Things That I Never Knew

[Al Agnew]

If you care about eating pigs and chickens and cows, you gotta read "The Omnivore's Dilemma". I guarantee it will make you start figuring up how you can afford to buy more true organic food. The stuff we buy at the grocery store, not to mention the slop that we buy from the fast food places, goes through an appalling process from CAFO to processing plant. Wife and I are really trying to eat organic and natural as much as possible...which is why I gotta kill a couple of deer this fall. We already eat only beef that comes from her brother-in-law...grass fed, no antibiotics or growth hormones.

Owls have buttholes, and they poop, but the grain of truth in the original assertion is that they regurgitate most of the "solid" waste. They eat most of their food whole, and barf up the bones and hair instead of passing it through. It's actually pretty cool to find an owl "pellet". Dig through it and you'll find a lot of nicely cleaned mouse skulls. I have a collection of them.

Owls also have ear holes that are asymmetrical...one hole is much higher on their head than the other. This gives them much better stereo hearing than other critters...not only is their hearing extremely acute, but they can exactly locate a mouse by sound in total darkness and catch it.

We all know that bats use echo-location to navigate and find food. But did you know that they catch insects in mid-air not with their mouths but with the membrane that stretches between their hind legs and their tail. They cup it like a catcher's mitt and fly into the insect, catching it in the mitt and then bending their heads down to eat it out of the mitt.

And maybe my all time favorite nature fact...freshwater eels, like those I have caught on upper Big River, for instance, migrate not only all the way to the Atlantic Ocean to spawn, but actually all freshwater eels in both North America and Europe spawn in the same region in the MIDDLE of the Atlantic, the Sargasso Sea. So those eels I caught on Big River had to migrate down Big River, down the Meramec, down the Mississippi, across the Gulf of Mexico, and halfway across the Atlantic to spawn! Scientists believe that this spawning behavior developed back when Europe and North America were all one continent. When the two continents separated, the eels spawned in the narrow strip of saltwater between them. As the two continents continued to spread, the eels continued to spawn in the middle of the widening sea between. Now, with the continents so far apart, the eels' instincts force them to go all the way to the middle, to what was always their ancestral spawning grounds.

[Buckshotdad1960]

Alright what did I miss? Everyone was here even browieman! Al’s got some more interesting stuff! I see cricket’s scheduled for a drug test! Well it’s about time! LOL And while he’s there I hope they give him an anal exam too! Well….the owls want to know if he has a butt hole! LOL

I wonder where the old saying “Quicker than greased owl s__t” came from?

[zander]

Speaking of bats and buttholes, owls do not have a true butthole, no birds do despite what you may see on your windshield or freshly washed car. They have a cloaca which is something like a general purpose exit hole. Poop, eggs, and tinkle it all goes through the same place so you can think of that the next time you crack an egg open.

Bats and moths have had an arms race going for the past several million years. Bats use echolocation to find the moths and when they get close they emit a more precision based series of sounds. Some species of moths have evolved a counter measure to this. When the bat does the "fixing to eat you" acoustic series of sounds the moth emits its own and effectively "jams" the bats signals. It buys them just enough time to make themselves a little more scarce. Of course bats then have to adapt to this and it has been going ever since.

[Buckshotdad1960]

That’s interesting, did you know you can catch Bats on Rod and Reel? It of course takes some doing; you’ll make quite a few casts before you get close enough to one to even have a chance at doing it do to the erratic flying behavior of the bat. If it wasn’t for a wild story and a bet over a girl at the age of 14 we still probably wouldn’t know that this is even possible.

Here’s how you do it. As a kid we trout fished a creek that ran through town and just before dark the bats would come out and fly around as you say catching moths and bugs of some kind over the water. We took treble hooks and Velveeta cheese. Then by sight pick our bat, anticipate where it would be two seconds in the future and then cast for that spot. If we calculated right the bat would think the soft cheese was a moth or something eatable and scoop it up. You don’t even have to set the hook they do that on their own. What a ride! The ones we caught were over water and ended up crashing in the creek.

Of course I would never do anything like that now but 36 years ago as a kid I saw nothing wrong with it.

[Buckshotdad1960]

I never knew the EEL thing. But I think it's a stretch to assume that all spawning eels make that journey. I've seen them in the Little Niangua (above Bannister), and I've seen them seined out of minnow ponds at a bait hatchery near Richland, and was told it happens all the time.

Both of those locations would mean a serious trek across land. I've only seen a handful of eels in my lifetime, but the one out of the bait pond was Huge (well over 2 ft. long and mean as hell).

How did the eels get in the pond and are you saying they spawn in the pond? If not how do they keep getting in the pond.

[Buckshotdad1960]

Utterly amazing! Fact is stranger than fiction on planet earth!

Just yet more proof that there is a God!

I DON”T CARE WHAT YOU HEATHENS SAY! LOL

[Wayne SW/MO]

I might throw in a couple. As to owls locating mice by sound, house cats do this also and they don't catch them by sight in the dark. If you've never been under a tree at night with a Great Horned or Barred hooting in it, you won't believe how loud they actually are. If you don't know they are there you might need a change of underwear.

[Buckshotdad1960]

Here is something strange.

I remember as a kid watching Jock Cousteau on TV. He was really the one who gave us our first looks at what was in the oceans. It’s a fascinating world deep down under. He died some years ago and I guess his son took over. But I remember the episode where they investigated the Bermuda triangle. They found a hole in the ocean floor maybe a couple hundred feet across both ways. They maneuvered their ship into the middle of it and stopped. The surrounding water was no more that 10 or 20 feet deep. When they flew over it with their helicopter you could clearly see the ship setting over a black hole in what appeared to be a light blue sea.

The odd part is that we can send a sonar pulse to the moon and back to know how far away the moon is but when they sent a sonar pulse down the hole it never came back.

Why is that? Does anyone remember that episode?

[FishinCricket]

The longest river in the United States is the Missouri River.

The longest river in Missouri is the Gasconade.

The largest lake in Missouri is Lake of the Ozarks.

The largest flood control lake in Missouri is Truman.

Full, the Truman Reservoir has 1,150 miles of shore line and holds 55,600 Acres of water surface which puts it just slightly ahead and bigger than the 55,000 Acre Lake of the Ozarks.

What else would be interesting to know?

kokuchibasu is Japanese for Smallmouth Bass! Say it with me.. KO KUCHI BASU

[eric1978]

kokuchibasu is Japanese for Smallmouth Bass! Say it with me.. KO KUCHI BASU

kokuchibasu...good one cricket! I'm adding that to my signature. The Japanese are nuts about bass fishing.