Listener Questions: Would You Eat A Platypus Egg??

and I love your show. I've been a fan since episode one and Creature Feature has been the highlight of my week ever since. Thank you so much, You're so sweet. As a result, I have become the person at work that will randomly spout animal facts and conversation excellent. One. Such a conversation resulted in a question, how do tis where I lived? Ticks are constant problem? But how do

they get so prevalent? Like in order for a tick to reach maturity, it needs to find an animal to gorge itself on right, then it rides that animal to who knows where. I know that there are male and female ticks. How do they find each other? It would seem like they're nutritional and reproductive needs are at odds with each other. Second, I had a topic idea. Pride Month is coming up, and I am transgender. I would love to learn more about animals that have the ability

to change sex or mimic the opposite sex. I know you have touched on it a little in the past, frogs, cuttlefish, etcetera. I think it would be cool to learn about the gender and sexual fluidity in nature. Anyways, thanks for making a great show. Don't ever stop being you take care Rachel. Well, thank you so much, Rachel for your kind words, and

you're great, You're great. Questions. First of all, I think that sexual fluidity is a great idea for a show, and I'd love to do an episode on that real soon, just to quickly touch upon it. There are actually many species of ray finn fish who are masters of sexual fluidity, like clown fish. So with clownfish social structures, there are a dominant females and breeding males in a hierarchy, but when the dominant female dies, the dominant male will actually

become the new dominant female and undergo reproductive changes. To become female in the hierarchy. I think it's important to point out, and Rachel, I know that you're not saying this, but I think whenever we talk about like, we kind of make comparisons to human sexuality and sexuality and nature. It's an important note that like animals, for the most part, although well I'll talk about this little later, but for the most part, generally speaking, animals don't really have a gender,

so to speak. So I bet if we do research into intelligent animals, we may actually find some interesting information on the animals concept of gender expression. But when we talk about animals in general, like animal going through say a change of sex, like a clown, which changing from male sex to female sex. This is a physical, physiological process,

whereas in humans gender expression is it's different. I'm not necessarily an expert on gender expression in humans, but I think that for people it's both an internal and an external experience. It's both social and deeply personal. So, like you, you have your own personal concept of gender within yourself, and then there's also socially constructed gender, and so all

of that interacts in a very complex way. And so anytime we talk about animal sex like it it's it's going to be very different from humans, but not completely. Like it's not as if we can't enjoy seeing sort of like the diversity of sexual changes in animals. And you know, I do think it's interesting when people try to just ify bigotry against trans people or sexual and gender minorities by citing like, oh, it's not natural. And people who say things like that tint to not know

anything about nature. I mean, when you look at nature, it is so diverse when it comes to sex and reproduction. So to say like, oh, well, this isn't natural, it's like, well, okay, but nature has so much stuff going on when it comes to sexual reproduction, Like, how can you say it's not natural? You can't. There's nature has every type of sexual reproduction you can think of, every type of sex,

every type of kinds of behavior. So to say like this isn't natural, it's like, well, I mean, first of all, who cares if it's not natural. We're humans. We have televisions and medicine, which you could argue aren't natural either. But secondly, it's just wrong. It's nature has no like one type of sexuality. That's ridiculous in terms of actual

gender expression in animals. It's a much more complex question than say like sexual fluidity in animals because you can see you can look at a clown fish and see that, Okay, so it goes under this hormonal change where you know, a clown fish will like that situation I described, when the dominant females die, the dominant male will undergo this hormonal change and actually express uh female genitals. And so that's an external physical change we can observe, so researchers

can actually observe that directly. But gender uh in humans is an often not just a social experience, but an internal experience. So we can't just ask an animal like like, what what are your feelings on gender? Uh? What does that mean to you? So it's very hard to study that and say more intelligent animals like primates or dolphins or elephants. But that's not to say that there have been no attempts made to parse this issue out. So

there's this great article. I highly recommend you read the whole article because it does a great job of explaining all these things. Uh. It's in Sapiens Anthropology magazine by j. Schwartz and Assistant Professor of Psychological Science, at Western Oregon University. The article is called is Gender Unique to Humans? In this article there is a description of a study at Florida International University that looks at the behaviors of chimpanzees

and bonobo's, a couple of our closest primate relatives. Uh, And they look at, well, could there be something like gender expression in these primates? Could there be a social concept of gender? And they found that in the wild, uh, social grooming behavior differs by sex. Now, with that alone, we still don't know whether this is like a gender expression or what it is, because that could could be instinctive,

it could have all sorts of different explanations. But they did find that in captivity social grooming behavior doesn't really differ that much by sex, which seems to indicate that, you know, these primates in the wild may have a different culture than primates in captivity, where in the wild they have a different social expectations for different genders when it comes to grooming behaviors versus primates in captivity who

are cut off from that culture in the wild. Now, this is not definitive because animals in captivity, as I believe we've talked about on the show before, they are in a very different circumstance. So because it's such a strange environment for them to be in, and their stress responses and all their social organization gets kind of like

messed up by being in this captive setting. It's hard to say, well, is there's a difference because they're they're sort of gender culture is different within captivity or is

it because they're stressed and other factors. I don't think we really know yet, But this is really interesting to me that we're starting to, you know, think about like, well, you know, humans have a social gender construct and an internal gender construct and uh, you know when we look at animals, if we look at our closest relatives, I don't think it's too far of a leap of logic to think, well, maybe they may have something uh, you know, while not similar to our concept of gender, maybe they

have something uh, and we just don't know. And I think that's it's really interesting that we are starting to look into that. Um. But yeah, it's very difficult to research because, like I said, you know, gender is an internal experience like um that that you feel inside, and it's also an external experien that you learn from your culture. So either question is quite difficult for researchers to answer

when looking at a like, say, a primate culture. But we do know that primates do learn from each other, and they seem to have different cultures. So you have, um, you may have like a group of orangutans who use specific tools to get termites or ants, where you don't see that in other orienting groups. So it seems to indicate that primates do learn from each other they could form these cultures. So I think this is a really interesting line of research. And so oh, as to your

other question, Rachel, how do ticks work? This is a great question because it does. It does blow my mind when we talk about parasites. I love parasites. I don't obviously don't want ticks on me. I don't want ticks on my dog. But parasites in general as a topic of research is fascinating because of how incredibly specialized they are. It's almost beyond belief. In terms of your your questionab well, how does their needs for a host and mating interact?

It does seem counterintuitive, right, like why would you if you want to be able to mate, um, you know, having to be on another animal to get your food. It's like, well, that seems like that would potentially limit the dating pool because you're you know, just hopping from animal to animal. But they actually don't have too much of a problem. So, first of all, there are two main types of ticks. There are hard ticks and soft ticks,

and this encompasses a number of species. Hard ticks will actually mate on top of their hosts, which you know, well yucky, but the female will gorge herself on blood after mating and then drop off to lay her eggs. Soft ticks, the other group of species of ticks, don't spend as much time on their hosts. They typically just kind of bite their hosts, they get a little meal, um, so they uh well, actually mate off of their hosts.

So wherever they are usually like in grasses, and so they will feed after mating, so they may feed on a host, drop off and then lay her eggs. Uh So, in terms of the tick dating pool, unfortunately, there are just so many ticks out there, so many ticks in the sea, that they don't really have too much of a struggle to find a mate even if they are

hopping on an animal. So if you have a tick hopping on a deer, the chances that they encounter another deer or another tick on that deer pretty high unfortunately for that deer. And if they do struggle to find a host to feed on and find a mate, they actually have some tricks up there, little ticks sleeves. Soft ticks can survive years between feedings if they can't find a suitable host, and they go into this kind of

stay a sis until they detect a host nearby. So yeah, they are unfortunately for some of us who don't like getting bitten by ticks. They're very good at finding hosts and they're very patient, so they will be able to find a mate and a host, no problem, all right. And this is a short and sweet question from j who asks why are possums so perfect? They have little hands? Thank you, Ja, Yes, I agree a possums and possums

are amazing. So oh possums are the ones native to the Americas, and we often call them possums if you're in really sort of deep in the technical uh possum world. Technically, um possum refers to marsupials found in Australia, another a very similar but a different species. Oh possums and the Americas and possums are both more supials. The possums found in Australia are arguably cuter than our opossums, but I think that's also kind of subjective, and I love opossums.

I think they're adorable, so whatever. Um, But opossums, the North American impossums are actually the only more supial found in North America. They also have opposable thumbs and prehensile tails that allow them to grip onto tree branches, so very curiously primate like, but they are not primates. They are marsupials. Despite looking maybe kind of intimidating or scary, they are not at all aggressive. And when they puff

up it's kind of like a frightened house cat. They're just they're just trying to seem like they're big and scary and tough, and but really they don't want to fight you. That's the last thing that they want to do. In fact, they'd rather play dead when they are seriously threatened, so they can actually lower their body and picture and release a foul smell to make the act very convincing. They're the Daniel day Lewis of method acting in terms

of playing dead. They really don't want to mess with you, and they may kind of like surprise you sometimes because you're like, go, you're taking your trash out and book, there's a possum. But uh, they really don't don't mean any harm. And they all that hissing and puffing, that's all because they're scared of you. And they're actually great to have around in your community because speaking of ticks, which we talked about earlier, they love to eat ticks.

They eat a bunch of ticks. They eat the same kinds of ticks that cause lime disease. So hooray for possums or a possums, whatever you want to call them. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna judge you if you call them possums. I think that's totally fine. So yeah, I love apossums too. They're adorable, they're sweet, they're they're a little trash buddies. And then I got some wonderful questions. Actually two questions are very similar. Soul answer them both

at the same time. How do animals that reproduce parthenogenically maintain genetic diversity? Also, since platypus and some ant eaters lay eggs, would you try them and this is from twenty magic on Twitter. And another question those lizards in Arizona where the species and is only female. Does each lizard just reproduce a clone of itself or are there eggs mixing somehow? If so, can we figure out how

to do this with human couples? And this is from Hannah Michael's I've actually had Halla on my show and she's a good friend of mine, So thanks Hannah for sitting in your question. I love these questions because I get to talk about the whiptail lizard, and I get to talk about platypuses and lana treams, and I love all these animals. So here we go. First, I'll answer the question would I eat a platypus egg? And when you say ant eater, I think you are referring to

the spiny ant eater a k A kidna. Actually, so kidnas, just like platypuses, are monotorying, and they actually aren't related to other ant eaters like the giant ant eater, but they're just called a spiny ant eater because they have

that long snoot and they do eat ants. So monotreams are a fascinating ancient off branch of mammals, and they do lay eggs, so they do actually produce milk though, but instead of it kind of coming out of nipples all nice and tidy like most mammals, are just kind of gooches out of their their pores on on their bellies, which is a little weird, but you know, hey, you do you monotreams. I'm not here to judge, but they

do lay eggs. However, they do not lay unfertilized eggs like chickens, so every egg they lay is actually going to be a fertilized egg. So if I was to eat a platypus or a kidna egg, I'd be eating some platypus or a kidnea embryo or fetus. So no, I would probably not not eat one of their eggs. I'm not sure i'd like the mouth feel. So now onto the question. Both Magic and my friend Hannah asked

about parthenogenesis. So parthenogenesis is a type of a sexual reproduction in which an embryo from an unfertilized egg develops to maturity. So it is true that reproducing a sexually comes with the problem of limiting genetic diversity. Some species avoid this by going through cycles of sexual and then a sexual reproductions. So a fids do this. There are actually many generations of clonal females with aphids, but then when the conditions are right, there is a phase of

sexual reproduction. So during the parthenogenic phases, the a sexual phases, the females only give birth to live female nymphs. Nymphs are immature aphids, and in fact those nymphs can be borne pregnant already with their own clone. So it's an a FIT giving birth to an a fit, which is a clone of itself. But that little baby, if it is already pregnant with its own clone, which is you know, weird.

This is called telescopic development. But as you guys pointed out, this is a problem because how do you maintain genetic diversity in your population. Because when you don't have genetic diversity, if you're all clones, as soon as there's a new disease or a new predator or parasite or even changing conditions, you don't have enough genes to kind of shuffle through to get characteristics that may help your species survive during

these changes, So you'll just kind of go extinct. So their solution is to go through these periods of sexual reproduction in between the clonal reproduction. So this gives them the advantage of clonal reproduction, which is super fast, super smooth, like just pumping out many many clones. You know, think of Star Wars, an army of clones. But then you just like every so often, inject some genetic diversity into the population so you don't get this genetic fall neck.

So during the sexual phase, when weather conditions are right and the a fit females will start giving birth to parthenogenic females but also males. So typically when they go through their a sexual cycles, it's just female clones, a real wind for feminism. So but during the sexual phase, they give birth to both females and males, and then that generation goes on to do sexual reproduction and they

actually lay eggs instead of giving life birth. So that's how they actually kind of have a little loophole that allows them to do generations of clonal females. But then they mix it up with a little bit of sex here and there, so they have some genetic diversity. As for the truly all female parthenogenic species, there's one called the desert grassland whiptail lizards of New Mexico. So these are a lizard that is an all female species. They

do parthenogenic reproduction. They do not have sex at all. They're like you know, Amazonian uh, mythical ladies who just are chilling out, all female um. And they actually have a really interesting genetic story. So they actually have three sets of chromosomes that they got from the initial mutation that kind of spawned this all female, parthenogenic species of lizard. So instead of the regular two sets of chromosome that humans, other mammals, and other diploid sex having animals have, they

have three sets. And this means that the whiptail lizards can effectively shuffle through their deck of genes. They actually recombine their own three sets of chromosomes during the process of reproduction, allowing them to create non clone parthenogenic offspring. So when they give birth without ever having sex, unlike the aphids who are giving birth to clones, they're actually giving birth to a unique individual who is not a clone of themselves, and that is how they bypass that

problem of genetic bottleneck. Also, fun fact, even though they do not have real sex quote unquote, real sex where it's uh, you know, where they are exchanging genetic information with another of their species. They do pseudocopulations, so they will hump each other, essentially, do courtship and mating behaviors with each other. This all female species, and that actually

helps them get in the mood to give birth. So even though they're not actually exchanging any genes with their fellow members of their species, just the act of this pseudocopulation, you know, it helps kind of bring on the hormones that will help them give birth to their little Jesus babies, all female Jesus lizards. So really interesting stuff. Uh and I think it ties back in earlier when we're talking about just the incredible diversity of how sex works in nature.

Uh So if anyone says like, oh, you know, that's unnatural, like whatever sex thing, it's like you don't know anything about nature. Nature is buck wild. I guess that's the definition of nature. Here is a question from Mark f. This may be a dumb one, but how do animals know to breed with their species? How do the blue jays in my neighborhood no to breed with blue jays instead of the robin's nearby. This is from Mark f

It's not at all dumb question. Every time guys that you say like, oh, this may be a dumb question, it never is, so don't worry about it. This is a great question in terms of like being able to breed with your own species. For some animals, it's just pure instinct that you know, come pre programmed with these mating instincts, um. But for some other animals, including many species of birds, they actually learn as juveniles based on

their parents. So this is called imprinting. So they see their parents after they hatch and they imprint upon them that this is my species, this is who I am. And this is actually very important for many species of songbirds because this is how they learn their own species specific calls, so they're mating calls, their alarm calls. They

learn from their parents because they imprint. They as soon as they start to see the blurry world as little hatchlings, they see their parents like this is me, that's who I am, um. But sometimes this goes a little bit cock eyed, because if birds are raised by another species of bird and they imprint upon the wrong species, that's they'll just guilelessly think that they are this other species, and they will attempt to mate with their adoptive parental species.

In fact, this is such a problem that when conservationists raise baby birds like and trying to repopulate birds and these conservation efforts such as sandhill cranes, they have to be very careful that the sandhill cranes don't see that it's humans taking care of them, otherwise the cranes will

imprint upon the humans. So in order to feed them, what they do is they actually have a hand puppet that looks like a sandhill crane to feed the birds, so that the baby birds will see the hand puppet of the sandhill crane and think, okay, this is what I look like, this is my species instead of being

fed by a humans. So you'll see these researchers like ducking under tables just like a Jim Hanson operation, feeding these baby sandhill cranes, tricking them into thinking they're being fed by sandhill crane so that they understand that's their species, so that they can be released into the wild and understand their sandhill cranes and mate and uh be able to repopulate. So but when you don't do this, a bird can imprint on a human and think, oh, this is what I look like, I must be a human.

Sometimes they fall in love with human beings and they just think they're they think they're people. Uh. And this can happen naturally as well. Uh. There was a Canada goose spotted uh. Speaking of sandhill cranes. The Canada goose also imprints upon their parents. But this Canada goose was adopted by sandhill crane probably some kind of egg mishap, and it just thought it was a sandhill crane. So I hang out hung out with the sandhill cranes. Uh.

Thinks this is perfectly normal. The sandhill cranes didn't seem to mind it, So yeah, that's what happens, all right. And I got a question from another front of the show, Alex Schmidt, host of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, and I've had him on the show and he's a great guy. Highly recommend his podcast. And he writes, what's an exciting thing worth knowing about woodchucks? And also someone responded to this

question saying are they related to nun chucks? Uh? Well, thank you for the question, Alex, uh, and thank you for the nunchuck comment. Alberton Um, no, they're not related to nunchucks. Be serious. Come on, this is a serious science show and jokes will not be tolerated anyways. Wood chucks. So what is a woodchuck? Does it chuck wood? No?

Why is it called the woodchuck? Well, I think we talked about this a while back on the show, but uh, the likely story is that Colonizer's came here they misunderstood the language of the Algonquian Native American Indian nation of Rhode Island, and so then they thought like, oh, it sounds like woodchuck, which was probably misunderstanding because their actual

word for ground hogs is okuk chewan. Or it could have been that the colonists thought that they were talking about a woodchuck, whereas they have a word that sounds kind of like woodchuck, but that's actually word for a weasel like animal called a fisher. So you know, the name woodchuck is just based on stupidity. But here we are we call them woodchucks, then we have tongue twisters. But really, hey, woodchucks are just groundhogs, so you know,

just groundhogs by another name. In fact, they have other names such as whistle pig due to the noises they make, or mouse bear because I guess they look like tiny bears. I'm not sure I buy it, but hey, you know I guess I'm I wasn't there when they named these things, Otherwise I probably would have named them little little fluff buddies. And this is why they don't put me in charge of name and animals. So groundhogs a K wood chucks a K whistle pigs a K. Mouse bears are a

type of large rodent. They are healthy little dudes a weigh about thirteen pounds or six kis. Are actually about the same size and weight of my dog Cookie, So you know, she probably wishes she could take on one of these woodchucks, but I don't think so. I don't think so, Cookie. Uh. So, they're found all over North America and they are burrowing animals who, actually, like bears, do hibernate during the winter months. In fact, they are

really true hibernators, more so than bears. Bears don't really hibernate in the true sense of the word. They go into a lighter state of torpor, like a really, really deep sleep. They do slow down their metallobolism, but they can wake up, so during torpor, they will wake up relatively quickly in response to danger. But hibernation is a much more serious version of this. It's more like suspended animation, and the groundhog is almost completely dead to the world.

During hibernation, groundhogs body temperature or drops from nine degrees fahrenheit, which is about the normal human temperature, maybe a little higher, but it drops to thirty seven degrees fahrenheit, which we would be so extremely dead at this point, like anything around seventy degrees were already probably going to be dead. Uh, thirty seven degrees, we've probably been dead for a while.

That's yeah. No. Also, the groundhogs breathing slows to two breaths a minute and their heart beats slows to five beats per minutes, so like about as dead as they can be without actually being dead. For the entire period of hibernation, which can last around a hundred and fifty days, they will not eat and they lose about a fourth of their body weight. So it's able to survive this extreme food deprivation because their metabolism have has been slowed

to an absolute crawl. So it's essentially into this beended animation other quick which check facts. They are able to grind up tough vegetation like wild grasses because their teeth grow constantly to withstand the grinding. In fact, they grow around a sixteenth of an inch or one point five

millimeters every week. If their teeth are not aligned properly and they are not chewed down by the act of munching on grasses, the teeth continually grow until they are tusks, and they can actually be lethal if they grow up into the groundhogs jaw or grow so wonky and curly that they can't chew on grass. So ground hogs are actually quite social and friendly with each other. They dig burrows together, they whistle to report threats to each other.

And if you think that groundhogs look a little bit like marmots, you are correct. They are actually a type of marmot. And by the way, marmots are actually technically a type of ground squirrel, So yeah, other species of marmots and ground squirrels are also pretty social. They have these like little colonies where they dig burrows and they will alert each other two threats. So, uh, you know, this is what we got from wood chucks to basically ground squirrels. This is a quite a reveal fun fact

about marmots if you go hiking in the Sequoias. In addition to making sure none of your food is left out, you also need to be careful about anything you have that has your human sweat on it, because marmots love the salty taste of human sweat, and we'll try to steal your socks, even your hiking poles, which I learned

when I was hiking with my brother. Uh, a marmot grabbed his pole and ran as fast as it could, so if the pole hadn't gotten caught on a rock, probably the marmot would have my brother's hiking pole to this day. So yeah, they love the taste of human sweat, which I think is a little alarming because if they figure out they can make us it by making us really scared, we would probably be in some kind of

marmot fear factory saw type situation. But luckily they probably don't listen to this podcast, so hey, maybe we'll be safe from the marmot threat another year. So to end the episode, I think I'll play you some lovely groundhog slash wood chuck slash whistle pig sounds, so you will see why they are also called whistle pigs. There you go, the North American whistle pig. Thank you guys so much for listening. I really appreciate you sending in your questions.

If you have a question, it's not too late. I periodically do these listener question episodes. So you can send that in uh to my email Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com. You can send it into the Twitter Creature Feet Pod, which it's f e A T f e et that's something right different. Also Instagram Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, and you can send those questions right in. Sometimes I'll try to answer them on the spot. Sometimes

I'll save them for an episode. And I really appreciate it because these are great questions and I like talking about them. And thank you so much to these space Cossics for their super awesome song Exo Lumina. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or Hate Guess What Pridulous to your favorite shows. I don't judge, h less you really watched this propost. See your next Wednesday