Creature Classic: Don't Mind Me I'm trash!

Welcome to Creature Future production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host A Many Parasites Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show I'm Trash, we're talking about all the animals who intentionally make themselves look like garbage. These animals want you to just ignore them because they're normal, littered,

Hello, I'm super excited to be on this episode. Yes, I like, I feel like so many people also disguise themselves as trash exactly. Yeah.

I sometimes like you just want to kind of appear like trash. You can float through the world and not have any anyone interacts.

Do you I have a question, do you ever feel like a plastic bag?

Wow? That's beautiful.

Did you come up with that?

Yeah?

Just now, I just that's that's.

Such a beautiful sentiment. I love that. Yeah, I mean I do sometimes feel like like tarash. I don't know what I'm how I'm approaching that word, but I feel like trash sometimes.

I'm really excited to see like a fish that looks like a Dorito's bag, you know, just like trash. I was like picturing like human trash, and I was like, that's crazy that there's a like a lizard that looks like a water bottle. That's the wild I mean, give.

Them, give them like a few more million years of evolution and it'll happen.

Yeah.

But yeah, So we are talking about animals to disguise themselves as garbage for a variety of fun reasons. The first one I want to talk about is the cockatoo wasp fish, also known as a Blabby's tinodus.

Okay, I was gonna be like, fish, get your own animal name, because it's like cockatoo wasp fish, you know what I mean. I feel like it's appropriating very many different animal cultures, and it's good to know it has its own name.

Yeah, which is a Blaby's tin nionodus. Yeah. It is a six inch or fifteen centimeter fish found in the West Pacific near Japan, Australia, and Fiji. They are typically found on the sandy seafloor or in seagrass, and they basically their whole lifestyle is don't mind me, I'm a dead piece of gross kelp ignore me.

Mm calp the trash of the sea, right, other than the trash that we also put in the sea.

Yeah, yeah, that's also trash. It's like, yeah, but you know, KELP is sort of like the.

Dead leaves of the sea's trash.

Nature's trash, and it they really commit to the bit, uh, Paul. I've provided you with a couple of YouTube links if you like, be so kind of check those out.

That'd be so weird if I clicked on this YouTube link and I started getting ads from fish new kel they're all heavily Oh whoa, there was one in the foreground that I didn't even see, right, Wow, they're very good at it. And they're doing the whole like lazing around getting moved by the water. Yeah, water, which is wind of the sea.

The wind of the sea water.

Yes, damn. That's such a chill life, just like and just relaxing and trash.

Yeah, I mean it's they are doing a method acting of the of the dead.

KELP really going for who was the succession guy, Jeremy what's his name, Jeremy Strong could never. Jeremy Strong could.

Never, Daniel day Lewis, who else does wishes? Yeah, like Jared Letto, Lito.

Jared, A bunch of strangely ego tripping.

Men, right, more like Jared Lefo this guy there we go.

But yeah, watching the second clip one second?

Do they.

Like kelp is different colors?

Right? Yeah, I mean brown green mostly, So I'm.

Wondering if like the kelp in the area wherever these are, like, if they if they reflect the color of the kelp there.

Yeah, probably I would imagine, so like there's there's a great deal of this color of brownish sort of reddish brown kelps, so they would blend right in with the kelp force near where they are. And yeah, I really just appreciate how committed they are to acting like kelp. They swim in a way where they kind of make it seem like they're drifting, so it looks just like their kelp kind of floating in the current, but they are intentionally moving, so like their swim styles, like I

So yeah, and then you're gonna spine me.

Are you checking me?

It's a my.

Fault, right, Good luck with that. And even like more toxic of them is that they're predators and they will each shrimp and small crustaceans, and this form of mimicry is not just to evade detection from it is to evade detection from their prey. So they just act like a dead piece of kelp float along and then ambush some unsuspecting victim and suddenly this kelp is trying to eat you.

That would give me so many like I would have so many trauma responses to vegetation after that.

Yeah, I mean it's it. You don't expect like basically the limp salad of the sea to attack you. That's the last place you would expect violence from, like essentially

It's like in those videos of like people like moving chickens arounds and their heads to in the same spot.

It's exactly like that, except the chicken is covered in venomous spines and looks like sea salad.

Maybe they would do better on land if they did look like that.

Yeah, yeah, I guess, I mean, I guess we would, like that would be very effective. Camouflage for a chicken is like a salad, because then meat eaters are like, ew a salad. I don't want that.

I'd be like, oh, tasteress like chicken. I hate myself.

Pullavi. Is it just me? Or do you ever just like dress up in garbage when you don't want to be bothered, Like you put on into Yeah, just like the word you're most off putting sweater or jeans like an intentionally placed marinera sauce stained somewhere just so you know.

Yeah, it was intentional sure.

Art artfully designed stains so that when you go outside people will give you like a wide berth.

Yeah, for sure. I mean that's like when I walk my dogs, I'm always just like dressed in whatever I'm at in at home, and it's very like not attention. It's like it's unfortunately attention grabbing it the wrong way, like in that it's like so mismatched. But luckily in Hollywood nobody care, right, But yeah, I have a lot of my whole, my whole that's like this the Billie Eilish thing where she wore a bunch of like baggy sweatpants and stuff so people wouldn't look at her body.

Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, it's just sometimes you don't want to be noticed. And it's frustrating because I live in Italy and people actually dress very nicely a lot of the time, and everywhere.

Except the US people dress very nicely a lot of the time.

It seems that way.

Yes, I go to and yet I'm like, oh, I'm going out to dinner. Usually in the US, I would just like wear a T shirt and they were like, you would wear just a T shirt outside of your home? And I was like yeah, and they're like, that's disgusting.

Yeah. When I went to an Italian language class, I like was in there with like jeans and a hoodie and she's like, oh, did you just come back from the gym, And it's like, no, I'm just wearing clothes.

You're welcome that I'm here.

But the kind of the commitment to lounge wear, to wearing garbage so that you're not noticed is done by the humble crab who I don't know if you've heard of this idea of carsonization where animals repeatedly evolved to be crab shaped. But all I'm saying is we are sort of headed towards crab form eventually. And so isn't that what the.

That movie was about? The crab or the lobster? What was it that Jake jillen All.

Movie, No idea. I've never heard of this, but I would love it if there's a Jake Jillenhall movie called the Crab.

Farrell, they're kind of the same to Okay, yeah.

Colin Farrell, wasn't a movie called the Lobster?

That's what it was?

Where you have to like I think you have to like find you have to marry someone or you turn into an animal when you turn like forty or something.

And that's where we're all going. A single woman, this is exactly where I'm headed. I'm about to turn into this crab.

I think going crab is not so bad. Honestly, you can scuttle a lot more. Scuttling's nice, it's a good it's a good form of locomotion. Anyway, I would I would dig a crab lifestyle, especially decorator crabs, because decorator crabs are basically Yes, they're basically like, I am small and cute and edible, so I'm just gonna put a bunch of junk on my body so nobody notices me.

So they decorate themselves.

Exactly.

How come it's called decorator crabs and not like defender crabs. It's because they're cute.

Toxic femininity.

Their life, their survival skills or little arts and crafts to you.

Right, scientists, pinterest crabs. Yes, so there are at least fifteen species of crabs known as decorator crabs, who will pick up junk they find from the seat and place it on tiny, little velcrow like hooks on their bodies. They're literally covered in velcrow and oh wow, yeah, so they can just pick Yeah, that's crazy. The hooks are called cetae, and cetae are just it's just as science see word for like hair like bristles. So they can basically pick up any kind of seed junk that could

Wow, that's like having like one mean friend. Yeah, it's like they benefit because they get access to all the places you go because you're nice, But then you benefit when that goes down and you need to like throw that mean friend at the situation.

Right exactly. It's like your mean friend is always sort of strong arming in you into driving them around, but then you need them to really release some they will for you, they will right exactly. I love that. I love this friendship for them. So decorator crabs will use whatever they find in their environment, which makes sense because they want to blend in best where they are. But that means that if a decorator crab finds itself near human garbage, it will cover itself in human garbage.

So sad, so sad. Good. So there are little Dorito's bags wandering around the ocean pretty.

Much, pretty much so. A crab found near a sump system by photographer Michael Bach at a research station was covered in little pieces of plastic and netting that was in a filter system he had crawled into. So thankfully this wasn't like pollution in the ocean. There was like a filtration system that was to keep stuff from getting out into the ocean. But this little crab got in there. It was like great free junk and he put him on all on himself.

One's man, one man's trash is another decorator crabs. Michaels Art.

Michaels is like the number one generator of just stuff and junk. Like there's I feel like in a few if we last a few more, one hundred thousand years unlikely, But if we do, there's just gonna be like a fine sedimentary layer of like Michael's stuff, like sequin yeah, fillers yeah, yeah, felts, eyeballs, those little like weird styrofoam shapes.

Yeah.

So Unfortunately, this habit of wearing human trash is not only found with decorator crabs. It is a found with hermit crabs. So hermit crabs will wear trash if they end up finding that instead of an adequate seashell. So hermit crabs will use the abandoned shells of other marine life rather than producing their own shells. And as they grow, they need to move into bigger shells, so they're always on the hunt for a nice cozy shell.

Sustainable kings look at them, Yeah, using whatever they have incredible.

Reuse, recycle, literal green houses is what they're doing, right, Scuttle reuse, recycle crab life. So finding the right sized shell is difficult, So if they're surrounded by human garbage, they will wear that garbage like bottle caps, broken light bulbs. This photographer Sean Miller captured a bunch of photos of hermit crabs on a litter covered beach. In Okinawa and they're just there with their little bottle caps and ran garbage that they're wearing, like it's no big deal.

But it's if we're not going to use it, you know what I mean?

Yeah, And it makes me.

So sad that you see that. That is like so I'm like, no, we're like we don't need to. We've we've made we're such consumers. We've like endowed the consumer lifestyle and the capitalist culture onto crabs. They're like they're they're like work pilled.

Yeah, they're like, yeah, they're going to be shopping at Cole's next. It's it's a problem. It's a big problem. Yeah. I mean it is a problem though, because trash is on the whole not helpful for crabs. First of all, it's not an ideal home for them. But also there is something called a cascade of death that can happen to hermit crabs, which I do. I mean, this is bad,

It's like a scientist who didn't get into writing school.

Right, you know what, I mean this is what you're one shot, Yeah, exactly. So this cascade of death can happen to hermit crabs who get stuck inside plastic bottles that they're rooting around in. So they can sometimes go inside a plastic or glass bottle because they're looking for water. They think maybe it's a home, but it turns out

Okay, how do we do this? But with like billionaires lure them immediately, like how can we weaponize this? I'm better than other people.

Lure them into buying social media companies and dunk on them more and more.

That that they're like, it's affecting so many hermit crabs. It makes me so upset. And it's also like, I don't know, like people are always like, oh, like marine life gets trapped, and it's like you don't think about the little like insect like creatures too. People think about like turtles and stuff. It's really like the whole the whole food chain is affected.

Yeah, it's the little guys too. I love hermit crabs. I had a pet terrestrial hermit crab when I was a kid, and have.

The best pets, but that makes sense.

Yeah, they're not great pets. I own a lot of pets as a kid that like as an adult, I would advise against because, yeah, partially because it's like they're not great pets, and also it's not necessarily the best life for them to be manhandled by a child.

Your your hermit crab. You had that chimp that ate someone's face, I don't talk about anymore. Yeah, you had a whole slew of pets.

Yeah exactly. Uh yeah, but this, this hermit crab did try to eat my face, or at least my armpit. It like crawled into my armpit one time and then just clamped down really hard and I couldn't get it and it was.

Just so painful. It sounds like it was very painful.

I was conscientious as a kid, and I didn't want to like rip it off because I was worried I would hurt its little arm. So I just was like, well, this is my life now, and I had to wait until it decided to let go. I just had a hermit crab in my armpit for like half an hour.

Oh my god, what if you had like a cascade of death from that, like you accidentally and then it died. And then all of a sudden, all these hermit crabs like appeared out of your apartment and it's.

Like and then it's like someone's like, wow, it smells like a bunch of hermit crabs crawled up and died in your armpits.

I'm like, well about.

That, about that, And that's why Paula VI, I'm sure we both experienced the feeling of just feeling like crap and sort of like, you know, just just dressing like crap, just sort of embracing being craped for a day, you know what I mean.

Yeah, similar to this trash theme.

Yeah, I mean it's like there are days where, like, at least for me, I sometimes just like I feel kind of crappy and I just go with it. It's like, all right, I'm having a crap day. I'm just gonna be crap today. That's fine.

Yeah.

Well, lots of arthropods also love to be crap. In fact, they are very committed to looking exactly like poop. So this is something that happens in multiple different like insects and arthropods, and it is some of them like it's, yes, it is kind of gross looking, but it's also ridiculously the elegant evolution.

So it's very gross looking, but it is like you have to be really good at mimicry to do it exactly.

I mean, this is it's like, I don't know, I feel like it's high like when in like really high fashion, sometimes they do this like disheveled look where it's like, wow, that outfit looks like garbage, but it's very fancy and well thought out garbage.

I guess. Yeah, it's like the casual look. It's really well crafted.

Actually right, it's the sloppy bun. I've never been able to like, I've never been able to do a sloppy bun.

Why is a sloppy bun? Okay, but a frizzy bun isn't like let me, let me be a frizzball. I not come into fashion style.

Come on, I have extremely frizzy like Girl before the Makeover and teen movies hair.

Literally literally in middle school. I after, Okay, this is still sticking with me. This is how much it's a like a chip on my shoulder. I went to swimming class because we had like the gym rotations, and one of them was like swim learning how to swim, and then afterwards one of my male friends was like, you look like the before picture and Rachel looks like the after in a shampoo commercial.

Oh my god.

First of all, but I didn't know how to articulate that at the time. No, everybody just laughed and I was like ha ha okay, because I didn't have like a voice at that point. You know, I was by all these white people in Utah, but I was. I literally like in the morning, like I won't One thing that I do love about myself is that I won't look in the mirror in the mornings, and I like go walk the dogs and just like leave immediately. So

But yeah, yeah, big same. I When I try to do sloppy bun, I look like a Victorian era woman who's been like put in the asylum by her husband for speaking her mind. We're supposed to getting a lobotomy right exactly on Someday's post lobotomy. On Someday's pre lobotomy. But yeah, it's just it doesn't look great. So I feel like with the with the like stylish, messy bun. It's something that I have to imagine people work at this craft. Similarly, the bird poop spiders great segue perfect.

So you're so gross looking, this is so disgusting.

They really do look like bird poops. So spiders love to pretend to be poop, and there are actually many species who do it.

So.

For example, there is the Selenia excaveta, or bird dropping spider, who lives in Australia and looks literally like a little globule of bird poop. It is a splotchy white and brown and it's disconcertingly glossy on the.

White part, very uncomfortable.

Yeah, it looks literally like a bird dropping Uh.

Do they smell like them too?

I don't think these ones do. There are some bird poop imitators who do emit a foul odor to really sell it.

Talk about a cascade of death.

So yeah, they also. Daniel day Lewis ith they method act by holding their legs tucked in and staying still to really give it that authentic poop performance.

And some in law and order as a corpse right now, I would love it.

Oh my god, if we like lived in a magical world where animals, you know, like in the Flintstones, where animals were all employed as stuff, and like you had to have like bird poop in a movie, so you cast one of these as the bird poop and then you paid them a fair wage. Yeah, I mean, I think the.

Most unrealdcast, right, the most unrealistic part of that scenario is someone being Yeah, were like, what a dream of fair wage? What a dream?

I mean, sentient spiders, Maybe we'll get there soon. Fair wage not a chance? So so yes, Uh. They grow to be about half an inch or a little over a centimeter wide. So while they're not like super teeny tiny, they're definitely prey for birds. So what better way to keep a bird from eating you than looking like a piece of poop? Yep, So they are hunters as well they are spiders, and they actually go from day to

So I mean, who amongst us, you know, when we go out at night, right, look much different than the poop look during the day.

Exactly. So they hunt for their favorite food at night, which is moths. And at night it's not so much that they change their appearance, but they definitely put on a deceptive perfume. So the bird dropping spider releases a pheromone that mimics that of a female moth, So the horny male moths will come right up to the spider, who smells like a sexy female, and then the spider eats the male.

I think the female moths are in on it. I think they're the ones who are like, They're like, here, take this perfume and then murder my husband.

Right, I mean yeah, I think, yeah, like, would this this male moth just made fun of my antenna. Here's some perfume. Do what you will.

This is like the Chicago movie, like but moth and birds and oh I would.

I would definitely pay to see an insect version of Chicago. Yeah, can you met like Catherine Zada Jones is like a spider.

That'd be great. Yeah.

So yeah, it goes from being a piece of poop during the day to a femme fatale at night, which I love. It's what we all dream of. Hell yeah, So there are many other spiders and insects who use the poop defense. So, uh, one other type of insect. I want to talk about our moths. So the Drea's book You'd Rise, I have no Oh my god, You'd raise,

It's because it like goes from white to like slightly green to brown. Yeah, it looks like how a bird poop like crusts over. Yes, And so when they're like folded up like that, it looks like a drip of bird poop in like the positioning and then also in like the grady end. But then when they're open they look so pretty.

Yeah. I love that. I love that they can transform from pretty moth to like. Nope, I am a splatter of nasty, crusty bird doodo.

Moths contain multitudes indeed.

And uh, there's another moth known as macrosilics Maya, found in Malaysia, and they are perhaps the most impressive bird dropping mimics. Uh. Their wings actually feature an entire painting not only of splattered bird poop, but what seems to be a couple of flies eating the poop.

Oh my god, holy that looks crazy, right. It looks like a cartoon, like somebody drew it.

Yeah.

But also the bird poop also looks like a penis, like that part of it because it's like symmetricals right, so like when they pull it right and a penis coming up along the spine.

It's it's the first known of mimicry and pornography.

Yeah.

So not much is known about why this moth has this impressive mimicry, but it is likely it's to ward off predators who are not particularly interested in a bunch of bird poop and a couple of flies eating that bird poop.

Do you think flies get tricked too? You know what?

I bet they do? I bet they like go up to this moth's ass and they're like, hey, what's going on here?

And it doesn't smell like they wanted to smell.

Right, it's just not it's not working out for them, it is. I really there's like surprisingly not that much research on these things, and I really want there to be more because this is so it's so ridiculous. Like you can see the outline of the flies, you can see their little red heads, you can see sort of different segments of their bodies.

It's sort of really crazy, right, Like it literally looks like a cartoon, Like it's wild. Do you think there are other moths that we haven't discovered with like other things on their wings that would make you averse to coming up to them, Like a moth with a a drunk bachelor repe party scene on their wings, like you know, like a moth with like a red maga hat.

Right, a moth with the guy doing street magic. Yeah, No, I think I think definitely there are moms like that out there.

We have to we have to do the research to find them.

Right exactly. That'd probably be like that would be my choice for like you, like, if we could wear camouflage city camouflage that's just like things that would keep you away from you, like, oh, if you just wear this is mean because I do like green peace. But if you wear like a sweater sweatshirt with green.

Peace on it, people who clipboard.

And have a clipboard, people will leave you alone because everyone like dodges out of the way.

But then there's like that one weirdo who really wants to talk about it, and then you're the mark, you know what I mean?

Right, And then that and that weirdo is me. It was me the whole time.

I think that's a you and me discovering that we have the ability to wear whatever we want, you know, right, this full episode is that being like, let's take inspiration from these inxects. Yeah, express ourselves how we want to express her belt. Yeah.

I mean if I wear a shirt with a bunch of bird duty printed on it, then I can get pooped on by a bird and it won't make a difference.

Yeah, that sounds like a Mentos commercial. Actually, it's like remember the ones where he like he sits down on like a painted bench and he's like, oh no, and then he makes us pinc stripe suit out of.

Oh oh Yeah. That was like a really old one.

Birds. Oh yeah, that one all the time, because it's like in my memory.

Yes, like a mentos. You sit on bird poop and there's a bunch of like just a bird poop covered bench and you're like, oh man, I got bird poop. And then you roll around and then someone's like nice a Jackson Pollock.

Yeah, I think we figured out fashion. We figured it out.

Uh, pack it in Milan, pack it in Paris. We've got the fashion down and the fashion is bird crap.

So mimicry, animal mimicry exactly. Follow me.

Thank you so much for joining me today. Tell the people where they can find you.

Yeah. So I do have a podcast called City Council and it's spelled co o u n s e l.

Is my genius way of telling city council.

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