Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature feature production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and today on the show, we're talking
Speaker 1: about some twisted mating stories from parasites that take this
Speaker 1: scenic route to reproduction, to some species boycotting normal mating altogether.
Speaker 1: Discover this more as we answer the age old question
Speaker 1: how many nematodes can you fit inside an ant's key
Speaker 1: star Joining me today is author of the John Dyes
Speaker 1: at the End and the Zoe Ash series and fan
Speaker 1: of parasites, Jason Pargeon. Welcome. So my goal today is
Speaker 1: not to instill a sense of existential dread and horror
Speaker 1: and your listeners. I know this is not that kind
Speaker 1: of a show. So if I start if in the
Speaker 1: course of you describing these things, if I when I
Speaker 1: start talking about the implications of it, if I start
Speaker 1: going down too dark of the path, there needs to
Speaker 1: be some kind of a signal or a safe word,
Speaker 1: something you can say this like, no, Jason, I know
Speaker 1: that you are a master of modern horror, is what
Speaker 1: I personally, Katie. I'm calling you, Jason about I need
Speaker 1: you to to dial it I need YouTube dial it back. Well,
Speaker 1: I do quack out naughty words on this show, but
Speaker 1: I don't really quack out existential dreads. So I think
Speaker 1: it will be okay. And if the listeners don't need
Speaker 1: that right now, like let's nobody like nobody, surely nobody
Speaker 1: is listening to spend the rest of the day because
Speaker 1: I'm gonna just people who are unfamiliar for me and
Speaker 1: me and Katie used to work together, like, for example,
Speaker 1: just people unfamiliar with me. I personally, it's my understanding
Speaker 1: that the only reason one of my previous horror novels
Speaker 1: did not win the Pulitzer Prize was because it was
Speaker 1: just too too scary. That's because I in twelve. You
Speaker 1: may have heard like there was no Pulitzer awarded in
Speaker 1: fiction that year, and I think it's because my novel
Speaker 1: that year. This book is full of spiders. I think
Speaker 1: because I I was people don't believe me. But I
Speaker 1: was texting with the guy that gives out the Pulitzers
Speaker 1: and I was like, bro, like, yeah, Rodney, we call
Speaker 1: him pork Chop is his nickname. I was like, yo,
Speaker 1: it's am I winning the Pulitzer or not? And he
Speaker 1: he text me bags like, bro, it's like low key, bro,
Speaker 1: it's too like, I'm too scared reading this thing. The
Speaker 1: number one rule is you cannot make the Pulitzer Prize
Speaker 1: awarders pee their pants because then you know they won't
Speaker 1: give you an award because they pe their pants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they're like, that's no, you made it. You made
Speaker 1: it too, you made it too scary, so and kind
Speaker 1: and that sucks because like the Pulzer comes, it's there's
Speaker 1: like a fifty dollar gift card to Taco Bell like
Speaker 1: the like it's it's a really cool prized one. But
Speaker 1: the point I'm making is is that sometimes I can
Speaker 1: go to a place that's so terrifying that you can
Speaker 1: just be terrified into a coma. So if you hear
Speaker 1: in the course of recording this where it seems like
Speaker 1: there's gaps in the audio, that's where it's they've had
Speaker 1: to cut out some things that was too disturbing by law,
Speaker 1: Like it's legally and you can't put it into a podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I've got my lawyer right here kind of
Speaker 1: letting me know when I got to cut it out. Wait,
Speaker 1: what's that she's she's saying, cut all of this, but
Speaker 1: you know, well, we'll see if we can keep that in.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so we are talking about some pretty horrifying
Speaker 1: things today on the podcast, and one of my favorite
Speaker 1: parasites actually we're going to talk about and a parasite
Speaker 1: that I actually recently learned about that is now my
Speaker 1: new favorite parasite. So, Jason, when I asked you what
Speaker 1: you wanted to talk about, you mentioned the Lucochloridium paradox um,
Speaker 1: which is that parasitic brood sex that infects the eye
Speaker 1: stalks of snails and turns their eye stalks into this
Speaker 1: incredible undulating show of like these colorful lines and they
Speaker 1: kind of look like caterpillars or like some kind of
Speaker 1: techno caterpillar rave attached to this snail's head. I really
Speaker 1: I can't emphasize enough. And here's where if you are
Speaker 1: able to access a photo of this thing, and I
Speaker 1: know that there's no way listening to this, you're gonna
Speaker 1: know how to google what was the name of the parasite,
Speaker 1: Lucochloridium paradox um. This is the whole thing right here,
Speaker 1: because this thing it infects that she says, the stalks
Speaker 1: of of a snail and makes them look like caterpillar.
Speaker 1: But why would it want to do that, Katie. Well,
Speaker 1: in the strictest sense, it doesn't want anything, because it
Speaker 1: is a tiny flat worm with barely two brain cells
Speaker 1: to kind of rubbed together. But natural selection has created
Speaker 1: this completely bananas mating process for this thing. So a
Speaker 1: little bit of info about it. It lives in temperate
Speaker 1: forests of North American Europe. We actually did cover this
Speaker 1: on the episode Evolutionary Horror Stories, but that was a
Speaker 1: while back, and I think it's always fun to do
Speaker 1: a recap of this thing because it is amazing. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this tiny flat worm found in the temperate forests of
Speaker 1: North American Europe. So here is its lifestyle in a nutshell,
Speaker 1: or maybe I should say in a snail shell. So first,
Speaker 1: a snail will accidentally eat the eggs of the luca
Speaker 1: clurity of flatworm. While the snail is eating lee was
Speaker 1: contaminated by bird poop, and we're going to find out
Speaker 1: why this bird poop is important later. So the eggs
Speaker 1: hatch inside the snail's body, and so they are these
Speaker 1: really teeny tiny larvae of this flat worm. There, these
Speaker 1: tiny mouthless worms and they travel through the snail's body
Speaker 1: into its eye stalks, and once it's in the ice stalks,
Speaker 1: these first stage larvae actually transform into brood sacks. So
Speaker 1: it's not just that these larvae are growing inside these snail.
Speaker 1: The larvae are actually generating new larvae through a sexual reproduction,
Speaker 1: so they are multiplying until these brood sacks contains hundreds
Speaker 1: of new larvae. And these brood sacks caused the snail's
Speaker 1: eyes to swell, and that is what you're actually seeing
Speaker 1: when you're seeing this weird techno rave of these caterpillar
Speaker 1: like protrusions. They undulate inside the eye stocks, creating a
Speaker 1: hypnotic strobe effect of red, green, white, and yellow bands
Speaker 1: and spots, which looks like those two writing caterpillars, because
Speaker 1: the caterpillars are food for the type of bird is
Speaker 1: trying to attract. Now you're going to correct me, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna say, Jason, you you idiot, You you master
Speaker 1: of horror. Yet somehow, idiot, No one involved in this
Speaker 1: process wants anything. No one involved in this process knows
Speaker 1: what it's doing. That right there is my entire point.
Speaker 1: Because we've only you're only halfway through this process. That
Speaker 1: you're going to describe a process that is so complicated
Speaker 1: and so hyper specific and so strategic that it is
Speaker 1: impossible to understand how it could exist without an intelligence
Speaker 1: strategizing it out. It would be like if a flock
Speaker 1: of a flock of beavers, what's what's a group of
Speaker 1: beavers called? Oh, you know what? I'm not really sure. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm going to say the Parliament of Beavers. A herd
Speaker 1: of beavers accidentally carried out the Oceans thirteen heist, not
Speaker 1: because they had a Danny Ocean strategizing it, just because
Speaker 1: they mindlessly, following instinct, accidentally did every step of breaking
Speaker 1: into the vault and on all of that stuff. This
Speaker 1: is every bit as complicated as that, only it was
Speaker 1: all done through blind, dumb natural selection. No one involved
Speaker 1: knows what they're doing, and that to me is incredible
Speaker 1: because it kind of cast doubt on what intelligence is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it does feel very much like this was written by
Speaker 1: a serial killer. Like you you gave a serial killers
Speaker 1: some kind of animal creation powers and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to create a parasite that grows inside a
Speaker 1: snail and then a sexually reproduces until it creates these
Speaker 1: eggs acts inside the snails. Ey stalks that undulate and
Speaker 1: throb like two caterpillars, and then that gets eaten by
Speaker 1: a bird. Yeah, it's it's completely nuts and psychotics. So,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, just as these just as these
Speaker 1: flatworms have quote unquote planned all along, the birds will
Speaker 1: find that caterpillar mimicry display really appetizing and eat the
Speaker 1: snails i stalks or even the whole snail. Often just
Speaker 1: pick up the ice stalks themselves and leave this poor, blind,
Speaker 1: mutilated snail to die. And the local claridium quote unquote
Speaker 1: wants to be eaten by that bird to fulfill its
Speaker 1: sick and twisted lifestyle, so it will reproduce inside of
Speaker 1: the bird sexually and just basically having this orgy, and
Speaker 1: so it's eggs will get pooped out again. The horrifying
Speaker 1: life cycle will start again once a snail accidentally eats
Speaker 1: a leaf contaminated by that poop, and even more deviously,
Speaker 1: it actually changes the behavior of the snail to make
Speaker 1: it more likely to be eaten by a bird. So
Speaker 1: typically these snails will stay in the dense foliage of
Speaker 1: the forest where it's shady and there's not a lot
Speaker 1: of light in there, and it's harder for a bird
Speaker 1: to see them, but these local chloridium will cause the
Speaker 1: snail to actually go towards sunlight, where it's much more
Speaker 1: likely that these birds will be able to find and
Speaker 1: pick them off. So, like you said, it is my
Speaker 1: blowing that such a parasite could exist and would have
Speaker 1: such a detailed life plan that yeah, does really rival
Speaker 1: some kind of heist, except the bank is like a
Speaker 1: bird's intestinal tract. So to pull pull back the curtain
Speaker 1: a little bit, because the question people constantly ask me is, Jason,
Speaker 1: how is it even possible to write a horror novel? Like,
Speaker 1: surely only a genius could do it. Here's here's the
Speaker 1: reality any any monster horror story you've ever seen. It's
Speaker 1: the only premise is what if humans were subject to
Speaker 1: the same stuff that animals and insects are subject to
Speaker 1: all time? Yeah, Like like on this show, like previous
Speaker 1: guests have referenced aliens or something like that, It's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but aliens, that meeting process and aliens is something that
Speaker 1: you would see in the insect were old, only much
Speaker 1: much worse. So here to try to put this into
Speaker 1: human terms is something that no no horror writer, no
Speaker 1: matter how depraved would come up with. The human equivalent
Speaker 1: would be if you ate a salad and there was
Speaker 1: some sort of parasite in the leaves of the salad.
Speaker 1: This parasite then traveled to let's say, your arm, and
Speaker 1: formed an egg sac that looks and smells exactly like
Speaker 1: a cheeseburger. Then it mind controlled you into you thinking
Speaker 1: you're doing this for your own purposes. You don't know
Speaker 1: you're you're being controlled. In mind controlled you into crawling
Speaker 1: under someone's picnic and sticking your cheeseburger egg sact arm
Speaker 1: under their paper plate so that they would eat it,
Speaker 1: so that they would now have the egg from this
Speaker 1: eggsact inside of them. So then they the next time
Speaker 1: they are out and about and they poop on someone
Speaker 1: else's salad, it would start the cycle all over again. Right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean at first I wasn't scared because the idea
Speaker 1: that I would willingly eat a salad is just preposterous.
Speaker 1: But then you started talking about the cheeseburger arms and
Speaker 1: pooping on someone's salad, both things that I do enjoy.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, that is exactly what is happening here.
Speaker 1: What is so interesting to me is that this isn't
Speaker 1: something where it's like, oh, man, well, I guess in
Speaker 1: a world full of possibilities, we're going to get one
Speaker 1: parasite that does such a devious thing just due to
Speaker 1: the law of large numbers probability. But no, this is
Speaker 1: not the only parasite that has such a complicated lifestyle
Speaker 1: and such a devious plan. There is actually another parasite
Speaker 1: that does almost, if not more, of a devious kind
Speaker 1: of um does does a version of this that is
Speaker 1: just as devious. So Mermaconema neotropic come is a parasite
Speaker 1: that doesn't make its victim look like a caterpillar but
Speaker 1: a fruit. This is actually the only instance of fruit
Speaker 1: mimicry known in the animal kingdom, let alone unwilling mimicry
Speaker 1: caused by a parasite. So this is this is really creepy.
Speaker 1: And so this uh m neotropic come is a parasitic
Speaker 1: Nema toad, which is a tiny round worm that parasitizes
Speaker 1: a species of South American ants. So so far, pretty
Speaker 1: normal ants get all sorts of horrifying parasites all the time,
Speaker 1: And like the luco Floridium, the m. Neotropicum does have
Speaker 1: a dastardly convoluted plan to carry out its life cycle.
Speaker 1: Just like the lucochloridium, it starts with a bird uh,
Speaker 1: and its eggs are pooped out of a bird. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so how did it get inside that bird? Well,
Speaker 1: it's a funny story. So uh. These eggs will be
Speaker 1: picked up by an ant of the sea, a trada species.
Speaker 1: And these ants are actually really interesting in their own right.
Speaker 1: Their jet black, shiny ants with this kind of odd,
Speaker 1: blocky shovel shaped head. They're also known as gliding ants
Speaker 1: because they can use their legs in their butt to
Speaker 1: steer while falling, which is really useful because they live
Speaker 1: up in the trees of the Peruvian rainforest, and if
Speaker 1: they fall, being able to steer back to the tree
Speaker 1: trunk to easily return to their colony is much more
Speaker 1: preferable than getting lost or eaten by predators on the
Speaker 1: forest floor. However, m neotropicome, our little parasitic nematode, has
Speaker 1: other plans for these poor ants. So when the ant
Speaker 1: picks up the eggs in the bird dukie, it doesn't
Speaker 1: just eat them directly. It's even more convoluted than the
Speaker 1: snail story. They actually carry these eggs back to their
Speaker 1: colony because they think this is a source of food
Speaker 1: that they can feed their young. Then they feed it
Speaker 1: to their own aunt larva, unwittingly dooming them, and these
Speaker 1: poor larva will have their life completely altered by the
Speaker 1: parasite sick game. So as the aunt larva matures into
Speaker 1: a fully grown ant, the c neotropicome nematode is also
Speaker 1: developing inside the ant, reproducing inside the ants gaster. So
Speaker 1: that's the round caboose part of the ant. We could
Speaker 1: call it a butt. It's not technically a butt, but
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, I'm going to call it but anyways,
Speaker 1: So that means that male and female nematodes inside the
Speaker 1: ant that were hatched from these eggs that were fed
Speaker 1: to it by the ant's own caretakers are now having
Speaker 1: sex inside of the ants but and making more of
Speaker 1: these horrible little nematodes. So after the nematodes mate, the
Speaker 1: males die while the female stick around carrying their eggs. Again,
Speaker 1: this is all still happening inside of the ant gaster,
Speaker 1: and when we zoom back out to the ant, we
Speaker 1: see something even more nefarious happening. So the nematodes, who
Speaker 1: are sick little perverts, will complete its life cycle inside birds.
Speaker 1: And so to get there, it's got to do something
Speaker 1: horrible to this ant. Because the birds are actually uninterested
Speaker 1: in eating these ants. They have a bad tasting chemical defense,
Speaker 1: these hard pointing exteriors. Birds are not interested in eating
Speaker 1: the ants, so the ant has to be changed to
Speaker 1: suit the nematodes needs. So as the nematode eggs are
Speaker 1: developing inside the ants gaster, they're causing it to swell,
Speaker 1: become bright red instead of black, and look just like
Speaker 1: a delicious ripe berry that are commonly found in the
Speaker 1: trees where the ants live. And the birds will see
Speaker 1: this and think, hey a berry, eat it, and oh no,
Speaker 1: now they are unwittingly carriers of an ant torture mechanism.
Speaker 1: And Jason, I've shared with you a photo of one
Speaker 1: of these ants, both before it's horrible transformation and after,
Speaker 1: and also one of these ants nestled among some of
Speaker 1: these red berries that are commonly found in these trees,
Speaker 1: and it looks exactly like a berry. It's this is
Speaker 1: again where if you are in a place or on
Speaker 1: a device where you can see the vision will aids
Speaker 1: there in the show notes or whatever. It it doesn't
Speaker 1: just inflame. It's the it's aunt. But to be read,
Speaker 1: it's because you know, like it's like, well, humans, something
Speaker 1: gets inflamed in red. No, no, no, this is not
Speaker 1: how that's not how ants work. They don't have red blood.
Speaker 1: It looks like the exact shading and shape and everything
Speaker 1: is exactly like one of these berries. And again, specifically,
Speaker 1: as part of this incredibly complicated strategy, and again even
Speaker 1: in your course of explaining that, you used phrasing like, well,
Speaker 1: the ant thinks it's carrying food back, and anyone wanting
Speaker 1: to be pedantic will say, well, ants can't think. But again,
Speaker 1: I can't even give you the human equivalent of this. Well,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, it gets inside your body and it
Speaker 1: turns your butt into a beautiful fruit basket. And then
Speaker 1: and then you you take it to the office, and
Speaker 1: somebody thinks of fruit basket has been delivered to the office,
Speaker 1: and that tricks the because this is actually so convoluted
Speaker 1: that I can't explain it in those terms without becoming confusing.
Speaker 1: Because you've got at every stage you're gonna ask yourself, well,
Speaker 1: how does this parasite know that? And I guess the
Speaker 1: first question we haven't really addressed. It is like, well,
Speaker 1: why do they want to be eaten by birds in
Speaker 1: the first place. And you have to understand there's a
Speaker 1: strategy among this type of creature that the parents want
Speaker 1: their children to be as far away from them as possible.
Speaker 1: They so their goal is to broadcast themselves, like, to
Speaker 1: get far away, and that's just part of their Now,
Speaker 1: I don't actually I am not smart enough to know why,
Speaker 1: but getting into a bird to be pooped out somewhere
Speaker 1: miles away is a key part of all sorts of
Speaker 1: living things strategies, including fruit. That's how seeds. Seeds work.
Speaker 1: They make beautiful fruit that the birds want to come eat,
Speaker 1: but the seeds are made to pass safely through their
Speaker 1: digestion they get pooped out miles way on a new
Speaker 1: tree grows. It is not totally clear to me why
Speaker 1: these larvae or these parasites don't want to just breed
Speaker 1: near where they are, because it seems like those distances
Speaker 1: would seem like a long way away to a parasite.
Speaker 1: But their strategy clearly there's a benefit to getting inside
Speaker 1: of a bird and then starting the whole process, not
Speaker 1: just starting over, starting over miles away. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: were right. That dispersal seems to be the main motivating
Speaker 1: factor for having this elaborate system, and a reason both
Speaker 1: for things like plants or animals why they want dispersal
Speaker 1: is so that their offspring don't have to compete for
Speaker 1: as many resources. So if you have, you know, like
Speaker 1: with plants, like a tree, it's very easy to see
Speaker 1: if you have a cluster of tree, all of the
Speaker 1: young saplings who are under this tree aren't going to
Speaker 1: get any sunlight, They're not going to get as many
Speaker 1: nutrients from this soil. It's bad to have this dense
Speaker 1: population and that are all competing for the same resources,
Speaker 1: especially if it's your own genetic progeny, because you're going
Speaker 1: to outcompete your own offspring, and that's not a tenable
Speaker 1: strategy for genes being reproduced generation over generation. So in general,
Speaker 1: animals have also developed this technique of dispersal. We've actually
Speaker 1: talked about this on the podcast before from sort of
Speaker 1: a more I guess understandable from a human perspective, where
Speaker 1: you you'll have something like an elephant troop or a
Speaker 1: lion pride where the males will go off and and
Speaker 1: join their own pride or go mate somewhere else, so
Speaker 1: the males will disperse and move off. And this is
Speaker 1: kind of a more if you can think of it
Speaker 1: this way, it's more of a conscious thing that these
Speaker 1: males are doing, although also driven by instinct. But when
Speaker 1: you get down to you the parasite level, there's not
Speaker 1: too much thinking going on. It's just the ones that
Speaker 1: reproduced in a way that dispersed their offspring had a
Speaker 1: better chance of these offspring having enough resources to survive
Speaker 1: and then reproduce themselves. And that's also kind of when
Speaker 1: we think about really convoluted evolutionary stories. It it blows
Speaker 1: my mind always that you can get such complexity from
Speaker 1: just the very simplest of principles is that genes that
Speaker 1: survive survive, and that's it, Like that is the only
Speaker 1: concept you really need to know in order to explain this,
Speaker 1: which is it's hard. It's even knowing that it's still
Speaker 1: hard to really visualize it. So you can think of
Speaker 1: it as every time there's some kind of accident or
Speaker 1: mutation that happens with this parasite that results in it
Speaker 1: getting sort of a step closer to this system that
Speaker 1: works so well for it that offspring will survive so
Speaker 1: you can imagine like with these uh, with these nematodes
Speaker 1: accidentally getting eaten by a bird, like before they've developed
Speaker 1: this reproductive strategy, and these are called um, this is
Speaker 1: a called actually my asses, which my my, my, I
Speaker 1: my ass. And it is h when something unwittingly or
Speaker 1: let me see if I can phrase it, when something
Speaker 1: becomes a parasite even though it has not evolved to
Speaker 1: become a parasite. Like if you eat something like some
Speaker 1: kind of um, some kind of nematode, and it it
Speaker 1: is not actually a parasitic nemic toade, but now it's
Speaker 1: living in you because it has to because you ate it.
Speaker 1: So something like that could happen to this thing, but
Speaker 1: then it may start to evolve these strategies that actually
Speaker 1: make good use of this accidental ingestion. So like maybe
Speaker 1: these nematodes kept getting eaten by birds or kept getting
Speaker 1: eaten by ants, but then the ones that caused these
Speaker 1: changes maybe made the ant a little more swollen and
Speaker 1: noticeable when it was inside it. Those ended up surviving
Speaker 1: and passing on these genes that kept getting driven further
Speaker 1: and further into this direction, until we've got ants with
Speaker 1: berry butts well, and I think, you know, obviously with
Speaker 1: this show, we always are trying to put things into
Speaker 1: human terms, like imagine this happen, or you'll be i know,
Speaker 1: previous guests like they'll put it in terms of like
Speaker 1: what this was the Pixar movie, because Pixar, it's always
Speaker 1: the animals, but they're acting exactly like people. They're having
Speaker 1: parasitic nematode. Pixar movie, by the way. So for example,
Speaker 1: when you talked earlier about why offspring disperse, you know,
Speaker 1: and and so they you know, it's so the young
Speaker 1: don't have to compete for resources, and some listening are like, well,
Speaker 1: my my dad did that. You know, he just one day,
Speaker 1: he just left and he moved to Ohio and started
Speaker 1: a different family. Like that's probably what he was doing. Sure,
Speaker 1: but the problem with putting this into human terms. Obviously
Speaker 1: humans made it to the top of the food chain
Speaker 1: because of our big brains and our opposable thumbs, and
Speaker 1: we became tool users. That's why, you know, we have
Speaker 1: cars and stuff to get around on. We use our
Speaker 1: our technology, we can build things. So we can really
Speaker 1: only think in terms of intentionality, like like if if
Speaker 1: a human bought if a human built a house. We
Speaker 1: don't think, oh, that person had an instinct to build
Speaker 1: a house. We think, oh, they sat down, drew up
Speaker 1: the plans, bought a piece of land, and everything we
Speaker 1: do we think of as being the result of our
Speaker 1: conscious mind having the thoughts. But there is a viral
Speaker 1: tweet that went around where someone asked a question I
Speaker 1: think every school child was asked. There's like, when a
Speaker 1: beaver is building a dam, does it know it's building
Speaker 1: a dam? Or does it, as the tweet said, does
Speaker 1: it just see some flowing water and think absolutely not
Speaker 1: and and just start grabbing stuff to putting its way,
Speaker 1: like doesn't know what it's doing. I think every kid,
Speaker 1: every kindergarten kid must seem like a bird building a
Speaker 1: nest has asked, well, how did the bird learn how
Speaker 1: to build the nest? Who taught it? Didn't watch its
Speaker 1: mother build the nest? I mean, it's a this is
Speaker 1: such a huge question in evolutionary biology to the beaver thing. Actually,
Speaker 1: I can answer that tweet, which is it's the sound
Speaker 1: of flowing water and the beaver going absolutely not. You
Speaker 1: can actually play the sound of flowing water from a
Speaker 1: speaker and the beaver will come over to it an
Speaker 1: agitation and like shove twigs and mud at it because
Speaker 1: it has this instinct too when it can hear are
Speaker 1: flowing water and it's near this damn. The damn construction
Speaker 1: is actually fascinating because they have like a foundation. It's
Speaker 1: not just the beaver throwing sticks at a situation. They
Speaker 1: have a whole construction process. But once they've built this damn,
Speaker 1: they can hear leaks, and when they hear a leak,
Speaker 1: they are driven to go and angrily shove sticks and
Speaker 1: mud into it. And with the with the bird thing,
Speaker 1: it's a really interesting thing to bring up birds because
Speaker 1: birds are guided by so much instinct. But then they
Speaker 1: also have this capacity to learn. So you can take
Speaker 1: a bird away from its parents and it may still
Speaker 1: learn how to build a nest, but it may not
Speaker 1: learn how to sing because it requires the presence of
Speaker 1: other birds hearing their bird song in order to be
Speaker 1: able to learn how to sing that bird song. And
Speaker 1: you actually get bird song changing over time because if
Speaker 1: the parents of the bird start singing a slightly different
Speaker 1: version of it, then the offspring will sing a slightly
Speaker 1: different version of it, until the song actually starts to
Speaker 1: drift into something new and with humans as we're getting
Speaker 1: more complicated. Humans are really interesting because our babies are
Speaker 1: born prematurely compared to other animals. You know, we've got
Speaker 1: the soft, squishy heads, our skulls aren't entirely fused together.
Speaker 1: We're kind of useless. You look at all the other
Speaker 1: animals and the animal kingdom, so many of them aren't
Speaker 1: as useless. They can walk around and run uh hours
Speaker 1: after birth, but not babies. And the reason for this
Speaker 1: seems to be that we selected for these huge brains,
Speaker 1: and so the only way we could give birth to
Speaker 1: a baby with such a huge brain as if we
Speaker 1: gave birth to them prematurely, otherwise it would kill the mother.
Speaker 1: And because we give birth to them so prematurely, their
Speaker 1: brains are highly pliable and they go through a lot
Speaker 1: of development, and then that had the added benefit of
Speaker 1: the baby being born maybe with less pre programmed at
Speaker 1: pre programmed behavior, but more of a capacity to learn behavior.
Speaker 1: So are does that mean we have no instincts? No?
Speaker 1: I think we definitely have still have a lot of
Speaker 1: instincts that are sort of pre written in our brain,
Speaker 1: these sort of pre programmed templates in our brain. But
Speaker 1: because we go through so much development as young children.
Speaker 1: There is certainly so much that is shaped and sculpted
Speaker 1: by our an environment. And then it's a question of like, okay,
Speaker 1: so maybe we didn't come out of the wound pre programmed,
Speaker 1: but how much of our behavior was programmed sometime when
Speaker 1: we were babies absorbing all this information. And then you
Speaker 1: get into and not to steer us too far off
Speaker 1: the subject, but you get into things like parallel evolution
Speaker 1: where you have multip human cultures who all they all
Speaker 1: developed the same idea totally separately, Like they all have music,
Speaker 1: they all have certain things that are they all have dance,
Speaker 1: like there are things that clearly are coming from inside us.
Speaker 1: Like we find this satisfying and we're eventually going to
Speaker 1: come up with it, whether someone teaches it to us
Speaker 1: or not. Like if we were if you had a baby,
Speaker 1: you know, a group of babies raised on a desert
Speaker 1: island as part of some sort of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: cruel experiment and or reality show. Some calls like they
Speaker 1: may not come up exactly with the Fast and Furious
Speaker 1: franchise in their civilization, that they would have storytelling even
Speaker 1: if no one like like, there's certain things that to
Speaker 1: make for our brains to get where they are. You know,
Speaker 1: there's certain behaviors, there's certain things like humor, jokes, stories,
Speaker 1: there are certain things that are clearly come from the
Speaker 1: structure in the brain somehow that's not purely Oh I
Speaker 1: saw someone else do this, and so I'm doing it.
Speaker 1: It's so in terms of where that line is drawn,
Speaker 1: in terms of what we're doing automatically versus because it's
Speaker 1: not that you're born knowing certain things, is that you're
Speaker 1: born with a propensity to get leisure from certain things,
Speaker 1: and so you seek those things out, like you you know,
Speaker 1: you don't like sleeping in the rain, and so you
Speaker 1: come up with what, I need to put something over me,
Speaker 1: and so now you've invented the house again. Like it's
Speaker 1: that I'm fascinated by that because again, we we really
Speaker 1: don't like to think about anything we do as being
Speaker 1: the result of instinct revolution because it makes it sound
Speaker 1: like animals and it's too easy to humanize people, and
Speaker 1: I don't it doesn't have to be that. It's not
Speaker 1: trying to take away like the really like that. There's
Speaker 1: a certain personality type on the Internet of the guy
Speaker 1: who's so smart that heat that he doesn't enjoy anything.
Speaker 1: So it's like, well, you know, technically, are't as just
Speaker 1: a manifestation of our mating rituals blah blah blah or
Speaker 1: you know, or love doesn't exist. It's just a hormonal
Speaker 1: chemical and it's that's a silly way to look at it.
Speaker 1: Something can be natural and inborn and still be beautiful
Speaker 1: or precious or whatever. It's just it's not until you
Speaker 1: study how animals work that you realize how human they
Speaker 1: are in the sense that they've learned all sorts of things,
Speaker 1: you know, like deception. I mean, what we're describing here
Speaker 1: is this is a straight up scam, like they've this,
Speaker 1: this is an n f T bit coin scam. Here,
Speaker 1: They've they've convinced that they've convinced another animal that that
Speaker 1: there's a delicious food here, and then you know, the
Speaker 1: bird eats it and realizes that's eating a disgust dean
Speaker 1: aunt and then it logs in it's like, oh, somebody
Speaker 1: took my somebody took my ape ape photos, and now
Speaker 1: my n f T s or worthless. I do I
Speaker 1: do think that there is a really fertile market there
Speaker 1: to like market parasites to the crypto n f T
Speaker 1: brows because I think they might buy it, Like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is a really rare n f T. You actually
Speaker 1: eat this roundworm and it lives in you, and you
Speaker 1: have the only copy of that roundworm inside of you,
Speaker 1: And it would be so much more ethical than what
Speaker 1: they're doing now. Yeah, I mean, it'd be great for
Speaker 1: the environment. I have no idea if the parent company
Speaker 1: of this pod guess it isn't the n f T market.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to I'm not trying to subvert. I
Speaker 1: mean I am. I was just gonna say very very briefly,
Speaker 1: and the ants, we we didn't necessarily touch on the
Speaker 1: fact that on top of making their butts look I
Speaker 1: could bury it once again, May them go walk among
Speaker 1: the berries and brain controls them into sticking their butt
Speaker 1: up into the air so that it will even poke
Speaker 1: out more like a berry. Again. Then does know what's
Speaker 1: doing it? The parasites don't know they're making the ant
Speaker 1: do it, but it's it is another example of mind control, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, mind control extremely common in in the
Speaker 1: parasite world. Yeah, and the creepy thing is we don't
Speaker 1: really know how they do that. This is somewhat of
Speaker 1: a newly discovered parasite like in the past decade or so.
Speaker 1: And how they get the ants to do this like
Speaker 1: bottoms up defensive posture because usually when ants do that
Speaker 1: stick their posteriors in the air. It's a defensive posture.
Speaker 1: But somehow this parasite has convinced them to do this
Speaker 1: um all the time. And it also it also actually
Speaker 1: makes their butt ripe for the picking. Like literally, the
Speaker 1: the posterior the gaster becomes easier to detach from the
Speaker 1: rest of the ant's body, so the bird can just
Speaker 1: pick it off. It's it's complete. I mean, it leaves
Speaker 1: me kind of speechless. Uh. They also the reason um
Speaker 1: that they are able to turn the gaster red is
Speaker 1: because they can't While they can't change the pigment of
Speaker 1: the ant, uh, they can cause the cuticle. So that's
Speaker 1: the ants exoskeletal skin to turn translucent. And then the
Speaker 1: growth of hundreds of these parasitic eggs actually have a
Speaker 1: red coloration because of these nematode embryos, and that red
Speaker 1: coloration shows up through the translucent ant cuticles so uh.
Speaker 1: And then it also makes the ant sluggish, so it
Speaker 1: moves slower and makes it even easier for the bird
Speaker 1: to pick off. So it feels like evolution has thought
Speaker 1: of every thing in this case and planned this down
Speaker 1: to the last detail. But it's not. It's not really planning.
Speaker 1: You can think of it as improvisation over many generations,
Speaker 1: so many generations that your brain can't process it because
Speaker 1: as complicated as we've described described the process, if you
Speaker 1: could see under a microscope what's going on inside that ants,
Speaker 1: but it's even more complicated than that. And again all
Speaker 1: of those things she just described with the pigment and
Speaker 1: all of that. The end result is it looks so
Speaker 1: much like a berry that if you a human, were
Speaker 1: out in the woods picking berries to survive because you
Speaker 1: got lost or something, you would eat this ant because
Speaker 1: you thought it was a berry, like it would be
Speaker 1: enough to fool you with your giant human brain. And
Speaker 1: I think the way, if I'm not mistaken, I think
Speaker 1: the scientists who discovered this, I think they said it
Speaker 1: would be the equivalent of if this parasite made your
Speaker 1: butt look like a fruit basket and then made you
Speaker 1: start chworking so hard that your but fell off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the researchers actually thought this was another species
Speaker 1: of ant. It looks so different from what it's supposed
Speaker 1: to look like. They thought it was a separate species
Speaker 1: of red budded ant until they realized, no, this is
Speaker 1: actually a parasite turning it into a delicious berry. And honestly,
Speaker 1: if I saw one of these things, even if I
Speaker 1: recognized it was an ant, I might still eat it.
Speaker 1: It looks so good. So we've talked about the incredible
Speaker 1: ways that some parasites reproduce and have sex. And however,
Speaker 1: some animals just don't want to have to deal with
Speaker 1: having all that sex. They decided it's not for them,
Speaker 1: and they reproduce a sexually. Of course, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: being facetious when I am saying they've decided this, But
Speaker 1: I do like the idea of these animals just going
Speaker 1: You know, I am sick of exchanging these gam meets.
Speaker 1: This is tedious and uncouth, and I'm just gonna reproduce
Speaker 1: a sexually from now on. By the way, every person
Speaker 1: listening to this, I assume you can remember the day
Speaker 1: you found out how human reproduction works. I don't know
Speaker 1: if these days, if it's your parents tell you, or
Speaker 1: if you just run into it in a movie or
Speaker 1: on the internet. But when when I was a youth,
Speaker 1: like your parents had to tell you, um, and we
Speaker 1: all think about how silly we were when we were
Speaker 1: toddlers and we thought that, you know, in the cartoons,
Speaker 1: like a stork brings the baby. I don't know if
Speaker 1: anybody ever thought that, but it was or that like, well,
Speaker 1: one day, the you know, the mom, mom and dad
Speaker 1: they kiss and then the mom poops a baby from her.
Speaker 1: But and and you look back, it's like, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 1: I was so silly for thinking that. But please understand,
Speaker 1: there is nothing intuitive or logical about how the humans
Speaker 1: do it, and the fact that you're surprised to hear
Speaker 1: that's how it works is completely fine, because it's insane.
Speaker 1: There's the idea that this is the one way that
Speaker 1: reproduction would happen, or that it would require sex, or
Speaker 1: that even every animal has sex as an act that
Speaker 1: they do versus you know, having one of them lays
Speaker 1: eggs and the other one just comes into just does
Speaker 1: some stuff on the eggs. It's there is an infinite
Speaker 1: number of ways this happens, and most of them do
Speaker 1: not involve the boy and a girl having sex with
Speaker 1: each other. That's so yeah, you toddler's out there. Don't
Speaker 1: don't feel ashamed for the fact that you were shocked
Speaker 1: to hear that's how we do it. It's yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean I remember thinking that humans were oviparous as a kid,
Speaker 1: and that means when fertilization happens outside of the body.
Speaker 1: So like that's what happens with salmon. They'll lay some
Speaker 1: eggs and then a male come by and uh deposit
Speaker 1: his sperm on those eggs, I thought, because I had
Speaker 1: heard like, well, you know, the female has eggs, And
Speaker 1: when I heard this as a young kid before sex said,
Speaker 1: I thought the woman had a special like egg, and
Speaker 1: then the man had a seed like a chicken egg
Speaker 1: and a plant seed, and then they somehow put them together,
Speaker 1: and then the woman like ate that and then had
Speaker 1: the baby in her stomach. That's how I thought it worked,
Speaker 1: because when you hear these vague references to like an
Speaker 1: egg and a seed or something, then you come up
Speaker 1: with some weird system and then it's delightful as an
Speaker 1: adult to find out Wait, no, like these kinds of
Speaker 1: weird things do happen, Like there are animals that will
Speaker 1: quote unquote eat their offspring, like the gastric brooding frog,
Speaker 1: which is unfortunately extinct. But you know, there are other
Speaker 1: ways you can get creative with how you reproduce, and
Speaker 1: some of the most creative animals are ones who actually
Speaker 1: have kind of got off on their own evolutionary limb
Speaker 1: and reproduce a sexually. So it's hard to get across
Speaker 1: how weird this is in one sentence, because with a
Speaker 1: sexual reproduction you have this it seems like it would
Speaker 1: be a great strategy, right, because you reproduce a person
Speaker 1: of your genes. When you're reproducing sexually, only fifty of
Speaker 1: your genes are passed on. So if your genes want
Speaker 1: to get passed on, right, quote unquote one like, uh,
Speaker 1: it seems like okay, if you have a clone of yourself,
Speaker 1: that's all of your genes. That's great, and you survived,
Speaker 1: so shouldn't a clone of yourself also survive. So the
Speaker 1: reason that not all animals do a sexual reproduction is
Speaker 1: that there is a struggle with genetic diversity. If you
Speaker 1: limit the gene pool too much, your species won't have
Speaker 1: that genetic library to be able to pull out some
Speaker 1: tricks for unexpected road bumps, like adapting to new weather conditions,
Speaker 1: or predators or diseases. So if you have this very
Speaker 1: limited genetic library, you don't have as many possible recombinations
Speaker 1: or mutations that could save your species from, say a
Speaker 1: devastating disease. So some species will bypass this by reproducing
Speaker 1: a sexually for a few generations and then sexually every
Speaker 1: so often to introduce a little bit of diversity into
Speaker 1: their genome. Like a FIDS, they'll go through an a
Speaker 1: sexual breeding a few a sexual breeding seasons, and then
Speaker 1: they'll reproduce sexually for a season and then go back
Speaker 1: to reproducing a sexually. And again you want to try
Speaker 1: to put it into human terms and say, well, that
Speaker 1: one generation that comes along and it's the first one
Speaker 1: in memory that suddenly wants to do sex, are they
Speaker 1: regarded as perverts? And then the answer is that it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't work that way in the animal kingdom, Like
Speaker 1: there's some instinct that it's like, oh, we're going to
Speaker 1: do it this way now. And I know that in
Speaker 1: explaining why that's an advantage, you're getting into some very
Speaker 1: science e things about genetic diversity. I think the easiest
Speaker 1: way to understand it is it imagine that you had
Speaker 1: a superhero team where you need, like if you think
Speaker 1: of like the Avengers, you need them to each have
Speaker 1: different abilities because you don't know what kind of threat
Speaker 1: you're going to be fa seen. So like you may
Speaker 1: face a threat that needs a Hulk who is all
Speaker 1: powerful and immortal and invincible, or you may be facing
Speaker 1: a threat that just needs to be shot with a
Speaker 1: bow and arrow. But you need both because I see
Speaker 1: there's some pro Hawkeye propaganda going on here that he's useful,
Speaker 1: and I'm sorry, but like, if you've got a magic
Speaker 1: man like Doctor Strange, you can, like I guess, shoot
Speaker 1: magic bolts. In what situation do you just need an arrow? Okay,
Speaker 1: but you're undermining the metaphor you need a team of diversity.
Speaker 1: Everyone has their place because and if you've seen these movies,
Speaker 1: inevitably the halk will wind up fighting like a demigod,
Speaker 1: and then Hawkeye will have to shoot a person with
Speaker 1: a bow and arrow like the Hulk wouldn't Necessarily it
Speaker 1: would be weird if the Hulk just went in pul
Speaker 1: rise that person. Just from from an outside point of view,
Speaker 1: it's better if you just do the merciful thing instead
Speaker 1: of having the Hulk just squished him like a graper,
Speaker 1: having four all these people who literally cannot die. And
Speaker 1: then also on their team is Natasha Romanov, who is
Speaker 1: just a woman who can absolutely die at any moment,
Speaker 1: and they're just fighting together in the same battle, and
Speaker 1: it's like, yes, let's all charge into Asia, me who
Speaker 1: is totally immortal, and you a woman with a pistol.
Speaker 1: We will all, we will all try to take on
Speaker 1: this literal god. Anyways, idea, it is a very good metaphor.
Speaker 1: I actually do really love that metaphor you have. Like
Speaker 1: having a superhero team where everyone turns invisible, you could
Speaker 1: never like beat up the bad guy. You would just
Speaker 1: the bad guy would just be like, well, I can't
Speaker 1: find you. But I'm just gonna keep doing the stuff
Speaker 1: I'm doing because you can't stop me. But I also
Speaker 1: like the idea of the cloning is extremely and again
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep coming back to this. Every horror sci
Speaker 1: fi story, like scary, the type monster story you've read
Speaker 1: is really just something that happens in the animal kingdom
Speaker 1: all the time. So like the idea of running into
Speaker 1: your clone, Like let's say Katie, let's say you came
Speaker 1: home from work, Uh, tomorrow from the podcast studio and
Speaker 1: you came home and you found another you there. That's
Speaker 1: like the most weirdest, horrifying thing. Many movies have been
Speaker 1: made about something like that, when it's like, oh, they've
Speaker 1: made another me, which one is the real me? Because
Speaker 1: the idea of having another exact you, it just breaks
Speaker 1: your brain because you're an individual. You know, you want
Speaker 1: to think of yourself as as one of a kind.
Speaker 1: But that's a distinctably human thing. Based on human psychology.
Speaker 1: In the animal kingdom, the idea of something that's breathing
Speaker 1: by just making an exact copy of itself is very common.
Speaker 1: They would not find that alarming, if they could find
Speaker 1: anything alarming. But that's something where again we instinctively think
Speaker 1: of that as like a horror scenario, like how could
Speaker 1: there be if somebody said, hey, there's another exact you,
Speaker 1: and uh, toronto, it turns out exactly you down to
Speaker 1: the molecule, that would be like the weirdest thing that's
Speaker 1: ever happened to you. Um, But here it's just something.
Speaker 1: The only the only downside is, yeah, if they're all
Speaker 1: multiple clones and they all have the same weakness, so
Speaker 1: in theory, the same disease, the same weather event could
Speaker 1: wipe them all out, right, Yeah, exactly, it is. It
Speaker 1: is a strange thing too. It almost feels like cheating
Speaker 1: for an animal just to be able to clone themselves,
Speaker 1: because it's like, well, don't you You can't just do that.
Speaker 1: You can't just like make a new you, like a
Speaker 1: little version of you and pop it out. But that's
Speaker 1: exactly what animals do sometimes. And it is weird when
Speaker 1: animals do this and don't seem to need that genetic diversity.
Speaker 1: And it's one of these things that is actually an
Speaker 1: act of mystery an evolutionary biology, and I don't think
Speaker 1: that biologists really have the answer to it right now.
Speaker 1: And this is the case for a couple of really,
Speaker 1: really weird species that have one of the most bizarre
Speaker 1: and inexplicable mating strategies I've ever heard, which is the
Speaker 1: amazon molly fish and mole salamanders. So these are both
Speaker 1: species who are all female and don't have any time
Speaker 1: to trifle with males. They just reproduce a sexually, but
Speaker 1: they will still steal the sperm of males from other
Speaker 1: closely related species. And you might think, okay, yeah, so
Speaker 1: maybe they do a strategy like the a fits were.
Speaker 1: Occasionally they'll involve a little bit of the genome from
Speaker 1: the sperm, you know, but it seems like they actually
Speaker 1: just use that sperm. Uh, not for their genetic contribution
Speaker 1: because their offspring are still exact clones. They just use
Speaker 1: the sperm to kick start their reproduction. The presence of
Speaker 1: the sperm actually um triggers there they're reproductive process. So
Speaker 1: let's start with the Amazon molly fish. Uh. It is
Speaker 1: a hybrid of two species of Molly's, the sail fin
Speaker 1: Molly's in Atlantic Molly's. I don't know, Jason, if you've
Speaker 1: ever owned an aquarium, but this is a very The
Speaker 1: molly is a very sort of staple beginner aquarist fish.
Speaker 1: So they're these little, like thumb sized pretty fish. The
Speaker 1: Amazon molly is sort of this pearly colouration. Uh. They're
Speaker 1: they're cute and pretty and kind of um, you know,
Speaker 1: just normal little aquarium fish looking things. Yes, and we're
Speaker 1: me and the other listeners are sitting here waiting to
Speaker 1: find out how this thing gets the sperm from other species. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it will actually pickpocket sperm for itself. It will
Speaker 1: literally but in between mating pairs of its related species,
Speaker 1: either the SailFin Molly's or the Atlantic Molly's. Uh, and
Speaker 1: just kind of like take the sperm for itself. So, um,
Speaker 1: is there video of this occurring? And I don't mean
Speaker 1: that's in allurid way. I mean, is there song I'm here,
Speaker 1: I'm it's the fish and it just rings the doorbell
Speaker 1: and SCEs I'm here with pizza, and then it goes
Speaker 1: and just like robs the entire house of sperm. Okay,
Speaker 1: what you described is less stupid than the reality because
Speaker 1: you're saying that there are two other fish mating and
Speaker 1: this fish will get in between them and intercept the
Speaker 1: sperms somehow. And to put this into human terms, I
Speaker 1: cannot Because if someone wrote a horror movie where this
Speaker 1: is a monster that does this where it goes and
Speaker 1: finds couples having intercourse and then it slides in between
Speaker 1: them and intercepts the sperm to then use in its
Speaker 1: own breathing process, that movie would be banned, Yeah, from theaters.
Speaker 1: That would be too. Like your family would have an
Speaker 1: intervention if you wrote something like that. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean nature does kind of need an intervention. It seems
Speaker 1: like it's got a problem based on its track record.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it is very much like some kind of
Speaker 1: weird humanoid who's related to humans but not not the
Speaker 1: same species. Sort of like an two humans are trying
Speaker 1: to you know, a mommy and a daddy love each
Speaker 1: other very much, and they're trying to make a baby baby,
Speaker 1: and then this humanoid, this pale, weird humanoid, just kind
Speaker 1: of slides between them and goes, you know, I'll be
Speaker 1: taking that thank you, and then leaves. You know, it is,
Speaker 1: it's weird, it's intrusive. It seems like some kind of
Speaker 1: crime that this Amazon Molly is committing. Oh, and I
Speaker 1: should mention before I go any further. It's called the
Speaker 1: Amazon Molly, not because it's anywhere near the Amazon. It's
Speaker 1: actually uh lives in fresh water in northeastern Mexico and
Speaker 1: southern Texas. It's just called Amazon because it's named after
Speaker 1: the Greek myth of the Amazonians that all female warrior
Speaker 1: kind of people, except I guess in this case, they
Speaker 1: sometimes raid the rest of civilization, just as steel uh sperm,
Speaker 1: which you know is uh, it's it's it's certainly a
Speaker 1: choice that these these uh, this evolutionary path for these
Speaker 1: fish and so again it just and I am kind
Speaker 1: of buffuddled by this because it seems like the sperm
Speaker 1: just kind of like goes in the fishes in reproductive tract,
Speaker 1: bounces off the egg and then that like kick, starts
Speaker 1: the egg too reproduce a sexually. This is called gino genesis,
Speaker 1: which is a sexual reproduction that uses sperm to start
Speaker 1: the reproductive process but does not actually use the sperms
Speaker 1: D N A and uh, it's actually unclear why why
Speaker 1: they do that, why they need that, And it is
Speaker 1: an actual mystery that I can't answer because I don't
Speaker 1: think it has been answered, or it again to fall
Speaker 1: into the same fallacy we've we keep using all time.
Speaker 1: What what was the fish thinking when saw two other
Speaker 1: fish of a similar species meeting and thought, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna squeeze in there. I'm just gonna squeeze in there,
Speaker 1: and uh, I'm gonna and then you know, and then
Speaker 1: if if they if they other fish know this is happening.
Speaker 1: And again I realized, there's a listener saying, Jason, they
Speaker 1: don't know anything, but this is this is the whole
Speaker 1: reason this is fun for me, because you can't imagine
Speaker 1: living and without knowing things, even though, if you go
Speaker 1: back far enough in human evolution, you do find that
Speaker 1: humans that didn't have language didn't have the ability to
Speaker 1: have internal monologues with themselves or think verbal thoughts, because
Speaker 1: how would they didn't have language. But they were still
Speaker 1: building societies and they were still cooperating, they were still
Speaker 1: hunting in teams and communicating that they didn't have conscious thought.
Speaker 1: So that's weird to think that you can live a
Speaker 1: human life and do things without like and interior your
Speaker 1: mental life or whatever. Um, But it can't be that
Speaker 1: weird because everything on Earth lives that way except us.
Speaker 1: Uh So in terms of these two fish getting it
Speaker 1: on and this third fish comes along, are they just like, hey, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you're a freaquent. Yeah, it's you climb on, climb
Speaker 1: on in here, it's uh, it's it's it's a really
Speaker 1: interesting question. I think the difference that the kind of
Speaker 1: like difference between a human that has uh, sort of
Speaker 1: that meta cognition where we have language and we have
Speaker 1: that internal monologue, which not all people actually say they
Speaker 1: have an internal monologue. Some people kind of just thinking
Speaker 1: like pictures or feelings, and some people cannot think in pictures.
Speaker 1: The population that cannot visualize, they have a fantasia. They
Speaker 1: can't think in pictures, and so, you know, the human
Speaker 1: experience is very varied in terms of what is actually
Speaker 1: going on in our brain. And then we try to
Speaker 1: think about an animal, what is what is actually going on?
Speaker 1: I think that a fish something like uh, these little molly's,
Speaker 1: they I think are conscious in the strictest sense of
Speaker 1: they probably experience something. Now what that is, I don't
Speaker 1: know what is their experience when some interloper comes between
Speaker 1: them just to steal the sperm happening it, I would
Speaker 1: feel like maybe there is some very primitive, primitive fishy
Speaker 1: frustration going on. And but an interesting thing is whether
Speaker 1: or not they're aware of it. Sometimes the molly's of
Speaker 1: the related species that this amazon molly is stealing from
Speaker 1: well actually seem to use it to their advantage. So
Speaker 1: males will like pretend to go over to the Amazon
Speaker 1: molly and mate with them, even though typically the molly
Speaker 1: will seem to understand that this Amazon molly is not
Speaker 1: the same species. And then when a male kind of
Speaker 1: comes and follows them and notices it trying to mate
Speaker 1: with this amazon, it'll like chase it off to try
Speaker 1: to mate with the amazon itself, and then that molly
Speaker 1: will go back over to mate with its own species.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like it's almost like tricking these
Speaker 1: bigger males saying like, oh, look, I found this great
Speaker 1: female over here, and then the bigger male will go, okay,
Speaker 1: well that'll be my female. Then chase off the other one,
Speaker 1: and the other one may have a better chance than
Speaker 1: with mating with its own species. So it's just every
Speaker 1: time you look into these animal behaviors you'll find some
Speaker 1: new surprising detail where it really boggles the mind how
Speaker 1: such a simple little creature like a molly can have
Speaker 1: these crazy strategies. Yeah, and in fact, there will be
Speaker 1: people listening to this who will say, well, actually, you guys,
Speaker 1: in the course of the way you've described a lot
Speaker 1: of these things, like you know Katie earlier describing these
Speaker 1: parasites as perverts or depraved or whatever, that your judgments
Speaker 1: you're making are also based in evolution, That that human
Speaker 1: culture has developed taboos around whatever you know, burn Burglary, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, something found on in many human cities. Um,
Speaker 1: but that these are things that are we find them
Speaker 1: repulsive for evolutionary reasons because we are trying to prevent,
Speaker 1: you know, the genetic defects that come from inbreeding things
Speaker 1: like that, and that what we the end result is
Speaker 1: us on this podcast expressing like visceral disgusted by various things,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, yeah, but even that Visceral discussed,
Speaker 1: it's something that is instinctive to you, um that you're
Speaker 1: making these judgments because you're applying human rules of morality
Speaker 1: on these to these animals, these freaky animals, that your
Speaker 1: rules of morality are just as much a part of
Speaker 1: your instincts for reproduction as these This fish is weird,
Speaker 1: weird secret threesome heist. Yeah, I mean no fish court
Speaker 1: would find the smally guilty of sperm heist. Uh. And
Speaker 1: you can't try a fish in human court, so we're
Speaker 1: out of options. And uh, there's actually I mean, this
Speaker 1: is such a bizarre mating strategy. And it's not the
Speaker 1: only one though. There is another completely unrelated species. It's
Speaker 1: not even a fish, it's a salamander. The unisexual mole
Speaker 1: salamander uses this same technique. So the unisexual mole salamander
Speaker 1: is found in the Great Lakes region of North America.
Speaker 1: It is a tiny population of a mole salamander, and
Speaker 1: mole salamanders are this small kind of grayish dappled salamander
Speaker 1: um and this little population are all female, and they
Speaker 1: do something similar to the Amazon molly, where they steal
Speaker 1: sperm packets from males, which they use to trigger their
Speaker 1: reproduction without using any of the male's DNA again making
Speaker 1: a clone. And then even weirder is it seems like
Speaker 1: once in a while these females will use a tiny
Speaker 1: amount of the males DNA some of the genome, and
Speaker 1: it's unclear why they do this or if it's even beneficial,
Speaker 1: and it's just this total mystery of these these salamanders
Speaker 1: just kind of breaking the rules of reproduction, doing something
Speaker 1: that whether an you find, you know, ethical is sort
Speaker 1: of not uh, not a priority. It's whether, well, how
Speaker 1: does this even work from a natural selection perspective, because
Speaker 1: they're creating this population with less genetic diversity, and then
Speaker 1: they seemingly have these random rules of when they use
Speaker 1: part of the male's genome. So, yeah, if we could
Speaker 1: solve this problem of what is going on with these
Speaker 1: all female mole salamanders, we might actually learn a lot
Speaker 1: more about reproduction in general. This is an aside, But
Speaker 1: there's a thing that we used to do and maybe
Speaker 1: they still do it. In not to get all political,
Speaker 1: but sometimes in political media, when they're complaining about like
Speaker 1: what government money is being spent on, they will call
Speaker 1: out like these specific line items and grants. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: they spent five thousand dollars to study the mating habit
Speaker 1: of the Amazonian nematode, as if the only reason to
Speaker 1: study it is like if you're a weirdo, or why
Speaker 1: would anyone want to know this? Scientists are perverts. Surely
Speaker 1: that people listening to this as much as we joke
Speaker 1: about this being a voyeuristic perversion thing. Knowing how animals reproduce,
Speaker 1: if you're trying to keep them from going extinct, you
Speaker 1: need to know exactly how they reproduce. Like ideally, like
Speaker 1: all of this stuff where we've discovered exactly how you know,
Speaker 1: this weird cycle happens with this ant that looks like
Speaker 1: a berry or whatever. If there's a minor, minor change
Speaker 1: in the environment that for some reason means that this
Speaker 1: parasite doesn't breed in this exact way anymore, and the
Speaker 1: ants don't get eaten, and then suddenly something different happens
Speaker 1: with the ant population, and then that causes a certain
Speaker 1: plant to disappear, and then the animals that eat that
Speaker 1: plant now starve those tiny When you see how complex
Speaker 1: these processes are, you also understand how easy it is
Speaker 1: to disrupt them. It's a Jenga tower of and you
Speaker 1: pull out one weird salamander and you don't know when
Speaker 1: that's going to cause that whole Jenga tower of animals
Speaker 1: to collapse. Yes, and so this is something that is
Speaker 1: crucial because if you see that there's a population of
Speaker 1: animals suddenly is disappearing, or insects, this suddenly is like
Speaker 1: they've dropped off. When you look into it, you if
Speaker 1: you didn't know any better, you would say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: it's just because probably some chemicals in the environment that's
Speaker 1: killing them, or there's you know, their predators have increased,
Speaker 1: or their their habitats have been overrun by human housing development.
Speaker 1: But knowing how fragile and how hypersp specific these strategies are,
Speaker 1: you realize that teeny tiny changes where it's just one
Speaker 1: link in the chain that gets broken that has existed
Speaker 1: for millions of years probably, but it's humans come along
Speaker 1: and then suddenly a certain stream doesn't exist anymore or whatever,
Speaker 1: but you've broken a link in a chain. That's why
Speaker 1: it's important to know this stuff because if you're looking
Speaker 1: at preserving a species, reproduction is everything that's you know,
Speaker 1: that's the whole ballgame. And understanding how these unisexual moles
Speaker 1: or unisexual mole salamanders, and how these amazon molly's are
Speaker 1: actually able to continue their existence, continue these populations of
Speaker 1: clones without dying off because of this lack of genetic
Speaker 1: diversity could help us revived species that are on the
Speaker 1: brink of extinction, because that's one of the huge issues
Speaker 1: with reviving a species that is going extinct. Even if
Speaker 1: you say catch it and are trying a breeding program,
Speaker 1: you get a genetic bottleneck where it's hard to introduce
Speaker 1: more diversity into these uh the gene pool of this
Speaker 1: animal that you're revitalizing, because like say you have a
Speaker 1: population of only ten left, how do you bring that
Speaker 1: back from the brink while still keeping their genetic library
Speaker 1: sort of vital enough and diverse enough for them to survive.
Speaker 1: And so if we could understand how these things are surviving,
Speaker 1: how they can get by without too much of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, how they can get by basically cloning themselves,
Speaker 1: but also using genetic information from other species that could
Speaker 1: be a breakthrough and understanding how we could bring species
Speaker 1: back or endangered or even almost extinct. Yes, and I
Speaker 1: think this is something where ott of people don't understand that.
Speaker 1: For example, if some fish population and a certain body
Speaker 1: of water that humans depend on, when we talk about
Speaker 1: over over fishing, you think, oh, so you're afraid that
Speaker 1: we will fish until every single one of those fish
Speaker 1: is gone, like it will have gone extinct when we
Speaker 1: finally have caught the final fish. That's not how it works.
Speaker 1: There's a threshold of a certain number of breeding pairs
Speaker 1: of several thousand or however many, where you don't have
Speaker 1: enough genetic diversity left, and then one parasite or one
Speaker 1: disease can wipe out the rest. So what happens is
Speaker 1: you get to a certain threshold that's low enough that
Speaker 1: the rest of the population collapses. For the same reason
Speaker 1: we just discussed, you don't have enough enough of them
Speaker 1: breeding in enough varieties to be to withstand the natural
Speaker 1: stuff that's always going to come along in the environment
Speaker 1: that they can't handle the next winter or the next whatever.
Speaker 1: That what happens. It's not that we kill every single
Speaker 1: last one of these bears or these lizards or whatever.
Speaker 1: It is that the population gets low enough that they
Speaker 1: go ahead and just go extinct on their own. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean that's called once they've reached that point of
Speaker 1: no return and we can't do a captive breeding program,
Speaker 1: it's called being functionally extinct, where there's still technically some
Speaker 1: out there in this population, but it's only a matter
Speaker 1: of time before they go extinct because you know, we
Speaker 1: we can't bring them back from this threshold, and they
Speaker 1: cannot recover from this threshold, which is what's feared to
Speaker 1: be happening with some species. The one that breaks my
Speaker 1: heart the most is the Kido, which is this teeny
Speaker 1: tiny dolphin that lives off the coast of Mexico, and
Speaker 1: I think it's thought to be basically functionally extinct at
Speaker 1: this point, even though there's like maybe twenty individuals left.
Speaker 1: It's pretty it's looking pretty grim, which is just it's
Speaker 1: so sad, heartbreaking, And I know that no one in
Speaker 1: the listenership here is saying this. The questions like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but how does that benefit humans to keep these around
Speaker 1: or to know how to to to clone you know,
Speaker 1: creatures or whatever. The Remember, if someday you want humans
Speaker 1: to be able to build a clone army of super soldiers,
Speaker 1: we have to examine other species that have successfully done this.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, I mean that's my that that was my
Speaker 1: intention in my island experiment of clone babies that I
Speaker 1: left alone to fit for themselves, which I guess I
Speaker 1: had to shut down because you said it was like
Speaker 1: illegal or an ethical or something, and my lawyer is
Speaker 1: like shaking your head and saying, no, stop talking about this.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, I mean I think that is the
Speaker 1: most important lesson from this show. It's that we must
Speaker 1: study animals to create clone armies that can turn our
Speaker 1: enemies into berries. Yes, And the only way to get
Speaker 1: the funding through this is to buy one of the
Speaker 1: limited edition jpeg n f T s that have been
Speaker 1: released through this show that again can only be purchased
Speaker 1: with the specific cryptocurrency of this show, creature coin, creature coin. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I send you a packet of your very own
Speaker 1: parasitic nematodes that you just swallow with a glass of
Speaker 1: water and there you there, you have your very own
Speaker 1: n f T, your nematode freely swimming in your tummy.
Speaker 1: So if you're asking how does that, like, how is
Speaker 1: that going to make me rich? All I can say
Speaker 1: is you're ignorant. You don't understand. You understand the future, research, blockchain,
Speaker 1: just research and you'll understand. Yeah, because because you know what,
Speaker 1: when the computer was invented, they said that was stupid too,
Speaker 1: They said that was a scam. So if you if
Speaker 1: you're against this, you're literally just against progress exactly. It's
Speaker 1: the and it's not a parasite controlling my brain and
Speaker 1: making me say that to propagated species. That's ridiculous. So
Speaker 1: before we go, we do actually have to attend to
Speaker 1: some extremely important business, and that's the guests who's squawking game.
Speaker 1: It's the mystery animal of the week. So first I
Speaker 1: have to extend my deepest apologies. I have made a
Speaker 1: horrible mistake. A couple of weeks ago. I did something unforgivable.
Speaker 1: I forgot to announce the winners who correctly gives the
Speaker 1: sound of the baby carockle uh. So I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: that now. The fastest three guessers were Anti b, Hannah
Speaker 1: w and Remy h. You guys, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for your guesses on that amazingly, I'm so proud of
Speaker 1: you for guessing. I'm so sorry, are you I forgot
Speaker 1: to to declare those Uh please, if you can find
Speaker 1: it in your heart to forgive me at some point,
Speaker 1: I would. I would appreciate that. But you know it's
Speaker 1: a Now we got to move on to last week's
Speaker 1: mystery sound. So every week we play a mystery animal
Speaker 1: sound and you, the listeners, try to guess who is squawking,
Speaker 1: who is making that sound. And the hint for last
Speaker 1: week was, this is a baby aquatic mammal with big teeth. Adorable,
Speaker 1: but you'd better pray mama is not around. H m
Speaker 1: h m. There's surely no way. Baby otters sound like that, Like,
Speaker 1: this thing sounds big. It sounds sounds like Walrus, like
Speaker 1: more Walrus e something in the Walrus category of of product. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in the in sort of the Walrous section of Walgreens. Yes.
Speaker 1: So this that is a very good guess because this
Speaker 1: is a baby hippo. It is a an aquatic mammal
Speaker 1: that's got those big two teeth. And congratulations to the
Speaker 1: three fastest guessers, Anti B, who is our Champion Animal
Speaker 1: sound Guesser, as well as Saga E and Emily M.
Speaker 1: And an honorable mention to Joey P who not only
Speaker 1: guessed correctly that it's a baby hippo, but also specifically
Speaker 1: guessed it's Fiona of the Cincinnati Zoo, which is correct.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you guessed not only the species
Speaker 1: but the specific individual. Um so yeah, congratulations. Hippos are
Speaker 1: very vocally communicative. They will grunt at each other. Mothers
Speaker 1: will sometimes grunt out a special call to their babies,
Speaker 1: and babies will runt toilet their mother or in this
Speaker 1: case human caretakers know that they are there. Uh. Their
Speaker 1: calls each have a distinctive sound, and other hippos can
Speaker 1: recognize the individual by the literal calling card of their
Speaker 1: wheezing honks. And again, as always every week, all three
Speaker 1: winners will win a brand new Accord uh worth worth
Speaker 1: forty seven thousand dollars retail that that will be please
Speaker 1: sending your information. The car will be delivered to your
Speaker 1: to your home. Yes, send your information to Jason Pargeon.
Speaker 1: He handles um all of the the car gifting on
Speaker 1: the show. So yeah. And if he doesn't respond, to
Speaker 1: keep tweeting at him. He likes that, so legally, I
Speaker 1: guess we have to say there is you win nothing
Speaker 1: for this other than pride. It's not pleased, not legally binding,
Speaker 1: just a sense of self satisfaction that you're a smarty
Speaker 1: pants yes so so, no cars, just the good feeling
Speaker 1: of being smart. I feel like in the old radio days,
Speaker 1: you would win like a lifetime supply of some sort
Speaker 1: of soap, soap powder or something. You need a sponsor
Speaker 1: that you can you win. You win something, A year
Speaker 1: supply of something seems a year supply of parasitic nematodes.
Speaker 1: It's just they breed on their own and it's just
Speaker 1: one packet they Basically, it's basically a lifetime supply. You
Speaker 1: ever wanted that perfect berry shaped But well, you don't
Speaker 1: have to work out for hours at the gym anymore.
Speaker 1: So Onto this week's mystery animal sound. The hint is
Speaker 1: that this is what happens when you get a little
Speaker 1: too nosy with this group. Jason, can you guess who's squawking?
Speaker 1: I'm afraid to say because I think I know exactly
Speaker 1: what it is and I don't want to ruin it.
Speaker 1: I'll just bleep you out if you're right, that sounds
Speaker 1: exactly like a like a donkey, right, like a like
Speaker 1: a cartoon donkey. That that's it's it does? Doesn't it
Speaker 1: a brain donkey? Yeah? Brain? Yeah? I mean I guess
Speaker 1: that's another hint because it's not a brain donkey. It
Speaker 1: is something else. Okay, I was I was afraid to
Speaker 1: say because I think that's just straight up but I'm
Speaker 1: sure this it does sound like a donkey. That doesn't
Speaker 1: it a joke that previous guests have made on your show.
Speaker 1: But I love that some of these recordings, you know,
Speaker 1: they've got people in the recording because they're in captivity
Speaker 1: or whatever. But I would love one where the next
Speaker 1: the hint is just a person just shouting like what
Speaker 1: is this creature? That that is from the Prime Primeate family?
Speaker 1: Is just hey, what are you doing? Hey? What's that thing?
Speaker 1: What do you what do you record me for? Do
Speaker 1: you know what this creature is? One of these weeks,
Speaker 1: One of these weeks, I'll do that, But this week
Speaker 1: a hint. It is not a human, nor is it
Speaker 1: a donkey. It's somewhere between a human and a donkey. So, uh,
Speaker 1: if you think you know the answer to who is
Speaker 1: squawking on this week's Mr. Animal Sound Game. Send me
Speaker 1: an email at Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com. Jason,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me today and talking
Speaker 1: about everything from Barry but parasites to fish and and
Speaker 1: salamanders deciding they don't want to put up with normal mating.
Speaker 1: Where can people find you? I write novels for a
Speaker 1: living us. I may have mentioned on this show. The
Speaker 1: next one that I have up for preorder is called
Speaker 1: If the Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. Um.
Speaker 1: As she mentioned. This is a in a series of books.
Speaker 1: First one was called John Dies at the end that
Speaker 1: one got made into a movie. The movie is on
Speaker 1: HBO Max if you want to watch it and get
Speaker 1: a sense of what type of thing I write, and
Speaker 1: then you can go enjoy the books the movie was
Speaker 1: based on. They are for adults. Please do not complain
Speaker 1: at me if they are these are These are adult
Speaker 1: books for grown ups who even then maybe too to
Speaker 1: adult for many of you. Otherwise, my name is Jason Pargeon.
Speaker 1: Type that name into Google. You will find me on
Speaker 1: every possible social media platform except TikTok. I'm not doing
Speaker 1: TikTok ever, I'm not. That's where I draw the line.
Speaker 1: I have in Instagram, on on Twitter, I have three
Speaker 1: Facebook pages. I'm on all of them. I'm on good Reads,
Speaker 1: i have a YouTube channel. I have a substant Jason
Speaker 1: Parson dot substanct dotcom. I'm not doing TikTok. I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Are you wordling a word? I had to
Speaker 1: mute the word myrtle wordle from Twitter. I'm not mad
Speaker 1: at the wordld people. It's just that I don't it's
Speaker 1: not doing anything for me to just show me those
Speaker 1: green blocks every day. I'm not playing, so it doesn't.
Speaker 1: That doesn't communicate anything to me. That's fine. I'm not
Speaker 1: mad at you for playing it. I'm glad you're all
Speaker 1: having fun. I just had to mute it. Well it's
Speaker 1: a loss. It's a loss for word all to have
Speaker 1: lost you from from the from the wordle verse. But
Speaker 1: ah yeah, thank you guys so much for listening. You
Speaker 1: can find the podcast on the internet at Creature feature
Speaker 1: Pot on Instagram, at Creature feet Pot on Twitter. That's
Speaker 1: not et that is something very different, and thank you
Speaker 1: so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and
Speaker 1: you feel like it, I can't tell you what to do,
Speaker 1: but if you want to leave a review or a rating, like,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to stop you. I may even like it.
Speaker 1: I might even read your review, and it might make
Speaker 1: me feel all warm inside. And thanks to the Space
Speaker 1: Classics for their super awesome song Exo Alumina. Creature features
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Speaker 1: app podcasts or Hey, guess what are you listening to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows? Judge you see you next Wednesday.