From the Vault: Jumping Fish

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 Lamb and Joe McCormick 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. (Originally published July 14, 2016)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back.
It is Saturday. It is time to go into the
vault for a classic Stuff to Blow your Mind episode.
This one is going to be an episode we did
on jumping and flying fish after Robert saw some leaping
mullets in Florida. Yeah. I believe it was the coolest springs.
This is one of several episodes that ended up being

(00:28):
in Well, really, I think both of us have had
episodes that have been inspired by vacations. We would go
out into the world, we relax a little bit, we
learned something, and then we come back and we want
a podcast on it. And this in this case, I said,
a less podcast about jumping fish. Trust me, it's more
interesting than it sounds, and it is. We never end
up doing like the science of Margarita's No, wait a minute,

(00:49):
I think maybe you went on vacation and then we
did the science of cocktails. We did right, well, um,
I don't know if that was vacation related, but it was.
It was certainly based on interest in cocktails. Well, that
was a Christmas gift inspired when I received books about
cocktails for Christmas, and then I was like, hey, let's
do an episode on this. Well, the jumping Fish episode
turned out to be a lot more interesting of a

(01:10):
topic than I might have expected going in, So I
thought this one was a lot of fun and we
are happy to bring it back to you. This originally
aired Thursday, July sixteen, and here it is again for
your listening pleasure. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff

(01:38):
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 the way back
up we stopped at this place called Wakola Springs. Cooling
Springs State Park in Florida near Tallahassee. Ended up just
being really delightful. What's this place like? Basically, what you

(02:00):
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 the water here, 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 too

(02:23):
that that did want that constant temperature. Um. Interestingly enough,
they filmed a few scenes from the creature from the
from the Black 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. Ago.
You can swim there, but you can, but you get
to go in these these really cool boat tours where

(02:45):
you get to see all of these crazy estuary um
uh species doing their thing, all the diving birds, gators,
gators laying in the sun by the dozens, get to
see manatees, and you also get to see these uh
these mullets, the fish mullet, not the hairstyle. You probably

(03:06):
saw some of those. Yeah, I think I did see
see a 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 it's 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,

(03:28):
why 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's all sorts of animals around here, they're gators in
the water. 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

(03:52):
turns out there's more to it than that. And uh,
not only with the with mullets, but with other species
of ish as well. And that's the reason we're having
this episode discuss some of the mystery, some of the theories, uh,
some of the at times myths surrounding leaping fish, fish

(04:12):
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 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.

(04:34):
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 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

(04:56):
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 briefly leap into outer space. Yeah, or at least me,
It makes me think of the part in Phantasm where
they go through like the stargate into the barren world
with the dwarves or hauling stuff around. It is like

(05:18):
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 the raiding character does in the first couple
of Mortal Kombat games. You know, it's great, Yeah, what
does he say? When he teleports or does he have one? Um?
I have something he says when he does the Superman,
but I don't remember if he says anything when he teleports.

(05:40):
But maybe he should. He just grins and as lightning
come out of his eyes. What he should do? I
hope someday somebody goes back to the first Mortal Kombat
game and dubs in Christopher Lambert's lines from the movie.
Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot that he played the
first one. But back to leaping fish. Yeah, So, Robert,
knowing your inquisitive nature, I bet you asked somebody at

(06:03):
the park about the mullet jumping behavior, didn't you. I did,
and the park ranger was very insightful and all this
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

(06:24):
strange parasite removal strategies, including allowing cleaner organisms to crawl
into your body? Right? Um? Wait, what allowing cleaner you've seen?
I see you mean? Um, an organism that does cleaning,
not a relatively cleaner organisms, no, no no, no, yeah, I'm
talking like allowing a small shrimp to climb into your

(06:45):
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 parasites. I believe it's
the sunfish that does that allows all 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

(07:06):
space to try. Well, that sounds kind of ridiculous and
and indeed that's go one of the criticisms against this
theory um broadly speaking concerning fish, because you 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,

(07:27):
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
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

(07:49):
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
the water to breathe and then returned. But fish breathe,
I know, but but it's this is one of the theories. Um.
They also may jump during spawning season to break over

(08:12):
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 in these cases
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

(08:35):
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
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

(08:55):
very strange, can be a danger, can be a nuisance,
can be very money. 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
start broadly. What do we know about in general why
fish jump? Well, oh, and start one more thing, I
should say, we should specify you all out there. You

(09:18):
know the difference between a fish and a mammal. So
you've seen dolphins jump playing in the waves or at
a dolphin show, or uh, maybe just playing echo of
the dolphin. We're not talking about mammals today. This is
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
a high pressure water jet. We're not gonna get into

(09:40):
that either. Well, 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 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're roughly one thousand, two hundred and

(10:03):
seventy different species of killy fish, and most are fully
aquatic with no obvious morphological specializations for terrestrial locomotion. Locomotion
individuals from several different species have been observed moving across
land though via 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

(10:26):
land surface. Yeah, it's essentially it's getting due to too
dangerous in the water, I gotta jump out 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

(10:47):
the moon for a minute and then jump back down
somewhere on Earth. Yeah, or taking like you know, a
proposed space tourism flight that just sends you into low
orbit and then brings you back down. Huh, 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 godland and then coming back

(11:08):
into the picture somewhere else. And this is interesting because too,
because that the aquatic amphibious distinction is a key 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 things to the next level, right
bordering on you know, creature from the Black Lagoon or

(11:28):
bloodwaters of doctor Z territory. But aquatic fish that just
seems crazy, right, Um? So yeah, the tail flip flings
him out of the water through the air several body
lengths 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

(11:50):
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
you're gonna you could dry out or gets sixty eight.
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

(12:10):
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 carponado. Oh 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

(12:33):
to no? No, this is a grainy YouTube, okaysing to
set to some slick new metal riffs. Now, the boat
appears to be sitting in like a river or a lake.
It's opaque fresh water, 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

(12:55):
driver then throttles up the engine. The boat starts to
move in these lines of why churning wake peel out
the back of the boat and you can see 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

(13:15):
arc over the boat. Sometimes they fly right into somebody's
neck and slap them on the face if fish hits
you in the back or it lands flopping in the
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. And other similar videos
you might scratch the bow and arrow and feature just

(13:37):
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 nails
in it, uh pitchforks, et cetera. 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

(13:58):
metal background mu zick. It looks pretty dangerous, especially because
there are sometimes other boats in the water down range
of 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 of? I need a better metaphor

(14:19):
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, 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

(14:42):
of boats. So what are Asian carpet? Asian carp is
not one species, but it's a common group name applied
to several species of carp 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.

(15:03):
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 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

(15:24):
they were contained. They were contained in southern aquaculture and
sewage treatment enclosures, I think in Arkansas. Originally I saw
and so the idea was that these imported carp would
help control contaminants in these areas. 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,

(15:45):
of course, often connect waters that are not apparently 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 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.

(16:07):
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 other fish UH and I've seen estimates
that they can some of these species consume about twenty

(16:28):
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 to survive. So
they're causing problems for every organism everywhere along the line.

(16:51):
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 frequent lee,
having these frenzies where they leap out of the water
all over the place. And the commonly accepted explanation for
why they do it is pretty simple. It's the main
one that came to your mind when you were thinking

(17:12):
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 and they
start leaping all over the place. And once one starts leaping,
all of them start leaping. So that sounds like a

(17:33):
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 throw because they
slap up under there. 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

(17:56):
the big head and silver carp were known to jump
about three meters or about feet vertically out of the
water about six meters or twenty feet horizontally across the surface.
Uh silver carp tend to weigh up to about twenty pounds.
Big head carp commonly wigh up about twice that, but
in rare cases, these fish can reportedly grow very large,
up to around a hundred pounds. So think of like

(18:17):
a hundred pound object flying at you out of the water,
especially if you're moving at a rapid speed. Also, just
do the quick new tony in 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 ten and two thousand eleven. And it was a
small sample size, so don't read too much into this,

(18:38):
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 if you've seen a carp jump, chances are a

(18:59):
carp has slim ammed into you. Nine percent 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 last year August, and it tells the story

(19:21):
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 leap and they jump up all over
the place, and one hits him in the face and
a quote he gave his quote, I knew something was wrong.

(19:44):
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 cruise
to fix the shape of his skull. So this is
no small injury. This is This is a devastating fish impact.

(20:07):
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 as inspiration and maybe it'll be an overall just
jumping fish horror movie. All the various examples we throw

(20:28):
out here, it's the fish version of the birds. Maybe, yeah,
the fishes. Uh, the fish. Weirdly, though as mundane as
Carpon may seem, they actually also have a mythological significance.
I bet you didn't think that we'd 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,

(20:50):
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 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

(21:12):
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 the 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

(21:36):
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 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 on the way. Alright, what everyone,

(21:58):
keep that nith 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,
We're gonna look at swordfish, we're gonna look at sturgeons,
and ultimately the flying fish itself. All right, we're back. Okay.

(22:22):
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
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,

(22:42):
like a perfect like nature documentary image. It's the salmon.
It's the salmon going up stream to spawn, leaping over
the rapids, and a bear just grabbing that, you know
what I mean. Yeah, indeed, 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 claws
wiping in the same amount as it flies over the rapids. Yeah,

(23:03):
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 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 run
and what grizzly bears of course called like a seafood buffet, right. Uh.

(23:26):
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
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,

(23:47):
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.
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,

(24:12):
what have you. Oh, yeah, this is actually figured into
people trying to control the spread of carp like silver carp,
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,

(24:34):
jump tin tin feet high and twenty feet long, So
that would have to be a serious barrier to prevent
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 to keep the
carp out but make sure the right creatures moved through.
I don't know, it's tough. I saw one solution that

(24:55):
was literally an electrified fence in the water, where people
installed little devices that put electrical current in the river
to prevent 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,

(25:16):
and these these can be quite interesting because sometimes they
essentially look like nothing more than a series of buckets
they can splash and jump in and out of to
actually make it 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

(25:38):
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, 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

(26:00):
out of the water hit you in the face, and
that can cause some injury. But there are also fish
much bigger than carp that do jump, that's right, and
that some of them jump with tremendous speed. Um. I'm thinking,
of course about the mighty swordfish, which is uh, it's
it's a scientific name is zay FEUs gladius, which basically

(26:22):
is just the word sword repeated in two different languages.
So like, basically, we're so excited about swordfish 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 a it's basically just a a bill.
They are bill fish. There there are other billfish with

(26:45):
with bills that resemble swords. Others resemble bills. 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

(27:07):
sword meets the skull, and it prevents them from being
a proper javelin, like if they 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

(27:29):
whole in the thing's whole head that allows it to
just sort of slip through the water a little bit faster.
So before the swordfish races, they're sitting there looping 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

(27:52):
opposed to a full on like um uh, you know,
ramming speed type of a stabbing maneuver. There might be
a second area use or yeah, sort of you use
it in a pinch, yeah, because it's certainly it's certainly
is a it certainly can be dangerous, as we'll discuss here.
But the speeds the big thing and and indeed sword
of fish are generally ranked like the third fastest fish.

(28:15):
They're only surpassed by the black marlin and the sailfish,
both of which are are other types of billfish swordfish. Um.
The estimates vary on all these and 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 away. Yeah, ye kilometers per hour. Uh, that's like

(28:39):
twice as fast as your average boat can go. Yeah.
But but then again, these are these a creatures that
are living in the open water. They they're dealing with
with a lot of the vast distances, so they have
room to build up that speed. Um, sailfish sixty nine
miles per hour ten and the swordfish comes in at
a You know, I'm more concerned of sixty miles per

(29:01):
hour kilometers per hour. But again, people will argue back
and forth on these stats. No, that's still amazingly fast
considering the 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, they're also known to

(29:22):
use that intense speed to hurl themselves completely out of
the water. Now why one of the one of the
things about swordfish in particulars 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

(29:43):
there is a theory 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

(30:05):
their streamlined body right there. 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 are probably trying
to dislodge as well. Yeah, and that's certainly the iconic scene,
right somebody gets a sword fish on the hook and
it's leaping out of the water. Yeah. Well, I mean

(30:25):
you can see that at a much lower level. Just
imagine you've probably seen footage of a bass fisher 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,

(30:47):
just as these human interactions with swordfish are already kind
of a rare thing. Right, Um, you know, people fish
for them, but still they're elusive. So this isn'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

(31:09):
that in quotes because these are not creatures that eat
humans or would have seemed seemingly attack humans. Any incidents
seemed 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 death by penetrating head injury, did outline

(31:31):
one such incident. And then in two thousand fifteen, a
deep sea fishing charter captain in Hawaii was fatally 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 and killed him. So it's
a rare occurrence. But with a with a sword like that,

(31:54):
with a large fish flopping around, uh, jumping out of
the water, if you're close to it, yes, you run
the risk of being run through, right, 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,

(32:15):
and there's gonna you're rolling the die when that happens. Right,
You don't wrestle with a unicorn exactly. But then again,
of course 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

(32:38):
recreation vessel and uh and and a hundred pound carp perhaps,
But what 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 in aquarium, these they look
like an armored tank or something. You know, they're they're

(32:59):
rather intimidating, and then they get huge. They can come
in it at the Florida Sturgeon gould. Sturgeon in particular
can come in 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

(33:20):
there have been lethal occurrences of sturgeon impacts. Oh man, well,
I 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,

(33:44):
I mean, barely moving at all. Yeah, it is I
have to admit that too. Like seeing them in aquariums
are always really interesting, kind of intimidating, but very still.
But yeah, they jump. In two thousand fifteen, in fact,
one one of these jumping sturgeons actually killed a five
year old girl when it leapt out of water into
her family's fishing boat, and it also injured her mother

(34:06):
and her brother as well. In two thousand seven, nine
people 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 water up to six ft out of the water,
and then you have a motor boat, you know, moving

(34:29):
at high speeds as well. That's where 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 gold sturgeon is known to jump at two different

(34:51):
times of the 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 that's
a big 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

(35:11):
this is when I see 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

(35:34):
mammalian nervous systems, which is 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

(35:56):
be a trade off and behavioral importance beyond mere fun um.
He actually theorizes that this is a form of communication
with sturgeons. So there when they jump out and and
and splash, it creates a distinct sound, slapping noise, but
they also um announced that they also create a small

(36:16):
sound before and after um the jump. It's kind of
like they produced kind of like clicks and drumming noises,
So it's kind of a clicker, a drumming noise, the jump,
the 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,

(36:39):
this communication theory plays into something that I'm going to
mention later, especially when we talk about sharks. Yes, and
we'll get to 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. So you may
have heard this story. A man is walking in the

(37:01):
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 urine? I had
that same question, but this is how the story goes. Okay,

(37:23):
So for a few 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 column of his urine

(37:44):
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 has to undergo a really,

(38:05):
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 Stolts and John Voight in the movie Anaconda. Okay,
I I vaguely remember that. I tend to remember the
gross out moments of that film more. But yes, oh,
I mostly remember John Void's accent. What is his accent

(38:28):
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 in this story as agreed by

(38:51):
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 Vandelia's this tiny parasitic catfish, usually about an inch

(39:13):
or two inches, you know, two and a half to
five centimeters long, nearly invisible in the water, especially when
it hasn't fed recently. Uh. And it occupies the tropical
freshwater rivers of South America Amazon River basin. And it
drinks the blood of other fish, so it's regular emo
is it. You're you're a goldfish or something like that
swimming around in the river, and the kandaroo or the

(39:37):
vandelia 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. And so when it
enters the gills of the host fish, it bites at

(39:59):
an order artery, ventrall or 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, is just
letting itself fill up. Okay, So the idea here is

(40:21):
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. This doesn't
need that to happen, but it occurs accidentally, right that
this is a mistake for this animal. If if this
is true and uh, and it's a it's a fatal

(40:42):
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 that the less unbelievable
version is that mammals weighed fully into the water and

(41:04):
begin to urinate once under the water, and the candaroo
swims up one of their orifices, the urethro 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 come out
of the gills of its host fish. More on that

(41:25):
in a bit. And then once instide, 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 why this
causes extreme distress for people getting into these waters. Yeah,

(41:46):
and I can also see why a lot of this
is sort of hinged on just creating a cringe e
hert 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, you know. So it's it's
easy to see it as nothing more than that. Yeah.
So there are two questions here. Number one is the

(42:07):
general one to kinderu actually swim up people's urethras? 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
of accuracy that it jumps straight into your urethra that's

(42:29):
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
refer to. So in a euro genital surgeon named n

(42:52):
Or some odd who was working in Amazonia in Brazil,
reportedly extracted a dead Kinderu from 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
with his penis above the water, and he reported that
the fish jumped out of the water, swam up the

(43:14):
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's
It also makes me wonder if he did have something
lodged in his in his uh urethra like he own,
maybe he only became aware of it when he urinated

(43:34):
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 kind of like if you had imagine a

(43:55):
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 salmon do not swim up a waterfall, but they
can jump. They can jump over right, So I can

(44:16):
believe it's much more likely that a 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 according to a

(44:38):
BBC story I read on the candaroo legend um, the
American marine scientists Steven Spot met with some od the
surgeon who supposedly removed the candyo from the guy. 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. Some something was actually removed from

(45:01):
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 preserved specimen was a lot bigger than you'd expect
a kinderu to grow, which in one other source I

(45:23):
read it was more than five inches long and almost
half an inch wide, can you. And 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.

(45:44):
For example, 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, this sort of raises the question of Candio
entering the urethra and and other body orifice is more

(46:06):
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 or

(46:28):
jump into his penis and and get lodged there um
And also supposedly one of the explanations for this that
the kanderu 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 Steven Spot, along
with the guy mentioned earlier, along with colleagues Paulo Petrie

(46:49):
and Jensen Zonon, 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,
they just didn't care. Instead, they seemed to hunt for

(47:11):
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 Kandaru a little fish with bad

(47:33):
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 a threat to humans. Instead,

(47:56):
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 seems like wouldn't we be

(48:16):
hearing about this more often in the modern day, wouldn't
we be encountering stories of this happening. Uh, and and
there's almost nothing. There's just like that that those old
stories that have been repeated for decades, and then there's
this one disputable case. Yeah. I mean, the only counter
argument I can think of is that since it's like

(48:36):
a penile injury, that it 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

(48:58):
the medical literature, this 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. And in fact that as

(49:21):
part of the explanation is that many of these stories
may be sort of garblings because a lot of them
come from you know, colonial periods 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,

(49:41):
I feel like 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. Yournary urinary
track infection, you you know that it can feel like
a tiny barbed fish has slam in side chiefs. So
I could see where where such uncomfortable scenarios could lend
them selves to creative interpretations. Okay, so what do we

(50:05):
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 photoshopped of great

(50:27):
white sharks leaping over the Golden Gate Bridge and leaping
out of Yeah, leaping over bridges, or at least managing
to get their entire bodies out of the water in
a way that just terrifies us 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 governed my safety. Yeah,

(50:50):
I thought I was supposed to be safe in this boat. Well,
in keeping with 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.

(51:15):
One example of this kind 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

(51:36):
is one of the 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 kilogram 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

(51:57):
the walls in the boat, so 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.

(52:19):
Huge shark. Uh. So, of course they couldn't get the
shark out of the boat by hand. Uh. 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

(52:41):
they so they lowered it back into the water. But
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 half an
hour after that, the sharks swam away. It swam away

(53:04):
and seemed to recover. 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 flesh, trying to eat live right. So, So, when
a shark leaps out of the water, this is known

(53:26):
as breaching. And to use specific terminology that I love
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.

(53:46):
Uh So why do shark's breach? 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 about, 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

(54:08):
kinds that you'll read 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, pinnaped there
that's a nice, fatty, delicious, energy rich meal swimming along
near the surface of the water. And in these breaches,

(54:29):
the shark moves rapidly up from below, 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 is Yeah. I was reading a paper about this
the other day in preparation for this episode, and I

(54:51):
found that interesting because I really had not research actual
shark predatory behavior much and the idea that they wound
and then allow the 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

(55:12):
be cautious, like a prey can injure it 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 great white breaching
a good bit. They actually put together a shark hunting
decision tree, so it has it's like a flow chart

(55:33):
where you know what, depending on what happens, 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

(55:54):
mean thinking about the seal here either. No, this is
sort of working on it right right, butchering with its
mouth with basically, So, so why does it do this? What?
Why is the great white shark attacking the seal in
this way? Why didn't it 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

(56:14):
the predator and for the prey looking up from the
deep water below. The shark has more ability to see
a seal near the surface than the seal does to
see a shark. So the seal is illuminated by the sky,
and these attacks take place more often in low light conditions,
when there's less penetration of water of the water column

(56:35):
by the light in the sky, like if the sun's
at an angle. So you're a shark, you know several
you know, 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

(56:55):
look at the body composition of a white shark versus
a seal um according to one study I read between
ninety four and 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 pin up head like

(57:16):
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 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 shark's chance of success. And this

(57:39):
is why this rocketing up from below which leads to
breaching UH is so common. Well, that makes perfect sense
from the 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

(58:01):
and thirty meters and UH in these cases, the entire
attack you know, leaping up from the bottom after they
begin their strikes to u 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.

(58:24):
And in these cases, the shark attacks are successful about
forty percent of the time, 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,

(58:44):
there's no predatory attack or anything, um, no bait on
the surface that it's being coaxed to the surface with. Right,
So why what what's going on here? Well, according to
one theory, sharks have these well developed McCay no receptors
and chemo receptors and electro receptors. They have all you know,
receptive sensing organs that we don't have at that kind

(59:08):
of level. So it's been hypothesized that tail slap, 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

(59:29):
my food. You better get away because I could fight
you for it. And it's true that lots 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

(59:49):
fish to communicate between the sharks. And when you think
about it, a shark jumping out of the water 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. Yeah, it's certainly,
I mean, it makes a statement to us and we're
not even sharks. Yeah. And one reason to think this

(01:00:11):
is a good explanation is that this natural breaching often
seems to happen with sharks in the presence of other sharks,
not just hanging out by themselves. Now, this is interesting.
We're talking about this breaching behavior that's taking place, uh
specifically the predatory breaching behavior. It's taking place in the
presence of these seals. You brought up an interesting um

(01:00:33):
tidbit yesterday about the recent shark move movie The Shallows
in which the shark tries to eat like 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.

(01:00:55):
But I recalled that I read this, I think, on
Smithsonian where they were reviewing the trailer of the film.
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

(01:01:17):
supposed to take place in tropical waters, and yet you
see the shark when it attacks this guy leaps out
of the water. That's breaching behavior, which is not necessarily
something you'd be likely to see in tropical waters, because
the places 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

(01:01:38):
order to maximize their success rate at catching them. In
tropical waters, sharks probably have access to fish that 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. It's so plausible.

(01:02:01):
But from a cinematic standpoint, nothing is more terrifying than
the shark coming out of its habitat into our habitat
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, and that is, of course

(01:02:23):
the so called flying fish, right, because the distinction between
jumping and flying may seem very clear to you, right,
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,

(01:02:43):
you can certainly bog yourself down in in um definitions
of flight, to be clear. With with the flying fish,
we are talking about a gliding but 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

(01:03:06):
to the spawning here right right, and then there are
certainly no feathers involved. But um, it's interesting to put
this in, you know, to sort of top off this
discussion of all these leaping 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

(01:03:29):
near complete skeleton from the Tree Driassic period that's two
to two forty two million years ago, UM, 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

(01:03:53):
the sixty four known species of flying fish we find
today in all the world's ocean independence. So it's not
like an ancestor of them, like a cousin of them
that's now not here, right. It developed this gliding technique
on its own. Um. So it's interesting to to realize
that that gliding fish have evolved in the past separately,

(01:04:15):
they've died, had died out and uh, and we 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

(01:04:38):
is an area where where individuals can get into 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

(01:05:00):
airplane exactly, because we see plenty of gliding creatures 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

(01:05:21):
um and they can, they can really glide. They can
glide and or hydroplane distances of hundred feet or four
hundred meters in 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.

(01:05:42):
It's it's pretty impressive. So, since these fish are small,
I imagine they're not breaching to uh to inflict predatory
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. Yea, yet another

(01:06:03):
evasive maneuver right now. There have been some that are
proposed that this has to do with energy conservation, like
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

(01:06:24):
sort of crunching in his paper How and Why Do
Flying Fish Fly? Which is a certainly a good in
depth reread 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

(01:06:45):
making the energy expenditure worth it. Essentially kind of like
rate and teleporting during a fight to get behind an opponent.
You're not in a good position for your food, teleport
to the the to the positive position via flight. But
there's not a lot of it's 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.

(01:07:07):
I just have to go back to the raid and
analogy there. It's just the the it's in the realm
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 agreeans this is about
escaping predators. Now, in escaping those predators, flying fish that

(01:07:30):
were gliding fish, they don't flap their wings to gain
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

(01:07:50):
can actually pull this off. The smaller flying fish, before
they have attained appropriate size, they can't actually pull this off.
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, it's they're they're gliding fish

(01:08:13):
that we have jumping fish, we have longer jumping fish,
we have gliding fish. But I wonder why no fish
with the ability to maintain sustained flight, Because if you
imagine the the evolution of flight in its many forms, Uh,
it's commonly hypothesized that flight organs began with gliding organs.

(01:08:36):
You know, organisms had had maybe movements or or gliding
organs 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

(01:08:57):
help but think about this, especially when you look at
you jumping and then gliding, Why not flying? Why why
have 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 as at flight as

(01:09:18):
a is a rare adaptation, even though it has been
tremendously successful for the organisms that have achieved it. Because
as vertebrates go, we've we've only seen three takes on flight.
We've seen UH pedero sarin flight, We've seen avian flight,
and we've seen you know, bat flight and UH and fish.
So far as we know, unless there's some sort of

(01:09:39):
fossil out there that we've got to uncover, they've never
crossed the threshold UH and UH and and and all.
When you take an all biology, you have a single
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

(01:10:01):
of convergent evolution, not that like the pterosaurs the birds
and the bats didn't evolve from each other. They all
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 Alexander and Stephen Vogel titled Nature's Flyers, Birds, Insects,

(01:10:23):
and the Biomechanics of Flight, and they put it into
context like this quote. Although such convergent features may make
two animals appear quite similar, the adaptations are only superficially
similar and have fundamental differences. Fish or cold blooded, scaly
animals with gills, but proporpoises are warm blooded, smooth skinned
breathers of air. The point being that these are both

(01:10:43):
not flight based. But these are both sea creatures with
similar forms at first glance, but there of course very
different organisms. It continues, hummingbirds and bumblebees have almost identical
wing beat patterns, but hummingbird wings are made of bone, muscle,
and feathers. Bee wings or may of of pleaated membranes
supported by stiff, hollow veins. And they point out to

(01:11:05):
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
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

(01:11:28):
like an insect's swings. Uh, they would just be you know, fishire. Basically,
they would be evolved from the equipment available to fish anatomy. Well,
the one place that my mind immediately meant 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

(01:11:52):
too to the sort of gliding that evolves into flight. Yeah,
that could certainly like do you need or runway in
order to evolve flight? A solid runway or or a
high place to jump off of it? Can you just
not really ever evolutionarily justify the the evolution of propelled
flight mechanisms if you always have to start from underwater, right,

(01:12:16):
And and maybe that does hold true of vertebrates. But
then 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 environment, according to Martin,
so insects may have an out there. But maybe this
prerequisite holds true with vertebrates. But the thing is, when

(01:12:40):
you 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
are there no flying lemurs? Because certain they're they're in

(01:13:00):
the position where they're they're leaping out of trees, they're
gliding a little white Does 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 glide a

(01:13:23):
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 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 the time? Would?

(01:13:45):
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 don't 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 really a benefit that's going to play out

(01:14:07):
an evolution? And uh, so far the answer seems to
be no. Now, I do have to mention that this
this larger question of why I do some lineages evolve
into the sky and there's not? It remains something of
a mystery, and scientists have even looked to underlying molecular
mechanisms in this whole there's a whole study of biological

(01:14:28):
uh periodicity that gets into this. It gets a really
really deep and complex but 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 actually fly? But
why does do any numbers? Yeah, one more thing I

(01:14:52):
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, a show gills. But but certainly
we have land again right to the the mud skippers
and the walking catfish, this and earlier forms of lungfish.
So that alone doesn't seem like it would be a um,
you know, an eliminating factor, but it would certainly still

(01:15:15):
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
you're particularly fond of, or some just examples you've seen
in real life and have some stories related to. Yeah,

(01:15:35):
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 have 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
really don't need to be like super worried about getting

(01:15:56):
killed by jumping fish. Right, But certainly if there's a science,
ain't telling you not to to drive too fast on
the water because they 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

(01:16:16):
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(01:16:57):
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(01:17:27):
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