00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can Review with Ryan Kell Kelly in now Here's Kel. A giant, extinct bristle worm with snapping jaws has just been identified. The previously unknown creature was identified recently by a scientific team from the University of Bristol, London University in Sweden, and the Royal Ontario Museum. Apparently, said giant jowed worm lived about four hundred million years ago, and though the sample containing the critter was collected by the Ontario Geological Survey and stored at the Royal Ontario Museum, scientists just figured out what it was. Bristle worms are Polly Kate's poll Kate, meaning many bristles, so remember that next time you see your mom pushing a broom. There are more than eight thousand known polycates, including fireworms, bristle worms, clam worms, lug worms, sea mice, and feather dusters. The jaws of this particular fossilized bristle worm are the largest ever recorded, at just over one centimeter in length. To put that in perspective, this worm's jaws were half as long as the width of your index finger. Roughly. That may not sound as impressive as you or even I had hoped, but the scientific name may still wow you. This newly identified species has been named Webster ropean arms Strong e Armstrong being the name of the man who collected the samples back, and Webster from Alex Webster, the lead singer of Cannibal Corpse, the death metal band, who the researchers described as quote a giant when it comes to handling his instrument. I get us ancient worm. Researchers really liked party hardy. Good for them. This week we're going to talk bad publicity stunts, cart blood sucking, leeches, and lots of other stuff. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week currently as inn Right this second, I'm sitting here watching the sunrise on Lake Buchanan in Tennessee in a you know, nice mobile hotel room, which is pretty cool, but that's a story for later. Back to what I really want to talk about. I met up with my folks and did some camper camping, which, given the intensity of the mosquito population, was a really nice treat and a really nice change. We fished a small stream that twenty years ago was chock full of brook trout, but now seems to be inhabited primarily by brown trout. The fishing was good, the browns didn't appear to be too numerous, and they didn't come up and hit just anything. Plus, you know I got a big one. You guys probably already knew that. I also found a few chunks of bison bones and possibly a fossilized bison tooth. I'm waiting to see if I can get that formally identified. Stay tuned. The other neat thing I picked up was a parasite. While waiting the stream, a blood sucker, also known as a leech, attached itself to me. It had been quite a while since I had seen a live leach, let alone been a host to one. They're about six and fifty different types of leeches, the largest of which is the giant Amazon leach, which can grow to eighteen inches in length and live for twenty years. A leeches body has thirty four segments. They also have thirty two brains and three jaws, each of which have tiny sharp teeth. They're hermaphroditic, meaning of course that they have both male and female sexual organs, but they reproduce sexually, as in, no matter who shows up to the party, they you know. Party. Leeches produced their own unique anticoagulant called her rooting, which prevents the blood of their hosts from clawing as they suck it out. Leeches come in two types. One feeds on small animals like invertebrates, and the other feeds on blood. The invertebrate eaters use their suckers as anchors to hold themselves in place in a lake or stream and snag small critters as they pass by. These leeches need to feed every other day or so. The blood suckers or hema topagus leeches don't have to feed is often because they can gorge themselves when attached to a host. Blood sucking leeches can consume three to five times their body mass and blood after a large feed. Some species can survive for a year between meals. If you're getting a little queasy with all this leech talk, remember this. Leeches make for some of the best bait available. They stay on the hook better than worms, are easier to keep alive than minnows, and best of all, walleye, bass, croppy and even pike love them. All I can say is the critter I pulled from my leg was interesting to check out and release back into the water. All it cost on my end was a bit of blood, and as before mentioned, that meal of me may have saved the next angler or water waiting critter from being snacked on, like pay it forward type of angling blood bank type scenario. Alright, moving on, jumping in here with a few quick hitters. Predators create what's called a landscape of fear, meaning that their presence on the landscape influences the behavior of other species that are afraid of them. When you think of the top predators in North America, you probably picture bears and mountain lions, But there's another predator even farther up the food chain that would be us, the humans, and a new study indicates that those other predators are well aware of this hierarchy. It also suggests that mountain lions aren't that into poetry. A team of researchers from the University of Santa Cruz set up speakers in the mountains. These speakers played soothing human voices reading poetry at regular intervals. Large hats avoided the area when human voices were playing, while medium sized carnivores like bobcats, skunks, and a possums became more nocturnal or fed less often. Mice and rats, on the other hand, took advantage of the lack of predators and started foraging more boldly. So when you're out hiking with someone and having yourself friendly chat, even a chat that is intended to soothe or maybe even seduce human ears, no matter how soothing or seductive you think you may be, just know that you're creating a landscape of fear for any predators who may live in the area. Hello also kind of says something about the residents of Santa Cruz. Those large carnivores have good reason to fear us. Case in point, a Michigan man shot and killed the gator last week. The guy was out collecting minnows for bait when he turned around to see a six foot gator hissing at him, so he shot it. This wouldn't be all that noteworthy unless you were paying attention to the state that I mentioned, Michigan, not exactly what you'd call traditional gator country. Local deputies determined that the animal had escaped from a neighboring property, where they also found emuse tortoises, rattlesnakes and a couple more gators. Turns out that this is a legal activity in that part of Michigan where there are no statutes about keeping alligators. In case you're thinking this is random one off event, think again. This was the tenth incidents of loose alligators being killed or captured in the Midwest in the past month. Yankees be warned, gator precautions don't end at the Mason Dixon line anymore. Also, keep your eyes peeled if you're in the Orange County, North Carolina area and elusive five foot tall, one pound emu was on the loose and has evaded authorities for over three weeks. EMUs are the highly resilient flightless birds of Australia and origin. They can reach six foot in height, run over thirty miles an hour, and goes several days without food or water. Another interesting fact about emuse is that Aboriginals have been making calls and calling them in for tens of thousands of years, So maybe these North Carolina turkey and duck callers need to get in this game. Be the first kid on your block to call in a hundred pound turkey not too far from Australia, you'll find a place called New Zealand, an island nation of beauty and romance, and this year it seems to be extra heavy on the romance front for parakeets. Anyway, the orange front and parakeet was thought to be extinct until they were rediscovered twenty five years ago. That's what we refer to as a Lazarus species around here. Due to huge abundance of beach seeds this season, the birds are so flush and food that mating pairs are producing up to five clutches of eggs instead of the usual one or two. This is a concern I have about traveling to New Zealand the general fecundity of the place. I have at least one buddy who came back from a vacation. They're pregnant, and this story just reinforces my suspicions. Moving on to our stupid stunts with wildlife desk over in foggy London Town, two men apparently attempting to protest veganism, were convicted of disorderly conduct for publicly eating hole as in the hide and fur. We're still attached raw squirrels this display. It took place in front of a vegan food shop located in an outdoor market in London Soho District. The pair of so called protesters were found guilty of disorderly behavior likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress. One of the protesters wore a shirt that read Veganism equals malnutrition while he attempted to chew through a raw squirrel. So now you know that happened. That's not the only publicity stunt gone bad recently. Last week, Bush Beer announced that they'd be erecting a one day only pop up bar in mark Twain National Forest. Bush said that anyone who found the bar would be awarded with beer and merch, and that one lucky hiker would win a lifetime supply of Bush Light. Great idea terrible execution. Bush only planned for a few hundred fans to show up. We got a few thousand instead. Complaints started brewing on social media almost immediately. Attendees reported that the free merch was gone within thirty minutes, every hiker only got a single beer, temps topped one hundred degrees, and the trailhead got so crowded that droves of people were turned away. One Facebook commentator complained I left my vacation a day early and Joe fourteen hours overnight for no merch and warm beer. Another said, on the trek back, I got heat exhaustion and had to be taken to my car. Was it worth it? No? Many were quick to declare the Bush pop up as the beer brands very own hashtag Firefest. Not all was lost, though, Bush promised to plant thousands of trees and donate thousands of dollars to the National Forest Foundation. Cheers of them for bringing beer to the conservation table, even if it was warm and there weren't enough of them. Sticking with bad ideas on public lands, Buffalo and Yellowstone are offering free rides this month. That's a horrible joke, but true in a way. Uh. Nine year old girl was just tossed in the air by a bull bison near Old Faithful Geyser. Big bull bison will tip the scales at over two thousand pounds and stand over six ft tall at the shoulder. Bison can sprint at speeds up to thirty miles an hour and have repeatedly demonstrated their irritable dispositions over the years. Numerous rental cars and an unfortunate number of tourists have learned this the hard way and Yellowstone. These incidents are usually preventable and almost always precipitated by people either getting way too close or not yielding to bison when they approach. In this most recent case, witnesses at the scene estimate fifty people were surrounding the bison before it charged, and that some of the crowd were within five to ten feet of the bowl for ten minutes or more. I've also read multiple reports of people trying to pet the bison. Once again. It seems folks coming to Yellowstone are confusing national parks with theme parks, where the rides stay on tracks and the animals are designed to thrill, not kill. The Park Service recommends that visitors to Yellowstone stay at least twenty five yards away from large animals such as bison, elk, big worn sheep, and deer. Here's my public service announcement, or p s A as we call it in the BIZ. Twenty five yards isn't nearly far enough, To reiterate, a two thousand pound buffalo can sprint up to thirty miles an hour, grizzly bears can hit sixty miles an hour, and the recommended do not cross distance is a hundred yards again, way too close in my opinion. Even though we're talking about a park situation where these animals have lost some of their wild that doesn't make them domesticated or automated for that matter, and they have every right to defend their personal space. I'm not celebrating little girls being thrown in the air by bison or hikers getting mauled by bears. But when these things happen, a part of me raises an eyebrow and thinks, hey, at least they still got them all right. Moving on, but keeping on the Montana subject line, Not all tourists flocked to Montana in the summertime to be entertained by quote unquote wildlife. Lots of them just come here to fish for trout this time of year. Many of the locals skip the crowded trout streams to chase a very different fish when the tourists aren't interested in and might even be a little grossed out by, you know, or rubber lips, scumsuckers, golden bones, pond pigs, bugle mouth bass, brown bombers, yellow belly small mouth Sopranis Johnson. For those of you who aren't hip to the cool kids slang. I'm talking about KRT or, to be more specific, common cart not be confused with the Asian carp threatening to take over the Great Lakes that I covered in a previous episode. Common carp or cyprianous carpio are considered trash fish here in the US, but they got here under the best of intentions. American fish stocks were crashing in the eighteen hundreds due to a combination of over harvest and habitat degradation. President Grant created the United States Fish Commission in eighteen seventy one figure out some solutions. In eighteen seventy seven, the Commission imported three forty five carp and began to encourage carp farming across the country as an alternative to commercial harvest of wild fish. Problem was, Americans never developed a taste for carp, and when the carp farms went bust in the late eighteen hundreds, their surplus stock wound up in local waterways. Europeans, on the other hand, love carp. Common carper needed to the Danube River, and while we prissy Americans may shunn carp as food fish, they're considered a delicacy over that way. The traditional Christmas Eve meals and hung gree the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Germany and Poland all involved carp meat prepared in some fashion. Fun fact, many families in Central Europe actually keep their Christmas carp alive in the bathtub for several days before killing and preparing them. When was the last time you had a relationship like that with your food. This tradition probably dates back to the days before refrigeration, but some people claim that keeping them in clean water for a few days flushes the meat and makes it taste better. Folks will also keep scales from their Christmas carp in their wallets all year to bring good luck. Anyway. Though common carp originally hail from Central Europe, they're now widespread across the entire continent, and for that we can thank the Roman Empire. When the Romans invaded the Danube region, they discovered the perfect protein source for armies on the move. They carried loads of carp with them in earthen pots as they traveled west and distributed the fish all the way over to the UK. These days, angry is in the UK take carp fishing very seriously. The British gets so fired up about carp that record carp catches make national headlines. The best carp lakes are private and stocked was specially selected specimens bread to reach massive size. All the biggest carp in the country, those over thirty pounds, are known to anglers who give them names like Big Rig, Green One and Captain Jack. These fish are caught repeatedly and re weighed and heated attempts to best the national record that currently stands at sixty eight pounds one ounce. That fish, named the Parrot, was caught again a couple of months later and only way at sixty four pounds fourteen ounces. When the parrot died in two thousand seventeen, the whole British angling world mourned. There's an entire industry in Britain focused on carp fanatics that makes carp specific rods, reels, bait, tackle, these things called landing mats, which you know, if you imagine a slipping slide that you placed on the bank and catch up onto that that's a landing matt. They even make cart fishing tents so you can, you know, set a few lines out stretch out and comfort while you wait for that beld ring. No matter what the weather, you know you're gonna be cart fishing. It seems like a lot of effort and expense to catch a carp. To me, the whole approach runs countered everything that I personally love about cart fishing culture, namely that it's accessible, cheap, unassuming, and just, you know, a little bit dirty, kind of a blue collar kind of fishing. Then again, that's probably just me being an American, and we now know what Americans will do for warm bush lights, So who are we to judge. Thanks for listening to Cal's weekend review. Remember to subscribe and hit that furthest right hand star wherever podcasts are streamed or downloaded. If you want to get in touch, shoot me an email at a sk K C A L at the meat Eater dot com. Tell me how I'm doing, what I got wrong, and most importantly, what you want to know. We're up. Talk to you next week.