Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome the Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. We
Speaker 1: live in a UH we have in a curious biological world.
Speaker 1: We've profiled a lot of interesting UH specimens on this
Speaker 1: show over the years, and UH today we want to
Speaker 1: talk about animal sexual fluidity and general the general fluidity
Speaker 1: of of of sex and gender itself in the animal kingdom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we can't help but sort of take our human
Speaker 1: nous and just projected onto other organisms out there. So
Speaker 1: when we talk about gender bending, so to speak, in
Speaker 1: the animal world, what are we talking about. We're not
Speaker 1: just talking about sharing parental duties. So I'm talking about
Speaker 1: the sea horse. It's not enough to carry up to
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred eggs in your marine animal version of a
Speaker 1: baby Bjorn to be considered someone who is gender switching.
Speaker 1: So we are going to talk specifically about animals that
Speaker 1: change their sex and why they do it. And while
Speaker 1: we're talking about this, why not talking about the sex
Speaker 1: change chicken? Oh yes, you're talking about Gertie the hen
Speaker 1: who later became Bertie B. E R T. I e
Speaker 1: Bertie instead of Gertie. H. This was the rooster. Yes two.
Speaker 1: This is in two thousand eleven where you had a
Speaker 1: pair of British chicken farmers and they observed a spontaneous
Speaker 1: gender change in their previously egg laying hen Gertie. So
Speaker 1: she began to walk around like a rooster, put on weight,
Speaker 1: developed wattles under her chin, and she also grew dark
Speaker 1: brown plumage and a scarlet cockscomb on top of her head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and she began to crow. Um. The British couple said
Speaker 1: that at first the crow was terrible, but with practice
Speaker 1: is she actually sounded like a rooster. And according to
Speaker 1: Remy Molina, writing for Live Science, um, what happens with
Speaker 1: birds is that you have to sex organs present during
Speaker 1: the embryonic stages, but once a chicken's female jeans kick in,
Speaker 1: it typically develops only the left ovary. The right go nad,
Speaker 1: which is yet to be defined as an ovary or
Speaker 1: testies or both. It's called the OVI testis remains dormant.
Speaker 1: So the idea here is that something like an ovarian
Speaker 1: cyste tumor, or maybe even a diseased adrenal gland caused
Speaker 1: the ovary to shut down and Gertie and then the
Speaker 1: dormant ov testis kicked in and produced androgens, which are
Speaker 1: hormones that are associated with male characteristics, which would have
Speaker 1: led to Gurtie's but then Bertie's physical and behavioral changes.
Speaker 1: And this is more of an example of a loophole
Speaker 1: in sexual dimorphism. Um. But we're really going to talk
Speaker 1: more about organisms that are intentionally switching this up as
Speaker 1: a survival tactic or even a response to environmental conditions,
Speaker 1: situations where sex switching, yeah, is about the long game
Speaker 1: of survival. Now, there are a couple of types of
Speaker 1: sex switching um. The first is simultaneous hermaphrodites, and they
Speaker 1: have both female and male reproductive parts for their entire life,
Speaker 1: and they can mate with any other member of their
Speaker 1: species they should find we're talking about more like fish
Speaker 1: and gastropods slugs to call back to our our slug
Speaker 1: sex episode. Yes, that make up the bulk of this type.
Speaker 1: And then you have a sequential hermaphrodites. And sequential hemaphrodites
Speaker 1: are born as one sex but change completely into the
Speaker 1: other sex during the course of their lives. So this
Speaker 1: is definitely the more engaging for humanized example of sex
Speaker 1: changing because it's one where an animalist is actually transitioning
Speaker 1: from one gender into another and sometimes back again. So
Speaker 1: the question is why doesn't it occur more especially if
Speaker 1: you consider that this kind of strategy would double your
Speaker 1: chances for a Saturday night, so to speak, because you'd have,
Speaker 1: you know, from these strategies a large number of offspring.
Speaker 1: So Suzanne Alonso, Assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology
Speaker 1: at Yale University, says, quote, an intuitive yet rarely studied
Speaker 1: explanation is that the considerable time or energy it takes
Speaker 1: to change sex make hermaphroditeism unfeasible for most animals. That
Speaker 1: was the idea that she went into when she and
Speaker 1: her team created this theoretical model of hermaphrodite and separate
Speaker 1: sex life histories and in their their game that are
Speaker 1: rather the model sex change players I put players in
Speaker 1: quotes vary the age of their sex change, while the
Speaker 1: separate sex strategy responds by altering the number of male
Speaker 1: and female offspring it produced. And they found that a
Speaker 1: hermaphrodite could spend thirty percent of its lifetime in the
Speaker 1: process of changing sex and yet still persistent a population.
Speaker 1: And so would that suggests is that UM only huge
Speaker 1: changes or cost rather UM can disfavor sex change SOT
Speaker 1: is not really enough to be of concern to limit
Speaker 1: that species lifespan. They can still exist while doing this.
Speaker 1: If it were more up to a fifty of their time,
Speaker 1: so many percent of their their time and energy changing
Speaker 1: into another sex, then it might become an issue. And
Speaker 1: so Alonso and the researchers say that just taken a loan,
Speaker 1: that this cannot be the only reason why it's rare
Speaker 1: in nature. And maybe it's more about the environmental conditions
Speaker 1: which are generally more balanced, so you don't have to
Speaker 1: worry so much about there being too many females are
Speaker 1: too many males, Okay, So it's when the environment is
Speaker 1: out of balance that's when something has to change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And she also said for some species, parental duties might
Speaker 1: affect this as well, so it might be more advantageous
Speaker 1: just to have a separate sex system in place. Okay. Alright,
Speaker 1: so this leads us to the area of gender performance. Now,
Speaker 1: this is an obviously a situation where a male is
Speaker 1: not changing into a female, female is not changing into
Speaker 1: a male, but sometimes there is an advantage in pretending
Speaker 1: that you are a member of the opposite gender. One
Speaker 1: wonderful example of this, UH is the occurs with cuttlefish.
Speaker 1: So you have to you have a two tiered system
Speaker 1: of males with cuttlefish. You have a big brash brawlers
Speaker 1: and then you have smaller, stealthy lotharios. And the footage
Speaker 1: of of these encounters between the males, particularly in the
Speaker 1: larger cuttlefish species, not the cute, small ones, the little
Speaker 1: iridescent ones that you see um at so many aquariums
Speaker 1: that I'm talking about, the big cthulu esq ones. They
Speaker 1: get into these big carrying fights with each other, like
Speaker 1: ripping tentacles apart, just really brawling all over the rights
Speaker 1: to the female cuttle fish that are that are sort
Speaker 1: of waiting in the wings there. So on the surface
Speaker 1: of things, this might seem like it would just really
Speaker 1: favor the big, brash brawlers while the stealthy gal gutarios
Speaker 1: would be on the outskirts, right, what are the how
Speaker 1: are they going to get in there? Well, so what
Speaker 1: they do is they use uh the cuttlefish powers of
Speaker 1: shape changing and color changing, particularly by use of their chromatophores, uh,
Speaker 1: to look like a female to sort of draw in, uh,
Speaker 1: change their color a bit, and then they can move in.
Speaker 1: They move in closer to the female. And then the
Speaker 1: big the big brawler guy that's over here hanging out,
Speaker 1: he looks over and he's like, oh, that's just another
Speaker 1: female getting close to the female that I want. Maybe
Speaker 1: all made with both of them, So I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: do anything, right, But meanwhile that the little guy is
Speaker 1: getting closer and closer so that he can breed and
Speaker 1: often does successfully breed with the female cuttlefish. And so
Speaker 1: just clever is this disguise and so so perfect the
Speaker 1: use of their chromatophores. Two thousand twelve study out of
Speaker 1: McQuire University in Sydney, Australia found that males can actually
Speaker 1: split themselves down the middle, appearing to be a male
Speaker 1: on one side of their body and a female on
Speaker 1: the other. So he's floating here between the big brawler
Speaker 1: and the female and the big brawler it looks like
Speaker 1: a lady cuttlefish just floating there harmless. But on the
Speaker 1: other side he's flirting and uh and and gaming to
Speaker 1: mate with the female. I like that. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like having your own split billboard. Yeah, indeed, all right, Now,
Speaker 1: the female market squid does a similar thing. What she
Speaker 1: does is she flashes a pair of fake testies. And
Speaker 1: this is really interesting because the life of a female
Speaker 1: market squid is not an easy one. You have hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of market squids gathering to reproduce with really
Speaker 1: aggressive behavior from the males, which often causes injuries. And
Speaker 1: female squids they will lay tubes of their eggs on
Speaker 1: the seafloor and that's all good and well, except that
Speaker 1: a lot of times above them will be a big
Speaker 1: ball of um, sort of breeding ball in the ocean
Speaker 1: going on, and so it's really easy for them to
Speaker 1: kind of get sucked back into that breeding ball. And
Speaker 1: again it's very violent. It takes up a lot of
Speaker 1: their energy and their resources. And they have just laid
Speaker 1: these tubes of eggs on the floor. So what do
Speaker 1: they do to try to counteract this, Well, they use
Speaker 1: a little subterfuge. They control the appearance of this white
Speaker 1: stripe down the part of their body that mimics the
Speaker 1: approximate size, color, and position of testies on a male squid.
Speaker 1: So the male sees this and thanks, oh, not female
Speaker 1: leave alone. She gets off scott free. And according to
Speaker 1: Daniel Dumar teeny, one of the co authors of us
Speaker 1: study on female market fish, So we've seen the chromatov force, right,
Speaker 1: the chromatov force. Um, this those sort of specialized pigment
Speaker 1: cells and the ability to change coloring, right, but we
Speaker 1: have never seen before, uh, the ability to turn white
Speaker 1: on and off. And this is due to a specialized
Speaker 1: type of cell called ol lucaphour. So she's essentially it's
Speaker 1: like when the taxi sign goes in service out of service,
Speaker 1: we m with, you know, just testies as the stumble.
Speaker 1: I suppose all right, well that that brings us to
Speaker 1: the world of garter snakes. Now I want to everyone
Speaker 1: to imagine themselves in Manitoba, Canada for a minute. Alright,
Speaker 1: the snow has melted, spring is setting in, and that's
Speaker 1: when it pens of thousands of red sided garter snakes
Speaker 1: emerge from their limestone dens and begin to engage in
Speaker 1: great tangled mating rituals. We're talking Roman orgies of serpentine
Speaker 1: sex performed right out in the open, right there on
Speaker 1: the limestone. Yeah, and just big, big yeah, caligula, balls
Speaker 1: of snakes going at it right there in front of
Speaker 1: God and everybody. Afterwards, after all of a sudden done,
Speaker 1: now they end up sliding off into the local marshes
Speaker 1: for the summer, carry about their life, and then they
Speaker 1: return to their dens in early fall. Now, generally speaking,
Speaker 1: in each of these big clustered balls of snakes, there's
Speaker 1: a female at the center because the males are competing
Speaker 1: for the mating rights there, and that's all that. That's
Speaker 1: what's going on in this big tangle. But in some
Speaker 1: cases the males actually mimic females to wind up at
Speaker 1: the center of the heap slide. Yeah. Now you might
Speaker 1: wonder why why would a male snake do that? Well,
Speaker 1: I think think again about the fact that they're they're
Speaker 1: doing this. They're having this big snake orgy out in
Speaker 1: the open. So birds of prey are well aware that
Speaker 1: this occurs, because this isn't all you can eat snake buffet.
Speaker 1: Just just come down to you know, talents and beaks,
Speaker 1: blazeon and just eat as much as you want. So
Speaker 1: there is a survival advantage in being at the center
Speaker 1: of that heap, because you're gonna be far harder to
Speaker 1: get to there's far less possibility that these birds of
Speaker 1: prey are going to feed on you. So maybe this
Speaker 1: male snake, he doesn't have an actual shot at reproductive
Speaker 1: success in in a tangle, but he pretends to be
Speaker 1: a female, he can at least get a survival advantage
Speaker 1: and and and get to snake off into the marshes.
Speaker 1: So all plots in nature lead back to boozing buddies.
Speaker 1: So you're saying, yeah, okay, so we're talking about females
Speaker 1: imitating males imitating females. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this was
Speaker 1: in one of Shakespeare's Traumatis, but I don't remember which one.
Speaker 1: I'm sure. I'm sure that Shakespeare looked at the African
Speaker 1: bat bug, which is a small, reddish brown parasite that
Speaker 1: feeds off bat blood. Take that bats, and uh probably
Speaker 1: penned a couple of stories based on the um. These
Speaker 1: bat bugs practice something called traumatic insemination. We've talked about
Speaker 1: this before. It's when males stab females in the abdomen
Speaker 1: with needle like penises and the inject spurned directly into
Speaker 1: the bloodstream. And uh, yeah right, it's it's pretty it's
Speaker 1: pretty violent. It's hard on the females, and it's also
Speaker 1: hard on other males because sometimes males do it to
Speaker 1: other males and so this may be more of a
Speaker 1: combat thing. So to protect themselves, the female bat bug
Speaker 1: developed something called para genitals. We're talking about a funnel
Speaker 1: like genital opening on their body that tricks the male
Speaker 1: bat bug into sticking that, you know, the needle like
Speaker 1: penis into this area that is filled with immune cells.
Speaker 1: So it's it's really a smart strategy by the female
Speaker 1: batbugs because what it does is it reduces the site
Speaker 1: of injury to this one location and it's guiding the
Speaker 1: pro straight and straight into a bucket of immune cells,
Speaker 1: and that helps to reduce the impact of injury. Now,
Speaker 1: male bat bugs took notice of this, and this is
Speaker 1: where the males who are imitating females comes in and
Speaker 1: created a similar paragenital to redirect attacks on their bodies.
Speaker 1: Except that the para genitals made them look more like females,
Speaker 1: so right, oops. So they adopted a differently shaped funnel
Speaker 1: which is more open and exposed, and that greatly reduced
Speaker 1: to texts. So now you have females noticing that the
Speaker 1: males have done this and made this adaptation, and they
Speaker 1: also adopt the differently shaped funnel and clause. Rerhinehart of
Speaker 1: the University of Sheffled UK, who led us study on
Speaker 1: this um says that both of these female and male
Speaker 1: bat bugs who made these for their adoptions adaptations, uh,
Speaker 1: they suffered fewer mating scars than those with standard closed forms.
Speaker 1: So we see just this arms race between the genders
Speaker 1: in these African bat bugs. Right, So then the question becomes,
Speaker 1: so cool, do they just keep creating these these uh
Speaker 1: iterations of para genitalia until they become ridiculous looking? Yeah,
Speaker 1: until it becomes I mean, I guess there has to
Speaker 1: be a point where the like the wave kind of
Speaker 1: breaks and falls back, right, because at some point, um
Speaker 1: it would it would not be sustainable. So there'd be
Speaker 1: like a level of complexity that it couldn't go beyond. Right,
Speaker 1: So yeah, that brings up the question about what form
Speaker 1: will they ultimately take? Now, another wonderful example of this
Speaker 1: time of pseudo gender is the female spotted heighteninga. And
Speaker 1: this is this is pretty remarkable because female spotted hyenas
Speaker 1: are the socially dominant, larger and more aggressive of their species,
Speaker 1: and they have a pseudo penis. Now, to be clear,
Speaker 1: what they have here is an enlarged delatorus that can
Speaker 1: actually achieve a seven insurrection, as well as a structure
Speaker 1: that looks like a scrotum, a pseudoscurotum that's formed from
Speaker 1: the labbya and uh. This makes them the only female
Speaker 1: mammalian species devoid of an external vaginal opening. And that's
Speaker 1: why we used to we used to think that that
Speaker 1: they might be hemaphrodites, that they're these were either hemaphrodite
Speaker 1: individuals in the species or or that the species itself
Speaker 1: featured hemaphrodites um. Now, on a there are a lot
Speaker 1: of mysteries that remain about like what purpose this actually
Speaker 1: serves for the for the spotted hyenas. But on a
Speaker 1: biological basis, it's all due to higher levels of the
Speaker 1: hormone androgen in the females, particularly the pack dominant females,
Speaker 1: So it gives them their greater sizes, the greater strength,
Speaker 1: but it also makes reproduction difficult. So this uh, they're
Speaker 1: basically three areas where where where the where we see
Speaker 1: the wages of this first of all creates an awkward
Speaker 1: mounting situation for males and females, but sure that clariss
Speaker 1: is getting in the way. Yeah. In fact, it's the
Speaker 1: point they say that the males like really have to
Speaker 1: learn how to do it. Like there are some species
Speaker 1: they just you know, take to it like a horse
Speaker 1: to water. But with the spotted hyena, the male is
Speaker 1: going to have to get in a little practice before
Speaker 1: we can actually connect um. Also, there's a there's some
Speaker 1: difficult plumbing here when it comes to to the birth
Speaker 1: of the pups because they have to give birth through
Speaker 1: this pseudo penis. So on one level, you're talking about
Speaker 1: a narrow birth canal. It's an inch in diameter and
Speaker 1: the tissue often caress a two pound pup squeezes through,
Speaker 1: and that rip can actually prove fatal, So that means
Speaker 1: there's a higher mortality rate for a first time spotted
Speaker 1: hyena mothers. Additionally, the umbilical cord is a bit on
Speaker 1: the short side compared to the length of the birth tube,
Speaker 1: so the cord often breaks before the cub and merges,
Speaker 1: and this can this can lead to uh to death
Speaker 1: for the for the young cub. In fact, of hyena
Speaker 1: cubs die of suffocation inside the pseudo penis. So another
Speaker 1: example of this that we we've had on this show
Speaker 1: many times, I feel like I need to say and
Speaker 1: come out to the stage again once again and join us.
Speaker 1: Brazilian cave insects um because in the May two thou
Speaker 1: and fourteen edition of Current Biology Yoshizawa Casauro at All,
Speaker 1: they documented their findings from when they dissected four species
Speaker 1: of cave dwelling winged insects from Brazil called Neo Trogola,
Speaker 1: and they realized when they dissected them that the females
Speaker 1: had an internal penis like structure that they likely only
Speaker 1: extended during mating, and the males had a pouch like vagina,
Speaker 1: and so, okay, what are the mechanisms of this well mating,
Speaker 1: the female spiny penis gets tightly anchored to the males
Speaker 1: male vaginas sperm duct, allowing the female to receive the semens. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, the penis function is more like a
Speaker 1: straw than a spout, and if the male tries to
Speaker 1: break away, the abdomen would well rip open and he
Speaker 1: would lose his genitals there um. The female insects also
Speaker 1: mate with multiple males, and they can store two batches
Speaker 1: of sperm in the body, all right. What they think,
Speaker 1: the researchers think is that it could be the environmental
Speaker 1: conditions that have created this sort of penis like structure
Speaker 1: in the female cave insects. That's because there is a
Speaker 1: lot of competition among males for fertile females, and in
Speaker 1: the cave environment, food is scarce, and so it turns
Speaker 1: out the female sperm is seen as a nuptial gift
Speaker 1: because not only um can the female cave sy fighter
Speaker 1: transfer this to her eggs, but before she does so,
Speaker 1: she can actually eat some of it and it has
Speaker 1: nutritional value. So you see here that that's why the
Speaker 1: female is taking the role here as the aggressor in
Speaker 1: the reproductive relationship and essentially scooping out that sperm with
Speaker 1: this penis like structure. All right. That brings us to
Speaker 1: the area of gender change outright, ginger change. And we
Speaker 1: see this particularly in three different fish species, which serves
Speaker 1: as wonderful examples, the first of which is the anonymy
Speaker 1: fish a k a. The clown fish, and if you're
Speaker 1: a parent a k a. The nemo fish. Um. These
Speaker 1: are some of the most prominent examples of sequential hermaphrodites.
Speaker 1: UH they live in a mutualistic relationship with a single
Speaker 1: an enemy for most of their lives. Since this, of
Speaker 1: course the uh you know, the small aquatic organism with
Speaker 1: the with the stinging tendrils, right, but the the anemone
Speaker 1: fish are have an immunity to that sting. So it's
Speaker 1: wonderful safe place to live. But they're also kind of
Speaker 1: isolationalist here. Okay, So in this anonymy neighborhood, you have
Speaker 1: a sole female UH and the and the largest male,
Speaker 1: and those are the ones doing all the mating. But
Speaker 1: when the female dies, the largest fish in the ananymy
Speaker 1: neighborhood becomes a female, and then she begins mating with
Speaker 1: the next male. So you have a huge advantage to reproduction.
Speaker 1: In this UH. You get additional genetic diversity because every
Speaker 1: fish in the immediate environment is a potential mate. But
Speaker 1: it's also particularly good since again as we're talking about
Speaker 1: a secluded little neighborhood, a secluded environment, they don't stray
Speaker 1: from far from home. So if you need that that diversity,
Speaker 1: if you need a new female, you just make one
Speaker 1: from the population. Another example of this is the parrot fish,
Speaker 1: which is common around around tropical reefs. Throughout the world,
Speaker 1: and one of the adaptations that makes them unique and
Speaker 1: really interesting is that they have pharyngeel teeth which you
Speaker 1: can use to grind up corals, or they used to
Speaker 1: grind up corals. Another thing is that at night they
Speaker 1: surround themselves in this mucus like cocoon to protect them
Speaker 1: while they sleep in The idea is that the cocoon
Speaker 1: could mask their scent in making them harder for nocturnal
Speaker 1: predators like more eels to find. But of course the
Speaker 1: super interesting thing about them um is that they can
Speaker 1: change sex in response to fluctuations in population density. So
Speaker 1: they have two strategies when it comes to this. In
Speaker 1: the first strategy, they're all born female and then later
Speaker 1: they can change sex into males and they can also
Speaker 1: begin life as males. Second strategy known as primary males,
Speaker 1: and it's thought again that this sex change is in
Speaker 1: response to low population density in in one or the
Speaker 1: other of the genders. So in parrot fish populations, the
Speaker 1: large superman males these are large males that were once female,
Speaker 1: are dominant and they claim most of the females and
Speaker 1: the primary males often spawning groups with one female, So
Speaker 1: starting out as a female and then changing sex later
Speaker 1: would be really advantageous. Females don't have any trouble finding
Speaker 1: mates no matter how large they are, while the males
Speaker 1: are much more reproductively successful as larger individuals, so they
Speaker 1: can reproduce as females when they're younger, and then when
Speaker 1: they grow to a large enough size to compete as males,
Speaker 1: they change sex and reproduce as super males. And they
Speaker 1: see a similar situation with hawk fish now hawk fisher
Speaker 1: another tropical corald dwelling fish um and in the while,
Speaker 1: they have been been observed to participate in what we
Speaker 1: call bidirectional sex change. Uh so they're going from female
Speaker 1: to male but then also back again. So it's a
Speaker 1: similar situation with the parrot fish. You know, functional females
Speaker 1: changing into males. If a don and it's super mail dies,
Speaker 1: but they can change back. Ah. So they are multidirectional
Speaker 1: when it comes to that. Yeah, multidirectional. You can think
Speaker 1: of it in terms of, you know, they there's a
Speaker 1: there's an opening on the staff, this individual can transition
Speaker 1: into that road for into that role for a little bit,
Speaker 1: but then when they're no longer needed there back into
Speaker 1: their previous role. And this kind of this reminds me
Speaker 1: of that whole concept of survival as a whole, as
Speaker 1: a species, right, because it's not just about the individual
Speaker 1: fish here, it's looking at the whole population and responding
Speaker 1: accordingly and making sure that yes, we can respond to
Speaker 1: that and change and and um you know, offspring and
Speaker 1: it's corresponding genetic packages can be furthered into the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like we need a mail to survive. We need
Speaker 1: a female to survive who's going to step up and
Speaker 1: change and then you you have you have a fish
Speaker 1: that comes up and does the job, and then the
Speaker 1: genetic lineage can continue. Now, we wanted to leave off
Speaker 1: this episode with this really cool butter fly that was
Speaker 1: discovered at the Natural History Museum of London in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eleven. It's a Mormon butterfly. It hatched and
Speaker 1: the staff noticed today that the coloring looks a bit
Speaker 1: off on this and uh, they looked closer and they
Speaker 1: discovered that it was almost black on its male side,
Speaker 1: all black, and on the female side it was paler
Speaker 1: and flecked with blue red and tortoiseshell. And of course
Speaker 1: at first they didn't realize that this was half female,
Speaker 1: half male butterfly, because really you only see that in
Speaker 1: circus shows, right, Yeah, I mean there's sex organs were
Speaker 1: essentially welded together. You would think this is like a
Speaker 1: Fiji mermaid kind of a thing, right, what comes to
Speaker 1: you the half half man, half woman butterfly. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had one antenna was actually smaller than the others.
Speaker 1: And as you say, the reproductive organs refused together. And
Speaker 1: this is actually something called guy Nan Droom Morphy happens
Speaker 1: from time to time. Yeah, so it serves as kind
Speaker 1: of an interesting symbol. I think of the fluidity of
Speaker 1: of sex and gender that in butterflies, but in just
Speaker 1: any organism, it's not. It's not so so fixed an issue.
Speaker 1: It isn't and it's again it's a response to environmental conditions. Um,
Speaker 1: it's somewhat of a question of energy resources, uh, survival.
Speaker 1: And we wanted to point out too that we have
Speaker 1: an episode called Can Animals Be Gay that explores more
Speaker 1: of the behavior of animals. We didn't. We want to
Speaker 1: make a distinction between what we're talking about today in
Speaker 1: this idea that animals behave in a way that seems gay.
Speaker 1: I'm putting that in quotes to us. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: bring in the human baggage of trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how animals work. So indeed, check out that episode if
Speaker 1: you like. We'll make sure that we linked to that
Speaker 1: in on the landing page. At this episode, it's Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. You know, we have
Speaker 1: a few minutes here. Let's call over the robot and
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Speaker 1: what do I hear? During the Power of Polite episode,
Speaker 1: Julie mentioned donating to UNI Stuff is a nice thing
Speaker 1: to do while explaining the off record indirect politeness strategy.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you how happy that made me. Donated
Speaker 1: the unit stuff is a nice thing to do. Hey, Also, restaurants,
Speaker 1: maybe there should be a National Pizza Day where you
Speaker 1: give ten percent of your profits to UNI SEF. If
Speaker 1: you can mention our Nepal donate form on the podcast,
Speaker 1: I'd be really grateful. Thanks for all the thanks for
Speaker 1: all the great episodes over the years. That's unis f
Speaker 1: USA dot org slash Nepal. That's you in and I
Speaker 1: c e f u s A dot org slash Nepaul.
Speaker 1: Thanks Porter and uh yeah, guys, make sure to check
Speaker 1: that out if if that has been on your mind, um,
Speaker 1: that would be a great thing to contribute to. We
Speaker 1: also have a bit of correspondence here from Caroline. This
Speaker 1: was a Facebook message that she sent us. She said,
Speaker 1: I just listened to your episode about politeness, and I
Speaker 1: thought it was so great When you were leading up
Speaker 1: to the most impolite society, I literally shouted Eastern Europeans.
Speaker 1: I laugh because I'm a first generation American whose parents
Speaker 1: are Polish. I spent much of my life in Poland
Speaker 1: and the United States, and I can appreciate the direct
Speaker 1: attitude that Polish people have. It can be very abrasive
Speaker 1: to anyone from outside the culture. If I go to
Speaker 1: Poland for a few weeks at a time, I definitely
Speaker 1: begin to miss the friendliness of Americans. But I know
Speaker 1: a lot of my American friends perceived me as very
Speaker 1: direct and poland it's certainly no big deal for someone
Speaker 1: at a bus stop to tell a complete stranger that
Speaker 1: their kid is being too loud? Would that would never
Speaker 1: happen here? And she's right, it wouldn't. I get the
Speaker 1: unique experience of having both personality traits. You did also
Speaker 1: make a great point about familiarity in Eastern European culture.
Speaker 1: If you're a stranger, you will be looked at with suspicion,
Speaker 1: but if you are in the inner circle, you are
Speaker 1: among some of the kindest, loving people. We wouldn't greet
Speaker 1: a stranger with kisses, but your closest friends and family
Speaker 1: definitely get three cheek kisses. I love that you totally
Speaker 1: have the nail on the head with this episode. Keep
Speaker 1: up the great work, Caroline. All right, So there you
Speaker 1: have it. Hey, if you want to check out more episodes,
Speaker 1: including that can Animals Be Gay? Episode that we referenced earlier,
Speaker 1: I don't know where to stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: dot com that is the mothership. That's where you find
Speaker 1: all of our podcast episodes, videos, blogs, you name it,
Speaker 1: and if you have some thoughts on animal sexual fluidity
Speaker 1: and you want to send them to us, We can
Speaker 1: do so by emailing us at below the mind. How
Speaker 1: supp works dot com. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other top its, visit house staff works dot com. Yeah,