00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can review with Ryan kel Kell in now Here's Kel in Denmark. The only known specimen of narwhale beluga whale hybrid has been officially identified. The odd whale was killed by a subsistence hunter in the eighties. He kept the skull and recognition of the fact that it was noticeably different from the typical belugas. The skull was discovered by the scientific community in the nineties sitting on top of the hunter's tool shed. Just recently, through their use of modern comprehensive DNA testing, the skull has been confirmed to be a real deal nar luga. The pure white beluga and the unicorned narwhale have some real differences. At first glance. Belugas, again are white, while narwhals are often gray speckled with whites and browns. Bluega Us can have forty teeth between the top and bottom jaw, while the narwhale mail can grow a ten foot long tooth out the front of its head, yet has no teeth whatsoever on its bottom jaw. Despite those basically external differences, the whales share much of the same diet and feed at much of the same depths. They live on the same block and eat at the same restaurant, so to speak. In fact, it is thought that these two whales were actually the same whale up until about five million years ago. I'm not sure if that makes this an ancestral story or not, but will carry on. The bluga and the narwhal are the only two members of the monodont today family. They're similar in size. Beluga is getting up in the range of three thousand pounds and fourteen feet long, narwall's about pounds and seventeen feet in length. Bolts can be found in Arctic waters year round. Kind of making the case for this marine mammal union right. Well, doesn't seem that these two species hook up very often sexually speaking. Analyze genomes of narwhale and beluga show no evidence of successful hybridization between the species for at least the past one point to five million years. As far as we know, and we know admittedly little about this. The subsistence hunter may have killed the only ones in existence, or perhaps ever to exist. You did hear that, right, I said ones as in plural. The single skull was analyzed, tested and identified, but there were actually three of the whales in the pod killed by the subsistence hunter in Greenland that day. Now you may be thinking, how awful this bloodthirsty hunter just squashed a species that you know may have just crawled from the primordial muck for the very first time. Maybe, but that's one hell of a coincidence. And also, at the risk of sounding completely insensitive, that's exactly how evolution works, how the whole derned game has played, so to speak. Hybrids happen all the time and all throughout the animal kingdom. Mule deer and whitetailed deer will hybridize. Bee below is across between a buffalo and domestic cattle. A mule is a hybrid of a horse and a donkey. A grizz and a polar bearer will get together on occasion, creating something folks called pisley. Apparently, if a camel and a lama shack up, it's called a comma. It's a long list of humorous names, but the point is hybrids in some cases don't farewell in nature and most often do not reproduce. I'm spelling this out because it takes millions of years of hybridization to create a new species capable of reproduction. Our subsistence hunter didn't eradicate a species. You probably just closed the nar Luga chapter before a few of the last pages were read. This week we're talking beavers, wolves, the relationship between elephants and frogs, and so darn much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. It's fishing season in Montana and elsewhere for that matter. Grab my fly pole. Hit the Blackfoot River. You know that movie or river runs through it where the one McClean boy is played by Brad Pitt and he shows people how to cast a fly rod. That is forever frustrated fishing guides ever since that movie. Well, a good amount of time from that book and that film is spent on the quote big Blackfoot. And that's where I spent a couple of days. The fishing was good, the scenery great. On my way home, just outside of the bare Mouth exit, I noticed a beaver walking Interstate ninety. I was headed east. The beaver heading west caught me a bit off guard. But believe it or not, this isn't the first time I've come across North America's largest rodent or castor canadensists in a strange place. Beavers are typically pretty stationary during the winter, living and reproducing and bank dens or domed lodges, constructed mud weeds, sticks, and even sizeable logs. By the time spring rolls around mon pob beaver are ready to kick the kids out of the dam, timing the emptying of the nest with spring floods. The high water can train support young beavers strange places, even some places that might eventually turn high and dry. It's a risky but essential part of beaver life. One time I came across a beaver carcass in the middle of a prickly pear cactus covered prairie in eastern Montana. It had been a particularly high year for spring runoff, and every little drainage that could carry water did. In this case, a beaver had followed a series of greeks and rivulets small streams which ultimately left him, I assume, without water. Eventually he had to try and walk his web feet and water slap and tail across the high dry cactus patch where I would ultimately find his remains. Doesn't sound like a great way to go, but that's the danger of dispersal. Spreading those genes has a cost. That's just the beavers side of things. The critters that eat the beaver's side of things is where it gets even more interesting. In Voyagers National Park, a park in northern Minnesota named after the famed French Canadian fur traders of the region. If you haven't heard of or don't know what a voyager he is, you're in luck. I'm gonna tell you right now. The voyagers, as in the people not the park, had serious reputations, and for good reason. They operated massive birch bark canoes, sometimes forty feet in length, loaded to the hill with bundled beaver pelts and trade goods. The big canoes that operate on the Great Lakes and Ottawa River could haul three to four tons of beaver bundles at a time. That's roughly sixty seven eight nine ninety pound bundles of beaver pelts. Those bundles would then need to be portaged on the back of the voyager in between lakes. Some accounts described the trade that defined these stout canoeists was the ability to carry two of these bundles at a time. The heyday of the voyager was back in the seventeen hundreds through the early eighteen hundreds and pretty cool stuff. What's happening currently in voyagers and just outside the National Park with beavers is pretty darn interesting as well, so we'll get back to that. Since two thousand fifteen, by all, just in voyagers have identified more than four hundred wolf beaver ambush sites and one individual wolf that killed twenty eight beavers in one year. A scat analysis study of a thousand samples of wolf poop showed that beaver was actually the preferred prey of wolves during May and June, and voyagers that diet timed perfectly with the dispersal of naive young beavers from the lodge. Since we talked about canoes and we're currently in the Upper Midwest, I just can't not talk about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area was established in nineteen sixty four and it is our most visited wilderness area in the US, averaging a hundred and fifty five thousand people per year, over one million acres in size, twelve hundred miles of established canoe routes, with more than two thousand designated camp sites and eleven hundred lakes. This place is known for Northern pike, small mouth bass, that golden child of Midwest fisheries, the walleye, as well as a heck of a lot of other fish, birds, bears, moose, and general outdoors good times. Right now, there is a proposed sulfide or copper mining operation that could potentially have a huge impact on this area as well as areas downstream like Voyagers. Mining in this area isn't new. Five point one billion tons of iron ore came out of Northern Minnesota from eighteen to two thousand eighteen. The deposit in question, containing a possible four billion tons of gold, silver, palladium, platinum, copper, nickel, has an estimated value of over one trillion dollars, which you know, sounds like a hell of a lot of money. Here's the rub. The proposed mind site sits within an area protected by this nineteen seventy eight Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act and Act that band mining within the wilderness, and an additional two thousand acres that would provide additional protection for the entirety of the Rainy River Draining Basin, which is also part of Voyagers National Park. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area is considered the headwaters and the entire rainy river drainage basin headwaters meaning basically the start or the head end, the tippy top from which water must flow down. The mind property is least US Forest Service ground and ministered by the Bureau of Land Management. Signed a nineteen sixty six before the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act went into effect, six percent of Minnesota's water. The National Forest that calls the Boundary Waters home holds twenty percent of the fresh water in the entirety of the U. S National Forest System. That old saying of you know, stuff flows downhill is something to keep in mind here. I like folks to make a living. I realize we in the US consume a lot of goods that require raw materials to make. I just don't know if those raw materials should come from this particular spot. If you want to know more about this scenario and you should you own this land, check out Sportsman or the Boundary Waters dot Org. They're just one of the many groups looking out for this incredible area. Moving on to some quick hitters. One thing everyone is talking about is the so called mummified man that was supposedly rescued from the den of a brown bear out in the remote wilds of Russia's Tuva region. The man was apparently attacked and drug into the den, severely injured, surviving off his own urine for a month. At that point, he was located by chance, again in the remote, remote wilds of Russia, by hunters in the exact same spot, not looking for him, but they happen to have dogs that found him. I have so many, so many questions as the validity of this report and how this conflicts with my general sense of bare behavior that I can just barely stand to mention it here. So if you want to follow up on this, our own Spencer new Hearth has done some digging on his own. Find out what he knows at the meat eater dot com. Moving on to Morse strange occurrences with people in wildlife, social media influencers and the wildlife they pose with or getting some attention. In Australia, for the low price at two grand to night, you can pose nude in the bathtub inches from tigers in a glass walled enclosure, or get a picture sitting on an elevated deck next to a draft so there's that. If you've been looking for a deal on African elephants, Zimbabwe has got a deal for you. Just last May, China and Dubai reportedly purchased ninety elephants for only two point seven million or eight pound. The President of Zimbabwe is looking to reduce their current elephant herd from eighty four thousand to fifty thousand. Also up for grabs or lions and buffalo. No word on shipping costs. On the topic of elephants only in Myanmar, not Zimbabwe. A recent study has found that Asian elephant tracks provide predator free breeding areas in the pack of dern puddles. The elephant tracks can remain for a year or more and helped connect frog populations hopping over to birds. Ancient ones EO. Carracius Brackyptera was blue, or at least a maximum probability of only nineteen percent that EO. Carracius Brackiptera was gray. The Journal of Royal Science Interface just published a study of the oldest fossil evidence of blue feathers ever found. Apparently, blue feathers are fairly uncommon and are determined by pigments within microscopic pigment sacks called milano zones. Milano zomes, and modern birds tend to have distinct shapes. Recently, researchers looked at seventy two feathers from today's bird groups, then cross reference the milano zomes and their corresponding colors with the fossilized Eo Carrossis Brackiptera, and determined almost certainly that this possibly fifty six million year old bird from the Eocene period was blue. To Linger on the topic of ancient birds that are tough to pronounce, Europe's first ever giant bird fossil was just discovered in Crimea. Giant bird fossils have been discovered elsewhere, but until now not in Europe. Paleontologists believe the specimen of giant bird to be Packy Struthio or a relative of Packy Struthio, based off of the mass and length of a femur. This bird from the Crimean Peninsula is estimated to have weighed nine pounds and may have competed with one of our ancestors, Homo erectus pounds. That's roughly three times the size of an ostrich or your average telephone pole or one testicle from the right whale magic of the Internet, folks. Turns out the net is full of testical facts. Alright, We're moving on. In Malaysia, customs officials have been busy making back to back bus. One bust for the attempted smuggling of thirty one point six pounds of meth value to add a hundred and seventy two thousand, five hundred dollars. The other bust for the attempted smuggling of five thousand, two hundred and fifty five baby red eared slider turtles valued at twelve thousand, six hundred dollars. Both smuggling attempts involved two men with the illegal contraband hidden in their luggage. The math carries the death penalty upon conviction. The turtles are fine and up to five years in jail. Remember the South Carolina guy who branded sharks. Well, Apparently the illegal tagging of fish is becoming a thing. So we're going to finish this week out at the desk of poor decision making or the people who follow through with bad ideas and torment animals for no reason desk. The title is a work in progress at interim desk job anyway, A tournament angler on Lake Michigan recently landed a fish saddled with an eternal symbol of devotion or perhaps misery. The fish, a steel head caught not far from Chicago, had a wedding ring zip tied to its tail. A fishing guide had cut the fish two months previous, strapped the emblem of his failed marriage to the fish's tail, and set the steel head free. Photos show that the zip tie was damaging the caudle peduncle, which is a fancy name for the spot just in front of its tail, and it looked just completely flat out miserable for the steel head. Now, I've got nothing against grand symbolic gestures, but burdening a fish with your literal emotional baggage is the move of a man who just doesn't think things through. You could call this behavior selfish, even hell. One could go as far as to speculate that behavior like this didn't do much to prolong the marriage. You could go as far as to look at this situation and think how lucky this fishing guide's ex lady is to have that ring off her finger. Thanks for listening, and remember to tell me where I messed up or what I'm missing at a s K C A L. That's asked Cal at the meat eater dot com. If you like what you've heard so far, go to places where podcasts are streamable and downloadable, like iTunes and leave me a review and hit that furthest right hand start. If you want even more, follow me on Instagram at old cal O L C A L four oh six. That way, maybe you can see if I believe in this stuff myself. Have a great week.