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. Your cat may be eating sharks, and if you happen to wear makeup, you may be smearing sharks on your face, which isn't good news for sharks, but it could be a fun fact to keep in mind if you ever get drug into the Broadway show Cats. What's a gettical cut? Study released from stony Brook University in New York used multiplex mini barcode PCR protocol to analyze eight seven pet foods in twenty four different types of cosmetics for traces of shark DNA. That highly technical DNA stuff I just spouted basically says this is a specialized process that allows for tiny bits of beat up d NA be extracted from processed stuff like eyeliner and pet food. If you are wondering why would pet foods and cosmetics be lumped into the same study, It's not because feline lovers are make up heavy. It's because shark liver oil is a common ingredient in some cosmetics, apparently a great moisturizer, and the shark meat not destined for human consumption markets is sold to some pet food manufacturers. The Stony Brook study was aimed at identifying exactly what sharks made it into pet food and face products. As seafood fraud is something that we have covered on the Weeken Review multiple times, it should be no surprise to you that identifying a piece of fish by its label at the market may not be the most accurate. According to doctoral candidate shark biologists and lead researcher Diego Cardinosa, that is also the case when it comes to pet foods and cosmetics. All products tested in this study were not labeled as containing Elasmo branch based ingredients. Alasmo branches are cartilaginous fishes like sharks, raising skates that have five to seven gill openings on each side. Cardoniosa feels that consumers should have the choice between pet foods and cosmetics that do or do not contain shark, especially threatened or endangered ones. For instance, the short fin mako shark has been making its way into cat food. Perhaps not so incidentally, the short fin mako also makoed its way onto the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Vulnerable list in two thousand nineteen, and just recently, the i u c N updated the short fin mako status to endangered. Quick fun fact for you, the short fin mako is the world's fastest shark, capable of forty two miles prour. It also has one of the largest brained body ratios of all sharks. And just so you know, the world record was caught off of California's Huntington's Beach. That shark weighed one thousand, three darn twenty three pounds and measured twelve point two ft. Real cool critters. Now, if that information makes your brow a bit shiny as you set down the cat chow, don't reach for the moisturizing foundation just yet. The beauty products tested in this study revealed black tip shark, blue shark, and a critically endangered species, the scalloped hammerhead sharks DNA quick side note. I assumed shiny skin was a bad thing, but when I did a quick look into cosmetics, I found that shiny is actually called quote glow and it's a look, or was in two thousand seventeen at least. So if this information is starting to make you glow, listen up. One reason shark meat ends up in pet food is the demand for shark fin as in shark fin soup. The practice of finning, which is literally cutting the fins off of a shark that's been caught and tossing the rest of the shark back in the ocean where it dies, has been identify i not surprisingly, as a major factor in the decimation of what was once the most common hammer head in the Atlantic Ocean. According to the Smithsonian and estimated one million sharks are killed every year. While the cosmetic and pet food industries are not the primary drivers of the shark fishing industry, it may be best to hold off on anything with shark byproducts until we see these species rebound. Additionally, if you are currently feeding pets or beautifying your body with cosmetics, i'd encourage you to write in and ask your brand or brand of choice to leave out the shark. This week, We've got a hunting tragedy, California salmon, emotional support animals, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. I lent out my steel battery power chainsaw to one Mr Janis potell Us who had to have it for some specific ice fishing reason. In Minnesota. He actually flew with it batteries in his carry on and the chainsaw and check baggage. Just thought i'd point out yet an other benefit to having a handy, little, no gas leaking electric saw for those of you who may at some point think I had better fly with the chainsaw. As you know, this podcast is powered by Steel Power Equipment. Why because they're great And speaking of great Janice, but tell us myself and one Mr Stephen Ronella will once again be traveling the country, joined by a special guest for very unique to every state and venue live podcast experience. This year, we're doing a little differently. Think Meteor podcast off the air in evening you won't see or here anywhere else. Eleven cities San Francisco, Portland, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago, d C, Pittsburgh. Tickets go on sale Friday, January but are available exclusively to the mediator community beginning Tuesday, January four, Heath at ten a m by using the promo code mugs in Hey Mugs. Exclusive meat and greet signing opportunity available for v I P ticket holders. This year, we're only doing sixty five v I p tickets per show. Those are gonna go out quick. These shows are a ton of fun and a great excuse to come out and rub elbows with us and a bunch of other folks in the out of doors community. Be on the lookout at the meat eater dot com and book your tickets fast. All right? My week started out like this. I hopped on plane to Sacramento, rented a car, headed out to an end of the season pre Christmas lunch barbecue with a bunch of rice farmers, their buddies, and all the hired hands. Basically, everyone at this operation gets a winter break that starts prior to Christmas and and a few days post New Year. This break is the unofficial start of waterfowl hunting. For most of the folks were working rice in the valley. Like I mentioned in the previous episode, had gotten the invite from some friends in the Sacramento Valley to come look at their side of the water and salmon issues firsthand. I'll get to what that has to do with ducks in a minute. Water flow from the mountains, down the valley, through the delta and out to the ocean has been a serious issue in the last ninety years or so presettlement and agriculture development of California. The heavy snow packs would wash off the mountains down the valley, eventually overflowing the banks of the Sacramento River. This is historically what they would do. This overflow would then push out way across a vast floodplain that was full of marsh, grasses and wetlands, and that water would make it very slowly out through the delta and into the ocean. Then, like it says, and the best musical ever made, which is of course, paint your wagon along, came people and gum it up. Good people in the Sacramento Delta spent a generation or so creating a series of dikes and levees designed to manipulate the floodwaters to our control, releasing them through a series of weirs into areas that lack human habitation to protect the areas with human habitation. Areas that lack human habitation in the Sacramento Valley appeared pretty slim by the way. While the manipulation of the floodplain has been great for human habitation, many species have taken a real hit. One of those species is the chinook salmon. As previously reported. The amount of water that runs down the Sacramento River presently compared to when salmon numbers were at their peak, is much much less. The simple solution to get those salmon numbers to rebound has been to allow more water to flow down the Sacramento and less out into farmers fields. However, increased flow down the Sacramento River has not been met with increased salmon numbers as per usual, conservation ation just isn't a convenient business. The state of the salmon is such. This is all taken from the California Department of Fishing Game. Historically, winter on Chinook salmon spawned in the upper reaches of the Sacramento River tributaries, including the McCloud, the Pit, Little, Sacramento Rivers, Shasta, and Kesswick Dams now block access to the historic spawning areas. The run, despite having some good years, was classified as endangered under the State California Endangered Species Act in nine and as endangered under the Federal Endangered Species Act in spring around Chinook salmon were historically the most abundant race in the Central Valley. Due to the small number of a non hybridized populations remaining and low population sizes. Central Valley spring around chinook salmon were listed as threatened under both state and federal Endangered Species Acts. In fall around Chinook salmon are currently the most abundant of the Central Valley races, contributing to large commercial and recreational fisheries in the ocean and popular sport fisheries in the freshwater streams. Fall round chinook salmon are raised at five major Central Valley hatcheries, which released more than thirty two million smalls each year. Due to concerns over population size and hatchery influence, Central Valley fall and late fall round chinook salmon are a species of concern under the Federal Endangered Species Act. I realize that is a lot of info regarding the state of the California salmon. Suffice it to say there's plenty of work to be done. One project named, ever so cleverly, Nigiri Project. If you're not a sushi fan, that's fish on rice and by no coincidence, that is exactly what the Nigiri Project is. Now, keep in mind, this is a twenty minute podcast, so this is just as I understand it, shoot from the hip run down to this situation. Sure, I'm gonna get some stuff wrong, but this is an ongoing deal. I'm so I'm gonna stay on top of it because it's a fascinating thing that's happening over there. So what the Negearri project is trying to figure out is if the answer to getting more salmon back into the system isn't put more water down the river, maybe it's putting more water through the floodplain. After all, that's where a lot of water was going. Prior to the elaborate flood mitigation system that is currently in place in the Sacramento Valley, the Sacramento Valley was a vast wetland, those wetlands having large part been in the best case scenario replaced by crops, worst case concrete shopping malls. The city of Sacramento houses one crop I'm gonna talk about, of course, is rice. Remember we're speaking to Geary imitates a wetland as well as a monoculture. Can if you are in this area or have ever been through it, it is an easy connection to make, as the amount of waterfowl as in pintails, tee, old widgeon Gadwall Canada and specul belly geese curlew, Ross's geese, storks, herons, and many other species are just staggering. I was down in December, but last year the National Wildlife refuge count had hit a hundred ninety eight thousand speckled belly geese, three hundred and sixty thousand pintail, three hundred forty thousand teal that's counting both green wing and cinnamon. A hundred eighty thousand widgeon, and more than a hundred thousand shovelers. Two hundred and seventy thousand snow and Ross's geese were expected by mid November. This is an all due to rice. Of course, the refuge system into which our duck stamp dollars flow, and even the private refuges the duck clubs play a huge part as well. I'll just reiterate that the birds use the rice fields heavily, or that's what I saw anyway. Previously, rice straw was burned after harvest. Now many rice farmers will flood their fields long enough to enjoy incredible waterfowl hunting, but also to help break down the incredibly tough rice straw. Quick fun fact for you if you've ever been driving down like New road construction where they're cutting into a hillside. Those roadside bundles of straw that you see typically in like a green kind of mesh, that is often rice straw, places to mitigate erosion, you know, because again the rice straw is tough stuff, takes a long time to break down. Well, when the decomposition process begins in the flooded rice straw, and even more incredible abundance of life also begins in the form of invertebrates, algae and zooplankton, things that coincidentally make great fish food for young salmon. In February of two thousand twelve, juvenile salmon were placed into a series of cages. If you could think of like crab pots, that's what would be the best visual here. The cages were placed downstream of a discharge point on the Sacramento River with control fish in cages. Upstream of the discharge point, about five thousand acres of rice stubble was flooded and let's sit during the non growing season for four to six weeks, at which point the fields were drained and the water pumped back into the Sacramento River. The juvenile chinook at the discharge point as in. You know, the point where the rice field water was pumped back into the river grew five hundred percent faster than fish held upstream of the discharge point. Our control fish, fish caged one mile downstream of the discharge point, grew three hundred percent faster than the fish upstream of the rice field discharge. Fat or small going down the river will have a better chance of survival when they hit the ocean. The point of this particular study was to show that there's a lot of food in the rice fields and the salmon will respond well faster growth the discharge. You know, this is a highly contained study, but they got some good results. These juvenile salmon were dubbed quote floodplain fatties, which again I thought was very clever. And if you're going to smoke a California salmon, you probably want to smoke a fatty. The next step for this broad act is putting juvenile salmon into flooded rice fields. Again, the rice fields were once the natural floodplane. Now I still have a lot of questions in regard to this project, as I know the folks involved do as well. The water gets much warmer in the rice fields, does it get too warm? Are there any threats from residual pesticides in the fields. Other organizations like the California Waterfowl Association, even though they sponsor the project and sponsored is in quotes there. I'm not sure if they're just signed a letter of support or giving them cash or what the story is anyway. California Waterfowl Association has their concerns as well, mainly around increased water levels on the floodplane during hunting season. According to c w A, too much water in certain refuges can actually close the refuge down to access until the water subsides. They also have concerns over actual habitat loss due to continued high water in some areas. A Duck's and Limited study determined that there were four thousand hunting opportunities in the Yolo Bypass wild Life Area last December and January, whereas in the two thousand sixteen to two thousand seventeen season there were only hundred opportunities due to high water. I need to figure out exactly what they mean by an opportunity. Is that an individual day in the field or is that a discharged shell. If anyone has the answer to that, please let me know in any case, hunting opportunity has the potential to be reduced, which is something a hunter like myself doesn't like to see, but a conservationist like myself knows. Again, nothing is simple in conservation. Sometimes you have to take some tough times in the duck blind to get some good times on the river, and vice versa. Right now, there are a ton of birds in the sky, and the Nagiri Project conducted by cal Trout, which is supported by a whole host of interests from rice farmers to fisherman to US fish and wildlife to nonprofits and businesses, seem to be thinking outside the box and trying to find a fix to a complicated issue, to fix that will ideally allow for farming, fishing, and hunting in the Sacramento Valley far into the future. This has been a rough and tumbled version of what's going on, but it won't be the last you'll hear of it. It's really neat stuff. I'm definitely going back and checking on this firsthand. Moving on, we're gonna visit the emotional support wildlife desk. Airlines have had all sorts of issues with passengers and their emotional support animals, even well trained golden retrievers can have midair stomach problems. And even though you know that your emotional support peacock or emotional support squirrel is polite, frequent flyer, the person sitting next to you may not. Those are both real, by the way, and emotional support peacock and an emotional support squirrel have both been denied access prior to boarding well. Currently, in Iowa, man is fighting to maintain custody of his support animal, a coyote. The Iowan fed an abandoned coyote pup that he found on his property. This asked April. He told his Waterloo, Iowa neighbors that the pup was a German shepherd, which may have led to his being reported to animal control. It happens to be illegal to keep a coyote as a pet in the state of Iowa, so in order to circumvent the law, a doctor's note was obtained certifying the coyote as an emotional support animal. Now, I'm gonna give this fellow of benefit of the doubt. I myself am an animal lover. I am sure there's some sort of a bond between these two, but it does make me wonder if this doctor is up to speed on the abstaining from harm part of the hippocratic oath. The coyote is currently in the custody of a wildlife rehabilitation center where they say he is doing well and showing signs of being able to be released. There are far too many good dogs and shelters across this country. I am sure this is the case in Iowa. There is no reason, whether it be for your emotional well being or not, to habit weight and then cage up a wild animal, Drop the lawsuit, and make a happy home for a domestic. Moving on to our seldom visited astronomy desk, every hunter knows our friendly cohort and sky Oriyan. The constellation is a highly recognizable pattern of stars that it is, in my experience, particularly visible here in the western half of the US and Canada during the fall hunting season. If you, like me, like to check in on this constellation. You may have noticed that the star Beetle Juice has been getting dimmer. Beetle Juice is located on Orion's shoulder and is a variable star, meaning that it's brightness does come and go. Interesting fact that Beetle Juice, which apparently got its name from a poor translation of Arabic meaning the hand of Orion is sadly not pronounced like I am pronouncing it as you would the movie Beetle Juice. That movie is a fantastic example of the in redibly talented and best Batman ever. Michael Keaton, who I hear, is also a hunter Beatle Beetle Juice. That's it anyway, Beetle Juice can be one of the top ten brightest stars in our solar system, though not as bright as Ragel. Ragel is also located in the constellation Oriyan. In his left foot, all those fun facts aside. Most importantly, Beetle Juice is a ticking time bomb, a time bomb roughly twenty times the size of the Sun. That's right. Astronomers are predicting a massive supernova explosion. The shock wave will hit Earth and only six hundred million years. I for one am sad sincerely to see Oriyan change. I've stared up at this constellation many times on many different hunts, honestly because it's so visible, not because I'm great with constellations. One time I got a little turned round lost. Some would call it way back, a little wood drainage outside of Carry, Idaho, and it seemed like Orion sat right above our frozen little drop camp. I used an intersection of Orion's belt and the creek to guide me home. After I had advised strongly against one of my fellow campers uh discharging his firearm as a location device. The inky Black Knight did not give me a lot of confidence in the direction of the shots. So pack your bags, go someplace dark, and take a look at Orion and beetlejuice. Take comfort knowing that all things are fleeting, even the stars. You only have a hundred thousand years or so to appreciate each other. Alright, I'm gonna take a rare serious note here before we depart, but this is an important one. The big hunting community of which I am a part, suffered a serious tragedy New Year's Day. A father and his nine year old daughter were killed in a hunting accident of some sort in South Carolina. Hunting is an incredibly captivating pursuit for all of the as reasons, time outside, nature, camaraderie, and of course food. Another lesser discussed reason for the hunting addiction is the fact that hunting is incredibly complex. What may seem like a simple day in the woods or the marsh is actually a dynamic situation that involves atmospheric conditions, lunar phases, the timing of food sources coming in and out of season, so many variables that much of hunting is chocked up to luck. Luck because it is so damned hard to keep all these changing conditions straight, which is why there are constants in the woods or the blind that when hunters follow them, the predictable happens, which, oddly enough, is nothing. The constants are rules laid out to prospective hunters and reiterated to old hunters constantly all across the nation and hunter safety classes and in the field. Always keep your barrel pointed in a safe direction, Treat every firearm as if it is loaded, know your target, and beyond notice. These rules or commandments, if you like, don't include any outs, no ifs, or allowances for changing conditions. These deaths are tragic, they're sad, and they're avoidable. If we don't learn from them, then their deaths will be all the more tragic. Be safe out there. Teach others to be safe out there. There are no excuses. Thanks for listening as per usual, if they have gotten something wrong. If you have something interesting you would like to share, right in and let me know at 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 start. If you're loving what you're hearing, tell a friend or two thanks, and I'll talk to you next week. Many books a pen, often as p

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