Save the native fish and eat the rest

Hi, I'm Adam Reagusia, YouTube cook, science enthusiast, and noted fan of freshwater life. I love keeping freshwater fish. I love eating freshwater fish, which is why I've come to you today with a simple public service announcement. Save the native fish, eat the invasive fish. This is some invasive carp that I'm going to show you how I cooked. If you love freshwater fish too in any sense, I hope that you will join me this holiday season in supporting Conservation Fisheries, an incredible nonprofit here in Knoxville that protects at risk species from all over the American Southeast. And if you are able to support Conservation Fisheries right now, well, you can get this limited run t-shirt plus a paper recipe card written in my own hand. I mean, in my own hand, right-handed. So, something that makes freshwater fish so special and yet so vulnerable is how atomized they are. They don't all swim in the same big ocean. Populations are completely cut off from each other across a continentwide patchwork of delicate little streams and ponds. Like, literally, there are entire species that exist only in one pond. And all it takes is for one mining company to screw up. All it takes is for one farmer to put a cow pasture on the wrong hillside. There's a whole bunch of runoff and an entire species is gone forever. Why should you care? Well, apart from the intrinsic value of all life forms, it's always good to keep as many species around as possible because you never know when one of them is going to turn out to be really useful to humans. Either through its particular ecological function like eating mosquito larve or uh through its particular genetic properties, could be used for a medicine or a technology. You never know. Plus, I bet a lot of you like to go fishing. So, conservation fisheries is like a seed bankank but for fish. These biologists go all over the region collecting vulnerable species. They bring them back here to Knoxville. They figure out how to get them to reproduce, which can be surprisingly hard. And then they reintroduce individuals back into the wild and or keep some of them here in tanks just to keep a core population safe somewhere. For example, this flamboyant guy, the candy darter. This population is from a very small creek in southwest Virginia that was impacted by Hurricane Helen. So last year when we went, I did see corn in the tops of trees 40 ft above us. >> So so many fish were flushed out by that storm and washed up on land or their water was fouled or the entire course of their stream was like moved. >> Did not look great. And we still managed to catch 16. Uh the last year that we propagated them for the very first time, we did way better than we thought we would and we released probably over 500 at least already. >> Here's another refugee from Hurricane Helen. The first nonfish species that they've ever worked with here. Don't let them fool you. Looking all cute still in their eggs. These are hellbenders. Would you like to see a picture of an adult hellbender fighting a northern water snake? This is one of the greatest nature photographs I've ever seen in my life. It is by David Harrisonchuck. That is a hellbender. Also known as >> the snot otter, the devil dog, the lasagna lizard. They are America's largest salamander and they're actually related to the Japanese and Chinese giant salamanders. So when we came in, they were basically just little orbs of yellow. You couldn't really see anything. That was in early October of this year. And now they are actual creatures with arms and legs. And we get to watch them grow for at least two years to be released into the Cherokee National Forest. >> And fun fact, the babies actually develop a tiny tooth on their heads that allows them to cut their way out of their little egg prison. >> There's one that's hatched. Holy. We actually might need to get that guy. >> Okay, >> Jackson. >> Jackson is my buddy from my little aquarium club. He's actually training here to go help start up a similar facility. Now, obviously, the biologists at Conservation Fisheries are not able to save everything. Here's the Carolina Madtom, which lives only in two little river basins. The Noose River Madtos were wrecked by pig runoff after another big storm a few years ago. >> When our partners went to go look for this fish, they found two. They brought the two Carolina Madtos from the Noose River here for us to figure out they were males. What am what are we going to do with that? So, we've been trying to propagate those two males with tar river females. Uh, and they have not wanted to. >> And the other male died. So, this fellow looks to be the Omega Man, which is pretty sad. Should we do one more example? Do we need a happy story? Check out the boulder darter from the Elk River system, which is Tennessee, northern Alabama. So usually darters are called darters because they're on the stream bed and they dart around and that's a bin thick stage. So they're bin thick when they're on the stream bed. Boulder darters actually have a pelagic larville stage which means at some point in their lives they're actually swimming at the top of the water. Nobody knew that. And so in the stream that they were existing in, they were for some reason disappearing out of nowhere. And we kind of took a closer look when we found this pelagic laral stage and we said, "Oh my god, it's the dam. They live below a dam. They're getting washed away because of the dam. >> See, when you manage a dam, you generally release water from it on a regular schedule. Conservation Fisheries went to the Tennessee Valley Authority and said, "Hey, could you maybe tweak your dam schedule so that you don't wash away the babies when they're in their pelagic stage?" The answer was yes. And the Boulder Darter is doing way better now. Amazing. If you'd like to join me in financially supporting such work, well, listen up. We've printed about a hundred of these t-shirts which Aster from the video designed. >> Hi. >> You know how rarely I do merch drops. So, if you or someone in your life is a big Adam Regusia fan, now is the time to get some. And if you order it right away, you should get it by Christmas. Now, to go along with each shirt, I've also handwritten a recipe card with my signature vegetable soup recipe on it. You get the shirt and the signed card for a hundred bucks, which is a lot. But remember that this is a fundraiser for a very worthy nonprofit. If you have the cash, the fish will appreciate you. Now, here is a totally different opportunity. If you live within traveling distance of Knoxville, consider buying a ticket to Conservation Fisheries 40th anniversary dinner, which is coming up on February 15th. I sponsored a table, so I'm going to be there. The speaker is going to be Emily Grassley, the great science YouTuber, Hank Green Associate. She's going to do an awesome presentation. The links for the t-shirt fundraiser and for the 40th anniversary dinner are down in the description. These are both obviously limited opportunities, so act fast to save the native fishes. What about the introduced invasive ones? This is some silver carp that I got from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. Invasive carp are an ecological menace all through the Mississippi River Basin. Oh, contains fish. Good tip. The TWWR works with commercial fishers to get millions of pounds of these out of the water, and they encourage any anglers out there who encounter carp to go to town on them. If they're in the Americas, they ain't native. It's really tasty white fish. I just seasoned and fled it. I cannot bring myself to use teflon in a video about aquatic ecosystem health, so I'm using some extra oil in a stainless pan. I don't like the fish brown. I like it like pale golden, so gentle heat. But as a rule, you want to cook wild caught freshwater fish all the way through cuz germs. A pretty common restaurant trick is to fry in lots of oil and then pour most of that oil out before you build a pan sauce in there. It's so simple, but I don't think anything beats butter and lemon with white fish. Melt a bunch of butter, squeeze in the lemon, which really freshens up fish that can sometimes taste a little muddy, as they say. Maybe reduce it a little and then you are golden. Save the native fish, eat the invasive ones, and consider supporting Conservation Fisheries with my links below. Not a paid ad, I'm just a fan.