I mean, gar aren't taking advantage of all these little Asian carp that are swimming around?

• 53:53Speaker 04

  They are, they are. There's been a study down, I think it was out of Indiana or Illinois, which actually showed that short-nosed gar were one of the few native predators, or actually were selecting for invasive carp. So, they were eating the silver carp and the big head carp. The thing is, those are top predators, right? There's not gonna be enough gars to eat all of the invasive carp. So, it helps. It's a nice story when you got a native fish that can help you out against invasive fish. Whitefish, lake whitefish in Lake Michigan eat zebra mussels, but they're not gonna solve the zebra muscle problem. There was a story, you know, that came out back in 2016 where that really was starting to rehab the gator gar reputation, was like, a way to control invasive carp was alligator gars. And this gets to them restocking them in Illinois. It's like, well, we get the alligator gars, that's gonna be our silver bullet. There is nowhere near enough alligator gars,

• 54:38Speaker 04

  there never will be, to control for the silver carp. And those of us that were, you know, interviewed for the story that said, like, eh, we should probably pump the brakes on that, that was kinda left out of that story, because the AP ran with it. It went everywhere, Washington Post, LA Times, and they eventually had to do retractions along with Illinois DNR that had to walk it back. Illinois DNR realized that this is not the story we wanna tell, like, this is what the science says. So, you know, we have to be controlled.

• 55:02Steven Rinella?

  People always run away. That kinda make people run away with, like, these books, like, guys will do a book, like, war, I eat nothing but, I eat nothing but non-native species as a conservationist. It's like, buddy, you're not gonna eat your way out of this.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  Right, right, yeah.

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• 57:42Speaker 03

  Gare are also, in my observations, pretty inefficient predators, at least short-nosed and long-nosed. I used to have to take care of them at our aquarium, at the fish hatchery aquarium. And when you dump minnows into like a gar tank, they'll roll up next to the minnow, and then they'll like do a very sudden swipe at them, and it would be like 50% of the time, they would get their minnow. Now, a bass does not miss like that, a walleye doesn't miss like that. But like, long-nosed gar especially, were very bad at catching a healthy minnow.

• 58:11Steven Rinella?

  Or is it because he doesn't have the suction?

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's just like-

• 58:15Steven Rinella?

  When he opens his mouth, he doesn't create a vacuum.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  It seemed as though he was guessing often where his, like, rostrum was gonna end up.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  This is just not fair at all. Go ahead, yeah.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you see that with alligator gar? You're like, that thing is not very good at catching like an adult fish.

• 58:29Speaker 04

  Well, first I'd say if they weren't good at catching fish, they wouldn't be around for, you know, 150 million years. So clearly they're doing something right. But I agree with you. In captive situations, and we see this in aquariums and in hatchery, in our tanks in the lab, they're, you know, it's like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. It doesn't want to be fed, it wants to hunt. And so like, you get used to captivity, and so they realize like they don't have to, you know, connect every single time. A long-nosed's got a lot of range, they might be used to, you know, going after fish in the open water. And so it's a little bit different dynamics than if you're in a rounded tank or a raceway and you got all those fish that can kind of navigate a little bit better. So, I will agree, they do miss. But you know, you watch a wildlife documentary, the cheetah doesn't catch the gazelle every time either. So-

• 59:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, take like a little baby human and lock it up in a room, and then a couple years later be like, "I don't see, this thing's not that smart."

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  My takeaway from watching gar feed was that they're picking on not the healthy individuals.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  Right. Which is what predators would do in the wild anyway, right? But gars in captivity actually have smaller teeth than the gars in the wild. So when we catch them out of the wild, they got bigger teeth, which makes sense, right? So if you're not using, you know, that, you know, which are why put energy into sort of, you know, generating or growing bigger teeth, so-

• 59:40Speaker 05

  Do they scavenge at all, or is it mostly, because I mean, for these guys, a lot of dead baits get used.

• 59:45Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, yeah. Gator gars will scavenge, spotted gars, short-nosed gars, they'll feed off the bottom. You'll see them even in Indiana and Illinois, they'll go, they'll basically headstand, with the tails are sticking out of the water. So whether eating crawfish or whether they're scavenging. Long-nosed gars, more feeding on fish and whatever they can get down. They're more active feeders. It's like, they'd be trying to like using forceps, and we already know that you don't have confidence in their ability to eat anyway. So they're not gonna be able to pick up stuff off the bottom, so.

• 1:00:11Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I come from a long line of bow fishermen. Uh huh. My father was a bow fisherman. That's about the extent of it. That is a long line. It is for bow fishing. Yeah, yeah, it is. My, but he was bow fishing back when you would take a Folgers coffee can. Okay. Okay, picture you got a recurve bow. Uh huh. You take a Folgers coffee can, take a tin snip.

• 1:00:31Steven Rinella?

  And first off, you cut the end off it. Uh huh. So you got a cylinder now. Okay. And you take a tin snip and make two flanges. Okay. That you can hose clamp the flanges. To your bow, above and below the rest. Uh huh. Then you wrap the line around the Folgers can, pass the arrow through the can. So that when you shoot, the arrow goes through the can and pulls the line out. Uh huh. That's old school bow fishing. That's uh, that's impressive. I'm only setting this up to be that um, a multi-generational bow fisherman. Uh huh. I often find myself criticizing my own kind. Okay. My own brethren, my own bowfishing brethren. Who are like, oh, we're doing the world a favor.

• 1:01:18Steven Rinella?

  You know? And I was like, listen, it's, it's fine to go bowfish carp. It's fine. You're not hurting anything. You're not helping anything. Like, you cannot mechanically remove fish, remove carp from the Great Lakes or whatever watershed. Like, you can't mechanically remove them to a point where you have made any difference. We one time had a guy on the podcast, we, we, we had an expert on USGS guy about uh, Burmese pythons on the Everglades.

• 1:01:54Steven Rinella?

  He explained like, all this snake rodeo, this and that, doesn't matter. Like, when they wind up doing the work on the pythons, and how many are there, how many you're catching, that whole world. He's like, knock yourself out, have a good time, it don't matter. Uh huh. After that, I was in Florida and a guy's telling me, Richard Martinez, telling me his buddy, oh, he hates you. I'm like, what, which I hear this often. And I'm always like, kinda go like anxious to hear what he hates me about. He hates me because that guy said that, he's a rodeo, he's a snake catcher. He hates me because that guy said that and I didn't challenge him. But it's like some things don't matter.

• 1:02:34Steven Rinella?

  Shooting carp in the Great Lakes, you are not helping anything. You're not hurting anything.

• 1:02:40Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:02:40Steven Rinella?

  You're not helping anything.

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  So it's not like coyote hunters when it's like shoot a coyote, save a fawn. It's not like shoot a carp, save a whatever.

• 1:02:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, coyotes. It's been proven to be effective if it's done in a spatially, in a temporally and spatially advantageous set of circumstances. So you're not going to get there bowfishing carp. You're not helping anyone.

• 1:03:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Steven Rinella?

  Now, are they, if you're bowfishing gar, is it also a drop in the bucket? Like you're not actually having population level impacts on gar, just like you're not having population level impacts on carp? Or is it different?

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  I would say it's different. You look at where they are on the food web, right? I mean, carp are pretty omnivorous. They're eating, you know, stuff off the bottom vegetation, sometimes bugs, whereas gars are more on your sort of predator, apex predator level, right? There's way fewer gars than there are carp. So sure, you may be doing a drop in the bucket with carp and there's other ways. We work with organizations out in Minnesota that do carp removals on the inland lakes. And they actually do make a difference, but that's like massive carp traps and everything. So you're right. Shooting the carp, you can feel good about it. You want to, part of what we want to say is like, if you want to shoot something, you know, shoot carp, shoot invasive species, shoot as many as you want. There aren't limits on those as far as I know. Definitely in Minnesota, Michigan, those places, just dispose of them properly, but you know, shoot as many as you want there.

• 1:04:10Steven Rinella?

  That's aesthetic for sure.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Steven Rinella?

  We'll talk about that.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  And so, you know, but the gars, there's fewer of them. There's fewer of the bofins. Those are your predatory fish. And so when you do sort of take out a large number of these predatory animals that also live for a long time. I know we have disrespect for the short nose gar, but even they can live for 50 years. So, and we just found that from our work down in Mississippi. So if the sort of latitudinal differences mean anything, we expect they probably live longer in Montana. And in Minnesota than they do down south. So if they live for 50 years down in Mississippi, it's probably even older up here. And I would take an aside to say, I'm really impressed with Montana's doing. They've got a five gar limit. You have to get a gar card now as of this year to get short nose gars. So I thought that was pretty cool. Got in touch with the Fish and Wildlife.

• 1:04:55Steven Rinella?

  Who the hell's getting after short nose gars?

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  I, you know, it's a, you know. No clue.

• 1:05:00Steven Rinella?

  Long nose gar, that's fish.

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  I'm glad you're impressed. That was my first fish actually on the Muskegon River in Michigan.

• 1:05:06Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  I know, I did my master's thesis on the Muskegon River. It's a new way.

• 1:05:10Steven Rinella?

  We did a bow fishing episode filmed on the Muskegon River in which we messed around with bowfin.

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  Oh, really? Nice.

• 1:05:17Speaker 05

  I thought, didn't you shoot a gar?

• 1:05:19Steven Rinella?

  We shot gar, we shot bowfin.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Steven Rinella?

  Suckers.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, we worked on all those fish on the Muskegon.

• 1:05:25Steven Rinella?

  On the Muskegon River?

• 1:05:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Two thousand one to two thousand five probably was out there all the time. Yeah, yeah, yep. We stayed at that old coast guard station out on the, you know, Mona Lake.

• 1:05:36Steven Rinella?

  Did you really?

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:38Steven Rinella?

  Muskegon River.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yep.

• 1:05:40Steven Rinella?

  More Skegans, please.

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  They had the paper mill there, you know.

• 1:05:44Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. My old girlfriend's dad was a miller at that.

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  Okay, okay.

• 1:05:48Steven Rinella?

  I went to see him in the Tough Man contest one time.

• 1:05:50Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. It's one of the only spots you can find Chinook salmon and long nose gars in the same river system.

• 1:05:55Steven Rinella?

  Love that.

• 1:05:55Speaker 04

  Along with the buffalo.

• 1:05:56Steven Rinella?

  That was the only what?

• 1:05:57Speaker 04

  It's one of the few places you can see Chinook salmon and long nose gars in the same river system.

• 1:06:01Steven Rinella?

  That's great.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  So.

• 1:06:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man, we used to hunt that flat for ducks.

• 1:06:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, but those are invasive Chinook.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, right, yeah, exactly.

• 1:06:08Steven Rinella?

  Well, let's do that for me. Let's play that game for me. Because if you look up, like, if you look up, let's say you take a term like weed, and you look up weed in a dictionary. A weed just means like a non-desirable.

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:06:21Steven Rinella?

  Right? It's a non-desirable plant.

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:23Steven Rinella?

  So when we say

• 1:06:26Steven Rinella?

  something that's like here's where it gets a little tricky. If you take a fish and you deliberately introduce it, it usually doesn't carry the non, it's not native.

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  You can't retroactively call it invasive.

• 1:06:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, doesn't carry invasive, because invasive implies not desirable.

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Steven Rinella?

  But I was reading this book, there's a really good book called Fishing the Great Lakes. It's a history of commercial fishing in the Great Lakes, and it talks about it's funny because the dude's name, there's this ichthyologist named Seth Green. It's hard to look him up because of the other dudes. But. Uh, they, they were working to, as they were collapsing all the native fisheries in the Great Lakes. From over harvest and then rafting all those logs and all the spawning grounds. So the bark falls off. And you got like 13 feet of bark laying over the spawning habitat. As they're destroying all the native fish, they're in there introducing carp deliberately. Thinking that people are gonna appreciate them as a food fish, the same way they're appreciated in Europe.

• 1:07:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Steven Rinella?

  And appreciated in Asia. So there you get like, okay, so it was deliberately introduced. There was budget for it.

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:34Steven Rinella?

  We now regard them as deleterious, like whatever.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Steven Rinella?

  So there's all these like terminologies. No one says like salmon in the Great Lakes are absolutely not native. Walleye and the rivers here and in the lakes here are not native, but they're not like.

• 1:07:53Speaker 05

  Invasive.

• 1:07:54Steven Rinella?

  No, people don't call them.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  Some people, some people will try to, right? I mean, you'll hear people try to call brown trout invasive.

• 1:08:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I do that just to be. Yeah, I do that too. And I tease pheasants too.

• 1:08:06Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Steven Rinella?

  I tease pheasants. I tease brown trout, rainbow trout, pheasants. But just to clarify the terminology.

• 1:08:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Steven Rinella?

  You know.

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  It's all perspective.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. So introduced versus invasive, that's a tricky thing, you know, and uh, so yeah, we've got introduced some on it. I think getting back to Brody's question, like those introduced some on is are problematic in some parts of the eastern United States. You've got, um, you know, even the, the next category, there's like non game native fish, like the shiners and the darters and the minnows. They're problematic for some of those nest building areas. They take up space. They eat the fish there, the native species. So.

• 1:08:38Speaker 05

  Have you guys done any like reintroductions of these native fish in places where maybe they're wiped out or they're just not doing well?

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  Um, there's a group called Conservation Fisheries down in, um, Tennessee that's doing that. And so they're doing that with like different types of mad toms, darters.

• 1:08:54Speaker 05

  But not like the bit like gar.

• 1:08:56Speaker 04

  Not gar. Well, that gets back to, um, Illinois and the alligator gar.

• 1:09:00Steven Rinella?

  So they all, where all, who all had alligator gar?

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

  Who, oh, went all the way up into Illinois.

• 1:09:05Steven Rinella?

  So it's all the Mississippi-Missouri system?

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And so the damming and the leveeing and the eradication efforts. So, sure, I mean, the, looking at them as sort of trash fish and problematic was a problem, but so was the dams and the levees and the modification, cutting them off from those floodplain habitats where they can't get to that terrestrial vegetation that they need to spawn. And so now a big effort is not only to introduce some of those, you know, populations to try to recharge those, but also to reconnect the river with its floodplain habitat. And that is research that we're working on with Nature Conservancy, US Fish and Wildlife Service, to make those connections between the river and the floodplain, because that's good for the gars, it's good for other fish, it's good for water birds. We see thousands of these wood storks down there, all kinds of different animals.

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  But we're using the gars as kind of an indicator of that, because they do migrate onto the floodplain. So what we've kind of used to try to get some money for the grants is to show that you can use gars as indicators of this restoration efficacy. If you reconnect that river with the floodplain, these are fish that move on to them. So do we see the fish moving on there? Do we see those 12-inch young of the year popping out in, you know, a month and a half? And so far, we've seen that success there. And we do see tons of crappie there, a lot of other animals as well taking advantage of those habitats.

• 1:10:19Steven Rinella?

  So you'll put a tag on a gar and you'll see him travel out into that stuff?

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

  We're tagging some of them with Fish and Wildlife Service, their pit tag, they got an external tag too. But we're also using a fin clip where we look at a chemical signature, where we can actually look at, we catch you out of the river, do you have a river signature? Do you, we catch you on the floodplain, do we see a floodplain signature? And we can look at that by looking at carbon and nitrogen just from the fin clip. And at least that's a non-lethal way of doing it. So that's been helpful, and that's ongoing research. We're going there in October to do that.

• 1:10:47Steven Rinella?

  So they went up that system into Illinois?

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Steven Rinella?

  And now how far up are they?

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  They're still up in Illinois, I think Hennepin and Hopper Lakes, there's some lakes up there. They seem to be doing well there, because I guess there's like a nuclear plant or something, so it keeps it a bit warmer. Some of those fish are growing decent. But they don't mature until they're about 5 to 11 years old, depending on males or females. And we expect those ones further north are going to take longer to mature. We see that in other gar species as well.

• 1:11:11Steven Rinella?

  Are they protected?

• 1:11:12Speaker 05

  Like up in the northern extreme of their range.

• 1:11:14Speaker 04

  That's, that's a great question. I think they're working towards protecting them because that was the issue. Um, and we had that maybe five, five years ago where a bowfish actually shot one of the restocked, you know, one of the little guys that made it to be decent size. Um, and luckily, you know, she reported it and, uh, you know, we're able to see like, well, this might actually be kind of an issue. Um, where we might want to protect those fish, but you have to be able to identify the fish as well. And that's tricky with, with cars. I get it. Um, but at least being able to, you know, then you need some sort of maybe blanket protection or maybe a harvest limit. Right? That way you're not taking out all of them.

• 1:11:47Steven Rinella?

  Very careful, just as a, of advice.

• 1:11:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Steven Rinella?

  I wouldn't use the word protection.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Steven Rinella?

  Cause you're gonna, you're gonna generate too much social friction.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:11:58Steven Rinella?

  I would, uh, if I was in your shoes.

• 1:12:02Steven Rinella?

  Just a long line of bowfish men.

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Steven Rinella?

  If I was, if I was in your shoes, I would be talking about, um,

• 1:12:11Steven Rinella?

  I would be talking about putting a regulatory structure in place.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Steven Rinella?

  Cause people are gonna, they're gonna hear protection and their head's gonna go.

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:20Steven Rinella?

  In, in a certain direction. But, um, a regulatory structure.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  Manage, regulate.

• 1:12:27Steven Rinella?

  The same way, like the same way, all the other stuff, the same way, all the birds, everything like.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  No, I agree with you. And that's the language we use anyway. You know, I think it depends on the audience we're talking to as well. Um, but yeah, it's definitely more regulation and management. And even from our perspective, it's informing management, right? We're doing the science and we, you know, been lucky to work with Minnesota DNR has been very receptive to, you know, non-game native fish conservation and management because they don't have the data. So we go out there and we have that expertise coming off of six years in Louisiana and also, um, several years in Michigan. Where to find these fish, where to catch them, how to extract the odlets, what kind of data we can get from them because, you know, everybody's strapped for resources, whether you're state, federal, that sort of thing. Um, so that's been helpful, but we can help again, inform that management, give recommendations that, you know, might help improve that sort of a regulatory structure.

• 1:13:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I think an achievable goal would be that you would, that, that you would help fishermen.

• 1:13:29Steven Rinella?

  Help them understand that that we have this category we use to categorize fishes not that's not a great category and that we should understand that there are these problematic invasive fish that people brought from far away that we wish weren't in the systems. We have these fish that have always been here, right? And we should make sure they're always here. And so we draw a distinction.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Steven Rinella?

  Between these and these and with gars, and I don't know what the number is with gars is like you're allowed two or five a night or whatever the hell, just like you're allowed two or five bass a day, whatever. And like just start kind of creating this idea that it's not all that these fish aren't damaging to the eco that they're not all damaging to the ecosystems, you know?

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Steven Rinella?

  And that like buffalo is like a big sucker that used to be a very sought after commercial fish.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Steven Rinella?

  And it shouldn't be ditched like carp.

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 05

  Is there any like examples of there being like bounties on alligator gar or other did that ever happen?

• 1:14:32Speaker 04

  I don't think not in recent history. Um, you go back to the 1930s, uh, Texas Parks and Wildlife had the electrical gar destroyer that they made to just, uh, they thought that I think they were taking out, uh, um, I want to say it was water birds or something. And so, you know, they basically ran this rig that was supposed to, you know, kill all the gars.

• 1:14:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you use the term the gar war.

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Um, so Matt Miller is the director of science communications for the nature conservancy, a good friend of mine, and he wrote this book, Fishing Through the Apocalypse, which is great about fishing and conservation and he brought up like this gar wars idea, but using that broadly, not just gars, but other non-game native fish and even non-game isn't, you know, that's relative as well, um, to look at just kind of providing some respect for these fish. Again, looking at the North American model of wildlife conservation where we're looking at, uh, you know, having the best science available and then also not, uh, hunting these animals or using them for frivolous purposes. So if you're going to shoot it, if you're going to kill it, eat it. And you know, they taste delicious. I think with that also, we've got the opportunity

• 1:15:37Speaker 04

  to reach the next generation, which is important if we want to preserve that hunting and fishing and show that there's value. So there's two directions I want to go with that, but there's opportunity, right? So you go to a spot that may not be the best for rainbow trout or walleye or bass, but a lot of these habitats have plenty of gars, bofins, suckers. So there's opportunity for fishing that people may not have if they don't have a boat to go after walleye or to go after bass. So we're trying to introduce other opportunities for fishing, again, to look at, you know, both conservation and management and just better stewardship of our natural resource, but to conserve that recreational way of life. And so if we don't do that, that's going to start slipping away. You know, we can go on and on about how people

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  are, you know, on screens more than outside. And one of the ways that we've done that is working with the anglers, whether they're bowfishers or whether they're, you know, catch and release or hook and line anglers. We did this with bofin and my lab just a couple of months ago this summer, where a bunch of anglers that know how to catch bofin, some of them never caught them before, but they got together and I said, hey, can you catch us some bofin that we can use for our research? And I brought my research team with me and these are all, you know, undergrads and grad students. They also were able to catch bofin. They really had a blast. Like some of them, they're from Minnesota. They were able to fish walleye and fish bluegill, but they never caught bofin before and they really got into that. And then the anglers got to learn about, well, if you're going to help us out, here's what we want as far as a measurement and a photograph and a fin

• 1:17:01Speaker 04

  clip. So really building that relationship with the anglers. And we're doing that with the bowfishers too, looking at where are these lakes where you might be doing some bowfishing tournaments? Can we at least use the carcasses to get the data to look at the age structure of those fish? So we're definitely not looking to end bowfishing or to, you know, to, to stop that sort of recreational aspect, but we're looking to, can we manage it sustainably to where we can have the fish in the water doing their jobs as, you know, ecosystem services, balancing, you know, predator prey populations, but then also you can go there and you can shoot the fish, hopefully eat them sustainably. So, you know, kind of everybody wins. And so far that's, we've made progress with that, even with a lot of the bowfishers.

• 1:17:45Steven Rinella?

  Have you guys seen?

• 1:17:48Steven Rinella?

  Besides alligator gar getting extirpated from native range, have you seen any other fish that people categorize as a rough fish? Are there any records of other fish being extirpated?

• 1:18:00Speaker 04

  That's a good question. I think there's plenty. I mean, you've got the spotted gar in Michigan. So that's considered a species of concern. Now, it's not endangered or threatened. It is considered endangered in Pennsylvania. So there are places, state by state, there's places where you might consider a spotted gar to be protected. And in other states, it's just, we don't know enough about them. But now we know that they can live for over 40 years. So we've lagged so far behind. So I think that's a great question. Where have we seen them extirpated? Quite honestly, we don't have enough data in a lot of places to tell, are they still here? Are they gone? Why might they have, you know, gone? We like to say, like, we're about 100 years behind what we know about trout and salmon and walleye. We don't have to take 100 years to catch up on that. So what we're trying to do is use

• 1:18:43Speaker 04

  those methods that you've all, you know, learned about for managing smallmouth bass, largemouth bass. How do we apply that to these data deficient species? So again, working together to more sustainable management with that stuff. So honestly, we don't know. We could be losing populations and not know it because we aren't accounting for the harvest of those fish.

• 1:19:01Steven Rinella?

  You know, that, that brings up a really interesting ecology point that my brother Danny raised to me. He's, he's with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, works on salmon. And we were talking about, I brought this up before, we're talking about the difference between the lower 48 in Alaska in terms of, we're speaking about fisheries, but you could almost apply it to like conservation in general, where he was just, like, not in a publication form, just talking casually. He was saying that like the lower 48 is kind of like in recovery mode, right? Like conservation in lower 48 is like largely about recovery.

• 1:19:42Steven Rinella?

  He said in Alaska and big parts of Alaska, we're still in the descriptive phase. We're still trying to be like, what's here?

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Steven Rinella?

  Right? There's salmon runs that like, people know, it's like people don't know. I mean, people have been utilizing the salmon runs for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, but no one's put their arms around it yet.

• 1:20:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:20:03Steven Rinella?

  No one's been like, okay, what does it look like in 2020? What does the run look like in 2021? You know what I mean? Like, like measuring, trying to put some kind of number around like, what is here?

• 1:20:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:20:16Steven Rinella?

  So a lot of the work, they'll do work of just trying to describe what's here.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Steven Rinella?

  Which makes the recovery mode, it lets you track change over time. But what you're saying about Gar almost like contradicts that because if you look, there probably are things down here that we haven't done the discovery mode on because we just disregarded it or lumped it into some goofy classification to the point where you might later say, um, we don't know where they lived.

• 1:20:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Steven Rinella?

  Like, there's a lot of old people talk about seeing them, but like, I don't know.

• 1:20:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52Steven Rinella?

  How accurate is that? Can't find one now, you know, because no one ever measured it.

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:20:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 04

  No, I think that's a, that's a great analogy. I think we're very much still in the discovery phase, but also in a recovery phase too, because we don't know where they've been, you know, overfished or where it's a combination again. It's not just harvest, but it's, you know, the modification of those habitats.

• 1:21:13Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  Um, so I think we're playing catch up and, uh, you know, we're just trying to, you know, make the best that we can. And sort of that's why sort of encouraging the value of these native species, um, to sort of then promote our ability to research them, to get multiple stakeholders involved, whether it's the bowfishers, the hook and line anglers, the state and federal agencies. And I think there is momentum towards that. And to do that, we want to communicate effectively and want to build those relationships, not, you know, shooting people down with like, you shouldn't be doing this or this should be stopped. Um, and that's a big part of our sort of science communication aspect of it. So, and we appreciate the work that you all do for that because I think we need a multifaceted approach to make that happen before we, you know, lose what we didn't even know we had.

• 1:21:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

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• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  Do you know examples of other parts of the world that are being wrecked by our native rough fish, the way carp are like disturbing our waterways, like over in Germany, the short head red horse is just ripping up their creeks or something like that?

• 1:24:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, well, you know, it's funny you mentioned, so there's two parts of that. Yes, our fish are wrecking plenty of habitats in other places, but it's not our native rough fish, it's our game fish. You know, largemouth bass, steelhead, bluegill, I mean, rainbow trouts, one of the most widely distributed species of fish in the world. I know, you know, fishermen that go down to Argentina to fish for steelhead. I'm like, what? I would rather find out what fish are actually there and then, you know, go for those. So it's mainly our game fish because, you know, we like to take the fish that we like and take them to other places. Now, as far as gars go, they have been introduced, not on purpose, relatively speaking, through the aquarium trade.

• 1:25:20Speaker 04

  And so in some places where they've released them, there's a couple of parts of India, there's parts of Southeast Asia where they've, they've made their way into waterways. Oh yeah, you can go-

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  Hold on, dudes in Southeast Asia are buying gar from here to turn loose in their aquarium and then dumping them?

• 1:25:35Speaker 04

  They're mainly wanting to keep them in their aquarium, but then when they get too big, because believe it or not, you know, as you know, I mean, alligator gars get big. So it's a big aquarium fish. They're super popular, gars, and then they've got aruanas down there too.

• 1:25:48Speaker 03

  That's badass. That's a good fish.

• 1:25:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  That's a boat fishing fish. And how are, how are our gar doing in those other places?

• 1:25:54Speaker 04

  In most places, they're not doing great because they don't have enough to sort of create a sustainable population, a self-sustaining population. But there are a couple of spots, I've seen it in India through video sent to me where they have spawned. Now, sure, that could be problematic, but it's probably something that's still controllable there.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  Are you cheering for them secretly?

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, I know, I feel, I feel kind of like, you know, I also feel like, you know, who better to take care of alligator gars in India than an Indian dude you could send out there? So maybe it's just job security, we'll see. But, uh, yeah, I think, but in other places, they've kind of tracked, alligator gars have been released. There was, I think, a moat around a, some sort of palace or castle in Japan where an alligator gar was released. And so they had like, I don't know, their version of fish and wildlife trying to catch this gar out of there for a while. And so you'll hear stories.

• 1:26:40Speaker 05

  They put it in there to keep intruders out.

• 1:26:42Speaker 04

  I know, right? Yeah, it's not gonna, not gonna work that way.

• 1:26:44Speaker 05

  Is there, actually, is there, like, I'm sure people have been bitten by mistake.

• 1:26:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:49Speaker 05

  Like in muddy water.

• 1:26:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:26:51Speaker 05

  Like, is there claims of them ever attacking?

• 1:26:53Speaker 04

  There is like very, very few records of even the mistaken identity. I think there was something that happened a couple of years ago. There was, I think, a woman in Texas or Louisiana had stepped near an alligator gar and got tagged by it. But that was it. And there wasn't, it was pretty foggy details around that. But other than that, gars aren't, they definitely are not attacking people. They're very gape limited. So even a fish like that. How big can you get this guy I'm holding? Exactly. That was probably about a five foot long fish, you know, give or take, maybe four and a half, five feet. But you look at that, that mouth isn't, you know, it's not going to fit anything further down that throat.

• 1:27:24Speaker 05

  That's as far as it can open.

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  I mean, it can open wide up and down, but that throat doesn't open up very much. So they're very gape limited. So they're not gonna, you know, they can't swallow a person or anything like that. Even a big alligator, the biggest one we've caught in our research was eight feet, one inch long. Just a couple of inches off of the known, you know, world record fish. But we did pull a three foot long carp out of the stomach of that fish. Really? Um, I've got a picture of my student who. Hold on, that sucker got a three foot carp down. Yeah, it was, and it was mostly di- not mostly, it was partially digested to where it was just a lump of flesh.

• 1:27:54Speaker 05

  So they could get someone's like house poodle or something.

• 1:27:57Speaker 04

  I mean, it's, it's, it's possible. Brody's trying to pump them up now. Keep your dogs on leashes, I guess, but you know, yeah. How are gator gar doing in Mexico? They're doing well in Mexico. They're native in Mexico. And in Mexico, you've got the alligator gar and the tropical gar, which are big time food fish down there. So you go into the Tabasco region, Tabasco State in Mexico, which they, there was a gar conference there, believe it or not, they do happen. Um, in 2012, tropical gar stuff was, you know, in the little shops there, they were in the restaurants. We had tropical gar empanadas, tamales, we roasted them to where they were just gutted, but you could put them on the grill. And then the scales just flake right off. Um, so. How big are they?

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Um, those tropical gars on the grill were probably about, you know, maybe foot and a half long, but they get to three and a half, four. Four feet long as well.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  So they're looking there.

• 1:28:46Speaker 04

  Not as long as, you know, but they're fatter than the longer. That's a stouter fish because that's related to alligator gar. Long noses are in a different genus. So they're the skinnier guards like your short nose and you're spotted. But it's as important of a food fish there as salmon are in the Pacific Northwest. So not only have they depleted the wild populations in some places, then they're aquaculturing them to restore those wild populations. So Cuba and parts of Mexico are actually good templates for gar aquaculture restoration. Everything we know, like through Fish and Wildlife Service, not everything, but the starting to what we know, came from those places where people are already culturing those fish to try to restore alligator gar, bring them back in certain populations.

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  So they're not using the term rough fish down there.

• 1:29:26Speaker 04

  No, no, it's a big food fish. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  You spend a lot of time working in Minnesota at the edge of the Mississippi watershed. And in 2017, there was an American eel caught at Cottonwood Lake in Minnesota, which was 30 miles off of the Mississippi River even. So like it has the potential to collect some fish that are far away from what you'd consider to like be their home up there. What are some of the unique things you've caught in Minnesota?

• 1:29:53Speaker 04

  Gotcha. In Minnesota so far, I mean, we're, we're still focusing a lot on the gars and the boffins because the, you know, the DNR typically isn't paying attention to them the same way that they're paying attention to the walleye and the bass. So I feel like that's some of our unique fish. We do get the blue sucker, which, you know, is found all the way down in Texas too, but that's a pretty unique fish. They look kind of like a shark, kind of a grayish looking. If you had a shark version of a sucker, that's what they look like.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  I'm not familiar with that fish. How big is it?

• 1:30:17Speaker 04

  Um, they get, you know, probably quite three feet long, but I mean, you're looking, yeah, decent sized fish.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  And they're deeply blue, especially when they're spawning. They have a tall dorsal fin on them. They're threatened in South Dakota. We used to raise them at the hatchery.

• 1:30:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, very cool fish. And, uh, you know, they stay in the mid-water, sort of mid-water and mid-stream. Um, a lot of, some ichthyologists and also anglers call them a unicorn fish because it's very difficult to catch them because it's a sucker. So you got a fish form, right? They got that ventral mouth.

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  Never heard of that one.

• 1:30:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So blue sucker, we can, you know, you come up to Minnesota, we can probably show you some. So they're putting trackers in some of them to find out where they go. So DNR is doing that. They've done that. With some of the long nose gars, so it's finding out where some of those fish are moving as well. Tracking the invasive carp where they're going. I'm trying to think, as far as unique stuff, we did find, you know, through some of those boffin that half of a large rat in the stomach, which shows that boffin will eat just about anything. The, I tell the students, just like with the plankton, to let me know when there's something interesting you find in the stomach. And so I was coming back to the lab and showing somebody the lab. And then I said, did you find anything interesting? They said, yeah, we found a rat in the stomach. And I'm like, well, where is it? I said, you know, I need to see a picture or find it. It was already in like the carcass bin and stuff. I'm like, you're gonna have to fish that out of here so we can.

• 1:31:29Speaker 05

  Those boffins are getting your muskrats.

• 1:31:31Steven Rinella?

  You sure it wasn't a muskrat?

• 1:31:32Speaker 04

  I mean, I, it was the only posterior end of it. So, I mean, I, I couldn't tell you.

• 1:31:36Steven Rinella?

  Tail?

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  I'll send you the picture. Maybe you can, you know, idea. It did have a tail.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  What, what are the little bumps that some suckers get when they're spawning? Blue, blue suckers would really get those on their.

• 1:31:46Speaker 04

  Tubercles, tubercles. Yeah, yeah. So they get the spawning tubercles on them. And so buffalo will get those too.

• 1:31:51Speaker 05

  Some chubs.

• 1:31:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's, there's a lot of interesting fish. I haven't seen any eels there yet. When we're down in Louisiana, we saw eels all the time. So I think that's what's been interesting is having stayed in, worked in Louisiana for six years, now being in Minnesota, we're just following the Mississippi River further up to the top. But that's also what some of our research is doing, is looking at those gar and buffalo populations down south. We've learned about their life histories, some of the population structure. And we can look at gars and buffalo up north and then compare northern and southern populations. One of the things we want to do is like, can we start forecasting about climate change? How that might change things, right? Because we've got fish that are adapted to a warmer climate down south that we know about. How might the ones in the north start potentially changing?

• 1:32:36Speaker 04

  But then, you know, you've got your cold water fish are gonna be affected by that as well. But, you know, we don't have walleye way down south. So that's why the gars and the boffins and the buffalo can be useful for that kind of research as well. So again, we're trying to use them as sort of these multifaceted tools to tackle management, conservation, even climate science.

• 1:32:53Steven Rinella?

  What are these northern gars doing, uh, under the ice? Like I've never in my life even heard of someone. Catching one through the ice.

• 1:33:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, it it happens. I've got a couple of pictures that people have sent me. It's still on my bucket list to get a gar through the ice.

• 1:33:07Steven Rinella?

  So you've heard of people getting hit.

• 1:33:08Speaker 04

  Oh, they're just they're just kind of chilling under there, no pun intended. But there's places in Iowa where I've got video of that too, where the guy cut, you know, made his, you know, cut through the ice, dropped the camera down, and it's just this ice hole there. And then just a bunch of short-nosed gars just hanging out below there. Like, I mean, probably fifty or sixty.

• 1:33:27Steven Rinella?

  Moving around.

• 1:33:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, just, you know, kind of slowly waving their fins. But, you know, metabolism slows down. They're still gonna eat. But they're congregating there and they also are air breathers. But when the water's that cold, as long as they find well-oxygenated water, they don't have to go up for air there. But so they're there, both of them are there under the ice too. So that's still still on the list to check out.

• 1:33:47Steven Rinella?

  Can I ask you a snap and turtle question?

• 1:33:49Speaker 04

  Sure. I was into turtles before I was into gars, actually, so.

• 1:33:52Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:34:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:34:01Steven Rinella?

  Can't remember what his name is. He had a, like a thing hanging from, he had like a necklace that was like a pouch made out of a big old turtle foot.

• 1:34:09Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:34:10Steven Rinella?

  Big time in turtles, turtle trapper. But he got into raising turtles. He was saying, and I've told people, I've told people this a thousand times, that this is true. He was saying that a turtle in the winter, so it's iced over, like, you know, normally he comes up and sticks his head out of the water and gets a gulp.

• 1:34:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Steven Rinella?

  But everything's locked in ice. He was saying.

• 1:34:31Speaker 04

  I think I know where this is going.

• 1:34:32Steven Rinella?

  Is it true?

• 1:34:33Speaker 04

  Uh, yes, it is. If you're talking about colloidal respiration.

• 1:34:37Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'm talking about this.

• 1:34:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:39Steven Rinella?

  He was saying that that turtle can go down in the muck. He can burrow down in the muck and push himself up. And it sends bubbles of methane out of the muck. He says he's seen this in a wetsuit. It sends methane bubbles by disturbing the muck, and it goes up to the ice. And like he was saying, somehow like the CO2 can leach through the ice.

• 1:35:04Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 1:35:04Steven Rinella?

  And then he'll wait and eventually he'll go up and sip.

• 1:35:10Steven Rinella?

  He'll go up and sip that bubble.

• 1:35:12Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 1:35:13Steven Rinella?

  He says he's watched it.

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  That's uh, that's not what I thought with the colloquial respiration. That's where they just basically breathe through their butts and stuff. So that's how they get gas exchange there. But I've not heard about the methane bubble.

• 1:35:24Steven Rinella?

  I tell people like it's true.

• 1:35:25Speaker 04

  Below the ice surface. And then what was the advantage there? It would just, you get some sort of conversion.

• 1:35:30Steven Rinella?

  Picture you stir the muck up, all that gas comes up. Somehow, he was explaining, and I need to talk like, I was hoping you could help me. He's explaining that the certain, like some gas goes through the ice. I don't get it.

• 1:35:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:46Steven Rinella?

  But if it waits, he'll eventually go up and he'll sip that bubble.

• 1:35:49Speaker 05

  Uh huh. To what end is he sipping methane?

• 1:35:52Steven Rinella?

  He can't stick his head out of the water.

• 1:35:54Speaker 04

  I mean, there's gotta be some sort of organic chemistry situation there. Yeah, right. Yeah.

• 1:35:58Steven Rinella?

  But he was saying by the, I know, but that's why you gotta listen to what I'm talking about. He was saying that like, but that bubble sitting there for some period of time goes through some transformation.

• 1:36:09Steven Rinella?

  How is that stupid? How is that stupid? You think like a methane bubble will just live there chemically stable for the rest of its life?

• 1:36:19Speaker 05

  I don't know. I like.

• 1:36:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:36:21Speaker 05

  We'd have to.

• 1:36:21Steven Rinella?

  So.

• 1:36:22Speaker 05

  I don't think methane, a methane bubble turns into oxygen.

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  Exactly, right.

• 1:36:26Steven Rinella?

  I don't know. Maybe we need to have a gas expert on the show.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  Some Googling going on.

• 1:36:33Steven Rinella?

  You never heard this?

• 1:36:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've not, I've not heard that.

• 1:36:36Steven Rinella?

  He was talking about raisin turtles and eventually got so into it that he was observing them with a wetsuit. In the winter, trying to understand winter behavior. And he's talking about them in his mind deliberately stirring the bottom. And then going up and sipping the bubbles.

• 1:36:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Steven Rinella?

  So if you're calling him a liar.

• 1:37:00Speaker 04

  I'm not calling him a liar here.

• 1:37:01Speaker 05

  It's not methane they're kicking up. Maybe it's.

• 1:37:03Steven Rinella?

  I don't, I don't know.

• 1:37:05Speaker 07

  Can be converted into oxygen and other chemicals like carbon dioxide and water through oxidation.

• 1:37:11Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:37:11Speaker 07

  Which is often a highly exothermic reaction that requires high temperatures or catalysts.

• 1:37:16Steven Rinella?

  Or ice.

• 1:37:19Steven Rinella?

  Or a turtle.

• 1:37:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe the turtle's doing something.

• 1:37:26Steven Rinella?

  Never heard that one.

• 1:37:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I've not, I've not heard that one. But you know, they're surviving somehow, so.

• 1:37:30Steven Rinella?

  It's just one of them things that like sticks in your head your whole life and you just wind up telling everybody about it.

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  Oh, I know. I got a new turtle story.

• 1:37:37Steven Rinella?

  Eventually you're like, but is that true?

• 1:37:40Speaker 07

  Here, inertness of methane. Methane is a very stable and inert molecule and breaking the strong carbon hydrogen bonds requires significant energy input or specific catalysts. Like setting it on fire.

• 1:37:53Steven Rinella?

  Usually applied to turtles.

• 1:37:56Steven Rinella?

  Is there a chance that he's that that is there a chance like when you when you stir in the bottom up like, you know, you walk like you duck hunting every step like bubbles come out of there? Is there a chance there's oxygen high down there?

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the thing. I'm like, it may not, he might be talking about methane because that's what he knows, but you're probably stirring up all kinds of other gas or byproducts of that, you know, of the bacteria and all the muck on the bottom. So I think the story holds, it just may not be methane.

• 1:38:22Steven Rinella?

  But I might have made up that part.

• 1:38:23Speaker 04

  Oh, that that sounds legit then. I mean, if you've got your own additions of the story, I can't judge that.

• 1:38:28Steven Rinella?

  What I know I didn't make up, what I know I didn't make up is him talking about turtles.

• 1:38:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Steven Rinella?

  Disturbing the bottom in his mind. And I remember and I'm in the bubbles would come up.

• 1:38:41Steven Rinella?

  He talked about that he explained something that he thinks happens, but I don't remember what. And then the turtles would sip it.

• 1:38:50Speaker 04

  That part sounds.

• 1:38:51Steven Rinella?

  Remember we were trying to get that snap turtle expert on the show, Crin?

• 1:38:55Speaker 07

  Was that a few years ago?

• 1:38:56Steven Rinella?

  Before your time. And we wound up getting his kid.

• 1:39:01Steven Rinella?

  We didn't get his kid. We couldn't get the old man. We could have got the kid.

• 1:39:04Speaker 07

  That probably wasn't me. I probably wouldn't have gotten a kid.

• 1:39:06Speaker 04

  Tell me the kid said, I like turtles on, you know.

• 1:39:09Speaker 07

  Do we need it? Do we need a revisit?

• 1:39:11Steven Rinella?

  Well, there's two things that have evaded us. A Neanderthal expert.

• 1:39:14Speaker 07

  I know. I'm.

• 1:39:16Steven Rinella?

  I even pitched that on Theo Von's show and got that one guy reached out. A Neanderthal expert and someone who's real good on turtles. Like real good and understands that what I'm talking about.

• 1:39:28Speaker 04

  I could get you some recs too. Yeah.

• 1:39:30Steven Rinella?

  Like real good.

• 1:39:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, real good on turtles. Yeah. Especially like snapping turtles, even alligator snapping turtles.

• 1:39:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:35Speaker 04

  But common.

• 1:39:35Steven Rinella?

  Real good.

• 1:39:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:39:40Speaker 07

  I'm talking to a Neanderthal guy at some point, hopefully soon.

• 1:39:43Steven Rinella?

  How good are you on Neanderthals? He must be really old.

• 1:39:49Steven Rinella?

  I'm not gonna ask you a Neanderthal question. So they're active and they feed?

• 1:39:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:55Steven Rinella?

  And then, let's take an alligator gar. How many eggs is he kicking out?

• 1:39:59Speaker 04

  I mean, hundreds of thousands.

• 1:40:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:02Speaker 04

  She's kicking out, you know.

• 1:40:03Steven Rinella?

  Sorry.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:40:04Steven Rinella?

  And then how are those getting fertilized? What happens?

• 1:40:06Speaker 04

  It's external fertilization, so, you know, you get, you have what you call polyandries, that's more males than females. You might have one or two females, but it's usually one big female and a bunch of males will kind of cluster together. And that's also usually over terrestrial vegetation, so they need that flood pulse to do that.

• 1:40:22Steven Rinella?

  So they're creating a cloud of milk?

• 1:40:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Steven Rinella?

  And she's laying her eggs and they're just fertilizing by being in the cloud?

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  The eggs, as they are being laid, are very sticky, so they actually adhere to that vegetation. So it's not necessarily broadcasted and it's just going into the water column. It's basically attaching to that vegetation.

• 1:40:39Steven Rinella?

  She's applying them.

• 1:40:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, with that spawning though, and part of our other research is that we found down in Texas and other places, long-nosed gars, your apparent favorite gar, get into that mix and you get hybrids between long-nosed and alligator gars.

• 1:40:54Steven Rinella?

  Long alligators.

• 1:40:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:55Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:56Speaker 04

  So you get an alligator gar that's got a longer snout, kind of nicknamed crocodile gars, you know, because it's a little bit longer snout action there.

• 1:41:02Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:41:03Speaker 04

  Um, but that's across genera. So you've got two species of gar that are producing hybrids, which happens in fish.

• 1:41:10Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:41:11Speaker 04

  But not only are they two different species, they're two different genera that diverged about 100 million years ago. So they split from each other a long time ago.

• 1:41:20Steven Rinella?

  And are their offspring sexually viable?

• 1:41:22Speaker 04

  That's the thing. So that's what makes it also, you know, unique, or relatively unique, is that their offspring are fertile. So you've got these two species that can produce fertile offspring that split over 100 million years ago. The next closest organisms that can do that is two species of ferns. That split sixty-five million years ago. So what that suggests to us is that their DNA is that compatible over splitting that long ago. So their evolutionary rates being that slow, and that goes into some of the work we've done, looking at, Gars actually have the slowest rates of molecular evolution of any vertebrate with a jaw. So you rule out paddle, uh, your lamp rays and your hagfish.

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  Slower, the next closest is sturgeons, but they are changing slower than silicants, lungfish, tuatares, crocodilians, sharks, any of those things. So with that hybridization though, that suggests to us that their DNA is that compatible. So something might be maintaining that compatibility, the DNA, something might be correcting it. So, you know, evolution happens by mutations, right? So something, a couple of base pairs change, so it changes, you might get something that's advantageous or deleterious, whatever. With Gars, it seems like that DNA code has been staying pretty consistent for millions and millions of years. And what we hypothesize is that there might be something like a DNA repair mechanism, that when a mutation pops up, it's correcting that mutation, just setting back to what it's supposed to be. So you think of like a game of telephone, where you've got message

• 1:42:45Speaker 04

  on both ends, one's very different at the end of it from the beginning, right? Think of almost a perfect game of telephone, where something's correcting it over and over and over again. So one of the things we're looking at is like, can we isolate or identify what these potential DNA repair mechanisms could be? Um, cause think about, even in human health, how many diseases are based on out of control DNA replication, or damage to DNA? Whether you're thinking about things like even skin cancer, other types like that. Um, so that's very far off in the future, but that hybridization between alligator Gars and long-nosed Gars, or actually any Gars species can hybridize, um, is a potential biomedical value as well.

• 1:43:22Speaker 02

  So what, what prevents it from becoming a, why hasn't it just become a uni-species?

• 1:43:28Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. That's a great question. So, uh, we kind of joke that like, either there's one species of Gars, or there's maybe a hundred species of Gars. Um, but you think about with, uh, dog breeds, right? Dogs all one species, but look at all the variation there. Gars are just changing at such a different rate, relative to our, you know, way of thinking, that, you know, to them, maybe they are one species, they're just slight variations. On a basic blueprint, we don't know what that is.

• 1:43:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:52Speaker 04

  But that's just another area of research we're looking into, but that adds value to these fish. You take buffalo, um, I know you all had Alec Lackman on one of the previous, um, shows with fishing and stuff. The buffalo can live for over a hundred years, we know that, but since then, since 2019, when you all were talking to him.

• 1:44:09Steven Rinella?

  Buffalo soccer can live a hundred years?

• 1:44:10Speaker 04

  Buffalo soccer can live over a hundred years.

• 1:44:12Steven Rinella?

  One's in Minnesota.

• 1:44:13Speaker 04

  One's in Minnesota, even Saskatchewan, a hundred and twenty-five years.

• 1:44:16Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:44:17Speaker 04

  There's one, so buffalo story I can tell you is that some of the buffalo during, um, World War I, they wanted to, you know, ship more meat products, food products overseas. And so they wanted people stateside to eat less meat because they need all those resources to go towards a war effort. So they wanted to encourage people to eat more fish.

• 1:44:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:36Speaker 04

  And so in order to get people to eat more fish, they're building all these new reservoirs in the southwestern United States, the, you know, Roosevelt Reservoir down southwest. And so, um, some states, including Iowa, shipped a bunch of game fish, including some non-game fish like buffalo, over down to, uh, the Apache Lake down in Roosevelt Reservoir, that area, around 1917. Some of those fish are still alive today.

• 1:44:59Steven Rinella?

  No way.

• 1:45:00Speaker 04

  And they've gone back and looked at some of the offspring, which were from, born around the 1920s, still alive today.

• 1:45:05Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:45:06Speaker 04

  And they've done all kinds of aging with the odalits, radiocarbon dating. So sure, those are introduced species there, but we introduce them. Uh, but some anglers go there, they know them by the different spot patterns and stuff. Uh, but what they've also been able to find, looking at their physiology, their health has actually improved with old age. Uh, their immune system function, um, senescence, uh, the sort of DNA breakdown that we all have as we get older, they don't show that. So you've got these native rough fish like gars, that they've got this DNA that's been staying coherent for millions and millions of years, potentially with the DNA repair mechanism. You've got buffalo, which actually are improving with age. You're talking eighty-year-old, hundred-year-old fish.

• 1:45:44Steven Rinella?

  Just kicking ass.

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  Just, yeah, yeah. So, you know, there's a lot to learn about these fish. Yeah, yeah, exactly, you know, combine the two, you can live forever and get better with age, you know?

• 1:45:55Speaker 00

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• 1:46:25Steven Rinella?

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• 1:47:54Steven Rinella?

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• 1:48:22Speaker 05

  I got an angling question.

• 1:48:23Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:48:24Speaker 05

  Maybe not for alligator gar, because they have a, you know, they have a degree of popularity for fishermen. But the other species, if, if one was wanting to set a world record, or gar, one of those species that just kind of get ignored, and there's a bunch of like, open line class.

• 1:48:41Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:48:42Speaker 05

  Records.

• 1:48:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, even in Minnesota, they've got catch and release records that are open to a bunch of non-game native fish. I think the Beaufort one was just set this past summer. It was like a 31 incher.

• 1:48:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:48:53Speaker 02

  Because no dudes had ever put in for it.

• 1:48:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you know, not as much, anyway. But yeah, down south, you get some big long nose guards. We actually got the biggest long nose I'd ever seen with my students out at Nickel State when I was down in Louisiana, was a 60 incher. And later that summer, I think somewhere else in Louisiana, they got a 65 incher. But that is right along the records.

• 1:49:11Speaker 05

  Because there's some, some fishermen that just look for unfilled, like line class world records.

• 1:49:16Speaker 04

  That's a good spot to go for, you know, the line classes, the difference size overall, yeah. And that's, that's worth, you know, going after. I would say if you do shoot it, find a way to get us the odolith, because we want to, we want to age that fish, so.

• 1:49:29Speaker 05

  They got some skulls getting their odolith. That's got to be a process.

• 1:49:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  This skull, I can't stop messing with this thing.

• 1:49:35Speaker 04

  You have to use a hammer and a chisel for alligator gars. I mean, it's just, and we're working with skulls that are huge, too.

• 1:49:40Speaker 05

  It's like, what are your buddy up, up at the shack when he was chopping open those yellow eyes to get their odolith? That was work.

• 1:49:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a, it's messy business, but.

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  How'd you do this skull? This skull's amazing.

• 1:49:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's with some formaldehyde. You're probably getting maybe, maybe some, that's good, that's good.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  So you did what now?

• 1:49:58Speaker 04

  We, we get the skull, so we got it from Alligator Gar Rodeo down in Louisiana.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:50:02Speaker 04

  So that, it was, that was great. It's another opportunity to work with stakeholders there.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  Why did they shoot it with 22?

• 1:50:07Speaker 04

  Um, because they jug line for them first. So when you get the fish and it's alive, they want to find ways to dispatch the gar quickly. Yeah, yeah. I'm always curious as to how they're doing that on a boat and not misfiring and hitting the bottom of the boat or something, but they use the 22.

• 1:50:20Speaker 02

  Shoot over the edge of the boat?

• 1:50:21Speaker 04

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

• 1:50:34Speaker 05

  I told you earlier, I've got a ling cod head that I want to do, but like, the general public can't just get their hands on formaldehyde, right?

• 1:50:42Speaker 02

  Could you buy formaldehyde?

• 1:50:43Steven Rinella?

  Like a jug of formaldehyde?

• 1:50:45Speaker 04

  That's a good question. I can buy formaldehyde, but I don't know. I think.

• 1:50:48Steven Rinella?

  Type up buying a jug of formaldehyde.

• 1:50:49Speaker 02

  I swear I looked into it once and you could get out bad as on.

• 1:50:52Steven Rinella?

  Why don't they want people to have formaldehyde?

• 1:50:54Speaker 04

  I mean, it's a carcinogen. I mean.

• 1:50:56Steven Rinella?

  So you take the gar's head, fresh off the gar?

• 1:50:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:00Steven Rinella?

  And then you do what?

• 1:51:01Speaker 04

  We, well, those we eventually put on ice so we could store them for a bit. We thaw them out and then I, once we thaw them, we pry the jaws open, usually wedge something in there because, you know, the natural state of the gar isn't with the jaws wide open like that. And then we put them in a formaldehyde bath for like maybe two or three days, depending on the size of the fish. And then we take it out, we put it in a cooler with water and we just change that water bath a few times and we just let it air dry. Um, but you can do that with a regular fish. You could set it outside.

• 1:51:26Steven Rinella?

  You could drive a nail with this thing.

• 1:51:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've done, like, I've salted pike heads and let them dry, but that looks.

• 1:51:31Speaker 04

  That would work way better than pike too. Yeah. Yeah. Cause pike are still, they got a lot of flesh, you know, along the skull, whereas a gar skull, I mean, that's, you know.

• 1:51:38Steven Rinella?

  Well, can you buy that stuff?

• 1:51:40Speaker 07

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

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  Need a dealer.

• 1:52:00Speaker 07

  So we might need to, yeah, like anyone at MSU, get some contacts there.

• 1:52:05Steven Rinella?

  There you go. Well.

• 1:52:06Speaker 07

  Trade in formaldehyde.

• 1:52:07Steven Rinella?

  I was gonna bring this up with you, Corinne.

• 1:52:09Speaker 07

  Is that illegal if you said that?

• 1:52:10Steven Rinella?

  You still have those tuna heads in that freezer.

• 1:52:13Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 1:52:13Steven Rinella?

  You need to deal with them or get your formaldehyde?

• 1:52:16Speaker 07

  I thought Alec got some and made soup with them.

• 1:52:20Speaker 05

  Are the collars attached?

• 1:52:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:52:23Speaker 05

  I'd take one.

• 1:52:23Speaker 07

  Yeah. No, is it just the head? We've also got those.

• 1:52:26Steven Rinella?

  We cleaned them up.

• 1:52:27Speaker 07

  We've also got those fetuses in there too.

• 1:52:32Steven Rinella?

  This is a work art.

• 1:52:33Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, hope you all appreciate that, you know, we couldn't bring a big one in the suitcase or anything. It doesn't work, you know?

• 1:52:39Steven Rinella?

  With your hands. What's a big one?

• 1:52:41Speaker 04

  A big one, you're looking at, how about that big?

• 1:52:43Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:52:43Speaker 04

  I think I had some pictures in there. I'll send them to you, but that eight footer has a, was a pretty big skull. It got trapped in the net, so that one had unfortunately died, but we were able to get the odlets. I was 56 years old. But there you're looking at an eight foot long fish that was 56, could have easily been 100. When they get that big, they aren't growing, you know, very much each year. But this is out of the coastal Louisiana, so we had six footers that were 20 years old. Uh, I want to say we probably had a six and a half footer that might've been, you know, 20, 21. So they get, they get big, but that's where working with the rodeo was very helpful because we could get all the data we wanted. They let us just have at it. They were cutting the heads off for us. They're getting us, you know, any of the samples of the muscle tissue,

• 1:53:26Speaker 04

  the fins. And then they also cleaned them there. It was at a bar. It was at Manny's Bar on the Mariposa, off Lake Mariposa, Amiet River. And people come from all over that general region and they'd be eating this fried alligator gar. They make gar balls, which are like hush puppies.

• 1:53:40Steven Rinella?

  That's why I like Cajuns, man. Those Cajun dudes eat everything.

• 1:53:43Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, but gar's good. They got the big back straps. And the thing is, they invited us back year after year because they wanted to know what we were finding out. And we wanted to, you know, work with them and share that info with them too. So you've got multiple stakeholders. We weren't there to say like, you gotta stop doing this. We were there to like, learn about the resource. How can we figure out about the health of the population? We've been invited back every year. I couldn't make it this year because coming down from Minnesota is a little bit tougher. But next year, we plan on going back down there. So if everyone would, you know, send somebody to jump in on a gator gar rodeo, you know, we'll be there. But, but I think that's a good opportunity to again, work with stakeholders, work with the people that are using the resource for different purposes.

• 1:54:22Steven Rinella?

  Uh, this is my last question for you. They might have more. You know, when you have like, like Trout Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, right? Uh, they put tons of money into habitat work. They put tons of money into research. Who, like, like who out there?

• 1:54:46Steven Rinella?

  What, what NGOs are, put, put any money into, into gar?

• 1:54:50Speaker 04

  Right. Um, as far as a definite NGO, nobody. I think we're, we're lucky that we can try to go after grants from different organizations. Minnesota has a lottery tax that goes into their environmental and natural resources trust fund. And so we apply for that. We've been lucky to get support from the state then to look at these native rough fish. That's been extremely beneficial. And a few other states have, you know, stuff like that, too.

• 1:55:14Steven Rinella?

  But there's no gar enthusiast group?

• 1:55:17Speaker 04

  I mean, you're, you're looking at it, Steve. I mean, you know, it's a, you know, and then there's a native fish for tomorrow, which is A nonprofit group that is promoting the value of these fish.

• 1:55:26Steven Rinella?

  Where are they out of?

• 1:55:27Speaker 04

  But we're all kind of cobbled together. They're out of Minnesota as well.

• 1:55:28Steven Rinella?

  Native Fish for Tomorrow?

• 1:55:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So Tyler Winter is one of their main spokespersons. He also had a response to that article. But again, promoting, eating the fish, fishing for the fish. But again, that's advocacy. I mean, through the grants that we're getting, we're partnering with them to provide them funding. So we're kind of trying to get what money we can to work on that stuff. But doing things like this, the work you all do, gets that message out more about the value of these fish. But again, being able to convince, it was the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. They support our work down on the Mississippi River floodplain in Mississippi.

• 1:56:03Speaker 04

  Working with Nature Conservancy, US Fish and Wildlife. So it's a bunch of partners usually coming together.

• 1:56:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:07Speaker 04

  So I've been kind of selling the idea of like, we can use gar to answer these questions or to get at this type of restoration. But it really is advocating for the species and then trying to fund the funds to, or find the funds to back that research. And then show that these are, again, valuable organisms.

• 1:56:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because it's the new fountain of youth.

• 1:56:23Speaker 04

  Right, right, yeah.

• 1:56:24Steven Rinella?

  Once you figure out a couple of them little tricks.

• 1:56:26Speaker 04

  I will say that the biomedical value of the fish has bolstered that value. Spotted gar, actually, out of Michigan, is where we looked at that, comparing them and also in Louisiana. The gar genome is actually organized closer to the human genome than it is to other fish, like your walleye and your trout. So because of that sort of ancient lineage, they've got a lot of stuff that's in common with, you know, other sides of the evolutionary tree.

• 1:56:50Steven Rinella?

  I do got one more question.

• 1:56:51Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:56:52Steven Rinella?

  What is the toxin that's in those eggs?

• 1:56:54Speaker 04

  That is a great question. We've been trying to answer that for well over a decade. We think it might be sequestered from bacteria, but we don't know exactly. There's actually current work being done at Nichols State and at LSU on that right now. We did some preliminary work on that a few years ago. So we think it comes from bacteria, mainly in the eggs. And what's also unique about that toxin is it's toxic to birds, to mammals, to arthropods, like crayfish and crickets. But it's not toxic to fish. So, why if you're a fish would you have, you know, eggs that aren't toxic to the other animals that are there?

• 1:57:28Steven Rinella?

  So, bluegill can suck that like a-

• 1:57:30Speaker 04

  I've got videos of bluegill eating longnose gar eggs as the longnose are laying them. So, that kind of brings kind of full circle to like this game fish and non-game fish. You're actually supporting these giant bluegill. And what we think is because gar's evolutionarily would, I mean, they live in these warm waters, right? They breathe air. So, most of your regular, traditionally respiring fish like bluegill and, you know, bass, aren't going to live in those low oxygen waters. But you do have a lot of crawfish. You have a lot of water birds. You got a lot of small mammals there. So, it'll kill the crawfish. It'll kill the birds. It'll, you know-

• 1:58:00Steven Rinella?

  Have you ever given, have you ever actually given it to a mouse and seen him die?

• 1:58:03Speaker 04

  There, I haven't given it to him. There are experiments that have been done. They've given it to turtles too, where it's like slowed down the heart rate. And so, they have done experiments with those eggs.

• 1:58:11Steven Rinella?

  It's fatal how much later.

• 1:58:13Speaker 04

  Um, with-

• 1:58:14Steven Rinella?

  I mean, I know it's hard to generalize, but-

• 1:58:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It depends on how much you're consuming with that stuff.

• 1:58:17Steven Rinella?

  But like, like, quick or days later?

• 1:58:19Speaker 04

  With crayfish, it's pretty quick. Like, they basically, you'll see them eating them and they just slow down and they just stop.

• 1:58:24Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:58:25Speaker 05

  And, and parts of the country like down, like, where the Cajuns are eating these things, is that like a no, like, people know not to-

• 1:58:32Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a, you know, they know how to clean them there. But you, and it's, it's available on the thing called the internet, right? But you'll still see pop up every few years, these people got violently ill from eating a bunch of gar eggs.

• 1:58:44Steven Rinella?

  From eating the roe.

• 1:58:45Speaker 04

  From eating the roe, yeah. They thought, maybe I'm going to try to eat these. Cause, you know, you get a big longnose gar, there's a lot of eggs in there. You can eat both in caviar. They make that. They call it Cajun caviar. Um, I've heard it's not as good, you know, not surprisingly.

• 1:58:56Steven Rinella?

  I've heard of that too. I forgot about that.

• 1:58:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. But you can't do that with the gar. So, I mean, you're not going to die, but you're going to have a bad day. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:04Steven Rinella?

  We're trying to get a caviar specialist.

• 1:59:06Speaker 04

  Ah, nice.

• 1:59:08Speaker 02

  Methane specialist, too.

• 1:59:11Steven Rinella?

  It's going to be a short episode.

• 1:59:13Speaker 04

  You can double up on some of those.

• 1:59:14Steven Rinella?

  I got, I got one question.

• 1:59:17Steven Rinella?

  Are you from the north?

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  I got, I got two comments from earlier. We were talking about the native range of an alligator gar. The USGS says it goes, uh, following the Ohio River almost to West Virginia.

• 1:59:29Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  And then the Mississippi almost to Iowa. So like deep into the Midwest.

• 1:59:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:33Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 1:59:34Speaker 04

  They're trying to bring it back in Kentucky. They have found them in parts of, uh, Ohio and Indiana, along the Ohio River. So they think that the one that was, I think, found in Indiana is part of restoration, either in Ohio or in Kentucky. But yeah, there are parts, they're in the Ohio River.

• 1:59:47Steven Rinella?

  Are they maybe just not getting like five, six, seven feet long? So people just aren't like noticing them?

• 1:59:52Speaker 04

  They had big ones down in Horseshoe Lake in Illinois. Like I want to say it was like, it was like early 1900s. That biggest one that they got, like towards the end of their run, before they were fully extirpated, was like a five or six foot long fish. So they get big.

• 2:00:04Steven Rinella?

  I had just no idea.

• 2:00:05Speaker 04

  We've actually found gars in the north get bigger, like long-term maximum size than the fish in the south. Like that's looking at spotted gars. So they've got the growth rate that has to be able to compensate for winter. But we do find on average, they live longer and they can get bigger. Alligator gar, we just don't know enough because we wiped them out from the north. So we'll have to see. It's almost like deer. Yeah.

• 2:00:27Speaker 03

  Uh, other comment was Steve, you were asking about traditional use of gar. When I would give tours at the hatchery and we would get to the gar section and try to make people think they were cool. Some native tribes would use their scales for currency or jewelry. And then some of the early white settlers, uh, would line the front of their plows with gar skin because it could break through tough dirt.

• 2:00:48Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 2:00:48Speaker 03

  So there's some historical use.

• 2:00:50Speaker 04

  It's super tough.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  Uh, question Solomon, what, what is like an aquarium you really like? As a native rough fish man, where you walk in, you're like, no way. They have a quail back. They have a river carp sucker.

• 2:01:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I would say the, uh, the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga does an amazing job with freshwater fish. They've got a whole building that's all freshwater. They built another one that's marine, which I think is cool. But I was there for a conference last year. I visited the aquarium three times during that conference.

• 2:01:17Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:01:18Speaker 04

  Only went to the freshwater one. They let me feed the gars down there too. So shout out Tennessee Aquarium. Shed Aquarium, I was a post doc there. Um, and so they've got a good freshwater, uh, setup too. Tennessee's better, uh, but Shed does have some of my gars that I had in grad school that I couldn't rehome when I moved to Chicago. So if you go to Shed Aquarium and you see any gars, most of those are mine from grad school, you know, over 10 years ago.

• 2:01:38Steven Rinella?

  No kidding.

• 2:01:38Speaker 03

  And I sent him paddlefish to the Shed Aquarium. About a decade.

• 2:01:42Speaker 04

  Way back in the day, yeah.

• 2:01:44Speaker 03

  Um, in Minnesota, that's sort of like, um, ground zero for these wakeboard studies or wake boat studies. Have you followed these at all?

• 2:01:52Speaker 04

  I've not. I just know it's a, it's a topic that's come up when, you know, they're looking at new management that's, you know, we gotta look into it.

• 2:01:58Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's those boats they weigh them all down with ballast and then make the big waves to destroy the shoreline?

• 2:02:03Speaker 03

  You surf on them. Well, they're now like putting cameras underwater and seeing what it does to the bottom of the lake. Uh, and it, it appears to be like pretty devastating. Like a bomb went off.

• 2:02:13Speaker 05

  Oh, I'd love it if they got rid of those things.

• 2:02:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  I was, I was gonna see if you had any thoughts on what those do to, to rough fish.

• 2:02:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think whenever you're taking out habitat like that, that's problematic. And especially since a lot of the native rough fish like the near shore habitats. So when you're scouring out the bottom, increasing turbidity, that's bad for the plants. Um, and even if they're not near shore, you're creating that wave action that's going to have stronger impacts, um, also on the shore when you've got that vegetation. So I think, I mean, again, not being an expert on that myself, but I would say if it's damaging the habitat as they're describing them, that's going to be problematic for a lot of these

• 2:02:46Steven Rinella?

  fish. Can you imagine? Can you just imagine the conversation?

• 2:02:50Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 2:02:51Steven Rinella?

  In the wakeboard enthusiast community, when someone says, hey, man, you can't do that anymore because of the gauze.

• 2:03:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:02Speaker 04

  Setting me up. You're setting me up.

• 2:03:05Steven Rinella?

  No, I'd be like, yeah, you can't do it anymore because the gauze.

• 2:03:07Speaker 05

  They just make my boat bounce around a lot when I'm perch fishing.

• 2:03:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. They would be just like, oh my goodness gracious.

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  I don't think they're listening to this show.

• 2:03:17Steven Rinella?

  No, I don't think they are. And frankly, this is my message to the, this is my message to the wakeboard enthusiasts community.

• 2:03:24Speaker 03

  Have you delivered a message before or not? This is your first statement to them?

• 2:03:31Steven Rinella?

  I need to refine my message. My, my message is I'm on the lake bottom side of things.

• 2:03:41Steven Rinella?

  Man, who else got a question?

• 2:03:43Speaker 05

  Um, do they regrow their teeth their whole lives or they're constantly?

• 2:03:47Speaker 04

  That is a great question. Um, I think they can grow teeth, but it's not like sharks. So we were, yeah, we were at this rodeo and a little kid, you know, parents brought him up to us as we were processing these fish. And I'm there with Prasanta Chakravarti, a curator of fishes at LSU. So he and I are both there. He's an ichthyologist. I'm, you know, a gar person there. Little kid asked, can I have one of the teeth? And so I'm like, sure. And so we take the pliers and we go to pull the, the tooth out of this jaw. And it's like really hard to get out of there. And we pulled it out and it just goes down almost like a volcano underneath the water like, and, you know, we pulled that out and we're looking at it, me and Prasanta both. We've been studying fish for most of our lives. And we're just like, huh. Like we, we just, we had no idea that that's what it looked at. And, you know, we gave it to the kid. It made his day.

• 2:04:32Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:04:32Speaker 04

  And this little brother came up, I was like, I want a tooth too. So then we were starting pulling teeth out of these things. Um, so they do have an interesting structure there and they do have something called dentine or plisadentine around those teeth, which is similar to the, you know, some of the, uh, developmental tooth parts that we have as well. So there's a lot of things from the fish that are kind of connected to us as well.

• 2:04:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. Cause it seems like with those real long ones over time, like 50 years, they'd get broken and need to be...

• 2:04:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. With some of the big fish, they get, uh, they get broken, but in Michigan, uh, when we'd be doing our spotted gar work, we, we would get what we call the crocodile effect where you'd get gars where the teeth have grown from the bottom jaw and pierced the top of the jaw.

• 2:05:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, but you can see that all over, right?

• 2:05:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. So...

• 2:05:12Steven Rinella?

  He's got tooth holes in his jaw.

• 2:05:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, those, some of those are nostrils. Yeah.

• 2:05:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's nostrils.

• 2:05:16Speaker 04

  Actually, no, you're right. Those, those two where you can see the open hole going all the way down, those are the tooth holes for those lower fangs down there. Yeah.

• 2:05:21Speaker 07

  It's like piranhas. They're like rows of teeth in there, like a leaf from the mouth.

• 2:05:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. They got, they got a lot of teeth, you know, and they don't have a lot of bite force though. So they're more about, you know, they grasp and hold and then swallow the food as opposed to piranhas and sharks, which are more of a cutting plane, barracudas as well. Uh, but again, you know, you look at those teeth, that's going to be, you know, intimidating. So there's a, you know, an aesthetic to them as well. When you think about, you know, getting people interested in them. Alongside trout and walleye and bass. Besides humans, what else are killing alligator gars? Um, alligators to an extent, um, depending on the size. Once a gator gar is full size, nothing's really messing with it. Uh, water birds will eat gars as well. Um, other fish, other gars will eat them. I mean, that's not, uh, you know, we find bofin inside a bofin too.

• 2:06:06Speaker 04

  Um, so typically it's going to be other predatory fish, but usually like a bass or a walleye, they're not going to be able to take them down. Once they get to, once they get to decent size, nothing's getting through those scales really either.

• 2:06:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You mentioned being of Indian descent. You're born in the U.S.

• 2:06:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. My parents are from India. I was born in Washington state, uh, Arlington, Washington, kind of farm town out far out of Seattle.

• 2:06:26Steven Rinella?

  Did you fish as a kid?

• 2:06:27Speaker 04

  I did. Uh, you know, that's what I was going to ask you, like how we all got started fishing. I got started fishing, you know, mainly on non-game fish. So I lived in, uh, Washington and then North Dakota for eight years as a kid. And then Ohio is where I grew up. Um, caught creek chubs out of some random creek and we'd tie like ball up a piece of bread on a hook and then catch them that way. Um, but I remember catching some perch in North Dakota, going out fishing. That was one of the first fish I remember catching. Uh, the state capital had a big northern pike taxidermy there. I remember looking down the mouth of that and thinking those teeth are really cool. Um, and I was into dinosaurs as well. So, um, always getting outside. My dad would take me to the Still Gwamish River in Washington state. So like we'd chuck rocks in there. So there was that connection to the water. Um, so I enjoy fishing. I'm not good at fishing.

• 2:07:12Speaker 04

  Uh, my buddy Tyler Winter takes me out. So he can take me, he can get me like, where's the gar spot? Where's the bofin spot? So I can do that. He takes my kids out. They've caught red horse and you know, some other non-game fish. Um, of course my kids know gars. They've known that for, for their whole lives. Um, but I do think that's an important part of like, you know, getting kids out into nature, um, getting them outdoors. And so that's also what we want to do. Um, I would be remiss if I didn't say like my introduction to gars was through Ranger Rick magazine, which is through the National Wildlife Federation.

• 2:07:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we used to get that when I was a kid.

• 2:07:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got it for my kids too. And so, I mean, that's what got me started and you know, I thought they were cool, but you know, now we look at that as that's an opportunity to introduce kids to the outdoors. I'm also just getting them outdoors. So again, I like getting my kids out fishing and then, you know, helping them maybe reel it in. But I'm not a great. Dangler, I like to, you know, count on folks like you all for that. In grad school, I'm also not a hunter, but I am a consumer. So I just wasn't good at getting up early in the mornings. They go out hunting, you know, for duck and deer, but I would eat all the food they brought back. We'd have game night and do that. So I'm a participant on some level, but I do recognize the importance.

• 2:08:14Steven Rinella?

  How long you been married?

• 2:08:15Speaker 04

  Uh, nine years as of just a week and a half ago.

• 2:08:18Steven Rinella?

  Same person?

• 2:08:19Speaker 04

  Uh, yep. We met at Shet Aquarium, um, so she, and she was a grant writer. She's not a fish person, but she has bought into the gar, you know, the, the whole gar thing. At our wedding, instead of escort cards, you know, got the name tags for the table. Uh, she made escort guards, which are gar figurines with the name tags on them. I did not know about it all, so, you know, she is all for it. She's got the gar earrings and so again, we've got some, you know, fish connections there.

• 2:08:45Speaker 05

  Did you guys go to Jurassic Park on your honeymoon?

• 2:08:47Speaker 04

  I know, right? You know, if it existed, we would do that, Brody. So, you know, that's where the DNA is really going. We're trying to bring back gars, but then it'll just look the same as what we have now. So it's gonna...

• 2:08:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that'd be real bummer, huh?

• 2:08:59Speaker 04

  Millions of dollars in grant money. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:03Steven Rinella?

  It's a gar.

• 2:09:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:06Steven Rinella?

  All right, well, thanks for coming on the show.

• 2:09:08Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:09:09Steven Rinella?

  Tell people how to find your work if they want to come find her, if they want to send you weird specimens or whatever.

• 2:09:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, if they look up, uh, garlab, garlab.org. If you just look up garlab, you'll find us and, uh, we're on the social media platforms, uh, the garlab on Instagram and, um, on all the major platforms there. So if you look up garlab, you'll find us. There's not that many of them. I think there's, there's just one so far.

• 2:09:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:09:31Speaker 04

  Until we expand further, like the big 10.

• 2:09:32Steven Rinella?

  So they can, they can get ahold and send an email and say, one time I...

• 2:09:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, tell us the stories if you know spots for them, if you get a big gar. Like, we're interested in that. It is, again, a broad spanning effort and so we want contributions from the general public.

• 2:09:47Steven Rinella?

  If you catch a gar in a freak place?

• 2:09:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, let us know.

• 2:09:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:09:50Speaker 04

  I'm always up for gar stories.

• 2:09:51Steven Rinella?

  All right. Garlab.org?

• 2:09:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:09:54Steven Rinella?

  Garlab.org? Is that simple?

• 2:09:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yep, that's simple. There was a lot of competition for it, Steve.

• 2:09:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. When you did a keyword search on garlab, it was clean?

• 2:10:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:03Speaker 03

  Can I say one last thing?

• 2:10:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:04Speaker 03

  We, we used to do touch tanks at the hatchery lot. The most popular fish were always gar. Uh, they like really appeal to children. There's something like a very basic level we, we just love about gar fish. And they handle touch tanks super well. A lot of fish can't handle that stress, gar can. So they're great for like introducing kids to cool prehistoric rough fish.

• 2:10:24Speaker 04

  One of my favorite pictures that I've seen of kids interacting with gars is one that Spencer took from that hatchery. So I've used that before in outreach activities, but it's like these kids reaching and touching that long nose gar. So I think that's, they don't, they don't see it as weird, they don't see it as trash. So I think that's, that's hope for the next generation.

• 2:10:41Steven Rinella?

  You know what we didn't get into is cleaning them.

• 2:10:45Speaker 04

  Ten snips. Yeah, ten snips is good.

• 2:10:48Steven Rinella?

  That's one of our books, isn't it, Brody?

• 2:10:50Speaker 04

  Peeling them and all that.

• 2:10:53Steven Rinella?

  You know, pulling their little back straps out.

• 2:10:56Speaker 04

  Save the head for us, maybe.

• 2:10:57Steven Rinella?

  Well, from now on, once we get our, once we get a juggler from out of the hiding, that's all I'm gonna do. Alright, thanks a lot, man.

• 2:11:02Speaker 04

  Alright, thanks for having me.

• 2:11:31Steven Rinella?

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• 2:12:11Steven Rinella?

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• 2:12:54Steven Rinella?

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