Secret Animal Societies (Sea-cieties?)

Joining me today is one of my favorite science writers who has written amazing articles about all sorts of creatures for The New York Times, and she is currently working on a book for Atlas Obscure about some of the world's weirdest critters. Welcome, Kara Giamo. Welcome. I'm so excited to have you on. I'm a little starstruck because I often refer to your articles when I'm research ng for the show, so it's both weird and really exciting to be talking to you in person on the show. That's

really flattering. I'm so glad that I've helped to inspire such a wacky and fun show with my writing. Well, thank you so much. And speaking of which, I use some of your articles to help with research and inspired this very episode, including one you wrote on giraffes. So in this first section, I want to talk about this

secret social lives of mammals. These are secret mammalian societies because we often are very very like egocentric, very primate centric, where we think, you know, yeah, primates are smart, guerrillas, chimps, humans, elephants, and dolphins sort of like this, yeah, you're smart too, But then when we start to talk about other animals, were like, well, they couldn't be that complicated. They can't have like friends like humans do. That doesn't make sense.

They're just big, um glomping things like giraffes, which don't seem like they'd be very smart. They have this huge long neck in this itty bitty head perched on top of this impossibly long body, and it just doesn't seem

like they'd be someone interested in forming social bonds. But in fact they may have something like that, right, yeah, absolutely, So first I just want to say that in my experience, a lot of the history of animal research is and plant research, to be honest, and research into any living things is um scientists starting from the point of view that oh, this thing can't be all that smarter, all that talented, and then realizing over the course of you know,

years or decades that oh, actually, all these creatures can do all these incredible things that we didn't know about it. They are smart, whether it's smart socially or smart with their bodies, or just smart being able to survive or in ways that we haven't even thought of yet. So that's a really cool part of looking into this area of research. But yeah, with giraffes, I wrote about this recently for The New York Times about sort of secret giraffe social lives, and uh, yeah, it's true. They used

to have this reputation of being really solitary. Um, but more and more researchers are seeing that they have really complex family groups. It's sort of like a female centric society where moms and kids and grandmothers and grandkids will hang out. Um, they do things like they more and

they're dead. It's really complex. Um, it's really cool. Yeah, it's interesting because I mean my perception of giraffes, probably also based on sort of childhood stories about drafts, is they're very aloof there, nonchalant, just with their head in the clouds kind of literally eaten eaten leaves up in the trees with without much of a care in the world.

But they, yeah, they they seem to actually have these social bonds and like you said, it seems to be sort of this matriarchal society, so female drafts forming friendships, having them having an emotional reaction to the death of like a calf, where they stand over for for many hours. Uh. They seem to sometimes even engage in alto parenting, which is when uh, a non parent will look after another person, another person, another giraffe's offspring, so they babysit each other's calves.

And so this is something that is just recently sort of been observed. Researchers had to look at like their specific spot pattern to I d them, because it's sort of like a thumb print where when you have a spot pattern you can tell one individual from the other. But because they're so because they have that such such a like bolh Vida's kind of laid back lifestyle, it

was I guess hard to tell that. Yeah, they are in fact hanging out with each other, and they do prefer the company of certain friends as just we didn't think like a giraffe and didn't observe them from the point of view of a giraffe, and so we never really caught that. Yeah, totally. I think that's something that's also a little bit egocentric about us, is that when a creature doesn't live a lifestyle that's recognizable to us, we just sometimes kind of assume that it's not interesting

or not worth studying. Um. The researchers I talked to for this yeah, pointed out that giraffes especially are quite slow um and quite quiet. They don't have a lot of vocalizations. And so since humans are like really fast paced and many of us in our lives and we are constantly talking, constantly talking, I don't know anything about that. It's not like I do that for a living. Imagine a giraffe studying us. They would be like, they can't

possibly be doing anything meaningful. They're just chattering constantly. We don't know what they're saying, and so we don't care. Yeah, how can they have time to think? They they're spending all their time just like yammering on and on making meats sound to their little face flaps. It's very strange making podcasts like we can't. We can't handle this. Um,

but yeah, so you're you're right. Once they figured out how to distinguish individual drafts by their spot patterns, which took a while, um, they started to see that there were these really strong connections. Um. The daycare thing is. So the allo parenting is so impressive to me because I know that it's quite hard for humans to get together and figure out childcare. So the fact that drafts can do this is is pretty sweet. Maybe we should

be looking even more carefully about how they pulled us off. Yeah, yeah, I think that's kind of a constant theme on the show too. Whenever I tell a guest about a case of allo parenting, like, hey, look how bats and in giraffes and you know, all all these animals will sort of help each other rear their off throom. They're like, that seems like a really good idea. Especially parents who come on They're like, hey, could we do that too?

Maybe that would be great? Right, And I'm not a parent, so I'm not going to claim to understand this stuggle, but uh, it is interesting to think of having someone say I can't find a babysitter and you just say to them, oh, well, have you thought of finding a bunch of bats that could make like vomit food into your child's mouth every once in a while. It sounds

good to me. I'm going to find a colony of vampire bats and be like, could you just fom a little bit of that nice blood into my baby's mouth when I'm not around. It's got a lot of iron, a lot of nutrients. Yeah. There's this idea called the grandmother hypothesis, which is that in certain social animals, long lived females can help their offspring uh and grand offsprings survive.

And so you'll see in some animals, especially like elephants, but you also see it in giraffes where females will live long past their reproductive years, and so the ideas there is an advantage to this because they can actually offer help to the younger generations and ensure that they're their offspring and offsprings offspring actually survive, and this often will lead to more complex socialization because you you basically are able to retain more knowledge because you have an

extra generation hanging around passing on wisdom and knowledge. And whether we don't know exactly yet, like how this works in giraffes. I think the even knowing that giraffes have this capability is relatively new, So who knows what hidden giraffe wisdom is getting passed on from giraffe to giraffe. Probably things like the best kinds of throat laws and leaves to eat, because imagine being a draft with a

sore throat. You definitely want to get your heads together with some other drafts and figure out how to fix that. And it's not just grafts. I think that are very surprising when you learn how socially intelligent they are. One of the cutest animals that looks sort of like an over own rodent and is but doesn't seem like it has much going on in terms of intelligence are otters, which you know, there are many different species of otters. I think the most famous is probably the sea otter

because they're just they're the cutest otter. I mean, I love all otters. I try not to judge based on appearance, but I think it is pretty objective that sea otters are the cutest ones. Just those little cheeks. Sea otters are extremely cute. I actually, as a child um at a summer camp, kidnapped a stuffed animal sea otter because I couldn't resist how cute he wasn't I didn't want to think about him like in the winter with no one to snuggle him. Yeah, um, so I brought him

home as stuffed You kidnapped the stuff? Uh not a real one? Not a real I think that's called shoplifting. Actually, yes, I I stole him from a like a camp toy bin I see, Yeah, not technically a shop, but also probably not camplifting, atter napping and the most adorable crime, the most adorable time I've ever heard. I'm not an arc. Don't worry, I won't turn you into the outer police.

But yeah, I mean they are they are adorable. Um. I think a lot of people are aware of this otter fact, which is that sea otters will use rudimentary tools to use in aiding them to crack open the shells of shellfish that they like to eat. So either it's a little rock they keep on their tommies that they just kind of uses their favorite little uh abalone shell smasher, or they also use available rocks in the water, so if there's a reef for or sort of rocky coastline,

they'll smash their shellfish against those rocks as well. Um, but that's not the only instance of otter cleverness. They also use kelp forests or even human constructions both to kind of keep as a nursery for their offspring. So they just like kind of bundle their young up and uh some kelp or put them on a boat or something so that they don't float away, because that's a real concern. Aside from just their tool use and their clever use of their environment. You know, they also like

hold hands, which is the cutest thing ever. But yeah, they'll they'll grab their mates hand because they don't want their mate to float away because their main their main form of resting and the ocean is just floating on their backs like little boats, fuzzy cute little boats. But of course they want to stay together with their mate. They'll link hands together so they can be two ships

in the notion of love and it's adorable. Yeah, you just all you have to do is you put your baby in a bunch of help so it doesn't float away, and then you can hold hands with your mate and just float around. Yes, I do. They do also carry their their young like on their tummies. Uh you know, just keeping them safe. But if they need to like get some food, like you know, go hunting, there needs to be some way to keep the baby from floating away.

They also use the kelp force for themselves. They'll like tangle them up that tangle themselves up in the kelps so they don't float away. Um and while they're resting. So yeah, they have a keen sense of sort of naval protocol. Uh. They But there's some kind of interesting observational evidence that uh seems to indicate that otter intelligence goes even deeper than what we may think. So uh see, otters are not really easily available for research. They're not

in a lot of zoos. Uh, you know, they're not. It's not some an animal that you can really sort of post up next to and observe for long periods of time. So it's a little difficult to research. But we have been able to do more studies on other species of otters that are more common in zoos, such as smooth coated otters. So they are not sea otters.

They're fresh water otters found in Southeast Asian India, and they hunt cooperatively and will copy each other when presented with a novel problem such as food stuck in tupperware that must be open. So when researchers present them with a tupperware puzzle with some tasty food stuck inside tupperware that either pulls open or unscrews open, uh, they will

learn from each other. So it might take them a while to figure out, but once one of them has figured it out, a lot of them will quickly get it because they've copied the one that finally figured it out, and the young otters are really fast at that. So the young are definitely quicker learners than the older otters, and they will copy their peers much more quickly to open up the tupperware. It's like young humans who are like, oh, yeah,

I know how to use TikTok It's easy. And then the older humans they're like, I've never seen and anything like this before, a tupperware, a TikTok tack to it's not a shell. Yeah, now, what's a tik tac toe. It's like, yeah, the older otters are like, this shell, it's like plastic e and like it doesn't crack, Like I just don't even know how to deal with this. Oh my gosh, mom, it's called tupperware. Get it together. Yeah, yeah,

I love so embarrassing. Yeah, I just imagine these young ottors rolling their eyes clickity clacking on their little their little shell phone TikTok's like um but uh. And there's Even though this study has not been done with sea otters, there is some anecdotal evidence that seems to indicate they are also much more intelligent than perhaps we give them credit for. So. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, an otter

named kit amuses herself by creating her own puzzles. So she has a plastic board with a number of holes in it that I guess it's just sort of one of these like little ingridgment toys, but she takes it a step further by putting a shrimp on top of it, diving underneath it and trying to figure out how to

grab the shrimp from underneath this board. But every time she ends up getting it, and it's kind of a game of reverse whack a mole because there are these little holes and she'll like put a paw up to try to grab the shrimp wherever it is. And when she gets it, instead of just eating the shrimp, she puts it back on top of the board and dives under to try again. So this is not just a feeding activity. Uh, this is her little game that she's set up for self enrichment. That's so cute. My cat

does something like that. We like to play with twisty ties. Their sisters um and one of them. If you sew the twisty tie, we'll just like chase it, get it. Like then he s hear it again, She chased it, gets it. The other one, poppy seed. If you throw the twist house, she'll go behind like four different chairs so that she has to jump through them in order to get it. She like makes it more complicated for herself. It's very cute. She's got up the challenge. Like you know,

when you could be an utter. Yeah, I think there is something to that, because if you are a complex animal who's intelligent, and you have food readily available to you, like I'm sure you feed your cats, you don't make them subsist in the wild on their own. And these these otters in the zoo are are fed and taken

care of, but they still need that intellectual stimulation. So cats love to play, and this otter, probably in the absence of having to find her own food and figure out how to crack open her own food, which I'm sure the zoo probably also provides enrichment activities. But you know, it's a cushy life, and so she's got to introduce an element of fun and games into it. Yeah. I

think humans can definitely relate to that. Yeah, very I think. Um. Sometimes we're also sort of in denial about animals intelligence, especially when it makes us uncomfortable, such as the intelligence of farm animals and animals that we like to eat. And I'm I'm definitely not coming from a high horse because I personally am not a vegetarian, but I cannot deny that we do underestimate the intelligence of animals that we consume as food. And one such animals are cows.

So cows may not be the smartest of barnyard animals. I think that probably goes to pigs. Um. But that does not mean that they are mindless grass munching sort of empty vessels of meat. Uh. They have performed really

well at memory tasks when it comes to locating quality food. Uh. They can quickly remember a good food location or landmark within a day and remember that association for up to forty eight days, which I think might actually be better than my memories sometimes when it comes to sort of spatial navigation. And they also have a secret social life. They often have a preferred cow friend they like to

hang out with and eat with. So a little more complicated than I think is always comfortable to think about considering that we farm them. Yeah, that's really really good to remember. Um. I think again, like from my perspective, pretty much all animals have have something like that, even that's legible to us that we can see as intelligence. Um, if we just look carefully. And then also on top of that, probably a lot of things that we just don't appreciate because we don't live their lives. I want

to plug. I have a really a poem that I really love about cows by Lydia Is by Lydia Davis. It's just called the Cows, but it's about their movements and how they arrange themselves in space, and she makes it seem very intelligent and beautiful, which it is if you look at it the right way, I think. Um, so yeah, if you want to think a little deeper about cows, that poem is great and ironically excited about

cow poetry. Now great a copy, thank you, but yeah, and in fact, they have recently been found that they can be trained to use the toilet, so by rewarding cows with food for peeing in a special cow toilet uh, and then also sprits ing them with a sprinkler when they go outside the toilet, which I don't think hurts them, but they don't like it. It's kind of like when you bray cat with a spray bottle. They do not

like that. Not appreciated researcher was able to toilet train the cows, so the cows were able to open and close the gate to the bathroom all by themselves, go do their business and come right out. Which well, yeah, I know it's it's you, don't you kind of don't think of a cow. It's being capable of our perception of them as their big, dumb, messy and without really you know, much goals in life other than to eat

grass and you know, past gas. Yeah. I think that that perception seems really new to me too, because if you think about all the older cultures and the you know, non um us cultures that like valorized cows and also even like European like Renaissance paintings of cows. They're such beautiful, amazing, peaceful animals. I think the fact the factory farming system has kind of forced us to look at them in this particular way. But I'm glad that people are starting

to research their abilities. And I think I saw a study last year where cows could use VR goggles or something like Cows and Beer. Yeah, Cows of the Future. Yeah, And I think that was like to see if they could improve cows quality of life through VR, which is it's interesting and I'm not against that kind of research of it. It's also like, maybe we should just give cows a little more space outside. Yeah, right, it's kind of spooky, Like should we put cows in the matrix,

like a cow matrix? Yeah? Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Actually, I think I would have to say that I don't like that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that either. It's because then you're gonna need like a kiyamu reeves to be neo, you know, free all the cows from the cow matrix. I was waiting for it

to land that one. That was really good, thank you, But yeah, the hope for the cow toilet is that it will be more sanitary for the cows that allowed them to keep their living areas clean, giving them some autonomy over their environment, as well as reducing ammonia emissions from their urine, which can be really bad when it sort of gets into the water cycle. It can like contribute to acid rain and run off that can destroy

sort of wetlands and coastal areas. So cow toilets actually could be a vast improvement for for farms, but I think like that would still it's just one piece of maybe completely revamping our factory farm system, because you know, even if you're not a vegetarian, which I'm personally not a vegetarian, but I'm still extremely uncomfortable with factory farming.

I think that if we're going to eat animals, we should at least have the decency to give them a good life, not just sort of basic humane treatment, but actually good quality of life where they can go outside

and have fun cow times. Yeah, totally. I think that's another kind of upshot of the stuff we're talking about here, Like the more we learn about animals and how they like to enjoy life and all the different things that they do with their days, like, it's only logical and like, you know, moral that we should try to help them have lives like that, especially like you said, if we're going to eat them at the end of it. Um, I feel like we kind of owe to them. Yeah.

I am a vegetarian, so I have a very small soapbox, But I also understand that people make different decisions about that kind of stuff. Um. But yeah, I think I think if you ask your average person, they would agree that they wanted it the animals that they interact with

to have good lives. Yeah, I think, And it's something that's going would require some amount of sacrifice for our own just immediate once, like probably it would require are cutting our meat consumption because we simply cannot sustain sort of the massive magnitude of cows we keep in factory farm settings. But I think that in the long run, I think that kind of thing would also be much more beneficial to humans, because I don't think factory farms

are good for human workers. They put smaller farms out of business. They're not They're not great on workers rights and workers safety. We saw that during the pandemic, and

and it's really bad for the environment as well. So I think that when we open our minds to maybe respecting animals we see as dumb or unimportant or expendable, we may actually kind of be able to introspect a little more about how, well, maybe we're viewing this as an inevitable thing, but if we change it, we may actually improve human life as well as well as sort of I think are moral imperative to make sure the animals that we have in our care are you know,

living living, good, comfortable and enjoyable lives, even if we decide to use them as meat eventually. Yeah, I think that's totally true and a really good point. Like we're all connected, especially now, and humans make so many decisions that affect other species. Um, it is really good to think about them through in that way and not not just about like the profit motive or whatever like we're used to having at the top of our minds. Yeah, exactly.

One of my favorite kinds of animal secrets is when you don't even realize it's an animal, or that it's even alive. So, uh, there are lots of animals that like to play dead, and we've talked about some of them on the show. We've talked about uh, We've talked about possums a lot. I love love possums, love their incredible playing dead trick. We've talked about hog nosed snakes.

They also love to play dead. But I think sometimes it's like it seems like a fairly complicated behavior that you would expect from something like Okay, yeah, a possum is pretty intelligent, like you know, even a hog nosed snake. It's like they've they've got a sizeable brain and they can they can, you know, uh, use this to their

advantage to be able to fake out a predator. But you wrote in a recent article about antline larvae who will play dead, which to me is very interesting because it is, you know, when I think about insects, they're one of the more simple animals, no judgment. I love insects. But then you take that and you even take like their larva, it's like this very complicated behavior in such a simple little package. Totally. I love insects. I read about insects a lot, and part of the reason why

is because they're so surprising. Like you said, we have this image of them as simple and they are very small, and their brains are often very small. But um, while people, I think used to think of them as interesting study subjects because they thought of them as like automatons or their program to do certain things, and they have like a limited number of moves, you know, like a video game page or something. Um. We're learning that they're actually

much more complex and interesting than that. Um. And that predator species like praying mantis is um are so complicated in the ways that they are able to catch bugs. And then meanwhile, pray species like antliins are actually really complicated in the ways that they avoid being eaten. Yeah. Yeah, with these antline larvae, Yeah, some of them can play dead for over an hour, which is very difficult to imagine.

Like if you're in a let's say, like a zombie situation and you need to pretend to be dead, like, none of us could do it for an hour. It would be way too hard. You gotta breathe, you gotta My nose would immediately be itching. Like if I had to play, it's like, oh god, but I have to itch my nose. I'd be dead in like two minutes because I'd have to itch my nose. Like just thinking about having to itch my nose makes me want to itch my nose. Yeah, so the antline larvae would all

survive the zombie invasion and we would not Wow. Well yeah, you know, stick that in your pipe and smoke at humanity. Yeah. So you know, it's I think this is something that it touches upon this greater theme of like, you see this animal, it looks it doesn't look like much on the surface, like an antline larvae looks sort of like a creepy little, sort of fuzzy, spiky almost like uh, I don't know, like living tiny pine cone. They don't

you know, they don't they don't look like much. Um, but then they have this incredibly complex behavior of playing dead and then they bank on the fact that they sort of don't look like much too, uh, kind of be bypassed by some predator. This study was really cool because, um, like even the researchers, um, you know, they didn't mean

to find this out. They were something different, um. And they just had picked up a bunch of antline larvae because they wanted to weigh them, and they thought it was going to be really hard because they thought they'd

be skittering around. But as soon as they put them on the scale, the larvae were just we're dead, and the researchers like, we didn't know you could do this, so they decided to sort of look into it, and they found some really impressive um time spans that they could do it for, as well as the fact that the time spend really varies, so different larvae at different times will play dead for very very different amounts of time because it's kind of a group survival strategy where

like maybe like at least some will survive even if others can't, can't do it for long enough. Yeah, yeah, and that almost makes me think it's similar to, you know, the the kind of like gambling thing of of if you are always consistently playing dead for a consistent amount of time, that behavior becomes easier to predict as a predator, whereas if it's very variable, the predator can't figure it out, can't predict it. So it's like with slot machines are gambling.

If you can predict how the slot machine works, you basically can win at the slot machine. But if you can't predict it, it will continu you to trick you the whole time you're there, and you'll lose all your money. Not speaking from experience, I do like how one of the researchers described it as cute, how they seem to demonstrate an abundance of caution when they're playing dead. Yeah, yeah, no, no,

I'm dead. Don't worry about it for hours. I love talking to researchers, especially insect researchers, because they have often such fondness for their subjects, like anybody does when I've worked with something for a long time, and they will call things cute that you would never think of when you when you do pay some attention, you're like, yeah,

that is cute. Yes, yeah, no, that's I think that is to me, an important message to get across in this podcast is things that kind of like gooey or weird. It's like yeah, but if you get to know them, they're they're charming. Sometimes animals don't even seem like they're alive, and it's not even that they're playing dead, but or physical appearance is not what you would expect to find

in a living animal. Uh. And one example of this, which I think is it's really funny, it's this um recent discovery made UH in Japan is a is a pod that looks like a piece of sushi. Marine isopods are these creepy crawley arthropods that can either be small or really huge, like puppy sized. There are these tongue eating louses, which we've talked about before on the show. Uh. They kind of look like overgrown roly pulleys or pill bugs. I think it depends on which regeon you're in what

you call them, but like roly pollies, pillbugs. Maybe some people call them like potato bugs. I'm not really sure what all the different names are, but uh, And the reason they look like giant pillbugs is that pillbugs are also isopods, so their terrestrial isopods. While there are also marine i pods. Usually marine isopods are this pale, ghostly white.

They're a little bit creepy looking, maybe, especially ones that peek out of a fish's mouth just like you know, like ha ha, I'm I'm eating your tongue, which we actually talked about on the last episode. Off the coast of Japan's northern island Hokkaido, one of these was found that was pink and beautiful and it looked exactly like a piece of salmon sushi. It looks delicious. Yeah, I'm looking at this picture. Now, Um, if it were, you know, in a little tray, I probably think it was in

a tray with like some of that little like plastic grass. Yeah, it looks it looks delicious. It looks it has that you know, white banding across it, which is actually it's its segments, but it looks pink and it's it's like and the fact that it's belly is why eat it makes it look like it's a piece of salmon sitting on top of a ball of rice, which I think is what's so funny about this is clearly there's no advantage to this. I a pod looking like a piece

of sushi. This is an example of complete coincidence where we see this thing and it looks like something entirely different, but it has not evolved to look like sushi. It would be so funny if it had, if it involved, like specifically in the context of the whole Foods prepared food section. Right, it just like made its life there. But yeah, I see what you're saying. It's like preying on humans. Somehow we eat it and then it becomes an indo parasite inside us. That's a really cool idea

for a movie. Yeah, yeah, the secret sushi killers. The reason this one is this beautiful pink color and not its normal ghostly white pale color is thought to probably be it's diet. So the aquarium caretakers think this unusual color is because whatever fish that this little guy was a parasite on may have had more, uh more pink coloration or red coloration, and so for some reason, this this little guy was getting this from its diet. It

could also potentially be a mutation. We know that with lobsters, they there are a lot of color mutations, a change in the structure of the proteins in their exoskeleton that can turn them in from bright blue to sort of an orange orange color, which you know, lobsters are not orange. They do not look like cooked lobsters in nature. They look like they have this muddy brown coloration. Right. But yeah, it's I just I just love that. It's like it is seafood, but not the kind of seafood you think

it is. Yeah, No, it's very it's very fun to think about and look at I think carriage everybody to to click through and look at this little guy speaking of something that is seafood but deceptive, is I mean, just imagine you're in a fancy restaurant and a chef just drops this big gray, craggley rock in front of you, and you know, kind of looks at you expectantly and you're just like, okay, thanks for the rock, I guess.

Then the chef takes out a big butcher's knife slices into the rock, and it reveals like this marbled flesh inside. You're not on an alien planet. You are on Earth and you are lucky enough to try some meat rock known as Pyora chilensis. So this is extremely cool. Yeah, it looks like it looks like a photoshop or or an alien because it literally looks like a rock that you slice into and there's a bunch of sort of

reddish orange or guns inside. And this thing is actually alive and it is a Tunic hit also known as a c squirt, a much cuter name than tunicate. But we've actually talked about tunicates a little bit before on the show. How they start off life as a weird little tadpole creature and then they attached themselves to a rock, and as an adult they become completely sessile or immobile, and uh, they will grow this sort of hard cellulose like tunicate or tunate shell. Uh, it's not really a shell.

It's like this. It's actually really weird because it is structurally very similar to plant cellulose, but it is obviously coming from and animal. And so for the this meat rock tunique, it it is a little different from some of the marine tunicates we've talked about before, because a lot of tunic kates are these really beautiful, bright, vibrant colors. They look almost like plants or like some kind of

alien trumpet with bright purples and yellows. But Piora chilensis it just looks like a big, gray, weird rock until you cut into it. Yeah, it's really surprising to see the inside. It's really shocking. Yeah, yeah, it's it looks it looks it looks completely alien or completely made up. Looks sort of like a Cronenberg creation from one of his movies. It's called pure in Spanish, and it's commonly

found off the coast of Chile. So they're often used in cuisine because those chunks of meat inside the quote unquote rock exterior are apparently quite tasty, both raw and cooked. Apparently it tastes like a stronger sea urchin with a sort of cilantro soap be taste, which I'm not going to judge because I've never actually eaten it, but to me, soapy doesn't sound like something i'd want to eat. But you know, if it is used enough, it must it must have it must have some some good flavor going

on there. It's just so funny to think about, like it's such a human thing, um apparently also an otter thing to just like pick something up, crack it open and being like can I eat that? Yeah, something we

share with the otters. Yeah, yeah, I mean there was there was a YouTube video of some guy like cutting into these things and like stabbing these things, and it was actually taken down for graphic content, which I think is that is kind of funny because they are all sorts of YouTube videos of people like gutting fish, and you know, it's like it's the same thing, but somehow meat Rock was a little too far for YouTube standards. Totally. Yeah.

Like I mentioned earlier, like most tunic its, the this this meat Rock starts off life as actually a mobile little tadpole thing, uh that lives in the ocean, and then it'll attach itself to a rock, and in fact, like with a lot of tunic its, it goes through this this metamorphosis where it actually depletes its brain size and increases its stomach capacity, and so it starts it really kind of emphasizes the ability to suck food in

through the csiphone on Thanksgiving, right, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, that's I mean, like brain off, mouth open. That's my philosophy. That's my Thanksgiving philosophy. And this is this little guy's philosophy. And then it grows into this this rock like uh creature, and that heart exterior called a tunic in which, like I mentioned earlier, it's made out of a weird animal

version of cellulose uh. And then underneath that layer of tunquin is in a sort of skin and then muscle in organs, so very strange um and also even weirder and more alien is its blood is actually clear and full of vanadium, which is a rare chemical element whose role in the tunicuets circulatory system is really unclear. We don't know why. Yeah, yeah, And I can't figure out

the anatomy of it. I tried, and I looked for diagrams, but it's like you cut into and there's just all these like meaty chunks, and I'm assuming one of the chunks is like the pharynx, maybe the digestive tract. Probably one of them's the gonads, which they're hermaphroditic, which allows them to reproduce a sexually or sexually, which is handy because if you're basically living your life as an immobile rock and you happen to pick a neighborhood that no

other tuniquets set up shopping, you're out of luck. So you gotta be like, well, it's just me and myself and it's you know, I gotta gotta make babies somehow. This is like a good challenge for me. As I said before, I really try to see the like cool smart aspects of every creature, and the farther away you get from the human lifestyle and body plan, the more of an exercise and imagination that can be UM. And this guy is just like I have on faith um to me in my heart. He is very smart, meat

rock talented, but how like what's his deal? Well, he's seeing a meat rock is very impressive. But like what else? I mean he or she and often often both like he this this little thing it's like, well, it's not always that little actually can get to be kind of a sizeable rock, uh shape sort of thingy. It it seems to like it's one of these weird things where kind of a Benjamin Buttons because it starts out life with much more brain power, much more of a nervous

system that it sort of ends up at. So maybe that's that was the good decision, was getting rid of getting rid of its ability to think, and yeah, investing it all into the ability to like suck food in and filter it out and just live good life as a little gray rock. Maybe that's maybe that was that's the wisdom the whole the whole time. Yeah, good to

learn front. That's a really good point. M So one of my favorite of the sort of articles that you're right are on these mysterious glowing animals that keep popping up, and it is something that I've been falling a little bit on the podcast, and it's just it seems like every month or two there's a new animal. They're like,

this one glows too. So we're talking about biofluorescence in mammals, and there are a lot of animals that biofluoresce like reptiles and arthropods and marine animals, but no, like seeing biofluorescence in mammals is or it was up until recently, very unexpected. Can I just give a little breakdown of the inferences between these kinds of things. Yeah, So there's a couple of different kinds of of glowing when it

comes to animals. Um. So the one that we're talking about right now that has been observed in mammals recently and then before that in amphibians and some reptiles is is UV fluorescence. So when you put these animals under a UV light or expose them too strong UV light, um, they have mints or other chemicals or molecules in there

for or their you know, carapaces or wherever. That kind of transfer forum the light that's being absorbed into a different color of light and admit it within the visible spectrum. So it's like if you are at like a black light party and you have a glow stick or you have like a white T shirt. Your white T shirt is doing that same thing. It's like taking in light that's invisible to you and emitting it as like a

really bright blue color that you can see. So that's what those animals are doing, and then a lot of the underwater glowing from marine creatures, like marine creatures are much better at actually creating their own light. Yeah, which is which is a bioluminescence not biofluoresce. Yeah, so there's two different kinds. Um, we're talking about biofluorescence, and some people argue that we shouldn't call it biofluorescence because it's not like a living property, it's like a material property.

But I think it's okay because they're talking about a material property in a living things. Yeah, it's really it's really wild. Yeah, I mean yeah, so so marine life, you're right, absolutely right, Like there's a lot of bioluminescence, So that that's the kind of thing you see in angler fish or zooplankton, uh, diatoms sometimes um or or

even like things like fox fire fungus will bioluminous. I think that's the action for bioluminous but um but that is where the glow is produced by a chemical reaction and it is visible with the naked human eye. Typically biofluorescence, like you mentioned, is actually the animal skin or fur or whatever, or it doesn't have to be an animal can even be minerals or plants absorbing UV light and

then re emitting it at a different wavelength. And we can only see that when we are basically pumping in uh UV light and then seeing it re emitted in a longer wavelength than it was originally. And there there are also actually, to even get more confusing, there are marine animals that bio fluoresce and so bioluminous. Uh So, sharks do not are not bioluminescent, They don't provide their own chemical reaction that makes them glow, but they do biofluoress,

so they will glow under UV light. And there's some debate about like what this does, like is sharks are sharks using this social communication? Um. But even stranger is the fact that we're just finding more and more mammals who biofluoress, which you know, a reminder that is the UV light thing. So there is an ever growing list. I'm just gonna go through, uh some of the ones

that I have compiled. Uh So, one of the more recent ones is the spring hair, which you just wrote about in the New York Times, which has maybe one of the coolest patterns of biofluorescence because they seems to like be these orange and pink glowing swirls like some kind of alice in Wonderland creature. Yeah, it's like a pokemon. I think they're really cool. That's my favorite one too. That's the most recent one that's been sort of like

officially described. It's mostly one research group that's really digging into this right now, although even like people from zoos and people in their backyards are doing some like less rigorous experimentation with it or exploration with it. But the spring hair is amazing and the patchiness of the pattern is really cool because, like when you're talking about a material property, people who don't think that. The question for a lot of people is like does this fluorescence have

any utility for the animal? Like can the animals doesn't help the animals see each other or actually like see each other less well, or be seen by predators less well, because you can imagine like if your fur is absorbing UV light and then emitting it at a different wavelength, like maybe you're actually hiding from a predator that can see UV light and would otherwise see this light reflected off of you. Um, so it could be actually like

a camouflage mechanism. But people really argue about whether or not that's true. And the thing about the spring hair having like a patchy pattern is that some of like the hair is not um different in other ways, right, like why would some of the hairs be fluorescing and some of them not if it was just the I are the h I are on, Yeah, the fur is all the same, and so if the pattern is different but the fur is otherwise the same, then maybe the pattern does have some sort of utility or else, like

why would it be there. So that's really exciting to me. And different hairs h A R E have different pattern um. That is really Yeah, that is so cool and it's it kind of makes me think of sort of the the shark biofluorescence, where they also have these different patterns. So uh. Some researchers are wondering if this is a social thing, like a way to identify different individuals, But it's hard to know because we would first that they

must be able to actually see it. And I think there's some evidence that shark guys are able to see uh UV light, but I don't think we know. We don't necessarily know about the spring hair yet. UM, which by the way, is an absolutely adorable animal. Spring hair is a it's a large rodent that looks like you crossed a kangaroo with a mouse. And uh they and they actually live in uh the southern tip of Africa, so uh, they are not a marsupial, but they do

kind of look like a marsupial um. But what I mean, that's one of the weird things though about these glowing animals. And I don't know if this is just an artifact of the way the research is going, like are we testing this on more marsupials and monotreams or something, because it seems like a lot of these animals that are biofluorescing are either monotreams meaning like platypuses or kidnas, or are um marsupials like wombats, Tasmanian devils, bilbies, possums, bandicoots.

Just yeah, it's it's so strange. I can I can answer at least part of that question. The flipping answer is that Australia is really weird. All the animals in Australia are really weird. I don't know what they're getting

up to at any given five um. But that's that's that's not my real answer, which is that, um, the group that is studying this really rigorously thinks that the things that these animals have in common so far are that they are like crepuscular nocturnal, so they're active at night and in the evening and at dawn, which is like also a time when the light conditions are different obviously than during the day. UM, And that they're not predators like their their prey animals mostly or at least

they have predators. So that kind of also supports the idea that maybe they are using this to hide somehow. UM. The Australia thing is because so outside of that group that is doing like a little bit of more rigorous experimentation, there are places that have done just sort of like shine a black light all around in the museum and see what happens. And one of those people, one of those groups was an Australian museum that did a lot of light shining on their like taxidermed bilbies and stuff

and found a lot of glowing. But it hasn't been sort of rigorously um verified. So there's clues that maybe these Australian mammals all have this, but it hasn't really been shown yet. The ones that have it has been shown for um more definitively are platypus, the flying squirrel, or at least um some species of flying squirrel, some

species of a possum. Yes, and the spring hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's I think this is so interesting, and it's one of those things where once you kind of open up that Pandora's box of shining black lights on mammals to see which one of them glows, it's like, well, we have to keep going until we've tested it on every animal because it could be like we may be seeing some pattern, but until we know which animals do this, it's like, well, it could be that we just haven't

we haven't shown black lights on on enough animals. And I feel like one of the difficulties is you can't just walk up to a nocturnal animal with a black light and like, could you hold still? Well, I see if you're glowing, because they're not gonna they're not going

to react kindly to that. In fact, it seems like a lot of the tests are either done on already dead animals that have been taxidermine or people just going out to the roads at night and shining a black light on roadkill, which I love it, but it's one of the more questionable activities you're me as a researcher.

I feel like if a police officer stopped you and you're it's like, well what are you doing, It's like, oh, well, I just you know, I'm shotting this black light on a road kill to see if you know some of them glow. You need a cover story. You're getting arrested for that. But sure, I like the spring hair study because they I don't think they could do this with the platypus one, but for that one, they were able to, um, go to a zoo and find some spring hairs and

like give them peanuts and take pictures of them. Um. So you've got all these really cute, like little model posts of the very passive, beautiful glowing springares eating a peanut yea, rather than these poor mangled road kill glowing hands that totally it's a smushed, smushed platypus that that glows a beautiful color. Um. But just to kind of give everyone a sense of the magnitude of how many of these animals have shown some signs of biofluorescence UM

and what they look like. Uh, here here's a probably in complete list I've compiled of who's glowing and what they kind of look like. So, uh, sort of bluish

green glow all over their bodies. It seems like platypus uh and wombat maybe weakly bright white glowing spines seems to happen with a kidneas Tasmanian devils, which are interesting because they are now I they may have some predators, but they're mostly the predator themselves and they get into conflicts with each other, but not as much with other animals. But they do have seem to have some biofluorescence, especially around their faces um which kind of it's like they

have like blue highlighted features. Uh. Flying squirrels tend to have glowing underbellies. So there are a few species of flying squirrels that seem to biofluoresce and they have these like p glowing under belly which is adorable. Greater bilbies seem to have glowing white ears, and then ghost bats

are very appropriately named, seemed to have glowing yellow wings. Again, just to reiterate, this is all under UV light, so we can't see this with the naked eye um striped possum may have some sort of highlighter pink glowing abilities, and crefts gliders, which are sort of like a sugar glider or flying squirrel in appearance, seem to have glowing blue bellies, which I think is interesting because you have the flying squirrels which have glowing pink bellies, and then

another glider and its belly glows blue um, and then these I saw some indication that they do glow, but I couldn't find like what color they glow. But long nosed bandicoots anti chinas and tree kangaroos maybe with a big maybe there's like a really old um observation of

tree kangaroos. I don't think they've like replicated that, partially because tree kangaroos are very very very rare, and I think like, weren't they recently like thought to have been They were thought to have been very completely extinct and then like recently they kind of found some wild population or am I getting that confused with another animal? Oh? I don't know. I'm not up on my tree kangaroos, but I hope they're okay, you're not to date on

your tree kangaroo trivia. Yeah, No, there there are there are certain species of tree kangaroos which were thought to have been extinct up until and that was the Wanda Boy tree kangaroo. Um. So yeah, it's they're elusive, so we don't know, we don't know they're glowing secrets. But yeah, it's just it's it's wild to me how there are

so many animals. That's like, you know, we've never tried shining a black We've never taken these animals to array wave in their lives, and so we don't know if they glow like someone at Cotchella under a black light. So there's really only one solution, which is to do like a sort of Noah's Ark style rave. Yeah, yeah, one pair of every species in the same place, and we just go for it exactly and everybody gets like a wrist band since yeah, the most exclusive rave in

the world, the Noah's are Grave. I love that. But yeah, it is really curious and as far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, care, but we still don't know exactly why they glow like this. The the answer has yet to been definitively proven or even thoroughly studied. Yeah, nobody really knows, and a lot of people argue that there couldn't possibly be a reason. Yeah, it's actually it's one of my favorite types of scientific question, which is the like really st eric one that still

inspires ferocious angry debate. Yes, I love it when biologists get mad. I know, it's really fun. People have. Often the people who you know, discover this have maybe a bit of a vested interest in it being um having some sort of use, although of course they're also a rigorous scientists and they want to prove it for sure.

So often I'll talk to the authors of the papers and they'll have a bunch of theories, and then I'll talk to somebody outside and they'll say, like, no way, you know, or we have to do so much more work to even get close to that. But people have come up with some really good theories. What are some of those theories that you've heard without you know, this is clearly we don't know yet whether any of these

are true without further study totally. So UM. One of the ones is what I mentioned before, UM, in terms of hiding from predators through camouflage, so making themselves actually sort of counterintuitively less visible because obviously, like if you saw a platypus. Even in the moonlight, you wouldn't see it glowing. It would just look like a normal platypus, unless you happen to have a black light, because as you mentioned, you were a freaky researcher looking for kill

with a black light. UM So, I think one of the kind of confusing things that you have to remember when you're reading studies like this is like the pictures that we show to um like demonstrate the phenomenon, that's not what you would see in real life without a black light, not what another platypus would see. So you kind of have to like move one step beyond that and think about, um, okay, so what what another platypus

see or what would a platypus predator see? And a lot of predators yet can see UV light much better than people can, and so it's possible that a platypus that would normally be reflecting this UV light so that it was visible, is instead absorbing it and transmitting a different frequency, so the predator actually maybe can see it a little bit worse. So that's one possibility. It's sort of like the wearing the black turtleneck in a heist movie.

Because black will absorb light, and so you know, when you try to shine a light off of a black turtleneck, the museum guards don't see. And you can steal the diamond and you can shine a black light on all those specimens in the downstairs rooms. Yeah, or steal the hook down or both if you're having a really good because because these animals are often crepuscular or nocturnal, you're not getting a huge amount of like UV light at

night at all. So it's that makes it more mysterious where it's you know, they're not they're not absorbing huge amounts of UV light. We can only see it because we sort of pump them with this like little mini UV light ray that makes them, you know, leak out all these longer wavelengths of visible light that we can see after we are just like pumping them chopped full

of UV light. Yeah. Another theorious that, like as we know you be, light can be kind of harmful cells um, and so some people think that maybe by sort of taking it in and transforming it, the fur is protecting

like the vulnerable skin from being exposed to UV. Almost love that I would love some kind of like sunscreen that also biofluorescence, so I can like, during the day protect my red head, protect like my redhead skin from the sun, and then at night go to rave and it's like, instance, party all night, not get skin cancer during the day. One of the coolest examples that I've seen lately. I wrote this up like last month for

the New York Times. UM was there's this these species of paper wasps and and uh oh I saw your article on that. I'm excited. Yeah, it's cool. Um. It's mostly the coolest ones are in Vietnam, but they're found in other places as well. And the larva of these wasps, you know, spin their own cocoons out of silk and kind of stay in there while they're a better morphosizing UM, and so are metamorphizing. And that they found that again

by accident because of their ubi lights. UM found that the silk of the cocoon is really really strongly UV fluorescent, like way stronger than anything yet discovered in nature. It's like, that's bright green. It looks like I mean, it almost looks brighter than a glow stick to me. Yeah, it's super bright. It's almost like like if a tree was growing like a tennis ball. You're like, yeah, yeah, it's

really cool. And uh. One of the researchers said to me that his theory and again like it's this really requires further testing, is that when the larvae are metamorphizing into wasps, they need you know, photo period signals. They need to know how long the days are because that helps them figure out like when it's time to do certain things. So they need to be have access to the light conditions of the forest, but they maybe want

to be protected from UV. So by having these little glowing um, you know, not glowing but biofluorescent cocoon caps, maybe it's like keeping the UV out while still letting the light inside. So almost like you have of um, like I don't know, like a little led in your room that tells you when it's light out without exposing

you to the light. Like maybe you're a vampire or something and you need to stay time and when it's not but you don't want to be exposed to the having a windows treated with some kind of like UV protection like you get on sunk totally yeah exactly, um, and so looks really fluorescent, but to them it's like a protective but information giving yeah, which is really cool, which I think is it's like another one of these things that we have to we can't be so like

you know, anthrocentric or anthropocentric, where we uh, we think that in terms of like, well, they're glowing to us when we flash the the the black light on it. So it's so it must be have something to do with the glowing nature of this that gives them an advantage, but could be completely unrelated to the fact that they they buy O fluoresce. It could have to do with

like the way they absorb the UV light. It could be thermoregulation, uh, which is sometimes the case with like these There are these snakes that have this iridescence to their scales. It's beautiful and so you think, well, is this like, uh some kind of mate selection because it's

so beautiful. Well, no, they don't care. Uh. It's probably more to do with the fact that structurally these scales are made so that they can absorb heat um better, such that they can thermoregulate, so not getting too cold and not getting too hot. So the fact that they look like magical fairy princess snakes is just incidental, But

it's the it's the thermoregulation that's important. So something similar could be going on with these uv patterns where it could it could either be that it's helping them, you know, absorb uvy raise either for their benefit or to protect them from the harm, or you know, for some kind of thermoregulation, or it could be um could be completely incidental.

So it could be that the structure of the the proteins and the fur that like our biofluorescing just happened to biofluoresce, but they are structured in such a way that makes the fur like more protective for the animal or healthier. And in evolutionary biology, this is typically referred to as an evolutionary spandrel, So it's when something happens in evolution like there's some structure or some trait and it is incidental. So it's a byproduct of other structures

that are necessary for an animal's evolutionary survival. And I think it comes from architecture, which I know a great deal less about, but I think it's basically when you have an archway, you have like these places where the arch meets the wall, and so it's like this chunk of basically unused space. So architects it off and like decorate these these spandrels with designs, and then people would sometimes wonder like what is this, What is the structural

purpose of this? And it's like, well, there's no structural purpose. It's just there because it has to be there because of the way the arch meets the wall, and so you might as well decorated as an architect. So yeah, so before we go, we have to answer the question from last week of guests who's talking? So every week I play a mystery animal sound and you the listener, and you the guests, try to guess, Hey, who's talking?

Who the heck is that? And just as a reminder, last week's hint is that its name sounds like a collaboration between a biologist, a heavy metal band, and a hairdresser. Kind of sounds like a man drake or uh, scary baby. It's actually, yeah, I think I know exactly what it is. It's my cat peppercorn when she wants to go out ros. How did you know? How did you get into my house to record peppercorn? Yet? Well, do you have any

guesses other than peppercorns? Okay, so you said a biologist, a metal band, and a hairdresser got together to name this thing. So it's probably like a bird with something weird on its head, but that's usually the answer. Um, this screaming mohawk parakeet is my god, you're you're so close. You're a little bit off by like the alum and actual animals, but in terms of the name, in terms of the actual name, you're very close. So this is

actually the screaming Harry armadillo. Oh, what is an armadillo. It's an armadillo. So this is found in South America and it is indeed in armadillo. It is indeed Harry, and it does in fact scream as you just heard.

If you pick one up, they start shrieking uh. And it is thought that this is sort of the like um car alarm effect because they're not really that social, so this is not thought to be a warning call to other individuals in its species, but it's thought to either startle predators when they pick them up, or to make a predator afraid that an even bigger predator is going to approach, which I think is a really interesting gambit.

We've seen in a few prey animals where they will just make huge commotion and then that freaks out the predator. That's like, well, okay, I was trying to go in this sneakily, but if you're screaming like something bigger might come and actually eat me while I'm trying to eat you. So I think it worked on me because uh, it's just it's sounds like a demon baby m hmm. Yeah. No, I would definitely put it down if it did that. All right, And now onto this week's mystery animal sound.

Here's a hint, not so fast. This isn't who you think it is, kar Do you have any guesses? This is a very sneaky and tricky one. So it sounds like that despite how it sounds, it's not an adorable small bird who will help me get dressed for the ball. Um, So no, I don't. I have no idea. I I've been extremely sneaky with this one. I'm I almost feel a little mean about it, but I still keep my lips tightly sealed until next week when we reveal the answer.

And if you out there listeners think you know what this is, you can write to me a Creature feature Pot at gmail dot com, Creature feature Pot on Instagram, or Creature feet Pot on Twitter. That's e E teeth. That is something very different. Um. But Karen, thank you so much for joining me today. Uh, and for giving all your wisdom and insight. Uh that usually I would have to go and read your articles to get Yeah, this is in some ways more efficient. In some ways

probably a lot less efficient. But I really appreciate being invited on and I had a great time. Well where can people find all your awesome articles? And where can people find you online? Yeah? So I'm on Twitter at see j jimo that's ce j G. I A I m o um and then I right pretty frequently for The New York Times. And I'm working on this book for Alice Obscura that won't be up for a while, but when it is, I will tell you where you

can get it. I'm excited for that. Uh. And of course I just told you where you can find the podcast online. You can find me online at Katie Golden on Twitter. I don't always tweet about animals, but when I do, it's they're really weird. Yeah, thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you leave a rating and review, I will just be grateful

forever and ever. I'll never forget it. I actually do read all the reviews and I really appreciate all of them, and thank you so much for to the Space Classics where they're super awesome. Song x 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 Podcast, or Hey guess what, I don't care. Where you listen to your favorite shows. You can do it from inside of Meat Rock. See if I care, I

don't judge you. See you next Wednesday. M