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 Creatures Versus Video Game Bosses, we're matching some of the most iconic video game bosses with real life creatures in a no holds barred match of wits, bron brain and slime, which members of the Animal Kingdom can travel to the Mushroom Kingdom and defeat Bowser is echoed, the dolphin really up to the task of defeating the final boss or could he use some
fishy friends? And could a mycologist take down the batties from the most recent Resident Evil game. Discover this more as we answer the age old question parasitic Iapod Got your Tongue? Joining me today is the creator of the wildly popular YouTube channel that translates real life animal biology into video game terms. Patch from tears Zoo.
Welcome, Hi, Thanks so much for having me.
I am very excited to have you on for this episode. I think your videos are wildly entertaining. They're really cool.
Love.
I don't think it's a secret at this point that I'm a nerd kind of in every aspect of my life. I love video games, I love animals. I really love sort of I don't want to say gamification because I don't like that word, but taking sort of animal biology and putting it into terms that people who love video games can really understand.
Well, thank you so much. I'm really excited to rank some video game bosses versus animals with you, so uh.
First, I mean, we've got to go with maybe the most iconic boss of all time. I don't want to put any video game bosses on blast here, but I think Bowser it right.
King Koopa Basa is definitely a big bad that everyone knows.
I think, yeah, yeah. The Mario games feature Bowser as the main antagonist. He's that big, spiky turtle like fellow. He's king of the Koopas, which I guess is what those little turtles are. I only discovered that into my adult life. I just thought they were turtles that you jump on.
But yeah.
He frequently captures Princess Peach, and his life goals are to defeat Mario, become the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, and maybe go on a date with Princess Peach, which seems counterintuitive to the whole kidnappy thing.
But you know, I agree, maybe not the best way to go about it, and I think some of the recent Mario games have kind of addressed that. Yeah, but yeah, Yasa definitely a legend, a.
Right, a legend, just not in the dating sphere.
So perhaps not.
Some of Boers strengths are that he spits fire. It's pretty good. It's a pretty good.
That's a strong ability for sure.
Yeah, he's spiky. He got a lot of spikes, which you know, we know is a good defense mechanism for a variety of animals. He's got horns and claws and that that's good. That definitely helps him out. And he's big and strong.
Yes, he's got a serious size advantage over most of his foes.
Yes, Mario Mario. Yeah, Mario's kind of a he's a compact Italian plumber.
He's a short king.
He's a short king. Yeah, he's you know what he does lacks in size, he makes up in I guess stomping ability, right, that's his main power.
Stomping, Yeah, I suppose so.
Stomping and jumpin'.
Yep, he's breaking next, jumping on people's heads.
We love a short Italian plumber king who stepped on your neck. So Bowser's weaknesses is, well, there's his unrequited, unhealthy infatuation with princesses, which you know, that's more of a psychological thing. You know, maybe you could get under his skin with some comments about you know, he's he doesn't know how to talk to women. But other than that,
his weakness is I think poor agility and flexibility. And he has this spot open on his tail that in Super Mario sixty four you must grab that tail and spin him around to defeat him. Based on these specifications, I think we're looking for a sturdy animal or a very agile animal that can outmaneuver him, and something that can attack its praise tails, maybe do spin attacks, maybe some brute strength. What do you think?
Yeah, I mean my mind kind of goes to the sorts of animals that are the predators of turtles. Bowser's basically a dragon turtle, right, And I'm thinking, like, I don't know, birds, Like there's some birds that prey on turtles by like carrying them up into the air.
Oh yeah, yeah, I love that.
Really big bird to do that. I love it.
I love it when birds of prey, just like it's such a it's so devious to pick up your prey and you're not doing any thing to them yet, but you're just taking them higher and higher to drop down.
Exactly, you're letting you're abusing the physics of yeah, real life.
You know, you're letting gravity do the dirty work for you.
Exactly. It's super intelligent. It's genius. Uh, you know, it works smarter, not harder, right, Smarter, not harder, precisely. But I don't think we're gonna find any birds that can quite do that to Bowser.
Maybe not, maybe not, but you know there are animals. So one thing I was looking for is strong grip, right, because you need you're gonna need a strong grip because once you've got Bowser's tail, it's the game's over. Right, You've got his tail he can't get. That's one of the things is even though Mario is teeny tiny, like he can't turn around, because when Mario is attached to his tail, what's he gonna do like burn his own tail off? No?
Yeah, so are you thinking like crocodiles.
Crocodile's is a very good one.
Like if a bit a Bowser's tail for sure that Bowser would be in a tough, tough spot, pretty hard to get the crocodile off of you at that point.
I think, Yeah, so with the crocodile, I think you would not have to make any modifications. You could just take a classic saltwater crocodile pitted against Bowser, and in my opinion, the crocodile would win every time.
What do you think, I think, especially because if Bowser decides to use his firebreath attack, the crocodile could just like submerge itself under the water. Absolutely, I guess in this hypothetical scenario, the croc has to also have water around it for whatever reason, wading through some swamp or river or something.
There are water levels in Mario, right, There's lots of water.
Yeah, definitely water levels.
There's definitely water levels. So yeah, let's talk a little bit more about crocodiles because this is actually one of my picks for who I think could defeat Bowser. So, crocodiles are large reptiles found in aquatic environments all around the world. Most species of crocodile employ a devastating attack against their victims called a death roll, which I think
would be a particularly effective attack against a bowser. So the death roll is the crocodile's way of attacking and devouring prey many times its size, such as a will to the beast, which is not an easy thing to eat. I think even you imagine, like crocodiles are pretty big, but imagine trying to get like a will to beast all in your mouth, all at once. It's impossible. Right, You've never you've never tried to chug a will the beast.
I can't say that, I have no, have you no.
I think the closest I've gotten is like trying to get a whole in and out burger, like half of it in my mouth and one bike really hot challenge.
Awesome. I've done that with like donuts. I don't think I've done with a burger.
Yeah, it doesn't work very good with a burger, but I was really trying like a Guy Fieri bite with the burger.
Okay, nice, one bye challenge and then so many regrets. I respect it, Yep. The regrets are for later. That's a problem for a future Katie, right.
That's for future Katie. Right now, it's in and out Katie time. But for a crocodile. That's a real problem. Crocodiles don't really chew their food, do they. They don't. They don't have the chewing muscles that other carnivores. They can't rip and tear. They don't have the grinding action that like omnivores like humans have, like we can grind exactly.
Yeah. I think if anything, the crocodile would probably rip off Bowser's tail by doing the whole death roll thing. It wouldn't really have much other options right to actually eat Bowser. Yeah, so much of him is inside that shell, which I don't think a croucle will be really able to do much too, even with its powerful bite. I mean, just because it's like a sphere, like imagine trying to bite something round like that.
He'd have to hollow out Bowser from the inside, like get in there and pull the flesh chunks out from inside that shell.
I suppose is that that could definitely work. Some pretty grisly looking life videos though, Yeah, yeah, like Hyena's getting all up in like a hip, yeah, or an elephant after killing it.
David Attenborough narrating as you see, like like a hyena just come out of a crevice of Bowser's eyehole, I suck it, but yeah, so, because the crocodile doesn't chew its prey to break it down into smaller pieces, whatever it swallows it has to swallow hole. For smaller prey, that's easy enough. It just chomps down, crushes it, and
gulps it back like an in and out burger. And often for bigger prey, the crocodile will actually drown its prey first, because you know, dead drowned prey is easier to deal with than a kicking, live prey that's going, hey, wait a minute, I didn't sign up for this. So its jaws are great for gripping, bad for chewing, and in fact, it's jaw strength has a bite force of over sixteen thousand newtons, which I you know, that's just a number, right, Like, it's hard to put into perspective
of what that is. But for comparison, a human grip is about three hundred newtons, so you know it's pretty good.
You'd have to shake them off.
Yeah, yeah, it's why when you put your hand inside a crocodile mouth, it's usually not going to go good for you.
It's just not do not recommend that.
Do not recommend. I did find a video when I was researching this that I won't describe too much because I don't want people googling it. But it's bad. Don't put your crocodile mouth people.
Don't do it, not getting if you want your hand back, Yeah, don't put it there.
If you're not offering your hand literally to the crocodile to take for keepsies, don't do it. So it will bite down, clamp down on its prey and then do this death roll so where it just spin, spin, spin,
like a video game attack. It's an incredible like because they're in the water, they have some buoyancy, some more I guess agility than you would think such a large reptile would have, and they just spin around like a tornado and with that limb in their mouth and literally will twist it right off of the body of their prey. And uh so they are able to then disassemble something like a wildebeeste or maybe like a bowser chunk by chunk, such that they can just eat something much larger than itself.
It would certainly be a pretty gruesome sight to watch. Yeah, I think they could eventually take a part at least things that are outside of the shell. They could probably rip Bowser's limbs off, which is a lot.
Yeah, his tail, his feet and arms, a head, those cute little like goth bracelets that he's got. He's got a lot of points of contact outside of the shell.
I think, yeah, that's true.
And in fact, the death roll hasn't always been used by crocodiles to tear prey up into little edible bits. It's actually thought to be a defensive combat move that they can also use to tear down prey. So there have been observations of crocodiles using this move when they're fighting some kind of aggressive other animal or other crocodile. So it's totally totally feasible that a crocodile would use this move on Bowser in a one on one fight.
Definitely, I think given its home turf of a river or swamp, I think a crocodile has a would pose a pretty big threat to Bowser for sure.
Yes, yes, I agree, And but that is maybe not the only animal that I think could take down Bowser. Now, let's say, isn't there a there's a thingy that Mario can eat right in the game one of the mushrooms that makes him real big.
Yeah, there's one that makes him big. There's a few other power ups that give him the ability to kind of fly or shoot fire himself. Ah nice, But the big one is the most iconic for sure.
That's like this, that's like the Ghost Pepper, the Ghost Pepper mushroom story. He just shoots it out of his hands or his face. I see not as well. Anyways, if you gave a meerkat one of those mushrooms that makes it real big, I think that Bowser would be complete toast because if Bowser's point of weakness is grabbing and attacking the tail, mirror cats are just designed to fight dirty uh and grab you by the butt. So meerkats are a species of social mongoose found in Southern Africa.
You know, they're Timoon from The Lion King. Completely accurate depiction. They all have a Nathan Lane's voice, so they love to eat scorpions when given the opportunity. Now, I've seen a lot of conjecture that like mongooses are or sorry, meerkats are, well, meer cats are mongooses. But nevertheless, meer
cats that they're immune to venom or to poison. Yeah, they have some resistance to venom and poison, which are venom and toxins, which is good because they do like to eat snakes and scorpions, but they're not completely immune. They could not survive being stabbed a bunch of times by a highly venomous scorpion and they don't want to eat it. You know, It's just it's a bad time for the little meerkat that wants to eat a highly
toxic arthropod. So instead, what they do is when they want to eat a scorpion, they attack it from the butt side. They grab it by the stinger, rip off its entire backside, including the stinger. They discard the stinger, and then just rub the poor little scorpion in the sand until it washes away all the toxins and then
they can enjoy this tasty snack. So, in my opinion, the fact that meerkats learn to do this like since their babies, means that if you scaled up a merrcat, you gave it one of those dubious magic mushrooms and it was fighting size with bowser, it would just gruesomely destroy and our bowser.
Yeah, definitely, the agility that meer cats possesses pretty tough to beat now. I mean there's a little bit of uh asterisk next to the whole, like if you make it bigger, because you run into like the square cube law everything whether or not you can retain that agility while giant, Right, but it's.
Vascular system just sort of immediately collapse under the weight of its new girth, would it you know?
Yeah? And the whole moment of inertia of having limbs that are way.
Longer camp because yeah, would it not get enough oxygen? Yeah, there's a lot of questions when you scale things up.
Yes, we can ignore all of that if you need just to talk about giant meer cats. So in your scenario, are the mere cats because you said that they're very social animals and that's oftentimes how they hunt snakes and everything. So in the scenario, is it just one meer cat versus bowser giant merkat or is it a whole posse of meerkats?
If I think it's either or right to defeat Bowser, you could either have one giant meerkat or an army of regular sized meerkats, because together they're very good at teaming, like they can take on a king cobra together as
a unit, yeah, which is very impressive. Now, they don't often fight cobras, which there's always something a little bit suspect to me when you see wildlife footage of like mirrkats fighting a cobra, because like, they don't usually get into conflict, like did someone just throw a cobra at them?
And yeah, to find the most dangerous things they possibly.
Can, yeah, yeah, and like sort of staging something for uh, for dramatic television effects.
Maybe.
Nevertheless, they do. They do team up and fight snakes by forming a united front as a because they are highly social. So I think a team of meerkats could do it, or one giant merrcap. And my last contender maybe is something you wouldn't necessarily think of, but it has pound for pound an incredibly strong grip, one of the strongest grips in the world. It is the coconut crab. So the coconut crab is a large, large terrestrial crustacean found on islands and coasts in the Indian Ocean and
parts of the Pacific Ocean. They look like a weird big crab. They're actually more closely related to hermit crabs than actual crabs. Have you heard of carsonization?
I certainly have. I'm considered making a video on the subject.
Oh you must, I mean, it is inevitable. We all shall become crabs one day. Carsonization is the term for or they repeated, parallel or convergent evolution of arthropods into crab form, which apparently is the most desirable of forms in all of nature, is to be crab. So yeah, I've started scuttling, just in preparation for the future.
Get with the times, there you go.
Yeah, but yeah, So the coconut crab not really a crab, more of a hermit crab. It is a crustacean. They're huge. The fact that they are so big and live on land is a little bit disconcerting. They can weigh up to nine pounds or four kilograms and grow up to three feet or one meter in length. So intimidating. I'm intimidated.
I wouldn't want to mess with one.
No, no, thank you. Yeah, so researchers, God bless our natural biology researchers. They collected about thirty coconut crabs and measured their pinches with They look like these metal tubes that the coconut crabs would pinch, and then it would measure the force of those big pinches, and they found that they were able to pinch with a force of over one thousand and seven hundred newtons. So again, human
grip only three hundred newtons. A coconut crab the size that it is can grip at almost six times that of a human. And so if you scaled a coconut crab up to the size of say an average size maybe a little bit short human plumber, he could grip with six tons of force.
Yeah, I'm thinking that might be enough to do a number on bowsershell.
I think so. I think he could not only could he grab the tail and toss bowser like a limp rag, he could just crack open that shell like a little pistachio.
So that's like the whole reason they're called coconut crabs, right, is because they could shatter coconuts with their just the sheer force of their grip.
You know, I've never even questioned their name, but that sounds right to me.
I totally made that up't totally wrong. I believe it sounds right. It sounds right to me as well.
I believe you so. One of the researchers, marine biologists, Shinichiro Oka, was pinched by one of the tests subject coconut crabs, and said, quote, while it was only a few minutes, I filled eternal hell.
I do thank you. I would not want to be.
Him, no, no brave souls to invite a bunch of coconut crabs over to test their pinches.
Yeah, seriously, I was just in Costa Rica and even picking up little little hermit crabs on the beach. Yeah, I would get a little nervous if I grabbed, like a particularly big one and they would try to.
It can hurt, hurt, it can hurt bad.
So imagine one that's two thousand times as bigger. Thank you you had one as well.
I had a little tiny hermit crab as a kid, even though they don't really make good pets, but I was a kid. I don't know, and it's favorite thing to do. Probably it was looking for a different shell than the one that I had provided to it. Thought it was lame, not the right size, which is a tricky thing. If you have a hermit crab pet, you need to provide it with many different shells because it gets bigger, it needs to pick out a new shell.
It's gonna be picky, so I think, oh, like this one is a good size for it, Not according to it. So it would crawl in my armpit and like pinch really hard in there. Ah, because I think it was like trying out my body as a new shell, like testing the structural integrity of my armpit. But that hurt. So I can't imagine one seven hundred newtons of force? Which yauser's that? Yeah? Quite a strong handshake.
Yeah, leave a mark for sure.
You know those competitive business handshakes.
Uh, yes, Like basically the kind of handshake that your girlfriend's dad gives you the first time. Yes he meets you, think yeah, yes, calls you.
A sport, grabs your hand, your vice like grip just so you know, just so you know the pecking order. Don't date a coconut crab because a coconut crab dad could just crush your hand into a pulverized smoosh.
Absolutely all right.
So our next video game boss is the Vortex Queen from Echo the Dolphin. Now this is maybe not as well known as a boss, but I have I had to include it because this is one of the times when a video game boss is actually defeated by an animal, and I want to question the choice of protagonists in this video game.
So.
Echo the Dolphin was a nineteen ninety two Sega Genesis adventure game featuring Echo the Dolphin, who is a dolphin that jumps real good and is on an adventure to find it it's missing pod of dolphins. So I actually did not play this game as a kid because I didn't have the Sega Genesis.
I've never played it at all, but I might have to see if I can find an emulator for it, because sounds very unique. I haven't heard about this.
It is, I read. I went down a fandom wiki hole on this one, and it's an interesting plot. I mean like, when I saw artwork for this guy, I was like, yes, about a dolphin who jumps real good, but it's got aliens and time traveler it oh good?
Okay, Yeah, every game mads that, so.
They're are in this game. Your pod goes missing, your pod of dolphins. There are all these weird weather phenomenons like sudden storms and water spouts, which turn out to be the fault of an alien race of parasites known as the Vortex, So Echo the Dolphin must travel through time to collect powerful orbs to help defeat the Vortex Queen and rescue the planet and Echoes pod of dolphins. So the Vortex Queen is a giant alien head that lives in the deep sea with anglerfish like jaws and
huge black eyes. She attacks her enemies by using strong suction to pull creatures into her mouth and devours them instantly. She can summon vortex jellyfish and Vortex drones to attack the player, all the while trying to suck you right into her mouth. So you defeat the Vortex Queen, Echo must first destroy her eyes with sonar and then break off her jaw and then break her skull.
WHOA, that's so violent.
Yeah, I mean for a fun game about dolphins, it's a pretty violent and uh, pretty intense. Like this Vortex Queen. The pixel art of it it's bonkers. It's like it does look like a terrifying deep sea creature kind of fused with like an alien skull, which is definitely not probably what the mini thousands of grandma's who picked this game out for their kid like thought was going to be and just jumping and swimming and killing alien giant heads down deep in the sea, you know, standard marine
fun times. So the issue I have with this, I mean they try to explain away some of the things with Echo the dolphin like time travels and picks up magic orbs so that he can breathe underwater without Because dolphins are mammals, they gotta breathe sometimes, so they can't unlike maybe some larger cetaceans like a sperm whale or a blue whale. They really can't go that deep and spin that much time deep down without surfacing to breathe.
So Echo really shouldn't be down there. They try to explain it away with magic, but that's not good enough for me. Also, dolphins, sonar is not a weapon. It is a sensory tool.
Yeah.
It uses clicks to bounce sound off objects and form a map of their surroundings. These clicks don't do anything really to harm other animals unless it confuses some other cetacean that is also trying to find.
As far as sonic weapons go, there are much more dam dress sonic blasts in the animal kingdom, like even just like the shriek of a parrot I think is potentially almost as loud as like a gunshot, and that can definitely mess with your ears if you're too close, or.
The pinch of a mantis peacock mantis shrimp is gonna be sure.
Yeah, not really a sonic.
Weapon, but it's definitely shock wave, Yeah exactly, but no, Yeah, the sonar doesn't really do anything. This is very hyped up, sort of a Vana syndrome esque situation with act the dolphin really promising much more of a sonic weapon than and dolphin can really do. So, in my opinion, dolphin is not really the best animal for the job, even a magic time traveling dolphin. Of course, dolphins have a lot of strength that I should not downplay.
Like.
They are intelligent, they're great at teamwork, very strong abs. Have you ever seen the abs of a dolphin.
I can't say that I have no. I mean, I guess if you're doing all that, yeah, like you're basically just doing crunches in order to move.
Yeah, it's Jim goals.
I guess it makes sense.
It's up on my gym goals board. I want to have abs of a dolphin. They are agile and in groups of dolphins, they are capable of forming bubblenuts and sand nets, which would be very useful for trying to defeat an alien queen. Unfortunately, within the context of the story,
Echo's dolphin buddies have been kidnapped by the aliens. So oh right, And so my thinking is that Echo's going to need to get a team together and think outside of his dolphin group and find like a marine team of creepy ocean critters where you have like a cool montage of Echo going around to all these different marine animals and they're like, God, damn it, I'm in and then they play some music and they get in like a submarine van thing, and yeah, right, So the team
needs to be able to defeat the Vortex Queen. In the three stages that the player needs to defeat the Vortex Queen, it has to attack the eyes, the mouth, and then the skull.
So and to be able to deal with all the little millions, right, all the little minions the Vortex Queen was summoning like jellyfish. So I was thinking, if it's got to deal with jellyfish, maybe a marine turtle, a sea turtle, Yeah, pretty good for that. They love to jellyfish.
Maybe clear the way, Yeah, because they eat jellyfish, right.
Exactly, And so I mean in order to even get to the to the final boss, right, you wouldn't want to be swimming through jellyfish and take a whole bunch of stings and die from poison before you even have the chance.
Yeah, exactly. So you got you got your turtle squad who clears out the minions. There you go, perfect, and then you need something to attack the eyes. I'm thinking for that the copapod Omada koita elongata. Have you heard of this?
No? Is just like so a copa pod that's like a really really microscopic crustation, right.
It's they can be microscopic, so they can be zooplankton, and sometimes they can be larger such that they're visible with the naked eye, usually under about an inch. Still very small, okay, so real tiny, real tiny. But copepods are a class of crustaceans, and like you said, they're often really tiny, like zooplankton size. But this one, the oh elongatta, is little like worm size, like under an inch long, little pink. They're kind of a weird y shape.
They look like a worm that has two little noodle legs. It's actually kind of funny, and they are parasites that attach themselves to the eyes of their host, feeding on their eye tissue and impairing their vision.
Oh that's horrible. I would not want to be that thing's victim.
Its typical host is one of the largest and oldest living sharks, the greenland shark. So yeah, you know.
These are ones that live like half a millenniu basically, like four or five hundred years exactly.
Yes, ancient, ancient, So they'd give like the Vortex Queen a run for her money in terms of you know, old eldrick creatures that lurk in the water.
I feel like you could also go for like a swordfish or a marlin or something.
Oh yeah, just to put the eyes out.
Pokemon the eye if she needs to do.
That's a much more straight Yeah, that's a much more straightforward method. I feel like.
It might get the chopped on a little quicker if these parasites take a little while to start shop and destroy the eye tissue. On the other hand, a quick stab.
Is it as fun though, like to slowly, you know, like plant those months in advance, Like you could have a spy montage of these little copa pods getting in there.
You definitely could.
You're a little bit. You're a little less devious than I am. I think you're just like we go in, we scoop its eyes out with a swordfish, we go out.
Yeah.
So there are some theories actually that the copa pod and the greenland shark actually have a mutualistic relationship rather than a parasitic one.
Oh so you think it would betray the team.
It's possible because the copa pod actually emits a or at least the theory. I'm not sure exactly how much of this has proven, but they may emit a slight level of bioluminescence, and so the idea is, well, the greenland shark doesn't really use its eyes much to hunt in the first place, so it could use this bioluminescence of these copa pods to draw fish closer to it and then ambush, using its a sense of smell to ambush these fish and eat them. That's a theory.
It's quite a trade off. I could make that deal.
Have your have your weird living eyeball tassels in exchange for slightly easier meals. I don't know, maybe maybe I do it.
That's a tough call. I guess I wasn't using them like you said.
Yeah, like they use their sense of smell. It does feel like it'd be like kind of annoying, Like it always feels like you have something in your eye. Could you do.
Exactly, Paris. I always get eyelashes in my eyes, so I can't imagine a crustacean hanging on.
I hate eyeball stuff. I hate looking at think like I can't. I have a glasses prescription, and people like, well, why don't you wear contacts? It's like, no, never.
Your eye every time you take it out.
Yeah, no, no, no, those little peatrie discs that you put on there waiting for some kind of voracious bacteria to grow in there, no thank you. So either with a swordfish poking the eyeball out or the copa pods slowly but surely devouring the vortex Queen's vision. Let's say we've taken out our eyes. Next stage is taking out her mouth. Now echo does this by I guess dismantling her jaw with sonar, which we've established is not really how sonar works.
I really strong. Yeah, blast of sonic energy to break a bone.
Yeah, yeah, that's a jaw bone that it would be such a strong blast of sonic energy. I think it would destroy Echo in the process. It would just explode, right if.
It's being emitted from Echo's like face, I assume, or like it's a little it's.
Yeah, they use they use the mill in their head as like an echo chamber to help with the acoustics of these clicks. They would explode its head.
Yes, I do think it would take some area of effect damage there for sure.
A little bit of friendly fire. So instead of Echo exploding its head with this mystery sonar, I think we need a parasitic tongue isopod. One of my favorite parasites.
Oh, I don't like where you're going with this.
Oh no, the simultheo exigua. It's also called a parasitic tongue louse. We've actually talked about this little lady on the show before. Have you heard of this beautiful, beautiful tongue parasite.
I have, and it's probably one of the most gut wrenching things to ever think about. This is the creature that essentially replaces the tongue of its victim.
Yes, exactly exactly.
So I feel like at this point I'm feeling really bad for this pot like it can keep my friends. I'm not really go to these extreme measures to torture this thing's.
Objecting her to like, and then it slowly devours her eyes and then it replaces their time. This is psychological intimidation. The aliens are just going to pack up and leave Earth. It's like, well, you got tongue parasites down here, never mind keep stinking dolphins. Jesus. Yeah, so uh see eggs we uh or exit exigua. I have so much trouble
with that name. The tongue laus Uh will enter the gills of a fish and swim up to its tongue and cut off the blood supply to the tongue while sucking on that sweet, sweet fish blood tongue for its own self. And once it has consumed enough of the fish's blood, it will attach itself to the stub of the tongue because as it sucks the blood from the tongue, tongue atrophies and withers and falls off, which is fun
fun visual. And these little isopods, I mean imagine like a pale, white, giant version of one of those little roly polleys. That's what they look like kind of horrible. And when you open up one of these fishes mouth that has this is infected with this parasite, you just see like this little parasite face staring out like the little alien tongue, and aliens like, oh hell yeah. So she will live there, feeding off of the fish's blood
and sometimes the fish is mucus. She's not picky and acts as the fish's replacement tongue because the fish literally has no choice. If it's gonna eat, it's gotta use this isopod as its tongue. And once she is ready to release her brute pouch, she abandons fish and the fish actually dies without this parasite because it now has zero tongue it.
You know, really, so the so you're saying, the isopod is actually better than nothing.
It's better than not.
She help, it helps. Yeah, it's poor victim out at least a little bit right at.
It's better not to get it in the first place. But you're screwed once it leaves the host, and it will inevitably leave you to lay its eggs, which you know, it's just kind of it's kind of cruel to like take someone's tongue and be like, I'm your tongue now, and then when you finally get used to it, it's like, well see you, It's like, but you're my tongue, not anymore, I'm not bite. The reason I keep saying she is actually does the female isopod that does this, and it's
got a really interesting life cycle. So they all start out as males and enter into the fish gills where
they'll feed off blood supply near the gills. But if a second uh see exegua enters into the gills, the first one transforms from being male into being female, and uh they mate, and then the male you know, just I think, leaves and then the newly transformed female goes up and bites on the tongue and does that cool magic trick with the fish tongue that I'm talking about, So real, interesting little creature, absolutely horrifying to anything in the ocean that has a tongue. So yeah, that would
be horrible My plans for the vortex Queen's tongue. And then all you need to do if she's not freaked out enough that she just leaves Earth because it's so horribly messed up, much more messed up than anything she could come up with as this, like alien queen, you do need to attack her skull and this is maybe my favorite one, which.
I can't I can't wait to see how you're going to this.
Well, look, so the vortex queen is a deep sea creature. She's adapted to the crushing depths of the ocean floor. So she can't have a solid, hard skull filled with gooey brain like humans do, because it would collapse from the massive pressure of the bottom of the ocean to equalize. So if we went down, yeah, we went down to the bottom of the ocean, our heads would collapse a
little bit. Yeah, they'd be squished. It might not look like it wouldn't look like your whole face got squished in, but your skull would definitely crack and start letting in water to equalize the pressure, which is bad for your brain.
Yeah, this kills the person.
This kills the person. So to survive the crushing depths of the ocean floor, animals who have evolved down there actually often have gaps in their skull to help equalize
that pressure. So to illustrate this using like balls, like if you took a ping pong ball, and somehow shoved it down into the bottom of the ocean, it would collapse because the huge PSI force of all of that stacks and stacks of water would be trying to equalize the pressure from inside the ball, which is filled with air, which is less dense, and so it crushes the ping pong ball. That's like your human skull. Maybe not quite because our unless your total airhead literally filled with air,
would you have such a dramatic effect. But if you drop a whiffle ball which has a bunch of holes in it, down to the bottom of the ocean, it's not going to collapse because inside the whiffle ball is just more water, and so the density of water is equal to the density of other water, so there's no pressure to have to equalize, So whiffle ball.
Doesn't flow out out. So if you have the actual material itself doesn't get impacted like the plastic of a whiffle ball.
Yeah, pends on the material. So if you have a porous material like styrofoam, that actually gets crushed because all the air inside the styrofoam gets squeezed, And so you can actually take a styrofoam cup, put it down in the bottom of the ocean, it comes back a little tiny mini cup.
Oh okay, right, So the material has to be like super solid, rigid, no pockets of air inside.
Plastic that does not have air pockets, and I think is sturdy enough to survive the bottom of the ocean. Bones sometimes may not be because bone is more porous, so that might get more pressure. And in fact, with these deep sea animals, they often have cartilage instead of hard bone, so that they can move around and the pressure may kind of bend their bones a little bit and push inwards, but they're not as brittle as a sort of calcified bone, so that they're just much more
durable to that underwater pressure. So what I'm saying is the vortex Queen's skull has to be made at least partially out of cartilage, and it's got to have gaps in it. And so that means that these like ramming attacks that you do in the Echo the Dolphin game to like crush her skull, I don't think would be very effective because it's like, dude, I'm already getting you know, all of these these this pressure from the deep sea water, Like you can't punch my skull in basically, uh, with
your your puny dolphin powers. Instead, I think we need to use a hagfish's ability to bore a hole into the soft tissue of the vortex queens skull and eat it from the inside out.
So hag fish.
Hagfish, Well, they don't specifically look for brains, and typically they're looking for uh, dead or dying animals. But by the time this poor vortex queen has had her mouth and eyeballs taken care of, I think the hagfish would step in.
That makes sense. It's in pretty rough shave at that point.
Hagfish have a horrifying name that matches their horrifying little bodies. They're pink, slimy, squirmy, eel like primitive fish with no vertebral column and no jaw. They can grow around twenty inches or fifty centimeters long, which it's too much for me. When I'm thinking about just holding one of these, like pink slime worm, they look like worms. It's very uncomfortable. They're not worms. They are very primitive fish. So since they don't have jaws, they don't you know, no non
eat you know, like a regular fish. They have two plates covered in rows, and rows of pointique teeth, and they use these plates to grab and rasp flesh off of carrion or they're sickly and dying victims. And when they've grabbed a nice piece of flesh and kind of gotten it sort of secured between these plates of teeth, they'll often wiggle around and not like not themselves around and rip big chunks off of their target. So a
group of hagfish. Have you ever wondered, like what happens when a huge whale dies in the ocean, Like where does its body go? Sometimes it washes up on the beach, but we don't have just constant littering dead whale bodies everywhere, so it has to go somewhere right right, and it goes.
You get a good mix of hagfish and crabs and stuff. I I kind of always assume there's a bunch of crabs.
Crabs love a big, big cetacean body. They'll they love a big whale body. That's that's like, that's like TGI Fridays for crabs. So absolutely, the crabs are wonderful scavengers, great at breaking down decomposing bodies in the ocean. But hagfish are the unsung heroes of waste disposal. They love
a dead body. They will get all in there. You can see sometimes these ghostly corpses of a large whale and then just these hagfish darting in and out of the body as they kind of like tear out these holes and then go inside to the softer bits of the whale. Sou and they're very slimy. Hagfish slime. Is this really thick? It's almost like egg white texture. It's so thick and gooey, and in fact, it's so full
of proteins. Like some people, I mean have suggested we could use that as like an alternative to egg white protein, which you know, okay, yeah, just like for breakfast, just you know, like, good morning, I gotta got a.
Milk tasty hagfish omelet.
Yeah, I gotta milk the hagfish for its slime to make an omelet. You know, maybe it's more eco friendly. I don't know. That may be our future where you just milk a hagfish for your breakfast.
So I think I so much look forward to.
What a bright future. Look. Maybe it's delicious, you just can't judge. Uh So, yeah, I think that if you just set a bunch of hagfish on this poor this poor vortex coin. She's she's doomed in a horrifying way.
Wow. Wow, Yeah, that it seems like it would do it. I mean, I guess there's probably be plenty of crabs also following, and yes, all sorts of other bottom feeder parasites.
A party down there.
Pour into whatever hole this hagfish.
Kind of like scrobe lights like an anglerfish, sort of using his Laura's for Laura's stroke like.
Using y yeah by luminescent rave, let's go.
Do you remember when that new Resident Evil game like Resident Evil Villages came out or Village and that giant vampire Lady h Lady Dimitriscue. Uh, it just kind of took the Internet by storm.
Yes, I remember Twitter blowing up about that for sure, quite a day.
People love a giant, tall vampire queen.
I guess apparently there's a lot of simping going on on Twitter days. For sure.
A lot of people had crushes on her. I guess it was like because she could crush them and that exactly. You know, that does it for people sometimes the thing that's their thing, a big giant deadly vampire queen like the size of a giraffe that. I mean, look, I'm not here to shame people for their preference.
That's beyond me. But you know, that's if that's their thing.
But you know, whether or not you want to take her out on a date, she definitely wants to kill and eat you. So she is a boss in the Resident Evil game. Uh wow, that's definitely going to get picked up on the audio.
But whatever.
Okay, So, uh so, if you haven't played the Resident Evil games, which maybe some of us haven't, including me, I wasn't very good at trying to hide the fact I haven't played this game as being like.
Justin I played like the Oh yeah, I played on.
There is some version. I didn't play it, but I watched my brother play it back when I was a kid, and there was like a scene where one of the zombies was like slowly going up the stairs and you saw it from the zombies perspective, so you knew it was coming. I was like scared to use the stairs for a week afterwards. So spooky, and I think I've got some rain and thunder going on, so perfect ambiance for this section, guys. So in this Resident Evil game,
the giant vampire lady, I think it's Dmitroscu. D'mitra Scuv. Looks like a very tall, well dressed woman, and she was infected with a fictional parasite called the Cadou parasite. So I'm going to be trying to be really clear here because the video game the Resident Evil games deal with a lot of fictional like molds and parasites and kind of faux biology terms, and I'll try to clearly
label that these are the fictional ones. But I'm going to talk about some real molds and fungus in parasites that I think could counteract these video game ones.
So the.
Cado parasite somehow mutated her into a giant lady who needs to drink blood to survive. There's some sort of sciencey schmyancy explanation in the game. Doesn't really make sense, but I love it. I'm not criticizing it. I love it when video games are like, yeah, and then here's this fungus that makes everyone vampires, like right on? And then her minions are three lovely ladies who were also surgically implanted with the Cado parasite. Again fake this is all.
This is all fictional parasites which somehow merged their DNA with a swarm of blowflies so they can like separate into swarms of blowflies and then coalesce back into ladies, which you know, it's pretty cool. It's a cool it's cool powers.
I like, yeah, definitely useful.
Yeah, especially if you got if you're there's like some doggy doo doo in your house, it's like, don't worry, we'll get it. Boom, it's gone.
Yeah for sure.
So the Resident Evil series in general often combines folklore like vampires and werewolves with a sort of fake biology. Like the cause of some freaky powers or mutations, uh is caused by something known as the mold, which is a fictional fungus that can somehow store genetic information and cause specific hallucinations as well as mutations to create horrible monsters. So this isn't really biologically feasible, but uh, let's fight
the weird fantasy fungus with weird real life fungus. So I think this whole castle of weird fungal lady vampires could have been taken out by a smart micologist. So mycologist is someone who studies fungus and there are let's fight. Let's fight fungus with fungus. What do you say?
Okay, sure, I can't say I'm super well versed in mycology. I mean either of I.
Relied a lot on you know, mycology monthly for this research.
Excellent, I respect it. Uh. Most of what I know about fungus is like pretty much just the cordyceps fungus, which is yes, the kind that controls insect brains, yes, and the basis for the video game The Last of Us Yes, because the zombies in that game, or fungal as well.
That is one of my favorite of the parasitic fungus.
Uh.
So, Actually, those kinds of fungus that will eat insects and be parasites on an insect are called intomo pathogenic funguses. Into moo, let me try that one more time. Intimopathogenic fungus.
There you go, entomology and pathogenic disease.
Yeah, exactly. The Cordyceps are one of many species of fungus that kills and eats insects by attaching to the insects body is spores uh, and then germinating and colonizing under the insects cuticle, which is that exoskeletal structure that functions as their skin. So often these into pathogenic fungi will use enzymes to bore holes into the insects body and then grow throughout the body. Cavity.
Chemical warfare, Now exactly how we're going to beat the boss of chemicals. Sweet all right, bring us home atimopathogenic fung guy, let's get there.
Sometimes you will see like insects barely managing to crawl around where half of them have been eaten by some kind of fungus. Usually it'll be like a white or gray fuzzy mold. It's so creepy. So, like you mentioned, cordyceps can infect ant brains and cause them to climb up tree branches, like dig into the branch with their manibles to get a nice secure hold before they die in spectacular fashion as a fruiting body of the fungus
just explodes from their head. So we've got a lot of really interesting species of intomopathogenic fungi, but we want one that will be really bad for blowflies, right, because we've got these two her minions, the lady dimitrisk who's minions turn into a swarm of blowflies, which is hard to stab with a knife.
It's hard to fight, okay, so, but it presents a unique weakness, right, you can exploit. That's interesting. I would have not thought about using kind of turning it's it's special ability against itself. Yes, we exactly so. Uh.
The there's this species of anentomopathogenic fungi called Bovaria bassiana, which is a beautiful name. I feel like it like sounds sounds like one of these names from resident Evil to me, like lady Dimitrisciu. It's like the Bovaria bassiana fungus. Uh coming in to a right?
I mean, who knows. Maybe that's how they got their names. Right. If you look up the demetrisou fungus, maybe that's a thing. Who knows. Uh.
So, this fungus, with its beautiful name, is very dangerous to blowflies. It is so efficient at killing blowflies and other species of flies and pests. It is often used as a biological pest decide so it grows throughout the insect, leaving behind a hollowed out carcass covered in white mold, which often collects and spills out at the joints, if not completely overwhelming the carcass of the insects. So I have included a picture of a blowfly that looks like it's just covered in white fluff.
I see, it looks like it like it's covered in snow or something. Yeah, just when it like tumbled down a mountain and.
Right like in a cartoon, exactly exactly. But no, that is white mold that has completely subsumed and devoured this poor little blowfly. I think this fungus would make quick work of the minions and so onto killing Lady Dmitrisci herself.
Uh.
So, I looked up on another fan wiki thing because I have not played these games. I'm a fake nerd. I just don't know.
I haven't played bad game either.
I simply do not have a PS five or whatever you would need for these games.
PS five is pretty hard to come vice. I don't blame you, so uh.
The fictional Cadou parasite is a parasitic nematode spliced with this mysterious powerful mold that causes all these human mutations in the resident evil world. So, while the game version of the parasitic parasitic nematode isn't necessarily that accurate in terms of like, you can't really just splice its DNA with mold. I don't. It's two different kingdoms, guys.
Different for sure.
Yeah, but there are real life parasitic nematodes, and of course there are real life predators of nematods, and some of those predators are mushrooms. It all comes back to mushrooms. So in the Resident Evil game, to defeat the big bad lady Dmitriskiu, I cannot pronounce that is Dmitriskiu. Is it French?
It seems like it would be French, but I have never studied French. I'm not going to attempt it.
It takes place in Eastern Europe, but I don't know.
Dimito I did take Russian, but it doesn't look like a Russian name to me.
It doesn't. There's not enough conflicting consonants in it, so you but to defeat her you need a specific dagger imbued with monster killing toxins that are never specified. But hey, if you lose this dagger or butterfingers and drop it, then you're screwed. Except maybe you could just go out and forage for some nice oyster mushrooms. So, oyster mushrooms make a nice meal for humans, but they like to
feed on nematodes. So it seems a little weird for something like a fungus to be a carnivore, but they absolutely can be. So they will use droplets of toxins that paralyze the nematod then slowly digest them using the hyphae, which are these branching filaments that take in nutrients for the fungus. So they're kind of like plant roots. They're
not so fungus fungi are not plants. They don't have the same kinds of structures that plants do, but these hyphae do function a little bit like roots because they will suck in nutrients for the fungus.
Yeah, how does it find these nematods? I mean, neither.
Live in the They live in the soil where these mushrooms.
Are so okay, so they're just so ubiquitous that yeah.
Where exactly. But if that doesn't sound powerful enough, like if you throw some oyster mushrooms at or make or eat some, like you don't think that's gonna work. Uh, there's a lot of different mushrooms that are in line to kill nematoads, and they have some really dastardly methods of doing so. Sometimes they will have booby trapped fungal spores that will develop spikes and lodge themselves in the throats of nematodes, killing them and devouring them as they germinate.
So the nematot will eat this a little spoor, they think it's delicious, and then it just like starts to like grow out these hyphae into the nema toad's throat and just devours it completely. There's also you could gift a lady Dimitrisku with a necklace of giant arthrow bottyrs. So so arthrow botyrus is perfect for killing a vampiric
nematod mutant with a sense of fashion. Uh, because arthrow bootyrus uses fungal spores shaped like necklaces that ensnare nematodes and shoots spikes into the nematod's body as it grows into it and devours them. So you've got options, is what I'm saying.
Wow. Yeah, so we have chemical warfare, we have these booby traps, we have so many These fungus are definitely equipped to do some damage for sure.
Yeah, in the game, you have this mysterious mold that gives them all these powers. It's like, well, guys, there's like more than one species of mold out there. There are many fungi out there ready to party, so you know, mutually assured fungus destruction that could definitely take out some of these vampire queens. I don't know, what do you think, Uh, do you think these animals could indeed defeat these video game bosses or which of these bosses do you think would actually come out on top.
Bowser is definitely, like I would say, fairly evenly mashed.
For the crocodile, Yeah, he's got a chance. He's so spicy.
Yeah, there's a lot of ways Bowser can deal damage. But I think if the crocodile's playing his cards right, it could certainly get a good strike on Bowser's weak point or one of his limbs.
Yeah, but it's a fair Yeah, it is.
Bowser's bigger.
Yeah, but nobody's for the situation.
Potentially not for the Deep Sea Vortex boss. Vortex Queen, is that what that thing's just in for a world to hurt? If what you're doing is going to come to pass. If these parasites actually can do what you said, uh to the alien creature, I would not want to be that. I think it has no chance.
I feel like it would just be psyched out after the first attack.
Yeah, if I was, if I was the vortex queen, I'd be like, I'll find another planet. It's fine. You can keep your keep your parasites to yourself, dolphins.
And your weird eyeball parasites.
Exactly. As for vampire lady, I think if you can get the fungus to be the vampire, then you certainly got got a shot, right. Yeah, but considering they're not motile, you need a good of delivering me, right, fungal based toxins, and and.
You got to put them in a salad, you know, a nice salad and be like here, sure, nice salad. I know you drink blood primarily, but you know it's good to get some fiber.
Very true, very true. I would not. I'm curious to see how that affects their digestive tract these vamifires.
Do vampires need fiber?
I don't know. I wouldn't want to have no fiber in my diet. So yeah, and blood sounds like it doesn't have much, so I don't think so, No, it'd be tough.
Well, I think that's gonna do it for video game bosses. I think honestly they're going to have a tough time against these animals. But before we go, I do want to reveal the answer to last week's guess Who's talking mystery animal sound game. So every week I play a mystery animal sound at the end of the episode, and you all try to guess what is making that sound.
And so the hint for last week was that this may sound like a machine gun, but unless you're an insect, the only thing you'll really have to worry about is getting smacked in the face by its enormous beautiful tail. To me, that sounds like a like a blaster from like a video game.
Like a yeah it does a laser gun. Yeah.
What do you think is making that sound?
I think it's gotta be some sort of like mocking bird h or maybe a parrot, some sort of really really good mimic of sounds my experience tend to be birds.
Well, that is a great guess because the answer is that this is the mating cull of a brown sickle bill, which is a beautiful bird of paradise found in New Guinea. Females have a rusty red head and a black body, whereas males have bright blue spots on their backs and white underbellies and super long ornamental tails that are gorgeous, and they are just such a fancy looking bird to
be making like machine gun noises. I find the difference in their overall appearance is like, oh, it's a beautiful bird of paradise, and.
Then just like right, that's super interesting. It's just out of nowhere, like how did they think of that? Sound?
To Rake, Congratulations to the first three listeners to guess correctly, Abby, m Anda, La and Jesse Asika. Great job you guys. I feel like you guys are better at this game than I would be if I was playing on the other end. So really, great job you guys. I have such smart listeners. Now onto our next mystery animal sound for next week. The hint is that it sounds like a collaboration between a biologist, a heavy metal band, and
a hairdresser. So do you have any guesses for what this mystery animal is?
I mean, I want to say it's a verd again, it sounds like, I don't know a parrot. It's like a really angry parrot. My grandma had a parrot and it was always making super weird loud noises. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to go with some sort of parrot or some kind.
Of angry parrot. Well, the answer will be revealed next week if you tune in the day Work Creature feature. That's how I get you.
All right, I'll be there, I gotta know.
Well, thank you so much for joining me today, patch.
So welcome, thanks for having me.
The tiers Zoo YouTube channel is absolutely amazing, really wonderful way to learn about some evolutionary biology and feel like you're playing a video game.
So glad you like it.
Other than the YouTube channel, where can people find you?
Yeah, so YouTube dot com, slash tearszoo. You can also find me on Twitter at at at tearszoo. I'm also I also have a few things on TikTok Instagram. If you just search teers that you should be able to find them. But that's about it. That's uh, the extent of my online presence.
I think, I mean, I think it's pretty good to do it. Yeah, and you can find if you want to write in what you think the answer is to the mystery animal sound or any of your questions or comments or concerns. You can write at Creature Featurepod at gmail dot com, Creature feature Pod on Instagram, or Creature feet Pod on Twitter. That's FE eighteen, not feeteen. That is something very different and uh, thank you so much
for listening. If you want to rate or review the podcast, I read all the reviews and they bring so much joy to my heart. And thanks to the Space Cossics for their super awesome song XO Lumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast.
Or Hey guess what where?
Have you listened to your favorite shows? See you next Wednesday.