How Coelacanths Work

Coelacanths are incredibly interesting as far as fish go. For one, they were thought to have gone the way of the dinosaur, along with the dinosaur. They also give birth to live fish and tend to dwell more than 800 feet below the ocean's surface. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Learn all about these fascinating creatures in today's episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry, Jerome Roland, just
the whole the whole House Stuff Works gang here to

(00:22):
present to you stuff you should know, all three of us.
Are you doing good? Yeah? Yeah, Oh I'm a little caffeinated.
I should warn you a little bit, like when teeth
are about to just come right out of my face.
That's not good. Uh. You know, we did a video
about Cela Cants one time. Yeah, like was it this

(00:43):
day in history about when they were discovered. I ran
across it because it smacked is familiar to me, and
you know, the constant fear we have of recording an
entire podcast over uh is sort of always there. Yeah,
the fear that sometimes comes true. Yeah. So I definitely
went back and looked, and I was like, I new
we did something. Yeah, we were trapped in a shipping container, right.

(01:05):
I didn't watch it. I didn't either enough to say,
oh yeah I remember that. Yeah, that really weird, weird
thing we did. But this is really cool. I think
I need to Seela Cants were um, well they're interesting,
despite what the House Stuff Works article would lead you
to believe. It was. Yeah, it was a little thin,

(01:26):
was a little bit. It was all right. But luckily
the rest of the Internet is there for us. Right,
thanks especially to Smithsonian and mental Floss for this one. Right, Yeah,
that mental plus article is kind of neat, actually it was.
So you want to go back to the beginning, actually

(01:46):
the second beginning. Maybe, Well, I don't know what you're
talking about now, so just okay, Well we'll go back
to the very beginning. We'll go back to something about
four million years ago, doing the Devonian period, which is
a k a. The Rise of the Fish the Age
of the Fish, right, And in this Devonian period, there's

(02:09):
a lot a lot of stuff going on. Things have
been swimming around for a while on Earth. There's a
nice atmosphere that's developed. The things in the ocean are
starting to say, oh, what's out there? I want to
see what's on land. I want to just crawl out
and see. Yeah, I want to taste clover. So they
start trying. And during this period there was the progression

(02:32):
from the sea to the land, and one of those
things that was starting to develop legs to get onto
land was called the Ceila cant yeah, which um A
it means hollow spine, which is we'll get to there's
a reason for that. And B it's spelled c O

(02:55):
E l A c A n t h, which is uh,
you know, not how you would think it might be
spelled or pronounced rather either one. But it's sela camp.
It is sela can uh. And what it is is
a fish that is um, like you said, been around
for a long long time. It's um kind of funny looking.

(03:16):
And we'll get into all the physical characteristics that make
it unusual uh in a sec. But it is notable, uh,
mainly for the fact that everyone thought it was gone
forever until it was suddenly discovered. This thing that that
swam with the dinosaurs was discovered a new in the

(03:37):
nineteen thirties and then again a little bit later on. Yeah,
because it was it pops up for the first time
around um, four hundred and seven million years ago, I think,
I said, and and then it just drops off eighty
million years ago. So they said, well, a lot of
stuff when the way of the dinosaur around the time

(03:57):
the dinosaurs went away. Um, so that's probably what happened
to the Cela can't, so it was quite a big surprise.
In the nineteen thirties when a trawler um that was
out fishing, a trawler called the Narine which is keptain
by Hendrik Goossen off the coast of South Africa, came
in and as was Captain Goosen's want, he contacted the

(04:22):
director of the local museum in East London, woman named
Miss Marjorie Courtney Latimer, and she used to come over
and look at the fish loads this guy would bring
in because they were buddies and he's He gave her
a call like normal and said, I got to load
you want to come look at it? And she was like,
it's two days before Christmas and his blazing hot out.

(04:42):
Don't forget where in South Africa at the time, and
she's like, I don't feel like it. But the world
was saved, the world of ich theology was saved this
day because this lady Marjorie Courtney Latimer was so nice
that she decided to go look at the fish anyway,

(05:02):
just to wish the captain and his crew a merry Christmas.
So she takes a look at this fish and here
is her quote. Uh as she recounted. It wasn't her
quote at the time or quote at the time, it's
probably a South African expletive, but she said later I
picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most

(05:23):
beautiful fish I had ever seen. Uh. And of course
only a fish lover can find this thing truly beautiful,
because it's kind of ugly. It was five ft long,
a pale mauve blue with faint flecks of whitish spots
that had an iridescent silver blue green sheen all over.
It was covered in hard scales, and it had four

(05:43):
limb like fins and a strange little puppy dog tail.
Uh not literally, of course. Uh, it was such which
would be great though actually that's the dog fish that
has that. It was such a beautiful fish, more like
a big China ornament. But I didn't know what it was.
And um, it was pretty faithful that she was called

(06:04):
in uh to look at this thing, because it ended
up being one of the most important zoological finds of
you know, history, probably of the twentieth century at least
for sure. Yeah, this woman's curiosity, Um, something in her said,
this is weird, this is unusual, this is this is
something worth looking into. So she took it with her.

(06:27):
This thing was like five ft long, just under two ms,
about a hundred and how many pounds seven pounds. This
is a significant fish and uh ms, Courtney Latimer talked
her way into a cab with it. She took a
cab back to the East London Museum with this fish
stuffed in the back seat. And um, she took it

(06:49):
to the taxidermist and had it stuffed. Unfortunately, the taxidermist
wasn't completely aware of how to preserve a fish for
identification and throughout the skeleton and the gills, which to
what you need for for um the idea fish. Apparently, well,
she probably should have said something. Well she she like,

(07:09):
this is no ordinary mount. Yeah, right, she probably should have,
or maybe she did, and he just ignored her. He's like,
I'm not getta get boss dround by one. So she
contacts a guy named j. LB. Smith who is an
ich theologist. He's the head of the ichthyology department at
the university in Graham's Town and PhD in chemistry. Um,

(07:33):
he's a smart guy and he's the local fish expert
as far as she knows. Yeah, and their their pals,
and so she said, hey, I've got this. Uh, we're
looking fish. And then Smith his quote was, I told
myself sternly not to be a fool, but there was
something about that sketch uh, and apparently it was it
was sketched. She sent him a sketch of the fish

(07:54):
to begin with. Uh that seized upon my imagination and
told me that this was something very far beyond the
usual run of fishes in our seas. Uh. And luckily,
even though the fish was um um, I guess mounted
in a traditional form, which, like you said, takes away.
It's how you can identify it. She was able to
preserve some of the scales, and somehow from these scales

(08:18):
he was able to say, this is a Cola Cant
Seela canth. Well that's what he said at first, and
she was pronounce Cela can't. He's like, oh, apparently he
said when he saw that scale and I and identified
it positively as a Steela Cant. His quote was, if
I'd bet a dinosaur in the street, I wouldn't have
been more astonished. I like that guy. A little hyperbole there,

(08:40):
but I like it so he um, I mean, this
is seriously, this is like the zoological find of the
century and would be for the next sixties something years.
So he very magnanimously said, you know what, I'm going
to name this thing after you, and he named it
as a new species. Let him marry Chilumny because, um, well,

(09:04):
obviously her name is Courtney Latimer, Courtney hyphen Latimer. And
it was found in the Chilumna River at the mouth
of it where it hits the coast off the eastern
coast of South Africa. So that's a great name. It's
it's perfect. It really puts it in a place in time. Uh.
So they have now discovered this thing. They realized that

(09:27):
they have a big find on their hands. Um. They
thought this thing had long been extinct by tens of
millions of years. Uh. And so they started to research
and you know, try and learn more about this fish. Yeah,
which is no ordinary fish. No, but I mean this
was so this is right, and it was the only

(09:48):
one that had been found for another sixty years. Yeah,
I mean, there's only so much you can find from
a stuffed fish. But it did prove because it have
been caught alive. It wasn't like they pulled up a
fossil or a dead fish. It had been alive when
it was caught. Yeah, I think it was attached to
another fish, like potentially trying to eat it, which is

(10:11):
one of the uh well, not unusual but interesting things
about the Cela canth is that it's a it eats meat. Well,
there's a lot of unusual things about the Cela camp um.
So fast forward another sixty years exactly um in Indonesia,
which is on the other side of the Indian Ocean,
the eastern side of the Indian Ocean. It was actually

(10:34):
first seen in by a biologist named Mark Erdmann who
was in Indonesia doing his PhD dissertation, and he saw
a Cela cant in the market. That's crazy, that's a
sela can't what's that doing here? So apparently he put
a bit of a bounty out on it with the locals,
and within a year by they had brought him freshly

(10:55):
caught one, which is quite a task. Yeah, it's finding
a uh once thought extinct fish. Yeah, it's a big one. Well,
and we'll get to a little bit why. It's even
tougher than you would think to So the one that
Erdman found was brown, right, Yeah, it was a little
bit different color, right, the one like uh Courtney Lattimer described,

(11:19):
those are known to be like steel blue. This is
a brown a little smaller than the one that Courtney
Lattimer found. Um. And so eventually when Erdman got his
hands on that one, um, he described it as a
new species. Yeah. I mean, uh, it turns out that
at one point, um, you know, hundreds of millions of

(11:41):
years ago, there were you know, potentially over a hundred
different varieties of this fish. Uh, and they came in
all shapes and sizes. Um. These obviously were pretty big,
but there were some that were smaller and faster. Uh.
Basically just kind of a wide variety. And as far
as we know, I think are the the only two

(12:01):
known survivors, yes, so far. Yeah, the one that Corney
Latimer founder known as the West Indian Ocean Seila Cant.
Those are the blue ones, and they're typically found off
of the west, you know, the east coast of Africa,
south of Kenya. I believe, um, down to about the

(12:23):
Cormoros Islands. I think that's they're actually also known as
the Cormoros Islands Celia Cant because there's that's that seems
to be where they inhabit the most or the highest
density of them is Yeah, and UM, some of the
weird some of the weirdos that have well, we assumed
that they've been extinct, but you never know. One of

(12:44):
them was toothless, uh and over ten feet long. That
was the megalo se La canthus very appropriately, Uh, some
of them said forget you, ocean, I'm gonna go to
the freshwater. So they were actually freshwater Cela cants at
one time. And like I said, some of them were
slow and ambushed prey somewhere uh, smaller and faster. But

(13:06):
they've pretty much universally all been predators from what I've seen,
and the two species that are alive today that we
know of UM are aside from that Megalis Cela cant
um tend to be a little bigger than the the
extinct species, which UM I read is a good it's

(13:27):
a good example of why they shouldn't be called living fossils,
which is what they're frequently called. Yeah, that's Darwin's term
for something that UM basically never changed. Uh. And they've
actually studied the genome of the Cela cant and found
that they very much haven't changed and the kind of
the main reason is they haven't had to. Um, they've

(13:49):
kind of stayed in the same places. And when you
stay in the same places and you eat the same stuff,
then maybe you don't change so much. I read the
I read the opposite of that, they have changed enough
that they that they have been evolving in a good
example of that is that they're bigger than they used
to be. Interesting. Yeah, but the two species that are

(14:09):
alive today, Um, they have traced their genomes back and
decided that they've been separated for several million years at least. Yeah,
this one. Uh, they finally got the full genome and
they said that, uh, it does indeed match the fish's
appearance of slower evolution and a journal published in Nature
because they have a slower rate of substitution. Um. Basically,

(14:34):
she the doctor, well, yeah, I guess she has a doctor.
Just sounded weird to say that. The doctor the researcher
who was also a doctor, who was she said it
may reflect the fact that they do not need to
evolve quickly because they've lived in relatively unchanging environment whe
there are a few predators. Uh, and they basically haven't

(14:54):
needed to change over time like other organisms. Well, that
brings up another thing too, there's a there's a big
why would they just drop off of the fossil record
if they've been around this whole time, if they didn't
just go extinct eighty or sixty five million years ago.
The um only explanation I've seen is that the places
where the fossils turned up where areas conducive to fossilization,

(15:16):
Like there was a lot of sentiment that could turn
bone into rock. And then the areas that the living
uh species live at now are not conducive to that
kind of thing, possibly because they're mostly living around volcanic
rock that doesn't necessarily produce fossils. You want to take
a break, Yeah, let's take a break and we'll get
back and talk a little bit about this funny fish.

(16:00):
All right, So we talked a little bit about what
makes the Celo camp such a interesting critter. Um. Can
a critter be a fish? Yeah? Have you heard of
the cuttle fish? That's a critter? If there ever was
a cuddly critter. Uh So, here are some remarkable things
about the Cela camp um. They can live as deep

(16:20):
I mean, they're deep water dwellers. They can live as
deep as two thousand or more feet, but generally, uh,
they think the UM I think they generally live about
five eight hundred feet and what they call the twilight zone,
which is still pretty deep. That Remember our cave episode, Yeah,
UM that had the same thing. Remember there was like

(16:42):
organisms that live in the dark, organisms that live in
the twilight zone, and organisms that live in the lighted zone. Yeah,
these guys live in that threshold between light and dark
in the ocean. And they um apparently are nocturnal hunters. Yeah,
they come out at night, Uh, kind of stay hidden.
Most of these habitats are are caves, right that they

(17:05):
tend to stay in. But there's one off of Tasmania
that do not live in caves, and so they have
officially been placed on an endangered list because they don't
have the protection from bycatch that these other cave dwellers have.
That makes sense, Yeah, so they the average day in
the life of a cila can't at least the cave

(17:27):
dwelling UM species. They they'll you know, the during the daytime,
they're hanging out in a cave. They'll hang out in
a cave with I've seen between up the twelve to sixteen.
Other Ceila cants have coffee. Yeah, maybe just talk, you know,
talk about their night and then as nightfalls, they'll leave
their caves and they'll they'll go hunting. And like you said,

(17:48):
their um carnivorous predators. Um, they do that passive by
catch thing for the most part right where they let
the the current bring the food to them. But they
just basically hang out and wait for a cuttle fish.
It's one thing. They eat squids, other cephalopods, some fishes,

(18:11):
but they seem to not um show aggression towards one
another from what I understand. Yeah, and um, while they
are passive hunters, they do have an unusual feature which is,
like we said, one of many. But they have what's
called a rostral organ, which just means it's in the
nasal region and their snout uh, and it's filled with
a jellylike substance that they think uh. And they think

(18:35):
most of this stuff. I mean, they've done a lot
of good studying, but for something so rare, you can't
you know, be super sure. But they think that it
detects low level electrical signals and frequencies from prey. Yeah,
like a shark or array. Yeah, it's an electrosensory organ
where when living tissue contacts water, it can make an
electrical impulse that can be picked up. Yeah, and this

(18:58):
cool mental floss articles at eleven um eleven things about
the sea. Look ant, I can't remember how it was put,
but just eleven interesting features, eleven fishy facts. Unfortunately that's
why I forgot it, uh title aside, it's an interesting article.
And um. One of the things that they don't know

(19:20):
why they do, and I have a feeling it has
to do with that electrical frequency, is they will swim
nose down, um for up to two full minutes, which
is weird for a fish. It just kind of hovering
in place, headstanding, right, Yeah, and I guess I mean
if they have that nasal uh bag of a jelly
that helps them locate fish, I would imagine that's what

(19:42):
they're doing there, right. I imagine it like tonto, like
holding a railroad track, you know. Yeah, I think it's
the same thing basically. So um, when they catch their prey,
they eat them, and they can eat stuff that's way
bigger than them because I again, which is this is
um unique to see the cants among living things They

(20:06):
have a hinge in their cranium that allows basically their
head is convertible. The top of their skull can retract,
allowing their mouth to open really wide, so they can
eat a large, large cuttle fish. Yeah. And I think
the that feature also allows it to uh, their mouth
to close with like much greater force with extreme prejudice. Yeah,

(20:28):
like when it's unhinged um emotionally and physically, it can
really close that mouth, uh, super hard. They hate themselves
for eating cuttle so I just can't stop. So those
are just a couple of the features. Another is um
and we mentioned earlier that the name literally translates into

(20:48):
hollow spine. Uh. This is because they have what's called
a noo chord, which is a hollow pressurized tube filled
with oil where a lot of fish start this way
and then they'll eventually get a spine. But this doesn't
go away, right, And not just fish vertebrates apparently, um,
there's a lot of mammals that go through this, I

(21:09):
think possibly even humans. In the embryo and the sela
cancer says, I'm good with the noto coorse, I'm gonna
stick here, I'm gonna stop here, which is strange. It
is strange. You want to hear some more stranges. I
could do this all day. Well, it's a strange fish.
Cela canth um. We don't quite understand how they reproduce,
and the reason why is because males don't seem to

(21:34):
have any sex parts. They don't have junk. They think
possibly males grow it when they need it, but it's otherwise,
it's it's not around to growers. They're not showers right exctly,
that's exactly right. So we have no idea how they reproduce,
but we know that the um the mode of reproduction

(21:55):
is called uh ovo viviparity, which is how for the
eggs that the female has get fertilized. Once they're fertilized,
they just state or the eggs developed in the female,
and then they hatch in the female, and then the
live fishes continue to just date. Oh and like the

(22:18):
whole period last like three years before they're born. So
they go from egg to being hatched to being born
within a three year period. And so apparently this does
not make the mom Cela can't very happy, and sometimes
she will try to eat her newborn pups. So supposedly

(22:40):
Cela can't pups, that's what they're called. Can dive really deep,
very quickly the moment they're born to get away from mom,
to get away from their mom, who's like three years
three years paging Dr Freud. Yeah, uh yeah, I think
sharks maybe the only other uh fish that give the

(23:00):
live little ones? Is that right? I mean most fish
lay eggs, right, so that it's definitely unusual. Yeah, it's
it may not be new unique. Um. But the other
thing about their their sexy time is there's also a
theory that, um, they are monogamousts. In a German team. Um,

(23:25):
they had a couple of corpses of too pregnant. Um.
I believe that the African version, yeah, the Ladimir chlumni
and uh because what was I remember the other one?
It was Ladimir something else. For the Indonesian version, we'll
just go with that for now. I was practicing pronouncing
it Latimer menadoensis. Okay, wow, thanks. Uh. So they analyze

(23:50):
these two pregnant ladies, unfortunately that we're no longer with us,
and they found out that they had like most definitely
had a single father, which they said was unusual because
one of them had twenty six little baby pups inside
of her, right, and they um, they thought at first, well,

(24:11):
maybe it's because the Cela cant is so rare that
the female wouldn't have opportunity to mate with more than
one male. And they said, well wait a minute, well no,
not necessarily, once they found out that they stayed to
hang out together. Yeah, in caves all day long. What
else are you gonna do? Once general hospitals over just
looking around and everybody like, whoa, what do you want

(24:32):
to do? Yeah, that's a good point. All right, Well
let's uh ponder that and take another break, and uh
we'll finish up with even more interesting things about the
ceila cant. Yeah, alright, so these guys have live babies.

(25:08):
They might mate with a single mate. Good day. They
have they can unhinge their jaw to eat more. They
have a jelly filled thing in there, nostra that the
that the texts electricity, The texts electricity. I know I'm
having trouble thing to text. Uh what else? This is

(25:31):
sort of a recap. They have oil filled spine, oil
filled spine, and they're they're just good with They're like,
I don't need a real spine. This one is my favorite.
They were long thought to be the missing link between
fishes and the tetrapods, which are land dwelling four limbed animals. Yeah,
because a notable thing I don't think we mentioned yet

(25:53):
is this thing has well, I think I didn't a
quote from miss Ladimir Courtney Ladimir, but they have four
are fins that smooth, sort of like you would think
legs would move if a fish could swim out onto
the beach. Legs and arms. Remember how Shaggy walked in
Scooby Doo, Just like that. That's basically how a ceila

(26:14):
can't swims. And the fact that they're their fins are
suspiciously arm like in appearance just made people think that
even more. What's more, their arms, what are called lobes,
are attached by a bone that is compared to the
humorous in humans. So a lot of people said, well,

(26:34):
that's it. It's a missing link. The cela can't is
a missing link between the fish and the land dwelling
four limbed animals. And apparently once the genome came around
and said now a little disappointing, they said, yes, we're
all related. Technically, we are all um what are known
as sarcopterygians okay um, which means we are fleshy limb vertebrates.

(27:02):
So we're all that. So we are related, but it's
not like our direct ancestor. In fact, we're more closely
related to the lungfish than the seila can'ts. But the
seila can'ts holds this place of honors, probably living on
something of its own branch uh and is a very
close cousin, if not bro, of the lung fish. So

(27:22):
we're related by marriage right to the seal It can't say,
but we legally we probably could marry a sela can't
and have it not be super creepy except for the
thet it's a fish. I feel it's a fleshy, lobed
thin stroking the back of your head as you kiss it.
I got something for you that was I'm just walking

(27:44):
right past that one. Um. They taste gross, so don't
think it's some weird delicacy, right, uh not? You know
that there are that many of them to eat, But
apparently if you do eat them, they can make you
sick because these things are filled with urea, with oil,
with wax, esther and fat like ninety eight point five

(28:08):
percent fat. That's just in its skull. Oh I thought
that was the whole body. No, it's it's brain occupies
one point five of the area inside its skull. The
other is fat. And that's at the point that they're
an adult, right. Yeah. Supposedly their brains are bigger proportionately

(28:29):
when they're younger, and they just stay there. Yeah, they're
frozen in uh, perpetual like I guess toddler hood pretty much.
They love life. Yeah, no responsibilities, no bills, exactly. What
else I got one for you? Okay. Vestigial lungs Oh yeah, man,

(28:54):
I love these things. So they grow, They had CT
scans done and this is from the mental flass article
of these embryos, and they start growing little lungs uh
early in the gestation period and it slows down a bit,
and then by the time they're an adult, the organ

(29:15):
serves no purpose. Yeah, it's just there. Yep, that's a
good one. It is. It was. It's almost like the
Cela canth was an attempt and evolutionary attempt, and it's
just like, I'm gonna scrap this design. Let's move on
to the long fish. Yeah maybe so you know, um,

(29:37):
one of the things that struck me though, Chuck, was
when they were talking about how a couple of females
that had fully formed young yeah in them, ready to
be born, were caught. It's like that was a lot
of the Cela canth population that got wiped out with
those two caught fish. Yeah. I mean, if there are
only hundreds, then everyone matters. Yeah. They think that there's

(29:59):
possibly about a th thousand of the ones that live
around Indonesia and far fewer of the ones that live
off of the west coast of Africa on the western
side of the Indian Ocean. Um. And as a result,
both of them are on the Endangered Species list. They're
both protected. The problem is that if something happens to

(30:23):
these species and these species die out this time, the
whole order is gone, um for good this time around. Yeah,
unless we revive them, uh with some of their DNA. Alright,
I got one last one um And this was on
Mental Flosses list as well, under the title A prominent

(30:45):
hematologist once wrote a celacanth operetta A right, So that's
an attention grabber. Apparently there was a man named Charles
Rand of Long Guideland University, and he was a hematologist,
and um was doing some work with the Cela Camp
and uh, this is when the big revelation was. They

(31:06):
learned that it gave birth to live young. And he,
I guess, was a music guy and decided to write
a little operetta about this discovery titled a Cila Camp's
Lament or Quinn Tuplets at fifty fathoms can be fun
all song to the tune of various Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Right,

(31:32):
that's a hematologist for you. I have no comment on that. Well,
I mean it speaks for itself other than I wish
this was on tape somewhere. Surely it's on YouTube. Everything's
on YouTube, you think, yeah, sure, you want to go
over some of these other quote living fossils end quote Yeah, Um,
so again there was there's some fishes out there that

(31:56):
may have made the jump kinda to land or on
most did or what have you. But there's there's some
interesting fishes that are worth mentioning. Speaking of making the jump,
did you see that shark that jumped into the boat
the other day? There was a fisherman, Uh, and I
guess the shark just did you know one of their
famous uh it was a great white did one of

(32:17):
its breeches where they just jump out of the water.
Missing did that and landed in a dude's fishing boat. Uh.
And he got banged around a little bit but was
not like, you know, a bitten or anything, and basically
went into his little control room I think, and called
for help. And this shark like, I mean, it was
kind of sad. I think the shark just died. But

(32:37):
there were pictures of it. It's it's huge, it's like
eight ft long. It was not a little guy. Yeah,
do you imagine? No, Oh my god, that guy did
the right thing. He ran. He pooped his pants too. Yeah.
I may have jumped into the water had that happened. Alright.
So living fossils um, the bow fin, yeah, the dog fish,

(32:58):
mudfish or grindel I like dog fish. Yeah, this guy,
I looked all these up, lily. He lives in the
Mississippi River basin, in the Great Lakes and other places. Um,
and are pretty mean supposedly like eats small mammals, snakes, frogs,
other fish like they'll they'll go after you. Um. It's

(33:20):
sort of normal looking, just sort of a long fish. Uh.
Nothing remarkable as appearance wise, though, I'll tell you one
that's remarkable appearance wises. The gar. Yeah, you know, I
just saw a long nosegar so ugly last weekend and
I was like, it was floating dead in a lake.
I was like, what in the world. Because I went

(33:42):
by it at first, I was like, was that a swordfish? Like, well, no,
it's not a swordfish. But in the long nose ones,
I mean this this thing had a he had a
twelve inch beak. I mean it looks prehistoric. Yeah, they
very much do look prehistoric, which is one of the
reasons why they're called a living fossil um. And they
are just mean. Apparently they're known to kill other fish,

(34:04):
even not even to eat them, just because they were
in their way. Basically, like you see this nose. Yeah,
and you can't eat gar. They're inedible and as a
matter of fact, if you eat their eggs, it will
kill you. They're very toxic to humans and they just
go around killing other fish, So they're not the best
thing to have in your like if you like to
fish in a lake. No, and they did you ever

(34:26):
see Vernon, Florida the documentary? No, I've never seen that one.
By the great Errol Morris. It has uh one of
the interviews, it's one of my favorites, as with a
guy talking about talking about the garfish. Really, yeah, I
gotta see that one. Come across one of those. Oh boy,
I finally saw a thin blue line for the first time.
Oh yeah, that's a good one. It's really You probably

(34:46):
saw it after the parody of documentary Now, I definitely did.
I saw the documentary now on which they nailed like,
it's like perfect. They really one of the great shows. Uh,
what's the next? Hagfish? Yeah, mud dwellers. Yeah, they basically
look like eels, but their fish. But the interesting thing
about hag fish, aside from the fact that they don't

(35:07):
have any eyes, is that they eat fish from the
inside out. Yeah. I think you underplayed it when he
said they basically look like eels. It looks like something
out of Dune. Okay, like the body looks like an eel.
But have you seen the front end of this thing? Sure,
it's frightening. And to think about that crawling up in
you and eating you from the inside out, right, because

(35:29):
if you're dead or dying fish and you're like, oh man,
I hope, I hurry up and die before a hagfish
five and a hagfish swims down your throat and then
eat you from the inside out. That's a bad day.
That's not a good death. And then lastly, what about
the sturgeon. I love the sturgeon. Did you know that
they they are both freshwater and saltwater here in North America?

(35:53):
I did not know that, But um, I know one
thing is they're huge. Yeah, they get up to like
twenty ft long. Yeah, and I didn't I didn't see
any pictures of him that big, but I've seen pictures
of fishermen with like sturgeon that looked like they're at
least eight or nine feet long. Uh. And they're crazy looking. Yeah. Well,
the reason I was surprised that they are largely North

(36:13):
America's I always associate them with, um, the Baltic area
where they they're the beluga sturgeon is prized for its
caviar I always think of, I think sturgeon. No, I
didn't realize that that's where bluga came from either. Uh.
And they have armor like skin, and they're they're these
retractable mouths that I guess there are different varieties, but

(36:34):
some of them look almost like alligators from like the
head forward. Yeah, they're weird looking fish. Yeah, but they
don't want to hurt anybody. They just want you to
eat their eggs. Is that true? They're like the giving
tree of the lake. All right, up with sturgeon? Uh
you anything else? I got nothing else? But if you
want to know more about living fossils, like uh, you

(36:56):
know Cela, cants or us Right, you can type those
words in the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
And since I said search farts, time for a listener mail.
I'm gonna call this My mom married Bob Doro. You
see that one, right? And I thought it was because

(37:17):
that was the subject line. And then the very first
line of the email was sorry about that attention grabbing
subject line. And I thought it was a lie because
a lot of times people say something remarkable in the
subject line that is completely false, which always ticks me off.
But this is true. Uh, my mom married the wonderful,
talented and sweet Bob Doro twenty three years ago. And uh,

(37:40):
if you didn't listen to the show, Bob Dora was
um part of the genius behind Schoolhouse Rock. Um, maybe
you know the original genius. It was wonderful to hear
you two speak so highly of them in your recent podcast.
My own family listens to you guys a lot, so
to hear you speak of our Bob with such reverence
it warmed our hearts. Whence you meant? You mentioned earlier
in your podcast that you wished you could have gotten

(38:02):
Bob on the show. I wanted to jump through my
phone to say I can make that happen. Bob learned
about you guys about two weeks ago when we took
a short road trip for Mother's Day and listen to
the grave Robbing episode. Um, how awesome is that? I
know the guy listen to us right before we released
the Schoolhouse Rock episode. Yeah, it's primed and ready to

(38:23):
hear us mention it fortuitous, huh. He chuckled off, and
during the ride, and when we got to our destination,
he asked something to the effect of who are those
comedy guys? They're good man. That made me feel good. Uh,
And then to have the Schoolhouse Rock episode pop up
a few weeks later, it was like whoa. You guys
were spot on in your characterization of Bob as a
creative genius. A lot of his genius comes from his

(38:45):
hard work. The age of ninety three, he is still
traveling the world taking gigs. Uh. My mom often complains
that he doesn't know how to say no. Thank you
for giving Bob and schoolhouse rockets proper due. Next time
you come up the coast the northeast, that is will
be there and I'm sure Bob won't say no. And
that's from Pete. Uh, I guess his stepson and um

(39:07):
Pete sending a picture of Pee and Bob and that's
him in the flesh. It's pretty awesome, pretty neat uh.
And you should go to www dot Bob do O
d O r O U g h dot com and
just check it out. Fanny three and going strong, Nice going, Bob.
Thanks for listening to us, and thank you Pete for
writing in to let us know that we were spot

(39:29):
on about what a great guy he is. Yeah, we
were genuinely thrilled to hear this. If you want to
genuinely thrill us, you can tweet to us at s
Y s K podcast or I'm at josh um Clark.
You can hang out with us on Facebook dot com
slash stuff you Should Know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us

(39:51):
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff Works dot com MHM