00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can Review with Ryan kel Kell and now Here's Kel. The Northern snakehead, an invasive fish species, made national news for crossing the Florida Georgia line, unfortunately the actual state boundary line, not the somehow popular pop country group. The snakehead is a highly adaptable, fast breeding invasive fish species that happened to be very good eating, which makes them literally more palatable than the aforementioned pop country group. The northern snakehead is an obligate air breather, meaning it can breathe with or without water, and even in times when the water they are in is full of oxygen, it will still breathe there. In addition to cycling water through its gills. Tarpan would be a much more revered example of an obligate air breather. The snakehead prefers shallow, muddy streams, but in reality it can make its home just about anywhere it's planted, abandoned, or wriggles into. Snakeheads are native to China, the Korean Peninsula, and Russia, but according to USGS, they were first found in the US in California, Florida and two thousand Massachusetts in No. One, Maryland and OTWO, then North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, d C Arkansas, New Jersey, Delaware, Mississippi, Missouri, and most recently Georgia. The Maryland pond incident of two thousand two, which I reference here because the meat Eater crew and myself may have actually eaten some fish that could have possibly descended from them. Anyhow, the pond incident occurred to something like this. The owner of the pond had purchased two northern snakeheads because they look cool, I guess from a market in New York and release them eventually. He must have thought better of this and decided to report the situation to the state of Maryland. When they drained the pond, they found not only the two original fish, but an additional hundred or so juvenile fish. The northern snakehead is sexually mature, at about twelve inches in length. They'll spawn several times a year, potentially distributing more than a hundred thousand eggs, which only take two to three days to hatch. The younger fish have the ability to wriggle their way across sections of dry ground to move into new or more suitable habitat. According to the USGS, if needed, they can breathe only air for up to four days. As you can imagine, an invasive fish that can do things like move across dry ground is hard to keep track of. Currently, snakeheads have been reported in fourteen states. In the state of Maryland, local fishermen have taken them with archery equipment up to nineteen point nine pounds and a little over the five inches. The roden real record is out of Virginia at just under eighteen pounds. The bad news is state and in some cases federal agencies have thrown nets and poison like roting known at these sneaky, hungry invaders, but they still keep turning up in new areas. The only good news is that these fish are showing themselves, often at the end of a fisherman's hook. So go buy a fishing license and throw some bait for a tasty invasive kill your catch, preferably by a solid bonk on the head. Remember these fish can breathe there, record where you were and call your local Department and Natural Resources and states like Maryland where it is legal to do, so take your invasive home and eat it. We ate a bunch of Northern snakeheads while in Maryland last October. They were really good, and if you don't like fish, they taste way more like chicken. Heck, if you don't like fishing, you can shoot them with archery equipment and bag them that way. Hopefully you're chopping at the bit to go out and help with this issue. If so, there's just one more thing to remember. Snakeheads are often mistaken for another obligate air breather, the bow fin. This is a problem because while snakeheads are invasive and highly destructive, both fin are native and beneficial to their home ecosystems. Both fin, like gar get a bad rap for some anglers who claim wrongly that they eat more desirable sport fish and harm their populations. These native fishes have been swimming in our waters for a significantly longer than popular sport fish. If both fin were so destructive bass, and while I probably wouldn't be all of where they are today. For more about this very cool fish, check out our most recent trash Fish Tuesday article at the Meat Eater dot com and bone up on your anal rays and general fish identification skills before you head out to kill a pile of snakeheads so you don't accidentally take out a swath of bow fin instead. This week we've got horseshoe crabs, warblers, ducks, and the Fortnight Fishery. But first, let me tell about my week. I purchased three and a half horsepower two stroke outboard engine off a Craigslist thinking how easily it would power my old canoe. I had visions of getting into some really sneaky pheasant spots for opening weekend of Montana's Chinese ringneck pheasant opener. That's another invasive specie, by the way. Instead, I just powered the canoe and the oil and gas spilling stinky little engine down the river for three days, really making me think how much I enjoy my super clean, non smelly, super powerful steel battery power chainsaw. You could cut a cord of wood with that thing with all of your sent free white tail clothes on, then go climb a tree and smell nothing but my nature and ideally a sneaky old buck. In other news, I got an email from a listener named Kelsey who lives only thirty minutes from Steven Ronella's hometown. Kelsey wants to know what role porcupines play in the ecosystem, as it seems everyone in the area shoots them on site, while Kelsey finds them quote freaking adorable. Well, Kelsey, the reality is I don't really know what the role of the porcupine is other than being a common mountain lion meal. However, I do know that the name porcupine is derived from the Latin names porcas and spina, which we americanized quill pig, which is a catchy name, and the North American porcupine packs around thirty thousand quills, which is impressive. More importantly, Buddy's grandpa got really ticked at us for killing a quill pig to collect a five dollar bounty, stating that you never kill porcupines because they are an animal you can kill with a stick if you're ever lost in the woods. The porcupines diet is not limited to but does include tree bark, and I have seen the scars from their teeth on lots of young trees that eventually died, making me wonder if part of their role is to act as a natural tree thinner or deforester. But that is just my theory. If there are any North American porcupine experts that have the actual honest answer to kelseason now my question, please right in to ask Cal at the mediator dot com and let us know. Now for some real up to date stuff, I am currently sitting in a converted to loafing shed on a converted dairy to fishing slash hunting operation in South Dakota Lynn Lake Lodge. If you don't know it, it is pretty darn great. We went out and shot mallards in a flooded corn field this morning, plucked and cleaned our birds about lunchtime, and now we need to go find more birds. So I'm gonna make this quick one, but don't worry, we still got lots to cover this area. Although I do understand it is hit or miss. Two years ago it was in an absolute drought with hardly a duck or goose to be found. Now it's basically completely underwater, which is hard luck for the farmers, but good luck if you're a duck. Has giant salamanders that I'm absolutely infatuated with, So you know, you can go a lot of places and see a duck. But if you ever make it out this way, you're in luck. Because monster salam manders leopard salam matters, I believe they're called their tiger salam manders. Anyway, I cannot mention duck hunting without mentioning the duck stamp. The duck stamp, for those of you who do not know, is a fifteen dollar federal tax stamp that you must buy if you hunt migratory game birds like doves, cranes, geese, and of course ducks. Of that, fifteen dollars fourteen dollars and seventy cents is retained and placed into the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund. These funds have been used for bird refuges in every state, roughly six million acres, for wildlife the habitat they need, and in some places some incredible wildlife viewing as well as hunting and fishing opportunities. The stamp was created in nineteen thirty four. That year, about six hundred and thirty four thousand stamps were sold. Last year two thousand eighteen, over one and a half million stamps were sold, which is great, but it's not as good as it once was. In nineteen seventy one, over two point four million stamps were sold. What was happening in seventy one? They got more folks to buy duck stamps than right now this age of technology and free flowing knowledge. I don't know, but I do know this stamp benefits everyone that enjoys clean water and wildlife. So go buy a duck stamp. You can send me a letter with it. If you aren't interested and hunting a duck with it, I'll be very pleased with you either way. Moving over to our hematology desk. If you've ever seen a horseshoe crab, which if you've ever spent any time on any beaches out east you likely have, you know they kind of look like a giant armored tadpole, or maybe more like a soldier's helmet, only with a tail and some spindly legs. Point is, they're kind of an odd looking creature and probably not one that you get warm, fuzzy feelings about. They don't have the big doughey eyes and soft fur that tends to make humans get all sentimental. But let me just tell you this hand is maybe cute, but they haven't come close to doing for you what horseshoe crabs have. In fact, you can likely thank horseshoe crabs for saving your very life no joke. Every single American who has ever had an injection, which is pretty much all of us, can thank horseshoe crabs for the safety and sterility of the contents of that injection. More specifically, we can thank the blood of horseshoe crabs for that gift because their blood has a unique and incredible kind of superpower. Stay with me here for just a second. Horseshoe crab blood, which happens to be a creepy shade of bright blue, also contains a chemical called coagulagon that detects and traps even the slightest traces of bacteria. Back in nineteen fifty six, doctors began to extract coagulagon from horseshoe crab blood and use it to test medicines. When put into a solution, like say, for instance, about cha polio vaccine, coagul a gen will find any bacterial presence, even at a concentration of one part per trillion, surround it and trap it. And for the past sixty years or so, horseshoe crab blood has been used to test the safety of every drug certified by the f d A. You could say that horseshoe crabs have been very good to humanity, albeit not voluntarily. Humans, however, haven't been so good to the crabs. Historically, commercial uses were harvesting these ancient mollusks by the millions, and when I say ancient, I'm talking horseshoe crabs are in the fossil record dating back four d and fifty million years. Anyway, we've been grinding up these ancient critters for fertilizer and then using them as bait and conk traps. Currently, we still harvest them by the millions, but instead of grinding them up, we stick large needles into them during thirty percent of their blood, then let them go in the hopes that we can capture them again in the future and repeat process. We've been doing this for decades. Assuming that only or so of the blood crabs die, We're getting not a bad percentage out of this renewable resource, if you you know, take into account the benefit to humanity. A new study suggests that while only one in five crabs dies, the practice is still having a pretty significant negative impact on the population. See the crabs only get harvested when they come into the shallows to reproduce. In a normal spawning season, a mature female will travel back and forth in the inner title zone, spawning multiple times. But this new study shows that the bleeding process negatively impacts reproductive success. It seems that whole sticking a giant needle into the carapace and sucking out a third of the blood thing is a bit of a reproductive mood killer. Researchers are getting close to producing a synthetic coagulagent that would alleviate the need for crab bleeding. And here's where the final irony come in. If horseshoe crabs lose their incredible value as pharmaceutical industry dairy cows, they may go back to being fishing bait and fertilize. These creatures have been on earth for more than half a billion years, thanks in part to their crazy bacteria blocking bright blue blood that protects them from infection. We've been working really hard to keep the species alive and well while they were valuable to drug companies. But if they lose that necessity, who's going to give a crap about an alien looking thing scuttling on the sea floor. Moving on to the anthropology debts. Remember how we touched on food waste last episode, Well, it turns out that people have been tinkering with food storage for some time. In fact, Tel Aviv University researchers recently discovered evidence of food storage at cass M Cave that took place between four hundred and twenty thousand and two hundred thousand years ago. Evidence of food storage was found by analyzing the cut marks of an astonishing eighty one thousand and eight hundred and ninety eight bones from mostly fallow deer. Researchers determined that the cut marks made on bones that were found at the cave are different than that of bones that were fresh, leading the researchers to believe that the cave bones were left hide on specifically to help preserve the marrow inside the bone for later consumption. If anyone has tried to clean up an old skull versus a new skull, you know what they're talking about now. The bones that they're talking about, specifically are what we would call four legs. My experience with four legs is I used to give them as dog treats to my dogs all the time. They would stay fresh for a long time. This is anecdotal evidence on the personal side, of course, so that makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense is eighty one thousand, eight hundred nine eight of these four legs marrow bones is the number produced out of the same cave. At four marrow bones per fallow deer, that's roughly twenty thousand, five hundred follow deer consumed at one site. And that's assuming, of course, that these Paleolithic hunters weren't just keeping the extra thick bones. This fine challenges the thought that people from this period only lived hand to mouth. They traveled, killed and eight as they went, or they traveled didn't kill and didn't eat. This fine could be the oldest evidence of food preservation. Ever. Aside from that, it definitely proves that these Paleolithic hunters had a heck of a spot for fallow deer. Good news from US Fish and Wildlife the Kurtland's warbler, one of the very first species on the Endangered Species list, has now been delisted. In the nineteen fifties, fewer than twenty male Kurtland's warblers remained in the wild. Thanks to early efforts from the State of Michigan d n R that number was climbing even prior to the es A listing in one. By two thousand fifteen, that number had climbed to an estimated two thousand three eighty three warblers. This is an example of active cooperative management in the abs sense of natural management. In this case fire. The Curtland warbler needs young pine stands to reproduce the kind generated by naturally occurring forest fires. In the absence of those fires, reforestation projects after timber harvest, alongside the suppression of competitive species like the cowbird, allowed for the rebound of the warbler. Always a win to see a species come off the list they aren't supposed to be on there forever. Now we're checking in with an admittedly understaffed desk, the quote E Sports desk or the indoor Kids desk. Gamers are excited over a couple of new additions to the online game Fortnite. Fortnite being an online community game that is free to play. However, if you want certain things in the game, you can buy them with real money. This game makes hundreds of millions of dollars per month converting hard earned cash into online currency called v bucks in order to buy, you know, fake things, The latest update to the game includes the ability to go fishing, fishing for fish that give your player health. But speaking of player health, there is a class action lawsuit in the works on behalf of ten fifteen year old children against Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, claiming the game is more addictive than cocaine, and that the marketing aspect of Fortnite encouraged the two kids named in the lawsuit to spend more than a thousand dollars of mom and dad's money on v Bucks. I propose a settlement along the lines of this. Epic Games creates a fishing license that goes directly to a conservation fund to be spent on real live fish and real live fisheries, habitat and restoration. Currently, a thousand v bucks costs less than ten dollars. That seems like a reasonable license fee considering there over two hundred and fifty million Fortnite player is worldwide. If we can't get you outside, we can at least make you e gamers e conservationists. That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks for listening. If you're liking what you're hearing, tell a friend or two and leave me a review by hitting that furthest right hand start. If you're looking to send me straight or send me something interesting, you can always find me at ask cal that's a s k C a L. At the meat eater dot com