Ep. 793: The Mysteries of Gar Fish

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast — Ep. 793: The Mysteries of Gar Fish

Host: Steve Rinella
Guest: Dr. Solomon David, Aquatic Ecologist, “The Gar Guy”
Date: November 17, 2025

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Overview

In this deeply engaging episode, Steve Rinella dives into the misunderstood world of gar fish and "rough fish" with Dr. Solomon David, an aquatic ecologist who specializes in fish biodiversity and conservation. The conversation tackles the cultural baggage around native fishes like gar, bowfin, and buffalo, exposes the roots and consequences of the "rough fish" label, and spotlights current efforts to rethink and regulate the management of overlooked native species. The episode blends science, conservation, angling, and history with a hearty dose of humor, lore, and hands-on fish tales.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Who is Dr. Solomon David and What is GAR Lab?

[02:47, 11:16]

• Dr. Solomon David is an aquatic ecologist and assistant professor who runs the GAR Lab. The lab started out studying gars but now includes other ancient and migratory non-game fishes, like bowfins and buffalo.
• GAR Lab’s mission: Use underappreciated fish to understand ecology, evolution, fisheries management, and to communicate freshwater biodiversity's value.
• GAR Lab has expanded beyond just gars, akin to how the Big Ten conference has more than ten schools:

  “GAR Lab started with GAR, but, you know, now we're expanding.” — Solomon David [11:17]

• There are only seven gar species, so the lab broadened its focus.
• Funding for non-game fish work is limited compared to game species; much more research focuses on trout, bass, and salmon.

2. “Rough Fish,” “Trash Fish,” and the Language of Fish Value

[03:34, 07:29, 15:13]

• The term rough fish originated in the 19th century from commercial fishing — “less valuable” fish that were gutted but not filleted and often discarded.
• In the Midwest, “rough fish” are those with little to no regulation and easy harvest; this includes many native species that were culturally important.

  “We were using [‘rough fish’] as a catch-all for non-game, unregulated fish... but some fragile native fish get rolled into this category of trash fish and get laid waste.” — Steve Rinella [09:49]

• The label contributes to underprotection, wanton waste, and ecological ignorance.

  “We value some fish more than others... It gets kind of foggy—it is more of a colonial perspective.... People hadn't seen a gar before North America. And they're looking at this—'We can't fillet this like a walleye or a trout.'” — Solomon David [16:30]

3. Historical and Indigenous Use of Gar and Bowfin

[18:20, 19:23]

• Native Americans ate gar and bowfin; gar scales were used for arrowheads, jewelry, and even plow linings by settlers due to their toughness.

  “You find arrowheads that were made out of gar scales... those scales are basically made out of tooth enamel. That's the hardest substance our bodies produce.” — Solomon David [18:41]

• Bowfin is still eaten in places like Louisiana, where it’s known as “shoe pick.” Its flesh quickly turns mushy, so it must be quickly processed after harvesting.

  “They call them cotton fish, because the flesh turns to mush... you gotta process them as quickly as you can. And it was delicious.” — Solomon David [20:10]

4. Gar Biology 101: Species, Age, and "Living Fossils"

[14:00, 22:18, 23:27]

• North America’s gar species: Alligator, spotted, shortnose, longnose, Florida, Cuban, and tropical gar.
• Alligator gar is the largest (can exceed 8'), a true "destination fish" in Texas—catch and release has built its popularity.
• Gars have ancient evolutionary lineage (fossils 150 million years old); they’ve hardly changed since the Jurassic—hence “living fossils”.

  “If you look at a fossil gar and a living gar, they basically look the same.” — Solomon David [22:35]

• “Living fossil” is an imprecise term; evolutionary biologists bristle, but gars truly have a slow molecular clock.

5. Conservation Headaches: Bowfishing, Regulation, and Identity

[45:49, 50:44, 51:30]

• Poorly regulated bowfishing disproportionately impacts native predators like gar and buffalo.

  “You want to shoot something, shoot carp, shoot invasive species, shoot as many as you want... but the gars, there's fewer of them... when you take out a large number of these predatory animals that also live for a long time...” — Solomon David [67:03]

• Minnesota is pioneering regulation: differentiating between native “rough fish” and invasive fish, enacting harvest regulations and penalties for wanton waste.

  “Minnesota, very recently in 2024, enacted the most comprehensive native fish conservation bill, putting it into law, where they did one of the first things of separating common carp from the other native non-game fish.” — Solomon David [51:30]

• States resist stricter regs, claiming anglers/bowfishers “can’t tell the difference” between carp and buffalo.

  “How can you expect someone to tell a carp from a buffalo? I don't know, how do you expect them to tell a widgeon from a gadwall?” — Steve Rinella [50:53]

6. Gar Life History and Ecology

[36:08, 38:07, 40:19]

• Alligator gar can be over 100 years old; 100-pounders are typically several decades old.
• Gar eggs are poisonous to mammals, birds, and crustaceans—not to fish.

  “Gar eggs are poisonous... not toxic to fish, but will kill the crawfish, will kill the birds.” — Solomon David [41:55, 122:21]

• Gars switch to eating fish early and can cannibalize.
• Alligator gars can tolerate salt water but need fresh floodplains to spawn, relying on seasonal overflows to access terrestrial vegetation for egg-laying.

  “They need that big flood pulse and you don’t get those big floods every year, so they have to take advantage.” — Solomon David [37:04]

7. Fisheries Management Parallels and Solutions

[47:26, 76:32]

• Fish management lags behind birds/mammals in regulatory rigor, especially for non-game/frequently maligned native fish.
• The “Rinella Solution”: States should clearly categorize and regulate fish as native or non-native/invasive—native fish should have limits and protections.

  “Native fish have bag limits... You’re obligated to tell all kinds of shit [apart] in hunting. Why not with fish?” — Steve Rinella [50:44]

• "Protection" should be framed as "regulatory structure" to avoid negative public reaction.

  “Don’t use the word protection... people are going to hear ‘protection’ and their heads are gonna go in a certain direction. Regulatory structure." — Steve Rinella [75:02]

8. Science, Stakeholders, and Social Change

[119:42]

• Unlike trout or ducks, there’s no national “GAR Unlimited.” Dr. David relies on state funds, partnerships, and grassroots organizations for research.

  “As far as a definite NGO, nobody... we apply for state grants... there’s Native Fish for Tomorrow, which is a non-profit group promoting these fish, but we’re all kind of cobbled together.” — Solomon David [119:42]

• Collaboration with anglers and bowfishers is growing; research and outreach are pushing more sustainable management.
• Freshwater aquariums like Tennessee Aquarium and Shedd Aquarium (some of Dr. David’s old lab gars!) are praised for showcasing native “rough fish” and educating the public.

9. Global Gar: Invasions and Food Fish

[88:23, 93:52]

• US game fish—not rough fish—are the ones “wreaking havoc” as invasives abroad.
• Alligator gar have appeared in Southeast Asia and India via aquarium releases but aren’t yet self-sustaining populations.
• In Mexico and Cuba, gar are prized food fish; in Tabasco, Mexico, they’re farmed for restoration and local consumption.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “A gar comes into a bar. Bartender says, why the long face?” — Steve Rinella [04:29]
• “Some fish... change at a faster rate than others. Walleye changed faster... Gars have a very slow evolutionary rate.” — Solomon David [23:27]
• “Management is about limiting wanton waste and setting bag limits, not ending bowfishing.” — Solomon David [52:32]
• “The ecological difference? Carp are everywhere. Mechanical removal doesn’t matter. Gars, fewer population, top-level predators—it absolutely can matter.” — Steve Rinella & Solomon David [65:53, 66:38]
• “Buffalo can live for 100+ years... Some introduced in 1917 are still alive today.” — Solomon David [107:58, 108:46]
• “I got a long line of bow fishermen. My father was a bow fisherman. That’s about the extent.” — Steve Rinella [63:23]
• [On gar conservation PR]

  “If I was in your shoes, I would be talking about putting a regulatory structure in place... like all the other stuff.” — Steve Rinella [75:02]

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• [02:47] — Introducing Solomon David & GAR Lab
• [07:29] — Origins and definition of “rough fish”
• [16:20] — European and Indigenous perspectives on gar and bowfin
• [22:18] — Gar as “living fossils” & evolutionary context
• [36:32] — Alligator gar longevity, growth, and habitat
• [45:49] — Catch-and-release bowfishing and conservation issues
• [51:30] — Minnesota’s new fish conservation law
• [66:38] — Gar vs. carp population impacts from fishing
• [76:32] — Advocacy for regulation (not “protection”) of native rough fish
• [93:52] — Gar’s role as a food fish in Mexico/Cuba, aquaculture
• [108:46] — 100-year-old buffalo and aging research
• [119:42] — What’s funding rough fish research? The “no Gar Unlimited” problem
• [125:55] — Favorite aquariums for native fish outreach

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Additional Insights and Science Nerd-outs

• Gar hybridization: Alligator and longnose gar can hybridize despite diverging over 100 million years ago, suggesting incredibly slow evolutionary change and possibly unique DNA repair mechanisms with biomedical value. [105:09]
• Gar eggs are highly toxic to many taxa, but not to fish. [122:21]
• Gar in folk technology: Scales used as arrowheads, skin used on plows. [125:20]
• Ice fishing for gar: Under-ice gar confirmed in Minnesota; metabolism slows, but they’re active. [96:40]
• Collaboration with anglers: Data collected from bow or rod-caught gar; community science is welcome. [80:58, 134:07]

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Conclusion & Further Engagement

This episode is a compelling, frequently hilarious, and thoroughly educational journey into the world of underappreciated fish. The passionate case is made for ditching outdated prejudices, managing native fishes with the same care as “game” species, and deepening ecological knowledge and respect. Dr. David encourages listeners to contribute gar sightings and stories to garlab.org—helping fill knowledge gaps and supporting conservation.

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How to Connect or Learn More

• GAR Lab: garlab.org | Social Media: @TheGARLab
• Native Fish for Tomorrow: Grassroots advocacy for native fish conservation

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For the Curious

• Want to try gar cuisine? Heads up: clean promptly, ditch the eggs, and bring tin snips.
• Have a gar story or specimen? Reach out to the GAR Lab!
• Kids love gar: They’re a touch tank favorite and a great Angler Gateway species.

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Transcript

[Steve Rinella]

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[Steve]

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[Solomon David]

I mean, I'm in that too as well.

[Steve]

But then I realized this Gic park.

[Solomon David]

Why not both Steve, going to get into that?

[Steve]

We're going to get into this. That's going to be my first question, but I don't want to ask it yet. Solomon David is a aquatic ecologist and assistant professor. Works on fish biodiversity, conservation, science, communication, and runs the GAR Lab. It's like a colloquial term. GAR Lab focuses on the ecology of migratory and ancient fishes and how that research can help us better understand and conserve aquatic ecosystems. Additional projects involve conservation of Great Lakes migratory fishes. I'm assuming you mean the. The native ones.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Ancient sport fish, eg, Gars, bow fins. We're going to talk about what that means. Insert. We're going to talk about terms rough fish, trash fish, how those terms aren't really doing the best. They're doing a little bit of a disservice to some fish species. I'm going to call for, you know. You know, Brody does the indefensible law thing. I'm going to call for a new law, and I'm going to tell you why people think it's a bad idea. And then I'm going to refute that and explain why it's actually not why it's good. It'll be, how could people tell the difference? And I'll say, between a game and that's what'll happen. And I'll say, I don't know. How can we. How can they tell the difference on ducks? Why was that? Okay, that's what I'm going to use on them people. No one knows what I'm talking about yet because I haven't said it yet. I know exactly what you're talking about. You know where I'm going with this? It's a fish, so I'm going with this.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Oh, here's a good one. A gar. A gar comes into a bar. Bartender says, why the long face?

[Solomon David]

Classic.

[Steve]

I didn't make that up. It's in my notes. Is that your joke?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I kind of.

[Steve]

You made that up?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, for the most part. Other people have. It's crowdsourcing, too. So, you know, people do the puns for me these days, but got it started off artisanal.

[Steve]

I'm holding in my hand an alligator gar. We're going to talk about alligator gars, too. And I read the thing that Corinne put down that I had no idea about. Don't answer this yet. You can answer, like, a little bit.

[Solomon David]

All right.

[Steve]

I had no idea the alligator guys were up in Louisiana or up in Illinois.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, They're Trying to bring them back. They used to be had no idea. Damn.

[Steve]

I think of that as like strictly like East Texas, Louisiana. No idea.

[Brody]

That's almost an ice fishing state.

[Spencer]

And they even go further than Illinois.

[Steve]

Yeah, we're going to talk about that. I didn't know any of that. We're going to talk a little bit about buffalo. Not the animal, the fish. Yep, we're going to talk about the fish.

[Solomon David]

Buffalo.

[Steve]

Here's what, here's what, here's how this whole thing came to be. There was an article like I can't, you know, I, I can't police everything that happens. I can't police everything now a little bit. I'm going to complain about you.

[Solomon David]

Fair enough.

[Steve]

I'm going to praise you and complain about you.

[Solomon David]

Sounds about right.

[Steve]

There was an article on our website on themeeater.com and it was a bow fishing article and it used terms like rough fish as a catch all which. As a catch all like. And we were using that like we didn't say trash fish as a kid. We used rough fish meaning non game fish, unregulated fish. So if you had. If I was going to categorize, and I think most people in the country would understand what I'm talking about here. If I was going to categorize fish like in the most basic general terms would be. Someone might be familiar with this lingo. Game fish, okay. Which would be like regulated fish that people sport fish for. Then there'd be a fish that they don't really have a word for, but it's like the no touch fish in my area. Sturgeon. Okay. Growing up Michigan be like, no one would call a sturgeon a rough fish. But they're not a game fish. They're like a no touch fish. And then rough fish would mean any fish that there's no regulatory structure in place, no closed season, no bag limit and method of take would be least regulated. And that's kind of what you would use the term for. It didn't mean you didn't want it, it didn't mean you didn't eat it. It just meant like wide open shad cart.

[Brody]

You want to hear the origin of the rough fish term?

[Steve]

Hell yes.

[Brody]

Man originated in mid to late 8 19th century commercial fishing practices to describe less valuable fish that were rough dressed, gutted but not flayed, and often discarded from riverboats to, to reduce weight and prevent spoilage.

[Steve]

Go back to the rough dress. That's great. Yeah.

[Brody]

Gutted but not filleted.

[Steve]

That's what that comes from.

[Brody]

And then it evolved into.

[Steve]

I'll buy that. Yeah, I was thinking about that this morning. Well, I wasn't showering.

[Brody]

I thought it was like, I thought it was a term that came from like England.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. I mean they've got a term over there. I mean they use rough fish in a different context. It's not as. What are they negative as it here? What's that?

[Steve]

Oh, they use, they use it.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

But they fish for. They like name their carp.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, carp are native to parts of Europe too. So, you know. But yeah, it's like with the. Here when they had the riverboats and they had the fully dressed fish, so that was filleted, the fish that had higher value. And then you've got the rough dressed fish which just had the guts taken out. And then when they had to make it, you know, to market in time and navigate shallow waters and hot summers, they had to discard some of the catch. And so they ditch the rough dressed fish. That's first of all. And they kept the, you know, the fully dressed fish.

[Steve]

Where was I?

[Solomon David]

Oh.

[Steve]

So we had this article come out and, and, and Solomon took a front. He wrote a mean email.

[Solomon David]

I think the email was gentlest email.

[Steve]

He wrote a mean email being like you're just contributing to the negativity. You're taken away from fish conservation, not respecting fish. Right. I'm on your mean email.

[Solomon David]

It's a. I mean that's.

[Steve]

I hope you all go to hell and die.

[Solomon David]

That was in the postscript. That was the P.S. yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

That's how he ended it. I hope you go to hell and die. And he offered, he said sometime we should get together and talk about some of these issues. Now I trust I haven't looked, but I trust you wrote very flattering, nice emails when we published things like GAR recipes.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Okay. Yeah, we didn't dig those up. But no, in all fairness, in all fairness, Solomon David, the Gar guy wrote in saying, talking about a lot of his work doing with native fish that get from, from the perspective of like guys that grow up, bow fishing guys that grow up whatever that they get a lot of these fragile native fish get kind of rolled into this category of trash fish or this category of rough fish. And we have these very loose regulatory structures and people think they're out doing the world a favor by getting carp, like non native carp out of a system or whatever. They think they're doing the world a favorite. And meanwhile they are also unknowingly or knowingly laying waste to like, pretty sensitive native fish and throwing them up on the bank and thinking that they're somehow helping the world out. And it's like people. It's time for people to get a little bit more of a nuanced perspective of what fish are in their waterways. And I would argue it's time to get a little smarter about how we regulate these things. Let's start out. There's a lot of folks here, so we're gonna take turns asking questions. Let's start out by what? What? Tell people what the GAR Lab is.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Steve]

And within that. I got it. There's a second question.

[Solomon David]

All right.

[Steve]

Aren't you making the same mistake? Because you're saying garlab, but you're talking about stuff besides GAR, right. So you're lumping everybody into a GAR.

[Solomon David]

Well, Steve, if you look at the Big Ten Conference, okay, are we more than 10 teams now? It's. It's more of a name you've already lost, you know. Well, you know, you're. You're Michigan, right? You know, we're. Now. Yeah, yeah. It's not 10. It's like 18 teams now. So stupid. You know, gotta. It's more than it.

[Steve]

We work straight, honest.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

You knew that. I knew that. I didn't know.

[Solomon David]

I didn't know 10 years. I didn't know how many exactly, but I knew the Big Ten was.

[Brody]

I went to Penn State, which was the first school that made the Big Ten more than 10 teams.

[Spencer]

There's also a conference called the Big 12. That's not 12, right?

[Steve]

Yeah, I'll look it up later. I don't know if I buy it. I don't know if I believe it for sure.

[Solomon David]

So big 10 started with 10. GAR lab started with GAR.

[Steve]

No, I understand.

[Solomon David]

But, you know, now we're expanding.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Solomon David]

There's a lot of non game, native fish that, you know, we want to.

[Steve]

Work on, but it started out working on gar.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's still the flagship group. Yeah.

[Steve]

So talk about the scope of the GAR Lab.

[Solomon David]

Right? So we want to use these sort of native, non game fish, these underappreciated fish to answer questions about ecology, evolution, sustainable management, just informing our understanding of conservation of aquatic ecosystems and also increasing our knowledge and also sort of sharing the value of freshwater biodiversity. So it's kind of a multifaceted thing. We use a small group of fish. I mean, there's only seven species of gars, which is why we figured we had to expand now. But in order to show that, you know, you can look at things like fisheries management, conservation, native fish angling and consumption from just looking at some of these species. People been working on trout and walleye for ages. That stuff is being done. It's been done. So this is kind of a lot of money there. Yeah, yeah. There's. There's a lot more money there than there is in Gar and Bofin. Yeah. Funding.

[Steve]

Funding on Gar and Bowen works.

[Solomon David]

Got to be a. Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Solomon David]

We're trying to get by.

[Steve]

There's no, like, gar fishermen of. Of Michigan.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

You know.

[Brody]

Yeah. But I feel like alligator gar have a good PR thing going now.

[Solomon David]

That's. That's one that's kind of been improving. For sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve]

Oh, that's a des. That's become a destination fish.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah. All over the world. Texas and Louisiana. Mississippi.

[Steve]

7. Gar. Let's play a game.

[Solomon David]

All right.

[Steve]

You can't play.

[Solomon David]

Okay. All right.

[Steve]

Alligator Gar.

[Brody]

Spotted.

[Spencer]

Oh, I could. Short nose, long nose.

[Steve]

Slow down. We got alligator spotted, short nose, long nose.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I just ran out.

[Spencer]

Florida, Cuba. I can't think of what the last.

[Steve]

Yeah. I didn't know about Florida and Cuba.

[Spencer]

Or Florida and Cuba one.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Florida Gar and Cuban Gar. Yeah.

[Spencer]

I don't know what the last one.

[Solomon David]

There's one that runs from Mexico all the way down to Costa Rica. So you might call that range. What kind of range? Mesoamerican Got temperate. You got some, and you got tropical. Tropical. Yeah, Tropical Gar.

[Steve]

Tropical Gar.

[Solomon David]

Yep. Tropical Gar.

[Brody]

Do any of the. None of the other ones get close to the size of this?

[Solomon David]

No. Yep. Even as far as what we know in the fossils, alligator gar is still the biggest. Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

And then short nose compared to long nose. Like, how many inches off are we from the maximum?

[Solomon David]

Yeah. I mean, short noses, they max out around maybe 36 inches. Long noses can get up to 60 inches.

[Steve]

Yeah. That's our guard.

[Brody]

What percentage that long nose is?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, the long nose. The nose makes up, you know, quite a significant amount of that. So I'd say, you know, it's not. It's not 25, but it might be like 10 or 15%. Yeah. Decent size. But even a short nose. Gar has a long nose. So all relative. Right.

[Steve]

I want to get into what makes Gargar and why they're. Why they're special and what they do. But let. Let's just pass with this whole. Let's. Let's talk about some terminology for a.

[Solomon David]

Minute.

[Steve]

Trash fish, rough fish, non game fish. Right. Like in the sort of. Do, do you have any idea. And it doesn't matter what state you draw from in the regulatory structure. Like, how did that come to be? Do you understand?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Like, like, like take Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, whatever. Like, how did it come to be that they, that they create the categorization?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, well, you know, we just. We value some fish more than other fish. And so I think you gotta look at. When you think about historical perspective, it depends on where you're starting your history. Right? So when you're thinking about maybe modern fisheries management, what's been going on for the past, I don't know, 50, 100 years, we're looking at largemouth bass and trout and salmon. Those fish are valued because those are considered sport fish. People like to eat them. Maybe a significant portion of the population likes to eat them. But there are other fish, like suckers and gars and bowfins that were eaten by indigenous peoples for a long time before that.

[Brody]

What about, what about like colonial Americans or, you know, not even that. Did they have a different view, those fish, or like what we'd call rough fish?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, for sure. I think it's. It gets kind of foggy. You know, it. It is more of a colonial perspective when you think about the fish that we value now, especially if you look at a European influence, like they've got trout over there, they've got fish that are kind of like perch, fish that are kind of like walleye and even walleye. It took a little bit of time before people saw those as a game fish. So that definitely had an influence. Whereas these other fish. People hadn't seen a gar before, before they came to North America. And they're looking at this. We can't fillet this like you would a walleye or a trout. You got to use some sort of hatchet or, you know, tin snips now to do that. So those other fish kind of fell by the wayside. And we value these, you know, the bass, the trout, the salmon more. And that just kind of got wrapped up into fisheries management. So it started like we talked about with let's, you know, fully dress some of these fish that are considered valuable and some of these other fish might be less valuable. So we're just going to take the guts out. And if we got to get rid of some of them, then we will. And, and, you know, you kind of follow the money. That's where, you know, we valued them, we didn't value others. And you Know, we did research that looked at even the science behind these. We've got way more research on steelhead and largemouth bass and chinook salmon than we do on even some of the sturgeon or the suckers. So we like to think that science can attempt to be objective, but we gotta follow where the money is. Right. We've got way more money to look at these game fish. And now we're trying to play some catch up here. So that's been going on, you know, 100 years back, 200 years back, when you're thinking about what was historically valued by different peoples and what is now being valued. And now we're just trying to make it a little bit more, you know, inclusive as far as biodiversity is concerned. Like, why not? Why not, you know, take care of all the fish from a holistic ecosystem perspective? Because when you do that, that's good for everybody. When you think about waterways, water quality, habitat, that sort of thing, do you see.

[Steve]

If you ever visited with any archaeologists on this issue, do you see much evidence of Native American use of. Again, to define our terms, Native American use of gar. Absolutely. Suckers. I know that, but, like, Native American use of gar and bowfin, or dogfish.

[Solomon David]

Oh, yeah. I mean, you can look at even early illustrations, you know, when we had, you know, colonial explorers coming in. I mean, they. They sketch those out. There are some early documentation of indigenous peoples actually sharing those fish. And there was some. I can't think of the reference right now, but some of the colonists actually thought like, wow, this fish actually is pretty good. But that switched or, you know, that we moved away from that pretty quickly. But as far as archeology. Yeah. You find arrowheads that were made out of gar scales. I mean, you look at a big alligator gar, they can use that. Those scales are basically made out of tooth enamel. So that's the hardest substance that our bodies produce. So not like other fish. So, yeah, they've been part of human culture here in North America for a long time.

[Steve]

What about bowfin, though?

[Solomon David]

Bowfin has a food fish, for sure. Yeah. Even, you know, that's a rough one. Oh, yeah, you know, it's. It can be. It can be.

[Steve]

I eat gars, no problem. I like them.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Bowfin stuff.

[Solomon David]

Really? I lived in Louisiana for six years. We ate them all the time down there. Folks down there eat them. I was able to try them, but people fish for them alongside the roads. The big cane poles, flip them across the road when they're getting them out of the bayous. But you can drive down the road and you can see shoe pick patties on the sign lines. So they call them shoe pick down there, which is kind of a French and indigenous name for them. So it's a very popular food. Fish down.

[Brody]

You don't like them because why? They're mushy or something or what's your.

[Steve]

They turn. Yeah, they're just like brown.

[Solomon David]

Sure.

[Steve Rinella]

They. What's their just.

[Steve]

They have a. Like a over. I. I find relative to other fish, they have an overpowering flavor.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Well, they also. They do turn to mush pretty fast. So they call them cotton foot. Cotton fish. Do they? Because, you know, they got a bunch of different names, but because that flesh turns to mush, because they got these enzymes that just start breaking it down. So when I was down in Louisiana for the. One of my first times down there, went with a couple of professors there, they, you know, cook up anything. Shout out to Quentin Fontenot who can do this. They got both in. Put them in a bucket. They're air breathers. So they can survive the trip. You know, from where we were back home to their place. One of them got the fryer going. The other one took the bowfin out of the back of the truck, still alive because it can breathe air. Whacks the head on the back of the, you know, on the tailgate. And then immediately starts filleting that and then takes that fillet and throws into the fryer. And that's basically what you have to do. Yeah, basically process them as quickly as you can after you've, you know, dispatched the fish. Otherwise it just starts turning into goo. You can't throw that filet in a freezer or anything like that. And it was delicious. It was great. Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve]

I'm gonna have to try that.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I recommend it.

[Steve]

Well, I don't live in bowfin country anymore, but we grew up in it, you know.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Michigan, Minnesota's got bowfin. I mean, you don't know all that. You a short nose gar out here though, so.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Brody]

Are they.

[Steve]

Yeah. I can't get excited about short nosers. Not to disparage them, but.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Like a long nose guard.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Along those guards. Like you can see like along those guards. An impressive fish.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Brody]

Are both been kind of self contained as far as like, it's just them. They don't have other relatives.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. There used to be way more. And then recently I was part of a study where we actually split them into two species. So. But then I know 100 years ago, they thought there were maybe 10 of them. And then they're getting back to how understudied these fish are. Scientists back then said, Nope, there's not 10, there's just one with no evidence whatsoever, like, you know, tens too many. So we're going to condense that down. And then over the years, we found evidence from their morphology, like their shape and their genetics, that there's actually evidence for two species. And they're both pretty similar, but one's more on the Atlantic coast down to Florida, and one's from Michigan, Minnesota, all the way down to Louisiana. So we are still finding out new stuff about bowfin from what you can, you know, eat. You can fish from on the fly. They fight really hard too. And yeah, now there's two species instead of one.

[Steve]

How old are those species of gar?

[Solomon David]

They go. Gars go back to Jurassic era, jurassic period stuff. So 150 million years for gars. That's for the family, like long nose gar, short nose gar. They're about 2 1/2 to 5 million years old.

[Steve]

And how, how much have they changed since then?

[Solomon David]

Very little. Very little. So if you look at a fossil gar and looked at a living gar, they basically look the same. Yep, same.

[Steve]

That's. That was a question I had and I want to spend some more time on that. People will point out like, well, let me start with one that's annoying. People will say, that's an Ice age relic. I'm like, you're a nice age. Like, mice are nice.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

It's like a dumb thing to say.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Steve]

Like humans were around during the Ice Age.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Like every name something that's not an Ice Age relic. It's not like there's a bunch of new species emerged since the Ice Age.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

So that's dumb. But people will say that's from the dinosaurs.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Like, what does that mean when we say the fish is ancient? What do we mean it's ancient? Like, like is a walleye's not.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Do I mean, like, help me understand the relative quality?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. So some fish, you know, and some organisms change at a faster rate than other organisms. So when you think about mutation, mutations, what leads to evolution? So organisms changing over time, but some of them change slow, some of them change fast. Walleye change faster. There was that group of modern fish, we kind of lump them together called tele. So walleye, perch, swordfish, tuna, they're all part of that group. Haven't been around as long as sturgeons and gars. And that brings in this idea of a living fossil, which sounds kind of paradoxical.

[Ad Voice]

Right?

[Steve]

That's a good term. That's the one I'm talking about, the living fossil term. Like, what the hell do people mean?

[Solomon David]

Yeah. And so I feel like most people can kind of get an idea of what that means, but evolutionary biologists hate that term. They're going to. Well, actually that all the time. Because they'll be like. Well, that means that these animals haven't been evolving or anything like that. Like everything's evolving constantly as your DNA is replicating, pass from one generation to the next. But some change slower than others. And so if you were to look at a gar in the fossil record, looking the same as what the shape of a gar looks like now, they have a very slow evolutionary rate. So you go back to the Jurassic period, they look basically the same as they do now. If we were to look at something that might be walleye's early ancestors, they're going to look different than what a walleye looks like.

[Steve]

You're not going to recognize them.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. You're not going to recognize them as much.

[Steve]

But I could be standing there, like at the same time when there's a. At the same time when there's a Tyrannosaurus rex on the planet.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I could be standing there with my flashlight.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Shining into a marsh.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And I'd be like, holy. A guard.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Same basic group.

[Solomon David]

Whereas look what happened to T. Rex. I mean, they're pigeons or the, you know. Yeah.

[Steve]

Chickens.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Spencer]

I've dug around for fossils in the Green River Formation in Wyoming. Found a lot of different fish there. Most of what you're getting are extinct species of herring and shad.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Spencer]

But sometimes you'll come across a gar scale that looks just like a gar scale. Today you also come across paddlefish. These are 50 million year old fossils. You'll come across skates that look like our skates today. But there's like a handful of fish that when you see it, it's. It's just identical to what you would catch today. And that's 50 million years old.

[Steve]

And at that time, there was not a bluegill.

[Solomon David]

There might have been bluegill, like fish, but definitely not bluegill. Like we know them today. Yeah.

[Steve]

No Sunny. Spawning off the end of my mom's dog.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The doc probably wasn't there either. But you know.

[Steve]

They, they're a boned fish, Gar. All the things we're talking about are bones. No. Cartilaginous fish.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. Sturgeon and paddlefish are primarily cartilaginous fish, but that's different from, like, the sharks and the rays and skates. So you're all in that bony fish branch.

[Steve]

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[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Can you explain the fish that have like the notochord?

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Like talk about that.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

To people.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. I mean notochords kind of an early. It goes along with your vertebral column and spinal cord. So some early animals, when you think about the lancelets accordates they had, they had a notochord but they didn't have a true vertebral column. So for a while there was this idea that hagfish and lampreys didn't have what we consider to be vertebrae. So we didn't consider them vertebrates. We consider them a little bit off from that. But now, the new research going back to the fossil record suggests that hagfish and lamprey are also vertebrates. So the notochord sort of thing is an, you know, early structure, but now we're kind of. We're kind of past that. So some fish, let's say when you do talk about notochord scars, when they're little, they've got a notochord that turns into. Extends like a filament off the backside of the tail. And they use that like a little helicopter rotor. So when they're little, they move like little sticks through the water.

[Steve]

That's the notochord.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, that's a. It's basically an extension of the notochord. And as they get older, that reduces down. They don't keep that longer than their first year because eventually the physics of water changes. Right. You kind of think of it as moving with a little propeller. You're moving a little animal through there as they get bigger and bigger. That doesn't. You can't propel that through that anymore. And by then their scales hard and they're able to eat fish, but they move their pectoral fins beating back and forth really rapidly. So very good the chance. I think we got some video we can send you too. But they move that little note of chord, that extension, like a filament there. So a lot of those early fish, you can see it in bowfin, even in pike, they have a little one. They don't use it the same way gars do, but you will see a little bit of a notochord extension. So you see that in early development of a lot of vertebrates, but eventually that kind of goes by the wayside and, you know, gets kind of overpowered by a lot of other structures.

[Steve]

One of the more impressive things I've seen is I was with my friend Kevin Murphy, and we're fishing catfish. But here comes a big paddlefish that got hit by a boat prop, kind of half dead. So I shot it with my bow. I mean, it was already a mess. Yeah, it was fresh when he caught it. And that was a noise, pulling that note cord out. Dude, that was unbelievable sight.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Spencer]

And it looks way longer.

[Steve]

Just draw it out, right? Have you seen that before? Yeah, yeah.

[Spencer]

It'll come out like five times longer than the fish was.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

That was an unbelievable sight. And that made me think that that was like a very different kind of thing.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I mean, they. You're. You're also, you know, it could be pulling the spine like out of you're pulling that spinal cord out of the actual spinal column. I'd have to, you know, look into that for. With the paddlefish and the sturgeon. They're very similar, but. Yeah. How long was that, would you say?

[Steve]

Oh, man, we got it on video. Long.

[Solomon David]

How'd it taste, though? Paddlefish, man.

[Steve]

When you trim them up. When you trim them up, they're good, but you got to trim them carefully. It's like shark and stuff. Like, you got to trim it. All that red, all that red. The fat's not good. You gotta get the fat off. I think trim them up, they're good.

[Solomon David]

Nice. I've had sturgeon, haven't had paddlefish now.

[Steve]

Shovel nose sturgeon. That's not a good fish to eat.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, they're. They're pretty spiny, you know.

[Steve]

Yeah. The yield is low.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Like, you clean it, there's nothing left. You feel bad that you killed the thing in the first place and then you fry it up and it's not good. Yeah, yeah, that's been my finding.

[Solomon David]

They farm white sturgeon, though. Those are good. Yeah. Yeah, that's a real good fish.

[Steve]

Okay, we're all talk about these ones for a minute because these are the. The big, like, how alligator gar.

[Solomon David]

Okay. Are.

[Steve]

Becoming fashionable. Would you agree?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I agree.

[Steve]

Like, your work is complete on alligator gar. And I recently saw that they're making it. I think, who was it, what state was trying to make it that you can't shoot an alligator gar with a bow anymore?

[Solomon David]

Oh, really? Huh.

[Steve]

Or pushing for it.

[Solomon David]

Huh.

[Steve]

And I remember being like, oh, brother. A little bit.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah. I think they've definitely had a reputation improvement. You think about shows like River Monsters that came out, you know, almost 20 years ago now. Jeremy Wade going out there. I remember yelling at the TV when that episode was on because, like, picture isn't right or that's not the right thing. But, you know, overall, I think that was a win because you've got these big river fish that people weren't paying attention to. And you had this idea of the habitat's important. You can go and catch these fish. They're not, you know, monsters that are eating people or anything like that. So I think the reputation has definitely improved. We went fishing down in Texas with Bubba Bedri, you know, number one gar guide in the world. He, you know, took Jeremy Wade out and he used to be a bow fisher, and he realized that, you know, over the years these big fish were going away. He wasn't seeing nearly as Many as they were out there. And he realized, you know, if his livelihood is going to depend on these fish, he's got to put them back. And then, you know, now they're even more valuable because people are coming from all over the world to fish for them, catch them and then also release them.

[Steve]

Yeah. One of my buddies in Michigan went down to Texas to a for a catch and release Alligator gar.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yep. That's. That's what most people do now. I would say the majority are doing that. I mean, there's still people that harvest them. They've got a one fish per day limit that Texas Parks and Wildlife has put in. They've got probably some of the most conservation oriented regulations in Texas. You say that the job is done. I don't think, you know they're joking, but the job isn't done. You look next door in Louisiana, also arguably one of the healthiest gator guard populations in the world. There's no regulations on them, so you can shoot as many as you want. And the thing is, these are giant fish. We work with the fish rodeos there and we shoot as many as you want.

[Steve]

You can shoot as many of these as you want.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brody]

There's no limit how long if someone's killing, say a hundred pounds alligator gar, which is not nearly how as big as they get, but 100 pound or say how long does it take to replace that fish if someone kills one?

[Solomon David]

It depends on where you're coming from. Texas, there's different populations in the Trinity river versus coastal population. So I've had students work on this when I was down in Louisiana. I'd lived there for six years. And so those coastal populations have access to different kinds of food. Right. And gars can live in full salt water. You'll find them with bull sharks and sea turtles, you know, way off the Gulf there. So they have access to food, but they can also go into fresh water. They mainly need the freshwater to spawn.

[Spencer]

How far off the Gulf where you find them?

[Solomon David]

I mean, you could find a miles off the Golf.

[Steve]

No, really?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. You go to the aquarium, the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans. They've got them at sea turtles, tarpon, of course, and then all kinds of sharks, sandbar sharks.

[Spencer]

What are they doing out there? Is there like a motivation?

[Solomon David]

They can forage out there. I mean, it's other. Other food that they can go after. So, you know, if they can tolerate it, which all gars can tolerate saltwater for the most part. Long noses, you can find miles off the coast too. So. So highly adaptive. And you know, I think some of the latest research suggests that gars probably originated in salt water. Made their own fresh water.

[Steve]

But is that right?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, that. That sort of paleontology gets flip flopped all the time.

[Steve]

Can they live in salt their whole life?

[Solomon David]

They can't. They theoretically could, but they couldn't reproduce. They need that fresh water for reproduction. Alligator gars in particular need submerged terrestrial vegetation to spawn on. So they need that big flood pulse and you don't get those big floods every year. So they have to take advantage. Think about the flood in 1927.

[Steve]

He needs a, he needs a dry land plant that happens to be underwater to spawn.

[Solomon David]

Typically in a lot of the rivers in the floodplains where they spawn, they basically are spawning on submerged terrestrial vegetation. They aren't.

[Steve]

Because he needs his egg to dry out for a while or what is it?

[Solomon David]

It's just that's kind of indicative of the floodplain being submerged for a decent amount of time. Those eggs hatch, they hatch in like maybe a day or two, depending on water conditions and temperature, and then they'll move out within that season. But we've had alligator gars, they hatch out about, you know, less than half an inch long within a month, month and a half. They can be 12 inches long within their first season. Yeah, they grow fast. Yeah.

[Brody]

I want to get back to the age thing. Like in the Trinity river in Texas, how old is a hundred pounder? This is like a multi part question.

[Solomon David]

Sure. Yep.

[Brody]

How old is it? Have you seen like the average size of these things shrinking and then, and then like how do they deal with eating a chunk of dead carp with a treble hook that goes way down its throat? Like, and you cut, if you cut the line, does that thing do just fine?

[Solomon David]

Right. You're right. That is serious questions. I get it. Yeah. Get them in while you can. Yeah. So like 100 pound fish might be something like, you know, five feet, six feet long. It depends. So more we mainly go by length because depending, you know, if it's a gravid female, it's going to weigh way more.

[Brody]

Yeah.

[Solomon David]

But you could be looking at gravid. So that means got lots of eggs.

[Steve]

You ever heard of that?

[Brody]

For egg wagon?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, There we go.

[Steve]

That's what gravid means.

[Solomon David]

Yep, that's what gravid means.

[Steve]

Never heard that word. You didn't hear that word before?

[Spencer]

I worked at a fish hat.

[Steve]

That's right.

[Spencer]

I've worked with Solomon for a decade.

[Solomon David]

That's right.

[Steve]

For a minute you heard that word, Brody? Yep.

[Solomon David]

So yeah, so you know, we go by lengths more than weight, but that could be 20 years old. It could be 40 years old. And the thing you're not talking like 100 year old. It could be. So males, if you got an alligator gar that's over six feet long, that's typically going to be a female. Males don't tend to get that big. So you could get males that live for that long. But if you're talking just six foot fish that we don't know what the sex of it is. 20, 40. But if it's an old male, could be 60, 80, we know they can live for over 100 years.

[Steve]

I thought you're going to wind up saying a lot older when you said they can hit 12 inches. How fast?

[Solomon David]

Within a month and a half.

[Steve]

What?

[Solomon David]

But if they're fed, doesn't make any sense. They can reach two feet within that first growing season. They can get big fast. Yeah, they get huge. Even long nose gar can reach about. We got some out of Minnesota about 15 inches long that were born, you know, hatched out this year and they hatch out in May. You know, Michigan, Minnesota. It doesn't stay warm that long. So I was would have hatched out in May. We caught one in August and it was already about 15 inches long.

[Brody]

And then does it slow way down after the first year?

[Solomon David]

In sort of temperate regions, it slows down a bit because of winter. But what we found in our work is that they've actually evolved a faster growth rate in the north than they are in the south, but they live a shorter time in the south. If you're looking at fish that are from the north versus the south, alligator gar is a little bit different, but so they can live a long time and they grow super fast because they're eating fish. Gar switch to eating fish faster than any other North American fish. Faster than muskie, faster than pike, faster than bass. They also like to eat each other. A good gar shaped, you know, fish to eat is another gar.

[Steve]

Got it. What are they eating on that first day of life?

[Solomon David]

Yolk sack stuff. So I mean that's, they've got the yolk which is also somewhat poisonous. So gar eggs are poisonous. You're not going to find people making gar caviar. So if you're ever prepping that, I might have heard that, yeah, it's pretty toxic. So they're, they're toxic for, you know, the first few days and then once they absorb that yolk sac. Then they're eating plankton. So usually like, you know, Daphnia, that sort of zooplankton. But what we found is what might actually lead to the gar's alligator gar growing so big in their first year is that their gills are a little bit different than long nose gars and short nose gars. They actually have a filtration aspect to their gills. And we actually found an alligator gar that was about this big down in Louisiana, and its stomach was full of plankton. And so eating like a baleen whale, just. Yeah, exactly. It's like, imagine like a great white shark eating krill, which is what you're looking at, because you don't think of an alligator gar as a. As a filter feeder. And so my students.

[Steve]

How's it getting from. Because that's like, feeding into his bloodstream. How's it getting like he's, like, raking it out.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And then it somehow is getting down his esophagus.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yep. Just like, you know, paddlefish are filter feeders. Right. So alligator gars and the Cuban and tropical gar have gill rakers that work kind of like a sieve, and so they can actually filter out the plankton and that goes down their esophagus, like you said. Whereas long nose and short nose gars. We got spotted gars the same day. The gill rakers are very different. Nothing in their stomach, but we didn't know what it was. We had this frozen fish, and my students brought it up to me. It's like, we don't know what this is in the stomach because I'm always doing paperwork. So I. Students, when they're doing dissections, let me know if you find anything. Cool. We found half a giant rat and a bowfin ones. We found all kinds of stuff, but they said, we found some in the stomach. We don't know what it is. It looks like a Popsicle. And so I'm like, well, there's a frozen fish. So I said, all right, let's take a look at it. We dissected it, and I was. They were chopping it up. I'm like, this looks really weird. It reminds me of some fish food I used to feed to fish at home. I have gars and aquariums at home, too. And so we ran some water over it and started, like, melting into these particles and that. This is really weird. It's bright orange, too. I'm kind of like krill or carotenoid organisms, like an orange Popsicle. So we looked under the microscope, and it was all copepods and the stomach was full of this. And so up until then, it only been anecdotal, you know, stories about them maybe filter feeding in Mexico and other places. So we think being able to take advantage of those other food types allows them to grow that big. I mean, think about whales, right? They're getting that big, you know, eating those smaller food items. So not only are they eating shad and mullet, but they're actually able to eat these other fish, too. So there's a lot left to. To be discovered about these fish.

[Steve]

Well, that's pretty crazy.

[Brody]

So how do they deal with, like, as far as mortality and stuff with a great big rusty. Because when people are fishing for them, they're letting them chew on that chunk of dead bait for a minute.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Then they're just cutting the leader.

[Brody]

I don't know.

[Solomon David]

Usually they try to retrieve it. I know that a lot of anglers now are trying to use just circle hooks or J hooks, as opposed to the treble hooks. There is even when I included a picture of this, they come up with a Gar Saver rig, which actually has a bar, so the gar can't actually take it down into its. Into its stomach.

[Steve]

Oh, really?

[Solomon David]

It keeps it in the jaws. Yeah, yeah. It's like a crossbar. Yeah. So that way it allows the, you know, hook to get stuck in the jaws, which are easy to retrieve, but it doesn't go all the way down the stomach because. Yeah, you could gut hook a fish and that could be, you know, problematic. It's. It's hard to say. We know so little about these fish that even looking at catch and release mortality with the hooks like that is understudied. We know it's, you know, less mortality than, you know, bow fishing or bowfish catch and release, which does exist, but. So that exists.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah, but it exists. But it doesn't exist where they're picturing that it's going to live to be shot another day.

[Solomon David]

Believe it or not, in eight states, catch and release bow fishing, shoot and release bow fishing is legal.

[Steve]

That's not. That just burdens them with needing to deal.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Steve]

They don't think that it's living.

[Solomon David]

Well, that's when there's been conversations about changing that regulation. Like, let's make shoot and release bow fishing not legal, which seems reasonable. Would you shoot and release a, you know, a deer, a duck or something like that and just kind of leave it behind? The argument is that, well, those fish are okay because they're just so tough.

[Brody]

Like, they just hard, you know, anecdote.

[Solomon David]

Like, oh, you know, I've shot a bunch of fish, you know, and I'm paraphrasing overnight, the next day we shot maybe 100, 200 fish suckers, Gar. And the next day, there weren't any of them around. So they must have been fine or they all sunk to the bot.

[Steve]

Most people, they get shot by a gun, don't die.

[Solomon David]

Right, Right.

[Steve]

But it's not like. It's not like when you shoot people, it's not like a shoot and release.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

What? You're not thinking of it that way.

[Solomon David]

Right?

[Steve]

And so, like, yeah, chances are.

[Solomon David]

That's weird. Yeah.

[Steve]

I don't think that the shooter is thinking of it like that. I think the shooter's like, oh, sweet. I don't need to even deal with it.

[Solomon David]

Right. Yeah, it's a. It's.

[Steve]

And they shake it off the air.

[Solomon David]

They shake it off there and then they kind of leave it. But then they've done studies to look at shoot and release mortality where they've, you know, shot them and looked at them. Depending on where the, you know, animal gets shot. That depends on how it's going to survive. How long it's going to survive. Within 24 hours, if it's in the head or the spine, that fish is dead.

[Steve]

Sure.

[Solomon David]

But even after that, if it's somewhere else, it was over 50%, you know, 72 hours later. So that's one of the things.

[Steve]

But that's true of, like, most not. I don't know. Yeah, most deer.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve]

Well, okay, Spencer, what percent of deer that aren't? This is impossible to answer.

[Spencer]

Yeah.

[Steve]

What percent of deer that aren't recovered? Archery shot, Whitetails that aren't recovered. What percent do you think die that aren't recovered?

[Spencer]

What percent die in, like, the next couple days? I would say 50%. By, like the end of that following winter, probably another 10 or 20%. So that leaves like 30 to survive for the next hunting season.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Spencer]

Just a guess.

[Steve]

My only point being, I think that anyone that acts like they're shooting that arrow into that fish as a way of letting it go is being cute with themselves.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah. No, I. I agree. Absurd. And I think that's what, you know.

[Steve]

You say about everything, but, hey, sometimes you hit a duck and it doesn't die.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

This is no different than that.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Steve]

I'm like, well, no, it's different.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Well, ducks are managed. Right. And deer managed. So that's part of the reason why we're looking. Why not just, just manage these populations, put a limit on it, you know, as opposed to shoot a thousand. And then there's, you know, what are you doing with them if you're eating a thousand gar? Like my hat's off to you. But yeah, even as much as I like eating gar, I'm not eating a thousand car. But not to, not to digress too much from the question.

[Steve]

Are you questioning?

[Solomon David]

I'm good. I'm okay.

[Brody]

I think so. I'll think of more. I could go on all day I.

[Steve]

Was thinking of different parallel. I was trying to think of this morning I was trying to think of different parallels in, in the bird world. In bird management we've accounted like, we've accounted for all birds in bird management. Okay. Because we have the migratory and songbird treaty. Like we have a couple non native. We have a handful of non native deleterious English sparrows, European starlings, columbolivia, the street pigeon, which you can kill as.

[Brody]

Many as you want, but no one does.

[Steve]

Collared dove. Okay. We have a handful of like deleterious. So like very much deleterious. Non native. We have all our game birds. We don't have loose ends in the bird world. Yeah, but then I start thinking in the mammal world we have a lot of loose ends in the mammal world where you have. There's a host of like non game species that are. Some of them are desired. Like most states will run opossums, most states are going to run skunks. Most states are going to run short tail, long tail and least weasel. Non game. Those are all native animals. Right. So there's a parallel there where you just have this kind of like loosey.

[Brody]

Goosey configuration and it varies by state.

[Steve]

Oh yeah.

[Brody]

Like there's animals here that would be furbearers and other like highly regulated.

[Steve]

Yeah, they run, they run red fox in this state they run red fox is a non game. No closed season, no bag limit. They're tightly regulated. In other states. Yeah, so it's like. So with birds we've, we've kind of like sort of made. Every bird has its area of regulatory structure. With animals we don't and with fish we definitely don't. Yeah, like, and with fish. I think the problem is with fish is we don't even have. There's not even like a native non native distinction like you would think a state would say. Well this gets so complicated because in my notes, you know what I wrote in my notes? Bow fishing conundrum and the rinella solution.

[Solomon David]

Ah, nice.

[Steve]

Part of the problem. Part of the problem is in a lot of the big bow fishing states they made it a long time ago that you can't hunt the good eating fish. So it drives everybody to hunt the not good eating fish. In South America, they bow fish. Like I've been out bow fix. South America, you're after the best fish in the.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Steve]

In the river.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Because they bow fish. The really good ones. Yeah. So they've boxed dudes in and like, you can't bow fish this, you can't bow fish that, you can't bow fish this. So it is putting a lot of emphasis on these other things.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

But I do think it's ridiculous to me that a state agency wouldn't come in and say if, if they're going to be like that, they're not going to let you bow fish the good stuff. A state agent C would come and say non native deleterious fish are open all the time. And there's a. You can, there's no closed season, there's no bag limit and there's a very loose method of take structure. Native fish have bag limits.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

But like what they're gonna say is people can't tell the difference. Right. This is what I was talking about this earlier. They're gonna like, well, how could you expect someone to tell a cart from a buffalo?

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I'd be like, I don't know. How can you expect them to tell a widgeon from a gadwall.

[Solomon David]

Exactly.

[Steve]

From a mallard from a wood duck? Right. How can you, like you're, you're, you're obligated to tell all kinds of shit. How can you tell a deer's antler is over or under 3 inches long? I don't know. Like you figure it out.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, exactly. That's what we would like to do is just let's get some, at least attempt at some equal application of that onto fish. And I will say that Minnesota, very recently in 2024, enacted the most comprehensive native fish conservation bill, put it into law, where they did one of the first things.

[Steve]

Are you the lobbyist on that?

[Solomon David]

You know, I'm one of the advocates for it. Yeah. I did that even from down in Louisiana before I had any inklings of coming up to Minnesota. But so they did separate common carp from the other native non game fish. That was one of the first things they did because they call them now native rough fish, which are like, it's the least worst name because he's still got the Rough fish, but at least.

[Steve]

Yeah, but that's fine. What do you know that Brody told me where it came from.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not. I'm not worried about the name so much as now that we can get the work done. So if we've got the separation there, I'm not as concerned, at least on some level with the naming so much as we've got a category that separates the common carp, the other invasive carp, from our buffalo, our gars, our bowfins, and it's allowing us to then have restitution values. So if you have wanton waste, there's a penalty for walleye and bass. I think it's like something like 30 bucks a walleye. If you have, you know, wanton waste for walleye and a lot of the game fish. So even if they had like a negligible amount for, you know, buffalo or bowfin or gar, I mean, that would start racking up.

[Steve]

Sure.

[Solomon David]

So we've got some regulation there and we're going in the right direction. And so Minnesota's kind of leading the charge with that. I've got colleagues in Michigan that want to do the same thing. Wisconsin, we've got colleagues in Oklahoma. So I do think it's something that's going to start catching on. We know that it's already catching on. And these native fish have been here for, you know, longer than we have. So I think if we can get past the sort of human construct of this game fish, this is the valuable one and this is not the valuable one. And just look at a base level. Let's apply what we do to duck hunting to fish. You have to be able to tell the difference. Like, sure, a buffalo, you know, looks similar to a carp. I'll, you know, agree with that. But we hear from bow fishers, well, it takes a lot of skill to, you know, you know, over a company, excuse me, accompany. Accommodate for the refractive index of water. Right. So you already have to pay a lot of attention. How about we apply that to just look, does it have barbels? Is the scale type different? What is the dorsal fin look like? Apply that. And then also just these wanton waste limits. Like, I mean, is there really a reason to shoot a thousand gar. Hundreds and hundreds of buffalo if you're not eating them? You look at the, you know, North American model for wildlife conservation, that third, you know, point there of like, not a frivolous use for, you know, killing the animal. And I've had buffalo ribs, I've had gar. I'VE had bofin. Hopefully you try that sometime soon. But there are uses for that. Right. So it's sort of an eat what you kill and be able to identify it.

[Steve]

I won't be clear. I've tried it.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve]

But I think I might have waited like it. Yeah, I might have waited too long.

[Solomon David]

Right, right.

[Brody]

Is there, is there a lot of evidence for non native species like common carp, Asian carp impacting or other non natives. Non native game fish like impacting these native rough fish species?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I mean the, the non. Well, yeah, so we can take that as the, the invasive fish. Right. I mean, because you can. Non native is a pretty, you know, interesting term. You know. Right. You look in the Great Lakes region, we got steelhead, we got chinook salmon, but those aren't invasive. Those are people. Right?

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Solomon David]

Right. It's like, yeah. So carp and you know, like, so common carp and the invasive carp, like the silver carp and the, the big head carp, especially the silver and the big head, they eat plankton. So they're actually attacking the food web at the bottom of the food web. And that's what all the little fish, whether they're game fish or other native fish, they need to eat to grow. And so they know opening up for a potential trophic cascade from basically the bottom up. So they are problematic and they reproduce very fast. They get really big, really fast. Common carp, they, you know, they stir up the water, they remove vegetation and they're super durable fish. So I mean those are problems that we've let in and we can't eradicate those. It's all about control there. So they do affect the native fish. Now on the other end, the big mouth buffalo is a planktivorous fish. It's one of our biggest planktivores. They actually compete with the silver carp and the big head carp. So you know, as we work on controlling for invasive species, but also just bolstering and maybe protecting some of those native fish, maybe if it's, if it's just limits, you're actually creating a more resilient system to buffer against those invasive species.

[Brody]

So there's no like advantage either like carp or I mean gar aren't taking advantage of all these little Asian carp that are swimming around.

[Solomon David]

They are, they are. There's been a study down, I think it was out of Indiana or Illinois, which actually showed that short nose gar were one of the. A few native predators are actually we're selecting for invasive carp. They're eating the silver carp and the big head carp. The Thing is, those are top predators, right? There's not going to be enough gars to eat all of the invasive carp. So it helps. It's a nice story when you got a native fish that can help you out against invasive fish. Whitefish. Lake whitefish in Lake Michigan eat zebra mussels, but they're not going to solve the zebra mussel problem. There was a story, you know, that came up back in 2016 where that really was starting to rehab the gator garage reputation was like a way to control invasive carp was alligator cars. And this gets to them, restocking them in Illinois. It's like, well, we get the alligator gars. That's going to be our silver bullet. There is nowhere near enough alligator gars. There never will be to control for the silver carp. And those of us that were, you know, interviewed for the story that said, like, eh, you should probably pump the brakes on that. That was kind of left out of that story because the AP ran with it. It went everywhere. Washington Post, LA Times. And they eventually had to do retractions along with Illinois DNR that had to walk it back. Illinois DNR realized that, that this is not the story we want to tell. Like this is what the science says. So, you know, we always run away.

[Steve]

People run away with like these books, like, guys will do a book like war I eat nothing but I eat nothing but non native species. As a conservationist, it's like, buddy, you're not going to eat your way out of this.

[Solomon David]

Right? Right. Yeah.

[Steve]

I mean. This episode is sponsored in part by Better Help. Now. Winter's coming along. Days are getting short. There's a lot less daylight, there's a lot less going on outside. At night. People kind of tend to, you know, button up in their home. It's the time of year when you ought to start checking on people you love to make sure they're not alone, that they're feeling good about things. Okay. And as seasons change, right, these days grow darker and darker. It can be a tough time for many. This November, Better Help was encouraging everyone to reach out, check in on friends, reconnect with loved ones, and remind the people in your life that you're there. Just as it could take a little courage to send that message or grab coffee with someone you haven't seen in a while. Reaching out for therapy can feel difficult too, but it's worth it. And it almost always leaves people wondering, why didn't I do this sooner? BetterHelp does the initial matching with a therapist for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and better helps. 12 years of experience and industry leading Match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, you switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations this month, don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. Our listeners get 10 off their first [e-mail] Meater that's better. H E L P.com Meater Running a.

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[Spencer]

Gar are also in my observations pretty inefficient predators at least. Short nose and long nose. I used to have to take care of them at our aquarium at the fish hatchery aquarium. And when you dump minnows into like a gar tank, they'll roll up next to the minnow and then they'll like do a very sudden swipe at them and it would be like 50% of the time they would get their minnow. Now a bass does not miss like that. A walleye doesn' miss like that. But like long nose Gar especially were very bad at catching a healthy minnow.

[Steve]

I wonder if it's cuz he doesn't have the suction. Yeah, he's, he opens his mouth, he doesn't create a vacuum.

[Spencer]

It, it seemed as though he was guessing often where his like rostrum was.

[Solomon David]

Going to end is just not fair at all. Go, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Spencer]

Do you see that with alligator Gar you like that thing is not very good at catching like an adult fish.

[Solomon David]

Well first I'd say if they weren't good at catching fish, they wouldn't be around for you know, 150 million years. So clear they're doing and some but I agree with you in, in captive situations and we see this in aquariums and in hatchery in our tanks, in the lab. They're you know, it's like the T. Rex in Jurassic Park. It doesn't want to be fed, it wants to hunt. And so like you get used to captivity and so they realize like they don't have to you know, connect every single time along those got a lot of range, they might be used to, you know, you know, going after fish in the open water. And so it's a little bit different dynamics than if you're in a rounded tank or a raceway and you got all those fish that can kind of navigate a little bit better. So I will agree they do miss. But, you know, you watch a wildlife documentary, the cheetah doesn't catch the gazelle every time either.

[Steve]

So take like a little baby human and lock it up in a room and then a couple years later be like, I don't see this thing's not that smart.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Spencer]

My takeaway from watching Garfield was that they're picking on not the healthy individual.

[Solomon David]

Right. Which is what predators would do in the wild anyway. Right. But gars in captivity actually have smaller teeth than the gars in the wild. So when we catch them out of the wild, they got bigger teeth, which makes sense. Right. So if you're not. But using, you know, that, you know, mature white put energy into sort of, you know, generating or growing bigger teeth.

[Brody]

Do they scavenge at all or is it mostly because, I mean, for these guys, a lot of dead baits.

[Solomon David]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Gator gar will scavenge spotted gar, short nose gars, they'll feed off the bottom. You'll see them even in Indiana and Illinois. They'll go basically headstand with the tails are sticking out of the water. So whether eating crawfish or whether they're scavenging, long nose gar is more feeding on fish and whatever they can get down, they're more active feeders. It's like they'd be trying to like using forceps. And we already know that you don't have confidence in their ability to eat anyway, so they're not going to be able to pick up stuff out the bottom.

[Steve]

So I come from a long line of bow fishermen. My father was a bow fisherman. That's about the extent of it.

[Spencer]

That is a long line.

[Steve]

It is for bowfish.

[Solomon David]

It's a long line. Yeah, yeah, it is.

[Steve]

But he was bow fish back when he would take a Folger's coffee can.

[Solomon David]

Okay.

[Steve]

Okay, picture. You got a recurve bow. You take a Folger's coffee can, take a tin sniff. And first off, you cut the end off it. So you got a cylinder now, okay. You take a tin snip and make two flanges, okay. That you can hose clamp the flanges to your bow above and below the rest. Then you wrap the line around the folgers can pass the arrow through the can so that when you shoot, the arrow goes through the can and pulls the line out. That's old school.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, that's, that's impressive.

[Steve]

I'm only setting this up to be that. A multi generational bow fisherman. I often find myself criticizing my own kind. Okay. My own brethren, my own bow fishing brethren who are like, oh, we're doing the world a favor, you know? And I was like, listen, it's, it's fine to go bowfish carpenter. That's fine. You're not hurting anything. You're not helping anything. Like, you cannot mechanically remove fish, remove carp from the Great Lakes or whatever watershed. Like, you can't mechanically remove them to a point where you have made any difference. We one time had a guy on the podcast, we had an expert on USGS guy about Burmese pythons on the Everglades. He explained like all this snake rodeo this and that doesn't matter. Like when they wind up doing the work on the pythons and how many are there, how many you're catching that whole world. He's like, knock yourself out, have a good time. It don't matter. After that, I was in Florida and a guy is telling me, Richard Martinez, tell me his buddy, oh, he hates you. I'm like, what? Which is. I hear this often and I'm always like, kind of like anxious to hear what. He hates me. But about. He hates me because that guy said that he's a road. He's a snake catcher. He hates me because that guy said that and I didn't challenge him. But it's like some things don't matter. Shooting carp and the Great Lakes, you are not helping anything. You're not hurting anything. You're not helping anything.

[Brody]

So it's not like coyote hunters when it's like, shoot a coyote, save a fawn. It's not like, shoot a carp, save a whatever.

[Steve]

Yeah, coyotes. It's been proven to be effective if it's done in a spatially, in a temporally and spatially advantageous set of circumstances. So you're not going to get there. Bow fishing carp, you're not helping anyone.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Now are they? If you're bow fishing gar, is it also a drop in the bucket? Like you're not actually having population level impacts on gar, just like you're not having population level impacts on carp. Or is it different?

[Solomon David]

I would say it's different. You look at where they are in the food web, right? I mean, carp are pretty omnivorous. They're eating, you know, Stuff off the bottom vegetation, sometimes bugs. Whereas gars are more on your sort of predator, apex predator level. Right. There's way fewer gars than there are carpenter. So sure, you may be doing a drop in the bucket with carp and there's other ways. We work with organizations out in Minnesota that do carp removals on the inland lakes and they actually do make a difference, but that's like massive carp traps and everything. So you're right. Shooting the carp, you can feel good about it. You want to. Part of what we want to say is like if you want to shoot something, you know, shoot carp, shoot invasive species, shoot as many as you want. There aren't limits on those as far as I know. Definitely in Minnesota, Michigan, those places just, just dispose of them properly. But, you know, shoot as many as you want there.

[Steve]

That's aesthetic for sure.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, we'll talk about that. And so, you know, but the gars, there's fewer of them. There's fewer. The bowfin, those are your predatory fish. And so when you do sort of take out a large number of these predatory animals that also live for a long time. I know we have disrespect for the short nosed gar, but even they can live for 50 years. So. And we just found that from our work down in Mississippi. So if the sort of latitudinal differences mean anything, we expect they probably live longer in Montana and in Minnesota than they do down south. So they live for 50 years down in Mississippi. It's probably even older up here. And I would take an aside to say I'm really impressed with Montana's doing. They've got a 5GAR limit. You have to get a GAR card now as of this year to get short nose guards. So I thought that was pretty cool. Got in touch with the Fish and Wildlife.

[Steve]

Who the hell's getting after short nose guy?

[Solomon David]

You know, I don't know. It's, you know, no clue.

[Steve]

Long nose gar, that's fish.

[Solomon David]

I'm glad you're impressed. That that was my first fish actually on the Mesquite river in Michigan. I know you're almost. I did my master's thesis on the Muskegon River. It's a new way.

[Steve]

We did a bow fishing episode filmed on the Muskegon river in which we messed around with bowfin.

[Solomon David]

Oh, really? Nice.

[Spencer]

I thought.

[Brody]

Didn't you shoot a gar?

[Steve]

We shot gar. We shot bowfin.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Suckers.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, we worked on all those fish on the Muskegon.

[Steve]

On the Muskegon.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. 2001 to 2005. Probably is out there all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We stayed at that old Coast Guard station out on the.

[Steve]

Sure.

[Solomon David]

Like you know, Mona Lake. Did you really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.

[Steve]

More skeegon, please.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, there's a paper mill there, you know. Oh, yeah, that's something.

[Steve]

My old girlfriend's dad was a millwright at that.

[Solomon David]

Oh, okay.

[Steve]

I went to see him in the tough man contest one time.

[Solomon David]

Oh, wow. It's one of the only spots you can find chinook salmon and long nose gars in the same river system.

[Spencer]

Love that.

[Solomon David]

Along with the buffalo.

[Steve]

That was the only. What?

[Solomon David]

It's one of the few places you can see Chinook salmon and long nose gars in the same river system, so. Oh, man.

[Steve]

We used to hunt that flat for docs.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Brody]

Those are invasive chinooks.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

[Steve]

Well, let's do that for a minute. Let's play that game for a minute. Because if you look up, like, if you look up. Let's say you take a term like weed and you look up weed in a dictionary. A weed just means like a non desirable. Sure. Right. It's a non desirable plan.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Steve]

So when we say something that's like, here's where it gets a little tricky. If you take a fish and you deliberately introduce. It usually doesn't carry the non. It's not.

[Brody]

Right. You can't retroactively call it invasive. Kind of.

[Steve]

Yeah. Like doesn't carry invasive because invasive implies not desirable.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

But I was reading this book. There's a really good book called Fishing the Great Lakes. It's a history of commercial fishing in the Great Lakes. And it talks about. It's funny because the dude's name. There's a. There's this ichthyologist named Seth Green and it's hard to look them up because of the other day. But they, they were working to. As they were collapsing all the native fisheries in the Great Lakes from over harvest and then rafting all those logs and all the spawning grounds so the bark falls off. Then you got like 13ft of bark laying over the spawning habitat as they're destroying all the native fish. They're in there introducing carp deliberately thinking that people are going to appreciate them as a food fish the same way they're appreciated in Europe.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And appreciated in Asia. So there you get like, okay, so it was deliberately introduced. There was budget for it. We now regard them as deleterious, like whatever.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

So there's all these like terminologies. No one says like Salmon in the Great Lakes are absolutely non native walleye and the rivers here, and then the lakes here are not native, but they're not like invasive. No, people don't call them.

[Brody]

Some people, some people will try to. Right. I mean you'll hear people try to call brown trout.

[Steve]

Yeah, I do that just to be.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I do that too.

[Steve]

And I tease pheasants too. Yeah, yeah, I tease pheasants, I tease brown trout, rainbow trout, pheasants. But just to clarify the terminology.

[Brody]

Yeah, it's all perspective.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. So introduced versus invasive, that's a tricky thing, you know. And so, yeah, we've got introduced salmonids. I think getting back to Brody's question, like those introduce some on is are problematic in some parts of the eastern United States. You've got, you know, even the, the next category there's like non game native fish like the shiners and the darters and the minnows. They're problematic for some of those nest building areas. They take up space, they eat the fish there, the native species. So have you guys done any, any.

[Brody]

Like reintroductions of these native fish in places where maybe they're wiped out or they're just not doing well?

[Solomon David]

There's a group called Conservation Fisheries down in Tennessee that's doing that. And so they're doing that with like different types of Mad Toms darters, but.

[Brody]

Not like the bit like gar, not.

[Solomon David]

Well, that gets back to Illinois and the alligator gar, who all had alligator gar, who. Oh, went all the way up into Illinois.

[Steve]

So it was all the Mississippi Missouri system.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. And so the, the damming and the levying and the eradication effort. So sure. I mean the looking at them as sort of trash fish and problematic was a problem, but so was the dams and the levees and the modification cutting them off from those floodplain habitats where they can't get to that terrestrial vegetation they need to spawn. And so now a big effort is not only to introduce some of those, you know, populations to try to recharge those, but also to reconnect the river with its floodplain habitat. And that is research that we're working on with Nature Conservancy, U.S. fish and Wildlife Service to make those connections between the river and the floodplain. Because that's good for the GARs, it's good for other fish, it's good for water birds. We see thousands of these wood storks down there, all kinds of different animals. But we're using the gars as kind of an indicator of that because they do migrate onto the floodplain. So we've kind of used to try to get some money for the grants is to show that you can use GARs as indicators of this restoration efficacy. If you reconnect that river with the floodplain, these are fish that move on to them. So do we see the fish moving on there? Do we see those 12 inch young of the year popping out in, you know, a month and a half? And so far we've seen that success there and we do see tons of crappie there, a lot of other animals as well taking advantage of those habitats.

[Steve]

So you'll put a tag on a gar and you'll see him travel out into that stuff.

[Solomon David]

We're tagging some of them with, with Fish and Wildlife Service. They're pit tag. They got an external tag too. But we're also using a fin clip where we look at a chemical signature where we can actually look at. We catch you out of the river. Do you have a river signature? Do we catch you on the floodplain? Do we see a floodplain signature? And we can look at that by looking at carbon and nitrogen just from the fin clip. And at least that's a non lethal way of doing it. So that's been helpful and that's ongoing research. We're going there in October to do that.

[Steve]

So they went up that system into Illinois.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And now how far up are they?

[Solomon David]

They're still up in Illinois, I think Hennepin and Hopper lakes or some lakes up there, they seem to be doing well there because I guess there's like a nuclear plant or something. So it keeps it a bit, bit warmer. Some of those fish are going decent, but they don't mature until they're about 5 to 11 years old, depending on males or females. And we expect those ones further north are going to take longer to mature. We see that in other gar species.

[Brody]

Are they, are they protected like up in the northern extreme of their range?

[Solomon David]

That's, that's a great question. I think they're working towards protecting them because that was the issue. And we had that maybe five, five years ago where a bow fisher actually shot one of the restocked, you know, one of the little guys that made it to be decent size. And luckily, you know, she reported it and you know, we're able to see like, well, this might be kind of an issue where we might want to protect those fish, but you have to be able to identify the fish as well. And that's tricky. With, with gars. I get it. But at least being able to, you know, then you need some sort of maybe blanket protection or maybe a harvest limit. Right. That way you're not taking it.

[Steve]

Be very careful. Just as a advice.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I wouldn't use the word protection because you're going to, you're going to generate too much social friction.

[Solomon David]

Sure.

[Steve]

I would. If I was in your shoes, just long line of bow fishermen.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

If I was, If I was in your shoes, I would be talking about. I would be talking about putting a regulatory structure in place.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Because people are gonna, they're gonna hear protection and their head's gonna go.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

In a certain direction. A regulatory structure.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Manage, regulate the same way. Like the same way all the other stuff. The same way all the birds, everything like.

[Solomon David]

No, I agree with you. And that's the language we use anyway. You know, I think it depends on the audience we're talking to as well. But yeah, it's definitely more regulation and management. And even from our perspective, it's informing management. Right. We're doing the science and we, you know, been lucky to work with Minnesota. DNR has been very receptive to, you know, non game native fish conservation and management because they don't have the data. So we go out there and we have that expertise coming off of six years in Louisiana and also several years in Michigan, where to find these fish, where to catch them, how to extract the otoliths, what kind of data we can get from them. Because, you know, everybody's strapped for resources, whether you're state, federal, that sort of thing. So that's been helpful. But we can help again, inform that management, give recommendations that, you know, might help improve that sort of regulatory structure.

[Steve]

Yeah, I think an achievable goal would be that you would, that you would help fishermen, help them understand that we have this category we use to categorize fish that's not a great category. And that we should understand that there are these problematic invasive fish that people brought from far away that we wish weren't in the systems. We have these fish that have always been here.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Steve]

And we should make sure they're always here. And so we draw a distinction.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Between these and these. And with gars, and I don't, I don't know what the number is with gars is like you're allowed two or five a night or whatever the hell. Just like you're allowed two or five bass a day, whatever. And like just start kind of creating this idea that it's not all that these fish aren't damaging to the eco, that they're not all damaging to the ecosystems, you know.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And like buffalo is like a big sucker that used to be a very sought after commercial fish and it shouldn't be ditched like carp.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Brody]

Is there any like examples of there being like bounties on alligator gar other guy. Did that ever happen?

[Solomon David]

I don't think. Not in recent history. You go Back to the 1930s, Texas Parks and Wildlife had the electrical gar destroyer that they made to just. They thought that I think they were taking out, I want to say it was water birds or something. And so, you know, they basically ran this rig that was supposed to, you know, kill all the gars. Yeah.

[Steve]

You use the term the gar war.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. Is that the gar wars? So Matt Miller is the director of science communications for the Nature Conservancy, good friend of mine and he wrote this book, Fishing through the Apocalypse, which is great about fishing and conservation. And he brought up like this gar wars idea. But using that broadly, not just gars, but other non game native fish and even non game isn't, you know, that's relative as well, to look at just kind of providing some respect for these fish. Again, looking at the North American model of wildlife conservation where we're looking at, you know, having the best science available and then also not hunting these animals or using them for frivolous purposes. So if you're going to shoot, if you're going to kill it, eat it and, you know, they taste delicious. I think with that also we've got the opportunity to reach the next generation, which is important if we want to preserve that hunting and fishing and show that there's value. So there's two directions I want to go with that, but there's opportunity. Right. So you go to a spot that may not be the best for rainbow trout or walleye or bass, but a lot of these habitats have plenty of gars, bowfins, suckers. So there's opportunity for fishing that people may not have if they don't have a boat to go after walleye or to go after bass. So we're trying to introduce other opportunities for fishing again to look at, you know, both conservation and management and just better stewardship of our natural resources, but to conserve that recreational way of life. And so if we don't do that, that's going to start slipping away. You know, we can go on and on about how people are, you know, on screens more than outside. And one of the ways that we've done that is working with the anglers, whether they're bow fishers or whether they're, you know, catch and release or hook and line anglers. We did this with bowfin and my lab just a couple. A couple months ago this summer, where a bunch of anglers that know how to catch bowfin, some of them never caught him before, but they got together and I said, hey, can you catch us some bowfin that we can use for our research? And I brought my research team with me, and these are all, you know, undergrads and grad students. They also were able to catch bowfin. They really had a blast. Like some of them, they're from Minnesota. They were able to fish walleye and fish bluegill, but they never caught bowfin before. And they really got into that. And then the anglers got to learn about, well, if you're going to help us out, here's what we want as far as a measurement and a photograph and a fin clip. So really building that relationship with the anglers, and we're doing that with the bow fishers, too. Looking at where are these lakes where you might be doing some bow fishing tournaments, can we at least use the carcasses to get the data to look at the age structure of those fish? So we're definitely not looking to end bow fishing or to, you know, to, to. To stop that sort of recreational aspect, but we're looking to can we manage it sustainably to where we can have the fish in the water doing their jobs as, you know, ecosystem services, balancing, you know, predator prey populations, but then also you can go there and you can shoot the fish, hopefully eat them sustainably. So, you know, kind of everybody wins. And so far, that's. We've made progress with that, even with a lot of the bow fishers.

[Steve]

Have you guys seen, besides alligator gar getting extirpated from native range, have you seen any other fish that people categorize as a rough fish? Are there any records of other fish being extirpated?

[Solomon David]

That's a good question. I think there's plenty. I mean, you've got the spotted gar in Michigan, so that's considered a species of concern now. It's not endangered or threatened. It is considered endangered in Pennsylvania. So there are places, state by state, there's places where you might consider a spotted guard to be protected. And in other states, it's just we don't know enough about them. But now we know that they can live for over 40 years. So we've lagged so far behind So I think that's a great question. Where have we seen them extirpated? Quite honestly, we don't have enough data in a lot of places to tell, are they still here? Are they gone? Why might they have, you know, gone? We like to say, like, we're about 100 years behind what we know about trout and salmon and walleye. We don't have to take 100 years to catch up on that. So we're trying to do is use those methods that you've all, you know, learned about for managing smallmouth bass, largemouth bass. How do we apply that to these data deficient species? So again, working together to more sustainable management with that stuff. So honestly, we don't know. We could be losing populations and not know it because we aren't accounting for the harvest of those fish.

[Steve]

You know, that. That brings up a really interesting ecology point that my brother Danny raised to me.

[Spencer]

He's.

[Steve]

He's with us, Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska that works on salmon. And we're talking about. I brought this up before. We're talking about the difference in the lower 48 in Alaska in terms of we're speaking about fisheries, but you could almost apply it to, like, conservation in general, where he was just like, not in a publication form, just talking casually. He was saying that, like, the lower 48 is kind of like in recovery mode. Right. Like, conservation in lower 48 is, like, largely about recovery. He said in Alaska and big parts of Alaska. We're still in the, in the descriptive phase. We're still trying to be like, what's here? Yeah, right. There's salmon runs that, like, people know. It's like people don't. Don't know. I mean, people have been utilizing the salmon runs for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, but no one's put their arms around it yet. Right. No one's been like, okay, what does it look like in 2020? What does the run look like in 2021? You know, I mean, like, like measuring, trying to put some kind of number around. Like, like, what is here. Right. So a lot of the work they'll do, work of just trying to describe what's here.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Which makes the recovery mode. It lets you track change over time. But what you're saying about GAR almost like, contradicts that because if you look, there probably are things down here that we haven't done the discovery mode on because we just disregarded it or lumped it into some goofy classification to the point where you might later say, we don't know. Where they lived. Yeah, like there's a lot of old people talk about seeing them, but like, I don't know.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Steve]

How accurate is that? Can't find one now, you know, because no one ever measured it. Right, right.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, No, I, I think that's, that's a great analogy. I think we're very much still in the discovery phase, but also in a recovery phase too, because we don't know where they've been, you know, overfished or where, where it's a combination again, it's not just harvest, but it's, you know, the modification of those habitats. So I think we're playing catch up and, you know, we're just trying to, you know, make the best that we can. And sort of, that's why, sort of encouraging the value of these native species to sort of then promote our ability to research them to get multiple stakeholders involved, whether it's the bow fishers, the hook and line anglers, the state and federal agencies. And I think, think there is momentum towards that. And to do that, we want to communicate effectively and want to build those relationships, not, you know, shooting people down with like, you shouldn't be doing this or this should be stopped. And that's a big part of our sort of science communication aspect of it. So. And we appreciate the work that you all do for that because I think we need a multifaceted approach to make that happen before we, you know, lose what we didn't even know we had.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Solomon David]

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[Steve]

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[Solomon David]

Fascinating.

[Steve]

It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Solomon David]

Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Steve]

Cut the camera. They see us.

[Solomon David]

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[Steve]

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[Spencer]

Do you know examples of other parts of the world that are being wrecked by our native rough fish? The way carp are like disturbing our waterways. Like over in Germany, the shorthead red horse.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Spencer]

Just ripping up their creeks or something like that.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. Well you know, it's funny you mentioned. So there's two parts of that. Yes, our Fish are wrecking plenty of habitats in other places, but it's not our native rough fish, it's our game fish. You know, largemouth bass, steelhead, bluegill. I mean, rainbow trout's one of the most widely distributed species of fish in the world. I know, you know, fishermen that go down to Argentina to fish for steelhead. I'm like, what? I would rather find out what fish are actually there and then, you know, go for those. So it's mainly our game fish because, you know, we like to take. Take the fish that we like and take them to other places. Now, as far as gars go, they have been introduced not on purpose, relatively speaking, through the aquarium trade. And so in some places where they've released them, there's a couple parts of India, there's parts of Southeast Asia where they've, they've made their way into waterways. Oh yeah, you can go home.

[Steve]

And dudes in Southeast Asia are buying gar.

[Solomon David]

Oh, yeah.

[Steve]

Here to turn loose in their aquarium. Aquarium and then dumping them.

[Solomon David]

They're mainly wanting to keep them, their aquarium. But then when they get too big, because, believe it or not, you know, as you know, I mean, alligator gars get big. So it's a big aquarium fish. They're super popular gars. And then they've got arowanas down there too.

[Steve]

That's badass.

[Solomon David]

That's a good fish. Yeah, exactly.

[Steve]

That's a boat fishing fish.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Spencer]

How are our guard doing in those other places?

[Solomon David]

In most places they're not doing great because they don't have enough to sort of create a sustainable population, a self sustaining population. But there are a couple spots, I've seen it in India through videos sent to me where they have spawned. Now, sure, that could be problematic, but it's probably something that's still control.

[Spencer]

Are you cheering for them?

[Solomon David]

I mean, you know, I know. I feel kind of like, you know, I also feel like, you know, who better to take care of alligator gars in India than an Indian dude you could send out there? So maybe it's just job security, we'll see. But yeah, I think. But in other places they've kind of tracked alligator gars have been released. There is, I think a moat around a. Some sort of palace or castle in Japan where an alligator gar was released. And so they had like, like, I don't know, their version of fish and wildlife trying to catch this gar out of there for a while. And so you'll hear stories.

[Brody]

They put it in there to keep intruders out.

[Solomon David]

I know, right? Yeah. It's not gonna, not gonna work that way.

[Brody]

Is there actually, is there like I'm sure people have been bitten by mistake.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Brody]

Like in muddy water.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Brody]

Like is there claims of them ever attacking?

[Solomon David]

There's like very, very few records of even the mistaken identity. I think there was something that happened a couple years ago. There was, I think a woman in Texas or Louisiana had stepped near an alligator gar and got tagged by it. But that was it. And there wasn't, it was pretty foggy details around that. But other than that, gars aren't, they definitely are not attacking people. They're very gape limited. So even a fish, like how big.

[Steve]

Can he get this guy?

[Solomon David]

Exactly. That was probably about a five foot long fish, you know, give or take maybe four and a half, five feet. But you look at that, that mouth isn't, you know, it's not going to fit anything further down.

[Brody]

That's as far as it can open.

[Solomon David]

I mean it can open wide up and down, but that throat doesn't open up, up very much. So they're very gape limited. So they're not gonna, you know, they can't swallow a person or anything like that. Even a big alligator. The biggest one we've caught in our research was 8ft 1 inch long. Just a couple inches off of the known, you know, world record fish. But we did pull a three foot long carp out of the stomach of that fish. Really? I've got a picture of my student.

[Steve]

Who got a three foot carpet.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, it was. And it was mostly not mostly it was partially digested to where it was just a lump of flesh like so.

[Brody]

They could get someone's like house poodle or something.

[Solomon David]

I mean it's, it, it's.

[Steve]

Brody's trying to pump up now.

[Solomon David]

Keep your dogs on leashes I guess, but you know.

[Ad Voice]

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[Spencer]

How are gator gar doing in Mexico?

[Solomon David]

They're doing well in Mexico. They're native in Mexico and in Mexico you've got the alligator gar and the tropical gar which are big time food fish down there. So you go into the Tabasco region, Tabasco state in Mexico, which they, there was a gar conference there. Believe it or not. They do happen in 2012. Tropical gar stuff was, you know, in the little shops there they were in the restaurants. We had tropical gar empanadas, tamales. We roasted them to where they were just gutted. But you can put them on the grill and then the scales just flake right off. So how big are they, those tropical gars? On the grill were probably about, you know, maybe foot and a half long, but they get to three and a half, four feet long as well. So they're looking there. Not as long as you know, but they're fatter than longer. That's a stouter fish because that's related to the alligator. Alligator gar long noses are in a different genus. So they're the skinnier gars, like your short nose and your spotted. But it's as important of a food fish there as salmon are in the Pacific Northwest. So not only have they depleted the wild populations in some places, then they're aquaculturing them to restore those wild populations. So Cuba and parts of Mexico are actually good templates for gar aquaculture and restoration. Everything we know, like through Fish and Wildlife Service. Not everything, but the starting to what we know came from those places where people are already culturing those fish to try to restore alligator gar. Bring them back in certain populations.

[Brody]

So they're not using the term rough fish down there.

[Solomon David]

No, no, that's fish. It's a big food fish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh.

[Spencer]

You spend a lot of time working in Minnesota at the edge of the Mississippi watershed. And in 2017, there was an American eel caught at Cottonwood Lake in Minnesota, which was 30 miles off of the Mississippi River. Even so, like, like, it has the potential to collect some fish that are far away from what you'd consider to, like, be their home up there. What are some of the unique things you've caught in Minnesota?

[Solomon David]

Gotcha. In Minnesota so far. I mean, we're. We're still focusing a lot on the gars and the bowfins because the, you know, the DNR typically isn't paying attention to them the same way they're paying attention to the walleye and the bass. So I feel like that's some of our unique fish. We do get the blue sucker, which, you know, is found all the way down in Texas too. But that's a pretty unique fish. They look kind of like a shark shark, kind of a grayish looking. If you had a shark version of a sucker, that's what they look like.

[Steve]

I'm not familiar with that fish. How big is it?

[Solomon David]

They get, you know, probably quite three feet long, But I mean, you're looking good. Yeah. Decent size.

[Spencer]

And they're deeply blue, especially when they're spawning. Yeah, they have a tall dorsal fin on.

[Solomon David]

Right.

[Spencer]

They're threatened. In South Dakota, we used to raise them at the hatchery.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, Very cool fish. And, you know, they stay in the Mid water, sort of mid water and midstream. A lot of. Some ichthyologists and also anglers call them a unicorn fish because it's very difficult to catch them because it's a sucker. So you got to fish for them. Right. They got that ventral mouth.

[Steve]

Never heard of that one.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. So blue sucker, we can, you know, you come up to Minnesota, we could probably show you some. So they're putting trackers in some of them to find out where they go. So DNR is doing that. They've done that with some of the long nose gars. So it's finding out where some of those fish are moving as well. Tracking the invasive carp, where they're going. I'm trying to think as far as unique stuff. We did find, you know, through some of those bowfin, that half of a large rat in the stomach, which shows that bowfin will eat just about anything. I tell the students, just like with the plankton, to let me know when there's something interesting you find in the stomach. And so I was coming back to the lab and showing somebody the lab, and I said, did you find anything interesting? They said, yeah, we found a rat in the stomach. And I'm like, well, where is it? I said, you know, I need to see a picture or find it. It was already in, like the carcass bin and stuff. I'm like, you're gonna have to fish that out of here so we can.

[Brody]

Those bow fins are getting your muskrats.

[Steve]

You sure it wasn't a muskrat?

[Solomon David]

I mean, I. It was the only posterior end of it. So, I mean, I. I couldn't tell you. I'll send you the picture. Maybe you can get an idea. Yeah, he did have a tail. Yeah.

[Spencer]

What. What are the little bumps that some suckers get when they're spawning? Blue. Blue suckers would really get those on their tubercles.

[Solomon David]

Tubercles. Yeah, yeah. So they get the spawning tubercles on them and so buffalo will get those too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yep. So there's. There's a lot of interesting fisher. I haven't seen any eels there yet. When we're down in Louisiana, we saw eels all the time. So. So I think that's what's been interesting is having stayed and worked in Louisiana for six years now. Being in Minnesota, we're just following the Mississippi river further up to the top. But that's also what some of our research is doing, is looking at those gar and buffalo populations down south. We've learned about their life history. Some of the population structure. And we can look at gars and buffalo up north and then compare northern and southern populations. One of the things we want to do is like, can we start forecasting about climate change, how that might change things? Right. Because we've got fish that are adapted to a warmer climate down south that we know about. How might the ones in the north start potentially changing? But then, you know, you've got your cold water fish are going to be affected by that as well. But you know, we don't have walleye way down south. So that's why the gars and the bowfins and the buffalo can be useful for that kind of research as well. So again, we're trying to use them as sort of these multifaceted tools to tackle management, conservation, even climate science.

[Steve]

What are these northern gars doing under the ice? Like, I've never in my life even heard of someone catch them one through the ice.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, it happens. I've got a couple pictures that people have sent me. It's still on my bucket list to get a guard through the ice.

[Steve]

So you've heard of people getting a hit?

[Solomon David]

Oh, they're just, they're just kind of chilling under there, no pun intended. But there's places in Iowa where I've got video of that too, where the guy cut, you know, made his, you know, cut through the ice, dropped the camera and it's just this ice hole there and then just a bunch of short nose guards just hanging out below there, like, I mean, probably 50 or 60 moving around. Yeah, Just, you know, kind of slowly waving their fins. But, you know, metabolism slows down, they're still going to eat, but they're congregating there. And they also are air breathers. But when the water's that cold, as long as they find, well, oxygenated water, they don't have to go up for air there. But so they're, they're both in, are there under the ice too. So that's still, still on the list to check out.

[Steve]

Can I ask you a snap turtle question?

[Solomon David]

Sure. I, I was into turtles before I was into gars actually. So.

[Steve]

Okay. Years ago I was at the National Trappers association convention in Iowa and I went to a lecture by a turtle trapper. Okay, can't remember his name is. He had a, like a thing hanging from, he had like a necklace that was like a pouch made out of a big old turtle foot.

[Solomon David]

Okay.

[Steve]

Big time into turtles. Turtle trapper. But he got into raising turtles, he was saying. And I've told people I've told people this a thousand times that this is true.

[Solomon David]

True.

[Steve]

He was saying that a turtle in the winter. So it's iced over, like, you know, normally comes up and sticks his head out of the water and gets a gulp.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

But everything's locked in ice.

[Solomon David]

He was saying, I think I know where this is going.

[Steve]

Is it true?

[Solomon David]

Yes, it is. If you're talking about cloacal respiration.

[Steve]

Well, I'm talking about this.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

He was saying that that turtle can go down in the muck. He can burrow down in the muck and push himself up, and it sends bubbles of methane out of the muck. He says he's seen this in a wetsuit. It sends methane bubbles by disturbing the muck and it goes up to the ice and like, he was saying that Somehow, like, the CO2 can leech through the ice.

[Solomon David]

Huh.

[Steve]

And then he'll wait and eventually he'll go up and sip. He'll go up and sip that bubble.

[Solomon David]

Bubble. Huh.

[Steve]

He says he's watched it.

[Solomon David]

That's. That's not what I thought. With the cloakal respiration, that's where they just basically breathe through their butts and stuff. So that's how they get gas exchange there. But I've not heard about the methane bubble.

[Steve]

I tell people.

[Solomon David]

And it goes below the ice surface. And then what was the advantage there? It would just. You get some sort of conversion picture.

[Steve]

You stir the muck up, all that gas comes up.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Somehow he was explaining, and I need to talk, like, I was hoping you could help me. He's explaining that that certain. Like some gas goes through the ice. I don't get it.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

But if it waits, he'll eventually go up and he'll sip that bubble.

[Solomon David]

Uhhuh.

[Brody]

To what end is he sitting?

[Steve]

He's got to breathe. He can't stick his head out of the water.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. I mean, there's got to be some sort of organic chemistry situation there. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

[Steve]

He was saying by the. I know, but that's why you got to listen to what I'm talking about. He was saying that like by that bubble sitting there for some period of time, goes through some trans.

[Solomon David]

How is that stupid?

[Steve]

You think like a methane bubble.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Will just live there, chemically stable for the rest of its life.

[Brody]

I don't know.

[Steve]

Like, okay, we'd have to. So I don't think methane of methane.

[Brody]

Bubble turns into oxygen.

[Solomon David]

Exactly.

[Steve]

Right. I don't know. Maybe we need to have a gas.

[Solomon David]

Expert on the show. Yeah.

[Steve]

Some googling going on. You never Heard this.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I've not. I've not heard that.

[Steve]

He was talking about raising turtles and eventually got so into it that he was observing them with a wetsuit in the winter, trying to understand winter behavior. And he's talking about them in his mind, deliberately stirring the bottom and then going up and sipping the bubbles.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

So if you're calling him a liar.

[Solomon David]

I'm not calling.

[Brody]

Well, maybe it's not methane they're kicking up. Maybe it's.

[Steve]

I don't trap it on. I don't know.

[Steve Rinella]

Can be converted into oxygen and other chemicals like carbon dioxide and water through oxidation.

[Solomon David]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

Which is often a highly exothermic reaction that requires high temperatures or catalysts or.

[Solomon David]

Ice.

[Steve]

Or a turtle.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe the turtle's doing something.

[Steve]

Never heard that one.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, no, I've not. Not heard that one. But, you know, they're surviving somehow. So.

[Steve]

Yeah, it's just one of them things. Things that, like, sticks in your head your whole life and you just wind up telling everybody about it.

[Solomon David]

Oh, I know. I got a new.

[Steve]

Eventually you're like. But is that.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, true here?

[Steve Rinella]

Inertness of methane. Methane is a very stable and inert molecule. And breaking the strong carbon hydrogen bonds requires significant energy input or specific catalyst.

[Brody]

Like setting it on fire usually applied.

[Steve]

Is there a chance.

[Brody]

Chance that he's.

[Steve]

That. That. Is there a chance like when you. When you stir in the bottom up, like, you know, when you walk like you duck hunting, every step like bubbles coming out of there?

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Is there a chance there's oxygen hiding?

[Solomon David]

Yeah, that's the thing. I'm like, it may not. He might be talking about methane because that's what he knows. But you're probably stirring up all kinds of other gas or byproducts of that, you know, of the bacteria and all the muck on the bottom. So I think the story holds. It just may not be methane, but.

[Steve]

I might have made up that part.

[Solomon David]

That sounds legit then. I mean, if you've got your own editions of the story, I can't judge that.

[Steve]

What I know I didn't make up, what I know I didn't make up is him talking about turtles.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Disturbing the bottom in his mind. And I remember and, and I. And the bubbles would come up. He talked about that. He explained something that he thinks happens, but I don't remember what. And then the turtles would sip it.

[Solomon David]

That part sounds.

[Steve]

Remember we were trying to get that snapper turtle expert on the show.

[Steve Rinella]

Chris, was that a few years might.

[Steve]

Have been before your Time. And we wound up getting his kid. We didn't get his kid.

[Solomon David]

We.

[Steve]

We couldn't get the old man. We could have got the kid.

[Steve Rinella]

That probably wasn't me. I probably wouldn't have gotten it.

[Solomon David]

Tell me the kid said, I like turtles. On.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Solomon David]

You know, do we need it?

[Steve Rinella]

Do we need a revisit?

[Steve]

Well, there's two things that have evaded us. A Neanderthal expert.

[Steve Rinella]

I know, I'm.

[Steve]

I even pitched that on Theo Von's show and got that one guy reached out. A Neanderthal expert and someone who's real good on turtles. Like, real good and understands that what I'm talking.

[Solomon David]

I could get you some wrecks, too.

[Steve]

Yeah, like real good.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, real good on turtles. Yeah. Especially like snapping turtles. Even alligator snapping turtles.

[Steve]

Yeah, that comes real good.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay. I'm talking to a Neanderthal guy at some point, hopefully.

[Steve]

How good are you?

[Solomon David]

Really old.

[Steve]

I'm not going to ask you a Neanderthal question. So they're active and they feed.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

And then let's take an alligator gar. How many eggs is he kicking out?

[Solomon David]

I mean, hundreds of thousands. She's kicking out, you know, sorry.

[Steve]

Right. And then how are those getting fertilized? What happens?

[Solomon David]

It's external fertilization. So, you know, you get. You have what you call polyandry. So that's more males than females. You might have one or two females, but it's usually one big female and a bunch of males. They'll kind of cluster together, and that's also usually over terrestrial vegetation. So they need that flood pulse to do that.

[Steve]

So they're creating a cloud of milk.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And she's laying her eggs and they're just fertilizing by being in the cloud.

[Solomon David]

The eggs, as they are being laid, are very sticky, so they actually adhere to that vegetation. So it's not necessarily broadcasts. And it's just going into the water column. It's basically attaching to that vegetation.

[Steve]

She's applying them.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, with that spawning, though, and part of our other research is that we found down in Texas and other places, Long nose guards. Your. Your apparent favorite gar. Get into that mix and you get hybrids between long Nose and alligator.

[Brody]

Long alligators.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. So you get an alligator gar that's got a longer snout kind of nickname, Crocodile gars, you know, because it's a little bit longer snout action there, but that's across genera. So you've got two species of gar that are producing hybrids, which happens in Fish. But not only are they two different species, they're two different genera that diverged about 100 million years ago. So they split from each other a long time ago.

[Steve]

And are their offspring sexually viable?

[Solomon David]

That's the thing. So that's what makes it also, you know, unique or relatively unique is that their offspring are fertile. So you've got these two species that can produce fertile offspring that split over 100 million years ago. The next closest organisms that can do that is two species of ferns that split 65 million years ago. So what that suggests to us is that their DNA is that compatible over splitting that long ago. So their evolutionary rates being that slow, and that goes into some of the work we've done looking at GARs actually have the slowest rates of molecular evolution of any vertebrate with a jaw. So you rule out your lampreys and your hagfish. Slower. The next closest is sturgeons, but they are changing slower than coelacanths, lungfish, tuatars, crocodilians, sharks, any of those things. So with that hybridization, though, that suggests to us that their DNA is that compatible. So something might be maintaining that compatibility of the DNA, something might be correcting it. So, you know, evolution happens by mutations, right? So something a couple base pairs change, so it changes. You might get something that's advantageous or deleterious, whatever. With gars, it seems like that DNA code has been staying pretty consistent for millions and millions of years. And what we hypothesize that there might be something like a DNA repair mechanism, that when a mutation pops up, it's correcting that mutation, just setting back to what it's supposed to be. So if you think of like a game of telephone where you've got message on both ends, one's very different at the end of it from the beginning, right? Think of almost a perfect game of telephone where something's correcting it over and over and over again. So one of the things we're looking at is like, can we isolate or identify what these potential DNA repair mechanisms could be cause? Think about even in human health, how many diseases are based on out of control DNA replication or damage to DNA, Whether you're thinking about things like even skin cancer, other types like that. So that's very far off in the future. But that hybridization between alligator gars and long nose gars, or actually any gar species can hybridize, is a potential biomedical value as well.

[Steve]

So what, what prevents it from becoming a. Why hasn't it just become a uni species?

[Solomon David]

Right, exactly. That's a great question. So we kind of joke that, like either there's one species of garbage or there's maybe 100 species of cars. But you think about with dog breeds, right? Dogs, all one species. But look at all the variation there. Gars are just changing at such a different rate relative to our way of thinking that, you know, to them, maybe they are one species. They're just slight variations on, on a basic blueprint. We don't know what that is, but that's just another area of research we're looking into. But that adds value to these fish. You take buffalo. I know you all had Alec Lackman on one of the previous shows with fishing and stuff. The buffalo can live for over 100 years. We know that. But since then, since 2019 when you all were talking to him, Buffalo soccer.

[Steve]

Can live 100 years.

[Solomon David]

Buffalo soccer live over 100 years. One's in Minnesota, one's in Minnesota, you know, Saskatchewan, 125 years. No, there's one. So buffalo story I can tell you is that some of the buffalo, during World War I, they wanted to, you know, ship more meat products, food products overseas. And so they wanted people stateside to eat less meat because they need all those resources to go towards a war effort. So they want to encourage people to eat more fish. And so in order to get people to eat more fish, they're building all these new reservoirs in the southwestern United States, the, you know, Roosevelt Reservoir down southwest. And so some states, including Iowa, shipped a bunch of game fish, including some non game fish like buffalo, over down to the Apache Lake down in Roosevelt Reservoir, that area, around 1917. Some of those fish are still alive today.

[Steve]

No way.

[Solomon David]

And they've gone back and looked at some of the offspring which were from born around the 1920s, still alive today. Wow. And they've done all kinds of aging with the otoliths, radiocarbon dating. So sure, those are introduced species there, but we introduce them. But some anglers go there, they know them by the different spot patterns and stuff. But what they've also been able to find, looking at their physiology, their health has actually improved with old age. Their immune system function, senescence, the sort of DNA breakdown that we all have as we get older, they don't show that. So you've got these native rough fish like gars that they've got this DNA that's been staying coherent for millions and millions of years, potentially with the DNA repair mechanism. You've got buffalo, which actually are improving with age. You're talking 80 year old 100 year.

[Steve]

Old fish just kicking ass.

[Solomon David]

Just. Yeah, yeah. So you know there's a lot to.

[Steve]

Learn about these fish.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, combine the two, you can live forever and get better with it.

[Steve]

Age.

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[Brody]

I got an angling question. Sure. Maybe not for alligator gar because they have a, you know, they have a degree of popular popularity for fishermen. But, but the other species, if, if one was wanting to set a world record or gar, one of those species that just kind of get ignored and there's a bunch of like open line class records.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. Even in Minnesota they've got catch and release records that are open to a bunch of non game native fish. I think the bowfin one was just set this past summer. I was like a 31 incher.

[Brody]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Because no dudes had ever put in for it.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I mean, you know, not as much anyway. But yeah, down south you get some big long nose guards. We actually got the biggest long nose I'd ever seen with my students out at Nicholls State when I was down in Louisiana was a 60 incher. And later that summer, I think somewhere else, Louisiana, they got a 65 incher. But that is right along the records.

[Brody]

Because there's some, some fishermen that just look for unfilled, yeah, class world records.

[Solomon David]

That'S a good spot to go for, you know, the line classes, the different size overall. Yeah. And that's. That's worth, you know, going after. I would say if you do shoot it, find a way to get us the otolith because we want to, we want to age that fish so they.

[Brody]

Got some skulls getting their otolith lift. That's got to be a process.

[Steve]

I can't stop messing with this.

[Solomon David]

You have to use a hammer and a chisel for alligator gars. I mean, it's just. And we're working with skulls that are huge too.

[Brody]

It's like, what are your buddy up. Up at the shack when he was chopping open those yellow eyes to get their otolith? That was work.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, it's a. It's messy business.

[Steve]

But how'd you do this skull? This skull's amazing.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, that's with the. Some formaldehyde you're probably getting. Maybe, maybe some. That's good. That's good.

[Steve]

So you did what now?

[Solomon David]

We. We get the skull. So we got it from Alligator gar rodeo down in Louisiana. So that it was. That was great. It's another opportunity to work with stakeholders there.

[Steve]

Why they shoot about 22?

[Solomon David]

Because they jug line for them first. So when you get the fish and it's alive, they want to find ways to dispatch the gar. Yeah. I'm always curious as to how they're doing that on a boat and not misfiring and hitting the bottom of the boat or something. But they use the 20 shoot over.

[Steve]

The edge of the boat.

[Solomon David]

I guess so I've never seen it. We get them when they bring them in. So. But you know, you got to figure got these big fish. You're not usually hanging a big. That kind of gar. You might hang over the edge of the boat, but if you're hanging the head of a six foot or seven footer over the edge of your boat, you might.

[Brody]

I told you earlier, I've got a lingcod head that I want to do, but like the general public can't just get their hands on.

[Steve]

You buy formaldehyde. Like a jug of formaldehyde?

[Solomon David]

That's a good question. I can buy formaldehyde, but I don't know, I think type up buy, look into it once and you get that for the.

[Steve]

Why don't they want people to have formaldehyde?

[Solomon David]

I mean, it's a. It's a carcinogenic.

[Steve]

I mean, so you take the guard's head. Fresh off the guard.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And then you do what we.

[Solomon David]

Well, Those we eventually put on ice so we could storm for a bit. We thaw them out and then I. Once we thaw them, we pry the jaws open, usually wedge something in there because, you know, the natural state of the gar isn't with the jaws wide open like that. And then we put them in a formaldehyde bath for like maybe two, three days, depending on the size of the fish. And then we take it out, we put in a cooler with water and we just change that water bath a few times and we just let it air dry. Dry. But you can do that with a regular fish. You could set it up.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Brody]

Like I've salted pike heads and let them dry. But that looks.

[Solomon David]

That would work way better than pike. Yeah, yeah. Because pike are still. They got a lot of flesh, you know, along the skull. Whereas a gar skull, I mean, that's. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

We may have to communicate with Montana State University. So purchasing a jug of formaldehyde solution requires a special AS chemical supplier. It's not available for purchase at retail stores and is regulated by the EPA and OSHA due to health risk, including cancer. We need to demonstrate a legitimate use.

[Spencer]

Just need a dealer.

[Steve Rinella]

So we might need to. Yeah, like anyone at msu get some contacts there. Well, trade informaldehyde.

[Steve]

I was gonna bring this up with you, Krin.

[Steve Rinella]

Is that illegal?

[Steve]

You still have those tuna heads in that freezer? You need to deal with them or get your formaldehyde.

[Steve Rinella]

I thought Alec got some and made. Made soup with them.

[Brody]

Are the collars attached?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I'd take. I don't think they are, no. Is it just the head? We've also got those.

[Steve]

We cleaned them up.

[Steve Rinella]

We've also got those fetuses in there too.

[Steve]

This is a work art.

[Solomon David]

I mean, you know, hope. Hope you all appreciate that. You know, we couldn't bring a big one in the suitcase or anything. Show me a big one with your hands.

[Steve]

What's a big one?

[Solomon David]

Big one. You're looking about that big. Really? I think I had some pictures in there. I'll send them to you. But that eight footer has a. Was a pretty big skull. It got trapped in the net. So that one had unfortunately died. But we were able to get the otoliths. I was 56 years old, but there you're looking at a 8 foot long fish. That was 56. It could have easily been 100. When they get that big, they aren't growing, you know, very much each year. But this is out of the coastal Louisiana. So we had six footers that were 20 years old. I want to say we probably had a six and a half footer that might have been, you know, 20, 21. So they get. They get big. But that's where working with the rodeo was very helpful because we could get all the data we wanted. They let us just have at it. They were cutting the heads off for us. They're getting us, you know, any of the samples of the muscle tissue, the fins, and then they also cleaned them there. It was at a bar. It was at Manny's Bar on the Maripar off Lake Maripod. Amateur River. And people come from all over that general region. And they'd be eating this fried alligator gar. They make gar balls, which are like, hush.

[Steve]

That's why I like Cajuns, man. Those Cajun dudes eat everything.

[Solomon David]

I mean, you know, but gar's good. They got the big back straps. And the thing is, they invited us back year after year because they wanted to know what we were finding out. And we wanted to, you know, work with them and share that info with them, too. So you've got multiple stakeholders. We weren't there to say, like, you got to stop doing this. We were there to, like, learn about the resource. How can we figure out about the health of the population? We've been invited back every year. I couldn't make it this year because coming down from Minnesota is a little bit tougher. But next year, we plan on going back down there. So if you ever want to, you know, send somebody to jump in on a gator guard rodeo, you know, we'll be there. But. But I think that's a good opportunity to, again, work with stakeholders, work with the people that are using the resource for different purposes.

[Steve]

This is my last question for you. They might have more, you know, when you have like. Like Trout Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Right, right. They put tons of money into habitat work. They put tons of money into research. Who, like. Like, who out there? What. What nos are. Put any money into. Into guard.

[Solomon David]

Right. As far as a definite ngo, nobody. I think we're. We're lucky that we can try to go after grants from different organizations. Minnesota has a lottery tax that goes into their Environmental and Natural Resources Trust Fund.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Solomon David]

And so we apply for that. We've been lucky to get support from the state then to look at these native rough fish. So that's been extremely beneficial. And a few other states have, you know, stuff like that, too.

[Steve]

But there's no GAR enthusiast group.

[Solomon David]

I mean, you're looking at it, Steve. I mean, you know, it's, you know, and then there's Native Fish for Tomorrow, which is a non profit group that is promoting the value of these fish. But we're all kind of cobbled together out of Minnesota as well.

[Steve]

Native Fish for Tomorrow.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. So Tyler Winter is one of their main spokespersons. He also had a response to that article, but again, promoting eating the fish, fishing for the fish. But again, that's advocacy. I mean, through the grants that we're getting, we're partnering with them to provide them funding. So we're kind of trying to get what money we can to work on that stuff. But doing things like this, the work you all do, gets that message out more about the value of these fish. But again, being able to convince. It was the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. They support our work down on the Mississippi river floodplain in Mississippi, working with Nature Conservancy, U.S. fish and Wildlife. So it's a bunch of partners usually coming together. So I've been kind of selling the idea of like, we can use GAR to answer these questions or to get at this type of restoration, but it really is advocating for the species and then trying to fund the funds to. Or find the funds to back that research and then show that these are, again, valuable organization.

[Steve]

Yeah, because it's the new fountain of youth.

[Solomon David]

Right? Right. Yeah.

[Steve]

Once you figure out a couple of.

[Solomon David]

Them little trips, I will say that the biomedical value of the fish has bolstered that value. Spotted gar, actually out of Michigan is where we looked at that, comparing them. And also in Louisiana, the GAR genome is actually organized closer to the human genome than it is to other fish, like your walleye and your trout. So because of that sort of ancient lineage, they've got a lot of stuff that's in common with, you know, other sides of the evolutionary tree.

[Steve]

I do got one more question.

[Solomon David]

All right. All right.

[Steve]

What is the toxin that's in those eggs?

[Solomon David]

That is a great question. We've been trying to answer that for well over a decade. We think it might be sequestered from bacteria, but we don't know exactly. There's actually current work being done at Nichols State and at LSU on that right now. We did some preliminary work on that a few years ago. So we think it comes from bacteria, mainly in the eggs. And what's also unique about that toxin is it's toxic to birds, to mammals, to arthropods like crayfish and crickets, but it's not toxic to fish, fish. So really, why, if you're a fish, would you have, you know, eggs that aren't toxic to the other animals that are there?

[Steve]

So bluegill can suck that.

[Solomon David]

I've got videos of bluegill eating long nose gar eggs as the long nose are laying them. So that kind of brings kind of full circle to like this game fish and non game fish. You're actually supporting these giant bluegill. And what we think is because gars evolutionarily would, I mean they live in these warm waters, right. They breathe air. So most your regular traditionally respiring fish like bluegill and you know, bass aren't going to live in those low oxygen waters. But you do have a lot of crawfish, you have a lot of water birds, you got a lot of crawfish. So it'll kill the crawfish, it'll kill the birds. It'll, you know.

[Steve]

Have you ever given, have you ever actually given it to a mouse and seen him die there?

[Solomon David]

I haven't given it to him. There are experiments that have been done. They've given it to turtles too. Or it's like slowed down the heart rate and so they have done experiments with those eggs.

[Steve]

It's fatal. How much later with.

[Solomon David]

Depending on.

[Steve]

It's hard to generalize.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah. It depends on how much you're consuming with that stuff.

[Steve]

But like, like quick or days later.

[Solomon David]

With crayfish it's pretty quick. Like they basically you'll see them eating them and they slow down and they just stop.

[Brody]

What in, in parts of the country like down like. Or the Cajuns are eating these things. Is that like a. No, like people know.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, it's a. You know, they know how to clean them there. But you. And it's, it's available on the thing called the Internet. Right. But you'll still see pop up every few years these people got violently ill from eating a bunch of garlic, from eating the row, from eating the rock row. Yeah. They thought maybe I'm going to try to eat these cuz, you know, you get a big long nose guard. There's a lot of eggs in there you can eat Bowen caviar, they make that. They call it Cajun caviar. I've heard it's not as good. You know, not surprisingly.

[Steve]

I've heard of that too. I forgot about that.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, but you can't do that with the gar. So I mean you're not going to die, but you're going to have bad cav. Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

We're trying to get a caviar specialist.

[Brody]

Not nice methane specialist.

[Steve]

It's gonna be a short episode.

[Solomon David]

You can double up on something.

[Steve]

I got one question. Are you from the North?

[Spencer]

I got. I got two comments from earlier. We were talking about the native range of an alligator guard. The USGS says it goes following the Ohio river almost to West Virginia.

[Solomon David]

What?

[Spencer]

And then the Mississippi almost to Iowa. So, like, deep into the Midwest.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Seriously.

[Solomon David]

They're trying to bring them back in Kentucky. They have found them in parts of Ohio and Indiana along the Ohio River. So they think that the one that was, I think, found in Indiana was part of restoration either in Ohio or in Kentucky. But yeah, there are parts. They're in the Ohio River.

[Steve]

Are they maybe just not getting like five, six, seven feet long? So people just aren't like noticing they.

[Solomon David]

Had big ones down in Horseshoe Lake in Illinois. Like, I want to say it was like. It was like early 1900s. That biggest one that they got, like towards the end of their run before they were fully extirpated, was like a five or six foot long fish. So they get big.

[Steve]

I had just no idea.

[Solomon David]

We've actually found gars in the north get bigger, like long term, maximum size than the fish in the South. Like, that's looking at spotted garage. So they've got the growth rate that has to be able to compensate for winter. But we do find, on average they live longer and they can get bigger. Alligator gar. We just don't know enough because we wiped them out from the north. So we'll have to see some.

[Steve]

Was like deer.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Mm.

[Spencer]

Other comment was, Steve, you were asking about traditional use of gar When I would give tours at the hatchery and we would get to the gar section, I try to make people think they were cool. Some native tribes would use their scales for currency or jewelry. And then some of the early white settlers would line the front of their plows with gar skin because it could break through tough dirt. So there's some historical use. Super tough question, Solomon. What. What is like an aquarium you really like as a native rough fish man, where you walk in, you're like, no way. They have a trash fish quillback. They have a river carp sucker.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, Yeah. I would say the. The Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga does an amazing job with freshwater fish. They've got a whole building that's all freshwater. They built another one that's marine, which I think is cool. But I was there for a conference last year. I visited the aquarium three times during that conference. Only went to the freshwater one. They let me feed the gars down There too. So shout out to Tennessee Aquarium. Shedd Aquarium. I was a postdoc there and so they've got a good freshwater setup too. Tennessee's better. But Shedd does have some of my gars that I had in grad school that I couldn't rehome when I moved to Chicago. So if you go to Shedd Aquarium, you see any gars, most of those are mine from grad school, you know, over 10 years ago.

[Steve]

No kidding.

[Spencer]

And I sent him paddlefish to the Shedd Aquarium. Yeah, yeah, about a day.

[Solomon David]

Way back in the day. Yeah.

[Spencer]

In Minnesota. That's sort of like ground zero for these wakeboard studies or wake boat studies. Have you followed these at all?

[Solomon David]

I've not. I just know it's a. It's a topic that's come up when, you know they're looking at new management that's, you know, we got to look into it.

[Steve]

So that's those both. They weigh them all down with ballast and then make the big waves destroy the shoreline.

[Spencer]

You surf on them. Well, they're now like putting cameras under one water and seeing what it does to the bottom of the lake. And it appears to be like pretty devastating. Like a bomb went off.

[Brody]

Oh, I'd love it if they got rid of those things.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Spencer]

I was going to see if you. Any thoughts on what those do to. To rough fish.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I think whenever you're taking out habitat like that, that's problematic. And especially since a lot of the native rough fish like the near shore habitats, so when you're scouring out the bottom, increasing turbidity, that's bad for the plants. And even if they're not near shore, you're creating that wave action that's going to have stronger impact also on the shore when you've got that vegetation. So I think, I mean, again, not being an expert on that myself, but I would say if it's damaging the habitat as they're describing them, that's going to be problematic for a lot of these fish.

[Steve]

Can you imagine? Can you just imagine the conversation.

[Brody]

Oh, God.

[Steve]

In the wakeboard enthusiast community when someone says, hey, man, you can't do that anymore because of the guard.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, set me up. You're setting me up.

[Steve]

No, I'd be like, yeah, you can't do that anymore.

[Brody]

Because the gar, they just make my boat bounce around a lot when I'm perch fishing.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah. They would be just like, oh, my goodness gracious.

[Spencer]

I don't think they're listening to this show.

[Steve]

No, I don't Think they are. And frankly, there'll be something. This is my message to the. This is my message to the wakeboard and community.

[Spencer]

Have you delivered a message before or not? This is your first statement.

[Steve]

I need to refine my message. My message is I'm on the lake bottom side of things, man. Who else got a question?

[Brody]

Do they regrow their teeth their whole lives?

[Solomon David]

That is a great question. I think they can grow teeth, but it's not like sharks. So we were. Yeah, we were at this rodeo and the little kid, you know, parents brought him up to us as we were processing these fish. And I'm there with Prasantha Chakraborty, curator of fishes at lsu. So he and I are both there. He's an ichthyologist. I'm, you know, gar person there. Little kid asks, can I have one of the teeth? And so I'm like, sure. And so we take the pliers and we go to pull the tooth out of this jaw. And it's like, really hard to get out of there. And we pulled it out and it just goes down almost like a volcano underneath the water, like. And, you know, we pull that out. We're looking at it. Me and Prasanta both, we've been studying fish for most of our lives, and we just, like. I'm like, huh? Like, we just. We had no idea that that's what it looked at. And, you know, we gave it to the kid. It made his day, right? And his little brother came up like, I want a tooth, too. So then we're starting pulling teeth out of these things. So they do have an interesting structure there, and they do have something called dentine, or place a dentine around those teeth, which is similar to the, you know, some of the developmental tooth parts that we have as well. So there's a lot of things from the fish that are kind of connected to us.

[Brody]

Yeah, because it seems like with the. Those real long ones, over time, like 50 years, they'd get broken and need.

[Solomon David]

To be with some of the big fish. They get. They get broken. But in Michigan, when we'd be doing our spotted gar work, we. We would get what we call the crocodile effect, where you'd get gars where the teeth have grown from the bottom jaw and pierce the top of the jaw. Yeah.

[Steve]

So he's got tooth holes in his jaw.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, well, those. Some of those are nostrils, actually. No, you're right. Those. Those two where you can see the opal hole going all the way down. Those are the tooth holes for those lower Fangs down there.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, it's like piranhas are like rows of teeth in there, like.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, they got, they got a lot of teeth, you know, and they don't have a lot of bite force though. So they're more about, you know, they grasp and hold and then swallow the food as opposed to piranhas and sharks, which are more of a cutting plane. Barracudas as well. But again, you know, you look at those teeth, that's going to be, you know, intimidating. So there's a, you know, an aesthetic to them as well when you think about, you know, getting people interested in them. Alongside trout and walleye and bass.

[Spencer]

Besides humans, what else are killing alligator gars?

[Solomon David]

Alligators to an extent, depending on the size. Once a gator gar is full size, nothing's really messing with it. Water birds will eat gars as well. Other fish, other gars will eat them. I mean that's not, you know, we find bowfin inside a bowfin too. So typically it's going to be other predatory fish, but usually like a bass or a walleye, they're not able to take them down. Once they get to, once they get to decent size, nothing's getting through those scales really either.

[Steve]

Yeah. You mentioned being of Indian descent. You're born in the U.S. yeah, yeah.

[Solomon David]

I was born in Washington, state of Arlington, Washington, kind of farm town out far.

[Steve]

Did you fish as a kid?

[Solomon David]

I did. You know, that's what I was going to ask you, like how we all got started fishing. I got started fishing, you know, mainly on non game fish. So I lived in Washington and then North Dakota for eight years as a kid. And then Ohio is where I grew up. Cut Creek chubs out of some random creek and we'd tie like ball up a piece of bread on a hook and then catch them that way. But I remember catching some perch in North Dakota, going out fishing. That was one of the first fish I remember catching. The state capital had a big northern pike taxidermy there. I remember looking down the mouth of that and thinking, those teeth are really cool. And I was into dinosaurs as well. So always getting outside, my dad would take me to the still Guamish river in Washington state. So like we'd chuck rocks in there. So there was that connection to the water. So I enjoy fishing. I'm not good at fishing. My buddy Tyler Winter takes me out so he can take me, he can get me like where's the gar spot? Where's the bowfin spot? So I can do that. It takes my kids out. They've caught red horse and, you know, some other non game fish. Of course, my kids know gars. They've known that for. For their whole lives. But I do think that's an important part of, like, you know, getting kids out into nature, getting them outdoors. And so that's also what we want to do. I would be remiss if I didn't say, like, my introduction to GARS was through Ranger Rick magazine, which is through the National Wildlife Federation.

[Steve]

Yeah, we used to get that when I was kidding.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, I got it for my kids, too. And so, I mean, that's what got me started. And, you know, I thought they were cool. But, you know, now we look at that as that's an opportunity to introduce kids to the outdoors also. Just getting them outdoors. So again, I like getting my kids out fishing and then, you know, helping them maybe reel it in. But. But I'm not a great angler. I like to count on folks like you all for that. In grad school, I'm also not a hunter, but I am a consumer, so I just wasn't good at getting up early in the morning. So they go out hunting for duck and deer, but I would eat all the food they brought back. We'd have game night and do that. So I'm a participant on some level, but I do recognize the importance.

[Steve]

How long you been married?

[Solomon David]

9 years as of just a week and a half ago.

[Steve]

Same purse?

[Solomon David]

Yep. We met at Shedd Aquarium. So she. She was a grant writer. She's not a fish person person, but she is bought into the gar. You know, the. The whole GAR thing. At our wedding, instead of escort cards, you know, got the name tags for the table. She made escort guards, which are GAR figurines with the name tags. I did not know about it at all. So, you know, she is all for. She's got the GAR earrings. And so again, we've got some, you know, fish connections.

[Brody]

You guys go to Jurassic park on your honeymoon.

[Solomon David]

I know, right? You know, if it existed, we would do that, Brody.

[Steve]

So.

[Solomon David]

So, you know, that's where the DNA is really going. We're trying to bring back GARs, but then it'll just look the same as what we have now. So it's gonna.

[Steve]

Yeah, that'd be real.

[Solomon David]

Millions of dollars in grant money. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Steve]

Yeah, that's a gar.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Steve]

All right, well, thanks for coming on the show.

[Solomon David]

Thanks for having me.

[Steve]

Tell people how to find your work. If they want to come find her, if they want to send you Weird specimens or whatever.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. If they look up garlab. Garlab.org if you just look up Garlab, you'll find us. And we're on the social media platforms, the Garlab on Instag and on all the major platforms there. So if you look up Garlab, you'll find us. There's not that many of them. I think there's. There's just one so far. Until we expand further, like the big ten.

[Steve]

So they can. They can get a hold of you and send an email and say, yeah.

[Solomon David]

Tell us the stories. If you know, spots from. If you get a big gar. Like we're interested in that. It is, again, a broad spanning effort. And so we want contributions from the general public.

[Steve]

You catch a GAR in a freak place.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah, let us know.

[Steve]

No. Okay.

[Solomon David]

I'm always up for gar stories.

[Steve]

All right. Garlab. Org.

[Solomon David]

Yep.

[Steve]

Garlab.org Is that simple?

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yep. That simple. There was a lot of competition for it, Steve.

[Steve]

Yeah. When you did a keyword search on GAR Lab, it was clean.

[Solomon David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Y.

[Spencer]

Can I say one last thing? We used to do touch tanks at the hatchery a lot. The most popular fish were always gar. They, like, really appeal to children. There's something like a very basic level we. We just love about Garfish.

[Solomon David]

Yeah.

[Spencer]

And they handle touch tanks super well.

[Solomon David]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Spencer]

A lot of fish can't handle that stress. GAR can. So they're great for, like, introducing kids to cool prehistoric rough fish.

[Solomon David]

One of my favorite pictures that I've seen of kids interacting with Gars is one that Spencer took from that hatchery. So I've used that before in outreach activities. But it's like these kids reaching and touching that long nose. Gar. So I think that's it. They don't. They don't see it as weird. They don't see it as trash. So I think that's. That's hope for the next generation.

[Steve]

You know, we didn't get into. Is cleaning them.

[Solomon David]

Ten snips. Yeah. Ten snips is good.

[Steve]

That's one of our books, isn't it, Brody?

[Brody]

Peeling them and all that, you know.

[Steve]

Pulling their little back straps out.

[Solomon David]

Save the head for us, maybe.

[Steve]

Well, from now on, once we get our. Once we get a jugger. Formaldehyde.

[Solomon David]

All right. That's all we're gonna do.

[Steve]

All right. Thanks a lot, man.

[Solomon David]

All right. Thanks for having me. This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names.

[Steve]

Football is back. That means it's tailgate time.

[Solomon David]

And this season, the only meat I'm going to grill is Dietz and Watson. I'm loving the Black Angus Dietz dogs. They're flavor packed and you can tell they are made with the highest quality ingredients. Sundays just got a whole lot better. Visit deetsandwatson.com the right way to learn more about the Deets difference. ABC Wednesday. It's the CMA Awards live.

[Brody]

That's what I'm talking about.

[Steve]

With performances by Lainey Wilson, Kelsey Ballerini, Zach Topp, Riley Greene, Ella Langley, Kenny Chesney, Megan Maroney, Brandi Carlisle and the.

[Solomon David]

Hottest collabs, Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton, Jabuzzi and Steven Wilson Jr. Big X the plug featuring Liv Combs. It's country music's biggest night hosted by your girl, lainey Wilson.

[Steve]

The CMA Awards live Wednesday, 8, 7 Central on ABC. And next day on Hulu and Doug. Here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.

[Solomon David]

Fascinating.

[Steve]

It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Solomon David]

Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars.

[Ad Voice]

What? Watching us?

[Steve]

Cut the camera. They see us.

[Solomon David]

Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Liberty, Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates excludes Massachusetts. This is an I heart podcast.