Leaping Mullets! Flying Fish! Breaching Sharks!

Fish belong in the water, right? What business do they have leaping out of their world and into ours? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the surprisingly fascinating, dangerous and mysterious world of leaping, jumping and gliding fish. From skewering swordfish and breaching sharks to the alleged urethra-bound candiru, nature provides more than a few mind-blowing specimens of note.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how stop
works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. So, Robert,
I know that recently you were on vacation somewhere. I was. Yeah,
I went down to Florida with the family, and on

(00:25):
the way back up we stopped at this place called
what Coola Springs. What Coola Frings Springs State Park in
Florida near Tallahassee ended up just being really delightful. What's
this place like? Basically, what you have here is just
an enormous spring, okay, like a geological spring. Water coming
out of the ground. Yeah, water coming out of the ground,
water coming out of just enormous caverns that are under

(00:46):
the water here. Uh, really clear water, and it maintains
a constant temperature of around sixty nine or seventy degrees
so when winter comes it's a haven for manatees, and
especially manatees, but other creatures to that that that want
that constant temperature. Um. Interestingly enough, they filmed a few
scenes from the Creature from the Plat from the Black

(01:07):
Lagoon there. Yeah, particularly the creatures layer uh. You get
to pass by that if you take these boat tours. Uh,
And that's really the main reason to go. You can
swim there, but you can, but you get to go
in these these really cool boat tours where you get
to see all of these crazy estuary um uh species
doing their thing, all the diving birds, gators, gators laying

(01:33):
in the sun by the dozens, get to see manatees,
and you also get to see these these mullets, the
fish mullet, not the hairstyle. You probably saw some of those. Yeah,
I think I did see the traditional um hairstyle mullet
here there, but but yeah, these are the fish and
they're just leaping out of the water. It's like if

(01:55):
you look around, you expect to see like a Disney
princess waiting around, Like that's how active the wildlife is here.
And uh, but but it really makes you think, like,
why are these creatures one of these fish jumping out
of the water. If you're like me and you didn't
have a lot of preconceived notions or you hadn't researched
it before, you might think, oh, well, there are all
sorts of animals around here. They're gators in the water.

(02:16):
They're probably jumping out of the water to escape predators. Right, Yeah,
that makes pretty easy sense. A lot of the maneuvering
you'd see and the fish, especially a prey species, would
be fleeing behavior. And yet it turns out there's more
to it than that. And uh, not only with the
with mullets, but with other species of fish as well. Uh.

(02:38):
And that's the reason we're having this episode discuss some
of the mysteries, some of the theories, uh, some of
the at times myths surrounding leaping fish, fish that actually
throw themselves out of the water, out of their their habitat,
their aquatic habitat, into this strange, alien world of gases
and vapors. Yeah, when you think about it, it is

(03:00):
so weird. Um, it's hard for us to imagine what
it's like crossing this boundary between worlds from the water
up into the land of gas, into the atmosphere, because
it's not exactly like a terrestrial animal diving into the water.
Because when you jump out of the water, the water
is your natural environment. Gravity is always going to be

(03:21):
pulling you back down into this watery world. Plus there's
just so much more going on underwater than there is
going on in the air. I mean, on the land
is one thing, but you know, think about what most
of the air above the water is like. It's just
it's a void under the water is another ecosystem. Leaping
into the air is almost as if terrestrial animals could

(03:43):
briefly leap into outer space. Right makes me. It makes
me think of a part in Phantasm where they go
through like the stargate into the barren world with the
dwarves or hauling stuff around. It is like it's like
zipping out of your world into another and then coming
back into your your world, perhaps in a different location,
making it kind of kind of like that teleport that

(04:05):
the raiding character does in the first couple of Mortal
Kombat games. You know, oh it's great. Yeah, what does
he say when he teleports? Or does he have one? Uh?
He have something he says when he does a Superman
But I don't remember if he says anything when he teleports.
But maybe he should he just grins and as lightning
come out of his eyes. What he should do? I
I hope someday somebody goes back to the first Mortal

(04:25):
Kombat game and dubs in Christopher Lambert's lines from the
movie Oh yeah, that's right one. But back to leaping fish. So, Robert,
knowing your inquisitive nature, I bet you asked somebody at
the park about the mullet jumping behavior, didn't you. I did,
and the park ranger was very insightful and all this

(04:47):
and mentioned that they're a handful of theories here, okay, um,
and the idea that they're escaping predators is not one
of them. So one is that they may jump to
dislodge parasites, and certainly, aquatic life is full of many
strange parasite removal strategies, including allowing cleaner organisms to crawl
into your body. Right. Um, wait what allowing cleaner or

(05:11):
you've seen I see you mean, um an organism that
does cleaning, not a relatively cleaner organism. No, no, no, yeah,
I'm talking a lot like allowing a small shrimp to
climb into your gills or your mouth in order to
eat these things. Um, even at times, even allowing creatures
from the air to come down and feast on your parasite.
I believe it's the sunfish that does that allows the

(05:34):
love of certain birds to help remove its parasites. That's fantastic.
Now can you imagine if every time we got like
a guinea worm or something like that, we could just
leap into outer space to turn Well, that sounds kind
of ridiculous, and and indeed that's one of the criticisms
against this theory, uh broadly speaking concerning fish, because you

(05:54):
see that thrown out a lot with with jumping fish. Oh,
it's a parasite removal strategy. But critics of this theory
will point out that, hey, parasites, once they get in you,
they have ways of lodging themselves where they want to be,
just merely that the frantic leaping through the air is
not going to dislodge them. Well, then what are the
other theories? Well, the crazier theory, and this is one

(06:17):
that I find really interesting, is that mullets spend a
lot of their time in waters that are low and
dissolved oxygen, and so they may exit the water in
order to clear their gills and expose themselves to higher
levels of oxygen. So that that really blew my mind.
The idea that essentially the fish is coming out of

(06:37):
the water to breathe and then returned I know, but
but it's this is one of the theories. Um they
also may jump during spawning season to break open their
eggs acts in preparation for the spawn, and marine biologist
Dr Grant Gilmore thinks it may come down to their
sometimes dark habitats. They may jump uh in these cases

(07:01):
to let others in the school know where they are,
So in this case it would be a form of
communication or social signaling, which comes up later in this
episode with some of the other jumping fish we talk
about some of the more ferocious ones. Alright, so for
the rest of this episode, we're gonna be looking at
some of these some of the most interesting fish jumping
behaviors around the world. And I want to say that

(07:22):
I found this topic way more interesting than I expected to. Yeah. First,
I was like, Okay, what is there to say about
fish jumping? They jump? But but fish jumping can be
very strange, can be a danger, can be a nuisance,
can be very funny. Uh, And the reasons why they
do it are more mysterious in some cases than I
would have guessed. But okay, so I guess we should

(07:45):
start broadly. What what do we know about in general
why fish jump? Well? Oh, and sorry, one more thing
I should say we should specify you all out there.
You know the difference between a fish and mammal. So
you've seen dolphins jump playing in the ways or at
a dolphin show, or uh maybe just playing echo of
the dolphin. We're not talking about mammals today. This is

(08:06):
gonna be a fish focused episode. Yeah, I mean, there's
even a gliding squid that propels itself out of the
ocean by shooting out a jet of water at high
you know, high pressure water jet. We're not gonna get
into that either. Well, wait, if there's enough demand, will
save other leaping um sea life for other episodes. But yeah,
I think a good place to start is just to

(08:26):
sort of go back to this idea that okay, fish
jump out of the water to escape predators and acknowledge
that yes, this actually is a strategy with some creatures,
for instance, killie fish. Now they are roughly one thousand,
two hundred and seventy different species of killy fish, and
most are fully aquatic with no obvious morphological specializations for

(08:47):
terrestrial locomotion. Locomotion individuals from several different species have been
observed moving across land though a tail flip behavior that
generates a terrestrial jump. But wait a minute, so this
isn't just jumping into the air. This is jumping onto
a dry land surface. Yeah, it's essentially it's gonna do
the too dangerous in the water, I gotta jump out,

(09:07):
huh and and then flop back in. And they do.
They do this to escape predators or occasionally apparently pour
water conditions. Okay, So in our outer space analogy, this
is more like instead of just briefly leaping into outer space,
if things got really hairy wherever you were, you could
jump onto the moon for a minute and then jump
back down somewhere on Earth. Yeah, or taking like you know,

(09:29):
proposed space tourism flight that just sends you into low
orbit and then brings you back down. Uh, be that
kind of thing, I think. Uh. But indeed kind of
like Raiden's teleport where he's blinking out of this world,
I guess going to some god land and then coming
back into the picture somewhere else. And this is interesting
because too, because that the aquatic amphibious distinction is key

(09:51):
because it's one thing for saying, air breathing walking catfish
for mud skippers or lungfish to behave in this baby
this way because they've taken to the next level, right,
bordering on you know, creature from the Black Lagoon or
bloodwaters of Doctor Z territory, but aquatic fish that just
seems crazy, right, um? So yeah, the tail flip flings

(10:13):
him out of the water through the air several body
links sometimes out of the water and onto the bank,
and then they have to flip to get back in.
Sounds dangerous though, I mean, if you you're a fish,
you flip out of the water and then you rapidly
twist your body around to try to flip back into
the water. I mean you've only got a very limited
amount of time. They're right, right, yeah, because if you
because the big risks here are that you're going to

(10:34):
you're gonna you could dry out or you could as
sixty eight uh so, and and you know, of course
also banking on the idea that there are no um
terrestrial predators on the water bank. So that's the killie fish. Yeah.
What else do we have take us to the next
the next level here with our leaping aquatic creatures. Well,
I want to talk Robert about an Asian carponato Oh

(10:56):
sounds good, okay, So stop me if you've seen this video,
this YouTube video before. You've got two passengers sitting in
a boat there in twin seats, facing off the stern
of a fishing boat with an outboard motor. Is this
guy father too? No? No, this is a grainy YouTube
to set to some slick new metal riffs. Now, the

(11:18):
boat appears to be sitting in like a river or
a lake. It's opaque freshwater, and each of the two
passengers sitting facing off the back of the boat are
holding a compound hunting bow with a knocked arrow, and
the driver then throttles up the engine. The boat starts
to move, and these lines of white churning wake peel
out the back of the boat and you can see

(11:39):
the waves coming out. And as this happens, dozens of
fish or maybe hundreds of fish begin to leap out
of the water into the air, by the looks of it,
sometimes flying above the heads of the passengers, and they
arc over the boat. Sometimes they fly right into somebody's
neck and slap them on the face. It fish hits
you in the back, or it lands flopping in the

(12:00):
driver's lap, And as you would expect based on the setup,
the passengers try to shoot the fish with their arrows
as they leap through the air. Uh. And other similar
videos you might scratch the bow and arrow and feature
just nets, people trying to catch the fish with nets
or shooting at them with shotguns, trying to hit him
with baseball bats or maybe a modified baseball bat with

(12:22):
nails in it, uh, pitchforks, etcetera. I might add that
in the very first video I watched that I mentioned,
the one with the compound bow, it was sort of
this fish human collision super cut with with the new
metal background music. It looks pretty dangerous, especially because there
are sometimes other boats in the water down range of

(12:42):
the bow fishers. So we are not recommending this behavior. Yeah,
it sounds sounds a bit reckless. But what's going on here? Why?
Why are these hundreds of fish flying through the air
to be shot? I need a better metaphor than like
fish in a barrel, like like fish in outer space? Uh. Well,
the video identifies these very unfortunate vaulting fish as Asian carp,

(13:06):
and I can't confirm the identification through all the graininess.
But but this would make sense because some species of
so called Asian carp are known for this bizarre frenzy
jumping behavior in the presence of boats. So what are
Asian carp. Asian carp is not one species, but it's
a common group name applied to several species of carp

(13:28):
native to East and Southeast Asia, including waterways of Siberia, China,
and Vietnam. And these species would be bighead carp, black carp,
grass carp, and silver carp. So carp belonged to the
freshwater fish family known as Cyprinids, and before the Asian
carp were introduced a couple of decades ago, there there
were already carp in North America that were considered kind

(13:51):
of a benign nuisance species. But several species now known
as Asian carp were introduced the United States in the
nineteen sixties and seventies, and originally they were contained They
were contained in southern aquaculture and sewage treatment enclosures I
think in Arkansas, originally saw and so the idea was
that these imported carp would help control contaminants in these areas.

(14:13):
For example, they'd swim around and eat algae out of
ponds that were being used as fish farms, like for
catfish farming. But Flooding events, of course, often connect waters
that are not inherently connected, and so flooding allowed these
non native species to escape their farms and enclosures and
spread into natural waterways around the Mississippi watershed. And now

(14:36):
they're all over the place. They're spread all over freshwater
fisheries in the Midwest and beyond there in the Mississippi,
they're in the Illinois River. And a lot of people
are worried about these and consider them uh an invasive
species since they can represent a threat to native wildlife.
They reproduce quickly, they grow quickly, they supposedly degrade the
quality of aquatic environments, and they tend to outcompete their

(15:00):
fish UH and I've seen estimates that they can some
of these species consume about of their own body weight
every day, but they don't necessarily prey on other fish. Instead,
they're mostly plankton and algae feeders, which still is a
big problem because that's the bottom of the food chain, right,
That's what everything has to eat in order to work
its way up the food chain and get that energy

(15:21):
to survive. So they're causing problems for every organism everywhere
along the line. And so why do they jump, Well,
the big head carp in the silver carp can both jump,
but it's the silver carp in particular that's just notorious
for frequently having these frenzies where they leap out of
the water all over the place. And the commonly accepted

(15:42):
explanation for why they do it is pretty simple. It's
the main one that came to your mind when you
were thinking about the mullet. First. It's that they're scared.
They're leaping out of the water as an escape mechanism
triggered by a threatening stimulus, like the roar of a
boat motor. So somebody revs up their engine, they get
their their arrows knocked, and the fish here that sound,

(16:04):
and they start leaping all over the place. And once
one starts leaping, all of them start leaping. So that
sounds like a pretty funny situation. And I will admit
seeing these images of fish just flapping all over the
place through the air, slapping people in the back of
the head, leaving a big slimy streak across somebody's like
chin and throat because they slap up under there. Uh,

(16:26):
it sounds funny, but when you think about what it's
actually like to be in the middle of it. It
can get kind of scary because the big head and
silver carp were known to jump about three meters or
about ten ft vertically out of the water about six
meters or twenty ft horizontally across the surface. Uh. Silver
carp tend to weigh up to about twenty pounds. Big
head carp commonly wigh about twice that, but in rare cases,

(16:49):
these fish can reportedly grow very large, up to around
a hundred pounds. So think of like a hundred pound
object flying at you out of the water, especially if
you're moving at a rapid speed. Also, uh, just do
the quick new Tony and physics in your head. That
can be a heavy impact. Now. I found one survey
of people who used the Illinois River in two thousand

(17:10):
ten and two thousand eleven, and it was a small
sample size, so don't read too much into this, but
it found this was hilarious to me. Sixty five of
residents from these Illinois River sites who used the river
had seen Asian carp jump. Okay, but of those people
who had seen a carp jump, almost three quarters of
them had been hit by a car um And so

(17:33):
if you've seen a carp jump, chances are a carp
has slammed into you. Nine of them sustained injuries and
reported uh sustained watercraft damage from the Asian carp And
there's just one example I want to give of the
kinds of injuries these things can cause. I found a
kt v I local news story from St. Louis from

(17:55):
last year August, and it tells the story of this
guy named Jordan Fiedler who got his face messed up
real bad by some Asian carp while inner tubing along
a channel in the Mississippi. So, according to the story,
his father was driving the boat and he was riding
in an inner tube behind it, and then the fish
start leaping. They jump up all over the place, and

(18:15):
one hits him in the face and a quote he
gave his quote, I knew something was wrong. I felt
my nose and it was way over here. So Uh.
The impact fractured his nose, It dented his forehead, shattered
bones in his eye sockets and above his eyebrow. Uh,
and he had to undergo a three and a half
hour surgery to install a piece of mesh and screws

(18:37):
to fix the shape of his skull. So this is
no small injury. This is this devastating fish impact. If
nobody has made a Jaws style movie about carp yet,
about the leaping carp, I think they should. This is
the real Sharknado, except it's not a shark. This is Carponado. Well, hopefully,
I'm really hoping someone will take this whole episode is

(18:57):
inspiration and maybe it'll be an overall jumping fish harm movie.
All the various examples we throw out here, it's the
fish version of the birds. Maybe yeah, the fishes, uh fish. Weirdly, though,
as mundane as carp may seem, they actually also have
a mythological significance. I bet you didn't think that we'd

(19:18):
wrap some some mythology into this episode, But it's I
really yeah, I didn't even think about it, and normally
I'm I'm all about finding it. I didn't even think
to look. Well, apparently the jumping ability of carp has
a cultural and slight mythological significance in Chinese tradition. So
there's a story in Chinese mythology of carp swimming upstream,

(19:39):
and that if a carp swimming upstream is able to
jump over a waterfall that's known as the dragon gate.
That carp will transform into a dragon, and with that
comes all of the symbolic uplift that applies. Right, you know,
the dragon is a is a majestic regal creature associated
with power and with with grandeur and and with the

(20:00):
the imperial authority. Basically and flight, yes, and fly there
you go. So apparently, the expression of quote a carp
that jumps over the dragon gate commonly signifies a person
who accomplishes some feet that leads to like a sudden
improvement in life status, such as passing exams at university
or acquiring some coveted government position. It's like, if you

(20:23):
get a major life upgrade due to some some achievement
of yours, you're a carp who has jumped the dragon
gate and hopefully not smashed anybody's face. Onywhere Alright? What? Everyone?
Keep that myth in mind, because I feel like we're
going to get back to some of these ideas with
some of our later examples. We're gonna take a quick
break and when we come back, we're gonna look at salmon,

(20:45):
We're gonna look at swordfish, we're gonna look at sturgeons
and ultimately the flying fish itself. All right, we're back. Okay,
So before the break, we were talking about the mythological
symbology of carp swimming upstream trying to leap over that
waterfall and turn into a mighty dragon. But of course

(21:07):
carp are not the only fish that struggle mightily to
progress upstream against the current, even leaping over rapids and waterfalls. Yeah. Indeed,
what is one of the most iconic images of leaping fish,
like a perfect like nature documentary image. It's the salmon.
It's the salmon going upstream to spawn, leaping over the rapids,
and a bear just grab you know what I mean. Yeah, indeed,

(21:29):
that's the bare version of the people trying to hit
a carp with a baseball bat with nails in it.
It's just the bear's claw swiping at the salmon as
it flies over the rapids. Yeah, this is uh so,
so let's break down exactly what's happening here, um, because
it's it's pretty amazing. It's easy to take it for
granted when you've seen it so many times, but salmon
has been their early lives in freshwater rivers and then

(21:50):
they swim out to sea to the salt water to
feed and grow. But when spawning time comes, they engage
in what we cause salmon rhyme and what grizzly bears
of course called like a seafood buffet, right. Uh. They
so the fish travel upstream to their natal spawning grounds,
they spawn, and then they die, and then the nutrients
in their bodies washed downstream to the estuaries. So it's

(22:12):
you know, it's it's kind of an elegant um practice here,
but making it upstream is quite a journey, especially when
you're having to deal with rapids and waterfalls. Um, you know,
no dragon gates, but still some significant challenges there. Uh.
And so they leap out of the water, they jump
sometimes up to twelve ft or three point six five meters.

(22:34):
Now not only they have to contend not only the bears,
but also man. Humans have have shown a tremendous ability,
of course, to alter natural waterways, to install dams, bridges,
what have you. Oh. Yeah, this is actually figured into
people trying to control the spread of carp like silvery arp,

(22:55):
the jumping carp in American waterways. So you've got these
carp moving slowly upstream and to prevent them from spreading
even further. Some people have said, well, we need to
construct barriers of some kind, but these have to be
some pretty tall barriers, right, because these things can you know,
jump tin tin feet high and twenty feet long, So
that would have to be a serious barrier to prevent

(23:17):
the carp from progressing. Yeah, and then what do you
do about other creatures that have a natural right? Are
you gonna install like a border guard, keep the carp out,
but make sure the right creatures moved through. I don't know,
it's tough. I saw one solution that was literally an
electrified fence in the water, where people installed a little
devices that put electrical current in the river to prevent

(23:39):
the carp from swimming by well, you know with the
with the salmon. In the case of dams and other structures, Uh,
they actually we actually sometimes create the fish ladders or
fish ways to help them out. And these these can
be quite interesting because sometimes they essentially look like nothing
more than a series of buckets that they can splash
and jump in and out of. Who actually make it

(24:01):
over whatever the obstacle is, Yeah, a watery staircase sorts.
But it's a cool idea because because as as we
pointed out, like, not only is it important for the
for the salmon to actually reach their destination, but it actually,
you know, their ultimate death up there ends up having
playing an important role in the overall ecology of the river.
Isn't this also why the salmon cannon was invented? Yes,

(24:21):
I believe it was to help help the salmon get upstream.
I don't remember whatever became of that, Yeah, I don't
know if that became a standard or if that was
just kind of a flash in the pan. Alright, So
one thing that comes to my mind is that, of
course a carp can jump up out of the water
hit you in the face, and that can cause some injury.
But they're also fish much bigger than carp that do jump,

(24:43):
that's right, and some of them jump with tremendous speed. Um.
I'm thinking, of course about the mighty sword fish, which
is it's it's a scientific name is zay FEUs gladius,
which basically is just the word sword repeated in two
different languages. So like, basically, were so excited about swordfish

(25:04):
looking like a human murder weapon that we just call
them sword sword. It's like a little kid. Yeah, and
of course they're just uh, it's it's basically just a
a bill that they are bill fish. There they are
other billfish with with bills that resemble swords. Others resemble bills.

(25:25):
Sometimes they look like saws. Uh, they're a number of
different species um. And interestingly enough evidence seems to support
the theory that the pointy end is more about speed
than anything. So it's not a weapon. It's more of
an aerodynamic design. Right. There's actually a weak point in
the skull where the sword meets the skull, and it
prevents them from being a proper javelin like if they

(25:48):
if they were to hit something too great a speed,
it would just snap. And the weak point is due
to a lubricating gland that reduces drag and increases speed.
Like it basically pumps out oil um it like spreads
out through vessels, pumps out this this lubricant that lubricates
the sword and the whole in the thing's whole head
that allows it to just sort of slip through the

(26:09):
water a little bit faster. So before the swordfish races,
they're sitting there looving up their swords essentially and there
you know, I think there are still some arguments that
it may to certain degrees, have you know, have have
some sort of defensive capability as well, especially if you're
talking about a slashing as opposed to a full on
like um uh you know, ramming speed type of a

(26:33):
stabbing maneuver. There might be a secondary use or yeah,
sort of you use it in a pinch, yeah, because
it's certainly it certainly is that it certainly can be dangerous,
as we'll discuss here. But the speeds the big thing,
and then and indeed, swordfish are generally ranked like the
third fastest fish. They're only surpassed by the black marlin

(26:53):
and the sail fish, both of which are are other
types of billfish swordfish. The estimates vary on all these
people will get into fights over exact speeds, but generally
you're looking at the black marlin. It clocked around possibly
eighty miles per hour. Yeah, dye kilometers per hour. Uh,

(27:15):
that's like twice as fast as your average boat can go.
But but then again, these are these are creatures that
are living in the open water. They they're dealing with
a lot of the vast distances, so they have room
to build up that speed. Um sailfish sixty nine miles
per hour, and the swordfish comes in at a you know,

(27:35):
a more conservative sixty miles per hour kilometers per hour.
But again people will argue back and forth on these stats. No,
that's still amazingly fast considering no water. I mean, when
you think about moving through water, all the friction that's
that's there, I mean, that's crazy. And they've evolved to
deal with that friction about it just about as well
as any sea animal is going to manage. Of course,

(27:58):
they're also known to use that intense speed to roll
themselves completely out of the water. Now why one of
the one of the things about swordfish in particular is
that they're rare creatures, they're elusive creatures, and that they
don't do well in captivity, so it's it's hard to
really study them in their ways. But they are susceptible,
like everything else, to parasites. So there is a theory

(28:20):
that they may be trying to dislodge parasites. Uh, in
particular parasites um in particular that the paper I was
looking at mentioned remoras, which are of course sucker fish
that feed on other parents that feed on ectoparasites. So
essentially these things might be bothering them at the very least,
they're they're they're screwing with their streamlined body right there.

(28:44):
They're messing up their speed potentially. So perhaps they're jumping
out trying to dislodge those remoras, or if they have
a fisherman's like a sports fisherman's hook in them, well
that's something they're probably trying to dislodge as well. And
that's certainly the iconic scene, right somebody gets a swordfish
on the hook sleeping out of the water. Yeah, well,
I mean you can see that at a much lower level.
Just imagine you've probably seen footage of a bass fisher

(29:07):
or something like that with a bass on the line
and it jumps out of the water. Yeah. Okay, Well,
I know the question on everybody's mind here. Has anybody
ever been impaled by a swordfish by the sword the
sword sword? Yes, indeed they have. Um, now it's it's
a rare occurrence, just as these human interactions with swordfish
are already kind of a rare thing. Right, Um, you know,

(29:29):
people fish for them, but still they're elusive. So this
is didn't something to get really worked up about, right,
You're you're probably gonna be putting yourself in the position
to to have the outside chance of this occurring. But
as of two thousand seven, there were no recorded attacks.
And I put that in quotes because these are not
creatures that eat humans or would have seemed seemingly attack humans.

(29:51):
Any incidents seem to have been more or less accidental.
But as of two thousand seven, there were no no
recorded attacks that it actually resulted in death, though the
paper in question, Swordfish Attack and Death by Penetrating head Injury,
did outline one such incident. And then in two thousand fifteen,
a deep sea fishing charter captain in Hawaii was fatally

(30:15):
stabbed in the chest by one while trying to capture
it with a spear gun. So basically it thrashed around
after the spear hit the fish, and then it managed
to skewer him in the chest. So it's a rare occurrence.
But with a with a sword like that, with a
large fish flopping around, um jumping out of the water,
if you're close to it, yes, you run the risk

(30:37):
of being run through. But even in this one incident
mentioned here, it sounds like this guy was kind of
I don't want to say he was asking for it
he put him. Basically, he just put himself in in
close proximity to a large sharp fish, and there's gonna
you're rolling the diet when that happens, right, You don't
wrestle with a unicorn exactly. But then again, of course

(31:00):
there are other very large fish that jump as well.
The In fact, as we saw with the carp example,
you don't need a spike or a sword sword in
order to do some damage when you run into somebody, right,
all you need is a high powered recreation vessel and
uh and and a hundred pound carp perhaps, But what

(31:20):
if it was even bigger. What if you were talking
instead of a hundred pound carp What if you were
talking about, say, Florida's Gulf sturgeon, which if you've ever
seen a sturgeon and aquarium, these they look like an
armored tank or something. You know, they're they're rather intimidating,
and then they get huge. They can come in it
at the Florida Gulf sturgeon in particular, can come in

(31:41):
at eight ft long two point five meters in, up
to two hundred pounds or in weight. And yes, they
sometimes jump out of the water up to six feet
out of the water and occasionally that We're not only
talking the risk of injury here. There there have been
lethal occurrences of sturgeon in pack Oh man, well, I

(32:01):
got to hear about that in a second. But this
is weird to me because maybe I assume sturgeon must
be able to move fast. Uh, if this is the case,
but I've never seen a sturgeon move quickly. I've seen
sturgeon and aquariums and they always seem incredibly chilled out
and very languid fish just just hanging there, I mean,
barely moving at all. Yeah, it is I have to

(32:23):
admit that too. Like seeing them in aquariums are always
really interesting, kind of intimidating, but very still. But yeah,
they jumped in two thousand fifteen, In fact, one one
of these jumping sturgeons actually killed a five year old
girl when I left out of water into her family's
fishing boat. It and it also injured her mother and
her brother as well. In two thousand seven, nine people

(32:46):
were injured in a collision with a sturgeon resultant, and
this was in Florida, resulting in warning signs that were
posted to encourage slower motor boat and jet ski speeds.
So yeah, you have a two hundred pound fish flying
out of the wall or up to six feet out
of the water. And then you have a motor boat,
you know, moving at high speeds as well. That's where

(33:07):
these possibilities present themselves. Okay, but fish this big, why
do they jump out of the water. Well, it's remained
a bit of a mystery, but we have a few
familiar theories as well as one that's kind of new
here for our discussion here. So, first of all, all
species of sturgeon will jump at times. The golf sturgeon
is known to jump at two different times of the

(33:27):
year in the rivers, during July and August and early
in the offshore feeding period. So one theory is they
do it to escape predators, but it's a big exactly,
it's kind of a lame theory because the larger sturgeon
do not have predators. Um. Another theory is that they
do it for fun. And this is when I see

(33:48):
mentioned with dolphins, and maybe we'll save that one for
another another discussion. Well, I don't want to be unfairly
prejudiced against the uh. I don't know the intellectual capabilities
of fish, because as we learned with our birds episode.
Sometimes you underestimate what other animal minds are capable of.
But I tend to think of play as something that's
more associated with more complex mammalian nervous systems, which is

(34:12):
why it makes sense with with dolphins. You know, kind
of intelligent mammals. Fish, I don't know, are they mentally
complex enough to play? Yeah? I mean plus, it's also
it comes down to economics. I was reading some thoughts
on this from biologist Ken Sulak, and he pointed out
that the jumping, especially for a massive sturgeon, it's an
energy expenditure, so there has to be a trade off

(34:33):
and behavioral importance, you know, beyond mere fun um. He
actually theorizes that this is a form of communication with sturgeons,
so theyre when they jump out and and and splash.
It creates a distinct sound slapping noise, but they also
um announced and they also create a small sound before

(34:53):
and after um the jump. It's kind of like they
produced kind of like clicks and drumming noise is so
it's kind of a clicker a drumming noise to jump
splash another sound, and he thinks that they might be
announcing their presence in position to the larger groups. So
it's like the mooing of a cow, which which I
think is an interesting theory. Well, this, this does, this

(35:16):
communication theory plays into something that I'm going to mention later,
especially when we talk about sharks. Yes, and we'll get
two sharks in a minute, but before we do, we
have another potentially dangerous, perhaps even more worrisome for half
our listeners fish to contend with. Okay, so you may
have heard this story. A man is walking in the

(35:37):
jungles of the Amazon and he realizes that, oh man,
I had so much coffee this morning. I need to
evacuate some urine. Okay. So he wades knee deep into
the waters of the river, and he un zips and
begins to relieve himself into the water. Question, why does
he wade into the water before he You're in It's
I had that same question. But this is how the

(35:57):
story goes. Okay, So for if two seconds, this activity
proceeds as normal, but then, to his horror, he sees
a tiny, barely perceptible shape leap from the surface of
the water into his urethra Oh Okay. In an alternate
version of the story, it uh supposedly swims up the

(36:19):
column of his urine stream and into his urethra, and
then once inside there, it spreads this collection of barbed
spines like an umbrella opening inside your urethra and just
lodges itself there and begins to feast on the flesh.
And eventually he has to he either dies or he

(36:40):
has to undergo a really really undesirable surgery to get
it removed. Well, that's horrible. I think we've all heard
versions of this before, right you. You may remember a
version of this from some dialogue between Eric Stolt's and
John Voight in the movie Anaconda. Okay, I vaguely remember that.
I tend to remember the growth out moments of that
know more. But yes, oh, I mostly remember John Voight's accent.

(37:03):
What is his accent supposed to be? It's like a
cross between South American and and Count Dracula. That's great,
But but is this story really true? Does anything like
this happen? Can a tiny fish jump out of the
water and into somebody's urethra or swim up your urine
stream into your urethra? Uh? Well, the fish allegedly described

(37:26):
in this story as agreed by most authorities to be
in fact the Vandelia sarosa, which is a type of
parasitic catfish also known as a vampire catfish, but it's
commonly known in the sort of legendary literature as the candaru.
These are the facts about Vandelia so vandelias, this tiny

(37:47):
parasitic catfish usually about an inch or two inches, you know,
two and a half or to five centimeters long, nearly
invisible in the water, especially when it hasn't fed recently. Uh.
And it occupies the tropical freshwater verse of South America
Amazon River basin, and it drinks the blood of other fish.
So it's regular emo is that you're you're a goldfish

(38:08):
or something like that, swimming around in the river, and
the kangaroo or the vandalia scientifically swims into into your
gills and anchors itself there with spines that line it's
gill covers, and then it drinks your blood, becomes engorged,
and then it swims away to the bottom to burrow
in and digest the bottom of the waterway, right uh.

(38:31):
And so when it enters the gills of the host fish,
it bites at an a order artery ventroller dorsal, and
it doesn't need to suck because actually the host's blood
pressure just pumps blood into the candaroo's mouth. So instead
of blood sucking, this animal is more like when you
hook the lip of a balloon over a water faucet
and then turn the water on to make a water balloon,

(38:53):
is just letting itself fill up. Okay, So the idea
here is that if it preyed on humans, obviously, swimming
into someone's p hole is not it's it's design. This
would be it would be like a like a port
tape worm getting lost and winding up in your brain.
He doesn't need that to happen, but it occurs accidentally.
Right that this is a mistake for this animal. If

(39:15):
if this is true and uh, and it's a it's
a fatal mistake for the animal and sometimes for the person,
according to the story. So those are the facts that
just reported. Now there are also a bunch of claims
that are commonly reported as fact, and these include that
the kangaroo can swim up the urethra of a person
or mammal that might urinate in the water. So the

(39:36):
less unbelievable version is that mammals weighed fully into the
water and begin to urinate once under the water, and
the candaroo swims up one of their orifices, the ure
throw or the vagina or the anus. Uh. It's commonly
reported that this fish is attracted to the flow of urine,
maybe because it's chemically similar to some chemicals that would

(39:57):
come out of the gills of its host fish. More
on that in a bit. And then once instip once
inside you, it gets stuck, can't escape, dies obstructs the
path of the urethra, you can't pee, and it has
to get removed by surgery. Classical stories of this include
lots of accounts of penile amputation. So you can see

(40:18):
why this causes extreme distress for people getting into these waters. Yeah,
and I can also see why a lot of this
is sort of hinged on just creating a cringe e
horror tail to share with with visitors. Say, oh, the
officials swim up your pee hole and then we'll have
to cut your penis off, and you know, so it's
it's easy to see it is nothing more than that. Yeah.

(40:41):
So there are two questions here. Number one is the
general one to kinderoo actually swim up people's eurethras. Uh,
and if so, do they perform this even more crazy
sounding feat of either jumping from the water, this jumping
fish tie in here, which isn't as crazy based on
what we've been discussing. Lots of fish jumps, so it
seems possible. Now, could it jump with such a degree

(41:02):
of accuracy that it jumps straight into your urethra that's
kind of tough to imagine, or the even crazier one
that it swims up the stream of your urine. I
got some doubts about that. But are there any medical
cases of this? And in the cases of the medical literature, well,
there's one major report in the modern day that people

(41:23):
refer to so in n a euro genital surgeon named n. R.
Some odd who was working in Amazonia in Brazil, reportedly
extracted a dead kinderu from a patient's penis. And according
to the report of the patient's story, the patient was
standing thigh deep in the water, urinating into the water

(41:44):
with his penis above the water, and he reported that
the fish jumped out of the water, swam up the
stream of his urine and into his urethra. Now, I I,
as I alluded to earlier, I'm really suspicious about the
physics of the swimming up the urine stream. Yeah. It
also makes me wonder if he did have something lodged
in his in his uh urethra, like he oh, maybe

(42:07):
he only became aware of it when he urinated and
this and he just happened to be standing in the
water and he just made the assumption that, oh, that's
when it entered. Yeah, so we only have this second
or I guess third hand report in this case, so
it's hard to know exactly what happened. But imagine the idea,
like physically, just try to think of the fluid mechanics
of swimming up a stream of urine. It would be

(42:29):
kind of like if you had imagine a really good swimmer,
like an Olympic swimmer in a pool, and then you
stand on the roof of a house over the pool
and aim a fire hose at them and say, okay,
swim up the stream of the fire hose. To me, uh,
that just it doesn't seem to make any sense. It
would be like swimming up a waterfall, where the salmon
do not swim up a waterfall, but they can they

(42:51):
can jump over, right, So I can believe it's much
more likely that fish simply jumped out of the water
and in this one in a million chance kind of way,
happened to jump straight into this guy's unfortunate urethra, which
we should say does expand during urination, So it kind
of opens the possibility there, both figuratively and I guess literally. So.

(43:13):
According to a BBC story I read on the candaroo
legend um, the American marine scientist Stephen Spot met with
some od the surgeon who supposedly removed the candaru from
the guy uh in, and he met with this guy
in to investigate, and he was shown pictures and video
of the extraction. So a real surgery definitely took place.

(43:35):
Some something was actually removed from this guy's urethra uh
and there was a preserved specimen of the fish itself.
But Spot wasn't entirely convinced for a few reasons. One was,
um the physical mechanical problem I just mentioned in the
patient's story. The other was the preserve specimen was a
lot bigger than you'd expect a candiu to grow, which

(43:58):
in one other source I read it is more than
five inches long and almost half an inch wide. Can
you also it was bigger than the thing we'd expect
to find in your urethra. That also makes the story
all the more horrific to envision. Yeah. Uh. And then
the specimen also, according to Spot, did not show signs
of having been lodged or removed as described. For example,

(44:21):
it didn't have snipped off spines or anything. Uh. Then
again Spot reported he didn't entirely dismiss the account either.
At this point, many elements appear unlikely, but it's hard
hard to know what really happened. Um. But as a
side note that this sort of raises the question of
kndio entering the urethra and and other body orfice is

(44:42):
more generally right. So this has been widely reported as
fact all throughout the literature, both scientific and popular, for
a couple hundred years now, but a few critical writers
have pointed out these accounts are kind of weird, like
that they're almost always vague and second hand, it happened
to somebody that I heard of somewhere up the river.
Some guy in the next village had a candio swim

(45:04):
or jump into his penis and and get lodged there. Um.
And also supposedly one of the explanations for this. Uh,
the kangaroo are attracted to the chemicals commonly found in
human urine, such as urea that has been tested and
found to be completely without merit. So Stephen Spot along
with the guy mentioned earlier, along with colleagues Paulo Petrie

(45:25):
and Jansen Zonon and published results of an experiment in
two thousand one that found that Vandelia, these these parasitic
catfishes under lab conditions just didn't care about the chemical
attractants in the water at all. They were not interested
in ammonia, amino acids, fresh fish slime, or human urine.
No response, so they just didn't care. Instead, they seemed

(45:47):
to hunt for hosts such as Amazon goldfish, mostly by sight.
They saw them, said, those look like some good gills.
I'm going to them. And uh. And fortunately somebody has
actually tried to figure out if there's anything to all
these stories. Uh. There's a paper in the Journal of
Travel Medicine in by Erme Guard Bauer called candaru a

(46:08):
little fish with bad habits need travel health professionals worry
a review and so in this paper the least scandal
as possible headline. I know, but Bauer essentially concluded that
there there's probably nothing to these stories. Uh, there's they
So there was an extensive review of all the available literature,
and there's just not strong evidence that these fish pose

(46:30):
a threat to humans. Instead, the record sort of indicates
that these attacks are they're just always hearsay. The same
stories get repeated over and over as if they're fact.
And Bauer concludes by saying, you know, considering the range
of this fish, it's all over the place, and and
how how horrifying their habit is supposed to be, it

(46:51):
seems like wouldn't we be hearing about this more often
in the modern day, wouldn't we be encountering stories of
this happening? Uh? And and there is almost nothing. There's
just like that that those old stories that have been
repeated for decades, and then there's this one disputable Yeah.
I mean, the only counter argument I can think of
is that since it's like a penile injury, that it

(47:14):
would be underreported out of shame or embarrassment. But not
if you factor in like the severity of the supposed
severity of the infection. You know, I feel like this
is the kind of thing that if there were a
confirmed case where somebody went to a hospital and this
was you know, became part of the medical literature. This

(47:35):
would be this would be all over I f L
science and everything, you know what I mean, everybody would
be like, oh my god, I gotta fish up his penis.
We've got to report the heck out of this. Yeah,
and we just don't see that. Now that being said,
there are plenty of other things that can harm your
privates if you go waiting around in you know, Amazonian rivers.

(47:56):
In fact, that is part of the explanation is that
many of these story reason may be sort of garblings
because a lot of them come from you know, colonial
periods and in the Amazon and stuff like that, where
there were language barriers between the people reporting the stories
and then the and then the people writing them down
and publishing them. So I don't know, I feel like

(48:18):
there's a lot of room for legend and error. Yeah. Plus,
I mean, if anyone out there, if you've ever had
a U T I, your anary your ainary track infection,
you you know that it can feel like a tiny
barbed fish has swam inside you. So I could see
where where such uncomfortable scenarios could lend themselves to creative interpretations. Okay,

(48:40):
so what do we think on that Candaru leaping into
your urethra? Not impossible, but seems unlikely. Let's get into sharks,
because I think we've all seen these stunning images, some
of the the photoshops of great white sharks leaping over the
Golden gate Bridge, leaping out of Yeah, leaping over bridges,

(49:02):
or at least managing to get their entire bodies out
of the water in a way that just terrifies this
because you look and you say, well, that's a monster
of the water. But it is not allowed out of
the water. It is not allowed up here in the air,
because that just messes with with all of the guidelines
that govern my safety. Yeah, I thought I was supposed
to be safe in this boat. Well, in keeping with

(49:22):
our theme of fish leaping at people in their watercraft,
did you know that sometimes even great white sharks leap
into boats entirely into Yeah. So in this case, as
with others, this is not a situation of attempted predatory
behavior towards the humans on the boat. It's not an attack. Uh,
it's just very unfortunate coincidence. One example of this kind

(49:45):
of story July two thousand eleven, I found a National
Geographic news story covering one of these events. So in
July two thousand eleven, there's a research vessel off Seal Island,
off the coast of South Africa. And if you've seen
videos of great white sharks jumping into the air out
of the water, very likely that video came from around
Seal Island in South Africa. This is one of the

(50:07):
most famous places in the world to see this behavior
among white sharks. So there's a research vessel in the
waters out near this place, and a roughly five m
or half ton great white shark jumps into the boat
operated by these marine researchers, and it's in the boat.
It's stuck on the deck beneath the walls in the boat,

(50:29):
so it's thrashing around. Everybody had to get the heck
away from it and try to figure out how to
help it get back into the water so it wouldn't die. Robert,
for your benefit, I have a picture here. It's just
a shark in the boat. That is a big shark.
This is not if you're if you're picturing like just
a juvenile, small little aquarium shark. Huge shark uh. So,

(50:50):
of course they couldn't get the shark out of the
boat by hand, and so they attempted to drag it
out with a rope and that failed, and then they
so eventually they had to drive the boat back to
the harbor, and they tried to lift it out of
the boat with a crane, which was dangerous to do,
but the shark was going to die, so they had
to try it. Uh, and they so they lowered it

(51:11):
back into the water. But the shark may be confused
or injured from this, stranded itself on a harbor beach nearby.
They attempted to push it back into the water by
hand and that failed. So eventually they tied the animal
to the side of a boat and drove it out
to sea, and about half an hour after that, the
sharks swam away. It swam away and seemed to recover.

(51:34):
It slapped its tail. So nobody knows what happened after that,
if it eventually went on to live and be okay,
or if it was injured and if it died. They're
just not sure. But I hope that sharks out there
right now, uh, longing for seal flush, trying to eat right. So,
so when a shark leaps out of the water, this

(51:55):
is known as breaching. And to use specific terminology that
I of from one study that I read, when a
shark leaps vertically or near vertically out of the water,
so it's coming up from below vertically into the air
with a head up position, this is known as a
polarist breach. Oh, I love that. That's so good. That's
a good band name. Uh So, why do shark's breach?

(52:18):
Why why do they come up out of the water like? Well,
based on a lot of my research that concerns uh
like nineteen eighties Italian shark films that came out in
the wake of Jaws, they do it to make a
boat explode, right, Yeah, to smash a boat. And no,
that is not why they do it. They they're There
are two main kinds of breaching. There may be other
minor behavior, but the two main kinds that you'll read

(52:39):
about most often are predatory breaching and what's known as
natural breaching. So predatory breaching, it's all there in the name.
The shark is in the pursuit of prey. There's a seal,
you know, pinniped there, that's a nice fatty delicious energy
rich meal swimming along near the surface of the water.
And in these breaches, the shark moves rapidly up from below,

(53:02):
bites as it shoots up into the air and then
slams back down into the water. And a lot of
cases there it'll shoot up from below, hit the seal,
bite it, and then release it and then wait for
the seal to bleed out and die and come back
and finish it. This was Yeah. I was reading a
paper about this the other day in preparation for this episode,
and I found that interesting because I really had not

(53:23):
researched actual shark um predatory behavior much and the idea
that they wound and then allow the prey to bleed
and then come back for it is interesting because because
you know, nobody wants to get slapped by a seal,
including a great white shark. You know, the shark is
has to be cautious, like a prey can injure it

(53:44):
if it's fighting around with it while the prey is
still strong, so it wants to avoid that. In fact,
one of the papers I read about this by an
author named r Aiden Martin, who has written on on
great white breaching. A good bit they actually put together
a shark hunting decision entree. So it has it's like
a flow chart where you know what, depending on what happens,

(54:05):
do you move to this next thing or this next thing? Uh?
And so it includes like the initial attack and then
do you catch or do you wait and pursue? Do
you quote process? I love that at some point the
shark begins to process the seal um And we don't
mean thinking about the seal here either. No, this is

(54:26):
sort of working on it right right, butchering with its
mouth basically. So so why does it do this? What?
Why is the great white shark attacking the seal in
this way? Why didn't just swim up from behind and
bite it? Uh? Well, think think about how this plays
out in practice, like what the conditions are for the
predator and for the prey. Looking up from the deep

(54:47):
water below. The shark has more ability to see a
seal near the surface than the seal does the shark,
so the seal is illuminated by the sky and these
attacks take place more often in low like conditions, when
there's less penetration of water of the water column by
the light in the sky, like if the sun's at
an angle. So you're a shark, you know several you know,

(55:10):
meters down below the water, and you're looking up. You
can see your prey, but it's less likely to see you,
especially because of your your dorsal coloring, the dark coloring
on the top of you. And so why is this
element of surprise so crucial? Well, when you look at
the body composition of a white shark versus a seal
um According to one study I read, between ninety four

(55:33):
and nine percent of a white sharks muscle is composed
of what's known as white muscle. And this is this
is sprinting muscle. It's capable of rapid contraction, but it
has very low stamina, and a pinnip head like a seal,
on the other hand, can go the distance. It's capable
of sustaining long term evasive tactics. So the longer the
attack goes on, the better that the less chance a

(55:56):
shark has of catching the seal and getting it um.
So the sharks are better at sprinting the marathon, seals
can can keep evading, so a sudden surprise attack greatly
increases the sharks chance of success. And this is why
this rocketing up from below which leads to breaching UH
is so common. Well, that makes perfect sense from the

(56:18):
from a hunting standpoint, and according to a paper on
the on the physics of this process, so the shark
usually starts UH down deep in the water, a place
where the bottom depth is between twenty six and thirty
meters and UH in these cases, the entire attack, you know,
leaping up from the bottom after they begin their strikes

(56:38):
to UH to the seal is about two to two
and a half seconds, so it just doesn't give the
seal much time at all to react. And then, of course,
at the speed it takes to hit the seal from
below that fast, the sharks still propelled upwards and it's
going out of the water. Um. And in these cases
the shark attacks are successful about forty percent of the time,

(57:00):
which is not a bad hunting success, right. But then
there's this other kind of breaching image that's what that's
the predatory breaching, jumping out of the water to kill.
There's also what's known as natural breaching, when the shark
breaches for no obvious reason, there's no predatory attack or anything, um,
no bait on the surface that it's being coaxed to

(57:20):
the surface with right, So why what what's going on here? Well,
according to one theory, sharks have these well developed mechano
receptors and chemo receptors and electro receptors. They have all
you know, receptive sensing organs that we don't have at
that kind of level. So it's been hypothesized that tail slap,

(57:42):
so that's one type of slapping behavior, and then breaching,
jumping out of the water, and splashing down are communicative.
They they're allowing sharks to communicate between one another through
agonistic behaviors. That's not you know, fighting displays. I'm tough,
this is my food. You better get away because I
could fight you for it. And it's true that lots

(58:04):
of fishes do use sound as a communication channel, and
so it's hypothesized that these behaviors like tail slapping and breaching,
jumping out of the water and splashing down could exploit
this kind of mechano reception, This this sound sensitive ability
of fish to communicate between the sharks. And when you
think about it, a shark jumping out of the water

(58:25):
and splashing down is not necessarily a bad signifier of fitness.
That's like the bigger you are, and the stronger you are,
the harder of a splashdown you can make. It's certainly,
I mean, it makes a statement to us and we're
not even sharks. Yeah. And one reason to think this
is a good explanation is that this natural breaching often
seems to happen with sharks in the presence of other sharks,

(58:47):
not just hanging out by themselves. Now, this is interesting.
We're talking about this breaching behavior that's taking place, uh
specifically to predatory breaching behavior. It's taking place in the
presence of the seal. You brought up an interesting um
tidbit yesterday about the recent shark move movie The Shallows,

(59:09):
in which the shark tries to eat Blake Lively about
about what what does it mean when we see a
movie shark breaching like this in seemingly tropical waters. Oh yeah, yeah,
this was interesting. I believe I read this. Now this
isn't in my notes. I'm just trying to recall from memory,
but I recalled that I read this, I think on
Smithsonian where they were reviewing the trailer of the film.

(59:31):
But they spoke to a marine biologist who had some
knowledge of shark behaviors and said Okay, look at how
the shark's acting in the trailer for this movie. Is
this basically accurate? Uh? And I recall what the the
expert said was, well, it looks like this movie is
supposed to take place in tropical waters, and yet you
see the shark when it attacks this guy leaps out

(59:52):
of the water. That's breaching behavior, which is not necessarily
something you'd be likely to see in tropical waters because
the place as you really see it are are like
in South Africa, where they have these uh, these prey
like seals that they have to attack in this manner
in order to maximize their success rate at catching them.
In tropical waters, sharks probably have access to fish that

(01:00:14):
are much more slow moving and easier to catch, and
they just they don't have to resort to these breaching
behaviors in order to catch meals so that they The
expert they talked to rated that as not quite so plausible.
But from a cinematic standpoint, nothing is more terrifying than
the shark coming out of its habitat into our habitat

(01:00:37):
in order to especially to eat us. It's the inherent
perversity of the land shark. It is all right, well,
at this point, we really have only one sort of
leaping jumping fish to consider, right, and that is of
course the so called flying fish, right, because the distinction
between jumping and flying may seem very clear, you right,

(01:01:00):
you know, Uh, kangaroos jump and birds fly, and and
these are not all that similar behaviors, but the dividing
line between them, I don't know, is it really just time? Well, yeah,
you can certainly bog yourself down in in um definitions
of flight. Uh. To be clear with with the flying fish,

(01:01:22):
we are talking about a gliding sometimes kind of a hydroplaning,
where they're just where the tail is still in contact
with the water. Um. So it's not powered flight, it's
not true flight. So we're not talking about piranha to
the spawning here right right, and then there's certainly no
feathers involved. But it's interesting to put this in, you know,

(01:01:44):
to sort of top off this discussion of all these
weeping and jumping behaviors, because gliding fish might seem like
the the evolutionary pinnacle of jumping fish. Right. But but
the interesting thing here is that there's nothing new at all.
In two thousand twelve, paleontologists found a near comple eleat
skeleton from the Driassic period that's two to two forty

(01:02:05):
two million years ago, um and and near complete skeleton
boasted all the key attributes of the modern flying fish,
well developed pectorial fin and a forked, asymmetrical tail. And
even this form seemed to have evolved independently from the
sixty four known species of flying fish we find today

(01:02:27):
in all the world's ocean independence. So it's not like
an ancestor of the like a cousin of them that's
now not here right, it developed this gliding technique on
its own. Um. So it's interesting just to to realize
that that gliding fish have evolved in the past separately.
They've died, I had died out and uh, and we

(01:02:48):
have a fairly successful model of it today in the
in these sixty four known species of flying fish and
um and again, they don't necessarily fly as much as
they glide, but they can they can really glide. So
then what what would the difference be between a fish
that glides and a fish that actually quote flies. Well, again,
this is an area where where individuals can get into

(01:03:11):
discussions and disagreements over what defines flight, but essentially it's
a difference between powered flight and gliding, all right, So
is it is the creature flapping its wings in order
to sustain itself in the air or is it merely
sort of falling with grace? Right? Uh, hang glider versus
an airplane exactly, because we see plenty of gliding creatures

(01:03:33):
and it generally means in order to glide, you need
to either fall from something high, such as a tree,
which is why we see so many um, you know,
tree based gliders of boreal gliders, or it needs to
be able to jump up high enough to glide a
little bit. And that's what we see with gliding or
flying fish. Um and they can they can really glide.
They can glide and or hydroplane distances of hundred feet

(01:03:59):
or four hundred meters thirty seconds with maximum flight speeds
of up to forty five miles per hour or seventy
two kilometers per hour, which is pretty impressive. I feel
like we've all seen like splendid videos of this taking place.
It's it's pretty impressive. So since these fish are small,
I imagine they're not breaching to uh, to inflict predatory

(01:04:19):
damage on a seal or something like no no, no,
these are These are generally plankton eaters, and pretty much
everybody agrees that they jump and glide to escape. There
are many many enemies in the sea. Yeah, yet another
evasive maneuver right now. There have been some that are
proposed that this has to do with energy conservation, like

(01:04:39):
the running or porpoising that is observed in marine mammals
such as penguins or dolphins, but it really doesn't pan
out when you crunch all the factors, including the oxygen
debt of takeoff, and biologist John Davenport did just this
sort of crunching in his paper How and Why Do
Flying Fish Fly? Which is a certain only a good

(01:05:01):
in depth read if you really want to get into
the the economics and physics of this. Another theory sees
all of this is a means to move from a
food or plankton poor area to a food rich area,
thus making the energy expenditure worth it, essentially kind of
like rate and teleporting during a fight to get behind

(01:05:21):
an opponent. You're not in a good position for your food,
teleport to the to the to the positive position via flight,
but there's not a lot of evidence to back that up.
So why why would the flying or gliding in that
case be better than just swimming to the food rich area.
I just have to go back to the rate and
analogy there. It's just the the it's in the realm

(01:05:41):
of water. It is more like an instant appearance as
opposed to a journey too. But again, so you can
pretty much don't worry too much about that theory because
pretty much everybody is still in agreeance. This is about
escaping predators. Now. In escaping those predators, flying fish that
or gliding fish, they don't flap their wings to gain

(01:06:03):
lift um. They propel through the air water interface. I
like that terminology at a shallow angle, unfurl their large
lateral fins, and then rapidly beat their tail in the
water prior to actual lift off. And it's interesting too
that they have to be a certain size before they
can actually pull this off. The smaller flying fish, before
they've attained appropriate size, they can't actually uh pull this off.

(01:06:28):
They're limited to simple leaps with their fins held against
the body by surface tension. Huh yeah, okay, well so
flying fish, you might say, in this case is kind
of a misnomer. Then yes, they're they're gliding fish. That
we have jumping fish, we have longer jumping fish, we
have gliding fish. But I wonder why no fish with

(01:06:51):
the ability to maintain sustained flight? Because if you imagine
the the evolution of flight and its many forms, uh,
it's commonly hypothesized that flight organs began with gliding organs.
You know, organisms had had maybe movements or gliding organs

(01:07:12):
that would help them coast from one tree to another
or help them escape a predator faster. And overtime these
organs developed until they were able to create powered sustained
flight like birds. So why haven't fish gone there? Why
are there no fish birds? I know you can't help
but think about this, especially when you look at you
jumping and then gliding, Why not flying? Why why have

(01:07:33):
they not taken that next step? And then indeed is
that step even possible? Right? Because as as you pointed out,
so many of these examples of flight that we have
um and certainly there are not that many. You can
ultimately kind of look at at flight as a is
a rare adaptation, even though it has been tremendously successful
for the organisms that have achieved it. Because as vertebrates

(01:07:55):
go we've we've only seen three takes on flight. We've
seen UH a osaurin flight, We've seen a d in flight,
and we've seen you know, bat flight, and UH and fish.
So far as we know, unless there's some sort of
fossil out there that we've yet to uncover, they've never
crossed the threshold UH and UH and and and all.
When you take in all biology, you have a single

(01:08:17):
extinct lineage and three extant clades birds, bats and the
and and UH and also insects. But even in these
three extant examples of of vertebrate flight, they are examples
of convergent evolution. Not that, like the pterosaurs, the birds
and the bats didn't evolve from each other. They all

(01:08:38):
independently achieved the mechanisms of flight. That's right. They exploit
the same physical properties, but they're all different solutions to
the same problem. I was looking at this book by
David E. Alexander and Stephen Vogel titled Nature's Flyers, Birds, Insects,
and the Biomechanics of Flight, and they put it into
context like this quote. Although such convergent features may make

(01:09:00):
animals appear quite similar, the adaptations are only superficially similar
and have fundamental differences. Fish or cold blooded, scaly animals
with gills, but pro porpoises are warm blooded, smooth skinned
breathers of air. The point being that these are both
not flight based. But these are both sea creatures with
similar forms at first glance, but there of course very
different organisms that it continues. Hummingbirds and bumblebees have almost

(01:09:23):
identical wing beat patterns, but hummingbird wings are made of bone, muscle,
and feathers. Bee wings are made of of pleated membranes
supported by stiff, hollow veins. And they point out to
that technological evolution has produced several areas of convergence between
flying animals and flying machines. Quote the convergences were not
intentional copies of mechanisms used by animals, but technological solutions

(01:09:46):
to common challenges faced by all flyers. So this would
seem to indicate that there's no inherent reason you couldn't
expect fish to evolve mechanisms like a bird's wings or
like an insect swings. Uh, they would just be you know, fishier. Basically,
they would be evolved from the equipment available to fish. Anatomy. Well,

(01:10:08):
the one place that my mind immediately mean went was
all right, So almost it seems like all these other
examples are our land creatures that that take to gliding.
So maybe dwelling on the land is an essential prerequisite
too to the sort of gliding that evolves into flight. Yeah,
that could certainly like do you need or runway in

(01:10:29):
order to evolve flight? A solid runway or or a
high place to jump off of? Can you just not
really ever evolutionarily justify the the evolution of propelled flight
mechanisms if you always have to start from underwater, right,
And and maybe that does hold true invertebrates. But then,

(01:10:49):
according to biologists Jim Martin, the possible exception is with insects.
Flapping gills could have evolved into flight capable wings as
an aquatic in an aquatic ironment, according to Martin, so
insects may have an out there. But maybe this prerequisite
holds true with vertebrates. But the thing is, when you

(01:11:10):
start asking this question, you also have to take it
outside of fish too, because we could also say asked
the same thing about other gliding organisms, gliding snakes, lizards,
the gliding squid, various gliding arboreal mammals, including lemurs. Why
do they know flying lemurs because certainly they're they're in

(01:11:30):
the position where they're they're leaping out of trees, they're
gliding a little whine. Is that not developed into flight?
I guess the simplest explanation to me would would just
be a guess, But it would be that there's just
not enough incentive for it, Like maybe there's just no
clear advantage survival or reproduction advantage to fish remaining in
the air for longer than it takes to glidees a

(01:11:52):
short distance. Because you know, when you think about it,
what really happens in the air. I mean, birds use
the air to traverse between in different locations of feeding
and breeding and stuff like that. I suppose fish could
do the same thing, But I don't know would they
be more would they be more open to bird predation
if they were to fly around in the air all

(01:12:13):
the time? With I mean, it could just be that
there's not enough reason for them to have this trade. Yeah,
because yeah, because when you do one thing to say,
all right, why why on the flying fish just become
a true flying organism, But you also have to provide
the reason for it, like how is that going to work?
Is it is it? Is it really of benefit that's

(01:12:36):
going to play out in evolution? And uh, so far
the answer seems to be no. Now I do have
to mention that this this larger question of why do
some lineages evolve into the sky and there's not? It
remains something of a mystery, and scientists that even look
to underlying molecular mechanisms and this whole there's a whole

(01:12:56):
study of biological uh periodicity that gets into this. It
gets a really deep and complex bit and and uh
and has a lot of a lot of parallels in
in molecular concerns. So it's uh so, so it ends
up being a deeper question than just why don't fish

(01:13:16):
actually fly? But why does do do any numbers? Yeah,
one more thing I probably should say. It's may have
been too obvious for us to mention. But of course
there is the impediment of breathing. Oh yes, but certainly
we have land again right to the the mud skippers
and the walking catfish, this and earlier forms of lungfish.

(01:13:38):
So that alone doesn't seem like it would be um,
you know, an eliminating factor, but it would certainly still
be a concern because they are venturing outside of their realm. Yeah,
all right, so there you have it. Um. Now, we
only covered some of the jumping fish out there in
the world, so we may have missed some examples that

(01:14:00):
you're particularly fond of, or some just examples you've seen
in real life and have some stories related to. Yeah,
and one thing I do think we should make clear
is that Robert, you and I were not trying to
be alarmists about fish jumping. We we have covered several
stories of fish jumping into boats, fish jumping into people,
and injuries that have been sustained on those accounts. But
I think these events are exceedingly rare overall, So you

(01:14:23):
really don't need to be like super worried about getting
killed by jumping fish, right, But certainly if there's a
sign saying telling you not to drive too fast on
the water because there are leaping sturgeon, I would acknowledge
that sign and remember that, yes, individuals have been injured
or killed, so be cautious on or the sturgeon are
under the sturgeon. Indeed. All right, So hey, if you

(01:14:46):
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(01:15:07):
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(01:15:30):
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