00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can Review with Ryan kel Kelly and now Here's Kel. Hungarian fish scientists produced a brand new species while encouraging a sexual reproduction and sturgeon. The new species is a hybrid between a Russian sturgeon and another ancient fish, the American paddlefish or spoonbill. This hybrid with the ancient origin is of course named the sturtle fish. I'm not sure what's more disturbing the act of creating new species when so many sturgeon and paddlefish species are critically endangered, or the mental image brought about by a group of scientists performing the act of quote, encouraging a sexual reproduction. I'm not sure about you, but my mind doesn't wander to anything scientific when I hear the sentence we were encouraging a sexual reproduction, define encouraging. Russian sturgeons, specifically those from the Caspian Sea, have been on the decline for decades. The fish are highly prized for their row, which is lightly brined with salt at the peak of egg development, turning eggs into caviare. If you want a couple of fun caviare facts. One way that folks harvesting caviare find that the eggs are at peak development is by using ultrasound. There are many ways to extrude the row, one of which is gently massaging the fish. And don't go just throwing the word cavea around. If you are not talking eggs from fish belonging to the family a seppense saraday, which is sturgeon, or polodont today, which is paddlefish, you just aren't talking caviaar. You may be talking about tasty, slightly salted eggs that came from fish, but they are caviare substitutes, not caviare. It's a fake. Now, on a personal note, I've separated salmon row and small mouth bass row and trout row from their skeins, rents them, soaked them in a salt solution, and found them all to be very good eating, but probably much more visually appealing than tasty. The United States banned the import of beluga caviare from the Caspian Sea in two thousand five, over fishing, as well as habitat destruction in the way of pollution, had taken its toll on the population. Currently beluga sturgeon is listed by the i U c N as critically endangered. Despite this, starting in about two thousand and seven, there has been some legal trade of black sea and Caspian sea caviare. If you are a caviar eater, don't despair, Just try to do your research and see if you can is yours from sustainable stocks here in the US. Paddlefish or spoonbill or Polodon spafula. That's spafula, not spatula. But if you're familiar with the paddlefish, if it were Polodon spatula, that would be very fitting. As we have covered before, this prehistoric spoonbill has a bill or paddle or rostrum that can be about a third of its entire body length, sticking up where its nose would be. They date back about a hundred and twenty five million years and are found throughout the Mississippi and Missouri River drainages. Some folks even called these freshwater sharks because of their shark like tail and the fact that their body is cartilaginous no bones about it. Although the paddle fish has been greatly reduced in number, it can still be found in twenty two states and fished for in some capacity in thirteen of those twenty two states. In fact, in the state of Oklahoma, new paddlefish angling world record was just caught. You can get all the details at the meat eater dot com or on Spencer New Heart Road on that one. In a quick recap for you, suffice it to say that this fish was bigger than any previously caught by whopping two pounds eleven ounces means of take the angling in this case and in most cases when you're talking paddlefish is snagging. That's using a big treble hook, a little bit of weight, and you're ripping that treble hook through the water hoping to snag a battlefish. Paddlefish eat by straining zooplankton and phytoplankton out of the water, meaning that they have your typical like straining means of eating right. They open a huge wide mouth, they filter feed all these little tiny animals and miniature crustaceans through their gills, through their gill rakers, and trap that food as they move. And nobody's making any sort of like conventional tackle that has a big enough hook to land a possibly hundred forty pound fish while representing a miniature crustacean. Now here's some unsubstantiated evidence from a fellow I trust who has caught on a fly rod to paddlefish, and while he was in the boat, his friend next to him caught two paddlefish. This was blow a damn on an unnamed river that I can't tell you about, but they did it consistently enough to where they were catching paddlefish that we're eating their flies. Now again, if you ever take a look at the picture one of these things, they have like a giant bucket trap mouth. Right they're going to filter a huge volume of water. So it is very conceivable that as they're down there, especially in the river and moving water situation, that they're lined up and those big bucket miles could quite possibly just be harder to avoid than not, or they just eat more than we think of. Imagine that anyway, you shouldn't be catching any stirtle fish in the future, as are under lock and key in an aquaculture facility. I think the likely benefit to this particular man made hybrid species is a less expensive caviar. Hybrid caviar, which does exist, is typically less expensive than straight sturgeon row. In this case, you have a sturgeon like fish that is eating zoo plankton like a paddlefish, which costs way way less than your typical sturgeon diet would, which is good news for you egg eaters. Thinks never did like him much. This week the Great American Outdoors Act the Crime Desk, a new desk that I'm kind of tinkering with calling the that Sucks Desk, as we'll be talking parasites, get it, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. My week, and this podcast is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment. There happens to be some new construction going on next to me, and I heard the unmistakable rumble of a dependable steel chainsaw right out my window, so I went to take a look. I found a fella in my backyard using a steel chainsaw to cut through a stack of BC eyes, which are floor joyce. You use these joys to span gaps between load bearing walls. Then you lay your OSB or sheeting of some sort on top of that, and then eventually you clean that sheeting off of all the sawdust and old nails and screws and chew spit, and then you put yourn actual nice flooring on top of that. That's how you frame a house. Kids. Here's something I didn't know until just now in my pursuit of providing accurate information to all of you. The floor joist is an eye joist constructed by Boise cascade, which is where the be, the C and the eye come from. So it's Boise cascade, I joyce. Whereas we way back when when I was swinging a hammer on the job site, always called the d C I S, which I suppose is kind of correct, but it would have been way more accurate to call them, I joyce. This is not a big deal, but this is just one of those moments in life when you find out that you were going along with something for a long time and it you know it was kind of a lie, kind of like calling Cow's deer CU's deer. Arizona Game and Fish Department Wildlife Science coordinator Jim Heffelfinger lays that argument out in such a way where if you are a CU's person, well you're wrong. We haven't done any listener emails lately, so we'll catch up on the mailpile before we move on. First, I want to talk about spbs or soft plastic baits. You may not fish with these, but you probably know what they are. Molded plastic baits that resemble anything from frogs to crave fished worms and salamanders, basically anything of fish could think of eating. UH. Fella named Joe write Sam says, it seems odd that we're worried about pastic in the ocean and other bodies of water, but here we are throwing plastic baits into lakes all the time. Are these baits a special plastic that degrades faster? Well? I dug into this one a bit. It turns out the state of Maine at one point had proposed legislation that would make the use of spbs soft plastic bait it's illegal. If you go to Keep America Fishing dot org, you can look at a pretty good overview of the history of the litigious nature of this uh situation. Uh folks like Joe asking the question, and then somebody thinking that, yeah, that does make sense, and then they propose a rule change or regulation change, and then it shows how folks kind of smack that down. I reached out to Berkeley Power Bait through phone and email, couldn't get anybody to pick up the phone all week, and whoever is responding to email isn't great at reading the actual question. So I don't have any specifics as to the rate at which a paddle tail or twist tail or gulp minno bio degrades. I will tell you that I caught some really nice blue gill and a few croppy on a gulp minno just last week while I was in Minnesota filming for the new DOS boat season. So yes, I have been using a twister tail grub from time to time. Anyway, throwing plastic and rivers is not good. The American Sport Fishing Association seems to recognize this, but at the same time they show that there are no comprehensive studies showing that these soft plastic baits are killing fish or even really hurting them. Fish either agurgitata bait or pass it all the way through the system as in you know, they poop it out. The s A has put their efforts into angler outreach and education, telling folks to throw your spbs away or recycle them instead of throwing them overboard. To add on to this and my experience, you have a pretty darned good idea as to win a tail or A whole bait is going to come off your hook uck. So instead of casting again and giving a fish that that opportunity to swallow that plastic grub, you just swap it out for a fresh one, instead of allowing it to go into the river system or lake or ocean or what have you. This is not a stretch. This is not a big ask for folks buying these baits, as they're kind of spendy already. Don't act like you're saving cash by fishing everyone until it falls off the hook. Remember, my angling friends, if you throw these baits, these plastic baits into the river or even on the bank, and some shore bird or fish species of concern eventually washes up with one jammed in their gullet. The difference between a fisher person's piece of plastic and just a random litter bugs piece of plastic is the fisher person's piece of plastic. Everyone can tell who that belonged to. It belonged to a fisher person who was, you know, trying to dupe a fish unmistakable. We know where it came from. And to the non angling public, it doesn't matter if you don't even use that stuff. If you like the leech and lead method or floral carbon and fly. These folks who don't fish just think of fisher person as a fisher person as a fisher person. So pack it in and pack it out. Not a big gask and uh, you know, for you pro litter folks who love this microplastic talk, who will undoubtedly right in about how you don't litter, you'd never even consider it. But throwing plastic in the river or lake or the ocean isn't a big deal. And the fact that folks consumer credit cards worth of plastic er month isn't anything worth talking about. Just pick up your trash. Moving on the Eastern Arctic, killer whales were historically found throughout the eastern shore of Canada down to about Boston. Now, however, killer whale sightings. The killer whale is a tooth the whale that can grow to twenty two ft in length and about twelve thousand pounds. They're extremely rare. A few quick searches on this topic bring up a really interesting fishing report of one fisherman who's been fishing out of Boston for thirty five years who was seen two in all of his time fishing, some hoaxes, some mistaken identities, and a few bum links, so not all that much. There was a cool story about how maners back in the eighteen hundreds used to complain that there were so many killer whales that the killer whales would interfere with their attempts to drive blackfish onto the shore for harvest, which, you know, says that there were a lot of killer whales and Maine in the eighteen hundreds. Well listener named Kyle got a video from some childhood friends who are lobster fishermen in Maine who filmed one this past Monday off of the coast of Jonesport. I could say more about this, but Kyle's buddy in the video says it best. When looking at the unmistakably tall dorsal fin of a killer whale, he just stay, it's a frigging killer whale, which of course convinced me that this was at least Maine. Other than that, I cannot attest to the location. I'll tell you we were filming up in Southeast Alaska one year for the Meat Eator TV show. I was hunting blacktail with vortexas Mark Boardman, and we were going to this spot that required getting out real early in boats, and none of Steve's boats have any legal running lights, so you gotta wait for the sunlight to come up, and you just kind of creep out of the bay as the sun comes up on top of that. Once he got out of the cove and through the pass, the strait that led to this island that we were hunting was full of logs, so you had to kind of, you know, take your time, even though you didn't want to. Well, one morning, it is crystal clear, we're running out to our spot, the caesar dead calm, and I start seeing spouts the whales clearing their blow holes from a long way off, and that mist is just catching the early light. Eventually I see that we could get too close, as we're both going through the pass at the aim time, and being as I had camera crew with me, I didn't want to break any laws that I knew or didn't know about, you know, the Marine Mammals Act. So I cut the engine and gladed to a stop a long way from the pot of whales. Soon the other boat, captained by Janice pateel Us, caught up to us and stopped. The next thing that happened was truly amazing. I'll never forget it. This pot of killer whales, instead of just running through the pass, turned and came right to us kind to investigate. Just as we drifted there on the open ocean, they slid right in between our two sixteen foot aluminum skiffs. The distance between the two boats, I remember thinking, was like an underhand toss of a beer from one boat to the next. You can judge me on that later, but that's what came to me at that time. The other thing that struck me was the calf in that group. The smallest member of the killer whale group definitely weighed more than either one of our boat's engine gear people, and it would have been so so simple for anyone of those whales to just, you know, rub shoulders with the boat and just swamp us. I'll never forget that. I could have walked over to Janice's boat on the back of killer whales. And my response at the end of this awe inspiring encounter was not exactly the same, but kind of similar to Kyle's Buddy and Maine. You kind of just get left going man, freaking killer whales. So thanks for sending that in Kyle. Last, but not least, if you've been paying attention at all, you've noticed all sorts of conservation groups celebrating the House of Representatives have passed the Great American Outdoors Act by a margin of three ten to one oh seven. The Senate passed the Great American Outdoors Act by a margin of seventy three to twenty five. Now that these boats are behind us, all we need is President Trump to sign this pack kids into law. The reason that people are so excited is conservation work is tedious. It takes a lot of work. How much Well, just take one part of the Great American Outdoors Act, which is full and permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program that takes an excise tax on offshore oil and gas drilling. The American taxpayers aren't on the hook for this one. It was established in nineteen sixty five. That's fifty five years ago, and for fifty five years folks in the conservation world have been advocating their butts off for full and permanent funding, which has never happened. There is cause to celebrate, just briefly, because there's plenty of work left to do. I do want to take a moment here. There's some strong opponents, lifelong opponents to funding the land and water conservation funding, and one of them's robbed Bishop. Another one is uh oddly enough Utah senator named Mike Lee, who that guy didn't like anything. And they like to spend this funding of LWCF. In this statement that says mandatory spending on acquiring new land for the federal government, it's patently false. What they're saying is completely wrong. There are some occasions where LWCF acquires brand new land, but those same funds are available for such a giant range of access programs that just the bulk purchase of land is just a part of it. And to narrow it down to just saying this is what it does, It just makes the government by land would be as accurate as saying all l w CF does is make the government partially fund baseball diamonds, which is something that it does, or all it does. All LWCF does is make the government partially fund bike paths to the tune of nine million dollars a year. It's kind of true, but it's not the whole picture. These guys know what it does. They just don't like it. They also live in a state that has over public land that that state benefits greatly from. The recreational economy in the state of Utah is absolutely bonkers. All you gotta do the next time you have to connect through the Salt Lake City Airport is look at how they advertise the state of Utah. They don't advertise private land. They advertise all the national parks, all the national monuments. They advertise the outdoor recreational activities on public land. These guys are having their cake and eating it too. We're gonna move off that ramp and I'm just gonna tell you that there's more work to do. Okay. Thank you very very much for picking up the phones, writing emails, and hounding your state senators, your congressional representatives on behalf of the Great American Outdoors Act. Thank you. Thank you. Now the up the phone and thank those people. Make sure that they hear you say, hey, thank you very much. This stuff is very important to me. You did a great job on either co signing or voting for the Great American Outdoors Act. Then when that sunk in, say I got one more thing for you. I need you to co sponsor or vote for the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. Let them know that what is so cool about the Recovering America's Wildlife Act is that every state has submitted a list of wildlife and plant species that have the greatest conservation needs. We just got a package through the House and Senate that provides for a lot of human stuff deferred maintenance in parks on US Forest Service land, on BLM land, US fishing wildlife land, as well as funding through the Land and Water Conservation Fund for access projects like parks and baseball diamonds and bike paths and ease months and boat ramps. Now it's time to give our wildlife a funding boost as well. You supported the Great American Outdoors Act again, Thank you so much. You know how easy it is to write an email or call the switchboard at two oh two two to four three one two one, So just do it again. This is your call to action. Moving on to the things that sucked desk parasites, that is, the Chinese liver fluke is a parasitic flatworm that humans can get real familiar with by eating raw or undercooked fish. How familiar well, like the name suggests, liver flukes end up inhabiting your liver, bile duct, and gall bladder. In one recent case in China, a Mr Z had liver flukes and habit his liver for over four months. Over the course of four months, his resident flat worms had essentially emptied out the left lobe of his liver, leaving only a pus filled sack and thousands of eggs in the form of ciss behind in the cavity. If you have ever heard my buddy Stephen Ronella talk about this type of thing, it does sound very similar to trichinosis, only the cycle in this case was likely free swimming flatworm ciss in fresh water, which attached themselves to a snail, which eventually hatched more free swimming ciss that attached and fed upon a freshwater fish. That freshwater fish was then eventually caught and consumed by Mr. Z. The ciss then free swam through his gut to his bile, ducks, and liver, where they ate and laid eggs waiting to be eaten again. I'm find it just threw up at my mouth a little bit, so I guess what I'm saying is sometimes that sign that says fresh fish shouldn't be as tempting as the one that says, briefly, flash frozen fresh fish. That's the risk of freshwater ceviche folks. According to the c d C Center for Disease, can roll left unchecked, and given that you survive infections, flatworm ciss can last thirty years in the human gut. In Airbnb terms, you'd be a super host. Effective medication is available. The case of Mr Z was greatly exacerbated due to the fact that he waited four months before seeking medical attention, and again, freezing or cooking fish will kill the parasite, which literally means you can have it both ways. Brother. Moving on to the ever popular law enforcement desk, West Virginia natural Resources officers cited a man for illegally fishing on private property which he illegally accessed on a private road. The property was thoroughly posted. In fact, the individual had forgotten his kayak paddle and used one of the private property signs to paddle his kayak around while fishing that morning. He was sighted and stated that the fishing had been productive. Jumping over to Florida, Alude tenant with the Walton County Jail has resigned after she and her husband were recently caught outside of Argyle, Florida, by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, shooting at a robotic Dear decoy at night out of a vehicle. The husband told f w c C that he knew something was wrong, as he rarely ever misses. Now, just so you know, typically when you miss, or if you are in the position of let's say, teaching someone how to shoot, you look for inconsistencies. You'd kind of like figure out what the excuses are, right, so you can hone in on what the actual problem is. You know, were you shooting the same rifle, same cartridge, what were the shooting conditions. Once all that's established, then you can figure out what the situation is. So when this fellow says he rarely ever misses, is he really saying that typically when he's driving at night on a road, he rarely ever misses from a vehicle on a highway. Three times as the couple turned around to investigate the robotic decoy and f WCC officer apparently heard the sure shot husbands say quote that Dear Sure was pretty thanks for sending that one in. Mason, good luck this season. Jumping over to the I told you so days. Remember when you folks made statements like if everyone did that, then there would be nothing left. For instance, if everyone threw a rock in the Grand Canyon, or if everyone picked an apple, or if everyone picked a flower out of the field. Well you know they were right, not entirely, but they did and do have a point. People cannot help themselves. Cuba boasts, among many boasts, it's capable of boasting the greatest diversity of snails in the world, snails of all shapes and sizes, ranging from meduscule it's a large brown opaque, and of course to a critically endangered Cuban snail, the painted snail. The painted snail has a beautiful shell, is multicolored and glossy, and highly sought after by collectors, to the point where all six species of painted snail are listed as critically endangered. They're factors such as habitat and global warming, but one hard to ignore a factor is Cuban officials keep finding snail shells in people's pockets. On top of that, they have found an intricate network of snail shell exporters. According to National Geographic between two thousand twelve and two thousand, sixteen, Cuban customs seized more than twenty three thousand shells in fifteen seizures, all headed for the US. Now, twenty three thousand shells sounds like a lot, but really it's just a fraction of what is going on. The writer of this nag O piece, Bruno Dimici, personally inspected a couple's collection in Cuba. The couple had intended these shells for sale in their home. They had at least thirty thousand snail shells. If you look at what gets the most attention on the endangered species list, it is almost always something large or large with teeth. The grizzly bearers stayed on the endangered species list for a long time. For example, I find it important to include the pocket sized creators too, and to note that these snails likely developed their multicolored and vibrant scheme to deter predation until people came along and thought, boy, that's pretty That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks so much for listening. As always, let me know what I'm getting right, what I'm getting wrong, and what's going on in your neck of the woods by writing in to ask cal that's a s k C A L at the meat eater dot com. Thanks again and I'll talk to you next week.