Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature feature production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and I have a secret brother or
Speaker 1: a litinum out of the basement to be my guest
Speaker 1: today because we're going to talk about animal siblings. The
Speaker 1: sibling bond is strong in nature for better or for worse,
Speaker 1: from siblicide to an army of cooperative carnivorous siblings. We're
Speaker 1: gonna see if any of these animals capture our very
Speaker 1: own sibling dynamic. From baby sharks to millipedes, congo lines,
Speaker 1: and parasite thunderdomes. We're gonna finally answer the angel question. Mom,
Speaker 1: he's on my side. Can you tell him to stop?
Speaker 1: Joining today is brother of the podcast and myself, my brother,
Speaker 1: Aaron Golden. Hey, how's it going. I am doing well.
Speaker 1: How are you good? Good? Good? It's been a while
Speaker 1: since we talked. I think we talked like two hours ago.
Speaker 1: It was a wild guy. It's it's been rough. It's
Speaker 1: been rough two hours, but been rough. Yeah. How would
Speaker 1: you describe our dynamic in front of a nationwide audience? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: not on the spot at all. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a I feel very lucky to have a sister
Speaker 1: like you, not to not to get to cornball, but
Speaker 1: cornball is my default. Did I tell you we're live
Speaker 1: in front of like five billion people right now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like of the world's population. Yeah. I think we are
Speaker 1: very lucky. We didn't really fight that much growing up.
Speaker 1: All of our fights were pretty minor, you know, tickle fights,
Speaker 1: me attacking you with a badminton bat, so, you know,
Speaker 1: not really anything too serious. I do think it's interesting
Speaker 1: because both for humans and in the natural world, you know,
Speaker 1: sibling relationships, they can be very different. They can range
Speaker 1: from being really kind and nice and getting along together too,
Speaker 1: you know, straight up sibilicide, right. Yeah. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't want you to take this the wrong way, but
Speaker 1: I do have a whole section on siblicide uh animals
Speaker 1: that I can I can handle it. I think control
Speaker 1: my imagination here, and that's good. I'm we surprise set up.
Speaker 1: I am the younger sister, you are the older brother.
Speaker 1: We are separated by two years of blessed silence that
Speaker 1: you had before I entered the scene and started making
Speaker 1: her cousin a ruckus. Apparently you were the loud baby
Speaker 1: like I I was, in fact quiet, yes, quiet and calm.
Speaker 1: I understood that in order to assert myself, I had
Speaker 1: to cry a lot, in order to remind everyone that
Speaker 1: I exist. I too need resources. That's set up my
Speaker 1: whole career, right, Like, this is me on the podcast,
Speaker 1: is just me demanding people recognize I exist. Like, hey,
Speaker 1: you can hear my voice, right, give me resources and
Speaker 1: tell tell me you love me. Sure? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: nothing ever really changes, right, yeah, yeah, it really doesn't.
Speaker 1: Um And yeah, I'm I'm really excited to have you
Speaker 1: on the podcast to talk about animal siblings. I feel
Speaker 1: like this will this will lead to some fun story,
Speaker 1: like we'll be talking about sharks, and then we'll talk
Speaker 1: about like, hey, remember that time, you know that time
Speaker 1: that those other two siblings we had aid each other
Speaker 1: and oh yeah that's right, I don't remember, isn't young?
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's when Yeah there was a feeding frenzy. Well,
Speaker 1: speaking of siblings destroying each other, killing each other, devouring
Speaker 1: each other while inside the womb, all you know, great topics.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about intra uterine cannibalism. That's cannibalism
Speaker 1: coming to a womb near you. So that is when
Speaker 1: babies inside the womb eat each other. Now, there is
Speaker 1: a myth that human babies do this sometimes that you
Speaker 1: will eat your siblings this or like a twin, like
Speaker 1: oh I ate my twin. Um. That doesn't actually happen
Speaker 1: in humans. Usually what happens is like if you have
Speaker 1: twins and one of the embryos dies, it just gets
Speaker 1: reabsorbed into the uterus. It's not like one twin doesn't
Speaker 1: eat the other. It doesn't seem like embryos or you know,
Speaker 1: early development humans have a mouth or digestic capable of that. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm not exactly sure how the mechanics of that would
Speaker 1: play out, Right, how do you even believe that myth?
Speaker 1: Like when you think about it, I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: I can imagine just a little fetus with those little
Speaker 1: teeny tiny hands grabbing on and then just sort of
Speaker 1: you know, slowly corn cob. But that is that doesn't
Speaker 1: really happen. But it does. It does happen with other animals,
Speaker 1: including the baby sand tiger sharks. So sand tiger sharks
Speaker 1: as adults are quite big. They can grow to be
Speaker 1: over ten feet long, which is three meters. They have
Speaker 1: sharp teeth, pointy snouts. They range from grayish brown to
Speaker 1: gray in coloration, and they're very fierce looking. Despite being
Speaker 1: so frightening looking, they're actually pretty non aggressive, especially towards humans.
Speaker 1: There have been no cases of human fatalities with these sharks,
Speaker 1: so yeah, pretty pretty shy, not murdery sharks, not to
Speaker 1: say that they aren't cold blooded murderers when it comes
Speaker 1: to their own flesh and blood. So, these are sharks
Speaker 1: that give live birth, and inside of the female sharks
Speaker 1: uterus there is something of a baby shark thunder dome,
Speaker 1: so she will have multiple embryos, but typically only gives
Speaker 1: birth to one or two out of like a dozen embryos.
Speaker 1: And that is because the victors eat all of their siblings.
Speaker 1: And I've shared with you a photo of one of
Speaker 1: these embryos, and you were mentioning earlier like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: baby humans, like they don't really have much of a mouth.
Speaker 1: They don't have like teeth, Like, how would they eat
Speaker 1: each other? Well, looking at these this photo is that
Speaker 1: is a very very mouthy uh just right there. Yes,
Speaker 1: it has teeth and quite a large mouth, all all
Speaker 1: for eating its brothers and sisters all up and so
Speaker 1: that way it can get big and strong, and it's
Speaker 1: just like it is so bizarre, you know, if you imagine,
Speaker 1: like you get an ultrasound and you have like twelve
Speaker 1: embryos in there, and then a week later there's tin
Speaker 1: and then a week later there's five. But two of
Speaker 1: them are getting bigger and stronger looking all the time.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, I wonder, oh, now there are only three,
Speaker 1: and now they're only two. My question then about this
Speaker 1: is are the eggs all fertilized at the same time, Like,
Speaker 1: is there a first mover advantage right and in in
Speaker 1: the womb as I imagine, you know, if they're all
Speaker 1: growing at the same at exactly the same time, then
Speaker 1: it is truly like a survival of the of the
Speaker 1: murderous I suppose, but I don't actually know. That's a
Speaker 1: very good question, and it's actually very interesting because the
Speaker 1: female santiger shark will mate with multiple males, so siblings
Speaker 1: may not even have the same father. And that's a
Speaker 1: big explanation for why there's so much siblicide, because they're
Speaker 1: they're only half related and they are competing with each other. Basically,
Speaker 1: it is a way for sharks to have sort of
Speaker 1: a selective pressure before the shark is even born. So
Speaker 1: the female shark actually doesn't have even though she has
Speaker 1: like can have twelve embryos developing in her uterous, she
Speaker 1: doesn't actually have that much yoke and nutrition to feed
Speaker 1: that many embryos. So it's necessary for them to eat
Speaker 1: each other. So it's like, yeah, there, it's truly brutal
Speaker 1: because yes, they have to do it. And what this
Speaker 1: does is it not only means that she doesn't have
Speaker 1: to give a bunch of resources to like twelve embryos,
Speaker 1: some of whom may come out and not be fit
Speaker 1: and be killed off by another animal that has none
Speaker 1: of her genes, So like, why why give that nutrition
Speaker 1: to some strange animal that has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: your genetic lineage? Uh? It is it creates like basically, okay,
Speaker 1: already at this point, the point before you're even born,
Speaker 1: we are having evolutionary pressure for only the fittest to
Speaker 1: emerge from the womb. And it's just brutally efficient, yes,
Speaker 1: And that way the female shark can mate with multiple
Speaker 1: male sharks. And basically it's similar to sperm competition at
Speaker 1: the level of you know, the strongest sperm will fertilize
Speaker 1: the egg. In this case, it's just a step up
Speaker 1: where it's the strongest embryos will emerge, and that's gonna
Speaker 1: be more effective because it actually has at least some
Speaker 1: correlation to the baby sharks ability to survive. I mean, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: it's some cold logic, cold nature logic right there. Right.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine that if our parents had just been
Speaker 1: given us like a pair of swords and sent us
Speaker 1: into like this little colicy, like all right, fight it
Speaker 1: out every once, gets dinner again. But then again, it's
Speaker 1: just imagining human babies, these little clumsy, little fat, little
Speaker 1: balls of physical ineptitude. Is yeah, is comical. I don't
Speaker 1: want to you give them a little helm and sword
Speaker 1: shield you kind of falling over. I don't want to
Speaker 1: keep bringing this up because it's been almost like like
Speaker 1: almost thirty years. But you did drop a can of
Speaker 1: soup on my head. It's true. I did drop a
Speaker 1: can of soup on your head. I admit it. I
Speaker 1: think I was four. You were too. I think that. Okay,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. You were juggling some cans of soup
Speaker 1: as as you do, because you're like, you know, I
Speaker 1: were cartoonishly Dickensie and children juggling cans of Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: we we didn't have anything fancy like balls, so it
Speaker 1: was the hands of beans that we had. We had
Speaker 1: to play with cans of beans. Yeah, I remember all
Speaker 1: Canabeans soccer called Garbonza Garba the doll Cannabians. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: had a very Cannabians based we didn't. I feel like
Speaker 1: I have to say I thought, okay, alright, that we
Speaker 1: had a wonderful childhood other than other than you dropping
Speaker 1: soup on my head accidentally, quote allegedly, quote unquote acidentally.
Speaker 1: It was indeed an accident. I did not mean to
Speaker 1: drop the can on your head. In fact, in fact,
Speaker 1: as dumb as I was as a four year old,
Speaker 1: I was just juggling the can. And if and if
Speaker 1: I recall, which I probably don't because I was four,
Speaker 1: you crawled up underneath me that I was juggling, So
Speaker 1: you know I wasn't. This wasn't a case of reckless
Speaker 1: endangerment here. I was minded my own can juggling business.
Speaker 1: Yeah I was. I was stunting a little bit. I
Speaker 1: was trying to do a little bit of a stunt,
Speaker 1: you know, like like while you're juggling, I'll do the
Speaker 1: worm underneath some cool flips and stunts, and then you
Speaker 1: did drop. You did drop. This would have been a
Speaker 1: great hit me. It would have been great that soup
Speaker 1: did hit me. Um our mom did freak out and
Speaker 1: we rushed to the hospital. Yeah. I did get stitches.
Speaker 1: You were terrified because when they said that I had
Speaker 1: to get stitches, you thought it meant they had to
Speaker 1: stitch my eyes closed. Oh yeah, I had some I
Speaker 1: had some horrific like hell rasor level like imagery of
Speaker 1: you're going to come out of this, yeah, with like
Speaker 1: without a face, Yeah, just like horror show giant like
Speaker 1: twine right, stitching your entire eyes. Yeah, I was just
Speaker 1: like and then you'd wake up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night with me like at the foot of your
Speaker 1: bed going you did this as a kid. Well, fortunately
Speaker 1: we're not baby eagles, which is my seg away into
Speaker 1: the next section, because baby baby raptors, like bald eagles,
Speaker 1: will often try to kill each other by the age
Speaker 1: old tactic of definestration. Oh yeah, So what's interesting is
Speaker 1: that with the baby sharks, it's basically like food competition, right,
Speaker 1: There's like not enough food to go around, they have
Speaker 1: to enter into the womb thunderdome twelve ter, only one
Speaker 1: or two come out. For baby eagles and other raptors.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily in response to food shortage, but due
Speaker 1: to population density and the favorability of competitive chicks. And
Speaker 1: this is called kane ism, cane enable, that'll, that'll fun
Speaker 1: folk tale, and it's so often what happens with bald
Speaker 1: eagle babies is there will be two eggs and two chicks,
Speaker 1: and mysteriously only one chick ends up making it to adulthood.
Speaker 1: And there was this was actually caught on camera once.
Speaker 1: There was a popular webcam that was like set up
Speaker 1: to show like baby bald eagle chicks. It's like, oh, look,
Speaker 1: how cute there, because when you look they are adorable.
Speaker 1: They're like these little fluffy poofballs. I should have a
Speaker 1: picture of that for you to look at. They just look,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at these little mischievous little balls. One of
Speaker 1: them's most likely one of them is going to murder
Speaker 1: the other. So yeah, you can if you look deep
Speaker 1: into their eyes, I think you can kind of see, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which one's gonna which one's the murder. The quote from
Speaker 1: this Live Science article about this bald eagle chick webcam
Speaker 1: is that quote although three chicks hatched, regular viewers noticed
Speaker 1: one day that a chick was missing and never returned.
Speaker 1: The article is titled quote eagle chicks allegedly kill siblings
Speaker 1: on webcamp, which I like, I'm glad that they're presuming
Speaker 1: in a sence in that case. That's just like journalistic
Speaker 1: integrity right there. In raptors and and also in other animals,
Speaker 1: there's actually two types of kanism the killing of siblings.
Speaker 1: So there is obligate kanism, meaning that one sibling almost
Speaker 1: inevitably kills the other. And what's interesting about this is
Speaker 1: this is usually in larger, longer living species like bald eagles, uh,
Speaker 1: they will lay only two eggs uh And basically one
Speaker 1: of the eggs is just insurance against infertility in one
Speaker 1: egg or the early death of one sibling. And the
Speaker 1: problem with how trying to raise two of these two adulthood,
Speaker 1: first of all, is competition as adults. You know, you
Speaker 1: can't really ensure that they will be able to be
Speaker 1: competitive as adults with um the amount of resources they
Speaker 1: need as these huge birds. So the better gamble is
Speaker 1: actually to only raise one offspring give it all of
Speaker 1: your resources and have that one grew up to be
Speaker 1: big and strong and the uh just like this absolute
Speaker 1: unit of a baby eagle growing to adulthood. Because if
Speaker 1: you try to strain your resources and have to grow
Speaker 1: to adulthood, and they're also going to be competing for
Speaker 1: resources into adulthood, the chance that both will fail is
Speaker 1: more than they will both succeed, and is less than
Speaker 1: if you had just like invested everything into one chick.
Speaker 1: So they will both Basically, both chicks are going to
Speaker 1: try to oust the other. And this is kind of
Speaker 1: interesting though, because it does show a little bit of
Speaker 1: how evolution can be somewhat absurd, right, which is why
Speaker 1: not just have one chick at a time? Well, again,
Speaker 1: that's it's thought that having two chicks is insurance. Like
Speaker 1: if one of you spend all these resources mating and
Speaker 1: laying eggs, finding a partner, and then you lay your eggs,
Speaker 1: if the one egg you lay is not fertile and
Speaker 1: you have to invest again into mating and laying more eggs,
Speaker 1: you're basically ensuring first of all, that at least one
Speaker 1: of the eggs will hatch, and then if they both hatch,
Speaker 1: if one of them dies early on, then you have
Speaker 1: a backup. So true, So it would be interesting, like
Speaker 1: what the statistics on the odds of dying before the
Speaker 1: chicks are guests? I guess like programmed to murder the
Speaker 1: other words? Right, So yeah, that's actually really interesting and
Speaker 1: I wonder I wonder too, like if if that strategy
Speaker 1: is generally successful among I would assume birds may be
Speaker 1: higher up on the food chain. Well, so well. I
Speaker 1: guess the question though, is do the parents of the birds,
Speaker 1: like the mothers, murder their own babies to accomplish the
Speaker 1: same thing, or is it just the siblings that murder
Speaker 1: each other. It's in bald eagles, I think generally it
Speaker 1: is the siblings that murder each other. There are certainly
Speaker 1: cases in animals where the parents will kill their offspring
Speaker 1: basically to give them so resources, uh, and to ensure
Speaker 1: that they're not spreading all their resources too thin, and
Speaker 1: so they are ensuring the best survival for both themselves
Speaker 1: and the offspring that are stronger. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of cases where it's just basically a free for all,
Speaker 1: like they give birth to a bunch of offspring and
Speaker 1: then and then murder right exactly because they have so many.
Speaker 1: Like this happens in frogs a lot. They just have
Speaker 1: so many. You can have a few as a snack.
Speaker 1: It's okay for for bald eagles. It's interesting because I
Speaker 1: think the reason that the the parents don't generally facilitate
Speaker 1: the the fratricide the siblic side is that it also
Speaker 1: is a similar concept as with the with the sharks,
Speaker 1: where you are making sure that the by having the
Speaker 1: siblings fight it out, the stronger one will emerge victorious.
Speaker 1: Interesting or even if it isn't strang it dependent because
Speaker 1: a sneaky little nudge may not necessarily intelligence strength or
Speaker 1: like to pass it on. So that's actually that's actually
Speaker 1: interesting because it could simply be that when it's the
Speaker 1: sibling that does it mm hmm, by its own nature,
Speaker 1: that sibling is that does the murder is more likely
Speaker 1: to then pass it on. Right, that's true. I mean
Speaker 1: that is sort of the the essence of of evolution,
Speaker 1: where genes don't have an overall plan, it's just either
Speaker 1: they get passed on. That's really interesting. I hadn't ever
Speaker 1: really thought about that. That's there's also a facultative kanism,
Speaker 1: so that's when fighting occurs between siblings that sometimes results
Speaker 1: in murder, but not by necessity. So this happens in
Speaker 1: a lot of This happens in a lot of birds,
Speaker 1: even in raptor species. Generally these are shorter lived birds
Speaker 1: with larger clutches, so more eggs laid. And then basically
Speaker 1: it's they can fight, sometimes they even kill each other,
Speaker 1: but they don't have to, and that it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: because like with the larger uh smaller populations of birds,
Speaker 1: it's kind of more of a risky investment thing because
Speaker 1: you're investing a lot of your resources into one offspring
Speaker 1: to really succeed, and so the fact that you're the
Speaker 1: best gambles for them to like, Okay, i gotta shove
Speaker 1: this sibling out so I'm the only one getting all
Speaker 1: the resources and then I'm gonna live along and prosperous
Speaker 1: life hopefully, because I'm gigantic and basically, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: a living dinosaur. I'm here to rick ruin your lives.
Speaker 1: But with smaller birds, it's like, okay, we're diversifying our
Speaker 1: investment because we're smaller. We're you know, once like once
Speaker 1: you reach adult hood, you're not really necessarily an apex
Speaker 1: predator like a bald eagle is. So if you're an
Speaker 1: apex predator, if you're once you reach adulthood, you're basically
Speaker 1: good as long as you can find food. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so again it's like by having this canism, you're eliminating competition.
Speaker 1: You're investing all of that into getting that chick to adulthood.
Speaker 1: And by having not, by only having one offspring, you're
Speaker 1: limiting the population. So there's not as much competition for
Speaker 1: resources because you're so huge, and you need lots of
Speaker 1: lots of things, lots of little tiny mammals to get
Speaker 1: in your mouth, and lizards and fish and all sorts
Speaker 1: of things. There's this video of a bald eagle who
Speaker 1: caught a fish and it's just like trying to pull
Speaker 1: it out of the water, but it's slopping swim with
Speaker 1: this fish and it looks very embarrassed to have been caught,
Speaker 1: so undignified. Right now, so he's filming me at this moment,
Speaker 1: Mint of all moments. The other day I had the
Speaker 1: greatest kill. No no photographers. Then right, well, one more
Speaker 1: story about sibili side and move on at this I'm
Speaker 1: not this is not I don't want you to feel
Speaker 1: like this is like a subliminal messaging or anything, or
Speaker 1: or indicative of any problem, Like, oh, you know, we're
Speaker 1: just just a podcast episode that feel, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: really take deep. Hello, brother, would you like to join
Speaker 1: me on my podcast about sibili side? I have only
Speaker 1: the bestest of intentions, dear brother. Yeah, I feel like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you could ham it up and get get real dark.
Speaker 1: So what we do on the podcast get real dark?
Speaker 1: So um oh yeah, cannibal morph babies. That sounds like
Speaker 1: a cool, like a fun like TV show, you know,
Speaker 1: like teenage mutant ninja turtles, like salamander cannibal morph babies. Well,
Speaker 1: let's think of a salamander cannibal morph babies here to
Speaker 1: eat their bros. Yeah, there you go, I think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So salamanders and newts and also acts ladles all have
Speaker 1: a amphibious larval stage. And what's interesting, so quick thing,
Speaker 1: Acts ladles are just like salamander and newt young, except
Speaker 1: they just never grow out of it. They are always
Speaker 1: in that aquatic juvenile stage. They never reached their terrestrial stage.
Speaker 1: That's a whole interesting topic. I think we've covered before.
Speaker 1: But yeah, just a quick reminder, Acts ladles, permanent peter
Speaker 1: Pan versions of salamander and nut. Yeah, the Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: uh animal just yeah, the the Zuckerberg's of the salamander
Speaker 1: and newt world. This thing I'm going to talk about,
Speaker 1: the cannibal morph babies happens in baby newts, baby salamanders,
Speaker 1: and young axelttles as well, and they all have this.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you've seen an axe a lottle, you
Speaker 1: know what a young salamander or newt looks like in
Speaker 1: their aquatic stage. It's sort of similar to how frogs
Speaker 1: have tadpoles and those are their aquatic stage. Salamanders and
Speaker 1: newts have a aquatic larval stage where they have these
Speaker 1: like weird branching lungs that kind of look like that
Speaker 1: come out of their gill slits. There these feathery gills
Speaker 1: and they swim around in the water and they are
Speaker 1: very cute. But a little less cute is the fact
Speaker 1: that there will be there's like a screaming kid out there.
Speaker 1: Can you guys hear that? It'll be flavor. It'll be
Speaker 1: like NPR esque flavor or it's like you know, sound
Speaker 1: effects of like and the children eat each other. Anyways,
Speaker 1: what was I saying. Oh, but the insidious thing about
Speaker 1: these little cute stitch like aquatic creatures is that they
Speaker 1: have a cannibal morph, a cannibal babies. So cannibal morphs
Speaker 1: are a version of these babies that have in large teeth,
Speaker 1: wide heads and mouths, slender bodies, and they will eat
Speaker 1: their brethren and sister and sister and is not a word,
Speaker 1: but you know they eat They eat their siblings, They
Speaker 1: eat other babies, salamanders, other baby newts. I mean it
Speaker 1: would be like if human babies, Like you have your
Speaker 1: normal squishy, little human baby, but then a baby born
Speaker 1: with just a giant mouth and sharp teeth eats other babies. Well,
Speaker 1: so do they develop into that though it's not like
Speaker 1: just some of them. Do they all go through the
Speaker 1: stage or do you know? Not? Only some of them do.
Speaker 1: And it's due to environmental triggers. So when there is
Speaker 1: starvation or crowded environments, there seems to be some like
Speaker 1: environmental stress hormone that triggers this growth in certain salamanders, uh,
Speaker 1: certain of certain juvenile salamanders new snacks, lattels, um and
Speaker 1: but there's a more recent study that found that there
Speaker 1: being maybe more environmental factors at play, because some populations
Speaker 1: ended up having all cannibals. It's a little bit mysterious,
Speaker 1: like what exactly what is happening in the water that
Speaker 1: turns all the babies into cannibals. Interesting. It's like there's
Speaker 1: some evil axilotles that are planning the purge andpending on
Speaker 1: what they want. You know, it's like this year, this year,
Speaker 1: it's all it's gonna be oops, all cannibals, And when
Speaker 1: one cannibal more happens, more are likely to follow, which
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense because like once one of
Speaker 1: you decides to be accountable, it's like, Okay, well I
Speaker 1: guess I better start eating other people too, otherwise I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be you know, if it's gonna be that way,
Speaker 1: they're gonna play it like that then yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: like we're all gonna be pac Man. Now, that'd be
Speaker 1: crazy game. Everyone's pac Man. You know, it's gotta it's
Speaker 1: gotta be out there, it's gotta be there's gotta be
Speaker 1: a pac Man melee. Yeah, all the it seems like
Speaker 1: the games that are generating all the memes these days
Speaker 1: is among us and fall guys. Yeah, oh yeah, I've
Speaker 1: heard of among us. Yeah, fall guys. I tried fall guys.
Speaker 1: I do like the evolutionary biology angle of fall guys,
Speaker 1: where it's just absolute chaos every all these little floppy
Speaker 1: things struggling to get you. You're a little spermatozoa trying
Speaker 1: to make its way to the exactly it's it's really
Speaker 1: just a fertilization simulator. It's always comes back to that,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. Yeah, really, that's what it is. You're just
Speaker 1: trying to make your way to the right at the
Speaker 1: end of the tunnel there, and there's always these giant
Speaker 1: swinging hammers that try to stop you. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's anatomically correct. The big scrotch dude. Well, it's not
Speaker 1: true that human fetuses eat each other in vitro. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean there isn't at times pretty unusual situations when
Speaker 1: it comes to twins. Identical twins monozygotic twins occur when
Speaker 1: of fertilized eggs splits in two and each half develops
Speaker 1: a fetus. That's an unusual occurrence itself, but sometimes the
Speaker 1: egg does not fully split. A partial duplication of the
Speaker 1: zygote can result in a pair of citic twin and
Speaker 1: underdeveloped twin that lives off the fully developed twin. The
Speaker 1: parasitic twin usually does not have a brain or many
Speaker 1: functional organs. They can range from being nearly a massive cells,
Speaker 1: two entire legs, torsos, and in very rare cases, parts
Speaker 1: of a human head attached and fully dependent on the
Speaker 1: dominant twin. This is truly a one in a million
Speaker 1: occurrence and can also mean a very risky medical procedure
Speaker 1: to save the life of the dominant twin, especially as
Speaker 1: it's so rare that insight into best surgical techniques is limited.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick break and return on a
Speaker 1: happier note. Siblings getting along with congolines and old factory
Speaker 1: family fund. Aaron and I get along pretty well, but
Speaker 1: it's not like we didn't have our arguments as kids,
Speaker 1: and this is fairly common amongst siblings. According to a
Speaker 1: University of Toronto study, siblings that around two to four
Speaker 1: years old have a fight every ten minutes. So maybe
Speaker 1: to teach your kids to get along, they'll need to
Speaker 1: learn a lesson from well frogs. So, now that we've
Speaker 1: gotten the sticky topic of siblicide out of the way,
Speaker 1: you know, we've got it's it's always good to kind
Speaker 1: of like get get out that like oh you know,
Speaker 1: like I want to murder you, blah blah blah, that
Speaker 1: stuff that's always just beneath the surface of siblings, buried,
Speaker 1: buried and bottled up. Yeah, very skin deep. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: I want to talk about siblings that get along. I
Speaker 1: think it's interesting because I mean, there are obviously lots
Speaker 1: of animals where siblings get along, like in Orca's siblings
Speaker 1: form these bonds and they hunt together, and Cheetah's whole
Speaker 1: bands of brothers will go out into the world and
Speaker 1: hunt together, and and lions sisters stay together basically their
Speaker 1: whole lives, and uh form these prides. And it's so
Speaker 1: you know, I think although there's obviously times when siblings compete,
Speaker 1: sometimes they work together, but I think we sometimes think
Speaker 1: about like, oh, it's these it's sort of these more intelligent,
Speaker 1: like emotional animals that would ever develop a bond with
Speaker 1: a sibling, right, because you think about like even with lines,
Speaker 1: like you know, they like like to nuzzle each other. Sure,
Speaker 1: their bloodthirsty, but they they have emotions, right, they can
Speaker 1: feel affection for each other when you look at a frog,
Speaker 1: You're like, this frog doesn't have anything going on. It's
Speaker 1: not gonna like recognize a brother or a sister and
Speaker 1: get along and like, you know, have little like froggy
Speaker 1: tea parties sitting on toadstools and catching up and sipping
Speaker 1: tea out of like acorn cups. But you'd be wrong
Speaker 1: to think that, because it's not true. Well they don't.
Speaker 1: They don't have little tea parties, but not that you
Speaker 1: know of, not that you know of. You're just not
Speaker 1: invited to them. I'm sorry to say. But cascade frogs
Speaker 1: are these normal looking frogs with brown skin. They're found
Speaker 1: in the Pacific Northwest. They're they're just like your typical
Speaker 1: little frog, little froggy, and they have been studied and
Speaker 1: found to recognize siblings and show a preference for spending
Speaker 1: time with their siblings, regardless of which tadpoles they've been
Speaker 1: raised with. So they have some kind of sibling sonar
Speaker 1: where they can sniff out their blood relatives, and when
Speaker 1: they meet up with their blood relatives, they like to
Speaker 1: they show a preference for them. They like to hang
Speaker 1: out in a non competitive way. Fascinating. Yeah, which because
Speaker 1: like it's interesting I don't know if they've found like
Speaker 1: what they're smelling, like what that sibling signifier is. But
Speaker 1: it is really interesting that they do have some kind
Speaker 1: of way to detect so they actually don't know how
Speaker 1: they detect it yet. It's it's no un We've just
Speaker 1: observed it. That's that's interesting. Yeah, Um, which like makes
Speaker 1: me wonder because sometimes you hear about these stories of
Speaker 1: twins and like, uh, they've been separated at birth and
Speaker 1: then they get back together and they find they have
Speaker 1: all this stuff in common, Like they're very similar, their
Speaker 1: habits are very similar. Uh, it's really uh. And then
Speaker 1: like there's also stuff about like twins having like very
Speaker 1: eerily similar emotional reactions to things. So it is it
Speaker 1: is interesting that in nature there seems to be some
Speaker 1: kind of innate recognition for some animals where they can
Speaker 1: just like, Okay, that's that's my that's my brother, that's
Speaker 1: my sister. I can chill out around them. Do we
Speaker 1: have any like do we have anything that we share?
Speaker 1: I've heard that we laugh similarly. Yeah, I mean it's hard.
Speaker 1: It's hard from when you're on the inside to yeah,
Speaker 1: people say we all sorts of things that I mean,
Speaker 1: people tell me, Oh, it's it's really obvious that Katie's
Speaker 1: your sister. But yeah, it's hard for me to tell
Speaker 1: because it feels, you know, I feel like a different person.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we we have similar laughs. I guess we
Speaker 1: look the same. I don't know, we don't look anything.
Speaker 1: Are you kidding? You have a beard right, that the
Speaker 1: beard is different? That's no. But like we have similar expressions,
Speaker 1: which I think is interesting because we like, there's some
Speaker 1: photos of us where apparently we're like reacting to the
Speaker 1: same things. We have the same look of either horror
Speaker 1: or finding something funny or discussed or whatever. It's like
Speaker 1: the same expression, which I think is interesting because it's
Speaker 1: it makes me wonder, like how much of that is
Speaker 1: just like because we're genetically very similar, how much is
Speaker 1: of that is just like being raised together? It's you know,
Speaker 1: they're I mean, there's so much argument in psychology and
Speaker 1: evolutionary biology about the nature versus nurture thing, right, But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, who knows what the what the breakdown is there?
Speaker 1: I mean, I know, I know in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: like I pick up say, like verbal things from you.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I just picked them up. I think
Speaker 1: we picked things up from people we talked to a lot.
Speaker 1: I know, I was always picking up picking up your legos,
Speaker 1: talking about picking stuff up from which you're leaving your
Speaker 1: legos all around. Yeah, I got you. I did that,
Speaker 1: that's true, But I don't remember you picking up after
Speaker 1: me so well your legos though, But yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: I mean the frogs. I mean, maybe that's just proof
Speaker 1: that all frogs are like psychic and they're all like
Speaker 1: psychic frogs. I'm not surprised. Yeah, that's that. I think
Speaker 1: that's the scientific conclusion. There's right, right, they have I
Speaker 1: have hurt like people do say, like, oh, I can
Speaker 1: feel like they say they have like a psychic bond
Speaker 1: with their twin. I don't necessarily, well, I don't want
Speaker 1: to be like a stick in the mud, but I
Speaker 1: do think one thing that we will. I think it's hogwash,
Speaker 1: but I think it is. I do wonder, though, like
Speaker 1: with twins, if you're that similar and you're raised together,
Speaker 1: so you're you're similar in so many ways that if
Speaker 1: you are presented with a similar environmental factor, that you
Speaker 1: can maybe predict like how the other person is going
Speaker 1: to feel or react with very good accuracy. Because even
Speaker 1: like with you, I feel like I can predict, like
Speaker 1: how you're going to react to something, um extremely accurately
Speaker 1: and like down to like exactly what you're gonna say. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it makes sense. That makes sense. See I knew
Speaker 1: what you're gonna very good, well done, well done. I'll
Speaker 1: edit that in post to make it or make your's
Speaker 1: just a little before mine, and then that's a little
Speaker 1: before years bing bang boom, bing bang boom. So I
Speaker 1: do want you to click on a video I've provided
Speaker 1: for you. It is, it says UM, an interesting Russian
Speaker 1: video of a giant caterpillar. What am I looking at? What?
Speaker 1: What was? I don't okay, I gotta watch the aga
Speaker 1: I don't even know. Like so it's like a big
Speaker 1: one in the front and they're they're all like what
Speaker 1: are they? Is? They like munching on each other's tails.
Speaker 1: It's like a train of frogs. You don't look like frogs.
Speaker 1: So what you're actually looking at is a shrewd congo line.
Speaker 1: You are called frogs. I don't know h the I
Speaker 1: don't know why that, but it's a Russian video. Probably
Speaker 1: I just assumed because you just assumed it was frogs.
Speaker 1: I was trying to trick into thinking it was a
Speaker 1: giant caterpillar because it kind of looks like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. But it's crazy because it looks like
Speaker 1: there's like a big I guess mama shrew in the front.
Speaker 1: And then it's like they've each clamped chomped onto the
Speaker 1: one in front tail and they're all just running in
Speaker 1: a line. Yeah, and it looks it looks like when
Speaker 1: you're looking at it from a distance, it just looks
Speaker 1: like one animal, like a giant caterpillar movie. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: looks like, yeah, some kind of odd yeah snake with legs.
Speaker 1: So I will explain what's going on first. I kind
Speaker 1: of want to talk about what shrews are because some
Speaker 1: people I don't necessarily know. Um, that's not a condescending
Speaker 1: I'm gonna retake us. I going to talk about what
Speaker 1: shrews are. No, I'll leave it in be condescended to
Speaker 1: nobody knows shrews better than me. For those of you
Speaker 1: who don't know what a shrew is, Shrews are a
Speaker 1: family of little mouse like mammals found all over the world.
Speaker 1: They are actually not rodents and not really closely related
Speaker 1: to mice, even though they look like mice. They are
Speaker 1: more closely related to moles and hedgehogs, and they do
Speaker 1: not have mouse like teeth. Their teeth are little needle
Speaker 1: like a shrew bite is very unpleasant, especially because some
Speaker 1: shrews are venomous and they have venom glands that can
Speaker 1: distribute the talk some down grooves in their sharp little teeth.
Speaker 1: So one of the few mammals who are venomous, and
Speaker 1: in fact, the American short tailed true species have enough
Speaker 1: venom in their glands to kill two hundred mice, which
Speaker 1: is an oddly specific fact I read on Wikipedia, and
Speaker 1: I don't know how they know that or why it
Speaker 1: is specifically two hundred mice, because that's how many that
Speaker 1: it could kill. It's two. Did they like divvy it
Speaker 1: up and feed it to like I'm assuming what they
Speaker 1: did was they put it in a dropper and then
Speaker 1: just murdered and they were at like one, It's like up,
Speaker 1: we got we can use some more. And then they
Speaker 1: got to two hundreds like all right, and then two
Speaker 1: one not enough mouse, aretty. Sure that's how scientists do
Speaker 1: with Yeah, they do it. They measure venom and mouse
Speaker 1: units poisoning wise. Yeah, this ld fifty nonsense. It's it's
Speaker 1: how many mice? How many four thousand mice. It's it's
Speaker 1: called d m Q the dead mouse quotient. Yeah, d
Speaker 1: m mL dead mice permil leader. Um, yeah, that sounds
Speaker 1: pretty good. Dead. But however, while adult shrews are quite
Speaker 1: apt to defend themselves, baby shrews are just little defenseless
Speaker 1: beans who are born blind, squishy, and you know, probably
Speaker 1: pretty snack able. So if the mother must abandon her
Speaker 1: nest due to disruption or danger or needing to find
Speaker 1: more resources, if she just like leads them away, they
Speaker 1: will soon get lost because they're blind and clueless. So instead,
Speaker 1: she assembles her offspring into a train. So the mother
Speaker 1: leads and each baby instinctively bites down on the tail
Speaker 1: of the shrew in front of it, forming shrew train.
Speaker 1: Check a check a check chuck chuck a check a
Speaker 1: check out, shrew train. It's a shrew train. Shrew train.
Speaker 1: It's my new show called shrew Train, where we all
Speaker 1: hop aboard the shrew train. It would that be in
Speaker 1: the in the shrew crime category? Nice? Yes, welcome to
Speaker 1: shrew Crime. An entire train of shrews murdered. So what
Speaker 1: I find really interesting about the shrew train is that
Speaker 1: they move with surprising ease. It's like, you look at it,
Speaker 1: there's something about the simple little pro graham in each
Speaker 1: of these shrews that is like bite down on tail
Speaker 1: and follow immediately in front that makes them very efficient.
Speaker 1: There's a second video you can look at that shows
Speaker 1: and you know, just like how agile they are. They
Speaker 1: can like turn on a pin and like move around
Speaker 1: like a snake. It's pretty incredible that you have so
Speaker 1: many individuals coming together. Oh wow, and it's it's crazy.
Speaker 1: It's that's that's gotta be. And it looks like their
Speaker 1: legs are almost in sync, but they may just all
Speaker 1: kind of run with the same cadence. But that that
Speaker 1: is incredible looking. Yeah, it looks like it looks like
Speaker 1: a single organism. Well what's so okay? So there's something
Speaker 1: really unsettling about it, which is that most things that
Speaker 1: we at least that I've typically seen in nature that
Speaker 1: kind of are in that snake or caterpillar format or
Speaker 1: whatever or like smooth or shiny, you know, but it's fuzzy.
Speaker 1: It's weird. It's weird to look at. It's like it's like,
Speaker 1: is it imagine if snake's head for it's it's unsettling
Speaker 1: and strange. I have some bad news for you about
Speaker 1: some caterpillars. That's true. It's caterpillars. Are they are fuzzy,
Speaker 1: that's true. Yeah, they're also giant caterpillar congo lines as well,
Speaker 1: which we've covered in another episode. And that's all. That's
Speaker 1: basically safety in numbers. They go butt to head, butt
Speaker 1: to head to travel to other locations in order to
Speaker 1: remain safe and more intimidating because they have this these
Speaker 1: urticating hairs on their backs. Like the fuzz is actually
Speaker 1: a defense mechanism. So if they're form this giant line
Speaker 1: of caterpillars like where they're they're squishy heads and squishy
Speaker 1: butts are protected by the person in front and or
Speaker 1: sorry person caterpillar in front and behind. Those caterpillars are
Speaker 1: people too. But yeah, the conga line a very efficient
Speaker 1: survival technique used by multiple animals. I don't think humans
Speaker 1: have a really good analog for children, although we do
Speaker 1: have like leashes. I guess for toddlers. Mom put you
Speaker 1: on a leash when you were a toddler. She did.
Speaker 1: She never told you that, I'm sure No, it's not
Speaker 1: lies she did, because it's not. It's not a literal leash.
Speaker 1: It's like a little body harness with like a little
Speaker 1: sprawny bongee. And she didn't once just to like because
Speaker 1: it wasn't. It was to give you a little more
Speaker 1: freedom of exploration while still keeping tabs on you. And
Speaker 1: you're like, to, I don't remember this because I don't
Speaker 1: even think I was born yet, But she said, you
Speaker 1: went to some store and immediately like went around one
Speaker 1: of those like like so glasses. You know that's like rotating,
Speaker 1: it's coming back. I mean, I was too young to
Speaker 1: actually remember this, but now I remember. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: so Just so the listeners know, um our mom did
Speaker 1: not just keep this from me and secretly Katie about this,
Speaker 1: I should also say, we don't keep Aaron in a
Speaker 1: basement like the Bart twin from the Simpsons. Um O, god, no,
Speaker 1: that's our other secret sibling that we don't talk about it.
Speaker 1: We didn't talk about that one. We don't talk about that.
Speaker 1: I'll edit that out, but no, you you immediately wrapped
Speaker 1: yourself around a display rack and my mom was like, well,
Speaker 1: that probably isn't gonna work. Yeah, I just I can
Speaker 1: just imagine just you know, you know, my imagine she
Speaker 1: is kind of like one of the fall guys, little
Speaker 1: jelly bean men, just kind of stumbling around and chaos
Speaker 1: flopping around. Researchers are fascinated by twins due to how
Speaker 1: they're as close as we can currently get to studying
Speaker 1: human clones, and looking at how twins behave is one
Speaker 1: way to study nature versus nurture, to see how your
Speaker 1: genes and your environment interact to create well you. Psychologist
Speaker 1: Thomas Bouchard to just study in comparing twins who had
Speaker 1: been separated at birth, raised by different families, and then
Speaker 1: were reunited later. In some cases, they had startling similarities,
Speaker 1: like a pair of twins who had the same hobbies
Speaker 1: both married and divorced women named Linda and remarried women
Speaker 1: named Betty. Aside from this eerily coincidental case, most twins
Speaker 1: in his study had much more significant differences. Something Bouchard
Speaker 1: concluded was evidence that twins are not carbon copies and
Speaker 1: become unique individuals throughout their lives, which is probably not
Speaker 1: news solve the twins out there listening to this now,
Speaker 1: but hey, at least you got science on your side
Speaker 1: when we return, We're going to talk about siblings who
Speaker 1: joined forces to destroct It's not unusual for siblings to
Speaker 1: team up to achieve greatness. There's the Right Brothers, the
Speaker 1: Bronte Sisters, Venus and Serena Williams, and the Kardashians. Anyways,
Speaker 1: when siblings join forces in nature, sometimes the result is
Speaker 1: mind blowing, impressive and abjectly horrifying, you know, like the Kardashians.
Speaker 1: So we've talked about siblings who do not get along.
Speaker 1: We've talked about siblings who do get along. Now I
Speaker 1: want to talk about siblings who team up to destroy
Speaker 1: the world around them. I feel like it's inspirational, you know,
Speaker 1: just just siblings forming an army that eats and fights
Speaker 1: its way through the world. Uh, it's I mean, like
Speaker 1: a lot of the things like we think of as
Speaker 1: like hives, um and colonies, like aunt colonies, b hives,
Speaker 1: termite colonies, those are all siblings. Those are most of
Speaker 1: the ones you will see will be sisters, because all
Speaker 1: of the workers are sisters. They're highly related to each other. Um.
Speaker 1: Their brothers are just being lazy and staying inside all
Speaker 1: day and eating like you know, just like our dynamic exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: but I do want to talk about other groups of
Speaker 1: siblings that team up to form a giant army to dominate. Uh.
Speaker 1: And first I want to talk about millipede balls. That
Speaker 1: sounded wrong, but I mean, I mean big clusters of millipedes.
Speaker 1: So many species of millipedes have very close sibling bonds. Again,
Speaker 1: we think about sibling bonds that are loving to be
Speaker 1: exclusive to, like uh, fuzzy charismatic mammals, like even truths
Speaker 1: like those are cute. They're like they look like, you know, cut, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they could nuzzle each other. They you know, chew on
Speaker 1: each other's butts to stay safe. That's pretty cute. Insects
Speaker 1: can team up to in insects, arthropods, they can form
Speaker 1: sibling bonds as well. And millipedes, which are you know,
Speaker 1: those mini legged, very creepy, crawley little arthur pods have
Speaker 1: very close sibling bonds and they will form as young millipedes,
Speaker 1: they will form huge clusters of riving millipedes who roll
Speaker 1: around in search of food. If you click on that
Speaker 1: link right here under millipedes ball, you can see of it.
Speaker 1: You of that, Oh wow, that's a that's a lot.
Speaker 1: They look tiny though they are because they're little babies.
Speaker 1: The big ball baby millipedes that is it looks you know,
Speaker 1: they're kind of pink and mhmm, blesh. It's it's it
Speaker 1: is h. Yeah, that's pretty neat, big old ball baby
Speaker 1: bouncing baby millipedes. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Actually. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: they formed this cluster that's so dense even like a
Speaker 1: single ant can't work its way through it. And so
Speaker 1: they out of many they become one sort of mega
Speaker 1: cluster of millipedes that is safe from predators. And they
Speaker 1: will so millipedes feed on organic matter found in soil,
Speaker 1: so in order to find patches of nutrient rich soil,
Speaker 1: they will travel in this giant ball of millipedes and
Speaker 1: and just kind of cluster around patch of soil and
Speaker 1: get their food and moved on. And if you like
Speaker 1: force them to disperse, like try to stomp on the
Speaker 1: ball and they all have to scatter, they'll all run
Speaker 1: into one direction and then reform the ball relatively click quickly.
Speaker 1: It's very like very sci fi to me. It does
Speaker 1: it looks like some kind of yeah sci fi cluster,
Speaker 1: like a nanite cluster that it looks like a lot
Speaker 1: of the yeah, pretty popular, Like like there's kind of
Speaker 1: that that slithery snake clusters like in the Matrix series. Right,
Speaker 1: I wonderful, I wonder how many people have seen this stuff?
Speaker 1: Is this? It's pretty cool looking. It is cool looking,
Speaker 1: and it's also heartwarming because these are all these are
Speaker 1: all siblings coming together to exactly another heartwarming story of
Speaker 1: Arthur pods who come together are black lace weaver spiders
Speaker 1: are a spider found in Europe, North America, and New Zealand,
Speaker 1: although they are invasive species in New Zealand. They're about
Speaker 1: sixteen millimeters long's about point six inches. They're they're pretty neaty.
Speaker 1: They're like a spider that you'd see and go like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, that's a there's a spider right there. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, you know you don't want that thing in
Speaker 1: your eyeball. That's how I measure spiders by, like how
Speaker 1: bad it would be for it to be in well,
Speaker 1: but then you get once you get past a certain
Speaker 1: size though, then they can't. It's true, then they can't
Speaker 1: get in the eyeball. No, that's true. That's true. Like,
Speaker 1: well but that doesn't maybe I actually like the bigger
Speaker 1: spider right exactly because they are more you know, they're
Speaker 1: more cuddly. I can fit a big enough spider and
Speaker 1: a baby Bjorn and carry it around. So um, the
Speaker 1: baby spiders will eat their own mother and then dance
Speaker 1: together in synchrony. And this sounds horrible, but it's actually
Speaker 1: heartwarming and sweet. So the black lace weaver female will
Speaker 1: have over a hundred young and the mother will lay
Speaker 1: trophic eggs, which are unfertilized eggs, for her babies to eat. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so she is giving as much of her resources
Speaker 1: as she can because she is not going to survive
Speaker 1: to mate again. And once they have eaten the trophic eggs,
Speaker 1: she wants to provide them with one last meal, and
Speaker 1: she will guide her babies under her body and offer
Speaker 1: herself as food. So she'll actually lay on top of
Speaker 1: them and just like stay still for them to eat her.
Speaker 1: Because like, she has created a huge amount of offspring
Speaker 1: and her best bet for having them pass on her
Speaker 1: jeans is to give them the best start in life,
Speaker 1: and that means cannibals. So the babies will eat her. Um.
Speaker 1: There's actually a lovely video if you want to see that.
Speaker 1: It's just it's actually not that gruesome. It doesn't look
Speaker 1: like much, but I just know that they are sucking
Speaker 1: out all her juices. I'm clicking on a video now here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like it's a bunch of little, tiny, cute,
Speaker 1: little tiny spiders crawling all over, all over mom. But
Speaker 1: they are sucking out all all of her juices. But
Speaker 1: that's how she likes it. She's like, I'll be your
Speaker 1: juice box babies, but a good but a good mother.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, spiders are pretty metal when you
Speaker 1: think about it. It's pretty metal. And I think it's
Speaker 1: a female, the males, and I know that the babies
Speaker 1: the females, but I mean, I shouldn't be surprised considering, well,
Speaker 1: it's yeah, and it's not just that the babies eat
Speaker 1: the females. The mothers actively encourage the babies to eat her.
Speaker 1: Just a ritual sacrifice, right, you know, on the on
Speaker 1: the blood altar of that's very metal. I like that
Speaker 1: they really they really got like their mother's eyes and
Speaker 1: their mother's legs, and their mothers are And what's interesting
Speaker 1: is this sacrifice on part of the mother sets them
Speaker 1: up not only in terms of giving them a lot
Speaker 1: of nutrition, but it also encourages them to work together
Speaker 1: as siblings. Because they have all of this nutrition from
Speaker 1: the get go, they're less likely to need to compete
Speaker 1: with each other. So they will form social groups that
Speaker 1: hunt together for about four weeks before finally dis ersing
Speaker 1: to go off and mate. So they will it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: thanks mom for letting us use you as a juice box.
Speaker 1: Like we're all pretty well fed, so we can hunt
Speaker 1: together and like work together. You know, they're not suffering
Speaker 1: such scarcity that they need to fight each other or
Speaker 1: try to eat each other like the other siblings we've
Speaker 1: talked about earlier in the episode. And that whole ritual
Speaker 1: dance that they do together where they seem to do
Speaker 1: this techno dance all in unison. That is a way
Speaker 1: for them to collectively ward off predators by making this
Speaker 1: larger vibration by all of them like dancing all together,
Speaker 1: that they seem like a much bigger animal by creating
Speaker 1: this like large vibration. Right, this is this is neat.
Speaker 1: They're tiny, they're a little yeah, they're a little little, right. Cute,
Speaker 1: They are pretty cute. So the last animal I want
Speaker 1: to talk about, and I'll issue a warning now, this
Speaker 1: is maybe the grossest story today. So if you're eating
Speaker 1: something like, you know, especially something like a spring roll
Speaker 1: or burrito or you know, you might want to just
Speaker 1: hold off on a because So I'm going to talk
Speaker 1: about copa do Soma floridanum wasps. So these are teeny tiny,
Speaker 1: unassuming wasps that look like a tiny house fly, but
Speaker 1: they are not flies. They are wasps. They're found all
Speaker 1: over the world. They are so tiny they're about the
Speaker 1: size of the ball in a ballpoint pen. And the
Speaker 1: um female wasps ah man wasps are like the weirdest
Speaker 1: freaks in nature. They're always pulling such like bizarre crap
Speaker 1: on other animals, especially when it comes to their offspring.
Speaker 1: Like Parasitoid wasps are a trip And we've talked about
Speaker 1: them before, but I don't think we've talked about this
Speaker 1: one yet. So the female will lay a couple of
Speaker 1: eggs inside of a caterpillar egg. Okay, so far pretty
Speaker 1: standard parasite things like not that much worse than a
Speaker 1: cuckoo bird or something. When the caterpillar hatches, the wasp
Speaker 1: eggs begin to multiply into a cluster of eggs inside
Speaker 1: of the caterpillar. Each egg contains two thousand wasps embryos,
Speaker 1: which are about a fifth of an inch long. So,
Speaker 1: according to Dr Mike Strand of the University of Georgia, quote,
Speaker 1: the caterpillar is about two to three inches long, so
Speaker 1: you can stuff a lot of wasps in there. I did,
Speaker 1: I'm cheating. I'm looking ahead. I've looked at the photo. No, no,
Speaker 1: you're not cheating. That's that's appropriate. You can look it.
Speaker 1: It is um. It has a kind of a sausage
Speaker 1: like vibe. But you know, it looks to me kind
Speaker 1: of like a spring roll with a bunch of like
Speaker 1: rice in it. Yeah, you know, kind of more writhing though.
Speaker 1: But also each of those like grains of rice is
Speaker 1: like an egg. But each of those eggs contains like
Speaker 1: thousands of embryos. So yeah, I guess I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not up on you know, how biology works, but I'm
Speaker 1: surprised to hear that what we would consider individual eggs
Speaker 1: can have multiple embryos in them. That, well, it's an egg,
Speaker 1: I guess more accurately, you would call it an egg sac.
Speaker 1: So these are each so it is a cluster of
Speaker 1: eggs sacs. Yes, gotcha, Okay, And so it's already we're
Speaker 1: getting into sort of body horror territory. Oh, it's it's yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is brutal. This is like this thing
Speaker 1: that looks like a sauce of transparent sausage casing filled
Speaker 1: with rice. Again, I'm so sorry if you're eating this
Speaker 1: is a caterpillars, possibly still alive. I'm not sure at
Speaker 1: this stage of the pure they're looking at. It's like
Speaker 1: it's as if there's just this thin sausage casing around salt.
Speaker 1: It's just packed with I can't imagine that there is
Speaker 1: enough internal or like like this one. This one might
Speaker 1: could be, but there are exactly how long parasites can
Speaker 1: get in there and how many can be in with
Speaker 1: the poor hosts. Still, it was insane. No, but it couldn't.
Speaker 1: I'm what I'm saying is like often it takes a while,
Speaker 1: like there's still enough organs and juices for them to
Speaker 1: survive this god amount of parasites inside them. There are
Speaker 1: other types of parasites that will parasitize caterpillars and emerge
Speaker 1: from the live caterpillar, but so many of them come out.
Speaker 1: But in this case, they do generally consume the whole
Speaker 1: caterpillar until it finally mercifully dies. Um. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: One catapar like like uh dr Mike Strand says, you
Speaker 1: can fit a whole lot of wasps inside this caterpillar
Speaker 1: because I remember, these are tiny wasps about the size
Speaker 1: of a ballpoint pen, and these are the larva. So
Speaker 1: multiple wasp mothers, unrelated wasps will lay their eggs in
Speaker 1: a single caterpillar. So this becomes a living nursery for
Speaker 1: many different wasps. But wasps don't ness there. These are
Speaker 1: not really social animals. They are not necessarily going to
Speaker 1: work together with unreal lated wasps. There's no evolutionary advantage
Speaker 1: to that for them, So they will battle it out
Speaker 1: inside the caterpillar. Again, we have a parasite thunderdome. But
Speaker 1: do the but do the siblings team up? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it like a team fight? Ah? This is very
Speaker 1: interesting because so you have different morphs of larva. And
Speaker 1: this is where it gets confusing and complicating and fascinating.
Speaker 1: So most of the larva are blood suckers. They will
Speaker 1: suck up the caterpillar's blood until they pupate into adults. Simple,
Speaker 1: you get it. Some of them are not blood suckers.
Speaker 1: They're soldiers. They do not consume the caterpillar. All they
Speaker 1: do is attack other wasp larva. They have slender bodies
Speaker 1: and scraping jaws that are designed purely as weapons, not
Speaker 1: for feeding, and they never reach maturity. The whole reason
Speaker 1: that they develop is to protect their siblings, and they
Speaker 1: will attack unrelated siblings and they won't attack their own siblings.
Speaker 1: They will not attack their own siblings. Simically, again, like
Speaker 1: we talked about with the frogs, they may it, maybe
Speaker 1: smell it, maybe some kind of kill some own thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the assumption is it's a it's a pheromone or chemical
Speaker 1: that they're detecting. I don't think they've identified what that is,
Speaker 1: but it's a pretty safe bet. Thats or psychic got psychic,
Speaker 1: psychic frog, psychic wasps. You know what's really interesting is
Speaker 1: that these soldiers are female always, and they will never
Speaker 1: attack their sisters. And they are like be colonies and
Speaker 1: aunt colonies. Like we've talked about before, they're very very
Speaker 1: like their genetically identical hole to their female siblings. They're
Speaker 1: like twins essentially, they are not genetically identical to their
Speaker 1: male siblings, so they will actually attack their male siblings.
Speaker 1: But they will not attack their sisters. The female soldiers
Speaker 1: will die. They do not go on to reproduce. They
Speaker 1: basically go down with the ship. The ship in this
Speaker 1: case is the caterpillar that eventually gets all of its
Speaker 1: juices sucked away, and then the sisters that they've died
Speaker 1: defending from unrelated uh larva will grow on go on
Speaker 1: to grow up and pupate into adults and leave the caterpillars,
Speaker 1: whereas the soldiers just die off. Do the male siblings
Speaker 1: have a warrior morph, No, they just kind of you
Speaker 1: know it, well, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, uh,
Speaker 1: one male can probably fertilize a bunch of females, but
Speaker 1: females have to invest a lot into creating eggs, so
Speaker 1: you don't need as many males. Really, I'm not I'm not,
Speaker 1: you know, making any political message here, but I'm just
Speaker 1: simply saying you don't need as many males. Um and
Speaker 1: again they kind of this. The whole way that they're
Speaker 1: more related to their sisters than they are to their
Speaker 1: brothers is the whole haploid diploid thing that happens with
Speaker 1: insects such as ants and bees, where you um have
Speaker 1: unfertilized haploid eggs producing males and fertilized diploid eggs producing females.
Speaker 1: So you know a little bit of genetic shenanigans there.
Speaker 1: And remember when I said earlier, she lays a couple
Speaker 1: of eggs and they start to uh multiply, that is
Speaker 1: clonal multiplication. So these sisters are literally clone of each other. Um.
Speaker 1: And so that is why it makes sense for some
Speaker 1: of the clones. And I'm assuming that the soldier morphs
Speaker 1: is more or less random. You're basically defending your own
Speaker 1: clone and the genes that will again in the future.
Speaker 1: It's like you're passing on your genes essentially by defending
Speaker 1: your clone, and your clone will have jeanes where their
Speaker 1: offspring also have a random chance. Some of them become soldiers,
Speaker 1: some of them become you know, the blood suckers that
Speaker 1: will go on to reproduce. So you're it's basically you know, uh,
Speaker 1: war of the War of the clone clone wasps right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's crazy. Yeah, I didn't realize that life, and
Speaker 1: I guess that makes sense. I don't know why I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have thought that that was something that happened, but
Speaker 1: that like full full on eggs or egg sacts even
Speaker 1: because it looks like is it the the whole egg
Speaker 1: sac splits or do individual eggs within this sack split? Wait? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Then I think it's I think it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's basically within the egg sacs, the individual eggs or
Speaker 1: and then and then they hatch into larva, and then
Speaker 1: those larva go on to royal around and the caterpillar
Speaker 1: and fight each other. Actually know this picture of the
Speaker 1: caterpillar that looks like it's like a rice dumpling, those
Speaker 1: might be larva rather than yeah that that might make God,
Speaker 1: it really does look sort of like food but snack
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, like you know you get those like
Speaker 1: the rice snacks. It's like or like sesame seeds sticks. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't for that caterpillar, right, and like the the
Speaker 1: sort of constant roiling motion. I'm imagining the larva fighting
Speaker 1: each other. But uh, you know, if we were wasp larva,
Speaker 1: I would still defend you, even though you're my brother.
Speaker 1: That's good to know. Yeah, glad to hear it. And
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be able to defend you because I'm just
Speaker 1: I'm a sitting duck. Yeah, essentially, unfortunately, those are the
Speaker 1: cards nature game. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I feel like
Speaker 1: insects really understand feminism. We'd go K sixty nine comments
Speaker 1: on the on the podcast, like I like this podcast
Speaker 1: until the host got all political. Well listen, that's that's
Speaker 1: all the sibyl ing animals I have to talk about today.
Speaker 1: I hope that this has helped strengthen our sibling bond
Speaker 1: to talk about, you know, all the mayhem and distructions
Speaker 1: from sibli side to ritualized sibling collaboration to destroy caterpillars
Speaker 1: from the inside out. You know, yeah, it really it
Speaker 1: really makes you think. It really makes you think. Well
Speaker 1: it does. Like you know, aliens looking at human sibling
Speaker 1: right relationship, they're probably thinking, that's that's very strange. Why
Speaker 1: would he drop a can of beans on her head?
Speaker 1: Surely this is a form of sibling competition. He tries
Speaker 1: to gather resources by using his sister's head as a
Speaker 1: can opener. The primary food source for humans appears to
Speaker 1: be what is called cans of beans. They are made
Speaker 1: out of beans. We must study these beans and they're cans. Normally.
Speaker 1: This is um where I would ask you to plug
Speaker 1: stuff but you're you're just my brother. You're doing I
Speaker 1: don't like engineering at Stanford or something stupid, but like, ah,
Speaker 1: so instead of asking you to plug anything, Um, do
Speaker 1: you have any grievances to air publicly public grievance airing? No,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I mean I like that. I
Speaker 1: like that as your nickname though, like public grievance airing eron. Ah, Yes,
Speaker 1: I need to I need to start an online presence
Speaker 1: and yeah, any conflicts to resolve from our childhood as
Speaker 1: your chance Yeah, you know. Um, I feel like I
Speaker 1: probably was the cause of more trouble than you were
Speaker 1: when we were kids. There's one thing I always felt
Speaker 1: a little bad about, uh, which was this one time
Speaker 1: we were pretty young, and I thought it would be
Speaker 1: real funny to uh sneak into your bed, yes and wait,
Speaker 1: lie under the covers just perfectly still until you, you know,
Speaker 1: haplessly stumble into your room, at which point I erupt,
Speaker 1: erupt from the sheets and say boo, which I thought
Speaker 1: was pretty funny at the time, but I may have
Speaker 1: given you a traumatized I felt bad. I I that's
Speaker 1: that's when you know. One of the things you know
Speaker 1: you do when you're like five or six or however old,
Speaker 1: and you just are are you know, three whatever? No,
Speaker 1: I've told this story. I think I told this story
Speaker 1: on the podcast about that this too, Like you were
Speaker 1: and like you're not giving yourself enough credit for the
Speaker 1: ingenuity of the prank because you were lying and you
Speaker 1: got under the covers and you like slowly rose up
Speaker 1: like a zombie and was and like you either said
Speaker 1: boo or you like whoo. Well, I thought, I mean,
Speaker 1: I could be remembering it differently, but I thought that I, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just said boo, Like I wasn't really going for
Speaker 1: like maybe time slowed down for me because I was
Speaker 1: so scared. I suspect because I thought, you know, at
Speaker 1: the time, I thought it was better natured than it was,
Speaker 1: right until I started to scream, damon, damn, I got roasted.
Speaker 1: I guess my, I guess the opposite of a grievance.
Speaker 1: What's the opposite of a grievance? I guess, like um
Speaker 1: contrition is I think that you would you would get
Speaker 1: in trouble more than me for things that were sort
Speaker 1: of equally are doing, Like we would have be equal
Speaker 1: participants in a Shenanigan. But I would emerge, uh, innocent eyed,
Speaker 1: clear eyed, and you would have The thing is, I
Speaker 1: think you didn't know how to hide your guilt as
Speaker 1: much just me, because I would. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: like it wasn't so much that I was hiding my guilt.
Speaker 1: It was more that I was very openly contrite, like, yes,
Speaker 1: I think I did a bad thing, and you would
Speaker 1: like look at the ground and shovel You're full, I know.
Speaker 1: I think part of yeah, I think your your response was,
Speaker 1: you know, to show that you were sorry, blah blah,
Speaker 1: And I was like, what what's wrong? What's wrong with
Speaker 1: the what it did? It was pretty cool? Right, Like
Speaker 1: that was fun. We're having fun here. And I think
Speaker 1: that that having a being just constitutionally unable to recognize
Speaker 1: why what you're doing is annoying, Uh, well, annoy a parent,
Speaker 1: I think understandably. So that may have been Yeah, do
Speaker 1: you think if we were eagles, which one of us
Speaker 1: would be defenustrated and which one would be the definis strate?
Speaker 1: T interesting? I would say that just the diplomatic answer
Speaker 1: is that I would definistrate you because I'm older, so
Speaker 1: statistically speaking, I'd be more likely to get to the
Speaker 1: who it's time to definistrate first. Now, if we're going
Speaker 1: on personality, though, probably you, I think you'd you'd offer me.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure. I I think it's the I think
Speaker 1: it's the sneakiness. I think I'm sneakier than you. I
Speaker 1: think i'd be like, I think I would be able
Speaker 1: to sort of redirect your attention more easily. Thank you
Speaker 1: would I'd be like, what's that over there? I don't
Speaker 1: know what what would baby eagles be interested in? Is
Speaker 1: that a is that a fish? Or that a dead squirrel?
Speaker 1: I really don't know what baby eagles. Um. Is that
Speaker 1: some mom vomit? Oh? Was mom vomiting something up for you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: It would be your your bomb's neck. Yeah, look it's
Speaker 1: some mom bomb over there. Check out the mom bomb
Speaker 1: over there and the night Felia over the edge there.
Speaker 1: I'm a gonner global Yeah, my poor global herd sell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well luck, we were humans. Yeah, thank you, thank you
Speaker 1: for coming on. This was fun. Yeah, thanks thanks for
Speaker 1: having me on. It was it was last It's it's
Speaker 1: a little surreal having listened to the show as a observer,
Speaker 1: not entertainer, not comedian, member of the of the public. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you're part of the podcast family because we are
Speaker 1: a family here and and that we do have the
Speaker 1: capacity to sniff at each other's pheromones, So there is
Speaker 1: that's true. I wouldn't call it pharomones, though I would
Speaker 1: get a gross gross. All right, well, thank you guys
Speaker 1: so much for listening and for uh for humoring me
Speaker 1: and us as we are out our sibling grievances publicly
Speaker 1: for the first time. If you're enjoying the show, first
Speaker 1: of all, tell your siblings about it. Be like, hey,
Speaker 1: there's this great episode about sibili side. No, I don't
Speaker 1: mean it that way. Why are you looking at me
Speaker 1: that way? And also like, if you leave a rating
Speaker 1: and review, that actually really helps us out, not only
Speaker 1: with the algorithm, it makes me feel good. I My
Speaker 1: ego is insatiable. I am like a gaping void that
Speaker 1: requires more adulation constantly. It never ceases. My hunger for
Speaker 1: praise is unending. Thanks to the Space Classics for those
Speaker 1: super awesome song Excelumina Creature feature is a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you
Speaker 1: just heard, visit the heart radio app Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: Hey guess what just between you and me? Any old
Speaker 1: place Shell, listen to your podcast, doesn't matter. I don't judge.
Speaker 1: See you next Wednesday. Yeah,