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 Fat Babies, we're talking about some of the biggest babies around, everyone's favorite Internet hippo Moo Dang, as well as the enormous, gargantuan, fluffy and
incredible baby king penguin Pasto. I am so excited to talk about these I really wanted to sort of have a full discussion about mood Dang, the internet sensation and what is she, how does she function, why is she and also the interesting conversation about how we treat animal celebrities. Joining me today to talk about these enormous babies is writer for one nine hundred, Hot Dog, the comedy website, and of the horror novella Healthy Choices, Lydia bug. Hi.
Thanks for having me.
You actually suggested this topic to me because you mentioned Pesto, the incredible baby king penguin, who is just apparently growing bigger and bigger. He's not going to stop until essentially he is the size of a building. Yeah.
I told my husband it's like me having a baby, and it being six feet tall. Yes, that's what it reminds me of.
It's wild, it's very wild. So, but first, I do want to talk about Moodang. You are familiar with Moodang, I would presume, Oh, my.
Gosh, yes, obviously I'm obsessed with all of the fat baby animals. There's a TikTok talker who does the Knights of the rotund Table, which is all of the fat baby animals that are at Zeus. And uh yeah, Moodang is like the King Arthur of the Knights of the Road Hunt.
Yes, she's incredible, So let's talk about her first. So Mooding, it's the internet's favorite juvenile pigmy hippo. Pigmy hippos hail from West Africa. Let's talk about this species a little bit before we talk about mood Dan. Specifically, they are one of two living species within the hippo family. The other is the common hippo, which is much larger. That's the hippo we know in love. That's the one that does the ballet in Fantasia. They are quite big now.
Adult pigmy hippos grow to be around four hundred to six hundred pounds, which is one hundred and eighty to one hundred and seventy five kilograms, which sounds like a lot maybe until you realize that common hippos average over three thousand pounds. Oh my god, one five hundred kilograms.
Right, dainty.
Pygmy hippos are tiny compared to common hippos. Like the largest kind of individual common hippos can weigh in to be over five thousand pounds or over two thousan two hundred kilograms, so that compared to say, amax size of six hundred pounds. Pygmy hippos are little. You know, they're pigmy hippos and they're little. They're the Chihuahuas of the hippo world.
Did we like breathe them like teacup chuahuas to be tiny or they're just like.
Fortunately, no, they are just naturally like that.
Because if someone wants a house hippo, that's really not good.
Yeah, that's probably. I love the idea of a little lap hippo, but it's not gonna ever happen ethically. So, pigmy hippos only grow to be a little over three feet tall about a meter, so yeah, they are truly the cute little cousins of common hippos. They are similar in some ways to the larger hippos. They are semi aquatic, although they are a lot more terrestrial than common hippos. They spend more time on land. They're also less aggressive than common hippos. They're a lot more shy.
Really because Moodang is spicy.
Mood Dang is very sassy, but contrary, she's not murderous. I would say, like pygmy hippos are sassy. They will go after you if they feel you are, you know, bringing down the mood harshing their mellow, but they won't kill you. I can't. I couldn't find a case of a pygmy hippo over killing anyone, whereas common hippos regularly kill people. They're very dangerous, they are very aggressive.
I feel like I heard once they were like one of the most dangerous animals on Earth. Is that true?
They're They're not the like one of the most dangerous animals on earth. They are far more dangerous than say, sharks in terms of killing people. That's crazy. The most dangerous animals on Earth are mosquitoes, dogs, and snakes, and in descending order of badness, I think or no, I'm not anyways, regardless, those are the three ones that cause the most human deaths of sort of animals, right, Like, obviously bacteria and pathogens can cause more death.
That makes sense because those are prolific animals.
Yes, yes, so. And it's also like with mosquitos, it's unintentional they carry disease. Dogs, it's rabies, uh and in a lot of countries where there is not as much of a successful campaign against rabies. And then snakes obviously with their venom they actually can cause a good number of human deaths. But but you know, like common hippos are up there, they are more dangerous than sharks, but they but pygmy hippos not so much. They are not
that aggressive. They will fight back, as we know from Moodang, who is a spicy little sausage. So the pigmy hippos are more shy than common hippos. They form smaller social groups, usually family units like a mother and the calves. They avoid confrontation with other pigmy hippos. They don't really fight so much, and they like to rest in the river during the day and then they come out at dusk to feed. And so you know they are overall a bit more shy, a bit more introverted, a bit more chill.
And so the way I interpret mood Dang's behavior is that she's annoyed at all the attention and just wants to be left alone.
I get it, relatable. I just want to chill in a river and come out at night to feed. Like, yeah, that sounds like the life.
If like, I could just bite someone's leg every time I feel socially exhausted, my life would be so much more simple.
Yeah, that's why we love Mudang. She's the people's pigmy hippo. We're all like, I get it.
Yeah, I've said this. I think I've said this before on this show. But like, I had a plumbing disaster that a few weeks ago, just as Moudang was spiking in popularity. And what happened was I filled my sink up with dirty dishwater. Well not intentionally, My sink was clogged. There was a clog deep down somewhere and I I
was filled with dirty dishwater. So me smart took out the u trap of the sink and I did put a bucket under there, but it was a small bucket, not enough bucket, and also the water came out really fast because it was under pressure, and I did get blasted with dirty dishwater. The bucket overflowed and I flooded our kitchen and I was wet and mad. And when I saw Moodang, I was like, well, sister, I get it, but you do look.
Like me the most relatable in that moment.
Yeah, wet and mad? Yeah, uh so, yes she is. I think that the fury of the little hippo is very relatable.
And she's just always doing normal things and the zookeepers are like bothering her. Like I saw one where she was sitting in her mother's food bowl, which genius. Like if I were tiny and could fit into a food bowl, I would sit in it and eat like that sounds great, And her mom was trying to eat like around her. Yeah, zookeepers were like, get out of that food bowl, and then she was like, no, I'm gonna bite you.
Yeah, very reasonable, she should. I used to it when I was a kid. I would like to take cereal into the bath, and sometimes the cereal would fall into the bath and I thought, huh, I'm basically swimming in a bowl of cereal. Because my cereal is now my bathwater.
Oh my god. I love eating in the bathtub, Like I feel like that's good. It's such a hick thing to do, but I love it.
I had a setup where in my parents' bathroom, if I opened the door, I could like turn on the TV from the other room and incredible, watch the TV from the bath and take a bubble bath and then eat eat fruity pebbles in the bubble bath. And it was sort of the best thing that's ever happened in my life. I can't say anything has ever topped that. Yeah.
No, Like at my old house, I had a jet bathtub and I had enough space to put my laptop at the edge of the tub, and I was willing to like live dangerously and do that. I remember at Christmas once Bridgerton had just come out and I was like in the bathtub watching Bridgerton. I had some kind I think, like a bottle of sparkling wine and some cheese. This is incredible.
I mean, this is the thing. Like, yes, mood dang is highly relatable. We like to swim around in our in some water, have food out the ready, and we don't want people to interrupt our good times. One cute habit that pigmy hippos share with common hippos that they like to do poop fan So they will poop vigorously and then helicopter their tail and just spread the dung around.
And it's not that they like whole papers have been written about exactly what they're trying to achieve with this, like it's basically thought to be marking sort of trails or territories, but it is just it's, you know, it's a pooh tornado that they like to produce.
That's great. I think I've seen videos of hippos and zoos doing that and people being like horrified.
That's It's just a normal behavior for them.
I love it, and they know. I'm sure that people like, hey, people think this is terrifying. I'm gonna do it, yes, like everybody check this out. All the chorists are like.
Oh my god, no, yeah, they probably they probably get a kick out of it. They do sometimes do it like at each other in the wild, not necessarily pigmy hippos but common hippos, So there can be some poop poop fan aggression going on. So I wouldn't be surprised if sometimes it is used towards visitors to be like, hey, get out of here.
Is poop fan the scientific name?
You know, it's not not scientific. So that is the background on pygmy hippos. Let's talk a little bit more about Moodang specifically. She was born in July of this year, twenty twenty four. She's a juvenile pygmy hippo living at kau Ko Open Zoo in Thailand. Her antics are looking perpetually annoyed and soaked in water. She has two siblings, Nadette and Mutuan, though like the Baldwin brothers, they are
not as famous. So and my favorite thing about her is that her name Moodang roughly translates to bouncy pig.
Oh, that's so cute.
She really is that she is a bouncy pig. Yeah, she looks like an overstuffed cushion. I love her. Her popularity actually doubled the number of visitors to the zoo, which can in some ways be good, right, but in other ways it's proved to be a challenge. Some of these visitors took it upon themselves to try to harass
Moodang by throwing water or objects at her. I believe that all of these visitors should be lined up and receive a bite from Mudang, like just be like, all right, you did this, you get bitten.
Yeah, you receive if.
You if you violate Moodang's boundaries, you should be willing to receive. Moudang's retribution is Mike.
I can't I can't even imagine what goes through a person's head that makes them want to throw something, I mean, at any animal, but especially at the cutest animal on friggin' Earth.
Yeah, they're trying to think because they're trying to provoke a reaction, probably to get like a photo or a video for social media, that would be my guess. But the zoo has responded, I mean by definitely scolding people, but also they become more protective of her and they only allow visitors like five minutes to gaze upon MoU Dang other because like, she's just become so wildly popular and they've got to protect her. And you know, but I think it's a very interesting example of how weird
animal celebrity gets. You know. I love this little hippo, I get it, she's adorable.
But it's also a.
Little concerning sometimes because she is a wild animal. She's not gonna appreciate or like the excess attention that she's actually getting like in real life.
Yeah, I have this exact same like worry about because zoos know that these little animals are huge money makers now ever since like Fiona, I think was the first big celebrity hippo, and I wonder if they're being ethical about how many babies they're having because of how much money they can bring into the zoo. Like, I had lots of questions about this. It's because I love it, But I'm like, am I is it bad that I love this so much?
You know, it's a good question. I don't have it as simple answer for this. You know, there's a lot of really good zoos that do a lot of good conservation work. I think that overall zoos can be a positive thing both in terms of conservation, rehabilitation, education, research. All of these things can make zoos actually I think a net benefit for the for animals, for the environment.
But you know, I think that in cases like this it is a definite gray area because on one hand, uh pigmy hippos are endangered and Moodang has now brought a huge amount of attention to pygmy hippos. Now everybody knows what they are. They see her, they find her really key. And so if you tell them, like, look this type of hippo, like they're endangered, people make care more.
Right due to her fame and her popularity. On the other hand, it's an we do kind of like it concerns me obviously the people who throw stuff at the at her should just be fired off into the sun. But like it's also now that she gets so many visitors, I wonder how much that stresses her out right, because like I said, they're basically crepuscular, borderline nocturnal, like they they you know, usually rest in rivers during the day and then at night is when they like at dusk
is when they come out to feed. So be getting that much attention during the day, I wonder how much that affects her stress and her health, right, Like, I just hope that you know, she is being protected so that she can stay moisturized in the lane.
Yeah, Like I was psyched to hear that they took her off display except for five minutes a day, because if you're having if that's like you know, if they're having these issues. That's what needs to be done obviously, is to like mainly have her be protected and doing her own thing, and then every once in a while people can look upon her like.
Right, yeah, I think it might be five minutes of visitor. Let me check on that, visitors.
I remember reading about that.
Oh no, it's good, you're right. It's like for only five minutes. Visitors could see mooding for only five minutes on Saturdays and Sundays. I think it might be on Saturdays and Sundays, each visitor, like you know, like you're in a line and basically you're ushered forward, so you only get about five minutes to look at her. But it is it is limited to Saturdays and Sundays.
Okay, that's not so bad, like, you know, because that keeps the crowds smaller too, so she's not dealing with Like when I went to see Fiona, there was like, you know, sixty people like pressed to the glass.
Yeah sure, sure.
It's less stressful to have two people at a time kind of staring at you.
Yeah yeah, uh yeah, yeah. I think it is really important to kind of balance the I mean, of course, I don't blame anyone for wanting to see her in person. I'd love to see her in person. Who wouldn't an adorable little hippo. That's not necessarily the problem. It's that we do need to balance sort of the fun of it all, like, which is like, you know, I mean having fun internet stuff about her. There's no harm in
that that I can really see. But yeah, just making sure that doesn't bleed over into you know, I don't want people thinking like that she's basically like a pet or a toy or you know, that she's anything other than a wild animal who isn't a zoo obviously, but that deserves respect and deserves to be treat, you know, not treated like a form of entertainment, but rather as a living creature.
Yeah, you don't want the zoo to like stage mom mood day, you know.
Now, I'm just thinking about those hippos and Fantasia, the ballet hippos, and like, yeah, they had to go through dance moms.
Yeah, you don't want Mudang to go through what Jojo Siba went through.
Oh no, no, oh man, no ah, Yeah, that's that's just Moodang in a sparkly bikini drinking to Pila. I'm not gonna end up well, all right, well we're gonna take a quick break, and then, much to Lydia's delight, we're gonna talk about Pesto the Penguin.
I've been dying to talk to anyone about Pasto that will listen, So.
All right, so we are back, and Lendy, you actually suggested this one to me. This is about Pesto the penguin. What drew you towards this little penguin or probably shouldn't say little penguin?
No, thank you for asking. So I think what's so special about Pesto is the fact that a lot of big baby animals just look like a slightly smaller version of that animal. So if they're born really big, you can't really tell how big they are. But the fact that Pesto has his like penguins have that fuzz when they're born, and then they get their like oily slicker feathers, you can really tell, like, this is a baby, and it looks like a baby, but it's taller than all
of the adults. So it makes me picture, like I said, a six foot tall, like two year old, yeah, walking around a house, and how much destruction that would bring. And it makes me like smile and laugh every single time. And I have heard like an origin story for Pesto that is very cute, but I don't know if it's true, and I don't know if you know it's true. But do you do you want me to tell you what it is?
Yeah? Tell me?
I okay, all right. I heard that his dad was like one of the biggest king penguins ever in Captivity, and he was very old and he passed away either pre Pesto's birth or when he was very young.
Uh.
And his mother also has passed away. And so Pesto's two dads, he says, two dads, and that's the penguins he hangs around with. And they're smaller penguins. So part of why he also looks so big is because he's hanging out with these two smaller penguins all the time.
Yeah, So I think at least part of that is true. So he is.
Like I thought. I thought it was sus so I didn't google it because I liked it so much.
So his his father is one of the oldest and largest penguins at the zoo. I don't know that his father, Blake is actually dead. He is being raised by foster parents. So like the the foster parents are Tango and Hudson. I'm not sure that these are these are I don't know if they're They might be gay penguins. There's so I would like, Yeah, I believe it's so. Yes, I believe so so and but yeah, I don't know. I haven't really seen anything specifically about the mother. I don't
know that the mother's actually died. I think it may just be that the father's really old. Raising a penguin is kind of a two penguin job, and so they wanted to try out. They wanted to give this egg to Hudson and Tango to raise, to see how that if that would work out well, and it did work out really really well. It worked out super well, well cared for. So Pesto he's a juvenile king penguin, not an emperor penguin, so we're not talking about happy feet here.
Happy feet penguins are emperor penguins. King penguins are slightly smaller, so Pesto is enormous. He was hatched January twenty twenty four at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium, and like most baby penguins, he grew a fluffy brown coat that started to lighten, and eventually, as an adult it will molt in favor of that black, yellow and white coloration that you're familiar with of penguins. But currently I think he's sort of a fluffy gray, sort of light gray. He started out
as a dark brown gray. That coat lightens, gets a little thinner as they age, and then they'll molt and then have their adult colors. But Pesto is unique because Pesto is absolutely enormous. He towers over his gay foster dads. So for a frame of reference, adult king penguins typically average around thirty five pounds, so that's about sixteen kilograms. In September of this year of our Lord and Savior King Penguin twenty twenty four, Pesto weighed forty six pounds.
Lord almighty.
Thirty five pounds is the average. He's forty six pounds and it's just baby, and he's a baby, and that's about twenty one kilograms. He was eating twenty five fish a day. He's the largest baby king penguin in the aquarium's history, and he's only getting bigger. Last time I checked, it's looked like he was maybe fifty pounds at least.
Yeah, every time he's on TikTok. You know, the search bar of TikTok has what everybody else is searching every single video of Pesto without fail. The search bar is why is Pasto so big? Why is Pesto so big? We need to know?
Well, the according to the zoo, it's partially genetics. His father was one of the biggest penguins in the zoo's history, or the in the aquarium's history. Part of it, they say, is because of his parents. The foster parents are incredibly attentive,
so feeding him a lot. So like both both genes and environment mean he is enrm uh, but they do say the caretakers do say that he'll drop and wait after fledging, so like once he finally molts as an adult to around thirty three pounds or fifteen kilograms, so dropping down to somewhere in the average. But I'm so skeptical, Idia, Yeah, I believe.
Them he's got twenty pounds of feathers that he's gonna drop.
Okay, no, no, And I mean part of it could be, like the metabolism changes a little bit, But like I'm also very skeptical, Like in I tried to sort of hunt this down. In the wild, it looks like, in good conditions, pre fledgling king penguins have an average weight of about twenty eight pounds or thirteen kilograms. Remember, Pesto is like fifty pounds right now, But let's say the weight is higher, right, Like in the wild they may be thinner, right because they're getting less nutrition. Let's say
they're heavier on average in captivity. Even then, like let's say they're like, you know, instead of twenty eight pounds, they're like thirty eight pounds or something. Pesto is fifty pounds, So like there's still this like vast difference in weight. Like I I want to place bets, Like what do you think he's gonna weigh as an adult?
I think what was his father's weight? Do we know it was forty something?
Oh we don't. Yeah, I don't know what his father's weight is. Let me see, But I mean he was big.
Right, I think he's going to be bigger than even his dad, which is the largest. So I think he'll definitely be the new largest in captivity. I guess he's still he's still going to weigh forty three pounds.
That's very close to my guess, which was just forty pounds, because it's a nice round number.
Yeah, but we'll.
See, we shall see. In the wild, king penguins are one of the biggest species of penguin, outmatched only by emperor penguins. They're just a sleeker, slimmer version of emperor penguins. They're found in the South Atlantic in South Indian Ocean on these Subantarctic islands. Typically they live in warmer conditions than the emperor penguin. So it is it's almost as if someone like slipped in an emperor penguin egg into the enclosure and is just like trying to pass it off as.
Wow, that would be a hilarious twist in this someone just put the wrong egg in the wrong place and they're like, oh god, oh.
No, yeah, so just got the egg switched. Fun fact about pesto, Oh no, we already we already covered that. But yeah, the pesto is being raised by these foster parents, and it is really cute because penguins are very attentive. They there's a good chance that if you give them an egg, they're just gonna be like, hey, free kid and raise that egg as their own.
Incredible. These are half off this.
Month, so yeah, and parental care is quite significant for penguins, including king penguins. The like I said, males also caretake for the eggs and for the offspring. Once the egg has hatched, that baby is very vulnerable. Even though they grow that really fluffy, brown, downy coat, eventually, when they are newly hatched, they barely have any feathers or any down at all, so they're very vulnerable to freezing to death. So what the parents have to do is they sort
of tuck them under their tummy. They have this thing called a brood pouch that they can tuck either over the egg or once the chick is hatched, they can tuck it over the chicken. They balance the egg sort of like on their feet and then tuck the pouch over so they're nice and snugly and warm.
Oh that's so sweet. It's kind of like a reverse kangaroo pouch. Then it's like an Audi pouch.
It's an Audi pouch. I love that. But but yeah, and I mean, like because that's one reason like that. I mean, there's like in every species, every species of animals will have gay animals, Like, that's just basically something that will happen if there is an animal that sexually reproduces, I think it's almost guaranteed that some of them will be gay. And so penguins are not unique in being gay. Penguins are unique in that we have them in captivity a lot so we can observe them, and also that
they are such good and loving dads. So that's why we get these unique situations where we have we get to see like loving gay parents raising a foster a foster pesto. So because and because you know, the fathers do really invest just as much care into raising the chicks as the females do, which is something that is more common in seabirds, it seems, because the demands of the environments are so harsh that you really need both parents to be involved.
Yeah, I think that's so great. That's some good, great gay representation, because like I mean, how big a baby penguin is has to be a metric for like how well you're taking care of it. So it's like these are amazing fathers. Yes, yeah, they're killing it. We shouldn't we.
Shouldn't need to like point to penguins to encourage people to support gay rights.
But you know, but this penguin said gay rights.
This penguin didn't say gay rights. Yeah, it just it makes me think about like here in Italy, I think there's just a law pass that makes it illegal to it effectively bans gay people from adopting or becoming parents, which I think is disgusting that this is happening in Italy, and it is, you know, it's just like it's so weird, right, like that we come up with all these laws and hang ups. Meanwhile, penguins are just like, we've just raised this baby to be the world's largest pain one large.
We're literally, statistically the best penguin.
Parents, statistically the best penguin parents. Like you have ever seen witness our enormous child.
Yeah, he's the miracle penguin baby, and Italy is just ignoring it.
Yeah, make that movie DreamWorks with Disney, I dare you. All Right, So we're gonna take a quick break, but when we return, we are going to talk about or we're gonna do a little change up. We're gonna kind of do the opposite the tiniest babies that grow into the biggest adults.
That sounds great.
All right, so we are back and we're going to talk about the world's any bittiest baby. But the twist is that they grow into very large animals. So this is about some of the greatest growths from birth weight to adult weight in the animal kingdom. And so my two favorite examples of this are the red kangaroo and the sunfish, two very different animals. Let's start with the
red kangaroo. I like that you brought up earlier, the fact that the penguin brewed pouch is like an Audi pouch, like a kangaroo pouch but Audi, and we are going to talk about kangaroo pouches here. So red kangaroos are marsupials, and like other kangaroos, they're actually the largest kangaroo. And when they give birth, their joeys start out incredibly tiny.
They are basically like fetuses at this point, and they are like the size of a tiny bean, and they crawl their way out of the vaginal canal up into the mother's the mother kangaroo's pouch. It's this like incredible journey that takes them. It's actually surprisingly fast. It takes like around five to ten minutes for them to crawl up.
They do it themselves. They do it themselves. Yeah that's crazy.
Yeah. They And then once they're inside the pouch, they have to latch onto a teat and then they stay there until they start growing. So adult red kangaroos, like I said, they are the largest roo, biggest rou and they weigh anywhere from around ninety pounds or forty kilograms if female, or up to two hundred pounds around ninety kilograms if male. Guess how much the newborn babies weigh, man, I've seen.
A baby kangaroo before, and they are teeny tiny, like the size of a mouse. So I'm gonna say like a pound.
Yeah that's because you see it after it started developing a little bit. The newborn babies are like a single gram. They are like they are smaller than a bean, which means that they grow around ninety thousand times their birth weight when they reach adulthood.
Man, kangaroo's got it made. I'm jealous of kangaroos, I.
Know, right, Like when I think about having children, it's just like, why wasn't I born a kangaroo? Yes, although I guess they get a squirming toddler like attached to your stomach pouch all the time, although that just happens with us.
We do that, we do that to us and carry them around, and that's when they're the most peaceful, honestly, is when they're like like super pressed to their mother's body. They usually just sleep. So dang kangaroos. God loves kangaroos.
Have you ever seen like people who are like kangaroo rescuers, Like, say, the kangaroo babies are being raised in sort of a rescue organization. They can just like hold out like a bag and the little kangaroo will come up, the joey'll come up and just like flop right into the pack.
It's so cold, that's amazing. Oh, they're so portable.
They really are the most the most I would say convenient baby. Another convenient baby is the baby of the sunfish. Oh wait, no, no, no, I have something really cool to say about the red kangaroo. First, so one fun little thing with that might either make you jealous or not. I'm not sure, but like female red kangaroos are almost perpetually pregnant. Now that sounds bad, I'm off ford, I'm afward.
Their bodies can actually freeze the development of the embryo if she senses that she currently has a Joey in her pouch, so essentially she can control when she gives birth to the new Joey, which again is gonna be like a teeny tiny bean. And then once the older Joey like moves out of the pouch, like moves out of his old room, then she starts up the the birthing process that the like the embryo continues to develop, is born and then crawls into the empty pouch.
Can if they sense that there's like not enough resources or something around, can they just not have a baby at all? Or does it always have to be sort of in some in some way in that process? I guess does that make sense?
Like I would imagine that if there's other environmental cues, right that like she can hold she can can continue to hold off on giving birth, right like like you pull it in essentially in a way, in a way.
But yeah, that's a very good point, like resource, uh, like, if there's your resources, yeah, she might she might also continue to halt the embryonic development, but yeah, and there could of course, there could also be like miscarriage type type situation, which is like sort of a natural abortion that would be in cases where your body is very stressed and so it aborts the baby to you know, prevent there from being a pregnancy during a time that is not good for it.
So so interesting.
Yeah, yeah, it sounds convenient to me. I'm very jealous. Now. So the other one that I love are sunfish. Have you ever seen a sunfish?
I know they're very big. Yes, are they big? Are they big? Flat guys?
Yes, you have seen them. Yes, they're enormous, weird flat fish with big bulging eyes. They're very strange looking. They weigh up to one thousand kilograms or two thousand, two hundred pounds.
Wow.
In contrast, the babies that hatch look like teeny tiny spikey stars and they weigh less than a gram. Uh, they're almost like planked in it, like they're just a few millimeters wide. Oh wow, Yeah, it's wild. Many of them will not reach adulthood. They're so tiny. They're like an easy snack for a lot of things. But it's fine. It's fine because mom can carry around three hundred million eggs.
Okay, so you really don't want her to have all of those babies, or we would just there would be no ocean, there would be no sunfish.
You could just walk on on all these sunfish. Yeah. Uh. The ones that do survive increase their birth weight by a factor of a million. It is an incredible change.
Yes, that's so crazy, Like how do you even have enough cells in your body to construct?
Well, you don't start out with them, you make it. They start dividing, myosis, my toe, my god.
And like I think about how much like when you're a teenager you have growing pains like I had bad and pains, and.
Yeah, especially in the legs. Well they don't have legs, so maybe it's fine.
Yeah, they just they just kind of go out.
Yeah, flat pancake. Well, uh, before we go, we do have to play a little game. It's called the Mystery Animal Sound game. Every week I play a mystery animal sound and you the listener, and you the guest, try to guess who is squawking' wow, let me take that again. Uh, and you the guests try to guess who is squawking. Let's guess who's squawking. So last week's mystery animal sound, the hint was this happy hollow Wayne from this loud little aquatic gentleman. All right, we're able to hear that.
Yeah, is that a bat?
Uh? That's a very good guess. It does sound a little bit like a bat, But no, this is the lesser water boatman. Uh. Micro Netta shalt seal. That is that there's a lot of consonants in this name. It's Microta schultzee. So it is an oval aquatic insect only around two millimeters long that produces an incredibly loud sound
by rubbing its penis against its abdomen. It's kind of like, you know, like a spoon and a washboard kind of thing, or one of those like weiro instruments that you played as a kid in elementary school.
But it's a penis on an abdomen.
But it is a penis on an abdomen. Uh. This is something called stridulation. It's similar to what crickets do, but in this case it's with a penis.
And you're so beautiful.
It's glorious, it's beautiful and it is you know, I dig it. This musical singing penis can reach volume up to ninety nine decibels. That's very loud. That's like, you know, that's almost jackhammer loud. Fortunately, the water protects us from being subjected to the sound at full volume, so we really don't hear it like that loud. It's always underwater
when it's making these stridulations. So but yeah, that is the You know, it's kind of fun when a guy just serenades you, but with his wiener, with.
His wiener, you know, and it's so loud that it's the sound like the sound of a jackhammer.
Just imagine a guy playing a violin in a very specific way.
Yes, oh god, all right, it is horrifying. Thank you for that image in my head.
You're very welcome. I thought that we could wash down all of the cute babies stuff with like horrifying piece instrument from above. Yes, get here, Yes, all right, onto this week's mystery animal sound. The hint, Well, first of all, this is an animal I learned from my guest Kara Jaimo about an episode or so ago. And the hint is this holy ray fins Batman. All right Lydia got any guesses?
Is it?
Is it a sting ray Ooh, that's a good guess. I definitely did say rayfin in there. That is a very good guess. Well, I won't reveal the answer or not yet. You gotta wait around until next week's Creature feature. Lydia, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about Moo Dang and Pesto and our beautiful little bean kangaroos. Where can people find.
You on social media? I'm at, you know, Lydia on pretty much everything. It's yo you k and ow Lydia. My biggest platform is probably TikTok.
Hey, yeah, I should figure out how that website works.
Just skip right past it and go to Snapchat. That's where everybody is now.
Seriously, yes, I'm such a grandma. I can't like. I'm like, oh, do we see how these tiktoks work? And it's like, now everyone's on Snapchat. Now you missed it. You missed it? All right, Well, thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show, you can leave a rating or review. I read all the I appreciate all the reviews. I got that mixed up. I read all the reviews, and I appreciate all the ratings. Someone's gonna leave a
rating like cannot distinguish between reviews and ratings. One star stars and thanks to the space Cossics for their super awesome song x Alumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or Hey, guess what? Why have you listen to your favorite shows? I don't judge you. You live your own life, you follow your own dreams, give birth to two tiny beans, and you know, be
like Pesto enormous. See you next Wednesday.