Speaker 1: Welcome to stuct to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And to uh introduce today's episode, I thought maybe we
Speaker 1: should begin by reading a poem. Robert or you game,
Speaker 1: I'm game for a little little poetry. In fact, it's
Speaker 1: not just poetry, it's moetry. I did not make that
Speaker 1: joke in my head yet, but maybe because I'm not
Speaker 1: as perverse as you. This is by the New Zealand
Speaker 1: poet Alan kernw This was originally published in nineteen and
Speaker 1: it's called The Skeleton of the Great Moa in Canterbury Museum,
Speaker 1: christ Church. The Skeleton of the Moa, on iron crutches,
Speaker 1: broods over no great waste. Deprivate swamp was where this
Speaker 1: tree grew feathers. Once that hatches, it's dusty clutch and
Speaker 1: guards them from the damp. Interesting failure to adapt on
Speaker 1: islands taller but not more fallen than I, who come
Speaker 1: bone to his bone. Peculiarly New Zealand's the eyes of
Speaker 1: children flicker around this tomb under the skylights. Wonder at
Speaker 1: the huge egg found in a thousand pieces piece together,
Speaker 1: but with less patients than the bones that dug in
Speaker 1: time deep shelter against the ocean weather. Not I some
Speaker 1: child born in a marvelous year will learn the trick
Speaker 1: of standing upright here. You can find that poem, by
Speaker 1: the way, in the nineteen seventy nine anthology and Anthology
Speaker 1: of twentieth century New Zealand Poetry. And Yeah, I really
Speaker 1: love the cadence of that poem, and also I feel
Speaker 1: like it effectively captures the weird beauty of these reassembled
Speaker 1: skeleton remains one sees of the mighty moa. You know,
Speaker 1: we just did Marianne Moore in the paper Nautilus. This
Speaker 1: is another poem like that. I love a good poem
Speaker 1: that genuinely ponders biology like this deals with the evolutionary
Speaker 1: reputation of the moa, the flightless birds of New Zealand,
Speaker 1: uh and and the idea of learning the trick of
Speaker 1: standing upright. Yeah. Now, this is gonna be a fun
Speaker 1: couple of episodes. I'm really excited about these episodes. I
Speaker 1: think the moa is one of the things that's really
Speaker 1: keeping me going right now. You're getting to research read
Speaker 1: about the moa and envision the moa. Uh No, no
Speaker 1: matter what where I don't know where you are out there,
Speaker 1: if you're listening to this, where you are in your
Speaker 1: previous understanding of of the moa and other flightless birds.
Speaker 1: But this is a this is a wonderful and weird
Speaker 1: story that has as a number of number of connections
Speaker 1: to things we've talked about in the past, but but
Speaker 1: also some new angles. We're gonna be talking about evolution,
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking about first contact between man and beast.
Speaker 1: It's a it's gonna be a fun ride. And there's
Speaker 1: no better place to start a fun ride than in
Speaker 1: New Zealand, the land of avian decadence, that's right, And
Speaker 1: and the place where the mammal is truly debased. That's
Speaker 1: right because you I knowbviously, the rise of mammals is
Speaker 1: one of evolutions most celebrated victory stories, right because in
Speaker 1: part because we are, of course mammals ourselves, and there's
Speaker 1: perhaps a sense of of the gods and the primordial
Speaker 1: titans when we consider the age of the dinosaurs that
Speaker 1: came before us in our own mammalian age that we
Speaker 1: have you know, ascended uh in now, well, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's very much a case of when you look at
Speaker 1: the Cretaceous paleogy and extinction event that caused the demise
Speaker 1: of the non avian dinosaurs. Uh, it's quite clear that
Speaker 1: their loss was our gain, yes, but it was wasn't
Speaker 1: only our gain. It was also the gain of of birds.
Speaker 1: And we often neglect the just the exceptional dominance of
Speaker 1: birds for theirs is the the the legacy of the
Speaker 1: of the dinosaur, and then they remain highly successful and
Speaker 1: widespread to this day. They remain masters of the air,
Speaker 1: frequent masters of the water, and sometimes masters of the
Speaker 1: land as well. Now, why would birds be the masters
Speaker 1: of the land, Like they've got the air that seems
Speaker 1: so much better than the land, why even bother with
Speaker 1: the land? Well, of course that the obvious answer there
Speaker 1: is that is that to be a master of the
Speaker 1: of the air requires a great deal of energy, and
Speaker 1: if you don't have to fly around, you quickly find
Speaker 1: reasons not to Evolutionarily speaking, of course, Well, so if
Speaker 1: we're talking about mammals and avian dinosaurs or birds, why
Speaker 1: exactly was it that the loss of the dinosaurs was
Speaker 1: the gain of these other clades? Well, because suddenly you
Speaker 1: have all of these uh, these niches in the in
Speaker 1: the in the in the in the environment that open up. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's suddenly a bird can can occupy, or various creatures
Speaker 1: have the ability to occupy mammals included. But this is
Speaker 1: where we see the emergence of a number of these
Speaker 1: different flightless birds. This is where we see the emergence
Speaker 1: of the terror birds and the demon ducks. Uh. And
Speaker 1: we'll get into some more examples of flightless birds as
Speaker 1: we go. Uh. But yeah, to be sure, we still
Speaker 1: have some amazing flightless land birds with us today, and
Speaker 1: some of them are are quite enormous. The largest, of course,
Speaker 1: is the ostrich. There are two species remaining. There was
Speaker 1: a third, the Asian ostrich, that went extinct roughly six
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Yeah. The two extant species are the
Speaker 1: common ostrich and the Somali ostrich, and they're both native
Speaker 1: to Africa. Yeah. And I sometimes I feel like we
Speaker 1: sometimes overlook how cool ostriches are. I find that it's zoos.
Speaker 1: They you know, the one thing, it's a zoo habitat,
Speaker 1: and and you know it's it's you're seeing an ostrich
Speaker 1: in a fenced in area. But then sometimes the Ostrich
Speaker 1: is in there with a giraffe, which seems particularly unfair
Speaker 1: because the giraffe, of course, is the is the tallest
Speaker 1: um extant mammal that we have. And it feels kind
Speaker 1: of like a dirty trick to showcase the world's to
Speaker 1: the world's tallest extant bird with the tallest mammal which
Speaker 1: towers over it. Right, It's like I'm trying to show
Speaker 1: off my muscles, but then you put me next to
Speaker 1: a gorilla. But but we have some other wonderful examples
Speaker 1: of flightless birds, uh elsewhere. For instance, we have EMUs,
Speaker 1: which are very fascinating. You get a chance to just
Speaker 1: look at an emu, just watching emu as it goes
Speaker 1: about its business. It's it's remarkable. The cassowary is one
Speaker 1: of my favorites mine too. There's a cassowary here at
Speaker 1: the Atlanta Zoo, Cecil Cecil the cast wary, who we
Speaker 1: we've talked on the show before with with a friend
Speaker 1: Jason Ward here in town about Cecil the cassowary, who
Speaker 1: remember Jason telling us that it's dung is very like
Speaker 1: fragrant and kind of smells of fruit, even though it
Speaker 1: is the I mean not to demonize animals, but when
Speaker 1: you get up close to it, it is a horrifying beast.
Speaker 1: Like it's beautiful. Its colors are beautiful. It has the
Speaker 1: blue and the red and the black feathers. It's a
Speaker 1: gorgeous animal. But also if you look at its foot,
Speaker 1: it's foot looks like a puppet from a monster movie.
Speaker 1: You know it is. It is just a killing thing.
Speaker 1: It's got these claws and this scaly, scabby skin. Uh
Speaker 1: that's a tongue twister. But yeah, look at a cassowary
Speaker 1: up close sometime if you just want to be terrified
Speaker 1: and audit nature. And yeah, they they can. They can
Speaker 1: prove quite deadly if you know, the human comes into
Speaker 1: close contact with them and there they begin engaging in
Speaker 1: the defensive behavior. Yeah, don't try to look at their
Speaker 1: feet up close if there is not a like barrier
Speaker 1: between you. Yeah. Of course, we have other flightless birds
Speaker 1: who consider one of the more amazing ones. Of course,
Speaker 1: it's the key we of New Zealand um the nocturnal
Speaker 1: ground bird. All of these birds are what we call rattites,
Speaker 1: a diverse group of flightless birds that were widespread across
Speaker 1: the scattered fragments of the supercontinent don Dwana UH and
Speaker 1: the and their dominance is waned over time, certainly with
Speaker 1: the rise of Homo sapiens. We still have all these
Speaker 1: various examples that still remain today. Yeah, and you find
Speaker 1: you find large flightless birds, well actually large and small
Speaker 1: flightless birds everywhere from New Zealand to South America. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's without even getting into the the
Speaker 1: the obvious example of just other flightless birds. There's also
Speaker 1: the penguin, of course. But well, this raises the question
Speaker 1: why do we have flightless birds all over the place
Speaker 1: like this? Well? Uh. In the nineteen nineties there was
Speaker 1: a wonderfully titled theory MOA's arc which would assume that
Speaker 1: all of these ratites descended from a common ancestor. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, that the idea here is that a
Speaker 1: a flighted ancestor became flightless on god Dwana, and then
Speaker 1: as the supercontinent split, this one flightless ancestor UH diverged
Speaker 1: into all these different flightless species. Okay, so you get
Speaker 1: one instance of these birds descending from an ancestor and
Speaker 1: becoming flightless, and then the flightless one goes all over
Speaker 1: the place, and then there's continental drift, the supercontinent splits up,
Speaker 1: and the flightless descendants of that one ancestor all go
Speaker 1: off into different places and evolve in different directions, and
Speaker 1: they become everything from the Ostrich to the key We
Speaker 1: to the moa. Right. But one of the issues with this, UH,
Speaker 1: this idea is that this would mean we'd expect something
Speaker 1: we'd expect, say in New Zealand, we'd expect the moa
Speaker 1: and the kiwi to be closely related to each other.
Speaker 1: We'd expect that any any of these ratites that live
Speaker 1: close together would also be closely related, but subsequent DNA
Speaker 1: studies have revealed that this was not the case. Instead
Speaker 1: of MOA's ark, the model seems to be one of
Speaker 1: numerous cases of flighted to flightless evolution around the world.
Speaker 1: So again, convergent evolution. UH. This repeated instance of a
Speaker 1: flighted bird evolving into a bird that doesn't fly, which
Speaker 1: seems so strange of a of a choice for evolution
Speaker 1: to make. I mean not to personify it too much,
Speaker 1: but but what is the advantage there? I think we
Speaker 1: alluded to this earlier. One of the main theories about
Speaker 1: this is that it's an energy advantage. If a bird
Speaker 1: doesn't need to fly, then it doesn't need to make
Speaker 1: huge pectoral muscles capable flapping wings that can get it
Speaker 1: into the air. And if it doesn't need to make
Speaker 1: those big muscles, it spend that energy on something else,
Speaker 1: or it can just survive on less food. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 1: and it can have just like a smaller it can
Speaker 1: have less of a basal metabolic rate. And we we've
Speaker 1: talked on the show pretty recently about birds having a
Speaker 1: pretty high BMR. So so yeah, this is basically the
Speaker 1: reason why we see the rise of these various flightless
Speaker 1: birds and in you know, all corners of the world
Speaker 1: really But then of course a number of them end
Speaker 1: up falling away. And of course we'll get into the
Speaker 1: details of of of the fall of the moa in
Speaker 1: these episodes. Uh, in the case of the moa and
Speaker 1: in the case of the elephant bird, it's it's the
Speaker 1: encountering human beings that did the trick. Yes, once again,
Speaker 1: human beings seem to be a sort of anomaly in
Speaker 1: the fossil record in the evolutionary story. Once we enter
Speaker 1: the picture, things tend to go haywire. But another question is,
Speaker 1: coming back to what we were just talking about like
Speaker 1: the energy considerations in losing flight. So it is clear
Speaker 1: that you can save a lot of energy by not
Speaker 1: being a flying bird if you don't need to fly.
Speaker 1: But in what case would a bird not need to fly?
Speaker 1: Shouldn't flying always help a bird to survive? Well, basically
Speaker 1: it comes down to, like like we said earlier, the
Speaker 1: death of the dinosaurs creating these these holes for it,
Speaker 1: these niches for it in the environment. You need a
Speaker 1: place where I mean to use a very simple even
Speaker 1: tacki metaphor here for birds they need a place to land, uh,
Speaker 1: in a place it's not already occupied by say a
Speaker 1: highly successful dinosaur or highly highly successful mammal. And so
Speaker 1: there there are corners of the world, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: other shards of Gondwana where the the the idea of
Speaker 1: a kingdom of the birds remained at least partially unchallenged
Speaker 1: by mammalian usurpers. Like nothing came nothing was already there
Speaker 1: to keep the bird from landing, and nothing came up
Speaker 1: to U to erase it from the ecosystem. Um. For instance,
Speaker 1: there's the island of Madagascar, which enjoyed something like eighty
Speaker 1: eight million years of isolate Asian during which it fostered
Speaker 1: various forms of lemur as well as the massive elephant
Speaker 1: bird uh not only a rattite but often considered the
Speaker 1: largest known rattite to ever walk the earth. But then
Speaker 1: there's also far flung New Zealand, which enjoyed an amazing
Speaker 1: degree of freedom as well from the mammalian revolution, well
Speaker 1: until roughly umred c e with the arrival of human beings.
Speaker 1: Now that's not to say they were completely free of
Speaker 1: mammals that believe they're too extinct, primitive mammals known only
Speaker 1: as the Saint Bathans mammal that are present in the
Speaker 1: in the fossil record from the Miocene. Otherwise, the only
Speaker 1: way for a mammal to get to New Zealand was
Speaker 1: to fly there or to swim there. So you'd have
Speaker 1: this huge island that's got birds on it, but does
Speaker 1: not have any large mammalian predators. It doesn't have any lions,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have any wolves, it doesn't have any foxes,
Speaker 1: anything for a bird to need to fly and escape from.
Speaker 1: So if you don't have a predator you have to
Speaker 1: fly and escape from, why even keep making wings Exactly?
Speaker 1: You just you land and you start filling those niches.
Speaker 1: There's no buffalo there, no horses again, no wolves. And
Speaker 1: then the as far as the other mammals, the ones
Speaker 1: that have swam there. I mean, we're talking about seals,
Speaker 1: sea lions, whales out in the waters around New Zealand.
Speaker 1: And they they're they're they're not gonna invade the forest
Speaker 1: anytime soon. Uh, they're doing just fine. And then other
Speaker 1: than that, we have bats. Bats flew to New Zealand,
Speaker 1: where we do see you do see an interest in
Speaker 1: case where where the bats that come to New Zealand
Speaker 1: end up spending more time on the ground than you
Speaker 1: see elsewhere in the world, particular the New Zealand lesser
Speaker 1: short tailed bat, which spends a lot of its time
Speaker 1: foraging on the forest floor, crawling around, um, basically taking
Speaker 1: on a far more terrestrial a role than bat's employee elsewhere. Again,
Speaker 1: this would make sense as an evolutionary adaptation if there's
Speaker 1: just not a lot of stuff to worry about on
Speaker 1: the ground like there is everywhere else. Yeah, Like we
Speaker 1: mentioned the kiwi earlier, Like the kiwi is an example
Speaker 1: of a ground dwelling bird. Uh, you know, it goes
Speaker 1: around at night, it eats things like worms, but there's nothing.
Speaker 1: There's nothing like a mole. There there are no moles
Speaker 1: to fill that niche in the environment. Uh, therefore the
Speaker 1: kiwi is is taking that role on even though it
Speaker 1: is a bird. Now you do see some cases where
Speaker 1: reptiles or gastropods are also you know, filling in these
Speaker 1: these niches in the environment in New Zealand. But for
Speaker 1: the most part, the birds are the real stars here. Um,
Speaker 1: we mentioned the kiwi and there are there are numerous
Speaker 1: other examples of flightless birds in New Zealand. There's a
Speaker 1: there are various extant species that we still find, such
Speaker 1: as the South Island tacky heat and then there's also
Speaker 1: a flightless bird known as the Weka. But the most
Speaker 1: amazing examples are the nine now extinct species of moa,
Speaker 1: including the giant moa that used to uh To to
Speaker 1: exert their dominance over New Zealand. Well, maybe we should
Speaker 1: take a break and then when we come back we
Speaker 1: can talk about this giant bird. Thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So we just introduced the character of the moa. This,
Speaker 1: I guess we alluded to a little bit earlier. But
Speaker 1: this giant flightless bird that used to inhabit New Zealand.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, there were nine different nine different species
Speaker 1: are known to exist. There's the upland moa, the little
Speaker 1: bush moa, and I have to stress the little bush
Speaker 1: moa was still one point three meters or four point
Speaker 1: three ft tall, so it's still a sizeable bird. Wait
Speaker 1: is it now? Is it the little bush moa or
Speaker 1: the little bush moa? Uh? The little bush moa sometimes
Speaker 1: just referred to as the bush moa. I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to think. I mean, is it like a bush moa
Speaker 1: that's little or is it being compared to a little
Speaker 1: bush or something? Oh? I think it basically lived in
Speaker 1: the bush bushma would have would have lived more in
Speaker 1: the rainforest. So essentially the moa is so successful. You
Speaker 1: have all you have like nine different varieties and different
Speaker 1: parts of New Zealand. Uh, different sizes. By the two
Speaker 1: largest were dinormous Robustus which means robust, strange bird, and
Speaker 1: dinornous novels Olndia. So we're largely gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: those two because they were the biggest. We're talking about
Speaker 1: moa that reached the heights of three point six meters
Speaker 1: or twelve feet tall. That's with the neck outstretched and
Speaker 1: there with with estimated weights of two or five and
Speaker 1: ten pounds. So these were these were sizeable critters. They
Speaker 1: looked rather like an enormous emu. So if you've seen
Speaker 1: an emu in in person, you have like a good
Speaker 1: starting point for imagining them. Like a wide, kind of
Speaker 1: shaggy feathery body on long uh you know, lethal looking
Speaker 1: legs with these great claws at the end, and a
Speaker 1: long snaking neck you know, almost like a like a
Speaker 1: like an like an elephant's trunk, at least a too
Speaker 1: comparatively small head, yes, and the skeletons. It's almost like
Speaker 1: a comically small looking head compared to the gigantic nous
Speaker 1: of its body. But so another one thing I would
Speaker 1: wonder about, of course, is okay, well we know it's
Speaker 1: probably flightless, but what does it do with its wings?
Speaker 1: Does have a little a little like t rex arm
Speaker 1: talons up there or what's happening with the wings? Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's typically what you expect, right. Flightless birds typically
Speaker 1: have at least vestigial wings, a little shrunken remnants of
Speaker 1: their long neglected flying limbs. Uh. Sometimes, as with an ostrich,
Speaker 1: there's still some sort of a use for these wings.
Speaker 1: The ostrich uses it's it's so it's little wings there
Speaker 1: to stabilize them when they run and to aid in
Speaker 1: courtship displays, even though they're you know, they do not
Speaker 1: produce flight at all. Right, Well, I mean you can see, uh,
Speaker 1: some birds that are thought to be flightless actually do
Speaker 1: kind of glide near to the ground. Some I'm like
Speaker 1: chickens can use their wings to kind of glide around
Speaker 1: near the ground. Right. But but even failing that, like,
Speaker 1: sometimes there's some purpose, even if it's a display, right, U.
Speaker 1: And even if there's not a purpose, you might expect
Speaker 1: to find, as with other flight was birds, to find
Speaker 1: some vestigial remain of that limb, you know, like little
Speaker 1: bones or something. But the moa doesn't even have vestigial wings.
Speaker 1: There are no little not like even like shrunken bones
Speaker 1: that are left over. There is no trace of their
Speaker 1: wings at all. They have simply been erased through their evolution.
Speaker 1: That's creepy. It's yeah, it's amazing. It's it's it's one
Speaker 1: of the very few known creatures to possess only two limbs.
Speaker 1: The only other creatures that I could run across that
Speaker 1: were in a similar situation at all are the Mexican
Speaker 1: moble lizard and the Serenada salamanders. Both of these are
Speaker 1: cases where creature has lost its hind legs and retains
Speaker 1: it's its front limbs. But you won't find any mammals
Speaker 1: that are like this. Even the hind legs of the
Speaker 1: great whales remain in this stigital form um. No, you
Speaker 1: find no other birds, no dinosaurs, just these nine species
Speaker 1: of giant land birds. Even the t rex w it's
Speaker 1: you know, famously small, um you know, four limbs. So
Speaker 1: we've we've discussed the various theories for why they kept
Speaker 1: even those those tiny limbs on the show before. But
Speaker 1: even the t rex still has little little arms. The
Speaker 1: moa has no arms, no, no wings at all. It's
Speaker 1: just such a strange creature. The other day I was
Speaker 1: imagining it as a kind of biological unicycle. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's so weird. It's it's like some of the
Speaker 1: illustrations look oddly huggable, but it has no arms, it
Speaker 1: has no wings, like there's nothing. I kept thinking like,
Speaker 1: why does this, why does this amaze me so? And
Speaker 1: I think part of it is that when we think
Speaker 1: about animals so I've noticed when when children think about animals,
Speaker 1: they often embody the animal, you know, they have to
Speaker 1: like act like the animal, uh, you know, pandomiment and
Speaker 1: so forth, which is a fascinating tendency. By the way,
Speaker 1: why do they naturally do that? But I think even
Speaker 1: if we're not like actually moving our bodies around, when
Speaker 1: we look at animal, there's part of us that like
Speaker 1: puts ourselves in its body, and we imagine our limbs
Speaker 1: as its limbs. And this creature has has no uh,
Speaker 1: nothing like arms at all. So if you're trying to
Speaker 1: get this in your head, just you know, stop, if
Speaker 1: you have a chance, look up some images of the moa,
Speaker 1: of its skeletal remains, and also reconstructions of what it
Speaker 1: would have looked like, and just focus on the fact
Speaker 1: that it has no vestigial wings. It's just so wonderfully weird. Now.
Speaker 1: I know you said it it looks huggable, and I
Speaker 1: sort of agree, but I do want to stress if
Speaker 1: they actually recreate these things and bring them back from extinction,
Speaker 1: do not try to hug them. No, that's a very
Speaker 1: bad idea. Right. Yeah, we discussed how potentially lethal the
Speaker 1: castle areas and the same can be said of the
Speaker 1: ostrich So I think without a doubt the moa could
Speaker 1: do some areous damage. You are still around to kick you.
Speaker 1: Oh and by the way, if you if you want
Speaker 1: to look up some images of the moa or just
Speaker 1: get additional information about them, I highly recommend checking out
Speaker 1: New Zealand Birds Online, created by ornithologists Colin ms Kelly.
Speaker 1: It's a great Uh, it's it's great. It's one of
Speaker 1: the sources we use for these three episodes. Uh. And
Speaker 1: you'll find you find it an in z birds online
Speaker 1: dot org dot in z and if you go to
Speaker 1: the search bar and you type in moa, you'll get
Speaker 1: pictures of all nine varieties illustrations of all nine varieties
Speaker 1: of moa. Now, one thing that's kind of interesting about
Speaker 1: the moa is we often tend to think, okay, where
Speaker 1: there are large land dwelling animals, they often tend to
Speaker 1: be few in number. Right. But the but for a
Speaker 1: long time, New Zealand was kind of the land of
Speaker 1: the moa, right yeah, Yeah, The moa where New Zealand's
Speaker 1: dominant land vertebrates and dominant herbivores. So they basically we
Speaker 1: went around consuming twigs, leaves, flowers, seeds, and berries from
Speaker 1: a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and vines. They also
Speaker 1: ate um mushrooms, which we'll get into a little later. Uh.
Speaker 1: They were able to process a highly fibrous diet due
Speaker 1: in part to large gizzard stones and a tough beak.
Speaker 1: So I met those gizzard stones were involved in some
Speaker 1: great curses probably so excellent magical items. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're they're basically every again, nine different varieties, like
Speaker 1: basically adapting over time to the different environments of New Zealand.
Speaker 1: And Uh. They laid enormous eggs and are suspected to
Speaker 1: have produced I think one or two per breeding season,
Speaker 1: and the incubation period was likely longer than two months.
Speaker 1: So big birds, big eggs, um more of a time
Speaker 1: investment in a limited number of eggs, and the male
Speaker 1: likely incubated the eggs, as this is what is seen
Speaker 1: in extant ratites. I don't think I knew that. Now.
Speaker 1: Just because it was the dominant land organism doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it was completely unopposed, that it was off the predation hook,
Speaker 1: because again, this is the world of birds, and and
Speaker 1: when you think of birds, you probably think of a
Speaker 1: number of different flesh eating varieties, and so the moa
Speaker 1: too had to contend with a mighty avian predator, and
Speaker 1: that predator is the largest eagle to ever live. Right,
Speaker 1: So at this point, I want to briefly come to
Speaker 1: one of our favorite subjects, which is monsters. Why are
Speaker 1: there so many monster movies about giant spiders but not
Speaker 1: about giant lions? Uh? Well, a lion is already large enough, right, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So I've got a hypothesis here. I think humans, whether
Speaker 1: through instinct or learning or combination of both, do a
Speaker 1: lot of intuitive phylogenetic sorting of predatory threat imagery. So
Speaker 1: the idea of a large cat that kills and eats
Speaker 1: you is in fact terrifying, but it's not especially unusual
Speaker 1: in the terms we've talked about on the show before,
Speaker 1: in the terms of cognitive science of religion. It's not
Speaker 1: even minimally counterintuitive. It's just sort of a fact of nature.
Speaker 1: So it would be terrifying if you were really faced
Speaker 1: with it. But it's also not a particularly arresting image
Speaker 1: in the memory, and that it doesn't stand out. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it would be a memory if it actually
Speaker 1: happened to you, but probably not in terms of fictional storytelling.
Speaker 1: Compared to something like a giant spider, A large man
Speaker 1: eating spider is definitely counterintuitive. It's not something found in nature,
Speaker 1: and because the image is unusual, it sticks in the
Speaker 1: mind and captivates our fear. And I have to think
Speaker 1: about this for a while. Like the idea of a
Speaker 1: human being eaten by an invertebrate like an insect or
Speaker 1: an arachnid, not only feels scary, it feels perverse. It
Speaker 1: violates the natural order. In Biblical terms, I think this
Speaker 1: is what would be called an abomination, and so I
Speaker 1: think our brains do this kind of unconscious threat math
Speaker 1: a lot. We sort potential threats from animals or organisms
Speaker 1: more generally by morphology or body shape, which is a
Speaker 1: simple way of sorting them along evolutionary relationships. Large carnivorous
Speaker 1: mammal shapes are natural predators. They are genuinely threatening in reality,
Speaker 1: but less captivating of the terrified imagination. I think the
Speaker 1: same goes for large reptilian shapes like crocodiles or sharks
Speaker 1: or whatever. But here's another phylogenetic or morphological branch of
Speaker 1: potential threats. How about birds. I think we intuitively sort
Speaker 1: birds into the non predator pile, right, Like we prey
Speaker 1: on birds, they don't prey on us, right, Yeah, for
Speaker 1: the most part. I mean now to come back to
Speaker 1: the cassowary and the ostrich, Like, clearly these are both
Speaker 1: potentially dangerous animals that they're encountered in the wild, but
Speaker 1: they are you know, they're kind of exceptions from the rule.
Speaker 1: They are a rather different rate of bird than the
Speaker 1: the sort of bird that most of us are going
Speaker 1: to encounter on a daily basis, right, And they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be trying to hunt us. Like, if we encountered one,
Speaker 1: you know, a cassowary in the wild and it was
Speaker 1: being aggressive, that would probably be it. You know, from
Speaker 1: its point of view, it's acting in defense. Right now,
Speaker 1: if we were to travel in time back to the
Speaker 1: age of the terror birds and the demon ducks, and
Speaker 1: that would be a little it would be a different scenario. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I would say that that age might go a lot,
Speaker 1: It might come a lot more recently into history than
Speaker 1: we would think. Uh So, maybe this, this intuitive sorting
Speaker 1: about birds is one of the main reasons movies that
Speaker 1: use dinosaurs as monsters resist putting feathers on them, right,
Speaker 1: even though many predatory dinosaurs probably had feathers, we associate
Speaker 1: feathers with birds, and birds are generally not thought of
Speaker 1: as scary, right, Yeah, when, for instance, when we think
Speaker 1: of all the times featheries are used for comedic effect, right,
Speaker 1: like a feather pillow feathers, uh, you know, stuck to
Speaker 1: a person after you know, something sticky has has has
Speaker 1: gotten on them, that sort of thing. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: there's that. But then on the other hand, and pretty
Speaker 1: much in exactly the opposite direction of what I just said,
Speaker 1: we want to think again about the counterintuitive thing. A
Speaker 1: lot of times monsters are great because they violate these categories. Know,
Speaker 1: no spider actually praise on us in the wild, but
Speaker 1: we love the giant killer spider idea that sticks in
Speaker 1: the memory. There are a lot of stories about it,
Speaker 1: and there are stories of giant predatory birds that do
Speaker 1: show up in monster mythology all around the world. There's
Speaker 1: the rock, the cock a trice, the winged on zoo
Speaker 1: from Sumerian and Babylonian myth like do you remember how
Speaker 1: in Bandersnatch it says that the demon packs is the
Speaker 1: thief of destiny. The humanoid bird monster on Zoo is
Speaker 1: the original thief of destiny. Do you know about the story?
Speaker 1: And so in this uh, there's this ancient Akkadian epic
Speaker 1: where on Zoo the bird the humanoid bird monster, steals
Speaker 1: something called the Tablet of Destiny from the King of
Speaker 1: the Gods. And the Tablet of Destiny is kind of
Speaker 1: like this great law book that's sort of a like
Speaker 1: the permanent record of everybody. It's got like all of
Speaker 1: their you know, the I don't know, all their lawbreaking
Speaker 1: or whatever written down in it. And possessing this document,
Speaker 1: this tablet gives you the power to rule the world.
Speaker 1: And so when on Zoo the bird monster steals it,
Speaker 1: he has to be destroyed I think by Marduke. Well
Speaker 1: that's what Marduk's for rights, that's pretty much his job.
Speaker 1: I mean, Marduke. It's funny Marduk is the hero of
Speaker 1: the story, but in in my feeling, Marduke's also he's
Speaker 1: often kind of the party pooper, Like there's a great
Speaker 1: monster getting up to no good and then Marduke comes
Speaker 1: in and just puts a lid on everything. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: the humanoid figure that that gets rid of the interesting characters.
Speaker 1: He's like the assistant principle that comes in and stops
Speaker 1: the party. Um. But so I think the bird as
Speaker 1: man eater story. It does pass the minimally counterintuitive test
Speaker 1: for mythological resilience. If a giant hawk could swoop down
Speaker 1: from the sky and bite your head off, that image
Speaker 1: that makes a good story that would stick in your memory. Um. So,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how exactly that goes in conflict with
Speaker 1: the fact that, like people won't put feathers on dinosaurs
Speaker 1: and movies because they're not scary enough. Maybe maybe these
Speaker 1: things two things are just both true and in competition
Speaker 1: with each other. Like the feathered monster has a cognitive
Speaker 1: advantage because it's more counterintuitive stands out in memory, but
Speaker 1: the scaly monster has a cognitive advantage because it's physical
Speaker 1: features are more naturally prone to activate our threat responses.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you think is going on there,
Speaker 1: but as we we love to think about monsters, and
Speaker 1: I think that that tension is interesting. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: again we're talking about the idea of monstrous birds here,
Speaker 1: not just birds perceived as a threat, because certainly there
Speaker 1: are people that are afraid of birds or a little
Speaker 1: wigged out by birds when they're close to them. Certainly
Speaker 1: Hitchcock's the birds managed to strike a nerve with people.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the idea of a a bird being large
Speaker 1: enough to do not just like pester you or two
Speaker 1: uh or too certainly in a large number attack you,
Speaker 1: but like a single handedly take you out and consume you,
Speaker 1: to prey on you, to to hunt you as if
Speaker 1: you were its dinner. Yeah. Uh. Now I want to
Speaker 1: talk for a moment about a very important fossil in
Speaker 1: physical anthropology, which is a fossil skull that is between
Speaker 1: two and three million years old. I think last time
Speaker 1: I saw the dating it was like two point eight
Speaker 1: million years old. They thought it was unearthed from a
Speaker 1: quarry in South Africa in nineteen four in a place
Speaker 1: called Tongue. And it is the skull of a young
Speaker 1: hominid now known to be from the extinct human relative
Speaker 1: Australopithecus africanus. And note that this is a different species
Speaker 1: from australi Epithecus afarensis, which is the species to which
Speaker 1: the famous Lucy skeleton belonged. Uh So, this Africanus skull
Speaker 1: is known as the Tongue child, and evidence indicates that
Speaker 1: this hominid died when it was about three years old,
Speaker 1: and we actually have a lot of evidence now indicating
Speaker 1: exactly what happened when it died, how its death came about.
Speaker 1: Just a warning. This is a kind of sad and
Speaker 1: grizzly story, but also biologically fascinating. So the tongue child
Speaker 1: skull has puncture marks in the bone at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the eye sockets, and these puncture marks are similar
Speaker 1: to the marks made on other man mammals like monkeys
Speaker 1: when eagles attack them today. Also, the skull was found
Speaker 1: in a soil bed along with eggshell fragments, as well
Speaker 1: as the bones of many other small animals, including rodents, lizards,
Speaker 1: juvenile antelopes, and baboons, and a lot of these other
Speaker 1: bones also show damage that looks like it could have
Speaker 1: been caused by the beaks and talents of a large eagle.
Speaker 1: The South African paleontologist Lee Burger has argued that it
Speaker 1: was an eagle that killed this child. He argued for
Speaker 1: the eagle predation hypothesis. For example, in in a short
Speaker 1: communication I was reading to the journal the American Journal
Speaker 1: of Physical Anthropology in two thousands six, writing that quote
Speaker 1: re examination of the tongue juvenile hominin specimen, the type
Speaker 1: specimen of Australia Epithecus africanus reveals previously undescribed damage to
Speaker 1: the orbital floors that is nearly identical to that scene
Speaker 1: in the crania of monkeys preyed upon by crowned hawk Eagles.
Speaker 1: And Burger argued that this evidence, along with the strange
Speaker 1: collection of other animal bones at the side of the
Speaker 1: tongue child's discovery quote, strongly supports the hypothesis that a
Speaker 1: bird of prey was an accumulating agent at tongue and
Speaker 1: that the tongue child itself was a victim of a
Speaker 1: bird of prey. I think this is an example of
Speaker 1: how scientific writing so often has a way of stating
Speaker 1: things that is like facially abstract, bordering on euphemistic, but
Speaker 1: so much so that it actually sounds more horrifying. So
Speaker 1: this bird of prey millions of years ago was not
Speaker 1: a bone collector but an accumulating agent. Well, that makes
Speaker 1: it look it sounds like it was working for some dark,
Speaker 1: other force. Right now, if this hypothesis about the town
Speaker 1: child is correct, uh, and from what I read, I
Speaker 1: think it probably is. Uh. We don't know for sure
Speaker 1: exactly what kind of bird killed the child, but the
Speaker 1: paper I was just quoting from raws attention to the
Speaker 1: similarities between the marks on the fossil skull and the
Speaker 1: wounds left by a modern bird of prey. It still
Speaker 1: exists today, called the crowned hawk eagle or stefan Oidas coronatus,
Speaker 1: also just known as the crowned eagle. This is a
Speaker 1: truly frightening and magnificent bird, so it lives throughout central,
Speaker 1: southern and eastern Africa, mostly inhabiting like mountains and forests.
Speaker 1: Rainforest places with tall trees also sometimes found in the savannahs.
Speaker 1: These eagles can weigh up to ten pounds or about
Speaker 1: five kilograms, with a wingspan of up to six feet
Speaker 1: or about a hundred and eighty centimeters. They're large, they're
Speaker 1: not the largest eagle. The females are generally larger than
Speaker 1: the males, and the crowned eagle gets its name from
Speaker 1: a crest of feathers on the head. Sometimes it's got
Speaker 1: feathers sticking straight up, but sometimes it looks just like
Speaker 1: a bulging of the feathers towards the back of the
Speaker 1: head and looks a little bit like Gary Oldman's weird
Speaker 1: vampire bun head from the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula. It
Speaker 1: does really Yeah, do do you see what I'm saying?
Speaker 1: And plush? The spirit of of the two are closely
Speaker 1: linked here. Yes, I imagine this eagle also loves the
Speaker 1: children of the night because like Dracula, this bird is
Speaker 1: an astonishingly strong hunter. They've been known to kill prey
Speaker 1: more than four times their size. And I think this
Speaker 1: is this is key too, because certainly, even in an
Speaker 1: urban environment like in Atlanta, we see vultures and hawks
Speaker 1: fairly common. Hawks especially, you see them around a lot
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of a lot of creatures for
Speaker 1: them to prey on. We went into the the urban
Speaker 1: advantages of the hawk in our one of our previous episodes,
Speaker 1: Oh Yeah. We talked with Jason Warred about the about
Speaker 1: the peregrine falcon and it's urban hunting methods where it'll
Speaker 1: sit up on top of a building and wait for
Speaker 1: its prey birds to fly underneath and then it die
Speaker 1: of bombs them from above. But generally you think about
Speaker 1: a bird like this grabbing a bird of this nature,
Speaker 1: grabbing something like man maybe a sad and maybe it
Speaker 1: grabs a squirrel. Uh, maybe maybe it even gets a
Speaker 1: small dog. But you don't think about them grabbing something
Speaker 1: four times their size right now. If they grab something
Speaker 1: four times their size, they're not going to be able
Speaker 1: to carry it away. But they can totally kill this
Speaker 1: thing and either eat it where it falls, or take
Speaker 1: it apart and take pieces with them. So when attacking
Speaker 1: large prey, the predatory strategy of the crowned eagle often involves.
Speaker 1: It'll it'll involve swooping down from above and then using
Speaker 1: their meaty legs and fearsome hind talents to break the
Speaker 1: prey animals spine when they make contact. Uh. They hunt
Speaker 1: a diverse range of prey, including monkeys, antelopes, and other
Speaker 1: small mammals and lizards. Uh. And they, like I was saying,
Speaker 1: two basically feasting strategies. Once they've got a prey animal dead,
Speaker 1: if it's small enough, they'll try to carry it with
Speaker 1: them up to a safe tree top to eat at
Speaker 1: their leisure. If the prey is too large to carry,
Speaker 1: they will either eat it where they have killed it,
Speaker 1: or sometimes they'll they'll they'll tear you know, chunks of
Speaker 1: it off. They'll tear off ahead or tear off an
Speaker 1: arm or something and take it away with them, one
Speaker 1: piece at a time. Another interesting fact about them, the
Speaker 1: crowned hawk eagle sometimes uh. Well, so, they generally lay
Speaker 1: one or two eggs per nest brood, and if there
Speaker 1: are two eggs, when the eggs hatch, the larger of
Speaker 1: the two chicks usually kills its sibling. The parents are
Speaker 1: known to guard their newborn chicks very ferociously. You know,
Speaker 1: they violently repel encroaching animals. And so you might have
Speaker 1: a question, well, would these powerful hunters that can kill
Speaker 1: animals much larger than themselves, would they be able to
Speaker 1: attack humans today? Uh? Possibly, but if so, it is rare.
Speaker 1: I don't wanna, you know, get you in the idea
Speaker 1: that you should be afraid of or demonize these birds.
Speaker 1: But there are a few accounts of crowned eagles attacking children.
Speaker 1: The accounts are mostly older. It was kind of hard
Speaker 1: for me to tell how much stock we should put
Speaker 1: in them. But such a claim of crowned eagle attacks
Speaker 1: on humans does not at all seemed to be unheard of,
Speaker 1: and they do regularly attack monkeys, which of course are
Speaker 1: shaped a lot like us, and small human children would
Speaker 1: be within the size range of their prey. Remember, they
Speaker 1: can attack prey more than four times their size, so
Speaker 1: they can attack animals that are maybe like forty five pounds,
Speaker 1: or again be in awe of their predatory strings. I
Speaker 1: don't mean to demonize these animals, because I know their
Speaker 1: habitats are threatened now and their numbers are declining, and
Speaker 1: but in general, a smile child is likely to to
Speaker 1: flip certain switches in a in a sizeable predator that
Speaker 1: might normally not not switch on when they see a
Speaker 1: fully grown human. Oh well, yeah, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you ever looked up those videos on the internet of
Speaker 1: small children against the glass and like lying enclosures at
Speaker 1: a zoo. Oh, I mean, I've I've taken my son
Speaker 1: when he was smaller. I remember taking him to uh
Speaker 1: some sort of a zoo like uh place somewhere else
Speaker 1: in Arizona. I think maybe it was Arizona even But
Speaker 1: but when we were there, it's like there was a
Speaker 1: one part. We're walking out there are these cages, and
Speaker 1: they had some large predatory cats, and you can just
Speaker 1: see them like there's a change in the way they
Speaker 1: are viewing their surroundings. There's a change in their body language.
Speaker 1: You can you can tell that they're you know, even
Speaker 1: if they're not actively hunting your child, they're reacting to
Speaker 1: it as if it is potential food. Yes, I mean
Speaker 1: the same way that the human instinct is activated by
Speaker 1: a small child. You know, most adult humans would see
Speaker 1: a small child and want to say, is that child okay?
Speaker 1: You know you want to take care of them delicious. Yes,
Speaker 1: the looks very small, very weak, easy, easy kill. Not
Speaker 1: to shame any of these predators, that's just that's just
Speaker 1: the coating. That's the basic UH way of the tooth
Speaker 1: and claw. They're right. So you've got these claims of
Speaker 1: modern eagle attacks on on human children. But if these
Speaker 1: claims are generally correct, even then it does appear to
Speaker 1: be a kind of unusual thing to happen, you know,
Speaker 1: something that just happens here. And there was there for
Speaker 1: a predatory bird that would have had humans more firmly
Speaker 1: within its prey buffet, but you know, even larger, even
Speaker 1: more diverse in the kinds of prey it would seek out.
Speaker 1: And that brings us back to New Zealand. UH in
Speaker 1: the age of the Moa and the MOA's primary enemy.
Speaker 1: It's it's primary predator, the has eagle. So the Maori
Speaker 1: people of New Zealand have had legends of gigantic birds.
Speaker 1: Apparently there are several different legends of gigantic birds that
Speaker 1: have been linked somewhat too real bird species. The two
Speaker 1: different legendary bird monsters that I was reading about from
Speaker 1: the Maori where the ta Hokioi or the Pua Kai.
Speaker 1: But there may be other legends that sort of fit
Speaker 1: into this mix as well. And uh and in real quick,
Speaker 1: I want to again reminder that the Maori came to
Speaker 1: New Zealand less than a thousand years ago, so we're
Speaker 1: talking um roughly. Eh. Well, we'll get more into into
Speaker 1: the history of the Maori and they're they're coming to
Speaker 1: New Zealand and their eventual interaction with other human beings
Speaker 1: uh in our in our second episode. But just remind
Speaker 1: everybody about the time frame we're talking here. So this
Speaker 1: this giant bird monster of Maori legend. It's a huge
Speaker 1: bird with black and white feathers. It's got a red
Speaker 1: crest and yellow green coloring on the tips of its wings.
Speaker 1: It was believed in some legends to have raised the
Speaker 1: hawk to the heavens and was known in other some
Speaker 1: legends as a man eater. It's not only a feature
Speaker 1: of Maori oral tradition, but it's it's terrifying frame appears
Speaker 1: in archaic rock carvings of the area, and many paleontologists
Speaker 1: now believe that the this animal, the ta hokioi or
Speaker 1: the Puakai, is not purely fictional mythical as a monster
Speaker 1: like the on Zoo. It may be the cultural memory
Speaker 1: of this real giant predatory bird of New Zealand, known
Speaker 1: as the Hosts eagle or Harpagurnus mori, which again would
Speaker 1: have been the predator that preyed on the moa because
Speaker 1: again less than a thousand years ago when the Maori arrived,
Speaker 1: when the archaic mallory arrived in New Zealand, they would
Speaker 1: have encountered, uh the nine species of moa. They would
Speaker 1: have encountered Hosts eagle in its predation of the moa.
Speaker 1: Like all this was the world, this unique environment was
Speaker 1: in full swing when they first arrived. Hosts eagle was
Speaker 1: a beast. I think if we saw it we would
Speaker 1: be in awe It could weigh up to fifteen kilograms,
Speaker 1: which is about thirty three pounds. The female might have
Speaker 1: had a wingspan of up to three meters or almost
Speaker 1: ten feet. Like other birds of prey, often the female
Speaker 1: was larger than the male. Remember that the most powerful
Speaker 1: predatory bird in the world today not the largest, but
Speaker 1: the most powerful hunter, the crowned eagle, weighs up to
Speaker 1: only about ten pounds or about five kilograms. This is
Speaker 1: like three times bigger, and with their size and hunting power,
Speaker 1: hosts eagle could and did regularly take down moa as prey.
Speaker 1: To think about how amazing this is given the size
Speaker 1: of the moa. What were we saying about the size
Speaker 1: of the moa earlier? Oh, we talked about ten to
Speaker 1: twelve feet with their with their head stretched out. I
Speaker 1: mean even the even the bush moa was like four
Speaker 1: and a half feet tall, you know, like, yeah, the
Speaker 1: little bushma. Yeah, I'm sure they were. They were really
Speaker 1: at a loss here. So a predatory encounter might have
Speaker 1: involved waiting at say a tree top near a water source,
Speaker 1: and then waiting for a moa to come out and
Speaker 1: take a drink, and the hosts eagle could then swoop
Speaker 1: down at the moa at eighty kilometers per hour about
Speaker 1: fifty miles per hour. And again, think of something that
Speaker 1: weighs forty pounds hitting you at about fifty miles per hour.
Speaker 1: Some forensic analysis of the bones of the hosts eagle,
Speaker 1: I know there was some analysis done through cat scans
Speaker 1: and things. Uh. This shows that the eagle's body was
Speaker 1: by design able to absorb shocks from high impact speed.
Speaker 1: Um So at the impact the predator comes in, talents
Speaker 1: out and it has talents that could penetrate bone. So
Speaker 1: after killing the moa or the other large prey bird,
Speaker 1: the eagle could usually take its time eating the kill
Speaker 1: in the spot because they were not large mammalian predators
Speaker 1: to worry about coming along. Because this is New Zealand, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've I've also heard it. Heard it described that the
Speaker 1: talents of Hassi eagle were about the size of a
Speaker 1: tiger's clause. That's how big they were. Yes, So I
Speaker 1: was reading an article in The Independent that interviewed Paul Scofield,
Speaker 1: curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. This was
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine and Schofield is also the author
Speaker 1: of one of the papers that was doing the forensic
Speaker 1: analysis of the hostiagle skeleton. And also, by the way,
Speaker 1: the Canterbury Museum is the same place where Alan Curnow
Speaker 1: saw the Moa skeleton that he writes the poem about.
Speaker 1: But so Schofield says, quote, it was certainly capable of
Speaker 1: swooping down and taking a child. They had the ability
Speaker 1: to not only strike with their talents, but to close
Speaker 1: the talents and put them through quite solid objects such
Speaker 1: as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.
Speaker 1: So think about So it comes in with the claws extended,
Speaker 1: can hit you at high speed with amazing force and
Speaker 1: then latch on with the claws to cut through flesh.
Speaker 1: And this would of course leave you bleeding and all
Speaker 1: of that. And Schofield said, has eagle wasn't just the
Speaker 1: equivalent of a giant predatory bird, It was the equivalent
Speaker 1: of a lion. Wow, Yeah, a lion of the air. Again,
Speaker 1: it's just a it's like an order of magnitude beyond
Speaker 1: any kind of flying predatory bird that we have we've
Speaker 1: become accustomed to in our our world today. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I think like a like a griffin, you know,
Speaker 1: like this this is a flying it's like a flying
Speaker 1: big cat if a leopard could fly. So again the
Speaker 1: Maori arrived, they encounter this world and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and we'll discuss the details of this later, but basically
Speaker 1: the moment would last scarcely more than a century after
Speaker 1: that they were they were rather swiftly a adicated by
Speaker 1: human beings, and therefore hoss eagle. Since it depended on
Speaker 1: the moa for food, it went away as well. But
Speaker 1: there would have been time there, so there was. There was,
Speaker 1: There was a period of time and Mallory history for
Speaker 1: their for the archaic mallory and for the moa hunting mallory,
Speaker 1: for for them to have their children picked off by
Speaker 1: this terrifying bird, this terrifying predator of the sky. It's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine, but I just did. Well. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're terrifying predators of the land. Are bad enough when
Speaker 1: they can come from above. I don't know what. That
Speaker 1: just seems like that would that would entail a whole
Speaker 1: reordering of the way you view, you know, danger and
Speaker 1: safety in the world, because you generally think the sky
Speaker 1: at least is safe. I don't need to look that way.
Speaker 1: All right, We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll
Speaker 1: be right back and for more discussions of the mighty moa. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So one question that comes up. We're in
Speaker 1: man eationing this this clash between these enormous moa and
Speaker 1: this enormous eagle clash of the giant birds, and so
Speaker 1: I was wondering, well, how does how would a giant
Speaker 1: moa defend itself? And like what kind of fight could
Speaker 1: it put up? So we already mentioned how if we
Speaker 1: look to extent to ratites, we looked to the Austrians,
Speaker 1: we looked at the Castle Wary, we see excellent examples
Speaker 1: of just how ferocious a kick from one of these
Speaker 1: creatures would be. But then you start image. So if
Speaker 1: you're imagining, say, say an unarmed human uh coming up
Speaker 1: and trying to start uh sort of fight with say
Speaker 1: an Austria's or Castlewary or perhaps a moa, that's not
Speaker 1: a good idea. You can imagine how that's gonna go
Speaker 1: kick wise, um, you know, or or any type of
Speaker 1: land predator trying to mess with one of these these creatures.
Speaker 1: But if something is coming from above like it does seem,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't find a lot of sources on this
Speaker 1: about like what the MOA's defensive capabilities would have would
Speaker 1: have been But if it certainly have it had trouble
Speaker 1: kicking that high. What could it do if something was
Speaker 1: attacking its back? You know, it could it could peck
Speaker 1: at it. It could use its beak certainly, Um maybe,
Speaker 1: and this is just me guessing. I'm thinking maybe it
Speaker 1: could whip it with its neck a little bit. That is,
Speaker 1: that is the strategy we see with giraffes. You know,
Speaker 1: there's there's footage of giraffes fighting each other with using
Speaker 1: them next as these broad whips, and certainly the cat.
Speaker 1: Certainly the MOA's neck was was long and tough, but
Speaker 1: I don't know if it could actually have used it effectively,
Speaker 1: certainly against host eagle, which again is this this lion
Speaker 1: of the sky attacking it with enormous talents and perhaps
Speaker 1: making pretty short work of it if it got the drop. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're coming out a large bird like the moa
Speaker 1: from below, I mean obviously that that's not the place
Speaker 1: you want to be. But what does it do on
Speaker 1: its back? I mean, it seems like the perfect place
Speaker 1: to pray on it, and you can make wounds on
Speaker 1: the back of a large bird. Like this, that is
Speaker 1: it's exposed and you know, if you can get the
Speaker 1: talents in there and get out, even if you don't
Speaker 1: break its back when you first hit it. Uh, probably
Speaker 1: just like what bleeds to death, it's it's there and
Speaker 1: drowns in its own blood. Yeah. So it seems like
Speaker 1: a case where the moa was just particularly vulnerable to
Speaker 1: hass Siegel. But at the same time, it means hoss
Speaker 1: Eagle was particularly dependent upon the moa like they were.
Speaker 1: They were locked in this. In this you can say
Speaker 1: eternal struggle. I guess you want to get be dramatic
Speaker 1: about it, but really an eternal balance until until this
Speaker 1: new force, this new terror, came to unbalance that that equation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well it's um. I mean, it's weird to think about
Speaker 1: because like when you see a predator chasing prey in nature,
Speaker 1: I think naturally most of our sympathies are with the
Speaker 1: prey animal, and that makes sense. Like you know, if
Speaker 1: you were to see one person trying to hurt another person,
Speaker 1: your sympathies are with the victim. But in in nature
Speaker 1: you could think about it as a as a kind
Speaker 1: of balanced thing because the predator is also trying it's
Speaker 1: just trying to survive. It is fighting starvation every every
Speaker 1: day in this same way that the prey animal is
Speaker 1: fighting the predator that's trying to kill it. Right, And
Speaker 1: again we we already mentioned We'll get into some of
Speaker 1: the genetic data on this in the next episode. But
Speaker 1: the MoMA was highly successful and it was spread all
Speaker 1: over New Zealand, so you know, it was a situation
Speaker 1: where it could support a dominant predator like this. Their
Speaker 1: numbers were such that the predator was ultimately playing an
Speaker 1: important role in supporting a healthy moa population. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: I mean, one thing I've read is that the hostiegel
Speaker 1: probably would have been very few in number, right, like
Speaker 1: most apex predators are, right, you know, they tend to
Speaker 1: be their needs to be many fewer of them than
Speaker 1: there are of the prey animals or the or the
Speaker 1: ecosystem can't sustain itself. Now, it's it's easy to grasp
Speaker 1: only the extinction of the moa came hand in hand
Speaker 1: with the extinction of of the great hass eagle, But
Speaker 1: extinction impacts a wide variety of species, and when you
Speaker 1: have such an established creature as the nine moa species,
Speaker 1: you have a lot of organisms that come to depend
Speaker 1: upon them. So you know, you're talking about bacteria, parasites,
Speaker 1: fist scavengers, predators, but also whatever plants and fungi have
Speaker 1: come to depend on their feeding habits to propagate. And
Speaker 1: so I ran across an interesting study that got into
Speaker 1: some of this. In two thousand eighteen, researchers from the
Speaker 1: University of Adelaide's Australian Center for Ancient DNA or a
Speaker 1: c a D published a study in the journal the
Speaker 1: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the contents
Speaker 1: of dried dung from four varieties of giant moa. Thank god,
Speaker 1: we're getting into some copper lights. Yeah, I mean we can.
Speaker 1: You can learn a lot from copper copper lights. You know,
Speaker 1: they're highly useful and uncovering the especially in this case
Speaker 1: the genetic records of diet pathogens and even the behavior
Speaker 1: of the creatures in question. So the researchers here found
Speaker 1: that the moa consumed a wide variety of mushrooms and
Speaker 1: fung gui, including species that are critical for New Zealand's
Speaker 1: beach for us, and they were they were very interested.
Speaker 1: The researchers were very interested in exploring the prior but
Speaker 1: unproven hypothesis that many New Zealand fungi with bright colored
Speaker 1: fruiting bodies are adapted for dispersal by native ground dwelling birds.
Speaker 1: Now this couldn't really be tested because all the moa
Speaker 1: are extinct, But but this gave them a chance to
Speaker 1: sort of to explore it a little bit, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So in general they found confirmation regarding diet in a
Speaker 1: few moa species. So they found that the little bush moa,
Speaker 1: for instance, which would have resided in the rainforest, fed
Speaker 1: mostly on fibrous forest vegetation. Upland moa and giant moa
Speaker 1: were widespread dietary generalist, with upland moa populating the higher altitudes,
Speaker 1: so they would have eaten a wider variety of things.
Speaker 1: But the mushroom contents of the moa dung uh certainly
Speaker 1: contained plant symbiotic fungi that the wide ranging moa would
Speaker 1: have spread as they ranged, grazed, and pooped. According to
Speaker 1: lead author Alex Boast, then PhD student at Land Care Research, quote, worryingly,
Speaker 1: introduced mammals which consume these mushrooms don't appear to produce
Speaker 1: fertile spores. So this critical ecosystem function of the giant
Speaker 1: birds has been lost, with serious implications for the long
Speaker 1: term health of New Zealand's beach forest. So what does
Speaker 1: that mean that? Um, the mushrooms passing through the digestive
Speaker 1: system of the birds would have still been reproductively viable.
Speaker 1: But going through mammal digestive systems, they're not. Right. The
Speaker 1: mammals that have come in to fill that ecological niche
Speaker 1: that was left by the by the now extinct moa
Speaker 1: like there, they'll eat the same mushrooms. Perhaps they'll even
Speaker 1: spread them, uh even you know, travel you know, to
Speaker 1: decent distances. But the spores they leave behind are not viable.
Speaker 1: They're not able to actually uh fulfill the role that
Speaker 1: the moa fulfilled in spreading those spores. And again, those
Speaker 1: the mushrooms uh have this crucial relationship with with the
Speaker 1: trees of the beach forest. So um, this is again
Speaker 1: I think it's just a it's a wonderful example of
Speaker 1: of the cascading effects of extinction. They also found evidence
Speaker 1: of parasites in those copper lights. They found a quote
Speaker 1: surprising diversity of parasites, many completely new to science. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: and these are these are largely parasites that would have
Speaker 1: been exclusive to the Moa uh and or the Moa
Speaker 1: species in question that just went extinct with their hosts.
Speaker 1: And these included, for instance, various types of nematodes uh.
Speaker 1: So you know again, you you you can't take a
Speaker 1: species out of the out of the game without impacting
Speaker 1: numerous other species as well. And it's certainly going to
Speaker 1: be the case when you have such a firmly established
Speaker 1: and dominant species as the Moa of New Zealand. I'm
Speaker 1: mourned for the Moa. Yeah, it's hard not to, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I do want to stress that that, and
Speaker 1: we'll get more into the relationship between the Moa and
Speaker 1: the Maori people in our next episode. But it is
Speaker 1: crucial not to not to feel a special amount of
Speaker 1: shame over over the Maori in this situation, because again,
Speaker 1: any time human beings have come into contact with new ecosystems,
Speaker 1: they have brought extinction with them. We change everywhere we go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's that is just that is the nature of
Speaker 1: human beings. Um, you know, no, no matter where they go,
Speaker 1: no matter what the time period. We did a previous
Speaker 1: episode where we talked about Roman extinctions just brought on
Speaker 1: by the spread of Roman civilization. Um, and we previously
Speaker 1: mentioned the elephant bird of Madagascar, similar situation. Uh it was,
Speaker 1: it was doing really well than humans came, and that
Speaker 1: spelled its doom. Now, the story of that doom in
Speaker 1: the case of the moa is something we're going to
Speaker 1: get more into in our next episode. Though. You know,
Speaker 1: I just thought of another thing from Madagascar. I believe
Speaker 1: I was just reading earlier today that a an extinct
Speaker 1: relative of the crowned eagle of Africa was the Madagascar
Speaker 1: crowned eagle. But it's gone because when humans came to Madagascar,
Speaker 1: they hunted its primary prey animal, the giant lemur, to extinction,
Speaker 1: and then it had no prey anymore. There you go,
Speaker 1: all right, So we just keep doing it, and we
Speaker 1: just keep doing it, and yes, some some amazing creatures
Speaker 1: have been lost along the way. But I tell you,
Speaker 1: the moa. It I'm just really impressed with this animal.
Speaker 1: I think it is my It is my my new
Speaker 1: spirit animal for these trying times we live in. Uh
Speaker 1: I will I will ease myself into the imagined arms
Speaker 1: of the moa. It has no arms, It has no wings,
Speaker 1: but there's something about its nature that I can I
Speaker 1: can cuddle up with and uh and find comfort in.
Speaker 1: You're gonna become the lower ax of the rat eye.
Speaker 1: It's you're gonna go on a quest where you want
Speaker 1: people to stop using the ostrich as the example animal
Speaker 1: of like cowardice and ignorance. I'm gonna have to I
Speaker 1: need to get out of the house and go look
Speaker 1: at some rattites this uh, this weekend. There is there's
Speaker 1: an email that lives fairly close to my house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's its name? Big Glue? Biglue the email. I don't
Speaker 1: think I may have to go feed Big Glue this weekend. Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't think I know about Big Glue. Oh well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you about it when we go at the air.
Speaker 1: You can find Big Lu for yourself alright. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: go and check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. They're a bunch of them. You can find
Speaker 1: them wherever you get your podcasts, and you can also
Speaker 1: find us by going to special Blow your Mind dot
Speaker 1: com that will shoot you over to the I heart
Speaker 1: listing for this show wherever you get the show. Just
Speaker 1: make sure you rate review and subscribe. Huge thanks as
Speaker 1: always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
Speaker 1: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
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