Welcome to Creature future production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show Eggs. I like your eggs over easy, scrambled, fried, hard boiled, whatever you like. There are so many eggs in the animal kingdom, and they can be bonkers, from tiny camouflaged works of art to very strange but ingeniously shaped eggs. We are taking eggs
to a whole new level. Discover this and more as we answer the age old question when does giving birth coincide with home improvement? Joining me today is friend of the show, my close and personal friend, podcasting buddy, host of the podcast Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, which I'm also on that one too, Alex Schmidt. Welcome.
It's so good to be here. Thank you for having me for eggs, a thing I don't think enough about.
Nobody thinks enough about eggs.
Yeah. I also feel like I have learned from various friends and so on that different American accents kind of say the word differently, So I hope everyone's comfortable with how I say the word eggs. Sometimes eggs varies eggs.
I feel like I say eggs. I don't know how do other people say it? Eggs? Eggs?
Like eggs?
Eggs? Yeah, I say eggs.
I think I usually say eggs and sometimes I go eggs a little bit. And so we'll see what happens to me as we go on this journey.
Either way is excellent. So we're going to talk about some really interesting eggs. There are a lot of animals, from insects to monotremes that lay eggs and they are all very very interesting. So Alex, you like a stick bug?
Yeah? Yeah, especially I've only ever seen them in like zoos, but there will tend to be in a reptile house, maybe a little cubby where there's a stick insects living out of plant and it's awesome.
Yeah. I love the bug house. Like the San Diego Zoo. They have all sorts of cool insects and there's always a stick guy in there, just being sticky, going around like a stick. Stick insects belong to the fasmid order. We mostly think of them as these small brown, stick like bugs, but they can also be green. Rarely, they can be bright colors, such as stick insects found in Madagascar who can be bright blue and orange when males reach maturity, but most stick.
Insects blue and orange.
Yeah, wow, charges Iago.
Bears football value like it feels great?
Wait, Chargers is yellow and blue. You're right? Wait what's it's?
Uh?
The Chicago Bulls Bears Bears, Bears Bears.
I don't watch football anymore, but the culture is meaningful to me. Through an orange everyone can see you coming from you.
Guys, got a stick bug who's a fan? So that's something. But yeah, most stick insects do go for camouflage. They try to mimic green or brown sticks or vegetation. Even really big stick insects try to blend in with their environment, such as uh Tinomorpha gargantua, which is the gargantuan stick insect found in Australia. Females can grow almost two feet long, which is over fifty five centimeters. Males only grow a fraction of this in are thinner, which enables them to fly.
For most stick bugs, the females are too thick to fly, too big, and the males are the ones that can fly. So then yeah, the bigger females are flightless and their brown branch like appearance allows them to blend in with the forest canopy despite being so huge.
Yeah, two feet is a branch.
It's a branch. That's a branch bug. It's not a stick bug. That's a branch bug. Yeah.
Like, you can't throw it to your dog, you're like too big. Put it down a different stick.
Oh no, this poor. Imagine throwing the stick insect to your dogs like, oh no, not that kind of stick.
Hopefully become best friends.
Yeah, that would be I would love that story. A Pixar movie about a dog and a stick insect and their adventures together. Sounds good.
Carries around their friend.
Hey yeah, and then they go and fight the Nazis or something anyways, so really escalated. Wow. So, these gargantuan stick insects, as well as other species of fasmids, lay eggs, either through sexual reproduction with a female with the eggs and a male fertilizing the eggs, or if the female gets no male takers, they can actually reproduce through parthenogenesis,
meaning that she can lay unfertilized clonal eggs. So you know, if you can't find yourself a man, just pop out a few clones of yourself and call it a day.
Right, that is double pressure from your parents. Why haven't you found a partner? And also why haven't you parthenogenesis? Some grandchildren for us, I guess they don't say it because, like me, they stumble over saying the words, but otherwise they will bring it up.
I feel like parent Yeah, like parental guilt about having children would be trickier if they had to say parthenogenesis every single time. So, you know, one little obstacle.
But yeah, frustrated dad is just like, why haven't your Parthenon's I'm not learning the just Parthenon, come on, make a Greek temple.
Not being on them face blocks and Parthenon a kid already. So yeah, the eggs of stick bugs are actually no less fascinating than the stick bugs themselves because the eggs are also camouflaged. And Alex, I want to I want you to guess what the eggs of a stick insect might be camouflaged as, Like, the.
Really fun one would be berries, right, or nuts or something.
You are something you are so close. So the eggs of many stickbug species mimic plant seeds, So isn't that cute? It's a stick buzz that's cool. Their eggs look like seeds.
They're just really doing at this point, they're larpang as a tree. They're doing all the parts.
It's a hardcore sort of fandom where they're naming their kids after trees. They're dressing up their kids as seeds. It's a little bit dorky.
So yeah, like are they going to make a wikia about free cannon and information?
Now?
Like how deep is this gonna go?
Yeah? I feel like stick insects are already pretty just nerdy when you look at them, and then you add in this whole this whole plant fixation. It's it's it's it's endearing. Though, So the eggs mimic the seeds of local plants. Depending on where the stick insects live, the
mimicry can be very refined in certain stick insects species. So, for instance, the giant prickly stick insect lays eggs that look like seeds with a knob like growth, and then these fake seeds, which are actually the eggs of the prickly stick insect, are actually carried off by spider ants into their colony because these ants often pick up seeds and bring them back to their colony. Because the ants eat these seeds. They actually eat a part of these seeds,
this like nutritious knob on these seeds. And you might be asking, well, why would you want to disguise yourself as food for another animal, which is a great question. And the ants only eat part of the fake seed eggs, so that like knob like growth on the egg that mimics a seed is called a capitulum, and the capitulum is full of nutrients, but eating it does not damage
the growing prickly stick bug larvae inside the egg. So essentially it's like gives the ants a little gift, which is a little bit of edible part of the egg case because the ant thinks it's a seed. But then the prickly stick insect continues to develop and when it hatches, its juvenile form mimics the spider ant, so it can proceed to be protected by this ant colony. So why
does it want to be in the ant colony? Because ant colonies are full of protective soldier ants who will mess up whatever is trying to get inside of the ant colony. So this little juvenile stick bug mimics the ants, and then finally, as it develops, older juveniles will start to look like bark, and then finally its adult morph
looks like crumpled leaves. It's fantastic. It goes through this whole life cycle from an egg that looks like a little seed that tricks ants, then they look like the ants themselves, then they look like bark, and then they look like crumpled leaves. Incredible.
They did not need to go this hard and no mimicking one thing is a lot, and they decided I'm going to have a different mimicry for each life stage. There are seasons to my life, and I'm going to be an autumn chapter. When I'm a crippled leaf, I'm going to be like you guys in the are they called spider ants. The spider ant yell, which sounds like two bugs to me. This is a lot. This is great.
Yes, it's fantastic. There's this wonderful National Geographic article that shows a photo by by Levon Biss in this National Geographic article about these these fasmin eggs, and they are I'll provide a link to both the National Geographic article and to this photographer's website in the show notes. But they're absolutely beautiful. They look like these intricate wood carvings. Now in this photo they look big, but this is like a macro photography. These are actually really really tiny,
like think really tiny head of a pin seeds. So when you can look at them though, when they're blown up and you look at them in detail, they are incredible looking. They're all sorts of different shapes. There's like, uh, there's sort of more conical shapes, there's oval shapes. There's even some that look like a weird like almost like a totem pole or like a it's a rod with like these little holes carved into it. It's just they're so beautiful.
Yeah, this is so much to get up to as a juvenile or infants bug, right, Yeah, like I aged many years before I did anything besides poop and cry, and these these bugs are really on the ball immediately, They're like, I'm immediately an HR Geeker figure in a positive way. Look at my phenomenal weird nature art.
I'm still at the stage of pooping and crying a lot. You know a lot of what I get up to.
It's our break from podcasting, it's what we do.
We recharge and I'm afraid of being ashamed of it. Yeah, but I do. I just love the complicated lifestyle of like basically from birth to the end, like they are always tricking. Ye, there are always life's of stage for these fasmids.
Yeah, because that that was so many schemes. You're a tree seed and then part of you is eaten by ants, and then you pretend to be an ant, and then you pretended to be like bark crumpled leaf, and I think something else before that.
It was bark before crumpled leaf. But yeah, exactly, It's just.
It even sounds hard to do bark before leaf. I would think leaf would be dinner easier. This is a lot, it's a lot of scheme. I recently saw a show called Lupan that is on US Netflix, where it's a French show of about a master thief who also disguises and elaborate schemes, and I keep I'm just thinking of this guy telling his French friend about a plan to be various bugs of eggs.
It does. It feels like an ocean's eleven, but for insects, it's so convoluted it doesn't. It seems like a fake, bad, fake movie script of the insect world. But it's real. It's amazing.
Yeah, and this picture is Bucker's. I'm glad you're looking it for everyone.
Yeah, it's just definitely check out that National Geographic article and the photographer's website because it's beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Well, we are going to take a quick break and when we get back, we are going to talk about another egg, which is like a work of art or a work of engineering. So, Alex, I know you don't like sea life too much, but how you feel.
About legs, they're weirdly fine. And I have learned that my phobia is sort of constructed around would it broadly make sense as a land animal, right? And if sharks had legs, they would they would basically be some kind of smooth wolf. And so that's fine.
They're smooth wolves. That's a good way to put it. There's smooth sand papery wolves. Yeah. I like sharks. I feel like they are sort of like fish doggies, and they're cute and some of them will kill you, but they're typically harmless when you look at them as broadly in terms of all the species and stuff, and so such is the case with the horn shark, which I think is a cute one. Horn sharks are goofy cute little sharks with spots. They grow only about a meter,
which is three feet in length. So you know, I feel like you could cuddle one of these. You wouldn't want to, because, like I think that'd stress the shark out. But you know, they also have a few defensive techniques which would not be great for cuddling. But still I think they're cute.
When I think of shark defensive techniques, I just think of biting me at eating me. So is that one of them?
No, not, Actually they will bite, they can't really eat you because they're too small, but they do have another defensive technique other than biting. They actually have a set of two protective spines on each of their dorsal fins that can be sharp. So that's, you know, is kind of like an anti cuddling barbs going on there, which is a shame they are, but their temperament is very sweet. They are not that aggressive. They will bite you if
they're harassed, but otherwise they're very chill. They eat crustaceans, small fish, sea urchins, mollusks, other small sea life. They do not actively go after your people aggressively because they're so sweet.
That's nice.
They live. Yeah, yeah, they live in the Pacific, off the coast of North America down to Mexico. And yeah, they're actually so sweet. Their temperament is so good. In twenty eighteen, three people tried to smuggle a horn shark out of an aquarium and a baby stroller. A baby stroller.
I immediately was imagining some kind of duffel bag full of water. I like that, it's a baby's stroller.
Baby stroller. Put a pacifier in its mouth and it sucks on it like Maggie Simpson. So they scooped the shark out of the tank, and they wrapped the shark in a wet blanket and put it in a stroller and.
Right, and then shouted, are you calling my baby ugly? I don't anyone who even looked at it, like preemptively, that's the move. Just shame them and that question to get there.
So this was in the San Antonio, San Antonio Aquarium. The shark's name was Miss Helen.
And this is in Mexico. It's not Santonio, Texas.
I think it was Texas.
Actually, yeah, there's a lot of stuff named after him.
Yeah, San Antonio, Yeah, San Antonio Texas is where it was. This is definitely a tex This was in Texas.
Yes, oh phenomenal.
Isn't where Brenda's from?
Yes?
Oh yes, so wait to have what was Brenda doing in twenty eighteen.
Telling me she was bringing a child home and then suddenly dropping the subject. So I don't know, couldn't be here.
So yeah, they tried. They wrapped miss Helen this juvenile horn shark in a wet blaze get put her in a stroller. God the shark did survive. The suspects were apprehended. The shark was returned to the aquarium when the thieves were caught. The reason they kidnapped this cute baby shark is that it sells really well in the pet trade, so unfortunately it's not It was not like a shark
liberation front, which would be misguided, but really funny. This was like they were they go for a lot of money in the pet trade because they're I mean, because they're really pretty in docile. I guess they while it's not like a nice life for them, they I guess people who have large aquariums they put them in there. But yeah, they they these are survivors. They're pretty hardy sharks that are accidentally caught in fishing nets can often
be returned to the ocean and survive. So they're they're troopers, and they're sweet, and they're precious little babies. And while you should not roll it around in a baby stroller, I love that that did happen, and I wish I could have seen it.
Yeah, there's so much else to do in San Antonio. Go to the river walk, have a breakfast taco rights game. They have an astounding new French guy. Now, like, do that game?
Put a shark in a s Wait? No, no, okay, breakfast burrito, put shark in star Wait. Damn, it's hard. It's just like breathing. It's natural for me. So onto the eggs because this is really cool. The sharks are really cool in their own right. But we're talking about the eggs. So like a lot of sharks, they will weigh basically egg cases, so they have an egg case that covers a developing shark embryo. Some sharks give live birth, but a lot of sharks will lay these egg cases.
So egg cases are made up of a tough collagen, and different species lay different shapes. Sometimes they're kind of like they look like little purses or little crescents. But the horn shark egg case are shaped like corkscrews, and they are incredible looking. They do not they look like you're talking about like hr Giger earlier Geiger. Yes, it looks like some science fiction e thingy. It is this like beautiful corkscrew. It's smooth, it looks like it's made
out of plastic, but it is. They're incredible looking.
Yeah, I'm seeing the picture and it looks like a man made augur or cool screw, but also sort of like a grenade in a good way. It's great.
You toss it and a little baby shark pops up.
Oh wow, and then we sing this song.
No, oh my god, that song has ruined talking about shark life cycles. So, but not only is it shaped like a cork screw, it actually functions like a corkscrew. So the shape of this egg case allows the eggsack to become wedged in rocky crevices or on the sandy floor, and it kind of kind of screws in there, and that protects it from both predators and currents and allows it to kind of kind of latch onto like a get wedged into like a crevice or down in some sand,
so it like it sort of screws in naturally. I've read different things regarding how this happens. Some research indicates it kind of naturally ends up wedged in crevices just due to the shape. I've also read at least one source that contends that the shark intentionally picks up the egg case and like puts it near a suitable spot
or kind of wedges it in. But I haven't been able to find any really good observational studies about whether they do this, whether females like actually themselves manually wedging, And the thing that seems more likely is that it naturally just kind of like she lays it in an area that's pretty suitable and then the just like the gravity and currents end up kind of pushing it into crevices.
But I really wish, and I really hope that they find evidence that these sharks are grabbing the egg case and just screwing it in like a light bulb into like into the rocky crevice.
Right, the evidence is a screwdriver, Right, screwdriver, We just find that and then.
Ah, man, can you imagine if Tim Allen was a shark.
H Yeah, making that noise. What I actually want is shark al right? Al was his friend? Great?
Wait, which one was out? Was Al? The one on the other side of the fence.
No, that's Wilson, which would also be a fantastic shark because that's just the fin instead of his hair. Right, But Al is the bearded guy on the show, right, he was not Pamela Anderson.
Man. You know what, I never watched that show as a kid. I saw that that come on, and that was an immediate, immediate channel change. You think you think six year old me wants to learn about saws and home improvement. I think I could handle that much flannel on the television.
No, Right, And they failed to make them all various species of cuddly sharks.
If they had been sharks in that show, I would have watched it and I probably would have learned how to do home improvement, which I assume is the purpose of the show.
It is so distinctly weird that a major character was the top of a guy's hat behind a fence. Yeah, like, you probably don't know for about seeing it. But Tim Allen would be in his backyard having whole conversations every week with the top of a guy's hat and you never see his face.
And that is very shark coded, right, because like sharks are super famous in a lot of movies just for their fin, which I think that's good branding right there, Like your fin or your hat is like just a synectic key for you. You've done. You've done good. You've done good branding there.
Yeah, it makes more much more sense. From a shark. He really should have been a shark and really could have been a shark. You can put a hat on a fin. No one will stop you.
You can put a hat on a fin, No one will stop you. That's such a good that's such a good philosophy. Thank you, alex Well. Let that, let that settle in that beautiful phrase, and we will take a quick break and then we will return wiser and better.
Yeah, everyone, provide one picture of you doing that, and then you can.
Cutting a hat on your fin, your dorsal fin. That's right, all right, we are back and we are going to talk about some complex egg engineering engineering. Wow, I just I wrote that joke in my notes and I just came up with it. Now I'm really predictable.
I mean is how the English language works, folks. It's it's what's coming, you know, right, put a hat on a fin too. I have a lot of commands this week, but a hat on a fin.
So this comes, uh, this, this incredible egg engineering feet comes from one of the most deadly, most despised animals on the planet. Can you guess, Alex, an.
Even bigger shark, like a mega shack.
Go in the opposite direction, an even smaller shark. I walked into that when I set that one up. No, this is the mosquito. Mosquito. Yes, the common house mosquitoes lay their eggs in fresh, slow moving or stagnant water. As you may have known, Like if you live anywhere where there's like bodies of water, but it maybe ponds, and it's during mosquito season and they're just freaking everywhere biting you up. It's because they use stagnant water to lay their eggs.
Yeah, gross, cut it out, cut it.
Out, knock it off. But yeah, so when the eggs hatch, the mosquito larvae is aquatic. It breathes air through a tube on their butt, So their rear ends have a tube that they breathe through, and they kind of float bottoms up and will feed on microscopic organisms in the water, and then they will molt into their adult flying forms, and then they go around being pests and spreading disease but also providing food for a lot of animals.
Breathing through a tube of the butt feels like something some kind of pseudoscience health influencer will try to tell me I can do, man, you know what I mean. Yeah, Like, if you just tried harder, you would be doing this.
I definitely see butt sunbathing where you're supposed to go naked and like hold your butt out to the sun and it's supposed to do something I would caution against it unless you put sunscreen on your butt, in which case, you know, go for it. I'm not going to tell you now, but yeah, this is definitely this is definitely Goop Goop esque breathing through your butt with like a straw essentially. I think they sell those actually butt straws.
To breathe through, right, because there first they tell you can do it literally, and then when you find out you can't, they'll be like, actually, like spiritually, you can do it if you just align your chakras to breathe right through the butt. And I know chakras are a real thing in a specific way, but like Internet, people use it for the nonsense.
Definitely not what you're saying, Alex in terms of something you can breathe through your butt. You've just offended so many, so many people. Uh yeah, but yeah, I definitely could see there being like a sort of h woo woo spiritual grift of breathing energy through your butt.
Right, you're getting bad energy through your mouth, right, somehow, the good one we'll come through your butt.
Yeah, and they just sell you basically an enema or something. Anyways, I these these mosquitoes are actually breathing air, oxygenated air through their their butt tubes. H. But we are talking about the eggs because the eggs that the mosquitoes lay in the water are particularly interesting because this species of mosquito, along with other species, but we're talking about the common house mosquito, they lay egg rafts, So egg rafts rafts made out of eggs. These are tiny rafts made out
of hundreds of eggs. The eggs are so small that each raft is only a fraction of an inch big. Like there's I've shared a couple of photos with you. One is of the raft and it looks like a bunch of grains of rice, kind of like stuck together into a floating raft form. But they are much smaller than rice, way smaller than rice.
Yeah, rice is dead on or like a brief toothbrush bristle, like a bunch of toothbrush. It kind of looks like a tooth brush short, too short for my teeth.
Gotta be thinking about that when I brush my teeth, Like this is like mosquito eggs that I'm rubbing on my teeth. Thanks for that.
Yeah, I'm glad I can bring that to the world. You're welcome.
But yeah, but yeah, this the scale of it is kind of hard to tell from this photo. But there's another photo of like you see, it's like it's just this tiny. The entire raft itself is smaller than a grain of rice, and it fits on like your finger, very tippy tip of your fingertip. So each egg is really really tiny.
But I guess it's still bigger than I imagine somehow. Yeah, it's tiny for sure. And then I just I somehow I think of all mosquito things as being microscopic, even though they are big enough to see.
Yeah, but still like the thing that you're seeing, the visible thing on the finger that is like still smaller than a grain of rice, is hundreds of eggs. That's like hundreds of eggs all together as this raft and so the Yeah, so basically the raft is formed through this cluster of vertical eggs, and the raft is buoyant due to a bubble of air inside the egg and the exterior of the egg being water resistant. So it's like an inflatable raft. But it's made out of mosquito eggs.
Wow, Okay, I mean that's just cool. Yeah, good for them, and a good use of their weird, stagnant water rather than the flowing water that us proper people like.
It's proper polite society likes flowing water. But yeah, I mean the reason they want these to float is like, if you are setting it up such that when they hatch, they want to be floating butt up so they can breathe through that butt straw. You want to be on the surface of the water. You don't want to be, you know, kind of settled to the bottom of the water or get eaten by a fish.
Oh, it's all coming together Yeah, the butt tube was so critical to the engineering and the understanding.
The butt tube is sort of so like they can like hang out in water, benefit from the nutrients in the water, and then when they hatch, they you know, fly off and are a menace.
It's like it's like a little chorus and a cartoon, Like when a dozen cartoon characters are singing, all their mouths are up, you know, but this is their butts are up.
But it's the butts, the butts that are up. Yeah, that's not the first thing that pops into my head, but you know, let's go with that.
I guess I'm very musical.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah.
I once found a bunch of mosquito larva in a I guess it was a wheelbarrow that had been rained in And I didn't know anything about anything because I was I was a kid, and so I just thought I had discovered a new type of cool tiny water bug. And so I thought maybe they were sea monkeys, naturally occurring sea monkeys. Sea monkeys, by the way, are just brine shrimp. But these I collected a bunch of them in a jar. I brought them home. I was so excited about it and I showed my parents are like, oh,
that's mosquito larva. Like you say, what, Like, that's a bunch of mosquito larva. I'm like, I'm pretty sure these are sea monkeys that I found in our backyard, mom and dad, and uh, but yeah, it turned out that they were indeed mosquito larva. So I brought them this show and tell my teacher was you know, looking at it through personal lips. Yeah, I uh, but you know, I kept it sealed. She was like very concerned. She's
like that that's keep that jar closed, please. And then and then I brought it home and I think I gave it to my dad and I think he like flushed him or something. I'm not really sure what happened. Uh. They certainly were not given an opportunity to turn into a bunch of mosquitos inside of the home.
I have so many questions about the flow of this because, like, because at least one of your parents has a lot of like biological training, right.
Like under stops, No, they just you're an or something. Well yeah, so he he yeah, he's a he's an engineer who works for an oceanography But I don't know if that helps you with mosquito larva. I think it was just they'd seen their fair share of mosquito larva.
I see, okay, yeah, because I was imagining some big gulf of knowledge between your parents knowing a lot and your teacher not knowing that stuff, so that they just kind he was going to bring some larvae'd be cool about it.
You know. I think the teacher also knew it was larva, and she was just like, didn't want a bunch of mosquito larva to get lease in the classroom, which is reasonable, I think.
Right at every turn, young Katie is running into jerk squares burnt down with her mosquito larvae liberation plans.
Like I found a puppy and it's just a lot of cockroaches, a lot of cockroaches. Like that's not a puppy. It's like, well, I think it's a puppy and I'm bringing it to show and tell. But yeah, so that's the Mosquito larva are really fascinating. They're really interesting looking. The way that they breathe through their rear end is really cool, and they kind of move around in a
really cool way, and they look interesting. There's sort of this kind of like almost like they look like weird not curly shrimp, but really tiny and they're very strange looking. And but yeah, it's it is. It's like I think that when we consider the humble mosquito, we just think about the adults that are super annoying, but not these really interesting earlier morphs of the mosquito. And it is it's still a really interesting little animal, despite how destructive it is.
Yeah, and this is such a global feature, right, like like some some various species will not be near you when you think about them, but like these are all around us. Mosquitoes are They're all over the earth because they build these weird rafts and that's on top of the.
Raft trans atlantic everywhere. Yeah, they're everywhere. They cause a lot of diseases. They're they're not not great in terms of you know, disease spread, but they are they're important for the ecosystem. So you know, we uh, it is it's important to both respect them but also try to protect people from malaria, which we can do both. I shrink. Yeah, Yeah, there's room, there's room. Yeah, And there's so many mosquitoes.
We can kill a lot of them. It's hard to kill a good amount of them, and there they will still be around. But you know, but yeah, they do build rafts, so in that way, they are somewhat like Tom Hanks. Yeah.
I have never had occasion to construct a raft, and I think if somebody approached me about it, I would ask if we are stranded or something. Right, it feels like definite mistake on a sandy island activity, right.
I feel like I would die in that situation because I don't think I could build a raft. I'd probably get distracted and do a wicker chair or something, and probably try to make it too fancy, and then the whole thing would sink like a small wooden Titanic, like I shouldn't. Maybe I shouldn't have had a had a bar and a conversation pit on this raft.
I knew I shouldn't have fallen in love with someone from a different social class. On the raft there wasn't.
Rube at all. So yes, Mosquitoes build the world's tiniest rafts, and that's pretty cool. But before we go, we gotta play a little game. Alex, you like games like games. This game is called Gets You Squawking. It's the Mystery Animal sound game. Every week I play mystery animal sound and you the listener, and you the guest kind I guess who's making that sound. It can be any animal in the world, world or out of the world. I
don't know. Once we find him it could be. Uh. But yeah, last week's mystery animal sound hint was this, Do not adjust your television and ignore the barking in the background. This hissor is better off in a manger. All right, Alex, did you hear that beautiful noise?
Yes?
Yeah, that that beautiful hissing sound.
Yeah. It it sounds like something leaking but cooler.
Uh.
I almost feel like it's like an ambient purring, but weird, like some kind of is it? Is it some kind of like fox or something like oh with a fox's good guess.
Foxes can make some pretty weird noises. You are wrong, so you're not going home with a brand new Ford Fiesta. This is a young barn owl hissing, So congratulations to cat s and Heather E who getsed correctly. Yeah, this is a barn owl. Barn owls are cosmopolitan. They are found almost everywhere in the world except in extremely hot, desert or extremely cold arctic climates. And in a lot of islands they're not found, but otherwise they are pretty cosmopolitan.
They have a white heart shaped face, white bellies in tan backs, and sort of tan heads that like wraps around their face like a hood. They're beautiful owls. They're one of the most beautiful owls I think, and they're often sort of used in movies to like, oh, look at this owl. Very elegant, owlegant. They feed on small rodents, reptiles, amphibians, and insect and insects as well as the occasional small bird.
Because they have a fold to seek out dry, pre existing shelters for their nests, they often roost in old buildings, particularly barns, which are open structures, so this is why they're called barn owls. Barn owls do not hoot. They either shriek or hiss. The sounds that come out of them are horrifying. Despite looking so beautiful and elegant. They don't like if you hear a beautiful hoot and you're watching a movie and then you see like a barn owl pictured like the movie is lying to you. Because
barn owls do not hoot, go wok. Right.
The hooting was probably from one of the human romantic leads, and they were hooting at each other. And you're confused yet.
But yes, so that is the sound of a barn owl.
That's such a gift to get to hoot as an animal, and it's weird that they'd passed that up to hiss. But I guess they want snake privilege, and they.
Want that snake privilege. Yeah, I mean the the hissing is a little more threatening, I guess, But yeah, hooting is. I do like a.
Hoot, fantastic.
It's a great sound, a little yeah.
Yeah, and every owl we would accept it from, but barn owls are like, don't need it now, yes.
S, and your attic, so onto this week's mystery animal sound of the hint is this, don't add this fuzzy fellow to your fruit salad? All right, alex any guesses.
I want it to be something so cute, but it's probably fuzzy and I probably ate it in a fruit salad, So.
I told you not to. Don't add this fuzzy fellow to your fruit salad.
I'm just so rebellious. I think, let's say it's gonna be some kind of colorful frog. There's all those colorful frogs at in the rainforest there.
Maybe one of those colorful frog is Alex's guess Yeah, do you out there have a guess right to me at Creature featurepot at gmail dot com. And if you guess correctly, maybe I'll be like, hey, good job you did it, but yeah, and we will find out who is making that sound on the next episodisode of Creature Feature. Alex, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you? Are there perhaps other podcasts that you do?
It is such a joy to make secretly incredibly fascinating with you buddy every week. It's a lot of fun and I hope people check it out.
Do you check it out? It's it's really great. I like it because Alex does most of the work on that show, so that makes me happy.
Advice on this it's a joy. It's great.
It's fun to not do work and to talk. That's the always a benefit of no but it's it's an excellent show. I really enjoy being on it. I feel like, well, thank you, but I it's the Alex energy is makes it a real fun show and I learn a lot, so I assume you also learn a lot. So yeah, get secretly incredibly fascinated. Thank you guys so much for listening. You're enjoying the show, and you leave a rating or review. I would be so pleased to see that because I
read every single review. All the ratings really do help me. It's fantastic, And thank you to the Space Classics for there's super awesome song. Exo Lumina 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, wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I don't judge you, not your mother. I can't tell you what to do.
You got to live your own life, make your own mistakes, you know, get out on your tiny little mosquito raft and just ride those waves that we call life. I'll see you next Wednesday.
I also breathe that up your butt. That's required.