Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show we are getting Guy and YU can see we are talking about animal immune systems now as we hopefully exit the cold and flu season. I'm sure a lot of you have had some recent experience with your immune system, and despite how unpleasant it is,
it is also really fascinating. So today is a special episode because I have a guest who is a naturalist, a teacher, and an author whose recent book, Sick is about amazing stories of the animal immune system. It would be a book that if I had got my hands on this book when I was a kid, it would be like my personal Bible. Is it is really fun even for adults. Welcome Heather Montgomery.
Hey, I'm so excited to be here and talk to folks who are just as excited as I am to learn from the animal world. It's so amazing what's out there. If we open our eyes and start asking questions. Wow, I just get carried away with it.
I feel like we're very much kindred spirits. Because I love the grossness of biology Obviously, I do love a beautiful butterfly. I love a beautiful bird, but I think I also enjoy appreciating just the you know, the poop of nature. It's so interesting and it's I mean, it's not only a great way to I think teach kids about it, because like, you know, you got to lean in a little bit to like the gross stuff to get kids interested. But honestly, I also believe that is
true of adults. Like we may not like to admit it, but I certainly have never outgrown learning stuff about poop and fighting. It both kind of funny and really interesting.
Right, isn't that funny that happens? Like when we grow up, we're supposed to not be interested in the things that we're innately interested in. I'm not sure why why, but it's like we're always attracted and repelled at the same time by these things, and those are the things that fascinate me. I'm kind of curious as to why people are so interested in the yanky stuff, but we are. Yeah, it's really cool.
It is really interesting because it makes some sense that we are repelled by poop, because I mean, in some ways it's very practical, right, Poop can spread parasites, can spread disease. But it's so it's good that we're not, you know, that we grow out of the phase of playing in our own poop. However, it is still really interesting. I think that we are drawn to kind of like you know, when you're on a hike and you see some animal dung and you see there's stuff poking out
of it. I think people would be lying if, like they wouldn't admit that that's a little interesting, and you're kind of like, Okay, I do kind of want to poke that with a stick and find out what's going on in there. It's both gross for good reason, but it's also really interesting exactly.
That's actually what led me to write a whole book about poop, a different book, you know, it was a different book, yes, but it was like the surprising side, right that we when we look at this stuff that's so gross, what we can actually learn about the world, whether it's animals, you know, or the rest of the world. All of the kind of big questions that come out of scat.
Yeah, no, absolutely, I mean it's it's a whole thing like in in research. It's so such an important actual kind of like research method is collecting and studying animal poop, which sounds you know, it sounds like not a fun job, but then when you think about it, like that is kind of cool because you get to be out in nature, you collect a bunch of dung, and then you bring it back for analysis. But there is so there is one poop story I want uh to talk about a
little bit. It's in your book. Uh. It's I think one of the most endearingly gross stories about poop.
Uh.
It is about puppy poop and the mother's response to puppy poop. And it's it's really cute but also horrifyingly disgusting, and I don't it's one of those things where it's like perfectly combining cuteness with grossness exactly right.
So, if you're a mom and you've got a whole litter of puppies and a you know together, what are they going to do a lot of is boop? Right, and that's awesome. You've got to get rid of this stuff. Plus what if there's parasites in it, which they're likely are you know, if you're if you're not a pet and taken care of, and so how do you deal with that because the puppy's immune system can't deal with it at all. So mom sacrifices and she laps it up.
She carries it away from her babies through her own digestive system, which is atrocious but not really because her immune systems better handle these kinds of parasites. Plus, she basically hauls away and she can't pick it up with her hands, right, so she basically hauls away through her system and deposits it elsewhere. And if she deposits it elsewhere, soon enough, the eggs haven't hatched for say, the round one,
and so she gets rid of them. It's just like that in and of itself, that kind of behavioral adaptation is phenomenal to me, Like how that came about. It's just amazing gross but awesome too.
You know, it's so gross, but it's so sweet because like obviously you know, it's this dog wanting to I mean, it's hard to talk about animals in terms of what they want, like because they have these instincts, right, and this mother dog doesn't know why she's drawn to eating her offsprings poop, but it is it is a it's still sweet because it's like this this instinct to protect your offspring to help them grow and develop. I mean,
it makes sense, that's how evolution works. But it's also like it's one of the things that like, oh yeah, like humans are not the only ones that deal with baby poop, like other animals deal with baby poop. A cute thing. I think another kind of cute gross poop thing is that birds, a lot of bird species, they don't want to just have their baby birds poop and have the poop accumulate and the nests. So the baby
bird poop is actually kind of comes in it. When it comes out, it's sort of encased in this like mucoasal sack, and then it lifts its little butt up and presents this poop too. It's and the mom bird just like picks it up with her beak because you know, she doesn't have hands, and carries it outside the nest and deposits it outside the nest. So it's it's kind
of gross but also really cute. And I have seen a video of someone who's taking care of a baby bird that was sadly abandoned, and this person has to take a pair of chompsticks and pick up the little poop package every time this bird feeds and then like presents its butt, presents this poop. It's really cute and also obviously a little gross.
Isn't it phenomenal that that works that way. I actually challenge kids and adults sometimes because we're all just big kids, to watch a nest with binoculars and you can actually tell when the young have hatched and started to digest food or consume food because you'll start to see the mother and add too, carrying away the fecals. It's just crazy.
It's so it's it's like, oh, yeah, other animals, I guess have to deal with quote unquote poopy diapers, except it's like a natural diaper.
Yeah, and it would be great if you know, we had natural diapers for our young as well, but yeah, but we don't.
No, we don't, we don't. So another major theme in your book is the immune system, which I mean, again, I as an adult, got to kick out of reading this book, but it is it is a great book
for kids as well. And I think this is a great introduction to the immune system to kids because it's it seems overwhelming, right, Like the immune system, it's so complicated, there's so many things but I think it's also like when you think about the parts of the immune system, it gets a little bit easier to understand what's going on because there's actually two major parts of the immune system, and one is the innate or non specific immune system
and the adaptive immune system. And the innate immune system we see every day when you look in the mirror, you look at other people. It's our skin, it's our mucus, it's our earwax, our hair, all of these things that are a barrier to pathogens. There's also on the cellular level innate immune cells, such as phagocytes that will actually basically eat pathogens, eat things that are not supposed to be there, break them down so that they are harmless.
Sometimes they break it down and then that's when the adaptive immune system can come into place. So the adaptive immune system is the part of the immune system that actually launches a response specifically towards a type of pathogen that it recognizes. So when you learn about a virus, like you get infected with a virus, your body learns about it, then it launches an adaptive immune response, and this one is a little more precise and it can be stronger it can in a stronger reaction, but it is.
It's really interesting because this adaptive immune system is in this kind of like ballet with viruses and bacteria, this evolutionary kind of arms race, and so both humans and animals have adaptive and innate immune systems, and the balances can be different. Some animals actually have a very weak adaptive immune system or a very weak innate immune system,
and it kind of they balance each other out. Like the deep sea anglerfish has actually kind of done away with a lot of its adaptive immune system because the male deep sea anglerfish attaches itself to the female and actually kind of like fuses grafts itself onto the female. And if this adaptive immune system knew that this male was there, it would try to kill it, and that would put a kibosh on the wh whole like mating
strategy of these these fish. And so instead it's thought that it overcomes this weaker adaptive immune system with a stronger passive immune system, like a you know, thicker skin, more mucosal membranes and so, and also just the fact that they're not really running into each other a lot down there, so sparsely populated, but in general, animals have both an innate and an adaptive immune system, and the
innate immune system can be really really interesting. Uh, And I really love your examples in this book, especially when when we're talking about slime. So what is so many animals are slimy and it seems gross, but it's actually really interesting and really important. So what is I mean, what is slime? What is mucus? And what is what is it used for? And why is it so popular in nature?
Oh? Slime is awesome. Don't we love it? I mean, it is just great. We all have it. It's there, it's a part of of well, I don't know an animal that it's not a part of. But the amazing thing is that slime protects us, you know, it's in our nose and it's one of those other than skin, which is kind of the first barrier, right, But that slime is there to catch intruders as they come into the body and attack it. One of the stories I love is about the hagfish, which people.
Probably I love the hagfish.
They're so gross and so slimy, right, and their slime does a number of different things, but it also includes licensomes and that when they the licenz homes are just these amazing attackers, right, So any bacteria or things like that, they just go at it, hack it, wack it, and smack it. And I just think that's pretty awesome to look at kind of across the dul Kingdom, how similar adaptations are used, and also how every species has its
own unique way of attacking these invaders. One of the stories I love to talk about is the ants, because ants don't give a lot get a lot of credit, right, I mean, there's little things, but amazingly scientists are studying ants in order to better understand our immune system. One of the things that happens, at least to my mind,
when I'm understanding immune systems is it's so complex. It's hard to hard to visualize, right, But when you think about an ant colony as an individual a super organism, you can kind of get a better sense of how a human body might work. For example, we've all seen yeah, yeah, right, Like we've all seen an ant hill. We see ants go in, right, and if you think about that ant hill, if you touch it, you know how they react. So thinking that that ant hill is kind of like our skin,
the outside surface, Like if we attack it. They're gonna attack us, just like if something breaks our skin barrier, our immune system's gonna attack it. But then there are the normal places where things go into the ant hill,
like the openings, you know, the entrance ways. But right there at the entrance ways to that ant hill are guards, and those guards are gonna attack anything that tries to come in that is not the self, right, just like our nose that slim in our nose, it's gonna do the same thing, right, And as you go deeper into
the ant hill, you have more and more protection. What was amazing to me is as I researched for this book, I discovered I never thought about the fact that ants are exposed to fungus all the time because they live in the soil, and fungus lives in the soil, and fungus would just love to like dive into an ant hill and create an epidemic because one little ant carrying fungus spores into the ant hill. Oh, they could go crazy. But you know, you've got those guards on the doorway
that are gonna maybe catch those spores. But as the ant worker ant goes deeper into the ant hill, there's there are other cleaner ants, sanitation ants, right, and so what's fascinating to be is that these ants, these sanitation ants, remove these fungal spores, but yet don't get sick themselves. And I was like, how, And so I looked into the research and it's just amazing. This guy, Christopher pull
is doing some awesome research with them. One of the things that happens in certain ants is they they actually put the spores in their mouths. Wait, leaning the ants, they're putting the spores in their mouth It sounds really really like the wrong thing.
To get dangerous.
Yeah, right, but they have these pockets in their mouth, little pockets in their mouths that they stuck the spores into, and then they carry the spores off into the garbage basically and get.
Rid of them and spit it out. Yeah, that's amazing.
And this story goes deeper and deeper because in this story, actually if the young, the pupa, the larvae are infected by spores, the sanitation ants actually destroy them, which sounds.
Terrible, right, it's zombie apocalypse rules, you know.
The zombie absolution, And but it's such an analogy to our own bodies, where if we have cells that are infected, guess what they have to die?
Apoptosis is. It's it's really interesting because the cell death sounds really bad. Oh, cell death, it's the thing that keeps us alive. We need our cells to die. They can replenish obviously. If you have too much cellular death, that's a bad thing. But if you have no cellular death, that's actually what cancer basically is. It's when your cell doesn't know how to die. It's your cell loses the ability.
There's a mutation that prevents it from uh from dying from this process called apoptosis, and that is really really bad.
It's also what protects us from pathogens, because an infected cell can be like, oh, this isn't good actually, like destroy itself, and even through destroying itself, can can cause the virus to break apart, and then that can be picked up by other cells, which go, oh, this is an interesting thing to learn from and bring those little those little antigens, the parts of the virus that are
that can be learned from. And so yeah, it's really interesting how like the the immune system does attack our own bodies sometimes and that's both important in life saving and can also cause a lot of problems, right like, if if our immune system attacks our own cells too strongly, that can actually kill us. And if they don't attack cells strongly enough, it's too weak of an immune response, and so then the virus can actually directly harm our cells and go and be and replicate unabated. But yeah,
that bounds. I love the connection to the ants because you see these kind of very complex colony behaviors. Is very much like how the immune system works because with ants, you have a hierarchy. It's use sociality, right, Like, so you have very specific roles that each of the ants has, and you have like obviously the queen ants, which are the ones that are the only ones that can reproduce generally, but you also have different roles for the ants and something.
It can also be a different role based on the time and the ants life or the same thing with bees, right like a bees life cycle, their role might change as it gets older. And so you see a very similar thing in the immune system where you have these immune cells and they have these It's kind of like
a use social system within our own bodies. Because you have this hierarchical system, you have these very specific roles that each of the cells play and these rules they have to play by, and it's really interesting because we have to have to be a unified organism. There has to be that sacrifice in order to help the larger system, right, the entire ant colony or the entire human to function.
And without that kind of sacrifice of these cells, we couldn't function as an entire organism, which I think is so interesting.
Yeah. Right. And the fact, one of the other things that I found interesting about the story of about the ants is that the worker ants basically are inoculating themselves against the disease. Those interesting. Yeah, So if they're exposed to a small amount of scores, which they do as you know, workers bring in spores from the environment than those workers and then those immune sorry, those sanitary ants, sanitization ants are immune.
They develop immunity. That's incredible.
Yeah. Again, it's just a great analogy because we can visualize that ant moving here and there and everywhere, and in fact, in our body and all animals, you know, the cells are kind of like those little animal can I go back to something you mentioned absolutely, and that is you mentioned how our immune systems sometimes kind of can react and.
Overreact and how that affects our body, you know, speaking specifically about viruses, because that's something that we're all very interested in these days.
Yeah, you know, the symptoms really are just our body reacting and overreacting. And that reminds me of the story of the bats, which just blows my mind.
Mm hmm. I love bats, and I let there well, I don't want to interrupt you, but I just they're so interesting to me, and especially when it comes to immunity, because they have such big requirements in terms of energy for flying. A mammal that can fly, it's it's an incredible feat. It's this warm blooded, thermal regulating animal that can also fly, and it has a relatively short evolutionary history of flight when you compare it to say, like insects,
and so it's really really interesting. And the pressures, the the metabolic and energy pressures on these bats are incredible, and so they have really interesting immune systems. And anyways, now I'm gonna let you you tell your story.
No, that's great, I love it because one of the things about bats is there's still so many questions about them, right, like this idea that they can fly, but yet to do that requires this huge metabolic rate.
How do they survive that? Because if we tried to do that, our body would crash in so many ways. Number one, because we'd be producing so much waste that our immune system would be going after that waste and and it would just be it would be it would be a storm of our immune system. Right. So scientists are really curious about how bads actually survive. I mean most people have heard that, you know, bats can carry many many viruses and that we can't in fact acquire
viruses from bats and vice versa. But you know, how is that? How can they survive? I mean, there's so many bad species, there's bats across the entire world except for Antarctica, and how can they be surviving so many viruses? And come find out one of the one of the things is their innate immune system is strong, so strong that that may be driving the evolution of viruses, right because their bodies. In order for a virus to successfully
infect that, it's got to be pretty amazing. The interesting story that I discovered as I was doing research for this book is that the innate. While the innate immune system, the first immune system basically is so strong, the secondary or the adaptive required depending on who you're talking to. That immune system basically says, guess what, virus, if you made it past that first line? Okay, so what if
the immune system decides to not react? And I'm saying this anthropomorphically obviously, but if the immune system isn't reacting in this storm, the symptoms aren't there, right, And in order to figure that out. The work that went into that was amazing because you had to actually look at what was happening on a cellular level to create that storm.
This inflammation they call it the inflammazone and basically what's happening is, in comparison to other mammals, bats turned down like a dial, they turn down or they dial down that inflammation rate. And when you do that, you don't have the information. When you don't have the information, therefore you don't have the symptoms. Basically, they're kind of saying them, Oh, wait, you're not really hurting me, virus, Why don't I just let you be? Like, we don't have to fight, which
I think is a really cool message just to think about. Right, if you're not really killing me, yeah, you know, we can deal, we can survive. Yeah, we can coexist, which is powerful.
Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, you do talk about this a bit in sec which again I love because this is so cool to like introduce these concepts of like the fact that we do have some viral DNA still with us, right, Like viruses don't always viruses in bacteria especially like are not always dangerous. They can actually start to incorporate themselves that there's like a there can be like a mutualistic symbiosis between animals and bacteria and
even viruses, And it's so cool. And I mean the other thing with bats is, like I think it's it's a really important thing for people to understand that the reason that bats can have these these viruses that can be dangerous for humans is not because they're dirty. They're actually very hygienic, uh, they but the fact that they have these this very different kind of immune system, this
immune system that has adapted differently from ours. So like if they when they encounter a virus, right and they don't have they have successfully whittled down the viral load because of their incredible innate immune system, and then they don't have as strong of an inflammatory response, so then
they survive. When we're introduced to that same virus, our innate response, our adaptive response is going to be much stronger, and so we can actually even though without our adaptive immune system we wouldn't get very far because we wouldn't be able to destroy viruses and pathogens that could replicate inside of us. It also means that we can have this massive inflammatory response, a cytokine storm, which is essentially like a game of dominoes gone wrong inside of your
immune system, and it can be really damaging. So it's like the same immune response that can save your life, right, like a fever which is killing off a bacteria or virus which can save your life, can also kill you. But back to the concept of these viruses not always being bad for us, Like the the fact that we have like in our DNA now like from you know, millions of years ago, like viral DNA that has inserted itself into our DNA and then it just works out is incredible to me.
Yeah, we think of that, you know, we have this bias that viruses are bad. Well, guess what, so much of our DNA is viral, which I had no idea how that happened, right, I didn't understand the entire concept of retroviruses, which, okay, can we we can dive deeply into this I didn't get, so let's do it. There's an entire chapter that didn't make it into this book because it was so complex, but it just am so
fascinated by it. Right, So, retroviruses, all viruses, we most of us know that the virus has to enter the cell of the host to be replicated, right, but retroviruses go deeper than that. So once they enter the cell and their DNA is their their genetic material I should say, is replicated, then that genetic material actually enters the cell's nucleus, which.
Is like whoa, whoa, Like that's the safe house, you know, like the cell is one thing. But entering the nucleus, where like the genetic material of the host exists, you're like entering the vault.
And then that that retroviral genetic material inserts itself into the host's genetic material, which is like so mind blowing that that can actually happen. But if you think about it again, it's this concept that like, do we have to be a war? We're two there are two organisms here, and you can either be a war and one can win and the other can lose or you could coexist
in an amazing way. That's happened and every placental mammal, every placental mammal, so we think of that as you know us and other large organizers, but we all have retroviral DNA in us that allows us to give live birth.
It's amazing, amazing.
Okay, I have to tell this story about these kittens that came into my life as I was doing this research. There was a cat that got hit by a car and long story short, she was pregnant and she was not gonna make it, but she was doing well enough that she crawled up in my lap and gave birth to kittens. Wow, they were amazing. Well, I had never observed that, and I had been doing this research about placenta, so I got very interested in the placenta and how
this happened. Turns out, you know, and a zygod an embryo is is going to be considered non self right right, Yes, an outside invader inside the mother. The question comes, how in the world does a mother's body accept this invader in because they shouldn't. Like the immune system from the mother should attack this invader and kick it out. Well, who's really good at checking the immune system viruses. In order for a virus to enter our cell, it has
to trick us. It has to have that message on its surface, that protein that says, wait, wait, I'm part of you. It's okay, don't worry about me. I'm just I belong here.
Fake the fake ID that sells carry around because we have these, we have essentially tiny cops inside of our bodies called natural kill our cells that will go around checking everyone's passport, checking everyone's papers. It's a little bit you know, it's a little authoritarian inside our bodies sometimes. And so a lot of viruses have created this like basically a fake ID to show the natural killerself like I'm legit. But yeah, that that can be applied to protecting our own offspring is amazing.
Right. So if that, if that future offspring didn't have that retroviral genetic material that therefore programmed the proteins on its surface to tell the mother, hey it's okay, let me in the placenta, would never happen, right, The attachment would never happen. And so every single one of us we should be thinking that the viruses, right, because we were born it's just amazing and a phenomenal thing. Kind
of on a little another aside, but it's amazing. Is there's there are some lizards that do this as well. Wait lizards. Lizards are not supposed to have licentis, but yet they did some of them down right. It's because this retroviral invasion has happened so many times across time. Girls.
Yeah, it's it's amazing. Yeah, it's so it's I mean, it's the same. I think that people are more familiar with this concept when it comes to bacteria, right, Like, we've got good bacteria and bad bacteria. Uh, and a lot of it is not even just good or bad bacteria, but the balance of bacteria, right Like, it's a specific balance of which bacteria you have and your own immune system.
Right for some people, bacteria that's generally good and fine can be bad for someone else because their immune system reacts too strongly to it. So there are all these different factors that come into play. But that's the same thing with like viruses, right like most I mean, it's true that most times you catch some kind of virus, right like a cold or a flu, it's not good for you. It's not good necessarily good to get sick, you know. Sometimes it's it's just a fact of life
that you're going to get sick. Uh. And some times the timing of when you get sick can be really important, right Like, if you get certain viruses, you absolutely do not want to get as an infant because your immune system's too weak. But some if you do get as an infant, they're less serious when you're an adult. Now we have vaccines which make it a lot safer to introduce viral information to infants and to adults without us
having to go through the risks of infection. But it's really interesting to see the way that you know, the that like viruses, like being introduced to a virus isn't always bad. Sometimes it depends on the timing of the virus. And then sometimes there can be a virus that actually aids in our evolution. But then again, I'm not suggesting that you go out and like French kiss someone who has COVID or the flu, because most times, most times that we encounter viruses, it's not necessarily going to be
a good thing. It might not hurt us that badly, but it's certainly not gonna, you know, be the next stage in human evolution. But if that happens enough, like I think just that the scale of evolution of millions of years of this happening, you know, once in a while there will actually be a useful mutation caused by this viral DNA, which again, it's it's really interesting when like that RNA and DNA essentially can like float around and then just be absorbed into the cell and then whoop,
now it's part of our DNA. It's so weird. That doesn't seem like that should be how it works, right, that there can be free floating uh, you know, RNA or DNA that we can actually incorporate into our own
genome and then pass on through our reproductive cells. That seems like that should not work, but it does, and that's probably I mean, that's like we're getting into sort of the origin of life, right like where you have these free floating strands of proteins that one you know, glob absorbs another glob and now it's become a more complex glob that has proteins that can start to actually construct new proteins, which is, you know, so hard for me to wrap my head around how that started.
And so hard for all of us, and I think science in general were hesitant to accept ideas, which is awesome, right. That's what makes science unique in that we consider new hypotheses and theories, but we have to have lots of evidence. And one of the really cool stories about that, of course, is our own mitochondria. This story started a very long time ago where people started wondering, weight, what's up with
this mitochondria? The powerhouse, right, the cells like ourselves can function without them because they're what converts the sugar into energy. But they're weirdos. They don't seem to belong in a cell. And for the long time, some scientists were very curious about this and saying, wait, there's something different, and other folks were like, no, no, no, no, you're what are you talking about? That's weird, you know. And for a long time, the uh, the science behind my country where
they came from, was ignored. But now we understand that they are very different the mitochondria as an organelle. And you know, the theory is that they came from microbes. So if we had never incorporated this microbe, this other you know, into a cell, the complex cells with the U carry outs would never have evolved, which just so mind blowing. I mean, the whole idea of good versus bad is a thing, you know, right, like the story
of the Turkey vultures. We talk about vultures because they are awesome.
I mean I love them so yes, absolutely.
They're amazing. I mean, like they stick their head in the grossest nast stuff, which we know is full of bacteria. And if we think about sticking our head into a dead body and eating it, of course we think everything in there, all that bacteria that's rotting it, it's got to be awful. But yet they don't get sick, right, they don't. They survived this stuff and they don't have any food
poisoning and wow. And so a scientist decided to investigate that, like he's like, we've got to understand what's going into their body, and so he took a bunch of dead vultures. Sadly, there were a number of vultures that he swabbed their faces and their necks, and he found like over seven hundred different bacterial species on them, Like, wait, seven hundred
can you imagine? And some of those were like really really intense, And he's like, okay, so what's going in their mouths, you know, is whatever's on their face and lo and behold when he looks in their guts, there's about seventy over just over set species. Like that's huge, and so how did that happen? You know? And what's going on that we don't know? Right? That is such
new science, We don't know. But what's intriguing to think about is the ones that are in the guts are the ones that we would freak out if they were in our guts. Like there's flesh eating bacteria in there, there's ecola, there's this stuff. We're like, whoa get away from us? Right, But yet they're surviving and thriving in there, and we would assume that that's terrible. Maybe not, you know, maybe they're actually supporting each other.
Yeah, now, I mean that is what is so interesting, right, Like, you can have these very complex symbiotic relationships, and symbiosis is not always good and it's not always bad, right, Like, Symbiosis just describes a close uh, basically a ballet between two species. It could be a parasite and a ghost,
or it could be a mutualistic relationship. And sometimes these relationships can like change over time, right, something that was once like maybe at some point in the vulture's evolutionary history these bacteria did harm them, and then over time they evolved to coexist in a way where the bacteria
were able to survive, but so was the vulture. And I mean it's so interesting because I mean, I do I love vultures, and I love how like all of the things that we see about them that seems to make them gross, right, Like they have these bald heads and it's like, oh, that's that's gross looking. That's for hygiene. That's so blood and stuff doesn't get stuck to their feathers. And then they poop on themselves. They poop on their legs and for us that'd be like the most gross
thing you could do, But that's also for hygiene. They have this very like they like bird poop in general is a combination of urine and feces typically, and so like the turepoop has this very it's very acidic, and so it actually cleans their legs. And so it's like these things that we would consider disgusting about them, right Like they're eating they're eating a corpse. It's usually a
rotting cadaver, or it's it's really disgusting. Well, they're actually taking a lot of like bacteria and nasty things out of the environment and then converting it into food, containing it and expelling it in a way that is less harmful to other animals, to other to the environment. So it's like, you know, these are actually amazing, Like we can think of them as like the sanitation experts of
the animal kingdom. So everything that seems gross about them to us is actually this process of taking these bad things and then turning it into a process that like works for them and then is helpful for preventing the spread of disease and other animals.
We should be thinking them every.
Day, I personally do.
I realized I misspoke. When Gary the scientist Gary Graves studied the vultures, he found over five hundred species on their heads. I get so many. You know, what we keep kind of coming back to is this idea of evolution and you know, microbes and germs and all of those things that we see is so bad. They're bad for individuals, yes, but for populations it's.
Different, you know, Yeah, And.
So it's interesting to you know, our perspective as individuals is that these things are bad because they can kill individuals. But if we look in the evolutionary scope, that's different, right in terms of the diversity that we have on the planet. They've driven this evolution, and that's just a mind boggling idea.
Right, Yeah, And without that diversity, I mean, what's this is what's interesting, right, is because we have all sorts of different selective pressures, from the very small like bacteria and viruses, to the very large, like a meteor hitting the Earth and changing the climate. And we can't like, like the the fact that like bacteria and viruses have driven this diversification of species, right, Like you know, you would think like, well, so what right, it causes a
lot of suffering. So it's not they're not really good to have. But because you have such a diversity of species, then life can survive things like the climate suddenly changing, a meteor striking their earth and causing because now you have more of a like a genetic library for these different animals. And so you're going to have the mass extinction of a lot of animals, but you're going to have just enough that have the ability to survive this.
And so much of that is driven by microbes, by things that are things that are harmful and bad but have driven this diversification of species that they actually are able to survive, you know, devastating events. Maybe not on the individual level, which is sad for the individual of course, but in terms of like just life on Earth, like, viruses and bacteria are not necessarily bad for life on Earth like for individual lives. Yes, and so again, keep
washing your hands, keep getting vaccinated. I'm not saying on an individual level it's good for us to get walloped by the flu or whatever. But yeah, in terms of just general life on Earth, these relationships that we have with with pathogens is actually really complex and it's not all bad exactly.
And there's the whole, the whole idea that we've lumped all microbes into this bad category. You know, it's very easy for us too, because we can't see them, and when we can't see them, we don't understand them. And that's why I'm so passionate about learning and teaching about this because the more we know, Wow, it opens our
eyes to so many things that we didn't understand. This complexity that's there, These microbes that are in our bodies that we wouldn't survive without you know that's it's mind blowing.
It's something you can't even if you can't directly see it, it's something you can feel. If you've ever had a bad stomach flu, which I have had recently, and essentially what happens with the stomach flu is your body is like hits the eject button because something is in there that's that's bad. Sometimes it's a virus, sometimes it's food poisoning, and so your body is like emergency, We've got to evacuate. We've got to get rid of this. So you're gonna
vomit and you're gonna have diarrhea. Uh. And so that's why it's I mean, the number one thing when you have a stomach flu or food poisoning is hydration because like you're losing a lot of fluid, uh. Food, you don't have to worry about as much. You will you will be hungry when you're hungry. It's going to take a little while. But yeah, so you should hydrate. But
your your body is doing something important. It is it is getting rid of something that it thinks is really dangerous and could cut and could really severely hurt you. Is it always right? Maybe not, but it's it's doing the best job it can in terms of gauging. Okay,
when do we need to just eject everything? But what happens is you actually lose like through that injection, Like after that, you might find that sometimes you get more kind of you feel kind of yucky a while after, Like after you're done with the stomach flu, after you're done with the food poisoning, you still kind of maybe
get maybe some like indigestion or some stomach issues. And it's like, well, because you flushed out a lot of good bacteria as well, and which is why you know, the immune response has to be so delicate and not always go off all the time whenever you are infected with them, you know, a tiny pathogen like because that that flushing out, you are flushing out also like good bacteria.
So it's you know, it's good to like uh sort of uh try to you know, once you start to rehydrate and eat food and stuff, and naturally your your gut flora will repopulate. So it's not something you have to panic about or anything like that. But it is really interesting and it's also it's so interesting these there are things in medicine where we recognize right, the power
of this gut bacteria. So we have things like fecal transplants, which sounds horrifying, sounds sounds not like something that you would want to have happened, but it is apparently something that can be really important in terms of helping repopulate someone's gut with good bacteria, with something that can actually help them help a person like when you digest, but it can also protect you from other bacteria because bacteria,
like any organism, are in competition with each other. So if you have a less harmful bacteria that is populating your gut, it will try to compete with and interfere with bacteria that might make you sick. So yeah, like bacteria is often our friend, it's just sometimes when it isn't, it's really noticeable.
Yeah, and it's nasty discussing. Yeah, fecal transplants are just amazing. I just I can hardly believe that that works, but it does. And once I met some folks who have had fecal transplants and successfully, you know, cure m it's just amazing what they what they can do. So when one of the things that amazes me is that even bacteria that we see as the bad guys like staphylococcus, right, which can be really a huge problem. But staff itself
is infected. Some staff can exist on us in a very healthy way, and other staff that have has genetic material that's we're not really sure how it gets in there, but it has. It has additional genetic material from another organism that in fact is like it in self is infected. So we don't think about the fact that that all of these microups are in their own world dealing with infections of themselves just mind blowing.
When you zoom out more like it's easier to comprehend that where when you have a mosquito, Mosquitoes do not make us sick, right, Mosquitoes are would actually be relatively harmless. They are parasites, but they would if if not for
pathogens that actually infect the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes themselves would be pretty harmless to like a human, but because they themselves can be infected with uh, with pathogens with like something that can actually be passed on to us, and in fact that it's the whole reason that they will
infect the the the mosquito. The mosquito can then pass something along to us and so something that we see right, like as this mosquito is like hurting us, It's like, well, it's not really the mosquito itself, it's whatever has hitched
a ride on the mosquito. And then but then when you of course, like you go and sort of like all the evolutionary pressures and the sorts of like symbiotic relationships that affect like like organisms, you know, macro organisms are those same things are happening on a microscopic level. Like that is not my I don't talk about it as much because it is not sort of my area of expertise, but it is still really really interesting.
It is mind blowing. I came across a study of ticks, same concept, where a tick doesn't ask to be infected by lime disease, right, that's not something they chose, right, they are infected. There's an amazing study of a lizard out in the western United States. Who if an infected tick bites this lizard. We don't understand everything that's going on here, but the tick when it leaves the lizard no longer has carries lime disease.
Oh that's so interesting, so.
Amazing, right, So something's happening when the blood from the lizard enters the forega of the tick that's affecting that disease causing microbe. Just mind blowing to think about it. You know, we think of ticks they're terrible, awful, but just like mosquitoes, they and of themselves don't cause that much damage.
But yeah, yeah, but they are too convenient of a little taxi for like they like mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, rats, you know, all these these little animals that we think of as you know, gross, like you know, plague bearing animals. It's just because they're little taxis, right, Like, they get around a lot. They're easy to hitch your right on, and you know, I mean it's like a flea hitching your right on a rat. But then you know the
the bubonic plague hitching your right on the flea. It's it's these these other intermediary organisms have no idea that they are little cab drivers for disease. And it's not really their fault. Uh So it's I mean, it's not even the disease's fault when you get down to it, but you know, it's just it it is really interesting. Before we go, I guess I just wanted to circle back to kind of the initial question that we talked about, like, why do you think so called gross stuff is so
fascinating to people? Right? Because I certainly find it fascinating. I have never grown out of finding poop and puke and mucus to be really interesting. Now I don't want to necessarily see it much in real life, right, Like, if I step on dog poop, I'm not like, well,
this is great. But in terms of being interested in stories about it, being interested in the science of it, what do you think is so compelling about it that that kids and adults, even adults who don't want to admit it, find so interesting.
I think it's the questions, because I think questions are and or curiosity all to linked together. That's what drives learning, and the human mind wants to learn, right, We're innately driven to learn and learn and learn. And when we find something such as poop or blood or something like that that society says, oh, no, gross, don't look at that, don't pay attention to it, We're like, wait, what you know? I want to know more? And the first question is
why why am I not supposed to look at that? Right? It's a kind of a taboo subject. But why, well, then that just drives us to learn more and more the human mind. It's an amazing thing when we ask those questions, when we look a little closer, that's when we discover all of this that we've been talking about today was
all driven by questions. Somebody's question about something weird that happened, that they observed, and they dug a little deeper, and in the end, our minds get blown again and again as we look at the animal kingdom right as we discover these little bits and and what I'm so fascinated with is the fact that every single one of us can do that every day. All we have to do is look and start asking questions.
Absolutely, Well, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find your book? What's it called? And because I think that it's a really fun book. I think it's especially good for older kids. But look, I read it, I'm an adult and I still enjoyed it. So where can people get your book?
Well, first, thanks for that. I'm honored that you read it and enjoyed it so much. This book is called Sick the Twist and turns behind Animal Germs, and you can find it online bookstores. It will not be available until February twentieth, and it's also available if you want to look at any of my books at Heather L. Montgomery dot com.
Yeah, and can you pre order it or is it?
Yes, it can be pre ordered any online booksseller.
Fantastic. I have so much respect for these kinds of books and science education because I think it's so important to help drive sort of what kids are interested in. And if kids are interested in gross stuff, and it's like, well, maybe we should maybe we should pay attention to that and respect that rather than you know, seeing that as not an appropriate thing. So thank you so much again for coming on today, and thank you to the listeners for listening to the show. A happy new year everyone.
I'm so excited about a whole new year of podcasting. And if you are enjoying the show and you leave a rating or review, I deeply appreciate it. I read all of your reviews, every single one. Print them all out, make a book, read it every night to myself. And thank you to the Space Classics for their super awesome song. Ex Alumina Creature Feature is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard visit day, iHeart radio, app Apple podcasts, or hey guess what wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. I am not your mother. I cannot tell you what to do, how you decide to live your life. I will see you next Wednesday.
M hmm