Listener Questions: Do Mosquitos Never Sleep!?

or thought journeys research. So let's get right into it. Hey, Katie, I have a question and a conundrum for you in tech behavior question. I know bugs must rest somehow and sometime, but it seems like there's always a type of mosquito around day or night. Are there specific times of day when bugs, or at least those awful zebra mosquitoes will be so that I can sit outside in peace. I also wanted to ask your philosophy on naming pets. Below

er some pictures of my new friend. The name this shelter gave him didn't fit, so I've been referring to him as my guy, but all I know he thinks his name is Hey. Personally, I think I feel like a name needs to be at least three levels of meaning, but I've got a mental block theories, ideas, scathing, derision. Thanks for the creatures and the features, Andrew, Thank you so much. Andrew. First of all, I think Hey or Guy is an absolute cutie. My philosophy on pet naming

is basically anarchy. I think, whatever you want to name them, you know, it's sometimes it's good to have like a name that you can definitely say in like a friendly upbeat tone. But usually my pet names are two syllables. They have like an E sound at the end. That's just my thing. Like I had it Pete the parakeet, Poppy the parakeet, Binkie the cat, Stewie the hamster, Mousey the mouse, which one of my more creative namings, and of course Cookie the dog, and I had just thought about, like, well,

why do I do this? Why do I always have it and in an E sound? And I think it's because my name is Katie, so I'm just used to name sounding like that with an E at the end. But I don't think all pets need to be named that way. Really, it's just if the name has a positive association for you, that's the most important part, because pets can understand tone of voice, but they can't really understand words so much. We can teach them a few words,

but your dog's not gonna know. Really the difference between being named like no Stradamus or being named guy as long as you're saying it with a lot of love. So that's that's it. Onto the question about most squitos.

Do they ever sleep even though it seems like they don't, because believe me, it really does seem that way, they're always around, they do actually sleep, so researchers have studied mosquitoes sleep in several species and found that sleep deprived mosquitoes would choose rest over blood meals, so they do need sleep. They will even sometimes prefer sleep over biting you,

but that's only when they're sleep deprived. The problem is that they're not always sleep deprived, so mosquitoes are really easily roused from rest by the smell of a nearby food source, and if they're not sleep deprived, they'll happily

wake up to try to bite you. University of Cincinnati researchers had to take this into account when designing their research on mosquitoes, because mosquitoes tend to wake up and become active when human researchers walk in the room because basically they smell like a banquet, and so they had to isolate their mosquitoes that they were doing sleep studies on from passers by. So that's one reason it seems

like they don't sleep, you see. Assistant Professor of Biology Joshua bin Watt said, quote, it's really hard to quantify sleep and mosquitoes when as soon as you walk in the room, you're considered their Thanksgiving dinner. So that's one problem. Mosquitoes are great at waking up, smelling us, and then wanting to bite us. Another problem is that different species

have different sleep schedules. So if you're in a mosquito rich area, the chances are that you have multiple species there and some species that are going to be active at different times a day, and some of that means even during the daytime hours and then even at night there may be mosquitoes that are active. So for instance, the striped mosquitoes Adias elbow pictus, also known as the Asian tiger mosquito, are those black and white banded mosquitoes.

I think some people call them zebra mosquitoes. They're found in tropical areas as well as the south and southwestern US. They are real menaces. They can spread danga and zeka in areas where the disease is prevalent. They're not inherently diseased. They can only spread the disease if the pathogen is present in that environment and in that country. That's why mosquito related deaths are worse in some countries. They like to feed during the day, primarily in the morning and

the evening, while resting at night. Now, at the same time, common mosquitoes kulex are more active and tint to bite at night, so those are also the ones that make more sound buzz in your ear. So this is why it seems like mosquitos never rest. They do, but usually at least one species is on the clock. And also even though they might be resting, they're very sensitive and they can detect carbon dioxide emissions so easily that we make while we're breathing that they can wake up, find

you and eat you. They are just really good at it. And I'm sorry, there's no better there's no good news I can tell you about mosquitos. They're just amazing at finding us and biding us. All right, on to the next listener question. Dear Katie, could you kindly focus your powers of research and deduction on this poor creature? So I was sent a video of what appears to be a crocodile with a deformed S shaped spine. All right, now back to the email. What happened to them? Where

in the world are they? Are they being well taken care of? Are they suffering? Is this common among crocodilians? A huge fan of the show, and we'll give you a million good reviews if you can find any answers about this little guy, who I think is my new spirit animal, at least a million good reviews. Thanks for all you do. Keep up the good word, Susie. Thank you so much for your question, Susie. So I can tell you what happened to them and about their care,

I can't. I couldn't figure out where this specific crocodile was. But let me get into what's going on with this guy. Just a description of the video. It's a very It's a crocodile that looks like it has a really really severe like scoliosis. It's spine is shaped like an s. It's kind of like it looks a little bit scrunged up in a way, and it is alive and it's walking and it's an adult, but it's moving pretty awkwardly

due to this huge s and spine. This unfortunately seems to be a crocodile with cayphoscoliosis, which is a curved deformation of the spine caused by osteomalicia, which is kind of the word for quote, soft bones. This is due to improper mineralization during development, so it starts when they're baby crocodiles. This is a disorder primarily found unfortunately in captive crocodiles, because when they're young, what can happen is they're not getting enough calcium and other minerals in their diet,

so they start to develop these symptoms. Other symptoms are translucent, glassy teeth, inflexible jaws. They call them rubber jaws in the medical literature. It's just these jaws that they don't have enough of the calcium and these other minerals to have the strength in their jawbones, and so that can also cause spinal deformities. So when crocodiles are only fed meat without bones or other supplementation, like say, just fed chicken,

raw chicken with no bones. No, they're supplements, no other vitamins. They don't get enough calcium in their diet to properly grow their bones. In the wild. They don't just eat deboned chickens you'd get in the grocery stores. Some captive crocodiles are fed, but they'll eat entire animals, including bone, skin, joints, all the things that wild crocodilians can break down and use as nutrients. They also get a variety, right, they don't just eat chickens. They eat a variety of different

animals which give them a variety of nutrients. So it can be treated in young crocodilians with calcium supplementation which will save their lives. But any spinal deformation is likely permanent, so if they start to get a spinal deformation as a baby crocodile, they'll just have that throughout their whole lives, as can be seen in the adult crocodile in the video that Susie sent to me. So without treatment, though, they will lose the ability to walk, lift their heads,

and eventually this is fatal. So this is why wild animals like crocodiles, alligators. All crocodilians are really not good pets. I mean, it's pretty obvious, right because once they grow up they can also eat you. But beyond sort of the you know, an adult crocodile, an adult alligator is not a good pet because they are an alligator and a crocodile, and they are built to be eaten swimming machines,

not pets. The other factor is that they have very specific dietary and behavioral needs which are typically not feasible for the average pet owner. They may be adorable as babies, they are really really cute babies, but they're predators. They're not only driven to dangerously try to eat prey, which is not great in the suburbs, but they must do

so for their own health. So even if you keep your pet crocodile from eating the neighbor's dog, it's gonna be unhealthy, probably because it's not getting the full diet that it needs. It's actually this is kind of tangential, but it's one of the reasons I cringe sometimes when I see tiktoks of people giving their dogs or cats completely raw diets. Sometimes that's okay, but if you're not an expert and you're not being guided by a veterinarian.

Giving your animals more quote unquote like natural foods isn't necessarily good because unless you're getting all of the nutrients that they need, and you could be missing something, right, Like if you feed your dog just chicken every night, like cooked chicken, that's not enough. So kibble has a lot of problems. I agree with that. Kibble's definitely not perfect, but good kibble is nutritionally balanced with these components that

your dog or your cat needs. So if you don't, if you're not an expert, kibble's pretty good and that will get your dog and your cat the nutrition that it needs. And so unless you really know what you're doing, you can actually paradoxically deprive your pet of nutrients if you say, feed them raw meat only right, you may have the best of intentions wanting to have a healthy

animal and actually accidentally give them a nutritional deficiency. Dogs in particular, are very different from their wild wolf counterparts and have different dietary needs. So looking at what a wolf feeds is not necessarily gonna help a dog. They've evolved to be able to eat eat near our human tables and our food supply. They actually have evolved to be able to digest grain in a way that wolves can't,

so it is it's tricky. I'm not saying that fresh meat raw diets are always bad and that you shouldn't ever do them, but it's really important to do it with a guidance from a veterinarian so you can find out make sure that you're not accidentally depriving your pet of key nutrients. It's also good in terms of like individual animals will have out food allergies sometimes, right, so some people actually do have to put their pets on a specific diet, sometimes a raw diet because of food allergies,

but those are guided by a veterinarian. They're probably also being given vitamin supplements. So yeah, anyways, trying don't just feed your dog or cat raw sheet every night, that's not a good situation. And don't feature pet crocodile, just raw chicken, and don't have a pet crocodile is the main takeaway. So unfortunately, Yeah, I feel really bad for this crocodile in Susie's video. Not fair, not a great situation, unfortunately.

All right on to the next listener question, Dear Katie, I am reading a marvelously gospy British bird book and hit a puzzle to quote my commonplace book. Okay, So, a female cuckoo seeks to lay an egg in the nest of a bird of the same species it hatched in quote from the book. Having contracted out the care

of it's young to a series of foster parents. The cuckoo's breeding season comes to an end as soon as the eggs are laid, or in the case of the male, as soon as the females are no longer soliciting for copulation. Cuckoos have no need to hang out out and find out the fate of their progeny. The youngsters have an internal clock and will and compass that will help them make their way under their own steam to the wintering areas. Thus their task completed, Some adult cuckoos migrate south as

soon as they can. Amazingly, this means that some reach their winter quarters even before their offspring leave the foster nest. This is domin Nick Kuzin's twenty twenty four The Hidden Life of Garden Birds, the unseen drama behind everyday survival

that sounds like a great book. By the way, I probably need to read that right back to the email, and that's it in the book, leaving me to figure figuring that first year migrating cuckos learn how to be cuckoos really only when they reach their winter quarters, the shyness with which they must approach other cuckoos for the first time. I wonder how comparable it is to homeschool students arriving out of college campus. Typically, birds learn the songs of their species by hearing them in the nest

and for some birds local groups. They're often human discernible regional variants. In doing a light web search to find out what has been found out about this processing cuckoos, I've found research on Chinese blackbirds learning cuckoo calls and teaching them to other blackbirds in the vicinity. Can you elucidate Thanks in advance, Mary Anne. What a thoughtful, well researched email. This is really impressive. Thank you so much

for this. This is a great conundrum. So essentially the question is how do cuckoos learn how to be cuckoos if their parents abandon them to care abandon them In the care of these foster parent birds foster parents is kind of a nice way of putting it. Really, these are brewd parasites, right, Birds that lay their eggs in the nests of unsuspecting birds to the detriment to these

other birds real offspring, and so they're considered parasitic. And the quote unquote foster parents are host parents, right, it's not sort of a consensual adoption happening happening here. So but nevertheless, this problem remains, right the cuckoo, how does it learn to be a cuckoo or a cowbird? Write another brood parasite, how does it learn to be a cowbird when it doesn't have a cuckoo parent or a

cowbird parent there to teach it? And we know a lot of birds learn, so they learn complex songs from their parents. The songbirds are fascinating because they present a really interesting case of both the power of pre programmed behaviors learned behaviors. They've been studied a lot by linguists because of their ability to learn complex songs, but also have the framework that they're built with to learn complex songs. But brood parasites like cuckoos and cowbirds are really interesting.

They share something in common, so they have really strong pre programming that keeps nature in a sense stronger than nurture. So there was a study done on cowbirds where the sounds of a host species and their own species were both played to them from a young age. The cowbirds instinctively had a preference for the sounds of their own species.

So this means they have a built in schematic for what cowbirds are meant to sound like, so they are born within their brains basically a framework that will recognize the call of a cowbird and know that is a cowbird call and something they should pay attention to versus the call of their you know, quote unquote foster parents. Another interesting study found that they have a preference for birds who share the color of their own plumage, so they're looking at their own plumage, they see the color

and they're drawn towards that type of plumage. The way they found this out was by painting brown cowbirds black and raising them in isolation, and they would find that these cowbirds will incorrectly prefer birds with black plumage, So that part they are learning, but it's self referential and they're programmed to know to look at themselves rather than their foster parents for cues on who is going to be their appropriate mate. There's also some research that finds

that they self reinforce with their own song. Right, They're pre programmed with an ability to do a song, and then they listen to themselves, and then that this kind of creates a reinforcement loop of knowing what song to

recognize as a cowbird song or a cuckoo song. So basically cowbirds and cuckoos, these brood parasites are born with brood parasite dot ex right a program, a strong program that tells them that they should learn either from them themselves or not from their host species, and it gives them certain bits of data right about like what does the sound of a cowbird? What is that? And what should I look for in plumage And basically it prevents

them from imprinting too much on their host species. Also something to note is like, compared to songbirds, their calls are really simple, like the cuckoo call cuckoo. You might have heard it. It's like, oh, you know, very simple call. Cowbirds I can't really do. It's kind of this gurgling sound and a chatter, even though it's sort of hard for me a human to do. It is not a long complicated song, nor do they have a repertoire of

many different songs like some songbirds do. And those kinds of songbirds absolutely have to learn that repertoire, so to be pre programmed. Essentially, you do need relatively short and simple songs. The birds that have the really long complicated songs vast repertoires do need to learn them. So as versatile and as plastic as human brains are, right, we're

great learners. We are so affected by our environment. We definitely don't seem like little preprogrammed robots, right, and I wouldn't say we are, but we are born with certain schematics and there's a lot of weird pre programming that we have because essentially, when you are first born, you have to come out being able to identify your own species. Other humans got to be able to eat, and you got to be able to cry make sound when you're

in distress. But what's really interesting is that newborn babies have a rough schematic for what a human face looks like, and from a young age seems to know that there is the facial parts are supposed to fall in certain places, Essentially, they are more likely to look at correct facial diagrams, like a simple drawing of a face, and they're less interested in random patterns or diagrams of faces that have been scrambled around, like a nose on the forehead and

eyes and places they're not supposed to be. They're really drawn towards a facial schematic of eyes essentially where they're supposed to be nose mouthed in relatively the correct proportions. So it's a bit spooky to consider that. Even we come with a lot of pre programming, but it's necessary for our survival to come prepared to eat recognize members of our own species. Also, even for the things that we learn, right, we have certain frameworks for learning. We're

not completely blank slates. Were kind of like a canvas that has like basic schemas already penciled out a little bit. And then as we're growing, we are just absorbing so much information and we're learning so much. And this is a little different from like a cowbird or a cuckoo, who is probably learning, you know, of course they are some things, but they're not learning a whole lot from

their host species. They're basically pre programmed with the edict that you know this, this bird that is feeding you is not your own species. You don't need to pay attention to them too much. You need to pay more attention to your own plumage. And then they've also got these handy calls. So is it like being homeschooled and going off to college for the first time. I can't

speak to homeschooling. I haven't experienced it, so I don't know, but I would say that these birds probably are a lot more comfortable meeting members of their own species for the first time in a way then say, you know, we would write because they do come with so much pre programmed schema where it's like, ah, yes, I had these instructions to seek out a bird that has this call and a bird that has this kind of plumage,

and there they are. So I don't think they're necessarily confused, but it is a little spooky maybe to think of them as these robots that come with programming. But that's what happens with a lot of animals, animals that come right out of the shell, having a lot of behaviors that they just can go right into, like sea turtles kind of following the light of the moon, sort of reflecting on the ocean, knowing to go towards that ocean water that just is in them right as they hatch.

No learning, just they gotta go. So uh yeah, it's a it's an interesting thing. I guess it's kind of nice to be an animal that has a lot of stuff that we get to learn and shape us that we're not inherently born with. So yeah, we're not like a cowbird or cuckoo. Although I guess being able to just leave your kid with some hapless victim and have them raise it, is that a good thing. I don't know. I like kids, all right, guys, So thank you so

much for all your questions. If you have an animal related question that you'd like to send to me, you can write to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com. I'm definitely gonna do a few more of these episodes. I'm kind of taking like a quasi summer break, but I still want to have some freshness in here, and I feel like having listener questions episodes is a good way to do it. I hope that you're liking them,

and I will see you next Wednesday. Two features a production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts like the one you just heard, Visit I heard Radio, app Apple podcasts, or Hey, guess what? What? Have you listened to your favorite shows? I can't judge you and thanks to the Space Classics, but they're super awesome. Song Excellana, I think I did the outro in the wrong order, but you know, only God can judge me. See you next Wednesday.