Speaker 1: And now for traffic, we take you to week Way
Speaker 1: Ray in the Channel five sky skiff. Hey, Jim, we're
Speaker 1: pretty clear of sandstorms across much of the dune seed
Speaker 1: this morning, so that's great news for skyhopper and land
Speaker 1: speeder traffic. So far, however, we're already seeing a bit
Speaker 1: of pre wunt to eve classic traffic heading into moss Aspec. Plus,
Speaker 1: things are grinding to a halt out near the Great
Speaker 1: Pit of Carcoon and the walp rats are play and
Speaker 1: as it looks like the huts are hosting another multi
Speaker 1: skiff Sarlac offering. Always best to steer clear unless you've
Speaker 1: got an invite, especially if you've got an invite. All
Speaker 1: too true. Ray. Now let's check in with Merge surgeon
Speaker 1: on for a look at this week's solar activity. Looks
Speaker 1: like we're in for a double helping of solar flares.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: here we are finally here in a galaxy far far away.
Speaker 1: I did not think we would end up doing Star
Speaker 1: Wars content, especially so close to May fourth, but not
Speaker 1: on it. Things are getting strange. Yeah. Now, fittingly, we're
Speaker 1: recording this episode on May the fourth, but that that
Speaker 1: just benefits the two of us. The listeners are gonna
Speaker 1: get it a little later. However, since the May the
Speaker 1: fourth like sales begin before May the fourth, I think
Speaker 1: it's okay to assume that May the fourth is just
Speaker 1: generally a a you know, a multi day even multi
Speaker 1: week affair in which we celebrate Star Wars. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like Christmas gradually creeps out to the edges. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: thirty days of May the fourth or what have you. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: so you've been going on a Star Wars expedition in
Speaker 1: your house, right, Yeah? Yeah, we've been watching all the
Speaker 1: all the movies. We also watched The Mandalorian. I think
Speaker 1: at this point we've watched everything except the most recent one,
Speaker 1: and we're going to catch that one tonight because it
Speaker 1: just dropped on Disney Plus. But yeah, we've been we've
Speaker 1: been full, full blown into the Star Wars um and
Speaker 1: it's been It's been pretty fun because I've i think
Speaker 1: I've been personally been like several different stereotypical Star Wars
Speaker 1: fans over the years. I was born in seventy eight,
Speaker 1: so the original trilogy and their associated toys were just
Speaker 1: a key part of my childhood and uh and just
Speaker 1: as aspects of their structure were based on you know,
Speaker 1: archetypes of comparative mythology. You know, these films introduced many
Speaker 1: of us to some of these mythic energies. So I
Speaker 1: remember loving these films as a child. I remember lapsing
Speaker 1: somewhat during what I think of as like the Star
Speaker 1: Wars dark Age of the early and mid nineties. I
Speaker 1: think that's when I was getting like the Star Wars
Speaker 1: Insider fan magazine. Oh cool, yeah, and he'd kind of
Speaker 1: gone uh underground. I mean, I don't want to say
Speaker 1: undergund because obviously there was there was still tons of
Speaker 1: content coming out and the you know, the Expanded Universe
Speaker 1: and so forth. There were books, there were comics, there
Speaker 1: were there were games, but it wasn't as as prevalent
Speaker 1: uh in the pop culture at that time. But of
Speaker 1: course it was gearing up because then came, uh, the
Speaker 1: the prequels, right um uh. Now, I I too remember
Speaker 1: reading some of the extended Universe stuff and getting into
Speaker 1: that and the like the late nineties but then we
Speaker 1: had Phantom Menace, and I remember being first of all,
Speaker 1: like super excited for it, and then I was a
Speaker 1: bit of a prequel apologist there for a bit regarding
Speaker 1: the Phantom Menace, and then I became kind of a
Speaker 1: snarky fan who focused only on the flaws of the
Speaker 1: prequel films. And I'd say I didn't fully recover from
Speaker 1: that until I watched The Mandalorian with my family, uh,
Speaker 1: and we all loved it. And then we started watching
Speaker 1: all the films again. And and now I'm I'm leaning
Speaker 1: into the force. I'm I'm I'm just saying, I'm enjoying
Speaker 1: all of them. I've enjoyed each film that I've watched,
Speaker 1: and and she really kind of tried to watch them,
Speaker 1: you know, with my son, but also kind of threw
Speaker 1: his eyes. And it's been a blast. What are his favorites?
Speaker 1: He tells me that his favorites are the Phantom Menace
Speaker 1: and let's see Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi,
Speaker 1: but especially Phantom Menace. He in fact requested that we
Speaker 1: watched that one again, and so we watched half of
Speaker 1: it last night. Those it does not escape my attention
Speaker 1: that those are the two that have the highest quotient
Speaker 1: of cuteness content they do, they have they have cuteness,
Speaker 1: But then also they just have a ton of creatures.
Speaker 1: And I think that's also key because like The Phantom Menace,
Speaker 1: most of it takes place on like a dinosaur ridden uh,
Speaker 1: you know planet where there's just you know, monster after
Speaker 1: monster after monster, and and yeah, you have the comic
Speaker 1: elements as well, and you have an actual child in it,
Speaker 1: which I think also is adds this kind of anchor
Speaker 1: for younger viewers, the going against what I was just
Speaker 1: saying about cuteness. Obviously, Return of the Jedi is where
Speaker 1: we get the the e Walks, the classic Teddy Bear planet.
Speaker 1: But the first half of Return of the Jedi its
Speaker 1: just when we rewatched it not too long ago, I
Speaker 1: was like, man, I love this wasn't when I was
Speaker 1: a kid. But the first half of this movie is gross.
Speaker 1: It is full of like just like like nasty, slimy
Speaker 1: critters everywhere and and and horrible monsters and uh. And
Speaker 1: I would say, actually, the thing maybe that stands out
Speaker 1: the most in my mind is going to be the
Speaker 1: subject of today's episode, which is the Sarlac. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: the Sarlac features heavily into this portion of the film,
Speaker 1: and it is it's just something that just captures. Uh.
Speaker 1: It certainly captures the young imagination, you know, here's this pit,
Speaker 1: here is this thing. And I think it it also
Speaker 1: played well with the action figures growing up, because you
Speaker 1: could you could pretty much make a star lack there was.
Speaker 1: I don't think there was a star lak Um like
Speaker 1: action play set or anything, because how wrong you are,
Speaker 1: really they had one because I was just thinking you
Speaker 1: just had You had dirt, you had holes, you had
Speaker 1: things you could do with like a bedspread, and you
Speaker 1: had instant Sarlac Robert. I want you to scroll all
Speaker 1: the way down to the bottom of our notes and
Speaker 1: have a look at the images I've attached for you.
Speaker 1: I thought these would fill you with joy. This comes
Speaker 1: from a board game that I found evidence of on
Speaker 1: the internet late last night. I think. Uh. It's called
Speaker 1: Battle at Sarlac's Pit. It was released at the same
Speaker 1: time as the movie, or sometime around the movie, I guess,
Speaker 1: to help promote it. And it is a It is
Speaker 1: a board game with a Sarlac, like a cardboard Sarlac
Speaker 1: cone set up, and then it's got a little barge
Speaker 1: or skiff on top where it looks like you you
Speaker 1: you play with miniatures of Han Solo, Luke, Skywalker, Chewbacca,
Speaker 1: and I guess maybe that's also it's supposed to be Leiah.
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to tell. The miniatures are not
Speaker 1: super detailed, and you have to fight your way through these,
Speaker 1: you know, green pig face guards and Boba that to
Speaker 1: to confront Jab of the Hut, and I guess if
Speaker 1: you lose, you fall off into the star Lack's mouth. Ha.
Speaker 1: Well that it looks beautiful. I mean, especially the cover
Speaker 1: art in this box looks incredible, and then the set
Speaker 1: itself is is pretty ingenious, especially given the time. I
Speaker 1: can't obviously, I can't speak for the the actual gameplay,
Speaker 1: but it looks intriguing. Yeah, I've never seen this before. Well,
Speaker 1: I know you're a miniatures guy, so I was wondering
Speaker 1: if you might end up looking this thing up. I
Speaker 1: might have to the miniatures. It looks like the miniatures
Speaker 1: are supplied poorly painted, or perhaps they're supplied unpainted, and
Speaker 1: what we're looking at here is the work of a
Speaker 1: child roughly painting them. I can't tell, but yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have to look into this more. This this is interesting.
Speaker 1: If I had known this existed when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I would have insisted on it. So I guess we should.
Speaker 1: We can assume that most listeners have probably seen Return
Speaker 1: of the Jedi, don't the star Lack doesn't need a
Speaker 1: lot of explaining, but just to do the very basics,
Speaker 1: we should explain what happens in the movie. So the
Speaker 1: role in the plot is you remember our heroes Luke Skywalker,
Speaker 1: Han Solo, Chewbacca. Uh, they are sentenced to death by
Speaker 1: the gangster Job of the Hut. He's the big slug
Speaker 1: guy and Job Job of the Hut says the method
Speaker 1: of execution for these three heroes is going to be
Speaker 1: a kind of alien desert version of the Pirates walking
Speaker 1: of the plank, Right, you know, they're gonna be forced
Speaker 1: to walk the plank off of this floating barge or
Speaker 1: this floating boat type thing into this hole in the desert,
Speaker 1: and the Droid C three p O translates job as
Speaker 1: execution order. He says, you will therefore be taken to
Speaker 1: the dune sea, this big desert and cast into the
Speaker 1: pit of Carcoon, the nesting place of the all powerful
Speaker 1: Sarlac in his belly. You will find a new definition
Speaker 1: of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over
Speaker 1: a thousand years. And I'm not gonna lie that concept
Speaker 1: haunted me as a child. I was like, slowly digested
Speaker 1: over a thousand years? Wouldn't it be over? Are sooner
Speaker 1: than that? Yeah, there's this idea that it extends your suffering,
Speaker 1: that it is to enter into the star Lack is
Speaker 1: to kind of enter into an underworld or an afterlife
Speaker 1: of pain. It's like going to hell. Yeah, yeah, a
Speaker 1: hell of digestion. And I also love how in C
Speaker 1: three pos translation there's this idea, Yeah, that's that's not
Speaker 1: only the Sarlac, it is the all powerful Sarlac. There's
Speaker 1: this idea that it is a thing that is revered,
Speaker 1: that it almost has a divine quality to it. And certainly,
Speaker 1: as we see in the film, it's not something that
Speaker 1: is defeated. It is not something that is really truly overcome.
Speaker 1: It is just avoided and escaped at best. Well, it's
Speaker 1: not really the enemy, right, it's kind of the setting.
Speaker 1: It's the threat in the setting. It's kind of in
Speaker 1: the way that in most zombie movies the zombies are
Speaker 1: not really the enemy. They're more like a hostile environment
Speaker 1: in which the drama between the characters is set. Usually
Speaker 1: in a zombie MOVI, you've got a human villain, and
Speaker 1: the same is true here. Clearly the villain is Jab
Speaker 1: of the Hut, not the not the Sarlac. And of
Speaker 1: course so it's very satisfying when when Leah chokes out
Speaker 1: Jab of the Hut, that's like a great you know,
Speaker 1: defeat of the villain scene. But there's no need to
Speaker 1: kill the Sarlac. It's just doing its thing in the desert,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, there's this It has this quality where
Speaker 1: the star Lac is kind of like a pet. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like a pampered pet of of javas much
Speaker 1: like the rain corps is that we see earlier in
Speaker 1: the film. But it also feels like something that is
Speaker 1: greater than job and certainly it's something that will will
Speaker 1: outlive Java. Yeah. So one thing I really liked about
Speaker 1: this monster when I was a kid um was something
Speaker 1: about the way that the monster was presented visually the
Speaker 1: pit of Carcoon and the Sarlac. It was that the
Speaker 1: monster wasn't just in a pit. The monster was the pit. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and so to explain this a little bit more,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a presented visually as a bio
Speaker 1: geological hybrid, like a cave or a hole in the
Speaker 1: ground that has tentacle tongues and eats bounty hunters alive.
Speaker 1: You can't tell where the animal stops and the earth begins.
Speaker 1: And as a point of comparison, I think i'd i'd
Speaker 1: use the appeal of like the bio mechanical artwork of
Speaker 1: hr Geiger that and how that influenced the creation of
Speaker 1: the xenomorph in the Alien films. Xenomorph is basically supposed
Speaker 1: to be an animal, but it has tons of body
Speaker 1: features that look like parts of industrial machines. It's an
Speaker 1: animal made out of tubes and hoses and hinges and pistons.
Speaker 1: And I think I always thought the Starlac was cool
Speaker 1: because it was like this, but with geology instead of machinery. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's it's a mouth that is the earth. It looks
Speaker 1: like the teeth are coming out of rock or coming
Speaker 1: out of the sand. And Uh. Of course this is
Speaker 1: all predicated on the fact that I grew up watching
Speaker 1: the versions of these movies before the special edition remasters.
Speaker 1: So the version I'm used to seeing is the original,
Speaker 1: where it's just the gaping mouth that blends into the
Speaker 1: earth and has these rings of inward facing teeth and
Speaker 1: the tentacles that reach out from who knows where and
Speaker 1: grab things. When the remasters came, of course, they added
Speaker 1: a big c g I beak poking up out of
Speaker 1: the pit, which sort of eliminates some of that bio
Speaker 1: geological magic. I try these days not to be one
Speaker 1: of the guys who's just constantly shrieking about how Lucas
Speaker 1: ruined things and complaining about remasters and prequels and all that,
Speaker 1: but I will say I do not like this change.
Speaker 1: I think it's creepier in the original version without the
Speaker 1: c g I beak. I like it when it's just
Speaker 1: the hole in the earth, the cave with teeth. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I I certainly grew up with the the unedited version
Speaker 1: as well, and so that's that's probably the version that
Speaker 1: was It's cemented in my mind the most, and I
Speaker 1: used to feel I think a lot stronger about it
Speaker 1: where I'm like, Nope, original Starla only, but I don't
Speaker 1: know I can I'm okay with the the redesign I
Speaker 1: just wish that the c G I would maybe get another,
Speaker 1: you know, a fresh coat of paint to make it
Speaker 1: look a little sleeker. But but still like I also,
Speaker 1: I understand that they are part of the original concept
Speaker 1: was that it would have those elements, but they weren't
Speaker 1: able to make it happen because they just didn't have
Speaker 1: the budget of the technology to implement it at the time. Um.
Speaker 1: But but I and I also think that the addition
Speaker 1: of the plant like elements doesn't completely take away from
Speaker 1: what you were describing, this idea of the monster as
Speaker 1: as pit, the monster as Earth. Um, there's something very primal,
Speaker 1: primordial even about about the star lac And you know,
Speaker 1: some people, I think a lot to like to criticize
Speaker 1: Lucas and you know that they want to go all
Speaker 1: in on this idea that well, Lucas depended on all
Speaker 1: these other creative people and anything that he got right
Speaker 1: he only did accidentally. But I suspect that you know
Speaker 1: that he was really onto something with this idea of
Speaker 1: the star Lac. Um. I think they're there is something
Speaker 1: intentionally primordial about it. And well, and we'll get into
Speaker 1: that as we go. Well, I think it just it
Speaker 1: suggests the magical thinking that that that is so common
Speaker 1: in human culture that characterizes caves and pits in the
Speaker 1: earth as a mouth. I mean that kind of that
Speaker 1: kind of language is extremely common. Yeah, So before we
Speaker 1: get a little bit more into some mythic parallels for
Speaker 1: the star Lac, I want to talk just a little
Speaker 1: bit more about its presumed biology and its biology is
Speaker 1: presented uh in Cannon, and also just a little interpretation
Speaker 1: on our part. So obviously, the vast majority of the
Speaker 1: star Lacks bulk is hidden beneath the sand, leaving only
Speaker 1: its spiked, entacled mouth exposed. Now, presumably the star Lac
Speaker 1: just normally, you know, waits there. It doesn't move. It
Speaker 1: just waits first, you know, some creature to fall into it.
Speaker 1: You know, some of the mega fauna of tattooings, such
Speaker 1: as the do back or the bantha. You know, it
Speaker 1: just waits for them to wander close enough to fall
Speaker 1: in or succumb to the fast moving grasping tentacles. And
Speaker 1: if this, you know, seems a rare enough occurrence, we
Speaker 1: have to consider that it's it has an alleged one
Speaker 1: thousand year digestive cycle. So presumably it has a slow
Speaker 1: enough metabolism that it doesn't need just regular feedings. It
Speaker 1: can get by on the odd banthera that just falls in.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, we have to consider
Speaker 1: that this star lac might be in a privileged situation
Speaker 1: as well, sustained by regular feedings from Job as pleasure barges,
Speaker 1: because let's face it, Job is the type of fellow
Speaker 1: that's liable to just throw people into the sarlac on
Speaker 1: a weekly or bi weekly basis, So we may not
Speaker 1: be observing the sarlac in its natural environment. This this
Speaker 1: could be a domesticated sarlac of sorts. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we have to take that into into account now. Um,
Speaker 1: in terms of, like, you know, turning to the literature
Speaker 1: for you know, explanations of something like the sarlac, uh,
Speaker 1: that can be a bit confusing because, first of all,
Speaker 1: you know, it's presented as it is in the movie,
Speaker 1: and I think a fair amount of mystery about it
Speaker 1: is ideal. Like, for instance, C three Po doesn't turn
Speaker 1: to you and explain everything about the star lack. He
Speaker 1: doesn't go into a big ten minute monologue about it,
Speaker 1: because you're supposed to do some of the work, right
Speaker 1: it's supposed to inspire you, right, Yeah, I mean what's
Speaker 1: cool about it is that you can't see so much
Speaker 1: of it. It's a mystery, it's hidden under the earth.
Speaker 1: I think some of that would be spoiled if you've
Speaker 1: got a better look at it, or you've got c
Speaker 1: three po explaining its whole life history. As much as
Speaker 1: I would have wanted that when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: and we were talking recently about like children, you know,
Speaker 1: being obsessed with Cannon and the stories they love and
Speaker 1: like wanting to know all the details, I mean, I
Speaker 1: bet when I was like eight, I would have just
Speaker 1: wish that the Star Wars movies included like Star Wars
Speaker 1: illustrated encyclopedia pages as as like scenes throughout them. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it works better as a mystery. I think that's my
Speaker 1: adult mind. Yeah. Now that being said, it this, this
Speaker 1: sort of mystery has inspired lots of people, and so
Speaker 1: you have you have a number of different, uh you know,
Speaker 1: expanded universe treatments of the Star lac as well as
Speaker 1: compendiums that attempt to explain to some degree what the
Speaker 1: Star Lack is. And you're gonna deal with, you know,
Speaker 1: conflicting accounts and uh, and and so forth if you
Speaker 1: start looking at all of those. But I do want
Speaker 1: to touch on some ideas that were presented in a
Speaker 1: relatively new book that came out, Star Wars Alien Archive,
Speaker 1: which I've been reading with my son. Uh. It's you know,
Speaker 1: it's basically a you know, a monstrous compendium, a monster
Speaker 1: manual of Star Wars aliens, and it's pretty fun. It
Speaker 1: has these fabulous illustrations in it, and it you know,
Speaker 1: doesn't have everything that shows up in the Star Wars
Speaker 1: films and TV shows, but it has quite a bit, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, everything from you know, from from major characters
Speaker 1: and and and major aliens to even a few things that,
Speaker 1: for instance, only show up in one of the e
Speaker 1: Walks movies. So it's a fun collection. Naturally, of course
Speaker 1: there's an entry on the Mighty Sarlac. So I just
Speaker 1: want to touch on a few of the key points,
Speaker 1: uh that that are that are made in this Lucasfilm
Speaker 1: Press book. First of all, it's described as quote terrifying
Speaker 1: carnivorous beast, and this seems to fall more on the
Speaker 1: animal side of interpretation. Some people try, and I guess,
Speaker 1: explain the Starlac as being more of a plant. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it is sometimes described as reproducing by spores, which
Speaker 1: leads in list to more of a you know, fungal explanation.
Speaker 1: But of course none of this is exactly limiting when
Speaker 1: we're ultimately talking about an alien life form that may
Speaker 1: you know, easily skew the lines that we draw on
Speaker 1: Earth between one kingdom and another. That's exactly right, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: if we want to be real technical sticklers, the difference
Speaker 1: between plants and animals is an evolutionary division that you know,
Speaker 1: there they are different clades. You can sort their histories differently,
Speaker 1: and you know, animals arising on other planets might be
Speaker 1: animal like and that they might move around quickly or
Speaker 1: something like that. Or they might be plant like in
Speaker 1: that their sessile and the photosynthesize or whatever. But uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, they would not be descended from these kingdoms,
Speaker 1: so those sortings wouldn't necessarily even make sense. Yeah. Plus,
Speaker 1: oh man, there's a whole additional, uh deep end we
Speaker 1: could get into if we tried to figure out how
Speaker 1: we consider life in the Star Wars universe, a universe
Speaker 1: where not only do we have um life you know,
Speaker 1: certainly arising on a plethora of different worlds. But also
Speaker 1: you have interstellar life still life that is clinging to asteroids.
Speaker 1: You have pan spermia and colonization taking place that you
Speaker 1: know at you know, at various points in galactic history.
Speaker 1: There's a lot to unpack their deep space evolution. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, the minox they live in a vacuum. How
Speaker 1: is that possible? I don't think a large animal would
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah. Well, that would be a fun one
Speaker 1: to come back to at some point, maybe maybe, maybe
Speaker 1: some some people have written on that topic. Um okay.
Speaker 1: A few other points from the Alien Archive book. Uh.
Speaker 1: They to point out that the star lac of Carcoon
Speaker 1: is sustained at least in part by sacrifices and executions
Speaker 1: by the huts. But they also say that adults are
Speaker 1: lacks such as this one can also release an odor
Speaker 1: that attracts nearby herbivores to the pit. Oh okay, So
Speaker 1: that answer I I that would answer a question that
Speaker 1: I had because I was thinking about how a sarlac
Speaker 1: would normally eat if it's just this, you know, sessile
Speaker 1: pit in the desert. Most sessile trap predators have some
Speaker 1: way of assuring that prey will fall in like sessile
Speaker 1: predators in the ocean will often try to maximize their
Speaker 1: catch by doing their best to latch on in places
Speaker 1: where the current will carry unfortunate prey animals right by them. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: trap predators like some that we'll talk about in a bit,
Speaker 1: like insects that that lay traps in the ground, need
Speaker 1: to find a place where, you know, places that are
Speaker 1: naturally trafficked by prey, places where you know, ants or
Speaker 1: beetles or whatever going to be walking by. Another option
Speaker 1: is to look more at the realm of of plants,
Speaker 1: which you know, let's say, like carnivorous plants like the
Speaker 1: picture plant that's not an animal, but it is a
Speaker 1: predatory organism that functions as a trap pit. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it uses smells to attract animals to it. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: perhaps we might imagine that, um, you know, say that
Speaker 1: the sarlac releases uh uh, some sort of odor that
Speaker 1: mega fauno would associate with an oasis, you know, or
Speaker 1: with with with plant life, and therefore it brings them in.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to bring them in all the way, right,
Speaker 1: because those tentacles will do the rest of of the job.
Speaker 1: The shifting sand will do you know the rest of
Speaker 1: the work. But but perhaps this odor will be enough
Speaker 1: to just bring in some food. That makes a lot
Speaker 1: more sense than what I had in mind. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I was just trying to think. Okay, so it just
Speaker 1: waits until a banta wanders and seems like you'd be
Speaker 1: waiting a long time yea once a millennium. The Alien
Speaker 1: Archive also points out that the creature has several stomachs,
Speaker 1: which you know, I guess makes sense given a lengthy
Speaker 1: digestive process. Also says that it's average length is of
Speaker 1: one and this is interesting. It contends that younger star
Speaker 1: Lacks are capable of moving about to capture food, which, um,
Speaker 1: which is an interesting detail. But I think one that
Speaker 1: you brought up is is kind of supported by an
Speaker 1: old Super Nintendo game, right, Oh that's right. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I I was trying to remember, don't you fight a
Speaker 1: sarlac in like the old Super Nintendo Superstar Wars game?
Speaker 1: So I looked up the boss fight on YouTube. Robert,
Speaker 1: did you watch it? I did. Yes, It's terrible. It
Speaker 1: doesn't capture the star Lac magic at all because it's
Speaker 1: not a pit. It's just like a big worm that
Speaker 1: comes up out of the ground and it moves around
Speaker 1: and spits rocks at you. That's not a star Lac.
Speaker 1: But but maybe it's supposed to be a young Starlac
Speaker 1: a different part of its life cycle. I I guess.
Speaker 1: So if we were, if we were to force ourselves
Speaker 1: to to take that boss fight and incorporate it into
Speaker 1: into Star Wars canon, I think that's the only way
Speaker 1: you could go that Basically we'd be looking at, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, say a four part lifespan that goes like this.
Speaker 1: You have a spore of the star lack that's carried
Speaker 1: by the you know, the dust storms. Then you have
Speaker 1: some sort of burrowing larva, and then you have a
Speaker 1: sandworm esque burrowing juvenile like we see in the Super
Speaker 1: in ne S game. And then that eventually, if it survives,
Speaker 1: will become a stationary adult like we see in Return
Speaker 1: of the Jedi. That is very interesting, and it's also
Speaker 1: interesting how that is going to be the exact inverse
Speaker 1: of some examples. Will look at from the from the
Speaker 1: natural world in a bit where there are things that
Speaker 1: are only a trap predator for part of their life cycle,
Speaker 1: but it actually comes at the beginning rather than the end. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. Uh, it's interesting that if we were to
Speaker 1: really look for some potential real world analogs that match
Speaker 1: this basic uh you know, four part transformation, I'd say
Speaker 1: that something like this mostly resembles the life cycles uh
Speaker 1: that we would see in uh say corals or perhaps
Speaker 1: a barnacle, both of which we've discussed in depth on
Speaker 1: the show before. Um, you know the idea that this
Speaker 1: is something that is free swimming earlier in its development,
Speaker 1: but then initially eventually puts down roots and stays there
Speaker 1: for the rest of its life. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, well,
Speaker 1: maybe we need to take a break, but when we
Speaker 1: come back, we can talk about Pitt monster mythology and
Speaker 1: about h pit trap predators in the natural world. All right,
Speaker 1: we'll be right back. Than alright, we're back now. Either
Speaker 1: way you look at it, h I'd say the star
Speaker 1: Lack is a creature with with fittingly deep mythological roots.
Speaker 1: It is in essence as you as you pointed out,
Speaker 1: the earth swallowing up the living, with key ties to
Speaker 1: understandings and interpretations of earthquakes sink whole just caves in general,
Speaker 1: but also other land based catastrophes. So, in preparing for
Speaker 1: this episode, I wanted to look something up, something that
Speaker 1: I've always assumed because you see it in movies. You
Speaker 1: know the scene in the movie where there is an
Speaker 1: earthquake and the ground opens up, there's this giant fissure,
Speaker 1: then everything just disappears super deep into the earth. Uh.
Speaker 1: I was like, wait a minute, does that happen in
Speaker 1: real life? Basically? From what I could tell most of
Speaker 1: the time, No, I think it's not, in principle impossible.
Speaker 1: But generally in earthquakes there might be you know, fissures
Speaker 1: that form in the ground, but they don't You don't
Speaker 1: get these deep chasms going down into the belly of
Speaker 1: the earth that you know, swallow people and buildings. Hold
Speaker 1: that if that happens at all, that does not happen
Speaker 1: very often. Yeah, that that specifically happens in the Force Awakens.
Speaker 1: Remember when Ray is having that duel with Kylo Wren
Speaker 1: and then the the the earth shakes and suddenly there's
Speaker 1: this this deep gulf between them, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: awesome in a film, but maybe not that likely uh
Speaker 1: in the real world. Yeah, but it's interesting that So
Speaker 1: if this doesn't actually happen in reality, or at least
Speaker 1: doesn't happen often enough for people to you know, really
Speaker 1: see it and make a meme out of it in
Speaker 1: their culture. Where does this idea come from? Because it
Speaker 1: goes way back, the idea that the earth like cracks
Speaker 1: open and swallows people whole. Right, Yeah, I remember, like, well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I probably saw it in various films
Speaker 1: growing up as well, but I specifically remember having an
Speaker 1: illustrated um Bible stories book and it had an illustration
Speaker 1: of of what I what I seem to remember being
Speaker 1: the this episode from the Book of Numbers in the
Speaker 1: Old Testament, which this is the the King James version quote,
Speaker 1: and the earth opened its mouth and swallow them up
Speaker 1: with their households, and all the men with Cora, with
Speaker 1: all their goods. Wow. Well yeah, that's basically what the
Speaker 1: Earthquake movie pictures. Yeah, so you know it's it's I
Speaker 1: guess it's a pretty deeply set idea in that respect.
Speaker 1: So I was looking around to see if I could
Speaker 1: come across any other like specific ideas of monsters or
Speaker 1: gods or you know, the adventures of a hero that
Speaker 1: involves something like the Sarlac. And what I what I
Speaker 1: came across is maybe not a you know a directly
Speaker 1: related example, but but I think once I explain it,
Speaker 1: people will see a number of parallels that are pretty
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. This is from the Mesoamerican mythology of the Aztecs,
Speaker 1: the earth goddess tlou Tekutali that is t l A
Speaker 1: l t e c u h t l I and
Speaker 1: most translations, and man, she's a really interesting earth goddess.
Speaker 1: And yes, so for starters, she embodies a typical primordial
Speaker 1: god goddess archetype of a divided and dismembered form who
Speaker 1: scattered pieces constitute the world, and we see that a
Speaker 1: lot in mythologies. But she is also monstrous, incorporating amphibian
Speaker 1: and reptile morphology, and she is also presented as an
Speaker 1: eater of the dead, so the blood of human sacrifice
Speaker 1: flows into the earth to feed her, and she is
Speaker 1: often depicted with a flint knife between her teeth and
Speaker 1: or rivers of blood flowing from her mouth. She's also
Speaker 1: seen as a boundary deity, bridging the world of a
Speaker 1: living to Micklin the world of the dead, and her
Speaker 1: role here is essentially one of of maintaining balance, and
Speaker 1: therefore sacrifices made to her are about keeping into the
Speaker 1: balance of the world's together. I mean, she is the earth,
Speaker 1: and she is also this bridge between our world and
Speaker 1: the world of the dead. And when you look at
Speaker 1: likenesses of her, this is also interesting. Her likeness was
Speaker 1: often carved into the base of sculptures, you know, where
Speaker 1: humans could not see them once the sculpture was in
Speaker 1: place where the sculpture touched the earth. So you know
Speaker 1: that the living would not see this. It's it's as
Speaker 1: if it was only to be seen by her. Interesting. Now,
Speaker 1: her color was red, which is of course the color
Speaker 1: for blood associated with sacrifice, but red was also the
Speaker 1: color of sunset because at night she was said to
Speaker 1: consume the sun. We think of the you know, the
Speaker 1: setting sun. Uh seemingly too to be consumed by the
Speaker 1: earth and then night sets in Yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: a motif we see in other mythologies from around the world.
Speaker 1: I think there are the god or the monster that
Speaker 1: eats the sun appears in Egyptian mythology I believe in
Speaker 1: in Hindu stories. Yes, yes, indeed, Now, if you look
Speaker 1: up some interpretations of this goddess Uh, you'll find at
Speaker 1: least a couple of different versions. One is more of
Speaker 1: a uh, you know, more of a just a monstrous
Speaker 1: feminine form. But there's another one that's really interesting where
Speaker 1: it's kind of the squat toadlike creature with its mouth
Speaker 1: open skyward towards the eagle and uh. And this one
Speaker 1: really makes me think of the starlight because it is
Speaker 1: like a mouth opened wide towards the heavens now. I
Speaker 1: think all this is interesting in context of the star
Speaker 1: Lak because the star Lak two is presented as something
Speaker 1: that is perhaps divine and to some degree immortal, and
Speaker 1: an entity that demands sacrificial victims as well, and something
Speaker 1: of a gateway between our world and a hellish underworld. Again,
Speaker 1: think back to that, to that idea of a thousand
Speaker 1: years of digestion in the belly of the star lak Um.
Speaker 1: I remember this was explored to a wonderful effect in
Speaker 1: a short story. This was by um an author by
Speaker 1: the name of Daniel keys Moran published under the name J. D. Montgomery,
Speaker 1: and it was in a short story collection called Tale
Speaker 1: from Jabas Palace titled a bar of like that The
Speaker 1: Tale of Boba Fette Um And I haven't read it
Speaker 1: since junior high school, but I remember really loving it
Speaker 1: because it it kind of scratched that itch of like, oh,
Speaker 1: I must know how Boba Fette escapes from the star Lack.
Speaker 1: You know, you must write it for me, make it happen.
Speaker 1: Uh And so it succeeded in that, but it also
Speaker 1: presented digestion in the Starlac as being this kind of
Speaker 1: sentient immortality of pain. I have so many thoughts about this.
Speaker 1: Uh So, first of all, I'm thinking about all of
Speaker 1: the like sort of off label Star Wars fiction that
Speaker 1: I read in the nineties. I didn't read as much
Speaker 1: of it as some people did, but I do remember
Speaker 1: I read some series of books that involved people who
Speaker 1: had three eyes and like a whole bunch of weirdness.
Speaker 1: But the other thing is, I'm sorry if this is
Speaker 1: a is a frivolous side trail that I've got to
Speaker 1: ask you, Robert, do you have an opinion on the
Speaker 1: belch the star Lac burp oh after fat falls in? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't fat fall in? And then and then the
Speaker 1: thing just it burps it. I'm not mistaken about this, right, No, No,
Speaker 1: I believe it does burp um pro burb or anti
Speaker 1: berb I guess I'm I'm pro burb It's it's fun
Speaker 1: it's funny. I was probably there was probably a point
Speaker 1: that I'm not specif typically remembering in my Star Wars
Speaker 1: worst fandom, where I probably thought I was above it
Speaker 1: and thought that that belt should be edited out because
Speaker 1: I also didn't want any indication that Fett was gone
Speaker 1: and that a belt should be uh you know his
Speaker 1: um uh you know his tombstone. But you know, I
Speaker 1: don't really have any strong opinions about it now. It
Speaker 1: seemed an ignominious end for this, this much beloved minor character,
Speaker 1: and uh, I think I think it bothered me when
Speaker 1: I was younger, when I also thought Boba Fette was
Speaker 1: so cool. I just gotta say, I'm about to earn
Speaker 1: us all the hate mail we're going to get for
Speaker 1: the rest of the year. Boba Fette's armor looks cool,
Speaker 1: but I don't actually get what is just like, mind
Speaker 1: meltingly amazing about him. Two people, I just feel like
Speaker 1: he's a kind of cool looking character. He's got like
Speaker 1: five lines. Yeah, yeah, I think it comes back to
Speaker 1: like the less you know, right, there was mystery about
Speaker 1: really all those bounty hunters and um, you know, who
Speaker 1: were these guys? What what was their deal? You know what?
Speaker 1: What was the I like the one that's got like
Speaker 1: in sec dies like a fly's head. Yeah, he's good.
Speaker 1: Or the reptilian one with the long arms. And I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I know they all have names and species and uh
Speaker 1: I if I had my alien archive book in front
Speaker 1: of me, I would look them up. But but basically
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful rogues gallery. Well. I don't have a
Speaker 1: firm position on the burp, but you know what, I'll
Speaker 1: support you in your decision, so so have me on board.
Speaker 1: I'm probb too. Yeah, I mean it's star Lag getting
Speaker 1: a good laugh there. I I think I think it
Speaker 1: was well received by my son. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about mythology here because I
Speaker 1: feel like there's an excellent connection to be made um Specifically,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about a parallel here in Greek mythology, where
Speaker 1: of course we have Skilla and Charybdis, the twin oceanic
Speaker 1: dangers that Odysseus must sail between the very horns of dilemma. Uh.
Speaker 1: These are magnificent monstrosities. Oh yeah, the classics. I mean,
Speaker 1: like the ultimate sea monster. How could you beat it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So Charybdis. I I think it's the most obvious analog here.
Speaker 1: An underwater monster of varying description that above water is
Speaker 1: just seen as this massive whirlpool that threatens to swallow
Speaker 1: up any ship that comes near it. Meanwhile, Skilla is
Speaker 1: this multi headed beast that plucks men from their ships.
Speaker 1: Now the star Lack basically incorporates elements from both of
Speaker 1: these monsters, because we have to remember that, Okay, Tattooing
Speaker 1: is a desert world, but the dune sea has all
Speaker 1: of these oceanic qualities to it as well. And in fact,
Speaker 1: I mean the whole encounter in Return of the Jedi
Speaker 1: is essentially the sci Fi mash up of nautical and
Speaker 1: swashbuckling tropes. Oh yeah, I mean, I think that's the
Speaker 1: thing people might not realize if they're not familiar with
Speaker 1: the old Errol Flynn pirate movies and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But clearly they're walking the plank off the skiff. This
Speaker 1: is supposed to be boats on the ocean. Job of
Speaker 1: the Hut is an evil pirate captain. Yes, yes, so,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes perfect sense that the cryptis analog
Speaker 1: here becomes very clear. And I should also point out
Speaker 1: that for anybody out there who maybe a Percy Jackson fan.
Speaker 1: In uh, the film adaptation Percy of Percy Jackson Sea
Speaker 1: of Monsters, it has a wonderful crybdis in it. Uh,
Speaker 1: Crybta shows up and really takes on a very star
Speaker 1: lackey in appearance, no doubt playing up on this connection. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you attached an image. It is a very good looking
Speaker 1: mall and it's got the inward facing spike teeth. I
Speaker 1: like it a lot. Yeah, it's it's quite it's quite
Speaker 1: a wonderful sequence. Like if you if you just want
Speaker 1: to check it out for no other reason, check it
Speaker 1: out for that. Uh, it's pretty fun as well. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: my son and my wife who have read the book
Speaker 1: tell me that in the book, uh, both Skilla and
Speaker 1: cryb does show up, but in the movie we're just
Speaker 1: stuck with the whirlpool. But still the whirlpool is fabulous. Now,
Speaker 1: I think maybe it's time to turn to the natural
Speaker 1: world and look at some animals that that even here
Speaker 1: on Earth somewhat mimic the sarlac. Now, there there might
Speaker 1: be one that you out there are already thinking of,
Speaker 1: because it's it's it's quite monstrously close though on a
Speaker 1: much smaller scale, and that would be, of course, the
Speaker 1: ant lion. Yes, uh, the ant lion is is certainly
Speaker 1: the first place that my mind goes when I think
Speaker 1: of the star lac because it's also something that I
Speaker 1: definitely remember encountering as a child. Getting to see the
Speaker 1: ant lions in action. Uh, you know, and try and
Speaker 1: you know, ultimately try and trigger them to you know,
Speaker 1: try and get them to to eat the ends of
Speaker 1: sticks and whatnot, which I'm not recommending you do, but
Speaker 1: if you get a chance to observe an ant lion
Speaker 1: in the wild, it's worth checking out. Robert, where did
Speaker 1: you encounter them? Were you in the Southwest? I know,
Speaker 1: in Arizona or wherever? Uh this, I definitely remember encountering
Speaker 1: them in Tennessee. Actually, yeah, like this would have been
Speaker 1: um north western Tennessee. I remember encountering them there. Maybe
Speaker 1: my mind was primed for Arizona because I just know
Speaker 1: that that's where they shot the star Lac scenes. I
Speaker 1: think it was near Yuma that they did that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess the rain ing of the ant lion is
Speaker 1: much wider. Yeah, I mean it needs sand or loose soil.
Speaker 1: But uh, I understand it's fairly widespread. Now, I will say,
Speaker 1: I am just recalling a childhood memory here. It is
Speaker 1: entirely possible that I was observing something else and thought
Speaker 1: it was an ant lion, or that my memory has
Speaker 1: some other has become altered one way or another. But
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I saw an antline. Oh, I'm not
Speaker 1: doubting you. The ant lion, as we alluded to earlier
Speaker 1: when we were talking about life cycles of of the
Speaker 1: possible sarlac or or analogs in the natural world, the
Speaker 1: ant lion, as we know it is, is actually mainly
Speaker 1: one stage of the life of a certain insect. That's right,
Speaker 1: it's the it's the larval form of a rather nondescript
Speaker 1: of flying romellion today, insect of which there are some
Speaker 1: two thousand individual species. So, in other words, the ant lion,
Speaker 1: the larval form here is a high is highly interesting
Speaker 1: and unique, while the adult form is basically a short lived,
Speaker 1: I mean, very short lived flying nothing that is far
Speaker 1: less studied. I mean, when you got you got one
Speaker 1: stage of your life cycle where you become a sarlac,
Speaker 1: you're just not going to get a lot of attention
Speaker 1: for the part of your life where you grow wings
Speaker 1: and fly around and land on plants. Yeah. So let's
Speaker 1: talk about the larval form first. So the larval ant lion,
Speaker 1: and I recommend looking at the picture of this anyone
Speaker 1: if you you have seen an illustration, because it's really gnarly.
Speaker 1: It has this globular abdomen, a narrow head in a
Speaker 1: set of vicious sickle shaped mandibles. Some species but not all,
Speaker 1: famously make their home at the bottom of a shallow pit,
Speaker 1: a shallow pit trap that they make themselves, uh. And
Speaker 1: then they produce this by burrowing backwards in a circle,
Speaker 1: flicking loose soil or sand out of the way as
Speaker 1: they go. And then once they're situated, only those twin
Speaker 1: mandibles remain visible, poking out of the bottom of this
Speaker 1: sand pit. Yeah. So, so they form this thing, like
Speaker 1: you're saying, by sort of digging around in the con
Speaker 1: goal in a conical shape, going backwards, flinging the sand
Speaker 1: out until they've created this pit that's got these sort
Speaker 1: of perfectly sloped conical sides. It's like a you know,
Speaker 1: like a coffee filter sort of uh. And it reminds
Speaker 1: me of the episodes we did about spiderweb cognition because, um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's interesting to think about the underlying algorithms
Speaker 1: in an animal's brain, like in the spider's brain that
Speaker 1: produced the web, or in the ant lion's brain that
Speaker 1: enable it to make these perfect little conical pit traps.
Speaker 1: And I remember one of the things we talked about
Speaker 1: in that other episode about spiderweb cognition was how beautiful
Speaker 1: and complex patterns emerge in spiderwebs, even based on extremely
Speaker 1: simple algorithms for spinning, which, of course, the spiders can
Speaker 1: vary to adapt to environmental conditions. And I think there
Speaker 1: are some environmental variables that that work on ant lions
Speaker 1: as well. This might include things like the depth of
Speaker 1: the sand and the grain size. I was looking at
Speaker 1: one study that said apparently ant lions and a similar
Speaker 1: prejuctor are called worm lions tend to prefer finer and
Speaker 1: deeper sand. The finer sand, I'm sure better to trap
Speaker 1: you with. Exactly, so, how does this trapping work? Well?
Speaker 1: When ants or other small insects fall into the pit,
Speaker 1: the ant lion throws up more sand, like flicks more
Speaker 1: sand up towards the would be victim in order to
Speaker 1: keep them from escaping and then they grapple their victim
Speaker 1: at the bottom of that pit, piercing their body with
Speaker 1: those mandibles and sucking out the fluids. Afterwards, the ant
Speaker 1: lion flicks the desiccated corpse out and then resets the
Speaker 1: pit for its next meal. Yeah. The and you can
Speaker 1: look up video of this of them literally just throwing
Speaker 1: like desiccated ant bodies out of their pit, just chucking
Speaker 1: them off to the side. Yeah, literally a dead soldier. Now,
Speaker 1: I can't remember if we mentioned, but the antline does
Speaker 1: have it does have chemicals on its side when it
Speaker 1: attacks the victim that falls down to the bottom of
Speaker 1: the pit. So it's uh, it's piercing mandibles, the it's
Speaker 1: pincer type things injective venom to the prey. But then
Speaker 1: also they've got a digestive enzyme that they use much
Speaker 1: like some of the spider feeding stuff that we've talked about,
Speaker 1: where they can inject the enzyme that sort of melts
Speaker 1: the guts of the prey animal and then allows some
Speaker 1: easy slurping. Now, like the sarlac, the ant lion benefits
Speaker 1: from a really slow metabolism. The ant lion can go
Speaker 1: months without food and get this does not even have
Speaker 1: an anus, it simply puts off defecation until it assumes
Speaker 1: it's a mature and final form. And this is something
Speaker 1: we see in other larval forms as well, um elsewhere
Speaker 1: in the animal kingdom, where basically the creatures an eating machine.
Speaker 1: It's just about eating and eating, and it can in
Speaker 1: some cases just put off pooping until it has reached
Speaker 1: that final morphological form that is going to obtain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's stick on this for a second. In case that
Speaker 1: just went by you, the ant lion in its larval
Speaker 1: stage does not have an anus and cannot poop, and
Speaker 1: this goes on for the entire larval stage of its
Speaker 1: life cycle, which can last for up to three years. Right, no,
Speaker 1: anis you got your poop in for three years? So
Speaker 1: I guess imagine if like we only grew in anus
Speaker 1: and became able to defecate when we turned eighteen or something,
Speaker 1: you know, the parents talking about how you know you'll
Speaker 1: poop when you're older, you'll understand then Oh man, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I have mixed thoughts about that, because on
Speaker 1: one hand, not having to poop is is that mean
Speaker 1: it's really everyone's dream? But on the other hand, being
Speaker 1: filled with an increasing amount of poop is everyone's nightmare.
Speaker 1: So uh, I guess it just comes down to the
Speaker 1: like you either extreme you you don't want either extreme,
Speaker 1: you want the balance of normal human pooping. Now, the
Speaker 1: funny thing is that there are some skewed ways where
Speaker 1: we conceptualize animal life cycles, insect life cycles and stuff.
Speaker 1: Because we're talking about how when the antline is done
Speaker 1: with its pit trap larval stage, it then matures and
Speaker 1: becomes an adult. But this adult stage age lasts for
Speaker 1: a much shorter period than its larval stage does, so
Speaker 1: in a weird way, you shouldn't think of its adult
Speaker 1: phase as like its normal life right right, yeah, because
Speaker 1: again you mentioned that the larval stage will live like
Speaker 1: about three years, but the flying adult stage lives for
Speaker 1: a mere twenty five days or so. So really it's
Speaker 1: adult form is just its last hurrah. You know this
Speaker 1: is about it just well, I guess, finally pooping, but
Speaker 1: also and more importantly reproducing. Right, yes, Now, this would
Speaker 1: sort of answer the question for me that I had
Speaker 1: when we were beginning to work on this episode. I
Speaker 1: was wondering, like, does a star lac poop if its
Speaker 1: whole body is under the ground, if it does poop.
Speaker 1: Where does the poop go? Now, you hypothesized, Robert, You
Speaker 1: were like, well, maybe it doesn't poop, just like the
Speaker 1: antline doesn't poop. But the airline's got a poop eventually,
Speaker 1: it's got the next stage of its life cycle. And
Speaker 1: as far as we know, the star lac does not.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna eventually grow wings, grow ananus, and then
Speaker 1: fly off somewhere to poop everything that has accumulated over
Speaker 1: the thousands of years. So what's going on with the
Speaker 1: star lac? Well, it does make me think it could
Speaker 1: this is just me, you know, spitball in here. But
Speaker 1: perhaps if there is anything it cannot digest, maybe it's
Speaker 1: spits it back out kind of like an owl will
Speaker 1: do you know with something that it you know that
Speaker 1: it is swallowed, you know, the various bones and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Or perhaps there is this just like terminal digestion going
Speaker 1: on inside the star lac. You know, it's just digesting
Speaker 1: and digesting, and at the end of this there's just
Speaker 1: nothing like maybe it's just that efficient. I can see that,
Speaker 1: But I also like the idea of the two way
Speaker 1: digestive system. There are organisms like that that live in
Speaker 1: the ocean mainly like the hydra I believe has a
Speaker 1: has a two way digestive system where it basically eats
Speaker 1: and poops through the same opening. That's right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we went into that on our episode about the
Speaker 1: evolution of the anus um. So yeah, there are there
Speaker 1: are various models for this that we see throughout the
Speaker 1: evolution of life on Earth. It could be, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: used to explain it another way of looking at it
Speaker 1: would be something down there under the ground is pooping
Speaker 1: for the sarlac, but we don't really know what sort
Speaker 1: of underground environment it is pooping into. Like there could
Speaker 1: be a pretty rich under underground world on tattooing, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, there could be you know, organisms that depend
Speaker 1: on the poop of the sarlac for food or or
Speaker 1: for shelter in the same way that the poop of
Speaker 1: of of large you know, megafauna are essential to the
Speaker 1: life cycles of organisms here on the surface of Earth.
Speaker 1: Here's one for you. Here's here's my hypothesis. Okay, the
Speaker 1: sarlac secretes an acidic compound that slowly over time dissolves
Speaker 1: the bedrock, dissolves the sedimentary rock down below where it
Speaker 1: is resting in the ground and forms a karst cavity
Speaker 1: in the ground, basically creates its own poop cave and
Speaker 1: then poops into the cave. H what do you think?
Speaker 1: I like it? I like it. You could have a
Speaker 1: whole uh, you know, a whole aspect of tattooing society
Speaker 1: where like jawas are out there trying to dig down
Speaker 1: to get those poop reserves from the star lacks, you know,
Speaker 1: like especially if it's like ancient poop reserves of the sarlac,
Speaker 1: it's aged and uh you know, highly valuable for something
Speaker 1: or another. I'm sure. Uh oh, I've got it, the
Speaker 1: most sought after fertilizer in the universe. Yes, the poop
Speaker 1: must flow. Yes. Now, I mentioned earlier that not all
Speaker 1: ant lions um are are going to be these these uh,
Speaker 1: these pit digging um trapped predators. You also have some
Speaker 1: that that that have other modes of existence. And we
Speaker 1: see this also with owl flies, which are uh an
Speaker 1: organism that look very similar as larva and also live
Speaker 1: as ambush predators in the soil. They look again a
Speaker 1: lot like ant lions, but while it seems like they
Speaker 1: have been known to obscure their lower bodies with sand
Speaker 1: and debris. The al fly larva don't seem to engage
Speaker 1: in the sort of robust pit based and stationary ambush
Speaker 1: tactics that we see with those most notable species of antlions. Now,
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier that there is a very similar pit
Speaker 1: trap predator which has a hunting strategy almost identical to
Speaker 1: that of the ant lion, and this is a winged
Speaker 1: insect family called Vermilion a day known as the worm lions.
Speaker 1: I think this might actually be an even closer parallel
Speaker 1: to the sarlac because it is a striking worm and
Speaker 1: in this way it kind of resembles the tentacles of
Speaker 1: the carcoon, uh of the star lack of the pit
Speaker 1: of carcoon. So despite how similar their pit trap strategies are,
Speaker 1: I was reading that interestingly, worm lions are not closely
Speaker 1: related to ant lions. This appears to be another interesting
Speaker 1: example of convergent evolution where in totally different ways, uh,
Speaker 1: different organisms have discovered basically the same way to to
Speaker 1: make a living, and in this case it's digging these
Speaker 1: conical pit traps in the sand. Another thing I was
Speaker 1: wondering is like, why do the conical pits look so similar?
Speaker 1: If the hunters are not closely related, wouldn't the pits
Speaker 1: be kind of more different for these different animals. Apparently
Speaker 1: has to do with maths or like the geometry of
Speaker 1: how sediments lay at an angle. Uh. The angles of
Speaker 1: the pit slopes are determined by what's known as the
Speaker 1: angle of repose, which is the steepest angle at which
Speaker 1: a sloping surface formed of a loose material is stable. Interesting,
Speaker 1: so you'll see that kind of like on the edges
Speaker 1: of mountains where they're sediments sliding down, it will settle
Speaker 1: into a certain angle that is stable. If it gets
Speaker 1: any steeper than that, it will start to collapse in
Speaker 1: an avalancheal form. Yeah, that that makes sense. I should
Speaker 1: also add that everyone should definitely look up a picture
Speaker 1: of the worm lion because it is very very cool
Speaker 1: looking at It has I think you mentioned like tentacle
Speaker 1: like protrusions around its head. Uh, Like the image I'm
Speaker 1: looking at here looks like four of them. Oh, and
Speaker 1: that it's body just itself looks like a tentacle. It
Speaker 1: is the organism, but like when it's wrapping around an
Speaker 1: ant or beetle or something that's falling into the trap. Uh,
Speaker 1: it looks kind of like a sarlac tentacle. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: it's segmented, but but appears far more prehensile than you know,
Speaker 1: something like a normal earthworm. But there is another organism
Speaker 1: that's parallel to the sarlac in some ways I think
Speaker 1: we should definitely talk about, and that is the predatory
Speaker 1: polycute worm known as unisy afrodetois yes, also known as
Speaker 1: a sand striker uh, and it has some other names
Speaker 1: I'm not going to mention here on the show, but
Speaker 1: that have been informally applied to it. But it is
Speaker 1: essentially a rainbow colored marine deathworm and it buries itself
Speaker 1: in the sand, ready to strike at passing prey. They
Speaker 1: can reach lengths of nearly nine point eight feeders or
Speaker 1: two pots, but most of its segmented body remains coiled
Speaker 1: in the sand as an array of five antennae to
Speaker 1: help it since prey, a feature that I think is
Speaker 1: reminiscent of of you know, this idea that the sarlac
Speaker 1: might have a root like systems of system of feelers,
Speaker 1: spines and tentacles, which you see in some of these
Speaker 1: illustrations that try to get to the heart of the
Speaker 1: star lac. But the sand striker. Here it strikes with
Speaker 1: incredible speed, whipping out its mandible studded farynx to capture prey. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think let's dwell on this just a little bit
Speaker 1: more because this might have gone past really fast. This
Speaker 1: is a predatory worm buries on the sand, attacks and
Speaker 1: it grows to like ten feet long. This is a
Speaker 1: ten ft long or you know, three meter worm that
Speaker 1: preys on fish and other animals in the sea. So
Speaker 1: it'll just have its little head poking out. But if
Speaker 1: you were to keep pulling this worm up out of
Speaker 1: the ground, you could end up with like the magician's
Speaker 1: scarf situation where it just keeps coming out as ten
Speaker 1: ft long. I was reading that sometimes it's it's pincer
Speaker 1: attack is so powerful that it chops pray fish in half. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I was reading a Scientific American blog post from
Speaker 1: from by writer named Becky Crew about these animals, and
Speaker 1: she drew my attention to this one story about how
Speaker 1: back in two thousand nine, at a marine aquarium in
Speaker 1: a town called New key In in England, aquarium keepers
Speaker 1: noticed that in this one tank the coral on display
Speaker 1: and some of the fish and stuff kept accumulating weird damage.
Speaker 1: It was as if something inside the tank was like
Speaker 1: chopping parts of the coral formation off and killing the animals,
Speaker 1: and there was no obvious culprit in the tank. So
Speaker 1: they had to like remove rocks and coral and plants
Speaker 1: from this tank one at a time to find out
Speaker 1: what was causing the attacks. And a curator named Matt
Speaker 1: Slater was quoted in the Daily Mail at the time
Speaker 1: talking about what happened. He said, quote, something was guzzling
Speaker 1: our reef, but we had no idea what. We also
Speaker 1: found an injured tank fish, so we laid traps, but
Speaker 1: they got ripped apart in the night. That worm must
Speaker 1: have obliterated the traps. The bait was full of hooks
Speaker 1: which he must have just digested. Uh So, I don't
Speaker 1: know if that sounds kind of hard to believe, but
Speaker 1: if that's true, it would kind of mirror the sarlac
Speaker 1: digestion thing. But in any case, like it does seem
Speaker 1: to be the case that they had one of these worms.
Speaker 1: Uh One of these worms burrowed down in the bottom
Speaker 1: of the tank, so the workers discovered that there was
Speaker 1: a stowaway sarlac. Like this predatory burrowing sea worm was
Speaker 1: hiding down in the sediment at the bottom, and it
Speaker 1: had probably snuck in among the coral that were transplated
Speaker 1: into the transplanted into the tank years before and had
Speaker 1: just grown there and hiding ever since. But this also
Speaker 1: made me think, so this worm is fast, powerful, venomous,
Speaker 1: mostly hidden down in the ground or down in the sediment.
Speaker 1: How can prey animals defend themselves? Well, actually, I found
Speaker 1: an interesting article about this where there is one stress
Speaker 1: rategy that's been uncovered and it was published in Scientific
Speaker 1: Reports in It was by jose La Shot and Daniel
Speaker 1: hog Walker Nagle called novel Mobbing Strategies on a fish
Speaker 1: population against a sessile analid predator And basically the authors
Speaker 1: here described this weird thing where these fish a type
Speaker 1: of bream called Scalopsis athanus. They would where like one
Speaker 1: fish would find one of these worms, would be near
Speaker 1: it and discover it was there and would start spitting
Speaker 1: jets of water toward the worm, and then other fish
Speaker 1: would join in. These prey fish would join in this
Speaker 1: mobbing behavior where they would all gather around and start
Speaker 1: spitting these jets of water towards the worm, which apparently
Speaker 1: caused the worm to retract down into the sediment. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure exactly what's going on there. I mean, so
Speaker 1: obviously this is some kind of group defensive behavior against
Speaker 1: a predator when the predator's location is discovered. But it
Speaker 1: makes me wonder if anything similar go on with the
Speaker 1: sarlac or would it even need to Like, would you
Speaker 1: need to have Banta's like spitting jets of air at
Speaker 1: a starlac or something, or could they just stay away
Speaker 1: from it? Yeah? I guess that's the thing about a
Speaker 1: land based scenario versus the marine scenario, is that on
Speaker 1: the land once, unless you were a you know, in
Speaker 1: a flying creature, by the time you got close enough
Speaker 1: to the star lac to really be in danger to
Speaker 1: really need to spit at it, it's probably too late. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, I think part of this this
Speaker 1: behavior though, might just be not necessarily in like harming
Speaker 1: the worm or something, but in alerting the other con
Speaker 1: specifics to its location. So you can imagine something like
Speaker 1: that for trap predators too. I mean, I would. I
Speaker 1: don't know of any evidence like this, but I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be surprised if there are some types of ants or
Speaker 1: other prey insects of the ant lion that have some
Speaker 1: kind of group defense strategy where when one species identifies
Speaker 1: an ant lion pit, it can kind of like you know,
Speaker 1: sound the alarm and alert the others to to to
Speaker 1: what's happening there. I don't know of any evidence of that,
Speaker 1: but I would not be surprised to find out something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, so you know, I think maybe the
Speaker 1: banthers might have some sort of um, some sort of
Speaker 1: the strategy to deal with that. Now, um, Ultimately, the
Speaker 1: sea is home to other bottom dwelling ambush predators as well,
Speaker 1: more than we could conceivably list in the in the
Speaker 1: the episode here. But you have things like the devil
Speaker 1: scorpion fish and the ward eye star gazer, and if
Speaker 1: you watch enough, um, you know, underwater documentaries, you'll see
Speaker 1: some of these bizarre and wondrous creatures. All Right, we
Speaker 1: need to take another break, but we'll be right back
Speaker 1: to discuss digestion for a thousand years. Thank Alright, we're back. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I think we need to finish up today by
Speaker 1: talking about the idea of the star lacks really slow digestion.
Speaker 1: Remember C. Three p O says that when you fall
Speaker 1: into the all powerful starlac again. I'm not maybe things
Speaker 1: this can come up again. I'm not quite sure why
Speaker 1: the star lack is all powerful. It seems relatively powerful
Speaker 1: within its own mouth and the range right around there,
Speaker 1: but beyond its powers rapidly diminish. Um Uh. But c
Speaker 1: P says in there in the belly, you will find
Speaker 1: a new definition of pain and suffering as you're slowly digested.
Speaker 1: Over a thousand years now, we've already discussed the slow
Speaker 1: metabolism and of the eating machine, the ant lion. But
Speaker 1: I want to look at another emblem of slow digestion,
Speaker 1: this time of mammal I think we should look at
Speaker 1: the sloth. And now there are a lot of ways
Speaker 1: actually that sloths have been observed to be generally slow. Right,
Speaker 1: the name, their English name is not a coincidence. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this this slowness does extend not just to their
Speaker 1: movements through the trees. You know, if you watch them
Speaker 1: climb something, they tend to be very slow moving creatures.
Speaker 1: But their slowness extends down to the chemical, the biochemical
Speaker 1: level within their bodies. I was looking at a study
Speaker 1: by Jonathan and Pauli ms Karaiah Peery, Emily D. Fountain
Speaker 1: and William H. Kerasov called arboreal foliovores limit their energetic
Speaker 1: output all the way to slothfulness in The American Naturalist
Speaker 1: in sixteen. And the authors here are trying to explore
Speaker 1: possible reasons that animals they call arboreal folivores animals that
Speaker 1: eat tree leaves, hang out in the trees, eat eat
Speaker 1: leaves from trees, why they are relatively rare compared to
Speaker 1: some other types of animals and do not display as
Speaker 1: much adaptive radiation as some other animals. And adaptive radiation
Speaker 1: here means, uh, you know, diversifying of the species into
Speaker 1: different ecological niches, basically like evolving into many different types
Speaker 1: and variations to fill ecological niches. You don't see a
Speaker 1: lot of this with animals like sloths. And so they
Speaker 1: point out that, you know, like mature tree leaves that
Speaker 1: the dietary the main diet source of these animals like sloths,
Speaker 1: and there are other animals like this two Pandas Koalas
Speaker 1: and so forth. Mature tree leaves are not a high
Speaker 1: quality food. They tend to be tough and woody. Often
Speaker 1: they've got some kind of poisons or tannins or some
Speaker 1: kind of unpleasant chemical in them. It's generally really difficult
Speaker 1: to live by eating, digesting, and extracting energy from mature
Speaker 1: tree leaves, but sloths do it. So maybe the energy
Speaker 1: constraints on these animals have somehow controlled their spread and evolution.
Speaker 1: So the authors here wanted to measure the metabolic rates
Speaker 1: of sloths in Costa Rica, and they write, quote, we
Speaker 1: quantified the field metabolic rate or FMR, movement and body
Speaker 1: temperature for syn topic two and three toed sloths, extreme
Speaker 1: arboreal fullivorees that differ in their degree of specialization. Both
Speaker 1: species expended little energy, but three toed sloths possessed the
Speaker 1: lowest FMR recorded for any mammal. And so the three
Speaker 1: toed sloth lives on a on a field metabolic rate
Speaker 1: of a hundred and sixty two kill a jewels per
Speaker 1: day per kilogram of body weight. Now that number alone
Speaker 1: might not mean much to you, but comparing it to
Speaker 1: other animals, uh, it's way lower than say the howler monkey,
Speaker 1: who who has a field metabolic grade of five hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty three killer jewels per day per kilogram of
Speaker 1: body weight. It's lower than koalas at four hundred and
Speaker 1: ten even the giant panda is more at five The
Speaker 1: three toads lost is the lowest ever measured uh at
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty two kill a jewels per day
Speaker 1: per kilogram, And so in a way it is a
Speaker 1: profound evolutionary experiment in slowing everything down. And this is
Speaker 1: historically in a kind of funny and interesting way lad
Speaker 1: some thinkers to view sloths as as some kind of
Speaker 1: like like that there's a problem with their existence, that
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with them, Like the Count de Buffon,
Speaker 1: you know, George Louis la Clerk, Count of Pafon, who
Speaker 1: we talked about in our Age of the Earth episode,
Speaker 1: because he did some experiments trying to uh, trying to
Speaker 1: determine the age of the Earth based on I believe
Speaker 1: his idea had to do with like how long it
Speaker 1: would take the Earth to cool to its current temperature.
Speaker 1: But he wrote this huge, multi volume natural history work
Speaker 1: during his life where he tried to become you know,
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century uh plenty of the elder, you know,
Speaker 1: to catalog all of the stuff in the world and
Speaker 1: tell you all about it. And his section on sloths
Speaker 1: is is kind of hilarious. Are you ready for this Robert, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's bring it on, Okay, so he says. These animals
Speaker 1: have neither incisive nor canine teeth. Their eyes are dull
Speaker 1: and almost concealed with hair. Their mouths are wide, and
Speaker 1: their lips thick and heavy. Their fur is course and
Speaker 1: looks like dried grass. Their thighs seem almost disjointed from
Speaker 1: the haunches, their legs very short and badly shaped. They
Speaker 1: have no soles to their feet, nor toe is separately movable,
Speaker 1: but only two or three claws like sessively long and
Speaker 1: crooked downwards, which move together and are only useful to
Speaker 1: the animal in climbing. Slowness, stupidity, and even habitual pain
Speaker 1: result from its uncouth conformation. They have no arms, either
Speaker 1: to attack or defend themselves, nor are they furnished with
Speaker 1: any means of security, as they can neither scratch up
Speaker 1: the earth nor seek for safety by flight. But confined
Speaker 1: to a small spot of ground or to the tree
Speaker 1: under which they are brought forth, they remain prisoners in
Speaker 1: the midst of an extended space, unable to move more
Speaker 1: than three feet in an hour. They climb with difficulty
Speaker 1: and pain, and their plaintive and interrupted cry they dare
Speaker 1: only utter by night. After some more moralizing about how
Speaker 1: awful they are, he says, uh, we have already observed
Speaker 1: that it seems as if all that could be does exist,
Speaker 1: And of this the sloths appear to be a striking proof.
Speaker 1: They constitute the last term of existence in the order
Speaker 1: of animals endowed with flesh and blood. One more defect
Speaker 1: and they could not have existed. Oh my goodness, Now
Speaker 1: I think this is funny because like in some ways, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Bafon was considered a very you know, learned
Speaker 1: man of his day. But like just the amazing ignorance
Speaker 1: of this is just like, given what we know about
Speaker 1: animals now. And le Clark had all kinds of terrible ideas.
Speaker 1: You know, he he endorsed scientific racism. He believed that
Speaker 1: like the animals of the New World were somehow inferior
Speaker 1: to the animals of the Old world. Uh, there's all
Speaker 1: this weird, genuine disgust in his writing when he talks
Speaker 1: about animals found in North and South America. So he
Speaker 1: had all these extremely misguided theories. Because all this stuff
Speaker 1: that he characterizes as defects with this species, I think
Speaker 1: we would probably look at and say, I don't know,
Speaker 1: given our modern evolutionary understanding, you are probably not understanding
Speaker 1: these correctly. These are probably not actually defects, these are adaptations.
Speaker 1: His his thinking falls prey to the naive version of
Speaker 1: survival of the fittest, as you know, the fittest, not
Speaker 1: as in best adapted to its environment, but as like
Speaker 1: the toughest, the buffest, the biggest, sharpest teeth and so forth. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean it's um in his his description of the sloth,
Speaker 1: really it comes off like a like a dis track,
Speaker 1: you know, against against the slot. It also reminds me
Speaker 1: a little bit of of Darwin's descriptions of the with
Speaker 1: the marine iguanas. Oh yeah, the iguanas of the glob.
Speaker 1: I mean Darwin didn't normally fall into this way of thinking,
Speaker 1: but occasionally there was some animal he didn't like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the sloth, like the main like counter arguments. In
Speaker 1: addition to to what we said here about the true
Speaker 1: nature of adaptation, I would also you know, put forth,
Speaker 1: at first of all, sloths tend to be cute. That
Speaker 1: tends to be our interpretation of them, especially baby sloths
Speaker 1: or slothes if you're using the British pronunciation but but
Speaker 1: also the adults there's a certain an adorable nous to them.
Speaker 1: And I have to say when when I was in
Speaker 1: Costa Rica with my family and we went on a hike,
Speaker 1: uh through the forest there and we got to see
Speaker 1: got a glimpse a wild sloth like where we you know,
Speaker 1: had to stand there for several minutes and watch what
Speaker 1: was presumed to be a sloth finally move and slowly
Speaker 1: confirm it's it's sloth hood Like that was a genuinely
Speaker 1: magical moment. Like that has to be one of one
Speaker 1: of my top interactions with wildlife ever. Like it just
Speaker 1: it truly felt like magic and time was standing still. Um. So,
Speaker 1: I you know, it's it's very difficult for me to
Speaker 1: to put my put myself in the mindset of of
Speaker 1: sloth hating um worldview. I think Buffon would think you're
Speaker 1: a sucker, But yeah, I think he was quite clearly wrong.
Speaker 1: Like the sloths, including the extremely slow, yes very slow
Speaker 1: three tote sloth, are incredibly well adapted to their environments
Speaker 1: in very interesting ways. I was reading an article about
Speaker 1: this on the Conversation from sixteen by a British zoologist
Speaker 1: named Becky Cliff who I believe she either currently works
Speaker 1: or has worked in a sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica, so,
Speaker 1: you know, doing a lot of hands on work with sloths.
Speaker 1: Um and and so she's writing about these adaptations. She says,
Speaker 1: of course, it's true that sloths are slow in pretty
Speaker 1: much every way. At the sloth sanctuary she works out
Speaker 1: in Costa Rica, they use these sloth backpacks two track
Speaker 1: sloth movement in the wild. And yes, it's true they
Speaker 1: move very slowly and they move very little. But there's
Speaker 1: a reason for this. It's not weakness. It is strategic
Speaker 1: in an evolutionary sense. Slow movement uses a lot less
Speaker 1: energy than fast movement. Remember that metabolic discovery we were
Speaker 1: talking about earlier. Three toad sloths have the slowest metabolism
Speaker 1: of any known mammal. In a weird way, they're almost
Speaker 1: like you can imagine them kind of like going through
Speaker 1: a convergent evolution thing, but across kingdoms of life. They're
Speaker 1: trying to slowly over the eons converge with plants. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, like so too. And to make this possible,
Speaker 1: you know, this this low metabolic rate. Of course, they
Speaker 1: move very slowly, but they also regulate their body temperature
Speaker 1: differently than most mammals. Do you know. Mammals have their
Speaker 1: warm blooded they have thermoregulation, they've got to keep their
Speaker 1: body temperature up through internal chemical means. But sloths manage
Speaker 1: a much lower body temperature than your average mammal. They
Speaker 1: they tend to go it around thirty two point seven
Speaker 1: degrees celsius or ninety one degrees fahrenheit. That's a full like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, seven or eight degrees lower than our average
Speaker 1: body temperature. And uh. Cliff mentions that their metabolic rate
Speaker 1: is somewhere between forty two seventy four per cent of
Speaker 1: what you would expect for an animal of its body mass.
Speaker 1: So they're they're they're going way underweight on energy needs.
Speaker 1: And so the question might be, well, why live like this?
Speaker 1: Why would you be so slow have such a relatively
Speaker 1: cool body and all that. Again, it's cheap, it's mega
Speaker 1: chi Sloths require much less food energy than other mammals
Speaker 1: of similar size. They can eat this, you know, this
Speaker 1: kind of bad food. I mean, it wouldn't be bad
Speaker 1: from their point of view, but it's low caloric density.
Speaker 1: This food like tough fibrous tree leaves, and they don't
Speaker 1: even need to eat all that much of it. Usually,
Speaker 1: if you're an animal that's subsisting on tough plant matter,
Speaker 1: you have to eat a ton of it to survive.
Speaker 1: Cliff points out that howler monkeys, who also live in
Speaker 1: the trees and eat tough leaves, they have to eat
Speaker 1: three times as much food per kilogram of body mass
Speaker 1: as the sloth does, and so requiring three times less
Speaker 1: food than something else in your niche opens up all
Speaker 1: kinds of possibilities for survival. So the sloth might not
Speaker 1: be lean and fast moving in a physical movement sense,
Speaker 1: but in a chemical sense, it is lean. It is
Speaker 1: like it has a lot to work with. It's got
Speaker 1: this wiggle room. But here's another thing we get to
Speaker 1: with sloth. Sloth metabolism in a in a way that's
Speaker 1: related to their very slow metabolism. They all so digest
Speaker 1: food really slow. And this brings us back to the sarlac.
Speaker 1: Cliff points at research saying, well, so we we don't
Speaker 1: know the exact rate, uh you know, the exact bounded
Speaker 1: rates of sloth digestion, but there are estimates that it
Speaker 1: takes food between like a hundred and fifty seven hours
Speaker 1: or up to twelve hundred hours to pass through the
Speaker 1: slots digestive system. So the upper end of this estimate
Speaker 1: would be like fifty days. Um. And you can imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, having having your food waste in your body
Speaker 1: for that long. Robert, you said before we came on
Speaker 1: to record today that you have actually watched video of
Speaker 1: a sloth pooping. You people at home, If you have
Speaker 1: not seen this, you should look it up. It's fair warning.
Speaker 1: It looks kind of traumatic, like there's a lot coming out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean, the other interesting thing about slots pooping
Speaker 1: is that, of course they have to climb down to
Speaker 1: do it. Uh. They don't just poop out of the branches.
Speaker 1: They return to the earth to carry this out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh and so Cliff rights quote. Unsurprisingly, the sloth's four
Speaker 1: chambered stomach is constantly full, and so more leaves can
Speaker 1: only be ingested when digesta leaves the stomach and enters
Speaker 1: the small intestine. Food intake and critically, energy expenditure are
Speaker 1: likely limited by digestion rate and room in the stomach. Indeed,
Speaker 1: the abdominal contents of a sloth can account for up
Speaker 1: to thirty seven percent of their body mass, so it's
Speaker 1: digesting for days at a time, maybe you know, a
Speaker 1: month or more at a time, digesting food. It's maybe
Speaker 1: a third of its body weight or more is the
Speaker 1: poop that it's got inside it right now, and it
Speaker 1: you know, hasn't purged yet. You can also imagine though
Speaker 1: that like why would it hang on this long? I
Speaker 1: can also imagine this having to do with what you're
Speaker 1: talking about, that it has to come down to the
Speaker 1: forest floor to do it, which is inherently a vulnerable activity.
Speaker 1: So and because it's slow moving, you might want to
Speaker 1: limit those trips down to the vulnerable position as much
Speaker 1: as possible. Yeah, it's if you live in a you know,
Speaker 1: a walk up apartment in New York and you prefer
Speaker 1: to um to poop in the say the jobba juice
Speaker 1: down on the street. I think that was the joke
Speaker 1: from Dirty Rock toilet image. You might limit how many
Speaker 1: times you'd go to the jobba juice to poop exactly. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: you might. You might wait, Awhile, there was another interesting
Speaker 1: fact that came up in this article, by the way,
Speaker 1: that the Cliff mentioned that I had never heard about before. UM, So,
Speaker 1: you know, the obvious question might be, how does a
Speaker 1: sloth of aid predators. If it's so slow, it's not
Speaker 1: a fighter, it doesn't run, it's a hider. Uh. So
Speaker 1: the sloths have to protect themselves via camouflage, and Cliff
Speaker 1: mentions in an article that uh that all of the
Speaker 1: sloth's major predators like jaguars, awesl lots, harpy eagles are
Speaker 1: primarily visual hunters, so camouflage can actually go a long
Speaker 1: way to protect you. And she points to an interesting
Speaker 1: suggested symbiotic relationship with algae with between sloths and algae
Speaker 1: that grow in the sloths for and this algae is
Speaker 1: apparently passed on from mother to offspring, so it is
Speaker 1: visual camouflage through inherited microbiota, which is pretty interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I do have to say that time that I got
Speaker 1: to to see, not only see, but to to find, uh,
Speaker 1: the sloth in the wild, like it wasn't pointed out
Speaker 1: by a guide. Well, it's just the whole time I
Speaker 1: knew based on what the guys that told us that
Speaker 1: there might be sloths in the trees, we just have
Speaker 1: to look really hard for them, and it did. It
Speaker 1: took forever to see this this creature because you're just
Speaker 1: kind of constantly on the lookout for possible movement, possible lumps,
Speaker 1: uh you know in the in these you know, rich
Speaker 1: canopy of trees that might be a slot. And most
Speaker 1: of the time I was wrong, or at least I
Speaker 1: was unable to confirm that what I was looking at
Speaker 1: at a distance was a living creature at all. So
Speaker 1: so when it really I was more lucky than anything.
Speaker 1: I think that I was able to to to zero
Speaker 1: we in on this this lump in the trees, and
Speaker 1: then finally see it move and finally make out the
Speaker 1: movements of of an actual swath. So yeah, I imagine
Speaker 1: they have a you know, tremendous advantage versus predators that
Speaker 1: are doing the same thing, you know, on constant lookout for,
Speaker 1: uh for prey amid the tree limbs. I don't know this,
Speaker 1: but I'd also guess that slower metabolism, slower movement would
Speaker 1: make you less fidgety. Yeah, yeah, they're not fidgety like
Speaker 1: I remember. That was another thing, is like the movements
Speaker 1: were We're very slow and fluid and kind of far between,
Speaker 1: like it wasn't It was wasn't like looking for the
Speaker 1: movement of a traditional creature, you know, or at least
Speaker 1: the kind of creatures that I tend to find myself
Speaker 1: looking for, you know, like the movements of say a
Speaker 1: squirrel or a or a chipmunk or a bird of
Speaker 1: some sort. You know, it's a it's it's a totally
Speaker 1: different animal. Can we imagine a sarlac evolving over over
Speaker 1: a very long period, over millions of years, from some
Speaker 1: type of sloth like creature, like a formerly totally mobile
Speaker 1: creature that over time evolves too slow its metabolism and
Speaker 1: digestion down further and further and further in order to
Speaker 1: you know, survive on maybe tough dietary material like like
Speaker 1: plant leaves or something, uh to support this high efficiency
Speaker 1: of you know, a slow metabolism, highly efficient digestion. I
Speaker 1: wonder if there are routes like that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: have wondered before. Like one of the main things we
Speaker 1: think of is characterizing intelligent animal life is fast movement.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't you can understand why intelligence evolves from
Speaker 1: fast movement in the history of animal life, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to stay that way in terms of that association, right,
Speaker 1: Like you could imagine that there could be an animal
Speaker 1: with intelligence that just keeps evolving back down to have
Speaker 1: less and less need to move its body around and
Speaker 1: kind of becomes sessile, becomes plant. Like Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean maybe maybe millions of years in the future.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying there there will be ant lions that
Speaker 1: evolved from sloths and you know, fall into the pit
Speaker 1: and you'll one day get to be a part of
Speaker 1: their dramatic traumatic pooping. I like that. Yeah, the idea
Speaker 1: of a far future sessile sloth. All right, So there
Speaker 1: you have it. Did we expose all of the secrets
Speaker 1: of the star Lak? Uh? No, we did not. The
Speaker 1: Sarlak retains its mysteries, which I think is is, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the key attractions to the creature to begin with. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean you can't fully lift up the sarlac and
Speaker 1: peak at what's under it, but we'll have to imagine
Speaker 1: that there is a poop cave. Yeah, Or what if
Speaker 1: there's just a NonStop party in there, you know, like
Speaker 1: what if you had an alternate cut where Boba fett
Speaker 1: Is is swallowed whole by the star Lac and then
Speaker 1: he's just dropped into this stomach cavity that's actually just
Speaker 1: to really happening hang out. You know, everybody that's ever
Speaker 1: been eaten by it is just in there kind of chilling,
Speaker 1: you know. And it turns out the Starla does digest
Speaker 1: people instead. It has like a symbiotic relationship with you know,
Speaker 1: other organisms, uh, you know, beneath the surface of tattooin
Speaker 1: and everything like friends. Yeah, yeah, it gets lonely. It's
Speaker 1: an intelligent creature. It gets lonely. It needs friends. Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: this has been a lot of fun. Yeah, this has
Speaker 1: been fun. Um. It is kind of hard to believe
Speaker 1: this is the This is I think the first Star
Speaker 1: Wars episode of stuff to blow your mind. But hey,
Speaker 1: who knows. There's a lot of a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: in the Star Wars universe. Maybe we'll maybe we'll get
Speaker 1: up the energy to do another one of the one
Speaker 1: of these one day. I'm game. In the meantime, obviously,
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We know
Speaker 1: we have a lot of Star Wars fans, general science
Speaker 1: fiction fans, monster fans, uh out there amid our listeners,
Speaker 1: and yeah, we would love to hear your feedback on
Speaker 1: this episode on the Star Lac itself, your memories and
Speaker 1: interpretations of the star lack and indeed, if you think
Speaker 1: there's a strong candidate for a future episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind related to Star Wars or any
Speaker 1: other work of fiction, science fiction, et cetera, let us know.
Speaker 1: Um we'll tell you how to get in touch with
Speaker 1: us here in a second, But if you just want
Speaker 1: to support the show, the best thing you can do
Speaker 1: is rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get this podcast.
Speaker 1: Hughes thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hi, you can email us at contact that Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your
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