April 16, 2026 • 47 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the royal histories and curious biologies of such resplendent fish as the common gold fish and koi.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
in our series on fishes of gold the orange, yellow,
and golden colored fishes in the carp family, such as
the goldfish and its close relative the Crucian carp, and
the varieties of cultivated carp known as coy fish. In
the previous episode, we talked about the carp family and
(00:37):
its historical role in human aquaculture, about how orange, gold,
and yellow colors of goldfish today are mostly a result
of artificial selection by humans that goes back more than
a thousand years in China, and we also talked about
how despite the fact that the color of the goldfish
(00:58):
is a mostly human selected trait, there are some reasons
that animals in nature develop bright orange and yellow colors,
including some cases of intra species communication like signaling of
reproductive fitness or just self recognition within a species, as
well as inter species communication like signaling to predators that
(01:21):
you are toxic or bad tasting, or somehow unpalatable, and
this is known as appo semitism.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, and some animals are just garish and tacky. What
can you say? There you go.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
We also talked about how goldfish are actually able to chew,
even though if you look at their mouths they have
quite smooth, smooth looking, soft toothless jaws. The short version
of the story is that goldfish, along with other fish
in the carp family, have a grinding chewing mechanism known
as phrynge old teeth at the back of their throats,
(01:55):
and occasionally these throat teeth fall out for aquarium keepers
to find, which be a fun surprise. You think your
fish is toothless, you discover it's not. It's just that
it's teeth or in its throat. We talked about the
historical association of goldfish with royalty in China, and finally
we talked about an interesting adaptation in goldfish and other
(02:17):
close relatives like the Krucian carp that allows them to
survive extended periods of time in oxygen deprived waters that
would suffocate many other vertebrates. And the adaptation is actually
that they are able to ferment alcohol in their bodies
and then purge it out through the gills. They do
(02:38):
this as an alternative to the other normal end product
of anaerobic respiration, which is lactic acid. So producing alcohol
instead and then being able to easily purge it from
the gills helps the fish avoid the deadly state of
acidosis that usually comes from prolonged extreme oxygen deprivation. And
we're back today to talk about that's.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Right, and we're gonna do a little bit of a
carp ketch up here regarding some of the things we
were talking about last time. In the last episode, we
briefly discussed some carp related bits of folklore and mythology.
There's going to be a good bit more of that
in this episode. But at the top, I wanted to
confirm that, yes, the carp of the Longman of Chinese mythology,
(03:23):
this is we're talking about the upstream swimming carp that
leaps over a waterfall and transforms into a dragon. This
is in fact a carp. Yes, they are known in
Japan as Taruman and the Pokemon magic carp. Yes, that
we've discussed in the show before is a reference to
this transforming from its fish form into the dragon like
(03:44):
form of giri. Doose certainly look up images of this
if you are not one of our many listeners that
has the Pokemon data permanently installed in your cranium.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
I looked this up too, Yeah, because it came up
in the last episode. We couldn't quite remember what the
tail was, but we remember there was something about a
Chinese myth of a fish swimming upstream or jumping over
a waterfall and then becoming a dragon, and we were wondering,
is that a carp. It absolutely is a carp. Yeah,
so you're right there. Based on what I was reading
this time, the term long amen it actually means dragon gate.
(04:19):
And this is historically understood to be a waterfall, or
maybe not literally a waterfall, maybe more like a steep
rapid where the Yellow River passes through a gorge, so
it's kind of a narrow passageway with strong currents. Allegedly,
this path of the river was opened by You the Great,
the legendary king who tamed the flood. So the idea
(04:42):
is that if a common fish, generally a carp, can
swim upstream against the strong current of the dragon gate
or can leap over the falls, it will transform into
a dragon, as you said, and a dragon comes with
strong connotations ritual connotations in Chinese culture, it is it
(05:03):
is a powerful, majestic being, and the carp is typically
the fish named here because the carp itself, even before
any transformation takes place, is commonly associated with courage, perseverance,
and hard work in China. And there's an important human
interpretation or element added on to this, which is that
(05:26):
the idea of leaping the dragon gate is also a
standard metaphor for success in like great tests and trials,
often in scholastic and academic success. So I think it
can be applied more generally that from what I was reading,
it is most often applied to like academic success or
like passing a test. And in history this was strongly
(05:50):
linked with the efforts of young men to pass the
imperial examinations, which were the primary path to social mobility
historically across you know, many many years in China. So
you work hard, you excel at the test, and you
will leap the gate and transform into a more elevated existence.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, absolutely, I was reading about this as well. And
so outside of these cultures it may come as a
surprise that a carp what many of us would you
know outside of say Japanese and Chinese cultures and related
traditions might just think of as oh, that's just a
normal fish, maybe not even an exciting fish. But there
is a great deal of power there. There's a great
(06:29):
deal of important symbolic power within these traditions.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Last time, we were talking about whether we should think
of the carp as exceptional or as not exceptional, and
it's really kind of both. It is exceptional in that
they are these very interesting things about it, but it
is also from a different perspective, the most normal of fish.
They're almost like your standard freshwater fish. They're about as
(06:55):
regular as it comes, even though they are remarkable in
so many ways.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, I'm gonna skip ahead just for a second here.
I'm gonna come back and talk about them in more
detail later. But the Japanese ningyo, which is like a
it's often thought of as a Japanese mermaid when people
are applying you know, Western motifs to uh to to
other traditions half human, half fish, but the fish part
(07:21):
is often said to be that of the fish parts
of a carp. And I found this particularly interesting because
you know, you think of Japan, you know island nation,
you know a great deal of marine diversity that is
that is also traditionally you know, harvest and enjoyed for food.
And yet it is the carp that is the fish
(07:41):
that is drawn upon for this hybrid creature that has
you know, all these additional magical properties that I'll get
into later. You know, it's it's telling because the carp
is important, but also the carp is ubiquitous, like everyone
would have some familiarity with the carp. Uh, And so
it takes on this this interesting air. We're on one level,
(08:02):
it is mundane, it is every day, but then it's
also it's also beautiful. But also by being close at hand,
by being the familiar thing that we spend a lot
of time with, it is the thing we see ourselves
in more and it is more readily available for these
various symbolic meanings we apply.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Well, yeah, that's interesting. It speaks to another tension in
what kinds of animals would you expect to just be.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
On our minds?
Speaker 3 (08:33):
And in one sense, you could think of the most
exceptional animals, maybe the scariest ones, the most dangerous ones,
the biggest ones, the ones that if you see them once,
you will remember them forever. On the other hand, you
could think of. It's the animals that we encounter the
most often, that we see every day.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, yeah, and in seeing them every day, we'll occasionally
see them in a new way and see them with
a new eye. Yeah. Oh. One other thing I wanted
to mention is in a reference than nineteen seventy nine
Japanese film Demon Pond, which we discussed on our Weird
House Cinema episodes in recent months. There is a character
in there who is Carp, and he is a carp
(09:12):
though if memory serves, basically, he's just wearing a bunch
of like you know, dark paint on his body and
is kind of like greasy looking.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Barbles.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Right. Well, there's the there. Well, there are a couple
of different fish people, and I think maybe he's like
a catfish monk, the guy with the barbles. I think
the other guy is Carp.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah, I'm mixing up two characters.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah. And then there's Crab of course.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Right now, Carp is the first guy who's hanging out
with Crab, and then they meet the catfish priest.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah. All right, Well, let's uh, let's talk a little
bit first. I want to talk a little bit about
about the koi as we touched on in the last episode.
The history of koi lines up with the history of
goldfish in some key ways. So they're both selectively bred
ornamental varieties of wild carp species, and they both have
(10:02):
a lot to do with the with both aquaculture and agriculture,
specifically as far as rice farming is concerned, so you'll
have like flooded rice patties the perfect place for karp
to also be bred, and of course both produce a
food product that becomes vitally important to the people who grow,
slash raise the species in question. But while the modern
(10:26):
goldfish is again the product of one thousand years of
artificial selection, koi date backed only to nineteenth century Japan.
But like the goldfish, they have spread all over the world,
like you know, I've seen I've seen koi in you know,
in China. I've seen koi in Nashville, Tennessee. Like you know,
they're everywhere. Listeners out there, you may have koi just
(10:50):
outside your house, in your own pod. So this still
even with a much shorter time frame here, it still
results in multiple varieties of koi. But as Nick Fletcher
points out in the book The Ultimate Koi, which is
just an insightful book with a lot of stuff I
think geared towards people who are more intimately involved in koi,
(11:11):
like raising koi, but it also has some great overview material.
He points out that it means that, quote, their body
structure and the way they respond to their environment are
fundamentally the same as those of their wild ancestors. Any
differences are superficial, and the colors and patterns of skin
pigment belie an internal uniformity much more consistent than that
(11:34):
of their cousin, the goldfish.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Oh okay, So is this saying that the goldfish is
selective breeding has actually really altered the organism in more
profound ways than the selective breeding of the koi.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yes, and it just has to do with just the again,
the fact that the koi is just a much more
recent development. We're only going back, you know, something like
a century in terms of devoted selective breeding. Now Here
is a perhaps less obvious question regarding all of this.
How did freshwater carp get to Japan? To begin with?
(12:10):
The short answer is that they were introduced from mainland
Asia as far back as prehistoric times by human beings,
and this has long been the prime explanation, with the
Yayoi people in particular being the ones that brought over
agriculture and aquaculture in the form of raising carp in
flooded rice patties, brought it over from mainland Asia, and
(12:33):
we're talking about this happening perhaps somewhere between three hundred
BCE and three hundred CE. However, it gets a little
more complicated than that, because apparently genetic strains of much
older carp have been determined. A genetically distinct wild lineage
of carp associated with Japan's largest lake, Lake Biwa, which
(12:55):
in this particular strain would seem to go back millions
of years and predate the arrival of humans on the
Japanese islands. So, depending on the exact genetic strain, Japanese
common carp can be considered both a native, prehistoric resident
and an ancient introduced species. Okay, anyway you cut it, though,
carp have been in Japan for a long time. People
(13:15):
there have been utilizing carp, and they were doing so
far before goldfish were introduced, which I dated in the
last episode of the seventeenth century, but it may have
been the sixteenth century depending on the source I've seen
both Now, despite the Koy's nineteenth century origins, there were
colorful common carp in Japan and in China for many centuries,
(13:38):
with accounts going back into the first millennium Sea. However,
these were seemingly the product of natural mutation in aquaculture
rather than targeted artificial selection by human breeders. Systematic breeding
of the amor carp that's cyprinous robru fuscus, or or
(14:00):
of the common carp which is a Suprnus carpio did
not begin in Japan till around eighteen twenty, and in
particular this would be the Nijumarago region of northeast of
the northeastern coast of Honshu, the largest of the Japanese islands. Now,
we didn't have time to get into this with goldfish
last time, but one of the really curious things about
(14:22):
their adaptability, which has long been exploited by selective breeders,
is that they exhibit significant morphological plasticity in response to
water depth and water flow.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Okay, so they can relatively easily change their body shape
or body size depending on their environment, like how deep
the water is or other dimensional characteristics of the body
of water.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
They inhabit correct. Yes, so shallow, low flow water environments,
these encourage more compact body shape, and this is thought
to be because they don't need to swim as much
and can therefore invest in a shorter, stockier body, and
then high flow environments favor slender, streamlined bodies. Now it
(15:08):
makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So not to imply that
they're just like T one thousands, like just rapidly changing around,
but still as far as you know, organism morphology goes
still pretty rapid.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Well, it kind of reminds me of research we've talked
about on the show before, positing that like when you
go deeper in the ocean, there's more evolutionary experimentation with
fish body shapes, and so you get more kind of
more experiments with like weird compact or you know, squat
types of body shapes or or extremely elongated ones, whereas
(15:43):
when you go closer to the surface, where there is
there's more dealing with current or more just pressure on
fish to be fast in order to escape predators or
to hunt, there is more of a pressure kind of
pushing fish towards this standard streamlined body shape that you
see in a lot of oceanic fish right.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Right, And then with the goldfish, like this is something
that has been exploited to try and favor, Like you
want a nice slender fish, okay, go in this direction.
But if you want a chonker, if you want a
nice squat fish, then this then this is what you
need to do with its environment. Now I want to say,
I think this is a good time to mention this.
(16:24):
We're talking about you know about goldfish in particular, getting
you know, their body shape changing depending on what sort
of environment you're in, and we should not let these
tantalizing facts accidentally feed the myth that a goldfish grows
in accordance to the size of their bowl or tank.
Goldfish grow throughout their life no matter the size of
(16:45):
the habitat, and as is the case with a lot
of organisms, if they're growing larger in a very small environment,
it is going to be uncomfortable for them in a
number of ways. In general, I would say, and I'm
saying this not as someone who keeps fish, so certainly
those of you who are the keepers of fish out
(17:06):
there may have additional data to share on this, but
in general, disregard any myth you hear that centers around
the idea that a goldfish doesn't require a proper, well
maintained environment, because, yes, as we discussed in the last episode,
they can handle some pretty rough conditions, but that doesn't
mean they're having a good time or that they are impervious.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Right right, I mean, just the fact that they can
survive some conditions that will kill other fish, that doesn't
necessarily mean it's good for them.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah. Yeah, like you know, you can sleep in a
really dirty bet, but that doesn't mean you should or
path to Noah, that sort of thing. Now, part of
this myth seems to stem as well from historic misunderstandings
of traditional Song dynasty goldfish presentation rituals that entailed placing
a particularly beautiful goldfish in a say, a small shallow
(17:58):
display bowl or some sort of jar for temporary display,
and then after you were done, you would return them
to the larger pool or pools that the fish lives in.
Victorians popularize the use of globular goldfish bowls for displaying
the fish, and you know, a lot of this just
is kind of a misreading of what the Chinese were
(18:20):
doing with the fish. It was like, oh, that's all
they need, you can just keep them in a little glass,
a little bowl, and they're good to go. That is,
it's not really the case. It's a lot more complicated.
They need proper care, as any fish does.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
It's almost like if you tried to make Olympic athletes
live on the like three steps with the first, second,
and third place.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, exactly, Like this is just a temporary display situation. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,
this also connects to the koi though, because the same
basic principles apply to these carp as well. Faster moving
waters lead to slimmer carp, while slow moving shallows lead
to chonkier carp. Now, I have to admit one of
(19:12):
the things that drew me into selecting this for our
discussion this week, As you know, I was looking at
some biological features that were kind of you know, provided
an overview of different fish, and I read something in
passing about koi living a long time and to be clear,
and then we'll get back to more examples of this.
(19:32):
Koi and carp in general are sometimes associated with longevity
in a magical sense, in a symbolic sense, but when
you dive into the subject of long lived individual koi,
the results are are not all that convincing. In general,
the life expectancy of a koi tends to be around
(19:53):
twenty five to fifty years, somewhere in that range depending
on how they're cared for and just roll of the dice.
But there are accounts of much much older koi, with
the alleged superstar being one Hanako, a red karp koi
last own by doctor Komei Koshihara and said to have
(20:14):
died in nineteen seventy seven. This is the fish at
the ripe old age of two hundred and twenty six
years old. If true, this would mean that fish was
born during the Edo period, a fish of the Togagawa Shogunate. So,
you know, a pretty impressive lifespan for a fish, and
one that you know kind of is you know, stirs
(20:35):
the imagination to think about how long this fish has
been going around doing its thing.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yeah, but was there like continuous documentation of the life
of this one fish or is it just a later
person saying, yeah, this fish has been alive for hundreds
of years.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Basically, it seems to be the latter unfortunately, and to
be clear, it does sound like like this man and
his fish did have a very special relationship he loved
this fish, and there were a lot of ideas associated
with this fish, and there was this idea that the
fish had been passed down through the family and then
also sound it's also been attributed to this fish displayed
(21:11):
a unique personality. It would like come up and look
at you and stuff. But the additional story that is
attached to this scientists use scale dating to determine that
it was more than two centuries old. This has generally
been met with at the very least healthy skepticism for
snopes dot com fans out there, they have an article
(21:31):
on the topic and they point out that there just
doesn't seem to be any way to really fact check
this again likely legend, like there's no you know, there's
no apparent peer reviewed or scientific journal information about this
fish or the alleged dating of its scales. And then
also scale dating in and of itself is apparently not
(21:54):
the most accurate way to determine fish age. I believe
my understanding is that scale based dating is good if
you have a live fish and you don't want to
hurt the fish, But if the fish is dead, you
can do a lot more specific testing based on its remains,
and so Yeah, some combination here of inaccurate readings, legend making,
(22:19):
and maybe some some shoddy record keeping, you know, But
I don't know. I think you can probably attribute most
of this to legend that is tying in with traditional
ideas about koi and about carb Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
I would also have to think that you would be
informed in this by considering how old is the claimed
age of this fish compared to the oldest age of
the same species that we can verify. You know, if
it's like a little bit older than the otherwise the
best known record holder, then you know, you'd be more
(22:52):
open minded about it. If it's like this seems like
this is maybe I don't know, more than double or
three times the age of that anybody's ever really verified
for these species.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding as well. And you know
it's you know, not to say that fish can't live
for a very long time, you know. I think, as
we've discussed in the show before, we have some real
Sioux superstars out there in the fish world when it
comes to living for centuries. But it does not seem
to be the case that that the carp specifically the koi,
is capable of this. But again, we're largely dealing with
(23:25):
dealing with the realm of legend here, and that's perfectly fine.
It's as long as we considered a legend, because there
are some really fabulous carp legends out there, and I
think that's what we're gonna basically be dealing with for
the remainder of the episode here, I turned to the
(23:45):
pages of one of Carol Rose's encyclopedias of magical creatures
to see there was anything I was missing, and she
does mention it sounds like a very related tradition from
Korean folklore of a dragon carp, a creature with the
head of a dragon and the tail of a carp, which,
upon being caught by a fisherman, speaks and begs for
(24:06):
its own life. The fisherman releases the creature and it
turns out to be the son of the dragon king.
So he's like, oh, you know, dodged a bullet. There
not a lot to that one. I guess they, at
least in the version that I read. There may be
a more robust version of that out there, but I
still found it kind of amusing and plays in with
some of the fishing motifs we've been talking about.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Well, I would wonder what this kind of legend. Does
the fishermen get a boon for giving the fish or
the son of the dragon it's life back.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
I would hope so. Certainly we have other fishing legends
where the talking fish grants a wish or something, So
I would hope that this is in some way auspicious.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
This association between dragons and carp. Beyond just the you know,
the transformation of the persistent carp who makes it up
through the dragon gate turning into a dragon. Beyond that one,
this association between dragons and carp will come up in
a legend. And I want to talk about in a
bit about an immortal Oh excellent.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Well, before we get to that, let's let's divert briefly
over to India. I was looking in Naditha Krishna's Sacred
Animals of India, and that book highlights a number of
sacred fish, though not all of them are tied in
this text to specific species. Two, however, do seem to
(25:26):
align with some sort of species of carp. There's the
Rohita fish, which is a symbol of Mahayana Buddhism, and
it is a right hand symbol of the goddess of Varahi.
A pair of golden fish symbolizes happiness as well as
possibly holy rivers and also the possibility of transcendental wisdom.
(25:47):
The species libeo Rohita or the rohu fish, is a
carp found throughout South Asia. Its prized as both a
game fish and a product of aquaculture. I don't believe, however,
that they are ever golden in color. Now there is
also the mahashir or masir, and this is a fish
(26:09):
considered sacred in many rivers of India. And this is
a carp species of the genus tor And. I was
looking at pictures of these. Some pictures I did not trust.
Some of these look like they might be ai. But
there are some other older images that seemed more authentic
that seem to indicate that they can take on some
level of golden color. I don't know if this is
(26:30):
how much of this is the sun playing on glittering
scales once they've been removed from the water, But some
potential for golden fish here. And then turning back to Japan, Yeah,
once more, there is that the ningyo, which is a
Japanese human fish hybrid. Again often sort of described as
(26:53):
a merman or mermaid through the Western lens, and it
is often invoked with the fish parts being that of
a familiar carp. And this was really interesting because the
ningo is often described as being a fish, generally again
a carp with a human face, sometimes with like parts
(27:13):
of a human's upper body, like little arms or so forth,
and much like the Fiji mermaid Mumma fied, examples of
this creature were created via taxidermy, transforming conjoined fish and
monkey parts into a new being. In fact, the Fiji
Mermaid is likely a ningyo that made its way into
the hands of nineteenth century American showman P. T. Barnum.
(27:37):
So just a little rebranding here.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Okay, wait, so I don't know if you know the
answer to this, But is it thought by whoever established
this historical record that he knew it was this Japanese
creature and he's like, I need to rebrand it for
an American audience, or is it just like I have
no idea what this is. I'll make something up from.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
What I was reading and perhaps have to get into
a more robust history of the Fiji mermaid later. I
think it came it didn't come directly. You came through intermediarymediary,
so it's very possible that it was rebranded along the
way as it made its way to his hands.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Okay, before it even got to him.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
I see. Now there are different traditions concerning the ningo
the eating of its flesh. It said that this will
give you long life. But on the other hand, catching
one is a bad omen that'll bring about terrible storms.
So kind of a catch twenty two there. But there
is a tale that is told of a nun by
the name of yal Bikuni who attained eight hundred years
(28:40):
of perpetual youth by eating the flesh of one of
these creatures.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Wow, you got to get that eternal youth, that's the
important part. You don't want to live forever but continually age. Yeah,
we watched at least one movie about that.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
I think, yeah, yeah, that's always the curse, right, yeah,
or you get immortality, but you don't get that that
that wolverine healing factor to go with it. So in
any ere, you know, it makes sense that if you
hate the flesh of one of these creatures, that it
would have some sort of benefit to your longevity, because
again there is this long standing connection between carp and
(29:14):
longevity and also of transformation again with the idea of
the carp becoming the dragon and so forth. Now, an
interesting sort of final wrinkle on this particular angle is
that koi fish can, with the right markings and the
right of observational conditions, maybe the right photograph angle, they
(29:36):
can appear to have humanoid faces. Some of these images
have made the rounds on the Internet over the past
couple of decades. And I'm sure there are some you know,
AI monstrosities out there now and men probably some photoshop
stuff in the mix, but it's my understanding there are
some genuine images out there that, you know, do kind
of look like you're looking at a carp with a
(29:58):
human face. So and you know, this is not this
is not something you just find in cooy. There are
other fish species out there that I think are captivating
because their face feels a little more human. I'm thinking
of various puffer fish, for example, which are sometimes when
people photograph them and say snorkeling environments, like the phone
(30:19):
will like do the whole like face thing, like it'll
like recognize the face of the fish, yeah, which is yeah,
I think, I think says something about why we find
them so fascinating.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yeah, puffer fish in particular are not just they don't
just have faces, but they're making a face.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, and they're kind of like all face because they
kind of feel like a big head, right.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Yeah, Like I'm thinking about particular puffer fish faces, and
they make good reaction meme style faces. One is kind
of a slack jaw are you kidding me? Face?
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah? They always feel to me like and this, especially
if I'm observing them in the water, they always kind
of look like they're thinking looking at me? Are you
still looking at me? And they you know, and they're
kind of like drifting away from you the whole time.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
How can I talk myself out of this situation? Yeah? Yeah, Okay,
are you ready to talk about carp riding?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Oh? Yes, let's do that. We haven't touched on this, So.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I think the best way to approach this subject is
to begin with you and I Rob looking at a
work of art that we can describe for the listeners
at home. So, Rob, I've got the image for you
to look at. Here in the outline, I'm going to
describe it. This is a Japanese color wood cut from
the Edo period, approximately the your eighteen twenty or so,
(31:49):
by an artist named Toyota Hoke. I found this in
the online collection of the Spencer Museum of Art at
the University of Kansas, which had some good explanatorys along
with it. So I'll describe it first and then talk
about what it means. The woodcut shows a sagely older
man with long hair and a mustache, wearing Taoist ceremonial
(32:14):
robes and so he's he's dressed in these robes. The
robes are very flowing and his hair is flying back
behind him. He has a oh, I would call this
a sly look on his face. It's just the slightest
hint of a smile, like pretty flat mouth, but just
curling up at the corners, like he's onto a pretty
funny joke. But he hasn't said anything about it yet.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Yeah, almost like he's riding a Harley or something. I
don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yeah, and he's got something in his lap. I'll talk
about that in a minute. But so this is all here. Yeah,
So he's got the expression, he's got the robes, but
he is riding on the back of a giant carp
just riding a fish the size of an orca like
it's a horse, sort of positioned right back behind the head,
around where the first pair of fins is and the
(33:02):
fish who how do you describe that fish's face? Fish
has We can only see one side of its face,
but it has a huge eye. And the fish also
appears to be kind of smiling. It's got an upturned
corners of the mouth. It looks like a happy fish.
It is not unhappy. It is not being broken like
a mustang, and you know, having its spirit beaten down.
(33:23):
This is a fish that is glad to be giving
a man a ride.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
And yet there's a certain wildness to it as well.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Yes, totally so. The man in this artwork is a
figure of legend. The Chinese Taoist immortal known as Chingau
or King Ko. Chingao was a sort of holy recluse
or hermit, a wise man of letters in a way,
a master player of an instrument I've seen in some
(33:52):
sources called a zither, like a seven stringed zither, which
is a stringed instrument in other sources. I don't know
if this is a different instrument or if it's another
word for the same thing, but they say he played
an instrument called the chin just qi n and so
he was a player of this instrument, and he was
known as a painter of fish. So I guess if
(34:14):
you paint him and there's a fish in the painting,
you're really inviting scrutiny of your craft. But according to legend,
the transformation of this Taoist sage Chingau into an immortal
was signaled by him appearing before his students or his
(34:35):
disciples riding on a magical carp and then after this
it was said that he traveled up and down all
the waterways of the world on the back of this
carp steed. But in some representations, such as this artwork
that you and I are looking at, Rob, in this one,
he is shown flying up into the clouds. He's going
(34:57):
to the heavens, and this is why the fish is
surrounded by clouds on this woodcut. I didn't actually notice
the clouds at first, but Rob, if you look at,
say the outline of the fish, you can see kind
of the fluffy edges of the clouds that it's almost
almost like the fish is sitting on the clouds.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yes, yes, very much. And you see similar depictions of
outright dragons, yes, in Eastern traditions, where they're like he
had nested on the cloud.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Did you notice that this carp is also its body
appears to you said, it looks very wild, and I
think that is suggested in part by the implied motion
of its pose. It appears to be writhing. In fact,
it is writhing in an S shape, the same kind
of S shape we often see Chinese dragons depicted. So yeah,
(35:45):
it's there in the clouds. It's writhing like this. It's
having a great time. One thing I did want to
point out about Chingao here is that in this woodcut
he is not observing hands free eyes on the road
driving rules because he has some kind of text spread
out in his lap and he's reading it while he
is writing the fish. I don't know if rules are
(36:08):
different when you're like writing an animal that has its own,
you know, some degree of its own intelligence and guidance,
versus driving a car. But the museum explanatory text here
says that the papers in front of him are thought
to be possibly a work of sheet music because he
was a a player of the stringed instrument, or maybe
a treatise on painting because he was a painter. Also
(36:32):
on the woodcut below the image, there are two short poems,
which the museum explains touch on the themes. One of
the themes is it is good to read and study,
so text is good text life. And one of the
other themes is it's good to have a long life.
Thumbs up the longevity. And it quotes one of these
poems saying, in translation quote count all the great karps Scales,
(36:56):
read all the Master's works and grasp his nature on
the long spring days. So, if you're going to make
that bumper stickery, I think the message is sort of
live long, read books, joy, enjoy nature.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah, or count read, grasp, but I think the whole
thing it would be a long bumper sticker. It would
cover the whole bumper. But I think count all the
Great carp Scales read all the Master's works and grasp
his nature on the long spring days. That would look
pretty good. I think maybe that would calm traffic a
little bit. You know, the person writing your bumper might
(37:31):
back up and say, yeah, I should count the Great
carp Scales a little more often. I'm not doing enough
of that in my life.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Also, not while you're driving, though you stop before you
count the scales.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:41):
Another annotation to this work is by a scholar credited
here named Veronica de Jong, and this note points out
the broader cultural significance of the carp in this legend
and in the artwork. We've already talked about some of this.
So the carp is again an auspicious animal bring success
and good luck. She points out, I hadn't read this
(38:04):
anywhere else that it's also associated with faithfulness in marriage.
Kind of interesting, but you can see how that pairs
with general themes of persistence over time, that you are
sticking to your commitment. And then she also links it
to the myth of the karp leaping the dragon gate
like we talked about, and mentions that in Japan, historically
(38:26):
the carp was not only associated with success and good
personal qualities like we're talking about in the Chinese examples,
but historically with samurai, which I thought was interesting. So Rob,
I want to look at a couple of other artistic
representations of Chingau or kin ko. The one is called
the Immortal Chingau Riding a Fish. This is an anonymous
(38:50):
ink on paper artwork from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century.
Also from Japan. It's in the collection of the Princeton
University Art Museum of you scroll down in the out
line and see it here once again, it is a
man in Taoist robes riding on a fish, and there
are a few differences. Unlike the last painting where the
(39:10):
fish was flying up into the clouds, here it is
shown gliding through the water, and you can see even
some representations of the bank, like there are branches of
bamboo in the lower left foreground. And the material explaining
this piece of art has a bit more detail on
Chingao's legendary biography. So this comes from a text known
(39:31):
as Biographies of Exemplary Immortals attributed to Lu Jiang. And
I want to note that there appear to be some
different versions of the legend of this guy's life which
have different details, so I'm reporting what I read from
this one. But the story says that Qingao lived during
the Warring States period, and he at one point served
(39:53):
as an advisor to a king, either an advisor or
possibly a musical performer to the King Hung of the
State of Song, and he studied under two other renowned
immortals named Peng Zhu and juan Zi, and then he
went wandering for two hundred years. You got to get
some experience, and then finally we get to the carp. So,
(40:16):
after the two hundred years of wandering, Chingau tells his
own students, his disciples that he is going to jump
into a lake. He's going to jump into this lake
called Lake Juou to go looking for dragons or looking
for a particular dragon. In one of the sources I
was looking at that seemed a little less This one
(40:37):
was not citing its sources, so I was a little
less sure of it. But it mentioned that he was
actually looking for a carp that was thought to be
the son of a dragon, bringing back to what you
mentioned earlier about a different legend of a carp being
the son of a dragon. But in this telling, it's
just says that he goes looking for dragons or for
a dragon in the lake. And so he said, yeah,
(40:58):
he goes into the water, and he gives his disciple
a time and date that he's going to emerge from
the lake and says that they should be there to
meet him. But first they got to do some preparations.
They should bathe and fast and put together a shrine
or a temple at the edge of the water. So
his disciples do as they are told. They wash themselves,
(41:18):
they fast, they build the shrine, and they're there waiting,
and at the appointed hour, Chingao finally pops up out
of the water and he is riding on the back
of a red carp. So after this, I guess this signals, okay,
he has become an immortal now, and he hangs out
at the shrine for a month while everybody comes to
see him. The story says that thousands of people flocked
(41:40):
from all over to come see him. The sources I
was reading do not say whether he was on the
carp the whole time, or whether he only came out
on the carp and then dismounted. I would like to
think he's on the carp the whole time. That would
make him much more interesting to see, right for all
the people coming from all over over. But anyway, after
(42:02):
this month long visitation at the temple or shrine is up,
he goes back back into the water, and from this
point on I think he either ascends into the heavens
on the carp or he rides around on the carp
going to the lakes and rivers of the world.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
You know. That that that that that second idea does
tie in with some things I was reading about about
the carp, about how the its ability to again you know,
not to not to apply too much logic to this,
but the idea that a carp can travel on all
the rivers and all the oceans of the world, you know,
or something like that, it implies a kind of supernatural
(42:39):
ability to travel, like and a unif you know, like
a uniformality to bodies of water. You know, like you
dip your finger in one body of water, you're touching
a distant shore. And the carp has this kind of
magic in it that it can it can travel that
great distance. It's like, you know, it's you know, it's
(42:59):
just part of its magical ability and just how in
touch with the natural world it is.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah, the theme of the magical theme of the adaptability of
the carb connects to the reality, the biological reality of
the adaptability of the carp. And then we have these
other themes that we see popping up again and again
in these stories. One is longevity or long life. Again,
probably some of these carp that are said to be
(43:25):
hundreds of years old or probably not really, but you know,
at least we have this cultural association with long life.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
Yeah, and they do live long enough that conceivably you
could have people pass a carp on from one generation
to the next, you know, if things panned out just right.
They're just not living to be two hundred. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Yeah, you know, they're not like they're not tetras or something.
I actually I don't know how long those live, but
I assume, you know, I remember having a small freshwater
aquarium at my house that a lot of these fish
did not live too long, though partially that could have
been our fault. I don't know, I hope.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Well, yeah, I mean this is one of the you see,
this discussed a lot in the literature about particularly goldfish,
is that by being such a popular species and thought
of it and times thought of as being an easy
species to keep, it leads to a lot of unfortunate
mortality in goldfish.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
Yeah. But so, yeah, you got that theme. And then
you have these themes again of perseverance, grit and courage,
of faithfulness, and of success in the face of hardship,
which are all wonderful things to associate with this fish.
This comment very very common, very diverse family of fish.
One more artwork I wanted to look at before we
(44:38):
wrap up this section. This is an artwork called Taoist
Immortal Chingau or Kinko sin in riding a carp This
is a Japanese ivory sculpture. This is more recent. It's
from the early twentieth century, and I just wanted to
make a let's see, where did I find this? I
think this was online from the Museum of Asian Art,
(45:00):
and I just wanted to flag it because I really
like how in this representation the fish is significantly less
vehicle or steed designed. It's like the wise man is
not riding the fish here, He's sitting in the fish.
He's totally absorbed in his reading, and the fish looks
(45:21):
like a comfy reading chair. Do you do you get
the same thing.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
Out of Absolutely? I love this. This seems like exactly
the sort of little icon you might have, you know,
on a desk or a shelf that is inspiring you
to count the scales and to read all the texts
and to live along life.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
It made When I saw this, I was like, I
don't want to work today, I just want to read
my book.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, just yeah, yeah, cuddle up with a good book
and a large fish and waste the day away. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
So that's all I've got on Chingao or Kinko. But
I like this guy new new favorite legendary figure unlocked.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Yeah, definitely when it comes to figures writing fish, right, Yeah,
all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close out
this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, but we'd
love to hear from everyone out there, your stories about goldfish,
your stories about KOI, also just carp in general, including
the eating of carp. Do you have a favorite carp
recipe or is there a particular carp dish that you've
(46:21):
greatly enjoyed at some point? All that's fair game as well,
and certainly any legends works of art that we didn't
touch on here write in. We would love to hear
from you.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
in our series on fishes of gold the orange, yellow,
and golden colored fishes in the carp family, such as
the goldfish and its close relative the Crucian carp, and
the varieties of cultivated carp known as coy fish. In
the previous episode, we talked about the carp family and
(00:37):
its historical role in human aquaculture, about how orange, gold,
and yellow colors of goldfish today are mostly a result
of artificial selection by humans that goes back more than
a thousand years in China, and we also talked about
how despite the fact that the color of the goldfish
(00:58):
is a mostly human selected trait, there are some reasons
that animals in nature develop bright orange and yellow colors,
including some cases of intra species communication like signaling of
reproductive fitness or just self recognition within a species, as
well as inter species communication like signaling to predators that
(01:21):
you are toxic or bad tasting, or somehow unpalatable, and
this is known as appo semitism.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, and some animals are just garish and tacky. What
can you say? There you go.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
We also talked about how goldfish are actually able to chew,
even though if you look at their mouths they have
quite smooth, smooth looking, soft toothless jaws. The short version
of the story is that goldfish, along with other fish
in the carp family, have a grinding chewing mechanism known
as phrynge old teeth at the back of their throats,
(01:55):
and occasionally these throat teeth fall out for aquarium keepers
to find, which be a fun surprise. You think your
fish is toothless, you discover it's not. It's just that
it's teeth or in its throat. We talked about the
historical association of goldfish with royalty in China, and finally
we talked about an interesting adaptation in goldfish and other
(02:17):
close relatives like the Krucian carp that allows them to
survive extended periods of time in oxygen deprived waters that
would suffocate many other vertebrates. And the adaptation is actually
that they are able to ferment alcohol in their bodies
and then purge it out through the gills. They do
(02:38):
this as an alternative to the other normal end product
of anaerobic respiration, which is lactic acid. So producing alcohol
instead and then being able to easily purge it from
the gills helps the fish avoid the deadly state of
acidosis that usually comes from prolonged extreme oxygen deprivation. And
we're back today to talk about that's.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Right, and we're gonna do a little bit of a
carp ketch up here regarding some of the things we
were talking about last time. In the last episode, we
briefly discussed some carp related bits of folklore and mythology.
There's going to be a good bit more of that
in this episode. But at the top, I wanted to
confirm that, yes, the carp of the Longman of Chinese mythology,
(03:23):
this is we're talking about the upstream swimming carp that
leaps over a waterfall and transforms into a dragon. This
is in fact a carp. Yes, they are known in
Japan as Taruman and the Pokemon magic carp. Yes, that
we've discussed in the show before is a reference to
this transforming from its fish form into the dragon like
(03:44):
form of giri. Doose certainly look up images of this
if you are not one of our many listeners that
has the Pokemon data permanently installed in your cranium.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
I looked this up too, Yeah, because it came up
in the last episode. We couldn't quite remember what the
tail was, but we remember there was something about a
Chinese myth of a fish swimming upstream or jumping over
a waterfall and then becoming a dragon, and we were wondering,
is that a carp. It absolutely is a carp. Yeah,
so you're right there. Based on what I was reading
this time, the term long amen it actually means dragon gate.
(04:19):
And this is historically understood to be a waterfall, or
maybe not literally a waterfall, maybe more like a steep
rapid where the Yellow River passes through a gorge, so
it's kind of a narrow passageway with strong currents. Allegedly,
this path of the river was opened by You the Great,
the legendary king who tamed the flood. So the idea
(04:42):
is that if a common fish, generally a carp, can
swim upstream against the strong current of the dragon gate
or can leap over the falls, it will transform into
a dragon, as you said, and a dragon comes with
strong connotations ritual connotations in Chinese culture, it is it
(05:03):
is a powerful, majestic being, and the carp is typically
the fish named here because the carp itself, even before
any transformation takes place, is commonly associated with courage, perseverance,
and hard work in China. And there's an important human
interpretation or element added on to this, which is that
(05:26):
the idea of leaping the dragon gate is also a
standard metaphor for success in like great tests and trials,
often in scholastic and academic success. So I think it
can be applied more generally that from what I was reading,
it is most often applied to like academic success or
like passing a test. And in history this was strongly
(05:50):
linked with the efforts of young men to pass the
imperial examinations, which were the primary path to social mobility
historically across you know, many many years in China. So
you work hard, you excel at the test, and you
will leap the gate and transform into a more elevated existence.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, absolutely, I was reading about this as well. And
so outside of these cultures it may come as a
surprise that a carp what many of us would you
know outside of say Japanese and Chinese cultures and related
traditions might just think of as oh, that's just a
normal fish, maybe not even an exciting fish. But there
is a great deal of power there. There's a great
(06:29):
deal of important symbolic power within these traditions.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Last time, we were talking about whether we should think
of the carp as exceptional or as not exceptional, and
it's really kind of both. It is exceptional in that
they are these very interesting things about it, but it
is also from a different perspective, the most normal of fish.
They're almost like your standard freshwater fish. They're about as
(06:55):
regular as it comes, even though they are remarkable in
so many ways.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, I'm gonna skip ahead just for a second here.
I'm gonna come back and talk about them in more
detail later. But the Japanese ningyo, which is like a
it's often thought of as a Japanese mermaid when people
are applying you know, Western motifs to uh to to
other traditions half human, half fish, but the fish part
(07:21):
is often said to be that of the fish parts
of a carp. And I found this particularly interesting because
you know, you think of Japan, you know island nation,
you know a great deal of marine diversity that is
that is also traditionally you know, harvest and enjoyed for food.
And yet it is the carp that is the fish
(07:41):
that is drawn upon for this hybrid creature that has
you know, all these additional magical properties that I'll get
into later. You know, it's it's telling because the carp
is important, but also the carp is ubiquitous, like everyone
would have some familiarity with the carp. Uh, And so
it takes on this this interesting air. We're on one level,
(08:02):
it is mundane, it is every day, but then it's
also it's also beautiful. But also by being close at hand,
by being the familiar thing that we spend a lot
of time with, it is the thing we see ourselves
in more and it is more readily available for these
various symbolic meanings we apply.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Well, yeah, that's interesting. It speaks to another tension in
what kinds of animals would you expect to just be.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
On our minds?
Speaker 3 (08:33):
And in one sense, you could think of the most
exceptional animals, maybe the scariest ones, the most dangerous ones,
the biggest ones, the ones that if you see them once,
you will remember them forever. On the other hand, you
could think of. It's the animals that we encounter the
most often, that we see every day.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, yeah, and in seeing them every day, we'll occasionally
see them in a new way and see them with
a new eye. Yeah. Oh. One other thing I wanted
to mention is in a reference than nineteen seventy nine
Japanese film Demon Pond, which we discussed on our Weird
House Cinema episodes in recent months. There is a character
in there who is Carp, and he is a carp
(09:12):
though if memory serves, basically, he's just wearing a bunch
of like you know, dark paint on his body and
is kind of like greasy looking.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Barbles.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Right. Well, there's the there. Well, there are a couple
of different fish people, and I think maybe he's like
a catfish monk, the guy with the barbles. I think
the other guy is Carp.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah, I'm mixing up two characters.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah. And then there's Crab of course.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Right now, Carp is the first guy who's hanging out
with Crab, and then they meet the catfish priest.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah. All right, Well, let's uh, let's talk a little
bit first. I want to talk a little bit about
about the koi as we touched on in the last episode.
The history of koi lines up with the history of
goldfish in some key ways. So they're both selectively bred
ornamental varieties of wild carp species, and they both have
(10:02):
a lot to do with the with both aquaculture and agriculture,
specifically as far as rice farming is concerned, so you'll
have like flooded rice patties the perfect place for karp
to also be bred, and of course both produce a
food product that becomes vitally important to the people who grow,
slash raise the species in question. But while the modern
(10:26):
goldfish is again the product of one thousand years of
artificial selection, koi date backed only to nineteenth century Japan.
But like the goldfish, they have spread all over the world,
like you know, I've seen I've seen koi in you know,
in China. I've seen koi in Nashville, Tennessee. Like you know,
they're everywhere. Listeners out there, you may have koi just
(10:50):
outside your house, in your own pod. So this still
even with a much shorter time frame here, it still
results in multiple varieties of koi. But as Nick Fletcher
points out in the book The Ultimate Koi, which is
just an insightful book with a lot of stuff I
think geared towards people who are more intimately involved in koi,
(11:11):
like raising koi, but it also has some great overview material.
He points out that it means that, quote, their body
structure and the way they respond to their environment are
fundamentally the same as those of their wild ancestors. Any
differences are superficial, and the colors and patterns of skin
pigment belie an internal uniformity much more consistent than that
(11:34):
of their cousin, the goldfish.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Oh okay, So is this saying that the goldfish is
selective breeding has actually really altered the organism in more
profound ways than the selective breeding of the koi.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yes, and it just has to do with just the again,
the fact that the koi is just a much more
recent development. We're only going back, you know, something like
a century in terms of devoted selective breeding. Now Here
is a perhaps less obvious question regarding all of this.
How did freshwater carp get to Japan? To begin with?
(12:10):
The short answer is that they were introduced from mainland
Asia as far back as prehistoric times by human beings,
and this has long been the prime explanation, with the
Yayoi people in particular being the ones that brought over
agriculture and aquaculture in the form of raising carp in
flooded rice patties, brought it over from mainland Asia, and
(12:33):
we're talking about this happening perhaps somewhere between three hundred
BCE and three hundred CE. However, it gets a little
more complicated than that, because apparently genetic strains of much
older carp have been determined. A genetically distinct wild lineage
of carp associated with Japan's largest lake, Lake Biwa, which
(12:55):
in this particular strain would seem to go back millions
of years and predate the arrival of humans on the
Japanese islands. So, depending on the exact genetic strain, Japanese
common carp can be considered both a native, prehistoric resident
and an ancient introduced species. Okay, anyway you cut it, though,
carp have been in Japan for a long time. People
(13:15):
there have been utilizing carp, and they were doing so
far before goldfish were introduced, which I dated in the
last episode of the seventeenth century, but it may have
been the sixteenth century depending on the source I've seen
both Now, despite the Koy's nineteenth century origins, there were
colorful common carp in Japan and in China for many centuries,
(13:38):
with accounts going back into the first millennium Sea. However,
these were seemingly the product of natural mutation in aquaculture
rather than targeted artificial selection by human breeders. Systematic breeding
of the amor carp that's cyprinous robru fuscus, or or
(14:00):
of the common carp which is a Suprnus carpio did
not begin in Japan till around eighteen twenty, and in
particular this would be the Nijumarago region of northeast of
the northeastern coast of Honshu, the largest of the Japanese islands. Now,
we didn't have time to get into this with goldfish
last time, but one of the really curious things about
(14:22):
their adaptability, which has long been exploited by selective breeders,
is that they exhibit significant morphological plasticity in response to
water depth and water flow.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Okay, so they can relatively easily change their body shape
or body size depending on their environment, like how deep
the water is or other dimensional characteristics of the body
of water.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
They inhabit correct. Yes, so shallow, low flow water environments,
these encourage more compact body shape, and this is thought
to be because they don't need to swim as much
and can therefore invest in a shorter, stockier body, and
then high flow environments favor slender, streamlined bodies. Now it
(15:08):
makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So not to imply that
they're just like T one thousands, like just rapidly changing around,
but still as far as you know, organism morphology goes
still pretty rapid.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Well, it kind of reminds me of research we've talked
about on the show before, positing that like when you
go deeper in the ocean, there's more evolutionary experimentation with
fish body shapes, and so you get more kind of
more experiments with like weird compact or you know, squat
types of body shapes or or extremely elongated ones, whereas
(15:43):
when you go closer to the surface, where there is
there's more dealing with current or more just pressure on
fish to be fast in order to escape predators or
to hunt, there is more of a pressure kind of
pushing fish towards this standard streamlined body shape that you
see in a lot of oceanic fish right.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Right, And then with the goldfish, like this is something
that has been exploited to try and favor, Like you
want a nice slender fish, okay, go in this direction.
But if you want a chonker, if you want a
nice squat fish, then this then this is what you
need to do with its environment. Now I want to say,
I think this is a good time to mention this.
(16:24):
We're talking about you know about goldfish in particular, getting
you know, their body shape changing depending on what sort
of environment you're in, and we should not let these
tantalizing facts accidentally feed the myth that a goldfish grows
in accordance to the size of their bowl or tank.
Goldfish grow throughout their life no matter the size of
(16:45):
the habitat, and as is the case with a lot
of organisms, if they're growing larger in a very small environment,
it is going to be uncomfortable for them in a
number of ways. In general, I would say, and I'm
saying this not as someone who keeps fish, so certainly
those of you who are the keepers of fish out
(17:06):
there may have additional data to share on this, but
in general, disregard any myth you hear that centers around
the idea that a goldfish doesn't require a proper, well
maintained environment, because, yes, as we discussed in the last episode,
they can handle some pretty rough conditions, but that doesn't
mean they're having a good time or that they are impervious.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Right right, I mean, just the fact that they can
survive some conditions that will kill other fish, that doesn't
necessarily mean it's good for them.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah. Yeah, like you know, you can sleep in a
really dirty bet, but that doesn't mean you should or
path to Noah, that sort of thing. Now, part of
this myth seems to stem as well from historic misunderstandings
of traditional Song dynasty goldfish presentation rituals that entailed placing
a particularly beautiful goldfish in a say, a small shallow
(17:58):
display bowl or some sort of jar for temporary display,
and then after you were done, you would return them
to the larger pool or pools that the fish lives in.
Victorians popularize the use of globular goldfish bowls for displaying
the fish, and you know, a lot of this just
is kind of a misreading of what the Chinese were
(18:20):
doing with the fish. It was like, oh, that's all
they need, you can just keep them in a little glass,
a little bowl, and they're good to go. That is,
it's not really the case. It's a lot more complicated.
They need proper care, as any fish does.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
It's almost like if you tried to make Olympic athletes
live on the like three steps with the first, second,
and third place.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, exactly, Like this is just a temporary display situation. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,
this also connects to the koi though, because the same
basic principles apply to these carp as well. Faster moving
waters lead to slimmer carp, while slow moving shallows lead
to chonkier carp. Now, I have to admit one of
(19:12):
the things that drew me into selecting this for our
discussion this week, As you know, I was looking at
some biological features that were kind of you know, provided
an overview of different fish, and I read something in
passing about koi living a long time and to be clear,
and then we'll get back to more examples of this.
(19:32):
Koi and carp in general are sometimes associated with longevity
in a magical sense, in a symbolic sense, but when
you dive into the subject of long lived individual koi,
the results are are not all that convincing. In general,
the life expectancy of a koi tends to be around
(19:53):
twenty five to fifty years, somewhere in that range depending
on how they're cared for and just roll of the dice.
But there are accounts of much much older koi, with
the alleged superstar being one Hanako, a red karp koi
last own by doctor Komei Koshihara and said to have
(20:14):
died in nineteen seventy seven. This is the fish at
the ripe old age of two hundred and twenty six
years old. If true, this would mean that fish was
born during the Edo period, a fish of the Togagawa Shogunate. So,
you know, a pretty impressive lifespan for a fish, and
one that you know kind of is you know, stirs
(20:35):
the imagination to think about how long this fish has
been going around doing its thing.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yeah, but was there like continuous documentation of the life
of this one fish or is it just a later
person saying, yeah, this fish has been alive for hundreds
of years.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Basically, it seems to be the latter unfortunately, and to
be clear, it does sound like like this man and
his fish did have a very special relationship he loved
this fish, and there were a lot of ideas associated
with this fish, and there was this idea that the
fish had been passed down through the family and then
also sound it's also been attributed to this fish displayed
(21:11):
a unique personality. It would like come up and look
at you and stuff. But the additional story that is
attached to this scientists use scale dating to determine that
it was more than two centuries old. This has generally
been met with at the very least healthy skepticism for
snopes dot com fans out there, they have an article
(21:31):
on the topic and they point out that there just
doesn't seem to be any way to really fact check
this again likely legend, like there's no you know, there's
no apparent peer reviewed or scientific journal information about this
fish or the alleged dating of its scales. And then
also scale dating in and of itself is apparently not
(21:54):
the most accurate way to determine fish age. I believe
my understanding is that scale based dating is good if
you have a live fish and you don't want to
hurt the fish, But if the fish is dead, you
can do a lot more specific testing based on its remains,
and so Yeah, some combination here of inaccurate readings, legend making,
(22:19):
and maybe some some shoddy record keeping, you know, But
I don't know. I think you can probably attribute most
of this to legend that is tying in with traditional
ideas about koi and about carb Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
I would also have to think that you would be
informed in this by considering how old is the claimed
age of this fish compared to the oldest age of
the same species that we can verify. You know, if
it's like a little bit older than the otherwise the
best known record holder, then you know, you'd be more
(22:52):
open minded about it. If it's like this seems like
this is maybe I don't know, more than double or
three times the age of that anybody's ever really verified
for these species.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding as well. And you know
it's you know, not to say that fish can't live
for a very long time, you know. I think, as
we've discussed in the show before, we have some real
Sioux superstars out there in the fish world when it
comes to living for centuries. But it does not seem
to be the case that that the carp specifically the koi,
is capable of this. But again, we're largely dealing with
(23:25):
dealing with the realm of legend here, and that's perfectly fine.
It's as long as we considered a legend, because there
are some really fabulous carp legends out there, and I
think that's what we're gonna basically be dealing with for
the remainder of the episode here, I turned to the
(23:45):
pages of one of Carol Rose's encyclopedias of magical creatures
to see there was anything I was missing, and she
does mention it sounds like a very related tradition from
Korean folklore of a dragon carp, a creature with the
head of a dragon and the tail of a carp, which,
upon being caught by a fisherman, speaks and begs for
(24:06):
its own life. The fisherman releases the creature and it
turns out to be the son of the dragon king.
So he's like, oh, you know, dodged a bullet. There
not a lot to that one. I guess they, at
least in the version that I read. There may be
a more robust version of that out there, but I
still found it kind of amusing and plays in with
some of the fishing motifs we've been talking about.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Well, I would wonder what this kind of legend. Does
the fishermen get a boon for giving the fish or
the son of the dragon it's life back.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
I would hope so. Certainly we have other fishing legends
where the talking fish grants a wish or something, So
I would hope that this is in some way auspicious.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
This association between dragons and carp. Beyond just the you know,
the transformation of the persistent carp who makes it up
through the dragon gate turning into a dragon. Beyond that one,
this association between dragons and carp will come up in
a legend. And I want to talk about in a
bit about an immortal Oh excellent.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Well, before we get to that, let's let's divert briefly
over to India. I was looking in Naditha Krishna's Sacred
Animals of India, and that book highlights a number of
sacred fish, though not all of them are tied in
this text to specific species. Two, however, do seem to
(25:26):
align with some sort of species of carp. There's the
Rohita fish, which is a symbol of Mahayana Buddhism, and
it is a right hand symbol of the goddess of Varahi.
A pair of golden fish symbolizes happiness as well as
possibly holy rivers and also the possibility of transcendental wisdom.
(25:47):
The species libeo Rohita or the rohu fish, is a
carp found throughout South Asia. Its prized as both a
game fish and a product of aquaculture. I don't believe, however,
that they are ever golden in color. Now there is
also the mahashir or masir, and this is a fish
(26:09):
considered sacred in many rivers of India. And this is
a carp species of the genus tor And. I was
looking at pictures of these. Some pictures I did not trust.
Some of these look like they might be ai. But
there are some other older images that seemed more authentic
that seem to indicate that they can take on some
level of golden color. I don't know if this is
(26:30):
how much of this is the sun playing on glittering
scales once they've been removed from the water, But some
potential for golden fish here. And then turning back to Japan, Yeah,
once more, there is that the ningyo, which is a
Japanese human fish hybrid. Again often sort of described as
(26:53):
a merman or mermaid through the Western lens, and it
is often invoked with the fish parts being that of
a familiar carp. And this was really interesting because the
ningo is often described as being a fish, generally again
a carp with a human face, sometimes with like parts
(27:13):
of a human's upper body, like little arms or so forth,
and much like the Fiji mermaid Mumma fied, examples of
this creature were created via taxidermy, transforming conjoined fish and
monkey parts into a new being. In fact, the Fiji
Mermaid is likely a ningyo that made its way into
the hands of nineteenth century American showman P. T. Barnum.
(27:37):
So just a little rebranding here.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Okay, wait, so I don't know if you know the
answer to this, But is it thought by whoever established
this historical record that he knew it was this Japanese
creature and he's like, I need to rebrand it for
an American audience, or is it just like I have
no idea what this is. I'll make something up from.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
What I was reading and perhaps have to get into
a more robust history of the Fiji mermaid later. I
think it came it didn't come directly. You came through intermediarymediary,
so it's very possible that it was rebranded along the
way as it made its way to his hands.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Okay, before it even got to him.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
I see. Now there are different traditions concerning the ningo
the eating of its flesh. It said that this will
give you long life. But on the other hand, catching
one is a bad omen that'll bring about terrible storms.
So kind of a catch twenty two there. But there
is a tale that is told of a nun by
the name of yal Bikuni who attained eight hundred years
(28:40):
of perpetual youth by eating the flesh of one of
these creatures.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Wow, you got to get that eternal youth, that's the
important part. You don't want to live forever but continually age. Yeah,
we watched at least one movie about that.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
I think, yeah, yeah, that's always the curse, right, yeah,
or you get immortality, but you don't get that that
that wolverine healing factor to go with it. So in
any ere, you know, it makes sense that if you
hate the flesh of one of these creatures, that it
would have some sort of benefit to your longevity, because
again there is this long standing connection between carp and
(29:14):
longevity and also of transformation again with the idea of
the carp becoming the dragon and so forth. Now, an
interesting sort of final wrinkle on this particular angle is
that koi fish can, with the right markings and the
right of observational conditions, maybe the right photograph angle, they
(29:36):
can appear to have humanoid faces. Some of these images
have made the rounds on the Internet over the past
couple of decades. And I'm sure there are some you know,
AI monstrosities out there now and men probably some photoshop
stuff in the mix, but it's my understanding there are
some genuine images out there that, you know, do kind
of look like you're looking at a carp with a
(29:58):
human face. So and you know, this is not this
is not something you just find in cooy. There are
other fish species out there that I think are captivating
because their face feels a little more human. I'm thinking
of various puffer fish, for example, which are sometimes when
people photograph them and say snorkeling environments, like the phone
(30:19):
will like do the whole like face thing, like it'll
like recognize the face of the fish, yeah, which is yeah,
I think, I think says something about why we find
them so fascinating.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yeah, puffer fish in particular are not just they don't
just have faces, but they're making a face.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, and they're kind of like all face because they
kind of feel like a big head, right.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Yeah, Like I'm thinking about particular puffer fish faces, and
they make good reaction meme style faces. One is kind
of a slack jaw are you kidding me? Face?
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah? They always feel to me like and this, especially
if I'm observing them in the water, they always kind
of look like they're thinking looking at me? Are you
still looking at me? And they you know, and they're
kind of like drifting away from you the whole time.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
How can I talk myself out of this situation? Yeah? Yeah, Okay,
are you ready to talk about carp riding?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Oh? Yes, let's do that. We haven't touched on this, So.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I think the best way to approach this subject is
to begin with you and I Rob looking at a
work of art that we can describe for the listeners
at home. So, Rob, I've got the image for you
to look at. Here in the outline, I'm going to
describe it. This is a Japanese color wood cut from
the Edo period, approximately the your eighteen twenty or so,
(31:49):
by an artist named Toyota Hoke. I found this in
the online collection of the Spencer Museum of Art at
the University of Kansas, which had some good explanatorys along
with it. So I'll describe it first and then talk
about what it means. The woodcut shows a sagely older
man with long hair and a mustache, wearing Taoist ceremonial
(32:14):
robes and so he's he's dressed in these robes. The
robes are very flowing and his hair is flying back
behind him. He has a oh, I would call this
a sly look on his face. It's just the slightest
hint of a smile, like pretty flat mouth, but just
curling up at the corners, like he's onto a pretty
funny joke. But he hasn't said anything about it yet.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Yeah, almost like he's riding a Harley or something. I
don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yeah, and he's got something in his lap. I'll talk
about that in a minute. But so this is all here. Yeah,
So he's got the expression, he's got the robes, but
he is riding on the back of a giant carp
just riding a fish the size of an orca like
it's a horse, sort of positioned right back behind the head,
around where the first pair of fins is and the
(33:02):
fish who how do you describe that fish's face? Fish
has We can only see one side of its face,
but it has a huge eye. And the fish also
appears to be kind of smiling. It's got an upturned
corners of the mouth. It looks like a happy fish.
It is not unhappy. It is not being broken like
a mustang, and you know, having its spirit beaten down.
(33:23):
This is a fish that is glad to be giving
a man a ride.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
And yet there's a certain wildness to it as well.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Yes, totally so. The man in this artwork is a
figure of legend. The Chinese Taoist immortal known as Chingau
or King Ko. Chingao was a sort of holy recluse
or hermit, a wise man of letters in a way,
a master player of an instrument I've seen in some
(33:52):
sources called a zither, like a seven stringed zither, which
is a stringed instrument in other sources. I don't know
if this is a different instrument or if it's another
word for the same thing, but they say he played
an instrument called the chin just qi n and so
he was a player of this instrument, and he was
known as a painter of fish. So I guess if
(34:14):
you paint him and there's a fish in the painting,
you're really inviting scrutiny of your craft. But according to legend,
the transformation of this Taoist sage Chingau into an immortal
was signaled by him appearing before his students or his
(34:35):
disciples riding on a magical carp and then after this
it was said that he traveled up and down all
the waterways of the world on the back of this
carp steed. But in some representations, such as this artwork
that you and I are looking at, Rob, in this one,
he is shown flying up into the clouds. He's going
(34:57):
to the heavens, and this is why the fish is
surrounded by clouds on this woodcut. I didn't actually notice
the clouds at first, but Rob, if you look at,
say the outline of the fish, you can see kind
of the fluffy edges of the clouds that it's almost
almost like the fish is sitting on the clouds.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yes, yes, very much. And you see similar depictions of
outright dragons, yes, in Eastern traditions, where they're like he
had nested on the cloud.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Did you notice that this carp is also its body
appears to you said, it looks very wild, and I
think that is suggested in part by the implied motion
of its pose. It appears to be writhing. In fact,
it is writhing in an S shape, the same kind
of S shape we often see Chinese dragons depicted. So yeah,
(35:45):
it's there in the clouds. It's writhing like this. It's
having a great time. One thing I did want to
point out about Chingao here is that in this woodcut
he is not observing hands free eyes on the road
driving rules because he has some kind of text spread
out in his lap and he's reading it while he
is writing the fish. I don't know if rules are
(36:08):
different when you're like writing an animal that has its own,
you know, some degree of its own intelligence and guidance,
versus driving a car. But the museum explanatory text here
says that the papers in front of him are thought
to be possibly a work of sheet music because he
was a a player of the stringed instrument, or maybe
a treatise on painting because he was a painter. Also
(36:32):
on the woodcut below the image, there are two short poems,
which the museum explains touch on the themes. One of
the themes is it is good to read and study,
so text is good text life. And one of the
other themes is it's good to have a long life.
Thumbs up the longevity. And it quotes one of these
poems saying, in translation quote count all the great karps Scales,
(36:56):
read all the Master's works and grasp his nature on
the long spring days. So, if you're going to make
that bumper stickery, I think the message is sort of
live long, read books, joy, enjoy nature.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah, or count read, grasp, but I think the whole
thing it would be a long bumper sticker. It would
cover the whole bumper. But I think count all the
Great carp Scales read all the Master's works and grasp
his nature on the long spring days. That would look
pretty good. I think maybe that would calm traffic a
little bit. You know, the person writing your bumper might
(37:31):
back up and say, yeah, I should count the Great
carp Scales a little more often. I'm not doing enough
of that in my life.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Also, not while you're driving, though you stop before you
count the scales.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:41):
Another annotation to this work is by a scholar credited
here named Veronica de Jong, and this note points out
the broader cultural significance of the carp in this legend
and in the artwork. We've already talked about some of this.
So the carp is again an auspicious animal bring success
and good luck. She points out, I hadn't read this
(38:04):
anywhere else that it's also associated with faithfulness in marriage.
Kind of interesting, but you can see how that pairs
with general themes of persistence over time, that you are
sticking to your commitment. And then she also links it
to the myth of the karp leaping the dragon gate
like we talked about, and mentions that in Japan, historically
(38:26):
the carp was not only associated with success and good
personal qualities like we're talking about in the Chinese examples,
but historically with samurai, which I thought was interesting. So Rob,
I want to look at a couple of other artistic
representations of Chingau or kin ko. The one is called
the Immortal Chingau Riding a Fish. This is an anonymous
(38:50):
ink on paper artwork from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century.
Also from Japan. It's in the collection of the Princeton
University Art Museum of you scroll down in the out
line and see it here once again, it is a
man in Taoist robes riding on a fish, and there
are a few differences. Unlike the last painting where the
(39:10):
fish was flying up into the clouds, here it is
shown gliding through the water, and you can see even
some representations of the bank, like there are branches of
bamboo in the lower left foreground. And the material explaining
this piece of art has a bit more detail on
Chingao's legendary biography. So this comes from a text known
(39:31):
as Biographies of Exemplary Immortals attributed to Lu Jiang. And
I want to note that there appear to be some
different versions of the legend of this guy's life which
have different details, so I'm reporting what I read from
this one. But the story says that Qingao lived during
the Warring States period, and he at one point served
(39:53):
as an advisor to a king, either an advisor or
possibly a musical performer to the King Hung of the
State of Song, and he studied under two other renowned
immortals named Peng Zhu and juan Zi, and then he
went wandering for two hundred years. You got to get
some experience, and then finally we get to the carp. So,
(40:16):
after the two hundred years of wandering, Chingau tells his
own students, his disciples that he is going to jump
into a lake. He's going to jump into this lake
called Lake Juou to go looking for dragons or looking
for a particular dragon. In one of the sources I
was looking at that seemed a little less This one
(40:37):
was not citing its sources, so I was a little
less sure of it. But it mentioned that he was
actually looking for a carp that was thought to be
the son of a dragon, bringing back to what you
mentioned earlier about a different legend of a carp being
the son of a dragon. But in this telling, it's
just says that he goes looking for dragons or for
a dragon in the lake. And so he said, yeah,
(40:58):
he goes into the water, and he gives his disciple
a time and date that he's going to emerge from
the lake and says that they should be there to
meet him. But first they got to do some preparations.
They should bathe and fast and put together a shrine
or a temple at the edge of the water. So
his disciples do as they are told. They wash themselves,
(41:18):
they fast, they build the shrine, and they're there waiting,
and at the appointed hour, Chingao finally pops up out
of the water and he is riding on the back
of a red carp. So after this, I guess this signals, okay,
he has become an immortal now, and he hangs out
at the shrine for a month while everybody comes to
see him. The story says that thousands of people flocked
(41:40):
from all over to come see him. The sources I
was reading do not say whether he was on the
carp the whole time, or whether he only came out
on the carp and then dismounted. I would like to
think he's on the carp the whole time. That would
make him much more interesting to see, right for all
the people coming from all over over. But anyway, after
(42:02):
this month long visitation at the temple or shrine is up,
he goes back back into the water, and from this
point on I think he either ascends into the heavens
on the carp or he rides around on the carp
going to the lakes and rivers of the world.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
You know. That that that that that second idea does
tie in with some things I was reading about about
the carp, about how the its ability to again you know,
not to not to apply too much logic to this,
but the idea that a carp can travel on all
the rivers and all the oceans of the world, you know,
or something like that, it implies a kind of supernatural
(42:39):
ability to travel, like and a unif you know, like
a uniformality to bodies of water. You know, like you
dip your finger in one body of water, you're touching
a distant shore. And the carp has this kind of
magic in it that it can it can travel that
great distance. It's like, you know, it's you know, it's
(42:59):
just part of its magical ability and just how in
touch with the natural world it is.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah, the theme of the magical theme of the adaptability of
the carb connects to the reality, the biological reality of
the adaptability of the carp. And then we have these
other themes that we see popping up again and again
in these stories. One is longevity or long life. Again,
probably some of these carp that are said to be
(43:25):
hundreds of years old or probably not really, but you know,
at least we have this cultural association with long life.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
Yeah, and they do live long enough that conceivably you
could have people pass a carp on from one generation
to the next, you know, if things panned out just right.
They're just not living to be two hundred. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Yeah, you know, they're not like they're not tetras or something.
I actually I don't know how long those live, but
I assume, you know, I remember having a small freshwater
aquarium at my house that a lot of these fish
did not live too long, though partially that could have
been our fault. I don't know, I hope.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Well, yeah, I mean this is one of the you see,
this discussed a lot in the literature about particularly goldfish,
is that by being such a popular species and thought
of it and times thought of as being an easy
species to keep, it leads to a lot of unfortunate
mortality in goldfish.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
Yeah. But so, yeah, you got that theme. And then
you have these themes again of perseverance, grit and courage,
of faithfulness, and of success in the face of hardship,
which are all wonderful things to associate with this fish.
This comment very very common, very diverse family of fish.
One more artwork I wanted to look at before we
(44:38):
wrap up this section. This is an artwork called Taoist
Immortal Chingau or Kinko sin in riding a carp This
is a Japanese ivory sculpture. This is more recent. It's
from the early twentieth century, and I just wanted to
make a let's see, where did I find this? I
think this was online from the Museum of Asian Art,
(45:00):
and I just wanted to flag it because I really
like how in this representation the fish is significantly less
vehicle or steed designed. It's like the wise man is
not riding the fish here, He's sitting in the fish.
He's totally absorbed in his reading, and the fish looks
(45:21):
like a comfy reading chair. Do you do you get
the same thing.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
Out of Absolutely? I love this. This seems like exactly
the sort of little icon you might have, you know,
on a desk or a shelf that is inspiring you
to count the scales and to read all the texts
and to live along life.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
It made When I saw this, I was like, I
don't want to work today, I just want to read
my book.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, just yeah, yeah, cuddle up with a good book
and a large fish and waste the day away. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
So that's all I've got on Chingao or Kinko. But
I like this guy new new favorite legendary figure unlocked.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Yeah, definitely when it comes to figures writing fish, right, Yeah,
all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close out
this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, but we'd
love to hear from everyone out there, your stories about goldfish,
your stories about KOI, also just carp in general, including
the eating of carp. Do you have a favorite carp
recipe or is there a particular carp dish that you've
(46:21):
greatly enjoyed at some point? All that's fair game as well,
and certainly any legends works of art that we didn't
touch on here write in. We would love to hear
from you.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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