Risqué Fishqué Business

Dean and marine biologists have in common? Joining me today is friend of the show, host of the upcomping podcast Heidi World, The Heidi flysh Story, which is coming to I Heart Radio this year, and also frog appreciator Molly Lambert. Welcome, Hello, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be back on Creature Feature. Yes, yes, I am having you back because you wanted to talk about frog balls, uh, the balls of frogs that is which we will talk about

at the end of the episode. Very exciting and also the rest of the episode I would say is a little bit risk a uh, we're definitely going to quack out our curse words. But you know, if you have young ears that you don't want to know about, like the love making of fish, dolphins, and frogs. You know, just consider that's what we're talking about. First, we're gonna talk about the loudest, one of the loudest underwater sounds in the world, and this is due to a mass

fish love fest. So there are obviously a lot of problems when it comes to over fishing. It's bad for the environment, it's bad for fish populations, it's bad for populations of animals that survive on fish. And you know, it's also bad for animals that get cotton fishing nets, bad for coral reeves. It's terrible. But perhaps the worst thing is that it is killing the vibe for these giant fish orgies. So the Gulf Corvina is a fish found in the Gulf of California between Baja California and Mexico.

And you know, there's sort of just a regular looking silver fish. They're not too exciting, um, kind of just you're a very archetypical looking fish. They can grow up to be about a meter or three ft long and up to about twelve kilograms or twenty six pounds. They eat crab, sardines and other small marine mammals. There's really nothing too special about them until you consider their mating habits. Because it is it's loud, it's loud and wild, it's

it's wet, it's wet, wild and wonderful. Exactly. It is a wet and wild kind of fun going on with a mass spawning event of millions of these goulf Corvina fish. And yeah, they do not keep quiet about it. Males actually have a mating call, do you really like when you think about fish, you don't really think of them as having mating calls, Right, that's like a bird's thing. Yeah,

I mean it makes sense. Everybody's gotta gotta have a little noise that helps them find people to make out with, right, Yeah, I mean I like sort of to do a classic siren just like boop poop and then hope you know someone sees that, like, hey, you know, that's that's my that's my call, you know, car al arm poop. Yeah, they're perfect. That's I mean, I think that's how I found my husband. So you know, it's uh, it's a real winner of a call. And indeed, these fish have

a beautiful, alluring, sexy and sensual call. And I'm going to play it for you. Try not to like dive into the ocean to romance one of these fish. Wow, sensual, it is sensual. I mean I like it. I thought kind of like a cat purring. It's comforting. I'm a strong and sensitive gulf corvina and I will inseminate your eggs kind of kind of vibe. So imagine that call, which is already pretty loud, times a million, because there are millions of these males making this call at the

same time. In fact, it's so loud you can hear it outside the water and through the holes of ships passing near the area. It's one of the loudest sounds in the sea, only beaten by sperm, blue bowhead and fin whales. And in fact, each individual fish has a mating call of a hundred and seventy seven decibels, which is louder than a chainsaw and can actually damage the

hearing of other marine animals underwater, which I do. Feel like if you're a sea turtle and you're going to like the sea turtle doctor and you're like, yeah, my hearing has been I've been getting Tonita's and it's been bad lately. It's like, well, why have you been going to rock concerts. It's like, no, it's just you know, listening to fish sex, you know, a little embarrassing. Hey, you know you're into what you're into, that's true. I

really shouldn't kink shame sea turtles. I need to like cross stitch a thing to hang in my office so that I can see, like, do not kink shames turtles, so that I always remember. Unfortunately, for these fish, these loud meeting calls are a great way for fishing boats to find the fish and they will fish them on mass, which is really uncool. Speaking of kink shaming, and these poor fish are just trying to get down funky with it,

and it's there being real real spawn blockers. I think it's I mean, maybe the ultimate party foul is like trying to fish you while you're trying to flirt with other fish, you know what I mean. Speaking of fishy mating, there is another species of fish that has a pretty large impact on their environment and it is salmon molly. Are you familiar with the mating cycle of salmon um? Is that when they swim upstream, yes exactly, right, spawn,

yes exactly? Then yes a little bit, and I watch them, I love to watch the explore dot org bear cam nice where all the salmon are swimming and the bears just trying to like fish them out of the water. The most soothing thing. Do you ever watch that? No, but I want to know it's a bear. I'm gonna send it to you. It's so it's incredible. Explore dot Org. Guess this incredible website I talked about on every podcast

because obsessed with it. It's just nature cams, live cams with their nature, and so one of them is a feed of a river in Alaska and it's just bears, bears and salmon. That's amazing. I love it and I want it incredible. I put it on all the time when I just like need to relax and don't want

to watch something like narrative. I mean there's a narrative. Well, yeah, the narrative is a cute fuzzy bear getting a delicious snack of dying spawning fish, which is I think going to be my new favorite bedtime bedtime show to watch. That sounds incredibly relaxing. I guess unless you're you kind of identify with the salmon, then it's sort of more of a horror situation. Yeah, but you know, yeah, I love watching bears just just pulling fish out the water.

It just looks so satisfying, fun, having the time of their lives, just watching like a group of teenagers descend upon the sizzlers, right exactly, just just chilling. Yeah, all right, thank you a link. It's actually I guess it's off season right now because it's so they but they have the greatest hits real, of course, thank you so much. I like to think that the greatest hits are just some salmon getting decapitated in the bear looking so happy. Yeah.

For every sort of dark turn that nature takes, it's there's also an adorable side to it. For every like antelope that's ripped open, there's a cute little lion cub, you know, chewing on. It's to watanum. So anyways, salmon, yes, you're correct, Molly. They do spawn. They do go upstream.

They are anadromus, which means that they spend their adult lives in the saltwater ocean and then to spawn, they swim up into freshwater streams where they're young will hatch, and then the young salmon will migrate back out to the ocean, which is a really fascinating life cycle. It's unusual for fish to be able to transition from salt water to freshwater and back. But even more interesting is

that samina are architects of the river environment. So fish mating often involves external fertilization, So the female will lay her eggs and the male will pass over the eggs, releases sperm, fertilize them externally, and then hey, presta, you're done, which you know, sufficient at least, maybe not all that intimate, but definitely efficient. Hey, efficient can be intimate sometimes if you're on the go, I gotta get it in streamlined intimacy.

So basically, once the eggs are fertilized, the male's job is somewhat done, but the theme ale will continue to do a little bit of parental care for these eggs. So she will lay her eggs in a little trench that she's dug, and the male will fertilize it. And then the female will actually bury the eggs in rocks, which you know, she's sort of artfully placing these rocks so she's not crushing the eggs, so this will protect them.

And this is called a red which I think it's because there's like an Irish word red, which means to make something ready. So basically, you know, she tidies up this area, covers the eggs with rocks, and then she will protect them for ten days and then die because they are similar paris, meaning that they spawn once and then die in a beautiful, beautiful cycle. Yeah, I mean, just like all these sort of zombies amon like that.

The stress of spawning is so intense and they use up so much energy that their immune system kind of fails and they just start falling apart even while they're still alive. So they look like a bunch of zombie fish. Uh, And they use their last act to try to try to protect their their young eggs. So you know, who doesn't love a zombie fish. The act that the female takes in digging up these trenches to protect her eggs

actually has a massive impact on the environment. So the digging up of sediment and the movement of the rocks are thought to have a big impact on the river system.

She is actually releasing small rocks and sediments into the current of the water that can pick these up and away, which exposes more bedrock to the power of the water, which can cause more erosion, and even though it may not be a really strong effect for a single fish during one mating season, researchers have actually modeled this behavior and scaled it up to millions of years and found

a significant impact on shaping the terrain. Uh. There was a paper called Sex that Moves Mountains the influence of spawning fish on river profiles over geological time scales, which, you know, I really do appreciate when researchers try to make their titled sexy, and I think it is charming. Charming is not really the word awe inspiring that salmon sex can terraform the earth, like what is Elon Musk done lately? I don't think the same can be said

for him. Absolutely not. It's I think like that could be sort of a response to whenever Elon Musk starts crying about terraforming Mars or whatever, it's like, well, salmon terraform earth just by having sex. So you know, call me when you do that. Thank you, bye bye bye. So now we're going to move on to some mammalian romance, but we are staying in the water because we're talking about dolphin mating habits, which when you think about it,

it's a little strange. Typically mammals will mate outside of the ocean, and our biology is not really suited for submerged mating, whereas dolphins have some interesting adaptations to manage this. But there's a problem in terms of research because it's actually pretty difficult to connect research on the mating habits of large marine mammals because they're under the water and

they're big. So, uh it's sounds kind of like it would be obvious to know like the mechanics of sex with dolphins, but it's actually pretty uh, pretty difficult, pretty tricky to uh, you know, monitor without being a huge pervert. And as we'll talk about soon, like all the ways in which they try to study dolphins sex just makes

them seem like serial killers. There are a few necessary adaptations that dolphins have to have for sex underwater, because salt water is actually a spermicide, so they need to make the uterus waterproof, otherwise they wouldn't be able to have a success ustible copulation because the salt water would immediately destroy any of the male sperm. So female dolphins actually have these very convoluted vaginal canals with a lot of folds in it and a mucastle lining that protects

the entrance of the cervix. Yeah, they're like kind of accordions shaped. It's wow, like a duck kind of yeah, kind of like a duck. They're not exactly corkscrew shaped like ducks are. For those of you out there who have not had the privilege of hearing about uh duck genitals. The males have corkscrew shaped penises and the females have corkscrew shaped vaginas in sort of a arms race for the females to try to have more control over whose sperm she allows UH to fertilize her eggs. So dolphins

have sort of a similar situation. It's made more complicated by the fact that they need to make sure that the saltwater doesn't enter the uterus and kill the sperm. And male penises for dolphins are not weirdly shaped. I mean, I guess they are in the general sense, but they're

not like a corkscrew shaped like ducks are. So the folds actually in the female dolphins vagina are surrounded by muscles that may be able to essentially seal off the entrance to the cervix to prevent saltwater from reaching it, which has this sort of side benefit or even a major benefit of potentially allowing her to control whether the sperm ever reaches her cervix, so giving her sperm choice control over incimination, so she can just like get a bunch of sperm in there and then just like like

close off the sheet. That is the theory. Yes, I don't think that that conclusively, No, yeah, yeah, And there are a lot of instances in the animal kingdom of females exerting this sort of reproductive choice where they're able to control whether the sperm actually reaches their eggs or you know, whose sperm they use. They can like save different sperm packets, and it's really interesting. And so I think it is like for especially for mega fauna, something

big like a dolphin. It is really interesting to see this kind of uh possible reproductive choice that the female dolphins are able to use. But to even understand the mechanics of dolphins sex is really difficult. You can try to like go underwater with some cameras, but that's not

gonna help you understand all that much. As there are these techniques that researchers can use for really little critters like insects where they can flash freeze them with liquid nitrogen during mating and then basically be able to like cut them open and see how their genitals interlock. Ah. Yeah, it's a real, real Edgeen territory here. I guess I should issue sort of a warning that it's gonna get worse from here on out. We're we're this is like

serial killer Edgeen body parts horror. So if you don't want to listen about that, you know, maybe maybe skip the next the next section, it's like dolphins serial killer horror, which is even scarier. Yeah, they've got the perfect horror movie scream just going the whole time. But so researchers have to rely on the frozen body parts of dead

dolphins in order to study the mechanics of mating. So they'll use frozen dolphin genitals of a variety of species to recreate mating by artificially inflating the male's penis and then trying to fit it into the frozen vagina and then doing a CT scan to document this unholy abomination that I don't understand. How you know, the FBI hasn't just like burst down their door. Sorry, I was just

like I don't have it. I'm trying to think of a joke, and I'm just like, ah, I know, it's just it is just kind of it's just kind of horrifying. It's like, I get that it's research, and I'm fairly certain the researchers are good, normal people, because I've never met a nasty marine biologist, but damn you guys, like whoever wrote that grant must be a genius, because how you write that without getting arrested, I have no idea.

It's like, yeah, we're looking for some government funds. Um, well, basically what we've done is we've frozen a bunch of dolphin penises and vaginas and we're just we're just kind of kind of put them together like legos, you know how you do that? You know, So we're gonna we're gonna need a grant for that. Yeah, No, that's it's uh,

you know, science is fascinating, it's absolutely incredible. Uh So you know, if you gotta, if you gotta sometimes mash some like dolphin popsicles made out of their genitals together in the name of better understanding their biology, I guess I guess it's cool, you know, all right, Well, so through this research, they actually found that different species of dolphins seem to have different interlocking shapes, if that makes sense, which seems to indicate that there's different levels of sex

based competition. Where in some species they're very competitive, so the females are kind of have evolved a vagina that is able to thwart male insemination more, whereas other species

they don't have those kinds of mechanisms. So it's really interesting to see how, you know, we think about animals competing maybe in terms of food, or competing against other species, or competing for a mate, but there's also competition involved when it comes down to basically who gets to decide um what you know, what goes on during reproduction and whose sperm you get to use. And they're they're even animals that will collect sperm from different males and you know,

use which one is the strongest. And it's really it's really interesting and obviously also really sometimes disturbing when researchers have to pick through frozen, frozen dolphin wieners. Just the mental image I think is enough for me right now. Yeah, Well, I'm you're lucky you only have a mental image in researching this, I found a slide show that was at like a lecture of just a bunch of different you like animal uterus is and I wish I hadn't seen that.

I wish you hadn't seen it too. Thank you all. I appreciate that. Alright, So now this is your favorite topic, Molly. We're going to talk about toad set balls, and I'm talking about not like toad uh testicles. I'm talking about

big balls of toads all having a good time. Question Mark, you actually uh talked about this on a previous episode where I had you and I think on the Squid Games episode, right, Molly, Yes, that's right, and you were sort of saying you think that there are these uh toads or frogs that form these big sort of mosh

pit balls of sexual activity. And indeed you're absolutely right. Uh. First one that we're going to talk about is the western toad, which is found all along the West of America's so that's Canada, the US, and Mexico in the western regions. It's this inconspicuous little green and brown toad. It grows about two to five inches long, which is six to thirteen centimeters. It's found in forests meadows and bogs,

and it seems like a pretty vanilla toad. Again, doesn't seem that interesting when you're just looking at this little toad, But it's actually what is known as an explosive breeder, which means that they made in huge flash mobs during breeding season. So usually it happens right after it rains. They like to breed it in aquatic environments like ponds, calm rivers, or springs, and so like, when the conditions are right, when the mood is right, there's just this

explosion of mating activity, which is complete chaos. I love it. I learned about mating balls, I think, um because I would just get really mad at like evolutionary psychology people, which is like, well it's used always for like men's rights type stuff. So there was all this stuff always about like well men have to like spread their seed to the most you know, people possible because that's like what nature does, blah blah blah. And then it was like, yeah,

guess what else happens in nature? Like a lady frog it's like a hundred dude frogs to collect all their sperm, or like a lady dolphins with all the dolphins and then like decide switch dolphin she wants Like they all used it to frame it as like male selection chooses everything, you know, and I was like, actually, it's all chaos. And also the idea even mammalian creatures would reflect like

human sexual behavior. It's also just like not necessarily and also it's not that scientific, Like people are different from each other too. You know, some frogs want to pack all the frogs, and some frogs just wanna one frog at a time, and some frogs don't want to pack any frogs at all. You know, that's what that's what makes up life beautiful. They're not necessarily very picky about what they are trying to hump as we'll talk about soon. But no, I do completely agree with you. I get

I get frustrated with pop evolutionary psychology. I studied both psychology and evolutionary biology, which I always say in my intro. But what's interesting is like I could by studying sort of the separate disciplines. Is like, there's very clear distinctions to me about what you can infer through evolutionary adaptations the path of evolution versus an individual psychology. Obviously, psychology in general, like our our brains in our physiology is

a result of evolution. But to try to pin a thread from a specific behavior and wind it all the way back hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago to some path and evolution is extremely difficult. And anyone making that claim just suspicious and think it's also socialized.

I think I think it's like even like there was some study I think it was Bonobo's, but just about how different tribes of monkeys acted had different behaviors and that were based around like what other tribes of money and so I think also it's like like people who are really into evopsych and just being like this is hardwired.

This is how it is. It's like, well, it's also socialized, and like if you ignore how how much everyone is socialized, especially socialized into like sexual identity and roles and stuff like that, and you're just like, you know, caveman have to hunt. Like also like the hunting and gathering thing isn't true. I just I'm this is my my platform. I'm big on this topic. You're preaching to the choir here.

Monkeys and other apes do definitely have culture in in my humble opinion, based on how different different groups different troops of primates will have different behaviors, like they're specific types of tool use and communication methods that they'll use. Even different groups of like cetaceans which are whales and uh, dolphins will have like different dialects. So yeah, culture like socialization is really important in terms of behavior, which is

true both in humans and in animals. It's always wild to me when people try to point to nature for some kind of like socially conservative norm because they very rarely know what nature is actually up to, which is some real freaky stuff. So um, which we're going to

talk about now. So the next time like someone tries to say like, oh, this isn't natural or whatever, remember the western toad because because they like to form giant sex balls where they're all just trying to hump each other, uh, indiscriminately. So because they have this what's called an explosive breeding event, the males obviously are trying to find a female and they unfortunately don't have a mating call, so they have to be very active in trying to find a female.

And as a friend of the show, Greg Polly, who have had on before to talk about herbs herpetology, who is a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles has described these male toad mating strategies like this quote. They basically jump on everything that seems reasonably toadlike. So the male toads have a high rate of um sort of misfires here, so they'll try to jump on clumps

of mud, random garbage, other male toads. And actually male toads have a special chirp that they used to signal other males that like, hey, I don't actually have eggs for your bud. And this is the chirp which you can hear if you pick up one of these toads, which I don't recommend, but this is what it sounds like. So that is the call for let go of me. I do not have eggs. The way these big mating balls form is that competition for females is really fierce.

As I said before, these toads aren't very bright when it comes to finding a female. So once someone finds a fe male, it can lead to this domino effect of other toads trying to jump on the bandwagon, and it just creates this mating ball which sounds like a real bad deal for the female. And I suppose it is, but females do have a choice in who they actually mate with. So the way that mating works is that the females will release a string of eggs that the

males release sperm onto. So it's external fertilization. Yeah, just like with the salmon. And so they like squeeze out the string of eggs that are connected by this very thick mucus. So it's kind of like this conveyor belt.

And the male attaches himself to the female by holding onto her, not so that they can have any internal insemination, it so that he is right there ready to fertilize the eggs as they come out, sort of like you know that scene and I Love Lucy where she's trying to get all the candies in her mouth, except that Lucy would be a male toad trying to inseminate the candies. Is this metaphor working, Oh, it's working perfectly for me. I'm following exactly. Great good. I'm a very good science educator.

So yeah, So the female doesn't have to release her eggs if she doesn't want to for these males. So, uh, sometimes if she's nonplussed by the male, doesn't want to mate with them. She'll just scrape them off like against a tree root, uh, which is you know, sometimes what you gotta do and you've got a clinger. This uh is actually not the weirdest amphibian sex out there. There is a frog sex death cult in the Amazon, which

is another free band name enjoy that everybody. The Amazonian rainforest frog Ranella proboscietta is a small, rusty, brown, own leaf shaped frog which is usually under an inch long. It's less than fifty five millimeters. Wow, I love a leaf shaped frog. Yeah, they're cute and they're kind of pretty and innocuous looking, which is why it's so shocking to find out that they are in a froggy sex death cult. Um, that's I really shouldn't do that. I

need some water, but uh. The males, just like with the western toad, will form these mating balls, but they get so intense and heavy they will sometimes drown other

frogs that are in this ball, including the females. But even worse is that it doesn't stop these little perverts from trying to successfully mate, so some of the frogs will actually squeeze the dead females like a tube of toothpaste to extract the eggs so he can fertilize them like an app lute little freak, which is just they look so innocent and then again boom, they're like little ed geans, little horrible monsters. I just think their neat

seems cool. That is an interesting response to you know, frog sex death cult. But hey, you know, I guess all of nature should be appreciated in its uniqueness. Before we go, let's move on to the guests whose squawking mystery animal sound game? So last week, uh, I played a sound for you. You guys tried to guess it, as I do every week. Um, and the hint for last week was, if you think this is a bird

or a dog, you're barking up the wrong tree. In fact, you shouldn't be looking in trees at all, but in burrows. M So, Molly, do you have any guesses for who is making that sound? Um? Maybe like a mere cat? M hmmm, that's my guess, your cat or groundhog? That those are good guesses. Actually, I had some other listeners guess Prairie dogs and mere cats also got guesses like

foxes or badgers. All really good guesses, but only one person got it right and that was Sarah in c with the answer barking geck So congratulations Sarah, good guessing everyone else. So barking geckos or pe garrulous like their name implies, like to bark, and they do not sound like echoes, do they. They kind of sound like some little little rodent or mammal. Oh yeah, I thought it was gonna be a little rodent. Yeah yeah, but yes

they are geckos. They're found in southern Africa and arid regions, so in these kind of sandy areas where they dig these little sandy burrows, males will stick their heads out of burrows and bark trying to attract a female to his burrow. He is both he's a lazy coward and doesn't want to risk predation by going out to find a female himself, so he will make her come to

him by making this little noise. But if the female likes him in mates with him, she will actually kick him out of his burrow and use it to raise their offspring, and he has to go off and dig his new burrows. So I guess you know, everything evens out in the end with these two. So now onto today's mystery animal sound here is the hint. This guy has a face that looks a bit like US President Chester A Arthur, but otherwise there's nothing American about him. So, Molly,

do you have any guesses? Wow? No, something cool, something cool. That's correct, it's something cool. But for a more precise answer, tune in next week where we will reveal who is squawking. If you out there think you know, you can write to me at Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com and also on Twitter at Creature feet Pod that's f A T not f E T. That's something very different, and on Instagram a Creature Feature Pod. Molly, where can people find you? Thank you so much for joining me. Oh,

thanks for having me. You can find me on Twitter at Molly Lambert and on Instagram Molly Underscore Lambert. And soon enough you'll be able to check out Heidi World. Exciting looking forward to that. What's what's Heidi World going to be about? It's about Heidi Flice, who was a Hollywood madam who almost brought Los Angeles down, um, and about why sex work needs to be decriminalized. That's amazing.

I'm looking forward to that. Well, thanks for so much for having me, absolutely, thanks for thanks for coming on, and thank you to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo Alumina Creature features a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. See you next Wednesday.