Welcome to Creature Feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites.
Katie Golden.
I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on this show, it's a listener's Questions episode. You can write to me your questions and then guess what I try to answer them.
That's what happens.
So if you're listening to this Q and A and you're like, hey, wait a minute, I have a question. Why doesn't Katie answer my question about animals and stuff?
Well, it's easy.
You can write to me at Creature Featurepod at gmail dot com with your question and I will do my best to answer it accurately. Let's get right into it. First question, Hey, Katie, We here in my part of Newfoundland were fortunate enough to be right in the path of totality of the eclipse. So a friend and I decided to move a bit closer to the center of the path and observe it next to a ghost ship that recently appeared on a beach.
That's spooky.
Okay, it was awesome and Sareel got way colder than I anticipated. The horizon was orange, which was confusing, and thankfully we got a break in the clouds right before the sun turned black with the eerie white glow. As it became darker, I didn't hear or see any animals around us. I was a bit disappointed because I wanted to know how they'd react to this, but nothing. Our animals usually quiet as it darkens in anticipation of night. I don't know, or are they just thrown off by
the timing. However, as soon as the sun started peeking out, the world became lighter, even before it really warmed up, birds started chirping. There were animals around us apparently, and one other strange animal behavior that I'm mostly curious about. As we walked back to where we parked the car, we met a young man and his saint Bernard. He the giant doggie seemed friendly enough. My friend got close because it seemed fine, leaned over, and the dog suddenly
bit him in the arm, like pretty deep. The man had to use force on the leash to get him to back off. It was really on edge suddenly. My friend had never been bitten before, and the guy said his dog had never bitten anyone before. He was very apologetic and it seems sincere, although we don't know for sure if he was telling the truth, but if he was, it had me wondering if dogs have a very sensitive circadian clock and if this behavior was the result of
him being thrown out of whack. I'm curious if you know of other stories like this or if other listeners might have recent animal eclipse stories as well. And this is from PK. Thank you so much for your story, PK. I am very jealous that you got to watch the eclipse next to a ghost ship. Also, apparently people were able to see the northern lights. But hey, guess what. Guess who's got two thumbs and didn't get to see the eclipse or the northern lights.
Uh me, it's me. So I'm very jealous. That's very cool.
So yeah, let's talk about animal behavior during the eclipse. So animals, like humans, typically follow a day night cycle, but in different ways maybe than humans. So they may be diurnal as we are, which means mostly sleeping at night and mostly being active during the day. There's also nocturnal animals that's being mostly asleep or inactive during the day and mostly active at night, and crepuscular animals and those are mostly active at dawn and dusk. Otherwise they are resting.
So there are.
Also animals who use the day night cycle to engage in mass migrations. So billions of zooplankton migrate from the.
Depths of the ocean.
Up to the surface every night to feed, and then they go back down to the depths to hide from the sunlight because they are trying to evade predators that can see them. Zooplankton being very small, very snackable. So photoreceptors, which in humans and many other animals are mainly concentrated in our eyes, respond to light dark cues and stinctly, for instance, producing the hormone melatonin in response to dark
light cycles, which signals to our body to sleep. So during an eclipse, it would make sense for animal behaviors to change. But to what extent is it changing and is it because the animals literally think it's night or is it due to fear or confusion. So the problem with trying to study animal behaviors during total eclipses is that they are so rare. Uh. Also, human observation during
eclipses may differ. Right, Like, you are so hyper focused on the event, you may be paying particular attention to sounds and sights and noticing things maybe that you wouldn't have noticed before, So maybe you're more likely to notice subtle changes in behavior that may happen with some regularity. It's just everyone's paying attention right now because it's an eclipse and it is really exciting. So that being said, there really does seem to be some response from animals
to eclipses. So zookeepers report animals acting erratically during an eclipse, probably confusion about the sudden darkness or maybe anticipation.
Of a storm.
Researchers found that some diurnal birds seem to continue their song during an eclipse, while observers have noticed that other birds will fall silent, So it's possible that some birds think it's night, or they might be confused and go into a cautious standby mode, whereas others are less sensitive to that change. Insects may respond more rapidly to eclipses, becoming more active as it gets dark. For honeybees, it's
actually the opposite. Researchers found that honey bees return to their hive and hunker down during the darkness of an eclipse, and in fact, it seems like their return is pretty rapid, more rapid than they usually do. So it could be that they are in something of a panic because they are confused or it seems dangerous to them that this
sudden darkness has approached. As for the question about the dog, so we don't know, right, like if this guy is telling the truth or not that his dog has never bitten.
But let's take him at his word. Okay.
So dogs really like routine, and they can get very stressed if their routine is disrupted by something unpleasant like the world suddenly going dark. So when I say routine, I don't mean just like boring stuff. Of course, dogs like stimulation, they like getting out about, they like novelty to some extent. But if their routine is altered in a really significant way, especially something spooky like the world suddenly going dark, I think it's very reasonable for the
dog to get really stressed. Because dogs do have a pretty good sense of time. They have a good sense of routine, like that's why your dog expects dinner at a certain time. So I could definitely see a dog as reacting with fear and anxiety to the unexpected darkness. Also, I have found that dogs are very sensitive to vibes,
which you know is obviously a scientific term. But if a dog's senses something is weird, right, like if people's behaviors have suddenly changed, if everyone if there's just a certain I guess emotional.
Change.
I think dogs can be quite sensitive to that, and that can make them anxious. I'm really sorry that your friend was bitten. Of course, this is not his fault at all, and you know, but I can't imagine a dog getting really stressed over a unusual event like an eclipse. As a dog owner who has a very anxious little dog, She's tiny, so she can't really do much damage, but she does nip if she's stressed out. So what I
do is if she is in an unusual situation. First of all, I tried to avoid putting her in stressful unusual situations, but if it's unavoidable, then I make sure that she stays away from people, because I don't want her to nip at people. Even if she's tiny, she she can she can get in a good little nip there, and it's it's not it's not fun. But yeah, so she she has a little bit of trauma as well,
which we have worked through. But yeah, she does easily get very anxious and stressed and scared in situations, and an anxious and stressed and scared dog is one who could be unpredictable. They could they could bite, they could nip, So it's always important to keep that in mind as a as a dog owner. And yeah, so I'm really sorry that happened to your friend. But yeah, maybe maybe it really was the Saint Bernard's first time because he thought it was the apocalypse, or maybe ghosts from that
ghost ship possessed the dog. I don't know. Next question, Hey, how many times have we talked about a seals the plant animal marine flatworm? They're totally wicked and this is from Jercifuentis, So I don't think we have talked about them yet, and.
We probably should.
So. A seals are an order of marine invertebrates that are similar to flatworm. A seals kind of look like used band aids. Maybe more charitably, they look like sort of flat orangish discs, and they vary in size depending on the species. They are both carnivorous and in a symbiotic relationship with algae that can photosynthesize, so the algae is dispersed throughout the aceeal's tissue. But you know, even though we haven't talked about the acal, we have talked
about another marine invertebrate that uses a similar technique. It is called the leaf sheep, also known as coast Ciella kroscheme, which is a sea slug that looks like a weird sheep whose wool is made of thick green leaves. I highly recommend you google leaf sheep.
It's very cute.
So this sheeplike aspect to its face is due to these projection that kind of look like ears, which are actually rhinophores. These are chemoreceptive sensors. It's also got a couple of eye spots that are really close together and look like really cartoony. They kind of look like a Gary Larsen cartoon of a cow's it's very funny. So the green leaves on its body are fleshy projections full of chloroplasts, which it actually steals from the algae it eats.
So this is kleptoplasty. It's actually stealing chloroplasts from the algae that it eats and integrating it into its body, and these chloroplasts can photosynthesize and produce nutrients for the sea slug so a similar situation to the acal. But you know what, You're right. We should have talked about the acls. They're very cool and maybe I'll talk about them more on another episode. Next listener question, how do
animals know what to eat? With humans? It seems to be a learned behavior, knowing what is safe to eat and what food we need for a healthy diet. Do animals use their senses? Is it learned behavior or something else? Thank you, Daniel, Thank you for your question, Daniel. So, for many animals, food is instinctive. They have sensory organs like a nose, antenna, or tentacles that alert them to the smells or.
Tastes of food.
They intuitively understand which foods are good or bad. All animals have some instinct when it comes to eating, including humans. We innately like the taste of sugars, carbohydrates, and proteins. Different flavors will appeal to different animals, of course, due to the differing nutritional and health needs. So, for instance, cat poop might seem like an abhorrent snack to most of us humans, but to a dog, cat poop is like candy. Given how high a protein content exists in
catfood and is excreted in cat poop. So when your dog eats cat poop, he's not being a freak. It's just that cat poop seems like candy to dogs, believe it or not. So what happens when our instincts tells us that something will taste good and we try to eat it and then we get sick, Well, that is learning. So learning is a major way in which animals figure out how to eat. So, for instance, a butterfly might be a nice snack for a bird, but certain butterflies
are actually toxic. Birds can learn that certain colors on a butterfly or frog means they are about to encounter a yucky thing that makes them throw up. This is actually called poison shyness. So butterflies actually some species of butterfly mimics will take advantage of this and pretend to
be the toxic butterflies. But what happens actually is if these mimics become too great in numbers, the birds unlearn the toxicity signal, the apisomatic coloration, that's coloration that is a warning color that you know I am dangerous, I am yucky. And so if mimics become too big a number. The birds unlearn it, they statistically are more likely to encounter a mimic, and so they learn, hey, this is
actually pretty tasty. And then you have sort of this realignment in populations, a drop in the population of mimics, and then suddenly once the actual toxic butterfly population becomes more prominent, after the birds have picked off a lot of the non time toxic mimics, then the apisomatic coloration works again and the birds are like, hey, actually, every time I try to eat one of these, you know, red or orange butterflies, I get a tummy ache and
I throw up. So, yeah, that is poison shyness. So conservationists sometimes take advantage of poison shyness to try to teach endangered animal populations not to accidentally lethally poison themselves. So an example is with the quall. So qualls are an endangered Australian marsupial and on the other side you've
got cane toads. Those are an invasive species. They were introduced to Australia because we had this thing that we would do as humans where we would have some kind of problem with a crop, right, like a cane sugar crop where it's like, ah, there's these cane beetles eating our cane sugar, So we'll just introduce an animal to eat the can cane beetles. And we did that with
the cane toads. Didn't work to control the cane beetles because apparently the cane beetles were too high up on the cane stock for the cane toads to actually eat them, because it's a different species than they would prey upon in their native country. And so then the cane toad just started eating everything else, and you know, like marsupial mice, and the cane toads were highly toxic, so they would also poison predators. So it was a terrible situation. The
cane toads are still highly invasive. It's not really a good idea to introduce a species as pets control, no matter how many times we've tried and failed. Yes, it's still it's never gonna be a good idea. Okay, So we've got these cane toads and we've got these qualls. Qualls are adorable native species, and they would try to eat the cane toads, and the cane toads are so toxic. They have a buffo toxin that can actually kill the quall, and we don't want that. These are quality qualls and
we don't want them killed. So what conservationists do is they take a dead cane toad that is not, you know, not no longer deadly toxic, and they actually lace it with a nausea inducing drugs. And these nausea inducing drugs won't actually kill the quall, they will just make them feel sick to their little tommies. And so they like lay out these dead altered cane toads that have these these drugs in them that will make them taste nasty.
So then the quall learns like, hey, wait a minute, I should avoid this cane toad because it makes me have a tummy ache. And that way it can learn without actually just dying from the lethal cane toad toxin. So that is a really great conservationist use of poison shyness.
Poison shyness can sadly also happen in terms of when people use pest control and try to like say, poisoning rats, and rats can be very sensitive to that and learn to avoid certain foods or to test out certain foods, or even watch their friends eat something and see if it's safe.
And so there's.
Actually been more advanced rat poison that instead of being a fast acting poison, it's a basically like a extreme blood thinner that causes internal bleeding, but it takes a while to actually happen, and so that's meant to overcome the poison shyness. It's pretty grizzly. I like rats, so I don't love this kind of twisted method of killing them. Animals can also learn the inverse of poison shyness or that something is yucky. They can learn that something is
yummy that is not intuitive. So the most famous example of this is probably the Japanese macare that learned that washing sweet potatoes in salt water makes them taste better. They basically they salt their food. It's not washing them for hygiene purposes, but for the flavor of the salt water. So this was taught to multiple generations of these Japanese macaques by a single female, and that idea spread and has been passed down and passed among these Japanese macaques
long after her death. So sometimes learned feeding behavior and genetic food preference coincide and interact. So domesticated dogs have become much better at digesting starches over time, Like genetically, they are better at digesting starches due to their proximity with humans and starchy foods that we will give them. Compared to their ancestors, the wolves. Dogs are much better at digesting starches. That's what thousands of years of begging at the table gets you as a dog.
So, you know, one can't imagine the.
Dogs that were better able to digest these starches flourished more among human settlements, and so they were more likely to pass along their genes and perhaps maybe it made them even friendlier towards humans. Right, Like they can digest starch well and they're more friendly towards humans, and so humans would reward that right by trying to make more
puppies like that. So you have this really interesting interplay of artificial selection of humans selecting the dogs, evolutionary pressures right of dogs being able to eat more food that is around human settlements, and genetics. Now, dogs are very distinct genetically from wolves such that they are much better at eating starches. So like dog chow and wolf chow
would have to be very different now. So, like many behaviors, knowing what to eat can both be instinctive, like a newborn who knows how to immediately suckle at the teat, to learned like putting salt on food to make it taste better, or just a combination right of genetics learn behavior over long periods of time, creating you know, new situations. So yeah, it's a very deep and interesting question, so
thank you. Next listener question, Hi, Katie, I enjoyed your recent secretly incredibly fascinating episode about the middle finger, and suddenly I found myself wondering about the evolution of the penis. Hey, you know what that tracks. I've heard that some birds have penises, while many non mammals manage fine with just chloak. Did dinosaurs have penises? Do any fish have them? How often have they evolved independently? What makes an insects of
a positor not a penis? Thanks for the fascinating show. Wanted to thank you so much for this question. It is a fascinating topic. Don't you dare giggle even once during my explanation. So penises, they are actually extremely interesting. There are birds who don't have them in mate by bumping cloacas together. There are also birds who do have penises.
Reptiles also vary in terms of who have penises. Some reptiles like the tuatura, only use cloacas, whereas reptails like lizards and snakes actually have hemipenies, which are two headed penises that they met with. In fact, they are often spiky. They basically look like a two headed morning star mace, but you know they use it for love, not war.
So fish are.
Extremely diverse, so some species of fish are less closely related to other fish as they are too terrestrial animals. That said, there aren't any true fish stix, I mean true fish penises. They do have a variety of either chloika or penis like organs, So I would say, I
mean this is similar to the insects ovipositor. The insects overpositor is not a penis, just because that's just sort of a definition thing, right, but its function is very similar and ovipositor usually is used to deposit eggs, not sperm, and so just based on our definition of a penis, that that wouldn't count as a penis. But even with these fish, right like, they will have structures that resemble penises. But just because of the way that we define things,
we don't define them as penis. We call them penis like structures. But it's it's all, that's just semantics, that's just how we define things. So so, for instance, sharks have claspers. They are a set of umbrella like organs that funnel semen into the female's kloaca. Some fish like guppies, have gona podium, which are modified anal fins that act as a trow basically to loge sperm into the female's kloaka.
Now let's move on to dinosaurs. So dinosaurs, it's a really fascinating question and one that scientists don't really have all the answers to because it is so tricky to get answers to questions for species that we only have fossil records for. Of course, we do have modern day dinosaurs, which are birds, and that factors plays a huge role in how we understand what dinosaurs that are extinct were like. So penises don't have to have a bone. Human penises
do not have a bone. A lot of mammalian penises, most mammalian penises do actually have a penis bone, but human penises do not, so given that penis bone may not have existed in dinosaurs, right, it would just be soft tissue, So how would we know if they had penises based on fossil records. Also, discovering something about one dinosaur doesn't mean we know everything about every other dinosaur.
Dinosaurs were very diverse. Some were warm blooded, being able to thermoregulate on their own, and others were cold blooded, meaning they relied on their environment to thermoregulate. That's just an example of how diverse dinosaurs were as a whole. And so one species might have a penis, whereas others maybe didn't develop that, but we don't necessarily know. So there is fossil evidence of kloacas in dinosaurs, but no
hard proof of the existence of penises. Biologists speculate that at least some dinosaurs may have had penises because old lineages of birds birds being you know, the dinosaurs that remain do have penises. So based on embryonic evidence, that is, like you look at the stages of the development of the embryo and you see you see like early on, maybe it starts to develop a penis and then it
stops developing. And so based on that evidence many birds who did not have penises likely did have them in their evolutionary history, but then lost them over time due to it not being necessary or different mating techniques, et cetera. So what about mammals. All male mammals have some sort of are All male mammals are born with some sort of penis. Even some females have pseudo penises, Like the female hyena has something a structure that looks very much
like a penis. It is something that she has to give birth through, which is incredibly difficult. One of the theories for why hyenas have a pseudo penis is that it improves the survival of cubs of hyena cubs because perhaps in earlier iterations of their evolution, males would kill young male cubs, and so by making it more difficult to differentiate, it would make it less beneficial for male hyenas to kill the cubs.
That's just one theory.
I don't know, though, it is very interesting why the females have a pseudopenis. It seems like there must also be some evolutionary pressure in terms of the social structure of hyena groups. Anyways, researchers believe that all mammals have a common ancestor that had a penis, and so the mammalian penis evolved once. In fact, it's thought that all amniotes share a common ancestor who had a penis. So
amniotes include birds, reptiles, and mammals. The idea is that even reptiles or birds who do not have penises once had a common ancestor with like us mammals, with everyone else, all other amniotes one common ancestor who did have a penis, But some species ended up finding the penis unnecessary and it just shrank into oblivion. Well, on that note, we've
done it. I have answered your questions, and if you're out there saying like, hey, I have a question, I'm worried it's dumb or it's about butts, so I feel like it's inappropriate. I just spent like I don't know, eight minutes talking about penises. So any question is welcome, and you can write to me at Creature Featurepod at gmail dot com. Any question about animal biology, evolution, your pets, some kind of random bug you found, send it to me. I love doing these and I hope you like them too.
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