Listener Q's: Drunken Moose & Too Many Legs

the first listener question. What foods are toxic two pets and which ones aren't. I know not to give chocolate to dogs, but that's about it, and no alcohol. Are some animals immune to alcohol? I've read about elephants getting drunk Steven M Hi Stephen. So to answer your first question, there are actually tons of foods and substances that are toxic two pets. So it's always a good idea to you only feed them something if you've already looked it

up and check to make sure it's not toxic. But just in addition to some of the more well known foods toxic to dogs, like chocolate, some surprising ones are that you should not let them eat grapes, raisins, or currents, because these can actually cause life threatening kidney damage. It's thought that it's the tartaric acid and grapes that causes

kidney toxicity and dogs, but not in humans. There's also another surprising thing that you shouldn't let your dog eat, which is zylatol, which is the artificial sweetener often found in sugarless gum, sugar free ice cream, or even some brands of sweetened peanut butter. In dogs, zylatol is quickly absorbed by the blood stream and triggers a massive release of insulin, which is an effect that does not occur

in humans. This can dangerously fast track the absorption of blood sugars, causing a blood sugar crash a k a. Hype glycemia, and this can be life threatening. So yeah, there are actually a lot of other things you should not feed your dog, and I'm not a vet, so I don't feel comfortable giving advice or the whole list of what you shouldn't feed your dogs, So always check with your vet or a trusted source before you let the meat stuff that's not dog food or dog treats.

So cats also you need to be careful with in terms of what they get to eat. A surprising thing to me about cats is that essential oils can actually be quite dangerous to them. So essential oils can cause liver damage when a cat ingests it or gets it on their skin. There are a bunch of essential oils that are bad for cats, including but not limited to, peppermint oil, citrus cinnamon oil which I didn't even know, cinnamon cane in oil form, but there it is, uh

tea tree oil, and others. So don't use a cential oil products on your cat. Um, keep them out of your cat's reach. Talk to your vet, like if you if you have essential oils that you use, you can talk to your vet about like, you know, making sure that they're not dangerous to your cat and there's no cross contamination. Um. Yeah, just be just be all careful with the kiddies because it's super concentrated stuff and they cannot handle that. So onto drunk animals, So stories of

drunk elephants maybe apocryphal. There's not really any solid evidence of elephants eating enough rotting fruit to get drunk, and they seem to prefer fresh fruit. UM. And they're so big it would take a lot of fermented fruit to actually get them drunk. But uh, that doesn't mean a

big animal cannot get drunk. So however, moose definitely do get drunk because they will happily eat a bunch of fermented apples, will get drunk, and they have sometimes been found to crash into trees while drunk moss ng which I don't know if that's a crime, um, but you know that is what happens. So in terms of whether some animals are immune to alcohol, there are some that have incredibly high alcohol cool tolerances, such as tree shrews. So the pin tailed tree shrew is a mouse like

arboreal mammal, meaning it lives in trees. Um from Malaysia, So they are these little mouse sized shrews. They have a tail where the hairs on the end, these white hairs stick out like a feather pin and that's why they're called pin tailed. They're very cute. They can fit in the palm of your hand, and they can hold their liquor much better than a mouse. So they love to drink nutrient rich fer mint to nectar that comes

from the bertram palm tree. Uh in the paper with a title that I Love Chronic intake of fermented floral nectar by wild tree shrews. The researchers found that these tree shrews, if scaled up to say a human woman size, could drink nine glasses of wine in twelve hours without showing any signs of intoxication. For me, I can do like one glass. Uh and yeah, so twelve glasses of wine scaled up is what they can handle without showing

any signs of intoxication. And that's not healthy for humans, but it works for the pin tailed tree shrew due to adaptations to their metabolism that allows them to efficiently process alcohol and limit the concentration in their brain and bloodstream. Now onto another question, also from Stephen. I did a Google search for coming from animals other than cows. It seems pigs just don't like humans milking them, and I kind of understand why nobody wants to try to get

hippopotamus milk, But what about other mammals? Have people ever try to get milk from them? Do cats and dogs produce too little milk for people to be interested? So domesticated dairy cows, sheep, and goats were selected and bred for high milk yield. Cows who came from the extinct wild oroc were able to be selectively bred into docile, high yield milk producers, and frankly, their teeths are easy to grab onto to milk. Like trying to milk a dog or a cat. Their teeths are really small and

there's not gonna be much there. It's just not worth it. Also, cow milk is high and fat, it separates well into cream and milk, and it has a mild taste, all making it very ideal for human cultivation. But that doesn't mean that there aren't there animals that people can and do try to get milk from, including camels, horses, water buffalo and uh. Pigs do not like you to milk them. They are very ornerary. But apparently there are some chefs that are trying to figure out how to get pigs milk. Um.

Good luck with that pig. They're not docile and they do not want you up in their business like that. Next listener question, Hi, my son Max has been listening since the first episode. He is a spooky kid. He has asked me to write and suggest some spooky topics. One animals that could be in the Aliens franchises a Ka Xenomorphs too. Animals that could be the subject of the SCP Foundation that is a meta fiction about anomalies that should be secured, contained or protected by a fake

government agency. Three. Max would like to know what animals seem like they should be from crypto Zoology, especially moth Man. For are there animals that seem like they should come from anime, especially JoJo's Bizarre Adventure? So if you have podcaster block, Max is happy to share ideas. Also, we recently went to Africa and saw a bachelor heard of Kate Buffalo's several were staring us down while shake urinating. The guide informed us that that's a sign of aggression.

We said, yes, mean mugging while shakepea translate as a aggression across species. We then spent the next week giggling about how fast you would call the police if someone walked in our bar and was shakepeaing. Sorry for the random story, Thanks for encouraging my son somewhat inappropriate but very funny love of animals. Thanks Sonya, f Hi, Sonia and Max. First of all, yes, I feel like a buffalo peeing aggressively at me would be threatening. It basically

anything peeing aggressively in your direction is threatening. Message received. Uh. Now onto Max's ideas. I love these. I may indeed do an episode to use your ideas. Max. In the meantime, A little appetizer for some of these animals I think fit the bill. Uh. The bobbit worm is one that I think is scarier than the alien from the movies Aliens. It is a worm that lives on the ocean floor,

actually burrows down into the substrate and the ocean. It's got many segments, these very dangerous looking pincers, and it will pop out of a hole and grab a fish and pull it down into this hole in the ocean, and it is It's very scary. Uh. And it looks very alien. Um. Now, in terms of animals that look like they come from an anime, um, this is one that I think is really interesting and kind of cute

in a weird way. The Cicada parasite beetle family are species of beetles whose larva are parasitoids of cicada nymphs. The adult beetles will lay their eggs in the same holes in trees created by cicadas for their offspring, and the beetle larva will feed off of the cicada nymphs. So as dastardly as they are, the adults are actually really cute. Their antenna look like these incredibly feathery antlers.

They have these big round eyes, and in my opinion, they look pretty cute, like if someone crossed a moose in a beetle um. More bugs that I think look like they come from an anime or maybe even from the movie Aliens. This one, I think looks like an alien robot. They are the trilobite beetles. They are a genus of beetles, where the adult males look pretty boring. They just look like a standard beal beetle, but the

females and juveniles look like weird segmented alien robots. They have a triangular head segment to trapezoidal segments, and then a bunch of tail in segments with spikes or barbs coming off of them. Some species have bright orange markings or yellow but the weirdest and most alien looking species to me plate oh drillists. Ruficollis is found in Malaysia and has black, shiny markings on its back that looked like a bunch of weird alien eyes. Seriously, it is crazy.

Look that up uh platow drillists ruficulis. If you want cuter animals uh that look like they come from an anime, look no further than the mouse sized lowland streaked tenric of Madagascar, who is bright yellow and black coloration and incredible hedgehog like spikes. Would put it right at home in many anime art styles. Besides, it's also got a long, boopable snoot, and it will shake its quills together to

create a sound. The only mammal known to do strigulation, as strigulation is the production of sound by rubbing body parts together. So quite an amazing little animal. I think it could definitely be a pokemon uh, and there are many more like that. So maybe in the future I'll do a whole episode using some of your ideas. Max, and I hope you enjoyed these animals in the meantime. Next listener question, Hello Katie, I could barely contain my excitement when I heard you got to the question about

whether there's more eyes or legs in the world. I've made an estimate based on current research earlier this year and the Reddit sub our biology. In short, shrimp are overwhelmingly many, mostly as zooplankton. They're pretty much the deciding group, and the result is therefore that there's a lot more legs than eyes. These calculations were made from numbers including estimates of species not yet found, but of course we don't know if something completely new turns up. I did

not include o'celli in this calculation, so o'celli. Side note, listeners are very primitive, almost eye, sort of like sensory cells, but not really eyes. But anyway, um back to the email. I did not include ocelli in this calculation. My definition of I is that it has to be able to discern shape as well as light, and for legs they need to directly bear the body. I remember that there were some blunders in this calculation, but nothing that would

skew the results really. I remember that I went down a rabbit hole with us and learned a lot both about the vast amount of unidentified fish in our oceans, how many worms there really are, and a lot of cool facts about eyes. Thank you, as always for a great show. Saga e Hi Saga. This was an amazing thing to look at all of your calculations. Um, thank you so much for that. I agree with you. I

think legs would win in a landslide. And even if we were to count o'celli as eyes, which I agree, I don't know that they really count as eyes, but if we did that, only to be fair, we should count podia or tube feet as legs as well. So podia are these tiny tubes bound on the body ms of like starfish and other kindoderms that work as these tiny legs to move them around. They can also use them for things like grabbing onto food and pushing it

into their mouths. The podia actually use hydraulics to move, so water being pumped in and out of them, and they have a sticky adhesive that they use to attach to a substrate. And a starfish can have over ten thousand tube feet each. So if you loosen the definition for what an eye is to like an o'chelli, one of those just simple light sensing cells, then you'd have to loosen the definition for what a leg is to one of these podia, And in that case, I think

the legs are gonna win in a total landslide. Speaking of lots of legs. Millipedes are famous for having tons of legs, and there's a newly discovered millipede, e Persephone, which has broken the record for most legs on an animal. It has been recorded with one thousand, three hundred legs spread over three hundred thirty body segments. It's actually the only known millipede to live up to its name Millie meaning one thousand and peede derived from feet in Latin.

It was found deep in an Australian mining area, about fifty to two hundred feet or fifteen to sixty meters underground. It is eyelis and it has this hair like body. It's around nine point four centimeters long a little under four inches and about one millimeters or point zero four inches thick. So millipedes are interesting in that you can figure out how old they are by counting how many

segments they have. It's kind of like with rattlesnakes. You can figure out how old they are by counting how many segments is on their rattle because they grow them at sort of a constant rate as they age. Millipedes grows segments throughout their life. Uh So, if you know about out how many segments. Species of millipede grows per unit of time. You can add them up to figure

out how old they are. The e Persephone specimen, found with over one thousand, three hundred legs, is suspected to be around five to ten years old based on average growth rates of other species of millipedes um, which is older. Usually millipedes only lived to be around two years old, so that if this is true, this is quite an older living millipede that lives deep, deep underground in the minds. Uh,

certainly nothing spooky about that. I think that if for humans, if we added a new pair of legs as we got older, that'd be very interesting. We'd have much more I guess, eventful birthdays, and I feel like I would finally appreciate birthday gifts of socks like a lot more. M next listener question on Hi Katie, I'm Mino, a listener from Italy and my pronouns are they them? After the latest listener questions rounds the fact about the single

double serings has left me wondering. Has the double tone of the double serings ever been used for voicing alien creatures and movies. I immediately thought about elves when you described it because of their nature being adjacent to human but not exactly after hearing it, I think it would be befitting for most alien creatures in one way or another. What do you think? Second, much broader question, what can you tell us about pet rats? I was scared of them when I was a kid, but now I have

three of them and they're the cutest furry potatoes. Thank you for your amazing work, Mino, and I did get pictures of the rats. I can confirm that they're very cute, so thank you so much for your question. Mino. Firstly, I do love rats. They're very sweet, they're very smart, and my favorite thing about them is that they are ticklish. Uh and perhaps the best rats study ever. In Canberra, Australia, researchers are tickling rats to see if it improves their happiness.

The goal is to find out how to better handle rats and improve their quality of life, even in laboratory settings. But apparently there is a finesse to tickling rats. In an interview with Yen Huan of The New York Times, Carly Motley, a lab technician at the University of Wollongong, explains that you have to learn how best to tickle a rat. You can't just go in too hot. You gotta be gentle, you gotta you gotta have some skills there. So here are some tips from Carly. You gotta tickle

the rats neck with light movements. You can gently flip the rat onto its back and tickle the rat between its front legs on its chest while it's rolled over. You do not want to tickle the tail or rear haunches because those are area is where they are sensitive to being nipped by other rats. It's like where other rats might nip them when they're being aggressive. So they don't necessarily like to be touched there. Um, but yes, they do like it between his front legs, on its

back or on their neck. You can actually get certified in rat tickling. You can google rat tickling certification and take an online course on rat tickling. And this is not a trick. I'm not joking. I'm actually gonna go there right now. Let's see rat tickling certification. I see it. Uh, it's a dot org dot UK website, so it's from Purdue University. Um, okay, let's see if I can get certified in rat tickling. Start the course. Oh my God, this is a two hour course, so I might do

this later. Uh, get my certification in rat tickling later. But that is incredible. So rat tickling, when done correctly, can improve the bond between a rat and a human. It is thought that rat tickling mimics the playful wrestling between rats, and it's just fun for the rat, just like when we tickle each other as humans. So if you own a rat and you want to connect more with your pet rat, consider learning how to tickle them,

maybe even get certified. Now onto your other question, you know, uh, in terms of whether bird sounds could be used in movies as aliens and that double SEARINGX of songbirds being kind of a kind of an alien sound. So yeah, I think bird sounds are used all the time in movies to be the sounds of like mysterious creatures to

create a spooky ambient environment. Um. But first, I actually want to make a bit of a clarification to the episode Listener Cues Muse blues Deer who Choose Uh, which is a title I didn't think I'd have to say out loud, but here I did it. I guess I deserved that, so uh. In that episode, I talked about double versus single searings and birds, um, but I want to add a little bit of nuance to that. So in case you think there's like two synxes, it's kind

of considered one organ. So the seringx is a single organ, but in many birds it in many birds it's bifurcated or double barreled, so it's kind of this upside down y shape. The difference between parrots and songbirds isn't so much that parrots have one serins and songbirds have two seringxes, although I kind of oversimplified it this way last time, but that parents use more of a tracheal synx, whereas songbirds use a tracheo bronchial serings. So if you're like,

what is that, I will try to explain. So, parrots have one set of vibrating membranes and strong muscles surrounding the trachea. Uh, the fact that it is not so like they're they're sort of sernx muscles aren't so focused on where the tricky branches off into these bronchi means that they are mostly using that single the single trachea, that single sort of tube, and uh, they only have one set of muscles surrounding the trachea. Uh, this makes

it a little bit more similar to a human larynx. Then, say, if you compare a human larynx to the songbirds synx, which is, instead of just being a tracheal serinx, is a tracheo bronchial sernx. So the songbird synx has more muscle activity where it branches off into that uh, those bronchi,

so it's more double barreled than the parrots syrinx. They have several pairs of syrngeal muscles instead of a parrot's single pair, and they can make use of two independently controlled sound sources inside their stynx, allowing them to sing two notes at once. Um. So I just wanted to kind of add a little bit more nuanced little clarification to what I said earlier in terms of songbirds being used in movies for spooky sounds. I don't know specifically

of songbirds being used as aliens. Um, but if there are are any movie nerds out there who do know about that, please write to me. I do know that in the movie Prometheus, uh, pet parrot was used to make some alien sounds, So even just the even though the parrots uh starynx is more human like, it is certainly not the same as a larynx, and so they can still produce some eerie interesting sounds. Also, last I'm on Creature Feature for the Mystery Animal sound game, I

played this sound, which I think is hauntingly beautiful. Last week's hint with that sound was whoever named this animal was being a bit judgmental. But because this animal sound goes so well with your question, I will give you another hint before revealing the answer next week. Here's my second hint for the sound. This is often used in movies to create a spooky, haunted atmosphere, even when it's

inaccurate to do so. Uh So, Yeah, that is a sound you may recognize from a lot of movies that tries to give it this spooky eerie, maybe even a prehistoric ambience, But it is in fact a very real animal that is not so scary. So um, thank you guys so much for all of your questions. Again, if you have a question that you would like to hear me answer, or maybe even send you an email response, you can write to me at Creature Feature pod at gmail dot com. Yeah, and I really appreciate all of

your emails, all your animal pictures. Your pets love to hear from you guys, so yes, feel free to email me just to even say hi if you want. And thank you so much for listening. I guess I'm gonna go and try to get certified in rat tickling uh. And I will see you guys next week. And thank you so much to the Space Cossics for their super awesome song. Excelumina. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio.

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