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Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Chuck and I'm Josh and we're the host

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Speaker 1: of Stuff You should know, the podcast that's right And

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Speaker 1: if you're into understanding cool and unusual and seemingly ordinary

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Speaker 1: and even boring things that are made interesting, you should

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Speaker 1: check us out. Please and thank you. We're on iTunes, Spotify,

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Speaker 1: Google Play Music, anywhere you get podcasts. Welcome to House

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Speaker 1: to Works Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum, a researcher

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Speaker 1: and writer. Here at House to Works. Every week I'm

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Speaker 1: bringing you three stories from our team about the weird

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Speaker 1: and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology, and culture.

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Speaker 1: This week, we've got a trio of watery wonders for you.

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Speaker 1: Some catfish seem to be hunting land mammals and hopefully unrelated. Uh.

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Speaker 1: Cuttlefish have been shown to have a number sense similar

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Speaker 1: to human infants. But First Senior writer Jonathan Strickland explores

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Speaker 1: why China is set to build a state of the

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Speaker 1: art laboratory on the ocean floor. Bloomberg reports that Chinese

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Speaker 1: officials are fast tracking a plan to build a large

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Speaker 1: underwater platform in the South China Sea. It would be

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Speaker 1: similar to a space station, only this one would be

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Speaker 1: at the bottom of the ocean floor, some three thousand

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Speaker 1: meters or about ten thousand feet beneath the waves. Why

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Speaker 1: build a sea lab, Well, it's not because they think

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Speaker 1: it's better downward, it's wetter. According to Chinese officials, the

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Speaker 1: plan is to build a large, movable facility in an

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Speaker 1: effort to search for valuable minerals and rare earth metals.

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Speaker 1: For the last several years, rare earth metals have played

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Speaker 1: an important part in China's economic growth. Our computers and

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Speaker 1: electronics require these materials, and demand is high, but not

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Speaker 1: everyone is sure that the proposed sea lab would have

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Speaker 1: much luck mining more of them. According to the American

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Speaker 1: Security Project, estimates of rare earth metals in the region

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Speaker 1: are unreliable. They may be plentiful under the ocean floor,

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Speaker 1: or it might be a bust. It may turn out

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Speaker 1: that the sea lab focus is more on harvesting oil

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Speaker 1: and natural gas instead. Another possibility is that the facility

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Speaker 1: will serve in some military capacity. Chinese officials deny that

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Speaker 1: a military application is the primary purpose for the c lab,

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Speaker 1: but have said that it could perform some military functions

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Speaker 1: in addition to mining operations, and since the South China

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Speaker 1: Sea is a disputed area that numerous countries wish to access,

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Speaker 1: and underwater lab might be just the thing China needs

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Speaker 1: to secure a claim. It's unlikely such a lab would

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Speaker 1: be able to move about undetected. Instead, it might serve

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Speaker 1: as a terrant, a threat that says back off, this

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Speaker 1: is mine. Supporting this idea is the fact that China

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Speaker 1: revised passports in two thousand twelve to show a map

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Speaker 1: of China's borders, which included areas that are internationally disputed,

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Speaker 1: and there have been incidents in the region that point

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Speaker 1: to China interfering with the activities of other nations, though

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Speaker 1: the Chinese government denies this was done intentionally. Whatever the motivation,

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Speaker 1: if China builds an underwater lab, it won't be the first.

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Speaker 1: The famous scientist Jacques Cousto oversaw the construction and deployment

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Speaker 1: of three underwater habitats in the nineteen sixties. Then there's Aquarius,

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Speaker 1: a lab off the Florida Keys that concentrates on marine

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Speaker 1: biology research. You can even book a night's stay at

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Speaker 1: a former sea lab. What used to be the La

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Speaker 1: Cholupa Research Laboratory is now the Jewels Undersea Lodge. In

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Speaker 1: Key Largo, Florida. Whether China will actually build a large

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Speaker 1: underwater lab remains to be seen. If it does, you

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Speaker 1: can bet the international community will keep a close watch

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Speaker 1: on what happens next. Next up, my fellow writer and

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Speaker 1: researcher Christian Sager has the story of how catfish are

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Speaker 1: expanding their gastronomic interests. We already knew that they eat

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Speaker 1: pigeons when the opportunity arises, and now they've added mice

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Speaker 1: to their diets. But why remember that scene in the

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Speaker 1: shark Tack classic Deep Blue Sea when Samuel Jackson's making

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Speaker 1: a big speech next to a pool and then a

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Speaker 1: shark leaps out and swallows them whole. I don't know

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Speaker 1: if sharks can really do that, but catfish sure can.

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Speaker 1: According to a recent study in the Journal of Arid Environments,

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Speaker 1: catfish in Australia have been consuming mice, a lot of mice,

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Speaker 1: and no one knows how. We're specifically talking about the

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Speaker 1: lesser salmon catfish here in the Ashburton River in Northern Australia.

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Speaker 1: When researchers cut open eighteen of these bad boys, half

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Speaker 1: of them had spin effects hopping mice in their bellies.

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Speaker 1: This is the first report of Australian catfish eating land

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Speaker 1: based mammals at this higher rate, though previous studies had

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Speaker 1: found similar mammals to be about four percent of the

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Speaker 1: catfish's diet. These lesser salmon catfish are common in northwestern

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Speaker 1: Australia and can weigh just over three pounds and measure

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Speaker 1: more than one and a half feet. They're big enough

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Speaker 1: to qualify as the one that got away, especially if

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Speaker 1: they're full of you see, juicy mice. Of the eighteen

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Speaker 1: fish sampled here had mice in them, and of those

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Speaker 1: mice made up of what was in their tummies, two

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Speaker 1: of them had three mice each inside of them. But

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Speaker 1: they usually eat insects, crustaceans, and plants. Fish eating terrestrial

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Speaker 1: mammals is possible, but usually infrequent. The hopping mice getting

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Speaker 1: eaten don't usually hang out by the water, and they're

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Speaker 1: good at jumping, So how are they getting eaten by catfish? Well,

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Speaker 1: one possibility is the catfish are actively hunting mice on

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Speaker 1: a river bank. It sounds crazy, but a studies showed

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Speaker 1: that a larger catfish species was beaching itself so it

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Speaker 1: could attack and eat pigeons. Even though the stunt wrist

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Speaker 1: bit being trapped on land. Similarly, African tigerfish will jump

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Speaker 1: up and pull other birds underwater for a meal. In

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Speaker 1: the case of the pigeons, researchers thought it resulted from

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Speaker 1: the catfish adapting to a new environment to survive. Maybe

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Speaker 1: the same things happening here. Another possibility, and the researcher's

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Speaker 1: best guess, is that last year's extreme summer rainfall flooded

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Speaker 1: the burrows of these mice, pushing them out into the river.

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Speaker 1: Since these floods could be throwing the local ecosystem off balance,

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Speaker 1: the team wants to investigate further to find out exactly

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Speaker 1: what is happening. I know what you're wondering. First, pigeons

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Speaker 1: than mice. Are catfish coming for humans next? Well, The

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Speaker 1: findings suggests that lesser salmon catfish will consume large quantities

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Speaker 1: of land mammals whenever available, But thankfully we can't fit

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Speaker 1: down their mouths. But still, I'd recommend that you avoid

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Speaker 1: noodling or catfishing with just your hands in Australia. Finally,

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Speaker 1: this week, senior writer Robert Lamb explains how a team

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Speaker 1: of researchers sussed out that cuttlefish us number sense. It's

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Speaker 1: the same basic concept the powers the humanity's grasp of mathematics. Yes,

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Speaker 1: scuttlefisher science headline superstars, so you've probably read about their

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Speaker 1: amazing chromatic communication systems, their shape shifting prowess, and their

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Speaker 1: hypnotic powers. Of course, all of these biological gifts are

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Speaker 1: useless if you don't have the brains to back them up,

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Speaker 1: which is why cuttlefish boast one of the largest brain

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Speaker 1: to body size ratios of any invertebrate. These amazing little

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Speaker 1: creatures have to be able to react, quickly, learn and

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Speaker 1: adapt if they wish to score that next meal or

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Speaker 1: secure themselves a mate. That's where our latest study comes

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Speaker 1: into play, pondering just how much number since they employ

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Speaker 1: in deciding which prey to pursue. Number Since it is

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Speaker 1: essentially how the brain naturally extracts numbers from the surrounding environment,

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Speaker 1: I mean, similar to how it identifies colors. It's not

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Speaker 1: math or a number system, but rather the primal thing

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Speaker 1: beneath those systems. To test the number sense of old fish,

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Speaker 1: researchers at Taiwan's Singwah University introduced a cuttle fish into

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Speaker 1: a tank along with a transparent two chamber box, so

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Speaker 1: that the cuttle fish might choose between two encapsulated meals

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Speaker 1: in order to assess number. Since they played with varying

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Speaker 1: ratios between the two boxes, one shrimp and box A,

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Speaker 1: five shrimp and box B, and just about every possible

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Speaker 1: variation on that one to four, two to three, four

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Speaker 1: to five. They even played around with a larger shrimp

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Speaker 1: and dead shrimp to see how those conditions factored into

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Speaker 1: their decision making. They tested fifty four different Faraoh cuttle

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Speaker 1: fish and found that the creatures had no problem picking

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Speaker 1: larger quantities of shrimp over smaller quantities. This entails logarithmic counting,

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Speaker 1: or counting based on integral increases in physical quantity. A

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Speaker 1: human infant uses this when he or she picks five

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Speaker 1: teddy bears over one teddy bear. But the one month

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Speaker 1: old cephalopods here beat that by excelling when the ratios

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Speaker 1: grew harder to discern, such as five shrimp to four shrimp,

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Speaker 1: a feat that larval humans tend to fail at. In fact,

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Speaker 1: the searchers theorized that given the longer computation times in

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Speaker 1: these incidents, the cuttlefish are not only using logarithmic counting,

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Speaker 1: but are actively engaged in counting the shrimp zipping about

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Speaker 1: in each box. The cuttlefish factored in additional preferences live

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Speaker 1: shrimp for better than dead shrimp. Bigger shrimp are great

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Speaker 1: but are riskier to catch. But the creatures can at

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Speaker 1: least count to five and maybe higher, even if their

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Speaker 1: un language minds lack words for the quantities. We can

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Speaker 1: scarcely fathom the mind of the cuttlefish. I mean, just

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Speaker 1: try to imagine a number comprehension without knowledge or the

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Speaker 1: names and symbols we use. Their intelligence is alien to us,

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Speaker 1: yet quite comparable in number sins to human infants and

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Speaker 1: other primates. So think about back the next time you

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Speaker 1: see a cuttlefish of the aquarium, perhaps counting the number

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Speaker 1: of hairless apes cuddling up to the class. That's our

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Speaker 1: show for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in.

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Speaker 1: Subscribe now for more the latest and strangest science news,

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Speaker 1: and send us links to anything you'd like to Here's

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Speaker 1: cover plus your favorite fact about cephalopods. You can send

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Speaker 1: us an email at now podcast at how stuff works

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Speaker 1: dot com, and for lots more stories like these, head

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Speaker 1: on over to our home planet now dot how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot com,