00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can Review with Ryan kel Kell and now here's cal super Bowl is still a few weeks away, but that doesn't mean you should put down the old snake skim. In order to promote the Florida Python Challenge, which I'll explain in a couple of minutes, Florida Governor Rhonda Santas, the NFL in the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are giving away python skin footballs to v I P super Bowl guests. Super Bowl fifty four will be in Miami this January. Miami is known for many things. Cubano's art deco fashion and the average elevation of six feet, those little coffees made with espresso and sweet and condensed milk that give minor heart attacks, drag shows, beaches, stone crabs, the movie star face, and all that stuff you already know. But here's something you probably didn't know. Miami is the only major US city to be founded by a woman. Citrus grower Julia Tuttle lobbied to reroute a rail line to the then town of three hundred in eighteen seventy six. Miami grew like crazy from there. That happened about forty four years before women were allowed to vote in the US. Imagine that, of course, for some of US. Miami and Florida in general are known for invasive species. About of the life that crawls or swims in South Florida isn't native. That doesn't include the non native plants, well over a thousand of which are thriving in the nearby Everglades. Quick side note for you, there's a difference between exotic species and invasive species. An exotic species is a non native with minimal impact, something we enjoy and are willing to put up with, like the Chinese ringneck pheasant, Hungarian partridge, rainbow trout in a lot of air is, or maybe even the Sika deer. An invasive species is a non native that we find to be a pain in the ass, something that destroys and sometimes eliminates native wildlife, like the common house cat or more specific to this story, and back to that catchy opening phrase of throwing the old snake skin around the python. In an effort to curb the spread of pythons throughout the state, the Florida Python Challenge has been held every three years since two thousand thirteen. There are prizes for the longest, heaviest, and most pythons captured. In two thousand thirteen, the largest python measured fourteen ft three inches long. In two thousand sixteen, six hundred snake hunters participated. The winners brought in thirty three snakes, including one big Lady. She measured fifteen feet and a hundred and twenty five pounds, which was the biggest of the competition. The combination prize for most and biggest netted the team eight thousand dollars. Though that team's bag sounds impressive, most of the old apparently didn't know what they were doing, since only a hundred and six total pythons were caught. Hunters in Snake Bowl will have to go through a mandatory thirty minute online python identification training course, as well as adhere to the listed humane means of capture and killing the pythons. One humane means of take listed is decapitation. Peter the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals took issue with this particular method, saying quote allowing hunters to decapitate pythons who remain alive and an agony and who will writhe for an hour even after their heads are cut off, is despicably cruel. I reached out to a veterinary friend of mine to make sure snakes do not remain alive and an agony after their heads are cut off. She assured me they do not, and in her opinion, as far as animal death and rights go, snake decapitation has nothing to lose your head over. In all seriousness, I think it is incredibly cool that during something like the Super Bowl, an event that encourages apathy and laziness, the state of Florida is taking the opportunity to promote ecosystem health by highlighting invasive species issues and encouraging folks to get motivated. They're in estimated, and keep in mind, nobody actually knows three hundred thousand burmese pythons in Florida. They have no natural predators and do an incredible amount of damage to the native wildlife by eating it. You do not need to participate in the Python Bowl to get in on the action, as Florida's Python Challenge actually goes on all year long. The state incentivizes python removal, So if you find a snake, kill it and document the where and when of when you encountered the snake. You will receive a Python Pickup Program T shirt and be entered into a grand prize winner announced October. Read all about it at www dot my f WC dot com. So next time you head for the Sunshine State, have this question in mind. What are the kids going to remember more another beach side stand with overpriced ice cream and obnoxious T shirts or mom hip deep in the Everglades wrestling of fourteen foot Python. Make this next one a conservation vacation. As per usual, Col's we Can Review. This podcast is powered by Steel Power Equipment. They make a wide range of awesome stuff for folks who like to do things with their hands, including these super clean, quiet, nifty, little backpackable and extreme situations battery powered chainsaws that pack a lot of power. This week we've got the surprisingly diverse sex lives of mccox, What on the Prowl means, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. I went to Nebraska to hunt for the first time ever, took part in the late muzzleloader season outside of Chadron, Nebraska. Have pretty darn good time. That portion of the state has really cool spots, fairly diverse terrain, big rock bluffs, deep and varied history. Crazy horse entered there and was killed there, all sorts of stuff. The deer had been chase for a few months prior to our arrival, and we're quite sensitive to human activity, so you really had to be on your toes. Pretty good snow storm arrived just before we did, followed by a warm sunny stretch with freezing tempts at night. The result of all this was snow everywhere, covered in a heavy, loud crust, especially loud since the storm seemingly took all the wind with it when it left. In short, finding deer was relatively easy. Getting within muzzleloader range, however, proved relatively hard. As often as the case on these types of trips, some of the side stories made for the best memories. We stayed at the Westerner Motel about sixty bucks a night for a single room. The Westerner prides itself on Western hospitality, and although the rooms don't have kitchen ats, they don't mind if you cook on the tailgate in front of your room. Spencer new Hearth made a couple of batches of turkey soup Sam long grun stirred Fred's milk, and we, in true Midwest fashion, even got the West and deep Friar out for something the South Dakotains called chisslick, which is cube fried meat served with saltenes and toothpicks. I also met a whole pile of cool old ranchers in that area, which I have a tendency to do. At a restaurant called Helen's that advertises steaks and pancakes, we ran into a group of ranchers average age about seventy eight guests who were playing dice for money at eight am. Uh. They seemed to be pretty serious about it, so I didn't chat him up too much. I hopped a flight out of Chattering via boutique Care, which appeared to be an old private plane repurposed as a commercial buddle jumper. Chatted with a rancher on board who was very excited his wife finally pride him lose from the ranch to attend the NFR in Vegas. That's National Finals Rodeo for those of you who are not in the know. We got to talking and I found out that he and his wife both worked in Alaska before settling in chattering. They worked for an oil company and taught school, and said the key to living up there was to have a plane and no machines, which they did. I was quite interested in the plane, as anyone with their head on straight as at some point which they lived in Alaska and owned a plane, preferably with a set of tund retires and skis. Mind you, this conversation was going on in a very cramped airplane and included three other people who don't fly often. The ex pilot rancher got excited started telling stories about all these different places. He took his piper cup, which made one of the other passengers noticeably uncomfortable. Eventually, one of these uncomfortable passengers turned to the pilot rancher and said, just so you know, none of this sounds good to me. The pilot rancher responded, you know that cub only has a top speed about eighty miles per hour, so you can't get into too much trouble with them, although I did crash it a few times which left me crying in laughter. All in all, real good flight if you are interested. My muzzleloader hunt ended without a bang, more like a pop and a fizzle. But it was a good time and cool country. You can look forward to seeing all of it in a future episode of Meat Eater Hunts, which will air on the Meat Eater YouTube channel in the new year. Some quick housekeeping I've gotten quite a few emails from the state of Delaware sent me straight on Sunday hunting. Had previously included Delaware and a list of states where Sunday hunting is illegal. Well, it turns out that this hunting season, Delaware has allowed Sunday deer hunting specifically on private land and some public land. You can get the specifics and you should before you take to the hills at www dot d n R e C dot Delaware dot gov. Need to offer some clarification on heavy duty three mill painters Latex gloves, which is my glove of choice for my little kill kit. I learned from a listener named Dave that three mill gloves are not the same as three millimeter gloves. The three mill on the box is not millimeter. Three millimeters is roughly an eighth of an inch, which is pretty damn thick glove. According to Dave, the three mill actually refers to three thousands of an inch or point zero zero three A mill is one thousand. That's really picking the ant crap out of the pepper boys. I'm just kidding. This is a knowledge based podcast, so thank you for sending me straight for my weekly call to action. I'm gonna land pretty darn close to home. If you're one of those folks who's into trout fishing, then you've probably heard of the Madison River. Folks travel from all over the world to our backyard here in Bozeman to fish this ditch, probably because it boasts some ridiculously high trout numbers, upwards of five thousand per mile. The thing is, it also boasts some ridiculously high numbers of people fishing for trout, and over the past decade that number has been skyrocketing. In two thousand eleven, there were eighty eight thousand anglier days on the Madison, but by two thousand seventeen that number climbed to two hundred and seven thousand, with most of that traffic coming between mid June and the beginning of October. Some stretches of the river have well over one boats on them per day during peak season, and all this crowding has led to the difficult conundrum of if and how to regulate river use. This is a public waterway that belongs to all of us. We all have equal right to it. Anglers don't want their fishing days limited, and guides and outfitters don't want the state government to cap or shrink their businesses. But the numbers clearly show that we've got a problem. So how do we control the guest list to the party in a way that feels fair and equitable. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is in the process of trying to figure that out right now. They're conducting a survey until January six to get as much public input on the matter as possible. I don't have a solution, but I do know that more people who contribute to their thinking, the better chance we have of coming up with a fair solution. So if you fish the Madison, or you'd like to fish the Madison sometime in the future, go to the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks website just to hammer this home. If you like fishing where the incredible freedoms are public lands and waters provide this does concern you, whether you live in Montana or not. The public comment link will be right there on the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Park's homepage. Moving on, Japanese macoux are the most northern living non human primates in the world. If you're familiar with Japanese macoux, and I'm not saying this right, which I have no doubt, I am incorrectly pronouncing macox, I punched it into like the Google Translate thing, and that's what I came up with. Knowing sea otters hold hands while they sleep makes my algorithms feel all warm and fuzzy. Anyway, They're far northern, snowy habitat has also earned them the nickname snow monkeys. These are the cute brown furred, red faced monkeys that Nature shows always feature grooming each other, nipple deep and snow bound hot springs. What isn't shown or necessarily cute, depending on who you are, I guess, is the fact that adolescent female macoux have set with adult male seek a deer called stags. Now, this sexual behavior consists of the adolescent females jumping up on the stags back and performing some pelvic thrusts. The stag in some cases got a few parasites picked off of them in return, although it would be hard to say that's what the stag expects. Just take a minute and get over yourselves. It's damn near twenty. We all know by now that sex isn't always done with reproduction in mind. If it were, I probably wouldn't be here. That may be unfair or inaccurate. Let me back up. If you were to take my three sisters in me as a sample set, I'm willing to bet that if reproduction were the primary goal, at least one of us wouldn't be here. That is to say, sex isn't always done with the intention of population increase. If that anecdotal evidence isn't enough for you, nonreproductive sex has been documented in all types of animals, from penguins to brown bears. The reason the Japanese macoq sex scene is being documented now is simply that this may be the for documented case of non human primates having sex with non primates in the wild. This group of macox has been observed for a very long time, and this deer mounting behavior has just recently started to occur. One theory goes that this could be a form of safe sex for the young females, as they are not of breeding age, and sex with a male macaque could be harmful to them. A recent study in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior also noted that only the mature seeka stags tolerate this behavior. The females and young males did not. The researchers attributed this simply to the fact that older stags were more docile. How's that for monkey business? Sticking with the things we do for love, desk Uh Indian tiger went on an eight hundred mile walk, about the longest ever recorded for any of India's big cats. Adult males can attain weight it's beyond five hundred pounds, with the largest over seven hundred. The two and a half year old male that went on the long trek dispersed from the Tepeeshuar Wildlife Sanctuary and over the course of five months of wandering through the jungle and agricultural areas where he picked off a few cattle, eventually ended his trek at another wildlife sanctuary in Maharashtra, approximately a hundred and eighty six miles from his start. As the crow flies, tepehu War Sanctuary is home to a dominant male, which left the young tiger little chance of finding a mate in his home range. They need to establish his own hunting territory as well as finding potential females, is the likely reason for his trek. That's what they mean by being on the prowl. Enough about cats, We're moving on to trustworthy, helpful, and reliable creatures. Dogs. Dogs, the obviously superior pet choice, can smell diseases like avian bird flu Researchers and biologists from Colorado State University, the National Wildlife Research Center, Idaho Fishing Game, and Local Sportsman collaborated in an effort to train dogs to detect avian influenza in waterfowl this past week in Idaho. Hunter harvested birds were a common source of testing for early detection of bird flew up until two thousand and ten. According to the u s g S, bird flew outbreaks and domestic foul in two thousand fourteen and two thousand fifteen called for the killing of over five million birds in the US. These researchers hope to train dogs to detect the disease, with the idea that early detection might help prevent such large scale impacts on domestic foul as well as mitigate the human disease risk. There have been one thousand five hundred and sixty eight confirmed human cases and six hundred and sixteen deaths worldwide from the H seven and nine strain of bird. Flew that since two thousand thirteen, dogs have been trained to detect malaria, cancer, diabetes, and tuberculosis and humans. Those are good boys. Jumping over to our international desk. Peter O'Halleran was snorkeling about four hundred meters from shore off Australia's northwest Cape when he felt something come up and bite his arm and give him a good shake. The fifty seven year old O'Halleran then swam for shore, drove himself to the hospital received immediate care for the shark bite that quote goes through the meat and took off a bit of bone. Then he hopped a domestic flight for surgery. The type of shark doing the biting is unknown, but I just wanted to include this to say Mr Hlleran, I like your style. Study out of Hebrew University and the Shawn Brune Zoo in Vienna revealed a couple of very interesting things about giant tortoises. The giant tortoise can weigh up to nine hundred pounds and measure about four and a half feet in length. Although giant tortoises were widely distributed prior to human proliferation, our ancestors couldn't resist over harvesting these slow moving mounds of meat. A famous example from the US came out of a sinkhole called Little Salt Spring in Florida, complete with a possible spear between its lower plate and carapasts, dated to about twelve thousand years ago. Now, however, there are only three groups of giant tortoises, two of which are distinct, the Aldabra atoll and Frigate Islands and Sayshells being one distinct group, and the Glopagos tortoises being the other. Aside from being slow moving and apparently easy to kill with a stick, the giant tortoises had a few other things going against them. By the time pirates and whalers crossing the oceans on ships came along. The tortoises can survive for a year without food or water, making them an ideal sort of livestock to stuff into a ship's hold for sailors running short on water. The tortoises next stores drinkable water, which could be used as an emergency reserve. Also, their meat and oil was apparently delicious. The Glopagos and Aldabra tortoises do not hit sexual maturity until thirty years of age, at which point female tortoises may only lay one clutch of up to twenty four eggs per year. Turtle eggs are soft and are buried relatively shallow, making them an easy meal for all the introduced rats and dogs that came off the ships of explorers like Darwin, whalers, merchants, and buccaneers. All of these factors led the wholesale decimation of giant tortoises, including the extinction of four species known in modern times. At the beginning of this year, we did get one species back, so to speak, that was previously thought to be extinct. The Fernandina giant tortoise, a one year old female, was found on the two d thirty four square mile Galapagos Island. The last sighting had been recorded in nineteen o six. Although not necessarily a swimmer, the giant tortoise can float with its head stretched high above the waves, which is how the species is thought to have distributed itself. A slow but apparently effective method of transoceanic tortoise dispersal. In two thousand four, and aldabra tortoise covered barnacles was found walking ashore in Kimbiji, Tanzania. The tortoise traveled four dred thirty five miles as the crow flies. Who knows how far that thing actually plodded along before washing ashore. This flies in the phase of past theories of tortoise dispersal. Basically that this big, bulky critter that moves really slow couldn't have gotten all the places it's been found, meaning that people had to move them there for a means of future food, or that a faster moving turtle than evolved to a tortoise wherever they're found now, or possibly that the tortoises have been around long enough to where they actually just hitched rides on moving tectonic plates. Either way, very cool critter, and the aforementioned research makes them even more so. The authors found that tortoises were able to be trained to bite the same color ball blue, green, or yellow. When tested three months later, the tortoises remembered their training and bit the appropriate ball. When tested nine years later, the tortoises again remembered their appropriate color. What's more, the authors found that tortoises that were trained individually took longer to learn than tortoises that were trained in a group, suggesting that tortoises learn from each other. Some tortoises in captivity have survived beyond two hundred years. So the next time you think I think he remembers me, you may be right when it comes to giant tortoises. Anyway, that's all I've got for you this week. Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends, share the wealth. Let me know what I've got right and what I've got wrong. That ask cal at the meat eater dot com. That's a s k C A L at the meat eater dot com and leave me a review by hitting that furthest right hand star. Thanks for listening.