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dot org slash join. Thank you. Kidneys known for being animal famous for being hedgehog shaped animals. Nobody thinks much about them, So let's have some fun. Let's find out why echidnas are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey, they're folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of Podcasts all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmid, and I'm not alone because
I'm joined by my ghost Katie Golden Katie. Yes, what is your relationship to or opinion of Echidna's.
I love them, That's how it is. We're in a very loving relationship. I love everything about these frittle guys. They're so funky. They look like something out of a surrealist painting, and they are truly very weird in terms of their anatomy and how they work as animals. You know, thumbs up Australia. You got another you know, got another good one?
Yeah, totally. I mean you think about animals more than I do. You have a wonderful podcast creature feature everyone should listen to. But I feel like in my learning about animals, there was a stage where people said, Australia is different. Oh, you learned about the animals. Now we're opening the Australia closet in the back of the story so you can see those and and the kidneys are one of those. It's awesome.
They have a lot of marsupials and monotremes, and both of those like to play by slightly different rules than the rest of the mammals.
So it's great.
So it's a you know, platypus included. It's it's but yeah, I actually find these guys kind of weirder than platypuses. Platypuses actually make more sense to me than these guys, so I'm excited to talk about them.
And also two tiny programming notes. One is that when folks bread up this topic, thank you to Da Koop Beer for suggesting it, also ls Gregor and others for supporting it. In the polls. A lot of it. Folks brought up knuckles, the echidna from the Sonic Games. That's our bonus topic, all knuckles.
All knuckles.
And then I've also found this pronounced more like echidna and more like echidna, and I find I just go back and forth. Please just go with it, folks.
It's fine. Yeah, tomato tomato really yeah, they you know, it's another thing this. I don't know if you're going to talk about this so much, but I think people like in terms of their size, they're different species of echidna, but the at least for one of the species, the long beak echidnas. Those are like the size that people think platypuses are. People imagine platypuses to be bigger than they actually are. Platypuses are quite small, like a month
old kitten. They're they're pretty small the platypus. When you look at pictures of an adult platypusts, people are usually pretty shocked by how small they actually are, whereas a kidneys are the ones that are actually a big handful, And I think people have it flipped like people think kidneys are the little ones. Platypuses are sort of the bigger ones. But it's actually the opposite of kidneys are like they're they're a nice armful of weird, spiky, snooty little animal.
That's exciting. I in my research really focused out of kidneys. That I missed that platypuses are so small. Apparently they're only little more than the foot long as an adult. Great, maybe maybe approaching foot and a half or two feet. That's that's not that big, yeah, because a lot of that length is duck faced or tail, you know.
Yeah, exactly. You can hold them in both of your hands, like if you cut your both your hands you can fit a platypus in there very comfortably for some time.
Do I do this? How do I do this right now?
And then with with the a kidneys, that's not going to at least for the long beaked to kidneys which are bigger, that's not gonna work. It's too big.
Yeah, let's talk all about the echidnas and the long beak and the short beak and so on, because on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called I might read some stats. That's the best idea. Gonna put them on the SIFT podcast.
Golf clap, golf clap, golf claps all around.
Thank you. Then it was a bit of my action populated on the discord. Thank you. We have a new name for this every week. Please make a Masillian wackem bad as possible. Submit yours through Discord or to sif pot at gmail dot com. The first number four echidnas
is two or four. We know how to count how many achidney species there are in the world, but people tend to call it either two or four because in general there are short beaked echidnas and long beaked echidnas, and then also the long beaks break down into three entire species according to taxonomous.
Yeah, I mean it's taxonomy is always a little bit fiddly because you can sometimes have a species and have an argument about whether there's two different species or of ones subspecies. It's not necessarily that they discover an undiscover species of these animals. It's that there's like genetic research or arguments about whether or not they are they count as an entirely different species when they're close enough genetically, or if they're like a subspecies, things like that.
Yeah, and the short beaked ekidna is someone I've probably seen the most like pictures of because that species lives all over Australia and nearby islands. There are relatively large numbers of them, and then long beaked echidnas all three species around the island of New Guinea. And so if you think of like quote unquote Australian animal, it's probably a short beak ekidna. Those are a little bit smaller.
They tend to be active during the day, long beaked er active at night, and long beaked are in greater danger of extinction. While this number there is twenty twenty three because in the year twenty twenty three people documented a living member of one of the long beaked ekidney species with a camera for the first time. Wow, twenty twenty three.
They're pretty I think outside of like natural rescue areas and preserves are very very shy. Yeah.
Yeah, and apparently all the achidneys are shy, but especially the long beaked. And then they're in the just parts of New Guinea and in smaller numbers, and so we have surprisingly little observation of some of these because that one that we hadn't documented. It's a species that's called Attenborough's long beaked Echidna in honor of Sir David Attenborough.
Yeah. Well, he's a nice guy. He lies in the dirt and talks about a kidness even when the cameras aren't rolling. That's what people don't know is that he's just always doing that where he's like lying in the dirt talking about a kidness, but like when people notice he's doing it, the cameraman come over and try to catch him in the act.
Now, I want him to do all sorts of animal behaviors that would be relatively impolite in human society. But because he's describing it in such a nice voice as he does it, we're all like, that's great.
Yeah, he's like he's peeing on a chair leg explaining how this helps him mark his territory, and we all accept it.
And we're like, oh, yeah, I wonder who he's going to mate with in his territory that he's wallowing. And we're like, look at that little guy wallow. That's how he keeps cool. It's the only way they can keep cool.
But then who David Attenborough's David Attenborough documentary. It's sort of a who do we get to narrate the David Attenborough documentary?
It's the eternal question of nature? Yeah, yeah, because there's the western lung beak to kidna, the Eastern lung beak to kidna, and then Attenborough's long beak to kidna, and in nineteen sixty one researchers decided they had discovered the Attenborough's long beak to kidna species. In nineteen sixty one, they found one deceased specimen, they identified it, put it in a museum, said surely we'll see more of this,
and then nobody identified more of them until twenty twenty three. Wow, And in the intervening sixty plus years, scientists wondered did these go extinct, Like did we kind of find one when they were on the way out? And apparently not.
Yeah, they're just real reclusive. I mean, they spent a lot of their time just snuffling around in the leaf litter in these forests. So I don't think that it's like super easy to spot them.
It does seem really hard. And at also like, if you do see one, how do you tell it apart from the other two.
From a different because yeah, they are quite similar looking, Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, we really won't spend any time on the differences between these because it's not that visible or easy to figure out.
It's only the long beaked and short beaked are pretty easy to tell apart. And that's about it.
Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, And we only found Attenborough's long beaked to kidna for the second time ever because in twenty twenty three, a research team from Oxford University tried to study the entire ecosystem of what's called the Cyclops Mountains in the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea. We'll link just the geography of New Guinea as an island that's about half in Indonesia and half its own country of Papula and New Guinea.
And they were looking for all sorts of things in these mountains. They found a lot of insects, species, they found amphibians, they found a kind of tiny shrimp that live in wet soil and in trees instead of say an ocean. It's amazing.
Yeah, man, it's gonna it's gonna be my next sort of food sensation.
Ugh, can we get some tree shrimp for the table?
Yeah, some tree shrimp poppers? Thank you.
They just pop over like they fly out of the kitchen.
Yeah, that's that's pretty great. I love I love it when you find out those like weird crustacean type animals are just like not in the ocean.
Yeah. And so they're doing this observation with dozens of trail cameras, Like they wire up a bunch of video cameras and they say, wow, we're finding like dozens of species. This is already great. And then toward the end of the project, an echidna shuffles onto camera. Yeah, and they look at the footage and they they say this is amazing. This is the second identified Attenborough's long peaks to kidna ever, and they're not extinct.
Turns out, I think that given that it's not like a heavily surveiled area, it's safe to say that, like, just because you don't see doesn't mean they're extinct exactly.
And I also just love that some of these Akidney species are basically secret, Like we still need to find out a lot more about these there's a lot to learn about the world.
Yeah, they're just secretly incredibly secret. That's it. That's all we know about them.
Sis, yes, yeah, and yeah and pps Nature says that the Eastern long beak to kidna is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN that does these designations of species in trouble, and the other two are critically endangered. Meanwhile, we think there are millions of short beaked to kidnas in Australia and that species is of least concerned. They're not like easy to find or super underfoot, but it's not a species where we're concerned that they're going to go away.
Right, Unless you are concerned that they are going to take over, then maybe we should be a little more concerned.
I welcome the takeover. Seems great.
They're very cool. I don't know how much you're going to talk about like their snoots, but and the superpowers of their snoots, but I trust them to run the government.
Yeah, this I love that this episode will be very biological, Like there's almost too much ECHIDNA anatomy and biology to talk about, and so we're just going to be all over the place of and then this is amazing, and then this is amazing, and it's amazing that it's like even for an animal episode, this is pretty biological because the kidnap bodies are wild and yeah, and then also those short beaked of kidneas are a target of the pet trade.
Yeah, that's not great.
We don't think that will like end their numbers, but probably shouldn't keeping a kidney as a pet. And Australian law says that there are some ways to legally sell any kidnap pet if it's been raised in captivity. But the thing is, it's really hard to breed echidnas in captivity. And the number here is twenty nineteen. In twenty nineteen, forensic scientists created a database of ECHIDNA DNA by looking at the DNA and their spines in order to fight the illegal trade of echidnas.
Ooh, this is this is exciting. This is like CSI echidna. This is exciting.
It's those exact same kind of scientists. Yeah, and echidnas are covered in spines and those are made of caraten. It's like the hair and fingernails of humans. It's like the scales of pangolins, if people remember the pangolin episode.
Around twenty nineteen, a team of forensic scientists at the Australian Museum and also working with law enforcement, they found that there were at least seventy echidnas listed for sale as pats in Australia, but all of Australia's zoos had only successfully bred about thirty ekidneys in the previous ten years combined, and so they said, just based on the numbers, it's unlikely animal breeders bread all these. They're probably just catching them in the wild and forging papers to sell them.
Yeah, like like faking baby photos of the echidnas, like where they photoshop on little diapers, like no, we raise this one, see you look.
Right, baptism yeah, faith.
Yeah. The problem with one of the problems with the pet trade is not necessarily that this is like people might think like there's plenty of echidneys, they're not going to make the kidneas go extinct, Like what's the problem with the pet trade. One of the big problems is UH disease. So zoonotic diseases are a huge concern with
the pet trades. So when you bring animals that don't normally have a lot of contact with human beings or different animals, right, Like echidnas are not a very social animal with like a huge giant colonies of other kidnas, right, and so you're bringing them and having them no noose snowp to snoop with a lot of different animals, and that's that's not good UH for or diseases jumping from human to a kidner or kidney to human. And the other thing is just like it is really like these
are they're not great pets. I wouldn't imagine. I think that they seems like they're going to be happiest just snoofling around in leaf litter in forests, and that's really hard to recreate like a giant snowful zone in your backyard. I think it's probably not going to be adequate exactly.
Yeah, a few verses this week they all said that echidnas are both very plentiful in Australia and also not seen that often because they're very shy and don't like bigger at this. And so if you keep it as a pat it has to be aut us all the time. That's not what it wants.
Come on, yeah, it's going to stress it out.
And yeah, and so Now, as of twenty nineteen, Australian authorities can use a database of a kidney DNA to check out a pet trader's claim, Like they can take DNA from the caroten spine of that echidna and check whether it's parents are probably why old versus the known echidnas and captivity.
And then does the kidnat get like a reprieve the ceculic co If it's.
That would if they could specifically five the parents, they could like send it back to its family. That would be a basic almost kind of a step back. The next number is two, because platypuses and echidneys are the two broad kinds of monotrems in the modern world. There's really just one platypus species today.
It's so weird. It's such a strange troop because like all the other monotremes are extinct, these are the only extant monotremes. It's so funky. They're so unique compared to other mammals, even compared to like marsupials, which are quite weird. Yeah, they you know, they're the only well I don't want I don't want to steal your thunder if you've got if you've got stuff. But yeah, there, it's just just
it's super weird. Like they are mammals, but they're just so different from the rest of placental mammals.
Yeah. I was always kind of loosely told that mammals don't lay eggs, and then monotreams are mammals that lay eggs. So there you go. Yeah, the.
Things categories are not black and white in biology. But yeah, they are mammals. They do leggs. They also lactate, but they don't have nipples, and so that means that their milk just kind of like leaks out of their bellies through their pores and just a free for all. They also have a kloaca, which is not something that mammals typically have. Like the kloaca is found in birds, reptiles, amphibians. You know, it's this amazing hole that does a lot
of different stuff. But males also have a penis, and it's a really weird one, so it's they're pretty all over the place, these guys.
I also assumed monotreams would be named after the egg part, but apparently the word monotrem comes from etymology, meaning one opening. Like you're named after the kloaka, the kloika for urination, defecation, mating.
Yeah, that's one thing that's really weird. If I can just make one more note about the penis, which is that the males have this very strange penis, but they don't actually urinate out of the penis. They urinate out of the kloaca. They only use the penis for sperm transfer.
That's it, because it is into takeaway number one. A melee kidna has a four front penis, which is sort of like having a double reptile penis, sort of.
Yeah, these look look. I normally don't say google these things because it's usually not safe, but if in the safest way that you can look up ekidna penises, because they're so yeah, to me, it's funnier than it is gross or lude it just because it looks like a little hand. It's like a little cartoon hand. They have four heads, essentially like four apertures. And again like this is not for your nation, this is only for sperm transfer.
Yes, yeah, apparently they like tuck it away except when they're using it, and.
It's very polite.
It is honestly keysors or science writing for The New York Times by Natalie Angier, a twenty twenty one study in the Journal's Sexual Development. And then a mental fluss piece, which is one of many ways you can see pictures because it has four glands, it has four sort of tips on it. And then some observers compare this to the hemipenes of reptiles, because a hemipene is a pair of reproductive organs tucked into the reptile's body, usually until it's time to mate. That's sort of like a two
headed penis. And then a kidness basically have a double two headed penis. It's four heads.
Yeah, And if you actually, if you do look at heavy pens of of reptiles, they look like medieval weapons often because they're like spiky and weird. It looks like some kind of weird, weird medieval weapon that probably didn't work very well, but yet I believe also for the for snakes and reptiles, they do not urinate out of those. Those are just for looking cool and passing on their DNA.
The medieval element. Our recent episode about HS tapes, people were very excited about your Phantom of the Robin Hood Disney movie, and so now I'm thinking about Sir Hess having some kind of weapon and penis combo and the gritty reboot.
They never that never made it. They really need to do a live action remake of Robin Hood.
Now.
I know that Disney doesn't have a great track record with live action remakes. They're usually superfluous at best and terrible monstrosities at worst. But hear me out, Okay, sir Hey gets a heavy penis, we get the freaking lion king treatment where these are realistic gas animals and like to the tea and they're just fighting. And you just got a fox and a sir his fighting and you see sir His is weird mating apparatus. There's uh, you know, do do do do do do?
Do?
Oh my god? Uh you know, I think it'd be cool.
We're gonna be like only a quarter of the way through the pitch, and Disney has already walked us into the parking lot and not validated if they put black.
Bags over our head and are taking us to the facility.
And this penis apparently we've done further continuing study of it, because wow, there's so much going on, and we think that the male akid is able to ejaculate from just two of the four structures at a time. Yeah, and so when a male mates with a female, it uses essentially half of the penis, so we can use its other half on the next female, and then they also
have a faster fractory time period. So a study in twenty twenty one suggested that a male at kid that could ejaculate ten times before it needed a significant break to rechart.
Golf clap, golf clup, golf clup. Good job, guys. So it's less it's less a less a garden sprinkler, and more of like a machine gun.
Right, it's like nineteen eighties action movie weapons.
Yeah, right, right, right, which is really really important for males when they're trying to get as much spoying out there as possible. And being able to have like a like there are there are little mammals that will mate so frequently until they like collapse and have heart attacks and tie. Because the idea is like the more genetic
material they get out, the more successful they're going to be. Right, Like, it's more likely that they're going to have something that carries on their genes and for it really depends on the species. There's a lot of types of animals where the males actually do invest more in parental care and it's less about it's more about quality over quantity. But there's plenty of animals where it's about quantity over quality. So this is one of them.
Yeah, yeah, especially with the males because because the other amazing thing to be about their reproduction is takeaway number two. Echidnas are named after a mythological serpent woman m partly because of how female ekidnas lay and carry eggs.
Now I'm excited because I didn't know this, and I thought I knew everything about a kidneas, but enomology. Now, entomology I know a lot about, but etymology gets me. So I'm excited about this.
Ooh, and the kidnas eat bugs, so they love entomology too delicious to them.
They also do.
Yeah, yeah that the name at least in like European language is like English, This name Echidna comes from Greek mythology. A being named Echidna was the product of monstrous mating between sea and land beings generated a monster with the head and breasts of a human woman hot and the lower body and tail of a serpent a.
Little less hot but still hot, I guess.
And so yeah, like Europeans partly re use that name for this animal because it's like a mammal but does eggs, and they're like it's a reptile in a mammal all at once, like the serpent woman monster. Yeah, they just straight up re used the name. They didn't adapt it at all.
Yeah. I love it when, like when old Europeans were confused by mammals that didn't play by the rules, like when it was with fevers. It's like they're almost seafood, right because they're in the.
Water a lot, all Europeans and also lots of people till today. They're like I only know a couple of things, So if there's a new thing, I'm naming it after the old thing, right, exactly, that's all I got. Yeah, and yeah, And then because it's such a Greek mythology name first Nations peoples in Australia had totally different names for it, naming the Gamilla ray language is Biggiebilla and the name in the world Pierri language is yanar Lingi.
It's all just completely different names because they didn't have Greek mythology of course.
Right right, they weren't like they didn't see this like fuzzy, spiky animal with absolutely no tits and think what about the Greek half snake lady with boobies right right.
And it's also it doesn't attack humans at all. It's been a useful food source for people. Like it's just like a positive animal in your life. So why would you name it after a monster.
It's just a cute little snorfloer who goes after like bugs in the leaf litter.
Yeah, that's all that's all it wants to do. And so yeah, that's where they get their name. I had no idea, and a lot of it is because Europeans were like, this mammal lays eggs. I can't handle it, right, and the egg laying process is amazing semikidness, apparently, especially a subspecies on what's called Kangaroo Island south of the
Australian mainland. They'll do something called a love train, which is where one female akida is followed by a long line of male ekidness ruffling around and hoping to.
Mate the most perverted congo line that is out there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the strange specifically sexual penis of the male plus the female's reproductive anatomy that the goal is to have as many sperm compete for just one egg. A female a kidney lays just one egg at a time.
It's wild because she's got some sort of marsupial characteristics as well. She's got a pouch and she it's a weird kind of step between placental mammals where we give birth, we don't. We're not we're live bearing, we don't layla eggs. And then you you look at marsupials and they do have live births of like teeny tiny little beans that have to crawl their way up into this pouch where
they continue to develop until they're actual identifiable babies. But then you've got like this in between step, which is the echidnas where they lay the eggs, but they store the eggs in a pouch, so the egg continues to develop and hatches inside the pouch. So it's kind of this weird in betweeny step between laying eggs and just like laying an egg, sticking it in a nest and being like good luck and having a live birth as a mammal.
Yes, I didn't know any of that before research egg because it's so profoundly confused, especially if you have like a loose knowledge of kangaroos. Let's say, yeah that you're like, okay, so there's humans and kangaroos. Those are the two mammal ways, and then.
Those are the two animals.
Yeah, and like you said, this echidna baby. Also the human nickname for these babies, at least in English is a puggle.
Puggle great, so cute.
You can find pictures of that too, We'll link some. They really cute. But yeah, the echidna, it lays an egg and then doesn't leave it in a nest or whatever. The female forms a somewhat temporary pouch by contracting abdominal muscles and then incubates the egg against her body for about ten days.
I mean, we all sometimes clinch to try to look good in bathing suits. But imagine doing that for a long time to wait for this egg to hatch. Just the control, the core control is impressive.
Yeah, because it ends up being about two months of carrying something because the egg hatches after ten days. And then the puggle is inside mom's pouch for several weeks. Like Katie said, they don't have nipples. They have a gland type thing called a milk patch where milk just comes out of it like a part of their body. And it is mammal milk. It's just not exactly the
anatomy for dispensing it we're used to. And yeah, and then the puggle is in the pouch for about seven weeks and only sort of gets kicked out because it starts developing spines. Yeah, and mom says, no spines in the pouch.
She's like, oh, what the hell, get out?
Yeah, and then the kidnam Mom digs a burrow to like put this seven week old baby in. And also apparently they then leave their baby to fend for themselves at a relatively young age by mammal standards.
Yeah, I mean, you know, they did do a good amount of stuff for like a few months and then they're just like, you know what, Actually, you're good. Now you're all spiky. But the it's a good kind of timeline though, right, because once they develop spines, then they are somewhat protected from predation, so you are getting at the stage where they might be able to fin for themselves without having to give birth to a bald spikes, which would be really awful.
Yes, yeah, they let them go around seven months apparently seven months old, so they're not totally an infant.
At seven months. Babies are just that, you know, they're ready to start working. Send them to the mines.
Let's see you have spines, a tie, a briefcase. Okay, you're in ad.
Sales, Yeah, get out there, Yeah.
All right yeah yeah. Another number to fit in is about forty years of age. That's the life span of any kidney in the wild. Approximately. They can get closer to fifty in captivity. So a mom stopping around seven months on that long of a life span is almost reptilia into our minds, like it's these because animals are such mammals and such other stuff too.
It really is strange. But it's not like I don't want to get people to get the impression that these are the ancestors to all other mammals, right, Like, these are not. It's not like we all it's not like they are the in between step between reptiles and then the rest of mammals and then we all descended from
echidnas and another monitors. That's not the case. They just represent like we don't necessarily know what the in between step was for the rest of mammals, like what the common ancestor was, but we we think that these ones might have been. They might have shared some qualities.
Yeah, that's a great segue into the next takeaway too, because takeaway number three, based on new studies of ancient bones, we think echidnas and platypuses evolved from the same aquatic mammal near anti Arctica.
Ooh, that's that's crazy. That's wild, because yeah, like we don't usually go back up like once we like come out of the water and then we're like actually no, the sucks, and we go back into the water. We don't usually go back out.
Yeah, there was a lot of like back and forth water and land with an animal that led to echidnas anti platypuses. Nice and platypuses are still semi aquatic. Echidnas are mostly a land animal that it also turns out as excellent its swimming, partly because of this heritage.
Nice never it never forgets. Michael Phelps was once it's ancestor, and the.
Big reason for monotrems seems to be plate tectonics, and that monotrems were sort of separated from the rest of animals in a crucial and specific way.
But like whatever God you believe in did their best to keep these weird separated from the rest of mammals.
Yeah, I mean the scientology god, and so yeah, he used the nineteen sixties commercial airliner to separate the bottle trees. Yeah, because the long set of movements of what became continents involves a very large super continent that we've named Gondwana, and about one hundred and eighty million years ago that split in half. Gondwana ends up forming pretty much all the Southern Hemisphere lands. So like one half becomes Africa
and South America. After that's further subdivides, the other half continues breaking into pieces, creates Madagascar, India, and a lot of other things. And then about eighty five million years ago Antarctica and Australia began to split. Yeah, they were together toward the last stage of all this.
God damn it, yoka Ona, what won't you ruin.
Yo go dated Antarctica? She has big coats on and stuff. Yeah, And apparently also the climate was different, and so the combo Antarctica Australia had like a polar forested region. It's not all the way at the south pole, but it's below what's now the Antarctic Circle. It's very cold and
also a thriving ecosystem. Researchers from the Australian Museum and a few universities in twenty twenty two announced that they thought they found the first mono dream Wow, which was a tiny prehistoric mammal scientific name Taina lofos truslaiai, and it lived on the combo Australia Antarctica with polar forests.
Is do we have like pictures of these guys?
No, just like bone fragments that they've sussed out what it could be. And it was also tiny. It'd only weighed about forty grams, which is about what one slice of bread weys. And it was tiny to be a tiny insective orient like dove into snow and moss to eat bugs, right.
And snow and moss does have a lot of insects, but they're little, they're tiny insects.
Yeah. And we also think this helps explain the electrosensitive parts of platypuses, indi kidness. Ah.
Yeah, this is exciting because they, like sharks, have electro receptors. The way it works is every animal produces small electrical signals because of muscle movement, also brain activity, but mostly what they would be detecting would be muscle movement, and
so you have these these very sensitive little glands. When it detects sort of this change in this electrical balance, right, Like, it triggers that nerve there, and then they can, like because they have so many of these glands, they can determine the direction from where it's coming and then they can go in that direction and find the thing. And both platypuses and kidnas have electroceptors. Platypuses to have them in their billain kidneys have them in their snoots. Yeah.
Yeah, like a lot of animals we associate with the sea. The theory is either from living in the sea or from tracking down bugs in snow. These earliest monotremes develop that same electrosensitive ability to like feel where prey are from the electricity in their bodies and helps them eat and live. That is almost unique with land animals. It's another amazing anatomy thing.
And it's really helpful for them because for platypuses, they're often looked around for worms and other little invertebrates in muddy, silty water where they can't see very well. And for kidnas they're rooting around in the dirt for worms and stuff where you know, they can't see very well.
Yeah, it's so cool that the ability has been useful for at least one hundred and thirty million years. It's yeah, good to keep that up. I love it.
It's like you can feel food with your face, which we can too, but usually that's when you just sort of rub it into your face and by that point you kind of already have the food and it's fine. But yeah, being able to sense your food moving around is very useful.
Thinking of David Edinburgh describing as a disgusting behaviors in the coolest voice.
Yeah, he's rubbing a sandwich against his face. It's like, this is how the kidna finds its food.
The Attenborough acquias the HOGI and like people are, that's amazing. Nature's so cool, and he's just ruining the restaurant and yeah, and then there's tons of debates still with this whole evolutionary trajectory. There is a study published about it in April twenty twenty five. They examined one bone from an extinct animal scientific name Crierictus cad berry eye. It was
found on a coast in southeastern Australia. It's the only bone we have from the entire species and based on its weight and its microscopic features, we think this was a semi aquatic burrowing monotrem Cryarechtes cadberry eye.
I bet it was cute.
Yeah, we just figure it looks monotremy. We'd only have the one bone, so is.
It a cute bone though, I bet it's a cute bone.
It is. It's the bone called the humorus, so ah, funny. Our theory based on that is one of a couple things happened to make platypuses into kidnas separate. Either Cryirectus continued to live mostly in water and became platypuses, and then a branch of them moved onto lands and became echidnas or cryirectus evolved into platypuses, and then platypuses branched into echidness and apparently echidna fossils are much newer, right.
So we so basically we don't know. So basically we have no idea. It could be either wine, it could be happened this way or the complete opposite. Those are our two theories.
Yeah, that's right. It's the few things we do feel like we know are that echidnas have a bunch of aquatic life features that are surprising. And also the way continents moved explains why monotreams are only down in the
Australia area there and not across the rest of the world. Theoretically, this branch of evolution could be all over, but they were initially just living in polar forests of the combo Antarctica Australia, and by the time they adapted to warmer climates and other climates the other continents that moved away.
They're like, ah, I get that thing away from us.
Yeah, that's why they're in the Australia category only yes, yes, like I don't have monotreams on my street, reoding through the trash.
You know, yeah, I mean if only like it is, it is still to me it is wild that we even have any marsupials in the Americas, Like we have possums, which is crazy.
A miracle. They're great.
Yeah, they're great. They are rooting in your trash, so that's fun.
I want them to have it.
Yeah, I know, good for them.
Like when a mom puts a note at a kid's school lunch, I put a little note for the opossums.
Like yeah, I love he's have good day, enjoy love you and and yeah.
Echidnas, they they're amazing at burrowing. They have hind feet that face backwards. There's a theory that the backward facing feet might have originated as rudders for paddling through water. The electro reception, the focus on eating insects, it all could fit aquatic life or be a reason they moved on to land because there were more bugs. And then. Echidnas do not need to swim and love to swim.
They have the diving reflex where they can tell their body to conserve energy when submerged in water to maximize oxygen. They move very well through it. And my favorite quote about this is Australian geographic. They interviewed Peggy riss Miller, who's any kidne expert and works for a wildlife center, and she says that people often think they are rescuing a swimming echidna. They're like, oh, that a kid is
in the water. It needs help. Yeah, and as soon as they pull it out of the water, it runs straight back into the water to be in the water.
Yeah. It's like someone's chilling out in a like a kiddie pool and then a rogue lifeguard comes and it's like, I'll save you and smashes into the kiddie pool and you're like what.
Yeah. So, especially Americans and like video game fans too, we think these are sort of a hedgehog looking guy that just wants to be on land all the time and they are quietly an Antarctic swimmer sort of. It's amazing.
Yeah. They also the males on those back legs. The males do have these spurs, which you probably heard of in Platypuses are venomous, like they're one of the rare venomous mammals. Echidneas don't have venom don't mention it to them, like, don't tell the male a kindas like, I know you don't have venom It's considered really impolite, but like, yeah, they're they're they're not venomous, they're not harmful, but still
don't pick it, like, don't pick them up. I mean, you know, just leave them alone, let them swim around.
Yeah, and apparently they can like they still have the spurs sort of and they can release a hormone or a communicative thing through it. But yeah, it's not venomous anymore. They let it go.
Yeah, it's not it's not dangerous. Yeah.
Yeah, So, like Katie said, be polite to your local, didn't it right?
Let them swim? Yeah, remember that nine pm to two am is a kidnea free swim.
But that's what I want to be at the pool to watch. Uh And folks, that's so many numbers and takeaways already, We're going to take a quick break and then do a couple more takeaways about these amazing echidna monodreams.
I'm excited.
We are back, and we're back with takeaway number four. Short beaked echidnas air ate until the soil across all of Australia.
You know, I've never thought about that, but that makes complete sense because all the snuffalon We've been talking about, all the snufflin, and I've just never thought about the consequences of the snuffalin.
A like nickname for ekidnas is the spiny ant eater, and for reasons we just explored, they're not particularly related to ant eaters or hedgehogs. They're from this other whole branch. But they're constantly eating ants and termites and other bugs. They love to dig, and in the process they support the entire ecosystem of all of Australia, from snowy mountains to the hottest outback.
That's uh, that's fantastic.
Yes, it's amazing.
They're also super cute. I mean, like, if you if you can do yourself a favor and look for try to find photos of short beaked a kinya's with their faces directly at the camera. It's the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life.
We were what me, Kittie were you may like, I said her, the what pic trifiut where it just kind of looks like the echidna is grinning. It's not really grinning. But I love it. It's I'm gonna post it. It's my favorite.
They're real cute. They're real, real cute.
You replied with, what it was even snootier, like in a good way. The snoop was like, hello, not not snooty like a rich person.
It's all the cuteness of a hedgehog with an even bigger snoot.
Yeah, it's great. They also have a snoot with a long, sticky tongue, and they don't have teeth. They grind the bugs against a hard mouth bone. But they're amazing at eating bugs with that whole snowden system. And then the electro receptors to see them.
Ant eaters are similar. They have a long, sticky tongue. They grind ants through like sort of a hard throat area. So it's like a very similar mechanics. But they're not. They didn't descend from one another or anything like that. It's an example of convergent evolution exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, then anteaters would be like what are you? You're laying an egg? What? They're so different?
Ah, dang, I should try that.
Oh yeah, maybe that's good. Yeah. A key source about this digging and climate support is a twenty sixteen study in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Also more writing about that from Cosmos magazine by Amy Middleton. Because this twenty sixteen study, you know, it's just one study, but they tagged and tracked the activities of short beaked echidneas, the mainly Australian kidna, and even as recently as twenty sixteen researcher we're I think they spend their day eating bugs,
but like, what are the details. We don't really know because we're not observing it that much and we need to tag it. And they discovered two amazing things. One is that he kidness spend about twelve percent of their day digging, like actively just digging, which is a lot, Like twelve is a lot. If you think about if you did that in the day, you know, like you would be a digging animal if you.
Did that, it sounds not bad, you know, like just digging, you know, when you're not if you're not digging for the man. If I had to dig for the man, then I think it would suck. But if I'm digging for me m E and just digging all day, that seems kind of fun. Yeah, hanging out with the worms, slurping them up when I find them, like spaghetti's.
We should seize the means of digging. We should dig for ourselves.
For not for the man. But yeah, their claws are really weird and shovel like they like, they're very cute, and then you zoom in on their claws and they're nasty as Yeah.
The two observations one is how much digging they do, like in a concentrated way. The other thing they found is that echidnas walk in a funny way. If you've seen videos of a kidnas walking, it's a funny little shuffle, it's really cute. But the way their feet move when they do that disturbs the soil more than an average shuffle, and so it sort of creates a light digging element to the way they walk ow.
So it's sort of like when we talked about buffalo that they they will make little little trenches with their hooves. These guys make little tiny trenches with their little claws exactly.
That's exactly the thrilling feeling I had. I was like, echidnas are sort of a tiny Australian bison. Great great, great, exciting, exciting, very heavy and yeah, and one term for what ekidneys are doing with that is bioturbation.
Eh oh, that sounds cool.
An animal stirring up and tilling and narrating soil, you know, like when the kidna digs to eat that ant. It's not by attribation necessarily, but when I'm just like doing stuff that adjusts soil, that's that right. Cool.
I'm gonna like when I'm just walking around in the dirt and someone asks me what I'm doing, saying bioturbating, You're welcome, yeah.
And using these two discoveries, these researchers did a possibly wrong estimate, but they did like a bunch of calculating, and they came up with a number of one adultakid ina moves two hundred and four cubic meters of dirt per year, h one adulty kid inna two hundred and four cubic meters.
It seems like a lot of dirt. I don't really know how much dirt that is. I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm bad at units. I'm trying trying to picture the amount of dirt. Is it a lot of dirt?
They tried to help They did a comparison where they said, Okay, if twelve ekidnas do that amount, that's enough dirt to fill an empty Olympic swimming pool.
That's a lot of dirt. Okay, I get it.
That's a lot of Olympic swimming pool.
Yeah, right by twelve by twelve ekidness.
Yeah, and they're little like compared to an Olympic swimming pool, you.
Know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's pretty good stuff. Yeah. So they're they're bioturbating the dirt, and so that's does that have like a pretty profound effect on the on the ecosystem.
It does. It helps capture and retain leaf litter and soil. It traps organic matter below the surface of the soil, so then plants rooted in at animals living in it can all eat. I like the idea that a kidneys are basically making more stuff for the bugs they eat. Yeah, Like it's a nice situation all around. And then also ekidnas make foraging pits actively to find bugs they found.
When any kidney does that, the soil in and around the pit absorbs double the amount of water afterwards, but it would have if it hadn't been disturbed.
So they're kind of raising the water table maybe.
Yeah, and also like helping plants get water from that soil, so like they're sort of greening their whole world by doing this.
They're like little gardeners. Did you ever watch or did you ever read bea Trix Potter books when you.
Were a kid, and not really I'm familiar with that.
Hey, I read them. They were very cute. They had she had like a little hedgehog lady who is very industrious. And I think that there's a lot of love for hedgehogs in the UK because of all the good they do for gardens. But this is like the same thing we need, because I think it was Miss tiggy Winkle was the hedgehog one, which is you know, definitely what female hedgehogs are generally named. And I just I want an Australian version of Beatrix Potter with all the beautiful illustrations,
but with these really weird versions of these animals. That would be really cool.
Miss echidnasiggy Winkle look out for the love trade, oh boy. Yeah, yeah, Like it's it's just such an astounding animal for every animal around it. And the other thing with modern Australia is that as primarily white colladizers proceeded to build like
European style cities in Australia. That expansion of human habitat has impacted a lot of Australian mammals, and apparently echidnas are the most common remaining mammal that does bioturbation, because other animals like bandicoots and also bilbies are known for doing bioturbation type stuff too. Is they look for bugs and move around, but their habitats and numbers were impacted a lot more than a kid numbers. Yeah, so ekidnas are like picking up the job in some ways.
Also by those dang cane toads and also rabbits. I don't compete with bilbi's and bandicoots, so but yeah, the kidnas remain snow competition.
Yeah, and like going into this, I really would have presumed all the kidneys are endangered because just many cool animals are. But the short beaked ones in Australia and it's adjacent little islands are are doing pretty well. There's a lot of them, and so it's a surprisingly plentiful animal and it makes the whole ecosystem go.
I mean, they are covered in spikes, they are covered in spikes.
Also mentioned they do this in every Australian climate. That helps get into our last takeaway number five. Echidnas do amazing and silly things to survive in various climates.
Oh, I'm excited to hear this. They wear do They wear a little hat, roll around in scarves.
They're very good at cold or hot temperatures. And one of the cold temperature things is that some subspecies just grow thicker coverings of fur and air. Yeah, so they're like fuzzier.
Reasonable, it's really good.
Subspecies in Tasmania known for that in the mountains. Yeah.
Yeah.
The main source here is an excerpt from the book Platypus Matters, The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals by Cambridge Zoology Museum director Jack Ashby, also writing by a veterinary scientist, Kate Dutton Register who lectures at the University of Queensland. Echidnas with those sharp spines on their body that also does a lot of temperature control. They mostly release heat through their belly, their limbs and other not spiny small areas.
They're also amazing at forming a ball. Yeah, they will at the slightest provocation, apparently as little as a twig crunching near them in a way they don't expect. They will tuck their limbs and belly under the spines and then also fully ball up. They have a layer of muscle that, when contracted, works like a draw string to pull their spines down over their limbs heads.
Zep, like yeah, whoop, goodbye. Yeah, no there, it's only it's like only spines. When you look at when they're all curled up, it's a very impressive ball of spoikes.
It is the apparently other move they can do besides the ball is Jack Ashby says they can do what he compares to jazz hands with all four limbs in order to like make their whole body dig down and just be a dome of spikes in dirt.
That's fantastic. Yeah, I think I see why these guys have survived for so long. Because they can be ball of spike or jazz hands. You into submission.
Almost even more than the spines. They're super tough against temperatures and partly because their bodies can go into tor poor and fully hibernation.
Yeah, and tour poor is basically when your body systems slow down. It's not quite hibernation, but your metabolism slows down, Your body kind of slows down. But it's a lot it's easier to wake up from than hibernation, Like you can do it shorter periods of time.
That's so cool. Yeah, again, like loose understanding of mammals that stuff I associate with like bears, and then hey, kidneys are doing it very exciting.
Actually bears are. It's an interesting thing because bears are kind of considered like the most famous hibernators, but they don't. They're not actually major hibernators when you compare them to a lot of other animals, Like bats are really good at it. A lot of smaller mammals are actually quite good at hibernation. The record takers for hibernations are things that like bats, I can just hybridate many many, many months at a time and just almost completely stop their bodily processes.
That's bats should be famous for that. That's so cool. They should be Yeah, why do we think bears are amazing at it? And then bats are some sort of dracula like, like, well, bats should be famous for hibernating.
It's really not fair. I think it's a barrel obbyists have gotten gotten the message out big bear.
Oh no. And in political cartoons, bears are the Soviets, so that's bad. They're in the government. Oh no. But they're also the markets, so oh yeah, right, do they love capital? Do they hate capital? Come on?
Yeah, I have I've never figured out what a bolish market and a bearish market is because it's like, oh, a bearish market is bad, but bulls are good, and it's like why huh.
Just both dangerous animals? Yeah? What? And yeah, and kidneys among all mammals have a surprisingly low body temperature. Their body temp sits at around eighty nine point six fahrenheit or thirty two celsius, and then when they go into torpor they can plummet it all the way to fifty fahrenheit or ten celsius.
Yeah. That's goin to help slow down their metabolism quite a lot.
Yeah, And so apparently in all climates of Australia they will use that to get through tough winter, tough summer, anything. And then between that and being able to grow more hair and fur, they're very good at cold temperatures if they need to be.
It's amazing. What can't they do?
And then the other thing this might tie into snoot stuff you're thinking about. Apparently in the hottest parts of the outback, they will blow snot bubbles on their snowt for cooling.
Yes, there we go. That's that's the gross thing that I was looking for. Yeah, snot bubbles. It's you know, when you're trying to stay cool, well, anything goes. Vultures will poop on themselves and that running poop will help cool them down by pooping on their legs snot bubbles. Kangaroos lick their hands, so they use saliva all over their arms to cool themselves down. So, yeah, we got
a lot of fluids that we can use. Like when you don't have a water bottle or one of those little handheld fan, you got saliva and poop and snot bubbles and all of those things can help you with evaporative cooling.
It turns out, yeah, yeah, the beaked nose of the echidna is covered in blood vessels a lot of potential for releasing heat, and so they've figured out that they can blow snot bubbles onto their own nose. The bubble bursts, then the wet moisture evaporates and that evaporation cools their nose, which then cools their whole body. Nice ekinnas have apparently been seen sheltering and hollow logs of the outback while the temperature is forty celsius, which is one hundred and
four fahrenheit. I love that spines protecting kidness so well. But I also love that they're almost even more of a temperature super animal.
Yeah.
Well link pictures from the Conversation dot Com of them walking through snowy mountains like the north in Game of Thrones character. And then also they hang out in the hottest desert in the content.
It's really cool and there, and they're great at fondue parties marshmallow roasts.
Yeah they could.
They can't carry it all, yeah, Bob's yeah, canapees because.
If you bring a porcupine, they're going to eject those quills. You can. The spines do not each other.
Yeah yeah, yeah, so it's better and porcupine. Yeah, it's interesting those real.
Animal effect to joke about fondu.
Parties, porcupines, they don't shoot them from a distance, but porcupines do. They'll come off. So like if you're curious coyote and you stick your snoop at a porcupine. Their quills can come off and they get stuck with these little tiny barbs in your snout and it's really uncomfortable and unpleasant. Hedgehogs, that does not happen. The kidnas, that doesn't happen. The kidnas are actually much more similar to hedgehogs and the sort of spine stuff like. And also
hedgehogs will ball up and porcupines don't ball up. They go on like an offensive like, oh you want some of this, and then they start backing their butt. There's spiny butt into your face.
I just love how many elements are so close to another animal. And then I want echidnas to like speed date these animals. They're like and the other animals like, you're so like me. And the kidna is like hold down one sec, like lays a whole egg right there, like oh, okay.
Right, I'm sure we're going to talk about this more on the bonus. But just like with Sonic, we've got Sonic the hedgehog, we have Knuckles the echidna, and then tails the fox.
Why no porcupine and they details in between Sonic and Knuckles.
Yeah, so what the hell then we don't even we don't get tendricks. There's so many spiky animals to get through, and I can't believe they whiffed it like that.
Our next pitch after Disney is Sega, Sega, Hey listen.
Hey listen. Why didn't you include weird penises in your game franchise? Why was there no mention of kloacas even once.
Perfect bonus transitions? Thanks Bolts. That is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a runback through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one. A male echidna has a four front penis, which is sort of like having a double reptile penis. Takeaway number two. Echidnas are named after a mythological reptilian monster, partly because of how female echidnas lay and carry eggs. Takeaway number three.
Based on new studies of ancient bones, we think echidnas and platypuses evolved from an aquatic mammal near Antarctica. Take Away number four. Short beaked echidnas air rate until the soil across all of Australia. Takeaway number five Echidnas do amazing and silly things to live in any climate, and then so many stats and numbers about the entire evolutionary history of echidnas, the amazing forensic science protecting Australian echidnas,
and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximumfund dot org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to
the main episode. This week's bonus topic, as promised, is the entire series of business and technological decisions that led to Knuckles the echidna in the Sonic the Hedgehog video games. Visit sifpod dot fund for that bonus show, for a library of almost twenty one dozen other secretly incredibly fastening bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max funbonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank
you to everybody who backs this podcast. Operation additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fund dot org. Key sources this week include so much amazing digital science writing. Those outlets include PBS Nature, Australian Geographic, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The New
York Times. Also a lot of scientific resources online, including the journal PNASS, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, digital resources from the Australian Antarctic Program, in particular for the plate tectonics that separated Antarctica from Australia. And then one book excerpt. I did not read the entire book because it's mainly about platypuses, but there's an amazing excerpt about echidnas from Platypus Matters, The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals that's by
Cambridge Zoology Museum director Jack Ashby. That page also features resources such as Native Dashland dot CA. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hooking, the traditional land of the Muncy Lenape people and the Wappinger people,
as well as the Mohican people, Scatagoque people and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I once we now in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, In particular, the entire range of Echidneys, Australia, New Guinea, other island territories in the Southern Pacific Ocean. Native people are very much still here and there at elsewhere that feels worth doing on each episode, and join the Free Sift discord, where we're sharing stories
and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode two hundred that's about the
topic of helium. Fun fact there, the people who discovered helium as a specific element on the periodic table were widely mocked as being wrong about how the sun works, so I recommend that episode. I also, of course recommend my co host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature feature about animals and science and more. Katie is of course a massive source on this episode about an amazing animal and if you enjoyed this at all, you will love Creature Feature.
Check it out. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artists Burton Durand Special thanks to Chris SUSA for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that talk to you then.
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