SciShow Tangents - Fish with Kurtis Conner
Episode Date: April 20, 2021Comedian, streamer, and YouTuber Kurtis Conner (@kurtisconner) stops by to talk to us about fish! Don’t be koi… give it a listen!This episode has everything you could want: multiple poop facts, mi...nd-blowing revalations, and a celebrity guest! It's the total package!Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsIf you can’t get enough Kurtis Conner, check out his YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7zsxKqd5MicTf4VhS9Y74gA big thank you to Patreon subscriber Eclectic Bunny for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Definition]Fish evolutionhttps://www.npr.org/2010/07/05/127937070/the-human-edge-finding-our-inner-fishhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210205210627.htm[Ask the Science Couch]Smelly fishhttps://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/23/science/q-a-rotten-fish.htmlhttps://nutrition.org/is-fish-smelly/https://www.jstor.org/stable/24086628?seq=1https://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4461https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/09/Source-Fishy-Odors-Identified.htmlhttps://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/trimethylaminuria/[Butt One More Thing]White sand beacheshttps://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sand.html
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase.
I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week as always is resident science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. I feel uncomfortable with you using that to introduce
me to someone I've never met before because they know you from TikTok as like a science expert,
and I can't top that. Look, Sari, what everybody used to know is that when I have a TikTok I need
to make, I just call you. I don't know. I know know nothing and that's canon uh also joining me today is our
resident everyman sam schultz sam how is everything going i'm feeling social anxiety for the first
time in a year because there's a person in the room who you don't know yeah because we are also
joined by a special guest comedian and and YouTuber and streamer, Curtis
Connor is here.
Hello.
Yeah.
I really appreciate you coming.
And I have a question for you and the rest of our panel here.
It has been confirmed that Kim Kardashian is now officially a billionaire.
If you were a billionaire, how would that happen?
How would it have happened that you became a billionaire?
And inheritance is not allowed.
I'm not allowing it.
That's not fair.
That's how it happens to most people.
If I were to become a billionaire, I feel like you would have to be like just through theft, I feel like.
There's no natural way for it to happen, right?
Right.
So you just get somebody's password to their Bitcoin wallet?
Yeah.
And sort of, you know, rob them blind for, you know, lack of a better word.
Inherit their, well, no, I guess you can't really inherit.
I was going to call it.
No.
Inherit.
I would inherit their stolen money.
Illicitly inherit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think that's what that, I think that word is specific to not stealing.
Though I guess in cases, sometimes people will murder,
and that's kind of an inheritance theft.
Yeah.
If you don't get caught.
That's the trick.
Is that how you would do it, Sari?
No, I wouldn't do a murder.
I would probably take advantage of rich people
and offer a ridiculously expensive SAT prep class or something
like very stupid.
Right.
I've thought about doing this very thing.
You would parasite them, right?
Is that what happens in Parasite pretty much?
Minus the hiding in their house.
But yeah, parasite in spirit of I will show up as a tutor.
All the fun parts of Parasite with that.
Sam, how would you become a billionaire?
It's impossible for me to see a path to me
being successful in any capacity.
Oh no. Probably
probably
like a very
accidental like stock market investment
or like finding
a treasure. Something like that.
Yeah. That's a good one.
I fall in a hole and there's a bunch of gold in the bottom of the hole.
I think that's the only one.
A nice gold hole.
Yeah.
The podcast you're listening to is called SciShow Tangents.
And here, every week, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic.
And we're playing for Glory.
We're also playing for Hank Bucks.
And I'll be awarding one of you
the victory at the end of the episode curtis looks like he has something to say no that's
my mouth dropping in just shock because i i didn't know there was i didn't know i didn't
know there was money to be won a special hank currency yeah and every hank buck has an nft
yeah and there you could they're they're open for bidding right now at nft.nft.
And so you can have a Hank Buck for yourself if you have enough Ethereum, I guess.
What a sentence.
And as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic because, I don't know, Curtis, do you even know what the topic is yet?
Yeah.
Oh, I know.
It's, what, am I going to give it away right now?
I get to announce it?
I'm about to say it.
Yeah, you can tell us.
What is it?
It is fish.
You passed the test.
Yeah, imagine.
It is beans, legumes.
Oh, God, beans.
That's got to be soon.
Sari, so what is your fishy science poem?
One fish, two fish, more like 30,000 species.
They're in all kinds of water, floating with their feces.
There's guppies and hammerheads with their furrowed brows.
They're squishy or bony or their phosphorescence wows.
Some use gills to breathe, jaws to eat, fins to speed them up instead of feet.
With scales for protection, eggs for reproduction, remoras even have a special head for suction.
But then lungfish and hagfish seem to break all the rules, using land or oozing slime, and not swimming in schools.
They've had hundreds of millions of years to change, so it's no wonder that so many fish are so super strange.
So from a little goldfish in a bowl to tunas in the sea, just know they share an ancestor with Will Smith and Angelina Jolie.
Perfect.
Sari, thank you for your poem.
What is a fish?
And this is now like a meme in science communication
that like they're literally,
there are podcasts and books about the fact
that fish don't exist.
What, really?
I didn't look into the fact that fish don't exist,
but I looked into the meme that we are all just fish.
Yeah.
It's one of the two.
Either I am a fish or there are no fish.
The definition of a fish, as we consider them now,
if you point to a fish in the water,
that people will agree upon without getting into meme territory,
is that they are aquatic animals, so they're living in the water.
They have a backbone, so they're vertebrate.
Okay.
They have gills to help them filter oxygen out.
Mm-hmm.
And they don't have limbs with digits, like fingers and toes, like we do,
because they have fins.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure dolphins are in there.
They're a mammal.
Yeah, but you just listed a bunch of attributes that dolphins also have.
So not a mammal is another one of the important attributes. Yeah, I think not a mammal. Okay.
But there are cartilaginous fishes. So like a shark is a fish. Yes. So they don't have to have
bone and they don't have to have jaws because there are lamp rays. But it turns out that the
things that are fish are very, very distantly related to one another.
And we are much more closely related to some fish
than other fish are to other fish.
They've just been around so long or what's going on?
They've just been around so long.
And the ocean is a big, big place.
They've been here for way too long.
They got to get out of here.
They have to cede the territory.
They're overstaying their welcome absolutely the ocean
is ours now fish are over if we're fish then why can't then we can just play the ocean well that's
the wild thing about dolphins is that they are fish that left and then came back well like i
don't i don't like it in the ocean i'm gonna leave and then it was like actually that was great
i'm gonna have like a hundred million year break on land and then head back head back it's like's like when you go away to like university and you're like, this is going to be great. But
then you're like, this kind of sucks. So you just kind of move back home.
Dolphins took a gap year.
Taxonomy turns out to be extremely complicated, but very, very fun.
Sari, fish, I feel like almost definitely is a word that we have no idea where it came from.
Is that the case?
Yes and no.
It's like we have no idea where it came from
because we used it for so long.
We pointed to a thing, anything in the water,
and we're like, that's a fish,
which is how we got words like shellfish and starfish
because we'll just tack on the word fish of like,
okay, well, we've got fish fish,
and then that one looks like a star.
So we're going to call it a starfish now.
But I did learn a word.
I did learn a new word in the process of researching fish.
It comes from the Proto-Indo-European root pisk, which forms all or part of the words fish, piscatory, Pisces, corpus, and grampus.
What's grampus? My dad's dad. Yeah, and Grampus. What's Grampus?
My dad's dad.
Yeah.
My Grampus.
So that's why we're all fish, because Grampus is fish.
It was actually a word that people used for killer whales, like orcas, and other large
dolphin-like creatures.
So there is like a Grampus dolphin out there that has just carried this name on into the
present.
Is this like granddaddy fish, Grampus dolphin out there that has just carried this name on into the present. Is this like granddaddy fish?
Grampus?
Like big fish, I think.
Like a big whopper.
Grand Pisk.
Yeah.
So they used to call them Grampuses and then killer whales had like a rebranding effort.
They were like, that does not sound mean enough.
I want you to recognize my status as a murderer.
I want you to recognize my status as a murderer.
Man, it's wild to watch my son watch a nature documentary where a killer whale straight up murders a penguin.
And he's like, no.
And I'm like, sorry.
Whale's got to eat, buddy.
That's a yes.
They're like, why is he doing that?
And it's like, well, that's just a little meat pill for that boy.
Do you know that some penguins are so fatty that they will burn?
Like you can use them as like fire logs.
Anyway.
Wait, hold on.
Have you done this?
No, but people did because they're like on islands
where there was basically no wood to burn a fire with,
they would just like use penguins.
Sounds like an extravagant
rich person thing to do.
It's awful.
That's super awful.
And that is a fact
from one of the very first things
that was ever published
by me in a magazine.
It was a Mental Floss magazine
in the early 2000s.
Wow.
If you'd like to look it up.
So that fact stuck.
Unlike all of the other ones
that I learn and also all of the other ones that I learn, and also all of the other
ones that we are about to learn.
I'm excited to have our first game of SciShow Tangents, where there are some points on the
line.
And our first game is another edition of Rhyme Time.
This is a very simple game where I tell you about something, something
that is a two-word phrase
and then you tell me what that two-word phrase
is and then all of the subsequent descriptions
of other things will rhyme
with that initial thing and then
you'll get it eventually, Curtis.
Don't worry. All of those things
will rhyme with a scientific term
about fish that I will then
tell you about.
It won't make any sense.
And then it will make sense.
And then you'll be really mad at Hank.
Okay.
As long as it ends with me being mad at Hank.
So we're going to start out.
Hopefully everybody gets this one.
But whoever says it first is the one that gets the point.
A small horse that made a basketball shot that didn't even hit the rim.
Pony swoosh? That didn't hit the rim. Pony swoosh?
That didn't hit the rim?
A pony swish?
A pony swish because Curtis knows more about basketball than Sari, who thinks it's called a swoosh.
One letter more than me.
Yeah, swoosh is not quite the noise that it makes.
It's a pony swish.
Curtis got our first point of the game.
Everything in this round will rhyme with pony swish.
If you squeezed the doctor who is in charge of the pandemic,
that would be a?
Comey pinch?
Comey?
No.
Who's Comey?
That's the FBI director.
That was some other guy.
Yeah. Rhymes with pony, though. Who's in charge of the pandemic, you guys? Who's that new famous doctor that the FBI director. That was some other guy. Oh, yeah.
Rhymes with pony, though.
Who's in charge of the pandemic, you guys?
Who's that new famous doctor that we all know the name of now?
Fauci Squish?
No, what's his first name, friend?
Tony.
Tony Squish.
That's right.
It's a Tony Squish.
Thank you, Sari Riley.
Gets another point. Rhyming with Tony Squish, if you wanted to rock very badly and you asked a genie for it, that would be a?
Stony wish.
Oh, Sam Schultz coming in fast with the heat.
Our final one of this category.
If someone fed you odd processed meat slices on a plate, that would be a?
Bologna dish.
Yeah.
And the thing that we were rhyming with, anybody know?
Bony fish? Bony fish?
Bony fish is correct.
So there are many different kinds of fish.
We've already talked about some of them.
There are lampreys and there are hagfish and there are cartilaginous fish.
And there are bony fish, which are 99% of the fish.
And they have jaws and mineralized skeletons.
And you can very easily make the case that you are among them.
It's called osteichthys. And we are in among the osteichthys,
which we have already talked about, so I don't need to talk any more about that.
And so now it is time for our second category and final category of Rhyme Time.
And we will start out.
Now, refresh your brain.
None of this will rhyme with Bony Fish.
A way to get to the top of the building at your
high school that has the shiniest wooden floors would be a gym ladder gym ladder oh nice no way
you need you need to be on all the time sam and i take forever to get the first one
so it rhymes everything will not rhyme with jim ladder wow curtis i'm very impressed
yeah me too what the hell the man who played dr frankenfurter has been transformed into a
poisonous snake that would be a rhymes with jim ladder i don't know his name i know the snake
tim adder tim adder sam schultz gets a. If you want to propel yourself through the water, but you need to do it even
more sad than you were before,
you would
swim sadder.
And finally, this man
who makes hats in olden times
is not very smart.
Bad Hatter? You might even say that
the light in his head is not very
bright. Dim Hatter. Dim Hatter. I the light in his head is not very bright.
Dim Hatter.
Dim Hatter.
I forgot the first word we were rhyming with. Dang it!
And that rhymes with anybody?
Want to know what that rhymes with?
That is a fishy scientific term.
Dim Hatter.
Swim Ladder?
Swim Ladder?
Yeah, it's like when salmons jump up.
Oh, you're right.
It is.
There is such a thing as a swim bladder,
but that's not the thing I was rhyming with.
Sarah gets half a point.
Is a swim bladder?
Swim bladder!
You already said swim, though.
You can't use swim and then use swim again.
Yeah, I can.
Okay.
I didn't even know I did it.
Swim bladders are used by most non-cartilaginous fish.
They're not used by all non-cardiogenous fish,
but they control how shallow or deep
the fish go in the water
because water pressures are different
at different levels in the water,
different amounts of gas,
and the swim bladder will result
in neutral buoyancy at different depths.
And fish want to be roughly neutrally buoyant
so that they don't sink or float.
That would be bad.
They would have to expend lots of energy
making sure that they stay at the right level. Now, some fish gulp air into their swim bladders, but other swim bladders are filled
by an organ that actually pulls oxygen out of their blood and turns it back into a gas or into
a gas because it wasn't originally a gas for fish. It was diffused out of the water, turns it back
into a gas that they can then use to fill up the swim bladder or empty it back out by diffusing the oxygen back into the blood,
which is wild that they can just make gas in their bodies,
which I guess I do too.
Can fishes fart?
Sorry, sidebar.
Sari, I saw a nod from our science expert here.
Can fish fart?
Some of them use farts to communicate, I think.
They like fart lots of bubbles. Little clicks and stuff, right? Yeah, warn to communicate, I think. They like fart lots of bubbles.
Little clicks and stuff, right?
Yeah, warn their friends, I think.
Right.
They get nervous and they fart, just like me.
That's totally understandable and a part of life.
If anybody was keeping track at home of how you did,
let us know on Twitter at SciShow Tangents
where you can tell us,
I did even better than any of you.
I got every single one of them.
That rhyme time was so easy.
And then we can feel bad about ourselves.
But the totals that we have come to
in the end, Curtis
got three points. Sari got
three and a half. Sam Schultz
in the lead with four.
Yeah, baby. I'm a smart
rhyme guy. Next up, we're going to take a short break
and then I have another game for our
panel.
Welcome back, everybody.
Now it is time for Triggered.
I have prepared three science facts for your education and enjoyment,
but only one of those facts is real.
Our panelists will have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess,
which is the true fact.
And if you do, you get a Hank Buck.
If you are tricked, no Hank Buck.
I have facts about goldfish.
So they are popular pets,
though humans are not always great at raising them.
But while they may seem fragile in our care,
they are very hardy fish in the wild,
able to survive winter and the oxygen-less conditions that it creates in water.
How does the goldfish prepare
and ultimately survive the winter?
Well, the following are three possible
explanations, but only one of these explanations for how goldfish survive the winter is true.
Fact number one, goldfish get ready for winter by turning to some friendly neighbors, the beaver.
With winter upon them, goldfish have been spotted gathering in dams, swimming close to the much
warmer beaver, taking in their heat while also salvaging some much needed oxygen closer to the So they just cuddle up with beavers.
Or, fact number two, goldfish burp their way through the winter.
To adapt to anoxic conditions, goldfish switch from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism, which relies on stores of glycogen in their liver. One of the main
byproducts is lactic acid, which could lead to lactic acidosis if it builds up too much in the
fish. So to get rid of the lactic acid, the goldfish burp out little lactic acid bubbles.
Or finally, remodeling. Goldfish make themselves seasonally appropriate by doing some remodeling
of their gills.
When temperatures get cold, they adapt their gills by removing cell masses and increasing the surface area of their respiratory structures, which allows the fish to take in more oxygen from their environment.
They just rebuild their gills. three facts. We've got burping, remodeling, and beaver fever for us to
choose from. Please
now quiz me. Don't insult my intelligence
with a beaver one. Come on.
We don't think they cuddle?
There's coys and koi ponds
like down the street from me. There are beavers
hanging out on the koi ponds.
Yeah, actually, I
walked past that koi pond too. actually i walked through i walked past that
koi pond too that's that's too bad i should i should have remembered that we live in the same
neighborhood so but just like for my knowledge i never thought about goldfish being in the wild
where do they live like where can you go out and observe a goldfish not in a fish tank i don't
think they're from i would guess they're not from North America,
which is the only place that beavers are from, correct?
Look, yes.
And they're from East Asia.
And just don't guess the beaver one.
Yeah.
I mean, well, we know now that...
Funny enough that I asked about fish farting
now that one of the options is burping fish.
It's basically that.
So it is, yeah, it's basically a fart out of the mouth, essentially.
My son, and I don't know where he learned this,
calls farts butt burps, which I'm like, no.
Just say fart.
Just grow up.
Just say the words.
That's not better.
But yeah, I think burp's totally plausible.
I feel like if you can get gas out of one end, you can get gas.
I don't know, fish aren't very big.
They're a team too.
Squeeze gas out of both ends.
The guilt-changing one seems too hard for a goldfish to do too.
They seem like they'd be lazy creatures.
Yeah, remodeling, that sounds like a lot of work.
They had to call in the Property Brothers or something.
They are really good at getting big though like how koi's grow to fill the size of their tank and all goldfish do like that that is a big problem when people are keeping goldfish is
that they don't have a big enough tank my brother had a koi that got a little comically huge and
then we had to donate it to a japanese garden because it was like it cannot be happy not
turning around in this tank did he go visit it after it was there?
Yeah, we could go visit it.
We could like, you could buy little baggies of food for like 50 cents and then sprinkle
them in the garden sometimes.
That's so nice.
I put my goldfish in a pond that a neighbor had and an egret ate it.
Did you see it happen?
No, I didn't.
They informed me.
I like went by and I was like, where's the goldfish? And they're like,
oh, sorry. Oh, no. That's Florida for you.
Well, as long as they don't get eaten, they're good at growing. So I would say
biologically, the gill seems plausible. I think I'm going to go with burping because
burping seems easier. So I'm going to lock that one in.
Yeah, I think I'm going to. Gosh in yeah i think i'm gonna gosh yeah i'm gonna go with the burping
i think okay burping i'll i'll go with gills i'll stand by my own logic okay just in case sarah is
standing by her own logic is that really it or were you leading them astray intentionally because
you won oh i did not leave them okay i don know. I do have a friend who recently bought a house and discovered that despite all these like property tours, there was a koi pond in her yard with four fish living at the bottom that no one mentioned.
Like no one, not the seller of the house, not the realtor.
And she was just like, they're alive in there uh they survived
a michigan winter yeah that's what it is wild the they don't take them out of the pond down
our street either it's like i always assume they did but then i saw them in like september or
something and i was like those guys are probably too cold but i guess not no they're there they're
apparently fine because they can do winters very effectively. Now, kleptothermy is a thing. It even has a name where one animal will warm up to another animal and just kind of get the good warm vibes from somebody.
ponds and many fish end up dying from the lack of oxygen that results.
So opposite.
Fish do burp, but they do not burp lactic acid.
Goldfish do switch to glycogen stores for anaerobic metabolism.
So they do that and it does produce lactic acid. But instead of burping it out, they convert the lactic acid to ethanol, which diffuses
out of their gills.
And they do that conversion using an enzyme similar to the one found in brewer's yeast.
So kinda goldfish can make booze.
That's neat.
Dang.
But don't do that because they also poop in their water.
So it's not just booze.
But yeah, goldfish and some other carp relatives have the ability to remodel their gills to
take in more oxygen.
They do that by killing off masses of cells called the inter lamellar cell mass, which can take up space between the oxygen bringing in
structures called the lamella that are on the surface of the gills. And that removal exposes
more surface, allowing more oxygen intake. And it would be maladaptive for goldfish to always have
that higher surface area because they would lose things that they need in their blood, like ions.
But it's useful for adapting to hypoxic conditions
or low oxygen conditions
because it allows the goldfish
to prolong their normal metabolic processes before
turning to that limited glycogen store
and anaerobic metabolism
where they produce all that ethanol to survive.
It's pretty cool, goldfish.
Look at you.
Good for them.
I don't know why we're so good at killing you if you're so good at surviving.
And that means that we have our final scores for the episode.
Curtis and Sam came in at three and Sari pulled out the win with 4.5 points.
Dang.
That makes sense.
You went to school for this kind of garbage.
For this stupid stuff.
Yeah, you went to fish school.
A school of fish.
Yeah, that's all I did for four years.
I swam around in the ocean,
became one with the fish for this episode.
Real quick, Sam got four points.
I did?
Oh, okay.
Yeah, in the first one.
No!
I know.
No, come on.
I was feeling kinship with you, but now I just feel superiority. Yeah! I know. No! Come on! I was feeling
kinship with you,
but now I just
feel superiority.
Yeah, right?
I got to do
your job so good.
Tuna, thank you
for your update.
And now it's time
to ask the science
couch, where we've
got listener questions
for our couch of
finely honed
scientific minds.
It's from
at Macrocellis,
who asks,
why do fish
smell fishy?
I imagine it's a compound that contains nitrogen, but that's all I got.
It does contain nitrogen.
Hey, they all nitrogen is so stinky sometimes.
The nitrogen containing compound in question here is trimethylamine.
That sounds stinky.
Just picturing that.
I don't like I don't like that.
I don't like how it looks.
It looks like a stinky molecule.
Can you really picture that in your head?
Yeah. I mean, that's
not a complicated molecule.
Okay, well.
I literally did go to four years
of school to be able to do that.
Yeah, Hank and I are
just very well prepared for this one
kind of mental imaging,
but I don't know any words that are
related to basketball outside of basketball. So you pick your poison, what you want to be dumb at.
Well, anyway, the reason why it's so high in fish and like particularly ocean fish is because they
use a compound called trimethylamine oxide, so like a related chemical,
to stabilize the proteins in their cells
because as you get deeper, the pressure increases
and that can mess with the way your cells function.
And this compound like helps make sure
that there isn't too much like salt rushing in or out
or ions rushing in or out.
And the proteins can still still move around and do the
things that they need to do to synthesize, I don't know, keep your body running. Proteins do so many
things. And we know from studying bony fishes specifically, because there are so many of them,
that TMAO and the trimethylamine oxide increases with depth. So if you catch a deep sea fish and bring it up to the surface and then
kill it and expose it to the air then all of the trimethylamine oxide in its body will get
chemically converted by bacteria or just like exposure to the air or enzymes within the fish
to trimethylamine and it will stink so the deeper a a fish, the stinkier a fish? Yeah, that's why freshwater
fish aren't as stinky.
I feel well, truly educated on
fish stink. If you want to ask your question to the
Science Couch, you can follow us on Twitter at
SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming
episodes every week. Thank you to
WitchVulgar, at Iviarela,
and everybody else who tweeted us your
questions for this episode. I'm pretty sure
I pronounced WitchVulgar right, but I'm pretty sure I pronounced which vulgar right,
but I'm pretty sure I got the other one wrong.
I think you kind of blew the second one, yeah.
Thank you everybody for making a podcast with me this week.
Curtis, you can find Curtis Conner's work.
It's Curtis Conner.
It's spelled like that with a K in the first one
and a C in the second one.
Nailed it.
There's many funny videos that you can find and watch
and also podcasts.
I'm one of them that you can go listen to.
What's your podcast called? My podcast is called Very Really Good. It's a weekly podcast
and yeah, it's a good time. I promise. If you like this show and you want to help us out,
it's very easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a
patron and get access to things like our newsletter and also our bonus episodes. We already have more
than 250 patrons,
so thank you to everybody who has signed up
to become a part of that community.
Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen.
That's helpful and lets us know what you like about the show.
And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents,
just tell people about us.
Thank you for joining us.
I've been Hank Green.
I've been Sari Reilly.
I've been Sam Schultz.
I've been Curtis Conner, the best guestari Riley. I've been Sam Schultz. I've been Curtis Connor.
The best guess ever.
SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz,
who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima.
Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto.
Our editorial assistant is Tupoki Chakravarti, and our sound design is by Joseph Tunemenish.
Of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon.
Thank you and remember,
the mind is not a vessel to be filled,
but a fire to be lighted.
But, one more thing.
Parrot fish in Hawaii like to dine on algae found on rocks and dead corals,
using their fused teeth to scrape the algae and some other tooth plates to chomp up the rest of the coral.
And after the coral passes through the digestive system, it gets pooped out as sand.
So much sand that it's estimated that around 70% of the white sand beaches in Hawaii and the Caribbean is made this way.
That's disgusting.
Wow, Curtis, how do you know so much about parrotfish? Amazing.
I went to school for specifically parrotfish. I wish the questions were about that.