Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
Speaker 2: Out of the Ground. The Lord God formed every beast
Speaker 2: of the field and every bird at the sky, and
Speaker 2: brought them to the man to see what he would
Speaker 2: call them. And whatever the man called a living creature,
Speaker 2: that was its name Genesis two nineteen. Well, that passage
Speaker 2: doesn't seem to cover fishes, but hey, I've got just
Speaker 2: the guy. It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 2: A giant, hairy creature part epe part masts.
Speaker 3: In Luckness, a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in
Speaker 3: the Highlands of Scotland.
Speaker 1: It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 4: Mornster.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 2: Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. This is an episode
Speaker 2: about science and cryptozoology. If you like monsters and you
Speaker 2: like science, this episode should be fun. Today we're talking
Speaker 2: with biologists Benjamin Frabele. Ben is an ichthyologist who works
Speaker 2: as a collection manager of the Marine Vertebrate Collection at
Speaker 2: Script's Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. He's also
Speaker 2: a listener to this show and an enthusiast of cryptozoology,
Speaker 2: but foremost a dedicated scientists. Today, he's going to explain
Speaker 2: how life forms are actually named scientifically and how species
Speaker 2: are identified and then the process of that. We'll be
Speaker 2: talking about monsters, science, dinosaurs and silly names.
Speaker 5: Mornster Ben, how did you get into this field?
Speaker 6: Well, I have had a fascination with kind of the
Speaker 6: biodiversity of life, for the diversity of forms, since a
Speaker 6: fairly early age when I was when I was young,
Speaker 6: my my father collected fossils, and so we kind of
Speaker 6: had fossils all over the house, and you know, as
Speaker 6: every young child does. At some point I went through
Speaker 6: the dinosaur phase. And then at some point early on
Speaker 6: I got a book about seashore life and was just
Speaker 6: enamored with the diversity of seashore life, and over time
Speaker 6: it turned into fish. I will say that at least
Speaker 6: at some point Pokemon had a little bit of an
Speaker 6: influence at least later later on in my in my life.
Speaker 6: But then, uh yeah, I just and then when I
Speaker 6: got to university, I really wanted to pursue studying fish.
Speaker 6: It was fish was what I decided was an interesting
Speaker 6: group of animals and what I wanted to work on.
Speaker 6: And so once I was at university. I tried to
Speaker 6: find and if there was a collection there because it's
Speaker 6: kind of the best place to have interactions with the
Speaker 6: diversity of different types of fish on a daily basis.
Speaker 6: And yes, I just started there, and I've been working
Speaker 6: in museum collections pretty much ever since for about over
Speaker 6: ten years now.
Speaker 2: So there's there's several kinds of fish.
Speaker 6: So this is something that comes up a lot. And
Speaker 6: there's actually one of the curators at the Smithsonian this
Speaker 6: is something he will always yell about. Is there's fish
Speaker 6: versus fishes. So when you're using fish that way plural,
Speaker 6: it's actually just referring to everything of the group of
Speaker 6: fish of the same species. And when you say fish
Speaker 6: is it's referring to fish, multiple species of fish. So
Speaker 6: I actually had a little faux pod there earlier.
Speaker 1: I should have said fishes when I said fish. We didn't.
Speaker 5: We didn't notice.
Speaker 2: So let me see if I understand that correctly. If
Speaker 2: there's lots of goldfish, that's fish. But if there's goldfish
Speaker 2: and catfish, that's fishes. Yes, okay, I see that's interesting.
Speaker 2: And if I'm fishing, but if I'm fishing there's no fish,
Speaker 2: there's that's been my experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Sam, all right, interesting.
Speaker 2: That is interesting. I suspect we're going to get into
Speaker 2: a lot of interesting things here. The reason we're having
Speaker 2: you on is actually because you reached out to us,
Speaker 2: which is great as a listener and a scientist working
Speaker 2: scientist about this topic which I've always found interesting, but
Speaker 2: I didn't really I never really thought about doing an
Speaker 2: episode about it. But I think this will be fun.
Speaker 2: We're actually going to talk about how animals are named.
Speaker 2: I'll probably call the episode something like Naming Monsters, but
Speaker 2: we'll probably talk about more common animals first. But I
Speaker 2: wanted to get to like, let's assume for a moment
Speaker 2: that our listeners represent a wide spectrum of expertise. So
Speaker 2: I imagine there's some people who have no idea how
Speaker 2: this works or even how animals are named at all,
Speaker 2: and people who are actually working in the field. We're
Speaker 2: all over the place. But because I know a lot
Speaker 2: of our listeners are young people who are interested in science,
Speaker 2: can you talk a little bit about the normal process,
Speaker 2: kind of at a high level, for how one goes
Speaker 2: about identifying and naming species.
Speaker 6: So when people discuss it, they kind of break it
Speaker 6: down into a bunch of different parts. The initial part
Speaker 6: is the discovery of the new species, which can come
Speaker 6: in a lot of different and interesting ways. For me,
Speaker 6: and I think a lot of ichthyologists or people that
Speaker 6: study fishes like myself, it's not as glamorous as one
Speaker 6: might think. You're sitting in a museum, you're comparing some
Speaker 6: dead fish that somebody collected in the seventies together. You know,
Speaker 6: notice one of them looks a little different, and you
Speaker 6: know it's from a slightly different part of the world
Speaker 6: or maybe slightly different habitat, and you go from there.
Speaker 6: That's one way of discovery, and that's honestly how a
Speaker 6: good number of them in terms of fish, and and
Speaker 6: throughout this interview, I'm actually gonna kind of mostly focus
Speaker 6: on fishes because that's what I know best. I know
Speaker 6: in other fields of zoology and in botany, the species
Speaker 6: description process can vary a little bit.
Speaker 1: Especially in botany.
Speaker 6: It's it's it's somewhat similar, but there it's very confusing
Speaker 6: as to what a species even is in plants, so
Speaker 6: I'm gonna refer refer mostly to to fish and vertebrate life.
Speaker 6: But anyways, so you know, you could find it in
Speaker 6: a museum. You could be fortunate enough to find it
Speaker 6: out in the field. You could you could have a
Speaker 6: fisherman may have caught one. But it's very difficult to
Speaker 6: describe a species off of one specimen, and so you
Speaker 6: go out on a purpose, purposeful expedition and try to
Speaker 6: collect more.
Speaker 1: And you can get lucky and do that.
Speaker 2: Interrupting me, why would it be difficult with one specimen?
Speaker 2: Is it because of like sexual dimorphism or that sort
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that that type of thing you you want in
Speaker 6: a species description. It's you know, it's not a hard
Speaker 6: and fast rule that you have to have more than
Speaker 6: one specimen available, but it is definitely preferred because you
Speaker 6: can show that, oh, you didn't just find this one
Speaker 6: deformed or diseased individual of a commonly known species that
Speaker 6: you may just with one. You can also it's really
Speaker 6: good to present kind of the wide range of characters
Speaker 6: from a good number of specimens of the new species,
Speaker 6: so you can give, like, you know, something along twenty
Speaker 6: three to twenty five dorsal fin spines instead of just
Speaker 6: saying twenty three dorsal fin spines on this one specimen
Speaker 6: that I looked at and I guess that comes to
Speaker 6: another point, which we can talk about a little bit later,
Speaker 6: because this could take.
Speaker 1: A little tangent.
Speaker 6: Recently, actually just within the last year, there's been some
Speaker 6: some back and forth in science and nature, some of
Speaker 6: these you know, higher broader audience to research journals talking
Speaker 6: about describing species from photographs. This is kind of put
Speaker 6: forward by I think some ornithologists, people who study birds
Speaker 6: that don't want to kill these very rare and endangered
Speaker 6: birds to have specimens in a museum, and so they
Speaker 6: would like to try to describe I think they're actually
Speaker 6: more just in a subspecies, which is below the species
Speaker 6: level description, more for like a population. But they proposed that, hey,
Speaker 6: let us use a very high quality image as the
Speaker 6: specimen quote unquote for this description, and as you could imagine,
Speaker 6: there's actually been quite a lot of backlash and people
Speaker 6: being like, no, this is a very bad idea.
Speaker 2: A blurry bigfoot photo would not really count though, right,
Speaker 2: I mean you're talking about extremely high resolution.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I think a lot of this actually had already
Speaker 6: shaken up in the literature back in like the late nineties,
Speaker 6: people were talking about describing species from picks, and I know,
Speaker 6: at least in the cryptozoology world. I think there are
Speaker 6: about I think three at least three cryptids that have
Speaker 6: had formal quote unquote formal species descriptions, all from images,
Speaker 6: not specimens. Surprisingly, and so there was actually a little
Speaker 6: bit of discussion of this in uh, the more mainstream
Speaker 6: scientific literature back when this when this happened, I guess
Speaker 6: it was all precipitated by the description of Caddy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of my that was one of my questions. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't want to say, I don't want to take
Speaker 2: us off of the tangent yet, so we will actually
Speaker 2: come back to that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, How often are new species found of new pisches?
Speaker 6: So, at least in the fish world, it's it's fairly frequent.
Speaker 6: You know, Like I myself am working on at least
Speaker 6: one at the moment, I know of a bunch of
Speaker 6: other undescribed species that are just kind of floating around.
Speaker 1: And so there's a.
Speaker 6: Database kind of that's that some researchers of the California
Speaker 6: Academy of Science put together called Catalog of Fishes, and
Speaker 6: they have done a really good job of keeping track
Speaker 6: of new species descriptions, changing of names, and all these
Speaker 6: taxonomic things that happen with fish, and I think it's
Speaker 6: roughly about four hundred new species of fish are described
Speaker 6: every year. Wow, So it's pretty it's actually pretty high.
Speaker 6: It's more than one a day, I guess, if you're
Speaker 6: going to break it down.
Speaker 1: That way, yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 6: It can fluctuate, you know, there's some years where only
Speaker 6: three hundred get described or two hundred, but it's still
Speaker 6: And this is something I think a lot of people
Speaker 6: don't realize. And something I when I, you know, was
Speaker 6: first getting started in ichthyology as a as an undergraduate,
Speaker 6: didn't realize is.
Speaker 1: How much we actually don't.
Speaker 6: Have the diversity of life sorted out in biology class.
Speaker 6: You kind of just get this preconception that, oh, we
Speaker 6: already know what all the species are. Like it's some
Speaker 6: guys to carry that back in the eighteen hundreds. People
Speaker 6: don't realize that it's still very much active, especially in
Speaker 6: less populated parts of the world. So, you know, I
Speaker 6: think probably the three richest areas of effort in fish biology,
Speaker 6: at least fish taxonomy or South America freshwater systems, which
Speaker 6: is what I did a lot of my graduate work
Speaker 6: in and there it's you can't sneeze in a neotropical
Speaker 6: collection without uncovering a new species. And then Africa, African
Speaker 6: freshwaters and Southeast Asian freshwaters are all kind of the
Speaker 6: big where a lot of species are coming out of.
Speaker 2: Neat So basically the looking well, although I hear people
Speaker 2: talking about like if you go to these places where
Speaker 2: people haven't looked, they find these species, but I also
Speaker 2: hear people finding new species of smaller life forms in
Speaker 2: their own yards even.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So that's you know, going back to just kind
Speaker 6: of the original process, I mean, the discovery of it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: That's another way is people find it by acts it
Speaker 6: when they're looking for something else. So you have all
Speaker 6: these fun stories of somebody who's like an ornithologist and they're,
Speaker 6: you know, doing a dissection on this seagull and they
Speaker 6: find this weird little parasite and it turns out to
Speaker 6: be like a new genus or something like that of
Speaker 6: parasitic amphipod or tapeworm or whatever. Or people who are
Speaker 6: focusing on a group of organisms that just haven't been
Speaker 6: very well studied. Again, a lot of those tend to
Speaker 6: be very small. The bigger an animal is more well studied,
Speaker 6: it tends to be.
Speaker 2: They're easier to study because they're big, I don't know,
Speaker 2: as opposed to.
Speaker 6: There's a point where it gets a little difficult, like
Speaker 6: with whales or your arts. We actually know very very
Speaker 6: little about their biology just because it is hard to
Speaker 6: track them down and see what they're up to. You
Speaker 6: can't put them in the aquarium, you know, easily.
Speaker 2: No, No, it's tricky. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So finding so many new species all the time, does
Speaker 4: this make it more or less likely that aquatic cryptids
Speaker 4: might exist?
Speaker 1: Or yeah?
Speaker 6: So, I mean, so that aspect of it, as I
Speaker 6: was just you know, as we were just talking about,
Speaker 6: like the size does kind of play into it.
Speaker 1: Big new big things are not discovered nearly as frequently.
Speaker 6: And and a lot of new species descriptions are especially
Speaker 6: in the last fifteen or so years with the rise
Speaker 6: of using genetics to kind of poke around in evolutionary history.
Speaker 6: A lot of new species are things that look very
Speaker 6: similar to other species and people just didn't really notice
Speaker 6: that they were different.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: And so is that like the.
Speaker 2: Convergent biology are you talking about, like two, No, it's
Speaker 2: very closely related, right, closely related? Okay, got it.
Speaker 6: And so that's actually like i'd say, the majority of
Speaker 6: species that I personally have described is that's been the
Speaker 6: case where the two fish. You know, if you're not
Speaker 6: necessarily an expert in the group, or you're just out collecting,
Speaker 6: you catch a bunch, you are like, oh, there's a
Speaker 6: little bit of variation in the color pattern of the species,
Speaker 6: but you put them in the same jar, set them
Speaker 6: over to the collection, and then like thirty years later,
Speaker 6: I come along and I'm like, oh, let's run some
Speaker 6: genetics on the one with the spots versus the one
Speaker 6: that doesn't have spots and see if.
Speaker 1: They're the same actually or not.
Speaker 6: And a lot of times they do turn out to
Speaker 6: be genetically distinct closely related species, But there are instances
Speaker 6: of convergence as well. It's usually the like convergence, as
Speaker 6: in two things that aren't all related looking similar, don't.
Speaker 6: The differences are less subtle than between closely related species.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, sure, I think here about the there's so
Speaker 2: many species that sort of mimic other species for defensive purposes.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I love that, and I love Fasmin's anyway.
Speaker 2: I so let's step back a minute about this process.
Speaker 2: So we've talked here about how you find you species,
Speaker 2: but that doesn't really just give you the right to
Speaker 2: name it. First of all, you've got to prove it's new,
Speaker 2: right and then yeah, so how does that work? Is
Speaker 2: that always done through journals?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 6: So, up until I think nineteen thirty one, it was
Speaker 6: kind of all over the place, you know, so, I
Speaker 6: guess just a brief history lesson on naming species conventions.
Speaker 6: All of this was kind of started in you know,
Speaker 6: the Age of Enlightenment. In the seventeen hundreds, people started
Speaker 6: talking about trying to do a better job categorizing the
Speaker 6: organisms around them and categorizing life. It's all culminated in
Speaker 6: carl Lenaeus, Carlas Linaeus, who's a researcher, I believe in Sweden.
Speaker 6: He's a botanist mostly, but he published this giant work
Speaker 6: called system A Natura, Systema Nature, and in that he
Speaker 6: kind of tried to categorize all organisms, plants, and animals
Speaker 6: that he knew about, most of which are from Europe.
Speaker 6: But in that he also made up what's called binomial nomenclature.
Speaker 6: You know, this is the scientific name of a species.
Speaker 6: This is the species genus name and the species name
Speaker 6: like saens. Yeah, so Homo sapiens is the Homo's the
Speaker 6: genus sapiens is the species sapiens. The second sapiens is
Speaker 6: the subspecies name cool. And so this kind of became
Speaker 6: the naming convention. Prior to that, people had already played
Speaker 6: around with kind of these descriptive names, but they were
Speaker 6: making them like twelve words long, all in Latin, and
Speaker 6: so you'd have something like, you know, just I wish
Speaker 6: I had a good example, but it would be describing
Speaker 6: this one little fish from the Mediterranean, and it had
Speaker 6: just like three lines worth of very long Latin words
Speaker 6: describing it. People realized that was a little overkill, so
Speaker 6: we ended up with just kind of these two names,
Speaker 6: and then this hierarchical classification system that Lena has developed
Speaker 6: as well, with with with the help of some other
Speaker 6: researchers and other people's notes, and so this is where
Speaker 6: you you know, you've taken you back to u high
Speaker 6: school or middle school biology class, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species,
Speaker 6: and kingdom.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 2: Yay high school.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And so so it's stuck and that's what people
Speaker 6: are still using there. There are some camps that see,
Speaker 6: you know, because it is kind of an artificial system
Speaker 6: that humans has classifiers as organizers have developed to deal
Speaker 6: with trying to sort out the very complex history of life.
Speaker 6: There are some people that really don't like it. There
Speaker 6: have been a lot of proposals to kind of come
Speaker 6: up with a different system.
Speaker 1: So there's like this thing called was like.
Speaker 6: Philo code, where you're kind of really just focusing only
Speaker 6: on the tips, like the species. When you say like
Speaker 6: tips on a tree, I guess if you're looking at
Speaker 6: like a phylogene and evolutionary tree, the tip is the species, right,
Speaker 6: And so it kind of removes this hierarchy, which does
Speaker 6: kind of get confusing sometimes, but I think that makes
Speaker 6: them more confusing. So we've stuck with what Linaeus came
Speaker 6: up with over you know, a couple hundred years ago,
Speaker 6: and so in terms of in terms of that, people
Speaker 6: were kind of describing stuff all over the place. The
Speaker 6: early literature is very sticky and hard to get through.
Speaker 6: It's the descriptions. Linus's descriptions were like two sentences long.
Speaker 6: It's not great to only describe a new species and
Speaker 6: two sentences it doesn't really get a lot of information across.
Speaker 1: And people you know, started.
Speaker 6: Expanding on this, but it's still was kind of not standardized.
Speaker 6: It was all over the place until in the nineteen
Speaker 6: thirties they had a big meeting and they developed what's
Speaker 6: called the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, and in plants,
Speaker 6: there's also the Internet Code of Botanical Nomenclature. They meet
Speaker 6: every I don't know ten or fifteen years and kind
Speaker 6: of make a new edition of the IC. We call
Speaker 6: it the ICZN, the International Code Zoological Nomenclature, and.
Speaker 1: It's this book.
Speaker 6: It's not huge, and one pages in French, one pages
Speaker 6: in English, because apparently those are the only two languages
Speaker 6: that matter in taxonomy.
Speaker 1: And it just lays down all the rules.
Speaker 6: So when you are just defining a new species and
Speaker 6: describing it, you have to write a formal description. You
Speaker 6: have to provide an illustration of the species or a
Speaker 6: or a photograph of the species, and then you have
Speaker 6: to deposit what are called type specimens or type material
Speaker 6: at a museum or you know, at some sort of
Speaker 6: institution where it is publicly available for other people to
Speaker 6: look at.
Speaker 2: What's a type specimen. I hear that all the time
Speaker 2: with Bigfoot.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a type specimen is when you're doing your description,
Speaker 6: you kind of set aside to two different types of types.
Speaker 6: There's a holotype and then there are paratypes. So the
Speaker 6: holotype is the model specimen for this your hypothesis. What
Speaker 6: you're hypothesizing is a new species. So like that is
Speaker 6: going to stay at the museum, and that is going
Speaker 6: to be the one that if you think, oh, I
Speaker 6: don't really think that's a new species because it looks
Speaker 6: really similar to this other species that was already described,
Speaker 6: you can go to that museum, ask for the holotype,
Speaker 6: check it out, and you know, really that is the
Speaker 6: one that you, as the researcher doing the description, want
Speaker 6: that specimen to show all the characteristics that you think
Speaker 6: make that a.
Speaker 1: New species or its own species.
Speaker 6: The typing, as I said, was kind of made up
Speaker 6: in the late eighteen hundred's early nineteen hundreds. So unfortunately,
Speaker 6: there's not actually a type for Homo sapiens. Where I
Speaker 6: can't remember, Oh, somebody wanted to have their body set
Speaker 6: I think maybe like Cuvier. It was a very famous
Speaker 6: French naturalist and anatomist. I think wanted his body to
Speaker 6: be the type of Homo sapiens.
Speaker 2: Wow, I mean, sho't shouldn't they dig up carl and
Speaker 2: Ans I mean, would that be.
Speaker 6: Proposals of doing that as well, and so, and then
Speaker 6: you have what are called paratypes, which are.
Speaker 1: Kind of you choose how many there are going to be.
Speaker 6: You usually want to get like a bunch of specimens
Speaker 6: from what you think the geographic range, from all over
Speaker 6: that range, and then you know, a good variation in
Speaker 6: terms of the size. Or you could also have like
Speaker 6: different levels of development, so you could have larvae, you
Speaker 6: could have subadults, or you know, if you're dealing with plants,
Speaker 6: you could have you know, the seeds and the fruit
Speaker 6: and the whatever. And so you have all those and
Speaker 6: you call those are paratypes. So those are also called
Speaker 6: secondary types, and those are also supposed to be very
Speaker 6: good representatives of what you think is a new species.
Speaker 1: And you usually.
Speaker 6: Also tend to and it gets the paratypes at a
Speaker 6: lot of different museums, not just one place, so they're
Speaker 6: kind of spread out so people can see that in
Speaker 6: different parts of the world. So you have to write
Speaker 6: your formal description, you need a picture, you need to
Speaker 6: designate some types, and then you also have to propose
Speaker 6: a name and then explain the name.
Speaker 4: Okay, so I've got a question following from that point,
Speaker 4: and I guess this is a question that.
Speaker 5: You never hear ever at all. So to name all
Speaker 5: new species after yourself?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so that is in the International Code Zoological Nomenclature.
Speaker 6: That is one of the things you are not allowed
Speaker 6: to do. Oh but other people can name them after you, okay.
Speaker 6: And so if you're working in a field long enough
Speaker 6: it like in fish taxonomy, probably eventually somebody will name
Speaker 6: something after you, which is awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Or if you were doing cephalopods, you could be squid
Speaker 2: pro quo.
Speaker 6: So yeah, so there can be some pretty funny signic
Speaker 6: names out there. I wrote down a little list of
Speaker 6: just some fun ones. We can go through that now,
Speaker 6: or we can you know, do it later in the
Speaker 6: episode of Whatever.
Speaker 5: Are you gonna say?
Speaker 2: I'm so interested in this topic. I didn't believe I've
Speaker 2: got I'm just very I have lots of questions. But yeah,
Speaker 2: let's let's talk about some fun names. Yeah, and then
Speaker 2: back to the hard science because.
Speaker 6: This so in terms of the names, I mean, that's
Speaker 6: like the kind of the more interesting part of it, right.
Speaker 6: You know, you see a lot of names like we
Speaker 6: can use cad Burrosaurus Willis I as a good example,
Speaker 6: the so Cadburro serus is the genus Willis I is
Speaker 6: the species Willis I is named in honor of whoever
Speaker 6: Willis Willis was their last name, and then it's it
Speaker 6: has to be latinized, so there's an eye on the
Speaker 6: end of it, which is the the conjugation for a
Speaker 6: male name masculine gendered uh noun, and so it's one I.
Speaker 6: Sometimes two eyes are also present, so sometimes it'll be
Speaker 6: like Willis willisy I is how you pronounce that it's
Speaker 6: two eyes And that kind of has more to do
Speaker 6: if if if the name itself is actually derived from
Speaker 6: a Romance language, the endings can be a little different
Speaker 6: because you are turning it into Latin. So if like
Speaker 6: you wanted to name it Saint Peter, you'd be like
Speaker 6: Sancty Pit Tree would be would.
Speaker 1: End up being the name. It wouldn't just be Saint
Speaker 1: Peter I.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so it's a little complicated, but so you'll see
Speaker 6: you'll see a lot of species with you know, a
Speaker 6: name and then Willis I.
Speaker 1: Something else you'll also see is.
Speaker 6: The if it's named after somebody, it'll instead of being
Speaker 6: Willis I, it'll be Willis E. As an it ends
Speaker 6: in an ae, and so that is the feminine uh
Speaker 6: does conjugation. I guess ending that you would use in
Speaker 6: an in an honorific name, which is one that you
Speaker 6: name after somebody else. So if it's named after a
Speaker 6: female researcher or your wife or you know, your daughter
Speaker 6: or something like that, you put an A on the
Speaker 6: end of it, and you see those all over the
Speaker 6: place other names. You know, people usually make the name
Speaker 6: somewhat descriptive. So the first species that I described as
Speaker 6: a lizardfish in the genus I Nototus, and the species
Speaker 6: is macro stigmas. Macro means big in Greek and Latin,
Speaker 6: Stigmas means spot, so you could think like like stigmata,
Speaker 6: you know, people thinking that they have the wounds of
Speaker 6: Christ on their hands. Stigmas means spot. And this fish,
Speaker 6: the best character for telling it apart from the other
Speaker 6: one is it has a much bigger.
Speaker 1: Spot on the side of its head.
Speaker 6: So you tend to do simple things like that. But
Speaker 6: a lot of times again these names come into it.
Speaker 6: So there's a pretty pretty well known in theologist here
Speaker 6: on the West coast named John mccoscar. He did his
Speaker 6: PhD here at Scripts Institution of Oceanography. He's studied fish
Speaker 6: all over, so he has a genus of fish named
Speaker 6: after him called micoscar ickfis, which is kind of a mouthful,
Speaker 6: but that literally just means my Coscar's fish neat and
Speaker 6: a pretty good example of Also, just one more example
Speaker 6: of that that we can get into talking about a
Speaker 6: little bit more later because it's probably one of the
Speaker 6: most interesting fish species discoveries ever is the selacanth, which
Speaker 6: is this fantastic prehistoric looking lobed finfish that was discovered
Speaker 6: in deep deep reef habitats off of southern Africa.
Speaker 2: I am so glad you brought that up. It was
Speaker 2: on my list of options. I was like, I didn't
Speaker 2: know if you want to talk about it, but it's
Speaker 2: absolutely something I want to talk about.
Speaker 6: So yeah, yeah, And so its scientific name is Latimera chilumni.
Speaker 1: At least the species from Africa.
Speaker 6: There's actually a second species that was described in two
Speaker 6: thousand and four, which is latin Area metadonensis.
Speaker 2: I believe set the one off of is it India
Speaker 2: ai in Anesia? Okay?
Speaker 6: Yeah, and so Latimera chilumni, the genus is latim Area.
Speaker 6: It's named and isn't honorific for Marjorie Courtney Latimer, who
Speaker 6: was the naturalist. She was a curator at the small
Speaker 6: small museum in East London, South Africa, and she was
Speaker 6: the first person to get a Seala camth because her buddy,
Speaker 6: who's a fisherman, was bringing her a bunch of shark
Speaker 6: specimens and he's like, hey, we also caught this thing.
Speaker 1: Do you want it?
Speaker 6: And she had no idea what it was. She did
Speaker 6: have some ichthological training. She wasn't so much of an ichthyologist,
Speaker 6: but you know, she had taken fish biology or echtheology,
Speaker 6: and she was, I have no idea what his fishes.
Speaker 6: I'm definitely gonna take it. She sent an illustration of
Speaker 6: it to this researcher J.
Speaker 1: LB.
Speaker 6: Smith, who was a very prolific ichthyologist down in the
Speaker 6: main museum there in South Africa, and this fun little
Speaker 6: postcard with this little drawing by her of it.
Speaker 1: He saw it thought he was going.
Speaker 6: Crazy lost his This fish disappeared from the fossil record
Speaker 6: eighty million years ago. How could you find this thing
Speaker 6: still living? It is one of the greatest finds, probably
Speaker 6: in the twentieth century of a new species. It's up
Speaker 6: there with like the okapi and some of the other
Speaker 6: kind of you know, more fanciful things that it turned
Speaker 6: out to be actual species.
Speaker 1: So J. L. B. Smith described it in.
Speaker 6: Nineteen thirty nine and he named it latim Area in
Speaker 6: honor of Marjorie Courtney Latimer. And then the species name
Speaker 6: is Chalumny and that's actually named after the river that
Speaker 6: he caught it kind of in. The fisherman who trawled
Speaker 6: it up he caught it in between the Chilumna River,
Speaker 6: which is I think off of somewhere in South Africa,
Speaker 6: and so that's the species is named in honor of
Speaker 6: that river.
Speaker 2: It's the river he came up. I mean there are
Speaker 2: deep water saltwater fish, right, I mean there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, But he caught it kind of like in front
Speaker 6: of like the near the mouth of that river in
Speaker 6: the ocean.
Speaker 1: He didn't catch it in the river interesting itself. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 6: And so the other species of Silacan latin Area menado
Speaker 6: ensis is named so the ending ensis means a place,
Speaker 6: so it's from the island of Menado. I don't know
Speaker 6: if I'm pronouncing that correctly in Indonesia.
Speaker 1: And so this is so it would.
Speaker 6: Be you know Latim area, So Latimer's fish from Menado.
Speaker 2: Ah, so that makes more sense. So Grover Krantz named
Speaker 2: Bigfoot Gigantopithecus Canadas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Canada canadensis.
Speaker 2: Which is afterwards Canada.
Speaker 6: I guess, yeah, that's the same species epithet that the
Speaker 6: beaver has. Actually, so the beaver scientific name at least
Speaker 6: they one in the in the US is castor canadensis.
Speaker 2: There we go, Okay, yeah, but these these sort of
Speaker 2: hypothetical names, they they they only would be real names
Speaker 2: if they were they follow the rules in your your book.
Speaker 6: There, Yeah, right, and so so we can we can
Speaker 6: talk about that now if you'd like.
Speaker 2: Well, before we get off Seila Camps, I wanted to
Speaker 2: mention something about them that I think is interesting. They
Speaker 2: are like a poster child for cryptozoology, which is funny
Speaker 2: to me because well, cryptozoology could be described as the
Speaker 2: hunt for you know, hidden animals or mystery animals. I
Speaker 2: always imagined, or always felt like it should be animals
Speaker 2: that people proposed existed, and no one was really proposing
Speaker 2: that Ceila Camps was still alive.
Speaker 5: A good point.
Speaker 2: There wasn't like a rich folklore about it. It just
Speaker 2: they discovered it was still alive, and you know, it
Speaker 2: overturned the idea that it was extinct. But that's not
Speaker 2: the same as as a mysterious animal that people claim
Speaker 2: to see and then they find out it's real. Like
Speaker 2: the O copy is better. But I don't know why
Speaker 2: this Ceila camp gets such an exalted place in cryptozoology,
Speaker 2: because it's.
Speaker 6: Something that I always also always kind of confused about
Speaker 6: as a kid. You know, I was in trusted in
Speaker 6: you know, cryptozoology and you know, mythological stuff like this.
Speaker 1: This is why I listen to the show.
Speaker 6: I've still am very interested in it, and you know,
Speaker 6: I get these cryptozoology books and the seilcanth would always
Speaker 6: be in there.
Speaker 1: But I was like, hmm, why, Yeah, it.
Speaker 2: Is peculiar, and maybe that's maybe they like a more
Speaker 2: expensive I mean, it's not like there's an organization or
Speaker 2: body that determines what is a cryptid. But but they
Speaker 2: I think I feel a little bit like that's cheating
Speaker 2: in a way, you know.
Speaker 6: And but I think what it what it is with
Speaker 6: the ceilicanth actually is that it highlights this living fossil. Uh,
Speaker 6: you know that I think a lot of people want
Speaker 6: cryptids to be living fossils, you know, lake monsters, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 6: big bigfoot as No, that's that's a very good point, really, Gigantopithecus.
Speaker 2: So I want to throw out something else. Again, I'm
Speaker 2: not a biologist, but I read a lot. And one
Speaker 2: of the things that bugs me about the whole idea
Speaker 2: of living fossils is there are several species around that
Speaker 2: that seem to have the strong morphological resemblance. They appear
Speaker 2: in form quite like their ancient ancestors, but that does
Speaker 2: not mean that they have not evolved. They could have
Speaker 2: undergone tremendous molecular changes over the course of these millions
Speaker 2: of years, and we just don't know it because we
Speaker 2: don't have the genetic material from those ancient bodies.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and so something that's really interesting with some of
Speaker 6: these living fossils, sorry to cut you off, no problems,
Speaker 6: is that a lot of them like So, there's this
Speaker 6: thing called the lungfish, which is another type of lobed
Speaker 6: fin fish. So these are different than most other fishes.
Speaker 6: Vacilacanthus is of lobed finfish as well, in that at
Speaker 6: the base of their fins they have a number of
Speaker 6: bones and in the history of the evolution of life.
Speaker 6: Ancestor of tetrapod organisms was a lobed finfish that crawled up,
Speaker 6: you know, into a muddy environment and these little bones
Speaker 6: in the base of their fin turned into the bones
Speaker 6: of our arms are laid our hands. So these are
Speaker 6: a very ancient, very interesting group of fishes, and they
Speaker 6: led to, you know, the radiation of land tetrapods, on
Speaker 6: land tetrapods being you know, four limbed vertebrate animals like.
Speaker 2: Quick shout out to our friends at Tetrapod Zoology and
Speaker 2: the Tetzoo podcast.
Speaker 6: Yeah so, but what is really crazy is a lot
Speaker 6: of these TETs, these lungfish have some of the largest
Speaker 6: genomes of any animal. Their genomes are just like billions
Speaker 6: upon billions of base care. They're huge because they've just
Speaker 6: been around. This lineage has existed for so long that
Speaker 6: they've just kind of gone through a lot of what
Speaker 6: are called genome duplications, and they just ended up with
Speaker 6: just these absurdly large genomes. Cilacants also have a very
Speaker 6: large genome. But yeah so, in terms of morphology, though,
Speaker 6: it is a lot of these things they call living
Speaker 6: fossils are called such because they look exactly like they're
Speaker 6: you know, eighty million year old or one hundred and
Speaker 6: seventy million year old fossil. And part of what that
Speaker 6: is is that they found a morphology that works, and
Speaker 6: it works in a lot of different conditions for some
Speaker 6: or very specific conditions, but it's worked right, and so
Speaker 6: there's not a lot of incentive incentive in natural selection
Speaker 6: or even drift to get away from that morphology. So
Speaker 6: you see this in like nautilus, you see this in scorpions,
Speaker 6: you see this in you know, like some lobsters.
Speaker 1: You see it in ginko. That's actually Genko is a great.
Speaker 6: Example is the last you know thing, and it's entire
Speaker 6: what entire order is this one ginko biloba biloba, and
Speaker 6: it looks exactly the same as ginko did two hundred
Speaker 6: or one hundred and fifty million years ago. So that's
Speaker 6: I think what is so interesting about these things we
Speaker 6: call living fossils, right.
Speaker 2: It is crazy because what that means is, even though
Speaker 2: they may be really biologically different, in a molecular level,
Speaker 2: those same crocodile would probably be really sexy to their
Speaker 2: ancient ancestors, right, I mean, they're good.
Speaker 5: Potentially yeah, wait of putting it.
Speaker 2: Although I think I think the other thing is we
Speaker 2: the You've really already highlighted a great way how much
Speaker 2: expertise comes into play with these sort of classifications, and
Speaker 2: for the average layman, you know, I you know, most
Speaker 2: people probably couldn't tell the difference between a cayman and
Speaker 2: an alligator. I mean, you know what I mean. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just all going to look like a crocodilian and
Speaker 2: that's you know, as much as they need to know.
Speaker 6: And so I think that is definitely a very important
Speaker 6: part of describing new species, is that you really need
Speaker 6: to have the expertise of the organism that you're dealing with,
Speaker 6: and uh to provide a meaningful description. You know. It's
Speaker 6: there's all kind of these people who who want to
Speaker 6: describe a new species and maybe say they're like an ecologist.
Speaker 6: They are a good scientist, but they're not very well
Speaker 6: versed in fish taxonomy and evolution.
Speaker 1: The description that they would do is not necessarily the best.
Speaker 6: And there's a lot of times where people have gotten
Speaker 6: themselves kind of in trouble or just like really wrote
Speaker 6: a really bad paper and it somehow gotten got published
Speaker 6: and so the name is there, but the original description
Speaker 6: is very bad or very poorly done, so somebody could
Speaker 6: has to go back and say, redescribe the species, which
Speaker 6: also happens a lot with some of these, like you know,
Speaker 6: ones from the early eighteen hundreds where they literally wrote
Speaker 6: three sentences. You know, somebody will go back and what's
Speaker 6: called redescribe it. And so the expertise really is important,
Speaker 6: and that's something that's kind of scary, especially in taxonomy.
Speaker 6: You see articles about this pop up every once in
Speaker 6: a while that taxonomists are a dying breed. It's not
Speaker 6: focused on very heavily in undergraduate education anymore, and a
Speaker 6: lot of a lot of people don't go into it
Speaker 6: just because it's hard to get the grant money. You know,
Speaker 6: it's hard to make this sexy to the layman. To
Speaker 6: some degree, it can be very sexy, but you know,
Speaker 6: it's it's you're not you're not curing cancer, you're not
Speaker 6: developing a super weapon. So it's it's a little harder
Speaker 6: to fund, and it's tedious and people find it kind
Speaker 6: of boring. So as I said, you know, you have
Speaker 6: to write a very detailed description. What this entails is,
Speaker 6: you know, writing a very detailed description of the external
Speaker 6: anatomy of the organism, and then you have to do all,
Speaker 6: at least in fishes, you have to do all these
Speaker 6: proportional measurements. So like you know, snout length, eye diameter,
Speaker 6: length of first dorsal fin spine, anal fin length, caunal
Speaker 6: peduncle depth. That's one of my personal favorite anatomical parts
Speaker 6: of a fish.
Speaker 4: I think it's insulting us.
Speaker 2: I think you just cast some sort of hobbits. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So the peduncle is the area like at the base
Speaker 6: of the fish's tail. I don't know where I you know,
Speaker 6: I've looked this up at some point in the past,
Speaker 6: but I couldn't tell you where that name came from. Sure,
Speaker 6: But so you have all these measurements. You usually give
Speaker 6: a table. You know, you count, so you count all
Speaker 6: the dorsal fin spines, you count all the rays, you
Speaker 6: do an X ray, and count all the vertebra.
Speaker 4: So I wanted to ask how has molecular biology and
Speaker 4: DNA typing affected species naming. Are there corrections that have
Speaker 4: come into place over time?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 6: So, I mean it as soon as people started being
Speaker 6: able to do molecular methods cheaply in the nineties, it
Speaker 6: really took off, especially in the world of systematics and taxonomy,
Speaker 6: but people all see it for population biology that some
Speaker 6: folks use it to kind of identify new species. So
Speaker 6: that's another way is that you just collect a whole
Speaker 6: bunch of fish from an area you of the same type,
Speaker 6: you know, put them all together in a tree. You
Speaker 6: can either do this like purposely looking to see if
Speaker 6: there's going to be some genetic differences, which might be
Speaker 6: a little cheating but not really you're still finding new species,
Speaker 6: or you do it by accident. You just put everything
Speaker 6: that you collected together in a phylogeny with you know,
Speaker 6: sequencing a couple genes, and you find this lineage that
Speaker 6: you didn't have any idea was you know, present. And
Speaker 6: so that's one that's how you can say, find a
Speaker 6: new species using molecular methods. But this has also helped
Speaker 6: a lot with species delineation, especially in not so much
Speaker 6: in fish, but in birds. There are tons of subspecies
Speaker 6: and also in mammals, and molecular methods have really kind
Speaker 6: of given us a better idea of how closely related
Speaker 6: some of these are. Say, you know, we're calling this
Speaker 6: a subspecies, but it's actually genetically not at all different
Speaker 6: or subspecies, and there's genetically very different, so we need
Speaker 6: to bump that up to a species.
Speaker 2: Like the panda question. Is a panda bear or is
Speaker 2: it related to raccoons?
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 6: Above the species level, it's molecular methods are at this
Speaker 6: point indispensable, especially above the species level, trying to figure
Speaker 6: out the evolutionary history of a group. Again, it's been
Speaker 6: quite a few million years, a lot of stuff's happened,
Speaker 6: billions of members of that lineage have coming gone, a
Speaker 6: lot of things can happen, and so molecules really do
Speaker 6: hold a lot of that information. So it depends on
Speaker 6: at least in fishes, I feel like it depends.
Speaker 1: On where.
Speaker 6: How what the fish you're describing is Like I guess
Speaker 6: that's not a good way of putting it, But say,
Speaker 6: if it looks very similar to another species and you're
Speaker 6: trying to say it is a different species, at this
Speaker 6: point you probably want to have some molecular results in
Speaker 6: that paper and be like, yeah, I know it looks
Speaker 6: really similar, but I have found a few differences. And
Speaker 6: also if you look at their genetics, they are pretty
Speaker 6: different species.
Speaker 2: Of course, that implies that if there are species that
Speaker 2: look a lot alike and people haven't studied them. That
Speaker 2: we're going to find even more speciation with lots and
Speaker 2: lots of molecular.
Speaker 6: Studies, And I mean that's kind of it has actually
Speaker 6: ramped up a bit since of using molecular methods.
Speaker 2: Well, you hit on an interesting thing that I never
Speaker 2: really thought much about before, which is that Linnaeus was
Speaker 2: operating about one hundred years before Darwin. So how does
Speaker 2: species naming work with the evolutionary tree?
Speaker 6: So you know, scientific binomial nomenclature. Linnaeus's classification system is artificial.
Speaker 1: It's things.
Speaker 6: At the species level, it's a it's an entity that
Speaker 6: you can wrap your head around. For the most part
Speaker 6: is it is not clear cut. But at least you
Speaker 6: could say this group of organisms that all look the
Speaker 6: same are probably related. But once you get above kind
Speaker 6: of like the genus level, things start to get a
Speaker 6: little like what is a genus?
Speaker 1: What is a family? What is an order?
Speaker 6: Things start to get a little fuzzier, and there's actually
Speaker 6: not very good definitions of what those things are there.
Speaker 6: There are like written definitions, but in terms of operational definitions,
Speaker 6: what a family is versus what a genus is like
Speaker 6: I could get you know, think of just a group
Speaker 6: of fish, where the diversity of different shapes of fishes
Speaker 6: that occur in this one genus are more diverse than
Speaker 6: this the like six genera in this one family. And
Speaker 6: so it's kind of the Lenaean system does have its flaws,
Speaker 6: and a lot of those relate to kind of just
Speaker 6: these higher level bunching of species.
Speaker 1: But you can, you.
Speaker 6: Know, evolutionarily in using molecular methods, kind of if you
Speaker 6: make what's called a phylogenetic tree, you know, kind of
Speaker 6: sort out how things are related by comparing kind of
Speaker 6: like a trix of characters to construct a topology just
Speaker 6: kind of like a branching figure of relatedness, and you
Speaker 6: can see distinct clades. A clade is a bunch of
Speaker 6: you know, organisms or these what I call tips or
Speaker 6: branches that branch off together, and you know, these do
Speaker 6: correspond to what we're calling genera or a genus, what
Speaker 6: we're calling a family, that kind of thing. So it
Speaker 6: does hold up for the most part, but there's definitely
Speaker 6: it's blurry, sure.
Speaker 4: Okay, And in some of the correspondents we had before
Speaker 4: the show, you mentioned a little bit about lumpers and splitters.
Speaker 4: Can you tell us a bit about those?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so that's a that's a pretty fun aspect of it.
Speaker 6: So lumpers are people that try to lump everything together.
Speaker 6: They you know, see a couple spec or you know
Speaker 6: people some somebody might describe two species that look very
Speaker 6: similar and are only different. The only difference is maybe
Speaker 6: slight difference in body shape or someone along those lines,
Speaker 6: and they'll be like, no, I don't think I don't
Speaker 6: think that's that other that one should be a different species.
Speaker 6: I'll just use lizardfish as example. But say, like, okay,
Speaker 6: so there's this fish, Synodus feet tends in the Caribbean
Speaker 6: and the Gulf, and the Gulf and the coast of
Speaker 6: the United States. There was another species that was described
Speaker 6: by a guy in the thirties called Sinotus bondai. In
Speaker 6: the sixties, somebody was like, no, I don't think that
Speaker 6: looks different enough to actually be a different species. So
Speaker 6: they do they sink it or they synonymize it, so
Speaker 6: they're like, no, this is not actually a different species.
Speaker 6: This name is referring to Synodus feet tens. So what
Speaker 6: happens is Synodus bondai becomes a synonym of I Nodus
Speaker 6: feet tens. Somebody could come along later and pull it
Speaker 6: back out and be like, no, it was actually here's
Speaker 6: evidence to show that it.
Speaker 1: Is actually a different species. And so the.
Speaker 6: Lumpers are people that try to kind of rein it
Speaker 6: back in and put put it back in minimize the
Speaker 6: number of distinct species. I guess too, because they you know,
Speaker 6: it's they see it as either overkill or they think
Speaker 6: people are going a little crazy with their species descriptions.
Speaker 1: So splitters are kind of the opposite of that.
Speaker 6: They're splitting everything up to the most divisible level, I'd say,
Speaker 6: at least in ichthyology. For the most part, younger ichthyologists
Speaker 6: tend to be more on the splitting side of things
Speaker 6: than people of the kind of the early baby boomer
Speaker 6: generation icthyologists tend to be more on the lumping side
Speaker 6: of things.
Speaker 2: Would you say that's because it's easier to do the splitting,
Speaker 2: and they're looking to make a name for themselves.
Speaker 1: Potentially, that was that was horrible.
Speaker 2: I've cracked myself up. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: I was like prepping myself for your puns.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's no preparation, there's nothing you can do.
Speaker 6: Sorry, but Yeah, no, so, I mean that's probably part
Speaker 6: of it. But I think with molecular methods, especially splitting
Speaker 6: has gotten kind of the upper hand because we are
Speaker 6: finding these molecular differences that people can propose correspond to
Speaker 6: new species. But something that's really interesting in there that
Speaker 6: I'm just gonna mention very briefly, is the cutoff. Like
Speaker 6: in a molecular study, when you have a genetic a
Speaker 6: tree based on sequencing a couple genes, what percent difference
Speaker 6: you use to say this is a different species than
Speaker 6: this one is kind of like not very standardized. People
Speaker 6: tried to standardize it. They tried to standardize using this
Speaker 6: one gene called cytochromoxidase one CO one, the barcode gene.
Speaker 6: Don't know if you've ever heard the barcode, the genetic barcode.
Speaker 6: It's this one gene that you know all organisms have.
Speaker 6: It's in the mitochondria. No, and people try to use
Speaker 6: that as like the species gene, like this one varies
Speaker 6: the best between species for telling species apart.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, it has its flaws.
Speaker 6: I mean it's a mitochondrial Geneu's not part of the
Speaker 6: nuclear genome.
Speaker 1: It's part of a different completely different genome in the.
Speaker 6: Body, so it's has those flaws, and for different groups
Speaker 6: of animals, their mitochondria can evolve very differently and very
Speaker 6: much faster slower than other ones. Anyways, So in in
Speaker 6: cytochromoxidase one, they just some people wrote a paper in
Speaker 6: like two thousand, I want to say, five or six
Speaker 6: and they're like two percent genetic difference as they cut
Speaker 6: off for species in mitochondria I mean in cytochromoxidase one
Speaker 6: COO one. But that doesn't really hold up too well
Speaker 6: because there are people that are just going to make
Speaker 6: the argument, oh, this is one point two percent difference. No,
Speaker 6: there's still definitely different species. Look at how different they look.
Speaker 6: So it's kind of an arbitrary somewhat not necessarily arbitrary,
Speaker 6: but not the best cut off.
Speaker 2: I guess I think it's probably worth mentioning that the
Speaker 2: whole idea of species is kind of a human construct.
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, as I've mentioned, with like kind of system.
Speaker 2: This is one of those topics where I think most
Speaker 2: working scientists, especially biologists, would you know, the idea of
Speaker 2: evolution and natural selection is a given you have to
Speaker 2: it's obviously real right.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I know it's not.
Speaker 2: And it's kind of funny because you've got this other
Speaker 2: thing going on where people just don't want it to
Speaker 2: be real and are looking for little excuses for why
Speaker 2: it's broken or it can't work because they find one
Speaker 2: thing that they feel like is an exception. Meanwhile, you're
Speaker 2: going so deep, right, everything is related. We're all related
Speaker 2: every living thing. If you bring in like one living
Speaker 2: thing that doesn't have DNA, yeah, okay, well show me right.
Speaker 2: But other than that, everything seems to have a really
Speaker 2: nice relatedness. But the idea of species is so complicated,
Speaker 2: even though everybody thinks they know what it is right exactly.
Speaker 6: It's one of these things you know that you can
Speaker 6: think of another example of something like that, where you
Speaker 6: you know what it is, but.
Speaker 1: You can't actually describe it if somebody.
Speaker 6: Asks, exactly, you know when you experience it, but you
Speaker 6: can't describe it, right.
Speaker 1: That's why there's so much music.
Speaker 6: But so this is what's called the species concept, and
Speaker 6: so a lot of people operate what they're taught in
Speaker 6: high school. This is changing finally, but what you're taught
Speaker 6: is a species is a group of organisms that can't
Speaker 6: interbreed with other organisms, or if they do interbreed, the
Speaker 6: offspring are sterile. So this is you know, like horses
Speaker 6: and donkeys make make mules or I can't remember the
Speaker 6: the one that's the hybrid, but one of them is sterile,
Speaker 6: you know, in some duck species. You see that a lot,
Speaker 6: and it holds up as a species concept. This is
Speaker 6: a really easy, straightforward way of defining a species, is
Speaker 6: it can't interbreed with other stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's that's the one I hear most of
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 6: But and that's that's called the biological species concept, and
Speaker 6: that's the one that you're taught in school. That's the
Speaker 6: one a lot of people operate under. But it doesn't
Speaker 6: work great for a lot of things, especially plants, because
Speaker 6: they can hybridize like crazy, yeah, and make new species
Speaker 6: really quickly.
Speaker 2: They are weird, but yes, but they're slow and most
Speaker 2: people find them boring, so you know, But.
Speaker 6: So there are a whole host of other concepts that
Speaker 6: you can use to describe a species. You know.
Speaker 1: There's the.
Speaker 6: Phylogenetic concept, which is you know, doing more what I
Speaker 6: was talking about, like looking at a single lineage of
Speaker 6: ancestor descendant populations, so like, this is all going on
Speaker 6: its own evolutionary trajectory as descendants of this one line
Speaker 6: of life. You can have what's called the ecological species concept,
Speaker 6: and it's this species are lineages that occupy the most
Speaker 6: similar ecological zone together. You could have one of my
Speaker 6: personal favoritichs the authoritarian species concept. I am an expert
Speaker 6: in this group. I say it's a new species.
Speaker 1: Species.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that doesn't really fly right.
Speaker 6: Not necessarily, but that's actually, honestly kind of what it
Speaker 6: boils down to a lot of.
Speaker 1: And so things get sticky. You know.
Speaker 6: I'm sitting here looking at my shelf and I do.
Speaker 6: I have this book called Species Concepts and Phylogenetic.
Speaker 1: Theory A debate.
Speaker 6: It is one of the most boring books that I've
Speaker 6: ever read, and I feel bad. I'm not trying to
Speaker 6: belittle the editors of this book, but man, it is
Speaker 6: tough to get through. And once you get into really
Speaker 6: the semantics of trying to figure out what a new
Speaker 6: species actually is, it does get you know, kind of well.
Speaker 2: It requires so much expertise. You don't have any context
Speaker 2: to discuss it with people who aren't also experts. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean that makes it a real chat. That's the
Speaker 2: same for like really deep computer work. It's the same.
Speaker 2: Anytime you get into a really really deep technical concept
Speaker 2: where you have to have so many specialized terms and
Speaker 2: I have to understand so many concepts, it's really challenging
Speaker 2: to make it accessible.
Speaker 4: So exactly same in linguistics as well, people do an
Speaker 4: entire PhD on one.
Speaker 6: Word exactly exactly so, and you also get very philosophical
Speaker 6: about it as well. Discussing a species concept can also
Speaker 6: involve a lot of philosophy, which gets a little sticky also,
Speaker 6: especially around scientists.
Speaker 2: Yeah, keep that away from the physicist Brian Coxwell, have
Speaker 2: you right?
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 6: Yeah, but so it is hard to determine what a
Speaker 6: species is. But again it's you kind of know it
Speaker 6: when you see it, especially if you're very familiar with
Speaker 6: a group of organisms or you know, working in biology.
Speaker 2: I kid you not when I say I could easily
Speaker 2: talk with you another hour or two about this without
Speaker 2: getting tired, but we do have to wind down. Have
Speaker 2: you had any real life monster encounters or any real
Speaker 2: life monsters you've researched?
Speaker 1: Not really.
Speaker 6: I mean again, I've kind of had this interest in
Speaker 6: cryptozoology from a skeptical standpoint for a lot of my life.
Speaker 6: So I definitely keep keep tabs and all that. And
Speaker 6: there are some fairly monstrous looking fishes out there. And
Speaker 6: my current position here I manage the SCRIPTS institution in
Speaker 6: a shnography fish collection. We are probably the large, the largest,
Speaker 6: if not one of the largest deep sea fish collections
Speaker 6: in the world, and which means we have a lot
Speaker 6: of really weird looking fish from the deep ocean, some
Speaker 6: of my personal favorites, a lot of big teeth, a
Speaker 6: lot of glowing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, let's be honest. I mean, your your
Speaker 2: you know, specimen is someone else's nightmare. I mean that's exactly.
Speaker 6: I mean it's great and so so in terms of
Speaker 6: monster hunting, that is for me really what it is.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: We I take students on field trips quite a lot
Speaker 6: for various classes off the Here we go literally just
Speaker 6: ten miles off of San Diego and trawl, put a
Speaker 6: big net in the water about say, maybe about two
Speaker 6: thousand feet one five hundred feet down in the open ocean,
Speaker 6: pull it for like fifteen or twenty minutes, and then
Speaker 6: it takes like an hour and a half to get
Speaker 6: it back up.
Speaker 1: It takes forever to get it back up. But when
Speaker 1: you get that on the deck.
Speaker 6: And there's like dragonfish and vampire squid and you know,
Speaker 6: giant red red shrimp and lots of teeth and everything's
Speaker 6: black and some of it's still glowing.
Speaker 1: Wow, that to me is really, you.
Speaker 6: Know, monster hunting in an essence, and is very different
Speaker 6: than a bunch of people running around the woods of
Speaker 6: Oregon shouting or playing noises.
Speaker 1: And lately, I guess.
Speaker 6: That's gutting back to kind of what field biology actually
Speaker 6: is versus what the Discovery Channel or History Channel will
Speaker 6: have you believe field biology is.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Oh, and for your students not being accustomed to those creatures,
Speaker 4: they must be very strange.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, I mean it's great. They the students love it.
Speaker 6: And I mean even I, you know, I didn't really
Speaker 6: have much exposure to deep sea stuff, but any body
Speaker 6: of water if you put a net down there, pool,
Speaker 6: or just the concept of fishing, you know, is you
Speaker 6: never know what you're going to catch unless you're targeting
Speaker 6: a certain.
Speaker 1: Type of fish.
Speaker 6: So that aspect of it, the discovery is really an
Speaker 6: aspect that drives me in the field or even as
Speaker 6: you're if you're snorkeling or scuba diving, it's that aspect
Speaker 6: of it is great, and I'm sure it's the same
Speaker 6: for people doing work on land or anywhere else.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 4: Well, we have one final question, and that is what's
Speaker 4: your favorite monster?
Speaker 1: Ah? Yeah, So.
Speaker 6: I guess I kind of have. I guess two two?
Speaker 6: Can I get too? Can I have two?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Go for so one, which.
Speaker 6: I think is also if I remember maybe one of
Speaker 6: Blake's favorites, which is the Thing from the movie The Thing,
Speaker 6: John Carpenter's The Thing.
Speaker 2: And it's awesome because it's every monster exactly.
Speaker 1: I love I just love that one. That's probably my
Speaker 1: favorite movie. So I like that.
Speaker 5: Next hour of conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 6: And then in terms of a cryptid, I have a
Speaker 6: favorite cryptid. It's mccaulayan Bembe and that one I was
Speaker 6: just always enamored with as a kid because to me,
Speaker 6: you know, I've been in uh, the Amazon rainforest, I
Speaker 6: can I can see how difficult it is to actually
Speaker 6: see animals in those environments. The congo is probably just
Speaker 6: as dense, just as crazy, and so to me as
Speaker 6: a kid, that was one where I was like, oh man, this.
Speaker 1: Could actually be a thing.
Speaker 6: And that's why I was really taken by Mcolayan Membe
Speaker 6: more than anything else I think in the cryptozoological world.
Speaker 6: And so that really I think to me still I
Speaker 6: would I would put as my top favorite cryptid for.
Speaker 2: Sure, it would be it would be so great if
Speaker 2: it was real, that would be.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But then if you go to like, you know, read
Speaker 6: more about it, especially in recent years, is a little
Speaker 6: less Oh.
Speaker 2: No, no, it's absolutely not a living dinosaur.
Speaker 6: No, especially since some of the creationist researches have really
Speaker 6: taken taking charge with it, it's gotten a little less
Speaker 6: fun to follow.
Speaker 2: But I still it is a wonderful one to imagine
Speaker 2: and and uh, it would be be fascinating if true. Uh, well,
Speaker 2: it's so, I mean for this one more thing, this
Speaker 2: is you just reminded me since you're talking about Mikailmbavimbe.
Speaker 2: Uh and you do taxonomy. What what about the whole
Speaker 2: thing about bronosaurs and a Patosaurus is is that is that?
Speaker 2: Can you demystify that for me?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 6: So, I don't know if either of you. There's another
Speaker 6: podcast called blurry Photos. It's a comedic skeptic podcast, and
Speaker 6: I'm friends with those guys, and this came up recently.
Speaker 6: They got in trouble for saying Brono sources don't exist
Speaker 6: anymore and everybody's but that paper came out, So so
Speaker 6: what that was is this, you know, a student published
Speaker 6: a paper kind of revising that whole fing of dinosaurs
Speaker 6: that that they occur in and and they re examined
Speaker 6: the type material of Brontosaurus and determined kind of based
Speaker 6: on the shape. For if I remember correctly, I read
Speaker 6: the paper like right after it came out, but it's
Speaker 6: been a couple of years, so I can't remember correctly
Speaker 6: or exactly what it was, but I think it was
Speaker 6: having to do with the shape of the femur of
Speaker 6: the type specimen of Brontosaurus, even though the specimen was
Speaker 6: made up of bones of what was like two or
Speaker 6: three different species. I think is why it ended up
Speaker 6: getting kind of sunk initially. But the femur was different
Speaker 6: enough for him to do what's called resurrect the species
Speaker 6: out of synonymous, so bring it back and being able
Speaker 6: to write resurrect in a paper is great also in
Speaker 6: this context you when you're writing about this, But so
Speaker 6: he was able to, you know, the student resurrected the
Speaker 6: name Brontosaurus because he thought that the type material, so
Speaker 6: the holid type of Brontosaurus, or I guess at that
Speaker 6: point whenever it was described didn't use that term, but
Speaker 6: he thought it was different enough that paper came out,
Speaker 6: and very quickly a rebuttal was written saying that this
Speaker 6: is not necessarily the best evidence for bringing this name back,
Speaker 6: and he moved a couple other species into that into
Speaker 6: the genus Brontosaurus. I think also happened, and so some
Speaker 6: people wrote a response. I think it was in Science
Speaker 6: or Nature, and then honestly, I haven't really heard much
Speaker 6: since then, and I think it's been but two or
Speaker 6: three years, because I was just you know, talking to
Speaker 6: the guys over there about this, and yeah, I haven't
Speaker 6: found any mention of it kind of since twenty fifteen
Speaker 6: or fourteen.
Speaker 2: So it's a settled matter.
Speaker 6: I think it is, honestly, as it stands on the
Speaker 6: books at the moment, Brontosaurus is valid.
Speaker 1: It's back. Brontosaurus is back, baby, it's valid.
Speaker 6: But I think you know, somebody probably working on a
Speaker 6: paper that's going to sink it again.
Speaker 2: I see, well, but maybe not if if you order
Speaker 2: the ribs it will tip your car over. That's the
Speaker 2: main thing I know about Bronny. All right, let's finish
Speaker 2: it up. I really appreciate you joining us today.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 5: That's fascinating you know so much.
Speaker 2: This is great. It's a really cool hard science for
Speaker 2: the show. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, listeners will love it.
Speaker 4: Monster.
Speaker 2: You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 2: I'm Blake Smith.
Speaker 5: And I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2: You've just heard an interview with Ben Frabel about the
Speaker 2: methodology of naming species. Ben works at the Script's Institution
Speaker 2: of Oceanography in San Diego, and if you happen to
Speaker 2: be attending the twenty seventeen San Diego Comic Con, you
Speaker 2: can catch Ben on Sunday, July twenty third, from four
Speaker 2: to five discussing the crossovers between science and science fiction. Also,
Speaker 2: if you enjoyed listening to this episode stories about various
Speaker 2: species names, there's a little more of that after the
Speaker 2: credits in this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Monster
Speaker 2: Talk is an official podcast of Skeptic Magazine. The views
Speaker 2: and opinions expressed on this show are those of myself
Speaker 2: and my guests and do not necessarily reflect opinions or
Speaker 2: the views that the Skeptic Society or of Skeptic magazine.
Speaker 2: Of course, Skeptic does have views, and you can find
Speaker 2: them at your local news standard by visiting Skeptic dot com.
Speaker 2: While you're there, why not check out our show notes
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Speaker 6: Monstert and so just really quickly because I didn't do
Speaker 6: it earlier, and I know this has gone on for
Speaker 6: a while, and you guys can edit this how you'd like.
Speaker 6: You have a list of some fun names I just
Speaker 6: throw out.
Speaker 2: Oh this, you know, I always like to put some
Speaker 2: stinger at the end after the credits. So yeah, how
Speaker 2: long do you think this will be?
Speaker 1: Like five minutes?
Speaker 2: Oh, let's do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So one of my personal favorites is a deep water
Speaker 6: pygmy angel fish. This is a beautiful reef fish group.
Speaker 6: And there's one that lives on deep reefs in the
Speaker 6: Inno Pacific and its name is species name is central
Speaker 6: Piggy Narcosis. Central piggy is a genus, Narcosis is the species.
Speaker 6: It's called narcosis. So when you're when you're when you're
Speaker 6: scuba diving, if you go below a certain depth, the
Speaker 6: the amount of nitrogen kind of going into your body
Speaker 6: causes you a below a certain depth, under a certain
Speaker 6: amount of partial pressure, you you start to get a
Speaker 6: little loopy. It's kind of like you're drunk. It's called
Speaker 6: the Martini principle. I believe for every every atmosphere of
Speaker 6: water you go down, which thirty three feet or ten
Speaker 6: meters of water, it's like drinking one dry martini.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 6: So there were these. There was a researcher named Richard
Speaker 6: Pyle who studies deep reefish and he's done some pretty
Speaker 6: dangerous diving, Like diving at three hundred feet on air
Speaker 6: is not a really good thing to do. You usually
Speaker 6: want to use a higher oxygen mix, or not higher oxygen,
Speaker 6: but less night less nitrogen mix. So he mixed helium
Speaker 6: or something. Anyways, so he was down there. He had
Speaker 6: heard about this fish, and so he was trying to
Speaker 6: collect it. He got up to the surface finally after
Speaker 6: his like three hours of going back to the surface,
Speaker 6: and he was so narked out that he thought.
Speaker 1: He hadn't caught it.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 6: And then he in his collecting bucket while he was
Speaker 6: there and it was there. So he named it centri
Speaker 6: blacking narcosis because he thought he had just kind of
Speaker 6: hallucinated the fish.
Speaker 2: That's neat.
Speaker 6: And then you have some with like you know, not
Speaker 6: as big as stories, but another there's a great a
Speaker 6: little baslet it's not a baslet. I don't really know.
Speaker 6: It's a beautiful little reefish. They're called pseudochromis. I don't
Speaker 6: know what their common name would be anyways, it's called
Speaker 6: Sipho zapps.
Speaker 1: Zapp.
Speaker 6: Zapps is the Greek word Greek word for lightning. He
Speaker 6: collected the fish during a lightning storm.
Speaker 5: Dangerous.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's a It was just described last year Piccolti
Speaker 6: a greedo I because its face looks a lot like
Speaker 6: the character Gredo from Star Wars and it shoots first.
Speaker 4: Yes, that makes me think of the Bishop fish.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, which we talked about.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 6: There's a genus of Gobi called Zappa, which researcher named
Speaker 6: in honor of Frank Zappa.
Speaker 5: Oh nice.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And then so there's all sorts of fun names out
Speaker 6: there every you know, you hear about these dung beetle named.
Speaker 1: After George W. Bush or the spider named after you
Speaker 1: know whoever.
Speaker 6: People do that a lot for publicity, and it's a
Speaker 6: good way to get your lab you know, on the map.
Speaker 6: Somebody named a bunch of darter species in Alabama after
Speaker 6: various US presidents that had good environmental records. So there's
Speaker 6: those fun things around. But I guess just summing it
Speaker 6: all up, as there are still a lot of undescribed
Speaker 6: species out there, we still have a lot of work
Speaker 6: cut out for us. We need people with the training
Speaker 6: to do it. We don't need people without the training
Speaker 6: who are unwilling to get the training doing it, which
Speaker 6: has kind of been the case for you know, cad
Speaker 6: Burrosaurus and NeSSI terris and was it Cryptofidion's kind of
Speaker 6: some of these cryptids that got scientific species described in
Speaker 6: their names but aren't actually like valid descriptions. Yeah, there's
Speaker 6: a lot that we still don't know. And that's I
Speaker 6: think that's the biggest take home in talking about species
Speaker 6: discovery is you can still anybody can describe a new
Speaker 6: well not anybody, But what I'm saying is with the expertise,
Speaker 6: you can probably find a new species to describe, and
Speaker 6: you can get your name on a paper, and you
Speaker 6: can be at a dinner party and be like, yeah,
Speaker 6: I've described three new species of fish.
Speaker 2: Well, so what I'm hearing is it's better to be
Speaker 2: friends with someone who's looking for names. Yeah, exactly, not
Speaker 2: nearly as much work, and you can get your name
Speaker 2: on it, exactly. I see your whole field's broken, don't
Speaker 2: you see. That's the one rule they've made there has
Speaker 2: caused so many I mean, of course, you don't want
Speaker 2: every species to have your name on it, but I
Speaker 2: bet that one little change totally change the field.
Speaker 6: I mean, there's a there's a lantern fish called Cocoa,
Speaker 6: and the guy who described it his last name was
Speaker 6: Coco and he's like, oh, no, no, I named it after
Speaker 6: my dad.
Speaker 2: Nice, that's pretty funny.
Speaker 5: You need to be a work around somewhere.
Speaker 2: My name is William Smith. No, no, I was naming
Speaker 2: after the actor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, you know Smith eye.
Speaker 2: I bet there's a lot of Smith eyes. I should
Speaker 2: just go there.
Speaker 6: There are a lot of smith named after me and
Speaker 6: my my processor here at work. His last name is Walker.
Speaker 6: And unfortunately, there was another very prolific South Southern California,
Speaker 6: Nick theologist in the fifties, whose last name was also Walker.
Speaker 6: So there are a lot of Walker eyes, and a
Speaker 6: lot of them are not my coworker.
Speaker 2: But what aboutexas ranger eyes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, not yet, but you could. I think there is.
Speaker 1: I think there's a Tonto.
Speaker 2: I I was gonna say, Chuck Nor probably doesn't need
Speaker 2: species named after him.
Speaker 6: You know, there's probably a Norris eye. Honestly, probably there's definitely.
Speaker 6: I think there's a genus. I'm just thinking of other
Speaker 6: famous things. I think there's a genus called Beetlejuice, not
Speaker 6: the galaxy or star, but the named after the movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really.
Speaker 6: And then just recently, okay, one last one a cyclid
Speaker 6: with kind of a cyclid you know these African freshwater fishes.
Speaker 1: There's one.
Speaker 6: This is a cyclid from South South America that has
Speaker 6: kind of these weird like rodent fanglike teeth in the
Speaker 6: front of its mouth. And they named the genus Nosferatu.
Speaker 2: Oh cool.
Speaker 6: That was sorry, that was at the top of my
Speaker 6: list and I actually forgot skipped that One's awful.
Speaker 2: That one what is the vampire squid actually called those?
Speaker 1: I think it's vampertoothis.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's a wicked, cool looking animal.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They're a lot smaller than they than you think.
Speaker 2: How How small do I think they are?
Speaker 6: What I mean, well, I know it immediately like a
Speaker 6: lot of people have a misconception that things are because they're.
Speaker 2: Not looking I want to get I think they're about
Speaker 2: the size of maybe smaller than a soccer ball, bigger
Speaker 2: than a softball.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're kind of closer to the softball size, but yeah,
Speaker 6: you're definitely in the ball.
Speaker 2: I'm in the ballpark. What he did there?
Speaker 1: I even thinking about it?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, contagious.
Speaker 2: Crap, but I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, but a lot of people think these deep sea
Speaker 6: fishes especially are a lot bigger than they actually are,
Speaker 6: like the angler fish. Those guys are pity most of
Speaker 6: them are smaller than a softball.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think so many people are just scared of the
Speaker 4: ocean and it just seems so large and frightening, and
Speaker 4: so they just envisioned these things as being much bigger
Speaker 4: and scarier than they really are.
Speaker 2: Oh that's like, yeah, that's like life. Man, I just
Speaker 2: got deep.
Speaker 1: But anyway, well, I do have a little bit of
Speaker 1: a plug. If you don't mind, I'll go for it.
Speaker 1: I am.
Speaker 6: It's it's still kind of top secret at the moment
Speaker 6: until like two days from now, but since it's not
Speaker 6: going to be aired until then, I'm I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 6: being featured on a panel of scientists for any of
Speaker 6: the listeners out there that are going to Comic Con
Speaker 6: here in San Diego in three weeks or two weeks,
Speaker 6: I'm going to be on a panel of scientists kind
Speaker 6: of talking about the influence of science fiction on science
Speaker 6: and the influence of science on science fiction. And that's
Speaker 6: gonna happen on the last day of Comic Con. And
Speaker 6: I'm going to be joined by like a nanotechnologists and
Speaker 6: mechanical engineers, robotics guy, genetics folks, And that should be
Speaker 6: really fun. So if you happen to be at Comic Con,
Speaker 6: come on by. Yeah, definitely, I have again, I can
Speaker 6: pull out examples upon examples.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, if I actually come to your where you work,
Speaker 2: I could see some real stuff.
Speaker 1: I would I would love.
Speaker 6: Yeah, if you guys are ever find yourselfs in San Diego,
Speaker 6: I love to give a tour of our collection. I
Speaker 6: have a goblin shark prominently displayed, a serious collection.
Speaker 4: Oh my two year old would love that too.
Speaker 5: Maybe one day sounds great.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because I mean the goblin shark is probably one
Speaker 6: of my favorite real monsters.
Speaker 1: I was obsessed with that fish.
Speaker 6: And you know, it's original Japanese name is tanguzame, which
Speaker 6: is a tangu is a you know, a demon to
Speaker 6: a Yoka demon.
Speaker 2: They are awesome there. So how big are they are?
Speaker 2: They like six feet or.
Speaker 1: Their max size is about fourteen feet Actually.
Speaker 2: Really they're way bigger.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 6: The one that I have is a juvenile, which honestly
Speaker 6: most of the specimens and collections are kind of the babies.
Speaker 6: So my guy here or my gal here, I guess
Speaker 6: he's I think it's female.
Speaker 1: Is only about three and a half feet long.
Speaker 2: Okay, still amazing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, one more, one more fun thing to
Speaker 6: look up. I'll let you guys look this up on
Speaker 6: your own if you've never heard about it. But it's
Speaker 6: called cookie cutter shark.
Speaker 5: No, no, I haven't heard of that.
Speaker 6: You should take a look at the Wikipedia article on
Speaker 6: that fish. That's another one I always show and like
Speaker 6: at the beginning of a tour.
Speaker 2: Really, oh my god, I'm doing it. Yeah no, that's yeah.
Speaker 2: That is an odd like an animal. Yeah yeah, yeah, Okay, No,
Speaker 2: I gotta stop because I would just keep talking to you,
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, frequently, so I have to always control myself that
Speaker 6: as well.
Speaker 2: No worries. All right, well I have a get even
Speaker 2: you guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, take care monsttal wait you do an X ray
Speaker 1: and countle the vertebra.
Speaker 2: Did you say peduncle?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Wow, there's a pedant and peduncle joke right there.
Speaker 5: I don't know, let's leave it unsaid.
Speaker 2: Pedants and uncles. This is awesome.