00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Media Doors World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ryan kel Kelly and now here's Kel coming to you alive from Portland, Maine. That We're gonna need a bigger boat department. Researchers from o Search have found what they call the Queen of the Ocean, a great white shark estimated to be seventeen feet long, three thousand, five hundred and forty one pounds and around fifty years old, tagged off the coast of Nova Scotia on October two. It's the largest shark O Search has tagged in the Northwest Atlantic. The Shark Research Organization has a very popular and cool program where you can follow along with the research by tracking the sharks on their website o search dot org. They named this one Nakumi, for the legendary wise old grandmother figure of the Micmac people who have long lived and thrived in this part of the world. By any name, a shark like this one is a fearsome specimen. The average great white gobbles down about eleven tons of food per year, meaning over the course of this old girl's life, she has hunted and eaten somewhere around five and fifty tons of seals, tuna, dolphins, whales, raise other sharks, sea turtles, and pretty much anything else she could get her mouth on. It's estimated that great whites can live to sixty or perhaps seventy years old, so Nakumi still has plenty of time left inner. Certainly, one of the factors that's helping sharks like this live long and grow huge is the remarkable recovery of the gray seal population. The gray seal population has exploded from record loads in the seventies to healthy populations in many areas along the coast. Nowhere is this more evident than on Cape Cod, where the seals have come back in abundance, and with them record numbers of sharks. They're in a number of white shark attacks on humans off the cape in recent years, including fatalities, and signs about shark warnings, are as common as steamers during the summer. Many local striper fishermen say stripe bass fishing, while still good, just ain't what it used to be. There could be a number of reasons for that, but seals get most of the blame. Recently, at the meat eater dot Com, Tom Kier wrote about the attacks on Cape cod in an article titled blood in the Water, and I gotta say it didn't make me eager to take a dip. We're going to keep an eye on Old Nakumi on o search dot org as she swims and eats her way along the Atlantic coast this week Big Sharks, fat bears, and picky eaters. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as This podcast is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment. Steel the brand that made flying with pruning shears and necessity. See seriously, I've been traveling with a pair of steel pruning shears in my check baggage. Super handy when t s A puts those giants super tough zip ties on your gun case, or when you're breaking down birds like rough to grouse and woodcock. Pick up a pair. Today, When I don't travel with them, they're standing at the ready in my kitchen. This week, I traveled all the way to the state of Maine and check back in with Brent West of the High Peaks Alliance and Shiloh Pond. I have to tell you that Old Shilo Pond, the property that we all helped raise, just to touch over seventy tho dollars to get out of hawk and into the public domain. Looks awfully awfully pretty wearing her fall colors. A lone loom was, you know, learning about Maple and oak leaves are flying high on the wind from a tall ridge to the pond's north, and although I did not see them, a few brook trout we're probably going about their spawning business somewhere on the pond's edge. It was good to check up on the place. If you don't remember, Maine is over private land. The Shiloh property will be just a drop of public land in a big state, but it's just a good thing. It's a good thing to do with. The property has a permanence to the people that will go out on the water for a paddle or take just that short walk around its shore. Although Maine has an incredible history of landowners allowing legal trespass on their lands for all types of recreation, which I sincerely hope continues forever, having the pond in public hands, specifically for public use, just gave me the feeling of ease, I guess. Let me describe it like this. Imagine you are a month to month renter and you come home one day after a long day's work, you see like a four sales sign on the property you're renting. That type of uneasiness. That's kind of uneasiness I get on some of these big chunks of private even huge chunks of private ground we were on in Maine. By acquiring that Shilo Pond property and keeping it specific ckly for public use, there is just a feeling of permanence. That's all I can say. But that's not all I checked out. While I'm Maine. Brent showed me some standard October main pursuits. We hunted woodcock, roughed grouse, mushrooms, and ducks, and we hunt all of them on private land because of mains de facto trespassing law. The private land we hunted is essentially open to the public, but it is still private owned by corporations or family trust. We basically did as we pleased, just as if we were on US Forest Service or BLM ground. No real difference. But here is what is different and what makes me want to be so protective over that U S Forest Service or BLM ground. They're gated roads with checkpoints in the main woods, folks and warming huts taking fees to allow trespass in some areas. You can think, well, what's the difference between that and the National Park. Well, it gets more complicated as some of these areas that have been known as the say Great Moose or bear areas are then put up for lease and privatize as and like no trespassing signs go up around their hunt to areas as our whole bodies of water. It's a pay to play a system which from landom perspective, is still pretty darned generous. I cannot imagine this pace for maintenance and upkeep of the extensive road systems in these areas right now, the system that they have in the state of Maine seems to work pretty darn well, to be honest. There's a lot of access and hunting and fishing opportunity on that private land, but the situation seems very tenuous. Like I said, you could come back to your spot and see that trespassing sign and that's all there is to it. Very excited to get my first woodcock. It's a strange little bird. I had a bunch of listeners right in and even invite me to come woodcock hunting. I managed to knock a couple down this week for those of you who need to know which is everyone. The woodcock is a long legged similar to a snipe, but slightly larger. Their primary feed or earthworms, and I found them to be quite greasy, tasty birds. Here's a few fun facts for you. The woodcock is a migratory bird that averages only fifty feet in elevation duran's migratory flights. They have long hinged bills like the top part of the bill has some flex in it, which is unique. Imagine a pair of tweezers with a little extra range motion on one side. Their eyes are abnormally set far back in the rear of their heads, their noses around just the very base of the bill, and their ears are in between that. Their brains are also oriented upside down. You could say they have two unique calls, and they even fan out their hind feathers and strut almost like a tiny turkey. Very cool. The roughed grouse is the other species that we busted through the may and brush to find. Very very cool bird. A male rough grouse, once he finds a place to drum it's drumming log, will spend the rest of its life no further than eight hundred feet from that drumming log, which is you know, quite unique that that little stack got a couple of inquisitive looks from some of the mainers I was hanging out with. So if there's some rough grouse biologists out there, please let me know. I have to say, absolutely gorgeous birds and hunting them the way that we were with pointing dogs and hiking through the brush is no easy task. You end up shooting a lot of trees in the day of May, and I found all right. Moving on, and you know, keep in mind, I gotta wrap this up before I board this flight. Now on to the most truly American contest ever created, cat My National Parks Annual Fat Bear Week. I'm stuck drugging. Let it all come from taking too much. You heard that right. One of Alaska's most famous bear viewing parks holds a tournament every year to determine the chunkiest brewing. Cat My was established in nineteen eighteen and part to help protect important habitat for salmon and thousands of brown bears. So what the hell when I have some fun with it. This annual elimination tournament began two thousand fourteen as a trendy social media stunt in a way to celebrate these healthy bears as they binge on migrating soak salmon before heading towards hibernation. Want to keep track of these bears from your couch, you can visit the park's bear cam web page to watch the bears splash around in the Brooks River. Earlier in July, the bear cam that looks in on Brooks Falls had twenty five bears on screen at once. These bears were in the coveted quote jacuzzi below the falls, which cat might describes as a sort of plunge pool where the bears can simply sit and wait for the fish to come close enough to grab. Fans of the tournament can check in on the atness of their favorite bears live and in color. You'll want to know all of the various fishing styles cap my lists for the bears, which include stand and wait, sit and wait, dash and grab, snorkeling, pirate ing, diving, and of course begging. All the need is a drive through window and they'll be set. Twelve bears were chosen this year with names like Chunk Walker, Otis, and grazer to battle it out for the ultimate hyper fagic eater. I know what you're thinking, how do they weave the bears? I'm surely not going to volunteer to coax one onto a scale. Well, this season was the first time the park was able to gauge the actual weight of the bears by using a three D scanner. This year's winner was a big fat bear named seven forty seven, weighing in at four hundred pounds. The park posted the news on their Twitter accounts, saying the votes are in. You've crowned the Earl of war de pose Bear, seven forty seven, the fat Bear Week champion, no longer the runner up. Seven forty seven fulfills the fate of the fat and fabulous as he heads off to hibernation. Oh seven seven received more than forty seven thousand, three hundred votes, fending off Chunk to weighed in at a whopping pounds and got twenty one thousand, nine hundred votes. On this show, we don't promote feeding bears, but watching them feed on webcam, naming them, weighing them with three D scanner, making a tournament, and voting for the fattest in an online contest. Well, I guess that's okay. It's a little weird, but we'll let it slide. Whatever we have to do to bring attention to our wild places in the animals that call them home. I can make some excuses for I got to get these uh COVID kids locked in on zoom and video games little taste of the out of door somehow, some way. But keep in mind, live and in person bear viewing can be a great way for people of all ages to get a chance has to safely enjoy these big, bold and beautiful bruins while also adding an important piece to the economic puzzle. In Alaska, fat bears can be fun at a respected distance. Next, we're heading to the reproduction desk, where age is just a number and size definitely matters. The oldest known sperm in the world has been discovered locked in a piece of solidified amber. I know what you're thinking, cal isn't that just the plot of Jurassic Park? Yeah? I know, but sometimes Hollywood kind of gets something right. In this case, the giant sperm comes from a minuscule creature called an ostracod, also known as a quote seed shrimp. Kind of fitting ostracods typically grow just a few tents of an inch long. Their bodies are protected by a bivalve shell, from which tiny crablike appendages is sometimes protrude. They typically boast giant relatively speak, king sperm cells that are much longer than they are, to the tune of point four six inches. So if I'm doing my math right, these sperm are up to four times bigger than the tiny creature that produces and expels them. Though there are thousands of ostracod species around today, the giant sperm found inside a disc of amber about the size of a postage stamp in a mine in northern Myanmar is from the Cretaceous period one hundred million years ago. It's the oldest unambiguous example of any animal sperm. By fifty million years. There were a total of thirty nine ostracods found in the resin, thirty one of which belonged to a never before seen species now called Myanmar Cyprus. Hui paleontologist and a postdoctoral researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science named He Wang, was the first to reconstruct a three dimensional image of the sperm. Put your childish humor away. He sent it to an ostracod expert and paleontologists at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, who immediately congratulated him on having reconstructed the oldest animal sperm. For Whang and others in the field, this is incredibly exciting stuff and there is so much to learn going forward. For now, let's just sit back and wonder at how hard it must have been for ostrocod to mate. Think about it, how do well? Anyway, we'll just focus on science and not the sex here. That's what's important. Well, you know, that's just like your opinion man. Moving on to the picky eater desk, or you could say that's pretty gross desk. Introducing Thailand's small banded kukri snake and its unique feeding method on the local toad population. Way back in two thousand sixteen, herpetologists were studying snakes in Thailand, the same place that sends trashy act campers with a nice note, They came across an interesting technique for how the kirky gets its meal. The small banded kirky is found in relatively large numbers in the forests of Cambodia, allows southeastern Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, where they're typically light brown or buffed to gray brown color, and irregular dark brown cross bands which are edged in black. According to new research published this month in the journal her pet Azoa and republished on Smithsonian mag dot com, the scientists observed the snakes as they used a set of enlarged curved teeth to the back of its jaws to make a slice on the left side of the large poisonous toad's belly. The snake's head swung from side to side as it made the incision, and then slowly plunged entirely inside the toad's body and pulled out the unfortunate amphibian's liver, heart, lung, and stomach. The snake then proceeded to eat the toad's organs one by one. In case you're wondering, this feeding behavior is different than any other snake ever described. Normally, snakes swallow their prey hole, but that isn't the case here. This is a quote. During those macab attacks we managed to capture on camera three times, the toads struggled vigorously to escape and avoid being eviscerated alive, but on all occasions this was in vain. The fights we saw lasted for up to a few hours, depending on the organs the snake would pull out first. Thankfully, these snakes are relatively harmless to humans. I say relatively because while not poisonous, small banded Kirky can slice you open really good while also injecting an anti coagulant agent that will make you bleed like crazy. Kirky's teeth are designed to inflict lacerations, not punctures, which would make a bad day for us, but they produced some horrific deaths for these toads, as the snakes spend hours ripping out their organs. Maybe I should have saved this one for Halloween type special. Thanks so much for listening. I know this is a short one, as per usual. Let me know what I'm getting right, let me know what I'm getting wrong, and more importantly, let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods. By writing into a s k C a L. Let's ask cal at the Meat Eater dot com. I'll talk to you next week.

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