Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2: And as we continue our Halloween seasonal offerings, we have
Speaker 2: to ask ourselves a question, is there anything more suitably
Speaker 2: creepy than a vast collection of bones? I have a
Speaker 2: feeling that a number of you, like us, have found yourself,
Speaker 2: especially this month, this month, more than like any past Halloween,
Speaker 2: have found yourself wandering through your neighborhood and neighborhood yards
Speaker 2: are just littered with plastic bones. Like every year, the
Speaker 2: skeleton decorations just get more and more intense, more gigantic.
Speaker 2: Some of these yards are just littered with plastic bones.
Speaker 3: I can't remember if I've already mentioned it this year,
Speaker 3: but my daughter, who is very Halloween brained at this moment,
Speaker 3: is also especially skeleton brained, which she calls selkins selkin brain.
Speaker 3: So we have to go around the neighborhood to buy
Speaker 3: a request to see particular skeletons in particular yards. There
Speaker 3: are some that are better than others. There are scary selkins,
Speaker 3: there are cute selkans. There are beautiful selkins. There's a
Speaker 3: whole taxonomy, and I don't know exactly what the criteria are,
Speaker 3: but she does. And it's clear that while a subset
Speaker 3: are considered scary, some are not scary at all. Some
Speaker 3: some are just beautiful things to admire. There. You know,
Speaker 3: it's like people are putting Christmas lights up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it is fascinating how the symbol of
Speaker 2: the skull, of the skeleton of bones, or the skull
Speaker 2: and bones. You know, at a very basic level, it
Speaker 2: always means death, but there are so many different tweaks
Speaker 2: on that, and so culturally pop culturally, skulls and bones
Speaker 2: can be very empowering. They can be very life affirming,
Speaker 2: They can be fun, they can be hilarious, even if
Speaker 2: there is like a very like basic message about mortality
Speaker 2: at the bottom of everything.
Speaker 3: Have we ever talked before about the what I take
Speaker 3: to be implied humor in all of these anatomically incorrect
Speaker 3: skeletons that proliferate different kinds of animal, skeletons of animals
Speaker 3: that don't actually have internal skeletons, like you know, an
Speaker 3: octopus skeleton or a.
Speaker 2: Skeleton the most ridiculous. But I've also seen some like
Speaker 2: there's one of an owl where the owl has its ears,
Speaker 2: so you need to tell by its profile that it's
Speaker 2: an owl skeleton.
Speaker 3: There are dogs around our neighborhood that have cute, like
Speaker 3: fluffy dog ears in bone dog skeletons with the ears
Speaker 3: are phone ears, and I think that's because, Yeah, you
Speaker 3: wouldn't know it was a dog necessarily if it didn't
Speaker 3: have the ears.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cat looks solid, though. We have a fake cat
Speaker 2: skeleton on our porch and I'm not sure it's one
Speaker 2: hundred percent anatomically correct, but I don't think it has
Speaker 2: any fake ears, but maybe it does. I'm going to
Speaker 2: check after a record and see if I've been duped.
Speaker 3: The fact that we have to put these non bone
Speaker 3: things onto skeletons to make them recognizable as the animals
Speaker 3: we know in life gives you real perspective on paleo
Speaker 3: art and reconstructions of dinosaurs and stuff like. You know,
Speaker 3: you have to realize how much soft tissue there is,
Speaker 3: and that there is some guesswork involved in reconstructing the
Speaker 3: body of an extinct animal when all you've got is
Speaker 3: an imprint or fossil of the hard parts. I mean,
Speaker 3: in some cases we actually do know, because you know,
Speaker 3: there are clues that you can get through fossil evidence
Speaker 3: of what the soft tissue parts may have been, but
Speaker 3: not in every case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, later on in this episode, we'll be talking a creature,
Speaker 2: a prehistoric creature. And I was looking around to see
Speaker 2: if there was a nice bit of paleo art to
Speaker 2: throw into our outline, just for you and me to
Speaker 2: look at. And you know, I just wasn't. I wasn't
Speaker 2: taken by any out so I just included a picture
Speaker 2: of the skull. And it's like, the skull is the
Speaker 2: hard data in this case. Anyway, the skull, I think
Speaker 2: really illustrates a lot of what we'll be discussing regarding
Speaker 2: the creature.
Speaker 3: But clearly skulls and bones are a big part of
Speaker 3: the imagery of modern horror. In fact, we're going to
Speaker 3: be talking about a weird house cinema movie this week
Speaker 3: that has a great bone body reveal. It's got a
Speaker 3: lady with a fleshy head and at one point they
Speaker 3: pull the cloak back and you see her her body
Speaker 3: is just bones, yes, or it's not just bones. I
Speaker 3: don't know. It's bones and some gungk.
Speaker 2: But mostly bones.
Speaker 3: Yes, bones, bones are revealed at least Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are so many great examples from especially from
Speaker 2: horror cinema and horror media that I think we can
Speaker 2: turn to where bones is especially big. Heaps of bones.
Speaker 2: Collections of bones are very very important, and they can
Speaker 2: read in different ways. So I thought we might run
Speaker 2: through just a few examples before we get into the
Speaker 2: meat of our episode here. But you know, speaking of meat,
Speaker 2: I think one of the great ones is, of course,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy four is the Texas chainsaw Massacre, where we
Speaker 2: have our characters, you know, slowly approaching the saw your
Speaker 2: home and as they begin to you know, creep every
Speaker 2: closer to the house in that ominous generator that's that's running,
Speaker 2: we begin to see like little bone trinkets hanging from limbs,
Speaker 2: and then when we get into the house itself, there's
Speaker 2: also like more things made out of bones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the saw your household is not wasteful. They don't
Speaker 3: like to throw things out, you know, they make use
Speaker 3: of what they got.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. In other cases, we you know, we have
Speaker 2: plenty of examples of essentially a monster's layer where there
Speaker 2: are a lot of bones. One great example that I've
Speaker 2: always I've always liked back from my days when I
Speaker 2: think read the story for the first time in junior.
Speaker 2: High would be the nineteen seventy Stephen King short story
Speaker 2: Graveyard Shift, as well as the nineteen ninety film adaptation
Speaker 2: that I quite like. There's eventually you end up in
Speaker 2: a vast subterranean chamber. It's just filled with human and
Speaker 2: animal bones.
Speaker 3: Is that the one is about like a giant rat
Speaker 3: or bat.
Speaker 2: Ultimately there is a giant rat or bat, and then
Speaker 2: just a lot of rats.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny. These first two examples
Speaker 3: you mentioned highlight what I would say are the main
Speaker 3: two genres of bone collections in horror. One, exemplified by
Speaker 3: the Texas Chainsaw massacre, is the intentionally curated bone collection,
Speaker 3: often where artifacts have been fashioned out of bone, or
Speaker 3: where bones are placed in a particular arrangement. And then
Speaker 3: the other is the midden or the pile of bones,
Speaker 3: where bones are just accumulating haphazardly, And they both suggest horror,
Speaker 3: but in very different ways. One is a kind of
Speaker 3: chaotic biological horror that just suggests a kind of like
Speaker 3: some animal is just like eating the flesh and stripping
Speaker 3: the bones and here's where the bones end up, whereas
Speaker 3: the former suggests a creepy fascination that suggests aberrant behavior
Speaker 3: and obsession.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is a good distinction to make. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's certainly if there's a collection of bones somewhere and
Speaker 2: there's some sort of intelligence behind it, it's not necessarily
Speaker 2: an intelligence we want to interact with. You know, it
Speaker 2: falls under the heading of like trophy taking, and you know,
Speaker 2: we're not really going to go in that direction probably
Speaker 2: with these episodes. But I think there are plenty of
Speaker 2: examples of that to point too in human history. But
Speaker 2: then the other example being like whoa, here's a place
Speaker 2: where there are a bunch of bones. A bunch of
Speaker 2: bones means a lot of death. Maybe a lot of
Speaker 2: death happened at once, maybe a lot of death has
Speaker 2: taken place over time. But you know, obviously humans and
Speaker 2: are myth making and our supernatural thinking, those places can
Speaker 2: often be interpreted as places of bad vibes, places that
Speaker 2: might be haunted, cursed, or you know, in some manner
Speaker 2: given supernatural weight, they can also be rather holy places
Speaker 2: in their own right as well. But also the idea
Speaker 2: of a place where there are a lot of bones
Speaker 2: that could also spell the possibility of a very real
Speaker 2: life danger. What if the thing that is producing all
Speaker 2: of these bones is still here some manner of predator
Speaker 2: or predators that could threaten us directly. I mean, that's
Speaker 2: getting into some of our basic hardwiring as an organism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly right. There are sort of ecological implications
Speaker 3: whenever you see a collection of bones that kind of
Speaker 3: suggests what else may be about in the area. But
Speaker 3: then there's another thing, which is just the self reflective
Speaker 3: version of the reaction to seeing human bones in particular,
Speaker 3: which is I think of uh, the you know the
Speaker 3: quote from uh, you know, the story of Wilhelm Runken
Speaker 3: when he first you know, creates the X ray machine
Speaker 3: and he gets an X ray of his wife's hand
Speaker 3: and she she looks through on the plate and sees
Speaker 3: her bones printed on the on the image. Uh, and
Speaker 3: she says, I have seen my own death. You know,
Speaker 3: you're not supposed to see your own bones unless and
Speaker 3: you don't unless there is some kind of catastrophic imagery. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say injury, but yes, catastrophic imagery as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought you were going to say
Speaker 2: if we do see our own bones. They better be dancing.
Speaker 2: It better be in carniform, you know. I should also
Speaker 2: mention the killer rabbit from a money python in The
Speaker 2: Holy Grail.
Speaker 4: That's another great example.
Speaker 2: Just look at the bones.
Speaker 4: Look at the bone.
Speaker 2: Now, we put together a whole list of additional horror
Speaker 2: movies that had some sort of bone collecting going on
Speaker 2: in them. We may come back to some of these
Speaker 2: as we get into specific examples, because we are, of
Speaker 2: course going to dip into the natural world here into
Speaker 2: the real world. And I thought a great place to
Speaker 2: start would be with a creature of prehistoric caves, a
Speaker 2: creature that accumulated bones in such caves and would have
Speaker 2: been encountered by our ancestors. And I think this is
Speaker 2: particularly potent to think about because these would have This
Speaker 2: would be an example of a bone littered environment that
Speaker 2: our ancestors would have seen, would have thought about, would
Speaker 2: have processed, and also a creature that we would have
Speaker 2: had direct interaction with. I'm going to be talking about
Speaker 2: the cave hyena. The cave hyena consisted of two extinct species.
Speaker 2: There's crocuta crocuta spellia and crocuta crocuta old Tema, and
Speaker 2: they would have ranged across Eurasia during the middle to
Speaker 2: late plus to seen, an age that saw the expansion
Speaker 2: of modern humans and the extinction of archaic humans, including
Speaker 2: the Neanderthals. There of course relatives of the modern African
Speaker 2: spotted hyena that is Crocuta crocuta, and there are also
Speaker 2: three other extant hyaena species, as well as other extinct
Speaker 2: species that they're related to, such as the giant short
Speaker 2: faced hyena. Now, the modern spotted hyena alone is an
Speaker 2: impressive organism. I think everyone has some knowledge of this creature,
Speaker 2: hopefully more from documentaries than maybe going to zoos and
Speaker 2: so forth, as opposed to just the lion king.
Speaker 3: But I thought you were going to say just having
Speaker 3: them as pets.
Speaker 2: Or no, you know, please don't have them as pets.
Speaker 2: But you know, this is definitely an impressive and fascinating
Speaker 2: organism that we could we could easily do an an
Speaker 2: entire episode on, and they're more than capable of inspiring
Speaker 2: myth and legend on their own. I mean, they're large,
Speaker 2: scavenging carnivores with a wide vocal range. They can make
Speaker 2: very perplexing sounds, and they're also noted and have long
Speaker 2: been noted for their propensity for a grave robbing, and
Speaker 2: sometimes they've been known to opportunistically prey on live humans.
Speaker 2: They are voracious bone eaters, and I'm to understand they
Speaker 2: can digest all organic components of bone, not just the marrow.
Speaker 2: So they are, you know, basically like the idea of
Speaker 2: like a graveyard ghoule is very much a humanoid take
Speaker 2: on a hyena.
Speaker 3: But do I understand correctly with the spotted hyena, it
Speaker 3: not only gnaws bones to get the meat off, It
Speaker 3: actually eats the bones themselves. It crunches up the bone
Speaker 3: and digests the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's how it goes down. And you can
Speaker 2: mentioned skulls earlier. You can look up the you know,
Speaker 2: certainly the skull of a modern spotted hyena, but also
Speaker 2: look up the skulls of any of these prehistoric hyenas
Speaker 2: and you'll just see how robust they are. And you
Speaker 2: can you can really take one look at this skull
Speaker 2: and realize, oh yeah, this is a bone muncher. This
Speaker 2: is a bone munching machine. Just look at those jobs.
Speaker 3: This head is like the machine press that they crushed
Speaker 3: the terminator in at the end of the first movie.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, exactly. So again, they're very fascinating creatures and
Speaker 2: they have They've inspired all sorts of different folk beliefs, legends,
Speaker 2: and mythologies. Ancient writers discuss them quite a bit also
Speaker 2: got a fair bit wrong about them, especially considering their
Speaker 2: gender and sexuality. There are these various misnomers and in
Speaker 2: ancient writings about how they would they were they were
Speaker 2: like bisexual or hemaphroditic, or you know, various takes on
Speaker 2: this just obviously a classic case of of the observers
Speaker 2: not really knowing what they're observing and looking at with
Speaker 2: a particular organ. But then there are all these other
Speaker 2: crazy ideas as well, such as I'm just gonna read
Speaker 2: a little bit from our old friend plenty of the
Speaker 2: elder here. Okay, a number of other remarkable facts about
Speaker 2: it the hyena are reported, but the most remarkable are
Speaker 2: that among the shepherd's homesteads, it simulates human speech and
Speaker 2: picks up the name of one of them so as
Speaker 2: to call him to come out of doors and tear
Speaker 2: him in pieces. What And also that it imitates a
Speaker 2: person being sick to attract the dogs so that it
Speaker 2: may attack them. That this animal alone, digs up graves
Speaker 2: in search of corpses, that a female is seldom caught,
Speaker 2: that its eyes have a thousand variations and alterations of color. Moreover,
Speaker 2: that when its shadow falls on dogs, they are struck dumb,
Speaker 2: and that it has certain magic arts by which it
Speaker 2: causes every animal at which it gazes three times to
Speaker 2: stand rooted to the spot.
Speaker 3: The last part is that a metaphor does he say,
Speaker 3: does he mean the animals literally grow roots?
Speaker 2: I'm going to assume it's not going to that link.
Speaker 2: But but the idea I guess is that they they
Speaker 2: had they have the power to essentially hypnotize with their gaze.
Speaker 3: Yeah, look three times in its freeze tag.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they're alarming animals.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: And some of the footage and and images I've seen,
Speaker 2: and certainly again they have that extended vocal range. They
Speaker 2: create very strange sounds that we often compare to laughter.
Speaker 2: And you know, they're not alone in this. There are
Speaker 2: various other organisms that make sounds that remind us of
Speaker 2: human human laughter, human conversation, and it can be very uncanny.
Speaker 3: You can almost sense the telephone game in this reporting.
Speaker 3: They do actually make strange sounds that could sound kind
Speaker 3: of human in ways, but here this this gets escalated
Speaker 3: to they say your name and call you outside.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Likewise, the whole bit about them being the only creatures
Speaker 2: to rob human graves, I mean, they're various creatures that
Speaker 2: if they can, if they can dig up a body,
Speaker 2: they will do so and get to it, you know.
Speaker 2: So it's not just in the hyaenas. And then also
Speaker 2: they are known to sometimes make opportunistic attacks against humans.
Speaker 2: They may in some cases become man eaters. But again
Speaker 2: they're not alone in them.
Speaker 3: But to be clear, do we think that plenty here
Speaker 3: is talking about like the African spotted hyaena or is
Speaker 3: he talking about an extinct variety of Hyaena.
Speaker 2: I believe he's talking about you know, sub Saharan African
Speaker 2: spotted hyaenas here. Okay, thus sort of the game of
Speaker 2: telephone in places here. Yeah, but yeah, suffice to say,
Speaker 2: it's a species that certainly invites mystery, and they occupy
Speaker 2: a number of roles in the traditional beliefs of people
Speaker 2: who have long lived beside them. You know, some fearsome,
Speaker 2: but also there are plenty of examples that are either
Speaker 2: ambivalent or even protective in their attitude regarding human beings,
Speaker 2: so they're not just batties. So there's more than just
Speaker 2: the lion king in play when we consider myth making
Speaker 2: in legends with hyaenas. Sure, now I want to come
Speaker 2: back though, to, of course, cave hyenas, because modern hyaenas
Speaker 2: are broadly considered habitat generalists. You know, they may reside
Speaker 2: in they may reside in dens that they've dug out
Speaker 2: of the earth. They may reside in caves, they may
Speaker 2: lay around on rocky outcrops and various other locations. They're
Speaker 2: generally quite flexible. Wherever they make their den, they may
Speaker 2: bring carcasses and bones back for further consumption and therefore
Speaker 2: litter them in that environment. And then we have the
Speaker 2: cave hyenas. And the name might easily summon the idea that, okay, well,
Speaker 2: these are hyenas that exclusively lived in caves, and therefore
Speaker 2: there's some sort of a cave specialist. But this too
Speaker 2: would be incorrect. So cave hyenas, despite their name, they
Speaker 2: could also make dens in various other places, and did,
Speaker 2: but their use of cave dens is particularly pronounced. And
Speaker 2: these environments have served as time capsules, preserving the littered remains,
Speaker 2: the bones left over from their habitation there.
Speaker 3: That makes sense. So because the caves protect what the
Speaker 3: hyaenas did inside there to some extent, that evidence is preserved,
Speaker 3: and so we have an idea of what cave hyenas
Speaker 3: were doing when they were in caves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a lot of what we've learned about cave
Speaker 2: hyenas has come from these environments, and we've learned a
Speaker 2: lot about the animals that they preyed on from these environments.
Speaker 2: But the cave hyenas themselves, they would have been They
Speaker 2: were larger, heavier creatures compared to modern spotted hyaenas, and
Speaker 2: they were considered apex predators in their own right alongside
Speaker 2: the likes of the cave lion. They were probably less
Speaker 2: skilled at running after prey or running away with meat
Speaker 2: and bone compared to modern day spotted hyaenas, but they
Speaker 2: would have been really good at dragging away much larger carcasses.
Speaker 2: So you know, they were essentially you can think of
Speaker 2: them as beefier and therefore better able to drag away
Speaker 2: big bodies, big pieces of meat. And this was a
Speaker 2: time when multiple large mammal species thrived and provided carcasses
Speaker 2: on a regular basis to sustain them.
Speaker 3: So can you think of them as the tractor model
Speaker 3: rather than the sports car.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that would be fair. Like there
Speaker 2: were a lot of big bodies that would occasionally drop
Speaker 2: to the ground, maybe with a little help, certainly with
Speaker 2: a little help either from cave hyenas or various other
Speaker 2: carnivore creatures. And then these guys would have been just
Speaker 2: really good at dragging the meat, dragging the bodies back
Speaker 2: to the caves where they could take their time breaking
Speaker 2: down the bodies. And then also I'm to understand there
Speaker 2: would be a certain amount of a preservation in there
Speaker 2: as well, so sort of a cold storage environment, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't think that was the main point, but there
Speaker 2: would be some of that in play as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, low gear, torque, not speed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so they'd occupy specific cave mouths on and off,
Speaker 2: and that's key for thousands of years, seemingly displaced by
Speaker 2: and displacing other occupiers, including Neanderthals at times, and also
Speaker 2: perhaps cohabitating certain caves with other creatures, either kind of
Speaker 2: at the same time or in phases, and in the
Speaker 2: process accumulating just great quantities of animal bones that would
Speaker 2: just build up over time. Nobody's dragging those carcasses or
Speaker 2: those bones back out. They're just building up and providing
Speaker 2: this ultimately wealth of data for paleontologists to come in
Speaker 2: the distant future from their time.
Speaker 3: So I assume you have examples of caves like this
Speaker 3: where their middens have been found.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there was. In twenty twenty three, it was
Speaker 2: reported that the Siberian there's a cave near the Siberian
Speaker 2: city of Cacassia, and it was said to contain some
Speaker 2: four hundred kilograms or eight hundred and eighty two pounds
Speaker 2: of bones estimated, And this would have included the likes
Speaker 2: of mammoths, rhinos, bison, yaks, deer, gazelle, ancient brown bears,
Speaker 2: and then various smaller creatures like foxes, wolves, every you know,
Speaker 2: all the way down. These guys apparently weren't too proud
Speaker 2: to drag you know, just about anything back to the layer. Now,
Speaker 2: there are various other cave hyena dens that are you know,
Speaker 2: important sites for paleontology, such as Zulithan Cave in Bavaria
Speaker 2: in Germany. This site is thought to have been a
Speaker 2: major cave bear den with cave hyenas, wolves and cave
Speaker 2: lions co occupying or scavenging over time.
Speaker 3: Now, if we know that different types of carnivores or
Speaker 3: predators occupied these caves over different times, how are we
Speaker 3: able to identi when they were occupied by different types
Speaker 3: of predators or which predator it was that was responsible
Speaker 3: for a specific kill or for eating a carcass that's
Speaker 3: left in the cave.
Speaker 2: Well, a part of it comes down to, you know,
Speaker 2: looking at the bones and seeing the wear and tear
Speaker 2: on them, because you know they would have been gnawing
Speaker 2: on them. We can essentially, you know, use byte data
Speaker 2: to understand this, like, Okay, what's been chewing on this bone? Well,
Speaker 2: it looks like it was cave hyenus, So that's part
Speaker 2: of it. And then there's just various other evidence in
Speaker 2: the way that the the different layers of sediment have
Speaker 2: built up and where the bones are in caves. I
Speaker 2: was looking at a paper by Dietrix and Zach from
Speaker 2: two thousand and six and the Bulletin of Geosciences. This
Speaker 2: particular paper was looking at a at a cave in
Speaker 2: the Bohemian Karst. This is in the Czech Republic and
Speaker 2: like they had a nice little illustration in this paper
Speaker 2: that I included here for you, Joe that kind of
Speaker 2: like lays out like these different sort of the different
Speaker 2: phases in occupation of a cave, with like cave bears
Speaker 2: occupying a place and then well a cave bears being
Speaker 2: larger organism kind of like you know, physically impacting the
Speaker 2: shape of things. We've talked about this on the show before.
Speaker 2: How you have something like a like a large sloth,
Speaker 2: a giant sloth or or a bear, and when they're
Speaker 2: habitating in a cave, they kind of create these little
Speaker 2: indentions kind of like wallowing points, right, Yeah, and those
Speaker 2: you know, in the preserved environment of a cave, those
Speaker 2: those little indentions can remain over time. And what happens
Speaker 2: when hyenas come in with their bones, well they're liable
Speaker 2: to put those bones right in those indentions, fill those in.
Speaker 2: So we we have evidence like that that we can
Speaker 2: look at. And in this paper they also discussed that, yeah,
Speaker 2: like you'd have cave bears and kive cave hyenas and
Speaker 2: they seemingly like trade back and forth over usage of
Speaker 2: the cave. So it's not just it's not necessarily a
Speaker 2: situation where you know, either organism is in the cave
Speaker 2: all the time, despite what you might come to think
Speaker 2: watching an old caveman movie. But cave bears would use
Speaker 2: the caves for birthing and hibernation, and then hyenas would
Speaker 2: come in and use them periodically or seasonally for the
Speaker 2: drag in their their their kills, or their scavenge the
Speaker 2: meat and bones. So there's it seems like a fair
Speaker 2: amount of traffic in these caves when they're you know,
Speaker 2: cohabitated or uh. And then certainly you throw in neanderthals
Speaker 2: and potential interactions with with our human ancestors where uh
Speaker 2: they would be competing for the same cave environments at times.
Speaker 2: Uh So, yeah, there's a lot of a lot of
Speaker 2: back and forth here.
Speaker 3: So what happened to the cave hyena? They no longer exist?
Speaker 4: Correct?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah they are. They are quite extinct, and it's
Speaker 2: it's notable that, in addition to changing climate, humans likely
Speaker 2: played a key role in the extinction of cave hyenas,
Speaker 2: likely out competing with it for prey and carcasses. Neanderthals,
Speaker 2: of course, had already competed with cave hyenas with with
Speaker 2: the with the cave Heyen is at least Cave Heyen
Speaker 2: is at least scavenging Neanderthal dead, if not outright preying
Speaker 2: on them from time to time as well. So that's
Speaker 2: kind of interesting in and of itself. It's kind of
Speaker 2: like who we became the new masters of carcasses and
Speaker 2: bones to a certain extent, we didn't, you know, we
Speaker 2: didn't put it all in the caves. We started doing
Speaker 2: other things with the bodies, fully processing the bodies in
Speaker 2: our own human ways, uh, and in doing so, ultimately
Speaker 2: changing the shape of the natural world around us. But
Speaker 2: it's it's interesting to contemplate potential human, early human interactions
Speaker 2: with these caves and the creatures that made their homes there,
Speaker 2: such as the Cave Hyena. Because again, caves in and
Speaker 2: of themselves, as we've discussed in the show many times,
Speaker 2: have long been places of wonder and mystery, places of
Speaker 2: spiritual and cultural significance, places where one might find resources
Speaker 2: some resources anyway, certainly find shelter, but also encounter danger.
Speaker 2: And then caves were often seen as you know, gateways
Speaker 2: to some sort of underworld. So it's kind of fitting,
Speaker 2: or at least curious that our ancestors would have found
Speaker 2: caves such as this just choked with bones. You know,
Speaker 2: one can't help, but wonder, like, did we think about
Speaker 2: them in such a way that like, here's a here
Speaker 2: is a cavern full of bones, some of which are
Speaker 2: bones like I have in my body. Is this, on
Speaker 2: some level some gateway to a realm of death?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's an interesting question. I do wonder for a
Speaker 3: prehistoric human, you know, Homo sapiens or Neanderthal, coming into
Speaker 3: a cave and finding bones in there, what is the
Speaker 3: most salient thing about that? What is your primary association?
Speaker 3: Does that make you think competition for this piece of
Speaker 3: shelter or does that make you think predator? Or does
Speaker 3: that make you just think death? Or does that make
Speaker 3: you think resources? You know, like, I wonder what is
Speaker 3: the salience? Because obviously, you know, there are some just
Speaker 3: sort of objective facts about the reason we associate bones
Speaker 3: with death. But also I think we have to recognize
Speaker 3: that a lot of our associations between bones and you know,
Speaker 3: frightening horror ideas are culturally conditioned and contingent, and we
Speaker 3: might have different associations. I don't know if you're if
Speaker 3: you're like a butcher or something. You might have very
Speaker 3: different thoughts about bones. You maybe mainly associate them with
Speaker 3: making a living or with you know, with food.
Speaker 2: That's a great point because especially when we're talking about
Speaker 2: the humans here, the humans that are gonna outcompete the
Speaker 2: cave hyenas for scavenge carcasses and and of course it
Speaker 2: also kills of various mammals. You know, they're obviously people
Speaker 2: that are far more connected to the killing and butchery
Speaker 2: of animals than most of us are today. So yeah,
Speaker 2: they might have just been like, hey, these this place
Speaker 2: is great, This.
Speaker 3: Is good hunting around here. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the kind of place I would love
Speaker 2: to have, and these cave hyenas have figured it out
Speaker 2: for themselves. Might have to steal some business from them.
Speaker 2: One more bit of cave hyena information I wanted to
Speaker 2: share for a little bit. There there was this argument
Speaker 2: that the accumulation of bones and caves like these were
Speaker 2: due not to prehistoric predators but to the Great Flood,
Speaker 2: the Great Biblical flood. Okay, this was an idea that
Speaker 2: English geologist William Buckland in particular, who lived seventeen eighty
Speaker 2: four through eighteen fifty six, theorized early in his career
Speaker 2: concerning Kirkdale Cave in North Yorkshire, but to his credit,
Speaker 2: he later shifted his view based on his own findings.
Speaker 2: So he came around and said, actually, you know, these
Speaker 2: bones are this accumulation of bones, this is due to
Speaker 2: cave hyenas, though for a while he maintained, Okay, cave
Speaker 2: hyenas are the reason. But see this soil deposited on
Speaker 2: top of the bones that's over from the Great flood.
Speaker 2: But then he later abandons this idea as well. But
Speaker 2: I like the idea that, like, here's somebody that is
Speaker 2: identifying evidence for a biblical event in the natural world
Speaker 2: and is not just illogically sticking to his guns, Like
Speaker 2: his opinion is changing based on the accumulation of actual,
Speaker 2: you know, objective evidence.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Sure, respect to Buckland for updating. But though I haven't,
Speaker 3: I would like to go read about this because I'm like,
Speaker 3: why would the bones in the cave have anything to
Speaker 3: do with the flood? Why would that be different than
Speaker 3: bones anywhere else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't go hard on this, but I mean
Speaker 2: maybe the idea is, well, the water had to drain
Speaker 2: somewhere and it took all those bodies with it, and
Speaker 2: this is just like the clogged bone drain of the earth.
Speaker 3: Oh that's cool. Okay, cave, that's my guess.
Speaker 2: That's my guess.
Speaker 3: The drain at the bottom of the bathtub.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, where all the bones go. There
Speaker 2: you go.
Speaker 3: Okay. Well, given the distinction we talked about at the
Speaker 3: beginning of the episode, I think we could sort the
Speaker 3: cave hyena more into the middens category. This is a
Speaker 3: somewhat chaotically assembled pile of bones or animal remains that
Speaker 3: just happens to all end up in the same place
Speaker 3: because of the lifestyle or living habits of the animal
Speaker 3: that brought them there. Then we had the other category,
Speaker 3: which was more like Texas Chainsaw massacre, where you have
Speaker 3: a curated collection of bones, animal remains, things that are
Speaker 3: put in a certain way for a certain reason due
Speaker 3: to someone's obsessive interest, and how that's frightening in a
Speaker 3: different way than the midden is than just the predator's midden.
Speaker 3: I wonder when we're done talking about the next example,
Speaker 3: which category you'd put it in, because I think it's
Speaker 3: almost kind of a straddler. It could go either way.
Speaker 3: So I want to talk about an article published in
Speaker 3: the journal Science in April of this year, twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five by the researchers Daniel Rubinoff, Michael San Jose and
Speaker 3: Camielle Duran Weird called Hawaiian caterpillar patrols spiderwebs camouflaged in
Speaker 3: insect praise body parts. All three authors here are entomologists
Speaker 3: affiliated with the University of Hawaii at Manoa. So the
Speaker 3: authors begin this paper by talking about the interesting evolutionary
Speaker 3: laboratory of the Hawaiian Islands. Because of Hawaii's geographic isolation
Speaker 3: from mainland populations for so long, it evolved lots of
Speaker 3: weird and interesting invertebrates, especially when it comes to Lepidoptera.
Speaker 3: Now a reminder, Lepidoptera is the insect order containing moths
Speaker 3: and butterflies. A lot of people already know this, but
Speaker 3: just to be clear, caterpillars are the same animals as
Speaker 3: the winged forms of moths butterflies, simply at different stages
Speaker 3: of life. So caterpillars are the larval stage of the
Speaker 3: lepidopter in life cycle, in which the insect is this
Speaker 3: you know, fat little grub shape and it crawls around
Speaker 3: and it chomps the world. It's bulking up on food
Speaker 3: before finding a place to settle down and pupate. When
Speaker 3: it goes into the pupi phase, it undergoes metamorphosis, and
Speaker 3: then the winged forms that we think of as moths
Speaker 3: and butterflies kind of the main idea of what this
Speaker 3: insect is. The winged forms are the reproductively mature stage
Speaker 3: after the metamorphosis of the pupa. This is the stage
Speaker 3: in which these insects mate and lay eggs. And the
Speaker 3: authors of this paper mention several fascinating caterpillar adaptations found
Speaker 3: in the Hawaiian islands, specifically in the larval phase of
Speaker 3: local lepidopterans. There are caterpillars in Hawaii that hunt snails.
Speaker 3: There are caterpillars that are amphibious or like live underwater.
Speaker 3: There are caterpillars that work as ambush predators. You know,
Speaker 3: they kind of lie in wait and they hide in
Speaker 3: leaves and then they attack their prey. And this article
Speaker 3: is about another caterpillar from Hawaii that can be added
Speaker 3: to that list of beautiful monstrosities, the so called bone
Speaker 3: collector caterpillar of the moth genus Hyposmocoma. Which the author's
Speaker 3: rite is notable for quote, a bizarre housekeeping regimen not
Speaker 3: reported for any other insect, and an ecology not recorded
Speaker 3: elsewhere in the order Lepidoptera. So what are these unique traits? Well,
Speaker 3: the top line is that this is the first documented
Speaker 3: caterpillar evolved to depend on spider webs as a habitat
Speaker 3: spider webs. And to be clear, we're not talking about
Speaker 3: like exclusively abandoned old spider webs or something. We're talking
Speaker 3: about active spider webs with a spider in them.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah. These caterpillars typically dwell in webs within like recesses,
Speaker 3: So you would find these webs in tree hollows or
Speaker 3: rock hollows or in the voids inside of fallen log
Speaker 3: We're talking about those kind of three dimensional, tangled looking
Speaker 3: webs you see in a little depression or indentation somewhere
Speaker 3: in the natural world. So that's where you're gonna find
Speaker 3: these caterpillars in webs like that. Now, that alone is
Speaker 3: pretty weird. It's kind of like imagining a rabbit species
Speaker 3: that is evolved specifically to live in wolf dens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this seems like this seems like this would
Speaker 2: be the place most small creatures would not want to
Speaker 2: find themselves, leave it to the spiders and their prey.
Speaker 3: Right, so the author is right quote. Although caterpillars and
Speaker 3: spiders are common in the same environments all over the world,
Speaker 3: only this single caterpillar lineage in Hawaii is known to
Speaker 3: have made the leap to spider cohabitation. In fact, I
Speaker 3: was looking this up in some other sources to see
Speaker 3: if there was any contradiction on this. The only real
Speaker 3: counterexample I found was in a write up of this
Speaker 3: paper in The New York Times by Jack Tomisia, which
Speaker 3: quoted an entomologist at the University of Connecticut named David Wagner,
Speaker 3: who didn't really contradict this, but said he was aware
Speaker 3: of only one other moth species that had anything to
Speaker 3: do with spider webs. It didn't like live there entirely,
Speaker 3: but there was one moth species that was vegetarian and
Speaker 3: would sometimes eat plant material caught in spider webs. But
Speaker 3: this is the only example that we know of anywhere
Speaker 3: of a caterpillar that lives in fully evolved to live
Speaker 3: in the habitat of a spider's web. Another thing that's
Speaker 3: crazy about this is that it's not just like caterpillar
Speaker 3: goes crawling around the world until it finds a spider web.
Speaker 3: From what I was reading, it seems like the moths
Speaker 3: here will actually try to lay their eggs in spider webs.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, So you know the caterpillar hatches from the
Speaker 3: egg in the web, makes its home there, and just
Speaker 3: lives there. That's that is its environment, and there are
Speaker 3: some freaky specializations that make this arrangement work. Explaining both
Speaker 3: the why and the how of caterpillar cohabitation with a spider.
Speaker 3: The major part of the why is answered by another
Speaker 3: strange fact about the species. The bone collector caterpillar is
Speaker 3: a carnivore. Now, carnivorous caterpillars are, from an evolutionary perspective,
Speaker 3: pretty rare. The authors note that of all existing insect orders,
Speaker 3: Lepidoptera is actually the most herbivorous overall, So moths and butterflies,
Speaker 3: in all of their life cycles are the most vegetarian
Speaker 3: of all branches of the class Insecta, but there are
Speaker 3: a few exceptions. About zero point one three percent of
Speaker 3: the roughly two hundred thousand known moth and butterfly species
Speaker 3: practice some form of predation in their caterpillar stage.
Speaker 2: You know, I think most of us have to think
Speaker 2: back to probably our initial introduction to caterpillar anatomy and
Speaker 2: physiology and behavior, that being the hungry, hungry caterpillar. Yes,
Speaker 2: that basically tells you what everything you need to know. Right,
Speaker 2: Caterpillars have to eat. That's what they're here to do,
Speaker 2: to eat a lot so that they can become that
Speaker 2: reproductive flying adult. Therefore, you know, it makes sense that
Speaker 2: most of them would be vegetarian, most of them would
Speaker 2: depend on plant matter in order to bulk up their
Speaker 2: own mass for metamorphosis. I guess you can imagine why
Speaker 2: there would be more of that as compared to some
Speaker 2: sort of a carnivorous body plan that is going to
Speaker 2: depend on just eating lots and lots of meat in
Speaker 2: order to make that metamorphosis.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, you can think about this evolutionary energy dilemma.
Speaker 3: Of course, animal based foods do tend to be richer
Speaker 3: in nutrients, they're going to be more high calorie, but
Speaker 3: they're also a lot harder to come by. And you know,
Speaker 3: the plant food is abundant and it's a lot easier
Speaker 3: to get to as long as you can get enough
Speaker 3: of it and you can process.
Speaker 2: It right and deal with any kind of self defensive
Speaker 2: involved adaptations on the part of the plant. But there's
Speaker 2: you know, an arms race there between each side of
Speaker 2: the equation.
Speaker 3: That's right. So, yeah, so only about zero point one
Speaker 3: three percent of the two hundred thousand known moth and
Speaker 3: butterfly species practice some form of carnivorous predation. This is
Speaker 3: one of those those rare caterpillars. Now a minute ago
Speaker 3: we already mentioned carnivorous caterpillars in Hawaii, the ones that
Speaker 3: hunt snails or maybe disguise themselves among leaves and launch
Speaker 3: an ambush attack. But those things, they sound like a
Speaker 3: lot of work. What if you could get somebody else
Speaker 3: to do most of the trapping and killing for you,
Speaker 3: If you could just kinda crawl around and suck up
Speaker 3: the leftovers of a perfectly evolved predator.
Speaker 2: It's not a bad plan. It's one that prehostoric cave
Speaker 2: hyenas and prehostaric humans in some situations would have could
Speaker 2: definitely get behind.
Speaker 3: And yeah, so here we come to the why of
Speaker 3: the bone collector caterpillar. These carnivorous insects live in spider
Speaker 3: webs because spider webs are great places to, in the
Speaker 3: words of Mick Jagger, get the meat. That's where they
Speaker 3: get the meat. The author's right quote. Bone collector caterpillars
Speaker 3: crawl through the jumble of web and detritus and opportunistically
Speaker 3: eat any weakened or recently deceased insects they come across, eg.
Speaker 3: Cased spider prey, so stuff the spider might have left
Speaker 3: over after eating or might be saving for later. That's
Speaker 3: caterpillars now, yum yum. And they will even chew through
Speaker 3: the silk of the web to get to the meal
Speaker 3: so they can they can remodel the web environment to
Speaker 3: suit their needs if they need to get to food
Speaker 3: by going through it.
Speaker 2: Ah devious.
Speaker 3: I sort of mentioned this already, but the bone collector caterpillars.
Speaker 3: One thing about them is you're typically not going to
Speaker 3: find them in the plane shaped webs or flat sheet
Speaker 3: webs that you would see suspended out in the air
Speaker 3: between branches, the kinds of things that you're going to
Speaker 3: expect a butterfly in its adult stage to fly into.
Speaker 3: You're instead going to find them in these these tangled,
Speaker 3: three dimensional webs that you see spun in enclosed spaces
Speaker 3: like recesses in wood. Because these caterpillars specialize in the
Speaker 3: three dimensional webs, they can generally reach prey in any
Speaker 3: part of the web, and it seems that they are
Speaker 3: quite adaptable scavengers and predators. In other words, they can
Speaker 3: they can and will eat any insect that is immobilized, weak,
Speaker 3: or slow moving. In fact, they will even cannibalize each other,
Speaker 3: which is why you typically only find one bone collector
Speaker 3: caterpillar per spider web. If there were two, there would
Speaker 3: soon be only one. The larger would eat the smaller.
Speaker 2: Ah, there can be only one.
Speaker 4: Gotcha.
Speaker 3: Now, where does the name come from? Why are they
Speaker 3: bone collectors? It's sort of a cute name, because, of
Speaker 3: course we're not talking about bones here in the mammalian sense,
Speaker 3: In the vertebrate sense, we're going to be talking about
Speaker 3: almost exclusively prey with exoskeletons arthropods. But this is the
Speaker 3: other fascinating thing about them. These caterpillars cover their bodies
Speaker 3: in portable cases made of silk, and to the outside
Speaker 3: of that silk case that they make, they attach chopped
Speaker 3: up insect body parts. They don't seem to be very
Speaker 3: picky about what kinds of dead bodies are allowed to contribute.
Speaker 3: The authors report a single catterp having remains from as
Speaker 3: many as six different insect families stuck to the outside
Speaker 3: of it at once. In fact, Rob, I've got a
Speaker 3: photo from the article for you to look at here
Speaker 3: if you can see it in the outline. On the left,
Speaker 3: we have an adult female specimen of the bone collector
Speaker 3: caterpillar moth. This is what it looks like after metamorphosis.
Speaker 3: The adult moth is kind of a furry brown and
Speaker 3: white spotted appearance. It looks almost looks almost a Malian
Speaker 3: in a way. I see it kind of you know,
Speaker 3: looks like you would want to stroke the hide and dignified.
Speaker 2: And this is a dignified looking moth. Yes, the no
Speaker 2: hint of any kind of grotesque, shady past.
Speaker 3: On the right, we have the decorated silk case of
Speaker 3: a single caterpillar in the larval stage, which is absolutely
Speaker 3: spangled with invertebrate death. It has an ant head, fly wings,
Speaker 3: fly legs, a weavil head, a bark beetle abdomen, and
Speaker 3: then all over in between all that what look like
Speaker 3: jointed orange tubes, like little orange straws. These, in fact,
Speaker 3: are not prey animal pieces. These are parts of the
Speaker 3: host spider's exoskeleton leftover after molting. So it is the
Speaker 3: caterpillar has a bone armor of spider integument and dead
Speaker 3: hollow pieces of insect exoskeletons.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, it looks just absolutely apocalyptic.
Speaker 3: Like it shambling junkyard of insect death.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like, I mean, one instant you know, pop culture
Speaker 2: fantasy comparison is, of course, the character Rattleshirt from Game
Speaker 2: of Thrones. Yeah, the characters wearing armor that's made from
Speaker 2: like human bones and all Lord of Bones. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: that looks far more dignified than what we have here.
Speaker 2: What we see with the bone collectorc caterpillar is much
Speaker 2: more Texas chainsaw massacre. It is just pure chaos.
Speaker 3: Now. The fact that the caterpillar's silk case is covered
Speaker 3: in an insect slaughterhouse might make it seem like the
Speaker 3: stuff just kind of clings on their at random, right,
Speaker 3: Like maybe it just gets stuck there as it crawls
Speaker 3: around in the web. But no, there is diversity and variety,
Speaker 3: but it is not just randomly assembled or chaotic. The
Speaker 3: authors describe how you can observe the caterpillars carefully shopping
Speaker 3: for just the right parts and shaping them, you know,
Speaker 3: to fit just right. They will pick up an ant
Speaker 3: head or a beetle leg, whatever the part might be,
Speaker 3: and then they will measure it for size before adhering
Speaker 3: it to their silk case. So they will rotate it around,
Speaker 3: rotate the body part, feel it with their mandibles, and
Speaker 3: if it's too big, the caterpillar will often modify it
Speaker 3: by chewing it down until it's just the right size.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this gets even more horror show by the moment.
Speaker 3: Here's an interesting thing. The authors of this paper found
Speaker 3: that if you put one of these caterpillars in captivity
Speaker 3: and you deny it access to insect body parts, but
Speaker 3: supply it with little, similarly shaped things that are other
Speaker 3: than insect body parts, it will not use them. So
Speaker 3: it is not like a hermit crab that will take
Speaker 3: up residence in a vienna sausage. Can the bone collector says,
Speaker 3: chopped up, chewed down dead bodies or nothing, that's all
Speaker 3: that's all I want. And this is this is interesting
Speaker 3: because I think this implies possibly the fact that they're
Speaker 3: corpses and the remnants of spider molting that may be
Speaker 3: crucial to the caterpillar's survival somehow. The author is right
Speaker 3: quote given the context, it is possible that the array
Speaker 3: of partially consumed body parts and shed spider skins covering
Speaker 3: the case forms effective camouflage from a spider landlord. The
Speaker 3: caterpillars have never been found predated by spiders or wrapped
Speaker 3: in spider silk, so these authors here have studied these
Speaker 3: things for years. By the way, this is a research
Speaker 3: years in the making, and there is not a single
Speaker 3: documented instance of these caterpillars slipping up and becoming spider food.
Speaker 3: So is it possible that the bone cloak hides them somehow,
Speaker 3: makes them invisible or makes them uninteresting to this power
Speaker 3: predator a few centimeters away.
Speaker 2: Like any given zombie film or comic book where someone
Speaker 2: covers themselves in zombie gore in order to pass through
Speaker 2: the horde unnoticed.
Speaker 3: It could be. Yeah, we don't exactly know now. The
Speaker 3: authors also note the adaptability of the bone collectors survival strategy.
Speaker 3: I thought this was really interesting. While the bone collector
Speaker 3: caterpillar is native to Hawaii, of the four different species
Speaker 3: of spider in whose webs they have been found none
Speaker 3: of those spiders is native to Hawaii, and so the
Speaker 3: authors note that like of course, non native species dominate
Speaker 3: many of Hawaii's ecosystems. This is something we've talked about
Speaker 3: on the show before. So if this this moth had
Speaker 3: been too dependent on just a single species of native
Speaker 3: spider as its web host, it might not have survived
Speaker 3: recent exchanges with the mainland. But it's adaptable to different
Speaker 3: types of spider webs, so it has. And yet human
Speaker 3: encounters with these caterpillars are pretty rare. The author's right quote.
Speaker 3: These caterpillars are only rarely encountered on. Over twenty two
Speaker 3: years of fieldwork and over one hundred and fifty field
Speaker 3: surveys in the area where they occur have yielded only
Speaker 3: sixty two individuals, and most apparently suitable spiderwebs do not
Speaker 3: host them.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, So they would seem to be a rarity
Speaker 2: even among the sort of webs that they could call.
Speaker 3: Yeah, assuming we know where to look. But they do
Speaker 3: seem to be, as far as we can tell, limited
Speaker 3: to this small range, and as best we can tell,
Speaker 3: they're contained entirely within this like fifteen square kilometer forested
Speaker 3: area of a mountain range on the island of Oahu,
Speaker 3: though they used to have a larger range, we think.
Speaker 3: Through filo genomic analysis, the authors found that the species
Speaker 3: is at least six million years old, several million years
Speaker 3: older than the island of Oahu itself, and probably at
Speaker 3: least a million years older than any of the major
Speaker 3: Hawaiian islands that remain today, which implies that this lineage
Speaker 3: probably first appeared on Hawaiian islands that no longer exist
Speaker 3: or you know, have eroded into the sea, and then
Speaker 3: it migrated to inhabit new islands that came up, including
Speaker 3: islands that do still today exist in the Hawaiian island chain,
Speaker 3: but no longer have these caterpillars on them.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, now that new they have almost kind of
Speaker 2: like elder god status, right, and some sort of elder
Speaker 2: creature like we hail from islands that no longer exist.
Speaker 3: From the lens that sank we came And so the
Speaker 3: paper also does get into conservation concerns. Of course, Hawaii
Speaker 3: is one of the extinction capitals of the world, with
Speaker 3: introduced species and other factors threatening native life. They write, quote,
Speaker 3: the current range of the bone collector lineage is now
Speaker 3: limited to a single species holding on in a fragment
Speaker 3: of isolated forest that is increasingly beset with invasive species,
Speaker 3: exemplifying the vulnerability of many endemic Hawaiian insects and the
Speaker 3: ecosystems on which they depend. So, of course, you know
Speaker 3: that highlights conservation concerns that are true of all different
Speaker 3: kinds of Hawaiian wildlife, and especially wildlife island wildlife all
Speaker 3: over the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, thinking about how how fragile something like this
Speaker 2: is and how it could have easily passed away without
Speaker 2: us having a chance to even understand it and chronicle it.
Speaker 2: You know what other strange oddities of the natural world
Speaker 2: have just completely passed away without evidence. You know, we're
Speaker 2: lucky to have this.
Speaker 3: But it is really amazing to think about the spider's
Speaker 3: web as a life niche for something other than the
Speaker 3: spider itself. There are clear advantages. It provides food for
Speaker 3: a carnivore. You can swoop in there and eat, eat
Speaker 3: after the spider is done eating, or eat what the
Speaker 3: spider has saved for later. It provides presumably protection against
Speaker 3: other predators. You know, there are a lot of things
Speaker 3: that might threaten you otherwise, but they're not going to
Speaker 3: go messing around in a spider web. But there's a spider,
Speaker 3: so it seems pretty clear that there is some part
Speaker 3: of the silk case adaptation, you sticking all of the
Speaker 3: dead insect body parts to the silk case that protects
Speaker 3: the caterpillar against the host spider. But why does that work?
Speaker 3: How does the dead body parts suit protect the caterpillar.
Speaker 3: In one article I read, it cited the idea that
Speaker 3: maybe it makes the caterpillar look like trash to the spider, like,
Speaker 3: you know, it looks like this is the stuff I've
Speaker 3: already gotten rid of and no longer have any use
Speaker 3: for us. It's just not interesting to me. But I
Speaker 3: do wonder kind of how that actually works in the
Speaker 3: spider's brain. What does that look like to the spider?
Speaker 3: What's going on there? And I wonder how it would
Speaker 3: not be excited by, you know, the things that draw
Speaker 3: it to prey that comes into its web in any
Speaker 3: other case, like movement cues, vibrations in the web, or
Speaker 3: smell cues or something like that. I don't know, but
Speaker 3: it's super interesting that this animal can live in what
Speaker 3: would seemingly be like the most hostile of possible spaces.
Speaker 2: I'm imagining a terminator heads up display situation where it's
Speaker 2: like looking at it and it just says trash, you know,
Speaker 2: classification trash. But yeah, I mean it's so and it's
Speaker 2: also just so interesting to try to imagine like the
Speaker 2: presumably you know, gruesome and and doom ridden evolutionary journey
Speaker 2: to this point. Yeah, where you know this is this
Speaker 2: is a niche that had to be occupied over time,
Speaker 2: and you can imagine a lot of mistakes were made
Speaker 2: along the way.
Speaker 3: Oh well, that brings up another interesting sort of phylogenetic connection,
Speaker 3: which is that within this moth genus Hyposmocoma that you
Speaker 3: find throughout Hawaii, there are many other different kinds of
Speaker 3: unique cases. So the it's not just the bone collector.
Speaker 3: There are relatives of this moth where the caterpillar phase
Speaker 3: of the life cycle has the has these weird cases
Speaker 3: it makes that are i think, in most cases thought
Speaker 3: to help it blend in with the environment around it.
Speaker 3: This is the only one that puts dead insect body
Speaker 3: parts on itself and hides some spider's web. But there
Speaker 3: are these others that make these cases that are said
Speaker 3: to look like a crab. There's one that's called like
Speaker 3: the candy wrapper caterpillar. It looks kind of like a
Speaker 3: candy wrapper. There's one that looks like a cigar. There's
Speaker 3: one that looks like I think they say it looks
Speaker 3: like a burrito. So you get all these different shapes.
Speaker 3: I think generally they're thought to just be types of
Speaker 3: camouflage that help hide this from potential predators. But the
Speaker 3: bone collector really stands out like it looks quite different
Speaker 3: and much more striking than the other ones, which I
Speaker 3: think are mostly trying to appear drab and blend in
Speaker 3: with I don't know, an environment of leaves or sticks
Speaker 3: or something. But anyway, coming back to the question, where
Speaker 3: does the bone collector caterpillar fall on the you know,
Speaker 3: Cave Hyena versus Texas chainsaw massacre at scale? Like, you know,
Speaker 3: this seems to be much more intentional than the the
Speaker 3: midden of bones that has formed chaotically just through you know,
Speaker 3: you're eating nearby and that's where the bones get deposited.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really kind of taking advantage of a mitten.
Speaker 2: It's taking advantage of a a of an accumulation of
Speaker 2: body parts or bones if you rather, and then using
Speaker 2: it intentionally. It's like if you lived in the Texas
Speaker 2: Chainsaw massacre house, but you were not a member of
Speaker 2: the saw your clan, and you just covered yourself up
Speaker 2: with bones just to blend in with all the bone
Speaker 2: bone decorated furniture and so forth.
Speaker 3: And you get to eat leather faces lunch when he's
Speaker 3: not looking because you covered left.
Speaker 2: Over barbecue left under slaw. You know, I was sure
Speaker 2: I had some food.
Speaker 3: On my plate. Well, off to the bone collectors. I
Speaker 3: like your your style. Obviously the bone suit is cool,
Speaker 3: but also it's just like bold behavior. You know, this
Speaker 3: is a this is a boldness admired. I admire you
Speaker 3: from afar.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's a frequent story and evolution where
Speaker 2: you know, not not to personify evolution too much, but
Speaker 2: it is fun from time to time, and it's almost
Speaker 2: like gain evolutions to Hey, you know, there's a good
Speaker 2: living to be made living in a spider web if
Speaker 2: you're not a spider in the same way that evolution
Speaker 2: might whisper you know, Uh, there's a lot of riches
Speaker 2: in a bee hive. You could get in there and
Speaker 2: not alert the bees to your presence or make them
Speaker 2: think that you belong there. Well, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: honey in there, there's a lot of resources, and these
Speaker 2: are all you know, these are all dangerous missions, dangerous hests.
Speaker 2: But evolution is generally up for the job.
Speaker 3: That's true. This is not the only infiltrator in nature. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but maybe the most morbid looking one. Yeah, okay, Well
Speaker 3: should we call part one there?
Speaker 2: We should call part one, yes, but we will be back.
Speaker 2: Let's see today's Thursday. We will be back on Tuesday
Speaker 2: with a second part in which we'll look at some
Speaker 2: other creatures that make use of the bones, be they
Speaker 2: literal bones or some other parts of dead organisms. I
Speaker 2: will have a few more examples to discuss in part two.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out there,
Speaker 2: you know about any of the organisms we talked about here,
Speaker 2: or other examples from horror cinema, horror comics and so forth.
Speaker 2: There's some other great examples, you know. Actually, I will
Speaker 2: go ahead and mention one real quick that came up
Speaker 2: in my research. This is not a movie that I
Speaker 2: have seen, but there is a two thousand and three
Speaker 2: British Canadian horror film titled The Bone Snatcher which apparently
Speaker 2: does feature some sort of an insectoid creature that wears
Speaker 2: the bones of its victims. So it's like covered in
Speaker 2: bones or somehow partially armored in bones. I'm not sure,
Speaker 2: but it is. It's kind of interesting. This would have
Speaker 2: the two thousand and three and it does kind of
Speaker 2: match up with what we were discussing here with the
Speaker 2: bone collectorc caterpillar. I couldn't really find a good screen
Speaker 2: cap of the monster though, so I don't really have
Speaker 2: a great sense of it.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't want to insult a movie without having
Speaker 3: seen it, but it does have a real two thousand
Speaker 3: and three kind of look. Yeah tagline it will scare
Speaker 3: you out of your skull.
Speaker 2: Maybe so, maybe so?
Speaker 3: All right, next time.
Speaker 2: All right. Just a reminder for everyone out there, This
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
Speaker 2: culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
Speaker 2: form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside
Speaker 2: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
Speaker 2: on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway,
Speaker 3: and special thanks to our guest producer Today Andrew Howard.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much Andrew for stepping in. If you
Speaker 3: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 3: on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
Speaker 3: the future, or just to say hello, you can email
Speaker 3: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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