00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ryan Kel Kelly and now here's Kel. As though the last year hasn't been surprising enough, biologist recently discovered what may be a previously unknown tree dwelling nocturnal mammal that can produce screams over one hundred decibels. One hundred decibels means if you were either writing a motorcycle or writing this particular mammal the dendro high racks of the Tita Hills area of Kenya, you would hear the same volume of noise. In each case, you look a little different. Higher axes look like rabbits with short round ears. So I hope the mental picture of writing this cute bunny eared critter next to let's say, Harley Davidson Street seven fifty is coming into focus. Biologists from the University of Helsinki in Finland believed that these particular hieraxes in the tight of Hills may be a new taxon or a genetically distinct biological group because of the very distinct vocalizations they make. The scientists described the noise as and here I'm quoting A strangled the Whack. I think my seventh grade friends had a band named a Strangled Whack weren't half bad either. Another incredible thing about hieraxes is that the closest living relative of this fuzzy seed eater is not the marmot, or the sloth or the koala, but the elephant. Hieraxes, elephants, manatees, and sea cows all descend from a common ancestor, and higher axes even have tiny tusks. While we're talking elephants and things tenuously related to elephants, and ecologist at the University of Auckland recently published a modeling analysis of how far different animals can carry the seeds they've eaten before returning those seeds to the earth and their poop. Elephants are extremely effective at this digestive seed dispersal, which is known in the biology biz as zoe corey, because they have big stomachs and can travel long distances. African elephants have been shown to poop out seeds as far as forty miles from where they ate them, providing an important means for plants to spread and propagate. That'd be a new personal best for our long distance runner friends to go for. But zoo corey in the here and now has been well understood for a long time. This new Zealand ecologist George Perry is for the first time modeling zookory in wait for it, dinosaurs. We do have fossilized dinosaur excrement with seeds preserved in it. No, not corn seeds, so we know that this mode of seed travel did exist way back when. And we know the body size of various dinosaurs, which tells us roughly how much each dinosaur could eat and how far they could move. Too small like the two legged ornithopods who weighed only a few pounds, and the seeds passed through quickly. Too big like the ninety ton Argentinosaurus, and it's hard to move very far before the seeds exit, and so Dr Perry concludes that dinosaurs on the scale of the modern elephant, like the Triceratops and Stegosaurus, would likely have been able to move seeds the farthest, possibly up to twenty miles from the plants that grew them. Although we will never know how right or wrong Dr Perry might be, at least we now have a very new kind of very old mystery to ponder and something new we have in common with dinosaurs. Be sure to tell your teachers that one kids. This week we've got the law enforcement desk by catch and do you smell that? But first, I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as this podcast is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment. I'm making this week short because I'm packing up my steel gear and heading south to Sonora, Mexico, meeting up with a few folks from the outdoor clothing brand First Light, Seth Morris and the Honest patel Us, a meat eater. Old Steve was supposed to go, but he's locked up in his guesthouse with COVID. This one's for you, buddy. Where it is. It's been a dry season in Sonora, so we may not see the biggest bucks, but we will hike a lot more of that beautiful high desert than you will, and for that, I'm sorry. You're my boy, Blue, my boy. I will give you the full report hunting Cus d Or in Sonora, both here on the Weekend Review and on the Old Cal four oh six Instagram account. As for the Snort Report, it's on pause. See what I did there. Moving on to the law enforcement desk, I personally don't believe any of her animals could have done this, and I do know personally that the raccoon was locked up last night. Spoiler alert, this quote isn't a snippet from the Tiger King documentary. I'm never gonna financially recover from this, So let's just stop here for a moment with that image of the classic bandit the raccoon with his black mask across his eyes behind bars. Then let's think of how seriously you will be taken if you have to repeat that line to a local sheriff out of When Arkansas US that When Arkansas notable for being the closest city to the second largest state park in Arkansas, also the birthplace of Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, which is a name you know if you're a marine, which I am not, but I was in a marine wedding one time. Anyway, lock up the pet raccoon, or it may attempt to eat your baby. It appears a pet raccoon crawled into a near eleven month old child bed and actually bit the child so severely that the local sheriff didn't feel comfortable describing the bites. According to Fox thirteen News, the sister of the child's mother had this to say. Her legs she's referring to the baby from the mid thigh down were covered in little pinchmarks. It was very little. So if it was a dog dogs bite and these were little nibbles, I could say it was a mouse, but then they'd have to go in and look in the walls. I don't think the sheriff was there to determine which animal it was and track them down. The raccoon is, however, going in for rabies testing. No word on the python the ladies released to catch the raccoon before the sheriff arrived, or the silver back gorilla they released to watch the dogs in their absence. Sticking with law enforcement but moving on, officials from the Kentucky Department of Fishing Wildlife recently deployed a robotic deer in an effort to catch poacher's spotlighting, that is, blinding deer with lights so that they're easier to kill at night. Twenty nine year old James Malone was apprehended in Taylor County, Kentucky for doing just this, shining his light at the realistically moving decoy for long enough that game wardens were able to document Malone's behavior and make the arrest. Now, I think rigging up a robot deer to move naturally enough to catch poachers is just as cool as can be. But is it's selfish for me to want another kind of robot deer? Maybe one who is living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, has a CPU that's a neural net computer. I mean, who's better to take on poachers than the deer manator? I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle. Moving on to the UK Desk, recently we discussed some of the ins and outs of fox hunting, specifically that upper crust pastime in Britain whose adherents and opponents rival each other in both passion and persistence. British hunting went through another curf leffel recently when a little owl was found dead in a trap on one of the estates belonging to the Queen of England. The term little in the name little owl is not just a descriptor of the bird's size, but also part of the common name for the species Athene noctua, also known as the owl of Minerva. Minerva, of course, was the Roman name for the Greek goddess Athena, whose symbol is the owl, and after whom the city of Athens is named. So now you know that although the little owl is not officially on the list of protected species in England, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds believes populations to be declining, and as owls are most definitely in the charismatic section of the Avian family, many Britons went ballistic when the photo of the dead owl in the trap came out. By catch the term for snaring netting, catching things that you didn't mean to like this little owl is a challenge in all kinds of trapping, and skilled trappers can reduce by catch with careful technique. In the UK, the rules for setting traps are very detailed, and allegedly this particular trap wasn't properly embedded in a tunnel so as to limit the kinds of animals who were in danger of walking into it, And this particular trap on the Queensland wasn't set for the purposes that might first occur to you, the way you might set a beaver trap in hopes of some extremely warm fur and questionably appetizing tail. This trap and money like it was set in order to reduce the number of stoats, weasels, rats, and other predators who eat the pheasants. The British hunters love to go after predator control. You set a trap for your competition. Trapping predators to protect upland game species is often great practice, and it's done extremely well in many parts of the US. By controlling one of the main drivers of bird mortality, you can increase the numbers of all kinds of ground nesting birds, including many non game species that can use all the help they can get. There are actually a few ways to accomplish this goal. One of the most interesting is to lay off the control of coyotes. Even though we often think of coyotes as a major threat to game species, they often eat the varmints and smaller predators that really focus on birds and eggs. The land managers that set predator traps in the UK have an intimate knowledge of the landscape they're working in, and are in many cases outstanding stewards of the ecosystem. The wrinkle in this story of the little owl, however, is that these particular, protected pheasants are by and large not wild, but rather birds introduced by people expressly for the purpose of being shot. Although this doesn't represent all of the bird hunting in the UK by any means, the stocking of certain estates with birds and then having paid beaters flush those birds towards hunters is very popular. Very popular may have an asterix by it when you consider that a two thousand ten study accounted for only six hundred and twenty five thousand hunters amongst the fifty six point five million residents of the UK. Pheasant hunting the shooting sports are an enormous industry in England, partially supporting more than seventy thousand jobs. As many as fifty million juvenile pheasants or poults are released every year, and critics charged that the birds take a heavy toll on the ecosystem as they compete with native birds and other wildlife for food and habitat. Of course, things get even more controversial when an owl gets caught in a trap meant to protect artificially introduced birds, and it's on the Queens of state if they're not setting traps the right way. In the Queen's backyard. The thinking goes, what kind of example does that set for the rest of the country, And shouldn't the monarch be protecting vulnerable wildlife? And so on again. As with fox hunting, the fact that pheasant shooting is particularly associated with royalty nobility the upper classes causes a lot of friction. Forgive me for continuing to beat this drum, but this big British blow up illustrates another reason that recruiting new hunters and keeping them involved here in America is such a huge deal. Hunting might not exactly be mainstream here, but it's practiced by a lot of different people in a lot of different places, in a lot of different ways. According to d Ye in Deer Hunting Magazine, eleven point four million deer hunters were legally ready to hunt in the season that is, just deer hunters. In two thousand eighteen, the state of Texas sold over one million licenses. Two thousand nineteen, Hunting Licensed Data says fifteen million, five hundred forty four thousand plus people purchased a hunting license in the United States, which sounds like a lot, but you know, we have three hundred thirty one million people in the United States. And you know, for the record, fifteen million, five thousand hunters, maybe plenty of hunters in the US if everybody conducted themselves in such a way that the other three hundred fifteen or so million people in the US said, hey, I know a hunter. Those folks are great. If we're good stewards, if we represent ourselves well with non hunters, maybe if we bring some of these non hundreds some delicious pheasants delivered by let's say, a cute puppy, then maybe, you know, the attitude across the entire United States is like, no, I do not hunt, but I do know a good hunter with a cute puppy, and they're swell folks. Anyway, speaking of puppies, Whenever Snort is taken a little longer than I would like to learn something new, I occasionally find myself muttering something like, how can you not see that the thing is right there? But then I picture what Snort might say, if she could understand me, you're calling me dumb. I can smell emotions, for God's sakes, emotions, and Snort would be right about my deficiencies, especially in the smell department. Her canine compatriots continue to blow me away with the things they're able to do with their noses, especially in an area I carry a whole lot about locating hard to find invade subspecies. If you are a person who does not care much about the Florida Everglades, you may be tired of how much we talk about them here on Col's we can review, but amazing things keep happening there, including the unbelievable proliferation of Burmese pythons throughout the ecosystem. As we've discussed many times, when an animal finds a new place to live with an agreeable climate, lots of prey, and no natural predators, the numbers of that thing take off, and that is the case for pythons. One of the other advantages Florida pythons have is that they are exceedingly hard to detect. They can remain motionless for up to fifteen days at a stretch. They can stay completely submerged in water for hours. If you want to learn more about just how hard these things are to find, do yourself favor and go listen to episode two nineteen in The Meat Eater Podcast, in which herpetologist Dr. Robert Reid, a k A. Dr Bob goes into a hunishing detail about how well adapted these snakes are for being there and not having you know it, snakes, Why did it have to be snakes For the good of the rest of the animals and the everglades. The need to find these snakes and reduce their numbers as extreme. We are, however, not very good at it. They're an estimated one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand pythons in the everglades, which, if you can tell by the gaping two gap in the estimate, we have no clue how many pythons there are, and paid snake hunters have only caught sixty three hundred of them in the last four years, despite intense focus on problem. And that is where the very smart and capable dogs come in. In the past few months, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have been training dogs to sniff out pythons, and recently a dog named Truman found his first one. In order to train him and the other dogs in the effort, handlers introduced towels with pythons sent on them, then let the dogs find live snakes with implanted radio transmitters. Quick side note, you can pick up a set of python scented towels in ivory, sea foam green and coral pink, the perfect better late than never Christmas present for that special someone. Just look up Florida Fishing Wildlife dot com. Kidding or am I? I mean? Seriously? Have you ever been to Florida? Have you ever seen the classic Florida tourist traps? Python towels are probably buried in there somewhere. Anyway, Truman found his first snake in the Rocky Glades Public Small Game Hunting Area in Miami Dade County, where I'll bet there is less small game to be hunted now than there was prior to pythons and python dogs. Although this pilot dog training effort is small, it is showing promise, and the hope is that more dogs can be trained in the same skill. We're really going to be rocking and rolling when the State of Florida figures out some particularly good use for all the feral cats good dogs. Now. When it comes to invasives, it's always more effective to stop the spread before it gets out of hand and into the water or the bush. It's much harder to reduce numbers of a species that's fully established across a landscape, like pythons. Detecting a new invasive fast can mean the difference between a nuisance and a catastrophe. Pennsylvania is trying to contain exactly this kind of recent invasive whose numbers are growing but haven't yet exploded. The spotted lantern fly, native to East Asia, has been detected in the southeastern part of the state, as well as in parts of several surrounding states. It is a strange feeling when a harmful invasive species is also extremely beautifu full, but that is truly the case with the spotted lantern fly. It has two sets of wings, the top two spotted like a dalmatian's coat, the bottom two with pomegranate red patches. When the top wings cover the bottom ones, the red color glows through, giving the lantern effect that led to its name. Unfortunately, the lantern flies effects or anything but beautiful. The voracious eaters feed on all kinds of crops, but most especially grapes and stone fruit. They are a major threat to Pennsylvania's vineyards and orchards, and their appetites are not the only problem they present. They almost always leave behind a sooty mold that damages plants even further. Once lantern flies have grown to full size, it's too late to control them, and so it's critical to find their eggs and destroy them before they hatch. But of course, part of what makes them so tough to eradicate is that their eggs are very hard to see and very well hidden. So guess who has the detection skills to pinpoint where they are? Dogs? Not outdoor bird and small mammal destroying cats. Dogs. Veterinarian Cynthia Otto at the University of Pennsylvania's Working Dog Center has trained a German shepherd named Lucky to detect the spotted lantern flies unhashed eggs. Although dr Otto trained Lucky, she then handed her off to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture to patrol the edges of the known lantern fly zones to find and destroy the eggs before they spread any further. Although Lucky is just starting to be deployed in the field, she has passed the first critical test picking up the smell of the lantern fly eggs while ignoring the smell of the tree bark that eggs are almost always on, it would not be so useful to have a dog who would let you detect tree bark in a forest. The trainers went even further and introduced smells intended to distract he's nos. But she ignored these diversions and found the live eggs of the time. Good girl, lucky, and Pennsylvania is not messed around with this problem. They have already quarantined significant portions of the state, restricting the movement of landscaping and construction ways, plants, firewood, deck furniture, mobile fire pits, and much more. In order to move this stuff from place to place, you now need a permit from the state showing that you've been trained in inspecting your stuff and getting rid of any eggs. Think of that. A horsefly just makes you bleed a little bit. The lantern fly makes you get a state permit to move your own deck furniture around. You didn't file your paper with last night. That's some next level annoyance from the fly family. Moving on. Mount Everest is two ft taller. Take that, Sir Edmund Hillary. Sometimes it doesn't a to be first kids. Everest was recognized as the tallest mountain in the world in eighteen fifty six. The actual height of the mountain was calculated at twenty nine thousand eight feet in nineteen fifty four, then twenty nine thousand thirty five ft in nineteen and if the new number is recognized, the current official height will be twenty nine thousand, thirty one feet. Well wait, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Everest in nineteen fifty three when the official height was quote tallest. Now the official height is less than the fifty four calculation. But if you calculate in subsidence or shrinkage, the fact that the land compresses over time, Hillary in Tensing may actually be first to summit and have climbed the furthest to reach the world's tallest mountain, which means Ricky Bobby was right. If you're not first, your last shake and bake, what does that do? Did that blow your mind? That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks for listening as per usual right in. Tell me what's going on in your neck of the woods. You can find me at a s k c A L. Let's ask cal at the meat eater dot com. If you're loving what you're hearing, tell a friend or two. Don't hog all this good info for yourself. Thanks again, I'll talk to you next week.

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