Q&A: The "My Brain Melted" Special!

So I asked you guys on Twitter at Katie Golden is my handle if you want to check it out, and you guys came up with a bunch of fascinating questions. I wish I could get to all of them, but like I said, my brain is a puddle, so I will answer all the ones that I can. And yeah, I hope you guys enjoy this one. Uh, it's gonna be a little shorter than normal, just a short and sweet kinda. Hey, what kind of animal does this? And I go, hey, good question, here it is. Here's the animal,

so let's get into it. And I will answer these to the best of my ability. So first question is from water Chestnut to on Twitter and water Chestnut too asks analogous structures and convergent evolution. Baby, why are bird wings like arms but bat wings are like hands? So this is a really interesting question as we know birds and bats both independently evolved the ability to fly, and

bird wings and bat wings are very different. So bat wings kind of look like when you look at their skeleton, you can see their wings are these membranes that are stretched over these very elongated finger bones. And you look at a bird and there our arms kind of go backwards and fold in sort of a V shape, and then you have um muscle and feathers over this shape

that allows them to fly. And so the reason that they have this these two different mechanisms for flight, you just kind of have to look at their evolutionary history. So with birds, they rely on their feathers to fly, and you look back as that at their history as being dinosaurs, feathers probably didn't start out to help with flight. They likely first of all to keep dinosaurs warm or cool, maybe as a defense against parasites or maybe some armor

against predation. You know, you've got a bunch of fluffy feathers that might help them from getting bitten too much. It may have been to provide dinosaurs with camouflage or

maybe even attractive coloration for mating. And some dinosaurs found that they could use these feathers once they grew them out for gliding to be able to glide to like feathers started to develop on their arms and tails that allowed them to balance and eventually got exaggerated enough that they could jump from branch to branch and actually glide a distance. And then from there you started to have dinosaurs evolved into more bird like shapes until we get

the modern day dinosaurs of birds. And meanwhile, bats instead of using feathers because they never evolved feathers, they always had fur and they use flaps of skins, so like birds, bats probably started out as gliders. You can look at other examples of gliding animals to see how their wings evolved. So flying squirrels have a flap of skin that runs from their wrists to their ankles. And of course flying squirrels are not as good of a flyer as black bats.

They're more of a just skilled faller, so they can jump from branch to branch and lied from branch to branch, uh. And bats didn't evolve from flying squirrels, but probably from some sort of similar gliding rodent. So as bat wings became more developed and the webbing between their hands and ankles got kind of more wing like, their finger bones grew out, which gave them more surface area for these wings to give them more lift and more control in

their flight. And so that that's kind of you know, I think it's mainly comes down to the difference in their mechanism of how they evolved. Birds using those wonderful feathers to help them glide and the ancestors of bats using that flap of skin between their wrists and their back legs to help them fly. And that's why they're so different and both cute and wonderful. All right, So here is another question. This is from Jared Deeli who asks Katie, I have a stutter. Do other animals stutter?

And this is a really good question, and yes, other animals do stutter. And one of the fascinating animals to look at for this question are birds, because of how similar they are in terms of learning language, or at least in bird terms, learning bird song. So they develop their ability to communicate very similar to humans. Baby birds learn to sing during a crystallization period when they're young,

similar to how human children learn language early on. And in fact, with human children, if they're not able to learn early on, like say they get accidentally separated from human society, they actually really struggled to be able to learn language later on. And it's the same thing with birds. So you have this early stage of development where it's critical to learn language in humans and in birds to

learn bird song. And there was a study where researchers used electrical currents to destroy neurons in young zebra finch brains, which you know, kind of naughty thing they're scientists, but uh, so they affected this region in the zebra finch bird brains that is thought to be responsible for being able to imitate sound. And so as the young birds attempted to learn bird song from listening to their elders, they developed a stutter, so they would erroneously repeat notes in

the songs that they were learning. And researchers think that this may help us understand more how stutters form and humans so which is also thought to form as young children. So the zebra finch study seems to point towards the theory that stuttering isn't a sign of the brain simply being stuck in a loop, but the brain is trying to correct for miss neural connections by growing new neurons.

So it's almost like it's doubling up on this neural network, causing a repetition in a syllable or in the bird's case, a repetition in a note that they are singing. So I hope that answers that question. Let's take a quick break, and then when we get back, I will answer more of your questions and welcome back. I'm going to continue to answer your questions. So this is from Twitter user at ice cream for Cats. In your opinion, what is the cutest baby animal cutest fully grown animal? So this

is a really hard question to answer. I can't really think of just one cutest one, so I'll just pick out a couple that I thought of. So probably the cutest baby versus like the scariest adult for I would say are hippos, because baby hippos look like they just want me to cuddle them and carry them around in a baby bjorn all day and feed the melons. But adult hippos look like they would just crush my head like a melon. And yeah, adult hippos are very scary,

both the visually intimidating and also behaviorally. They are quite aggressive, so you don't want to mess with them. But the babies look so squishy and cuddle herble um. Extra points I think for cute baby hippos are baby pygmy hippos, which look like little made up fantasy animals. They are just adorable, little roly poly just they look like a Star Wars baby. I don't know, I'll include a picture in the show notes. They are absolutely cute and adorable.

As adults. Pygmy hippos are still rather large for something called a pigmy animal, but it's only about half as tall and a fourth as heavy as regglar hippos. Uh. They grow to be about three ft tall, which is about a hundred centimeters and five ft long hundred and seventy five cimeters and from four hundred to six hundred pounds in wait, so a hundred twenty so you know, still pretty formidable, and they are still pretty aggressive, but they are smaller than regular hippos. But the babies just

little cute. I just want to hold them and cuddle them and never let them go. Uh. Cutest adult animal. There are so many to pick from. I'm just gonna pick one that I thought of is the Wikita, which is the rarest marine mammal, and it is in threat of extinction. So there's another reason I kind of wanted to talk about it. I just want people to know about these little guys. They are little porpoises. They only grow to be about four ft in length, which is

about a hundred fifty centimeters. I think they're the smallest patition around. They have this like dark eyeshadow around their eyes and these little stubby beaks with uh kind of dark lipstick. They they're kind of goff gothy little guys, and they are really really cute. Unfortunately, there is potentially fewer than nineteen individuals left alive today, which is really really scary. They are at a great threat of extinction due to phishing. And yeah, you can go to Veakita

CPR dot com. That's a v A q U I t A CPR dot com. Uh if you want to find out more about conservation efforts to bring the Wikita back from the brink of extinction. And I think their name means little cow, and they are. They are just so cute. They're adorable. Here is a question from Colen Monty, what is the scariest creature or feature of a creature underwater, extinct or living. So there are tons of creepy underwater creatures. I think just the fact that they evolved in such

a different environment from humans. We're so unused to seeing anything like it, and so many of them look so alien and scary. But I do still love these animals, even if they look kind of spooky. U there are a few that genuinely creep me out and make me feel uneasy, and among those are these sea spiders. And sea spiders are not actually spiders, They are not arachnids, but they are marine arthropods. So I actually really like spiders. But marine quote unquote spiders look like a spider on

nightmare mode. You know, you have your normal looking terrestrial spider. I think they're kind of cute compared to marine quote unquote spiders. Every terrestrial spider looks absolutely adorable, and you're gonna want to hide behind them, because marine spiders just a whole, a whole basket of nope. Uh. They have really long, long long, spindly legs in comparison to this tiny body. They either creep along the ocean floor or they pulse their legs like an umbrella to swim. Just so.

The moving of these marine spiders is not good to look at. The shape of them is not good to look at. They can be uncomfortably big, so larger than a human hand, which is, you know, just sort of uh. I don't know, give me, give me a real terrestrial spider any day over one of these guys. They are not great, not great to look at. I'll probably go into detail on them a bit more in a full

length episode because I think they're really fascinating. But yeah, the idea of being like in a dark ocean and having one of these things crawl over me, it's there's a lot of reasons I don't scuba dive, and this is, you know, one of them. Next question is a really interesting one. This is from cobalt Quill on Twitter. Thank you, who asks does the human race have as much responsibility to parasitic life forms as we do to all other animals in terms of conservation and ensuring they do not

go extinct? This is for life forms affecting both animals and us, And given how we treat diseases, what is our responsibility to any animal that could theoretically be considered a predator solely or mainly affecting humans. So this is a really interesting question. I think it has both a practical, ethical and sort of philosophical element to it. So first I want to talk about the practical matter of it. So parasites, there are many, many different animals that would

be considered biological parasites. It means that it lives off of another animal and hurts them in some way, like either by stealing resources from them or stealing parts of their body like sucking blood, or you know, eating eating part of the animal without actually necessarily killing the animals. So a predator, you know, eats a whole whole animal. A parasite maybe just sucks your blood over a long period of time, or steals your food, or steals your resources,

or you know, steals your nests. So there are a lot of different types of parasites um and they're not always bad when you think about it in the sense of the whole environment or for humans. So like fungus can be a parasit site, it can live off of trees and and basically suck out the tree juice, and

we love, we love fungus. Mushrooms are great. Parasites can also help thin out populations of animals, and even though it sucks for the individual animal that is suffering from the parasites, for the overall population of the animal, it can actually prevent them from suffering mass starvation from over eating their resources. So it can actually helps keep uh, some animal populations in check and prevent kind of a

mass starvation event for those animals. Some parasites make it easier for predators to hunt and kill prey animals by making the prey animal weaker or more visible to predators, and that helps out predator populations, which can be really important. So from a practical sense of protecting our planet, protecting a lot of different types of parasites species is actually

really important. And so yeah, I would say that it is ethical to protect these parasites either because of the benefits that they have for many different species or how they keep our ecosystems in this very delicate balance, because like, whenever you remove anything from an ecosystem, it's like playing a game of Jenga. You just don't know which thing you're going to remove and have these kind of big

effects that you would not have expected. Another thing to consider when talking about parasites is they aren't always yucky in the sense of like some kind of worm that's living inside you and feeding off of you. All that does definitely happen. Uh. Some parasites are birds. Birds can be brood parasites like cuckoos and cowbirds who plant their eggs in the nests of other birds. Uh. You can

have beautiful insects like butterflies be parasites. So there are some butterfly caterpillars that are anti mimic parasites, so their larva pretends to be baby ants and they'll infiltrate ant nests and live off of the ants resources until they grow up and turn into beautiful, beautiful little brood parasite butterflies. So while these are can be deadly or very annoying

to host populations, you know they are. When you think of a parasite, you may think of something you know, like out of alien movie face hugger, horrible thing, but they can be beautiful. They can be butterflies and birds. In terms of parasites that infect humans, Uh, in terms of like should we preserve these species? What do we do? I think it really depends on a balance of protecting human life and comfort and protecting the environment as a whole.

So an example I think would be with mosquitoes. So mosquitoes aren't they wouldn't be considered a medical parasite because they don't live of permanently in or on the human body, But in evolutionary biology terms, they are parasitic because they take resources from us, namely our blood at our expense. A lot of the problems so that mosquitoes cause are due to another parasite that actually lives inside of the mosquitoes,

which is malaria. Malaria is actually a single celled organism that lives inside of mosquitoes as a parasite, and then the mosquito will inadvertently pass it on to humans. And malaria is extremely dangerous for humans, especially uh children, and so making sure that we control malaria and control mosquito populations saves countless human lives and is extremely important. So I think it is definitely an ethical imperative for us

to control mosquito populations to save so many lives. At the same time, you know, we wouldn't necessarily want all mosquitoes to go extinct because that could be have a huge impact on our ecosystem in terms of animals who need to eat mosquitoes to survive. So I mean, which is something like when we're talking about mosquitoes, we don't really have to worry about them going extinct at least in terms of our current methods of controlling their populations. Um,

mosquitoes are going to be just just fine. But yeah, I mean in but in theory, like if we had a way to make all mosquitoes go extinct, uh, it probably would not be a great idea because of the impact it would have on the environment and at the same time, trying to figure out ways to control the mosquito population so they don't spread malaria to humans is also of critical importance to human life. So yeah, I

think it is. It's really and it can get really complicated with with other animals, especially once that cause harm to humans, but are necessary for our ecosystem where we have to have this balance of taking care of our environment where we all live, which we all need, and making sure that human human life is protected. So yeah, it's it's a really good question and I would say, yeah, parasites are just like any other animal that we kind of have to take into consideration, uh in terms of

their environmental impact and their impact on humans. So here's another question from Brian Rose Junior on Twitter. With all the crab talk lately, I'm curious, have you ever featured the parasite Sacquelina on your podcast? It's fascinating and most likely my favorite parasite. I don't remember. I feel like I may have mentioned it in passing in one episode, I don't remember going into detail on it. I think this is fascinating parasite that deserves a full length episode treatment.

But just to tease people about this amazing parasite, they are parasitic castrators who mess around with uh A crabs junk in ways that cause some transformations that are really interesting. So yeah, I don't know. I feel like, because I can't quite remember if we've talked about it, must not have been in that much detail, and they definitely deserve a whole bunch of detail, all the nitty gritty about these parasitic castrators. So yeah, i'll I will talk about

that in a full length episode probably. Here is a another question. This is from This is from Vestigial Virgin uh cool cool user name on Twitter. Uh. Any surprise pairs of animals that are more closely genetically linked than people might think, uh, such as birds and dinosaurs though everybody knows that now, or animals that should be close but aren't, such as main mained wolves not being closely related to either foxes or wolves. Those are really good examples.

I do want to just say birds are dinosaurs technically, I just love to remind people of that that they are literally still dinosaurs. So this is a great question. I love these kinds of things. There's so much in terms of like convergent evolution and surprising twists and tours and evolution where you'll have too completely unrelated animals that look exactly alike, or animals that don't look related but are much more closely related than one would think. So

here are just a couple that I thought of. Hyenas look like they should be related to dogs. They basically seem like they are laughing. Um Miss g V is carnivorous dogs, but they are not related to dogs closely at all. Uh. No more than like a lion is related to a dog. Uh. Some of the hyena's closest relatives are actually mongoose's mere cats and civets. So in the Lion King, those hyenas much more closely related to Timon the mere cat than they would be to a dog or even to a lion, So I find that

really interesting. Another example of I think that people are sometimes surprised when I mentioned is that whales evolved from extinct land mammals that were originally these tiny little deer like ungulates. So ungulates are hooved animals, um possibly one of their ancestors was called the Elo Marricks, which were about the size of a dog. They kind of looked like these fuzzy horse, dear hippo animals and just these dainty, little little dear creatures that would eventually become these giant,

giant whales, which is quite incredible. Another thing is that hippos and whales likely shared a common ancestor, probably in this lineage of these little deer like animals, And so yeah, hippos and whales are pretty closely related all things considered, which I also find very interesting. And so let's just do one last question before my brain goes back into hibernation. So this is from ancient romans eleven. I find worms existentially terrifying. They have no arms, no legs, no faces,

no personality, just two holes and attracting between. They play an important role in our ecology, but it seems like such a bare utilitary existence and absolutely empty, thankless life. Is that weird? So this is a this is a fun question. Um. I don't think it's weird to think that way. But I have a kind of different perspective on on worms and other animals that are very simple. So one thing is the comfort of being a worm is how tiny your brain is. That you probably don't

think too much about your existence. You don't think too much at all, So I don't think you would have the capacity to miss, uh, you know, having a bigger brain, because you just don't. It never occurs to you. Nothing much occurs to you because you're a worm. Your brain is probably, depending on what kind of worm you are, uh, just a few hundred neurons in total and maybe about the width of a human hair. So yeah, not not a lot going on. It's interesting some animals don't really

have like a central nervous system. They have nerves and neurons, but they aren't really they don't have a brain, so to speak. But worms do, at least some species of worms do have an actual brain, like an earthworm does. It's just very very small, very shimple. So that said, I don't really think of their lives as being empty, just in like I don't when I think about a tree or a flower, I don't really think of like, oh man, that tree leads such an empty life because

it can't think. Um, because the tree it's still this really cool complex organism, and just because it doesn't really have a mind, I don't, you know, I don't. I don't pity it exactly because it just doesn't know what it's missing. It's it's just living its tree life, not really having any thoughts, which actually doesn't sound so bad when you think about it, you know, just being a tree, being a worm, no thoughts, empty, empty mind, clear head um.

I mean, like, because there are other animals too, like um, seeing enemies, jellyfish, a lot of these like interesting marine animals that look like plants but they are actually animals, like like coral and sea sponges. Is like, they really don't have much going on in terms of a central

nervous system. They they have nerves. They have a nervous system, but it's not there's not really necessarily centralized brain to speak of, And so I would say that they are probably they share more in terms of their internal experience with like, you know, a plant than they do with a with an animal with a more complex brain. I don't, I just don't. It's hard for me to imagine a jellyfish or a c an enemy or worm really experiences

life that much. But you know, again, I don't think because they don't necessarily experience much at all, they don't really know what they're missing. Uh, So I don't find

it that I don't find it that scary. I think it's like, you know, a flower doesn't really maybe experience that much, but you know, it's it's still it's still beautiful, and uh doesn't necessarily know what it's missing, you know, unless there's some kind of like hive mind of flowers and or worms that have a collective consciousness and they all rise up to form a giant worm slash flower beasts that consumes the planet, which I think is unlikely,

but hey never say never. So um, speaking of small brains, I think my brain is has died. I think that is all I can do today. But thank you guys so much for sending in your questions. If you guys liked this one, I might do more listener questions episodes, hopefully with a few more of my neurons functioning to rub together to give you good answers in the future. But yeah, this was really fun. Thank you so much

for sending in your questions. If you want to send me some questions, either for me to answer in an episode or just like you know, send your response on Twitter or an email. You can find me at Katie Golden k A T I E G O L D I N on Twitter. Um. There's also at Creature feet Pod on Twitter. That's f E A T not et that is something very different. I'm also on Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, and you can also if you prefer the old the old email, you can send me an email.

My address is Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com, or just send pictures of your pets. I love that too. I hope you guys are all doing well. I know, I mean, I feel like everyone in the world has been through the ringer of this past week, but especially in the U S. So hope you're all doing well and hopefully getting some better sleep now. Uh so, yeah, thank you so much, and um next week I will have a normal, normal length episode. I'm pretty sure my

brain is gonna work. Good bye then, so looking forward to that. Uh. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, is the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or Hey, where have you listen to your favorite shows? Thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo Lumina and I will see you next Wednesday.