Remember To Breathe Through Your Butt!

from hibernation to magical wardrobe changes to cryogenic freezing. Discover this more as we answer the angel question, when, if ever, is the right time to breathe through your butt? What is hibernation? How do you distinguish hibernation from a really, really long nap. While there are definitely some distinctive features of hibernation, like many behaviors and evolutionary biology, it's hard to get away with one easy definition. But one thing's

for sure. Hibernation isn't just an extreme nap. It's more akin to stasis, like something you'd come up within a science fiction setting. There are many ways that animals cope with the winter, and we'll discuss some of the wildest winter adaptations. So let's start with this most famous method and reveal the weird and sci fi details beyond our childhood image of a really sleepy bear in to nightcap. Joining me today to prepare for winter as comedian, writer

and co host of The Bechdel Cast. Caitlin Durante. Hello, I'm also a sleepy bear. We're here in our pijamas. I'll talked in you know, old timey bed, very very cozy. Yeah, so listen to this when you're driving and just let yourself drift off. Yes, very safe. How much do you know about hibernation? You know what? Not a ton? Um my. My personal favorite bear is, of course Paddington. And do not believe that Paddington hibernates uh in uh any of the movies, right, I don't remember him ever doing that

or in the books and the novels the series. Perhaps Peruvian bears do not hibernate. Well, they wouldn't need to write for the winter, makes sense because a tropical issue environment. Yeah, exactly, so um. Yeah, there hasn't been a lot of hibernation

visibility on screen, at least that I've seen. And that and I only ever learned things if I see them in movies, right, And and that's that's with the Bechdel cast you guys talk about movies and sort of from a from the perspective of like, hey, are there women in movies? Yeah? We should we should find Usually not, Yeah, sometimes you know, it's just like what was we forgot to put women in here? And then you put them in and then they've just spent the whole time talking

about boys. Yeah. I think that hibernation is one of those things that we learn about briefly in school and it's just like, oh, bear school to sleep for the winter, and then there's not much else learn about it. Maybe maybe the education system is better now, like I think that maybe children are smarter than we ever used to be. But yeah, let's get into some of the details about

it that I think are really bizarre. And it's one of these things that everybody kind of knows about hibernation, but when you actually look at the the scientific facts behind it, it gets a lot weirder than you expect. So, hibernation occurs during the winter. In summer, there are there's like a summer form of hibernation called estivation. It occurs in mammals, for reptiles and amphibians, it's called broomation. So

it's a similar thing, but it's not called hibernation. Um. The only exception is the common poor will, which is a nocturnal bird species in the family of night jars, and it goes into a state of torpor for weeks or months at a time, and this is I think the only bird species that's known to do this. Of the mammals that do hibernation, bears, squirrel, chipmunks, bats, skunks, hedgehogs,

and dwarf and fat tailed lemurs are among them. And dwarf and pat tailed lemurs are actually some of the only primates known to hibernate, and they can go up to ten minutes without breathing when they're hibernating. Yeah. Yeah, So this is where we get into some of the things about hibernation that makes it really clear it's not

just sleeping, it's not just a nap. So to prepare for hibernation, the body temperature drastically drops and brain activity greatly decreases to a coma like state, and the metabolism slows so that you can basically be in this coma state without dying of starvation, and the heart rate can drop drastically, so a grisly bear's heart goes from about eighty four beats per minute to nineteen beats per minute, which is pretty crazy. And there's the mechanism of how

this works is really interesting for a bear. So the heart isn't da imaged, which you would think it would. So like, if a heart beat slows too much in like a human, you're going to really damage the heart, which could be fatal because the blood builds up in the left ventricle and then that can cause the ventricle to expand and become damaged. And yeah, that's no good.

You don't you don't want your heart to be like an overly full water balloon essentially, I mean when we learned about I mean, speaking of wintertime, the Grinch, when his heart grows three sizes, he would die. He would die, He would die. That would be very bad. Well unless I don't know what species the Grinch is, but maybe there's something about his heart that I don't I don't know.

I think he would most certainly suffer an aortic dissection from that, Like there's not you know, let's let's fix grinch to be accurate, so that the Grinch dies and everyone is sad. So in the bear, Well, maybe the

grinch has some special heart. Uh. Theologists like a bear, right, So so the bears left ventricle stiffens, so as the blood pools in it from not beating as much, it doesn't damage the muscle and the heartbeat is significantly weakened so that that stiffer heart muscle won't be damaged by the left h or so Okay, the the left atrium pumps blood into the left ventricle, and so if the left atrium is like really pumping hard blood into a stiff surface of the left atrium, it's like taking a

water balloon full of blood and like smashing it against a brick wall. It's kind of like every Thursday. Well it is cathartic, but instead of smashing, if you kind of just like gently press it against the wall and there's like a little opening where the blood can school shout like, then you know you've got a functioning heart,

is what I'm saying. So that's impressive. But a chipmunk's heart rate slows from two hundred beats per minute to only about five, which is that decreases wild Yeah, and it really it's it's almost like they're in the state of almost death, like almost it's like one beat for every ten seconds. Yeah, yeah, it's I mean if we if we got anywhere near that, you'd be dead. That it's just you can't survive that kind of slow heartbeat.

But it is incredible that they're basic. And like one thing is if you wake up a hibernating animal like a squirrel, the effort, it takes them a long time to wake up. They can't just like instantly awake because their body has to essentially come back to life. Yeah, from this state of Stasi is kind of like that scene in Austin Powers, like he gets frozen and they unfreeze them and then he goes through all of this

like you know, hilarious unfreezing process in feminist text Austin Power. Yes, yes, uh you know, and it's really funny because we get to see his But comedy at its highest form, it's it's you have to go to years of comedy school to reach that level. So so the breathing rate also drops dramatically as there's less of a demand for oxygen because your heart rate is so slow. Like I said,

it takes a while to wake up from. And in fact, if they're waking prematurely for some reason, that can be really disastrous because that takes so much energy to wake up from the whole point of hibernation or or partially the point is to preserve your your energy stores throughout the winter because the food supply drops, so you're inducing the state of near death where you're not consuming energies so you can survive. And so if you wake up use all this energy to wake up, you're kind of screwed.

So it's really important to set your alarm clock like your little any chipmunk alarm clock right. Other ways, it's like when your your battery on your phone, is it like two percent, but you still need to call your lift home. And it's like, what if I call this lift, It's going to make my phone die and then I won't actually be able to take the run. It's just like that, you know what I'm saying. Chipmunks are exactly like that. Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, I couldn't put

it more precisely myself. You're welcome. Chimps are lifts. That would be cool though, just like you call it a giant like a giant chipmunk. Yeah, it's like the cat bus thing. Yeah, and then you can just like put all your belongings in his little cheeks. Cute. Why isn't that a thing? Well, because it would probably kill us,

I guess. So some scientists are hibernation purists and don't really think bears qualify as true hibernators because their body temperature doesn't drop that much and it's not too hard for the bears to wake up. But you know, it's it's kind of whatever your opinion is if you're in science, different science, Like some people are like, well, you know, it's close enough to hibernation. Hybernation is a spectrum, and we need to respect that. It is actually literally described

as a spectrum. So yeah, you're exactly right. So animals who are hibernating don't typically eat, although some do require little food stores, so they'll wake up briefly from hibernation, nibble on their little snack, and then go back into hibernation. They also don't poop or p and they don't produce. They don't produce fecal matter because their whole digestive system is slowed to crawl, if not like shut down entirely.

And they do produce uria, which is like the main ingredient in urine, but the body is able to break break it down and recycle it, like bears break down uria into amino acids and recycle it. Yeah, so they're not just like full of p although the pissing the bed right exactly? Uh, you put bears like paw and yeah, no to p or I'm sure we're angry. So how

do animals know when to go into hibernation? Is it based on like the like they know it's Academy Awards season coming up, or like, you know what, what's sort of the thing like the well, I mean when Paddington Too didn't get nominated or did get nominated but didn't win, He's like, well, I got to go into hibernation now just to cope with this subs my guest. I mean, yeah, you know that if you don't if weather's not a reason to go into hibernation, trying to cope with an

oscar snub surely is. Yeah. So in researchers discovered calendar cells inside animals who undergo physiological changes during winter, such as hibernation, and these cells are located inside a structure within the tour a gland called the pars to barrel us. The cells change what proteins they produce during the year in response to the amount of daylight. Actually, humans have a similar structure as the pars to to barrel it

to the pars to barrel us. Yeah, that's that's exactly right to me parts to barrel us, which indicates that we may also have some sort of internal calendar and research even though we don't hibernate obviously yourself, yes, so you're your heart essentially stops and you stop pooping and peeing and yeah every winter. Wow, that's that's pretty marvel or you're not getting enough fiber. I'm just constantly constipated. That's it's you know, just call hibernation. Then it doesn't

seem so bad. So there is a potential area of research suggesting that our immunity may change depending on the season, which means like maybe our immune system is giving us more protection based on like when we will most need it, and then that could potentially be regulated by this pars to barrel us got nailed it. So many animals who hibernate will prepare a din and insulate it with fur, dirt, vegetation, other cozy things. Uh, some animals will both bulke up

before hibernation, eating massive amounts of food. This is often like large omnivores or carnivores like bears, while others will store food in their dens, meaning they'll wake up occasionally to eat. This is often the tiniest hibernators, like mice and chipmunks, because they're little, tiny bodies can't store enough fat and their metabolism can't slow down enough to keep them alive throughout the entire winter. They need they need their snacks and fact chipmunks will really they'll like steal

from each other. They'll fight over food stores. It gets quite quite nasty. There should be a movie about this, yeah, like oh, like a gritty reboot of Alvin and the Chipmunks, like the squeak Wiel where it's just like it's like the Irishman, Yeah, like like I hear you know where my nuts are? You do know? You do know you will have to die, But it's all those squeaky chipmunk voices of like kill. It's like, oh mean caddi Talvin's

hid intermid I know. But actually some of the best hibernators are guess what, I bet you won't guess this is where I'm which which species? Yeah, um, oh my goodness, some of the best oh um, raccoons. That's a good guess. But it's wrong because obviously I love to do this, just spring a question on my guest because it makes me feel so smugly superior because I have all the

answers written down. So some of the best hibernators are bats, which is surprising, right, So big brown bouts in the wild can hibernate for around sixty days, but in captivity, one of these guys broke the record at three hundred forty four days. That's almost an entire year. That's almost an entire year. It was. This is actually a little sad. It was kept in a refrigerator in a lab environment to see how long it would hibernate, and it eventually

died of starvation. Like cool scientists like once he like got to three forty four days, you couldn't just be like, all right, buddy, that's long enough, Like wake up, let's get you some nachos. She's talk. But sometimes it's sometimes a little gruesome. So the for a lot about species. The heart rate can go from a thousand beats per minute when they're actively flying to only about twenty five and some species abouts only need to take a breath every forty five minutes or even up to two hours

during hibernation. That's it's they're like almost you wouldn't be able. You would think here's a dead bat, but it's not. The North American red bat can lower its body temperature to freezing point and can even survive its body tissues freezing due in part to its thick fur, extremely a low heart rate, and it's high red blood cell count, which is really crazy. It's I think one of the only mammals I know of that can really just kind of shake off having tissue frozen like that without getting

frost bite. Right yeah, I I I certainly can't. If I call it side and it's lower than fifty degrees, forget about it. The first thing that happens to me when it gets cold is my nose just starts running like a faucet, just streams and streams of like fluid and snot. I used to live on the East Coast, and then it would be great. You know, you go out and it's snowing, it's beautiful, and it's like, oh, I got to take a photo of me in the snow, and I turned the camera around him just it just

streaming every hole in my face streaming with with fluid. Yeah. Yeah, and then like you you like you're because like the wind's like your eyeballs freeze over. Does that happen to anyone else because it did to me? But yeah, I mean, yeah, I cannot withstand anyma of cold. Yeah, they're so good for those bats, Yeah, that they've really I'm just so it's kind of shocking to me that bats. I don't even really you don't think of bats as the traditional

winter animal. But they're really good, really good hibernators. So proud, so proud. So why don't humans hibernate? The most obvious reason is that our ancestors didn't originally evolve in the frigid tundra, so primates don't generally need to hibernate. But it's not unheard of for primate to hibernate. Like I mentioned before, one of the only types of primates who

truly hibernates our dwarf lemur species in Madagascar. The only other primate known to hibernate is the pygmy slow loris, a tiny primate from Southeast Asia who can interstates of tour poor for up to sixty three hours at a time. But these regions in Madagascar and Southeast Asia only dropped to about forty degrees in the winter, certainly not as cold as the frigid areas where animals generally hibernate. So

why do these small primitive primates do it. It's speculated that hibernation for small animals not only protects them from the colder, harsh or climate during the winter, but to stay hidden away from predators who may be seeking to pack on extra calories. This may be another reason why

humans don't need a hibernate. While we certainly have needed to fear some predators in our evolutionary history, our line of primates are larger, with more ways to defend ourselves than to bundle up and hide away, and when we started to migrate into colder regions, we already had our big, nerdy human brains to figure out other ways to adapt to the cold. But maybe in the future humans will need a hibernate, like when we start to become space explorers.

NASA is teaming up with Professor of Pharmacology and anesthhusiologist doctor Rob Hinning to explore ways to induce hibernation in humans. After all, animals can hibernate without losing too much muscle tone due to how they slow their metabolism down. This would be of great use to space station dwellers who often must compensate for their weightlessness with exercises, which still doesn't make up for their loss in muscle tone and bone mass. So figuring out how to copy the animals

technique for hibernating would be great for astronauts. Or hear me out alternative idea, Bears in Space. Bears in Space. When we return, we'll check out some Arctic adapters who go through a spectacular wardrobe change that's even more dazzling than those ugly holiday sweaters. I love home cooked meals, but what I don't really loves grocery shopping. I swear these grocery stores are designed like Labyrinth with Hello Fresh.

It makes cooking easy, simple and delicious. They have prepacked ingredients, pre measured spices and seasonings, every thing you need to get a wow worthy dinner on the table in just about thirty minutes. Now, I didn't think I was the type of person who could just like make risotto, But with Hello Fresh, I was able to make steel head trout over basil parm risotto using their easy instructions and pre measured ingredients. One of the things that's great about

Hello Fresh is that it helps you break out of ruts. Now, I'm a creature of habit. If I was left to my own devices, I would probably eat toast and hummus every day. But with Hello Fresh, you can get new recipes every week, which makes it easy to learn new recipes and switch things up, and there's something for everyone. Hello Fresh is also flexible. You can add extra meals to your weekly order add on like garlic bread, Thank you, Yes please, garlic bread, and you can easily change your

delivery days and skip a week whenever you need. Get nine free meals with Hello Fresh by going to Hello fresh dot com slash creature nine and using code creature nine. That's Hello fresh dot Com slash Creature nine and use code cream each your nine. Imagine it's the dead of winter and you're snugly tucked in a remote cottage that your peepa left you. It's a quaint old home, all snowed in, but You've got hot cocoa and cans of your favorite type of beans, so you're all set for winter.

You're in your little fur lined bed, all cozy and comfortable. You think back to your time with the local villagers who warned you to be quiet when you go home to your peepa's old cottage for a terrifying invisible beast roams these snow covered hills and kills anything that dares breathe too loudly. You chuckle to yourself, these villagers are probably bored and have a bit of cabin fever to

invent such a ridiculous monster. But as you're drifting off to sleep, you hear a weird sound, a soft crunching, like the snow over your roof is being gently pressed upon Santa's reindeer. Perhaps. Then you hear a muffled sound, as if someone's making snow angels on the roof. You start to get a little nervous and think back to what the villagers said. You hold your breath, trying not to make a sound. You hear a scraping and what sounds like a huge vacuum sucking up snow. Then silence,

just the soft pattering of snowfall. It's been several minutes, so finally you exhale. That's when suddenly boom, the whole house shakes, and then again boom boom, until finally crash, a huge face instead of jaws crashes through the ceiling. You've just been the victim of one of the cutest Arctic adapters, the Arctic fox terrifying so for humans, of course,

there are no threat. They're about eighteen to long, not including the tail, and about seven to seventeen pounds, so like a little doggie, and like you probably guessed it, lives in the Arctic. They live in burrows and snow tunnels, and they can survive temperatures as low as negative fifty eight degrees fahrenheit. That is pretty chili pretty cold, yep.

Their coats change from being tan and brown in the summer to fluffy white in the winter, and the coats help them keep warm and camouflaged, both in terms of hunting and from being hunted because they too have predators, so they're huge. Fluffy tail is used to wrap themselves up like a blanket. Is very cute. They're omnivores and will eat berries and scraps that they find They're very opportunistic because they have to be. They live in such

a hostile environment. They'll even store bird eggs in their dens as snacks for later. So food can be very scarce in the tundra, and they will sometimes tail after polar bears and eat their leftovers. And they can travel up to sixty miles a day and search for food, which I don't think I've ever walked even like more than two miles for food. I mean that, Yeah, that is quite a distance our polar bears one of their predators, or they have to have to worry about polar bears.

They basically have to worry about anything, even like red foxes will hunt them sometimes. Yeah, they they're you know, not the They're not the big big kid on the block, I would say. But yeah, as long as they give the polar bears their space, and the polar bears like bigger kills, than they'll just eat the scraps, the leftovers. So when winter intensifies and there are no scraps to scavenge,

they have to become killers themselves. So they're big. Ears have such sensitive hearing that they can listen for tiny rodents, mainly limmings, deep under the snow and find their exact location. So once a rodent is located, they can dig into the snow. Or even more excitingly, they like to spring up and then dive into the snow. And it's seen videos. It's very cute. You want to look at one right now.

It's really funny because they hop right up and then just face plant right into the snow, but then do a little before that, they do a little like toe touch. Yeah, they're doing a little digging because they found they found their location, and the snow can be really hard and icy, so they're trying to break through down into the burrow. So they do big hop. Oh, that was a good one.

If this snow is too soft, they can get kind of stuck and they kick their little legs in the air, and if it's too hard, they'll just like bounce off of it. So they have to get pretty good at determining like where's the best place to dive in otherwise it gets really embarrassing their butts just right in the air and they're flailing around. But when they get it, when they get it right, they can snatch a little limbing right out of its bed. Also, I had no

idea that lemmings were real things. Until just now, I thought they were just that little computer game. Now they're real, although they don't all run off of a cliff at the same time. That's a that's a myth perpetrated by the evil documentarian and the street. So yeah, it looks like ritualistic face planting. It's extremely cute, and they can

smell limming popsicles two ft under the snow. So what's I think is interesting is people usually see the Arctic fox when they're completely fluffy in their white winter coat, but they don't see them between seasons as much. And it's very funny. I don't know what that looks like. So let me show you. Here's the fox with these spotty patches of his coat growing in. Looks a little scraggly. That's still cute, still very very patchy. Yeah, and then

here here he is shedding the coat. Would be like springtime. Yeah, this is shot in springtime. It kind of looks like what would you say, It looks like, um, oh, good grief. Um it does look like good grief. It's it's not fun. It's just like I'm trying to think of like what like maybe like Jack Nicholson as he's like getting as he's you know, getting up there in age, think a bit haggard, and bits are falling off of him sort of an in sort of chunks. Yeah, yeah, now I

see that. I do see that. But still cute in some sort of ineffable way. So other animals obviously change their coats during the winter as well, including snowshoe hairs, stoats, peery caribou, and the snowy owl. And uh, one thing that's interesting is kind of like, how do you think, Like how do they do this? Like it seems it seems magical that they know every winter just to change

their coat. So one thing is that the fur itself isn't changing color like once it's already grown, because base hair for like, once it's already grown, it's not that part of it is not really alive anymore. So it's the hair follicles themselves that are changing at that level,

so they have to grow a totally new coat. So similar to animals that undergo hibernation, they have a body clock that triggers hormonal changes that causes the change and growth of denser white coats from the follicular level and so that's why between seasons you see these kind of Jack Nicholson esk patchy with the with the weird little little tufts of white hair growing in or or and then like in the springtime, they shed it, so it all comes out in these big tufts and I think

it's to me really cute, just like they look like they ran through a chicken coop, but then they got sticky and then all covered in feathers. That's a great description. But there is an animal that also has a coat change. I don't think you'd ever guess what it is, and the method that it doesn't is really crazy. So blog, a whale actually molt their skin every summer, and their skin over time will become a little more yellow and a little more marred. And that's not good for wanting

to blend in with the ice. Especially in the winter. As you know, they're surrounded by these icy um icebergs and they actually do molt, and they in order to get that old layer of skin to come off, they have a spa day or multiple spot. Treat yourself, treat yourself, self care, but lugas know about self care. I could take a lesson from a blue we really all could. They're great. We we talked about the amount of previous episode.

They are one of the only whales who can actually swivel their heads freely, which means that they can communicate by looking at each other and using expressions more than other whales. Yeah, so I I just I look because now I'm imagining them like kind filing down their back and just like throwing their head back and looking really content. Which it's like an herbal Essence commercial. Oh my god, that would be so good in an herbal Essence commercial,

like you know, just like, yeah, tell me about it. Yeah. So they will rub their bodies on gravel or river sand to help exfoliate the outer layer of skin, and this reveals that icy white skin underneath that will blend in better with their surroundings. And yeah, I just I want to. I would love to join Belugas on a spawt a. Now I don't my objective wouldn't be to look more icy white than I already with all my blue veins popping out everywhere, right, I mean it's sounds

just being exfoliated feels nice. You know. I do an apricot scrub on my face sometimes and then you know, you leave the shower feeling refreshed and reach you of an Yeah, I get it. There are certain skin exfoliating products that advertise that you'll see the like pilled up layers of skin to slough off your body, and it's that's an extreme level. That is a dedication to the exfoliation that I feel like Blugas would really appreciate. Like if you can't see your skin kind of coming up

in clumps, like, is it really exfoliation? Yeah, I don't see extreme extreme. Yeah. Yeah. I went to a spa where they offered that treatment where apparently they just really scrub you down until you're raw and like get all the dead skin off. And I was like, you know what, my dead skin can hang around a little while longer. That's okay, okay, you know what, you know what, it'll

leave when it wants to leave. Right throughout human history, we've had to figure out how to adapt the coldness of winter and in some cases camouflage ourselves against the snow. But that big white winter blanket presents another problem, snow blindness. Snow blindness, also known as photocare titus, is damaged to the eyes caused by u V rays from the sun, sort of like an eyeball sunburn. It's painful and it can cause temporary loss and vision. When sunlight reflects off snow,

eighty percent of UV radiation is reflected back. That's a nifty reminder to always wear sunscreen and sunglasses even in the winter. But how did we cope with snowblindness before we had sunglasses like in prehistoric times? Well, short answer, we actually did have sunglasses. Prehistoric people who lived in the Arctic Circle invented snow goggles over four thousand years ago. These goggles were carved from bone antlers or walrus ivory. Later,

they could be carved from driftwood. They were carved to fit the wearer's eyes with a thin, long, horizontal slit to see out of. This slit allowed the wear to see while minimizing the amount of reflected you be light from entering the eye. Sometimes a black suit was rubbed inside the goggles to cut down on glare. In some ways, these goggles remain superior to modern goggles as they don't

ice over in harsh conditions. That's why these goggles, the first ever sunglasses, remained a vital piece of equipment for people of the Arctic Circle for thousands of years, and though they weren't necessarily designed to be fashionable, they look pretty dang cool too. Speaking of cool, when we return, we'll talk about how some animals survive being turned into living popsicles. Well, the holidays are coming up, and that

means traveling and travel really stresses me out. But this year I am actually a little less stressed, and that's because I haven't away travel suitcase. Away suitcases are thoughtfully designed to make travel easier and less unpredictable. They have an optional built in battery that you can use to recharge your phone, so you don't have to fight for dominance for those positions right next to the outlet by inflating your neck pouch and ramming people with your antlers.

Away suitcases make lightweight and durable suitcases. They're made to last a lifetime of travel, and with a limited lifetime warranty, they'll replace or fix your bag if it ever gets damaged. One of the most stressful things about travel for me is packing and trying to get everything in the suitcase and worrying about it overflowing and not being lit on the plane. But with their hard outer shell and an inner built in compression pad. You can pack in more

and it will always be the same dimensions. It's also really easy to move around. It's got four three sixty degrees spinner wheels guaranteed for a smooth ride. It's like traveling with a rectangular plastic butler who carries all my stuff and it charges my phone. It's incredible. For twenty dollars off of suitcase, visit away travel dot com. Slash creature and use promo code creature during checkout. That's away travel dot Com. Slash creature and use promo code creature

during checkout for twenty dollars off a suitcase. When Jack frost nips at your toes, sometimes he bites off a whole chunk. Frost Bite is damage to the tissues, usually on extremities such as fingers, toes, and noses, as a result of being exposed to extreme low temperatures. While frostbite may not seem like a great coping strategy, the fact that your extremities suffer frostbite first is caused in part by your body's last ditch effort to save itself in

freezing temperatures. The blood vessels throughout the body narrow, which is called vaso constriction. This prevents heat from escaping out your extremities, keeping it inside towards the more vital parts of your body, such as your brain, guts, and chest. Normally, this only results in cold, maybe slightly painful fingers and toes, but if you don't warm up soon, the process of frostbite will begin. First comes frost imp where the extremities

start to lose feeling and go unnaturally pale. Blood flow to the outer parts of your body is reduced to the point where the tissues will start to become damaged if not warmed up soon enough. Frost nip can even result in a sunburned like injury due to the surface of the skin being frozen off, but this is not as concerning as frost bite. If you don't warm your fingers and toes and thyme, your tissues will fall below freezing point and ice crystals start to form in the cells.

Ice crystals, biologically speaking, are taking time bombs for cells, either destroying them during the freezing process itself or causing the cells to rupture when they start to thaw. This is why frost bite must be treated carefully and not warmed up too fast, or the damage will be even more severe. Frost Bite can range in superficial damage and blisters to the skin to the loss of entire digits or body parts if muscle and other tissues are affected.

Humans aren't really built to endure being frozen, but some animals cope with being popsicles surprisingly well. So I know that we have a lot of hopes that Walt Disney's frozen head could be brought back to life if you unthought. Of course, Walt Disney's head wasn't frozen. Don't see it anyways.

One of the problems with cryogenics and humans is sure you could freeze a body, but unthawing it is really difficult to do without those ice crystals, just like rupturing the cells due to the nature that the cells will contain liquid and then if the liquid density changes, that can just burst open cell um. But you know, we're not the only animals on Earth, and some animals actually manage this fabulously well. So would frogs. We've actually talked about on the show in our Eat Prey Diet episode.

But I think they bear another mention because they can remain frozen at zero degrees fahrenheit for up to seven months. Uh yeah, they're found all over North America, in including in boreal forests. There this little brown frog. They're very unassuming looking. They don't look like some kind of science

fiction Star Wars blue you know, baby Yoda things. Um. And they go through a process of partially freezing than rethawing over and over again until the glucose levels in their cells and their cells rise to an abnormal degree. And glucose, which is also you know, sugars can actually act as an anti freeze. Now that doesn't mean you can like eat a bunch of sugar and then survive

being frozen. But these frogs, by introducing the high glucose levels inside each of their cells, will protect the cells from the freezing process, keeping water inside the cells, which keeps them alive and in suspended animation. So like the wood frogs becomes so frozen, they're like literally like a rock. You could throw it against a brick wall and they'd shower. Something I do every Friday. Yeah you know that Thursdays, the blood balloon against the brick wall. Friday is smashing

frozen frogs against it. I mean it is like we all need ways to blow off steam exactly. And if blowing off steam means shattering a bunch of frozen wood frogs, I mean I'm not going to judge that. I think I would, but right, I mean I blow off steam by like, you know, making things out of clay, so that's much less making pottery. Yeah, you know, smashing frogs. It's all the same thing, right, It's it's therapeutic self care. Yes,

is what you should do. I want to have a spot day with belugas and then we could have great fun just smashing frozen frogs. It's what is the alternative rock band smashing Frogs? Right? Yeah? I play the clarinet, so I love if you bring any instruments to this. I sort of play the ukulele. Bad leading twenty years, right, I don't remember. I think we have a band. I think that's a band. That's band. We did it. Yes, Yes, Smashing Frogs the band we did it. Clarinet and ukulele

neither very good, but it is band now. So there's another contender for the best animal at enduring popsicle nous, which is the Siberian salamander. So this is found in well Siberia and Northeast Asia in wet woods, so that's like wooded areas where you have ponds and such. So they can survive being frozen at negative twenty two degrees fahrenheit, but for shorter periods of time. So that's a colder temperature than the wood frogs, but they can't last quite

as long. They can last up to forty five days, but they also have a lower survival rate, so they're sort of the more risk takers. So it is the idea that like ponds that they live in will like freeze over and then they'll but they'll survive like within the frozen frozen in the permafrost. Yeah yeah, so um. Though there are stories of these salamanders surviving being frozen in permafrost for years and waking up like, those haven't

really been confirmed. Uh scientifically, it kind of seems unlikely given that laboratory research shows they can only survive like forty five days in But I guess it's technically possible. I just don't I'm pretty doubtful. But like, let's Siberian find out, right, Let's put a bunch of Siberian salamanders like in the snow and see how they do. And sit there for you know, several years, several years. I

can't wait. I mean, if if we have enough water balloons full of blood and enough frozen frogs and our blooga friends, then you know we'll be fine. So now I want to talk about painted turtles. So these are pretty red and yellow streaked turtles that are found in North America and they live on land and in freshwater aquatic environments. And painted turtles don't hibernate. They brewmate because they're reptiles and I am a really pedantic person, so

they breathe through their asses during winter to survive. This is my favorite part. When their ponds freeze over, they can't rise to the surface to take a breath, which is seems like a pretty bad problem to have when you need to breathe, because you know, they're not fish. So since they can't breathe using their lungs, they'll use

their little butt holes. And actually a turtles butt hole is a cloaca, and a cloaca is the all purpose butt of reptiles, birds, amphibians, and sharks, and also monotreams such as platypus. They all have cloaca. The cloaca is the whole that can do everything. So it can it can excrete, open urine, it can reproduce, it houses the reproductive organs, it can lay eggs. It's just it's like triple threat and yes for disgusting things that bodies do.

It's the omnihole omni hoole. Yes. So the blood vessels around the cloaca are able to extract oxygen from water molecules, so they engage in chloacal respiration, which is butt breathing, and their chloac as sucking oxygen from the water like but gills. Incredible, that's my favorite thing so far today. Yes, if we could just breathe with our butts a little bit, you know, swimming would be so much easier because your butt is usually submerged. You can extract the oxygen. You know.

They used to try to save people who were drowning victims by throwing smoke in into their butt hole. And that's like, yes, and it's I mean it's true and that it happened. It's not true in that help, but yeah, so that's where I think that's where the same showing smoke up my ass comes from, because yeah, it's like it doesn't actually do anything, but it's acting as if you're helping. So yeah, and it was thought that this

would revive someone suffering from drowning. And I guess the only way it would work is just the surprise of someone blowing smoke up your butt might kind of bring you back. But I don't think there was any actual How would that even work, Like you put a tube and they would have like a special butt pipe. I think that they stuck in the butt and then blow smoke up the butt. I don't know why they thought that would work. I what era are we talking about here,

just like to early dred I think at it. Yeah, yeah, we don't know anything back then about you know, we were we thought we could just go into a human body and toss things around and see what happened. Those were the days of like, yeah, you have like seven types of bile in your body and nothing else. Right, let's put slugs in your eyes just you know, see what happens. I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying. I am a I'm a medical doctor in seventeen fifty,

and I don't know. No one knows. Let's let's breathe through our butts and just smash some frozen frogs and maybe that'll cure your consumption. I don't know. I am trying my best. My name is Hironymous Jay fits Welling, and I am trying my best. Good name. Thank you.

Now I want to talk about something pretty cute. And it is so like if you don't have the special trick of breathing through your butt or being able to be be frozen solid, what do you do and how do you evolve in a short period of time to survive just freezing cold temperatures? So I want to talk about wild Yakut horses. They are found in Yakushia in Siberia, and they can survive temperatures as low as ninety negative ninety four degrees fahrenheit. Wow, which is fairly cold. I

would say, so little a little chili. So these are horses that are thirteen hands. Now, I'm not a horse girl. I don't know what hands are or what that means, like if they have thirteen hands, what's going on? So I looked it up. Apparently a hand is four inches and the you measure it at the horses highest point of the withers. Oh, the horse with horse withers of course, Now, I didn't know what withers were, so I looked that up to and apparently the withers is the ridge between

the shoulder blades of the horse. So you put your hands on the withers, you have to have four inch hands. I guess you put your hands are exactly four inches. I he'd be great at measuring horses. The new Career ad wanted someone with exactly four inch hands to measure horses. So I guess that's like at it is four ft tall at the highest point between the shoulders. Is what hands means? You know? Come over here, horse people, I just want to talk to you for a second. Why

why why? Yeah? Because I think hands are only ever used to measure specifically horses. I don't think any other and I mean slide into my mention. I might be wrong about this, but do horses not like a tape measure? Do they get real? Do they get angry at a tape measure? Is this why hands are necessary? Desperate for human contact? See, they just they don't it's too informal. They want the laying of the hands. They want exactly. Most important fact about these YaHoot horses is that they

are super super super duper fluffy. They are so fluffy. They are the fluffiest horses you. Well, good news, you got pictures. I do. They're so pouffy. They look like if you, I guess, if you put a horse, a long haired horse in the dryer and just like it came out and it was just a poofball. You know, like in the cartoons where something that's not supposed to be put in a dryer comes out of a dryer and it's just a little poofball. Yeah, yeah, it's just

like this. They're so fluffy. I just want to dive my face right in there. I'll put my hands on this horse. I bet your hands would disappear into the How do you even know how many hands this horses? You can't see your hands. Oh my goodness. They are

very very cute. They have the thickest coat of any horse, and they're kind of chunky and compact built, which is good because you don't want to like we talked about with frostbite, the more compact you are in the cold kind of the better because your your blood doesn't have to work so hard to pump out to your extremities. They have slow metabolic rates relative to other horses, and they can dig in the snow for food like link dig, dig, dig,

find find some some vegetation under all that snow. And they actually didn't evolve from native species of horses in the area. Instead, these were horses that were brought to the area by the Yakut people eight hundred years ago, around the thirteenth century. And they're an example of rapid

evolutionary adaptation brought on by human interactions. So we brought we brought horses who were not adapted to this cold weather over eight hundred years ago, and over that period of time they developed these adaptations like being really really fluffy, being stout, and having that slower metabolic great and they even have anti freezing properties of glucose in the blood like frogs like the wood frogs. Not you can't freeze. You can't turn it into a horse sickle like that

will work, but it does help prevent frost bite. So what would have happened based on what I know about evolution, um, which I am not an expert by any means, but I did take a few you know, anthropology classes in college. So um, so they um, they would have brought these horses over and I'm guessing most of them would have died, but the ones that happened to be maybe fluffier or like carry the genes of fluffiness would have survived, and then they would mate with each other and then keep

perpetuating that trait that enabled them to survive. Thus the fluffiest horses we've ever seen. Yeah, and I'm I don't know this for a fact, but it is possible that we even helped along. Because humans are great, well, depending on how you define the word great. We're great at

selective breeding and creating ridiculous speeches and animals. But in this case, because the horses were very crucial to our survival as humans, there's a good chance that we maybe people saw, like we saw horses that were doing really well, and we're like, Okay, we gotta get this this one breeding a lot of baby horses because they've survived and

they're they're doing really well. You know, I think we could have It's well within our abilities to have done that at that time, So, you know, it was probably a mixture of I would say it's mostly the environmental pressures, but then maybe they were assisted in their survival by humans, and then that's how they evolved so quickly without just immediately all tying up. Actually, comparisons of the yakout horses to mammoth genome found similarities in metabolism, hair growth, and

body proportions, which is an example of convergent evolution. So convergent evolution is when you have very similar traits but they evolve at different points in evolutionary history, and they're like in different species or in the same species, but at different times. So one of the important things about yea coot horses is that they are mostly wild horses, so they don't they aren't kept in pens all year round. They're not kept at a corral are kept there. They're

allowed to roam wild. And your coot horse breeders have a really tough job because the horses get to go live free and wild for much of the time, and the horse breeders have to convince them to come back to get fed and get medical attention and to help them in their breeding. And so they'll drive out for miles and miles to search for these horses, and then once they get there they'll call them. They really have to convince them to come in because it's these big

these herds of horses. You can't just like laugh so all the horses and have it come in you. You have to kind of it's got to be a cooperative effort, like hey, we got hey, Hey remember remember hey, Hey, it's yes. And so they also will like call them out like be like, hey, come on, Fred. The horse probably not named Fred, but you know, um, I know there's definitely a Fred. Come on, Ginger and and Jasper Jasper, Yeah, not clearly. I'm not good at measuring nor naming horses.

I mean I named a bear Timmy earlier in this episode. That's a good bear name, though, sell yourself short on that. Thanks. So that's this habit of litting animals roam free and then calling them back in over long distances is actually also done in Norway and Sweden and has been done since the Middle Ages. And there's this practice called cooling, which is the term for a hurting call to let

livestock no, it's time to come home. So it is a specific type of song or call that has similar mechanics to yodeling, so that it can bounce off of the hills and and really for long distances, so that livestock can hear it even when they're far off into the mountains. And typically it's a tradition carried on by women because historically they were tasked with tending to flocks and herds, although men do also carry on the tradition, and each hurd or shepherd would have their own unique

call for their livestock. And this so I have a clip from a very talented cool ning singer. Her name is Joanna Genten, and she's calling her cows. All all provide a link to the full video in the show notes. I really recommend looking at it. It's it's really hauntingly beautiful. But I'll just play a really short clip so you get an idea of what it sounds like. And in this clip you can see the little cow it just like they're ambling on over like okay, I'm going I

recognize that. So as the idea that all of the the uh animals that um get hurted by the particular herders like recognize the sound of like their specific So yeah, I think so, And I think they they'll probably recognize the voice of their their herd, and they'll recognize the specific call they'll they know to come come home, because then they get fed and they get a warm place. Yeah.

I really love this, the practice of letting these animals just wander around, frolic around and play and occasionally get eaten by predators. But you know, and then you're just like, all right, come home, and they're like sure, Wow, that's how man, that's how farming should be done here. You know, just let the let the let the pigs just run around the city do their thing. I've seen Babe Pig in the City. That's the exactly the renowned documentary Big in the City I love. I love the George Miller

famous documentary, and I loved both of those movies. When I was a kid, I was always horrified at Everyone's just like, yeah, you'll be bake in someday and he's like what and there He's like, calm down, it's the way of things here. So I wanted to do an update to crow boarding. So a little while ago we did an episode on play and I talked about cow boarding, where there's this video of a crow picking up a metal lid to like a jar, and he walks up a snowy roof, sits on the lid and slides down

and does this a few times. And of course, okay, so this is just one example. You know, maybe this is just some some luke man, you know, malfunctioning crow or something. But actually I found online that there were there have been more sightings of crows and ravens sliding down snow covered roofs just to fly back and repeat it over and over again. So this is an observed behavior that ravens and crows do and they're just doing it for fun. We don't know why they're doing it,

but there seems to be no purpose. And one of the definitions of plays that it's a repetitive action that has no purpose. And then like logically you would conclude that it is just for fun or for some some pleasurable reason. And and then there's another report that birds would fly to a snow covered stump and then they would slide down the slope on their backs, and sometimes they would hold sticks as they would slide down, just

like skeers. Yeah, their crow poles love that. Yeah. Sometimes they seem to do it for attention, like they'll slide down a steep and line and then it seemed to try to attract mates by showing them how cool they are at cow boarding, and sometimes they do it because there's this lodge that's been in their family for generations, and this rich kid comes. It's like, I'm going to buy your lodge and then you won't be allowed back

in it. And the crows are like, we'll see about that, and then they raised them down Death Mountain, just like the plot of Oh my god, what movie is that crap? It's that it's a John Cusack movie. I think, No Runnings. It's yes, the famous movies not Running Better Off. His name is John cusa parody that plot in um in an episode of the American teen black comedy film starring John Cusack. Do I know film or do I know film? I do have a master's green screenwriting. I hate to

bring it up. In the town of Okay, according to Wikipedia, in the don't of Greendale, Northern California, high school student blah blah blah blah blah, am I totally wrong. Oh no, no, no. They try to ski the K twelve, the highest peak in towns, in hopes of getting winning back best love. All right, there's a race and who the race gets to get the woman as a reward because women are prizes. Yeah,

I you know, like I actually was weird. I went to this arcade and there's this big vending machine and then there's just a bunch of ladies in there as like trying to trying to like like get them, and they're like, please let us out of this giant claw machine. We're actually stuck in here because we tried to get the bears out by reaching our hands and we got sucked in. But I think that was just to add to the charm of the machine. Year sure, okay, so

back to the crows who are sledding for fun. Now wait, you suggested that maybe it's like could be sort of like the winter sports version of like the day answers the birds do like mating dances, because I need a training montage to get better at it's just this little crow like lifting sticks with its feet. I would watch that training montage. I would watch a whole movie trilogy about crows snowboarding and winning the winning the crow girls

as prizes, and winning the lodges as prizes. Sometimes the crow girl win skis as a prize. Sometimes the crow girl gets to ski, yes not the crow girl skis sometimes, and sometimes the lodge skis and wins the prize of a year. Yeah, yeah, you just mix it all up. Crows are in it. I think we could we could scrape this franchise and then we also need the Chipmunks as mafia stories, right, and we could have a crossover like this could be sort of the crow boarding universe

that we need, like an animal cinematic universe. Yes, yes, the crow boarding cinematic universe. Who got the chipmunks who are like killing each other for for acorns? We got the crows trying to win ski contests. You got Beluga like a sort of Bridesmaid's movie, but with Bluga's going out and getting a spot. But everything goes horribly wrong. But then at the end they found out the the Belugas where the friends you made along the way? Exactly. Yeah,

there's a lot of content. There's a lot of mindable content, guys, mute movie people content. Yeah, exactly. Again, I'm a screenwriter. We got to start writing me screening it. Start write me, please write me crowboarding screenplay. Yes, but what we'd call it, there's got to be a pun or something. Crowboarding is a pun, but like we need an extra one just to send it over the top, Like, why is this so hard for that. Take an improv class four of

us not me Corvus. Wait what is Corvus? That's the the family of the because oh I see that that mightidential slogan. Yeah, it's maybe it's a little too um, it's maybe too highbrow for the for the audience. We'll figure it out. Or if you have crow board and we'll have a raven good time. There we are there, It is there, It is there. It does. Send it to print DreamWorks, drop that up. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I've had a blast. Yeah,

this is really fun, raven time even good time. Oh and there goes my audience. They're all gone out by. Sorry about that. You guys, um, do you have anything to plug? Oh? Sure, you can listen to my podcast right here on this same network, do you see you? Guys are a lot um. It is called the Beactel Cast, and we analyze movies through a feminist lens. How dare you? I know? How dare i? Um? And you can follow me.

You can check that out at Bactel Cast on Twitter and Instagram, and then you can follow me on those places as well. At Caitlyn TORONTOI you can find us on on side inside the Internet, Creature Feature Pod dot Com, Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, Creature feet Pod on Twitter. That's f e A T, not f e e T.

That's something very very different. Uh. And I have been Katie Golden and you can find me on Twitter and you can also find me on Twitter at pro bird Writes, where I ensure that birds will one day take the reins to this planet and really steered in the right direction and more Birdie direction. I love it. Thanks to the Space Classics for their super groovy song ex Alumina. Creature Feature is a production of I Heart Radios How

Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, app podcast or where have you listen to your favorite shows? See you next Wednesday. M h.