00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Media Doors World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We can review with Ryan kel Kell in now Here's kel Back. In the sixth grade, everyone in my class had to write a poem about an animal. To be perfectly honest, I can't remember the animal I picked or what I said, but I can remember clearly and even quote word for word a poem that one of my classmates wrote, The sea is big, the sea is sick, and in it holds a slippery dick. The author of that particular stanza, a kid named Eric, was promptly sent to the principal's office after reading his poem allowed in class, which I thought was kind of out a line. See, a slippery dick is an actual name for an actual fish in Atlantic rass, to be specific, which a group of us kids discovered while looking through an encyclopedia of fish species. And it's not like you volunteered to say a slippery dick in front of the whole class. The teacher made all of us read poems out loud. Eric was a pre pubescent literary genius as far as I was concerned. I mean, I still remember the poem almost thirty years later. Can't say the same for most of the famous poems we read Phallic naming aside, the slippery dick doesn't look anything like an uh, you know, an actual member, but the same cannot be said for Eurychus you know sinctus. A marine spoon worm also known as the fat innkeeper worm or Chinese penis fish. That last name pretty well describes what they look like, seven inch long, cylindrical, fleshy sea worms. They get the name innkeeper worm because they dig burrows and title sand and mud fla outs of the Pacific, and are known to willingly share their homes with other marine species like gobies and p crabs. They also have an interesting method of gathering food. Innkeeper worms build slime now as outside their doorsteps that trap drifting detritus. When the net is full, the worm consumes it whole, then builds another one. But their life habits are not the reason that I'm covering these critters today. Cool facts aside, These worms are mostly obscure outside a small group of aquatic biologists, or at least they were until just a little while ago, when thousands of them washed up on California beaches, displaced by a massive bomb cyclone. This event made national news because of the worms striking resemblance to male genitalia. You can imagine what piles and piles of these creatures washed up on the sand might look like and why people may take notice of that and photos and selfies. Similar mass strandings of so called penis fish happened in two thousand eleven and two thousand sixteen, always following a major weather event tied to an el Neno year, when warmer than average water temperatures contribute to large storms and heavy rainfall. Biologists don't know how these strandings affect the overall population of these creatures. They're reclusive underground dwelling makes them difficult to quantify. We do know that they're an extremely old species, dating back some three hundred million years, so they've probably weathered their fair share of storms. Like I said, this story captured the national imagination for obvious reasons. The site of thousands of penis shaped worms washed up on beaches tickles the same part of the brain that allowed me to retain a perfect memory of that silly poem. I started this segment with but one piece of information stuck out. As I was researching this story. Google searches for penis fish recipes skyrocketed during the week that these worms were in the news cycle. Now I could understand these searches if they were coming from California. I can imagine Californians thinking, Hey, that's a lot of potential food washed up over there, about to go to waste. Can I make it delicious? But according to data from Google Trends, the majority of these searches came from Colorado, Minnesota, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Missus. Hurry, why so many people in parts of the country nowhere near the stranded worms we're searching for penis fish recipes is simply beyond me. If you were one of the people contributing to these search numbers, or just have a rational explanation for this phenomenon, shoot me an email. Hey s k cl at the meat eater dot com. I'm genuinely curious. You know. If you can sort of muscle your way past the gag flex, all kinds of food possibilities open up. This week. We've got birds, giant birds, bird migrations, birds wearing hats. It's bird bananas over here. But first, let me tell you about my week A couple of exciting things. My little steel chainsaw that I like so much that I've been filling with canola oil to do all manner of jobs. I had to get bigger. One said he needed some bar length to cut holes in the ice because I'm fixing to do some spearing. That's dropping a weighted spear through uh six foot by three foot rectangular square ice that you cut out and they to just sit there real quiet under a tent or shack sometimes and wait for big walley and pike to come underneath you. That's my program, fixing a check that out. Steel Power Equipment, as you know, is the sponsor of Col's Weekend Review. This podcast is powered by a steel so go check them out further. I'm heading out to the Sacramento Delta to take a look firsthand an issue that I covered way back in October of Col's Weekend Review, talking about the dismal salmon returns and the fate of the Delta. Smell friend of mine, who is a rice farmer down there, reached out to me. He wanted to enlighten me on a different tactic or a change in ethos. Basically, there's not a lot of water getting out to the ocean, and the water that is getting out to the ocean happens to not be carrying much life, much food. But the water that is out in these rice fields, out in the delta, that is not getting channeled through the canals, is picking up a ton of food, food that can grow fish. So I'm heading down to talk to these rice farmers, see what they're talking about, and hopefully shoot some ducks. They tell me, the California rice duck is the tastiest of all ducks, and I'm looking for some big fat birds. I of course, I'm gonna write up what I know and get right back to you, and we'll see how these stewards of the land are planning on helping out the delta, smell, the California salmon, and their own way of life. Moving on. Penguins are cute, cuddly and lovable, right. They're one of those almost universally liked animals. But what if I told you that they used to be as big as a full grown human, would you still want to hug one remains the newly described across valea why parensus or monster penguin, were found on New Zealand South island. It's too damn hot for a penguin to be just walking around here. These giant aquatic birds grew over five ft tall and weighed over a hundred and seventy pounds. Strange is the thought of a monster penguin may sound. New Zealand was once an epicenter for giant birds, like the massive flightless moa that grew over ten feet tall, the hass eagle, which had a wingspan nearly as tall as the moa, and a massive ancient parrot affectionately known as Squawkzilla. Due to a lack of predators, giant birds were able to thrive in New Zealand back then. But this was also a time period when penguins in general enjoyed easy living across the southern seas. The same extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs also got rid of most of the large marine reptiles that once prowled those oceans, allowing penguins free reign. Of course, that all changed when to the whales and pinnapeds started spreading, but for a few million years there penguins really ruled the roost in the Southern hemisphere, so to speak, and it seems like cross Valia why Parensis was once king of the penguins. Modern penguin species may not grow to the same size as their predecessors, but they're still vying for survival and dominance and harsh conditions, and new research shows that some are doing better than others. Chin strap penguins and gent two penguins are close relatives who both live in the Antarctic and feed primarily on krill. But over the past four decades, chin strap numbers have cratered while gent twos have exploded. So what's going on here? Well, the short answer is adaptability to climate change. With water temperatures warming and sea ice disappearing, krill are getting harder and harder to come by. According to a team of researchers at Louisiana State University who analyzed the chemistry of penguin feathers, gent twos have figured out how to diversify their diets to include fish and squid, while chin strap are still stuck on vanishing krill. I think we'd all take a lesson here about the importance of varied and flexible diet. Man cannot live on heart ease alone, say Hearty's because his buddy of mine in college. That's all I ate, And all of a sudden, the only heartease in Missoula, Montana closed down, and everybody got a phone call like midnight, as if the sky had followings, like did you hear It's like, no, dude, no we did not, because we were all eating antelope stakes at my house. Sticking with birds and climate change, another recently published study offers the first empirical evidence on how shifting weather affects seasonal migration. Three researchers with very different backgrounds collaborated to analyze twenty four years of radar data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on nocturnal bird movements. Now I'm not really a technology guy, but this study design strikes me as pretty damn cool. The team used artificial intelligence to help them comb through decades of radar data, a task that used to require actual humans to differentiate bird flocks from rainstorms on a case by case basis. New technology was able to automate that process and also allowed the team to crunch the numbers on this data set in forty eight hours, a task that previously would have taken a year at least. They found that birds are migrating earlier today than they did two decades ago, at least in the spring. For all you hunters out there looking for emerging trends in early season waterfowl, sorry, the study shows almost no change in fall migration patterns. Spring migrations tend to be more condensed, pushed by the drive to reach breeding grounds, find mating partners, and start making babies. I can see the sense of that. Fall migrations, on the other hand, are more spread out. Birds are in less of a hurry to reach winter grounds without the drive to mate. I think we all know how that goes. A couple of weeks ago, I told you about a plane ride I shared out of South Dakota with a bunch of ranchers headed down to Las Vegas for the National Finals rodeo. I'd like to think that one of them had a hand in this next story. I've personally spent a whole lot of time in Vegas, and although it's got its high points, I'll admit that, much like Florida, it acts as a kind of nucleus for strange behavior and you know, good stories. Well, right around the time of the National Finals Rodeo, Certain Vegas pigeons got a little more stylish because someone started outfitting them in tiny cowboy hats. On December five, guy by the name of Bobby Lee posted the first video of a pigeon strutting proudly in bright red brimmed headgear. In the background, you can hear him exclaim quote the birds have hats on bro. The video went viral, as the kids say, and since then, several more videos have popped up on social media showing that this pigeon isn't just a one off thing. The New York Times interviewed Charles Walcott, a Cornell University ornithologist who specializes in common pigeons. Walcott's take on the videos was that the pigeons don't seem stressed and are exhibiting normal pigeon like behavior, which is to say, strutting around, packing gravel and discarded food and pooping all over the place. The Avian milliner apparently took great care to make sure the hats were well fitted and didn't cover the bird's eyes. Walcott did also mentioned to the Times that the hats might get in the way of seeing a hawk come down from on top. As you all know, I'm not a fan of messing with wildlife, anthropomorphizing them, dressing them up, or making them cute, but even I have to admit that this was pretty darn funny. Closing loop on our birds segment, here, a Louisiana man who shot a critically endangered whooping crane with a twenty two semi automatic rifall last year in an attempt to quote scared away from his crawfish farm, was sentenced to a hundred and twenty hours of community service in two years of probation in federal court. Oh my lord, that's a crane. Folks in the avian conservation community are disappointed with this outcome, as they were hoping that the judge would impose a stiffer sentence on the crane shooter to set an example. Turns out poaching whooping cranes is quite the problem in Louisiana. Eleven birds have been shot since the flock was reintroduced there in two thousand eleven. For some context, only forty two cranes have been shot in the whole country since they were listed as endangered in nineteen sixty seven. The vast majority of these birds have not been shot by people actively hunting it. Seems like most folks who poach cranes do so because they considered the birds a nuisance or see them as a threat to crops or livestock. As was the case of this crawfish farmer. The shooter probably didn't know he was taking out a critically endangered species. He just saw a big gas bird picking away at his crawfish stock and decided to take protective measures. Unfortunately, for him and for the population at large, this particular big gas bird was kind of a big gas deal. That Crane and his mate produced the first pair of wild whooping crane eggs in Louisiana since the birds were reintroduced, and has been successfully doing so since two thousand fourteen. My takeaway from this story is non new but still important. Always make sure you know exactly what you're pointing your weapon app and never pointed at something you don't intend to kill. That's some basic hunter's ad for you, moving on and moving away from big birds. For all of you out there who assume big steaks grow big bodies, think again, at least if your whale. A group of whale researchers recently got together to ponder one of the great questions of history. Blue whales are the largest creatures to ever live on Earth, and yet they only eat tiny invertebrates. How does that work? Turns out, filter feeders get more cloric bang for the buck, so to speak, than to the whales. Although filter feeders like blue whales, humpback whales, and fin whales eat very small organisms like kill, they are able to consume a whole lot of them without expending a whole lot of energy. To the whales, like killer whales or porpoises, on the other hand, chase down fish and squid that individually make for much larger meals, but they have to use echolocation to hunt each one individually, which turns out to be less efficient. Interesting thing about krill, particularly in the Southern Ocean, is that it's estimated that krill alone have a biomass of three hundred and seventy nine million, which makes them the species with the largest total biomass. Although the whale by far and away outweighs the individual krill, krill by far and away outweigh the whale. All Right, that's all I got for you this week. Thanks for listening. If you're enjoying cow's we can review, Do me a favor and tell a friend to subscribe, or, better yet, a few friends. You can also leave me her view by hitting that furthest right hand star. Don't forget to write in and tell me what I got right, what I missed, and what's happening in your neck of the woods at ask cal. That's a s k C A L. At the meat eater dot com. Talk to you next week.

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