Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show we have a special episode because I get to talk to someone from a zoo. Now, this happens to be a human being, so we will be able to have a nice conversation. There's some really exciting news coming out from the Philadelphia Zoo and I am very pleased to have with me today Lauren Augustine,
who is the director of Herpetology at the Philadelphia Zoo. Lauren, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to talk to you guys today.
I am. I'm super excited about this news. I don't know if my listeners have heard it. But first, Lauren, tell us just a little bit about yourself. What's your role at the zoo and what kinds of animals do you work with?
From the director of her photology, her patology is a study of the creepy crawley so reptiles and amphibians, of course, and so my job is to oversee the collection here at the zoo, their animal care, the staff that take care of them, and then are conservation programs that are linked to those very special species.
I think this is something that's key when it comes to zoos because there's so like as a visitor, you get to see the animals and maybe you get to see some of the presentations that happen at the zoo, but there's a lot of stuff that's happening behind the scenes, especially when it comes to conservation. So in addition to actually taking care of the individuals at the zoo, taking care of their health, their diet, there's also larger conservation efforts.
So you may have a species of animals that is not doing so well in the wild. I imagine this is pretty common in herpetology, especially with amphibians, and so you also have a lot of efforts to actually help animals that are out in the wild or preserve species that are endangered.
Yeah.
Yeah, we do that in a lot of different ways. We're really fortunate in her petology we get a large diversity of species and so they come with a lot
of different needs. Sometimes we can meet those needs for the species at our institution or through the collaboration with other institutions, but a lot of times we are looking at managing those conservation efforts in the field with collaborators or directly through leading research projects, and so we get a lot of different avenues to contribute to species conservation through a modern zoo that takes a conservation first approach.
Yeah, that's fantastic. So let's get right into the exciting news you have. Mommy, the Galapagis tortoise has an announcement to make. Lauren will be the one to transmit that announcement.
Yeah, we're very excited.
Mommy's been at the zoo since nineteen thirty two and recently, Yeah, we are proud to announce that she is a mommy. Mommy has sixteen babies that hatched earlier this year from two different clutches or groups of eggs that she laid last winter.
That's incredible. How old is mommy?
So we estimate mommies around ninety seven years old, but we don't know. She came right in nineteen thirty two, so she's been at the zoo a very long time.
Ninety two years.
Yeah, that's so she's at least ninety two years old, if not, who knows a decade old?
Yeah, yeah, undready. Yeah, but is this a.
So, is this a miracle Galapago's tortoise or is this something that Galapagos tortoises can do in the wild give birth at such an old age.
This is something they can do in the wild, give birth to such an old age. What's so amazing about Mommy's story is that this is her first time. So the fact that she hasn't reproduced until this age is what's so incredible, and that it went so successfully really is a testament to the long term care of that animal. Right She's been in our in our care for over ninety years, and so it's just a really great story for Philadelphia.
That's fantastic. And I would assume this isn't the first time that you guys have tried having her breed. It's just this is the first time she's actually produced a clutch of eggs.
So with Mommy, the interesting story for Galopagos tortuses in general is that in the early nineties we did some genetics work to identify the different species from different islands, and so when we found out that Mommy was a Western Santa Cruz Galopagos tortoise, we went through the process working with our association to bring in a mail for her. So we wanted to make sure we are breeding and
maintain that genetic lineage for that island species. And so we had to get a Braso here who came from the Riverbank Zoo to pair with her because he is also a western Santa Cruise Island Galopagos tortoise. And so that is the process of working collaboratively to maintain those those really important genetics.
Right, because you can't you can't just take sort of there's a bunch of different populations of Galapagos tortoises, and so if you got a different Galapagos tortoise, they might be able to set successfully mate, but then you don't have that same wild lineage that you're looking to preserve, right, correct, So that is so exciting. So how often do Galapagos tortoises mate like, both in the wild and also in captivity.
So here at the zoo, because we are in a temperate climate, right, it gets colder in the winter, we have to bring the tortoises in. So every winter we actually separate the male of braso from the females just because of space and for a lot of other reasons. So every spring we reintroduce them together, and so there is breeding every year, the same thing in the wild. As they come across each other in the wild and through territories during breeding season, they will breed, so it's.
An annual event.
And then mommy laid actually three clutches of eggs her first year that she produced eggs for us since meeting a braso, and so they will lay eggs every year also, So she did lay three clutches her first year, and then two clutches this past year that resulted in these sixteen babies.
It's because from my understanding of Galapago's tortoises is that they it is tricky to get them to actually produce offspring, particularly in captivity. Is it that the because it sounds like the mating itself happens with some frequency, but actually producing a clutch of eggs that are successful seems more rare.
There are so many factors that go into the successful reproduction of a species in human care, and especially with reptiles and amphibians. So sorry, I'm going to call out that my tax are the best all the time, but we have so many things that influence the success of that reproduction, and it's not just one thing, so they're all playing off of each other and it can be
very complex. So we have to consider the lifespan of the individual, their age at the time of reduction, and then their care, the UV light that they've been provided, their nutritional status, their health status in general. All of this plays into success. Also their stress levels, right, so if they can't if they are nutritionally deficient in some way,
their eggs might not be fit to hatch. If they're not, if they're overly stressed, they might hold onto those eggs and and affect the hatch rate by not laying them right away, or even the developmental rates. So there's so many facets to this, which is why this is so impressive, because it shows that Mommy's care over the decades has been very good, that her stress levels are likely pretty low. I mean, all animals encounter stress, right, but we have
this beautiful outdoor yard. We were able to give her in a braso the ability to interact should they choose, but her the ability to get away from those interactions if she wants to.
Appropriates every important important in every relationship.
Yes, exactly, choice alone time. Choice. Yeah.
So just the fact that she has appropriate nesting sites that she likes them as well. You know, we as humans can say, oh, this is great nesting for a Galapagos tortoise, but she might not agree. So knowing that we were able to provide her with those things that resulted in the success yeats, it's definitely a complicated process. And then of course the incubation of the eggs is just adds on to it. And now the rearing of the offspring. I mean nothing about this is simple.
So how do Galapagos tortoises in the wild incubate their eggs? And is there a difference between the wild because of course you're not on that Galapagos islands, so you can't completely recreate those conditions. So then how do you do it at the zooke compared to wild incubation?
Great question. And so these guys are whole nesters. So they'll dig a hole and they'll deposit a clutch of eggs or a group of eggs into the hole and then they'll bury it back up and then they're done. The eggs will incubate in the ground in the wild. At a zoological institution, in general, we will dig up
the eggs and artificially incubate them. So one of the major reasons we do that for galopagos tortoises is that they have temperature sex determination, and so the temperature that the eggs are incubated will determine the sex of the offspring. So this is a really important part of their biology that helps us as population managers. Now I can control the number of males and the number of females I'm putting into the population, which is an amazing asset when
you have a smaller population in a zoological institutions. And so we do retrieve those eggs, but it also gives us the opportunity to track their development and see where and if we have challenges, what the problem or the cause.
Of those challenges might be for next time.
So we do need to track very carefully the environment that we give these eggs. So temperature and humidity are two key factors that we monitor very closely when incubating eggs. But then we're able to track through the four month incubation. It was a very long incubation the development of these eggs. You know, try to troubleshoot any challenges and then wait for these babies to emerge what was in a very exciting moment.
So when like little baby birds are born, they will kind of knock their way out of the egg with their little they got a little ridge on their beak and egg tooth. How hard is it for these little baby Globuka's tortoises to get out?
They also have an egg tooth.
So reptiles have an egg tooth, yep, and they use that to break through their eggshell. Yeah, and these tortoises, they'll we call it pipping the first moment that they break through the egg shell and then that's a yeah, it's so cute. And then they did just stay in the egg for a couple almost a week before they fully emerge and hatch.
Yeah, it's really cute.
It's a lot of work. I don't blame them, So you know, you gotta take a breather after you're hacking your way out of an egg. This is something that I have talked about on the show a little bit, which is the as I get a question a lot from especially women, which is like it seems really silly as placental mammals that we carry pregnancies and it's a huge headache, and I very much sympathize with this, So then why don't we as humans just lay eggs like
so many other animals do? And I think it's a really interesting thing you bring up with the things like changes in temperature and humidity, how much the environment impacts the eggs. So one kind of cool thing that plus intal animals did was that we create like a kind of miniature environment for our offspring, which we can control. As warm blooded animals, we control the temperature just like
you kind of do with incubating these eggs. I just find that kind of this is kind of a cool example of why there is a bit of a trade off the eggs. Yes, they can usually have more offspring at once. Maybe Galapaco's tortoises don't have as many offspring at one time, but there are plenty of egg laying
animals that have so many offsering all at once. But you can't control that environment as well, and so if you have if you're a species of animal that likes to invest a lot into one offspring, laying an egg usually doesn't make as much sense or comes with more risks when you're versus having the baby born live. So that's just kind of a cool kind of application of
some evolutionary biology ideas. But in terms of the rarity of Galapagos tortoises, why is it so difficult to breed them and why are they relatively rare in the wild as well.
Glapa ghost tortoises are critically endangered species, and they're island species, and so it's really important to remember when you're an island species that your populations are innately at a higher level of threat because anything, a storm could come and wipe out your population. The biggest threats usually to these island species are human human impacts such as you know,
habitat degradation, but also invasive species. And so because they have such a limited range and they're naturally smaller populations, they are at a high risk of extinction, and so that's why they are critically endangered. They are challenging to breed, I think in the United States because we have to move them around and they are very large animals, and we have to get the right animals together in the
right conditions. You know, reptiles are very seasonally driven their reproduction, and so being able to provide them the right habitats, the right social dynamics, and the right, care is not always very simple, so and moving you know, Brazos almost four hundred pounds, moving him to Philadelphia was not an easy feat. So that was probably the hardest part of breeding these guys, to be honest. But they are a very long lived species, which gives us a long opportunity
for each individual to get their genetics represented. So that is one of the fortunate parts of the Galopagos toward us and their biology.
That is the that is so interesting to me. How I mean, I think we kind of as humans, we tend to think about things in terms of our own lives, right, so where we go through menopause and we know are no longer fertile when we're seniors, so then to see an animal like this, it just seems so strange to us.
But there's not necessarily our perspective, right of us going through like having a long live span, but then having a long chunk of our live span where we're not fertilely reproductive is not necessarily the main blueprint for a lot of animals. A lot of animals have really short life spans and they're fertile for most of that lifespan. The kind of the species that we do see in the wild that have long life spans like we do, and a long chunk of that lifespan where we're not
usually is another social species. So you know, for instance, elephants, Right, so you have a lot of matriarchs there that may no longer be producing offspring, but they're helping out the youngsters who don't know what they're doing. So it's so the fact that this tortoise is able to it has such a long lifespan, but it also remains fertile. It's
not that it is weird. It's that we have a specific kind of interesting biological clock which is not shared by all animals on earth, particularly not necessarily by reptiles.
Yeah, what's really fascinating. They've done some research on crocodiles and what helps the longevity of their fertility is that they can shut their systems down, so we won't see the same hormone spikes seasonally in a singly housed female crocodile that we will see in a crocodile that's set up with a male and that is reproducing. They can
shut their systems down, which can make them last longer. Right, So for example, well, mommy didn't lay eggs for twenty years, right, she didn't go through the process her being paired up with a braso. The social interactions that is what started her cycling again and got her laying eggs and moving forward. So I think that's a really interesting part of it, like an ectotherms biology, that these animals can kind of turn it off and turn it on, which helps it be a little bit of a longer lifespan.
That is amazing. I mean, it's and it's something that is coming from like a social cueue, which is so interesting where you can have these hormones kind of like activated because she sees a male, not because she's there's something in the water or her diet has changed necessarily, although diet changes can also affect fertility for sure. But yeah, I mean, I another reason to be jealous of reptile is that the control they have over their production. But
you do you see that in other species. You see that actually in case gurus have some control over their reproduction that you know. Sometimes it's like, you know, I'm just not feeling so I'm going to freeze the development of this embryo until I feel like things are cool for me to have a baby, which is, you know, if only, if only, we could be like that. But
that's that's so interesting. So that sounds like, given that they are so their reproductive cycle, it's not like human women where you know, during our reproductive years, unless we use medical intervention, medication, we just have to have our periods no matter what. They have some that they're able
to shut that off. So that seems like that could be another potential challenge thought at a zoo because they if they're not sensing, if they're not you know, getting sort of the cues that this is a good time to be reproductively active, they may not be reproductively active. Are are there kind of ways like are there challenges to actually like kind of convince her that, like, hey, now's a good time to mate or to be reproductively active.
I actually think this is a totally fascinating part of our jobs is that we really don't know a lot about the social behavior of reptiles, and we're learning a lot thanks to zoological institutions, and so some of the research I've been doing on turtle breeding in general suggests that the over attention of a male, so the males don't just go breathe with the female one time, right. They are very insistent and often there's a huge ritual of nudging and mounting and circling that takes place as
courtship prior to copulation. And then this constant attention from the males is anecdotally linked in some species to the reproductive output of a female, so not just sparking the female to cycle, but actually the outcome of those eggs. And so that's a really interesting part of our jobs because a lot of people would see that also as stressful.
Right, this male is hounding this female. In the wild, he would come through.
Her territory, breathe with her and then move on. But in a zoo, maybe she's his only potential mate. They're sharing a habitat and a territory, and so he's constantly breeding and reproducing with her, and so there's that stress aspect, but also the aspect of that Potentially that's what is going to lead to success. And so I think one of the things that we're very fortunate about here in Philly is that we have this large outdoor yard. We have two go up and goos females as well as
two aldabra females. In with a braso so that he
can share his attention. When we did the first introductions, we did observe them and do a behavioral ethogram, So we had staff watching and observing a braso where was he spending his time because we were very concerned of mommy and mommy getting stressed out at her older age, and Abraso did selectively choose to spend most of his time breeding with mommy, but he did spread out the love and we didn't see a lot of signs of stress or indicators that we would want to separate those animals.
And so a lot of like really interesting social behavior stuff that we really are just now on the cusp of learning and reptiles is really fascinating.
I mean, that seems to be quite like that's the over many many years, like hundreds of years of having zoos, that seems to be one of the major shifts in terms of modern zoos, which is understanding that the behaviors of animals in captivity. You can't just copy and paste animals from the wild, put them in captivity and then
have their behaviors all be the same. Like a lot of misunderstandings about animal behavior comes from studying animals in captivity because it's so much easier to study animals in captivity, and it's I'm completely for researching animals in captivity because it's a great opportunity for conservation and understanding animal behavior.
But what the mistakes that we used to make were assuming that you know, you can have like a pack animal or a migratory animal, or or or you know, a tortoise with a really long lifespan and a large area and then see the exact same behaviors in the
zoo that you would see in the wild. So I think it is I think it's really important to know that, like you know, today, like in zoo's I think there's a lot more awareness of like, all right, we even if we can't completely recreate the Galapagos Island within the zoo, having the awareness of, like, okay, what are these sorts of stressors that these animals might feel, particularly with social animals, where you know, might you might see aggression in social
animals that are usually a lot more chill in the wild when they don't have time alone from each other. And so it's from my perspective, it seems like we've gone from maybe misunder standing these things many many years ago to now caretakers and researchers in zoos being really aware of, Okay, we need to create an environment that is not stressful for this animal and then to understand
why there might be conflicts among species in zoos. And I think because I think when people think about reptiles, they don't think of them as being particularly social, right, Like they see a crocodile, it's like, well, it's just sitting there, it's not talking to anyone, it's not groomed, they're not grooming each other, so they don't seem particular Like, I think it's easier to understand this concept when it comes to maybe primates or something, right because you see
their social behaviors that are much more like our own. But would you say, like in the herpetology department, like, are there a lot of considerations made in terms of the social lives of these animals.
So I think one of the things I've loved seeing as I've worked through my career and moved institutions, is that one we're not just offering more naturalistic habitats and trying to elicit more natural behaviors, but we're also using non natural.
Things to get the same output. Right, it doesn't really matter how I.
Get the natural behavior as long as I'm listening it because it's something that's healthy for the animal. And so that's where enrichment and training are coming in to our care. And I think the biggest thing for reptile keepers and fimmin keepers is to first say, we don't actually know
and they communicate in very different ways in us. So, like you said, it's very easy for me to look at a primate and recognize play behavior or social behaviors, but not so easy on a snake that's very old, factory or using pheromones for a lot of it's communication.
I can't possibly evaluate that right.
So all I can do is use my observations and develop metrics for evaluation that help us learn more and collect data and then collaborate with other institutions that might be seeing something similar or have maybe another a larger sample size on that species. So I think it's one of the most exciting parts of our job is that we're able to fill gaps in data on these species that otherwise would be unattainable.
Are there other endangered species that you are breeding at the Zoo, either within the Herpetology department or even outside of the Herpetology department. Is this sort of is mommy really especialness is like kind of a unique event or do you have this breeding of endangered species happening in other areas of the zoo.
Yeah.
No, we breed a lot of endangered species here at the Philadelphia Zoo. In the Reptile department specifically, we have a lot of different we call them species survival plans. They're the way we collaborate in North America in the Association of Zoos and Aquaria to move animals around, like we moved to Braso here to have ideal genetic genetic pairings.
And so we have Vietnamese.
Box turtles that we're working on breeding. We recently hashed a dwarf crocodile. We have Chinese crocodile lizards. We have a lot of different species, a lot of different critically endangered species.
That we're working on breeding here at the Zoo.
To develop these genetically sustainable populations, but are then available for education for research, and then of course we collaborate in the field with a lot of them as well, and so they can be representatives for their species here at the zoo. We had an orangutan born a few
years ago. Yeah, so we do. We work with a lot of different endangered species here and sometimes our role is just to house them until they're old enough to breed, and then we work with the Species Survival Plan to move animals around and sometimes our job is to pair them up and breed them. So it just depends on the species and the populations need at the time.
For instance, for the baby Galapagos tortoises, are these going to are they all going to remain in your care? Are they going to go to other institutions? My sense is that it's usually conservation, where you have breeding programs. For releasing into the wild is usually quite different because the problem is if you have a species that you have at zoo that you're raising, is that it's not
going to know necessarily how to survive. So you don't want to just send tortoise out there it's like, all right, good luck, and then it might not thrive.
So what.
Happens to these baby endangered animals after they're born.
That's such a good question because we're actually fortunate reptiles and amphibians that we can have a direct release right As you mentioned, egg laying species generally have a lot of offspring, and so we use a technique called headstarting, where we can rear the juvenile animal in captivity until it's a certain size and then release it. It has a much higher chance of success in the wild because obviously, for instance, tabpoles have a high rate of predation and mortality in the wild.
That's why there are so many.
It makes sure some animals make it to adulthood and can contribute to the population. By head starting animals, we can give them that kickstart in the wild and guarantee more animals make it, or not guarantee, but increase the chances that more animals will make it to adulthood and then become reproductive parts of the wild population.
However, that does.
Not mean that every animal that we're breeding in zoological institutions is going back into the wild. There's a high risk of transferring diseases and a lot of other problems that we don't necessarily want to perpetuate in the wild without proper testing and quarantining procedures. So most of our populations are for sustainability within the zoological field. That allow us to maintain those genetics if needed, and then also to research these populations. And so these tortoises will not
go back to the wild. They will be part of our North American population of western Santa Cruz Galapagos tortoises, which was forty four individuals and now is sixty so really nice big kick yeah, in the population, and we will not keep them all. They will have to be moved out in place to these get very large and live a every long time, so we will move them out into the aza population at other zoos within North America.
Yeah, I think that's and I think it is something that is important for people to learn about, which is that zoos. Natural history museums there's a lot of stuff there, both living specimens and you know, not living specimens where it is preserving a lot of information so we can look at DNA from an animal as this huge library
of information. And you know, obviously with natural history museums the specimens are almost always not living animals, but you still have like outside of the like display area which is for education and is amazing, I love it, but inside sort of the archives, you have a ton of stuff that is there for research, and also just to preserve things that you may not know what to do
with yet. Right, Like one of my favorite examples is a lot of museums have ear wax from whales, and they didn't they didn't know what to do with these, Like they're these like hard chunks, they're almost like they're kind of like fossils, but it's just hardened ear wax from whales, And they had no idea what to do with them for like hundreds of years, but they kept it, and then finally some researchers realized we can actually like cut into this and look at it and use it
to understand better whales seasonal diets and migratory patterns. So I imagine this is something that happens in zoos as well. Like you are, you have the front facing part of the zoo, which is educating people, letting people see into a world that otherwise they would not have access to, uh and kind of you know, allowing people to explore the their love of animals, which I think is wonderful.
But then you also have just a massive amount of information that is either being researched or there in case we lose some of these animals, so that we still have at least some of the record of these animals in living specimens. So can you talk a little bit about that, like the kind of maybe unseen side of conservation at the zoo.
Yeah, absolutely, So we do have a zoological information system where we collect vast amounts of data. So while you come to Philadelphia Zoo and you only see two Glopagos tortoises or now you know, nineteen, are nineteen or contributing data to the overall forty.
Four that we have housed currently.
But then just think about the number of Glophagos tortses that we've had in human care in North America in our history. And so every day the animal caretakers are collecting data, they're collecting important information on each individual here at the zoo, and then these individuals and they become part of a population and that amasses a large amount of data. And so this provides a repository right for
future research and for current research. We never know what questions we're going to ask or what needs we're going to have in the future, and what conservation issues might come up and where that data might be super valuable, and so often we're fielding research requests as as zoo professionals from universities where there's a professor or a student doing their master's research and they would like us to share data with them, or they would like to come
observe our animals for one of their research questions. So being able to provide that opportunity is huge.
This is a question that just occurred to me. So I don't want to put too much pressure on you, but what, like, are there any really funny kind of ways of data collection? Because I've heard stories of the very creative ways people have to, say, do fecal samples at zoos or try to figure out, like, hey, whose poop is this, and then using glitter or dye that's
safe in order to identify whose poop is this? So is there are there any like really funny ways either in general at the Philadelphia Zoo or within the herpetology department where you guys have had to do really weird things in the name of research.
Well, you named mine.
I mean for me, I did a fecal hormone study with crocodilians at a different institution, but I had to figure out how to get them to be markers in their fecal samples.
So that I knew whose species were each and one way was dye. So and you don't want to use like.
A red dye, right because they will come out looking like, you know, oh my god, what's proud animal.
Yeah, so one.
Animal got blue dye and had very green poop, and another animal got glitter. And that was hilarious because when I was feeding this crocodile one day, it kind of went up to grab the rat that had glitter in it, and it hit the rat and it just exploded like a glitter bomb all over the exhibits. So that was a really fun day for me when I was like, oh my goodness, you didn't see that happening.
And glitter gets everywhere, so everywhere probably still there to this day. Yeah, that's I love that. I mean, you have to you have to get creative because it's not like you can't interview these animals.
You can't.
They don't use toilets, you can't have them come. Well, you can do labs on them, but if you're just trying to let them live their lives and then collect their collect biological specimens from them, sometimes you got to feed them a glitter rat. That's amazing. So Yeah, any other conservation news, any other zoo babies or weird and wild stuff happening.
No, I think the biggest news here is that we're getting ready to you know, we've broke ground and we're working on our new Bear Country exhibit and so the opening of that is going to just be phenomenal next year. And we recently opened the Flamingo walkthrough, so that has been a really exciting guest opportunity where you can walk in with some of our some of our flamingos.
Is a nice new habitat.
So just you know, constantly progressing, moving forward, working with a lot of endangered species here and doing our best to really push the needle for conservation and animal care.
That's fantastic. And how are all the How are all of Mommy's babies doing now? Are they all all good?
Yes, there's doing awesome.
We're really happy we have an exhibit inside the Reptility Amphibian House. But in this nice weather, we've been able to get a group of them outside as well. So getting them out in natural, full spectrum lighting is just really beneficial to their health. So we're getting them outside and they're they're growing like weeds.
I'll tell you that they're they're adorable.
How okay, just one more like these? How small do they start off? And then like because they got to get to be around four hundred pounds eventually.
Yeah, so they hatched around but you know, anywhere between sixty and eighty grams, so like roughly the size of a tennis.
Ball right fit in the palm of your hand.
And I mean they are going on five months, six months, the oldest ones now, and they've doubled in size.
Wow, amazing. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's that's fantastic. Hopefully they will be big and cumbersome real soon. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's one of the actually the really difficult parts is making sure they don't grow too fast because they are, you know, grazers. They're constantly ready to eat, and so one of the things we learned early on wearing giant tortoises is that we don't want them to grow too fast because they'll end up with shell issues and arthritis.
And that's so interesting.
Yeah.
So it's actually a huge job raising these babies. Like we're weighing and measuring them every month. Our nutritionist is amazing and she's really tracking their diet intake and what they don't eat, so we know when do we increase the food availability to them. It's a really interesting process that is teaching us a lot about controlling our offerings to these animals. Because they are hungry and they are ready.
To eat, they will eat. Uh yeah, I I sympathize with that if I have a dog. I have a dog who would eat, who would eat herself sick if I if I lit her so I can't. But she thinks I'm a monster for it, and that's just that's just how it's gotta be. But I can baby Galapago's tortoise give you puppy dog eyes when they're not getting enough food or they do. They just kind of look eh whatever.
They're just like air biting around like the staff are, like they're hungry.
That is that is adorable. Uh Well, before we go, we're gonna play a little game called the mister Animal sound game. Guess who's squawking? Last week, the mystery animal sound hint was this. You can find this animal in Kara Jaimo's book about sea creatures called Leaving the Ocean was a mistake. We talked to Karl last week, so another part of the clue if you have not read the book is that it's not a bird and it's not a superhero sidekick. This one is really really tricky
if you haven't read the book. So I apologize. I'm I'm immediately giving you hard node for this. All right, Lauren, do you have any gifts? Oh my gosh, this is such a I would I wouldn't get this one. I'm just gonna I'm gonna come out with that. It's it's very very tricky.
Leaning towards a marine mammal, but yeah, I don't know. I'm thinking like a.
It does kind of sound.
Like a he was eating a clam there, and that's where I went with that.
It sounds it sounds like a happy sound, like a sea otter. But it's really fascinating because this is actually a fish. This is this is the sea robin. Congratulations to Emily m Alaura W and Craig K for guessing correctly. It is a fish that is able to make this kind of like weird groaning, gurgling sound that you can only hear as people. We can only hear it on lands. So this particular fish is very unhappy to be on land, so it is complaining, But yeah, fish do not normally
make a ton of vocalizations. It was a big deal a few years ago and we were able to actually get some recording devices near coral reefs and found out that there's a lot more sounds than one would expect that are being made by the fish and by the invertebrates that are living in the coral reefs. But yeah, sound communication, except for with cetaceans whales, it's not usually
going on with a lot of sea life. So it's really interesting when we find a fish, something that is not a mammal in the ocean who can make a sound like why can't.
Make this sound?
What are they doing down there? Onto this week's mystery animal sound. The hint is this, you may find these colorful animals at zoos, but they're not always in an exhibit. All right, Lauren, do you have any guesses?
Well, from your hint, I want to say, but I feel like when I've heard they sounded.
More like cats than that did.
Well, you're absolutely correct, Will I will be bleeping out your answer, but the listeners will know that you got it correctly. I have personal experience with one of these that showed up in my yard when I was a kid, and so pretty, so amazing. These are all more hints for you guys to have figured out. But like, it's a beautiful animal and then it just makes the most god awful noise and shrieks at you. It's very intimidating. And I have seen these at a lot of zoos,
and they're often just chilling out walking around. They're at the I know for sure they're at the San Diego Zoo, and usually you can just see them kind of like hanging out with the visitors. And I've never quite understood what they're doing there. I do, I'm pretty sure they're there purposefully, but yeah, they seem to just enjoy hanging out. So if you guys think you know the answer to this week's mister Animal sound game, you can write to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com. Lauren,
thank you so much for coming on today. Where can people find more information about Mommy, about the babies, about the Philadelphia Zoo?
Yep, well it's all over the news Mommy and her Baby, but you can definitely find out moreation on our website and then obviously please come to the zoo if you're in the Philadelphia area such a wonderful place. The reptile house is open and the babies can be seen inside and outside seasonally, and Mommy and abraso out in the yard as well when temperatures are ideal.
Amazing. That sounds so fun. I would love to see those babies if I was in the area. Maybe someday, maybe when they're grown, I'll be able to see them. And thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you leave a rating or review, it's greatly appreciated. That does help me a lot. I read all the reviews and I appreciate the feedback. And thanks to the space Cussocks for their super awesome song.
Ex Alumina Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or he guess what why of you listen to your favorite shows. I'm not your mother. I can't tell you what to do, but if I was your mother, I'd probably dig a hole, leave you in there and bury you again and just hope for the best. See you next Wednesday. H