Latest / Outdoor Journal Radio: The Podcast / Episode 238: Why Sea Lamprey Keep Coming Back (FISH TALK W/ THE DOC)

Transcript

Episode 238: Why Sea Lamprey Keep Coming Back (FISH TALK W/ THE DOC) · Outdoor Journal Radio: The Podcast

• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: This episode of Outdoor Journal Radio is brought to you in part by the Invasive Species Center, protecting Canada's land and water from invasive species.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Freedom Cruise Canada, rent the boat, own the memories, and JMB Cycle a Marine, your home for all things power sports, boats, and equipment.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And now, another exciting episode of the adventures of Outdoor Journal Radio.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you're all here because I know why you're here.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: You're here because you heard that our special guest today is none other than the doc, Dr.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen Cook.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen Cook will be joining us.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Hell yeah.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hello with you.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: He'll be joining us shortly.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: I always feel like I shortchange him because I have all these great notes, and then and then I'm supposed to introduce him when he comes on and do this elaborate.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then I choke up because I'm so excited to get right into it with him when I don't.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to do it now in case I should forget.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Dr.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen Cook will be joining us uh here in a few minutes.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: He uh, for those of you who may not be familiar with him, uh biology professor at Carlton University.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he's got uh over 1,200 peer-reviewed papers.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a lot of papers.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Know the particulars on that, but man, that sounds impressive.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's gotta be just 1,200 papers is a good stack of papers, huh?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: You know, anything if you had 1,200 uh$5 bills in there, it'd be a nice little stack of how much would that be?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it'd be a lot.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'd like I'd like to find out.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: He's also chair of the board of uh technical experts for the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission, which is a that I know is a big deal, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, which I also know is a big deal.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: I bob thought, boy, I I'd be a good fellow for that.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you're a good fellow, all right.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: For that, for that Royal Society of Canada.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh recently inducted into the fresh uh water fishing hall of fame and uh for his contributions to recreational fishery science.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the thing about uh Dr.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Cook is yes, he's an accomplished, well-decorated scientist for sure, but he's also an avid, crazy angler.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: He loves what we craves it, what we connect with the most.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Anyways, uh, he will be joining us, and I will probably forget to given the full benefit of the fish.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if when he catches a fish, he if he's a little mark on it, does he he must analyze it?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: You'd think he would, eh?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: Because we always wonder what the hell's wrong with this fish here, whatever.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: My question would be board, does he analyze why he's not catching it?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh he's doing it.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: We're all I think we're all of equal out there.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Why the hell are we not catching them?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Sort of thing.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but he knows.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: He would whereas you and I would be uh you know coming up with some crazy notion as to why he would know the science behind it.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: He should be able to say, you damn fool cook, what are you doing fishing here?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because based on you know the temperature, the moon, the run, uh you should be over there because he knows better.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: He should.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: Anyways, he'll be driving.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: He should be fishing tournaments if that's the case.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you that right now.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, speaking of tournaments, I was talking to the Buana today about tournament fishing.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'll I'll tell you about it later.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not something that we can discuss.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't think so.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's very anyways.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we're gonna the reason we bring them on because uh we've been asked quite a bit lately about the forest fires that are burning uh wildly, not only here in this region, but uh all over the country, all over the world.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And what are the impacts and what effects will they have eventually or even currently on fish populations in these areas?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: If they affect fish at all, then you never know, right?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: What the hell do we know?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: God's sakes, we can't use that.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's why we got him on the show, right?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because we don't know crap.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's our I'll tell you what we do know though.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: We know that you should get on down to the Fish in Canada store right now because aside from all of the other beauties that we have there, this one here is the hot ticket right now.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if you haven't uh seen this, which you should ticket.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's a hot ticket, man.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you haven't got one of these at your next dinner party, if you're not wearing one of these, you just not uh your dinner jacket on and just open up to that.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Old question When is a walleye a pickerel?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and it's a damn pike, that's why.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: So get yourself one of these, or a friend needs one of these that you has been bugging you because they keep insisting, no picker is what that thing is called, and you know better.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Get him one of these shirts, him, her, whoever.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Anyways, we know better, we do know better.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, listener feedback in response to our podcast about taking boy, we're getting a lot of this, aren't we, Dean?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: That was probably the most feedback we've ever had on an episode.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: In response to our podcast about taking small boats on the Great Lakes, and it's funny because it's it's not a question that has definitive edges to it, because you know, it's up to interpretation.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: What is a small boat?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: What is rough water?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's all different.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: We all it's very subjective, right?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why I'm surprised that we're getting all kinds of I love it.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is great because because we're we're looking at a kind of an the average fishing community, right?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Not everybody can drive around in a 20-foot bass boat or a 30-foot salmon boat or something.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Most people are, you know, we're in that 16, 14 to 17 foot range, probably, or there's a lot of them out there, anyways, that's for sure.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, yeah, and therefore they they know a lot about that size of boat.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they that's what they live in, right?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's what they fish out of.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: So um Todd Kohat.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Cohat?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sounds right uh via YouTube uh says I have a 16-foot aluminum with a 25 on it, which by the way is the perfect could there be a better setup than that?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Beautiful setup right there.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh I took it to the Slate Islands, eight miles into Lake Superior on the north end.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Eight miles into Lake Superior on the side.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: Just a picture of Lake Superior as it goes up as you get farther west-ish.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: There's Thunder Bay.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's a farther little, it starts to go south.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: But this where there, those islands are is the most northern point of Lake Superior and the on the east side of where the Nippegan River comes out of.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: So that and it's that's out there away.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So and it and we've seen it ugly.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, that wind comes from the south.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: You are toast.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Good luck.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Toast.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh goes on to say uh it was definitely sketchy on a windy day, but fine when it wasn't blowing too much.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now I now I live on Vancouver Island and routinely take it out to Cowichan Bay and around the islands there.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: We fish the river, yeah.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And right out to the bay.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and around the islands there.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's fairly protected, but I definitely have to pay very close attention to the wind.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: I would never take it out in open ocean.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying these are good ideas, though.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying these are good ideas, though.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, you're using common sense, uh Todd.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think you're uh you're doing it.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: 16-foot boat.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: You're doing it right.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely not an ocean boat for sure.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: But but you know, that's unrealistic, I think.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Completely unrealistic.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, freshwater.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I um see, I'm I'm probably I I probably a little bit too far to the other side of this because I think a 16-foot boat, although it's a wonderful craft, uh many a memory has been you know made in a 16-foot boat between anglers and and uh family members, etc.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not meant for big open water.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't care if you leave on the flattest and calmest of days to go out into big open water where you have to come back through it at some point during the course of the day, I think that is risky.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you even if it's flat.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: You need to know the forecast.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: If it's gonna be if it's flat on the first of the day and they're and they're saying, you know, 8k wins the whole day, you're probably okay.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: But when they say 18 to 20k wins in the middle of the day, depending not depending on if you're going to Lake Ontario, it doesn't matter what direction, you're gonna get beat up and maybe not make it back.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's common sense for sure.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's all about common sense because we've been on well, our tuna fishing last last year.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: The one day was flat calm.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: The whole flat calm.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: You can take a canoe or a kayak out there, no problem, right?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: The other day, the days the other one when the boys got a little chummy out there, it's a whole different story.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: So you just gotta watch the you gotta watch the winds for sure.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: I like I said, 16-foot boat is a wonderful craft.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: I spent many of my my butt was was sat in one of them for years.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh great craft.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: We still use them.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: We still use them when we go on shoots just a few weeks ago.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna 16-footer.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: So uh just uh you know what they say, know your limit, stay within it, right?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: And in this case, know where this boat can perform and get you home, and know where it can be.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's just not worth taking a risk.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's you know what, I can do it out there.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's not bad.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: They're only three footers.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: They could get bigger than that, they could be white capping on top, who knows, right?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: So you guys had me scared.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: You and Dean had me scared on a shoot this year.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, which Georgian Bay.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Georgian Bay.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: What that day you guys decided you were going to show out.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a great example.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh after a few hours, I thought, oh man, because it started blowing up good.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I hope they didn't go out there after all, because that would have been dumb.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then and then I got thinking, oh, maybe they did.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: It could get you on the radios, but that that's probably because of the distance.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's what it was.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I said, uh, I better go.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because I was in the big boat.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I had our big prince craft, and I said, I better go and check it out.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went out the way that I thought you guys would have gone out.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I got halfway out there, and I said, There's no way, there is no way they would have dared challenge this water, and it was it was starting to blow in really good.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I turned around.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: I turned around, I said, No, there's no point in me putting us at risk going out there when I know these guys wouldn't have gone out there in a small 16-foot boat.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so I turned around and came back through those channels back to the north shore there.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then I noticed on the map that there was a back way to go in there.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, I'll bet you that's what did, and sure as hell, I came up and there you were, right?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: The back way.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I thought you went through the front wave at first.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: And even the direction that we went, just uh so what Ang, everything he's saying is true, and the ways were iffy, but we were in a 16 and it was Dean and I, and not only is it just it would be unsafe, it would beat the shit out of you.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: So we drove up at trolling speed.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: We just we just it took us uh 40 minutes, Dean, to get to get to a place that took you five minutes normally in flat water.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: We just went really slow, really slow, because there's lots of rocks around too, so that's a perfect excuse to go slow, anyways.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: But and we just went very slow, cutting into the wit, like right into the waves, knowing you know, there's no white caps and that.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it was perfectly safe, but we did not push it or push the limits at all.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: We went the back way, the back route.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, the back route was great.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: You guys could have probably gotten at full speed.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we didn't even bother.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: We just said let's not get beat up.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: The front way was not, you know, the big the big prince craft was uh was uh a little nervous going out there, let me tell you right now.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but after after we've said all of that, the most important thing here that we cannot underline and we were doing it is you must have your life jacket on, not in the bottom of the boat where most of them sit.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: You have to have your life jacket on.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's insanity not to.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: So agreed.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okie dokie, enough about that.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, uh Todd uh YouTube.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of YouTube uh stuff coming in now, right?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's good.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder what that's about.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I wonder.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: Well, is there less email now, Dean, and more YouTube comments?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I think well, we mentioned on the show last time that uh I think it was an episode that we wanted people to just go to YouTube.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_05: People weren't writing in on YouTube very much.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_05: We were getting emails a lot through the contest and stuff, so I think people listened.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So here we are almost at the end of the summer period.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, why do you have to say that?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: You're depressed, you're depressing.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I know, I know.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: But we are at the end of well, let's put it this way there's more behind us than there is ahead of us for this fishing season.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh nothing more on uh grass carp.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Do you find that surprising?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the you had a big find in the wellland.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the one find in the I guess there was only one or two a year, though, right?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: We don't get very many, I guess.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: But I was hoping, I was hoping that we have more.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're it's you're right.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's nice to not because I I want people, not because I want the fish here, but I want people to be out there keeping an eye on it.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and discovering them and then yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: I gotcha.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, it's been it's been kind of slowish, eh?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it has, which I guess is a good thing.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: But listen, yeah, uh not the time to let the our guard down.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh let's stick with the program.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Go to invasivekarp.ca and uh arm yourself with all the knowledge, tools, and technique that you will need to be part of the solution, not the problem when it comes to grass carp uh coming into this country.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: On a scale of uh ten.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: One to ten.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Ten being I'm awesome.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm thank you.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: This is for you.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: You see one on the water, you think you're gonna ID it perfectly right off the hop?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: One to ten.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, there's a grass carp right there in the water before you even touch it.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'll say an eight.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I'd say about that too.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'll say an eight.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm pretty sure.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Depends on the angle of it, but if you see the side of it, you might, yeah.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Where was I?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Oh I was in uh a sales store recently looking in one of those, you know, they have the the bins where they have all the clear-up stuff, you know?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And they had some really great full-size, you know, body baits and um stuff.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and I was looking in the box and going through it, and all of a sudden, boom, I said, Whoa! Is that a grass garb?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: They had this plastic bait, big, you know, about ten inches.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Is that a grass?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: I picked it up and I looked at it.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: I said, boy, that's oh, turn it right side up, you idiot.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because I had the eyes down below the the down below the server because I had it upside down.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Scared the hell out of me, Bruno.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: That down to about a two out of ten for you now.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: That was good.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: Scared the shit out of me.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Jeez, they haven't got grass cartes.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the fish are eating them already.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Anyways, uh in the news brought to you by JMB Cyclo Marine, Ontario's largest princecraft mercury dealer in the nation.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Outboard motors, trailers, uh boats, packages, uh you name it, they got it.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, this time of year they're probably starting to change it over a bit to They all want to make some sales.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Snow machines, they all want to make some sales in boats, yeah.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: Snowblowers and I've seen I we were at JMB's, you were there too.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they got some good storage, too.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: I bet you if you bought a boat late in the year, they probably store it for your whole thing.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, for your real question.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: And now is the perfect time, by the way.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: I know you might be saying, What is the season's almost over?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's why you're gonna get it for a better price.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the season's not almost over, folks.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: There's some damn good fishing coming up right now, huh?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in the news, uh, what is behind Lake Erie's perch decline?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: This is a good one.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: Lake Erie, their commercial fishermen are reporting a decline in their yellow perch numbers.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: So we've been hearing in the angling community right now, it's an increase, the best it's ever been in the walleye population.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: So, right off the hotel.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: The first thing we're thinking and Angie and Peter saying, Well, I think them big pecker all are eating them perchies, right?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's gotta be it's gotta be part of the uh of what's going on if there's that many.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: A huge part.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like a huge part.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: It'd be like our salmon in Lake Ontario, right?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: With the L wife and and uh all the prey fish out there.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: So in this case, so if you read the story, which is fascinating, by the way, uh I don't think it's any one particular uh element.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's our first it's the perfect storm, right?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: You've got the perfect storm cormorants, cormorants, cormorants are kill them all, kill them all.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Metallica said it well, um are uh part of the problem.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: So when you add four or five of these you know tremendous schools of walleye which predate on pie on uh on perch, uh growing uh numbers of cormorants which prey on perch.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and by the way, when I say prey on perch, nothing has been put, especially in cormorants.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: They for whatever reason, there's not been a study done that I know of on corm rats as to what their preferences are.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: All we know is that they eat an enormous amount of fish every day.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Every day they consume fish.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: If the perch base was that good before two years ago, three years ago, you're picking the easy pickings, right?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh very quick story.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: I just recently saw a flock of merganzers, uh, ducks, merganser ducks, and they are a fish-eating duck.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: So very similar to a cormorant, very similar to all the fish-eating ducks, diver uh divers.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: They are handy as hell at catching fish.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: They were handy as a pocket and shirt.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: I could not believe there was four of them, and they were just they didn't give a shit.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: I was there.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: I was on the dock.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: They were in between me and the shore, the dock and the shore, and they were, and all of a sudden I saw one taken off after a minnow.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know how fast these minnows that big how fast they are?
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: He caught that thing within a half a second.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like, caught it, and then just popped up, chewed it down, and moved on.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: These things are killers, man.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: They are efficient fish-eating killers.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: The the this is a cormorant.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: They're uh the difference is they don't breed like.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just saying the devastation these things can can do down there.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: They're like they're pretty uh like a loon.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're very awkward on land and fly landing and flying and all that.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I know what underwater machines, yeah.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I'm saying.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: They're just machines.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we forget something about the cormorant that's worth noting here, very similar to the story you just they were used in their home range.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: They are used as hunters by humans.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a known.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: They the throat off or something like that, and then you pull the fish out and give them a reward of some type or whatever.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: So they are they're like uh retrievers or hound dogs or or a dog that's used for hunting.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like uh hog dogs, the ones that kill the you know, we'll kill them if they have to.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: And yet we say, oh no, don't, don't, don't eradicate them.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Don't hate them, don't eradicate them.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're beautiful.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: That slimy black finish.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: And when they go on an island and they go on an island and they turn it into white ash instantly overnight, and the smell is putrid.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: You can't even you can't hang out in the water where where they are, but don't hurt them.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: God no.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're laughing at it, but uh yeah.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so anyway, so yellow perch, uh corm rants obviously are two of the things.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a commercial fishery, get back to that.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: The human touch is always there when we have a problem in our fisheries.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's always a human element to add to this one.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but it's the isn't that the biggest industry, the perch industry on Erie?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely the biggest.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's something like 60% of it.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: I know there's a there's a big industry for charter boat fishing for walleye, but that's nothing compared to commercial fishing, right?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Although it's probably, you know, a percentage point.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's up there right now with the with the with the walleye boom that's going on.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: Guys are making money at it for sure.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: So and spending money at it.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a number of things, but you need to read the story uh because very interesting.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: You you kind of make up your own form your own opinion on what the problem is.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: My opinion based on the story is all of the above.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that's of concern.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: Wonder what the main forage for perch in Lake Erie would be.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: Would it be little bait fish, little minnows?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they might get if they haven't yet, you know, it might be now wondering what the declination of the perch, then something else is gonna rise up, maybe, right?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that might be an imbalance again.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: You never know.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: So hmm.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, why don't we ask uh Dr.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Cook when he comes out?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: If we can get five.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: With a 10 down, buddy.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: We're good.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: Rather, let's try to stumble through it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Anyways, great story.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's on fishingcanada.com.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: You might want to go over and check it out.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_04: Check it.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Fan question of the week submitted by Aaron Green, 4496.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Green, 4496.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Via YouTube.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: Fan question.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: He's a contender.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: A contender.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: So here we go.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Aaron says, question for the guys.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: That must be you and I.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: I guess so.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_03: If he said question for the girls, I think we'd be in trouble.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: What would we have to say then?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I don't know.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: Hello.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, have you ever been on water where the conditions quickly changed and forced you to stop fishing for the day?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where was it and what happened, and how did you make it back safely, or did you end up in the water swimming?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Are there any other safety recommendations you have for big water fishing?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, we just went through a bunch of things.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_03: How that ties in with the boat thing and everything.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: Well, how's our producer doing that?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think it's kind of natural?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's organic.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's organic.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's organic.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so Aaron wants to know have we ever been caught in a bad storm?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the problem with us two idiots is that uh um we kind of like being out there in that stuff, to be honest with you.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: If it's not thundering and lightning, and we'll probably take a chance or two, is what we'll do as a rule.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: But but we have dog, I remember Dog Lake a couple years ago.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: We're up there and we we saw that one coming, and that it was a black sky.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: It was just coming and it was coming in on us, and Angela and I were seeing, okay.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, it's not here yet.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: But it was so but we did leave before it hit us because we just we got to the truck at hey, and it started.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think I was in the boat, you got in the trunk and it started raining.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm thinking, you bastard.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god, you beat me.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: But we got in that we just in the nick of time got it.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_05: Happened at Lumberjack uh the year after, a couple years ago at Lumberjack.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, what day was that?
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_05: Sturgeon Lake up there.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, fishing the creek that day we fished the rock.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_05: The day after that.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_05: We were out and we raced back, and it was the same thing we got into the cabin, and then it was like hailing.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: Torrential, just absolute torrential.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we we we definitely pushed the envelope on that one.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I have to admit, we we we as I said, we kind of like it.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: We like fishing right to the end, that that split second before right and wrong.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_05: Like when the line starts to hang up above the water a little bit.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: You need to get out of there then.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's yeah, that's when you need to leave the area.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I I get off on surges.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: I really love being in the middle of those big, powerful wind and water surges, you know?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, I love that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: I like I like fishing in the rain.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: I uh it doesn't stop me, but I I have my limitations, that's for sure.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: I had I got knocked off uh Bay Aquinie this year.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: I was fishing uh a weed bed and it was perfect, and I just found a whack of fish, but I started stuffing on just by fishing.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: My boat started stuffing with the waves.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: It was getting bigger and bigger and bigger, just at the not even driving.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I had to turn around and and I literally drove back all the way back to Desarano at trolling speed again in a 20-foot boat.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_04: Oh boy.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's how fast it picked up, and I said, Yeah, I gotta leave.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: So we've had to leave a few times, that's for sure.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: My worst, of course, uh condition uh or or answer to this question was years ago during a tournament on Lake Ontario, and um we were fishing a series of islands out about one-third into the middle of Lake Ontario from the Kingston area, and so quite a distance out.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh series of islands that you can't see from shore.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: From land, yeah, you can't see them.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um the bottom line is it wasn't that bad going out first thing in the morning.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: But there were warnings of uh the wind shifting out of the south and and you know, small craft warnings.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, when you're young and stupid and don't care, you just do stuff like that.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: We went out anyways, spent the day whacking fish, it was out of this world, it was fantastic, and uh now it's time to come back.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: The wind has shifted coming out of the south.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: We had our back to the north this whole time, so we really hadn't paid attention to what was going on.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: We were protected by the islands, so for us it was it was beautiful, it was flat.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: And when we went to turn uh the boats around to head north, uh, whoa, we were met by walls and walls and walls, Lake Ontario walls, and we tried a few times to get offshore and push our way through them, but uh nah, we just about lost boats and equipment and everything else.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, bottom line is we we turned back and limped our way back uh towards the islands, um, and decided we we got no option here.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: We gotta spend the night, or at least until this subsides.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And now it's like 4:30, five o'clock in the afternoon.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: So chances are real good it's not gonna subside during this day, that's for sure.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we uh we ended up sleeping on the island in an old lighthouse that had been closed up for centuries.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: That was you and Reno's, that everybody knows.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we spent the night uh there.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that was that's a story that'll just that that goes on forever, man.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: But it makes but it's a a good story to to remind you of what can happen.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: During that uh event, uh two boats got lost.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um really um one of them we know they found them, but but they had capsized, they had filled up and and the guys were on the top sitting on top of the hulls?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so really and they got picked up.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Holy crap.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Two two separate boats.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: We saw the images of one.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Holy cow, it was to see it.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: So they went for it.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: So what you didn't go for, they went for they were in a different part of the lake.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know where they might have been on the the faults, just it doesn't matter because they was they did the same thing.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: They did what you guys didn't do, which is you made the good call, obviously.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you can't, you have to be reasonable, yeah.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, so here's our option.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: We knew for a fact we spent enough time in the water to know we go out in that, we're done.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: We might not drown because we have flotation devices on and all that, but our boat will fill up and/or we'll capsize and/or we'll lose it, yeah, along with everything else we've got in the boat, and we'll have to spend some hours floating around in the water.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody will pick us up.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the option to that is just hunker down here.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: What's the big deal?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, did the Coast Guard pick those guys up?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Both of them.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I remember.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: The image that was uh out uh after the event of them um pulling the guys out, the two guys out, and the boat was all you could see was the uh the nose of it.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because it had flipped, had filled, obviously, uh uh exceeded its flotation uh stability foam and all that stuff.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: And because of the waves, it turned over.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, and the engine being the heaviest part weighed the the bulk of the hull underwater, and just the nose was sticking out.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was awful, it was just god-awful.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And mistakes like that just should not happen, and that was a mistake, that was a judgment mistake.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Just a bad call.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Anyways, um so we have a contender here.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Green.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: What do we think?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good conversation.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think he he he prompted us to go back in time, and uh, and I think it's worth I say.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's a good safety talk and a reminder again for everybody.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd say yeah, for sure.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: Give me a hell yeah! Steve Austin says yeah, so that's gotta be.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_02: Stevie says it.
• 29:55
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• 29:57
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• 30:02
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• 30:06
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• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: Drop into one of 12 stores across Ontario and Quebec and talk to the real fishing specialist or gear up online anytime at Sale.ca.
• 30:18
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• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: All right, now let's get to the man of the hour.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: At least on our show he is, uh, the doc.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do a little fish talk.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh time for Dr.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen Cook.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, buddy, how are you doing?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_06: Hey, I'm well.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_06: You know, it's the end of summer, though.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_06: Got the don't say that, Stephen.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: Don't say that, buddy.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: Come on, don't.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: You're depressing me already.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_06: When is back back to school?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: I know you go back.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: So when is that?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so it kind of varies depending on where you are in the country, but uh most universities are going back right after Labor Day.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_06: So that Tuesday is for the most part the first day of school, welcoming all the new first year students and uh new grad students and kind of getting back in the grind of uh you know, more of a more of a nine to five, you know, on campus as opposed to uh, you know, dawn till dusk on the water.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean aside from the fact that you're teaching as opposed to doing, is there a lot of difference in the content of what you work with when you're teaching?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_06: Um, yeah, I this year I'm teaching a third-year field course where we go to places relevant to the environment.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_06: So, for example, we have a week on waste.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_06: So, guess what?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_06: We go to the dump, we go to the green bin facility after we take the kids there.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_06: They have to burn their clothes.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_06: They smell so bad.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_06: We take them to recycling facilities.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_06: So it so, and we do the same with topics like electricity and park management and so on.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_06: So it's kind of a fun one.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, you know, the day-to-day stuff.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_06: I still get into the field, still lots of meetings and calls with collaborators, shaking trees for money and you know, connecting with partners.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_06: So yeah.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_03: Sounds good.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: What we do around here.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have any do you have any uh what's a a long-term student in your in your courses?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: Would there be a four-year courses or what's a long term on that?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so most of our courses, the undergrad programs are four years, uh, although most are sort of in the four to six year path.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_06: That seems to be more common these days.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_06: And then I also have grad students, PhD students will stick around for four or five years, uh, master students for about two years.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: So we got you on today because uh we've been asked to uh actually it was asked of us, and we said, Hey, what are you doing asking us?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we're dummies.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk to somebody who knows their stuff.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Non-dummy, a guy that don't know some stuff.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: We were asked to um to talk about the possible effects of all of these crazy fires, and not just you know, regionally, but across the nation and and globally for that.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Globally, yeah, absolutely.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: What effect, if any, would they have on um on fish?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and and it's easy to assume that well, fish are in water.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_06: Last time I checked, water doesn't burn, and you know, so you know, they they should be hidden.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_06: Uh sadly, that's not the case.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, fish and the the waters they live in do get impacted in pretty pretty different ways.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_06: Most of what we know is based on work that's been done in the Pacific Northwest.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_06: So think about sort of from Northern California up to British Columbia and even into Alaska, where there are large research forests.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_06: So government or universities own large chunks of forests and they will have long-term studies underway where they actually will they'll burn this watershed on a given day in a very controlled sense.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_06: Um, or they're just big enough forests that natural wildfires will occur over time, and then they just study them repeatedly.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_06: So, for example, the U.S.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_06: Forest Service owns a ton of ton of lands where they can do that.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_06: So almost everything we know is about small streams, trout, salmon, things like that.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_06: Um and almost all of it is sort of indirect impacts on fish.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, you know, yes, if a forest fire rolls through and is, you know, super intense, you know, it might get so hot in the streams that all the fish in it die instantly.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_06: But it usually is a longer-term impact on the system itself that all of a sudden it becomes less of a good place for fish to hang out.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_06: Um, so I'm I'm gonna flip it around and ask you, what do you think?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_06: You know, imagine a landscape that has been, you know, burned, right?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_06: You know, what what do you think?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_06: And there's a stream that sort of carves through it.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_06: What do you think the kinds of things are that that might have changed from the perspective of a fish?
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, food for one thing.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, good lord, it's all the insect.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right, all life on land will either be dead or it it has been displaced.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, the food source for the fish has been interrupted.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: That would be the first thing, right?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the other, and the other you mentioned it already is temperature, uh, especially small streams, long, long, small streams that wind through the forest.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: And if the forest is is torched around it, that's got to raise that level.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: Would ash have a uh negative effect?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_06: Yep, yep, exactly.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_06: There's some ash that can end up in the in the system.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_06: And uh just going back to that idea of temperature, when trees are burned these days, these really high-intensity fires, it's not just the underbrush that disappears, which used to be kind of what used to happen.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_06: Now the crowns disappear too.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_06: So you lose the shade.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_06: And every good trout stream I've ever fished in is shaded, or the whole up up uh stream area, the up, the headlands of that that watershed should be covered in forest.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_06: That's the recipe for a good trout stream.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_06: And so that that kind of disappears.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and so I just want to remind folks that there is a difference between um wildfires of today and wildfires of yesteryear.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_06: Um, what's changed is the frequency of fires, so we're having more of them, and the intensity.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_06: They used to burn low and slow, and they tended not to burn the crowns.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_06: They would really focus on the underbrush, underbrush, they would smolder, they would be something that government would keep their eye on, but you wouldn't necessarily have to rush out with a fire crew.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_06: Or if you did, they're pretty easy to suppress.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_06: You didn't need, you know, water bombers and all sorts of fancy chemicals, you know, just a few folks in the bush with some, you know, axes and shovels.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_06: And you could, you know, you could usually control them.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_06: Today, you've seen it on TV.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_06: It looks like Armageddon, right?
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_06: God, it's brutal.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_06: You know, small armies of people and and air force, you know, you know, entire, it's like an entire country's air force, except they're all yellow, uh, forest fire fighting vehicles mobilized.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, we pull up, uh, we pull on uh mutual aid from our friends from around the world, flying in firefighters from Spain and Mexico and so on.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_06: And and similarly, we send our firefighters out, depending on on where things are going.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_06: And and we basically sit back and watch, right?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_06: It's it's you know, it rarely do you, you know, oh there's a fire and it's you know, it's headed right for that town.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_06: Rarely is there a good news story that we end up.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, is this uh is this solely due to uh the warming uh climate?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: I know what it is.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: I bet you I gotta guess is it?
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: I want to hear this guess.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: I want to hear because in in my fishing world, the winds are ridiculously high now every day.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: The wind is brutal, and one thing that's so bad for fire or gets fire going is a lot of wind.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: I bet you the winds are higher out, especially out west.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I'm just guessing at that, but it just seems so windy all the time now.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and all of those things are connected.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_06: So climate change just isn't hot and dry.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, it can be cold and wet, it can be windy.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_06: And so it's this this unique combination of things.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_06: And even in a year where we don't have fire, if it's hot and dry, we get more of that accumulation of kindling, right?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_06: You know, the the stuff you start your campfire with.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_06: That's what's just littering the bottom of the forest floor.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_06: And all it takes is a spark from, you know, whether it be a cigarette butt, whether it be a lightning strike, uh, whether it be uh um an electrical wire malfunction, uh, you know, a piece of glass with with the the sun magnifying through it.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_06: There's all sorts of reasons.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_06: Train sparks, breaks, um, sparks from trains are a common cause of fires.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: So wow, I didn't know that.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's a that's a new one for me.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I've heard I've heard that.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: There's so many trains that rip through those forested areas, maybe more than ever before.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: All right, that that's the obvious stuff in terms of uh rivers and streams.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think we can all imagine how they would be affected and affected quickly.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: But how about the lakes?
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: How about those, you know, big bodies of water that are out in the middle of nowhere?
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, there's fires all around them.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, there definitely is uh visible evidence that uh there are fires, but there's no real burning happening right on the lake.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: Are those fish affected, do you think?
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_06: They are, and here's why.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_06: From the rain, okay?
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_06: And so so take a second to process that.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_06: And I just you know told your fire is bad.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_06: In this case, it's rain.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_06: It's rain after the fires.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_06: So whether it be in a you know, so a lake is surrounded by streams and rivers that pour in.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_06: And what happens is after a fire, the first rain mobilizes all of that ash, all of that sediment, because all the roots and all the good, all what plants do is hold together the soil.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_06: When that's gone and you dump water on it, it all quickly rushes off the surface and into those streams.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_06: So it's that first rain pulse.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_06: And I know we all, you know, you you're sort of begging for rain when there's a fire, but that same water we're begging for turns around and mobilizes all that stuff.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_06: And all of a sudden you've got moving downstream this pulse of ash uh and the associated um uh high pH with that.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, you've got this pulse of sediment that's smothering all the good habitat.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_06: And all of a sudden the the fish are saying, whoa, what's happening here?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_06: And all of that, so the stream fish feel it first, and then it dumps into these lakes.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_06: There are nutrients that are mobilized too that have been stored up in those soils.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_06: And so nutrients are essential, right?
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_06: You know, like it's fertilizer is necessary, but too much fertilizer leads to algae blooms, and that's what happens.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_06: So you have lakes, all of a sudden they get this pulse of all sorts of nutrients as well.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, you got massive algae blooms, the algae dies, that sucks up oxygen.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_06: And so again, it's kind of an indirect path, right?
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_06: There's no fish are being incinerated, you know, when they're, you know, no walleye at 20 feet of depth, they're being incinerated, but they're the ones that have to deal with this crap water quality.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_06: And that those water quality issues post-fire can persist for five to 10 years.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_06: That's usually the time frame when we talk about recovery post-fire.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_06: That's usually the time frame we're talking, five to ten years.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_06: So if you're an angler and that's your favorite lake or your favorite river, you're kind of yeah, you're kind of out of luck for a for a while.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_06: You got to find a a new place to fish.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_06: When I talk about these things being transient, it's not like, oh, next week it'll be better.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_06: Uh it it really is the long game.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: But the effect isn't immediate, is it?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like all this stuff that you just said isn't, and I'm talking lake fish, not river fish.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_06: That that does take a little longer.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like it's not immediate.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's not gonna affect my fishing this year if we just had uh horrific fires around my favorite lake, is it?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, it it could, yeah.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_06: It could um again, it depends on how much area was burnt, how big the lake is, how much water comes in from those upstream tributaries.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_06: You know, this is science, so it depends, or you know, kind of is the answer to everything.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but there's certainly instances where uh, you know, if you got enough rain right afterwards, you know, you really could overwhelm a system.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_06: But those, you know, if we see an algae bloom and deteriorating water quality, yeah, that might be months.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_06: It might be just, you know, three or four years of subpar water quality.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_06: That's enough to impact growth, perhaps reproduction, you know, smother some of the spawning sites and takes a while for things to come back to normal.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting, isn't it?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: We're heading into some of that water pretty soon.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, we're passing that.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: We're we're passing there's there's force fires along the way, but we're passionate.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, along with the liquor store.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_06: But I I gotta remind everybody that you know fire is natural and fire is essential in ecosystems and even aquatic systems, especially, especially stream-dwelling fish, have evolved to live in systems where fire is pretty normal.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_06: Again, it's that intensity that's that's different.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_06: We do see recovery.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_06: Rarely after there's been a fire, do we do we kind of count it it, you know, do we put a big X through it and say, you know, trout will never live here again.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_06: You know, it's just a matter of time.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_06: And in fact, one of the things that uh fires do is help to mobilize uh wood.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_06: Big, like you know, big chunks of wood end up getting washed in and creating log jams.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_06: And that's the kind of stuff that Chinook and Coho and uh Cutties really.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_06: Love.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_06: So again, they're not going to move in and start using it as habitat the day after, you know, the fire, you know, but in due course, it's really those things are really important for helping to shape streams and create those pool type habitats that overhead cover.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_06: So fire isn't all bad.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_06: And in fact, when I, you know, in prep preparing preparing for this, you know, reading through a bunch of papers, I could find, you know, it's kind of like 60-40.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_06: 60% of the papers found things to be more negative, 40% more positive.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_06: The positive stuff usually was longer term, right?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_06: It was in that five to ten years later, there were positive, you know, the trout actually came back.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_06: There are more of them and they're bigger.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_06: There were just a few years where there were hardly any of them.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: And by the sounds of it, the the main problem is the spawning activity that season or the or the first couple of seasons.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Which manifests themselves two, three years, four years down the road, right?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why the the period of what about Stephen?
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is there any studies done?
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um we've only encountered this a couple of times, but the the haze that comes over, the fires are a long ways away, but they got this beautiful overcast sky.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: We're thinking, oh my God, this is the best conditions for fishing ever.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of dark, it's kind of like an eclipse going on here, but the sun's up there.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: Does that affect the fish at all?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know?
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_06: Uh I I think in exactly the way you would expect.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_06: You know, it's just like a cloudy day.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, I don't think the fish are able to discern between uh, you know, a cloud and uh and wildfire smoke.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_06: So for them, it's just a cloudy day.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_06: So I don't need to hang out under lily pads, I can maybe be a little bit shallower in the water column.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_06: And uh yeah, so I would fish them in in that way.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_06: How about barometer?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's an interesting one too, right?
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: Does the pressure change for these fish?
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: If if there's massive fires going on in the area, does that it changes the air quality?
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: We know that.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: Does it change the density?
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: Does it change the pressure at all?
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because that one would be interesting.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: That would be really interesting, especially especially where you've got a lot of uh fire activity.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: A lake is completely surrounded, a small lake, uh size of a small town or something, is completely surrounded.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um I bet you it's gotta have something.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's affecting the temperature of the water for sure.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_06: So and the smoke will settle down on lakes, you know.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_06: You I don't know.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_06: In my head, I'd always sort of assumed that you know lakes would sort of create this buffer and almost push the smoke back up.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_06: But I've I've been on lakes when it's been super smoky, and uh the the smoke sort of settles down in.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_06: Uh so yeah, I who knows what's going on.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_06: I guess we'd have to ask an atmospheric scientist.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: We we got caught in uh once for sure, maybe a couple of times, where we were surrounded with uh with fires, and uh I think we just I think we just ran out onto the lake and said, I think we'll hunker down here for a week.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: I remember a quantity there, yeah, a couple of years ago.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: How bad can it be?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: All we have to do is just go hang out in the middle of the lake.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's not gonna be the end of the world.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: Bring a couple rods too while we're at it on this lake.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: You remember things got a little difficult fishing-wise.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: It did change.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: Remember noticing it, and that last morning was really weird out.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like what I described there to Stephen is that's what I what I was in in visioning, and it was like, what is going on here?
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because it should have been great, should with the overcast looking skies, but in fact, it wasn't.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the things that we don't know, right?
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you said the only studies that are going on uh for this uh are limited to the West Coast, Northwest Coast.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_06: The vast, the vast majority.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_06: There has been work done right here in Ontario, actually, in the experimental lakes area, going back to the 1960s and 70s, but it's all on water quality and lake health, with fish just being what happens to fish is always inferred as opposed to studied because it's a longer-term game.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_06: So, oh, in the first year or two, this is what we saw.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_06: And we ran out of funding and we moved on, and so we just assumed that the fish didn't do as well.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_06: So a lot of it's kind of making inferences from water quality observations in the first little while.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, interesting.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have to keep an eye on it because we do spend an awful lot of time in those areas that have either had burns or are having burns or will have burns.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: So better we know our audience would love to hear about that, you know, because we're all around it in some way or another.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, it's an interesting subject.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_06: The barometric uh pressure question is really interesting.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_06: You know, if the fish are used to feeling barrow, you know, changes in barometric pressure when there's cloud, and as you know, yet they're getting the cloud, but you know, the cloud effect, but no change in barometric pressure, it may be rather confusing to them and they may not behave in the ways that as anglers we might assume they do.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_06: So yeah.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_06: Um I'll uh I'll do my best to check in with some folks to get get an answer for us on uh perfect.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely think they're and that's what happened to us that time in quant.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you could you could tell because it was ideal conditions.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_02: It was perfect.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: It was absolutely perfect and flat, calm, and just everything was just so nice.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: On a totally separate issue, uh earlier on in the program, uh we um we talked about a story about declining perch on Lake Erie, and and uh and there's like 10 different possible reasons for it.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh are you familiar with what's going on there at all?
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I'm just getting up to speed on the perch issue, uh wearing my hat as a Canadian commissioner for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_06: We've been neck deep in uh issues related to Lake Whitefish uh in my first few months at the table.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_06: So uh I'd love to talk about perch in the future.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_06: I'm not super well versed in that right now.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we we uh we talked about it briefly earlier on.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: I thought maybe it might have some uh input on that.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, no problem.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so what are we working on right now?
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: Anything you can talk about?
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, um, a couple things.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_06: Just got back uh from a trip to uh Michigan and up into Sault Ste.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_06: Marie, Canada, with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_06: We were on a tour of a bunch of the Canadian and U.S.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_06: government facilities.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_06: They're all focused on sea lamprey control.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_06: And uh in particular, visited a number of dams and saw a treatment, one of the lamprey treatments.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_06: And this was on the Manistee River, uh, which flows into Lake Michigan, quite a large tributary, and they treated a dam.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_06: And just the the operation was truly impressive.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, it felt less like fish biology and more like uh a logistics class meets or a logistics um uh activity meets a chemistry class.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_06: The amount of of effort and care put into preparing for and delivering one of these sea lamprey treatments is really impressive.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, with folks from both the US and Canadian governments involved working shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, uh, ensuring that uh these lamprey populations get get beat down.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_06: And what was really impactful for me is to see all those larval lamprey.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_06: Those are the babies that are getting treated, that are in streams, trying to kill the babies so they don't go to the go to the lakes and become parasitic, and watching them emerge from the sandy, silty substrate where they've been been growing slowly and uh basically come to shore and die along the shoreline, uh, and to see how many of them there are.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_06: So uh, you know, I'd I'd read about it, I'd seen a small treatment, but this was at a scale.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_06: You know, this is a million-dollar treatment, a million dollars between the amount of chemicals used, the the lamper side, and the people involved doing it.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, just truly impressive.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_06: So that was uh eye-opening.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: As a scientist, you've got to scratch your head at that one.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to be saying that what is going on?
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, lamprey were prevalent when I was wading the Osha Creek at the age of six or seven years old.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: There was lamprey, that was a big problem back then.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it seems like we've been fighting them forever, and and still, by the sounds of it, not winning much of the battles.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_06: Every three years.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_06: So we we win, but they're short-term wins.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_06: It requires sustained effort.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_06: And we saw that with COVID when we took the foot off the gas.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_06: Guess what?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_06: They they rebounded quickly.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_06: So most of the rivers get treated on a three-year cycle, uh, although they do regular monitoring, and sometimes, you know, we can wait a year or two extra on this one, but hey, this one's particularly bad, so we need to come in here and do uh do a treatment more uh more frequently.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_06: But the we also visited some of the labs where there's all sorts of cool work being done to try and figure out how to how to, you know, it's know your enemy, right?
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_06: So, what can we learn about lamprey that we can use against them?
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_06: So all sorts of funky work with uh with gene editing that's underway.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, you know, the sterile male program is is back on track.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_06: So you release a whole bunch of males that are functionally uh, you know, they're they're shooting blanks.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_06: Uh so they they hook up and and spawn with uh with female walleye, and those end up being non-fertilized eggs.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_06: So basically you're having her waste her eggs.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_06: She thinks she's she's spawning with a really fertile male, but in reality, it's a wash.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_06: So uh there's a lot of work there.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_06: Uh and then the biggie is we use dams to try to prevent lamprey from reaching you know upriver areas.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_06: We tend to put dams pretty close to river mouths to block them.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Specifically, are they those dams specifically for lamprey?
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 53:53
  unknown: Wow.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_06: Yep, yep.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_06: There are hundreds of dams throughout the Great Lakes basin that are explicitly there to block lamprey and allow them to be treated.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_06: It means you have to treat a smaller area downstream.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_06: But some of those, many of those, are also really important for our migratory cell monids, for small mode busts, for suckers that migrate upstream.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_06: And so what typically is done is you trap and sort.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_06: So you trap everything, and then you know, the lamprey go into the dumpster and everything else that's desirable gets shifted upstream.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_06: That's really labor intensive, and you can't do it at all of them.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_06: And so uh, so there's a lot of work underway as well now to figure out how to pass all the good stuff and block lamprey and and basically exploiting whatever we can figure out about their swimming abilities, their sensory physiology, uh, working with engineers to figure out how to how to how to have two pathways a pathway for lamprey that ends up in a in a dumpster and a pathway for everything else that just takes them upstream.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was a great project.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: We've we've seen it firsthand on um in Cornwall.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: At the big hydro damage.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: They've got American eels and lampreys.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: One's good, one's bad.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like how do how do you like it's a huge is that what they do there, Steven?
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what they're they separate them?
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_02: They get up to a certain point and they separate them.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_02: Is that it?
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_06: Or yeah, there at the dam.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_06: Uh if you're talking about Moses Saunders, that's upstream migrating, that's just eel.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_06: So um, so there, lamprey tend not to, they tend to be more upstream of there in the tribs of the Great Lakes themselves.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: So uh do they not fall back?
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: Does okay, give me this life cycle of a lamprey?
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_06: Uh so lamprey uh are spawned in freshwater streams and rivers, these tributaries of the Great Lakes.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_06: Uh they um uh they the eggs, the fertilized eggs end up in the soft substrate, and the larvae develop for a couple uh a couple years.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_06: They get to be about, I don't know, five to eight inches long, and then they transform, which is when they switch from being, hey, I'm I'm eating, I'm just filter feeding on stuff that's in the stream, to hey, I'm gonna emerge from the silt, I'm gonna move downstream, and I'm looking for a fish meal.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_06: And it's at that stage that they become parasitic, where they're swimming around the Great Lakes looking for a lake trout.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: So they are so they dump the they go all the way out to the lake itself, right?
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_06: Swim around in the lake and then make their way back to a tributary.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_06: We there's no evidence that they exhibit natal spawning.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_06: So they're they're just as likely to go to a random stream as they were the stream where they were hatched, um, which makes it harder to treat, right?
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_06: If you knew, you know, so you you've you've hit you've knocked them out here, but now they're all going over there.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_06: What draws them in is the smell of other lamprey.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_06: So that's this again, it's it's a game of whack-a-mole, right?
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_06: So, so you know, you've you've hammered them here so that you're okay there for a couple years.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but that one is coming up next year, so it draws a big crowd.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and so that's another thing the scientists are trying to do.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_06: They're trying to basically figure out what are those pheromones.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_06: So there's there's there's necromones, which is what a dead lamprey smells like.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_06: There's the pheromones, which come what does a what does reproduction smell like?
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_06: You know, what does a fertile male or female smell like, and trying to mimic that and use that to either um pull or push fish, uh lamprey, into different areas.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_06: If you could pull them into one stream and push them out of another, then you can focus all your treatment efforts into the one where you've you've you've attracted them.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and they were an invasive species to start with?
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_06: So in their native range, which uh in our part of the world, these are um these are sea lamprey that are from the Atlantic coast.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_06: So, you know, along the coast of Massachusetts, for example, they are native and they are not problematic for the fish that live there because they have co-evolved.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_06: When the uh various canal systems, and in particular, there's a fair amount of uh you know finger pointing that's going on towards the Erie Canal as opposed to the St.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence Seaway.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_06: We think it's the Erie Canal that was the pathway uh through Lake Champlain and into the Great Lakes that ended up introducing um uh sea lamprey to the Great Lakes basin.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_06: And there, these are fish like lake trout, um uh lake whitefish, walleye that don't have for which these were not part of their, you know, their history, right?
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_06: All of a sudden there's this parasitic fish that wants to latch on and they don't know any better and uh they're particularly effective.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_06: And so, yeah, so yeah.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_06: So it's kind of one of these things where in their native range they're doing poorly, and where they've been introduced, they're doing very well.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_06: That story repeats itself day in and day out.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_02: How many how how let's say it's uh we have a 10-pound lake trout?
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_02: What would it take in lamprey years?
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_02: How what would it kill a lake a 10-pound lake trout?
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_02: Would it be one lamprey on it for a week, five lampreys?
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a calculation to that?
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, one lamprey can do a heck of a lot of damage.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_06: And in fact, the math is around 44 pounds of flesh one lamprey can kill in its lifetime.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_06: And so they, as an adult, it'll jump around.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_06: So it'll like, oh, I enjoyed, thank you for thank you.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_06: I enjoyed sucking you dry.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_06: You know, you've got no no blood or worthwhile fluids left in you.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_06: So I'm gonna ditch you, you scrawny little lake trout, and try to find a plump a plumper one.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_06: Um, the hard thing is in the wild, it's really hard to study because you you catch the ones that are early in that feeding phase.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_06: If a fish is dead, we don't see it in the Great Lakes, right?
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_06: We don't see dead, dead fish.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_06: So trying to figure out how much they actually eat in nature is is challenging.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_06: There's obviously been lab studies and a bunch of creative ways to try to get at it, but uh yeah, there 44 pounds is the current estimate of what one adult sea lamprey can do.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_06: That's a lot of fish.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, how long do they live?
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_06: Uh when they're in their parasitic phase, a couple years.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_06: So yeah.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_06: Oh my god.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_06: It's funny a lot.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: We've been able to deal with most invasive species.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I I I probably the biggest one that we dealt with was the zebra mussels and of course gobies.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: And this is one that just and we've been able or nature has been able to to kind of bring them all into the fold and and said, you know, okay, let's coexist guys, let's figure out who how we get but sea lamp ray, like I said, from when I was a kid, so that means they were there way before I was, you know, walking through those watchers.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: We've never been able to do anything with there's just no doesn't have a predator, right?
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's that's the biggest problem.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing that predates on it, and therefore you could rule that out.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the poor Gobi found out pretty quick that they were good, good smallmouth bass food, and so that balanced its way out.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: But for this thing, there's just nothing there.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's the apex predator in uh in a world where we have been trying.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'll bet you more time and effort has been spent on trying to control lamprey than there has on rehabilitating walleye or lake trout or salmon or or any of that all put together.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're probably right, right?
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_06: We're about 30 to 40 million dollars a year between Canada and the US on sea lamprey control.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_06: It pays for itself, to be very clear.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_06: That is money well spent.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_06: It pays for itself six times over.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: How's that?
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: What do you mean?
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_06: Uh just the the in the value of the fishery that's protected.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_06: So even though we have to spend money to knock down sea lamprey, if we didn't, that fishery would be yeah, you would not be going out fishing for lake trout, fishing for walleye, fishing for Chinook.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_06: And so the value of that fishery is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_06: So it's been something, even in, you know, given current Canada US uh sort of status, um, there's been bipartisan support in the US for sustained funding of work on C lambre control because of that economic argument.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_06: It just pays for itself.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_06: The math is so simple, so obvious that, hey, everybody believes that this is worthwhile doing.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_06: And, you know, it's it's actually the largest and most sustained and most successful biological control program on the planet.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_06: But it is sustained.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_06: There's no like, you know, there's no silver bullet where we do it once and it's done.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_06: It has, it's it's like clockwork.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_06: And as long as we stick with the schedule, which COVID screwed up, as long as we stick with the schedule, we can keep them knocked down and we have fantastic recreational, commercial, subsistence fisheries.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_06: The second we take our foot off the gas, they're back at it.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_06: Eradication is, you know, uh probably a pipe dream, or at least in our generation, uh in the future, perhaps.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_06: Um, it's just one of those things.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_06: It's worth spending the money, it's worth all the effort.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_06: There are hundreds of professionals on both sides of the border that do nothing but work in this space, and we all benefit from it.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: There were I said there were two things.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing is, by the way, did you notice?
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: That was a both that was another podcast we just did right there.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's perfect.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: From a scientific standpoint, can you clarify this uh for folks who still insist on calling a walleye a pickerel and why we saw fit to come up with this as a reminder?
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_06: There's walleye is walleye.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, you know, pickrel does not exist in the common name of walleye or zander, if we want to talk about their European cousin.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_06: Um, there are, of course, chain pickerel, uh, which are an asakid, which is in the same family as muskelunge and pike.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_06: Uh they look nothing like a walleye, they taste nothing like a walleye.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, and uh you have to really work hard to find them, at least in this part of the world.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: So okay, so just so we have it, once and for all, because there's a lot of people who uh are uh erroneously believe that this was an American thing.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: That south of the border, they refer to this thing we call walleye as as a pickrow.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: We get that so often, right?
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_02: Up north though, especially up north in the K.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's the American walleye, that's American.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_06: Okie dokie.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I think there's something generational there, but yeah, it's no different than you know, I'm looking at what's behind you on the wall, and if I call it a bucket mouth, then you call it a bass, right?
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's the exact yeah, walleye is in the perch family, correct?
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, per kids, yeah.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_02: So there you go.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_01: All right, before we let you go, one final thing.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_01: Any updates on uh the old uh question do fish feel forward-facing sonar?
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_02: You're gonna find that out real soon, yeah.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_06: Uh mine's in the mail.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_06: So uh yeah, some good deals out there right now, folks.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_06: Um, yeah.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_06: Uh you know, it it doesn't make sense that they should feel it.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_06: Um we're pretty in tune, and I can guarantee you the manufacturers are in tune with uh what fish can and can't sense.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_06: For a long time, the science community has been looking for things that repel fish, that direct them, right?
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_06: Uh and we've done very poor with uh The kind of sonar waves that are emitted by these types of devices.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_06: You know, we're not talking about marine mammals, we're talking about fish, and they just don't have the cape, uh, the capacity for uh for sensing these things.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_06: Um, it is conceivable that people fish in different ways, or you simply are seeing what you couldn't see before.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_06: You never knew that the fish were, you know, swimming in the other direction when they heard your boat, whether that be your trolling motor, whether that be, you know, the your choice in music, your conversation, talking yourself or your buddy.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_06: Absolutely.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_06: You know, there's a lot of things that are happening uh on a boat that create noise.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_06: And noise is well transmitted through water um and at frequencies that fish can hear.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_06: So uh so when we're you know, when we're you know knocking around on a boat making noise, can fish hear that?
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_06: Absolutely.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_06: Um can fish hear the really, really uh, you know, um, you know, unique signals being emitted by these uh forward-facing sonar.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_06: There's no evidence that that's the the case.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_06: So yeah.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_06: And and a reminder for folks, this this isn't something that, you know, the you know, that we've got the three main manufacturers in this space.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_06: Um, this is you know, none of them sort of in quotes invented sonar, right?
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_06: This is this came from the military and it came from the commercial fishing space.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_06: No commercial fishing fleet is going to equip their boat with equipment that good point drive away the fish.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_06: That is so true.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_06: If you are a tuna fleet, the last thing you're gonna be doing is using sonar to find fish if you think you're chasing them across the high seas.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_06: So I think that should be, you know, should that should just end the conversation right there.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_01: Very well put.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing I'll argue with there is, you know, we all have these uh uh memories of watching the TV shows uh depicting uh military operations underwater, and that submarine would always send out that ping ping and they would hear it on the other side.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_01: They had the the headset on, they would hear it.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that's maybe what prompted all of this.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_02: I know I'll put a little two cents in here.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_02: I I've been well, we've been using I don't know how many years have we been forward-facing now?
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_02: Since it came out, I think.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_02: Whatever.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_02: Whatever.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, something like that.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I it I just got off the water a couple of days ago, and I used it uh extensively the last couple of days of it.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I cannot remember any time when I've shot my signal out there and fish just took off.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_02: I it's never happened.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's happened to me.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, then you might have had something else happen.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_02: Did you do that to the boat?
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_02: Did you know something else?
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't 10, 15 feet away, 50 feet away.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, because I was I was on a I was on a different patches, different schools of walleye just two days ago, three days ago.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I just sat there and I had my beam right on them, right on them.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I just sat there and watched them, watched them, watched them.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, threw a cast out there, boom, one comes up, eats it.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I got one.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_02: Throw it out again, another one comes up, and they just didn't they didn't budge.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_02: Now, they did stop biting because I was picking them off out of the school.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think they were getting smart on that, but they didn't budge an inch.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't care.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_02: I had smallmouth coming in under the boat, doing this, going up to the boat, like almost coming up to the transducer.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_01: But that's because you're Peter Bowman.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_01: No, and and you're you're the pie piper of fishermen.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_02: I I only can wish that, but I'll tell you what, but I'll tell you what, I don't believe that it's it's scaring them away.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, maybe you're the one instance or a couple instances, but out of out of thousands that we've seen, you know what I mean?
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_02: Doesn't it?
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still I'm leery.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_01: I know you're leery.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's all.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm 50-50 on it.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not going to uh go one way or the other until we have the scientific community.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_06: We need you guys on it too.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us yay or nay.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_06: There will undoubtedly be more, but from everything I've I've read, we're talking about frequencies that just aren't in the realm of possibility based on all the work that's been done on fish hearing and sensory physiology.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_06: There's been all sorts of lab work done for over a hundred years exploring these issues.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_06: And, you know, it just doesn't seem to compute.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_06: They're really good at and and fish talk to each other.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_06: Some of them communicate, I should say, um, with grunts and burps and even farts.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_06: Uh we know this.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's what all that bubbling coming out of there is.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_06: But all of them are, you know, you picked up uh, you know, um something like a drum uh or you know grunts, yeah, grunts, yeah, things like that.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_06: Like it's grunt, it's really low, it's like deep, you know, it's not like you know, like the frequencies that are being used on these things are so high, they're beyond what anything that that we or the fish can hear.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_06: They're just you know, organisms have their ears, their sensory physiology tuned in to a certain range, and that range for fish does not include forward-facing sonar.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_06: Similarly, ours does not either.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll tell you, it'll be a cold day in hell when I stop using that technology.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care what you guys come up with, I love using it.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Bottom line.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_04: It's fun.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, my friend, thank you so much.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_01: As usual, you're uh a breath of fresh air on a rather uh dull hour of uh dialogue.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: But uh we appreciate you joining us and uh keep in touch.
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_01: We'll uh when you got something that even if you don't hear from us for a few weeks, but something just hit the the scientific community in the way of fishing, please reach out to us.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_02: If you have any questions on your forward facing once you set it up, fire away, buddy.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_02: We'll appreciate that.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_01: All right, take care.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Cook, Dr.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen Cook, the in-house fish doc here at the Outdoor Journal.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_01: We took a whole bunch of stuff there.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_01: That was awesome.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I wasn't going to go out that far, but I thought, what the hell?
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like he's on every day.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_02: I guarantee you our audience loves this.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_02: They they love that right there.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_01: I guarantee you and I love it for sure.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_01: So and they are us, and we are them.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_01: So there you go.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Anyways, uh, did we uh hit all the marks?
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Dino?
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_05: We got all of them.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_05: That was very good.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_05: We were very nice.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_01: We even put the pike uh walleye thing out there.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_05: And that was kind of an ad for the new t-shirt that's on the store.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, well, I mentioned at the top of the show, uh, this is the latest and greatest uh addition.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: If you're uh even if you don't have somebody in your circles that's still calling that thing a pickerel, even if you don't, you should just put it on, wear it anyways for those who are thinking of it.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just a cool looking black and white t-shirt, if nothing else, too, right?
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_02: At the end of the day, black and white t-shirts rock.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_01: All available uh at the store fishingcanada.com, along with everything else that you would possibly ever need or think of in the fishing world.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that are it.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, contest may or may not be going on at this point.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, Dean.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: We got anything happening or no contest updates.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_05: There was a winner announced a couple episodes ago.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_05: So if you missed that, uh you can go find that.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_05: But I can spoil it for you.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_02: You thought the same thing I did.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_02: You can go find that if uh I can give you a spoiler though.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_05: If if you won the contest, you would hear from us, just so everyone knows.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_05: So Dean's being honest there.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Good point.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Boys and girls, time to head off on behalf of the entire crew, Mr.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Bowman here.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Nikki V, who is working on another project in the studio somewhere else.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Dean Taylor over there where he's always positioned.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Angelo Biola saying thank you very much for joining us.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to you next time.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_01: This episode of Outdoor Journal Radio has been brought to you in part by the Invasive Species Center, protecting Canada's land and water from invasive species.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Freedom Cruise Canada, rent the boat, own the memories, and JMB Cycle a Marine, your home for all things power sports, boats, and equipment.