Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today it's
Speaker 1: not Saturday, but we're bringing you a vault episode. We
Speaker 1: we missed a day of work this week, and to
Speaker 1: cover for the time off, we're we're subbing in an
Speaker 1: episode from last May. This is the one from May
Speaker 1: I think twenty second called the Mighty star Lack. You
Speaker 1: can guess what it's about. A creature from tattooed. That's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is really fun when we get into
Speaker 1: you know, talk a little bit about just sort of
Speaker 1: the Star Wars lore of the star Lack, but mostly
Speaker 1: we talked about, uh, stuff in the real world, actual
Speaker 1: terrestrial organisms that that are kind of parallel to this
Speaker 1: imagined creature. Now, one thing that that definitely has changed
Speaker 1: since we recorded this episode is the second episode, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: the second season of The Mandalorian came out and officially
Speaker 1: brought Boba Fette back into the live action UM Star
Speaker 1: Wars canon. So anything that I say in this regarding uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Boba Fett being dead or if you should
Speaker 1: stay dead, just take out that with a grainess of salt,
Speaker 1: because he has come back, and uh he I thought
Speaker 1: he was awesome, So I'm I'm very much in favor
Speaker 1: of Boba Fett being alive again. Uh in the live
Speaker 1: action played by Tamara Morrison, who of course played Django
Speaker 1: Fat and played all the clones in the prequel trilogy. Now,
Speaker 1: did we ever decide whether the burp was canon? Um?
Speaker 1: I guess the burp is still in there, So I
Speaker 1: guess the Bourp is canon. Yeah, far as I know,
Speaker 1: nobody's nobody's corrected us on that. Okay, Now I'm not
Speaker 1: sure where what that says about, you know, about the
Speaker 1: digestive system of the creature. We still don't know how
Speaker 1: how Boba Fett escaped. But when he shows up again
Speaker 1: in uh uh in the Mandalorian, which I believe this
Speaker 1: is also his first canonical appearance. Um, you know, um
Speaker 1: after the star Lack incident, he is like visibly scarred up,
Speaker 1: possibly by like digestive juices. So uh we we still
Speaker 1: are going to have to await the full story when
Speaker 1: he gets his own his own series this fall, the
Speaker 1: Book of Boba Fett. That is the best scar story
Speaker 1: I've ever heard, you know, that's like the scene in
Speaker 1: Jaws where they're comparing their scar. I got this, you know,
Speaker 1: thresher's tail. Uh more, A eel bit me through my
Speaker 1: wet suit. Oh yeah, well I was partially digested by
Speaker 1: a giant creature that lives in the ground. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know, but Boba plays it cool, so if you
Speaker 1: were to ask about it, he'd probably like be like,
Speaker 1: I've gotten a scrape once. Anyway, let's go ahead and
Speaker 1: jump into it. Then the Mighty Sarlac. And now for traffic,
Speaker 1: we take you to week Way Ray in the Channel
Speaker 1: five sky skiff. Hey, Jim, we're pretty clear of sandstorms
Speaker 1: across much of the dune seed this morning, so that's
Speaker 1: great news for sky hopper landspeeder traffic. So far, however,
Speaker 1: we're already seeing a bit of pre boot to Eve
Speaker 1: classic traffic heading into Moss aspect. Plus, things are dragging
Speaker 1: to a halt out near the Great Pit of Carcoon
Speaker 1: and the walt rafts are playing as it looks like
Speaker 1: the huts are hosting another multi skiff Sarlac offering. Always
Speaker 1: best to steer clear unless you've got an invite, especially
Speaker 1: if you've got an invite. All too true. Ray. Now
Speaker 1: let's check in with Merge surgeon on for a look
Speaker 1: at this week's solar activity. Looks like we're in for
Speaker 1: a double helping of solar flares. Welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And here we are,
Speaker 1: finally here in a galaxy far far away. I did
Speaker 1: not think we would end up doing Star Wars content,
Speaker 1: especially so close to May fourth, but not on it.
Speaker 1: Things are getting strange. Yeah, Now, fittingly, we're recording this
Speaker 1: episode on May the fourth, but that that just benefits
Speaker 1: the two of us. The listeners are gonna get it
Speaker 1: a little later. However, since the May the fourth like
Speaker 1: sales begin before May the fourth, I think it's okay
Speaker 1: to assume that May the fourth is just generally a
Speaker 1: a you know, a multi day, even multi week affair
Speaker 1: in which we celebrate Star Wars. Yeah, it's like Christmas
Speaker 1: gradually creeps out to the edges. Yeah, the thirty days
Speaker 1: 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 gone,
Speaker 1: uh underground. I mean, I don't want to say underground,
Speaker 1: because obviously there was there was still tons of content
Speaker 1: coming out, and you know, the Expanded Universe and so forth.
Speaker 1: There were books, there were comics, there were there were games,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't as as prevalent in the pop culture
Speaker 1: at that time. But of course it was gearing up
Speaker 1: because then came, uh, the the prequels, right um uh Now,
Speaker 1: I I too remember reading some of the Extended Universe stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm getting into that and the like the late nineties.
Speaker 1: But then we had Phantom Menace, and I remember being
Speaker 1: first of all, like super excited for it. And then
Speaker 1: I was a bit of a prequel apologist there for
Speaker 1: a bit regarding the Phantom Menace, and then I became
Speaker 1: kind of a snarky fan who focused only on the
Speaker 1: flaws of the prequel films. And I'd say I didn't
Speaker 1: fully recover from that until I watched The Mandalorian with
Speaker 1: my family, uh, and we all loved it. And then
Speaker 1: we started watching all the films again. And and now
Speaker 1: I'm I'm leaning into the force. I'm I'm I'm just
Speaker 1: saying I'm enjoying all of them. I've enjoyed each film
Speaker 1: that I've watched, and and she really kind of tried
Speaker 1: to watch them you know, with my son, but also
Speaker 1: kind of threw his eyes and it's been a blast.
Speaker 1: What are his favorites? He tells me that his favorites
Speaker 1: are The Phantom Menace and let's see Phantom Menace and
Speaker 1: Return of the Jedi, but especially Phantom Menace. He in
Speaker 1: fact requested that we watched that one again, and so
Speaker 1: we watched half of it last night. Those It does
Speaker 1: not escape my attention that those are the two that
Speaker 1: have the highest quotient of cuteness content they do. They have,
Speaker 1: They have cuteness, but then also they just have a
Speaker 1: ton of creatures. And I think that's also key because
Speaker 1: like The Phantom Menace, most of it takes place on
Speaker 1: like a dinosaur ridden uh you know planet where there's
Speaker 1: just you know, monster after monster after monster, and and yeah,
Speaker 1: you have the comic elements as well, and you have
Speaker 1: an actual child in it, which I think also is
Speaker 1: adds to this kind of anchor for younger viewers, going
Speaker 1: against what I was just saying about cuteness. Obviously, Return
Speaker 1: of the Jedi is where we get the the e
Speaker 1: walks the classic Teddy Bear planet. But the first half
Speaker 1: of Return of the Jedi's just when we rewatched it
Speaker 1: not too long ago. I was like, man, I loved
Speaker 1: this wasn't when I was a kid. But the first
Speaker 1: half of this movie is gross. It is full of
Speaker 1: like just like like nasty, slimy critters everywhere and and
Speaker 1: and horrible monsters and uh. And I would say, actually,
Speaker 1: the thing maybe that stands out the most in my
Speaker 1: mind is going to be the subject of today's episode,
Speaker 1: which is the Sarlac. Yes, yes, the Sarlac features heavily
Speaker 1: into this portion of the film, and it is It's
Speaker 1: just something that just captures uh. It certainly captures the
Speaker 1: young imagination, you know, here's this pit, here is this thing.
Speaker 1: And I think it also played well with the action
Speaker 1: figures growing up, because you could you could pretty much
Speaker 1: make a sarlac. There wasn't. I don't think there was
Speaker 1: a starlac um like action play set or anything, because
Speaker 1: how wrong you are, really they had one, because I
Speaker 1: was just thinking you just had you had dirt, you
Speaker 1: had holes, you had things you could do with like
Speaker 1: a bedspread, and you had instant Starlac. Robert, I want
Speaker 1: you to scroll all the way down to the bottom
Speaker 1: of our notes and have a look at the images
Speaker 1: I've attached for you. All these would fill you with joy.
Speaker 1: This comes from a board game that I found evidence
Speaker 1: of on the internet late last night. I think, uh,
Speaker 1: it's called Battle at Sarlas Pit. It was released at
Speaker 1: the same time as the movie, or sometime around the movie,
Speaker 1: I guess, to help promote it. And it is a
Speaker 1: It is a board game with a sarlac like a
Speaker 1: cardboard sarlac cone set up, and then it's got a
Speaker 1: little barge or skiff on top where it looks like
Speaker 1: you you. You play with miniatures of Han Solo, Luke, Skywalker, Chewbacca,
Speaker 1: and I guess maybe that's also supposed to be Leia.
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 fette to
Speaker 1: to confront Jab of the Hut, and I guess if
Speaker 1: you lose, you fall off into the starlacks mouth. Well
Speaker 1: that it looks beautiful, I mean, especially the cover art
Speaker 1: in this box, it's incredible, and in the set itself
Speaker 1: is is pretty ingenious, especially given the time. I can't
Speaker 1: obviously I can't speak for the actual gameplay, but it
Speaker 1: looks intriguing. Yeah, I've never seen this before. Well, I
Speaker 1: know you're a miniatures guy, so I was wondering if
Speaker 1: you might end up looking this thing up. I might
Speaker 1: have to the miniatures. It looks like the miniatures are
Speaker 1: supplied poorly painted, or perhaps they're supplied unpainted. And what
Speaker 1: we're looking at here is the work of a child
Speaker 1: roughly painting. Then I can't tell, but yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: 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 Chewbaccah. They are sentenced to death by the
Speaker 1: gangster Job of the Hut. He's the big slug guy
Speaker 1: and job Job of the Hut says the method of
Speaker 1: execution for these three heroes is going to be a
Speaker 1: kind of alien desert. For 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 Sarlac.
Speaker 1: In his belly, you will find a new definition of
Speaker 1: pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a
Speaker 1: thousand years. And I'm not gonna lie. That concept haunted
Speaker 1: me as a child. I was like, slowly digested over
Speaker 1: a thousand years. Wouldn't it be over sooner than that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this idea that it extends your suffering, that it
Speaker 1: is to enter into the Sarlac is to kind of
Speaker 1: enter into an underworld or an afterlife of pain. It's
Speaker 1: like going to hell. Yeah, yeah, hell of digestion. And
Speaker 1: I also love how in C. Three pos translation, there's
Speaker 1: this idea, Yeah, that's that's not only the star Lak,
Speaker 1: it is the all powerful Sarlac. There's this idea that
Speaker 1: it is a thing that is revered that it almost
Speaker 1: has a divine quality to it. And certainly, as we
Speaker 1: see in the film, it's not something that is defeated.
Speaker 1: It is not something that is really truly overcome. It
Speaker 1: is just avoided and escaped at best. Well, it's not
Speaker 1: really the enemy, right, it's kind of the setting. It's
Speaker 1: the threat in the setting. It's kind of in the
Speaker 1: way that in most zombie movies the zombies are not
Speaker 1: really the enemy. They're more like a hostile environment in
Speaker 1: which the drama between the characters is set. Usually in
Speaker 1: the zombie movie, you've got a human villain, and the
Speaker 1: same is true here. Clearly the villain is Jab of
Speaker 1: the Hut, not the not the star Lac. 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 do in its thing in
Speaker 1: the desert. That's right. Yeah, there's this It has this
Speaker 1: quality where the Sarlac is kind of like a pet.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a pampered pet of of Java,
Speaker 1: as much like the Rain Corps is that we see
Speaker 1: earlier in the film, but it also feels like something
Speaker 1: that is greater than Job and certainly it's something that
Speaker 1: will will outlive Java. Yeah. So one thing I really
Speaker 1: liked about this monster when I was a kid um
Speaker 1: was something about the way that the monster was presented
Speaker 1: visually the pit of Carcoon and the Sarlac. It was
Speaker 1: that the monster wasn't just in a pit. The monster
Speaker 1: was the pit. Uh And and so to explain this
Speaker 1: a little bit more, it's kind of like a presented
Speaker 1: visually as a bio geological hybrid, like a cave or
Speaker 1: a hole in the ground that has tentacle tongues and
Speaker 1: eats bounty hunters alive. You can't tell where the animal
Speaker 1: stops and the earth begins. And as a point of comparison,
Speaker 1: I think I'd used the appeal of like the biomechanical
Speaker 1: artwork of hr Geiger that and how that influenced the
Speaker 1: creation of the xenomorph in the Alien films. The xenomorph
Speaker 1: is basically supposed to be an animal, but it has
Speaker 1: tons of body features that look like parts of industrial machines.
Speaker 1: It's an animal made out of tubes and hoses and
Speaker 1: hinges and pistons, and I think I always thought the
Speaker 1: Star Lac was cool because it was like this, but
Speaker 1: with geology instead of machinery. Uh, it's it's a mouth
Speaker 1: that is the earth. It looks like the teeth are
Speaker 1: coming out of rock or coming out of the sand.
Speaker 1: And uh. Of course this is all predicated on the
Speaker 1: fact that I grew up watching the versions of these
Speaker 1: movies before the special edition remasters. So the version I'm
Speaker 1: used to seeing is the original, where it's just the
Speaker 1: gaping mouth that blends into the earth and has these
Speaker 1: rings of inward facing teeth and the tentacles that reach
Speaker 1: out from who knows where and grab things. When the
Speaker 1: remasters came, of course, they added a big c g
Speaker 1: I beak poking up out of the pit it, which
Speaker 1: sort of eliminates some of that bio geological magic. I
Speaker 1: try these days not to be one of the guys
Speaker 1: who's just constantly shrieking about how Lucas ruined things and
Speaker 1: complaining about remasters and prequels and all that, but I
Speaker 1: will say I do not like this change. I think
Speaker 1: it's creepier in the original version without the c g
Speaker 1: I beak. I like it when it's just the hole
Speaker 1: in the earth, the cave with teeth. Yeah, I I
Speaker 1: certainly grew up with the the unedited version as well,
Speaker 1: and so that's that's probably the version that was that
Speaker 1: It's cemented in my mind the most. And I used
Speaker 1: to feel, I think a lot stronger about it where
Speaker 1: I'm like, nope, original Starla only. But I don't know,
Speaker 1: I can I'm okay with the redesign. I just wish
Speaker 1: that the c G I would maybe get another, you know,
Speaker 1: a fresh coat of paint to make it look a
Speaker 1: little sleeker. But but still like I also, I understand
Speaker 1: that they are part of the original concept was that
Speaker 1: it would have those elements, but they weren't able to
Speaker 1: make it happen because they just didn't have the the
Speaker 1: 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 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 there there is something
Speaker 1: intentionally primordial about it. And well, we'll get into that
Speaker 1: as we go. Well, I think it just it suggests
Speaker 1: the magical thinking that that that is so common in
Speaker 1: human culture, that characterizes caves and pits in the earth
Speaker 1: as a mouth. I mean that kind of that kind
Speaker 1: of language is extremely common. Yeah, So before we get
Speaker 1: a little bit more into some mythic parallels for the
Speaker 1: star lac I want to talk just a little bit
Speaker 1: more about its presumed biology and its biology is presented
Speaker 1: uh in Cannon, and also just a little interpretation on
Speaker 1: our part. So obviously, the vast majority of the star
Speaker 1: lacks bulk is hidden beneath the sand, leaving only its spiked,
Speaker 1: tentacled mouth exposed. Now, presumably the star lac just normally,
Speaker 1: you know, waits there. It doesn't move, It just waits. First,
Speaker 1: you know, some creature to fall into it. You know,
Speaker 1: some of the mega fauna of tattooings such as the
Speaker 1: do back or the bantha. You know, it just waits
Speaker 1: for them to wander close enough to fall in or
Speaker 1: succumb to those fast moving, grasping tentacles. And if this,
Speaker 1: you know, seems rare enough for currents, we have to
Speaker 1: consider that it's it has an alleged one thousand year
Speaker 1: digestive cycle, so presumably it has a slow enough metabolism
Speaker 1: that it doesn't need this regular feet gings. It can
Speaker 1: get by on the odd bantha 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 fella
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
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 Lak. 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 mean,
Speaker 1: I bet when I was like eight, I would have
Speaker 1: just wished that the Star Wars movies included like Star
Speaker 1: Wars illustrated encyclopedia pages as as like scenes throughout them.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it works better as a mystery. I think
Speaker 1: that's my adult mind. Yeah. Now that being said, this
Speaker 1: this sort of mystery has inspired lots of people, and
Speaker 1: so you have you have a number of different uh
Speaker 1: you know, expanded universe treatments of the Star Lac as
Speaker 1: well as compendiums that attempt to explain to some degree
Speaker 1: what the Star Lack is and you're gon to deal
Speaker 1: with you know, conflicting accounts and uh and and so
Speaker 1: forth if you start looking at all of those. But
Speaker 1: I do want to touch on some ideas that were
Speaker 1: presented in a relatively new book that came out, Star
Speaker 1: Wars Alien Archive, which I've been reading with my son. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's basically a you know, a monstrous compendium,
Speaker 1: a monster manual of Star Wars aliens, and it's pretty fun.
Speaker 1: It 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,
Speaker 1: uh you know, everything from you know, from from from
Speaker 1: major characters and and and major aliens to even a
Speaker 1: few things that for instance, only show up in one
Speaker 1: of the Ewoks movies. So it's a fun collection. Naturally,
Speaker 1: of course, there's an entry on the Mighty star Lack.
Speaker 1: So I just want to touch on a few of
Speaker 1: the key points, uh that that are that are made
Speaker 1: in this Lucasfilm Press book. First of all, it's described
Speaker 1: as quote terrifying carnivorous beast, and this seems to fall
Speaker 1: more on the animal side of interpretation. Some people try
Speaker 1: and I guess explain the starlight is being more of
Speaker 1: a plant, uh And it is sometimes described as reproducing
Speaker 1: by spores, which leads in list to more of a
Speaker 1: you know, fungal explanation. But of course none of this
Speaker 1: is exactly limiting when we're ultimately talking about an alien
Speaker 1: life form that may you know, easily skew the lines
Speaker 1: that we draw on Earth between one kingdom and another.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, I mean, yeah, if we want to
Speaker 1: be real technical sticklers, the difference between plants and animals
Speaker 1: is an evolutionary division that you know, they are different clades.
Speaker 1: You can sort their histories differently, and you know, animals
Speaker 1: arising on other planets might be animal like and that
Speaker 1: they might move around quickly or something like that, or
Speaker 1: they might be plant like in that their sessile and
Speaker 1: the photosynthesize or whatever. But but yeah, they would not
Speaker 1: be descended from these kingdoms, so those sortings wouldn't necessarily
Speaker 1: even make sense. Plus, oh man, there's a whole additional,
Speaker 1: uh deep end we could get into if we tried
Speaker 1: to figure out how we consider life in the Star
Speaker 1: Wars universe, a universe where not only do we have
Speaker 1: um life, you know, certainly arising on a plethora of
Speaker 1: different worlds, but also you have interstellar life still life
Speaker 1: that is clinging to asteroids. You have pan spermia and
Speaker 1: colonization taking place that you know at you know, at
Speaker 1: various points in galactic history. There's a lot to unpack
Speaker 1: their deep space evolution. Yeah, that's right, the mine ox
Speaker 1: they live in a vacuum. How is that possible? I
Speaker 1: don't think a large animal would do that. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that would be a fun one to come back to
Speaker 1: at some point, maybe maybe maybe some some people have
Speaker 1: written on that topic. Um, okay, a few other points
Speaker 1: from the Alien Archive book. Uh. They to point out
Speaker 1: that the star lack of carcoon is sustained at least
Speaker 1: in part by sacrifices and executions by the huts. But
Speaker 1: they also say that adults are lacks such as this
Speaker 1: one can also release an odor that attracts nearby herbivores
Speaker 1: to the pit. Oh okay, so that answer I. I
Speaker 1: that would answer a question that I had because I
Speaker 1: was thinking about how a sarlac would normally eat If
Speaker 1: it's just this, you know, sessile pit in the desert,
Speaker 1: Most sessile trap predators have some way of assuring that
Speaker 1: prey will fall in, Like sessile predators in the ocean,
Speaker 1: will often try to maximize their catch by doing their
Speaker 1: best to latch on in places where the current will
Speaker 1: carry unfortunate prey animals right by them. Otherwise, trap predators,
Speaker 1: like some that we'll talk about in a bit, like
Speaker 1: insects that that lay traps in the ground, need to
Speaker 1: find a place where, you know, the 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 organ is um that functions as a trap pit,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it uses smells to attract animals to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so perhaps we might imagine that, um, you know, say
Speaker 1: that the sarlac releases uh uh, some sort of odor
Speaker 1: that mega fauno would associate with an oasis, you know,
Speaker 1: or with with with plant life, and therefore brings them in.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to bring them in all the way, right,
Speaker 1: because those technacles 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 banthera wanders end. Seems like it could
Speaker 1: be waiting a long time yea once a millennium. The
Speaker 1: Alien 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 interest thing. It contends that younger
Speaker 1: star 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: star Lac 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 Starlac magic at all because it's not
Speaker 1: a pit. It's just like a big worm that comes
Speaker 1: up out of the ground and it moves around and
Speaker 1: spits rocks at you. That's not a star Lac. But
Speaker 1: but maybe it's supposed to be a young Starlac a
Speaker 1: different part of its life cycle, I guess. So if
Speaker 1: we were, if we were to force ourselves to to
Speaker 1: take that boss fight and incorporate it into into Star
Speaker 1: Wars Cannon, I think that's the only way you could
Speaker 1: go that. Basically we'd be looking at, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: say a four part lifespan that goes like this. You
Speaker 1: have a spore of a star Lac that's carried by
Speaker 1: the you know, the dust storms. Then you have some
Speaker 1: sort of burrowing larva, and then you have a sandworm
Speaker 1: esque burrowing juvenile like we see in the Super in
Speaker 1: 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 say corals or perhaps a barnacle,
Speaker 1: both of which we've discussed in depth on the show before. Um,
Speaker 1: you know the idea that this is something that is
Speaker 1: free swimming earlier in its development, but then initially eventually
Speaker 1: puts down roots and stays there for the rest of
Speaker 1: its life. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, well, maybe we need
Speaker 1: to take a break, but when we come back, we
Speaker 1: can talk about pit monster mythology and about pit trap
Speaker 1: predators in the natural world. All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: All right, We're back now. Either way you look at it. Uh,
Speaker 1: I'd say the star Lack is a creature with with
Speaker 1: fittingly deep mythological roots. It is in essence as you
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, the earth swallowing up the living,
Speaker 1: with key ties to understandings and interpretations of earthquakes, sink holes,
Speaker 1: just caves in general, but also other land based catastrophes.
Speaker 1: So in preparing for this episode, I wanted to look
Speaker 1: something up, something that I've always assumed because you see
Speaker 1: it in movies. You know the scene in the movie
Speaker 1: where there is an earthquake and the ground opens up,
Speaker 1: there's this giant fissure, then everything just disappears super deep
Speaker 1: into the earth. Uh. I was like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: does that happen in real life? Basically from what I
Speaker 1: could tell most of the time, No, I think it's not,
Speaker 1: in principle impossible. But generally in earthquakes there might be
Speaker 1: you know, fissures that form in the ground, but they
Speaker 1: don't You don't get these deep chasms going down into
Speaker 1: the belly of the earth that you know swallow people
Speaker 1: and buildings. Hold that if that happens at all, that
Speaker 1: does not happen very often. Yeah, that that specifically happens
Speaker 1: in the force awakens. Remember when Ray is having that
Speaker 1: duel with Kylo Wren and then the the the earth
Speaker 1: shakes and suddenly there's this this deep gulf between them,
Speaker 1: which is you know, you know, awesome in a film,
Speaker 1: but maybe not that likely in the real world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's interesting that. So if this doesn't actually happen
Speaker 1: in reality, or at least doesn't happen often enough for
Speaker 1: people to you know, really see it and make a
Speaker 1: meme out of it and their culture, where does this
Speaker 1: idea come from? Because it goes way back, the idea
Speaker 1: that the earth like cracks open and swallows people whole. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember, like, well, first of all, I probably saw
Speaker 1: it in various films growing up as well, but I
Speaker 1: specifically remember having an illustrated um Bible Stories book and
Speaker 1: it had an illustration of what I what I seem
Speaker 1: to remember being the this episode from the Book of
Speaker 1: Numbers in the Old Testament, which this is the King
Speaker 1: James version quote, and the earth opened its mouth and
Speaker 1: swallowed them up with their households and all the men
Speaker 1: with Cora, with all their goods. Wow. Well yeah, that's
Speaker 1: basically what the earthquake movie pictures. Yeah, so you know
Speaker 1: it's it's I guess it's a pretty deeply set idea
Speaker 1: in in that respect. So I was looking around to
Speaker 1: see if I could come across any other like specific
Speaker 1: ideas of monsters or gods or you know, the adventures
Speaker 1: of a hero that involves something like the Sarlac. And
Speaker 1: what I what I came a process maybe not a
Speaker 1: you know, a directly related example, but but I think
Speaker 1: once I explain it, people will see a number of
Speaker 1: parallels that are pretty pretty interesting. This is from the
Speaker 1: Mesoamerican mythology of the Aztecs, the earth goddess plow to
Speaker 1: Kutli that is t l A l t e c
Speaker 1: u h t l I and most translations and man,
Speaker 1: she is a really interesting earth goddess. Yes, so for starters,
Speaker 1: she embodies a typical primordial god goddess archetype of a
Speaker 1: divided and dismembered form who scattered pieces constitute the world,
Speaker 1: and we see that a lot in mythologies. But she
Speaker 1: is also monstrous, incorporating amphibian and reptile morphology, and she
Speaker 1: is also presented as an eater of the dead, so
Speaker 1: the blood of human sacrifice flows into the earth to
Speaker 1: feed her, and she is often depicted with a flint
Speaker 1: knife between her teeth and or rivers of blood flowing
Speaker 1: from her mouth. She's also seen as a boundary deity,
Speaker 1: bridging the world of the living to Micklin, the world
Speaker 1: of the dead, and her role here is essentially one
Speaker 1: of of maintaining balance, and therefore sacrifices made to her
Speaker 1: are about keeping into the balance of the world's together.
Speaker 1: I mean, she is the Earth, and she is also
Speaker 1: this bridge between our world and the world of the dead.
Speaker 1: And when you look at likenesses of her, this is
Speaker 1: also interesting. Her likeness was often carved into the base
Speaker 1: of sculptures, you know, where humans could not see them
Speaker 1: once the sculpture was in place where the sculpture touched
Speaker 1: the earth, so you know, the living would not see this.
Speaker 1: It's it's as if it was only to be seen
Speaker 1: by her. Interesting now, her color was red, which is
Speaker 1: of course the color for blood associated with sacrifice, but
Speaker 1: red was also the color of sunset because at night
Speaker 1: she was said to consume the sun. We think of
Speaker 1: the you know, the setting sun uh aemingly to to
Speaker 1: be consumed by the earth and then night sets in yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is a motif we see in other mythologies
Speaker 1: from around the world. I think there are the god
Speaker 1: or the monster that eats the sun appears in Egyptian
Speaker 1: mythology I believe in in Hindu stories. Yes, yes, indeed. Now,
Speaker 1: if you look up some interpretations of this goddess uh,
Speaker 1: you'll find at least a couple of different versions. One
Speaker 1: is more of a uh, you know, more of a
Speaker 1: just a monstrous feminine form. But there's another one that's
Speaker 1: really interesting where it's kind of the squat toad like
Speaker 1: creature with its mouth open skyword towards the eagle. And
Speaker 1: and this one really makes me think of the star
Speaker 1: Lac because it is like a mouth open wide towards
Speaker 1: the heavens. Yeah, totally. Now, I think all this is
Speaker 1: interesting in context of the star Lac because the star
Speaker 1: Lac two is presented as something that is perhaps divine
Speaker 1: and to some degree immortal uh and an entity that
Speaker 1: demands sacrificial victims as well, and something of a gateway
Speaker 1: between our world and a hellish underworld. Again, think back
Speaker 1: to that that idea of a thousand years of digestion
Speaker 1: in the belly of the sarlac Um. I remember this
Speaker 1: was explored to a wonderful effect in a short story.
Speaker 1: This was by um an author by the name of
Speaker 1: 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 Jabs 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 escaped from the star Lak.
Speaker 1: You know, you must write it for me, make it happen. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so it succeeded in that, but it also presented
Speaker 1: digestion in the Starlac as being this kind of sentient
Speaker 1: 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 Starlac 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 pro burb or anti berb.
Speaker 1: I guess I'm I'm pro burp. It's it's fun, it's funny.
Speaker 1: I was probably there was probably a point that I'm
Speaker 1: not specifically remembering in my Star Wars wors fandom wre
Speaker 1: I probably thought I was above it and thought that
Speaker 1: that belt should be edited out because I also didn't
Speaker 1: want any indication that Fat was gone and that a
Speaker 1: belt should be uh you know his um, you know
Speaker 1: his tombstone. But I don't really have any st opinions
Speaker 1: about it now. It seemed an ignominious end for this,
Speaker 1: this much beloved minor character, and I think I think
Speaker 1: it bothered me when I was younger, when I also
Speaker 1: thought Boba Fette was so cool. I just gotta say,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm about to earn us all the hate mail
Speaker 1: we're going to get for the rest of the year.
Speaker 1: Boats armor looks cool. But I don't actually get what
Speaker 1: is just like mind meltingly amazing about him two people.
Speaker 1: I just feel like he's a kind of cool looking character.
Speaker 1: He's got like five lines. Yeah, yeah, I think it
Speaker 1: comes back to like the less you know, right, there
Speaker 1: was mystery about really all those bounty hunters and um,
Speaker 1: you know who were these guys? What what was their deal?
Speaker 1: You know? What what was the I like the one
Speaker 1: that's got like insect dies like a fly's head, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's good. Or the reptilian one with the long arms,
Speaker 1: and I'm sorry, I know they all have names and
Speaker 1: species and uh, if if I had my alien archive
Speaker 1: book in front of me, I would look them up.
Speaker 1: But basically it's a wonderful rogues gallery. Well, I don't
Speaker 1: have a position on the burp, but you know what,
Speaker 1: I'll support you in your decision, so so have me
Speaker 1: on board. I'm probb to. Yeah. I mean it's star
Speaker 1: Lag getting a good laugh there. I I think I
Speaker 1: think it was well received by my son. Now, I
Speaker 1: want to talk a little bit more about mythology here
Speaker 1: because I feel like there's an excellent connection to be made.
Speaker 1: Um specifically, I'm thinking about a parallel here in Greek mythology,
Speaker 1: where of course we have Skilla and Charybdis, the twin
Speaker 1: oceanic dangers that Odysseus must sail between the very horns
Speaker 1: of dilemma. Uh. These are magnificent monstrosities. Oh yeah, the classics.
Speaker 1: I mean, like the ultimate sea monster. How could you
Speaker 1: beat it? Yeah? So Charybdis. I think it's the most
Speaker 1: obvious analog here, an underwater monster of varying description that
Speaker 1: above water is just seen as this massive whirlpool that
Speaker 1: threatens to swallow up any ship that comes near it. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Skilla is this multi headed beast that plucks men from
Speaker 1: their ships. Now the star Lack basically incorporates elements from
Speaker 1: both of these monsters, because we have to remember that, Okay,
Speaker 1: Tattooing is a desert world, but the dune sea has
Speaker 1: all of these oceanic qualities to it as well. And
Speaker 1: in fact, I mean the whole encounter in Return of
Speaker 1: the Jedi is essentially the sci Fi mash up of
Speaker 1: nautical and swashbuckling tropes. Oh yeah, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that's the thing people might not realize if they're not
Speaker 1: familiar with the old Errol Flynn Pirate movies and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. But clearly they're walking the plank off the skiff.
Speaker 1: This is supposed to be boats on the ocean. Job
Speaker 1: of the hut is an evil pirate captain. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes perfect sense that the Crybdis analog
Speaker 1: here becomes very clear. And I should also point out
Speaker 1: that for anybody out there who may be a Percy
Speaker 1: Jackson fan. In uh, the film adaptation Percy of Percy
Speaker 1: Jackson Sea of Monsters, it has a wonderful Crybdis in it. Uh,
Speaker 1: Crybdis shows up and really takes on a very star
Speaker 1: lackey an appearance, no doubt playing upon 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 both Skilla and carib
Speaker 1: does show up, but in the movie we're just stuck
Speaker 1: 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 star lac. Now, there there
Speaker 1: might 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 if you get a chance to observe an ant
Speaker 1: lion in the wild, it's worth checking out. Robert, where
Speaker 1: did 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 a north western Tennessee. I remember encountering them there.
Speaker 1: Maybe my mind was primed for Arizona because I just
Speaker 1: know that that's where they shot the sarlaxines. I think
Speaker 1: it's near Yuma that they did that. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess the range of the ant lion is much wider. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it needs sand or loose soil. But uh,
Speaker 1: I understand it's fairly why I've spread. 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 romillion today, insect of which there are some
Speaker 1: two thousand individual species. So, in other words, the ant
Speaker 1: lion the larval form here is a high is highly
Speaker 1: interesting and unique, while the adult form is basically a
Speaker 1: short lived I mean, very short lived flying nothing that
Speaker 1: is far less studied. I mean, when you got you
Speaker 1: got one stage of your life cycle where you become
Speaker 1: a sarlac, You're just not going to get a lot
Speaker 1: of attention for the part of your life where you
Speaker 1: grow wings and fly around and land on plants. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the larval form first. So the
Speaker 1: larval ant lion, and I recommend looking at a picture
Speaker 1: of this anyone if you you have seen an illustration,
Speaker 1: because it's really gnarly. It has this globular abdomen, a
Speaker 1: narrow head, and a set of vicious sickle shaped mandibles.
Speaker 1: Some species, but not all, famously make their home at
Speaker 1: the bottom of a shallow pit, a shallow pit trap
Speaker 1: that they make themselves. Uh and then the and they
Speaker 1: produced this by burrowing backwards in a circle, flicking loose
Speaker 1: soil or sand out of the way as they go.
Speaker 1: And then once they're situated, only those twin mandibles remain visible,
Speaker 1: poking out of the bottom of the sand pit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so they form this thing, like you're saying, by
Speaker 1: sort of digging around in a conical in a conical shape,
Speaker 1: going backwards, flinging the sand out until they've created this
Speaker 1: pit that's got these sort of perfectly sloped conical sides.
Speaker 1: It's like a you know, like a coffee filter sort
Speaker 1: of uh. And it reminds me of the episodes we
Speaker 1: did about spider web agmission, because um, you know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting to think about the underlying algorithms in an animal's brain,
Speaker 1: like in the spider's brain that produced the web, or
Speaker 1: in the ant lion's brain that enable it to make
Speaker 1: these perfect little conical pit traps. And I remember one
Speaker 1: of the things we talked about in that other episode
Speaker 1: about spiderweb cognissition was how beautiful and complex patterns emerge
Speaker 1: in spiderwebs, even based on extremely simple algorithms for spinning, which,
Speaker 1: of course, the spiders can vary to adapt to environmental conditions.
Speaker 1: And I think there are some environmental variables that that
Speaker 1: work on ant lions as well. This might include things
Speaker 1: like the depth of the sand and the grain size.
Speaker 1: I was looking at one study that said apparently ant
Speaker 1: lions and a similar predator called worm lions tend to
Speaker 1: prefer finer and deeper sand, the finer sand, I'm sure
Speaker 1: better to trap you with exactly. So how does this
Speaker 1: trapping work? Well? When ants or other small insects fall
Speaker 1: into the pit, the ant lion throws more sand, like
Speaker 1: flicks more sand up towards the would be victim in
Speaker 1: order to keep them from escaping, and then they grapple
Speaker 1: their victim at the bottom of that pit, piercing their
Speaker 1: body with those mandibles and sucking out the fluids. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: the ant lion flicks the desiccated corpse out and then
Speaker 1: resets the pit for its next meal. Yeah, the and
Speaker 1: you can look up video of this of them literally
Speaker 1: just throwing like desiccated ant bodies out of their pit,
Speaker 1: just chucking them off to the side, 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 inject a venom to the prey. But
Speaker 1: then also they've got a digestive enzyme that they use
Speaker 1: much like some of the spider feeding stuff that we've
Speaker 1: talked about where they can inject the enzyme that sort
Speaker 1: of melts the guts of the prey animal and then
Speaker 1: allows some easy slurping. Now, like the star lac, the
Speaker 1: anti lion benefits from a really slow metabolism. The ant
Speaker 1: lion can go months without food and get this, does
Speaker 1: not even have an anus. It simply puts off defecation
Speaker 1: until it assumes it's a mature and final form. And
Speaker 1: this is something we see in other larval forms as
Speaker 1: well um elsewhere in the animal kingdom, where basically the
Speaker 1: creature is an eating machine. It's just about eating and eating,
Speaker 1: and it can in some cases just put off pooping
Speaker 1: until it has reached that final morphological form that is
Speaker 1: going to obtain. Yeah, let's stick on this for a second.
Speaker 1: In case that just went by you, the ant lion
Speaker 1: in its larval stage does not have an anus and
Speaker 1: cannot poop, and this goes on for the entire larval
Speaker 1: stage of its life cycle, which can last for up
Speaker 1: to three years. Right, no anus, you got your poop
Speaker 1: in for three years. So I guess imagine if like
Speaker 1: we only grew an anus and became able to defecate
Speaker 1: when we turned eighteen or something, you know, the parents
Speaker 1: talking about how you know you'll poop when you're older,
Speaker 1: you'll understand then, Oh man, I mean, I guess I
Speaker 1: have mixed thoughts about that, because on one hand, not
Speaker 1: having to poop is is I mean, it's really everyone's dream.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, being filled with an increasing
Speaker 1: amount of poop is everyone's nightmare. So uh, I guess
Speaker 1: it just comes down to that, like you either extreme,
Speaker 1: you you don't want either extreme. You want the balance
Speaker 1: of normal human pooping. Now, the funny thing is that
Speaker 1: there are some skewed ways where we conceptualize animal life cycles,
Speaker 1: insect life cycles and stuff. Because we're talking about how
Speaker 1: when the antline is done with its pit trap larval
Speaker 1: stage and then matures and becomes an adult. But this
Speaker 1: adult stage lasts for a much shorter period than its
Speaker 1: larval stage does, so in a weird way, you shouldn't
Speaker 1: think of its adult phase as like it's normal life,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, Because again you mentioned that the larval
Speaker 1: stage will live like about three years, but the flying
Speaker 1: adult stage lives for a mere twenty five days or so,
Speaker 1: So really it's adult form is just its last hurrah.
Speaker 1: You know, this is about it just well, I guess
Speaker 1: finally pooping, but also and more importantly reproducing. Right, yes,
Speaker 1: now this would sort of answer the question for me
Speaker 1: that I had when we were beginning to work on
Speaker 1: this episode. I was wondering, like, does a star lack
Speaker 1: poop if its whole body is under the ground. If
Speaker 1: it does poop, where does the poop go? And now
Speaker 1: you hypothesized, Robert, You were like, well, maybe it doesn't poop,
Speaker 1: just like the antline doesn't poop. But the airline's got
Speaker 1: a poop eventually, it's got the next stage of its
Speaker 1: life cycle. And as far as we know, the star
Speaker 1: lack does not. It's not gonna eventually grow wings, grow ananus,
Speaker 1: and then fly off somewhere to poop everything that has
Speaker 1: accumulated over the thousands of years. So what's going on
Speaker 1: with the star lac Well, it does make me think
Speaker 1: it could. This is just me, you know, spitball in here.
Speaker 1: But perhaps if there is anything it cannot digest, maybe
Speaker 1: it spits it back out, kind of like an owl will,
Speaker 1: do you know with something that you know that it
Speaker 1: is swallowed, you know, the various bones and whatnot. Or
Speaker 1: perhaps there is just like terminal digestion going on inside
Speaker 1: the sarlac. You know, it's just digesting and digesting, and
Speaker 1: at the end of this there's just nothing like maybe
Speaker 1: it's just that efficient. I can see that. But I
Speaker 1: also like the idea of the two way digestive system.
Speaker 1: There are organisms like that that live in the ocean,
Speaker 1: mainly like the hydra I believe has a has a
Speaker 1: two way digestive system where it basically eats and poops
Speaker 1: through the same opening. That's right, Yeah, I think we
Speaker 1: went into that on our episode about the evolution of
Speaker 1: the anus um. So yeah, there are there are various
Speaker 1: models for this that we see throughout the evolution of
Speaker 1: life on Earth. It could be, uh, you know, used
Speaker 1: to explain it another way of looking at it would
Speaker 1: be something down there under the ground is pooping for
Speaker 1: the star lac, 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 a here's my hypothesis. Okay,
Speaker 1: the sarlac secretes an acidic compound that slowly over time
Speaker 1: dissolves the bedrock, dissolves the sedimentary rock down below where
Speaker 1: it is resting in the ground, and forms a karst
Speaker 1: cavity in the ground, basically creates its own poop cave,
Speaker 1: and then poops into the cave. Uh. What do you think?
Speaker 1: I like it? I like it. You could have a
Speaker 1: whole uh, you know, the whole aspect of Tattooine society
Speaker 1: where like jawas are out there trying to dig down
Speaker 1: to get those poop reserves from the sarlacs. You know,
Speaker 1: like especially if it's like ancient poop reserves of the sarlac,
Speaker 1: it's aged and you know, high valuable for something or another.
Speaker 1: I'm sure. Uh, I've got it, the most sought after
Speaker 1: fertilizer in the universe. Oh nice, Yes, the poop must flow. Yes. Now,
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier that not all ant lions um are
Speaker 1: are going to be these these uh, these pit digging
Speaker 1: um trap predators. You also have some that that that
Speaker 1: have other modes of existence, and we see this also
Speaker 1: with owl flies, which are uh an organism that look
Speaker 1: very similar as larva and also live as ambush predators
Speaker 1: in the soil. They look again a lot like ant lions,
Speaker 1: but while it seems like they have been known to
Speaker 1: obscure their lower bodies with sand and debris, UH the
Speaker 1: al fly larva don't seem to engage in the sort
Speaker 1: of robust, pit based and stationary ambush tactics that we
Speaker 1: see with those most notable species of antlions. Now, I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier that there is a very similar pit trap
Speaker 1: predator which has a hunting strategy almost identical to that
Speaker 1: of the ant lion, and this is a winged insect
Speaker 1: 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 the interestingly, worm lions are not
Speaker 1: closely related to ant lions. This appears to be another
Speaker 1: interesting 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
Speaker 1: similar if the hunters are not closely related, wouldn't the
Speaker 1: pits be kind of more different for these different animals.
Speaker 1: Apparently has to do with mass or like the geometry
Speaker 1: of how sediments lay at an angle. Uh. The angles
Speaker 1: of the pit slopes are determined by what's known as
Speaker 1: the angle of repose, which is the steepest angle at
Speaker 1: which 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 there's 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 its 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,
Speaker 1: it looks kind of like a sarlac tentacle. Yeah, it's segmented,
Speaker 1: but but appears far more prehensile than you know, something
Speaker 1: like a normal earth worm. 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 unicey 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's essentially
Speaker 1: a rainbow colored marine deathworm, and it buries itself in
Speaker 1: the sand, ready to strike at passing prey. They can
Speaker 1: reach lengths of nearly nine point eight feeders or two pots,
Speaker 1: but most of its segmented body remains coiled in the
Speaker 1: sand and as an array of five antennae to help
Speaker 1: it since prey a feature that I think is reminiscent
Speaker 1: of of you know, this idea that the sarlac might
Speaker 1: have a root like systems of system of feelers, spines
Speaker 1: and tentacles, which you see in some of these illustrations
Speaker 1: that try to get to the heart of the star lac.
Speaker 1: But the sand striker here, it strikes with incredible speed,
Speaker 1: 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 in the sand, attacks and
Speaker 1: it grows to like ten ft long. This is a
Speaker 1: ten foot 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 prey 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. Wanted a time to find out what
Speaker 1: was causing the attacks, and a curator named Matt Slater
Speaker 1: was quoted in the Daily Mail at the time talking
Speaker 1: about what happened. He said, quote, something was guzzling our reef,
Speaker 1: but we had no idea what. We also found an
Speaker 1: injured tank fish, so we laid traps, but they got
Speaker 1: ripped apart in the night. That were must have obliterated
Speaker 1: the traps. The bait was full of hooks which he
Speaker 1: must have just digested. Uh So, I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's sounds kind of hard to believe, but if that's true,
Speaker 1: it would kind of or the sarlac digestion thing. But
Speaker 1: in any case, like it does seem to be the
Speaker 1: case that they had one of these worms. One of
Speaker 1: these worms burrowed down in the bottom of the tank.
Speaker 1: So the workers discovered that there was a stowaway sarlac
Speaker 1: like this predatory burrowing sea worm was hiding down in
Speaker 1: the sediment at the bottom, and it had probably snuck
Speaker 1: in among the coral that were transplated into the transplanted
Speaker 1: into the tank years before and had just grown there
Speaker 1: and hiding ever since. But this also made me think,
Speaker 1: so this worm is fast, powerful, venomous, mostly hidden down
Speaker 1: in the ground or down in the sediment, how can
Speaker 1: prey animals defend themselves? Well, actually, I found an interesting
Speaker 1: article about this where there is one strategy that's been
Speaker 1: uncovered and it was published in Scientific Reports in It
Speaker 1: was by jose La Shot and Daniel hog Walker Nagle
Speaker 1: called novel mobbing Strategies on a fish population against a
Speaker 1: sessile analid predator. And basically the authors here described this
Speaker 1: weird thing where these fish a type of bream called
Speaker 1: Scalopsis afinus. They would where like one fish would find
Speaker 1: one of these worms would be near it and discover
Speaker 1: it was there and would start spitting jets of water
Speaker 1: toward the worm, and then other fish would join in.
Speaker 1: These prey fish would join in this mobbing behavior where
Speaker 1: they would all gather around and start spitting these jets
Speaker 1: of water towards the worm, which apparently caused the worm
Speaker 1: to retract down into the sediment. I'm not sure exactly
Speaker 1: what's going on there. I mean, so obviously this is
Speaker 1: some kind of group defensive behavior against a predator when
Speaker 1: the predator's location is discovered. But it makes me wonder
Speaker 1: if anything similar could go on with the sarlac or
Speaker 1: would it even need to Like would you need to
Speaker 1: have bantas like spitting jets of air at a star
Speaker 1: lac or something, or could they just stay away from it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I guess that's the thing about a land based scenario
Speaker 1: versus the marine scenario is that on the land once,
Speaker 1: unless you are a you know, in a flying creature,
Speaker 1: by the time you got close enough to the star
Speaker 1: lac to really be in danger to really need to
Speaker 1: spit at it, it's probably too late. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think part of this this behavior though,
Speaker 1: might just be not necessarily in like harming the worm
Speaker 1: or something, but in alerting the other con specifics to
Speaker 1: its location. So you can imagine something like that for
Speaker 1: trap predators too. I mean I would. I don't know
Speaker 1: of any evidence like this, but I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 1: if there are some types of ants or other prey
Speaker 1: insects of the ant lion that have some kind of
Speaker 1: group defense strategy where when one species identifies an ant
Speaker 1: lion pit, it can kind of like you know, sound
Speaker 1: the alarm and alert the others to to to what's
Speaker 1: 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 I you know, I think maybe
Speaker 1: the banthers might have some sort of um, some sort
Speaker 1: of the strategy to deal with that. Now. Um, Ultimately,
Speaker 1: the sea is home to other atom dwelling ambush predators
Speaker 1: as well, more than we could conceivably list in the
Speaker 1: episode here. But you have things like the devil scorpion
Speaker 1: fish and the ward eye star gazer, and if you
Speaker 1: watch enough, um, you know, underwater documentaries, you'll see some
Speaker 1: of these bizarre and wondrous creatures. All right, we need
Speaker 1: to take another break, but we'll be right back to
Speaker 1: 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 Cee three Po says that when you fall into
Speaker 1: the all powerful starlac again, I'm not maybe things this
Speaker 1: can come up again. I'm not quite sure why the
Speaker 1: star lack is all powerful. It seems relatively powerful within
Speaker 1: its own mouth and the range right around there, but
Speaker 1: beyond its powers rapidly diminish. Um Uh. But see three
Speaker 1: Po 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 thousand years now, we've already discussed the slow metabolism
Speaker 1: and of the eating machine the ant lion. But I
Speaker 1: want to look at another emblem of slow digestion, this
Speaker 1: time of mammal. I think we should look at the sloth.
Speaker 1: And now there are a lot of ways actually that
Speaker 1: sloths have been observed to be generally slow. Right, the
Speaker 1: name their English name is not a coincidence. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this this slowness does extend not just to their movements
Speaker 1: through the trees. You know, if you watch them climb something,
Speaker 1: they tend to be very slow moving creatures. But their
Speaker 1: slowness extends down to the chemical, the biochemical level within
Speaker 1: their bodies. I was looking at a study by Jonathan
Speaker 1: and Pauli, M. Zachariah Pierri, Emily D. Fountain, and William H.
Speaker 1: Kerosov called arboreal folio wars limit their energetic output all
Speaker 1: the way to slothfulness in the American Naturalist in six
Speaker 1: and the authors here are trying to explore possible reasons
Speaker 1: that animals they call arboreal full levorees animals that eat
Speaker 1: tree leaves, hang out in the trees, eat leaves from trees,
Speaker 1: why they are relatively rare compared to some other types
Speaker 1: of animals and do not display as much adaptive radiation
Speaker 1: as some other animals. And adaptive radiation here means, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, diversifying of the species into different ecological niches,
Speaker 1: basically like evolving into many different types and variations to
Speaker 1: fill ecological niches. You don't see a lot of this
Speaker 1: with animals like sloths. And so they point out that,
Speaker 1: you know, like mature tree leaves, that the dietary, the
Speaker 1: main diet source of these animals like sloths, and there
Speaker 1: are other animals like this tu pandas, koalas and so forth.
Speaker 1: Mature tree leaves are not a very high quality food.
Speaker 1: They tend to be tough and woody. Often they've got
Speaker 1: some kind of poisons or tannins or some kind of
Speaker 1: unpleasant chemical in them. It's generally really difficult to live
Speaker 1: by eating, digesting, and extracting energy from mature tree leaves,
Speaker 1: but sloths do it. So maybe the energy constraints on
Speaker 1: these animals have somehow controlled their spread and evolution. So
Speaker 1: the authors here wanted to measure the metabolic rates of
Speaker 1: sloths in Costa Rica, and they write, quote, we quantified
Speaker 1: the field metabolic rate or FMR movement and body temperature
Speaker 1: for sin topic two and three toed sloths, extreme arboreal
Speaker 1: fulivorees that differ in their degree of specialization. Both species
Speaker 1: expended little energy, but three toed sloths possess the lowest
Speaker 1: FMR recorded for any mammal. And so the three toed
Speaker 1: sloth lives on a on a field metabolic rate of
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty two killer jewels per day per
Speaker 1: kilogram of body weight. Now that number alone might not
Speaker 1: mean much to you. But comparing it to other animals, uh,
Speaker 1: it's way lower than say the howler monkey, who who
Speaker 1: has a field metabolic rate of five hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: three killer jewels per day per kilo am of body weight.
Speaker 1: It's lower than koalas at four hundred and ten. Even
Speaker 1: the giant panda is more at five. The three toads
Speaker 1: lost is the lowest ever measured, uh at a hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty two kill a jewels per day per kilogram.
Speaker 1: And so in a way, it is a profound evolutionary
Speaker 1: experiment in slowing everything down. And this is historically in
Speaker 1: a kind of funny and interesting way lad some thinkers
Speaker 1: to view sloths as as some kind of like like
Speaker 1: that there's a problem with their existence, that there's something
Speaker 1: wrong with them. Like the Count de Buffon, you know,
Speaker 1: George Louis la Clerk, Count of Buffon, who we talked
Speaker 1: about in our Age of the Earth episode, because he
Speaker 1: did some experiments trying to, uh, trying to determine the
Speaker 1: age of the Earth based on I believe his idea
Speaker 1: had to do with like how long it would take
Speaker 1: the Earth to cool to its current temperature. But he
Speaker 1: wrote this huge multi volume natural history work during his
Speaker 1: life where he tried to become you know, the eighteenth
Speaker 1: century uh plenty of the elder, you know, to catalog
Speaker 1: all of the stuff in the world and tell you
Speaker 1: all about it. And his section on sloths is kind
Speaker 1: of hilarious. Are you ready for this, Robert, Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: bring it on, Okay, So he says. These animals have
Speaker 1: neither incisive nor canine teeth. Their eyes are dull and
Speaker 1: almost concealed with hair. Their mouths are wide, and their
Speaker 1: lips thick and heavy. Their fur is course and looks
Speaker 1: like dried grass. Their thighs seem almost disjointed from the haunches,
Speaker 1: their legs very short and badly shaped. They have no
Speaker 1: soles to their feet, nor toe is separately movable, but
Speaker 1: only two or three claws, excessively long and crooked downwards,
Speaker 1: which move together and are only useful to the animal
Speaker 1: in climbing. Slowness, stupidity, and even habitual pain result from
Speaker 1: its uncouth conformation. They have no arms, either to attack
Speaker 1: or defend themselves. No or are they furnished with any
Speaker 1: means of security, as they can neither scratch up the
Speaker 1: earth nor seek for safety by flight. But confined to
Speaker 1: a small spot of ground, or to the tree under
Speaker 1: which they are brought forth. They remain prisoners in the
Speaker 1: midst of an extended space, unable to move more than
Speaker 1: three feet in an hour. They climb with difficulty and pain,
Speaker 1: and their plaintive and interrupted cry they dare only utter
Speaker 1: by night. After some more moralizing about how awful they are,
Speaker 1: he says, Uh, we have already observed that it seems
Speaker 1: as if all that could be does exist, and of
Speaker 1: this the sloths appear to be a striking proof. They
Speaker 1: constitute the last term of existence in the order of animals,
Speaker 1: endowed with flesh and blood. One more defect and they
Speaker 1: could not have existed. Oh my goodness, Now, I think
Speaker 1: this is funny because like in some ways, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: Buffon was considered a very you know, learned man of
Speaker 1: his day. But like just the amazing ignorance of this
Speaker 1: is just like, given what we know about animals now,
Speaker 1: and the Clark had all kinds of terrible ideas, you know.
Speaker 1: He he endorsed scientific racism. He believed that like the
Speaker 1: animals of the New World were somehow inferior to the
Speaker 1: animals of the Old world. Uh, there's all this weird,
Speaker 1: genuine disgust in his writing when he talks about animals
Speaker 1: found in North and South America. So he had all
Speaker 1: these extremely misguided theories. Because all this stuff that he
Speaker 1: characterizes as defects with this species, I think we would
Speaker 1: probably look at and say, I don't know, given our
Speaker 1: modern evolutionary understanding, you are probably not understanding these correctly.
Speaker 1: These are probably not actually defects, these are adaptations. His
Speaker 1: His thinking falls prey to the naive version of survival
Speaker 1: of the fittest, as you know, the fittest, not as
Speaker 1: in best adapted to its environment, but as like the toughest,
Speaker 1: 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 sloth. It also reminds me
Speaker 1: a little bit of of Darwin's descriptions of the with
Speaker 1: the marine iguanas, the iguanas of the club. I mean,
Speaker 1: Darwin didn't normally fall into this way of thinking, but
Speaker 1: occasionally there was some animal he didn't like. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: the sloth, like the main like counter arguments. In addition,
Speaker 1: to to what we said here about the true nature
Speaker 1: of adaptation. I would also, you know, put forth at
Speaker 1: first of all, sloths tend to be cute. That tends
Speaker 1: to be our interpretation of them, especially babies sloths or
Speaker 1: slothes if you're using the British pronunciation, but but also
Speaker 1: the adults. There's a certain adorableness to them. And I
Speaker 1: have to say when when I was in Costa Rica
Speaker 1: with my family and we went on a hike, uh
Speaker 1: through the forest there and we got to see got
Speaker 1: the glimpse a wild sloth like where we you know,
Speaker 1: had to stand there for several min it's and watch
Speaker 1: what would presume to be a sloth finally move and
Speaker 1: slowly confirm it's it's sloth hood Like that was a
Speaker 1: genuinely magical moment. Like that has to be one of
Speaker 1: one of my top interactions with wildlife ever. Like it
Speaker 1: just 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: put my put myself in the mindset of of sloth
Speaker 1: hating um worldview. I think Bufon would think you're a sucker,
Speaker 1: But yeah, I think he was quite clearly wrong. Like
Speaker 1: the sloths, including the extremely slow, yes, very slow, three
Speaker 1: toed sloths, are incredibly well adapted to their environments in
Speaker 1: very interesting ways. I was reading an article about this
Speaker 1: on The Conversation from sixteen by a British zoologist named
Speaker 1: Becky Cliff, who I believe she either currently works or
Speaker 1: has worked in a sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica, so
Speaker 1: you know, doing a lot of hands on work with
Speaker 1: sloths um 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 to seventy of what you would
Speaker 1: expect for an animal of its body mass. So they're
Speaker 1: they're they're going way underweight on energy needs. And so
Speaker 1: the question might be, well, why live like this, why
Speaker 1: would you be so slow have such a relatively cool
Speaker 1: body and all that. Again, it's cheap, it's mega cheap.
Speaker 1: Sloths require much less food, energy, than other mammals of
Speaker 1: similar size. They can eat this, you know, this kind
Speaker 1: of bad food. I mean, it wouldn't be bad from
Speaker 1: their point of view, but it's low caloric density. This
Speaker 1: food like tough, fibrous tree leaves, and they don't even
Speaker 1: need to eat all the 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 also digest food
Speaker 1: really slow, and this brings us back to the sarlac.
Speaker 1: Cliff points out 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 fifty seven hours or
Speaker 1: up to twelve hundred hours to pass through the slots
Speaker 1: digestive system. So the upper end of this estimate would
Speaker 1: be like fifty days. Um, you can imagine, you know,
Speaker 1: having having your food waste in your body for that long. Robert,
Speaker 1: you said before we came on to record today that
Speaker 1: you have actually watched video of a sloth pooping. You
Speaker 1: people at home, if you have not seen this, you
Speaker 1: should look it up. It's fair warning. It looks kind
Speaker 1: of traumatic, like there's a lot coming out. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I mean, the other interesting thing about slots pooping is that,
Speaker 1: of course they have to climb down to do it. Uh.
Speaker 1: They don't just poop out of the branches. They return
Speaker 1: to the earth to carry this out. Yeah. Uh and
Speaker 1: so Cliff Rights quote. Unsurprisingly, the slots four chambered stomach
Speaker 1: is constantly full, and so more leaves can only be
Speaker 1: ingested when digesta leaves the stomach and enters the small intestine.
Speaker 1: Food intake and critically, energy expenditure are likely limited by
Speaker 1: digestion rate and room in the stomach. Indeed, the abdominal
Speaker 1: contents of a sloth can account for up to thirty
Speaker 1: seven percent of their body mass. So it's digesting for
Speaker 1: days at a time, maybe you know, a month or
Speaker 1: more at a time digesting food. It's maybe a third
Speaker 1: of its body weight or more. Is the poop that
Speaker 1: it's got inside it right now, and it you know,
Speaker 1: hasn't purged yet. You can also imagine though that like
Speaker 1: why would it hang on this long? I can also
Speaker 1: imagine this having to do with what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: that it has to come down to the forest floor
Speaker 1: to do it, which is inherently a vulnerable activity. So
Speaker 1: and because it's slow moving, you might want to limit
Speaker 1: those trips down to the vulnerable position as much as possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like if you live in a you know, a
Speaker 1: walk up apartment in New York and you prefer to
Speaker 1: to poop in the say the john, but choice down
Speaker 1: on the street. I think that was the joke from
Speaker 1: Dirty Rock. Toilet might limit how many times you go
Speaker 1: to the jamba juice too exactly? Yes, yeah, you might
Speaker 1: you might wait, Awhile, there was another interesting fact that
Speaker 1: came up in this article, by the way, that the
Speaker 1: 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 hyder. 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 fur, 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 find, uh
Speaker 1: the sloth in the wild, like it wasn't pointed out
Speaker 1: by a guide, Well, it was just the whole time
Speaker 1: I knew based on what the guys that told us
Speaker 1: that there might be sloths in the trees, we just
Speaker 1: have to look really hard for them, and it did.
Speaker 1: It took forever to see this, this creature, because you're
Speaker 1: just kind of constantly on the lookout for possible movement,
Speaker 1: possible lumps, uh you know, in the in these you know,
Speaker 1: rich canopy of trees that might be a slot. And
Speaker 1: most of the time I was wrong, or at least
Speaker 1: I was unable to confirm that what I was looking
Speaker 1: at at a distance was a living creature at all.
Speaker 1: So so when really I was more lucky than anything.
Speaker 1: I think that I was able to to zero in
Speaker 1: on this this lump in the trees and then finally
Speaker 1: see it move and finally make out the movements of
Speaker 1: of an actual sloth. So yeah, I imagine they have
Speaker 1: a you know, tremendous advantage versus predators that are doing
Speaker 1: the same thing, you know, on constant lookout for, uh
Speaker 1: 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. It's like the movements
Speaker 1: where we're very slow and fluid and kind of you know,
Speaker 1: far between, Like it wasn't it was wasn't like looking
Speaker 1: for the movement of a traditional creature, you know, or
Speaker 1: at least the kind of creatures that I tend to
Speaker 1: find myself looking for, you know, like the movements of
Speaker 1: say a squirrel or a or a chipmunk or a
Speaker 1: bird of some sort. You know, it's a it's it's
Speaker 1: a totally different animal. Can we imagine a sarlac evolving
Speaker 1: over over a very long period, over millions of years,
Speaker 1: from some type of sloth like creature, like a formerly
Speaker 1: totally mobile creature that over time evolves too slow, its
Speaker 1: metabolism and digestion down further and further and further in
Speaker 1: order to you know, survive on maybe tough dietary material
Speaker 1: like like plant leaves or something, uh, to support this
Speaker 1: high efficiency of you know, a slow metabolism, highly efficient digestion.
Speaker 1: I wonder if there are routes like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I have wondered before. Like one of the main things
Speaker 1: we 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 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 sarlac? Uh? No, we did not. The sarlak
Speaker 1: 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: peek 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 that everybody that's
Speaker 1: ever been eaten by it is just in there kind
Speaker 1: of chilling, you know. And it turns out the Starla
Speaker 1: doesn't digest people. Instead, it has like a symbiotic relationship
Speaker 1: with you know, other organisms, you know, beneath the surface
Speaker 1: of tattooin and everything like friends. Yeah, yeah, it gets lonely.
Speaker 1: It's an intelligent creature. It gets lonely. It needs friends,
Speaker 1: right well, Robert, this has been a lot of fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this has been fun. Um. It is kind of hard
Speaker 1: to believe this is the This is I think the
Speaker 1: first Star Wars episode of stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: But hey, who knows. There's a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff in the Star Wars universe. Maybe we'll maybe
Speaker 1: we'll get up the energy to do another one of
Speaker 1: the one 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. Um,
Speaker 1: we'll tell you how to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: here in a second, But if you just want to
Speaker 1: support the show, best thing you can do is rate, review,
Speaker 1: and subscribe wherever you get this podcast us banks as always,
Speaker 1: who are excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hi, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot Common. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're
Speaker 1: listening to your favorite shows.