Intro Read, Dave Perry from www.wickedfishah.com Valentines Special SPECIAL gUEST Amanda from the Great Beer Adventure Podcast www.greatbeeradventure.com Clay - Hey Amanda, thanks for coming on the show! - Tell us about the Great Beer adventure, what is your origin story? What are you drinking tonight Well this is the Fish Nerds Valentines special, because nobody is more romantic than a nerd! Let’s talk about love making, and make no mistake, fish make lots of love.. Not sure if love is the right word! Preview for Next week’s show Saltfish= Another name for girl parts ... Next week we introduce a brand new segment for the show #FNbookclub Jeff Danaldson (Librarian) will lead us through a discussion about Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World-Mark-Kurlansky Segment 1 Fish Love Percula Clownfish: Your Mommy Was Your Daddy. (from neatorama.com) In Disney's animated movie Finding Nemo, the animators forgot to tell you one thing about clownfish: they can change gender! Clownfish live in a group consisting of a breeding pair of male and female, as well as some non-breeding males. There is strict hierarchy based on size: the largest is the female, next largest is the male, and then the non-breeding males.If the female dies (or gets fished, I suppose), the male will change sex and become the female! Then the largest of the non-breeding males will get a promotion to become the breeding male. Sneaker Male earth-story.com">http://the-earth-story.com The most common mating strategy involves a large adult male (age 7+) building a nest and then providing parental care for his offspring. The male will groom the eggs with his tail and will attack anything that comes near his nest. Males even protect the nest after the eggs have hatched. The larger the male, the better chances he will have of defending himself and his offspring. Nesting is a way for a male to show off his fitness and reproductive ability. These older males also develop a dark spot behind the gills and brilliant blue coloration, which is a very noticeable signal that the male is ready to mate. Physical displays that symbolize reproductive fitness are common in the animal kingdom, but this does not always mean the largest male is the only one to reproduce. There are adaptations within bluegill populations that work around the parental male life cycle. Some bluegill males use what scientists have named “cuckolding” or “sneaking”. Sneaker males, smaller and younger (age 2+) than their parental male competitors, wait until the nesting male and female are about to spawn. As the female begins releasing eggs into the water for the male to fertilize, the sneaker will dart into the nest and quickly release his milt (sperm) in the hopes that he will at least fertilize some of the eggs. Sneaker males are unusual enough but there are also “satellite” males. Smaller male bluegill will develop the coloration and behavior of female bluegill. Female bluegill lack the bright colors that males have. This helps disguise them from the larger, aggressive parental males. Once the male and female begin fertilization, the mimic will swim up to the female and release his milt. The adult male does not see it as a threat so both males are able to reproduce. These three life histories do not overlap. Parental males are always parental males since they tend to mature later in life. Sneakers and satellites begin mating around age 2 and usually live much short lives than male parents. This is where the tradeoff mentioned above becomes evident. Parental males live longer, mature at an older age and are the most likely to produce the most offspring. Sneakers and satellites mate at a younger age but will likely produce less viable offspring. It is currently unknown what determines if a male becomes a parent, sneaker or satellite. It is believed to be a combination of genetics as well as environmental pressures (such as a lake filled with many large males) that determine which life history a male will follow. A nightmare for Male Anglerfish http://mentalfloss.com/article/57800/horrors-anglerfish-mating When you think of an anglerfish, you probably think of something like the creature above: Big mouth. Gnarly teeth. Lure bobbing from its head. Endless nightmares following. During the 19th century, when scientists began to discover, describe, and classify anglerfish from a particular branch of the anglerfish family tree—the suborder Ceratioidei—that’s what they thought of, too. The problem was that they were only seeing half the picture. The specimens that they were working with were all female, and they had no idea where the males were or what they looked like. Researchers sometimes found some other fish that seemed to be related based on their body structure, but they lacked the fearsome maw and lure typical of ceratioids and were much smaller—sometimes only as long as six or seven millimeters—and got placed into separate taxonomic groups. It wasn’t until the 1920s—almost a full century after the first ceratioid was entered into the scientific record—that things started to become a little clearer. In 1922, Icelandic biologist Bjarni Saemundsson discovered a female ceratioid with two of these smaller fish attached to her belly by their snouts. He assumed it was a mother and her babies, but was puzzled by the arrangement. “I can form no idea of how, or when, the larvae, or young, become attached to the mother. I cannot believe that the male fastens the egg to the female,” he wrote. “This remains a puzzle for some future researchers to solve.” When Saemundsson kicked the problem down the road, it was Charles Tate Regan, working at the British Museum of Natural History in 1924, who picked it up. Regan also found a smaller fish attached to a female ceratioid. When he dissected it, he realized it wasn’t a different species or the female angler’s child. It was her mate. The “missing” males had been there all along, just unrecognized and misclassified, and Regan and other scientists, like Norwegian zoologist Albert Eide Parr, soon figured out why the male ceratioids looked so different. They don’t need lures or big mouths and teeth because they don’t hunt, and they don’t hunt because they have the females. The ceratioid male, Regan wrote, is “merely an appendage of the female, and entirely dependent on her for nutrition.” In other words, a parasite. When ceratioid males go looking for love, they follow a species-specific pheromone to a female, who will often aid their search further by flashing her bioluminescent lure. Once the male finds a suitable mate, he bites into her belly and latches on until his body fuses with hers. Their skin joins together, and so do their blood vessels, which allows the male to take all the nutrients he needs from his host/mate’s blood. The two fish essentially become one. Segment 2 Guides Corner, with Michael Frank www.franksflyarts.com PROMO The Fish Nerds are part of the Outdoor Podcast channel! All your outdoor podcasts needs on one feed! Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Everyday another outdoor show! So fish shows, hunting shows, travel shows, camping shows and much more. Check it out! Segment 3: Product Reviews “Garmin Striker 4” fish finder Segment 4: Fish in the News Cod Love http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/05/europe/cod-accents-breeding-noise/ (Tweeted) Zachary David ‏@Adironzach @FishNerds Frozen fish in the news! http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/fish-pike-bass-ice-fishing-lake-indiana/ http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/shedds-grandad-worlds-oldest-aquarium-fish-dies/ Segment 5 Do fish kiss? http://freshaquarium.about.com/cs/anabantids2/p/kissinggourami.htm Clay So that is it. you have listen to a couple of Fish Nerds when you could have been fishing, Amanda: We’d like to thank our families for supporting us while we podcast, go on fishing Quests and do all sorts of silly things that Nerds do. If you would like to support Fish Nerds you can go to Patreon.com and search for Fish Nerds and help us crowd fund this podcast! Clay Special thanks to Amanda from the http://greatbeeradventure.com/ Amanda: And until next time, follow the code of the Fish Nerd: Spawn early and often; Clay Avoid free lunches with strings attached; Amanda swim against the current every chance you get.