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. Australian real estate agents might be kicking themselves this week for overlooking a skyscraper taller than the Empire State Building that was just discovered in their backyard. Though to be fair, this particular skyscraper is a little harder to see than most, given that it's completely underwater. In fact, it's a detached part of Australia's famous Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the world. Which if you don't know the Great Barrier Reef, then you obviously don't know Kurt Russell in Captain Ron, And according to Captain Ron, the Great Barrier Reef is a great eccent of a gun that runs the whole coast. The Captain is speaking of Australia. By the way, wait the Great Barrier read you heard it? Huh, smart lady. Although scientists have long known about several free standing parts of the Great Barrier Reef, this is the first new part of that great big reef to be found more than a hundred and twenty years, and it is enormous. The funnel shaped tower is almost a mile wide at its base, then rises five dred meters until its pinnacle SIT's just forty meters below the ocean surface. This tower wasn't made with cranes swinging I beams around. This tower grew. The coral built up incredibly gradually over millions of years. As the Earth's tectonic plates moved, the ocean floor kept gradually dropping, and a little by little, the coral kept growing so that it could keep the allergae that provides it with oxygen close enough to the sun to maintain photosynthesis. Last we checked these algae. We're not wearing hard hats, but with the diversity of species that live on the reef, you can never be completely sure. We are sure, however, that this is where our high rise construction metaphor will end. You're welcome if you're having a hard time imagining this mile wide at the base natural tower that grew itself to five hundred meters or one thousand, six d forty feet just to be near the sun. It's not that different than the sequoia or climbing vine that grows up to the same goal of monopolizing sunlight were in human terms, would be similar to some of those folks. I was just visiting Louisiana, who rebuild their homes on higher and higher pilings after every storm surge. So how could something so huge go unnoticed for so long? You may ask, well, the normal way, as I suppose, maybe the tower was a bit of an introvert, a late bloomer time. The reality is we actually know way less about the deep ocean than you might think. As you go deeper into the water, things get less and less welcoming. Pressure gets high enough to crush regular submarines. At the base of this new coral tower, a human would feel about seven hundred and seventy five pounds per square inch of pressure. A grizzly bear has a bite force of a little over a thousand p s. I temperatures get freezing cold, and the light from the sun is completely cut off. Humans are just inventing the technology to overcome those factors, and so we're still guessing about most of what happens down there. We have better maps of the Moon and Mars than we do of our own ocean floor, but using sonar technology, this team of scientists off the coast of Australia is making a much more detailed map of the ocean in and around the Great Barrier Reef. Their research ship, the foul Core, sends out powerful sound waves, then measures the echoes that come back from the structures on the ocean floor. Using that information, they can draw maps and in this case, notice this enormous reef that's been right under everyone's nose. Finding an entirely new reef structure is incredibly cool and thrilling. But what's even better news is it looks like life is thriving all over this tower. The Great Barrier Reef has taken a beating from climate change, pollution, over fishing, bleaching, periodic blooms of crown of thorn starfish which actually eat the coral, and yes, even I am sure plenty of real life characters like Captain Ron. But life on this newly discovered tower seems to be healthy and scientists are now busy studying the sharks, shellfish, turtles, and thousands of other species who live there. The deepest spot in the ocean, the Marianas Trench, has been measured at thirty five thousand, eight feet below the surface of the ocean. We know it exists, but it is a place we as humans quite factually may never ever see the top of this new Coral Tower extension. SIT's only forty below the waves and was until now just as unknown as the deepest, coldest, darkest place on our planet, which is kind of exciting right Lots to be discovered out their kids. This week we've got rodent dentistry, fish in a barrel, and cuddly sharks. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as the Cow's Week in Review podcast, as everyone knows, is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment, the maker of the finest chainsaws, be they battery operated or gas. And what's more, as we creep into the holidays, which typically I wouldn't be thinking about, but you know, anything after this election cycle is more enticing than living in the now, so be thinking of those little indispensable steel pruning shears, perfect for fish collar and game bird leg removal. They fit perfectly in a stocking. Honestly, even for the not so adventurous person in your life. A set of steel shears is a highly versatile, four season type of gift. You can trim branches in the yard, cut shooting lanes in the stand, make that duck blind look sharp, and keep them in the kitchen just as I do for the rest of the season. It's a lot of bang for your buck. Anyway. This week, my lovely lady friend and I went out to try to get her antelope. She drew a tag her very first one. We went and looked around preseason things looked promising. Not a ton of public land, but a lot of block management areas, which is Montana's version of private land with a state funded public access component. This is a really great program. Landowners get paid for hunter days. The landowner works with the biologist outline the specific rules for the property, like what species can be hunted, how many hunters per day, where hunters can drive, or if they should only walk on the property. The block management program, when treated properly, as a win win ranchers and farmers are able to reduce the amount of crop and feed damage caused by wildlife and get some compensation on top of that. It's a precarious situation, though, as it depends on people to behave like good neighbors. It is up to all hunters to police each other to make sure this program continues. In this particular antalope unit, the b m A program is the bulk of the hunting opportunity, Meaning if it went away because some bad actors drove through fields or tore up muddy roads, that tag, for most people would be more of a symbolic antalope tag as opposed to an opportunity to take an antelope. Anyway, I was fortunate enough to follow along as two antelope, a doe and her near adult size fawn, fed toward a draw on a field. My friend Sam managed to get within sixty one yards. She made a great shot and the dough went down. Now what happened next? As I have seen many times in my guiding career, the boyfriend girlfriend, her husband wife dynamic is not always the dynamic in which information freely flows back and forth. Did you not tell me you were an assassin? You don't tell me. I tell you twenty times, you never listen. Our relationship, surprisingly or not, is no different. So Sam took along the how to get a Dear bandana from the meat eater store and paid more attention to it than me for instructions, and it all worked out well. I can't find better meat in the freezer. I'll tell you that much now. A butchering note. As we butchered the antelope last night, a number of listeners wrote in to tell me about lopping shears as a standard butchering tool. I use the steel loppers on this antelope, and I gotta tell you a cut bone in roasts nice, even rib racks, and I won't look back. That tool is going to be with me on every butchering job, way better than a saw. So thank you for all those folks who hit me to that. Moving on to the snort report, we got our first limited sharp tails together. Snort was making me a little frustrated because she was not finishing her retrieves, as in, not bringing the bird to hand because she wanted to go find more birds. I told her that's how pointers behave, not retrievers. Side note, A plucked roasted sharp tail grouse is really fantastic table fair. Moving on quick stopping the mail desk, Tyler Stoltz, you have a real long winded buddy named Rob ken Singer. Rob says you have helped him out a ton and are a fine representative of both are armed forces and of a true conservationist. So first, thank you on behalf of all of us, both for spreading the conservation ethos and for your service, and thank you to Rob as well. The second part of this was the question what to get the outdoors person that has everything. Focus on the small stuff. Fire starters, sharpeners, water purification drops. I like aquam era, down booties, elkin, turkey, diaphragms, external read calls are all excellent gifts for the outdoors person in your life who has it all. There's nothing better than stumbling onto a good sounding call, especially if it's one you've never considered. Thanks for writing in and good luck this season. Next up, just a general address. I've gotten several emails, messages, etcetera asking for more economical outdoor clothing suggestions. Hunting specific and outdoor branded stuff is ex pensive. Army surplus stores, how I have first clothed myself, are even expensive these days. But see if you can't find some army surplus pants and hit the thrift shops for anything wool. My grandma used to work at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and she would collect wool sweaters, lambs, wool, v next sweaters, anything for fifty to seventy five cents apiece, and I hunted and guided in that stuff which was never meant to be outdoor clothing for a long time. If you truly have the desire to go, you'll figure out how to make it happen. Just be safe when you do realize the limitations of what you have. Those inclement weather day is when you will get soaked to the bone, stay in the tent or the lean to rip a big fire, and enjoy the lack of cell service. By spending time outside, you'll develop a much better sense of what you need to acquire or upgrade two to eventually spend even more time in the woods. But don't let a lack of what you perceive as necessary stuff to keep you from going outside. Don't wait on the perfect tent or the perfect pair of boots your scope. You've got to get out there. There's no substitute for time in the woods. Moving on to the otter desk Otters, the oceans, master of deception. Sure we've seen them all looking cuddly and holding hands, maybe floating in a bathtub, juggling, befriending baby tigers, and cuddling in open water. In fact, if I can Hold on a second, I'm gonna search cute otters on YouTube right now. Uh, look at that little guy playing with beach ball. Darn that they got me. They always do. But don't be fooled, folks. Otters are killers like a tiny little jaws. Recently, the shores of Simon's Town, False Bay, South Africa, have seen resident otters killing sharks to eat their very nutritious livers, hearts, and male reproductive organs before discarding the rest of the carcass. That's not the type of otter behavior that's going to make a motivational poster in your kids classroom, now, isn't. Local rangers were puzzled over the last few months when the partially gutted remains of shy sharks continued to show up on beaches, until they eventually spotted the slippery, furbearing predators doing the deed. According to local Falls Bay marine biologist Alison Coke, most people think of sharks only as predators, but they are often prey to a variety of other animals. Most sharks are not apex predators, but what we call meso or middle predators. It's only the largest sharks like great whites tigers and bulls, which we consider apex or top order predators, and even these are prey for killer whales. In False Bay and the surrounding regions, there have been several cases of great white shark carcasses being found with their livers missing. Killer whales are believed to be responsible. These cape clawless otters, the second largest freshwater species of otter, weighing in on average between twelve and fifty pounds, with a few recorded up towards eighty pounds and five feet in length, aren't quite big enough to take down jaws, but the abundant shy sharks or haplow blefarus are an easier target. The name shy shark comes from a distinctive defensive behavior in which the shark curls into a circle and covers its eyes with its tail. Who wins the cute award in this predator prey relationship. Now the reality in this case and all others involving the Mustelid family is otters or voracious predators. They use extremely sensitive whiskers as sensors in the water to pick up the movements of potential prey like frogs, crabs, and when they're feeling more confident unt these sharks. Here's one more way to think about it. If otters were bad at hunting, would there be so many videos of them just playing online? No. Animals with free time earn it by being efficient predators. The natural predators of the otters, aside from humans, of course, are pythons, fish, eagles, and crocodiles. But I'd watch out if I were them. That little juggling beach ball trick you find otters doing on YouTube might lure you in, but remember, by the time you realize he's actually juggling a bloody shark heart, it's gonna be too late. Next up, Royal Sturgeon, a story that has it all at king his treasure and underwater mystery and a barrel filled with a giant prehistoric fish. A Danish fleet sailed in the name of King Hans and the Baltics see some five hundred and thirty five years ago, when a one hundred and fifteen foot long ship named Gribbs Hunting caught fire and sent sailors in their treasure to the bottom of the sea. King Hans set sail from Copenhagen with his fleet bound for Kalmar, Sweden in with a pile of fancy stuff, meant to impress the Swedes and convince them to join a Scandinavian union with Denmark and Norway. The king made it to Sweden, but his favorite ship did not. It burned. Five centuries passed before archaeologists learned of the wreck of the gribbs Hunding in Swedish waters in two thousand. In two thousand fifteen, the wreck garnered worldwide attention when the almost perfectly preserved ships crocodilian like dog figurehead was brought to the surface. Over the next four years, divers pulled up some pretty cool stuff chain mail, crossbows, bones, glass and cap stands, but nothing was years cool as the barrel found last year revealing a well preserved Atlantic sturgeon. The fish offers biologists a rare glimpse into what the Baltic Sea looked like before modern human interference. Nowadays, Atlantic sturgeon are classified as critically endangered by the i u c N Red List of Threatened Species, as their numbers have dwindled due to overfishing and habitat loss. Atlantic sturgeon were prized for their eggs, which were valued as high quality caviar during the late eighteen hundreds, people flocked to the east coast looking for this cavea. Folks even called it the Black gold Rush. Close to seven million pounds of sturgeon were reportedly caught in eighteen eighty seven, but by nineteen o five the catch declined to only twenty thousand pounds, and by nineteen eighty nine only four hundred pounds of sturgeon were recorded. So was King Hans a caviare guy? Maybe he might have been carrying the fish for food or Researchers at Lundon University believe it could have been a propaganda tool, a sign of status heading to the negotiations, and even a possible gift for the Swedish region and court. Maybe King Hans was just a visual and literal person saying, hey, Sweden and Denmark and Union, that can't be beat. It'll be like shooting fish in a barrel. Just look at my literal fish in a barrel. We may never know these things, but it's fun to guess. Atlantic sturgeon are slow growing and late maturing, and have been recorded to reach up to fourteen feet in length and well beyond sixty years of age. Analysis of skull bones and scoots. The Army plating on these fish showed that this fish measured about six and a half feet long. Still more than of this underwater shipwreck remains unexplored. What else will they find? It doesn't matter, really, it won't be as interesting as this fish in a barrel. Moving on, Peter, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals when a battle recently when Costco and other retailers agreed to stop selling coconut milk and other coconut products sourced from certain suppliers from Thailand after PETA uncovered that the growers that were supplying the coconuts were using monkeys on leashes to do the harvesting. We might have our differences with PETA, but we're all in full agreement that the suffering of animals is a big deal and definitely not worth it for a dollarp of non dairy creamer or some cooking oil approved by the Paleo diet. The monkeys are definitely expert at accessing the coconuts, but if they don't get paid and they don't get to keep the coconuts, that's pretty unfair. Maybe we can look forward to an update to Upton Sinclair's classic expose of working conditions the jungle, and this time the title might make even more sense if you know the characters are animals. Before too long, there might be a whole range of animal labor unions. The Damn Builders Local eight for the beavers, the two forty two Sanitation Union for oysters and muscles filtering water, and even those construction worker corals from the top of the show might have some representation, provided they pay their dues. Of course, solidarity jokes aside show me economic benefit of housing, feeding, and cleaning up after monkeys over buying a ladder. Moving on, We cover a lot of kinds of pollution here on Col's weekend review, but here's a new one for US light pollution. As humans build more cities town than suburbs, the light from our buildings goes out in all directions, and as we expand our illumination into habitat, animals have to adjust to the light. But how exactly do they adjust? A recently published study in the journal Ecography tells us an amazing amount about this artificially lit nightlife. Scientists tracked the behavior of pumas and mule deer across the Inner Mountain West one seventeen pumas and four D eighty six mule deer to be exact, all fitted with radio collars. The scientists also scrutinized one thousand, five hundred and sixty two cash site locations, or places where mountain lions successfully hid their deer. Mountain lions will often cash or store their kills and tidy little bundles covered in pine needles or brush. If you live in an urban area infested with deer and you do, in fact have mountain lions in your state, do little getting off the beaten path this winter and poke around. I've found a lot of lion cashes within a quarter mile of housing developments. Those cats got to go where the food is, you know. These scientists meanwhile also built a map using satellite imaging of all the human made light across Nevada, Utah, and parts of California, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, and New Mexico. This is a particularly interesting zone because it contains both the darkest places and United States, and also a significant number of ever growing metropolises and countless suburbs. The scientists then followed the colored animals across that map. So are the pumas and mule deer dancing together to the light of humanity's disco ball. No, but the effects of light pollution are clear. Deer that lived in areas with more artificial light moved away from their traditional crepuscular patterns, meaning that they were more active both during the day and through the night instead of sticking to more normal morning and evening activity times. Pumas, like most cats, were a little harder to pin down. The cats living in the brightest areas chose the darkest spots they could find to take down their deer, possibly using those places as traps for deer looking to get out of brighter places where they were more exposed. But cats living in the low and medium night light areas chose brighter spots for their kills, maybe because deer were drawn to those slightly lighter places to forage, or perhaps it's that the brightest areas also had the most human activity while the low and medium night light areas had less. Scientists will continue to study how our light changes the patterns of wildlife, but we've probably got a while before any mule deer are going to be doing the electric slide on the glowing dance floor, which is improbable, I'll admit, but it is at the same time oddly feasible if you accept the fact that the amount of light we put out right now affects animal behavior, So how will the amount of light we put out in twenty years from now affect animal behavior? If you interested, and I encourage you to be, check out dark sky dot org for a list of ways to make your home, street, town city a dark sky city. Moving on to the desk that nobody wants to visit, the dentist. No one likes to go to the dentist, but any scientists worth her salt is always on the lookout for a good idea, no matter the source. Dr Pam Gill, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol, is just that kind of opportunist. When one of her co workers turned up the lab with a gap in his smile and said that the missing tooth was being X rayed so that his dentist could learn more about his health, Dr Gil had a flash of insight. Why not x ray the teeth of the fossil lives rodents her lab was studying, And we're not talking any old fossil lives rodents. Here we're talking two hundred million year old morganical codons, possibly the world's first mammals. It turns out that the teeth of these rodents growing annular rings like trees, and so by shooting X rays at these ancient teeth, which are no bigger than the head of a pin, Dr Gil and her team were able to count those rings and learn the age of these ancestors of today's mice and voles. But they found surprised them. Modern rodents typically don't live longer than two or three years. They have very fast metabolisms, meaning their hearts beat fast, they breathe fast, they move fast. This takes a toll on them and makes for a shorter lifespan. But after looking at the scans of the two million year old rodent teeth, there were a shocking number of rings, in some cases as many as fourteen, suggesting that these rodents lived for much much longer than their modern day and counterparts. Scientists think that a slower pace of life was responsible for this lifespan. These ancient mammals may have lived more like reptiles, conserving their energy and so managing to stick around for much longer sounds like what was good advice for early mammals is good advice for contemporary mammals. Take it easy and avoid the dentist. You'll live longer. Ah. That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks so much for listening, and as per usual, let me know what's happening in your neck of the woods by writing in to a s k C. A l Let's ask Cal at the meat Eater dot com. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next week.

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