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 in now Here's Kel. Although the c d C may be advising people to keep their travel to a minimum these days, a certain other travel corridor is getting a lot of use and it's nothing but good news. In two thousand eighteen, a wildlife overpass was created across the I A. D Highway near Parley's Canyon in Utah to allow animals to move more easily along their natural migration routes. Over thirty thousand animals were hit by vehicles in Utah between and two thousand five, and it's impossible to say how many animals were simply blocked from getting to their seasonal range over that same period. This particular stretch of i AD earned the grisly nickname slaughter row. The habitat fragmentation caused by man made obstacles of all kinds highways, pipelines, power lines, railways, housing developments, et cetera, causes all manner of chaos for animal populations. It's not just roadkill we're talking about when populations get split by these obstacles into genetically isolated groups. Any threat that would usually affect only a small number of individuals can sweep through an entire group. Think about those genetically isolated mountain lions over in l A. By making these human obstacles easier for animals to cross, the benefits of their natural movement can be restored. After the I eight overpass opened in two thousand eighteen, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources was going to give the bridge three to five years and then assess whether animals were actually using it. And I have to say, at first glance you could be forgiven for thinking the thing might not really work. It supposes that wildlife migration will take place through a bottleneck as white as a two lane street, and the gravel track with rocks and logs on it looks as much like a natural path through the woods as the wall in a climbing gym looks like a cliff face. Scientists did create a three mile wide cattle fence to funnel animals to this crossing, but no one was sure whether the animals would trust this particular shoot. But any doubters were proven wrong this week. When you tadd d w R, that's the Department of Wildlife Resources released a video showing all kinds of animals crossing along the bridge moose, deer, fons, bucks with their antlers in velvet, jogging bears, porcupines, you name it. My favorites include a bobcat padding across the bridge with what looks like ground squirrel hanging from its mouth, and another bobcat using a log as a scratching post. Very fun to watch and very encouraging that these wildlife migrations are happening the way we hope they would. Although i AD Bridge is the only wildlife overpassing Utah, there are more than fifty wildlife underpasses in the state, and this is just one of thousands of wildlife crossings that have been built across the country in the past three decades. Adding one of these crossings to an existing infrastructure project increases the overall budget by as little as five percent, and that investment pays off in spades by averting traffic accidents and the human injuries and deaths that those accidents cause. Infrastructure bills may not be sexy, but neither are the smells of bloated critters on the side of the road. You parents should really pay attention to this. The deer rep just ended here in Montana, and it looked like Santa's whole reindeer team took a wrong turn, is what I could say if this weren't a family podcast. This week we've got new critters, DOGO, DNA, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as This podcast is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment from the garage and backyard to the wood lot. Steel has a lot of options that will make your work and even fun more efficient. Check them out. Thank you to everyone listening to the podcast. I read a ton of listener emails. They are many, so I try to group them into common themes and address them without calling out individuals, not because each of you are not unique, special, thoughtful humans, but because this is only supposed to be a twenty minute podcast. Uh. Here is a good discussion item. I think it would be great to get some folks writing in with how they have negotiated the social side of hunting and spot finding. Listen to this one and right in to ask how. At the meat eater dot Com, Molly writes in Just to be clear, I'm changing this a little bit for the sake of anonymity. Molly starts out, I'm hoping for some advice. Started hunting two years ago, worked really hard to read maps, spots, sign and scout out areas to find the spots on public land. Found a hard to reach spot on public land, and when I got to the spot, I was crestfalling to see a trail cam and an empty tree stand. I didn't see any other hunters, so continued to hunt the area for a week without seeing anyone. Later on, I went to that spot again, only to have the hunt cut short before dusk by the owner of the stand and camera. The hunter took the camera off the tree and said he didn't want to get ripped off, insinuating camera theft was in the future. He then proceeded to say that he's been hunting that land for eighteen years and suggested I find somewhere else to hunt. He also said that he did me a favor by not interrupting the hunt earlier in the day. The hunter also stated he has other stands in the area. I am bothered greatly by this because one, it's public land, we have equal rights to it. That's a question. Two, the hunter was not present when hunting the area three, putting a stand up doesn't mean you have claimed the area. That's also a question. Am I wrong? Is it bad taste to hunt near an unused stand I am still trying to navigate the hunting etiquette, but this encounter just felt wrong. Thank you, Molly. Okay. I think this situation is a situation many of us have found ourselves in, and it is a story that is intimidating enough as he is that people never go looking for new spots, or even worse, cannot help but take advantage of their friends spots with that old tired what was I supposed to do? Excuse use which is lame. That's a bad excuse. Do not do that. Do not be that person. Here's my take. Yes, public land is public land. If you're hunting public land, hunt it as I do, with the assumption that you will run into other people. Etiquette, as far as I'm concerned, goes like this. The first person to a spot is the one who says what direction you are going. The other group, the people later to the spot, can then decide if they will continue to hunt but out of the direction you are going, or make the decision to go to a completely different spot. Either way, they have to adjust to you because they didn't get there before you did. A stand a trail camera falls in the category of the same folks at park a bunch of old trucks at trailheads, or leave piles of human feces and toilet paper to dissuade people from hiking in there. That is not claiming the area. You cannot claim an area. They do not have more right to it than anyone else. And if you're one of these surface pooping people, you should be drugged through your own feces and full display of the nearest township rubbish felf flying knock. That being said, if you know the area and you are the second party to the spot, you know how that area is best hunted and hunted effectively, then you will know if it's a waste of your time to continue hunting while other people are there, or if your time would be better spent moving to another spot, or God forbid you go try a brand new spot yourself, which brings me to my next point. You need more than one spot. You are setting yourself up for failure and frustration on the people and animal front if you do not have more than one spot and My final point, do not tell someone to go find another spot and this one is yours when hunting public land. I'm gonna give you the selfish reason why not. It tells them that this is a good spot to be in. Oh and by the way, I've hunted it for eighteen years and all the stands in here are mine. That tells the newcomer that this is a really, really good spot, so good that I am heavily invested in it. Wow. Thanks this story being a great example. I am not knocking you, Molly. This situation is we have a new hunter, a hunter closer to the start of their career than the end of their career. Odds are they missed a lot of sign They couldn't see the area that you have. Having so much experience there, so much time in the woods there, there is a very good chance that this new hunter would have been like, huh, tree stands just ran into a person. I just don't want to bother with it again. But you told them to stay away because it's a really good spot. Without you telling them, they may never have come back. The right thing to do, aside from the selfish thing, is be friendly, be discreet. If you bump into them again and find that the newcomer is going to stick around. Then exchange information and help each other out. You know this is a good spot. They now know this is a good spot. Figure out when each other's days off are. All you gotta do is exchange of text, let each other know your intentions, split the property up, work together. I don't care how good the property is. If you are constantly frustrated, if you've created a nemesis out of nothing, then it sucks. It is not a fun place to hunt. The last thing you want is somebody sitting in your stand before you get to it, or worse, sitting in the wrong stand for the wind and blowing all the mature deer into the next county for the whole darn season. Let me know your thoughts at a s K c A L. Let's ask how at the meat eater dot com. Thanks for writting in, Molly. Moving on to the new critter desk. First up, we may have a new species of beaked whale, or it could just be that part of the beaked whale family that talks a little funny like that cousin at the reunion. Who you know is family? But where the hell did they get that accent from. Well. Researchers have noted that whales can be recognized by their song the different pitches patterns. These beaked whales have a different pattern of song that has not been documented as of yet, and according to researchers, are visibly different as well. Beaked whales are very similar and notoriously hard to identify. The beaked whales are a deep diving group of whales that little is known about. How deep you ask well. A study conducted off the coast of southern California in two thousand fourteen and published in the journal plus one used satellite tags to track a Covier's beaked whale to a depth of two thousand, nine hundred and nine meters meters. For those of you who don't obla the metric system, that is deep. That's just two football fields short of two miles below the surface. That makes them the deepest diving known mammal on the planet. Beaked whales are described as moderately sized, meaning they can range from one to about sixteen tons, which, boys and girls, if we humans could describe moderate with a range from one to sixteen tons. This body shaming situation would be all over for the most part, those poor folks on the small sides of the bell curve would be uh unique individuals and all the more beautiful for it. Anyway. Another interesting fact about beaked whales is they have tusks, which, as far as we know, are more of a hindrance and feeding than a help. So what are they good for attracting females? Similar to a bowl elk's antlers. They may get in a fight every once in a while, but a yellow stone wolf is far more likely to get a hoofprint tattoo on their jaw than a hole on their side from an antler. Long winded way of saying, those boys are trying to impress those girls. These possibly new beaked whales were discovered by the Sea Shepherd team near the San Benito Islands of Baja Mexico. The San Benito Islands are oddly enough so remote that they developed a few specific species that could be found nowhere else on the planet, one of which was the San Benito house finch, which of course was overhunted by specimen collectors to extinction. Let's hope that little fact has nothing to do with this funny sounding possibly very rare to the whale being discovered and for these possibly new whales if you are in fact not new and just another example of someone really wanting to separate you from your existing family and make you unique. Remember I was also that weird sounding cousin at the family reunion. Why do you have that accent? I don't know, do I have an accent? My good buddy, an excellent human old dirt myth of dirt myth photography. Was also that funny sounding kid. But guess what, not adopted part of the family. You just next up at the new creator desk. Snake. It's a snake, which is unfortunately what I have observed most snakes hearing when quote discovered by a human. This new snake, discovered by researchers from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the Institute for Ecology and Biological Resources at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, is an oddly scaled snake. To be more specific, this one is from northern Vietnam's had Jang Province and it is iridescent, meaning that multiple colors are present when looking at this snake, and they seem to change when the viewer changes their viewing angle to back up a bit. Odd scaled means that the snake scales do not overlap like shingles on a roof do. Rather, they're arranged like paving stones. Odd just means that they are in the minority of snakes on the planet. Most snakes have overlapping scales. This snake is likely a burrowing or semi subsurface snake, which obviously would make it harder to find than let's say, a snake that loves sidewalk pavement, which is a confusing comparison because they did stumble up on this specimen on a road. That's not what you think, okay. According to one researcher, his twenty two years surveying Vietnam has only resulted in six oddly scaled snakes. These snakes, with the family name Akilinas, are non deadly and are an outlier in the snake community, having split from the rest of the family. Those not oddly scaled snakes, their DNA could hold secrets to snake evolution. To put a rare, heartwarming twist on this slithering tail, the research team decided to honor a mentor, George Zug, who is the retired curator of the Smithsonian Herpetology Museum, and his wife, Patricia zug By naming the snake after them. Neither of the Zugs were on the expedition, neither of them found the snake, but both of the Zugs were credited with being excellent mentors along the way for the team. Isn't that nice? So welcome Akilinus zagor and let that be a lesson to everyone. Be nice to those that want to learn in your life, and you may get iridescent snake species in Vietnam named after you. Moving on to the anthropology desk, we often talk on this show about not feeding wildlife. Wild animals getting habituated to human beings is almost always bad news, so much so that here at the weekend Review we are doomed to repeat the story over and over again, but with at least one species, it is way, way, way too late. We recently learned more about the ancient origins of the most habituated animal of them all, Man's best friend, and a lot of what we're learning about the first relationships between dogs and humans is just plain weird. Geneticists have been getting better and better at reconstructing ancient DNA As with most things, DNA starts to decay as it ages, and after a few millennia, the long helical strands that are intact in every one of your living cells get broken up into lots and lots of little fragments. But in recent years, scientists have learned how to take those little DNA fragments and piece them together, and they have managed to recreate entire genomes of people who lived at a time when the place I'm sitting right now in Montana was under a sheet of ice almost a mile thick. When you can compare the genetic structure of a person from so long ago to people living today, you can find out when and how certain changes and human beings took place. And we could talk more about ancient humans, I guess, but from how much all of you right in asking about what's happening with snort, I know that what everyone really wants to know is were there any cute dogs running around those ancient humans lives? Any ancient very good boys and girls traversing the frozen continent. We've always guessed that dogs are descended from wolves who began to follow human migrations, eating the food scraps and carcasses that humans left behind. But this new study that sequenced twenty seven genomes of some very very old dogs makes a convincing case that the kind of wolf that became our beloved fidos and Rex's and snorts did not branch into any modern day wolf populations and instead became extinct. I kind of want to say, bad dog, but that's not fitting. In fact, it's a bad joke, bad joke. Bad. The study also shows that once dogs and wolves separated genetically, dog DNA found its way into modern wolves, but no wolf DNA survives and modern dogs, which is very strange. We know that people bred the two populations together, and so it remains a mystery why all of that wolf dna died out of modern dogs. This could just be that human beings didn't like the behavior that dogs with wolf DNA exhibited and so only continued to breed dogs that didn't have those traits. And I guess I can understand that. I will admit to every so often curling up on the couch with good old Snort, her muzzle often mirror millimeters away from my undefended throat, gives me peace of mind to know that the animal who would, let's say, exploit that opportunity is nowhere to be found inside of her. Take that same scenario back a few thousand years. To win those incredibly costly expressions of ourselves, children were really hard to keep alive. It would have been very hard to justify the independent predator genes in the dogs that we decided to keep around that very valuable offspring. Realistically, you would want a pooch that fattened like pork, yet ate very little and hunted very well, which is kind of something I always think about but do not say. When I see people loading up strings of pack goats at the trailhead, I always kind of think to myself, well, at least those people won't starve anyway. Another answer could be that dogs before four thousand years ago were more diverse than the breeds we have today, and maybe that wolf DNA had just happened to end up only in the lines that didn't make it. But wait, how could those ancient dogs be more diverse than the crazy dogs that we have right now? The poodle pointers and the lab repoodles and the poopa doodles and the ship sues and the you know other things that aren't really made to function. How could this be, You'd say, I don't know. Well, let's go over it. Ancient dogs had more diverse DNA than modern dogs. Even though you can go out this very day and adopt both the chhuahua and a great Day and and have them sleep side by side in your home, the differences between the two are the result of breeders selecting for certain traits. In had a very uniform genome before or four thousand years ago. European dogs had many more different genetic compositions. We don't know much about how those differences showed up in the form or behavior of those dogs. So, again, because no one can prove me wrong, at least for now, I'm going to hope that there were certain dogs who could make a reasonable guestimate of distance between you and the animal you wanted to stick with your addle addle, kind of like a hunting companion and a golf caddy mix. Or, to be a bit more serious, we were dealing with a gene pool that hadn't been selected with. It was just nature running wild and selecting for what it thought dogs needed to have to survive all across the planet. So that's a heck of a mix, right, So maybe there were some dogs along the line that carried jeans that made them so smart. They just out hunted us and wanted nothing to do with us, so we wrangled them into submission. Who knows, may be a truly genetically rich, versatile hunting breed had a shiny coat capable of reflecting the colors of the foliage around it ultra camouflage, which was great for hunting. But we kept losing the damn things or tripping over him at the camp site at night. You could go on with the what ifs forever, but the reality is we simplified animals to fit our needs. One other thing I found fascinating from the study is how long ago all this happened. The study shows that all those separate genetic structures had established themselves and spread around the world as much as twenty thousand years ago. Up until now, we thought that humans migrated to the various corners of the world later than that, and so it's hard to explain how domesticated dogs would have traveled to where they did without us, until maybe you watch the honest Pitelis's hound dog mingus run away from you. Boy can cover some ground we are going to learn a lot more as scientists continue to study these newly reconstruct genomes, and so maybe learning more about dogs will teach us some things we didn't know about ourselves, like did we find dogs too complicated and need to simplify them. One thing it will likely never shed light on is a dog behavior I observe daily when Snort passes gas you know, farts, and then looks at her rear end in disbelief. Is that a character trait telling her to do that or twenty thousand years of leftover genetic material. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. As per usual, please right into a s k C A L. That's ask Cal at the Meat Eater dot com and let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods. And of course, if you're loving what you're hearing on Cow's we can review, tell a friend or two. Thanks again, and I'll talk to you next week.

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