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. Two new species of electrified eels were identified in South America recently, one of which has the most potent electrical charge of the two d and fifty known electrified fishes in that part of the world, and of any known to science. These eels, which are actually a type of knife fish, can grow to eight feet in length. Hopefully you can see them coming. Beyond the simple fact of how cool these fish sound, I'm amazed and excited that we're still finding new creatures, especially ones this big. Makes you wonder what else is out there, and in a way gives you some assurance that there is plenty of adventure to be had in the world. Now this part may shock you. Electric eels in the Amazonian ason have captivated Western scientists for hundreds of years. In fact, electric eels inspired a fellow by the name of Alissandro Volta, an Italian physicist, to design the first battery way back in s and this supercharged eel now bears his name Electro for us Voltai. But the eel puts old Alissandro to shame by producing an astonishing eight hundred and sixty volts, which, according to the New Jersey Electrical Contractors Association, is plenty to kill an adult man. In fact, this eel producing eight hundred and sixty volts is producing more than eleven times the voltage needed to kill an adult man. But don't worry. Although e voltai packs more than three times the voltage of a typical wall socket, it likely won't kill you. Depending on the conductivity of the contact surface, of course, and the fact that this eel is only producing one amp, which is low flow so to speak, that wall socket will be in the tended why amp range. Alissandro Volta the physicist, not the eel or knife fish. His first batteries weren't even strong enough to produce a spark. Considering these Amazonian eels were first described two and fifty years ago, maybe Alessandro should have found a stronger eel. Of course, batteries have come a long way since then. Just ask the folks over at Steel Power Equipment who happened to power this podcast. They're using batteries to power professional chainsaws, even saws like a normal guy like me uses steel one forty is my personal chainsaw choice for the back of the truck or the side of a mule. This week, we've got carnivores, the Bahamas, Dorian's Aftermath, the strange sexual ways of honey bees, and so much more. But first, I'm gonna tell you about my week. I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about elk this past week, looking at photos of bulls on friends phones and answering calls with you get your elk. Yet it's that time of year. The elk rat has begun here in Montana and everywhere else. Elker found the magical musical on sexual time when elk compete for, you know, sex, or if you want things in purely biological terms, compete for the opportunity to spread their d NA. Currently, over a million elk reside in the US. We should talk about this as the places where elk can be found have changed a lot in North America. In fact, many of the places I currently hunt or have hunted elk were completely void of elk only a short time ago. Prior to European settlement and estimated ten million elk roamed much of the continental US, as well as a large part of Canada from coast to coast. European encroachment literally eight up elk without game management agencies, unregulated hunting for meat and hides, and habitat destruction reduced the total population to an estimated fifty thou animals and completely extirpated them from much of their native change. What the market, hunters, settlers, and native people's couldn't kill and eat were pushed into new and seldom traveled terrain. Elk scattered to pockets of sanctuary high in the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest, especially thick timbered, steep slopes areas where feed was scarce but people were two. These holdouts were eventually used to re establish populations, starting here in the West and then moving into the Midwest and even stay It's like Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. In n fifty, elk were delivered to Pennsylvania by train from the Wyoming side of Yellowstone Park for your only thirty bucks ahead. Interestingly, over a hundred years later, a resident of Wyoming pays fifty seven dollars for an elk tag. If you aren't familiar with elk hunting, a tag dang sher doesn't guarantee an elk. So the thirty dollars for a whole live elk sounds like the steel of a century if I stop and think about it. I've hunted Wyoming elk in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and New Mexico, but never actually in Wyoming. Kind of head scratcher, I'll admit. If you don't know what I mean, take a look at a map and look at where I'm at in Bozeman, Montana. Now that I've bored you with that, I'll get back to the sex. The rut can mean different things to different people, but it only means one thing to elk. The rut is the time elk compete to spread their genes through sexual reproduction. Elk compete with each other and entice each other through a huge range of vocalizations, most commonly broken down into the human terms of bugles from bowls and muse from cows and calves. Take it from me, there is a wide range of vocalizations in the language of elk love, and now is the time to go listen. I encourage you, whether you are hunting or not, to go to the refuge, state park, monument, or national park nearest you with an elk population and listen to some of the coolest animals in the woods. You will hear an elk bugle with more than just your ears. You'll hear it with your whole body. Experience what active conservation cooperation and management from state and federal agencies as well as conservation groups have done to partially restore this iconic and tasty animal to the landscape. Moving on US fish and wildlife. Just to prove the import of a horn, hide, and skull from an African black rhino, there have been five rhinos imported into the US after nearly a three decade long hiatus, three under the Obama administration and soon to be three under the Trump administration. The rhinoceros to which the parts belonged was legally killed by US hunter from Michigan. Black rhinos are considered critically endangered, with just over fifty hundred remaining in the wild. Namibia houses more than half the population and currently allows five animals to be hunted each year. The Michigan hunter importing the parts drew heavy criticism for killing the twenty nine year old male rhino. For example, the Humane Society of the United States was no fan of this hunt, which is no surprise since hunting any species at any time draws criticisms from the H s U. S. But I'll admit hunting a critically endangered species sounds wrong to just about everyone at first glance. According to the Endangered Species Act, it is illegal to import any trophies of an endangered species unless doing so would help the survival of the species. Disappears to suggest that importing the michigander's trophy rhino parts has been determined to help the survival of black rhinos. But how could killing one of only a relative few critically endangered animals help the survival of said animals seems counterintuitive. We need context. The rhino in question was hunted and killed on the Mangetti National Wildlife Park, where he was seen by wildlife officials as a threat to the rhino population's ability to grow. Apparently, the twenty nine year old bowl was successful in running off other breeding age bowls while not quite being able to get the job of mating done himself. For that reason, the old rhino bowl was specifically selected to be taken out, killed, lethally removed from the population. The hunter paid a whopping four hundred thousand dollars to pull the trigger. That four hundred thousand dollars now supposedly supports ongoing efforts to protect and restore black rhino populations. The meat of the rhino was apparently distributed to people living around the park. You may have noticed a few seeds of doubts sprinkled in those last couple of sentences. I have supreme faith in wildlife agencies myself, but doubt almost always creeps into the conversations when talking hunting and conservation in Africa. Is the four hundred thousand dollars actually doing good for wildlife? Did the meat really get eaten? Is the hunter hunter? Or did he pay to kill? Is this conservation? I don't have the answers to all that, but I do know that poaching, not hunting, has been the largest driver of black rhino decline. Poaching is not hunting. We can debate the reasons people hunt, but poach for monetary gain, in this case, to satisfy the demand for rhino horn. Rhino horn is sold as a medicinal cure for hangovers and lazy libidos, not to mention being just a status symbol in some cultures for the ultra wealthy. I don't know about you, but no matter how hard my mornings get after long nights, I haven't come close to grinding up a critically endangered species to shed a temporary headache. Of course, I won't be paying four thousand dollars for hunts either. I'm not defending or condemning African trophy hunting here, but I feel it's important to draw clear distinctions between poaching and hunting and point blame for species decline where it actually belongs. Where you believe in paying huge dollars for rare animals or not. It's hard to ignore the fact that in this area of Namibia at least, the black rhino population is rising and poaching is declining, either despite or because of their regulated hunts. Now, keeping with theme here at the Weekend Review, old poop DNA from the parasite talx of Scars Leonina was recently discovered in the desiccated feces of a puma in South America. This DNA evidence suggests that the species of roundworm, still common in the guts of modern dogs, cats, and foxes, has been around for nearly seventeen thousand years. Prior to this discovery. Folks thought that wild carnivores contracted T. Leonina from domestic cats and dogs, but this shows that the parasites were in that part of South America before humans, so wild cats and dogs were carrying them around long before the process of domestication even started. One family of animals that have never been successfully domesticated ours today or bears. Unfortunately, too many bears have been conditioned to turn to people or our refuse for food. The old saying a fed bear is a dead bear once again came true here In Montana, State wildlife officials had to euthanize a three hundred pound male grizzly last week after he became conditioned to humans, likely because campers were careless with their food and trash. Lewis and Clark National Forest District Ranger Mike new Knows says the bear approached within twenty feet of people. Though the bear hadn't acted with any aggression, his continued pursuit of easy meals near campsites supposed a potential problem that rangers just couldn't ignore. So even though the bear hadn't done anything wrong, he had to be put down because people were acting out of either ignorance or carelessness. Just something to think about when you head out there into bear country. I mean, how many of these stories do you folks need to hear? Quit feeding the animals here at meat here we think a lot about what we eat. So I was surprised to learn that up until recently, evolutionary biologists hadn't really looked at the evolution of diet across the animal kingdom. When a group of researchers at the University of Arizona finally did so, their findings proved surprising, at least to some spoiler alert carnivores are king. But before you start getting all high and mighty, recognize that you are not a carnivore. No matter how much flood she choose to consume, You're still an omnivore, which puts you in the smallest minority. From an evolutionary diet perspective. The recent findings published in the Journal of Evolutionary Letters suggest that carnivory is the most common diet among all animals living and extinct at sixty her bivy like eating plants, comes in at thirty two percent, and omnivory, which is eating plants and meat accounts for just three percent. Before you start taping furiously about my mathematical failure. The remaining two percent were considered ambiguous taxa, meaning the researchers aren't sure where they fit. I've got a few friends like that. The study also suggests that many of the carnivorous species living today share a common ancestor that dates back eight hundred million years, a single celled organism that filter fed on bacteria. Her Bivory, on the other hand, seems to be a much more recent evolutionary development, and omnivory is downright freakish. While it may seemed like animals with indiscriminate diets would have a leg up on the competition, it doesn't actually work that way. And if you think about that one buddy we all have who will eat absolutely anything, no matter how long it's been sitting out on the coffee table or hidding back the fridge, that makes sense. Moving on to our pollinator desk. I'm not trying to get to zoomorphic around here. That would be the opposite of anthropomorphic or assigning animalistic qualities to humans. But speaking of that one buddy, he or she may make other questionable life choices beyond the dietary. I'm specifically thinking about behaviors around sexual partners and the finding, attracting, and maintaining of said partners. I don't know about you, but I have a number of friends with spotty histories in that department, and it appears that male honey bees do too. New research shows that male honey bees inject their partners with toxins that cause temporary blindness. And no, I'm not talking about tequila. The researchers hypothesized that temporarily blinding the female bee prevents her from flying away and mating with other male bees. While this may sound like the female bee gets the short end of the stick in this whole deal, keep in mind that hill go on to live for many years and start a whole colony of her own, while the male will be dead in a matter of minutes or hours despite his best efforts. She'll likely fight through the temporary blindness and go on to mate with a dozen or more other bees. So I'd say she comes out ahead here. I know, our Florida desk must seem like it's the size of a Vegas buffet table, considering how much coverage we give the state. Some of you may remember that I was over there earlier this summer filming an episode of the Meat Eater fishing show Doss Boat with my buddy Ed Anderson. If you follow this show and you watch that episode, you know Florida is dealing with some water management issues that have resulted in nasty stuff like a naturally large red tides, seagrass and oyster bed die offs, fish kills, and huge toxic algae blooms. The reasons behind all of this are complicated and generally misunderstood. I don't have time to break it all down for you, but if you've been wondering exactly what the deal is with Florida water, we just published a fantastic article over at the meat eater dot com titled Florida's water crisis is new leadership finally turning the tide. It's a comprehensive breakdown that would give you all the info you need to know about what's going on with Florida's fisheries and what's being done about jumping slightly east of Florida, let's take a minute to talk about the Bahamas. At this point, I assume that all of you are aware that a Hurricane Dorian decimated the Northern Bahamas, Abaco and Grand Bahama in particular. But I'm not sure if we're all really apprehending the totality of this storm. The New York Times reported in this part of the Bahamas, nearly everything is gone. Hurricane Dorian didn't just upend life, Dorian crushed it. There are no public utilities and no reliable sources of food or drinking water, and there's no sense when those needs might be restored. Our buddy, Chris Dombrowski, has spent a lot of time in the Bahamas and even wrote a book about the history and culture of sport fishing there. He told me on the phone, it's all your worst nightmare. The need to get people off the islands is imminent. Chris has managed to fly some of his close people to Florida. At this point, bahama Anians aren't even thinking about rebuilding. They're just trying to get away. It takes an extreme situation to make people leave their homelands with nothing but the clothes on their backs. When most of us think of the Bahamas, we picture Christine, sand flats crawling with bone fish, sweaty kaalic beer, bottles and conq fritters and salad. Whether you fish there, are just always dreamed of fishing there. This whole massive hurricane thing might seem like kind of a bummer, but let's all just take a breath and realize that the devastation this storm unleashed on the residents of those islands is far bigger than that fishing vacation you were really hoping to take. One day, a fishing buddy of the Meat Eater Crew, guy by the name of Josh Mills, came up with the hell of a good idea. Josh has never been in the Bahamas, and he's not what you'd call wealthy. He thought to himself, Man, I don't have enough money to really make an impact on this problem, but I do want to do something. So he sat down in his fly tying vice, spun up a dozen steel head flies and decided to auction them off over Instagram to the highest bidder and donate whatever he made. Then he realized that there's this whole big community of fishing folks out there, and if he could get them working together, he might be able to do something meaningful. So he did what the kids do these days. He started a hashtag and put the word out there into the social media land. As of this writing, hashtag dozen for Dorian has over thirty different fly tires donating collections of their work. We even got in on it here at the met Eatter and tied up a Baker's dozen flies, jigs and lures that we auctioned off. This is such a great example of the outdoor community rallying together to help folks in need that it makes me feel just a tiny bit better about the world. Hunters anglers are a generous bunch, and we rally around our own. I invite all of you to dig a few bucks out of your beer fund and send them to people in need. You can bid on some flies on Instagram, or just go ahead and make a donation to relief organization. The other day I talked to Jim Kluge, who's helping coordinate one of those organizations. The Double Hall for Dorian Relief Coalition, is partnering with the Bahama Manians who work in the fishing industry to get relief supplies directly to their communities. As of September tenth, they've managed to get three plane loads of supplies into Abaco and Grand Bahama. But as Jim told me, this is not a problem that's going to be cleaned up by the time it's falling out of the news cycle next week. We're working on a long term effort to help people survive and rebuild their lives. So donate if you can, but also don't give up on your dream of fishing these islands. They will rebuild and they're definitely going to need those tourist dollars in the years to come. And don't worry about the bone fish either. They just moved deeper water and they'll be back up on sand flats as soon as the crabs are. That's all I got for you this week. Thanks for listening to Cal's weekend review. Go to anywhere this podcast maybe streamable, downloadable, or share able. Leave me a review by hitting that furthest right hand star, and be sure to let me know how I'm doing at Ask Cal at the meat eater dot com. That's a s k C A L at the meat Eater dot com. And if you like what you're hearing, tell a friend as well. I'll talk to you next week.

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