Listener Q's: Mouse VR

get right into it with the first listener question. Hi, Katie, so I'm perplexed about various bird and animal diets. After the episode where you discuss the diverse diet of herons, this makes sense to me in terms of their physique and size. Now take Swan's How on Earth do they become so massive in size and need a diet of mostly pond plants, which I had to assume are not very calorically dense. How do they thrive on such a

minimal diet? I guess this goes for many land herbivores that grow to enormous sizes as well, cows, giraffes, elephants. I understand metabolism varies from species to species, but it still boggles my mind. Help me understand how pond wheat sustains a swan. Thank you look forward to your podcast each week, JODCS. So this is a great question. How do plants sustain such huge creatures like elephants, pandas, gorilla, etc. So, yes,

your correct, Swans primarily feed on pond plants. They do occasionally eat insects or crustaceans, but yeah, they most of their diet is vegetation, and this is also the case for even bigger animals like elephants. Elephants are primarily herbivores. They eat grasses, scrub, leaves, and sometimes even bark. They might sometimes supplement their diet with minerals found in dirt, watering holes or mineral lick sites, but yeah, they feed

primarily on vegetation. And it seems like it would be difficult to gain so much mass, fat, muscle, all that tissue just from vegetation, but yeah, vegetation can be converted into muscle mass, and when eaten in large enough quantities,

they can easily sustain a large animal. So it is true that carnivores are quote quote unquote more efficient in that more of the food that they eat, like the meat, that they can convert into energy and body mass rather than waste, whereas an herbivore will poop out a lot

of the indigestible plant material. I actually once had a journal that was made out of fibers that were collected from elephant poop because they poop out so much of the insoluble fibers from their diet, this fiber that cannot be broken down by their digestive system, that people can

collect it and then turn it into paper. So but in terms of like efficiency, it doesn't necessarily matter that if you eat, you know, a slab of meat, like you're gonna be able to digest that more easily than say, the equivalent amount of that amount of calories in veget in plants or vegetables, because it's about sort of the availability,

the abundance of the food source. So the food that herbivores eat vegetation is typically in high supply and easy to get in mass volume, whereas prey, you know, predator's life is not easy just because they eat meat, which seems more efficient in terms of energy. Well, they have to chase after the dang thing, right, like they have to risk quite a bit in terms of time, energy, and even they're on safety in order to take down

prey and eat that meat. So an herbivore eating a lot of vegetation and then yes, like pooping out a lot of the vegetation that cannot be digested just because they have to eat sort of larger quantities to get the same amount of caloric intake doesn't mean it's like not a good system for them, not an effective evolutionary

strategy obviously, because we have plenty of herbivores. So to kind of put this in perspective, an African elephant can eat around one hundred to three hundred pounds of vegetation per day, that's forty five to one hundred and thirty five kilograms. They spend most of the day grazing and eating, So the elephant's digestive system isn't the same as a human's. It's adapted for an exclusive vegetarian diet. Digestion can take over twenty hours, so different elephant species actually have different

digestive efficiency. So Asian elephants are more able to get use out of plant matter than say African elephants. So Asian elephants digest a greater percentage of the food that they eat, and it's speculated that this is due to basically the availability of the types of vegetation that's available

to Asian elephants versus African elephants in their environment. So African elephants are larger than Asian elephants, but they're more inefficient in their diet, So the size of the animal is not like directly correlated to the efficiency of their digestion. The Asian elephants, they have more of their diet is grasses versus the more diverse food in the African elephants diet, so the Asian elephant has to be more precisely efficient

at digesting those grasses. So yeah, size is really about a combination of the animal's metabolism and about how much food an animal can get. Like the biggest animal in the world, the blue whale, subsists entirely on these teeny tiny invertebrates like krill. They just eat a huge amount of them, a massive, massive amount of them, and that is able to sustain their large size. It's true that krill are very protein rich, but the common thread there with the krill and say like an elephant's diet is

the abundance of the krilled krill are highly abundant. The blue whale can get a lot of them, and so and the krill themselves feed on the abundant algae and phytoplankton in the ocean. So basically, in terms of getting big and getting buff in the animal kingdom, you don't have to eat meat. You just have to have an abundant food source. If you get enough mass of a food item, even if it's not the most efficient food

that you can eat, you will still get big. So, for instance, like did you know that panda ancestors they were not always just eating bamboo. They were once omnivores like other bears. They used to eat meat as well as fruit, plants and et cetera. But now they're exclusively bamboo eaters. So why would they do this? This is because of the abundance of bamboo in their territory. Being niche bamboo eaters mean they have a vast food supply

and don't have to fight or compete for other food sources. Now, this only applies as long as the bamboo forest remain intact. The reason panda's struggle is when their bamboo forests are depleted, either through you know, human human intervene or climate change. So you might wonder, like, well, it doesn't seem wise right for an animal to put all their eggs in one basket, like if the bamboo becomes more scarce, the pandas would be in danger. And that's true, that is

absolutely true. A lot of animals have probably gone extinct because they were specialists in a food source, very specific food source, and they weren't generalists. And then once that food source went away, maybe due to climate change, maybe due to humans, maybe due to another species of animal being more successful, then they can't compete anymore. So the thing to remember about evolution is evolution doesn't really have foresight.

It can only the only guiding principle behind evolution is if you can pass your genes on to the next generation, great, you did it. So it's like this very small scale thing of like, well I'm successful, I had progeny and now they're alive. And it's from that very small unit that you have this much larger, these much larger patterns

in evolution. But there's no way for evolution to like peer into the future or have some like greater understanding of what's going to happen to this animal, because that the evolution isn't like a meta cognition, it's it's not a force outside of just the principle of something that survives will survive, and then that thing gets passed on.

That's it. So, uh, you know, if an animal can evolve for millions of years, that hundreds of thousands of years, specializing in a food source and being really good at getting that food source, and it's successful for hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years, then that's what's going to happen. Even if in the future. Sometime in the future the climate changes, that food source goes away or changes, and then the animal is impacted and then

that animal might go extinct. So this is actually what is thought to have happened to Gigantopithecus, which is a giant extinct ape from around two million years ago, sought to have lived in southern China. It's kind of like the real life Bigfoot. Some researchers think it spent some of its time like walking on its hind legs. Some think it was too big to do that and walked more sort of gorilla style, but it at least looks a lot like our common perception of what a bigfoot

would look like. But it's extinct, and it may have weighed over six hundred pounds, so that's three hundred kilograms. It was a big, big thing, and it was an herbivore and it is thought to have got extinct around three hundred thousand years ago when climate change made the

tropical forests in the region more scarce. So you know, you have this happened to animals where you know, it has a successful evolutionary strategy for many, many years, and then something happens, the environment changes, and then it's no longer successful, and then they die out. And the reason things seems so stable to us now, right, like we have you know, animals that we can't imagine the world without, like elephants, Like we couldn't imagine the world without elephants. Well,

because humans live on a very small scale. Humans kind of our memories go back, you know, maybe thousands of years in terms of our history, not millions of years. So you know, that's that's why it feels like evolution is a more stable thing than it actually is. Next listener question, Hi, Katie, I've been wondering for a while, why can't animals tell time? My dog knows when her automatic feeder is about to go, often when it's time to go outside at five point thirty in the morning,

even on weekends. The cats know when it is time to be fed and start following us around. Crows know what time I get home from work and can expect some peanuts. It would seem like this would be an evolutionary disadvantage. If an animal has a routine and a predator can learn the routine, it would make it easier to stock and catch them. It seems like a chaotic schedule would be better with the exception of daylight considerations.

Thanks will h. So, I mean, first of all, I think animals can indeed tell time, and you know I mean it's true and a certain way that having a regular schedule predators might learn your habits more. But the problem with having any irregular schedule in terms of say, I don't know, waking up at a random time or sometimes being nocturnal, sometimes being diurnal, is that your food source and your ability to get things would become more difficult.

So or like a group dynamics, like something like a dog is a very social animal, so having a schedule where it follows you know, the pack, it's family, or it's you know, human family, is going to be very important for its survival. I mean actually the same thing with crows. Crows are highly social, so having schedules, having sort of patterns are really useful for social animals to function,

and even the less social animals having a pattern. A cat is a predator, so having a schedule, knowing like when small animals are the most active, is going to be good for it. And you know it's also part of the reason animals are active at certain times is temperature of the environment. Like say you you are, you know, somewhere where it's hot. You might be more crepuscular active in dawn and dusk, so that you can be active when it's a little cooler but not so cold like

it at night. Or you might want to be more active during the day because it's warmer and night is too cold. So those are just some reasons that that that there are schedules for animals. Also, sunlight, you know, if you're a visually predisposed animals, you're you're gonna want that sunlight so that you can see what you're doing. I mean with human beings, we're very visual creatures, much

more than a lot of animals. We don't use our sense of smell or even our hearing, although our hearing is fairly good, but our smell is, you know, it's decent, but it's not nearly as good as say, like a dog or a cat. But our vision is really good. And so we're a very like sun based animal. We need the sunlight so we can see, so we can hunt, so we can gather things like that, and so a lot of animals are like that. They need the sunlight

so that they can see things. And so having a schedule that basically maximizes the time you're out and about where you can actually see stuff is important. You see this also in the ocean, like you see the schedule that these very tiny animals follow, these phido, these zooplankton, which is both animals that remain microscopic and tiny their

whole lives. In animals that are larval, the offspring of larger animals, fish, ninerians, which includes jellyfish, a whole bunch of you know, crustaceans, everything will have a larva, you know, on offspring that can be really really tiny, and so all of these things, all these little tiny zooplankton go on a mass migration and every night where they go from the sort of depths of the ocean and come up to the surface to feed because during the daytime

they actually hide at the depth of the ocean, and that schedule actually protects them because they are they go down below where the sunlight can reach them, so predators have a harder time finding them, seeing them and eating them. And then at night they come up to the surface so that they can feed on phidoplankton, you know, algae that has been feeding off of the sun rays. And it's this huge mass migration that happens every day and

it's really amazing. So there are a lot of good reasons for animals to have schedules, even if that means predators can perhaps exploit that schedule to know when their prey is out and about. And in terms of whether or not animals can tell time, there has been some research on this. Now. Of course, animals have a sense of time, of timing, they don't maybe have a definition of time or precise sort of orological measurement of time with numbers and fractions you know, they don't have their

little wrist watches. But aside from clocks and understanding like what an hour is or how to set an appointment, animals have been found to have a sense of time. So there's research on mouse brains that show that they have an internal clock. And they do this research by putting mice into virtual reality, which is always funny to me when an animal is put into a VR scenario. So the mice ran on treadmills and we're attached to

a little mousey VR headset. They ran down a VR hallway, so they're running in place, just on a treadmill, but to the mouse, they think they're running down a hallway because they're in virtual reality. And then they come to a little VR door, you know, this digital door. After six seconds, the door would open and then they can keep going through the door and receive a little treat. So the treat is real, but the door is fake,

the hallway is fake. They're just on a treadmill. So after training like this, the mice learned that this virtual door is shut for six seconds and then opens and then they can keep going through and get their little treat. The researchers then made the door invisible, and they had like a marker on the ground, sort of the change in the floor, so that the mice would know that the door is supposed to be there, But then they

can't actually see the door. So the mice still waited at the invisible door for six seconds before proceeding to receive their reward, even though they don't see the virtual door opening, so they don't know when they're supposed to proceed through. There's the evidence that they are actually somehow able to wait six seconds, the amount of time they know they were supposed to wait to receive their treat.

By looking at the rat's neural activity, the researchers found that specific neurons fired when the mouse was waiting for the invisible door to open for that waiting period they know they have to wait before receiving their treat, which indicates that there may be specific neural networks responsible for timing. So it's I think reasonable to assume that if mice are capable of having this little internal stopwatch, other animals

probably also have this ability. But of course there's like a big difference between a mouse being able to remember how to wait six seconds and a mouse being able to have sort of the concept of counting, like, you know, thinking like one, two, three, four, five, six. You know, one mousissippi, two mousissippi. That's probably not happening, but yeah, really interesting to see that even a mouse is capable of very precise timing abilities. So quite quite amazing. Next

listen our question. Hello Katie, just in case you do a Listener Questions episode before Halloween, I have a spook key question for you. If you were a witch, assuming you're not assume away, what kind of animal would be you're familiar? I think I would go beta garbasca all the way. They definitely know how to get to the underworld and back. Another good option would be a black rat snake that coils around the neck like a necklace and is allowed to practice kleptothermy in exchange for its

services as a familiar. What about you? Would you have a velvet worm who can squirt black magic out of its little squirty holes. The poo tuo bird is also a good candidate for a familiar because they are clearly already involved in the dark arts. What do you think? Happy Halloween, Chelsea? Now of course this is after Halloween. Sorry about that, but I'm still you know what, For me, spooky season doesn't end on Halloween. Spooky season is all

of autumn and winter, because I don't know. Whenever I want to get cozy, I also want to think about spooky things like ghosts and velvet worms. Of course, I do love the idea of a velvet worm familiar who squirts black magic out of its little squirty holes. Real life velvet worms are a type of it's a worm like animal. It's not actual worm, but they look like a sort of cross between a caterpillar and a worm.

They're adorable, and they they have these little nodules on their heads where they can squirt the sticky substance at their prey because they prey on insects, and then the prey gets stuck and the velvet worm can go and nibble on them, eat them, and it's great. It's very spooky. I also love the badagarabasca that Chelsea mentioned. It is a river turtle found in Southeast Asia, also called the

Northern River terrapin. So males will change from an olive green to spooky halloween colors red and black coloration during the breeding season. Their heads turn black and their next turned blood red to attract females, So these are some goth loving females. So in terms of a familiar, I think I gotta go with a classic, because a familiar has to be good at carrying out my witchy asks.

It's got to be vaguely spooky, vaguely threatening, good at picking locks for my witch crimes, and capable of relaying messages to my coven of fellow witches, and also looks cool. So for me, I think I would pick the New Caledonian crow. They've got the classic kind of Corvid witchy. Look, you know a lot of witches are gonna have ravens and crows and stuff, and so it'd fit right in.

But the New Caledonian crow can make tools out of twigs, paper and wire, so they are really special species of Corvid. And I'm pretty sure I could train one to pick a lock or stir a witch's brew, as long as I made sure that they would get compensation. I think I would have to pay the New Caledonian crow a fair wage because these crows are very intelligent and I'm

pretty sure it would know if it's being exploited. Yeah, but I think their cleverness in figuring out puzzles and problem solving and getting grown rubs out of bark in the wild and food out of man made puzzles in the laboratory would make them a very valuable ally in the dark arts and in my little witch plans. You know. Also, they if I'm flying on some kind of broom or vacuum or whatever it is, they would be able to keep up and not be afraid of heights. Next, listen

our question. Hi, Katie, just wondering if you've seen the Apple TV series Invasion. The aliens in there not a spoiler because it's shown in the teasers. Teasers show everything. By the way, I've seen trailers that show the entire TV show Slash Movie, and there's nothing left to spoil. Anyways, back to the question, the aliens in there definitely got that could be highly evolved crab look to them. I wonder if the creators had the thought that all evolutions

lead to crab on the universal scale. Cheers Jesse. Hi, Jesse, So, I have not seen this TV series, but yeah, looked at some of the images from the show, and yeah, I agree with you. They're pretty crab like, maybe a little bit of sea archin tossed in there. I do love them. And I'm answering this question because I think it's really interesting how so many movies and TV shows about scary aliens have aliens that are ripped from the pages of marine biology. So I wanted to go through

some other examples that I can think of. So the alien from the Aliens franchise, you know, Signori Weaver and the aliens chasing around in her underpants. Those aliens look like you took a deep sea anglerfish and bred it with a human and a mora eel, And I love you know, like the when they open their mouth, the aliens in the movie have that little little guy that comes out like the extra little like bidy tongue. It's

that there's an actual thing in marine biology. Uh, there's a fair and geal second set of jaws that more eels have that can come out and grab food. So they open their mouths and then like a second little set of jaws shoot out of their mouths and can grab food and like pull them in, just like you see in the Aliens. I also find face huggers to be very crustacean, like very crab or like horseshoe crab. Like horseshoe crabs, despite being marine animals, are actually not

true crabs. They're not crustaceans at all. They are chalceraates related to Iraq. And it's like spiders and scorpions. So you know, if you see like this alien design and it's like, man, it's kind of like it's kind of like marine life, but it also kind of looks insect life. There's a lot of evolutionary crossover between marine animals like isopods or horseshoe horseshoe crabs and land arthropods scorpions, spiders, isopods. On land marine isopods you can get quite big, and

then terrestrial isopods are also known as roly Polly's. So it's you know, keep your eye out for alien beings in TV shows and movies that look like a cross between marine life or some kind of weird land arthropod. So there are more movies that have aliens that come right out of marine biology. War of the Worlds have alien powered ships that look like big squids. Arrival have less menacing aliens, but they look like big kind of

inkty squids or octopuses. The alien thing I'm gonna say, in the movie Nope was intentionally cribbed from marine life and was based on like a sand dollar design, and at other times weird sort of invertebrate sea life, like sea pens or sea squirts. So the alien in I mean, this is PH's a less famous movie, but the faculty had proto Baggins in it. This is an old movie

was explicitly a tentacled secretter that could infect humans. The abyss spoilers this movie features an alien civilization underwater suicide squad. Didn't watch the movie, but apparently it's aliens look like giant adorable starfish. Uh. And then in clover Field the little guys look like little isopods or crustaceans to me. So to me, the list goes on and on. I think the point is that we love a marine inspired

alien for some reason. I think that perhaps this is because marine life is the closest we get to alien life on our planet. Because, aside from say, aquatic mammals that hop back into the water like whales who started out terrestrial and went back into the ocean, our evolutionary history diverged quite early on from a lot of marine life so octopuses and humans evolved our brains and eyes

mostly independently. Our last common ancestor was some kind of nematode like creature, and so they have all of these abilities, all of these characteristics that are kind of similar to our own, like their eyes, they're very expressive and kind of an interesting way. They seem to perhaps even dream. And yet all of these things they had to evolve independently, because yeah, our last common ancestor was essentially like some kind of flatworm with like an eye spot, not an

actual eyeball. So I really don't blame the entertainment industry at all for using marine life as a stand in for aliens, although it makes me like the aliens more like it's hard for me to find them creepy or scary when it's like, oh, cute little octopus. Anyways, I love a mind flare adorable. Well, that'll just about do it for today's Listener Questions episode. If you have a question that you would like to have me answer, you can write to me at Creature featurepot at gmail dot com.

I either answer here on the show, or I'll write to you back in your email if I can, And I really appreciate all your questions. Thank you guys so much for listening to the show. If you're enjoying it and you leave rating or you, I truly do appreciate it. I read every single one of the reviews. And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song XO.

Lumina Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio ap Apple podcasts or Hey, guess what, why have you listened to your favorite shows? I'm not your mother, I can't tell you what to do. See you next Wednesday eight