Welcome to Creature future production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Mini Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show Screaming Yeah, Animals that scream, Animals that's sing, Animals that scream an sing from the teeniest tiniest screams to some of the loudest owls in the animal kingdom. Discover this some more as we answer the age old question how much would you pay for your own personal security system? Would you pay them in blood?
Joining me today is friend of the Pod, co host of George Center and Lower after Hours, Will Pull aka Christy Ever got you mean?
Welcome? Thank you for having me again, Katie. I think this is my third time on here. I'm a three peter. I'm super excited.
That's right. Should be receiving in the male of fruit basket?
Oh good, yeah? Good? Now what kind of fruit should I expect? Well, you know, citing like a tally up a pineapple. Okay, I just.
Get an apple, a regular apple. It's actually about just an apple, an apple in it?
Is there an actual basket or are you just mailing me a single apple with a stamp on it?
It's it's an apple wrapped in an appkin. Okay, and then once you get to five yeah, once you get to five episodes, it'll be an apple tied to a banana.
Tied to a banana? How okay? All right? I was curious how you were going to fasten it. That seems difficult and I don't think that's going to survive the postage, but I appreciate your effort.
And uh, ten episodes in, I'll thrown thrown a handful of grapes. So get excited.
I cannot. I cannot wait for for the rotten fruit to show up in the mailbox. So excited for this.
So did you know that animals screw sometimes?
So the when I think of animals screaming. We used to have a pet, pot belly pig, and when I would try to get his name was Spud. And whenever I would try to get Spud to cooperate with me, whenever I'd have to pick him up, that little dude, it's the wildest, most blood curdling scream you have ever heard.
I don't know if your listeners are familiar with the sound like a pig makes, or just how loud they can get but it's it's incredible, and the first time it happened, it startled me so so much like it uh, it completely uh catches you off guard.
I feel like pig screams too, are uncannily humanoid in a way that's really it's you can distinguish it from a human scream, but there's a definitely a humanoid aspect to it that's very unsettling.
I agree. I agree. Similar to those goats, the compilations yea oats that scream. Some of my favorite videos are when people take like metal songs or heavy music and then they put the goat screams as the tracks to it. It's so good.
There's one the let the Bodies hit the floor, Let the bodies hit the floor with animals sounds, and they've got like a screaming kackatoo a goat in there, kucka burrah. It's really good. I love it. It's one of my favorite videos.
Fantastic I've heard. I think the one that comes to mind as I think there's a system of a down mashup with like the song Chop Suey and yeah, the screaming goats.
That's really good. Yeah, No, that's that's incredible. I love that. So yeah, I mean, like, there are a lot of animals. We know that they can make loud sounds, sometimes they can scream. But I think something that is is potentially surprising to people is that in sex can also scream. In fact, bees can scream for help, which is cute and terrifying.
It is it is, and I imagine these screams are inaudible to the human ear.
That's not necessarily true. So remember the Asian murder hornets that we were freaking out about, I think kind of near the beginning of the pandemic. So we got a little bit sidetracked there, but.
Absolutely the the the uh man, what a pleasant thought like that that the murder hornets were back before the world completely had gone Yeah. That that that's a that's a that's almost like a nice thing to reminisce on.
Now. Yeah, we were like, oh, we gotta worry about these giant bees and then oops, no, that wasn't it. No, No, we were ye, but yeah, so so there was some uh, some worry and still some worry about them because they were found in North America and our North American bees are woefully unprepared for the presence of these giant hornets because they are very adept at murdering and ripping a bee colony to shreds, to literal shreds. They dismember the
bodies of these poor little honeybees. But of course these are invasive species, and when you go to their native territory in Asian countries, Asian honey bees have actually evolved a number of coping strategies for dealing with these giant murder hornets. So one of these strategies is a honey curdling scream. So obviously you may have an image of like b movie Jerry Seinfeld screaming into the camera with his weird little cgi bee teeth, which I hate so much.
What's with all these murders?
You murdy my whole my whole family. What's that you're digesting my body parts?
Okay, you do a much better Jerry Seinfeld impression than I do. And by buy better, I mean it's terrible.
Yeah, it's bad. Good, it's bad. Don't worry. Uh, it's gonna be bad.
That's what makes it so good, That's what makes it good.
So don't worry. Though, beads do not scream with their mouths. They actually scream with their butts.
We's somehow I knew it was gonna be the butt, and it still surprised me when you say.
Yeah, it's always the butt, isn't it.
It is it with insects. Yes, everything happens with the butt.
Everything, everything, all the time. You know that sign in that Japanese amusement park that went viral like a couple of years ago where it was like, please scream inside your heart because it was at the beginning of the pandemic and it was like they didn't want people to scream and release a bunch of saliva everywhere, so it was please scream inside of your heart to write while writing this roller coaster.
I missed that somehow, But that's such a beautiful and poetic like I feel like a lot of people are screaming inside of their heart at all times these days. Yeah, absolutely, evergreen sign.
Yes for the bees, it's actually please scream with your butt. So they point their posteriors in the air and beat their wings against their abdomen while running. So it's like if you were terrified, you like pointed your butt in the air and started slapping your thighs and then screaming as you ran.
Damn. Okay, so I was picturing an ace ventura moment where the bee is bent over, like spreading the butt and talking out of its butt. So not an ace ventura, no.
No, more like you're running with your butt in the air while you're slapping it, and your slaps are so loud they sound like a scream. So yeah, So this causes a high pitched shrieking sound.
You know.
It's similar to how stridulation and other insects like crickets, will stridulate by rubbing things against their abdomen. For the bees, it's the beating of the wings against their abdomen that creates this percussive sound that is at such a high frequency it sounds like a scream, and it alerts other Asian honey bees to the presence of a giant hornet.
It's also used to warn its comrades of other types of hornets, like the Vespa sore hornet, which is another large hornet who is very similar to the giant hornet, also hunts and packs and attacks beehives. So they've got a few hornet species to worry about, these poor honey bees. But the most unsettling thing about this scream is how eerily human like it sounds. So researcher doctor Heather Medela said to The New York Times quote, I would get
chills and start to worry about them. Even though the recordings are from years ago and the bees are long dead. There's something very human and recognizable in the sounds.
So that's spooky.
Yeah. Unfortunately, I looked. I tried to find audio of the bee screams. I couldn't find it. I'll keep looking and if I find it, I will definitely share with you guys, but it'll too Yeah.
I wonder if you did you happen to learn whether the screams were distinct depending on the type of hornet attacking the colony.
That's a really good question. I don't know if there are individual screams for this species of hornet, but there's definitely an alarm call. I think that means hornet intruder. But that's a I mean, that's a really good question. I wouldn't be too shocked if they had different kinds of sounds for different types of threats, but as far as I know, there's sort of one general. Hey, there's a hornet it's going to decapitate us. This is bad, sort of right, but drumming and.
Do these honey bees. I've seen video before where bees will swarm a hornet, yes, and overheat the hornet basically like using their wings to increase their body temperature to the point where it can't survive.
That is absolutely correct. This is the other tactic that these Asian honey bees will use. It's a remarkable behavior because they will cover the hornet and just like they just like you said, they will actually boil it alive. And they do that by vibe rating their abdomens, which generates this friction in a high enough temperature to cook the hornet in the middle of their tactical wash pit.
And they also by forming that ball I think they increase CO two levels, which also basically, if the boiling doesn't kill them, they suffocate it. And it is incredible. They actually have one more fun anti hornet tactic, and that is collecting animal dung and spreading it onto the entrance of their hive to ward off hornets. And it's kind of gross, but it's remarkable because bees are very fastidious.
They're very clean. They even poop outside of their own hives because they want to keep things as clean and tidy as possible. They want to protect their delicate larvae from pathogens. So the fact that they were bringing poop to their hive was really confusing to researchers, seemed very counterintuitive. But sure, by placing the animal dung at the entrance, it actually wards off these hornets with a foul smell,
and it's called fecal spotting. And they'll just take basically little bits of dung from all sorts of different animals and like put it sort of like a just's kind of like paint with it, very artistically, like Bob Ross, Like, now we wanna we want to put the I want to put the bear diarrhea right here. That's some nice bear diarrhea that'll really ward off those wasps. And oh
and here's some here's some bobcat dung. We're gonna put the bobcat dung, and it's gonna make this really nice kind of fresco.
Happy happy little logs, happy, happy.
Little happy little turds.
Okay, So I'm just I'm just saying I've never thought about this as like a security tactic. But if I went and collected the dog poop in my backyard and smeared it all over the front door of my house. I would not have to worry about anything showing up on my front porch. That would absolutely not. No one's visiting me. I'm not getting any packages also, so that would you know, that'd be unfortunate. But also home intruders.
Nobody is going to break into my house if they start to come in or try to pry in the front door. You don't need security systems. You don't need these ring doorbells or you know, weapons for to protect your home. Just smear poop all over your front door and the entrance way. By the way, it's brilliant.
This podcast is sponsored by Pooh Safe, a cheap, alternative and eco friendly solution to protecting your home.
It's absolutely recycle that poop. Get out there, you know, collect it from your neighbors will love you if you're collecting their dog poop for your protection. Well they it's a wind for everybody.
Well they, I sure love my neighbor who smears my dog's poop on their door.
I I mean, if you know what, like, once it leaves my yard, I don't care what happens to it. Necessarily. And also I don't have to visit them. No, I don't have to to you know, uh, you know, be neighborly or anything. I still think it's I think it's a net positive or a net positive overall. Should I say.
Yes? A good way to clear out guests too, Just start like, you know, laying down poop on the floor. It's like, oh, this is what I do it midnight, so you might want to mosey on. This may seem drastic, right for the bees to smear poop all over their beautiful hive entrance, but if you had to face these hornets down, these hornets that are more than three times your size, you would probably scream with your butt and smear animal hung around too. So just a quick quick
overview of these hornets. The giant hornets or otherwise known as the Asian murder hornets, as well as the vespers or hornets, are very formidable foes and they can decimate a honeybee colony. Just decapitate a bunch of bees, and you know they're rapid berserkers of bees. They will often attack impacts and chop up their victims into bite sized pieces that they carry back to their hornet hive where they feed the body parts to their larvae like they're feeding it into a wood chipper.
So the adults such a brutal description. God, this is horrifying. I feel like like that scientists said, she feels horrible. She like can can feel the connection listening to those recordings, I'm empathizing with these bees right now.
Yeah, just based on the horror that they go through. Yeah. The reason they have this, like using the baby as the wood chipper technique is that adult hornets cannot eat solid food, you know those that those hourglass figures that they have to keep with that very thin waste. Food cannot pass through that that is any any thicker than
a liquid. So the adults chew up the body parts and then spit this paste into the larva's mouths, and then the larva digest it and create this kind of like protein syrup, a protein shake, and then regurgitate that for the adults to eat. So you know what a cute family.
Yeah, seriously, I want a sequel to B movie. Yeah, but I want it. I want it done like a a like in a dramatic, like a drama. Yeah, just like a horror like drama style, completely serious, where we actually get to see the horrors of what it's like to be a bee and fend your family off from these wasps.
I want a remake of Game of Thrones, but it's bees. And if you've listened to this podcast before, you know that bees and wasps really deal in themselves to Game of Thrones style dramatization. I mean, these hornets not only attack honeybees, but they even attack other hornet species. They even attack their own species, like if there's another hive of their own species, sometimes they'll go in and do red wedding style, kill everyone, but then also eat them. So yeah, okay.
So they're they're hunting for their dinner.
I guess, yeah, say, hey, you know sustainable. Yeah. So we did just talk about bees screaming with their butts and horror before getting murdered in terrible fashion. So I thought I'd lighten the moon with some singing lemurs.
Cool singing mur like okay, so we're talking like Madagascar.
Saw Yeah exactly. Prince Julian is that that character when he thinks? So yeah, I like to move it, move it, that whole thing. Yeah. Yes, the early two thousands called they want their sort of dated CGI movie back.
A timely reference on I.
Love it though, because you're absolutely right that lemurs are from Madagascar. So that movie where you see you know, you have these many species of lemurs all together. They may not do a whole dance number and singing number together, but indeed Madagascar is where you will find all of
the world species of lemurs. And there are many cool, awesome species of lemur uh and one of them possibly one of the lesser known ones, but a incredible species that should be more famous is the injury or Baba Coodo. So the Injury is one of the largest lemurs in the world, like all lemurs, lives exclusively in Madagascar, and they are critically endangered, which is a shame because they
are absolutely amazing. So these injury weigh up to about twenty pounds or nine point five kilograms and grow up to about twenty eight inches or seventy two centimeters long, so you know, bigger than a cat, maybe a medium sized dog. They are adorable. They look like teddy bears. They have black and white fur and yellow eyes. Their faces have this black, fluffy fur with these tufted black ears that look like an extra fluffy teddy bear and they have these short, stubby tails, which is very rare.
In fact, they're the only lemurs that have lost their tails to this extent.
So they look, Oh, that's unfortunate, that's cute. Yeah, I guess so. But if I was, if I'm a lemur, I want to tail to swing from, like that's one of the coolest things about you know, living in a tree for that.
But they don't, as I'll discuss it, or they don't really need it. They do live in trees, but they don't need their tail, and there's an interesting explanation for that. Actually, they are so big that one of the main purposes of these tails for lemurs actually isn't to hang from trees. Uh. It is for stabilization. And this is true of a lot of primate species. It helps them stabilize. It's true
they can uh. Primates that have prehensile tables, sorry, prehensile tails can wrap them around branches to hold on to things, or even use them to like grip things like leaves. They typically use it to balance their their leaps and their jumps and movement, and that's the same thing for lemurs. So lemurs like to leap from branch to branch, and they will use these tails as sort of almost like mid air rudders to help balance them as they glide.
But the thing is, the bigger you get, the less a tail is going to do actually in terms of balance, and because the injury is so big, one of the biggest lemurs it is, these tails sort of become less useful. And there was some research done looking at how like tail masks basically no longer if they had a tail, it just wouldn't really help them stabilize their leaping.
So it makes sense.
Instead they have this cute little stubby tail that I think.
What, how do you spell that again?
Injury injury, I in dri or baba koto.
There we go. Okay, oh my god, he is so cute. Okay, I was looking at the wrong time. Wow, you were not kidding about the Teddy Bear thing. Like the big he's almost got like a Mickey Mouse shaped outline of a face and ears. That's absurd.
Lemurs are so absolutely adorable, like a cartoon Teddy Bear, extra fluffy cartoon Teddy Bear.
Do these things blink? It doesn't look like they can blinky blink. Maybe I'm sure they can, but like it's the most high on methamphetamines, like the animal in the Animal Kingdom.
It does look like they would win a staring contest with you easily, or like you would get one of these as a teddy bear and you'd sit it at the foot of your bed and wake up in the middle of the night and it'd be staring at you.
It looks like an animatronic, like that's you know, the the unblinking eyes of like a you know, showbiz pizza or Chuck E cheese or something. It gives off that vibe when I look at one.
Yeah, I see that. I think it's a creepy cute thing. Though it's like, yes, yeah, it's the I think it's because of the yellow eyes and little pupils. They look very alert. So despite maybe looking like a creepy animatronic sometimes or a cute animatronic, whatever your opinion, they are, their behavior is very cute. So they have little family units. They are monogamous and they stay in family groups, and they are very playful and like to wrestle for fun,
especially females. Another wind for feminism, so they are extremely difficult to keep in captivity. They actually typically only last like a year in captivity, despite the fact that they can live up to eighteen years in the wild, and this is likely due to their extremely specialized diet that is very difficult to replicate. So they only seem to eat certain foods at certain times of days, and it's a variety of foods, so leaves, seeds, flowers, fruit, and bark.
But they have this specialized diet where they eat a certain thing at a certain time of day and it helps them digest it better, which you just cannot replicate in captivity.
Sure, sure, yeah, too stressed out the follow their regimen probably, Yeah, you know, being handled by people or being in an enclosed environment. Yeah, that's I mean, that's I'm glad that they have realized that are these So they these aren't really kept. You can't see these anywhere but in the wild, basically.
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, and they are one of the They are actually the only lemur that communicates through singing, and they are very musically talented, so their calls sort of sound like airhorn blasts. Not only are these calls loud, but they also follow musical patterns. So there was a study done at the University of turin Italy that found that their calls were used for a number of types of communication, to locate family, to establish territory, and to
do sing offs with neighbors. And it can be either to establish a connection between neighbors, to communicate about mating or environmental conditions, territory boundaries, or warnings of predators. And it is actually interesting in that they seem to follow a musical pattern. So I'm gonna have you listen to a sample of some of these injuries singing. So this is actually, wow, a female singing with her mate and her son. So a little family, the von Trapp family singing group.
So was that was that was one uh, like continuous song there or or samples from from many.
Yeah, that's one continuous song.
Oh cool, okay, okay, you were not kidding about the the air hoorn.
Cow.
Yeah, it sounds like Jamaican airhorns, like you would hear it like, yeah, some reggaetone or something. Yeah, oh my god. That's and and it also has like kind of a like a humpback whale quality to some of them.
Yeah yeah, I can hear that. Yeah. And so yeah, I mean it's adorable because it's a family singing together, mother, father and son. And they often sing in duets, and I don't know if you noticed, but they were harmonizing there. They would have one singing one tone to the other in a slightly different tone, and singing together in these duets. And they have very flexible mouths and lips that can change the tone of these notes, so they, you know, do this like little what and so they can angle
the tone. I'm not a musician, so I can't.
Yeah, it's kind of like the the Doppler effect, like, yeah, you can stretch and contract the size of the wave of the vibration coming out of your mouth, right exactly. That's so cool.
And so researchers have studied these calls and found that they like to do them in a specific rhythm, a one to two ratio of beat patterns, which is actually the same type of beat pattern as found in Queens We Will Rock You, so the dun dukay dun dun dun, which is kind of interestingly musical. They also drag out the final notes of their calls, which is similar to in music when you have the retardando at the very end, where you kind of like slow down a piece of
music dramatically. It seems like they do that and have this kind of flourish at the end, which is unusual for animals who use song to communicate. Typically, an animal either sticks to a pattern or they don't. They don't often like add little flourishes at the end of their song, which is very interesting, especially because Yeah.
I was just gonna say, have they decoded why they do that?
I don't think so. No, it's not necessarily known why they have that slow down at the end of songs. They know that they use these songs for a variety of communicy cation from anywhere to saying like hey, I'm an available mate, to hey this is our territory, or even like you know, communication like I'm over here. So there could be a purpose to that. I'm not sure that it's known yet.
I'm just going to pretend that it's it's just the just artist choice like they're making. They're making a decision there and and that's that's their signature style, you know. Ye, the way I write a song and I have a certain style to it. That's just there. That's their artistic interpretation, their their expression coming out.
I mean, we got our appreciation from music from somewhere in our evolutionary history. Now, while we we did not evolve from lemurs, they are a primate. They are a cousin of ours, a distant cousin, a very distant one. But at some point, you know, primates had an appreciation for you know, rhythm and sound that became our human appreciation for music. So I do find that really interesting that we see another primate species, no matter how distantly
related they are from us. They did branch off at a very early point in our revolution, but they have this appreciation for some kind of I mean to me, it is at the very least a predecessor to music, if not if you couldn't classify it as music. Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of just musical air horn blasts. It's very festive. I kind of imagine them watching some European football together.
Oh man, yeah, just breaking that out. Like I imagine they make that sound like they've eaten some fermented leaves or something, they've gotten a little tipsy around the holiday party, and then the air horne start going off.
Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. Yeah, But like I mentioned earlier, they are critically endangered and conservation of the species is really really important. They can't be kept in captivity, so if their natural habitat goes, there is no way of preserving them or bringing their population back. And their habitat is threatened by deforestation and illegal mining of sapphires, which is a big problem in Madagascar. But before you get like mad at like these individual miners or something,
the humans in Madagascar are suffering as well. They're being exploited. So these miners are often driven to do these extremely low paying, high intensity labor mining because you know, they're not getting enough food, they're not getting enough money, they can't feed their families, and even the local mine bosses aren't really paid that much compared to the money being made aid off of this illegal sapphire mining. Most of the money goes to the gym dealers and the retailers.
So I think I'm bringing this up because I think it's often important to point out how exploitation of animals often goes hand in hand with exploitation of humans. So you know, you see that this beautiful species is being threatened by something like illegal mining, and I think sometimes people may react in this way of like, oh, you know, being angry at these miners, Like don't they understand they're ignorant, and it's like, well, no, they're also being exploited by
this system. So it's really a systemic problem. It's not these poor people in Madagascar are just trying to make a living, who are the problem. It's this system that is causing this problem. So you know, it's important to have as much, if not more compassion for people as it is for when we're upset about animal being threatened.
Yeah, direct direct the anger towards the the people that are are causing the most of it. It's like I recycle, I you know, I try not to use one use plastics and stuff. But then you know, it's it's the thing you see all the time, like look at the top one hundred most polluting corporations in the world, and it's like, there's not there's no amount of getting on the same page as a human population that can that can prevent the amount of CO two release as these
corporations do. Exactly, So direct your ire at the appropriate uh people responsible exactly.
Follow the money, follow it.
Yes, always follow the money.
So we talked about PHO safe earlier, right, the very environmentally friendly uh personal sort of home security system that rivals these other silly home security systems. Who's Safe Keeps protects your home twenty four to seven with the presence of foul smelling dung that you spread on your door. But I actually do have another home security system called
Oxpecker Alert. It is an incredible, incredible technology of the red billed oxpeckers who can alert you to the presence of poachers of many mini meters away.
Oxpecker is a very misleading name or something. I will say that much. I was I was not sure if this is going to be a bird or I did not know what kind of Okay, all right, moving away.
Right, well, it is a bird. Before you finish that thought, the red billed oxpecker is a bird. It's a actually quite a pretty bird. Excellent ho would you describe this bird?
Oh yeah, that's a that's a gorgeous bird.
Yeah. Yeah, he's like a it's like a small tan and black bird with a yellow and red bill and these red eyes. Quite yeah, and beautiful and they like to hang out with some big friends zebras, hippos, giraffes, cattle and other large mammals of the savannah in Africa. So They even sit atop the fearsome rhino and nibble at ticks, botfly larvae and other pests. Love a good
relationship there, Yeah, and it's a complicated relationship. It's really interesting because they do help their large companions by eating parasites, but they do occasionally peck little wounds into their host's skin and sip on their host's blood, which actually would make the birds themselves parasites. But there's kind of debate, right like, because you know, even though that itself is parasitic, they are also helping their hosts by getting rid of parasites.
So it's like, well, do they do more harm than good or do they help more? And some of the A point in favor of the oxpecker not being a parasite but being in a mutualistic symbiotic relationship is the fact that they seem to protect black rhinos from poachers.
Wow.
So black rhinos are big, tough, endangered animals with great smell and hearing, but very bad eyesight, and they are unfortunately often the victims of human poaching and they are critically endangered. So rhino researcher doctor Rohan Plots noticed that rhinos that were close enough for them to observe had no oxpeckers on their backs. They always seem to not have their little bird friends, and that made him wonder,
that's an interesting coincidence. Maybe it's not a coincidence. So they did some observational studies that found that the oxpeckers helped alert the rhinos of a human's presence. So when the oxpeckers spot a human, they issue an alarm call, which is a hissing shriek, and the rhinos listen to this alarm call and we'll move away from the area. So these studies found that rhinos with oxpeckers are better
at moving away from humans than rhinos without oxpeckers. And what's really interesting is the more oxpeckers they have, the better they are at being alerted. So one oxpecker is okay, but you got a whole group of five ox checkers all shrieking at your like, ah, geez, what's going on?
Yeah? One one one alarm on your front door is nice. But if you have all the windows uh hooked up and then your back door hooked up too, you're gonna that's you're gonna be even more safe.
Exactly not. I mean, the the more alarms, the better carl alarms, air horns, everything bells.
Yes, seriously, it's the home.
Alone version of home security.
Yeah, yeah, seriously. I I love examples of species talking to each other. I absolutely loved. I heard a story a long time ago. I think it was on like an episode of Radio Lab or something where this this researcher tells the story of basically learning the distinct calls of monkeys and like eagles in I believe like South America, where they made distinct calls whenever a leopard was spotted.
And he is walking through the jungle and it's starting to get you know, dusk out, and suddenly overhead he hears the distinct call. And as he's walking through the jungle, he you know, from from area to area they're making the call. He was basically being stalked by a leopard through this jungle. Yeah, he only he only knew about it because these other animals were making their call specific to the leopard. They they made a specific call just
for the leopard. When there was when the monkeys were threatened by birds of prey like an eagle or something, then they would make a different different Yeah. Exactly. So that's how he knew that there was a leopard.
Following him, right, Because it matters whether where the threat is coming from, if it's from the sky, if it's a leopard, it's coming from the ground, and knowing where and and the nature of that threat is very important both for animals and human eavesdroppers. That's an incredible story. I love that. I mean in that it's it. So it's so interesting about that story is the way that human used that those other animal alarm calls is exactly the way the rhino is using the bird's alarm call.
Because there's no evidence that the birds are intentionally warning the rhino of this threat. It's not like the birds are like, hey, rhino, get out of the way. They're warning each other, Yeah, this is what they've evolved to have this alert system with each other to warn themselves of a threat. But the rhino has learned that this call means humans and will use that knowledge to move away, so exactly in the same way that that human researcher
is like, I've learned this call means a leopard. I'm in danger, yes, And so it's the same thing with the rhino. But even more terrifying than a leopard the human.
And also like there's a bit of self preservation there, I imagine from the bird, and that if my little floating raft of food, my buffet, my tank of a buffet on the savannah gets killed by these poachers, then I'm out of a food source.
It can't hurt. Yeah, it couldn't hurt for them to warn the rhino. It's again, it's hard to know whether that's just a happy coincidence or if there's any like, any sort of intention. I mean, I think it's safe to see there's probably not much of an intention for the bird to warn the rhino. I don't know if they could logic that out, but I mean, maybe a smarter bird. There are some birds that I would not necessarily be surprised that they In fact, they may sometimes
use alarm calls. No, there are actually birds that use alarm calls to scare other animals away from some kind of food source so that they can get to it, so they can There are definitely bird species. I take it back. There are bird species that know what they're doing,
and they can use their alarm calls to manipulate. So it's possible that these birds are somehow they do know that if they alert that the rhino will move away, which is much better for them than having to like, you know, fly away and find another another rhino to sit on. But there's no there's no evidence of that yet, so either way, this is a lovely little system. The rhino gets warned, the oxpecker gets to keep its perch, and humans get to be thwarted by a dynamic duo.
Beautiful.
I love it, so will a Ka Christy Yamagucci. Men. Thank you so much for joining me. Tell tell the people where they can find you.
Oh, thank you so much for having me again. It was a delight as usual. You can find me on Twitter at wopple house w A P P l E h O U s E. And that's pretty much where I live most of the time. Not in real life. You can find me on there. I don't even know what my Instagram handle is, to be honest with you, it's long. There's underscores involved, so whenever I stupidly make a handle with underscores, I always forget where they're at.
So yeah, just find me on there. You can listen to George Center pod or George Center, but at George Center Pod on Twitter and lower after hours. If you're a fan of the Dan LeBatard Show and enough of a fan that you would make a podcast about being a fan of the Dan le Batard Show, you can find me.
There and thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show, please leave writing and review. I read all the reviews. I love them so much. I really appreciate them all, cherish them, print them out, put them underneath my pillow, and kiss them before I go to bed at night. And thank you so much to the space Cossics where they're super awesome song XO Lumanna. Creature
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