Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and this is short stuff and this is
Speaker 1: a good one because we are squeezing it in five
Speaker 1: Lazarus species animals starting now, right. If you're wondering what
Speaker 1: a Lazarus species is, we've talked about it before with
Speaker 1: the first entry that we'll talk about in a second,
Speaker 1: but uh, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead in the Bible,
Speaker 1: if you believe that stuff. And a Lazarus species is
Speaker 1: a organism that has been brought back from extinction or
Speaker 1: that we thought rather it was extinct, not one that's
Speaker 1: like threatened, and we do a good job with it,
Speaker 1: but people are like, well, there's no more of those.
Speaker 1: And then years later so I's like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: there's another one of those, right, And we actually did
Speaker 1: a whole episode on one of these already, the Cela
Speaker 1: canth That's right, That's what I was referring to. Number one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has like an amazing story behind it, which will
Speaker 1: briefly go over again because, um, it has four lobes,
Speaker 1: meaning it had like kind of these proto limbs, um.
Speaker 1: And when they found it first in the fossil record
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. It was, you know, a four
Speaker 1: hundred million year old fossil, and they're like, this is
Speaker 1: the missing link between you know, animals in the sea
Speaker 1: and animals on the ground. And we love the Cela
Speaker 1: cant for this reason, but it's long dead. I think
Speaker 1: the most recent fossil they'd found was from sixty six
Speaker 1: million years ago, So we just thought it was another
Speaker 1: very very interesting prehistoric fish, right, and it was very
Speaker 1: sad to not be able to study those in modern times.
Speaker 1: And then boom, not too modern. But in ninett they
Speaker 1: caught one or they discovered one off the coast of
Speaker 1: South Africa, and that was a big, big deal. And
Speaker 1: then since then they've gotten quite a few more of
Speaker 1: these live specimens on record. If I remember correctly, it
Speaker 1: was a woman's scientist to who was the one who
Speaker 1: recognized it for what it was and was like, the
Speaker 1: this is a big deal. Yeah, aren't they like not
Speaker 1: bottom dwellers, but they're pretty deep guys, right, yes, And
Speaker 1: I remember they see I'm enough that now that we're like, okay,
Speaker 1: these are definitely not extinct. They're still around. I think
Speaker 1: they Yeah, they just don't inhabit areas we frequent very much,
Speaker 1: and they're like, this is clearly not trying to grow
Speaker 1: arms and legs, but nice effort, right, So we got
Speaker 1: one under our belt, Chuck, What about the takahi. The
Speaker 1: takahi is native to New Zealand, one of our favorite places.
Speaker 1: Hello are Kiwi friends, And this is a flightless bird
Speaker 1: that's a member of the rail family. It's very pretty,
Speaker 1: about the size of a goose. They're kind of blue green,
Speaker 1: they're they're really really nice looking, and even from the
Speaker 1: beginning they were really rare. I think they were discovered
Speaker 1: by European explorers in eighty seven and they were never abundant. No, apparently, UM.
Speaker 1: After the second specimen was found, only four were found
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. When the guy who found the
Speaker 1: second one described it, um, he said that there's there
Speaker 1: these are gone like this whatever I just found maybe
Speaker 1: the last of it. He said, it's unlikely any further
Speaker 1: living specimens will be found. Um and that was that.
Speaker 1: That closed the book on it. But um, fifty years later,
Speaker 1: there's another guy named Jeffrey Orbell who was like, I,
Speaker 1: for some reason, I cannot accept that the taka he
Speaker 1: taka he is just gone forever and set out searching
Speaker 1: for him. Yeah. I mean it's amazing and I'm glad
Speaker 1: people like Jeffrey Orbell are out there because, uh, Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Orbell found one of these things on the South Island
Speaker 1: in nine of New Zealand. And you know, this kind
Speaker 1: of brings up something we did mention at the beginning,
Speaker 1: like how can science be wrong about something being extinct?
Speaker 1: And you know, it's it's fairly easy to happen. You know,
Speaker 1: the world is a big place, the Earth is a
Speaker 1: big place, and they do their best. But you know,
Speaker 1: at a certain point, when something isn't around for a
Speaker 1: certain amount of time, they get together and they feel
Speaker 1: comfortable saying this thing is extinct, and you know, if
Speaker 1: it comes back to life, is a lazarous species and
Speaker 1: that's great. It's not like science hangs their head in shame,
Speaker 1: like the can't is back. But um, it is sometimes
Speaker 1: tough to see, especially if it's a rare thing to
Speaker 1: begin with, that they're truly extinct. Yeah. The International Union
Speaker 1: for Conservation of Nature is the ones responsible for declaring
Speaker 1: something endangered or extinct in the wild, and their definition
Speaker 1: of extinct is that when there's no reasonable doubt that
Speaker 1: the last individual has died when exhaustive surveys and known
Speaker 1: and or expected habitat at appropriate times diurnal, seasonal annual
Speaker 1: throughout its historic range have failed to record an individual.
Speaker 1: So it's not just like nobody's reported one of these
Speaker 1: things for a while. It's like they go out and
Speaker 1: really try to find it, and if they can't find it,
Speaker 1: they're like, I guess it's extinct. Then they hang their
Speaker 1: heads in shame. That's right. I saw a great meme
Speaker 1: the other day. That's very appropriate for these times here
Speaker 1: in the United States. Uh. Something about science is not truth.
Speaker 1: Science is the search for truth. Uh. And basically, when
Speaker 1: things it was much more scinct than this, but um,
Speaker 1: when things change, science continues to search for that truth.
Speaker 1: It's not flipping and flopping on the truth. Right. Let's
Speaker 1: just leave it at that and take a commercial break. Okay, Chuck,
Speaker 1: So we're back with I think my favorite it's my favorite,
Speaker 1: too good. We're talking about the lord how island stick insect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not a great name. There's a better name for it,
Speaker 1: don't you think. Yeah. Leave it to Australia to uh
Speaker 1: have an insect called a tree lobster um. Lord Howe
Speaker 1: Island is is off the coast of Australia, kind of
Speaker 1: midway between Brisbane and Sydney, and these things, uh, were
Speaker 1: very common on Lord Howe Island out there in the Pacific.
Speaker 1: And this is a really interesting story. There was a
Speaker 1: shipwreck off the actually kind of on the island, and
Speaker 1: everybody knows that chips, especially back in the olden days.
Speaker 1: I think it was six or nineteen eighteen. This is
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, but they're off by a few years. We're
Speaker 1: just full of rats. And these rats descended upon the
Speaker 1: island and really really overtook this island in a big way.
Speaker 1: They were like tree lobsters deed lish. Yeah, so they
Speaker 1: actually ate all the tree lobsters on the island, and
Speaker 1: them all the rats did. The rats um had no
Speaker 1: natural predators on the islands, so their population boomed, and
Speaker 1: they also ate to extinction all sorts of bird species,
Speaker 1: lizard species, a bunch of other ones, but in particular
Speaker 1: this tree lobster, which you don't find elsewhere. And they
Speaker 1: thought like this thing was just endemic only to Lord
Speaker 1: Howe Island. So shortly after the twenties they were like
Speaker 1: the Lord Howe Island stick insect is now extinct. But
Speaker 1: then they were very surprised um in nineteen sixty when
Speaker 1: they found a few corpses. There were corpses, but they
Speaker 1: weren't like obviously forty year old descating corpses. They were fairly,
Speaker 1: fairly recent corpses. So they're like, wait a minute, these
Speaker 1: things are still around. And I guess somebody thought to
Speaker 1: go look on another nearby island. It's like Pyramid Island,
Speaker 1: I believe, something like that. And they found a new
Speaker 1: population of these things, just a handful, but a few
Speaker 1: of them perched in a tea tree on the highest
Speaker 1: point of this island nearby, that's right, And so they
Speaker 1: started breeding them in captivity and training them to be
Speaker 1: able to raise their middle finger. Because they have undertaken
Speaker 1: the Lord how Island rodent eradication project, where they are
Speaker 1: spreading forty two tons poison cereal pellets and twenty eight
Speaker 1: thousand bait stations across the island to rid this island
Speaker 1: of those rats. And this was a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, and the most recent article I read
Speaker 1: said that sometime this year they were going to reintroduce
Speaker 1: like all the rats should be gone, and if there
Speaker 1: are any few rats left, these tree lobsters can go
Speaker 1: back and give them the finger. Very nice. They're spreading
Speaker 1: poison quisp on the islands. Irresistible, man, I'd have a
Speaker 1: hard time but that. You'd feel like, I know it's poisonous,
Speaker 1: but I just can't help myself. I know. If it
Speaker 1: was Captain Crunch peanut butter, forget about it. I'm a
Speaker 1: dead man. Um. So, uh, there's another one. Uh, hats
Speaker 1: off to the Lord how islands tick insect. We're gonna
Speaker 1: take our leave and wish it luck and head on
Speaker 1: over to Peru, where the Peruvian yellow tailed wooly monkey
Speaker 1: was thought to have been extinct. It was first described
Speaker 1: in eighteen twelve just from a pelt um yeah I
Speaker 1: think so, yeah, a little yellowish um. But then only
Speaker 1: just a few times in the century that followed had
Speaker 1: they actually been seen and described by travelers. Um, I
Speaker 1: guess scientists in Peru. And then the last one was
Speaker 1: seen until in six and by that point this science
Speaker 1: was like, I think these things are are gonezo that's right,
Speaker 1: But not so, because in they found one in Brazil
Speaker 1: and this is being kept as a pet. And it
Speaker 1: turns out these things were being kept as pets kind
Speaker 1: of in different places all over the world. And this
Speaker 1: is one really interesting case where the illegal pet trade
Speaker 1: kind of brought, uh, in a roundabout way, something back
Speaker 1: from extinction. Yeah, they think there's maybe fewer than a
Speaker 1: thousand of them in the wild, which is still not
Speaker 1: terribly bad considering something was considered extinct for a little while,
Speaker 1: but apparently it was. And this is kind of like um,
Speaker 1: one of the definitions of a Lazarus species. It was
Speaker 1: news to science that this thing was not extinct, but
Speaker 1: to the local population in Peru who lived, you know,
Speaker 1: in these in the area the same area as these monkeys,
Speaker 1: they were well aware that these things were around. They
Speaker 1: just hadn't heard the science didn't know we're else. I'm
Speaker 1: sure they would have told somebody, that's right. What about
Speaker 1: this is my second favorite, Chuck, what about you? I
Speaker 1: can't believe we're gonna do five and shorty, But here
Speaker 1: we go with a robust red horse. It's a pale
Speaker 1: pink has pale pink fins, is sort of stout and
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's not very remarkable looking. If you
Speaker 1: look at a robust red horse You think that thing
Speaker 1: is misnamed because it's just sort of plain looking. It's
Speaker 1: an ug fish as what they should call it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not the best look. It's got a great Latin name,
Speaker 1: Maxostoma robust um. It's a good band name. Or maybe
Speaker 1: an album title, yeah yeah, yeah, prog rock for sure,
Speaker 1: or maybe like a like a Mastodon album, yeah, exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: This was first described by uh Edward Drinker Cope naturalists
Speaker 1: from Europe in eighteen seventy, based on just this one
Speaker 1: fish that he found in a river in North Carolina. Uh.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately that fish was destroyed because that was the
Speaker 1: last one that anyone saw for a hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: two years. Yeah, so everybody's like, well it's extinct. We're
Speaker 1: not even sure it ever exactly lived. We gotta take
Speaker 1: this Cope fellas word for it. And he's popped up before.
Speaker 1: I can't put my finger on it. But we've talked
Speaker 1: about them before. But then in nineteen eighty and then
Speaker 1: I believe also in people started reporting this. It's somebody
Speaker 1: who's like, know what I think that that is Cope's
Speaker 1: robust red horse fish. Uh. They started finding them in
Speaker 1: the Savannah and Pete rivers in Georgia and uh, South Carolina,
Speaker 1: I think, and um so they they actually made a
Speaker 1: deliberate effort. They launched an effort twenty years ago to
Speaker 1: find some mating pairs of the robust red horse in
Speaker 1: the Savannah River and um basically start breeding them in captivity,
Speaker 1: and I read I think in two thousand fifteen, Chuck,
Speaker 1: they released some and they recently identified the first wild
Speaker 1: juveniles that had been born to this restored population of
Speaker 1: robust red horses. A big comeback, huge comeback from the dead.
Speaker 1: Basically same here. So uh, that's it for short Stuff, everybody,
Speaker 1: if you want to look up some more lazarous Um species,
Speaker 1: then they're out there and it's thrilling. Every single one
Speaker 1: has a great story behind it, so go amuse yourself
Speaker 1: with that. In the meantime, Short Stuff says goodbye. H
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