Happy New Fear!

finding out when a butt is not a butt. Discover this more as we answer the angel question. Is any worms? Too many worms to have inside of you? It's a new year, a fresh start, but New Year's Eve can be anxiety inducing for some, even depressing. A study conducted in Britain found that one in six people found New Year's Eve to be the sad this day of the year, according to the Telegraph. Some psychologists think this is due to the stress of the holidays, compounded by the stress

of self reflection that the new year brings. Personally, I get overwhelmed by the idea that I have to make a fresh start for the new year, and I worry about things not improving in the world. I think maybe instead of avoiding fears of the new year, we should do a bit of radical acceptance. Instead of trying to dodge your fears, you accept them. Bad things might happen, worms might invade your body, but that's okay, and I

accept it. I accept those worms. So today on the show, I want to trawl through the animal world for scary things, fears I never even knew I had until now, to confront them and find beauty in them. Maybe joining me today at the Wonderful Women of the Night Call podcast Molly, Tess and Emily. So, could you guys go around and introduce yourself so people will get a feel for your voices. Hey, I'm Molly Lambert and sitting next to me, Emily Orshida and sitting next to me, Tess Witch, and I'm sitting

next to Katie. That's and that's me. I'm Katie. People can't keep our voices clear you Sometimes I can't either. Yeah, it gets so so good luck to everybody out there hiring us for the first time. Well, you'll be able to recognize my voice by the terrible things that come out of it. So in this section I did want to say. I usually name my sections, but I don't always say what they are. But this time I'm really proud of it. I call this section what is this

a horror movie for ants? Because we are going to talk about some of the most horrible things that can happen to you if you're an aunt. So, do you guys remember the Peter Jackson movie Brain Dead or Dead Alive? Peter jeekson before he made Lord of the Springs. I'm going to make some zombies. Uh he has. It's a

it's a zombie movie. It's like someone gets bitten by like a sumach and rat monkey or something, and then they get they get the zombie virus and then they start biting other people and then they all turn into zombies. And there's this fame scene where this woman is pregnant and her baby has the zombie virus and it like crawls up through her out of her I guess, from her uterus to her head, which can't really happen, but you know, let's suspend virus. It's a zombievirus, and the

baby just like explodes out of the woman's head. Yeah, yeah, I mean that classic Peter Jackson. Yeah, that's how I mean, that's that's what giving birth is. Right. Well, a tiny fly, in fact, the world's smallest known fly, does something even more horrifying to ants. So this is a new fly that was discovered in Thailand, and it's smaller than a grain of salt. It's called uri Plaidia nana keihaldy. It's a species from the group Forward, which is also known

as scuttle flies, also known as coffin flies. And in the this gena supplies the pseudoacton, contains many flies that prey on ants in horrible ways. So this tiny fly, the eurie Platia, lays their eggs inside the body of the ant, and generally they target acrobat ants, which are also quite small, but they're bigger than the fly. So you're an ant. You're just walking along mind in your own ant business tests. This is going to be fun

for you because you hate ant. I hate ants, and yeah, I really hate ants, and I know too much about ants now, but I don't know anything about what's about to happen to it. Well, you're gonna like this because this is a horrible, very sadistic thing that happens to this ant. So the little, this little, teeny tiny fly lays eggs inside of the ant's body. As the eggs develop into larva, they migrate up into the ant's head and feeds on its jaw muscles, which makes it unable

to open and close its mouth. But they're not done yet. Then they and migrate up into the ant's brains and eat the brains, which causes the ant to shamble around like a zombie for up to two weeks of this torture. What how is that possible to ants even live for two weeks? Yes, and then the larva decapitates the ant by dissolving the membrane that keeps its head attached to its body, and the larva will live inside the decapitated ant head for another two weeks until they mold into adults.

And then that adult fly will burst out of the ant's head and just go around its business. So it's like the ant or the fly that's laying the egg it's just like seize the ant walking by, and it's like, ah, my my dream home, my dream that's where I want to raise my children. How did they How do they get into the ant to lay the eggs in the

first place? So usually the fly. A lot of these pairs as atid of flying animals will have an ovipositor that they stick inside of the animals, so basically they're just injecting their eggs. Whoa does the ant? I wonder if he fights it off? You know, there are certain bugs that will try to do that, So I don't know if we know whether these ants try to fight it off. We do know that cockroaches and spiders have developed strategies to try to avoid parasitic wasps from laying

eggs on them and attacking them. So cockroaches actually employ a karate kick in midair, so they like jump up and like kick the wasp to try to avoid being turned into a mindless zombie when the wasp lays its eggs in its head, and spiders will actually roll up into a ball and tumble down a hill to try to avoid parasitic wasps. Wow, because I didn't know that ants.

I knew ants were social within their own colonies, but then I was reading recently about how certain species of invasive of ants are will take over other ant colonies and not necessarily kill the ants, and that enslave them. Yeah, they'll inslave them. And then there's the whole thing with the ants and the aphids that I just go on about for but it's basic. I mean, it just blows

my mind. They will they protect the aphids, but they won't let the aphids leaves, so they tear they bite off their wings, and I would say they're not necessarily protecting the aphids. They are keeping the aphids as live, larger prey, so they don't they bring them into their into their ant hills. Yeah, yeah, so they they It's an interesting relationship and some they're different types of relationships

that ants have with aphids. Some ants are mutualistic, so they kind of they protect the aphids and return for sucking some of the juices out of the aphids, and the aphids may try to cooperate more with the ants, evolutionarily speaking, in in exchange for that protection. A lot of the relationships is it's not so mutualistic where the ants are clearly just praying on the aphids, but they do protect them to some extent so that they can continue to prey on the aphids, but they'll overall have

a negative impact on the aphid population. So it's a very it depends on the species, and it depends on the conditions whether it's going to be mutualistic or predatory. And another relationship that ants have with another organism is the ant fungus mutualism. Have you heard of this? So so ants actually will cultivate fungus and essentially farm it,

so especially leaf cutter ants. So there's all sorts of species of ants that cultivate all search of species of fungus, but the sort of highest order is how the leaf ants interact with the fungus, and the fungus has co evalved with the ant to the point where the fungus can't survive without the ant and the ant can't survive without the fungus. So leaf cutter ants will actually cut up leaves and then bring them to the fungus and feed them to the fungus because the fungus likes to

eat on this fresh biomaterial. And then the ants will also they have a bacteria on them that actually acts as an antimicrobial for the fungus, and they will feed from the fungus. And these fungus that have co evolved with the ants actually have this little like bulb on the tip that contains nutrients that makes it really easy for the ant to just like suck a little bit of nutrients from the fungus. What does the fungus look like? It's kind of goo goopy, but it has like that's

so interesting. I never thought that a fungus would have like a preferred diet. Really yeah. Yeah, And in fact, the ants will specifically choose types of leaves that are not toxic to the fungus, so they'll pay attention to how the fungus reacts to the leaves. Some researchers think they can smell like distress signals from the fungus and then they'll like get rid of the leaves that aren't doing it for them and get new ones doing science

they're doing Yeah, they're like sending their cultivating this. We're doing trial and error. So that's amazing. It's a relationship that's taken around thirty million years to develop. It's pretty That's the stuff that always blows my moment about the stuff for the or the fly lane, the eggs that travel to the ant. It how many years did that

process take to become refined? Because it takes a long time, it feels so much more complex than I mean, I guess if you've never seen a human before, and you were and you described, you know, how humans procreate or something, you would seem needlessly complex maybe, but that also seems like insanely complex. We have all sorts of really complex interactions happening inside of our body. Is like, you know, mitochondria is very very early on in the development of animals.

It may have been a mutualistic relationship between the animals cell and the mitochondria. So yeah, it is pretty incredible. He's really weird and sometimes horrible relationships. Uh. Speaking of which, I want to talk about the passing a beetle, which has a pretty creative way of taking advantage of ants. And they're kind of butt holes, which is a joke that will become funny once I explain what goes on with these So they are found in the rainforests of

Costa Rica. F you dare to attack army ants because they are very aggro they are very pugnacious. They can take down scorpions and dismember them. They sting snakes and birds to death. Researchers have recently discovered a strange affliction that these ants have, and some ants have two butts and they were really confused. They found these ants specimens that had two butts, and it's like, you find a two butted animal, you gotta collect it and research it.

So they collected some of these two asked ants and they studied them, only to discover that the extra butt was not a butt at all. It was a beatle disguised as an ant. But why how big is this ant? Ant? Size normally at normally sized? Yeah, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny beetle. The beetle has its whole m o is to disguise itself as the ant, but it clamps down on the ants abdomen and looks like an extra ant gaster.

And the gaster is that little sort of bulb at the end of the ant, which, if you can describe it in any sort of humanoid way, it's the butt part. So it is. The beetle is called Nymphister cronarrae, but I like to call it the ac eating beetle because you know, it's easier to pronounce. And so why it mimics the ants but is somewhat of a mystery. The

ants themselves depend on pheromones to navigate. They actually have they're nearly blind they're not quite totally blind, but they only can tell like light and dark, so they can't see a butt. It could be that they've mimiced the ant but to protect it from other predators, so other

predators just see weird aunt with two butts. It is also this is the most compelling theory to me, is that it's very structurally similar to the ants, but so keeps the ants from suspecting anything if they feel up the fake butt, so like they're feeling the fake but if it just feels like another ants, but they're not

gonna think it's a beetle just piggybacking on them. But doesn't the aunt who's the host, feel the beetle on it's but I don't know that it may feel the initial thing, and then if it can't like get it off, it's probably just gives up. Yeah, and I can't reach it to attack. Probably it may be able to. I'm it's this is actually pretty recent discovery, so I'm not exactly sure what mechanisms the beetle employees to prevent the

ant from knowing what's going on. That's so crazy. Yeah, I guess it's just kind of like it feels like a but it looks like a butt, it walks like a butt. So the answer just assume it's a butt. And the question is that you guys have I think a lot of people would have, is why it does this, And scientists don't actually know, so all its life, it just wanted to be but it wants to be a butt. Most likely it's feeding on something either from the ant or around the ant. It could be for protection from

other predators. It could be for dispersal to be able to travel safely with the ants. Um could be a weird fetish. I don't know, it's it's truly a mystery. I mean, if if we know that ants can farm and do a scientific method, then beetles surely can have sexual fetishes. I'm sure they. I'm sure it's just like you know, have you ever just wanted to be a butt? You know, all the time, all the time. Honestly, I wonder if it's eating something. If it's I mean, I

don't want to get scatological. Is it eating something in the vicinity of the original But it could be eating anal secretions or eggs, could be eating eggs. It could be you know, feeding from aunt itself. It's hard to know. It's a very I think those are all good theories. I guess we won't know until we've dived deeper into this butt mystery. Do you have a fear of ants, spiders, or other insects? Many people do, and one way to face these fears is through the magic of the Marvel

cinematic universe. No, really so. A study conducted in Israel by social scientists ben Ezra and Hoffman found that phobias of spiders and ants can be helped by viewing the Spider Man and ant Man movies. Being being shown just a few seconds of each movie lowered their spider and aunt phobia scores, implying that a positive cultural association with

the superheroes may help to quell those fears. I guess seeing a friendly neighborhood Spider Man and Paul Rudd frolic among their Spider and Aunt motifs reduces the visceral phobia of these insects. Maybe Batman was right, not that he'd be able to help Gotham more by romping around in tights than just using his massive wealth to help the poor, but that by embracing his bat fears by making a

festive outfit and accessories, he could overcome those fears. When we return, we'll discuss some fears that I never even knew I had until now, and simultaneously will overcome them. Maybe we'll try imagine you're frolicking near the deep dark woods. Why are you near the deep dark woods? Maybe you're picking some berries, or about to go to Grandma's house, or you have some sort of tree fetish. I'm not

here to judge. As you stopped to admire a particularly cool piece of liking, you hear the faint but unmistakable cry of a baby coming from deep in the forest. You look around. There's no one around. You're way too horny for trees to remember your phone, so it's up to you to save this baby. You walk into the deep dark woods towards the sound of the crying baby, poor little thing out here all alone. Its cries become more frantic, so you hurry over now deep in these woods, disoriented.

The sound is close now, but you can't see any baby. Where is it. The cries seem to come from up above you. You look into a tree. Two huge golden eyes stare back at you, and from its drooling jaws, you hear the sound of that crying baby. But only now do you notice how strangely alien it sounds. Before you can even begin to understand what's going on, the giant creature leaps down from the tree and snaps your neck.

So you have been the victim of the marka junk cat, and it's a very cute cat, and it also likes to murder. Let me show you a picture of this vicious killer. Oh my god. Oh it's a little anime cat. It's funny that you should say it's a baby, because that is a bit of its m o. So the Margai is a very cute jungle cat. It lives in South American forests. It's nocturnal. It is pretty small. It looks a bit like an awful lot with really big eyes. It's like a kitten. It's like it does look like

a kitten. It looks like Justin Bieber's pet cat. Does Justin Bieber have a pet cat? You got some kind of semi exotic cat, Bieber, You don't don't get exotic pets. Bert, stop it. It is probably really cute though. So they're pretty small. They only wagh about five to eight pounds. They're very skilled climbers, and they hunt small animals and birds.

So in order to get themselves proper meals, sometimes they have to rely on very clever tricks, especially given one of their prey of choice, which is Pied Tamarin, a small monkey that looks half like a baby Yoda, half goblin. Of course, I'm going to show you a picture of that. Whoa, oh god, that looks like the boss you have to beat to win the game. That's so scary. It looks like but doesn't look like half orc half baby Yoda. It doesn't. It doesn't have baby Yoda's giant endearing eyes

the way the market a threatening animals. Yeah, it looks wise, it looks austere, It looks really humorless. It looks bossy. It looks klaus Kinsky. I wish, I wish they could smile more. Welcome to our roast of the Pied Tamarin with Bob Saget. So in order to Laura Pie Tamarin, the Margart imitates the sound of a baby monkey, which

is terrifying, deeply, deeply terrifying. So observation suggests that this behavior is passed from mother Margart's to her offspring who watch her hunt, and what they'll do is they mimic the kind of soft squeaking sound that baby tamarins make, which lures adult tamarin's out to investigate. Because tamarins are very social and like humans, they want to respond to the cries of a baby. So I don't think there

have been observating multiple observations of this. They've never cut it on video, so sadly, I don't have a sound sample. So instead I'm going to do my best impression of what I think a Margart imitating a tamarind baby would sound like. Hang on, let me get a sip of water here. I'm very excited for this. It's like the world's biggest mosquito. Me me where I'm a b Baby's really convincing. I mean, that sounds like a baby. I'm

going to care for that baby. So what is really interesting about this to me is that I looked into it and throughout basically all of human culture, there are mythological creatures that prey on people by imitating babies. And it's really eerie because this seems to indicate this deep instinctive human fear across like all cultures, and I want to talk about a few of these, and you you guys may know some of these already. The boo Back,

I'm sure I'm probably not pronouncing that right. It's from check folklore and it is basically a boogeyman that looks like a scarecrow and it wears the clothing made out of the souls that it is hard. I don't know how soul fabric is. Would that be like a terrifying it looks like slender Man? Oh yeah, it's like it looks like very returned to us. I think souls wear like an Eileen Fisher linen. That's what I would wear. Oh, that is really scared. That would that be hard to sew?

I don't know much about sewing, Like when sewing a soul? Is that that got like a weird grain? That would be hard to sew? No, I think it's pretty straightforward. You can do a seem, a hidden seem Okay. BBC has a big following on debian art. Really do they do they? Like? Do they pair back with like Slenderman or something that's kind of Elma and the one true pairing,

the one true scaring. So the boo Back drives a cart that's pulled by cats, which seems um inefficient, okay, And it makes the sound of a crying baby to lure and victims. So that's a that's pretty clean. That's so scary. Yeah, that's the cart with the cats is so funny. You know. One time, I actually I thought I heard like a kitten muling in a bush and I was like trying to find it and couldn't and that was the scariest. But I thought I heard a kitty crying from a gutter and I looked in the

gutter and I couldn't see a kiddie. I'm like, I'm about to get it. Yeah, I'm about It was like I was like digging through the bush trying to find the kitten because it was like sounded like it was in trouble. But then I was like, what if it's like a rat king or like a possum or something, then I'll have to you're already going down that roadwelling dropping hands. So the pontia neck is a vampire ghost woman in Malay and Indonesian folklore. So these are the

spirits of women who have died during childbirth. And these are I guess angry ghosts because they kill their victims by digging into their body and eating their organs. Fun fact about this vampire ghost lady is that sometimes she lives in banana trees. I'm not precisely sure why, but it's just I think it's potassium that's right here, that specifically the right it's the ghost of a woman who

died in childbirth. It's pretty macab, isn't it. But I mean, I think that's it's a lot of the ways that we cope with scary things, and like, that's a really scary thing, is by It was also so common for so long. Her presence can sometimes be detected by a nice floral fragrance identifiable as plumeria, followed by an awful stench resembling a decaying body. The Indian version, the trurail, can be identified by her feet turning backwards just before

her transformation into her vampire scary. For some reason, that's a bridge too far. What kind of dance stup is that? God? She also comes during a full moon and announces her presence with a baby cry. So you know that's because thought a full moon, you didn't run into hear any babies and smell any plumeria. Says, you got to put a nail in the nape of her neck to kill her. Oh, I thought it was a nail in the nape of

the neck to transform her into a good wife. But then if you if you remive the nail, she goes back into put the nail. If you put the nail in the hole, it turns her into a beautiful woman. And if you pull that nail out, it's like, it's like, can you imagine just like having a bad day as a woman, and like someone just like who removed your ghost nail? Somebody tries to shove a no, I feel like, ten times out of ten, that's not gonna work. So Bigfoot.

This is a fact I didn't know about Bigfoot is that in certain Bigfoot lore, people who believe Bigfoot is a predator, they say that Bigfoot can mimic the cries of a baby to lure people deep into the woods. So that's been interesting. I've always thought of Bigfoot is more of like a big old hippie. Yeah, totally off

the grid, off the grid, live in their life. And then another spirit is the Windigo, and it is from the folklore of Algonkian people's in the Nova, Scotia, Eastern and Great Lakes areas of Canada, and it's associated with sort of like winter starvation, and it's either a monster

or a spirit who can possess humans. And it's influenced as is evil acts such as cannibalism, murder, greed, and environmental destruction, or conversely, it is sort of summoned or created by these evil acts, and in some stories it can mimic the cry of a person or child in need of help, which is really creepy. Did you guys

see that video game Until Dawn? It had the Window Goes in it and probably not accurately represented to be fair, but they do have a scene where the window Goes lures a character by pretending to be a girl crying for help, and then if you go, you get the capitata. The window goes pretty famous, right, because it's there's an often Nash problem about the wind to go. And then I think it's also in Um Creatures of the lumber Wood. Well, this does a lot of it has to do with

people becoming cannibals. They would say they had when to go fever, when to go psychosis, Yeah, which I think is also that's a pretty controversial topic because a lot of that is basically like white people coming in and sentially misunderstanding the culture and the folklore and sort of just like giving this label to things like well, there's

a wonder goo secret. And I think one thing that's interesting is in a lot of stories it is sort of like a metaphor, so it's like a conceptual representation of human greed and gluttony and evil acts. So it's not always meant to be taken literally as a as

a physical creature. There are some stories in which it is a physical creature which is like a gaunt, gray skinned, skeletal like slender man creature, but in a lot of cases it's almost like a manifestation of our evil and sort of this um both spiritual or metaphorical sense, which

I think is interesting. And I think it is interesting this idea that this it still has that myth of like a fake cry for help, and I think that it's like um in all of these stories, this idea that we could be taken advantage by one of our greatest features, which are is our empathy for the helpless, especially helpless baby, and that sort of chilling juxtaposition of like a crying baby and a predator is really scary, and I have to wonder if there's something Now, I

don't know. I don't have any strictly like solid evidence for this, but I do wonder if, like deep in our evolutionary history, if we had these fears of some predator, like a big cat, because I know jaguars and some of these big cats also use similar methods to lure and pray. Like if we kind of have this this fear of something imitating our young and then luring us out and then preying on us, and I don't know,

that's fast. Maybe it's also kind of a warning against making like having empathy become a vulnerability, or or the fear that like by taking care of someone else that you could put yourself, you can neglect your own needs to put yourself in danger kind of thing. Yeah, because that the evil, evil baby, the baby crying and you walk towards it, and it's a trap. It's just it's almost ubiquitous in every human culture, so so many stories. Yeah, what if baby Yoda is really a parasite? Oh? I

like that. I like that theory. You don't know anything we are. It is a cultural parasite because I cannot step. You can't spit and not hit a baby Yoda. You know, like you can't take two steps without tripping over baby Yoda on these social media is. The thing about baby Yoda too, is there's just one of them. But if there were like a million, there were a million baby Yodas washed up on a beach, I'll be frightened. We

would be frightened. I mean, like they have telekinetic powers, they have the force, which you know is presented as good. But it's a baby. As soon as it gets mad, she's gonna smash you around like a like a big old rattle. The only reason we're not scared of baby Yodas that we're led to believe he's a wise baby because he's Yoda. Yeah, I mean he's got those little wrinkles. You've seen a lot of life. I mean, babies do

come out really wrinkly. They look like old people. Yeah, my brother came out as a little little wrinkly looked. He had that cute old man face when he came out. But he either premature or late, do you know? He was not I wouldn't say late, but he came out a little later than his due date. I came out a little earlier than my due date, but I was a big old chunker. Yeah, because sometimes I think it's mostly in babies who were born pastor I'm both of mine were, But so I don't know if if this is,

you know, a general thing. But their skin peels off just like a fun surprise, nobody prepares you, and then like a couple of weeks after bringing your baby home, they molts like a snake. Who I didn't know about that? Neither did I molding from a larva to its exactly? Are you ever afraid they're going to molt again? Maybe

it would be afraid. I also wonder if this fear of means so that this fear of cats imitating baby cries or sorry, it's not of cats, but maybe we should be afraid of cats mimicking baby cries because there have been some studies that suggest that cats manipulate their cries to sound more like babies. Have you guys heard

this Siamese cats, right? I think it's all cats, but there they may be especially good at it, and their cries share a similar frequency as babies, human babies, human baby I choose to believe this because my one of my cast has been keeping me up all night every night making imaginary baby sounds. Yeah. And they also the researchers found that when they compare normal cats sounds to like the cat sounds that seem to be closer to

a baby cry. Uh, people give more urgency to the ones that sound like a baby cry and show more anxieties. So you may want to like feed your cat more when it's crying like a baby. Cat does that exactly as the funk out of me, which one drags all are weasy? Maybe need a baby? She can do it right. She goes up in frequency when she's trying to get me to feed her at night. When I'm like, she's trying to sound like a baby. Maybe it does sound like a baby. And then I'm always like, oh my god,

imagine what a real baby is like. If a cat this manipulated? And well, I wonder if they if it is like an evolutionary thing where I mean, the logical

conclusion is that then cats learned to talk like the dogs. Stella, who's pressing those buttons where I have a lot of doubt, but I choose to believe that that dog but if these so, if these margarie cats, which the observational studies have seemed to indicate that they're learning it from their maternal the maternal cats and the mother cat passes it on to her children and then they learn this skill. So I wonder if domesticated cats have learned this over time,

and it's sort of um, it could be evolutionary. It could be that we selected for like the cats that were able to cry like babies, we kept more because we were more distressed and fed them more. I think that's very possible. But maybe the originally like some cats just kind of figured this out and then they passed those those genes or that knowledge onto the other cats.

I always think it's interesting how like domesticated pets, it's like the opposite of evolution because you're like selecting for patheticism instead of like actually actually being able to survive. If I mean it works, they have survived, they're highly successful.

Dogs are more successful than wolves as of now. Yeah, but I do wonder if, like, because we have this folklore about creepy, creepy baby crying being a trap, like you know, maybe it's it's our this like instinct telling us that the cats are trying to take advantage of us, like like warning bells. Like those cats, they're trying to get us all listen. We just don't. We don't know where the sources the cats were the what's it called

the the boo back the whole time. As humans, we seem to have a particularly strong negative response to imitators. The uncanny valley. Something we talk about frequently on the show is that graph that depicts one's feelings towards a fake image of a person. When the image is cartoonish, like Charlie Brown, we're pretty comfortable. We get more and more comfortable with the image the more human it gets,

until suddenly something changes. When the image becomes a little too human like but not quite realistic enough, like an animatronic face or c g I nightmare like that Dead Eyed the Polar Express movie. Our comfort suddenly plummets into the uncanny valley until the image becomes realistic enough to pass is human. Instinctively, we reject things that look similar but aren't quite right in terms of being human. Similarly, we're very afraid of body snatchers, and this is exemplified

by Capgrass syndrome. Capgrass syndrome occurs when there's a disconnect between the amygdala and the part of our brain that processes faces. This can be a result of brain damage, such as that which occurs after a stroke. This causes you to think that a loved one or friend has been replaced by an impostor. You see their face, you recognize them, but there's a disconnect between their face and

the emotional feeling of familiarity you normally feel. Therefore, that person feels wrong to you, and your reason that this must be because they've been replaced. There's even a disorder that can make you believe that an entire location has been duplicated. Reduplicative paramnesia is a delusion resulting from frontal lobe damage that causes you to think that a location has either been duplicated or has been removed and relocated

to a new place. For example, if you're in your house right now, you might think that this is a duplicated house, exactly the same in every way, except it's in a different city. Re leading theory on how this has caused is that damage to the busy of spatial cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual and spatial information, causes a disconnect between this visual spatial information and memory. When we return, we'll talk about a whole lot of fears,

about a whole lot of holes. Will be right back now. In this section, I'm going to tell you not to google something, so you will be spared a pretty gross image, but inevitably a lot of you will google it. I know I see you, but it's not your fault, and to be honest, i'd do it too. This is morbid curiosity, where we know we won't like to see an image, but some strange force compels us to look. Researchers have

looked at morbid curiosity and have revealed some seemingly paradoxical findings. Often, the stronger reaction you have to morbid topics, the more likely you'll be curious about these morbid topics. Those that have a stronger physiological reaction to morbid news were also those who had reported to survey greater morbid curiosity, and in general, research has shown that people prefer to view morbid images more than neutral ones, especially morbid images that

depict socially negative content, such as a war scene. Another study found that the stronger your fear of terrorism, the more likely you are to view violent images associated with terrorism. So sometimes our fear seems to drive us towards viewing images as if we think that viewing them will give us useful information to avoid our fears. Instead, these images likely form a feedback loop where we may perceive our

fears as more likely, which is called confirmation bias. But sometimes the reaction to fear is avoidance, such as is often the case with phobias and the phobia were about to discuss maybe one of the most difficult ones to avoid completely. So do you guys know about triple phobia? Oh? Yeah, yeah, we've talked about it all night. Call a little bit. It's the fear of holes. Yes, it's a fear or aversion to clusters of small holes or lumps. Even the word cluster just kind of gave me over. Was the

clusters or clusters so close to holes? Do any of you guys fall anywhere on that spectrum of tripophobia? Yeah, definitely, Yeah, I'm fine with them. I don't care. Yeah, I'm actually it doesn't happen to me, although I've got a warny as some of the content and this is it goes beyond just tripophobia into total gross out. What if I show you that picture of a lotus pod where they photoshopped it onto a breast. Yeah, I've seen that one.

So they so a lotus pod is it's the dried seed pot of a of a lotus plant, and it has all these little holes that the seeds are in, and that's a common trigger for people with triple phobia. And some sadist photoshops that picture of the seed pot onto a breast and so it looks like the breast has a bunch of holes in it. What's crazy, though, is if you actually look at the anatomy of the breast, the milk ducts do look like a bunch of little clusters of little balls. So it's like inside the breast,

it is horrible. But but yeah, that is cool or cool or really cool. That's that's right. This show is about embracing our fears and loving them and all of our holes and seed pods. So things like seed pods, sponges, seeds and fruit and even soap bubbles can trigger chip a phobia and it can cause panic attack like symptoms

and people who have it. So it ranges from just a version well I don't want to say just a version of version can be a real serious thing, but it can range from mild aversion to strong aversion to full on panic attack. A panic attack is an autonomic nervous system response that can be really hard to control. So this phobia, as there are a lot of phobias, is associated with O c D. I have O c D. I don't actually have triple phobia at all, but I

can't see how it's connected. I remember when I was a kid when something would gross me out, like I had a phobia of mummies, and I would seem patterns of mummies and everything like beef jerky, kind of like crusty bread. I would imagine that's like a mummified thing, and I couldn't eat um. They were dead beef jerky. What's not to hate? I thought it was cool. I was really into mummies. Yeah, so did some of my some some of my peers in sixth grade, and they

like to torture me with pictures of mummies. Yeah yeah, Well you know, was it like the wrapped up mummy or just the body, the desiccated body, all of it, I mean all of it was bad. It was all bad. It's like a terrible present. Okay, you get out of here. Cause of tripophobia isn't fully understood, but there are theories.

So one theory is that it's an evolution nary biological reflex similar to seeing images of spiders and snakes, which is sort of a are kind of an adaptation we have where we are automatically scared of certain things that are typically bad for us, and it is possibly an

oversensitive alarm to try to avoid disease or parasites. If I have any audience members out there who have triple phobia, this is the part where you might wanna skip ahead of I'll probably either just skip the rest of it because we're near the end of the episode, or if you want to hear the last bit I'll give you in the show notes, I'll say where you can come back in. But yeah, this is gonna be a little gross. I'll give people a grace period to fiddle with their phones.

How are you guys doing today? Well, nobody full of holes. Well, if you if you have to tap out, just just pass out and we'll drag you out of the room. So an example of a disease that both triggs triple phobia and maybe sort of like um where these kinds of fears may have come from sort of in our evolutionary it's the mango worm and it is also known

as Corteleobia anthropophagia, which means in human eater um. It is found mostly in East and Central Africa, and usually you get infected by coming into contact with contaminated soil or dirty bedding UH sometimes contaminated with like fecal matter, and the mango worm fly larva can burrow into the skin of animals and including humans, and if you get an infection of more than one larva, it looks like a cluster of bumps or small holes that have the

larva in them, and it can infect humans. It also infects dogs, which is there's Yeah, there's a lot of pictures again and I told you into in the intro not to google it. I know a lot of not looking this one up. Yeah, I know a lot of you are going to google it. It's truly very gross. Just her phone. It's something where I'm not even gonna include a picture in the show notes, just so nobody does an accidental click. But yeah, you can easily google it.

It's just really disturbing. And it's the ones where it's like the infected puppies is pretty bad too. It's just like puppies. But oh, I see, Yeah, it's the removal that you really want to move avoid. It's all of it, I think, Yeah, but yeah, the removal is especially bad. So yeah, I have a high tolerance for parasite photos medical photos, but even this grosses me out. So I really like, if you have any kind of sensitivity, I don't. I'm not going to show you. Guys a picture wasn't

what I thought you were going to say either. I thought you're gonna talk about prions. Prions like in the brain. Yeah, those little holes in the brain. Yeah, that is true. That's another one. That's why you can't be accountable because it makes you get brain prions. Yeah. Well, so you can't eat like, if you eat other brains, not just of humans, but other animals, like, you can still get

that's why we can't eat brains and my zombies brains. Yeah. Um, but I think that's interesting too because it says to me that it's not like like sometimes when you're repulsed by something like that, where you're like, oh, I shouldn't eat a person's brain. It is because your body can be good for you. Otherwise everybody just would Yeah, it's true.

We would all just do it, wouldn't we um. But so the an infection by mango worms isn't typically fatal for people, but it can cause like a serious infection, and it can be fatal for small animals. One of the more creative ways of treating it is by plugging up the larva holes with petroleum jelly, which suffocates the larva and then they come out as and surface so they can breathe, which is yeah, terrible. Don't look it up. We just kind of they look like little barley things. Yeah,

they look like regular maggots. Basically, they look like maggots that live in your skin. I mean, if you want me to paint a picture, it's like a bunch of holes or but it's like a bunch of bumps. And then like when they come out of the skin, it's like a bunch of holes with maggots. And it's like the load seed pod. It's like the loadus seed pod, but with magats. You know what, it also looks like I'm sorry, but I'm just going to say you know that, like, have you guys ever been targeted by the ad of

that like sticker you put on pimples. The ad is really horrible because it's one of those squeezy balls with like gel and it's so it's just a bunch of like like the stress ball, Like yeah, it's got it's a stress ball. The net over it and you squeeze it and like all the things. Yeah, so I was so like put off that I was being targeted by these things. It was like, well, how much do you

know about my complexion? But it looks it also kind of looks like that where it's like a like raised lump with like I see you guys on your phone. I'm trying to resist, try not to lose. We painted a picture. Yeah, it's very good. It's like you may be curious what you're going to find if you look up images of mango worms is exactly what I've described. It's very gross. It's just very great. I'm not like that put off by this one. I am because I just feel so bad for those puppies. Yeah, it's really

How round are the holes? This is actually a big part of my interesting I think I'd say they're fairly round because they are like more afraid if they're round, they're perfectly round. The more kind of uncanny it feels because it's a perfect circle, because it's like it's it's as if some kind of higher consciousness has decided to

afflict you with this disease. That's interesting. Yeah, maybe the regularity is part of it because that indicates not just sort of a randomized wound, but an infection of multiple organisms. It's similar size and shape. They look like they're pretty round, but that there's in most of the pictures there it's like they're inflame. So the inflammation is yeah, I mean,

I I had one. I was terrified once when I was like eight years old or something because for some reason I was sitting waiting in the car for my mom and the front window had started to fog, and for whatever reason, there was something on the window where the fog like it would fog up but except for these little perfect circles, And when my mom came back to the car, it was like freaking out and crying because I couldn't deal with the little circles on the

window very I mean, that's the common thing that's like part of it is like seeing soap bubbles because of the regular shape of the soap bubbles. It's like your brain. I mean it's it's an um, not as an insult, but just that your your brain has an over sensitivity where it's like picking up the signal of a bunch of holes, and it's seeing that pattern outside of the context in which it would be useful, like where a useful context was would be like you look at your arm,

there's a bunch of holes there. That's good. But you know so bubbles are okay. But it's it's an over generalization of a dangerous pattern that we know, we somehow know, like, yeah, that's not good to have, like what looks like an infection by these flies. But then you're you're just like your your brain is trying to warn you when it doesn't need to. But for polka dots, those don't do anything for me. Word, I don't like them. What about like a bee hive? With that is it? The behives

are okay? Although when I think about bee hives a little too hard or start to get freaked out. I think it's like if there's holes in something that's supposed to have holes in it, that's not scary, Like the top of a salt shaker isn't scary or well, So I now want to talk about how this affects this poor caterpillar that gets infected with Glipto Pantelis wasp larva. And this is a case in which the caterpillar probably should have shiptophobia because it's a horrible thing that happens

to these little guys. And the glipped to pantales wasp lives in North America, Central America, and New Zealand, and female glipped to Pantalies wasps inject their eggs up to

eighty eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. The eggs develop and grow and they feed on the insides of the caterpillar, but they don't kill the caterpillar, at least not yet, because they're taking care not to eat its vital organs, which is actually it's unusual, but it's not unheard of amongst parasites to do that where they will You're you're okay, did you just look up a photo? I told you, I told you, it's not gross. It's just like it triggers something. Yeah, I just don't like it at all.

She wouldn't. So the the eggs continue to grow, not eating vital organs. So the caterpillars still alive, and the caterpillar starts to bloat up like a horrible water balloon filled with nightmares. And eventually what Emily is currently freaking out about is that dozens and dozens and dozens of these little things will burst from the caterpillar's body in a horrible spectacle. So I'll show you gut. Do you guys want to see it? I mean, Emily already did that,

so Emily, you don't have to see it here. It is alright, alright, alright, okay, okay, okay, al right, everyone, all right, and we need to take I mean, speaking of scary stories in the dark like that, that was the worst one for me about the woman with the spiders. Weirdly, that image just not freaking out as much as the spider babies when the mom spider has the babies all over its back. That one is the scariest. But I also thought that one is a sweet story of motherhood

and this one is a horrible story of parasites. It is sweet, and I want to overcome whatever internal you know, bias against having spiders I have. So Molly's talking about is often spiders scorpions will do this to certain since the scorpions one also, I think it's something about a million tiny things on one. Well, the babies, the newly hatched babies will just hang out on their mother's back

for protection for a while. So it's this big cluster of little spider babies and little scorpion babies just kind of hanging out on their backs, just like an adult sized Yoda covered in baby. Yeah. Oddly enough, these parasitic wasp larva bursting out the caterpillar do not kill it.

The caterpillar is still alive, and the the larva actually they help keep the caterpillar alive, doing this really gruesome surgical hap dash job where they leave behind they molt as they come out of the caterpillar, and they leave behind their exoskeleton which plugs up all the whole which prevents the caterpillar from bleeding to the whoa, So they

like form a scat. They leave scabs basically. Yeah, so as it's it's functionally it's just the function of like as they're popping out of the caterpillar as they're molting, so they leave behind that the multidexo skeleton that basically plugs up the caterpillar's wounds and so, but they're still not done with this. Poor freaking caterpillars. So, the the wasp larva want to grow into wasps, and to do that they have to weave a protective cocoon. And while

they're in this cocoon, they're very vulnerable to predation. The caterpillar will help the wasp lava out by weaving its own silk cocoon around them, and it will stand watch over the larva and protect them until it's very last breath. And you might be thinking, why would the caterpillar do this, Like, what's in it for the caterpillar? The answer is nothing's

in it for the caterpillar. The caterpillar is being controlled from the end side by a couple of these larva who are taking one for the team for the rest of the larva by staying inside the caterpillar head and um. Basically, they are mind controlling the caterpillar, as a lot of

parasites do. And I don't know what the exact I'm not even sure we know yet what the precise mechanism is of how they control the caterpillar's brain, but often which what is the cases, they have some kind of chemical excretion that changes the balance of neurotransmitters in the caterpillar's brain, and then that causes some behavior to to go off or to become exaggerated. So, like cocoon weaving is a regular behavior for the caterpillar, so it'll weave

this cocoon in a context that doesn't make sense. As for attacking predators, that like staying watch over the larva and attacking predators that come near. That is such a bizarre caterpillar behavior. I don't know how they do that.

That's crazy. But yeah, so the caterpillar becomes a zombie bodyguard who attacks any predators who want to snack on or attack the larva, and it greatly increases the chance that the larva will develop into fully grown wasps, and the caterpillar will eventually starve to death full of plugged up larva holes. Totally thankless job. It's really sad it is, isn't it. It's your zombie bodyguard and nanny that just

eventually dies. Yeah, it feels like some kind of I can't I can't fill in all the blanks, but it feels like some kind of metaphor about like Um, like all weeklies or something. Um, that's brutal, poor caterpillar. Well do you guys want to do some palate cleansers. So welcome back to everyone who has skipped ahead. Um, we talked about horrible things. I hate this, um, so uh, first first pout, Actually it's just a news item, and then I got a couple of cool messages on Instagram

I want to talk about. So the news item is. Uh. The Audibon Society came out with an article asking the tough question of what is a burb? And they try to define what a burb is. And I'm very very grateful to this article because they attribute the coining of the term burb to my proverb rights account, which I had thought I had coined it, and I remember, I remember being the first one to do it, and I am just thrilled to finally get media recognition to my

contribution to society. So this is a self promotion tour where I go around bragging about how I invented the word bourb and I think I mowed like I've million dollars and right yeah, I'm crunching the numbers right now. That sounds very cool. So I'm rich now apparently. Um, so, yeah, that's thank you Audubon Society. That's pretty great. I think the so I can help out a little bit with the science of what a bourb is versus a bird. They try to kind of define like, okay, what's a

burb what's just a regular bird? Correctly, they're saying like if the bird is too big like an an Ostrich and Ostrich isn't a bourb um. But there's another thing, which is that the roundness quotation of the bird is directly correlated with how much of a bourb it is, so that that's a helpful tool as well. I also

got a couple of cool messages on Instagram. First of all, Instagram user Ali water Windows is a food scientist, and she wanted to talk about the recent episode Leftovers where we talked about the movie The Killer Shrews, where so in this this b horror movie, scientists try to make giant food to in a world hunger, but they accidentally

make giant shrews whoops us. So, so we were we had briefly talked about, you know, why why you would make giant food, you know, and we we talked about that that there's that other movie that had Matt Damon in it where they shrink people down to try to what was it called the Shrinkable Matt Damon? What was that movie called? Remember it's this is going to drive Me crazy? Yeah, I mean I saw it wasn't as

bad as people said Alexander Payne movie downsizing. Yeah. So this is from Instagram user all I want our windows, She says, Hey, I listened to the Leftovers episode and got so psycked because I love Creature feature and I love Savers. I had Savers hosts on the show. So she says, I had to weigh in on the shrinking

issue because it's a fun thought experiment. With our understanding of electron fields and how we believe at this point that much solid matter is actually full of empty space, it stands to reason that if we developed shrink technology, it would simply condense our electron orbits and not reduce our mass. So by shrinking ourselves, we could do agriculture on a much smaller scale and feed more people by

producing the same more food in a tiny space. But conversely, the challenge of enlarging things seems like much more advanced and complicated technology. Since matter can neither be created nor destroyed. And an enlarging machine would theoretically expand the electron orbits of the subject, and that seems problematic to their structure

and integrity. And an enlarged hypothetical strawberry wouldn't have any more calories than it had when it was normal sized, So all that effort of inventing that technology gives you no increase in harvest and yield. And then she says, thanks for humoring me, thanks for sending my mind down a physics wormhole. Hope you see this. I did. I don't have Twitter, and I don't wasn't sure how to contact you. Well you sure did contact me. It worked. Um, And then yeah, so she that is I think a

really good point that she brings up. Question then, is like a genetically modified apple or strawberries, you know, like when like there's obviously like GMO strawberries that are gigantic, is that the same amount of calories as like an organic No, because I think that in that case, it is the cellular growth of the apple has been modified, so there is more calories. It's just a hypothetical growth rate,

like you do a growth right right, right? Yeah, I mean like in any domesticated food and animals, we can futs with their genes such that they grow beyond their normal size, so like chickens, broiler chickens have Basically we've shut off some of the jeans that say, hey, stop growing, that's enough, So they grow these like huge muscles that we then eat and it's horrifying. But yeah, so that's likes.

I got this message from Samantha regarding our recent episode it's called out Remember to Breathe through your Butt, where we talked about fluffy horses and how horses are measured using hands. And I'm not a horse person, so I was I didn't know much about how you measure horses. Apparently you measure in hands from the withers of the horse, which is like the ridge along the neck. And I asked on the show, why don't you use a measuring stick?

Our horses afraid of measuring sticks. So this is Samantha, she says, horse girl here, been listening for a while, finally had information to add the hand measurements is only in North America. Actually, the rest of the world still likes to use cinemeters. We do the top of the shoulders as it is the highest point stays consistent as the head and neck goes up and down. And lots of horses are not a fan of our measuring sticks, even the ones with the hand measurements. I love the

foesy pony facts. I had no idea about their special blood. It is a fact I plan on sharing. Thank you for all your hard work. And then I asked her why aren't horses a fan of measuring sticks, and she said, horses are prey animals, so most of them are spooky by nature. That is what kept them alive. Plus they actually have nerve endings up in their weather area that keeps them from moving forward, so it is a kill spot. And mail horces stallions will grab there when they mount

us for breeding, so that is super interesting. Samantha really appreciate that. I had no idea that the withers was such a sort of sensitive subject for horses. And I guess like, if if I think about it, if some like creature that wanted to ride me came at me with a yard stick, I'd be kind of piste off to let me put it on and put it in my withers area. That's a that's a personal area. The Withers. So do you guys have anything to plug. We've got

our podcast just Nightcall, Nightcall. I was just on that podcast. UM check it out. We did a little pod exchange she did when where's right here? On the How Stuff Network. I haven't moved from this chair and over two hours I think we've been here on No, don't give anybody a peek behind the curtain face. We are in the information void. And we're all on social media too, which is the same thing. But I met Emily Yoshida on Twitter. I'm Mr tes Lynch, I'm Molly Lambert. They you guys

so much for joining me. This has been excellent. So if you want to send me message, it doesn't have to be horses and giant strawberries. Whatever you want. On Instagram or Twitter. It's Creature feature pod on Instagram and Creature Feet pod on Twitter. That's f e A T, not f e E T. That's something very different. In fact, exciting news. There is now a creature feet pod. I did not create this. This is someone else and apparently it is full of creature feet. So check that one

out too. Uh, thank you guys so much for listening. My New Year's resolutionists to keep making episodes for you and to collect more worms to please the Queen worm who's controlling my brain. One way you guys could really help is by subscribing, downloading episodes, leaving me a nice rating and review, or leaving me some worms. I Love Worms. Thanks to the Space Classics for their super slimy scormy song. X Alumina Creature features a production of I Heart Radios

How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. See your next Wormsday I mean Wednesday. Thank you so good, Thank you guys so much.