Listener Questions: Wormy Delights!

I want to hear the answer to it. Well, you can always email me at Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com and I will answer your question. So let's get right into it. First listener question, Hey, Katie, this blew my mind. So this listener sent me a link to a YouTube video by Ben Jordan. Ben Jordan's channels seems to be devoted to music things about music, technical things and you know, interesting stories about music and sounds, sound production and so cool stuff. Let's look into what

this listener email is actually about. So the linked YouTube video that was sent to me by this listener is about animal perception and about how animals view the world. And in the video you see these this approximation of how animals see things or hear things, and the thesis of the video is basically that animals experience life sometimes

slower or faster than human beings. So like maybe a dog experiences things like kind of slowed down, where as something like a cat might experience things sort of sped up to a certain degree. So the listener asks me, is this true? Is Ben's fascinating study on animal perception a bit too visual centric or is this on the right track. The most fascinating part to me is that a lizard could adjust its perception of time by adjusting

its metabolism depending on what's needed. Also, the facts that apparently elephants see us buzz along super fast as they watch weather patterns developing. Would love to learn more about what biologists know about this. And this is from p K. So I watched this video and I found it very interesting,

And so the question is is this video accurate? Is this actually how animals perceive the world, Maybe like dog seeing things kind of more slowly than humans, or an elephant seeing things really slow, so we kind of just or elephants seeing things sped up, So humans just kind of flitting around like we're like we're flies or something. So this kind of time time difference in terms of how animals perceive time. Of course, I think what this

YouTuber is doing is he's trying to approximate things. I don't think he's making any big claims that he absolutely knows what animal how animals perceive the world, but he's trying to sort of do a representation of how they might see things or hear things based on a concept known as critical flicker fusion rates. So what is critical

flicker fusion rate? I looked into this, looked into what biol just had to say about this, what bird researchers, sound experts, and physicists had to say about this whole idea of animals perception of time. So biologist doctor Kevin Healey I was interviewed by the BBC four channel in a segment called a Sense of Time, which I highly recommend if you are interested in learning more about this topic. So what is flicker fusion rate? So flicker fusion rate

is the rate at which you can see flashes of light. Essentially, so flashing a light to see a what point you stop being able to differentiate between flashes and then at what point, those flashes actually fuse into a single beam, or at least they fuse in your brain, so it's still flashing. The light is still flashing, but your brain can only perceive it as a steady light because it's going too fast for you to perceive the difference between flashes.

So if you flash a light slowly, you can see it. Right. Even if you flash light relatively quickly like a strobe light, we can see that. We can see that flashing. But if you flash it way way too quickly, we will stop being able to perceive it as flashing, and it's just going to look like a steady light. So humans can see at around sixty frames per second, but above that we can't see the flashes. It just looks like

constant light to us. So I looked into what evolutionary biologist doctor Kevin Heally had to say about animals critical flicker fusion. Right, So he was interviewed by the BBC four channel in a segment called a Sense of Time, which I highly recommend if you're interested in learning more about this topic. So, different animals have different critical flicker fusion rates. Some are higher and some are lower than humans.

So certain deep sea fish species can only see about one to two frames per second, so you can be moving around, but to this fish it would be like a slide show. Pied flycatchers, a type of bird, can see around one hundred and forty five frames per second, so this is well over twice the number of frames per second. Then we could see something like a blowfly can see around two hundred frames per second, which is bananas bonkers. And so if you wonder, like why can't

I swat a fly? Fly can see things coming and process things quickly, so our fast movements to them, they can actually process that. They can see our movements and you know, quite quite easily. But one of the downsides to this really high frame rate is actually that they when you move slower, it's really hard for them to perceive that movement. So really slow movement is going to be super super slow to them, and it may not

even come off as movement to them. So like you may find that trying to catch a fly, if you try to swat it quickly, it doesn't work, but if you very slowly, calmly grab it, it doesn't even realize that you are going for it. So you know, the question of why certain animals have different critical flicker fusion

rates than others. Why wouldn't we all just have really fast flicker fusion rates so we could all see things happening at this faster rate, meaning that like the ideas that maybe if you can see things at this faster rate, right like two hundred frames per second, you can perceive a lot more and your ability to react to it

may be enhanced or something. Well, having super fast eyesight costs a lot of energy and brain processing, so it doesn't really make sense to have for all animals, and it's not so like something that may seem useful right to all animals to have, Well, it's costly, and you can get by with a slower flicker fusion rate if you have cognitive processes that allow you to do other things.

So it is or if you have a bigger body, for instance, like a fly has a very tiny body, very simple brain, and so its ability to avoid getting eaten by any number of frogs, reptiles, birds, every basically everything wants to eat these guys. Being able to have that, you know, that high level of perception being a little see two hundred frames per second, Being able to have that kind of like bullet time. It maybe really really valuable to it it's survival because it's so small and

such a tasty snack for everything. Interestingly, some animals can actually turn up and turn down the flicker fusion rate as if going into bullet time, like Neo from the Matrix. So swordfish can do this by heating up an organ near their eye, which can increase their flicker fusion rate, which they might do while hunting to improve their performance.

So it's like Keanu Reeves, but a fish. So according to physicist Carlo Rovelli as well as evolutionary biologist doctor Kevin Healey, the idea that animals perceive time differently is not so bizarre. So time is not time is a thing in physics, but the perception of time happens in the brains. So the perception of time is not an objective,

physics based universal truth. It's based on the biology of our brains and how they function, how quickly they can process the events as they occur, how quickly we can process sounds or visuals, how many frames per second our brains work in. And you know, both this physicist and this evolutionary biologists believe that it is credible that animals can perceive time differently. In terms of empirical evidence of this,

there is, there's some. I mean, it's always hard, right, So why you have to keep in mind whenever you're thinking about animal perception is we cannot avatar into an animal head. We can't make an assumption about what it's like to be that animal just based on our empirical observations of this animal. But we can, we can guess, we can make these estimates. So some empirical evidence on

this biological time slovidone is actually in birdsong. So bird's song is lovely, sometimes it's shrill, and sometimes it sounds unpleasant, just like sort of chaotic screaming. But when you slow down birdsong sometimes you can perceive more notes than you were able to with birdsong being played in real time. So birdsong has many more notes per second than our human brains can process. And when we slow down the birdsong,

we actually can hear more of the notes. And so Bob Dueling, an auditory scientist at the University of Maryland, as well as Norah Prior, who is a postdoc researcher on birds talked on this BBC four program about whether birds can hear more, can hear more in the birdsong than humans, So like when you slow it down, there are more notes, But does this mean that birds can actually perceive these greater number of notes? So their research on birds do indicate that birds can just doing these

subtle changes within a single note that humans can't. So these birds may be able to distinguish these notes by perceiving things slower than a human with that higher critical

flicker fusion rights. So yeah, I would say that it's always going to be hard to know exactly, Like I don't I imagine that when you have such a different brain, right, you're an animal, you have a very different brain imagining the world is Just like when we look at these videos that Ben Jordan made, which I think are it's a really interesting video and I'm not I don't want to be too critical of it because I think it's

really fascinated and he presents the information really well. I think that like when you the problem, right is that we are looking at a video that's been slowed down or sped up, or you know, the colors changed, the sounds changed. To kind of estimate what this animals perception is based on, you know, some math based on their flicker fusion rate, the frames per second that they can

hear or see in. But we are a human being with our human brain looking at a video, So we're filtering all of this information through our human brain and trying to imagine what that is like as a dog, as a cat, as a fish, as a reptile, and so that it's it's we're kind of trapped in a prison of our own brains, so we can't directly experience what it's like to be that animal. So we can't ever really know what is that direct experience of that animal and what amount of it is being filtered through

our human brain. Looking at this video of going like, oh, it's kind of like if I'm a dog, it's kind of like I live in this like blue and gray, blue and gray and brown world with like humans, but the humans are kind of moving a little slower and their voices are slowed down. Well maybe, but it's also again that's been filtered through our human brains, our human cognition. But I would say, you know, I think it is

very plausible, very very plausible that animals. I mean, first of all, I do think animals are conscious and experience things, And so I think that this idea that animals could sort of experience things in this maybe slowed down experience or something like an elephant would perceive things as kind of like flittering around a little faster. Yeah, I think

that's very credible. It's something we I don't know if we'll ever have the technology to know exactly what it's like to be in an animal brain, because how do we escape the prison of our own brains? But it is really fascinating and I love that question. So we're going to take a quick break, but when we get back, we are going to actually talk more about bird song. So we are back, and speaking of birds, I have another listener question, a short and a sweet one with

a long and hopefully also sweet answer. Why can some birds imitate human voices and other birds don't? Our pigeons and sparrows not smart enough? Or is there an anatomical reason? Thanks sincerely, Stephen High Sincerely, Stephen, As you've guessed, both brain and the vocal structures are involved in being able to mimic human voices in birds. So when you think about it, like our brains are the software and the hardware are things like our larynx. For birds, this is

actually the syrinx. So birds who are able to mimic human voices have to have both the right physical structure, so the hardware of the syrinx that's the bird version of a larynx, and they have to have the right cognitive ability is the right software. So a bird's ability to remember different songs or bird calls is a repertoire.

Birds vary in their complexity of repertoire size. There are some birds like thrashes that have a wide repertoire of complex songs, whereas maybe a bird like a seagull has different calls for sure, and these calls can be complex and that they mean different things, but they don't have the number of like different songs different calls is say a thrush or something like a brown thrasher, which is

a songbird that has thousands of different songs. So a wide repertoire, however, doesn't mean a bird is like the smartest bird or even the best able to mimic human speech. So a raven, for instance, has a smaller repertoire than something like a brown thrasher, but ravens that were studied had around a dozen calls versus like the hundreds or

even thousands of songs that a songbird can memorize. However, ravens are very very intelligent, they're great puzzle solvers, they're highly social, and ravens can actually mimic human speech, whereas a thrasher can't. So corvids including ravens, but other other types of birds such as parrots. There are also starling's, lyre birds and minas. These all can mimic human speech. There may also be other species of birds who can mimic human speech, but they just don't spend enough time

around humans for us to really see that. So what sets apart the birds that can mimic human speech from the birds who can't? So also, I want to look at why birds can mimic human language but something like our closest relatives like chimpanzees or binobos can't, because it seems like they should be able to write. They have brains more similar to ours, They have larynxes more similar to ours. They have lips, But whereas a bird doesn't have a lips, doesn't have a lipts, they don't have lips.

Birds don't have lips, So what is going on. So let's look at parrots first. Parrots are a really good example of a bird who's very good at mimicking human speech, and they have a few things going for them. It's the syrinx and tongue structure in terms of their hardware.

So parrots have really strong tongues that can manipulate sounds, and the muscles controlling their synx are concentrated around this single tube before the seringx branches off into these two bronchial structures, and so this makes it a little more similar in structure and functionality to a human larynx than a lot of birds who have whose muscles in their serings are sort of more concentrated where the se splits

off into these two tubes. So you know, they have the hardware to be able to mimic human speech, and corvids, liar birds, starlings, and mina's are also they also have hardware to greater less extent in terms of like being able to mimic human voices. I think parents are, like, I mean, it's kind of arguable, like who's the best. I guess parents are sort of the best at doing it strictly speaking, But yeah, all those other birds do have the hardware where they can to some capacity mimic

human voices. So now let's talk about the software the brain, so repertoire size, the number of songs that a bird can learn, like I mentioned before, doesn't necessarily mean that a bird is the smartest or able to mimic things the best. So a lot of this has to do with how birds learn songs and sort of the may it's maybe line, maybe they're born with it. So a lot of songbirds will indeed learn songs, but they could

be optimized to learn songs of their own species. And this is useful because learning the songs of their own species their conspecific so conspecific means a member of your own species helps them do things like mate or defend territory. There are birds, a lot of birds actually, that are innate singers, so they are born with being able to recognize their own species songs and able to sing it. And there's a lot of sort of gray area here.

There are birds who are born with the innatability to sing, but by hearing it and sort of practicing it, they get better at it. There's some birds who are born basically with the structure these these sort of template structures that enable them to better learn and hear their own species songs, but they actually have to learn this larger repertoire.

So it's this really interesting I mean, bird's song is studied a lot by like linguists, by cognitive scientists because the language acquisition of birds, or the song acquisition of birds is very interesting in terms of this some of it being an innate characteristic they're born with this programming, and then some of it being learned this like plasticity, or they have to learn things listen, practice, develop muscle memory. So it's really really interesting and complex area of research.

So some songbirds are selected for a large repertoire, which may help males attract females mates. It could also help to then territory. Sometimes both males and females also sing to each other, but often songbirds like these, these mating songs can become very complicated. They can get these large repertoires, and there could be a fitness reason for why females like larger repertoires, where maybe it indicates a males more fit, but it could also be an example of runaway selection.

So we know with birds they are often selected for their beauty for these amazing ornamentations on birds, which doesn't necessarily translate to fitness, like in terms of being able to you know, survive better. A bird with a huge tail is not necessarily going to be better at flying.

In fact, sometimes it hinders these birds. But the females really like these signals, and so this is potentially an example of runaway evolution where there's some reason that this female is drawn to or notice is better the males that develop these greater repertoires, and then because the females are drawn to it, it's selected for more, until like it's more and more and more and more complex, just like you have in terms of bird ornamentation, like large

repertoires are the sort of auditory version of peacocks in terms of that amazing splendid visual display that they do for females. So this is all basically the complexity of the birds repertoire is due to selective pressures, and some birds may not have the same selective pressures, so they may not need a larger repertoire, but they may need a lot of cognitive skills to figure things out. Like parrots are highly social and they have to maybe get nuts or grubs out of tree. So they have these

like these you know, good cognitive skills. It's just not

based on like having this wide song repertoire. But birds like parrots, liar birds, even birds like mocking birds or birds like corvids may have a more of more plasticity, so they're able to learn and mimic sounds that are not necessarily just their own species sounds, and so they have more flexibility in the kinds of sounds that they can learn, even though they don't maybe have the capacity to learn the like thousands of songs that songbird may

be able to learn. They have more flexibility. They aren't sort of preprogrammed with this framework that is specific to types of songs that are unique to their species. So something like a liarbird can mimic a variety of sounds like lawnmowers or a camera shutter. So like these kinds of this kind of like plasticity in terms of being able to mimic a sound that does not come from its own species is something that was selected for in

these birds but maybe not in songbirds. And in addition, these birds with the more plasticity are have the hardware of the hardware ability to produce these sounds. And so think about it, like if you hooked a game Boy that was loaded with like Super Mario Brothers cartridge, and you hooked that up to a set of speakers. The speakers, which is like the syrinx or larynx, could technically play the sound of a violin if a iPod was hooked up to it. I guess people don't use iPods anymore.

It's all iPhones now, I'm so old. So but these speakers could play a sound of a violin, but not when a game Boy with Super Mario Brothers is plugged into the speakers, it is only going to play Super Mario Brothers sounds, whereas like if you plugged in a computer to the speakers, it could play basically anything. So this is probably this is like the difference between these like different birds in terms of these sounds. They're able

to produce a mimic. Of course, if you plugged in like a computer to something like a you know, I don't know, gramophone, it's not I mean, that's not going to work. That's not how computers is. I'm not a computers professor, but I know that's not how computers is anyways, you get the idea. It's both hardware and software. So birds that can mimic human sounds have the unique brains that are plastic enough and good at learning novel sounds, plus the hardware such that they can actually mimic our

human words. But why can't something like a chimpanzee do it? So it has this smart chimp brain and a larynx that's more similar to our own. So why could something like a parrot mimic human speech but a chimpanzee can't. So it's not about intelligence. It's not that parrots are smarter than chimps, or chimps are smarter than parrots, you know. Like again, like animal intelligence is somewhat relative, and it

depends on what that intelligence is geared towards. So chimpanzees are very intelligent, but their intelligence is directed in a specific way that is advantageous to them. And so in the same way that a human is very intelligent, But we can't slow down time in the way that maybe a blowfly can. It doesn't mean the blowfly is smarter

than us. It just means that the blowfli's brain has to put a priority on a high frame rate so that it can react quickly, whereas with humans, we don't need that high frame rate to function in our brains are more geared towards cognitive processing, learning, puzzle solving, social interaction, so very complex stuff. Just it's a different type of

intelligence and it is geared in a different way. And so chimpanzees lack the brain structure to learn speech outside of the chimpanzee vocalizations, whereas a bird like a liar bird or a parrot does have the brain structures that are optimized to learn and mimic sounds. So it's thought that humans and close human ancestors had genetic mutations that

allowed us to learn specific syntax and develop language. So human language is really unique because while birds are able to have a syntactical structure, there's not much evidence that they can learn language and use it in the same symbolic way that we do, where words have these nested meanings and you can put words together to form sentences that means something different, and put sentences together to mean

something that forms something even more different. So this kind of like nesting of concepts within words seems to be quite unique to human language, So there are there is some evidence that something really smart, like an African gray parrot, which is one of the more intelligent of the bird species,

and it can talk. They can see to make some associations between words and objects, so they can potentially learn what the name of an object is or even learn to differentiate between like what a plastic object is versus what a felt object is. But there's kind of a debate to what extent they understand the meanings of words and language, and their ability to kind of have this extent to which we nest concepts, putting a concept inside

a concept inside a concept seems pretty unique to humans. Dogs, for instance, can learn to associate words with like a toy or food, or going outside or the v et, but it doesn't necessarily mean they have the capacity to

understand language in the same way that humans can. They have associated a specific sound with a specific meaning, which sounds like, well, hey, that's just a word, right, But really, our human language is a lot more complex in terms of how we fit a lot of concepts inside, say a word, and then it has a lot of re related concepts, and we're able to kind of do this modular as symboling of language and words to give them new meaning. And that's quite unique, and that's quite special.

It does, I think, make us a little bit different from other animals, even animals that can communicate. That's not to say that animal communication is not complex. It's just ours is quite ridiculously, ridiculously complex. So we are going to take a quick break, and then when we get back, we're going to answer some of our listener questions. Okay, so I am back, and this one is actually more of a story that I am going to share because it was I think very interesting. And so here is

this listener's story. Hi, Katie, thank you so much for the hours of animal entertainment. Your podcast brings me so much joy and education. I'm a dork and harass my fellow employees with animal facts, and I've learned that I've learned from your show. I just got done with your drunken Animal part of your listener Maile episode. Here's my intoxicated animal story. I have a fifty pound pit bull and a three pound Chihuahua and a sixty pound Dingo

shepherd mix. Yes I did say dingo, and yes we did do a DNA test, and yes, she was very strange. She had oscillating wrists and an intense devotion to me, and ended up being my service animal due to her ability to sense when I was going to have an epileptic seizure. But to my point, we lived in a mobile home with a gas furnace, water heater, and a

neighbor that had an overhanging apple tree. My wife and I had really bad headaches one evening, and the Pity and the chihuahua started acting strange and falling while they walked. The dingo seemed fine, loll The dingo slept in a cold area of the house because she was tough, but the other two slept near us our heater ducks, even if we moved their bed. Our reasoning went to carbon monoxide poisoning because of recent gas work done in the home.

We called the fire department, not knowing fully what was about to happen. I communicated everything I told you, and the fire department told us to leave the house immediately, don't open any windows or doors so that they could test the air quality inside. So me and my wife and our dogs, two of which are acting crazy, in a smaller trailer park of less than one hundred homes all of a sudden, an ambulance for humans, one for animals,

which is rich people's stuff, not for our money. Class four police cars, one small fire truck and one ladder truck, and a hazmat team with full suit protection and detection gear, all with lights and sirens blazing. At one thirty am, we worked restaurant hours. The hazmat team inspected our home and four others while waking up residents to get them to evacuate their homes. So now we have twenty to

twenty five people standing in the street. In November, at one thirty eight m the fire department did a full inspection for raid on carbon monoxide and dioxide inspections on five homes around us. They didn't leave until four thirty am. After my wife and I passed every emergency test outside, they decided to see why our dogs were messed up. Turns out that our neighbor's apples had dropped into our yard and our greedy dogs got smashed on apples. My sweet Lola hated sweet food, so she was fine and

that's why she indicated to the other two. I don't know how many apples the big or little guy must have had, but they definitely got drunk. The fire department and ambulance and police laughed at the mistake but praised us for our vigilance about the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning. Plus we got a home inspection for free from the hazmat team before we sold the house. Do with that info? What chew? Well? And I hope my waisted pit and

chihuahua story makes you smile. Hope my dogs getting hammered makes you laugh. Also, just imagine a trailer park in the middle of no We're suddenly looking like a chemical explosion, where everyone knows your name, lots of questions to be answered. Two dogs like sweets, and Lola wanted nothing to do but take care of her friends. I hope you have a great day. And I hope I made you laugh because your show puts a smile on my face every time.

Peace Maddie. Gee, that was very, very funny. Yeah, I mean that is I would have done the same thing you did. I would have been very concerned about carbon monoxide if I had been feeling bad and if my dogs were woozy and acting strange. Yeah, that is scary. I'm glad it turns out it was just fermented apples

that your dogs got drunk on. That is incredible. Yeah, I mean there are It is funny because like you may see an animal acting loopy, and it's scary because there are all sorts of things that go through your head, like it could be raybies, it could be some kind of horrible thing happening. But then yeah, on occasion, it turns out that they have eaten something fermented and gotten drunk.

In fact, a lot of these wildlife bird centers have to deal with birds in the winter who get drunk because they eat berries that have been frozen and fermented, and then they crash into windows and then they have to go to kind of a bird drunk tank and get healed rest up before they get released. So it does happen. So here's another listener email that is more of a story than a question, and this one is in reference to the pololo worms that we discussed in

the episode mosh Pit. So to remind you, pololo worms are a type of polykeete marine worm that live in coral reefs, and so they will attach themselves to the reefs and then when they reach sexual maturity, they actually detach their lower obdomens, so they attach their butts, which then autonomously swim to the surface. So all these butts just like swimming to the surface where they mate with the other detached butts in a big soup of reproductive parts.

If you want to find out more, you should definitely check out the mosh Pit episode. But also, these pololo worms are a delicacy in certain Pacific island cultures, and it is the detached part of the worm. The in segments of the worm that come up to make that are collected as a delicacy. And because these worms actually follow a very strict schedule, only appearing at night for a couple of hours based on the moon cycle, it's

a rare treat, so keep that in mind for this email. Hi, Katie, I was excited to hear you talk about pololo worms on your mosh Pit episode because I had been meaning to write to you for ages to see if you could explain to me what the heck I ate. In late twenty nineteen, I took a trip to Samoa and it happened to coincide with the October full moon and the pololo night. I heard about it for the first time while on the island and managed to convince a

local woman I met to let me tag along. It helped that I had a higher car so I could drive her and her friends to the good beach. We gathered on the beach in the middle of the night, and pretty much all of Samo was on the beach, just chatting quietly and making last minute repairs to their nets, waiting for the right time to get in the water.

The ocean was just lousy with palolo worms. You could basically just scoop a cloth through the water and come out with a bunch, squish them into a bucket, trying not to squish them too much, and then go back for more. Everyone was out doing this until the sun came up. It was pretty lovely, with multigenerational families out there and all lighting their way with small lanterns, the tiny lights all up the coastline, looking like stars that had fallen into the sea. Wow, this is a this

email writer is a very good rider. Walking back up to the beach, everyone was comparing catches and the women I was with were explaining to me how much each catch was probably worth, and it was outrageous. I was trying to understand if it was expensive just due to scarcity, or if there were other properties which contributed to this. But it was hard to get a satisfying answer, probably

because I speak no Samoan, so communicating was challenging. But some people did say they were taking it for their sick grandmother, etc. So there are at least some beliefs of medicinal or restorative properties. The other thing I had been trying to get someone to explain to me was

what these worms actually were. I had terrible internet connection there, so my research only got so far as disembodied reproductive organ But asking complete strangers on a beach in the middle of the night if they are actual worms or escaped penises doesn't get you far when you have limited common language, and I suspect the intensely Christian culture and Samoa mint modesty stopped many people talking about animal genitalia with a stranger darn, so I am glad to have

finally gotten a satisfying answer. Anyway, I got to take a small sample from our catch back to my accommodation and asked the chef in the kitchen to cook it up for me. It was served to me like a kind of caveat, I guess although I have never had that. It was sauteed in butter and served with toast. It reminded me of snails, and that it was an unfamiliar texture and the taste was just whatever it had been cooked in, so it was just salty from the ocean

and very buttery. I only had a little served, but I couldn't pick any distinctive or memorable flavors, thankfully, not something I personally will crave for the rest of my days. Usually when I eat adventurously on holiday and end up with worms in my belly, it is unintentional, so it was nice to at least go in with my eyes wide open this time. I've attached a couple of photos and there's a video on my Instagram if you want to see them wiggling about and briefly. In the same episode,

you also said crabs have bug energy. I hope you know that there are several crustaceans here in Australia with such bug energy that they are called Moreton Bay bug and Ballmain bug. They are wonderfully buggy and much tastier than disembodied sex organs. Love your work, Katie from Melbourne, thank you so much for your story, Katie. I love how many interesting foods there are out in the world and the lengths to which we will all go to get a good meal and interesting flavors. The images that

you sent me actually look quite appetizing. It kind of looks like a pesto or a spinach dip. Although I'm pretty sensitive to textures any kind of like, I don't know, I just there are certain textures that I can hardly even swallow. It's some kind of just psychological thing, I think. So in addition to the pololo worms, here are some of my favorite worm or warm like dishes from around the world. So I haven't actually eaten these, I do

love the concept of them. Again, I wish I wasn't so picky about textures, because I definitely like to try this. But if you out there have tried any of these that I've described or something similar, I'd love to hear from you about what it's tastes like, what the experience is like. So with that said, let's look at some of the culinary worms from around the world. Now these are not all actually worms, these are just kind of

worm like animals. So first, the fat innkeeper worm aka the penis fish, not to be confused with the candero fish, which is that tiny Amazonian fish that is rumored to swim up people's urethras, and the evidence on that is kind of mixed. It's potentially an urban legend. Potentially, maybe it's happened like once or twice. Anyways, that's not what we're talking about. We are talking about the fat innkeeper worm, which is quite big. It is actually another polykeete marine worm,

like the palolo worm. So fat innkeeper worms look a bit like a wiener, which earns them the name the penis fish. They are pinkish and floppy, and you know, yeah, they kind of look like ding dogs or at least like floppy sea hot dogs. In South Korea they are eaten with chili paste and in China they are stir fried or they can also be ground up into umami seasoning. I love umami. So from the Philippines there are woodworms

or shipworms. So these are not actually worms, but a type of mollusk that feeds on rotting wood using symbiotic bacteria in their guts, similar to termites. They are the bane of ships, but for people who live near mingrove forests in the Philippines. They are a long and linguini like delicacy, similar in taste to other mollusks like oysters and so people have described these woodworms as having a creamy and salt see texture and they're apparently really good

with lime juice. So onto terrestrial worms, which they're not really worms. These are larva. So meal worms are the larval stage of the yellow mealworm beetle. The beetle itself is actually black. The larva is a sort of golden brown. You've probably seen meal worms or those little little guys, a little segmented sort of brown light brown worms. And yeah, the I for me, the texture is not great. I think I've now Have I had that? Or did I

have a cricket? I'm trying to remember, but yeah, not necessarily my favorite thing, but um, you know, they are very nutritious. And there are also oh wichitty grubs, so whichitty grubs are the larva of various wood eating malves. The larva are large and fat. Think that seen in The Lion King where Simba's learning to eat grubs. These are the are quite juicy grubs. So they have been used as food by Aboriginal Australians for centuries. They can

be eaten raw or cooked. So when they're raw they apparently taste a little bit like almonds, sort of a sweetish taste to them, that almondy taste. But when cooked, the inside has the consistency and color of a fried egg, while the skin gets crispy. I've said this before on the show, but I think it's too bad that, like in certain cultures, were taught to have such an aversion

to bugs or squirmy food sources. Like, imagine how many more food options we'd have if we weren't socialized to be so fussy about like, oh, but that's a larva, or you know that that looks strange. And I say this as someone who is a very picky eater. I cannot eat mayonnaise without gagging, and I'm very sensitive to textures. So I totally get being very picky and not wanting to eat something like an insect. Yeah, yeah, I struggle

with it too. I just kind of wish that we didn't socialize ourselves to be grossed out by it, because I think it is, you know, both in terms of practicality and also just culinarily. It seems like it'd be nice to have those as options. So yeah, I think it's really interesting to see these foods that you we just wouldn't have in our culture. But it's not really for any reasonable reason that we don't have them. So

onto the mystery animal sound segment. So last week's mystery animal sound, the hint was it's something no lemur wants to hear. Oh, all right, so that is definitely a horrifying sound that lemurs don't want to hear. Also, I don't want to hear it. That's scary. So I got so many people riding in with a correct answer. I'm really blown away. I'm so impressed and proud of everyone

for getting this right. That said, the three fastest guessers were Tim m Antibe and Laurel l Congratulations and congratulations to everyone else who guess correctly that this is the fossa. So, the fossa is a predator found on the island of Madagascar who looks like a brown cat with a head like a weasel cross with a dog. And they are a I would say, medium sized sort of animal. They are not as small as like a domesticated cat, but

they're not as big as say, a cougar. They're kind of you know, they're they're a little bigger than a bobcat. But yeah, so they're you know, they're about six feet long, a little over around maybe the thirty pounds, so yeah, it's it's not small, but it's not huge. So the fuss is in the Philoformia sub order, but many of its catlike features are an example of convergent evolution with

cats in the Philodaye family. So it may look like a wildcat related to maybe a cougar or something, but it is actually probably just they may have started out with a common ancestor, but then they had this like convergent evolution. So Fussa love to eat lemurs, and they love to scream and make horrifying noises while mating, as you have just heard. And they love to eat one of the cutest primates on the planet, the gray mouse lemur, who is a couple ounces of big eyed cuteness and

apparently a delicious snack for a fossa. I think, oh, this is this was a long time ago, but that movie Madagascar, I think that, yeah, the fossa were the the bad guys in that movie. And I think one of the little lemurs on the one of the lemurs I think is a ringtail lemur, and then the other one it was a gray mouse lemur. I'm pretty sure. I'm yeah, that movie came out a long time ago, but yes it was they were They were correct, though, the fossa is a predator to lemurs. So onto this

week's mystery animal sound. The hint it's not a cool refreshing Italian treat, but a lip smacking animal. Nonetheless, if you think you know who is making that sound, you can write me an email at Creature featurepot at gmail dot com. And if you have questions that you would like to hear me answer on the podcast, you can write to me there as well. Thank you guys so much for listening. I will be back next week with another episode of Creature Feature and thanks to the Space

Cossacks for their super awesome song Exo Lumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, is the iHeart Radio app Apple podcast or Hey Guess what Raby listen to your favorite shows. See you next Wednesday,