Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here in nature, there's a
Speaker 1: certain ethos of all scratch ere back if you scratch mine.
Speaker 1: Living things never exist in isolation, and organisms of different
Speaker 1: species occasionally need to cooperate in order to get stuff done,
Speaker 1: And sometimes one organism takes the benefit from another while
Speaker 1: that other one blithely lives its life unharmed but blissfully
Speaker 1: unaware of the service it's performing. Collegists call this form
Speaker 1: of half passive cooperation commence all is um, and it's
Speaker 1: different from some other ways that members of an ecosystem
Speaker 1: can interact. For instance, commence allism isn't the same thing
Speaker 1: as parasiteis m, where one partner the parasite lives on
Speaker 1: or in the body of a host and only one
Speaker 1: partner actually benefits while the other is harmed. It's also
Speaker 1: not exactly the same as mutualism, where both partners benefit
Speaker 1: from the partnership. But think about the relationship between bees
Speaker 1: and flowers. Of the bee gets food while the flower
Speaker 1: accomplishes its reproductive goals. Commence ali is um involves one
Speaker 1: organism just going about its business while one or more
Speaker 1: others called commence als just sort of hang out and
Speaker 1: benefit from that one guy's hard work. We spoke with
Speaker 1: Amanda Hips, director of Communications and Development at wild Landscapes International.
Speaker 1: She said, one of my favorite commensal relationships is the
Speaker 1: one of Eastern screech owls and blind snakes. The owls
Speaker 1: bring live blind snakes to their chicks, while some of
Speaker 1: the snakes are eaten. The lucky ones burrow into the
Speaker 1: nest and eat insect larva that they find there, lava
Speaker 1: that would likely parasities the chicks. A study by scientists
Speaker 1: from Baylor University found the chicks who grew up in
Speaker 1: nests with blind snakes grew faster and experienced lower mortality
Speaker 1: rates compared to nests without blind snakes. We can observe
Speaker 1: three main types of commence all is um in Quillinism
Speaker 1: is when one species lives on or inside of another species,
Speaker 1: the way that our gut bacteria live inside us or
Speaker 1: within a nest, burrow or dwelling created by another species.
Speaker 1: For instance, gopher tortoises, which are native to the southeastern
Speaker 1: United States, did long burrows for shelter, some of them
Speaker 1: reaching forty feet or twelve meters in length. Hundreds of
Speaker 1: other animals have been recorded using these burrows. Some of
Speaker 1: them have even evolved to require the burrows of the
Speaker 1: gopher tortoise in order to survive. Most of the commence
Speaker 1: als are insects, but these burrows are also important to
Speaker 1: a variety of species of snakes, frogs, and small mammals.
Speaker 1: Hips said, there are fourteen recognized insects that are fully
Speaker 1: reliant on gopher tortoises. One of these species is a
Speaker 1: moth that feeds exclusively on the keratin of the shells
Speaker 1: of dead gopher tortoises. Some of the remaining insects feed
Speaker 1: on gopher tortoise doung Others feed on pest flies or
Speaker 1: other organic matter inside the tortoise burrows. I like to
Speaker 1: think of them as a housekeeping service to the gopher tortoise.
Speaker 1: Although the impacts they have on gopher tortoises is not
Speaker 1: yet understood, they likely lower parasite loads for tortoises and
Speaker 1: the other vertebrates that also take advantage of the burrows.
Speaker 1: Another kind of commence all is um is called metabiosis,
Speaker 1: wherein one organism unintentionally forms a habitat for another while
Speaker 1: just going about its normal business. For example, maggots need
Speaker 1: to live somewhere, and it's often on or in the
Speaker 1: carcass of a dead animal that, to be fair, wasn't
Speaker 1: using that carcass anymore. Similarly, the gilo woodpecker makes its
Speaker 1: nest in the cavity of the saara cactus, and hermit
Speaker 1: crabs protect themselves and the discarded shells of snails and
Speaker 1: other gastropods that have outground them. Meanwhile, for a c
Speaker 1: is a type of commence ali is um when one
Speaker 1: animal attaches to another in order to catch a ride
Speaker 1: from one place to another. For instance, a nematode or
Speaker 1: might can't really get very far on its own unless
Speaker 1: it climbs on board a bee or a fly. The
Speaker 1: might or nematode gets a huge benefit from the exchange,
Speaker 1: whereas the bee or fly doesn't really benefit or suffer
Speaker 1: from the interaction. While commence all um is a huge
Speaker 1: benefit for some of the organisms in the deal, it
Speaker 1: can be really tricky for an ecosystem under stress. Hips said, Ultimately,
Speaker 1: I think having more commence ali is um in an
Speaker 1: ecosystem could make an ecosystem more vulnerable if you lose
Speaker 1: one species you could lose another If gopher tortoises went extinct,
Speaker 1: we will undoubtedly lose other species along with it. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Jescelin Shields and produced by Tyler Klain.
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