From the brains behind brains on, this is moment of um.

Answering those questions that make you go

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uh... uh... uh... I'm Manneko Wilhelm.

I'm I'm I'm Manneko Wilhelm.

Here at Moment of Umm, we love fishing for questions and the one we're answering now is a great catch.

It comes from Mark in Miami, Florida.

When lakes form, how do fish get in them?

The vast majority of cases where fish would end up in new lakes has to be through a water connection.

Hi, my name is Megan McPhee, and I'm an assistant professor in Fisheries at the University of Alaska Fairbanks,

and I study fishes in particular salmon.

Most fish can't handle being out of water for very long at all.

So it's important to remember that what we see as a lake on the landscape didn't always

look that way. So when the glaciers were receding there was probably a lot of really high-flowing rivers that were connecting lakes across the landscape. And so that's how we think most fish ended up in newly formed lakes that

followed the recession of the glaciers. And there are situations so if we

look at little ponds and lakes in Australia that are embedded in deserts,

when we might show up there,

we would see them as being really separated.

But every now and then, there's really big rainstorms

that cause flash flooding,

and all of a sudden, all those little water bodies become connected and fish have

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