The REAL Shark Tank

they all smell terrible? Joining me today is Friend of the Pod, Friend of Me, Katie and host of a podcast that I like to describe as a warm blanket that educates you, called secretly incredibly fascinating. Welcome Alex Schmidt. It is so good to be here. I'm glad to be in this blanket. Feels nice wintertime, northern hemisphere. Gotta bundle up. Yeah, just a blanket of education about animals.

Thankfully it's not a blanket man out of real animals, because that would probably be very stinky, being kind of clawing you, you know, biting at you, a lot of mucus maybe depending on the animal. Just saying one of one of Nature's greatest gifts is the fiber animal, where you can shear them and receive the fiber and you don't have to use the actual animal a time. It worked out great. Thank you Nature, Thank you sheep, thank

you sheeple. But yes, so we are talking about how animals stack up to real life inventions, and sometimes animals can inspire inventions. Um. But first I want to talk about animal smell. And smell is one of those things that to me is very mysterious and ephemeral because you got this nose. Look if I if I, if I smell funny today, you can just say so, like I know, it's so bad. It comes through a zoom and I'm

working on it. Okay, I was gonna say. They're like stink plumes coming out of the computer, like like green stink lines like in cartoons, and some little some little flies hovering around. Yeah, I do. I do. Every every Christmas, I receive a Peanuts collection, and the one from this Christmas like pig Pen as the cover boy. Pig Pen is very much on my mind all the time. Now. I just think about the dirtiest character in cartoons frequently.

The classic pig Pin stink lines. Unfortunately, we cannot see smell and we can't We can't send smells over the internet yet, which I would love. I would love that if we could, because then you read a recipe instead of getting the huge prayamble before on the recipe about like their childhood or their favorite dog or something. It's like, it's the smell of the cooked product over the internet.

We don't have that technology yet. Humans, we have great eyes, sight, great cognitive ability, and you know, decent smell, a decent sense of smell, but by far it is not the best sense of smell in the animal kingdom, Alex, what animal would you guess has the best recorded sense of smell? I always I feel like cartoons told me dogs. I'll

go with dogs. Cartoons. Once again, I'm leading on essentially snoopyed out, which is maybe typical, But cartoons told me that if a dog is hungry enough, it'll hallucinate you as a giant steak and float over there like on the smell lines coming out of the giant steak that is you. Yeah, especially if you're a very tall, skinny guy, you'll be imagined as a hot dog. And if you're sort of a rounder, wider guy, you'll be a hamburger because it's just science, folks. Yeah, exactly, it's science. Look

it up, read a book. So yeah, so how do you even test the sensitivity of an animal's nose Because you can't like take an old sock and hold it up to a variety of animals and like see who passes out. There's got to be some scientific method with it. So researchers have studied old factory receptor genes. So the old factory UH system is the UH the smelling, the smell, the sniffer, and we have genes that will have genetic

information relating to our old factory receptors. So there are a variety of mammalian species that researchers have looked at and they have found that, first of all, there's a ton of genes across these species that will code for for smell receptors. They've identified a total of ten thousand old factory genes over thirteen mammals that they studied, and in contrast, these mammals shared only an average of three

same genes amongst each other. So that means that out of ten thousand total identified receptor genes, they've only found that they're about three of them that these thirteen mammals they've studied share. So each animal species seems to have their very own unique library of old factory receptor genes. Three out of ten thousand that are that crossover. This

is incredible. So there's a huge diversity of genes that when it comes to old factory receptors and uh, they have studied how many genes each species has, and the knows the researchers studied that belonged to the animal with the most old factory gene means was also the nose that makes this sound. So, Alex, who do you think that is? I ran out of the room screaming, I'm sorry.

Maybe maybe this sound will help you whittle it down a little more So among the animals studied, elephants are the clear winner when it comes to number of old factory genes. So they have two thousand genes that code for old factory receptors. In comparison, dogs only had one thousand, and humans and chimps had fewer than four hundred of these genes. I feel like that's tracking with Schna's length. I know that's not how it works, but I like it.

I mean, that's not necessarily a bad idea. Elephant trunks are incredibly long, incredibly complex. So the idea that maybe because they have this really long trunk it could also be more sophisticated when it comes to smell, it is not. I don't think that's a I think that is probably pretty accurate. Man. It's like it's like a Christmas stocking, Like the longer it is, the more candy you're gonna get. It is fantastic. Just filling it with jeans in the night,

and that eating cookies and milk got in Santa. I guess in this case also evolution. It's a lack going on. I mean, Darwin is kind of like an evolution Santa. I guess when you think about it, He's got the beard, he's got the jolly belly that he fills with eating animals he just discovered. So you know, instead of leaving out cookies for Darwin, Santa, you leave out a plate of some rare turtle from the Galapagos Islands so that he can eat it. Okay, kids, let's prepare the plate

of finches like whoa, whoa? What? Hold on? Like he likes he likes to taste everything. He studies. An entire wooden English ship lands on your roof. It's terrible, huge hall marks on it. Remember some orange slices. Kids, they've all got scurvy. So the question is does the number of our factory genes necessarily translate to a better sense of smell, because if they have, If elephants have about two thousand of these genes and dogs only have one thousand,

our elephants twice as good at smelling as dogs. Well, we don't know exactly how the number of genes transcribes to goodness of smelling skills, but it does seem that more of these genes indicates better senses of smell. So research has shown that Asian elephants are at least as good as mice, who have around hundred old factories genes at telling the difference between smells. So elephants have a

lot of really amazing smell skills. They're able to recognize their family members based on the smell of urine, which I guess is one way to do business cards. Basically, an elephant business card is p That's why I don't put it in my wallet. Yeah, that's why elephant hands you this big, stinky, soggy card and it's just covered in its urine. Imagine like meeting an elephant who you can communicate with and being like, I'll still need a

business card to remember this. I need a lot of elephants I communicate with, Like, give me, give me something I can hang on too for this memory. Yeah, put it in the rollodex under elephant. Uh, people don't there's there aren't even really business Do people still use business cards anymore? They certainly don't use rolodex as I know that. Yeah, I made some for me in my show, but I yeah, I don't meet people in person very often, so I

I just sort of have them. It's mainly been useful for like, if I meet someone who I want to convince to like listen to it, I can just give them that instead of that's a great idea. I feel like I should do a business card. But it's a scratch and sniff and you scratch and it's sniff you sniff and it smells like skunk or like the or a bent a wrong anal gland, or maybe maybe a

beaver anal gland, and it will smell like vanilla. We actually talked about that on Alex's show because it's yeah yeah, So just hop over to cast storium dot com promo code. It's a promo code creature for your very own vial of beaver or anal gland castorrium which has the lovely smell and flavor of vanilla. So elephants can also detect the difference and smells between two groups of people, especially

when their life is at stakes. So they can smell the difference between populations of people and will avoid people who hunt them, and they are less avoidant of people who don't pose a threat to them. So when they are presented with clothes worn by people from a certain village or group who are more likely to hunt them, the elephants show more of a fear response versus clothes from the same types of clothes from another group where

they are much less likely to hunt the elephants. Additionally, and this is um this is unrelated to their sense of smell, but to their intelligence, they can tell the difference in humans based on their voices, their accent, the color of their clothes, and they will wreck ignize them and take a note of it. So if there's a group of people who are more likely to hunt elephants or to kill elephants. They will avoid and learn their accents.

It's really incredible. Yeah, so I this is thrilling for me, especially because I used to be a zoo tour guide, right, and so I'd be on a tram going around a zoo, projecting my voice through a speaker system as we, among other things, went past elephants. This leads me to believe they got to know me. This is probably. This is really cool. Yeah, absolutely, hide your smell on. They're like, hey, look at those stink lines. It must be Alex Schmidt. Yeah that too, Yeah, the honey voiced pig pan of

Brookfield Zoom Alex Schmidt. There is is that on your business card? The honey voiced pigpen of the zoo? Yeah? Yeah. And then they forget my podcast completely, they do. They're distracted. You need to work on your elevator pitch. It's like, hey, what's your podcast? Like, okay, so I'm disgusting first of all, and I met some elephants this one time. It's not like five year old telling a story like just constant random details. It's like, I'm disgusting. That does not narrow

down podcast hosts. I'm sorry, that is like all podcasts. We're disgusting. So this is what happens when you have a non visual medium. We just you know, there's no motivation there right now, there's like there's like an old sock sort of stuck to my forehead. You know. It's just there needs to be some accountability and there is none. It's just exactly those Monty Python peasants every time thing and it's one guy shouting about leftism. It really fits. Yeah,

that's that's exactly it for every podcast. They're all the same. So furthermore, elephants show a greater sense of smell than even dogs in terms of their accuracy. So elephants have been shown to be able to distinguish between different quantities of food. So, Alex, when you're smelling some food and it's like there's a bowl of I don't know what's a good what's a good food? You like the smell of, oh,

something about spaghetti? Spaghetti? I love spaghetti to um. So you gotta plate of spaghetti with your favorite toppins with your with meatballs and and marinara sauce, parm lots of harm, just heaps of farm and you have another plate of spaghetti and they're behind a curtain, And if you had to smell these two plates of spaghetti, would you be able to tell the difference between a plate that's like

more spaghetti than the other plate. Like, hey, this is like a big heap of spaghetti and this is just sort of a medium heap of spaghetti. I would never know amounts. That's amazing. Yeah, neither can dogs. So take that, dogs, You're not so great? Uh That I said to my dog today when I was researching this is like, ha ha, See you and I aren't so different. Think you better than me just because you've got more sensitive nos how we treat if I got in my hand, you don't know? Well?

Funny interesting. So I'm also realized that I set us up for a dog eating spaghetti, which is pure lady on the tramp stuff. Yeah again, teaching us all tramp imagining the waiters is like giant steaks eat some It might be thinking of a different movie. Even though dogs

cannot do this task, Asian elephants can. Asian elephants in Thailand were tested on this task, and they were able to tell the difference between buckets of sunflower seeds, because apparently elephants like some flower seeds, and they would have these two opaque buckets with little holes in it so the smells could come out, but you couldn't see into them with different quantities of sunflower seeds, and they would consistently pick the bucket with more sunflower seeds based on

smell alone. And this was even when the quantity between the buckets only different by like a hundred seeds or so. So that's absolutely amazing that they can smell quantities they can count with their nose. Yeah, that's that's such a higher level. Yeah, man, it's smell math. And I like that they like sunflower seeds because I associate that snack

with baseball. So that makes me imagine an elephant playing baseball, hold the bat with the trunk, really good eaten sunflower seeds, spitting them out with his trunk, like like he's using his trunk as sort of a gattling gun and he's spitting seeds out of it. This is definitely a cartoon. I think that must exist. And you learned, so we learned so much from cartoons, like how elephants play baseball. Unfortunately, we don't really have any human inventions that can give

us like super smell. We have things like binoculars or telescopes that can give us super sight. We even have ways to amplify audio to give us superhearing, but there is no device that can give you super smell, at

least not yet. There is some research to creating a smell implant that would function similarly to a cochlear implant that could help restore the sense of smell for people who have lost their smell due to traumatic injury, which is really important because a sense of smell, it's both for safety being able to smell smoke or gas, but also being able to smell food, and your smell has such a big impact on your quality of life, being able to smell the fragrance of everyday things, being able

to enjoy your meals better because smell actually plays a huge role in our enjoyment of meals. So being able to restore people's sense of smells actually this huge area of medicine that we really need to have more breakthroughs in, and so it's it's really interesting. Uh, the the research is very preliminary. At this point, I saw like there was some prototype for one of these potential smell implants.

And it's like a like a little smell microphone that was attached to a pair of sunglasses that would like dangle in front of your nose, send that information to an external process sissor, and then that would go into an implant in your brain. Uh. This has not ever been tried on a human before. So the image was like on as human skull or a you know, fake skull, and so it was like the skull wearing sunglasses. I

mean for yeah, forget the small part. I just wanted to skull wearing sunglasses just like my avatargrapher stuff and sounds pretty cool. It's like it's like, yeah, what is cooler than a skull wearing sunglasses? Nothing? Maximum coolness. Yeah, maybe if he's were like riding a skateboard doing a kip, kick a clip on a skateboard skeleton, sunglasses peak cool

can't get cooler. So even though there are no like super smell binoculars that you can stick up your nose like that future Ama, I think there was a thing in Futurama where the professor had like a smelloscope which was like a telescope but for smells, and he used it to smell different planets, which is funny because astronauts talk about how space has a weird smell. But yeah, we're not we're not there yet. We don't have smell scopes,

but there is a smellometer. So it may not give you a better sense of smell, but it's how you can detect the intensity of odors. And it's called drum roll. The nasal ranger. The nasal Rangers, I'm just imagined rangers a bunch of teenagers and robots suits that form a giant knows sniffing out crime like and your absorb will be the right nostril. They're like, okay, okay, were is this going? And yours will be the septom Uh what part is that again? It's the part between the nostrils.

So the nasal ranger was invented by chemical engineer Chuck McGinley and it looks it does kind of look like nose binoculars. It's this long, conical device you stick up to your nose and you just start sniffing. It's like a megaphone kind of, but you put it over your nose and I've shared with you, Alex, and this will be in the show notes a a picture of Check McGinley showcasing the Nasal Ranger, and it's I think one of my favorite pictures other than the skull wearing the sunglasses.

This is also one of my favorite pictures on the internet. He does well because he's wearing sunglasses and he's outdoors, so he's he's on the go collecting spells. Really good. It's so good. Yeah, it's it sort of looks like he's trying to speed gun traffic, but with his nose, I can smell a speeder. Yeah, he's checking if anybody's like not, if anybody doesn't have one of those little pine tree air fresheners, then he's gonna catch them and

pull them over. There's a new law against stinkiness, and so he stands on the side of the road just smelling people as they come by, and then turns on his lights and follows you. If you're a little too stinky. I mean, that's actually not as far from the truth as you would think. So this doesn't no, no, it's it's a good thing. I gotta air freshening fast. He's coming for you. It's like, I don't even need this. I can see the stink lines coming off with alex

miles away, So it doesn't enhance smell. But what it does is it helps you hone in and measure the intensity of a smell. So you put this over your nose, kind of forms a seal over your nose. So you're smelling through this like smell scope, and it has an aperture that allows the odor in and as you're smelling, you can slowly close the aperture so it gets smaller

and smaller. The goal is to close this until you can no longer smell the smell, and it measures, you know, how tiny this little pinhole is as you close it, And the tinier that hole is, the more powerful the smell because the more the smell can infiltrate the nasal ranger. Which it's one of those things that it's an invention where you think, oh right, duh. It's just seeing like how much smell can fit through a little tiny hole.

And if the smell is really strong, it's going to be able to get through this little tiny hole easier than smells that are weaker. And it's it's very simple, but it works. Yeah. I like that. It's a system of basically getting overloaded or overwhelmed by smell. Like I know the machine is not upset, but it's just like whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. If the smell is strong, that's cool. Well, no, it's the human. Here's the really interesting thing is it's

the it has to be operated by a human. There's no machine sort of detecting, because you can have something that like detects some source of odor, but this is actually just a human operated device. So the human operator. You hold it up to where you can smell something, and you smell and you're like, I can still smell it, and you close the aperture a little bit. It's like you can still smell it, and you just keep sniffing until you can't smell it anymore, and then you take

your measurement. Wow, okay, you're like a surveyor. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's it's kind of old school, but in a really cool way. It's like, you know, you just sense person out there to go sniffing around until they find a smell. And this this guy's lab, it's involved with a bunch of like smell related science where they go around trying to identify foul odors, finding out where they are. They create like a sort of lexicon for how to describe smells. And this is actually really

important for a few reasons. It can actually be used to measure the power of odors from factories, chemical plants, and other industry, which is really important for quality of life and for people's health. So, foul smells from industry can sometimes make people ill, it can reduce quality of life, and it's something really hard to quantify. If so you live near some industrial plant, you're like, it smells really bad. You know, you can't like capture the smell in a

jar and send it to the police. So and I've tried, and I've tried the jars back. No, pretty at least give the jar back. So if you want to be able to quantify a bad smell, you need some kind of bad smell measurement device and this nasal ranger can

do that. And so this can help researchers by like taking sort of somewhat objective ways to measure the power of a smell, and then they can use that in research to see if there are health implications for people who are living near industrial plants or uh quality of life implications. And this this is a very important issue.

And this is also something that disproportionately affects lower income people who often live closer to industrial related or pollution sources, and so it is something that could be used to help guide policy to try to make up for some institutional inequality when it comes to something like smell, which it's again one of those things that's easy to kind of brush off, is like, well, you know, detecting the

strength of smells. It's kind of it's kind of funny, and I mean it is very funny to see someone operating one of these things. But it's something that when you think about, yeah, like being able to detect odors, especially when it comes to like a chemical plant or an industrial plant that's releasing odor pollution, it's very important. Oh yeah, I think, man that when I saw this guy's picture, I gott a cop vibe, but I think in a good way. Like his His whole vibe is

not like, look at me doing smells, ha ha. He's like, I am on patrol. I'm going to like catch an odor that is ruining someone's life. That's really cool. He's a smell detective. This the smelliest detective out there. I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. Yeah, and so long we've outsourced the two hounds and other dogs. Finally a human can step in take that job from a doc. Imagine an old bloodhound really being mad. That's some guys, some guy with his his crazy device stole his job. So, Alex,

you know that show Shark Tank. Yeah, yeah, it's that show where inventors show their stuff too prospective, I guess investors, and they judge them or make fun of them, or sometimes invest in their product. And those inventions can get pretty silly. There was one where a guy made like a Transformers costume that you could drive around in. So like, what's the silly part? You wear like a car chassis and but then it's it's like made out of plastic and so you kind of hunch over on all fours

on the ground. And I've seen versions of this costume that worked really well, but this one like the ideas that you are actually able to drive around, like as if you're a r C car, and so you're balancing on these drivable wheels and awkwardly rolling around. And when you see it, it's this adult man sort of on all fours, somewhat look covered in a car chassis, but he can't fully fold himself because you know, he's a

grown man. And then and so he's kind of balancing on these wheels that are rolling around really awkwardly, and it's kind of nightmare fuel. I mean, the most awkward part was probably when all five sharks tried to give him all of the money they had. That really put some tension on the show. There was another one called the euro Club, which I mean euro club sounds like some kind of cool discothequa, you know, where your ego and go to a European sort of flavored nightclub. No,

it's a hollow golf club that you pe in. Oh like you like U r oh, Not U r oh, Yes, euro U r O Club. It's a hollow golf club that you put your wiener in in PN So there's a little privacy sheet near the handle that you drape over so nobody can see your bits while you're peeing into a hollow golf club, so you don't have to go all the way to the bathroom while you're on the golf course. Yeah, because if there's one thing golfers love, it's rough in it. That's why they never use carts.

Or have a nineteenth whole drink or anything. They love having a really rustic day. My favorite, My favorite thing about the Peeple Golf Club is that then when you're done, and I guess you steal it off, Like you just have this club you're carrying around that's sloshing around with warm urine in it, and you know it smells. You know that it has to smell like pe because it's not.

It's it's gonna it's gonna smell a peak, and every swing would feel weird, like you you mess with the entire rhythm that you like, you'd be so much worse at golf, Alex, I'm not sure that they golf. The weight is wrong. I'm not sure that you're actually supposed to golf with the pea club or just put it in amongst your other clubs so that you can discreetly pee into a club shaped urinal and it's rock you put a key in outside your place. It's just it's

just a fakey hiding plant, right for your peace. Like I like your idea better. It's like, okay, so you might as well be able to play golf with it, right right? Yeah? My, you know you pack your bag to be optimized exactly. You don't want to golf club. You can't golf with Yeah, cowards, these wonderful inventions aside, How do you think it'd go if Nicola Tesla showed up on Shark Tank. Let's have a shark tank in

Nicola Tesla's time. Do you think he'd get like laughed out of the room for his alternating current and his X ray technology. I hope he goes in only speaks Serbian or Croatian and just makes them catch up. I do feel really bad for Tesla because he you know, I feel like a lot of the recognition of his

talent was posthumous. There's an invention he made that really only got recognition many many decades after he died, and he probably would have been better off presenting his inventions at an actual shark tank with real sharks, because this invention took a page right out of shark biology. Did

you like that segue? Like? Yeah, it feels crazy. So. The Tesla valve is one of Tesla's inventions that he intended to use in a steam engine, which allows for the flow of fluids in only one direction with no moving parts or power needed. The Tesla valve is basically a series of tear drop shaped tubes where water can flow in one direction, but but when it tries to flow in the opposite direction, it becomes trapped in the

base of the loops. So if you have imagine you have like a bendy straw, right and you bend it in a U shape and you fill it with water, you can actually trap the water inside the bottom of that loop, whereas if you pour it out the other way, it just comes right out of the straw. And so the Tesla valve is like a bunch of these intersecting U shaped loops of a hollow tube structure, so it can flow one way, but then the other way it gets trapped in the basin of these loops. Yeah, I'm

seeing a diagram here. It's a really cool way to do the one way pushing on something. I guess. I feel like the steam era was all about pushing steam. It was just like that was the entire idea, and it let them do everything, including like brass Zeppelin stuff on the internet later pushing steam, steam pushers on the streets trying to get people to buy their steam. The least pleasant panhandler or someone in a dark alley opens his trench contains just want to buy some steam, and

it all comes out and floats up. He's like, god, damn it not again. Basically a human tea kettle, just like you know. Even though Tesla's original patent on this valve didn't do him too much good, at least financially, he actually filed for bankruptcy just a few months later. Many decades later, the Tesla valve was rediscovered and is now used in micro fluid ix so really teeny tiny microscopic fluid science, and in things like pulse jet engines. So it has all of these incredible uses. But Tesla

was not the first one to invent this valve. That patent goes to Evolution, goes to Santa Darwin. Darwin invented evolution, and so he must have invented this, uh, this shark intestine. That's how it works, right. I really want Darwin to be like pitching every animal function that has ever evolved to every live investors, like like like he's trying to lay an egg personally, it's coming, it's coming. I came up with it. It's coming and there and Mark Cuban's

just waiting, really really uncomfortable introducing finch point. Oh, the new finish for the modern gentleman. Yeah, I mean so, yes, Darwin did not invent evolution at all. Always existed forever and Darwin merely documented its existence. But yes, so evolution created the shark, the world's most lovable death machine with the most interesting digestive system. So, digestive systems are very important for animals to be alive. We need food to go in one end and ways to come out the

other end. And it's not really good to have partially digested food coming back up the way it came unless you're like a ruminant where you have a bunch of stomachs and you're kind of pushing food up and then redigesting it and pushing it back down. But for animals, like as humans, we kind of just want one flow of food where we basically we eat it, chew it up.

That's the first stage of the digestion with our saliva and enzymes, and then we swallow it down and then in our digestive system, after we have digested stuff in the stomach, it gets pushed with muscle contractions down our intestines. Yeah, a great invention by Darwin Lady rolled that out. I have an invention to present to you. It's pooping, and I didn't read the terms of service. Turns out it smells bad and stuff really really hoisted myself there by

my own petard. Could someone like patent pooping and collect royalties every time someone poops? Oh my god, Oh my god, I got I got, I gotta go to the patent office real quick. I'll be right back. So sharks do use some muscle contractions to move food down, but they also use gravity and a very cleverly designed digestive system and intestines. So they're intestines are eerily similar to the

tesla valve they have. They are in the spiral shape that effectively creates these loops that as the food moves down, it can flow slowly in one direction, but it can't move back the other way up. Wow, that's really cool. If you could shrink down to be the size of like a little fish that got eaten by a shark, it would be like moving down this spirally uh water slide,

but full of digestive juices. I think I think that happens in Disney's The Sword in the Stone and I wish Arthur pop back out of the fish and said, like it was full of tesla alms, just like share that information. Merlin's like, yes, I'm teaching tesla alms, not how to grow up and be king of England. That's right. I love that movie, especially apart with the owl trying to explain air dynamics aero dynamics to the little little Arthur guy, and then Merlin's like, ah, this is school's boring.

Let's just turn them into a bird. Yeah, because I yeah, I rewatched that movie with the pandemic started and there's very little king stuff and it's mostly like just making a kid turn out of different animals. The movie it's great, Like you want to learn about swimming? I turned you into a fish? Could you have made me a bigger fish? So I don't get you? Nope, exactly right. Yeah, I've seen it probably ten times, that movie. That was one of my favorite movies growing up, that in hundred and

one Dalmatians. But anyways, back to shark guts, a much more cheerful topic. Uh yeah, So if you were if you were shrunk down to a little bit of shark chalm and you're you know, you'd just be slipping and sliding your way down there. Intestines that are like some the shark's version of the Tesla valve may actually even

be more efficient than Tesla's design and maybe optimized. And researchers think that by studying the sharks and testines, we might be able to design better valves for things like wastewater filtration systems that use gravity rather than a lot of power in order to work. Yeah, and sharks ancients, like they've they've been around for so so long that this is probably one of the oldest animal systems still in use. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that one sewer in

realme that's from the Roman Empire. But it's just just keeps on going. Yeah, yeah, it's uh, it's a I mean maybe this is part of the reason why they're so old, because there are plenty of other animals that were alive during the time, but they haven't survived this long. Sharks, meanwhile, have a great design through and through has been tested throughout uh you know, millions of years. Yeah, it's like an oreo, don't mess with it. It works. What why,

It's a pretty normal thing to say. I think sharks are arios everyone's saying this. It's all over the streets. U. I'm not going to question it. It's great. So, Alex, what do you think is the world's most deadly dangerous animal? When I'm up, Yeah, Garry comes the stink lines with this visible stink lines like a cloud and little little black dots buzzing around that are signifying their flies there.

So yeah, yeah, well it is not Alex Schmidt, although probably close seconds, but it is the teeny and tiny mosquito. So mosquito, Yeah, they cause the most uh animal related deaths per year. They kill over a million people due to disease. Malaria alone killed over six thousand people in and people who live in areas with poor health, infrastructure

and more poverished areas are the most vulnerable. And so it's understandable that often we UH view mosquitoes as the enemy of humanity and that by controlling mosquito populations, by killing off mosquitoes, we can save human lives. And you know that's very true. But the very thing that makes mosquitoes so annoying and dangerous can actually UH save lives potentially. So have you ever woken up like the day after being out in the evening and maybe wearing shorts or

coo lots. Yes, yes, I'm trying to be inclusive to people who who wears cool Lots. There are dozens of us, dozens of No, it's a lot of people. Actually, it's not weird. I'm gonna get emails from people like I am a proud owner and uh loyal owner of cool Lots. I've been wearing cool Lots for over thirty years. Yeah, next time you email Katie, do a little cent from my cool Laps at the end of the message, right

like it's an iPhone. Yes, please everybody, everybody sound off, sound off and tell me about your cool Lots section. If you have anything to say about please leave a rating or review of the podcast and then be like, ps, I wear cool Lots. That's me. That person is me. So but you you, you know, the day after you may not notice it the night of, but the day after you get all of these itchy bumps, all these itchy mosquito bites, and you had no idea that you're

getting all bitten up. But then you'll wake up and you've got like there's like dozens of bites all over, Like where did these come from? I don't remember getting bitten. We would go to summer camp in western Michigan and it's on like the dunes on like Michigan there. It turns out their sand dunes there, and it's like people would have shirts around town that said, like give blood, go to this county because it's so many mosquitoes going

after people and just drinking them. So you just end up with a patch of bites on one spot of you that was open and maybe not sprayed. Yeah, and you can't see it coming because you can't you don't feel them biting you. And they're so tiny sometimes you don't see them and you'll only really hear them if they get close enough to their to your ear. Yeah, they're they're these little stealthy bloodsuckers. First of all, how

do they even find you. They seem to just emerge from wherever and hunt you down and track you down, and indeed they do so. Mosquito bites only come from female mosquitoes. Male mosquitoes actually feed on nectar, while female mosquitoes enjoy the extra pre orotein they get from your blood, which they used to nourish their eggs, So they're really only biting you because you know they're good mothers. H And I'm pro mothers vote. I'm running for office and

it's very important. But I come off this way. And if you have wondered how these mosquitoes find you, she is actually sensing the air you breathe. So when you exhale, you release a puff of carbon dioxide. And female mosquitoes have receptors that detect concentrations of C O two. And we'll move towards its source, which is you. Either it could also be a bird or a cow, or you a juicy human. Mosquitoes can also smell human skin and

are attracted to it. So I guess if you want to avoid mosquito bites but you don't want to use bug spray, you can cover up and not breathe, right, why don't I should just become one of those cross sections from the Discovery books where it's all of a humans muscles with no skin on it. Then there's no skin. Yeah, there you go. That sounds uh wet, seems easy to do.

I'll just go it seems like a sticky existence. But you know, hey, but see, even if you did that, mosquitoes could still smell the carbon dioxide coming out of your you know, skin face, so you know, you know what I'm ultimately going to have to be as a skull with sunglasses on it ultimately, which is the coolest thing to be. I think this trajectory was inevitable. Good dudes, we'll all have that chance someday. So that solves how mosquitoes find you. But how do they bite you without

you even knowing? They have optimized being able to suck your blood in a stealthy way that is almost completely pain less. First of all, they can inject you with saliva that actually has anticoagulant chemicals in it that will make your blood runnier and so it'll flow easier, and uh, you know, so you know, just so they can easily slurp up a nice yummy protein shake right out of

your right out of your body. Um. And but to make sure you don't feel it, the proboscis, so that pointy little needle on their face is specifically designed to inflict minimal damage to tissues and nerves. So the proboscis is very teeny teeny tiny, just a few micrometers in diameter, and it has these very delicate harpoon like barbs on

the sides that help ease it in. So when you look at it through a microscope, it's like, it seems like whoa, Like that's seems like it'd be more painful because it's like a harpoon, and you know how like a harpoon, it's got these barbs that point down words. So if you harpoon something, it can go easily go in one way, but it gets caught when you're pulling it out, So you think, like, hey, that seems like

that would kind of hurt. But these are so small in microscopic what they do is it just helps it get traction against the tissue, and this helps it actually very slowly work its way into the skin. So the mosquito will actually vibrate its proboscis, which allows it to very carefully inch its way into the tissue. Or I guess inches sort of a misleading word because it's we're not talking about units of inches, we're talking about micrometers,

really really tiny units. And so like a little notch by notch in this barbed bo skis, it works its way in. And if you look at how this works, imagine like a tube, like a normal needle that's hollow and that's at the center of it, and flanking it are these two sort of harpoon edges, and it actually does this alternating sawing movement of these barbed saws that are flanking the needle, and that helps it kind of like it's like it's kind of stepping its way into

the tissues, like gently walking towards the blood source. Yeah, we should, we should get this technology to those heist guys trying to get your vault doors. Seems like it's always just a big drill. I don't think that works as well. It seems better. Giant mosquito my blood fault. No, I'm the bank president now that I'm very upset. So this vibrating sort of method of this proboscis, where just very slow only works its way into your skin, is

actually minimizing damage and disruptance to your tissues. And in fact, all of the pain and itchiness from a mosquito bite that that bomb, that red spot is not from the damage it does with its proboscus. It does very little, if any damage with its proboscus. It's actually your body's immune response to that saliva. Remember what I said, the mosquito actually injects some saliva that acts as an anticoagulant.

You will have an immune response to that saliva because your body detects it as an unknown foreign pathogen, and you will issue a response. You'll send down histamines to the area that caused that itchiness, causes redness and inflammation. So all of that annoying itchiness, it's actually coming from your own immune response trying to protect your body from this foreign substance. This so liva that came from the mosquito. I like that the body is like, hey, this happened.

It's too late. That's the signal you're getting, is like, be sure to be itchy a bunch because something you can't fix already happened and it's not really a problem in this case. That's pretty much true. It does in a way, you know that. It's sometimes it seems silly when our immune response has that kind of delayed reaction of like, wait a minute, we got bit in a

few hours ago. Better itch uh. It's it is. Actually, it's less that it's trying to warn you about the mosquito and more that it is telling the body, hey, we've got some foreign substance in here. We should probably get rid of it. I see, it's for their benefit, not for me on this side of consciousness. Okay, I mean it's it's for you, but it's it's not for your comfort in terms of itchiness. It's for your your body.

Your body's immune system doesn't really know about you. It just does stuff to protect the whole body, which is weird, Like your body does all these things and it doesn't even know that. We've got this consciousness sitting in here experiencing all the weird feelings. Yeah, such a distant relationship. Yeah, don't. I don't feel seen. You know. Sometimes I just feel like my body isn't really holding space for me, you know what I mean. And then my body is like

I've had a long day. I just want to be here, but it's really just not connecting, you know. Come on, yep, yep, toxic corpore reality. So there's also a conversation between me a sculpt, sunglasses, and then the rest of my body.

Those are the two sides of it. Well, if you were wondering if there were already practical applications of a mosquito proboscis, hey, good news in research is tested mosquito proboscis inspired or mp I needles that use those harpoon those microscopic harpoon notches and incremental insertion techniques that mosquitoes use. The researchers found that the mosquito inspired needles caused less tissue deformation than typical needles. So this is this is important.

I mean, there's the aspect of hey, creating a more painless needle would be really great for having shots that don't hurt and all that, But there's actually a more critical use for these needles, and that's for things like biopsies. So getting a biopsy sample of a possible cancerous lesion is often done with fine needle aspiration. That so that's when they entered a very thin needle into the suspicious

tissue and pull out a sample. But the problem with this is if you want a really accurate sample from a very specific part of an organ, sometimes the needle will actually deform the tissue as it's inserted. I mean imagine pushing like a chopstick through some some peas or something like as you put and trying to like like uh stick like a runs to kitchen starts doing it well, trying to like stick a trying to stick in an

egg on a chopstick. Like if you're eating ramen and you've got that nice sort of soft boiled egg in there. It's so good, but you're trying to like stick the egg on your chopstick, it'll like sometimes like squish out of the way. And so imagine that, but on the microscopic level, um or a very tiny level with with something like your prostate. Imagine your prostate as the delicious soft boiled egg and a bowl of ramen that you're trying to stab. That's what I tell my doctor every day.

So so that's the problem. So if you can have a needle that is much more accurate and does less pushes tissues away less, so you can like just insert it into the place you want without it shoving anything to the side, without it causing much disturbance to the tissues around it, you can get a much more precise biopsy, and this could increase the accuracy of early cancer detection and help doctors more easily extract biopsy samples. So you know,

think a mosquito before you smash it. That is that's just a really cool, exciting especially because so many people are afraid of the needles we've got, you know, like whether it's rational or not. If we could just ease that, that'd be great. I think we'll have to have a better marketing pitch than like, hey, so you know mosquitoes. Well we made like a giant proboscis and I say giant, but it's not really that big. It's still really tiny. It won't hurt, trust me, just like mosquitoes bite don't

hurt anyways, I'll still relax your muscles. What if the pitches we just lie and say the idea came from a much cuter animal. Yeah, even if it doesn't make sense, like, oh yeah, we got this from pandas. We got from pandas. Panda scientists worked real hard on this and they'll be real sad if you don't use it. But why does it look like a big plastic mosquito. No, that's what a panda looks like. You're wrong. You just don't know much about pandas. Anyway, Well it's still yeah. I I

do not have a fear of needles. Uh. I have somewhat of a vasovagal reaction, sometimes too getting blood drawn, but never when someone's injecting something into me. Because I think there's something, there's something going on where it's like when someone's doing an inject and of something, it's like great new stuff for my body to enjoy. But when I'm getting like blood drawn, it's like, hey, I need that, and then I feel faint because it's like, hey, stop

stop taking my blood out. I need it. I need that to live. And then the nurses like this. I mean, I'm a human. This is for human purposes. That's why I'm taking it. Delicious, this will feed my babies. What's that? Uh, don't be a baby, and you can have this shot. Now we're not three mosquitoes in a long coat and you're like, I don't know, that's still really small. Yeah, I don't even think three of you guys can hold up a coat and you just pull back the coat

and it's thousands of mosquitoes. But you know, if you're out there and you do, like feel faint with needles, like, don't don't feel bad because the vase of vagel response, that like fainting response or squeamishness response can be really

hard to come role. And it really it doesn't have anything to do with you being brave or anything like that it's just just kind of a bodily response, but you can train yourself to have less of that response there, you know, definitely if you have if you have a severe phobia of needles, it's one of the most treatable phobias out there. You can go to Yeah, if you go uh to a therapist getting getting over those needle

phobias has a very high success rate. So I would highly recommend that if you're if you're nervous about shots, because you know it's, uh, it's important to get shots for your health. Obviously we know that now too with

the with the COVID vaccine, very very important. But if you're you're kind of scared to get the shot, definitely talked to uh, talk to a doctor about about the phobia because it is it is treatable, and a lot of shots too, depending on like the amount of fluid that they need to object With the COVID vaccine, a lot of people don't even feel it because it's not that much fluid that they have to inject. It's a

really thin needle. So if you can kind of relax your arm a little bit look the other way, you won't even feel it. I do I remember my first shot. It felt like such a small shot. I was like, did you do it? Yeah, that's that's a like if you have this needle here, you know, hang in there and and like Katie said, you can treat it. It's a real thing. But what the first shot. I was like, did you push it in yet? Oh? Yeah, we did

it already. It's okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. It was the same thing for me where it's like, you know, I was kind of concerned because I didn't feel it. I was like, I hope they actually did it right and it actually went in because I want that vaccine. And then then I got the sore arm and the and sort of the you know a little bit of sometimes I was like, okay, okay, this is a legit, legit vaccine. But it was so painless. I was like, I hope

they actually gave me the stuff right. They didn't do It'll be like a heist movie where they show the moment again and they like slipped it in their pocket or so, you know, there's a slow motion of what they really did and they're like, no, to go on the black market for vaccines. Yeah, yeah, that's how they got my zero dollars for the free vaccine. Now I know I have to tell you this story. First of all, I highly encourage everyone, if you haven't already get your

booster shot. I don't. I didn't even really have that many many side effects from or not side effects, but I didn't have like this sort of immune reaction. It didn't feel very sick after. It'll vary, but like it's it's so so much better than getting getting a real, real bad, bad case of macron. So yeah, I get that booster shot. Uh. Here in Italy, there was some guy who didn't want to get the shot. But here you need a green pass to be able to like

go to restaurants and and do a lot of things. So, like he went to get the shot, and the nurse noticed his arm was kind of weird and it was a prosthetic arm that he like put over his real arm so that when she gave him the shot, it would just go into silicon instead of his actual flesh. And of course she noticed, and he was, you know, gone in trouble for it. Are you telling me a

medical professional can detect mannequin parts? They learned that they could actually tell there's actually a quote by her where She's like, I honestly feel insulted as a nurse that someone would think you could get away with this. My my Grandma Schmidt, I really like to donate blood, and she would with pride tell us that every nurse would be excited about how big her veins were. They'd be like, you got some veins on you. You are trying veins,

like they really noticed arm details. To think that a prop arm would fool a nurse is incredible. I feel like there's only two kinds of people who would admire your veins and compliment you on your veins, A nurse a vampire. Note how they're saying it. If it's like, oh, you have really nice big veins, or if they're like I like this, how big your veins are? Yeah, you have such juicy veins. There it is, there's there's the Dracula.

It took me a little bit to get into it. Man, folks in like the Balkans and the Carpathian Mountains, they've gotta be so mad about that accent Dracula. It's got I am an actual nurse. I want to see your veins for for taking your blood test, not going to drink it. I want to measure your cholesterol. I keep work at work, and then you know, off the clock, off the clock vampires. YEA. Well, before we go and get sued by everyone from Transylvania. UM, we have got

to answer an important question. That question was posed last week and it was Who's squawking? We are playing the gifts who squawking mystery animal sound game? So uh it uh. Last week's hint was this guy has a face that looks a bit like a US president Chester a Arthur, but otherwise there's nothing American about him. And here's that sound, and guess who's squawking? So Alex, you've got any guesses? I thank you for a Chester a Arthur hint. That

really really narrows it down. I that's like Lady Hunters, U s history. That's my my batch of history that I think about the most. Uh. I I'm really thinking some kind of little Simian or monkey, like like some kind of Capuchin or Tamarin or something, because it is like a it's a really chirpy sound, but I feel like those little guys will do it. That is a great guess, and you are in fact extremely close. So first I want to congratulate the listeners who wrote in

with their guesses. We've got some really really good, really close guesses. I had people guessing gibbon, ad someone gissing the white cheek gibbon, which is really really close. And I want to congratulate Tim M who guessed a gibbon, Michael D who guessed even more specifically, a white cheeked gibbon, and Maggie M who guessed a buff cheeked gibbon. You're all, I'm gonna just give it to you. That is so

close basically correct. It is a yellow cheeked gibbon, which I think, actually, yes, the yellow cheek gibbon is the same thing as the buff cheeked gibbons. So amazing job you guys. I honestly don't know how you guys do it, because I don't think I would have been able to do that. It's easy on my end. I like, look up the sound of the animal that I want to showcase. I'm like, yeah, that's a gibbon. But it would be very hard for me to play my own game, I think.

But what's amazing is, uh, Katie, what you do? You select an animal, then you take a very large wooden mallet again from cartoons, and then you hit yourself on the head and then you play, and then you hear the little tweetie birds. Yes exactly, it's just guess little tweety birds every time. That's all you hear. But Michael d wrote in Uh that he hears them at the San Antonio Zoo and Maggie m here's them at the Cincinnati Zoo. So uh, but out you were. You were

so close. I feel like you deserve credit for being very very close. Yes, indeed it is a little monkey. So the yellow cheeked crested gibbon is its full name, also the buff cheek gibbon. Uh. They live in Vietnam, Louse, and Cambodia. So they start out as this really pretty blonde as babies, and then as adults they are fur turned this inky black, and males keep a streak of blonde near their cheeks, which gives them this wonderful chester

a Arthur Mutton CHOP's facial hair look. And females actually throughoutle they start out as blonde and then they get this dark fur uh during adolescence, but then once they reach sexual maturity they turn blonde again. Other than like this black cap that remains on the top of their heads, and the babies are always born blonde and that matches the mother's fur. The babies blend in with the mother's fur. Yeah, and so that they are kind of camouflaged against the mother.

And this this process of the color changing is really interesting because you would wonder, well, why don't female if female gibbons end up being blonde as adults, why would they start out as they start out as blond, then they get black fur, and then they become blonde again. Well, it's an interesting question. There are a couple of things that could be going on. One is that by being blonde when they're fully grown adults and having that coloration, it's a signal to the male gibbons that she is

a sexually mature female. Another thing that could be going on is that when the adolescent females get this black fur, it makes them blend in with the adolescent males. And there's this theory and evolutionary biology that sometimes it is beneficial for an animal species when the young uh will look similar, like they're less sexually dimorphic, meaning that both of the sexes look really similar, so that adult males won't go through and try to kill young unrelated males

to reduce competition before they grow up. So essentially, when all the young look alike, the males can't tell the difference between the females and the males, so it makes it less likely that, say, there would be a strategy that an older male would have where they go through and try to kill all the male babies so that when they grow up they're not competition. That was much

more harrowing than I expected. And that's fine. Yeah, it's a little bit because I have a distinct zoom memory of I don't think it's the species, but it was a monkey species where I saw they had it was a baby just hanging onto the mom's for very tightly, and it was like climbing all over the branches and trees that were available, and the baby was just on it like a little patch. Yeah, so so I jumped.

I was. I just had that grooving in my hat, and it was like and then the father's devoured the young, and like, oh no, oh jeez. Then I got real biblical on you. Yeah, I mean, I want to emphasize this is just this is kind of just my theory about why this hair color might change. UM, And it's

sort of a general theory and evolutionary biology. I'm not sure there's anything specifically about these gibbons, like any studies that have found that out about whether this is true for them, that that is, the coloration morphs changed to

protect young from that kind of strategy. Um, it just could be because like you know, the it could be something where maybe in sort of earlier evolutionary iterations where the offspring are easy easier to tell apart than you would have more of a risk of this kind of strategy. But currently, actually gibbons live pretty harmoniously. They live in

these small family groups and are monogamous. So you'll often see a blonde haired gibbon which is a female cuddling with a black haired gibbon which is male with like a baby, and it's adorable and they like to spoon each other and it's so cute. It's really nice. Yeah, good for them, Good for them. And so that call you just heard as an adult male, yellow cheeked, crested gibbon who is potentially seeking a mate or calling out

for it's made, or maybe even communicating with neighbors. They have all sorts of calls, and sometimes they're using it to kind of define their resources or their territory, or sometimes it's just to communicate with others, like saying like hey, I'm here, I'm single, and I'm ready to mingle. Now onto this week's mystery animal sound, and the hint for this week is don't be alarmed by this animal's name. It's called is purely Platonic, warning you about an approaching leopard.

So you hear that kind of raspy squeaking noise, like a squeaker that kind of has lost its squeak a little bit, yeah, like yeah, like a worn out squeaker to Yeah, So who do you think is squawking? Then? Is don't be alarmed by this animal's name. It's called is purely Platonic. Oh, I'm really at sea on this one, And I don't mean I'm thinking of sea creatures like a lot of different land animals. That's the edibles. Weird. I guess I'm imagining a little bird, but that's probably

not correct at all. Well, the answer will be revealed next week, so tune in next Wednesday. Alex, thank you so much for drying us today. Where can the people find you. It's it's great every time, and uh and yeah, I hope people check out Secretly incredibly fascinating. If you look up sift pod dot fund or just search the

name Secretly in your podcast and will find it. Each episode's about one thing people think is ordinary, and then we get into why it's amazing with history and science and stories and Katie's put an amazing gust on it. Many times. I've been on there and it's great. I can personally vouch for it because we've talked about beaver butts, We've talked about corn. It's amazing. Oh that Corn show so good that kicked off twenty two. It's killer here

Corn Year. So you can find you can find me on the internet at Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, a Creature feet Pod on Twitter. That's Evy not et. It's something very different. And if you think you know the answer to this week's mystery animal sound game, email me at Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com or send me your I guess opinions about cool lots. Yeah, that's thank you, sen send send cool lot opinions yea or nay. And thank you so much to the Space Classics for

their super awesome song ex Alumina. Creature feature is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or Hey guess what. Wherever you listen to your favorite shows, I don't judge you. See you next Wednesday.