Jul 01, 2021 —
Bullheads are slimy and hard to clean without hurting yourself, but both those qualities help them survive. The spines protect them for being swallowed whole, and their lack of scales makes way for thousands of cells that let them "smell" the water with their whole bodies, and even identify each other in a group. They also herd their young together for protection, watching over them for an extended period. Martha Foley and Curt Stager talk trash about bullheads.
Martha Foley: Let's talk about bullheads. Bullheads loomed large in my childhood because we had a camp on the Hudson River and we would fish for bullheads at night. My dad finally said "no more bullheads I'm not cleaning another bullhead" because they would stick him with the spines, and they were really kind of nasty to clean, but they're really cool looking. And as a kid, I didn't have any negative feelings toward them. I think there's a lot of weirdness about bullheads because they're just kind of slimy and icky.
Curt Stager: Bottom feeders.
MF: Bottom feeders. Exactly. Trash fish, but you know they're common, and let's talk about them.
CS: Yeah. As a former angler that's kind of what I always thought about them too. You're after some other kind of fish and they kind of get in your way, unless you go out at night specifically for that. But if you learn about them as critters, as individuals, there's really, really some fascinating things about them. So one thing you notice, if you ever caught them, you do have to be careful because of those spines. And when I was a little kid people were telling me it's the whiskers.
MF: Right.
CS: The "barbs" around their mouth, you know, and those are, you could say, feelers instead. They're very soft and they use that for touch and taste and things. But the spines are in the pectoral fins, the ones where your arms would be.
MF: Right where you put your fingers to hold.
CS: Yeah, and there's one on the back too. And there's a mild toxin in there too, so it can be irritating. But that's a really good defense, they can fold those out like a switchblade and lock them in place if they're being attacked. And that's a defense against being swallowed whole by a big fish, which makes sense. And so you do have to worry about that and be careful if you handle them. One thing you might have noticed was how slippery they are too. There are no scales on their skin.
MF: Right?
CS: So it turns out an advantage of that for them is without all that scaly armor they're in really close contact with the water. And it turns out their skin is covered with tens of thousands of little taste receptor cells. So they can taste the water with their entire body as they're swimming around.
MF: So they can sense... kind of like smell too?
CS: They can do real smell with their nostrils. But we'll just say it's like they're smelling the water with their skin.
MF: So they can tell where the food is, tell where other fish are, other bullheads?
CS: They can tell... they use it with their food. And it turns out they can smell each other and they can recognize individuals from the smell.
MF: Do they like individuals?
CS: Well, it depends. They recognize and remember individuals. So they're very social it turns out, which I hadn't realized, when you're pulling them up one by one, there's a social structure down there. So they have the big tough alpha bullhead hanging out with a bunch of subordinates in a little gang. If they encounter a stranger bullhead, they'll know they're a stranger by the smell, and they expect the alpha to go and inspect them and decide whether to let him into the group or not, and the subordinates hold back, and things like that.
MF: One thing I noticed as a kid we, of course, were hanging out in the shallows a lot. And once in a while you'd see this inky black mass and you'd get close and it seemed like thousands of tiny, tiny hatched bullheads. And it would just move as a cloud, you know, from one place to the other. What's with that?
CS: Yeah the bullheads are really good parents. So the female will make a little shallow nest, they'll have thousands of eggs in there. When they hatch, they come out as these little tiny black bullheads and the parents will herd them around in a tight clump and take care of them for about a month and they'll hover around and guard them. If one of them goes out of the little school they'll bring them back in their mouth and drop them in.
MF: Really?
CS: It's just really amazing. The first time I ever saw them was along the shore of a pond and I saw the inky black mass there and there were two parents kind of herding the babies along the shore like that, taking care of them. So then the school will stay that way, even after the parents are finished with them, and go off and then they'll kind of go on their own way.
MF: But they hang together for that long. We of course were trying to make them go places and do things and didn't notice the parent bullheads, but next time I see one of those inky clouds I will definitely stand back and check it out. Thanks very much Dr. Curt Stager of Paul Smith's College. I'm Martha Foley at St. Lawrence University.
Natural Selections is a weekly conversation about the natural world heard each Thursday morning on North Country Public Radio. NCPR is listener supported, your donation now at ncpr.org/give helps us continue to provide quality content like Natural Selections. Thanks!
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