Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature Feature production of My Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and today on this show it's another
Speaker 1: listener questions episode. That's the official song that I've seen
Speaker 1: exactly the same way every single time. Uh. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: guys sent me your questions and I try to answer
Speaker 1: them either through email or right here on this show.
Speaker 1: And as you're listening and you're thinking, Hey, I've got
Speaker 1: a question and I want that answered. Uh, you can
Speaker 1: send it to me at Creature Feature plot at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com any kind of evolutionary biology related question. I
Speaker 1: may not immediately know the answer, but I certainly can
Speaker 1: look stuff up and use my background to give you
Speaker 1: the best answer that I can. So let's get right
Speaker 1: into it. So, first email, in response to you. In
Speaker 1: my episode on cute animal names, the listener writes in,
Speaker 1: in addition to pufflings, baby puffins, might I add the
Speaker 1: Australian marsupials quacas whose baby is a bub Wooli's booties
Speaker 1: and pouderous. By the way, these creatures all have something
Speaker 1: in common. They sacrifice their young as a defensive mechanism.
Speaker 1: If they are attacked, the muscles surrounding their patch pouches relax,
Speaker 1: releasing the babies and letting the parents escape their fate.
Speaker 1: Are there other animals that give up their children. It's
Speaker 1: a way to evade death. Michael, Hi, Michael, so really
Speaker 1: fascinating information about these marsupials. It is true that quacas,
Speaker 1: and it seems like the other marsupials you also mentioned,
Speaker 1: abandoned their young who will fall out of the pouch
Speaker 1: as the mother flees, and that little baby will make
Speaker 1: this noise that attracts predators. So this idea is based
Speaker 1: on observational research where researchers found that these marsupials, their quaccas,
Speaker 1: are these little they look like a cross between a
Speaker 1: teddy bear and a hamps there and they're about the
Speaker 1: size of a teddy bear. And they when they are
Speaker 1: caught in this human research trap, a humane trap, they
Speaker 1: were in no real danger, but for the quaca quite
Speaker 1: a an alarming experience. Um these quacas would drop their
Speaker 1: babies out of their pouch, so the muscles in their
Speaker 1: pouch would relax and the baby would kind of flop
Speaker 1: out and the baby would start squeaking. So the Researchers
Speaker 1: speculate that this may be intentional or at least an
Speaker 1: involuntary response on the part of the quaca mother, given
Speaker 1: that the pouch has a number of highly controllable muscles.
Speaker 1: So in a sense, it maybe kind of like how
Speaker 1: we will peeer pants when we're scared. The quaca might
Speaker 1: not be consciously doing this, but maybe, you know, the
Speaker 1: involuntary reaction to high stress, high fear like that might
Speaker 1: be releasing this baby out of her pouch. And the
Speaker 1: baby is called a joey, So this joey kind of
Speaker 1: flops out out. And I think what's interesting about this
Speaker 1: specific situation is it's been observed when the quak is
Speaker 1: actually in a trap, and I think it may be
Speaker 1: indicative that the quaker really only does this as a
Speaker 1: last resort, so not when she's just kind of scared,
Speaker 1: but when she really feels trapped, and the thinking, or
Speaker 1: at least even if it's not like an intentional thinking
Speaker 1: on the part of the quaca, the evolutionary strategy maybe
Speaker 1: that it's better that she gets away to rear more
Speaker 1: young than they both get eaten. So giving up your
Speaker 1: own babies to avoid death is not a super common
Speaker 1: strategy in the animal kingdom, but it is more common
Speaker 1: than you would think. So in the case of these marsupials,
Speaker 1: the mother avoiding death likely leads to more successfully reared
Speaker 1: offspring than saving one individual Joey. Even though that sounds
Speaker 1: kind of callous, evolution doesn't have a moral compass. Really,
Speaker 1: it only cares if you're able to pass on your jeans.
Speaker 1: So Quacas can give birth to around seventeen babies over
Speaker 1: their lifespans. So in the Quacas case, if the mother
Speaker 1: is eaten, that's gonna reduce her chances of you know,
Speaker 1: rearing a successful offspring passing on her jeans to zero,
Speaker 1: whereas if one Joey is lost, that's only one of
Speaker 1: her reproductive potential lost there. So another common strategy is
Speaker 1: abandoning offspring that you don't have resources for, or even
Speaker 1: eating offspring when you need the extra calories or you
Speaker 1: have too many offspring. Uh. Sometimes it's the opposite, such
Speaker 1: as the fantail darter fish males who will actually eat
Speaker 1: their entire brood if the number of offspring is too small,
Speaker 1: which seems strange. Why would you eat your brood if
Speaker 1: you have too few of them? Well, apparently that investment
Speaker 1: in per until care is only worth it if you
Speaker 1: have economies of size of baby fish, So like he
Speaker 1: doesn't have enough baby fish, so it's not worth his time,
Speaker 1: so he just eats them all and tries again for
Speaker 1: a larger brood. It's very much and economics, uh, sort
Speaker 1: of way of rearing fish offspring um. Another interesting one
Speaker 1: is the long tailed skink, which is a lizard that
Speaker 1: lives in Taiwan, who will try to find off predators
Speaker 1: who threatened to eat her eggs. But if there are
Speaker 1: too many predators or if their intrusions are too frequent
Speaker 1: for her to properly defend her eggs, she would actually
Speaker 1: rather be the one to eat her own eggs, so
Speaker 1: she will actually turn around and eat her entire clutch.
Speaker 1: It's a very it seems spiteful, like if I can't
Speaker 1: have my eggs and you're gonna eat my eggs, well
Speaker 1: I'll just be the one to eat them. But when
Speaker 1: you think about it, it is a good evolutionary strategy
Speaker 1: because she's basically at the point where she realizes she's
Speaker 1: not going to be able to protect her eggs from
Speaker 1: these predators, so she just lets the predators eat these eggs,
Speaker 1: she loses her entire clutch anyways, and she gets nothing
Speaker 1: out of it, whereas if she eats the eggs now,
Speaker 1: she gets a boost in calories, a boost and fuel
Speaker 1: which may help her go out, you know, and maybe
Speaker 1: start a new clutch. So it is it's a grim calculation,
Speaker 1: um one that I guess Thomas Swift as modest proposal
Speaker 1: would cringe at that satire, but it is something that
Speaker 1: is actually employed in nature, and you know, it does work,
Speaker 1: even though it kind of defies our human morals. Now
Speaker 1: onto a question I got from the writings. Someone left
Speaker 1: a question where they would leave a rating, and I
Speaker 1: actually love that, so thank you for that. And here's
Speaker 1: the question. Are there more eyes or legs in the world?
Speaker 1: From my name is Mud? And that is a deceptively
Speaker 1: tough question. So to answer it, first, let's look at
Speaker 1: some of the most numerous animals in the world. And
Speaker 1: then instead of counting all their eyes and legs, which
Speaker 1: I simply don't have the time to do, we will
Speaker 1: just kind of look at them in general and see
Speaker 1: if they typically have more eyes or more legs. So
Speaker 1: this is all guests work on my part, sort of
Speaker 1: our educated guesswork. So I don't know. I'm not wolf
Speaker 1: Ram Alpha, I'm not a supercomputer, but this I've given
Speaker 1: it my best go. So the most populous organisms that
Speaker 1: would have i'd say, what we would identify as eyes
Speaker 1: and legs. I'm dis counting things like flagella, like, let's
Speaker 1: let's be serious, those aren't really legs. Uh. So with
Speaker 1: true eyes and legs, I would say are probably insects.
Speaker 1: So according to the Smithsonian Institution, uh, there's estimated to
Speaker 1: be around ten quintillion insects on Earth right now. So
Speaker 1: a quintillion is a little bit hard to fathom. It
Speaker 1: is a billion billions. So there are ten billion billion
Speaker 1: insects on Earth, and that's a lot. That is a lot. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are also microscopic animals, such as tartar grades, who
Speaker 1: can be found in quantities of like nine thousand individuals
Speaker 1: per gallon of water in marine or freshwater sediment. I
Speaker 1: was unable to find like a estimated global population of
Speaker 1: tartar grades. And it's not as simple as like figuring
Speaker 1: out how much water there is in the world, because
Speaker 1: the number of tartar grades is going to be different
Speaker 1: based on like what where that water is how nutrient
Speaker 1: rich it is. But suffice it to say there's probably
Speaker 1: just an enormously huge amount of tartar grades. So there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot of many many invertebrates like the
Speaker 1: like insects, arthropods and tarte grades things like that. UM.
Speaker 1: So let's look at these guys and see if, on
Speaker 1: average they tend to have more legs or more eyes. UM.
Speaker 1: First of all, let's talk about what an I is like.
Speaker 1: How do we define an eye? If we define an
Speaker 1: eye as like a single lens, dragonflies have around twenty
Speaker 1: eight thousand lenses per compound I. I kind of don't
Speaker 1: like this, though. I generally think that that would be
Speaker 1: regarded as a single compound I, not twenty thousand eyes.
Speaker 1: That's just that's the number of lenses on that compound. IE.
Speaker 1: So if you counted each lens as and I, I
Speaker 1: think eyes would win over legs in this game. But personally,
Speaker 1: I don't think a compound I should be counted as
Speaker 1: twenty eight thousand eyes just because it has so many lenses.
Speaker 1: I think it should be a single eye with a
Speaker 1: bunch of lenses. So let's move on to uh, spiders.
Speaker 1: So spiders are Arthur pods. Uh, they can have around
Speaker 1: eight eyes um, which is a lot of eyes, But
Speaker 1: they also have eight legs, so that kind of cancels
Speaker 1: out in the eyes to legs contests, so they just
Speaker 1: you know, fraction zero essentially or one. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm clearly not a math person, but I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say that those things cancel out in spiders. Uh, we can't.
Speaker 1: We can't factor their them into our eyes and legs
Speaker 1: calculations as well. So insects typically have more legs than eyes.
Speaker 1: Insects will all will often have a pair of compound
Speaker 1: eyes on either side of their head. They may also
Speaker 1: have one to three simple eyes called ocelli that detect
Speaker 1: movement and simple light but don't see in the way
Speaker 1: that eyes do. But even if we count all of
Speaker 1: these o'celli, they technically have around five eyes um, while
Speaker 1: insects typically have like six legs, So the legs would
Speaker 1: still win, especially if you add in little animals like
Speaker 1: the tartar grades which I mentioned earlier, who have eight
Speaker 1: legs and only two simple eye spots. So, based on
Speaker 1: my clearly very very deep mathematical calculations, uh, my guess
Speaker 1: is that there are more legs than eyes in the
Speaker 1: world just because of the sheer volume of insects tartar
Speaker 1: grades these other very small animals invertebrates. But we do
Speaker 1: have some animals who possess a shocking number of eyes,
Speaker 1: like ocean dwelling kitans. So kitans are oval shaped mollusks
Speaker 1: with a tough, flat plated shell. Certain types of kitan
Speaker 1: can have thousands and thousands of simple o'celli eyes. Scallops
Speaker 1: also have a shocking number of eyes. Scalops are bivalves
Speaker 1: who can have over two hundred bright blue little eyeballs
Speaker 1: that look like tiny beads which ready around their mantle,
Speaker 1: peeking out from their shells. So I would say that
Speaker 1: given if you're to ask me, like, what is the
Speaker 1: maximum number of eyes versus legs something could have, I'd say, like,
Speaker 1: you can have an animal that has more. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess it depends on how you define legs though, because
Speaker 1: there are these tiny little tentacle legs on things like starfish,
Speaker 1: and if you counted each one of those as legs,
Speaker 1: that'd be a lot of legs. It gets a little
Speaker 1: funky depending on how you define a leg, how you
Speaker 1: define an eye, but I think I still think that
Speaker 1: there's probably way more legs than there are eyes in
Speaker 1: the world. But if you disagree, you have some other
Speaker 1: evidence right to me at Creature Future pot at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com. I want to hear your arguments. Onto the
Speaker 1: next listener question, do you think the t rex was
Speaker 1: a scavenger or a predator or maybe something else altogether?
Speaker 1: And this is from Corman. So the research on t
Speaker 1: Rex has flip flopped a little bit historically. For a
Speaker 1: while in the ninety nineties, it was a popular theory
Speaker 1: that t Rex was just a scavenger, because the idea
Speaker 1: that such a massive monster would have just been meekly
Speaker 1: nibbling on dead prey was really surprising and there for
Speaker 1: a fun thing to write about. So this idea was
Speaker 1: mostly the brain child of paleontologist Jack Horner, who claimed
Speaker 1: that t rex couldn't be a hunter given that its
Speaker 1: arms were shorter than typical predators and that it was
Speaker 1: too big and bulky to run quickly in chase after prey.
Speaker 1: It also had large factory bulbs, which are the um
Speaker 1: sensory organs of smell, and so his idea was that, well,
Speaker 1: if they had this really keen sense of smell when
Speaker 1: they used that to find carrion. Also, their teeth could
Speaker 1: crush bone and thus perhaps they could extract marrow from carrion.
Speaker 1: So maybe they were just the garbage disposals of the
Speaker 1: dinosaur world. But the thing is that many paleontologists back
Speaker 1: then already started disagreeing with Horner. But it was such
Speaker 1: a fun and shocking idea that t Rex didn't actually
Speaker 1: murder things it was just a scavenger that many media
Speaker 1: outlets just kind of ran with that idea. But today
Speaker 1: it's more definitive that t Rex was not just a
Speaker 1: scavenger but hunted as well. So, first thing, Horner's evidence
Speaker 1: was not super solid. It's an interesting idea and something
Speaker 1: that would merit looking into, but you look into it,
Speaker 1: it does kind of fall apart a little bit. So
Speaker 1: his evidence doesn't really rule out hunting at all. There
Speaker 1: are many carnivores that don't use their forearms to hunt,
Speaker 1: so like the short t rex arms would not prevent
Speaker 1: t Rex from hunting. So an example is secretary birds,
Speaker 1: which are those beautiful long legged birds with those wonderful
Speaker 1: crests and those long, luxurious eye eyelashes. They look like
Speaker 1: runaway models, and they will actually stomp on their prey
Speaker 1: to death like snails or lizards or snakes in and
Speaker 1: it's they don't need arms in order to pound their
Speaker 1: prey into oblivion. Also, having teeth that are capable of
Speaker 1: crushing bone doesn't mean that they exclusively fed on bone.
Speaker 1: And when paleontologists compared t rex teeth to something like
Speaker 1: a hyena, who is much more um specialized for carry
Speaker 1: on eating, it seems like the highness teeth are quite
Speaker 1: a bit different from the t rex's teeth and quite
Speaker 1: a bit more specialized for bone crunching than t Rex um.
Speaker 1: So the thing that to me is really indicative that
Speaker 1: t Rex was a hunter is that there has been
Speaker 1: fossil evidence showing t rex teeth embedded in the flesh
Speaker 1: of other dinosaurs like the duck bill dinosaur, and then
Speaker 1: further evidence of tissue healing around the tooth, meaning that
Speaker 1: t Rex took a bite out of this attempted victim
Speaker 1: while it was still alive, it got away and then
Speaker 1: healed around the wound. So the current theory is that
Speaker 1: t Rex was like many modern predators who hunted but
Speaker 1: would happily carry in if they were lucky enough to
Speaker 1: find it in time. Um. The other part of Jack horners,
Speaker 1: I'm just realizing that Jack Horner is like the name
Speaker 1: of some kind of isn't there Isn't there that like
Speaker 1: fairytale rhyme. That's like little Jack Horner sat in a
Speaker 1: corner eating a something pie. Anyways, whatever, he was a
Speaker 1: real guy apparently. So back on track, Jack Horner was
Speaker 1: saying like t Rex was too big, too lumbering, and
Speaker 1: ponderous to be able to run and chase down prey.
Speaker 1: And in terms of t Rex is speed. Scientists have
Speaker 1: really waffled back and forth on this. So for a
Speaker 1: while they were saying that they could reach pretty decent
Speaker 1: running speed. More recent computer models estimated their running speed
Speaker 1: a little bit slower, around twelve miles per hour or
Speaker 1: nineteen kilometers per hour, which a human, like a fast
Speaker 1: human and a fleet footed animal would be able to outrun. Um.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that t Rex couldn't hunt or
Speaker 1: chase things down, because there were certainly slower dinosaurs that
Speaker 1: the t Rex would have been able to chase down. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: speed isn't only necessary for chasing prey. So this idea
Speaker 1: that if you're slow, you want to be a carryon
Speaker 1: eater rather than a prey chaser. Is a little bit
Speaker 1: strange because carrion also favors fast animals who can quickly
Speaker 1: track down and get to the buffet first. So when
Speaker 1: you have an all you can eat carrion buffet in
Speaker 1: the wild, you really want to be the first ones
Speaker 1: to get there, because if you're not, it might be
Speaker 1: all gone by the time you arrive. Uh, and you
Speaker 1: would have a lot of smaller animals. Like a pack
Speaker 1: of smaller animals that descend on carrion and tear it
Speaker 1: apart with many mouths may be able to get all
Speaker 1: the usable meat far more quickly than something like a
Speaker 1: t rex could, Like if it's lumbering over by the
Speaker 1: time it gets to the carrying it might be too late.
Speaker 1: And remember, like the floor is not littered with carrion,
Speaker 1: there are a lot there are many more like living
Speaker 1: animals out there at a given time than like rod
Speaker 1: and carrion just left out, And so carrion is going
Speaker 1: to be a more rare encounter than a living animal.
Speaker 1: So it's very very highly competitive. It's why you see
Speaker 1: like when you when you have scavengers fighting over carrion.
Speaker 1: It's very it's not easy pickings to be a scavenger.
Speaker 1: This idea that like, well, if you can't hack it
Speaker 1: as a hunter, you gotta hack it as a scavenger
Speaker 1: is kind of not not really the case, Like you've
Speaker 1: got to have skills to be a scavenger. So this
Speaker 1: idea that t Rex was too slow to chase down prey,
Speaker 1: even larger dinosaurs, but somehow fast enough to quickly locate
Speaker 1: carrion whenever it would happen to fall to the ground,
Speaker 1: is a little bit suspect. So I think that, yeah,
Speaker 1: when when this is all put together, I think that
Speaker 1: t Rex would have had to rely on every tool
Speaker 1: at its disposal to get enough meat to be that
Speaker 1: huge size. So would it turn its snows up at Karen. No,
Speaker 1: I don't think it would. Uh, just like modern day predators,
Speaker 1: they often will eat Karen if it's there, if they're
Speaker 1: lucky enough to find it and lucky enough to get
Speaker 1: there first, Yeah, they will definitely eat it. Um. But
Speaker 1: I feel like it can't be that it relied on Karrien.
Speaker 1: It had to have been hunting as well to be
Speaker 1: able to sustain its mass like that, And it seems
Speaker 1: quite well built for hunting, and I just don't think
Speaker 1: that Jack Horner's arguments were very convincing and ruling out
Speaker 1: hunting and then coupling that with the fossil evidence showing
Speaker 1: tooth marks inside, like what we knew was a dinosaur
Speaker 1: that was alive and then healed over that Bye, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it was a predator. So, you know, definitely
Speaker 1: not something you would want to run into in the wild.
Speaker 1: But then again, if the most recent computer models are correct,
Speaker 1: maybe we could outrun t rex. I wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: try it. Onto The next listener question kind of related
Speaker 1: which prehistoric animals would make the best pets. There are
Speaker 1: far too many candidates for worst pets. There are two
Speaker 1: in particular. I've read about the bare dog of the
Speaker 1: family emphas Cian a Day. It's sort of a bear
Speaker 1: like dog. And then there's Hemmy Scion the dog Bear.
Speaker 1: It is a dog like bear. I'm guessing the bare
Speaker 1: dog would be a little bit better as a pet. Stephen, Hi, Stephen.
Speaker 1: So both those animal families are very interesting. They are
Speaker 1: early carnivorous mammals. Um Emphasion a Day is more sort
Speaker 1: of like just related to a bunch of modern day carnivores,
Speaker 1: whereas the himmy scions seem to be more related to
Speaker 1: the bear family, so amphis cian a day uh that
Speaker 1: family would have I do agree that I think they
Speaker 1: would have been more were potentially more species in that
Speaker 1: family that could have become pets, maybe after some unnatural
Speaker 1: selection on humanities part like we did with wolves. Uh.
Speaker 1: So amphacian a day were a family of species of
Speaker 1: mammalian carnivores, and while some were quite big like the
Speaker 1: size of a bear, some were tiny, under eleven pounds
Speaker 1: or five kilograms so preust ark Chihuahua's. I would rather
Speaker 1: try my luck with the tiny ones personally. But then again,
Speaker 1: we did domess kate wolves, which are quite huge and scary,
Speaker 1: and kudos to those early humans that had the canes
Speaker 1: to do that. So the Himmision family or sub family
Speaker 1: I think is the most current understanding, seems to be
Speaker 1: more of an extinct ancestor of modern bears or a
Speaker 1: cousin extinct cousin of modern bears. And I honestly they
Speaker 1: look pretty fierce. Yes, they do look like a cross
Speaker 1: between a dog and a bear, and I don't think
Speaker 1: i'd want to tangle with them person only uh and go.
Speaker 1: Continuing with the theme that I am a big weenie,
Speaker 1: the best extinct pet, in my opinion, would be the teeniest, tiniest, cutest,
Speaker 1: most harmless of extinct mammals, the battodninetes, a shrew like
Speaker 1: animal who lived over forty million years ago in North
Speaker 1: America and was probably the smallest mammal ever to have lived.
Speaker 1: It likely weighed only about a gram and could comfortably
Speaker 1: fit on top of a pencil racer. For comparison, an
Speaker 1: adult house mouse weighs around twenty grams, so that's like
Speaker 1: twenty times the size of this little guy. So the
Speaker 1: current smallest mammals are the bumblebee bat and the etruscan shrew,
Speaker 1: who are tiny and way around two grams each, So
Speaker 1: that is still twice as big as the batto done nineties.
Speaker 1: So I really love these teeny tiny guys. Wish they
Speaker 1: were still around so I could fit like a hundred
Speaker 1: of them in my pocket. Onto the next listener question.
Speaker 1: Just finished watching an episode of the detective show Monk
Speaker 1: in which an elephant is used as a murder weapon.
Speaker 1: The elephants trainer placed his head under the elephant's foot,
Speaker 1: and the murderer commanded the elephant to press down via
Speaker 1: a walkie talkie taped behind its ears. My question is,
Speaker 1: given their documented intelligence and compassion for other species, would
Speaker 1: an elephant understand the outcome of crushing a person's head.
Speaker 1: If so, does this mean that the elephant in this
Speaker 1: show is actually an accomplish instead of a murder weapon.
Speaker 1: This is from Gretchen. Also she showed me peanut butter
Speaker 1: and jelly beans, who are two adorable kiddies. Thank you
Speaker 1: for that great question. Um, there's not great research on
Speaker 1: whether elephants understand murder, given how unethical it would be
Speaker 1: to try to get a bunch of elephants to murder people. Uh.
Speaker 1: That being said, let's look into elephants and killing and
Speaker 1: what their thoughts might be about such a thing. So,
Speaker 1: there is a history of elephants being used in execution
Speaker 1: in ancient Rome, Carthage, South and Southeast Asia and Africa.
Speaker 1: It was a very public, sort of lamboyant way to
Speaker 1: execute someone, as was the idea like we can control
Speaker 1: this huge animal and get them to smash you, and
Speaker 1: so it was supposed to inspire fear in awe of
Speaker 1: the ruler. Um. So in these cases, the elephants were
Speaker 1: under the control of a writer, and they could be
Speaker 1: trained to either kill the convict or to spare the
Speaker 1: prisoners if there was a last call for mercy. So
Speaker 1: sometimes the elephants were trained not to kill the victims
Speaker 1: but to kind of rough them up, which I suppose
Speaker 1: at the time was considered more humanitarian. So could the
Speaker 1: elephants understand the moral implications here? I think first we
Speaker 1: need to know if elephants even understand the concept of death,
Speaker 1: which is incredibly difficult to study. Researchers have gone through
Speaker 1: videos of elephants responses to other dead elephants, and there
Speaker 1: does seem to be pattern of behavior that indicates they
Speaker 1: since something is off and are upset in some way.
Speaker 1: They have the body language that indicates distress. But this
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily indicate they understand death fully, just that they're
Speaker 1: distressed that this other elephant is not behaving in the
Speaker 1: way that they want so, namely by being dead. So
Speaker 1: there has been anecdotal evidence of elephants being careful around humans.
Speaker 1: So one such is the story of which is kind
Speaker 1: of hard to verify. I don't know if this is true.
Speaker 1: It sounds like it could be, but it was the
Speaker 1: story of an elephant crashing into a couple's home, then
Speaker 1: stopping when it started to hear a baby crying and
Speaker 1: moving some of the debris off of the baby's crib
Speaker 1: before leaving. And um. There are also, though a lot
Speaker 1: of stories of elephants kind of mowing people down, you know,
Speaker 1: trampling tourists, trampling people and killing them. And I don't
Speaker 1: know whether this is like intentional murder or not if
Speaker 1: they fully understand I mean, like clearly when they do
Speaker 1: trample people, I think they're distressed and they're you know,
Speaker 1: trying to defend their territory there or defend themselves. Um,
Speaker 1: even if the human poses no threat to them, the
Speaker 1: elephant doesn't necessarily know that, so researchers. Although there is
Speaker 1: research showing that elephants can distinguish sometimes between humans that
Speaker 1: are more dangerous in humans that may not harm them.
Speaker 1: Researchers have found that elephants seem to be able to
Speaker 1: tell the difference between groups of people based on smell
Speaker 1: and accent, and react more defensively to the sounds and
Speaker 1: smells of groups of people who typically hunt them. It's
Speaker 1: a long story short. I don't really know if elephants
Speaker 1: could grasp the implications of smashing a human's head. My
Speaker 1: sense is that they may have some understanding of cause
Speaker 1: and effect um, because they are quite intelligent and they
Speaker 1: are highly social. UM. An elephant raised in captivity, like
Speaker 1: a circus elephant, or one of these elephants used in
Speaker 1: these like ancient executions, I don't know if they'd be
Speaker 1: properly socialized to kind of learn elephant ethics, because there
Speaker 1: may be some like elephant culture of teaching elephants like
Speaker 1: gentleness and things. So it's kind of hard to know,
Speaker 1: based on like your fictional monk Um example or the
Speaker 1: real life historical examples, whether that's typical elephant behavior, or
Speaker 1: whether an elephant in the wild would be more hesitant
Speaker 1: to do something like that um, because like in captivity,
Speaker 1: an elephant might just associate that crushing with getting a
Speaker 1: reward that reinforced that behavior sword so that elephants, if
Speaker 1: an elephant is capable of having a sense of morality,
Speaker 1: it would be very messed up by being in a
Speaker 1: circus UM. So I do think that elephants who have
Speaker 1: a normal social life in the wild probably do learn
Speaker 1: some cause and effect of their actions, and they probably
Speaker 1: have some understanding of that they can cause harm by
Speaker 1: trampling something. UM, And I think they do understand something
Speaker 1: is wrong when an individual dies when it stops moving.
Speaker 1: They exhibit a lot of distress when it comes to that,
Speaker 1: So I'm not I'm not um convinced that they fully
Speaker 1: grasp death, but I do think they have some understanding
Speaker 1: of cause and effect harm as well as when something
Speaker 1: is dead that's not normal and that there's something off
Speaker 1: about that and it upsets them. So not quite at
Speaker 1: the point of upgrading your monk elephant to accomplice, but uh,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe somewhat he might have an understanding that
Speaker 1: this may not quite be right. But I wouldn't arrest
Speaker 1: that elephant. Free that elephant, get him a lawyer. Thank
Speaker 1: you guys so much for listening. And if you have
Speaker 1: a listener question you want to ask, you can write
Speaker 1: to me a Creature feature pot at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: Um And you know, if you enjoy the show, if
Speaker 1: you want more of these listener questions episodes, you can
Speaker 1: leave me feedback. You can leave a rating or review,
Speaker 1: and hey, happy holidays everyone. I'll be back next week
Speaker 1: with a brand new spanking episode. Of Creature feature and
Speaker 1: thank you so much for listening. Thanks to the Space
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