Legends of sea monsters are as old as humanity, and some ancient cultures even credited them with creating the universe. Learn more about humanity's attachment to seeing monsters in the deep in this classic episode.
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Hi, everybody. It's December and podcast time. This is Chuck and we're talking about how sea monsters work. This is a great episode from back in the day. I remember. Boy, this is hard to believe almost six years ago. Time is really flying, everybody, I'm getting old. This is a fun podcast episode though, how sea monsters work? Right here, right now, Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Noel. There's Nicola Tesla. It's Stuff you should know. There's Johnny and Scott. Are those yourmasin? Eric? No, that was Sigmund the Sea Monster. Did you watch that show? No? Once again the brief cultural divide that expans between us. Was that from the seventies or earlier? Yeah, it was one of the Sid and Marty Croft shows, HR Puffins stuff. Yeah, Sigmund the Sea Monster and Johnny and Scott wear his buddies. Yeah, he was like a you know, he's a dude in a suit. I reckon, but he would he looked like a big blob of kelp. I'm sure it's total nightmare fuel with eyes. That was cool. Sid marty Kroft man their sensibilities scare me. Yeah. I went to the place once in Atlanta. You know, they had down at the Omni which is now Phillips Arena. They had Sid marty Croft World or whatever, and I went down there once and looking back now, it was like a drug fueled indoor amusement park. You're like, why are there so many twenty year old here? Yeah? I never really put without kids. Yeah. Uh yeah, I'm sure. I say this every single time that we talk about Sid marty Croft. But you've seen the Mr Show State of Drug Achusets. Yeah, that's one of the best. I mean, it's hard to pick out for Mr. Show, but that's definitely up there. Yeah, that's top five easy. Yeah. And that seems sea monsters they're gonna get you soon? Is that from a show? Okay? From this show? So, Chuck, are you familiar much with sea monsters when you were researching this where you like everybody knows all this sort of half and half? Yeah, I felt similar. There were a lot of stuff, a lot of things in here that I hadn't heard of, And the extra research we did too yielded some new insights. But one of the things that stuck out to me, and I guess it's probably the thesis of this whole thing, is that we've been seeing sea monsters for millennia. We've been talking about sea monsters for millennia, and we still are like, have you heard of the Montalk Monster? Yes? Did you see pictures of that thing? Yeah? I remember when it came out. Okay, I just heard of it yesterday. Yeah. Oh, I feel bad for not sharing that with you. It's awesome. Yeah that in the two thousand eight um what was the beach? It was around Montalk. Yeah, but there was a specific beach, ditch planes beach. This girl and her three friends found this washed up Montauk monster, And I think what's funny is they still there's a trend here in naming these things sensationally throughout history, and we still do it. Because they could have called it like a decomposed raccoon, but they called it the Montalk Monster. And the jury is not out. It is a decomposed raccoon. Yeah they I mean, they pretty much think so. But it's not like you can't prove that. I mean, they have like a line of biologists from mont talk to Manhattan saying it's a raccoon. It's a raccoon without its fur, which makes it look awesome. I've heard some other paleo zoologists say like it maybe a sheep, though I think it is too small, or other animals. But it's definitely not a monster, a sea monster. No. But this is two thousand and eight we're talking about, and some weird thing washes up on a beach, and around the world people hear of the Montauk mons except for me. Yeah, did you see the East River Monster? I heard that one was a pig. Yeah, it's clearly a pig, but it's still kind of cool looking. But still they named it the East River Monster, and not a pig. That was you know, I don't know how the pig got there, right, the pig of East River or something like that. Yeah, it's probably like, you know, somewhere in Chinatown a pig was no good and that thing in the river that's what they do. Yeah. Um. Also in two thousand and six, Um, there was one in Russia. I didn't see where, but on a beach. Uh, something washed up and they said sea monster and it turned out to be a beluga whale. Carcass greatly decomposed, but it looked weird. It didn't look anything like a beluga whale. But the point is is still in the twenty one century, whenever the sea spits something up, we're like, this is a monster. Clearly, obviously this is a monster. And then biology just come along and say it's not a monster, but it's this weird thing. Or sometimes they say this is new. Yeah, it's not a monster, but this is new. And this is the point finally that I'm trying to get to, is that the oceans, the seas cover seventies percent of Earth's surface, right, That's a lot of hiding places. And I think humans have known and still no intuitively that there's a lot of stuff down there that we don't know about. We don't know what it is. But over time we've science has replaced superstition enough so that while we still know there's stuff out there that we don't know, we don't think of his monsters, So our mindset has changed somewhat. But ultimately, the sea is this place of unknown, unknown organisms that we're still learning about. What's the of the deepest seas are still uncompletely like unresearched and Undiscovered. Well, James Cameron just took away a little percentage of that with his deep sea dive. He took away a bit of my soul with every movie he's made. Terminator to you like Terminator too, I didn't see that one. Yeah, it was pretty good. Huh, Yeah, I think that was that was a good one. Have you not seen Titanic? Did you know that the there was an alternate ending for it, where like they kept the diamond or or ument where something like the titan Tanic didn't sink, right, it worked out well in the end. No, Bill Paxton ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's what it was, I think. Um. Speaking of recent sea monsters though, which is not a sea monster, but did you see the footage of the anglerfish? That that's another great point. Yeah, some of these deep sea creatures look like creepy monsters. I mean, the the anglerfish is one of the scariest looking things I've ever seen in my life. Creepy and uh it's real though, It's just you know, science is It's not like, oh, what is this thing? They know what the angler fish is, but they lived so deep I think until recently it had never been filmed in its habitat until like this year, until like three weeks ago. Yeah. Um, apparently it wasn't until nineteen seventy five that we ever photographed a whale underwater. Really yeah. Interesting two thousand six, I think, um or nineteen seventy six we discovered the mega mouth shark. Uh. There's like the sea just coughs up new life to us. That Yeah, where we slightly more superstitious we would have called monsters. So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters. But it goes back, like really really far, and looking at the different kind of monsters we came up with really kind of reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it goes back. I mean pretty much since people were writing stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster, like the ocean is always just enthralled folks. I think the Mesopotamians had the goddess uh Tiamatt. It was a sea monster. Well she was, yeah, and she was their creator goddess originally. So if you go far enough back in Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from, That's where the universe came from. Was Tiamat right. And then eventually as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, Um, she became what's known as the Chaos monster, and she was slain by a male hero as and then the world was created from from that. But originally she was just a benevolent creator goddess. Well, and we'll see as we go through here. Not all of the sea monsters. That depends on the culture and the religion. Uh, some of them were benevolent. I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. Uh. The Old Testament had its Leviathan. So even in the Bible, right, and this is a question of mind, dude, is do do don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamatt are one and the same. And in the Old Testament it's the Hebrew God slaying the old Mesopotamian gods, saying, don't even bring that here, like you created the world, I slay you. Yeah, I am God. Well, I mean there's a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament and other religions, and some people take great offense to that. Others don't what that that It's not no, this is the word of God, period. There is no crossover. That's just coincidence. Um, two leagues under the sea. I think Jules vern this quote is pretty cool. Uh. In eighteen seventy he wrote that great, great book, and he said, either we do know all the right varieties of beings which people our planet, or we do not. If we do not know them all, if nature has still secrets in the deeps, for us, nothing is more conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans and other kinds of even new species, to which the character receiving that monologue said the yeah, but it just it kind of plays to the point, um that if there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains, are deep in the jungles are deep under the sea because people would have seen them. So it makes it exotic in uh, sort of grabby as a means of religion or literature, you know lore. Right, Plus the Jules Verne was writing in well, this is eight seventy when he wrote twenty Leagues under the Sea, So this is a time when a lot of the old myths and legends and monsters were being subsumed by biology. So like, yeah, that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, But it's not actually a kraken. It's an orfice. It's it's yeah, or it's a it's a giant squid. And and here's you know what it does and how it reproduces. And because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah, that's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're a fan of mythology, they are. There are tons and tons of cool stories about secrete hers and sea monsters, all kinds of monsters. Uh, namely one actus named by the Romans. King Cepheius I had a wife named Cassiopeia and they ruled Ethiopia apparently, and she said, you know what, my daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs. And of course, um She's like yeah, I said it. Yeah. And Setis was like, all right, well, I've got a dog like head and I'm part fish, and I'm gonna come up and kill your daughter beside kill kill Cetis. Yeah. And Perseus, of course is always saving the day. So he apparently was flying back carrying Medusa's head that he just chopped off, flying around and uh it just happened to pass by. Uh was it? Persephone who was about to be eaten and Dromeda Andromeda and said, all right, I'll take care of setis on my way home. My swords bloody already Harry Hamlin, who was Yeah, I never saw the remake of that. Did you see that? No? Not didn't either. I just remember released the Crack and yeah it was a buzzword. Yeah that's right. Le Neeson has a knack for buzzy movie. Uh lines of dialogue because that very particular set of skills was also a big thing for months, four different movies. I was just in the one Are you sure? Yeah, taken, Yeah, it was pretty good movie, by the way, Sure sure. I did not see the sequel though, Taken to Electric Googleoo. Yeah, I thought it was weird when he started breaking. He's doing the worm, but like not even very well. I would have thought they'd get like a body double who was like a professional dancer. Well he he did not have a particular set of skills when it came to being on the cardboard. So chucky. You're talking about Perseus slaying Cetus. Yeah. Um. Homer's Odyssey was also another great book of legends and mythology. Yeah, and there were some sea monsters in it. Yeah, sila or skilla and uh suis charybdis Uh. These two point out an important and ongoing um feature of some of these stories, which are that maybe they might symbolize something else real. Yes, either a sea monster or in this case, maybe a dangerous reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common thing, I know, the cracking. Also, the most dangerous part about the cracking, supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right, So, um, this is kind of a this is one thesis on why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory, yeah, a you know, a tale told of of warning. Right, So that quote or that description of scylla is described as having twelve ft six heads atop long sinuous necks and mouths bristling with rows of shark like teeth. Well, um, that's probably a reef, right yeah, and then sure just lay on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated the waters. There, probably a whirlpoole. Right, So it's a story saying maybe don't go there exact exactly. Did you read that thing on nuclear semiotics, dude, Let me tell you about this for a second. Okay, there is this um, this whole exploration that's trying to figure out how to express Say so, like, if you have nuclear waste and you need to put it away for ten thousand years and to keep people away from it for ten thousand years, you have to figure out a way to warn people away from it for ten thousand years, Well, how could you possibly do that? Godzilla sign? That's one idea. There's a lot of other ideas, and this whole thing is called nuclear semiotics. And one of the ways, too, probably the most agreed upon way, is to create this thing called a nuclear priesthood, which is this group of learned people who know the secret of this nuclear waste site but purposefully come up with a folklore to warn people away, so to add some sort of like superstitious danger or something to the site that will get passed down and passed down, so eventually the people surrounding the area live around it will know like, you don't want to go there, You'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear radiation anymore, but this folklore will get passed along and along, and they're saying like that may be the best way to pass along information. And that's exactly what um. What the idea one interpretation and of what sea monsters are is. It's like a ghost story too. You know, you don't want your kids to go in that decrepit house with all the rusty nails. Tell him a scary old lady lives in there, or to play near the water. You don't want the you don't want a carp to take you away. It's really just manipulating your dumb kid pretty much. It's not doing dangerous things, right exactly. Yeah, And it works, and it's a way and over time it's gotten passed down. So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like you said, the krack in um possibly being the giant squid, or I shouldn't even say possibly, it's probably a giant squid, right, Yeah, There's always been stories of the kraking terrorizing ships off of Iceland and Norway. And the kracking is noted because it is huge, like one point five a mile to a mile and a half wide, and uh, you know, the cracking is, like you said, most likely a giant squid. If you see a if you're a sailor back then and you don't know about biology and things yet, and you see a uh an eyeball pop out the size of a human head, it might make you think that's a big cracking seamonster exactly. So then if that gets embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide, with legs as as large as a sailing mast, capable of pulling down a ship, well, I mean it gets the point across the people back on land, like, wow, that was a really big monster that you guys saw. How big do these squids get? They get to like forty forty three ft forty forty ft long. There's something even bigger called the colossal squid that's so much bigger. It's its own um species, I believe um and it lives just in the Antarctic. So it's probably not the basis of the cracking. It's probably just a regular old giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. Look look at those things right exactly. They're scary looking, they are very scary, and they're very very big. Plus Also, the idea of the crack and may have first come about before sightings of giant squid. They may have been taken from whalers who found like crazy scars on whales who may have found like bits of tentacles, like huge tentacles in the whales stomachs, things like that, and to be like, what did this come from? Yeah, the beak, because they did find a giant squid once, but the sailors cut it up and used it for bait, but they preserved the beak, and that just fueled the legend even more and more. So that's the that's Another interpretation of sea monsters is that they came from misunderstood or embellished sightings of actual sea organisms that were familiar with. Now, so it's the same thing, we just changed the name. Sure, well, you're a sailor, you're drunk. Maybe you may be hallucinating because you've been out at sea for too long, licking toads, maybe looking toads. You may be uh, physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued. Um, and you see a giant squid, you might write in your journal that I've seen the cracking. It makes perfect sense, you know, and it spreads and take shape over to time. Scurvy going on. The krack is not the only one. Um that's probably based on something real, the like sea serpents. So the Leviathan was a sea serpent, many headed sea serpent. It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said, Oh no, I'm sorry it was It was in the the Old Testament. It may have been the Mesopotamian god, That's what I said. Yeah, but Leviathan always just sort of a catch all word now for any like large, unknown, huge creature. Yeah, and apparently it's in Hebrew it just means whale. Yeah, um, which again is probably a whale. Well yeah, it could have also been a sea serpent. So sea serpents are there are their own things. Um, the uh, the Norse had a legend of the your moannder there's a warm loot in there and everything, and that was apparently, um, one of Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah, that was the baby that was created when Loki, his brother, and a woman named on Garboda I guess, had um the sex of the gods and created this creature, a sea serpent that wrapped around the globe supposedly. Yeah. Yeah, and um, that's just one example of a sea serpent, huge sea bound snake. And there's a lot of suggestions of what accounted for sightings of sea serpents. Yeah, huge things of floating kelp seen in the distance. Um, schools of porpoises, Yeah, along the line together. There's one thing though, that could have accounted for all sightings of sea serpents. It's called the or fish. Did you see this thing? Yeah? It is huge and Um, if an or fish was was swimming in the water, it could be undulating up and down and it looks like little spiny humps coming in and out of the water, so that that makes sense. Sure they get up too, I think, um, thirty or forty ft Yeah, they can. I mean, there's there's plenty of photos of you know, like tend duds on a beach holding one up right, because it takes ten dudes. It's not like they all want their hand on the little fish exactly, you know. And these aren't photoshoped either. There's all kinds of stupid fake pictures too. But or fishes are huge and they look like big, slimy kind of serpentine fish. And then chuck mirror people were another kind of universal Um, I guess sea monster myth. That's a That's another thing that stuck out to me, is there where there are legends around the world from cultures that are separated by space. And time that had similar stories um without possibly interacting. So it makes you think that a lot of these people cited similar things and came up with similar myths and legends to explain what they were seeing. Probably the mermaid is you know, if you've seen Splash, you think, what what a neat thing to find a mermaid. But mermaids were not um looked upon kindly because they would yeah, and this article points out they would at the their best, they would just forget that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die. And at the worst they would do so on purpose and take the men down under the water and lights out for you. Tom Hanks, Yeah, sorry Tom Hanks for the rest of your career. Darryl. His career was pretty lousy after Splashing it Well, uh yeah, what um she Daryl Hannah though in the movie would she was not a bad mermaid because she uh kissed him and gave him breath? Right, Well, it's the Hollywood ification of the mermaid. Ladward or like aerial from a Little Mermaid and that dirty dirty DVD cover Oh yeah, I guess it was VHS cover. They probably corrected that before it went to DVD, probably those Disney guys board board and yeah, sure, yeah, I get bored and blame so um. The whole Mr creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north that they consider themselves Nordic rather than Scottish. Yeah, Orkney, I think. And there's a whole part of Scotland it's underwater now called dog Land that was around ten or twelve thousand years ago. That's like this really fertile Neolithic artifact area. It's pretty cool. Dogger Land, that's what it is, not dog Land. So um. They had their own things called carpis chuck. And what's interesting about the carpi is that the kelpie I was thinking harpies, kepies exactly, but this is not carp or harpies. They're kelpies, which are actually horses that live in the sea that can sometimes change into humans, so they're kind of mer creatures. But every every lake in Scotland has a kelpie. This is supposedly associated with it, including lock Ness And it wasn't until the early eighteenth century that NeSSI became like a c creature that we think of her today when some dinosaur bones please use sare bones were found around Lockness saying well, this is what the Lockness monster is. Right before that, it was just a kelpie. We could probably do a full show on Nessy. Just think the fun of it, um was has been pretty much disproven um unequivocally of course, because there is no Lockness monster. But I just think things like that are neat And when we did one big Foot, it's more about just the legend in the war around it Unlockness. Did you ever see the documentary that what's his name did Verna Hertzog? No, I didn't know he did one of those. It was I think it was he did a mockumentary, but not like a Christopher Guest mocumentary, just bow documentary waiting for Nessy, Waiting for Nessy um where it just looked like he wasn't remember any of where he was searching for the Latinus monster and saw, you know, caught it on camera. But it made it, he made it seem real. I think it was Runner Herzog. It was good, of course, you know it sounds a little dishonest for Werner Herzog. Well, I don't. I don't think he was trying to pass it off. I think you kind of see this. Yeah, I'll look that up at may not be him, but someone did that, and it was kind of cool because if you buy into it, then you're like, oh my god, there it is. Are you sure this wasn't like something on on cable? Nol says it was her talking. Okay, yeah, I mean it probably played on cable at some point. Nold talks a lot more than Jerry does. Um, so chuck there. That brings us to our third interpretation for where sea monster legends came from people finding dinosaur bones. Yes, and we'll talk more about that right after this break, all right, Dinah, Josh, Yeah, let's hear it. Oh well, so I said that NeSSI became this kind of sea monster around the time of please Asaur. I believe that's what it was. Um skeleton was found around lock nests. They said, well, this is this must be one of Nessie's relatives. Apparently that wasn't the first time that that a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent. You mentioned um the Chinese having a legend of some sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about three ft long. Um oh no, I'm sorry about a foot long. The Guizoo dragons, and they were basically marine reptiles called keasaurs shui. They they but they were lucky. Like if you found one of these skeletons, you kept it because it was a little sea monster skeleton that you got your hands on, and it would bring you a good fortune. That's right. And I know what earlier we were talking about just the early explorers, and uh, you can't fault some of these dudes because they were, you know, as this one article you said, they were literally an unchartered waters and it was before the rise of science, and all they had heard were stories in folklore and anytime you saw if you ever see a map, c map, oceanic map from there, it's gonna have some sea monsters drawn on it, even as just decoration. So it was a time when before there were you know, before observational data came along. We pretty much was sort of like the Internet today. You pretty much just rewrote earlier history books over and over until they finally got a little smarter and say, you know what, maybe we should really observe something and then write about it. For real and this didn't really lead to any anything more substantiated, you know, well for a while, sure, but um it was they called a transitional era in this article, which I think kind of sums it up. Yeah, these were early scientists, early naturalists, who were trying to get a handle on what the heck they were looking at. Um, but they still perpetuated legends like they might have a real creature like a whale. Right, and then it's similarly a natural um biological illustration of a mythical creature like a ce bishop. So the ce bishop was this thing that was supposedly caught and taken to the King of Poland because it was this fish like creature that had like a meter and robes like a bishop, and apparently you could also talk and refuse to eat, and when it would make the sign of the cross and everything. And later on somebody said it probably didn't talk and make the sign of the cross. But if you look at a squid a certain way, it looks a lot like, yeah, it's got the hat and in some of its flappy skin that's kind of like the robes, you know, So maybe that's where the sea bishop came from. Simultaneously, to this. We're talking like the sixteenth century. There was a pretty much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land had an an analogy in the sea. Catfish, dogfish, seahorse, all that stuff, and uh, in some cases they were right, there are catfish, there are dog fish because we call them that sea monkeys right, the sea horse to um. But all that kind of It was a rough time for science. It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah, because you know, like you said, things were mistaken, like a whale and a walrus might be a monster when it's just a whale or a walrus. And there were all kinds of tails that you know, when it's repeated over and over, you get the sense it is just one of those like urban legends back then, right, I guess it wasn't urban back then, though, what would it be? Just a seafaring legend um of whales being mistaken for islands, and like a ship will land on the whale and build a you know, and route down basically get off the ship and build a fire, and then the whale, I guess who was just chilling out at the surface says, hey, there's a fire on my back, and I'm gonna take your boat underwater and swallow you hole. I'm a whale to be aware of the you know, whatever they called that, whatever culture called that particular whale exactly now we just call it a whale. And again it was probably end on their backs. It was an embellished story, but there they it was based on the sighting of a whale before they called it whales. And back when everybody lied about everything, they saw another culture that found dinosaur bones and created their own legends. Where the Lakota and Dakota su Yeah, sure, they came up with something called um the um um tahila la. Yeah. I think that's about right, from from dinosaur bones found around the Missouri River. Yeah, and that was a water creature. Well, they were very evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another, and so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with them thunder beings. Yeah, but I looked it up. It's basically thunderbirds, gotcha. What they knew is that it wasn't a tonka, that's a buffalo, right. Yeah, they were pretty sure. You know, um, that's apparently where the legends of the psych the Cyclops came from. From Native Americans from no from um finding like old like elephant bones, elephant skulls, the huge cavity in the middle, like well, clearly there was a race of giants that just had one eye. No, they were elephants. You know. We often joked like they were done back then. Of course they weren't. They were just trying to figure it out. It's like to make stuff up. They didn't have TV or anything back then, and a lot of this stuff was was um legend to keep you know, voters from going in a maybe a particularly dangerous part of the sea, or to keep the children away from the water. And like the ghost story and the nuclear what's it called? Oh, nuclear semiotic? Nuclear semiotics, man, everybody go look that stuff up. Actually, Roman Mars has a nine invisible about that one. Yeah, nice nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat ineffective. I imagine we'll find out in ten thousand years. I guess. So, um, what else do you got anything else? I don't have anything else on sea serpents. Um, just take a look at the angler fish video and tell me if you came upon that. And see, we also didn't point out that this was before deep not even deep sea exploration, like This is before underwater exploration. People are just riding around on the top of the ocean. So we're fascinated with it and we've gone to the depths that we can attain. At this point, it's just pretty deep. I wish I would look that up. I don't know how deep we can go. How deep James Cameron can go. Oh he goes deep, buddy. But um, think about back then, man, when they couldn't Like, you're not scary, that would be right, when these strange creatures are Like you see a giant squid, yeah, and you're just partially seeing it if you can't see it underwater. Do you have no idea before the Diving Bell even like there was? Or the Butterfly? That's right, Yeah, you like that one. I finally saw that movie, by the way, hardcore man. It's good though, Yeah, really good. Uh. If you want to know more about the diving Bell and the butterfly or about sea monsters, you can type those words into the search bar how stuff works dot com. And since I said search parts time for listener mail, i'n call this uh Opah is German for grandpa. I thought it was Greek for like good times. Maybe I don't know really, yeah, bah, well, I'm sure those are just three letters together, might be something Greek. But like my brother in law, Carston, his German and his grandfather was I'm sorry his father. His grandfather was Opa, but his dad was native Germans, so my nieces called him Opah, as does this Lady's I'm writing in specifically about your whaling podcast. Oh how appropriate with a family story that Lucy relates. My great grandfather Opa left Germany when he was fourteen pre war to work as a sailor, came to the US and was a member of the U. S Coast Guard. One day, he was part of a team that was clearing a harbor of some old sunken chips. To do so, they use the sophisticated method of throwing dynamite into the water to blast the wood of art and then gathered the debris. His team wrote out in a fourteen foot rowboat to gather up the wood shards and noticed the blast had killed the fish they floated to the tops of the crew brought them into the boat as well. Waste not, wantnot. As they were going about their business, they came across a sixteen foot hammerhead shark that had floated up. Clearly it would be a great source of food, so despite their small boat, they pulled it aboard. I think you see where this is headed. Well, As it turns out, the blast is strong enough to kill small fish, but only stunned larger animals. The sharks slowly started to gain consciousness in the row boat, and being confused and out of water, was not pleased. It got to the point that it was thrashing about in the boat, threatened to destroy the boat and likely injured or kill the crew members. So in the midst of this chaos are able to flag down a sailor on a larger vessel proceeded to shoot the thing to death while that was still in the boat. Um, all of the crew members were safe and they still got to feast on hammerhead shark. But now I had a much more exciting story. Uh, and you mentioned in the whaling podcast Old timmy whaling crew members were deployed in small boats to get the whale and were often injured and killed. I thought you might find this interesting, and I was hoping that you could give a shout out to my sister Rachel. You turned me onto your podcast in two thousand nine. She lives in France. We don't get to see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh and Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is uh Wendy Bear. She is a registered dietitian. And Wendy and Rachel Uh thanks for listening and for spreading the word and for being uh sisters. Way to go being sisters. Yeah, thanks for writing in, Wendy. Yeah, yeah, thanks Wendy, Um and Chuck. This is our last episode of two thousand and fourteen. Oh man, the longest year. So we want to say happy new year everybody, and I want to say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife, you me. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. That's the rights free version. No, that's the Stevie Wonder version. Oh it's a good one, so it's not rights free. Yeah, so happy birthday you me. Happy New Year to all of you great people out there in podcast land. We'll see you next year. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.