Are There Sharks in America’s Great Lakes?

These parts of the world where people are willing to harvest things like that, like how did they figure that out? Who was the first guy that's like, you see that fucking beehive up there? Right. I'm gonna get some of that honey, dude. Right, I'm gonna dangle off a cliff. Yeah. Like, good luck, my friend. I was saying this the other day to some buddies. Who was the first guy to figure out caviar? Who's the first guy to suck off a sturgeon and be like, hmm, this is delicious, you know? Good point. Are you kidding me? I guess they probably just eat everything they can out of the fish. Yeah. And if you catch a sturgeon, man, the whole village is eating. Yeah, I mean, some are 9, 10 feet long. Dude, they are so big. My friends John and Jen, they live in Alberta, and they went sturgeon fishing, and they caught them and put them on their Instagram page. And you look at it like, that is a prehistoric dinosaur type creature. That thing is enormous. Those big scales down the sides and down the back and the weird mouth and whiskers are bizarre. Yeah, there's something about the way you're looking at them. You're like, I don't feel like you should be catching that. Right. Looks too old. Yeah, it looks like you should probably leave that thing alone. I think that that might be one of the, you know, there's a lot of those North American things that they think are monsters like Nessie. You know, like the Loch Ness Monster. They also have like ones in Lake Michigan. What do they call it? Lake Champlain. They have a Lake Champlain one, and they think that it might be sturgeon. Oh, interesting. These people are sick. Because, you know, especially because people have a tendency to exaggerate. If you see a 10 foot sturgeon, you'd think it's a 20 foot long. It's a dinosaur. Totally. Totally. Do you know that this is kind of interesting. They actually had documented bull sharks stuck in the Great Lakes. Yes, I'd heard about that. Pretty amazing. That is nuts. Sharks swimming a thousand miles from, you know, Louisiana up rivers and getting stuck in the Great Lakes. Well, they're one of the rare sharks that can breathe fresh water, right? Catadromous. Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah. In and out of freshwater. You know, they go through Osmo regulation. They can get the salt out or in whatever they need and then go into the rivers, spend time in the rivers, go back into the ocean to hunt. The inspiration for the movie Jaws was apparently bull sharks in New Jersey. A series of attacks in freshwater on a river system. Right. But near an ocean, I believe, right? Like at a river mouth. Yeah. Yeah. That was my understanding as well. Yeah. These people were going into the river and these bull sharks were killing them. Right. Like in a river. Yeah. Like what? Nowhere safe. Nowhere safe. Well, they're really aggressive, right? Yeah. They have the highest testosterone of any species of shark. And so they're just they're just jacked up and they're like, yeah, they're just ready all the time. Like they're they're bullish and you know, their shoulders are kind of arched over and their pecs are locked and they just they look ready at any time to just snap. Yeah, they found them all the way up in like Illinois. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. What the fuck? Like think of the temperature in Chicago right now, you know. And the shark swims all the way up there. Cold-blooded monster. Yeah. How did they get into the Great Lakes? Well, they used to go up the Mississippi River, but I think with all the locks that are there now in place, they just I think the idea was that they got stuck there when they were building the locks and then they died out over time. When did when was the last known sighting of one? I think so. Two years ago. There you go. They find them and it's been one found in Iowa, Texas. Iowa. How the fuck is a shark getting to Iowa? Imagine that, yeah, we lost Billy, got bit by a shark. What was he, surfing? No, he was in Iowa. Right, right. He was plowing corn and got killed by a shark. Billy might be an asshole. Yeah, in Ohio they found him. Really? Yeah. Ohio? Sharks in Ohio. What? How do they get in Ohio? I mean, all those rivers are connected. Yeah. God damn, that's amazing. Right. Nature finds a way. You know, whenever I look at those videos of bears catching salmon as they're jumping up the river, like what was the first salmon thinking when it decided, hey, I'm going to go up these rocks. Right. Back to the place where I was born. Right. And spawn there. Put a target on my back. Yeah. And then, oh, this gigantic fucking bear waiting to catch me in the air. Right. Like those images of bears catching them with their mouths as the salmon are flying through the air. Stunning. Trying to make it up the... It's just, but it's so weird. Like what a weird system. It's like nature's assuring robustness. They're sure assuring that these fragile fish don't make it. Right. Because in order to be able to make that trip to the ocean and back to get through the rivers and streams to survive, you have to be rugged. Right. And so they're ensuring it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So they're going upstream swimming against the current. Oh, oh, and by the way, here's a fucking 1,800 pound bear looking to eat you. God, it's crazy. It's so cool. But that is a viable system. This is the system that's been in place forever. Right. So strange. Right. And that we can destroy that so quickly. Oh, yeah. We put one dam in and that ruins that whole ecosystem for that river and the bears and the salmon and the spawning. And we can remedy it. We put salmon ladders in and yada, yada. But it's interesting that everything seems so tough, as you just said. And at the same time, it's so fragile because we do one thing, like put in a hydroelectric dam and it ruins the entire ecosystem. Yeah, we were in Seattle. And in Seattle, there's a place where you can go and it's like underneath this bridge and there's these clear plexiglass walls. Mm-hmm. And you can actually see the salmon making their way through and up the river. And they were explaining how they had put dams in and didn't really understand the consequences of putting these dams back when they did. And then all these salmon would go to the mouth of the river where they thought they were going to go up river and it would be blocked. Right. And they would be stuck there. And they would be fucked and they just died and they didn't breed. And so the population drastically diminished. These salmon died in the harbor. Yep. Like really wild stuff. Yeah, it's crazy. And that supports, you know, like that food source, that protein supports not just like the bears and the birds, but like the whole river is ecology, right? Like the river, the algae that live in the river, the little bugs that live in the algae depend on those salmon dying up that river and fertilizing the river. Yeah. So it's like the whole thing is so interconnected and then, you know, one little thing and poof. Did you? Yeah, that is really crazy.