Selects: How Coelacanths Work

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Speaker 3 Hi, everyone. Happy weekend.
I hope you're having a lovely, lovely Saturday wherever you are in the world. We're going to jump back in time to June 6th, 2017, to talk about coelacanths.

Speaker 3 How coelacanths work? What in the world is a coelacanth?

Speaker 3 I think I kind of remember. Check it out right now.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, Jerry Jerome Roland, and just the whole, the whole House StuffWorks gang.

Speaker 3 Here to present to you Stuff You Should Know. All three of us.

Speaker 3 How are you doing? I'm good. Yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm a little caffeinated, I should warn you. Oh.
A little bit, like when teeth are about to just come right out of my face. That's not good.

Speaker 3 You know, we did a video about coelacanths one time. Yeah, like, was it this day in history about when they were discovered? Yeah.
I ran across it.

Speaker 3 Because Smack is familiar to me, and you know, the constant fear we have of recording an entire podcast over

Speaker 3 is sort of always there. Yeah, the fear that sometimes comes true.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So I definitely went back and looked and I was like, I knew he did something. Yeah, we were trapped in a shipping container, right?

Speaker 3 I didn't watch it. I didn't either.
I saw enough to say, oh yeah, I remember that one. Yeah.
That really weird, weird thing we did. But this is really cool, I think.
I do too. See, Lecanths were,

Speaker 3 well, they're interesting.

Speaker 3 Despite what the How Stuff Works article would lead you to believe.

Speaker 3 It was, yeah, it was a little thin, wasn't it? A little bit. It was all right.
Okay. But luckily, the rest of the internet is there for us.
Right.

Speaker 3 Thanks, especially to Smithsonian and Mental Floss for this one, right? Yeah, that Mental Floss article was kind of neat, actually. It was.
So

Speaker 3 you want to go back to the beginning?

Speaker 3 Actually, the second beginning, maybe? Oh.

Speaker 3 Well. I don't know what you're talking about now, so just.

Speaker 3 Okay, well, follow me. We'll go back to the very beginning.
We'll go back to something about 400 million years ago. Okay.
During the Devonian period, which is, aka the rise of the fish. Yes.

Speaker 3 The age of the fish, right?

Speaker 3 And in this Devonian period, there's a lot, a lot of stuff going on. Things have been swimming around for a while.
On Earth, there's a nice atmosphere that's developed.

Speaker 3 The things in the ocean are starting to say, oh, what's out there? I want to see what's on land. Yeah, I want to just crawl out and see.
Yeah, I want to taste clover.

Speaker 3 So they start trying. And during this period, there was the progression from the sea to the land.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And one of those things that was

Speaker 3 starting to develop legs to get onto land was called the coelacanth.

Speaker 3 Yeah, which

Speaker 3 A, it means hollow spine, which is we'll get to. There's a reason for that.
Right. And B, it's spelled C-O-E-L-A-C-A-N-T-H, which is,

Speaker 3 you know, not how you would think it might be spelled. No.
Or pronounced, rather. Right.
Either one. But it's coelacanth.
It is coelacanth.

Speaker 3 And what it is, is a fish that is,

Speaker 3 like you said, been around for a long, long time. It's kind of funny looking.

Speaker 3 And we'll get into all the physical characteristics that make it unusual in a sec, but it is notable

Speaker 3 mainly for the fact that

Speaker 3 everyone thought it was gone forever

Speaker 3 until it was suddenly discovered. This thing that swam with the dinosaurs was discovered anew in the 1930s.
Right. And then again a little bit later on.
Yeah, because

Speaker 3 it pops up for the first time around

Speaker 3 407 million years ago, I think I said.

Speaker 3 And then it just drops off 80 million years ago. So they said, well, a lot of stuff

Speaker 3 went the way of the dinosaur around the time the dinosaurs went away.

Speaker 3 So that's probably what happened to the coelacanth. So it was quite a big surprise in the 1930s when

Speaker 3 a trawler that was out fishing, a trawler called the Nareen, which is captained by Hendrik Gusen off the coast of South Africa.

Speaker 3 came in and as was Captain Gusen's wont, he contacted the director of the local museum in East London, a woman named Miss Marjorie Courtney Latimer.

Speaker 3 And she used to come over and look at the fish loads this guy would bring in because they were buddies. Yeah.
And he gave her a call like normal and said, I got a load. You want to come look at it?

Speaker 3 And she was like, it's two days before Christmas and it's blazing hot out.

Speaker 3 Don't forget we're in South Africa at the time.

Speaker 3 And she's like, I don't feel like it. But the world was saved.

Speaker 3 The world of ichthyology was saved this day. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because this lady, Marjorie Courtney Latimer, was so nice that she decided to go look at the fish anyway just to wish the captain and his crew a Merry Christmas.

Speaker 3 So she takes a look at this fish, and here is her quote

Speaker 3 as she recounted. It wasn't her quote at the time, her quote at the time.
It's probably a South African expletive.

Speaker 3 But she said later, I picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen.

Speaker 3 And of course, only a fish lover can find this thing truly beautiful. Yeah.
Because it's kind of ugly. It is.
It was five feet long, a pale mauvey blue with faint flecks of whitish spots.

Speaker 3 It had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange little puppy dog tail.

Speaker 3 Not literally, of course.

Speaker 3 It was said, which would be great, though, actually, if it did. That's the dogfish that has that.
It was such a beautiful fish, more like a big china ornament, but I didn't know what it was.

Speaker 3 And it was pretty faithful that she was called in

Speaker 3 to look at this thing because it ended up being one of the most important zoological finds of, you know, history, probably. Of the 20th century, at least.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, this woman's curiosity.

Speaker 3 Something in her said, this is weird. This is unusual.

Speaker 3 This is something worth looking into. So she took it with her.
This thing was like five feet long, just under two meters, about a hundred and how many pounds? 127 pounds. This is a significant fish.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And Ms.
Courtney Latimer talked her way into a cab with it. She took a cab back to the East London Museum with this fish stuffed in the back seat.

Speaker 3 And she took it to the taxidermist and had it stuffed.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, the taxidermist wasn't completely aware of how to preserve a fish for identification and threw out the skeleton and the gills, which are what you need for

Speaker 3 to ID a fish, apparently. Well, she probably should have said something.
Well, she

Speaker 3 like this is no ordinary mount,

Speaker 3 yeah, right. She probably should have, or maybe she did, and he just ignored her.
He's like, I'm not going to get bossed around by a woman. This is 1938.

Speaker 3 So she contacts a guy named J.L.B. Smith, who is an ichthyologist.
He's the head of the ichthyology department at a university in Grahamstown and a Ph.D. in chemistry.

Speaker 3 He's a smart guy, and he's the local fish expert, as far as she knows. Yeah, and they're pals.
And so she said, hey, I've got this

Speaker 3 weird-looking fish. And then Smith, his quote was, I told myself sternly not to be a fool.
But there was something about that sketch.

Speaker 3 And apparently it was sketched. She sent him a sketch of the fish to begin with.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 That seized upon my imagination and told me that this was something very far beyond the usual run of fishes in our seas.

Speaker 3 And luckily, even though the fish was,

Speaker 3 I guess, mounted in a traditional form, which, like you said, takes away

Speaker 3 how you can identify it. She was able to preserve some of the scales.
And somehow, from these scales, he was able to say, this is a colacanth, coelacanth. Right.
Well, that's what he said at first.

Speaker 3 And she went, it's pronounced coelacanth. He's like, oh.

Speaker 3 Apparently, he said when he saw that scale and identified it positively as a coelacanth, his quote was, if I'd met a dinosaur in the street, I wouldn't have been more astonished.

Speaker 3 I like that guy.

Speaker 3 A little hyperbole there, but I like it. So he, I mean, this is seriously, this is like the zoological find of the century and would be for the next 60-something years, right?

Speaker 3 So he very magnanimously says, you know what? I'm going to name this thing after you. And he named it as a new species, Latimeria chalumnae, because,

Speaker 3 well, obviously her name was Courtney Latimer. Yeah.
Courtney hyphen Latimer. Yes.

Speaker 3 And it was found in the Chalumna River at the mouth of it, where it hits the coast off the eastern coast of South Africa. So that's a great name.
It's it's perfect. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It really puts it in a place in time.

Speaker 3 So they have now discovered this thing. They realize that they have a big find on their hands.
They thought this thing had long been extinct by tens of millions of years.

Speaker 3 And so they started to research and, you know, try and learn more about this fish. Yeah.
Which is no ordinary fish. No, but I mean, this was, so this is 1938, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it was the only one that had been found.

Speaker 3 for another 60 years. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's only so much you can find from a

Speaker 3 stuffed fish, but it did prove because it had been caught alive. It wasn't like they pulled up a fossil or a dead fish.
It had been alive when it was caught.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think it was attached to another fish. Oh, really? Like potentially trying to eat it.
Oh, okay. Which is one of the,

Speaker 3 well, not unusual, but interesting things about the coelacanth is that

Speaker 3 it eats meat. Well, there's a lot of unusual things about the coelacanth.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So fast forward another 60 years, exactly,

Speaker 3 in Indonesia, which is on the other side of the Indian Ocean, the eastern side of the Indian Ocean. It was

Speaker 3 actually first seen in 1997 by a biologist named Mark Erdman, who was in Indonesia doing his PhD dissertation, and he saw a coelacanth in the market. That's crazy.
That's a coelacanth.

Speaker 3 What's that doing here? So, apparently, he put a bit of a bounty out on it with the locals, and within a year, by 1998, they had brought him a freshly caught one. Yeah, which is quite a task.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's finding

Speaker 3 a once thought extinct fish. Yeah.
It's a big one. Well, and we'll get to a little bit why it's even tougher than you would think, too.
Sure. So the one that Erdman found was brown, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was a little bit different color. Right.
The one

Speaker 3 like Courtney Latimer described, those are known to be like steel blue. This is brown a little smaller than the one that Courtney Latimer found.

Speaker 3 And so eventually, when Erdman got his hands on that one,

Speaker 3 he described it as a new species.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 it turns out that at one point, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago, there were, you know, potentially over 100 different varieties of this fish. And they came in all shapes and sizes.

Speaker 3 These obviously were pretty big, but there were some that were smaller and faster.

Speaker 3 Basically just kind of a wide variety. And as far as we know, I think are these the only two known survivors? Yes.

Speaker 3 So far. Yeah, the one that Courtney Latimer found are known as the West Indian Ocean coelacanth.
Those are the blue ones. They're typically found off of the west, no, the east coast of Africa.

Speaker 3 south of Kenya, I believe. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Down to about the Cormoros Islands.

Speaker 3 I think that's, they're actually also known as the Cormoros Island Celacanth because there's that's that seems to be where they inhabit the most or the highest density of them is.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and some of the weird, some of the weirdos that have,

Speaker 3 well, we assume that they've been extinct, but you never know. One of them was toothless and over 10 feet long.
That was the Megalo Celacanthus. Very appropriately named.

Speaker 3 Some of them said, forget you, ocean. I'm going to go to the freshwater.
So there were actually freshwater coelacanths at one time.

Speaker 3 And like I said, some of them were slow and ambushed prey. Some were smaller and faster.
But they've pretty much universally all been predators from what I've seen. Right.

Speaker 3 And the two species that are alive today that we know of

Speaker 3 are, aside from that megalith coelacanth, tend to be a little bigger than the extinct species,

Speaker 3 which I read is good

Speaker 3 it's a good example of why they shouldn't be called living fossils, which is what they're frequently called. Yeah, that's Darwin's term for something that

Speaker 3 basically never changed. Right.

Speaker 3 And they've actually studied the genome of the coelacanth and found that they very much haven't changed. And

Speaker 3 kind of the main reason is they haven't had to.

Speaker 3 They've kind of stayed in the same places. And when you stay in the same places and you eat the same stuff then maybe you don't change so much.

Speaker 3 I read the opposite of that, that they have changed enough that

Speaker 3 they have been evolving and a good example of that is that they're bigger than they used to be. Oh interesting.
Yeah. But the two species that are alive today

Speaker 3 they have traced their genomes back and decided that they've been separated for several million years at least. Yeah, this one, they finally got the full genome and they said that

Speaker 3 it does indeed match the fish's appearance of slower evolution uh in a journal published in nature uh because they have a slower rate of substitution. Gotcha.

Speaker 3 Basically, she the the

Speaker 3 the doctor well, yeah, I guess she is a doctor. Just sounded weird to say that.
The doctor?

Speaker 3 The researcher who is also a doctor, who is she said it may reflect the fact that they do not need to evolve quickly because they've lived in relatively unchanging environment where there are few predators

Speaker 3 and they basically haven't needed to change over over time like other organisms. Well, that brings up another thing too.

Speaker 3 There's a big question. Why would they just drop off of the fossil record if they've been around this whole time?

Speaker 3 If they didn't just go extinct 80 or 65 million years ago.

Speaker 3 The only explanation I've seen is that the places where the fossils turned up were areas conducive to fossilization, like there was a lot of sediment that could turn bone into rock.

Speaker 3 And then the areas that the living species live at now are not conducive to that kind of thing, possibly because they're mostly living around volcanic rock that doesn't necessarily produce fossils.

Speaker 3 You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and we'll get back and talk a little bit about this funny fish.

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Speaker 3 All right, so we've talked a little bit about what makes the coelacanth such an interesting critter.

Speaker 3 Can a critter be a fish? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Have you heard of the cuddlefish? That's a critter if there ever was one. Yeah, a cuddly critter.

Speaker 3 So here are some remarkable things about the coelacanth.

Speaker 3 They can live as deep. I mean, they're deep water dwellers.
They can live as deep as 2,000 or more feet. But generally

Speaker 3 they think the

Speaker 3 I think they generally live about 500 to 800 feet in what they call the twilight zone. Right.
Which is still pretty deep.

Speaker 3 Remember our cave episode? Yeah.

Speaker 3 That had the same thing. Remember there was like organisms that live in the dark.
organisms that live in the twilight zone and organisms that live in the lighted zone. Yeah.

Speaker 3 These guys live in that threshold between light and dark in the ocean. And they apparently are nocturnal hunters.
Yeah, they come out at night,

Speaker 3 kind of stay hidden.

Speaker 3 Most of these habitats are caves

Speaker 3 that they tend to stay in. But there's one off of Tasmania that do not live in caves.
And so they have officially been placed on an endangered list because they don't have the protection

Speaker 3 from bycatch that these other cave dwellers have. Right.

Speaker 3 That makes sense. Yeah.
So the um average day or in the life of a coelacanth, at least the cave dwelling um species, they they'll, you know, during the daytime, they're hanging out in a cave.

Speaker 3 They'll hang out in a cave with, I've seen between up to 12 to 16 other coelacanths. Yeah, have a little coffee.
Yeah. Maybe just talk.
Yeah. You know, talk about their night.

Speaker 3 And then as night falls, they'll leave their caves and they'll they'll go hunting. And like you said, they're carnivorous predators.

Speaker 3 they do that passive bycatch thing for the most part right where they let the the current bring the food to them but they

Speaker 3 just basically hang out and wait for a cuttlefish it's one thing they eat squids other cephalopods some fishes but they seem to not show aggression toward one another from what I understand

Speaker 3 Yeah, and while they are passive hunters, they do have an unusual feature, which is, like we said, one of many, but they have what's called a rostral organ, which just means it's in the nasal region in their snout.

Speaker 3 And it's filled with a jelly-like substance that they think,

Speaker 3 and they think most of this stuff, I mean, they've done a lot of good studying, but for something so rare, you can't be super sure. But they think that it detects...

Speaker 3 low-level electrical signals and frequencies from prey. Yeah, like a shark or a ray.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's an electrosensory organ where when living tissue contacts water, it can make an electrical impulse that can be picked up. Yeah, and this cool mental floss article is, I think, 11

Speaker 3 things about the coelacanth. I can't remember how it was put, but just 11 interesting features.

Speaker 3 11 fishy facts. Was that it? Unfortunately.
That's why I forgot it.

Speaker 3 Title aside, it's an interesting article. And

Speaker 3 one of the things that they don't know why they do, and I have a feeling it has to do with that electrical frequency, is they'll swim nose down

Speaker 3 for up to two full minutes, which is weird for a fish. They're just kind of hovering in place, headstanding, right? Yeah.
Yeah. And I guess, I mean, if they have that nasal

Speaker 3 bag of jelly that helps them locate fish, I would imagine that's what they're doing there, right? I imagine it like Tanto, like holding a railroad track.

Speaker 3 You know? Yeah. I think it's the same thing, basically.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 when they catch their prey, they eat them. And they can eat stuff that's way bigger than them because, again,

Speaker 3 which is this is unique to coelacants among living things. They have a hinge in their cranium that allows, basically, their head is convertible.

Speaker 3 The top of their skull can retract, allowing their mouth to open really wide.

Speaker 3 So they can eat a large, large cuttlefish. Yeah, and I think that feature also allows it to

Speaker 3 their mouth to close with like much greater force. With extreme prejudice.
Yeah, like when it's unhinged. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Emotionally and physically, it can really close that mouth super hard. Yeah.
They hate themselves for eating cuttlefish.

Speaker 3 They just can't stop.

Speaker 3 So those are just a couple of the features. Another is

Speaker 3 And we mentioned earlier that the name literally translates into hollow spine.

Speaker 3 This is because they have what's what's called a notochord, which is a hollow pressurized tube filled with oil, where a lot of fish start this way, and then they'll eventually get a spine, but this doesn't go away.

Speaker 3 Right. And not just fish vertebrates.
Apparently, there's a lot of mammals that go through this. I think possibly even humans in the embryo.
And the coelacanth just says, I'm good with the notochord.

Speaker 3 I'm going to stick here. Yeah.
I'm going to stop here. Which is strange.
It is strange. You want to hear some more strangeness? I could do this all day.
Well, it's a strange fish. Coelacanth,

Speaker 3 we don't quite understand how they reproduce. And the reason why is because

Speaker 3 males don't seem to have any sex parts. They don't have junk.
They think possibly males grow it when they need it. But otherwise, it's not around.
They're growers, they're not showers. Right, exactly.

Speaker 3 That's exactly right. So we have no idea how they reproduce, but we know that the

Speaker 3 mode of reproduction is called

Speaker 3 ovoviviparity, which is however the eggs that the female has get fertilized. Once they're fertilized, they gestate or the eggs develop in the female.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then they hatch in the female. Yeah.
And then the...

Speaker 3 live fishes continue to gestate

Speaker 3 and like the whole period lasts like three years before before they're born. So they go from egg to being hatched to being born within a three-year period.

Speaker 3 And so apparently this does not make the mom coelacanth very happy. And sometimes she will try to eat her newborn pups.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So supposedly coelacanth pups, that's what they're called, can dive really deep very quickly the moment they're born. Get away from mom.
To get away from their mom, who's like three years. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Three years. Paging Paging Dr.
Freud. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think sharks may be the only other

Speaker 3 fish that give birth to live little ones.

Speaker 3 Is that right?

Speaker 3 I mean, most fish lay eggs. Right.
So it's definitely unusual. Yeah, it may not be unique.

Speaker 3 But the other thing about their sexy time is there's also a theory that

Speaker 3 they are monogamous.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, I saw that too. In 2013, a German team,

Speaker 3 they had a couple of corpses of two pregnant,

Speaker 3 I believe the African version. Yeah, the Latimera Chalumne.

Speaker 3 And because what was he? I don't remember what the other one was. It was Latimira something else for the Indonesian version.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 We'll just go with that for now.

Speaker 3 I was practicing pronouncing it. Latimera menadoensis.
Okay, wow. Thanks.
Nice work.

Speaker 3 So they analyzed these two pregnant ladies, ladies, unfortunately, that were no longer with us, and they found out that they had, like, most definitely had a single father,

Speaker 3 which they said was unusual. Sure.
Because one of them had 26, 26 little baby pups inside of her. Right.
And they

Speaker 3 thought at first, well, maybe it's because the coelacanth is so rare that the female wouldn't have opportunity to mate with more than one male. And they said, well, wait a minute.
Well, that's true.

Speaker 3 Well, no, not necessarily. Once they found out that they stayed hang out together.
Yeah, in caves all day long. What else are you going to do?

Speaker 3 Once General Hospital's over, just looking around at everybody, like, well, what do you want to do? Yeah, that's a good point. All right.
Well, let's ponder that and take another break.

Speaker 3 And we'll finish up with even more interesting things about the Celican.

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Speaker 2 250 years ago, the United States Postal Service made a promise to bind the nation, connecting families, friends, and businesses near and far.

Speaker 3 That's right. And during the holidays, that promise is more important than ever because it's about more than just gifts and cards.

Speaker 3 It's the peace of mind knowing your love will arrive reliably and affordably.

Speaker 2 That's why they're building a better network to meet your needs this season, working around the clock to ensure timely deliveries, offering easy and affordable ways to ship, and providing everything you need to make your season full of holiday cheer, from stamps to packages.

Speaker 3 So this holiday season, trust the United States Postal Service to carry your most precious deliveries. Visit usps.com/slash holidays to find tools and tips to help you ship with confidence.

Speaker 3 The United States Postal Service, delivering since 1775.

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Speaker 2 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 2 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 3 So, if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 3 Listen to Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 All right, so these guys have live babies. Yep.
They might mate with a single mate.

Speaker 3 G'day.

Speaker 3 They have,

Speaker 3 they can unhinge their jaw to eat more. Right.
They have a jelly-filled thing in their

Speaker 3 nastra

Speaker 3 that detects electricity.

Speaker 3 Detects electricity. I know, I'm having trouble saying detects too.

Speaker 3 What else? This is sort of a recap. They have an oil-filled spine.
Oil-filled spine.

Speaker 3 They're just good with. They're like, I don't need a real spine.
This one's my favorite. They

Speaker 3 were long thought to be the missing link between the fishes and the tetrapods, which are

Speaker 3 land-dwelling, four-limbed animals. Yeah, because a notable thing I don't think we mentioned yet is this thing has, well, I think I did in a quote from Ms.

Speaker 3 Latimir, Courtney Latimir, but they have four

Speaker 3 fins that move sort of like you would think legs would move if a fish could swim out onto the beach. Legs and arms.
Yeah. Like you remember how Shaggy walked in Scooby-Doo? I do.
Just like that.

Speaker 3 That's basically how a coelacant swims. Yeah.
And the fact that their... their fins are suspiciously arm-like in appearance

Speaker 3 just made people think that even more. What's more, their arms, what are called lobes, are attached by a bone that is compared to the humerus in humans.
Yeah. So a lot of people said, well, that's it.

Speaker 3 It's the missing link. The coelacanth is the missing link between the fish and the land-dwelling four-limbed animals.
Yeah. And apparently, once the genome came around, they said, no.

Speaker 3 A little disappointing. They said, yes, we're all related.
Technically, we are all

Speaker 3 what are known as sarcopterygians.

Speaker 3 Okay. Man.

Speaker 3 Which means we are fleshy-limbed vertebrates. So we're all that.

Speaker 3 So we are related, but it's not like our direct ancestor. In fact, we're more closely related to the lungfish than the coelacanth.

Speaker 3 But the coelacanth holds its place of honor as probably living on something of its own branch. and is a very close cousin, if not bro, of the lungfish.
So we're related by marriage

Speaker 3 to the coelacanth, say.

Speaker 3 But we legally we probably could marry a coelacanth. Sure.
And have it not be super creepy. Right.
Except for the fact that it's a fish. Right.

Speaker 3 You can feel its fleshy lobe fin stroking the back of your head as you kiss it.

Speaker 3 I got something for you. That was, I'm just walking right past that one.

Speaker 3 They taste gross, so don't think it's some weird delicacy. Right.

Speaker 3 Not that there are that many of them to eat. But apparently, if you do eat them, they can can make you sick because these things are filled with urea, with oil, with wax ester, and fat.
Yep.

Speaker 3 Like 98.5% fat. That's just in its skull.
Oh, I thought that was the whole body. No,

Speaker 3 its brain occupies 1.5%

Speaker 3 of

Speaker 3 the area inside its skull. The other 98.5% is fat.
And that's at the point that they're an adult. Right, yeah.
Supposedly, their brains are bigger proportionately when they're younger.

Speaker 3 And they just stay there.

Speaker 3 Yeah. They're frozen in perpetual, like, I guess, toddlerhood.
Pretty much. They love life.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 No responsibilities. No bills.
My life

Speaker 3 after them. Yeah, exactly.
What else?

Speaker 3 Oh, I got one for you. Okay.
Vestigial lungs. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Man, I love these things.

Speaker 3 So So they grow, they had CT scans done, and this is from the Mental Floss article

Speaker 3 of these embryos, and they start growing little lungs

Speaker 3 early in the gestation period, and

Speaker 3 it slows down a bit, and then by the time they're an adult, the organ serves no purpose. Yeah, it's just there.

Speaker 3 Yep.

Speaker 3 That's a good one. It is.

Speaker 3 It's almost like the coelacanth was an attempt, an evolutionary attempt. And it's just like, I'm going to scrap this design.
Let's move on to the longfish. Yeah, maybe so.
You know?

Speaker 3 One of the things that struck me, though, Chuck, was when they were talking about how a couple of females that had fully formed young in them ready to be born were caught.

Speaker 3 It's like, that was a lot of the coelacanth population that got wiped out with those two caught fish. Yeah, I mean, if there are only hundreds,

Speaker 3 then everyone matters.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they think that there's possibly about a thousand of the ones that live around Indonesia and far fewer of the ones that live off of the west coast of Africa on the western side of the Indian Ocean.

Speaker 3 And as a result, both of them are on the endangered species list. They're both protected.

Speaker 3 The problem is that if something happens to these species and these species die out this time, the whole order is gone

Speaker 3 for good this time around. Yeah.
Unless we revive them

Speaker 3 with some of their DNA. Yeah.
All right. I got one last one.
Okay.

Speaker 3 And this was on Mental Floss's list as well. Okay.

Speaker 3 Under the title, A Prominent Hematologist Once Wrote a Celacanth operetta. Right.
So that's an attention grabber. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And apparently in 1975, there was a man named Charles Rand of Long Island University, and he was a hematologist and was doing some work with the sea lacanth.

Speaker 3 And this was when the big revelation was when they learned that it gave birth to live young.

Speaker 3 And he, I guess, was a music guy and decided to write a little operetta about this discovery titled A C Lacanth's Lament or Quintuplets at 50 Fathoms Can Be Fun.

Speaker 3 All sung to the tune of various Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Right.

Speaker 3 That's a hematologist for you. Wow.
For sure.

Speaker 3 I have no comment on that. Well, I mean, it speaks for itself, right? Other than I wish this was on tape somewhere.

Speaker 3 Surely it's on YouTube. Everything's on YouTube.
You think? Yeah, sure.

Speaker 3 You want to go over some of these other, quote, living fossils, end quote? Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, again,

Speaker 3 there's some fishes out there that may have made the jump kind of to land or almost did or what have you. But there's some interesting fishes that are worth mentioning.

Speaker 3 Speaking of making the jump, did you see that shark that jumped into the boat the other day? No. That was a fisherman, and I guess the shark just did, you know, one of their famous,

Speaker 3 there's a great white. Oh, God.
Did one of its breaches.

Speaker 3 where they just jump out of the water. And this thing did that and landed in a dude's fishing boat.
Wow. And he got banged around a little bit, but was not like, you know, bitten or anything.

Speaker 3 And basically went into his little control room, I think, and called for help.

Speaker 3 And this shark, like, I mean, it was kind of sad. I think the shark just died.

Speaker 3 But there were pictures of it. It's huge.
It's like eight feet long. Oh, my God.
It's not a little guy. Yeah.
Can you imagine? No. Oh, my God.
That guy did the right thing. He ran.

Speaker 3 He pooped his pants, too. Yeah.
I may have jumped into the water had that happened.

Speaker 3 All right. So living fossils,

Speaker 3 the bowfin. Yeah, the dogfish, mudfish, or grindle.
I like

Speaker 3 dogfish. Yeah, this guy, I looked all these up.

Speaker 3 He lives in the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes and other places and are pretty mean, supposedly.

Speaker 3 Like, it eats small mammals, snakes, frogs, other fish. Yeah.
Like, they'll go after you. Right.

Speaker 3 It's sort of normal looking, just sort of a long fish.

Speaker 3 Nothing remarkable appearance-wise, though. I'll tell you one that's remarkable appearance-wise, is the gar.
Yeah, you know, I just saw a long-nosed gar

Speaker 3 last weekend, and I was like, it was floating dead in a lake. I was like, what in the world? Because

Speaker 3 I went by it at first. I was like, was that a swordfish? I was like, well, no, it's not a swordfish.

Speaker 3 But in the long-nosed ones, I mean, this thing had a, he had a 12-inch beak. Oh.
I mean, it looked prehistoric.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they very much do look prehistoric, which is one of the reasons why they're called a living fossil um and they are just mean apparently they're known to kill other fish even not even to eat them yeah just because they were in their way basically yeah like you see this nose yeah and you can't eat gar they're inedible and as a matter of fact if you eat their eggs it will kill you they're very toxic to humans yeah and they just go around killing other fish so they're not the best thing to have in your lake if you like to fish in a lake no and they um did you ever see vernon Vernon Florida, the documentary?

Speaker 3 No, I've never seen that one by the great Errol Morris. It has uh one of the interviews.
Uh, it's one of my favorites is with a guy talking about talking about the garfish. Oh, really?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I gotta see that one. Come across one of those.
Oh, boy. I finally saw Thin Blue Line for the first time.
Oh, yeah, that's a good one. It is really good.
You probably saw it after the parody

Speaker 3 of Documentary Now. Yeah.
I definitely did. I saw the Documentary Now.

Speaker 3 Which they nailed. Like, it's like perfect.
They really do.

Speaker 3 One of the great shows uh what's next hagfish yeah mud dwellers yeah they basically look like eels but they're fish but the the interesting thing about hagfish aside from the fact that they don't have any eyes is that they eat fish from the inside out yeah i think you underplayed it when you said they basically look like eels it looks like something out of dune okay like the body looks like an eel but have you seen the the front end of this thing?

Speaker 3 Sure. It's frightening.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 And to think about that crawling up in you and eating you from the inside out right because if you're a dead or dying fish and you're like oh man i hope i hurry up and die before a hagfish finds me

Speaker 3 yeah and a hagfish swims down your throat and then eats you from the inside out

Speaker 3 that's a bad day that's not a good death no

Speaker 3 and then lastly what about the sturgeon Love the sturgeon. Did you know that they are both freshwater and saltwater here in North America?

Speaker 3 I did not know that, but I know one thing is they're they're huge. Yeah, they get up to like 20 feet long.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I didn't see any pictures of them that big, but I've seen pictures of fishermen with like

Speaker 3 sturgeon that look like they're at least eight or nine feet long. Right.

Speaker 3 And they're crazy looking. Yeah.
Well, the reason I was surprised that they are largely North America is I always associate them with the Baltic area where

Speaker 3 the Beluga.

Speaker 3 Sturgeon is prized for its caviar. That's what I always think of when I think sturgeon.
Well, I didn't realize that that's where Beluga came from either. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And they have armor-like skin and they're these retractable mouths that

Speaker 3 I guess they're different varieties, but some of them look almost like alligators from like the head forward. Yeah, they're weird-looking fish.
Yeah. But they don't want to hurt anybody.

Speaker 3 They just want you to eat their eggs. Is that true? Yeah.

Speaker 3 They're like the giving tree of the lake. All right.
Up with sturgeon.

Speaker 3 You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about living fossils like,

Speaker 3 you know, coelacanths. Or us.
Right.

Speaker 3 You can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 3 I'm going to call this My Mom Married Bob Doro. Oh, I like this one.
Do you see that one? Right.

Speaker 3 And I thought it was, because that was the subject line. Right.
And then the very first line of the email was, sorry about that attention-grabbing subject line. Right.

Speaker 3 And I thought it was a lie because a lot of of times people say something remarkable in the subject line that is completely false, which always ticks me off. Sure.
But this is true.

Speaker 3 My mom married the wonderful, talented, and sweet Bob Doro 23 years ago. And if you didn't listen to the show, Bob Doro was part of the genius behind Schoolhouse Rock.

Speaker 3 You know, the original genius.

Speaker 3 It was wonderful to hear you two speak so highly of him in your recent podcast. My own family listens to you guys a lot.
So to hear you speak of our Bob with such reverence, it warmed our hearts.

Speaker 3 When you mentioned early in your podcast that you wished you could have gotten Bob on the show, I wanted to jump through my phone to say I can make that happen.

Speaker 3 Bob learned about you guys about two weeks ago when we took a short road trip for Mother's Day and listened to the grave robbing episode.

Speaker 3 How awesome is that? I know. The guy listened to us right before we released the Schoolhouse Rock episode.
Yeah. So he's primed and ready to hear us mention it.
Fortuitous. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He chuckled often during the ride and when we got to our destination he asked something to the effect of, who are those comedy guys? They're good. Man, that made me feel good.

Speaker 3 And then to have the Schoolhouse Rock episode pop up a few weeks later, it was like, whoa!

Speaker 3 You guys were spot on in your characterization of Bob as a creative genius. A lot of his genius comes from his hard work.
The age of 93, he is still traveling the world taking gigs. That's awesome.

Speaker 3 My mom often complains that he doesn't know how to say no. Thank you for giving Bob and Schoolhouse Rock its proper due.
Next time you come up the coast, the Northeast, that is, we'll be there.

Speaker 3 And I'm sure Bob won't say no. And that is from Pete,

Speaker 3 I guess his stepson. Yeah.
And

Speaker 3 Pete sent in a picture of him and Bob. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And that's him in the flesh. It's pretty awesome.
Pretty neat. And you should go to www.bobdoro.
D-O-R-O-U-G-H.com. and just check it out.
93 and going strong. Nice going, Bob.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening to us. And thank you, Pete, for writing in to let us know that we were spot on about what a great guy he is.
Yeah, we were genuinely thrilled to hear this. Yeah.

Speaker 3 If you want to genuinely thrill us, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Speaker 2 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 2 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 2 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, in partnership with Argenix, explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 2 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.