Listener Questions: Elephant Accomplice

a question and I want that answered. Uh, you can send it to me at Creature Feature plot at gmail dot com any kind of evolutionary biology related question. I may not immediately know the answer, but I certainly can look stuff up and use my background to give you the best answer that I can. So let's get right

into it. So, first email, in response to you. In my episode on cute animal names, the listener writes in, in addition to pufflings, baby puffins, might I add the Australian marsupials quacas whose baby is a bub Wooli's booties and pouderous. By the way, these creatures all have something in common. They sacrifice their young as a defensive mechanism. If they are attacked, the muscles surrounding their patch pouches relax, releasing the babies and letting the parents escape their fate.

Are there other animals that give up their children. It's a way to evade death. Michael, Hi, Michael, so really fascinating information about these marsupials. It is true that quacas, and it seems like the other marsupials you also mentioned, abandoned their young who will fall out of the pouch as the mother flees, and that little baby will make

this noise that attracts predators. So this idea is based on observational research where researchers found that these marsupials, their quaccas, are these little they look like a cross between a teddy bear and a hamps there and they're about the size of a teddy bear. And they when they are caught in this human research trap, a humane trap, they were in no real danger, but for the quaca quite

a an alarming experience. Um these quacas would drop their babies out of their pouch, so the muscles in their pouch would relax and the baby would kind of flop out and the baby would start squeaking. So the Researchers speculate that this may be intentional or at least an involuntary response on the part of the quaca mother, given that the pouch has a number of highly controllable muscles. So in a sense, it maybe kind of like how

we will peeer pants when we're scared. The quaca might not be consciously doing this, but maybe, you know, the involuntary reaction to high stress, high fear like that might be releasing this baby out of her pouch. And the baby is called a joey, So this joey kind of

flops out out. And I think what's interesting about this specific situation is it's been observed when the quak is actually in a trap, and I think it may be indicative that the quaker really only does this as a last resort, so not when she's just kind of scared, but when she really feels trapped, and the thinking, or at least even if it's not like an intentional thinking on the part of the quaca, the evolutionary strategy maybe that it's better that she gets away to rear more

young than they both get eaten. So giving up your own babies to avoid death is not a super common strategy in the animal kingdom, but it is more common than you would think. So in the case of these marsupials, the mother avoiding death likely leads to more successfully reared offspring than saving one individual Joey. Even though that sounds kind of callous, evolution doesn't have a moral compass. Really, it only cares if you're able to pass on your jeans.

So Quacas can give birth to around seventeen babies over their lifespans. So in the Quacas case, if the mother is eaten, that's gonna reduce her chances of you know, rearing a successful offspring passing on her jeans to zero, whereas if one Joey is lost, that's only one of her reproductive potential lost there. So another common strategy is abandoning offspring that you don't have resources for, or even eating offspring when you need the extra calories or you

have too many offspring. Uh. Sometimes it's the opposite, such as the fantail darter fish males who will actually eat their entire brood if the number of offspring is too small, which seems strange. Why would you eat your brood if you have too few of them? Well, apparently that investment in per until care is only worth it if you have economies of size of baby fish, So like he doesn't have enough baby fish, so it's not worth his time, so he just eats them all and tries again for

a larger brood. It's very much and economics, uh, sort of way of rearing fish offspring um. Another interesting one is the long tailed skink, which is a lizard that lives in Taiwan, who will try to find off predators who threatened to eat her eggs. But if there are too many predators or if their intrusions are too frequent for her to properly defend her eggs, she would actually rather be the one to eat her own eggs, so she will actually turn around and eat her entire clutch.

It's a very it seems spiteful, like if I can't have my eggs and you're gonna eat my eggs, well

I'll just be the one to eat them. But when you think about it, it is a good evolutionary strategy because she's basically at the point where she realizes she's not going to be able to protect her eggs from these predators, so she just lets the predators eat these eggs, she loses her entire clutch anyways, and she gets nothing out of it, whereas if she eats the eggs now, she gets a boost in calories, a boost and fuel which may help her go out, you know, and maybe

start a new clutch. So it is it's a grim calculation, um one that I guess Thomas Swift as modest proposal would cringe at that satire, but it is something that is actually employed in nature, and you know, it does work, even though it kind of defies our human morals. Now onto a question I got from the writings. Someone left a question where they would leave a rating, and I actually love that, so thank you for that. And here's the question. Are there more eyes or legs in the world?

From my name is Mud? And that is a deceptively tough question. So to answer it, first, let's look at some of the most numerous animals in the world. And then instead of counting all their eyes and legs, which I simply don't have the time to do, we will just kind of look at them in general and see if they typically have more eyes or more legs. So this is all guests work on my part, sort of

our educated guesswork. So I don't know. I'm not wolf Ram Alpha, I'm not a supercomputer, but this I've given it my best go. So the most populous organisms that would have i'd say, what we would identify as eyes and legs. I'm dis counting things like flagella, like, let's let's be serious, those aren't really legs. Uh. So with true eyes and legs, I would say are probably insects. So according to the Smithsonian Institution, uh, there's estimated to

be around ten quintillion insects on Earth right now. So a quintillion is a little bit hard to fathom. It is a billion billions. So there are ten billion billion insects on Earth, and that's a lot. That is a lot. Uh. There are also microscopic animals, such as tartar grades, who can be found in quantities of like nine thousand individuals per gallon of water in marine or freshwater sediment. I was unable to find like a estimated global population of

tartar grades. And it's not as simple as like figuring out how much water there is in the world, because the number of tartar grades is going to be different based on like what where that water is how nutrient rich it is. But suffice it to say there's probably just an enormously huge amount of tartar grades. So there's gonna be a lot of many many invertebrates like the like insects, arthropods and tarte grades things like that. UM. So let's look at these guys and see if, on

average they tend to have more legs or more eyes. UM. First of all, let's talk about what an I is like. How do we define an eye? If we define an eye as like a single lens, dragonflies have around twenty eight thousand lenses per compound I. I kind of don't like this, though. I generally think that that would be regarded as a single compound I, not twenty thousand eyes. That's just that's the number of lenses on that compound. IE. So if you counted each lens as and I, I

think eyes would win over legs in this game. But personally, I don't think a compound I should be counted as twenty eight thousand eyes just because it has so many lenses. I think it should be a single eye with a bunch of lenses. So let's move on to uh, spiders. So spiders are Arthur pods. Uh, they can have around eight eyes um, which is a lot of eyes, But they also have eight legs, so that kind of cancels out in the eyes to legs contests, so they just

you know, fraction zero essentially or one. I don't know, I'm I'm clearly not a math person, but I'm gonna say that those things cancel out in spiders. Uh, we can't. We can't factor their them into our eyes and legs calculations as well. So insects typically have more legs than eyes. Insects will all will often have a pair of compound eyes on either side of their head. They may also have one to three simple eyes called ocelli that detect movement and simple light but don't see in the way

that eyes do. But even if we count all of these o'celli, they technically have around five eyes um, while insects typically have like six legs, So the legs would still win, especially if you add in little animals like the tartar grades which I mentioned earlier, who have eight legs and only two simple eye spots. So, based on my clearly very very deep mathematical calculations, uh, my guess is that there are more legs than eyes in the world just because of the sheer volume of insects tartar

grades these other very small animals invertebrates. But we do have some animals who possess a shocking number of eyes, like ocean dwelling kitans. So kitans are oval shaped mollusks with a tough, flat plated shell. Certain types of kitan can have thousands and thousands of simple o'celli eyes. Scallops also have a shocking number of eyes. Scalops are bivalves who can have over two hundred bright blue little eyeballs that look like tiny beads which ready around their mantle,

peeking out from their shells. So I would say that given if you're to ask me, like, what is the maximum number of eyes versus legs something could have, I'd say, like, you can have an animal that has more. Well, I guess it depends on how you define legs though, because there are these tiny little tentacle legs on things like starfish, and if you counted each one of those as legs,

that'd be a lot of legs. It gets a little funky depending on how you define a leg, how you define an eye, but I think I still think that there's probably way more legs than there are eyes in the world. But if you disagree, you have some other evidence right to me at Creature Future pot at gmail dot com. I want to hear your arguments. Onto the next listener question, do you think the t rex was a scavenger or a predator or maybe something else altogether?

And this is from Corman. So the research on t Rex has flip flopped a little bit historically. For a while in the ninety nineties, it was a popular theory that t Rex was just a scavenger, because the idea that such a massive monster would have just been meekly nibbling on dead prey was really surprising and there for

a fun thing to write about. So this idea was mostly the brain child of paleontologist Jack Horner, who claimed that t rex couldn't be a hunter given that its arms were shorter than typical predators and that it was too big and bulky to run quickly in chase after prey. It also had large factory bulbs, which are the um sensory organs of smell, and so his idea was that, well, if they had this really keen sense of smell when

they used that to find carrion. Also, their teeth could crush bone and thus perhaps they could extract marrow from carrion. So maybe they were just the garbage disposals of the dinosaur world. But the thing is that many paleontologists back then already started disagreeing with Horner. But it was such a fun and shocking idea that t Rex didn't actually murder things it was just a scavenger that many media

outlets just kind of ran with that idea. But today it's more definitive that t Rex was not just a scavenger but hunted as well. So, first thing, Horner's evidence was not super solid. It's an interesting idea and something that would merit looking into, but you look into it, it does kind of fall apart a little bit. So his evidence doesn't really rule out hunting at all. There are many carnivores that don't use their forearms to hunt, so like the short t rex arms would not prevent

t Rex from hunting. So an example is secretary birds, which are those beautiful long legged birds with those wonderful crests and those long, luxurious eye eyelashes. They look like runaway models, and they will actually stomp on their prey to death like snails or lizards or snakes in and it's they don't need arms in order to pound their prey into oblivion. Also, having teeth that are capable of crushing bone doesn't mean that they exclusively fed on bone.

And when paleontologists compared t rex teeth to something like a hyena, who is much more um specialized for carry on eating, it seems like the highness teeth are quite a bit different from the t rex's teeth and quite a bit more specialized for bone crunching than t Rex um.

So the thing that to me is really indicative that t Rex was a hunter is that there has been fossil evidence showing t rex teeth embedded in the flesh of other dinosaurs like the duck bill dinosaur, and then further evidence of tissue healing around the tooth, meaning that t Rex took a bite out of this attempted victim while it was still alive, it got away and then

healed around the wound. So the current theory is that t Rex was like many modern predators who hunted but would happily carry in if they were lucky enough to find it in time. Um. The other part of Jack horners, I'm just realizing that Jack Horner is like the name of some kind of isn't there Isn't there that like fairytale rhyme. That's like little Jack Horner sat in a corner eating a something pie. Anyways, whatever, he was a

real guy apparently. So back on track, Jack Horner was saying like t Rex was too big, too lumbering, and ponderous to be able to run and chase down prey. And in terms of t Rex is speed. Scientists have really waffled back and forth on this. So for a while they were saying that they could reach pretty decent running speed. More recent computer models estimated their running speed a little bit slower, around twelve miles per hour or nineteen kilometers per hour, which a human, like a fast

human and a fleet footed animal would be able to outrun. Um. But that doesn't mean that t Rex couldn't hunt or chase things down, because there were certainly slower dinosaurs that the t Rex would have been able to chase down. Um. Also, speed isn't only necessary for chasing prey. So this idea that if you're slow, you want to be a carryon eater rather than a prey chaser. Is a little bit strange because carrion also favors fast animals who can quickly

track down and get to the buffet first. So when you have an all you can eat carrion buffet in the wild, you really want to be the first ones to get there, because if you're not, it might be all gone by the time you arrive. Uh, and you

would have a lot of smaller animals. Like a pack of smaller animals that descend on carrion and tear it apart with many mouths may be able to get all the usable meat far more quickly than something like a t rex could, Like if it's lumbering over by the time it gets to the carrying it might be too late.

And remember, like the floor is not littered with carrion, there are a lot there are many more like living animals out there at a given time than like rod and carrion just left out, And so carrion is going to be a more rare encounter than a living animal. So it's very very highly competitive. It's why you see like when you when you have scavengers fighting over carrion. It's very it's not easy pickings to be a scavenger.

This idea that like, well, if you can't hack it as a hunter, you gotta hack it as a scavenger is kind of not not really the case, Like you've got to have skills to be a scavenger. So this idea that t Rex was too slow to chase down prey, even larger dinosaurs, but somehow fast enough to quickly locate carrion whenever it would happen to fall to the ground,

is a little bit suspect. So I think that, yeah, when when this is all put together, I think that t Rex would have had to rely on every tool at its disposal to get enough meat to be that huge size. So would it turn its snows up at Karen. No, I don't think it would. Uh, just like modern day predators, they often will eat Karen if it's there, if they're lucky enough to find it and lucky enough to get

there first, Yeah, they will definitely eat it. Um. But I feel like it can't be that it relied on Karrien. It had to have been hunting as well to be able to sustain its mass like that, And it seems quite well built for hunting, and I just don't think that Jack Horner's arguments were very convincing and ruling out hunting and then coupling that with the fossil evidence showing tooth marks inside, like what we knew was a dinosaur that was alive and then healed over that Bye, Yeah,

I think it was a predator. So, you know, definitely not something you would want to run into in the wild. But then again, if the most recent computer models are correct, maybe we could outrun t rex. I wouldn't want to try it. Onto The next listener question kind of related which prehistoric animals would make the best pets. There are far too many candidates for worst pets. There are two in particular. I've read about the bare dog of the family emphas Cian a Day. It's sort of a bear

like dog. And then there's Hemmy Scion the dog Bear. It is a dog like bear. I'm guessing the bare dog would be a little bit better as a pet. Stephen, Hi, Stephen. So both those animal families are very interesting. They are

early carnivorous mammals. Um Emphasion a Day is more sort of like just related to a bunch of modern day carnivores, whereas the himmy scions seem to be more related to the bear family, so amphis cian a day uh that family would have I do agree that I think they would have been more were potentially more species in that family that could have become pets, maybe after some unnatural

selection on humanities part like we did with wolves. Uh. So amphacian a day were a family of species of mammalian carnivores, and while some were quite big like the size of a bear, some were tiny, under eleven pounds or five kilograms so preust ark Chihuahua's. I would rather try my luck with the tiny ones personally. But then again, we did domess kate wolves, which are quite huge and scary, and kudos to those early humans that had the canes

to do that. So the Himmision family or sub family I think is the most current understanding, seems to be more of an extinct ancestor of modern bears or a cousin extinct cousin of modern bears. And I honestly they look pretty fierce. Yes, they do look like a cross between a dog and a bear, and I don't think i'd want to tangle with them person only uh and go.

Continuing with the theme that I am a big weenie, the best extinct pet, in my opinion, would be the teeniest, tiniest, cutest, most harmless of extinct mammals, the battodninetes, a shrew like animal who lived over forty million years ago in North America and was probably the smallest mammal ever to have lived. It likely weighed only about a gram and could comfortably fit on top of a pencil racer. For comparison, an adult house mouse weighs around twenty grams, so that's like

twenty times the size of this little guy. So the current smallest mammals are the bumblebee bat and the etruscan shrew, who are tiny and way around two grams each, So that is still twice as big as the batto done nineties. So I really love these teeny tiny guys. Wish they were still around so I could fit like a hundred of them in my pocket. Onto the next listener question. Just finished watching an episode of the detective show Monk in which an elephant is used as a murder weapon.

The elephants trainer placed his head under the elephant's foot, and the murderer commanded the elephant to press down via a walkie talkie taped behind its ears. My question is, given their documented intelligence and compassion for other species, would an elephant understand the outcome of crushing a person's head. If so, does this mean that the elephant in this show is actually an accomplish instead of a murder weapon. This is from Gretchen. Also she showed me peanut butter

and jelly beans, who are two adorable kiddies. Thank you for that great question. Um, there's not great research on whether elephants understand murder, given how unethical it would be to try to get a bunch of elephants to murder people. Uh. That being said, let's look into elephants and killing and what their thoughts might be about such a thing. So, there is a history of elephants being used in execution in ancient Rome, Carthage, South and Southeast Asia and Africa.

It was a very public, sort of lamboyant way to execute someone, as was the idea like we can control this huge animal and get them to smash you, and so it was supposed to inspire fear in awe of the ruler. Um. So in these cases, the elephants were under the control of a writer, and they could be trained to either kill the convict or to spare the

prisoners if there was a last call for mercy. So sometimes the elephants were trained not to kill the victims but to kind of rough them up, which I suppose at the time was considered more humanitarian. So could the elephants understand the moral implications here? I think first we need to know if elephants even understand the concept of death,

which is incredibly difficult to study. Researchers have gone through videos of elephants responses to other dead elephants, and there does seem to be pattern of behavior that indicates they since something is off and are upset in some way. They have the body language that indicates distress. But this doesn't necessarily indicate they understand death fully, just that they're distressed that this other elephant is not behaving in the

way that they want so, namely by being dead. So there has been anecdotal evidence of elephants being careful around humans. So one such is the story of which is kind of hard to verify. I don't know if this is true. It sounds like it could be, but it was the story of an elephant crashing into a couple's home, then stopping when it started to hear a baby crying and moving some of the debris off of the baby's crib

before leaving. And um. There are also, though a lot of stories of elephants kind of mowing people down, you know, trampling tourists, trampling people and killing them. And I don't know whether this is like intentional murder or not if they fully understand I mean, like clearly when they do trample people, I think they're distressed and they're you know, trying to defend their territory there or defend themselves. Um, even if the human poses no threat to them, the

elephant doesn't necessarily know that, so researchers. Although there is research showing that elephants can distinguish sometimes between humans that are more dangerous in humans that may not harm them. Researchers have found that elephants seem to be able to tell the difference between groups of people based on smell and accent, and react more defensively to the sounds and smells of groups of people who typically hunt them. It's a long story short. I don't really know if elephants

could grasp the implications of smashing a human's head. My sense is that they may have some understanding of cause and effect um, because they are quite intelligent and they are highly social. UM. An elephant raised in captivity, like a circus elephant, or one of these elephants used in these like ancient executions, I don't know if they'd be properly socialized to kind of learn elephant ethics, because there may be some like elephant culture of teaching elephants like

gentleness and things. So it's kind of hard to know, based on like your fictional monk Um example or the real life historical examples, whether that's typical elephant behavior, or whether an elephant in the wild would be more hesitant to do something like that um, because like in captivity, an elephant might just associate that crushing with getting a reward that reinforced that behavior sword so that elephants, if an elephant is capable of having a sense of morality,

it would be very messed up by being in a circus UM. So I do think that elephants who have a normal social life in the wild probably do learn some cause and effect of their actions, and they probably have some understanding of that they can cause harm by trampling something. UM, And I think they do understand something is wrong when an individual dies when it stops moving.

They exhibit a lot of distress when it comes to that, So I'm not I'm not um convinced that they fully grasp death, but I do think they have some understanding of cause and effect harm as well as when something is dead that's not normal and that there's something off about that and it upsets them. So not quite at the point of upgrading your monk elephant to accomplice, but uh, you know, maybe somewhat he might have an understanding that this may not quite be right. But I wouldn't arrest

that elephant. Free that elephant, get him a lawyer. Thank you guys so much for listening. And if you have a listener question you want to ask, you can write to me a Creature feature pot at gmail dot com. Um And you know, if you enjoy the show, if you want more of these listener questions episodes, you can leave me feedback. You can leave a rating or review, and hey, happy holidays everyone. I'll be back next week with a brand new spanking episode. Of Creature feature and

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