Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show, we're going to talk about some weird, wet, and sometimes mucusy sea creatures. No matter how strange they seem, their behavior isn't always so different from us terrestrial animals, and maybe we can learn how to live a little from them. From the sunlight to the abyssle zone. We're going to go over some of
the weirdest citizens of the sea. Because joining me today is science writer for The New York Times and author of the new book Leaving the Ocean Was a Mistake. Life Lessons from Sixty Sea Creatures. Kara Jaimo.
Welcome, Hi, Katie. It's great to be back.
Yeah, I got a.
Copy of the book.
It's very enchanting. I love all of it. The illustrations by Vlad Sinkovic areautiful. And then you have coupled with it these amazing nuggets of knowledge wisdom about each of these sea creatures, and I feel like it gives you a really beautiful, charming sense of how wildly diverse the ocean is. And all these really weird things that are so like, they're so unusual, and it goes beyond sort of just like kind of the sea creatures we know,
like sharks, jellyfish, et cetera. I mean that there are there are definitely ones that you will know in this book and really interesting facts about them as well. But yeah, I love it because it really gives a nice sense of how weird these animals can be and nonsensical they
can be. Yeah, I mean, I want to talk about the subjects of your book a little bit, but first, of these sixty sea creatures you wrote about, are there any that really were kind of your favorites or close to your favorite or the weirdest one that you were most surprised to write about?
Yeah, totally.
I mean I found the research and writing process for this book actually maybe surprisingly surprising, considering that I do write a lot about.
Weird little critters.
But the ocean was a little bit of a zone for me that I had not thoroughly explored, So I kept being excited at surprise to like run into a weird guy. I think one of my favorites. Let me just flip and find it in my own book. There's like a special interspecies friendship which I always love between this really huge, kind of scary looking jellyfish and this really tiny fish. So it's the giant Phantom jelly which
is like a really very big jellyfish. It's bell so like, you know, the top part is the size of like your rige bean bag chair, and then it has these really long arms that I wrote are like haunted drapes, so it's sort of like a haunted looking jellyfish. And then it has this tiny friend, this little white fish called the pelagic brachela, and they just like are always found together.
Like the funny thing about doing research.
For this book is also that a lot of these creatures have only been seen three or four times total in the history of like recorded anything. But every time scientists and researchers have seen this big jellyfish, it's had a little fish friend.
So I think that's kind of nice.
And do they have any ideas as to why these guys are buddies?
No, they don't.
I don't think anyone has really looked into it. Like deep sea research is hilarious because they're just kind of like, I mean, not to you know, sell anyone short. But all they can really do is be like, hey, look at that guy. Oh he's gone. I hope I see him again.
Sometimes we check out this weirdo we found. Yeah, anyway, never seen him again. Yeah, that's this is something that happens. Like where I'm researching for the show things about deep sea creatures, I find one that's like, oh, this looks incredibly gnarly. It must have so much interesting research done on it. And no, not for a lack of wanting, but it is very difficult to observe them and the wild and often, like when you actually get specimens to the surface, they just are not at all like what
they are in the ocean. You can't observe their behaviors physically they might explode because when they're deep enough they don't. They aren't actually designed to be able to survive totally. And are you know PSI's up here, which is relatively light compared to the crushing depths, so there's sort of an explosion rather than an implosion. Yes, So they're really
hard to study. So so when we do find these weird things, sometimes all we can do is speculate, right, like look at behaviors of other animals, we say, there's a lot of like symbiotic behaviors where you know, I mean like one could imagine like maybe this little fish is able to get some protection from the jellyfish. Maybe it's eating some of the crumbs that the jellyfish is collected, and maybe that helps with the jellyfish's hygiene, maybe it helps attract other prey, the.
Movement of the fish.
All of this is I pulled all of this out of my butt, Like this is not these are not real facts. This is just there's so many potential possibilities for this friendship that we have between them, because they're like some this happens also with like terrestrial animals where you'll just have like this very odd like almost it's a buddy comedy because they don't seem like they would
work together. These tarantulas and micro highlight frogs where they're just like heaty tiny little guys, little frogs, and then these giant spiders and you think like, oh, the spider's gonna eat that little guy. They don't, and they have this like great relationship like Timone and Pumba. But yeah,
I love that. I have picked out some of my favorites from the book and I've gone sort of in order of descent, so like from the top of the ocean to the bottom, which I also like in the book that because I always get confused about ocean depths. I'm like, yeah, pleagic zone, benthic zone, and then I kind of like, I don't know, and then it gets
really dark yep, and I get confused. So I really appreciate the structure of the zone of the book where we go from the sunlight zone all the way down to be a bus zone to the very bottom.
And you'll see like, oh, I'm sorry, no, go ahead, you'll see like we my editor and I kind of made this plot where as the creatures get deeper. Not only did the illustrations get darker, because that's just what makes sense, but the advice goes from being like maybe a little bit cheesy to being like super surreal and weird, because the idea is that these deep sea creatures like are going to be even more out of touch with our lives than the ones that are closer to us.
But there's still something to take from even the.
Most strange advice.
Yeah, and I hope it made uh to be clear, like these like as you learn about each of these animals. They are also giving you some life advice, which I appreciate and I do need. So I do you appreciate their their advice, but particularly actually this first one is great advice for me. I like to be a nice person, but when when you are like a friendly person, it's also really important establish firm boundaries, which is the gloomy octopus's specialty. I love octopuses. I can't talk about it
the enough. They're so they're so intro like, they're so intelligent and kind of mystical, but then they're also surprisingly spunky sometimes, which I love. So talk about a little bit this this gloomy octopus who does not have a backbone but has a backbone.
Yeah, exactly.
So I really like this advice too, And I think one of my sisters said that this is her favorite piece of advice in the book. So the advice that the gloomy octopus is giving to us is never be
afraid to set and enforce your boundaries. And the behavioral observation that this advice comes from is that gloomy octopuses are mostly solitary, like they spend a lot of their time alone, like many octopuses, do, and if their neighbors get too close to them, they will throw stuff at them like shells, dirt and algae based whatever's around, in order to kind of keep that boundary literally sort of like, don't come any closer to me. I'm chilling by myself.
I don't need your intrusion here. I don't care how curious you are. I don't care what you need. Like this is my alone time almost all the time, so
that is that is kind of funny. I think this gloomy octopus research came from one of my favorite research sites, which is the two group octopus living sites Octopolus and Octlantis, which are both off the coast of Australia, and we're discovered by Australian scuba divers and snorkelers, and these are places where octopuses actually do live together, which again is as far as we know, kind of rare because they
like to be on their own. But these places are so filled with it's like the undersea topography attracted so many shellfish that the octopus has just started hanging out and eating all the shellfish and then throwing the shells away. And then when they see the shells away, they would make beautiful sort of like structures that could be used at octopus houses. So they're all like, okay, let's just stay here. And then they ended up living in almost
like a little octopus city. And then they're like, oh no, I hate living in a city.
I want to be on my own. And so at that point they started throwing stuff at each other.
Yeah.
I love that. I think this happens probably with a lot of introverts, where you find like a hobby that introverts enjoy, from magic, the gathering to crocheting, whatever it is, and then you're like, well, it's really convenient to share the hobby with other people. And then you join a bunch of groups. Ah, here's like a croche group, and then and it's great because we can share yarn. And then you're like, oh right, but I'm also very shy. Yes, I forgot I forgot that detail. I love octopuses are
so relatable. This behavior reminds me a little bit of the day octopus, which is another unique one in that it does seem to have a relationship with other animals, not necessarily other octopuses, but it seems to hunt with other fish. They'll have sort of like the large groups of these smaller predatory fish that kind of hang out
with the octopus. It's a little bit of a question of like they are the fish just hanging out because the octopus will act like a lawnmower and churn up all this stuff and then the fish can benefit or
is it more of a mutualistic relationship. I think researchers are kind of on the side of it being mutualistic because the octopus seems to be able to benefit from following the fish, like finding where the fish the fish may be better at finding like prey, but then the fish can't get to it because you have these coral reefs that have a lot of nooks and crannies maybe even like sand or rocks in the way that the fish can't get at because the prey has learned how
to hide really well. So then the octopus can get in there and flush it out. But sometimes the octopus will give one of these little fish that it tolerates really well a smack get smack with a tenticle, and so researchers think maybe it's something where one of the fish crosses a line isn't really cooperating in the hunt well, enough,
but it's it's just like it. It makes me think of sort of those old tapestries you see with like hunters with all their hunting dogs with these like but it's these octopuses with a bunch of me going around. I don't, I don't. I do not suggest that anyone smacks their hunting dogs. I think that this is only acceptable when it's done by an octopus because they're their legs are so squishy.
Yes, yeah, okay, it's just more of like a it's more of a communication than a violence.
Maybe, yes, yeah, exactly. That's what's so interesting to me, because like the octopus could turn around, Like if a fish is annoying it, why isn't the octopus just turning around, grabbing it and eating it?
Right?
Like there's something I mean, it's probably a pretty careful calculation where it's like, if it's a larger fish that is going to be more of a struggle, that's probably not worth it to the octopus. But also there's probably some recognition of like, hey, we're working together pretty well in general. Killing something that is helping me doesn't do any good for me, But teaching it a lesson with a little sort of limp noodled whack is you know,
constructive only in this circumstance. I'm usually very much a pacifist, but you know, when you're literally don't have a spine, I don't know what else you can do to enforce your boundaries with You might have to throw some stuff.
Yeah.
The way they throw this stuff is cool too, Just before we move on, they'll like scoop it up with their arms, and then they'll sometimes use their little siphons that they have to like blow it.
Oh amazing, like leaf flowers. Yeah, exactly, that's incredible. We see that in like captive octopuses too, where they'll either use their own siphons so like push things around, or they learn to use the the pumps in their tanks,
and they'll like take maybe like something that's floating. Like sometimes researchals will kind of leave little toys for them, not they're not real toys, but it's like I've heard, like empty plastic bottles or something, and then the octopus likes to play fetch with themselves by like throwing it in the current. Yeah. So they're very clever and also sometimes a little bit cranky, which I love. Yeah. So another this is kind of like going in the wildly
opposite direction. But hump back whales like one of the largest vertebrates in the world that lives in the ocean. It's it's always interesting to me because they're so whales are so huge. The assumption I think is that we should know pretty much everything about them because they're the biggest animal in the world. They're mammals like us, they're vertebrates.
They're so present in our popular culture. But then when you get to these like relatively large whales, the research is a lot thinner than you would think because it's just so hard to like observe them and kind of station yourself, Like, yes, we see them when they're migrating, but then when they're like deep in the ocean in their element, there's a lot of behaviors that we kind
of miss. So I really love it when we do find something really interesting about them, because they're really really complicated. So I love you talk about like people I think are generally aware of whale song that they sing. They have unique songs, and they're socially intelligent. But what you talk about, I think is a pretty interesting fact that I don't think people would be as familiar with in terms of their their song repertoires.
Yeah, so this is super fun and something I've had in my mind since I first wrote about it, maybe like six years ago, just because of the new study came out and I happened to see it. But like you said, yeah, humpback whales are known for singing. Their songs are quite famous. There are like recordings of them that you can buy in cool New age stores to this day. And then everybody knows what their songs sound like.
They're very like haunting and beautiful and exactly and basically like songs are a cultural thing for them, and different populations of these whales who meet at particular breeding grounds all around the world will have like certain songs, and those songs will change from year to year, but they'll all kind of like have their their favorite songs that
they all sing together. But researchers notice that different populations were sort of like borrowing from each other's songs and like remixing little bits into their own songs.
And they were like, how is this happening? When are they hanging out? And they figured out that there is like this place in the South Pacific specifically where whales.
In the area all come and hang out and sing together and like kind of teach each other maybe or like listen to each other's songs. And then when they depart again, that's when this like remixing happens. When they're sort of like, I heard this really cool thing that this guy from way far away was doing, and now I'm going to try to do it. And so yeah, it's this very cool cultural spot off the coast of New Zealand that I like to call a humpback whale karaoke zone where.
Everybody comes and tries out each other's music. And so that's amazing.
The advice that we kind of took from that for the book is share your art with friends and don't be weird about copyright.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
Fair use.
Whales understand fair use exactly. Why why doesn't YouTube? Yeah, I love that. I mean it is really interesting, like it is. I think we when it comes to animals that have songs, even animals that are arguably less complicated and intelligent versus wales, like songbirds, you do see a lot of evidence of local dialects and then cultural shifts,
generational shifts in song choice. Birds are also influenced by when they like migrate and they encounter maybe birds that have like a different dialect from them, they then start to kind of shift their songs a little bit. So there's a lot of this like kind of I think, you know, when you have an animal who learns their songs and their calls, like, because there are plenty of like say songbirds or animals that make a certain kind of call, who are just born basically with a pre
programmed thing that they do. Usually it's very simple because you don't have a lot of sort of space to write really complicated programming in an in a newborn animal's brain. But for the ones that have really complicated repertoires, that's almost always through learning, which is the case for whales,
which is the case for songbirds. And when you have that, then you almost it seems almost inevitable that you're gonna have like cultural changes in cultural influence because it's since it's a learning process, since they have to learn from those around them, there's there's like really interesting evolution of songs of groups of like and then you see the
influence of other groups. So it's much more I think similar to like you'll find in animals who are learners that kind of they when you whenever you have different populations of them, you inevitably have kind of different cultural habits and then those influencing each other, which I find really really interesting.
And like.
When and I first wrote about this, one of the commenters on the article was like, why do we call these songs, which, like, I don't know, that's a whole question in itself. But then this person said, like, maybe these whales are exchanging information, Like maybe this is a form of oral storytelling or like passing along stuff from like this is what it's like in my part of the ocean right now, Like if you come through, look
out for that octopus who's throwing shit or whatever. And yeah, I thought that was really interesting too, because I know there are more and more attempts to kind of decode whale language, and I have a lot of thoughts about that, but this could be, yeah, a way of them not only like having fun, but like telling each other important stuff, the same way that humans do in songs and other species as well.
I definitely think there could be something too whales communicating information through their song. I would my guess would be it's probably not like the same kind of like grammatical structure as human language has. But maybe there's something some other way that they're communicating that just does not not how we use language, But that doesn't mean it's not a form of language or communication.
It's so funny to think about, because like, I don't know humans. We have this spoken language that we use for so so many things, and then we have a written equivalent, and like to an outside observer, I don't I think it would be pretty hard to figure out that those things were connected, or that this thing we're doing with our mouths is necessarily communicating, because we do
so many other things. So sometimes I think about, like when we were watching whales and listening to them, we're like sort of like aliens trying to figure out like what they're doing. And if aliens were watching us, they might be like, oh, humans communicate through the length of their hair, or like humans communicate through like the weird things they do with their hands, like as they're moving their mouths, like they wouldn't necessarily.
Italians do, for sure, and I should know I live in Italy. That part's true.
Yeah, but like we have to.
Yeah, it's so easy to like map map our own stuff onto other creatures, and to some extent that's helpful because we all do share needs and drives and a certain evolutionary history.
But it only can go so far.
Yeah, exactly, we can overdo it with putting sort of human feelings onto animals, but we can also underdo it where we just like, of course, we're going to share a lot of characteristics with animals. We're all we've all evolved on the same sort of stuff as they have in general, so there's going to be some similarities. I do want to talk about the sarcastic French head before
that break. I love these guys so much. They're this sort of like when they're just kind of in their normal state, they're kind of this awkwardly shaped brown fish with this huge head and kind of a slim body. They just look a little bit funky. There's nothing to me they like. They're not intimidating at all. They're just kind of like a weirdly shaped little fish. But then when they're competing with each other, they have this really like it's both kind of It can be viewed as
scary or funny, I think, depending on your perspective. But yeah, you want to talk a little bit about their the special party trick that they have.
Yes, it's totally worth looking up a video of this
when anyone has the time. If this was like a sort of magical book, I would have put a moving image on this page because these French heads, which, like Katie said, are sort of like cute, droopy mouthed little fish that kind of like bop along underwater when they are feeling you know, it's hard to say if they're feeling aggressive, if they're feeling flirty, like why they do this, but they open their mouths and their mouth opens like like a horror movie monster.
Mouth or like yeah, like Predator from Predator, you know, yeah, that has a little like weird sort of I don't know.
Yeah, it's like a like yeah, like a pop up tent.
It's sort of like pop yeah, and it's suddenly like so much bigger and like so much sort of more like scarily angled. And uh So they do this and one will go like wow at the other one, and then the other one will go like waw back, and then they sort of just like make out, like they squish their mouths together and they like around yeah. Yeah, and nobody is totally sure, like what this is about or why they do it?
And the top.
Theory is like, okay, it's like an aggressive contest almost like you know, deer with antlers, and the winner is going to get like the best house, which is right, It's like if you think about it as like a human reality competition show that's on, like you know, the HGTV or what ever, it's like yeah, fringe head house makeout competition.
Honestly, the housing market is so messed up, like if we just had a new system where it's like whoever has the most unfoldable mouth gets the biggest house, I'm fine with that.
I don't know, like.
It's I think it's it's already it's already a pretty messed up market. Yeah, yeah, I do think that the theory that this is like a form of like I because it's this kind of competition happens a lot between males with a lot of other species where yes, you could fight each other, but both the victor and the loser uh suffers some cost from that, right, could be energy, it could be injury, it could even be killing one another. Right, so there's a big cost involved to physically fighting with arrival.
If you're fighting over resources, over territory, over access to emails. There's a motivation to fight, but actually fighting is really costly.
So a lot of animals have developed kind of a system where they either sort of like measure each others up, like their bodies, Like they look at their bodies and they're like, you know, you might have two elephant seals kind of waddle up to each other and like kind of size each other up, like, Okay, who's actually gonna win this, like before they start slamming their necks into each other, right, because neither of them necessarily wants to fight,
because they would much rather it just be like, oh, yeah, I know you're way bigger, like I'll be gone bye, I'll see you. Because that's better for the one that would lose, certainly, but also for the one that would win, because the one that would win might still get injured or at least have to waste a bunch of effort fending off all these little guys.
So you they.
Want to generally be able to find out like, Okay, who's tougher, who's bigger? The only the problem is when you have a situation where it's less clear right where it's like, ah, we don't know who's actually gonna win. We're kind of the same size. And then they actually have to fight, and it can be pretty pretty grizzly with all sorts of animals, like from from deer to elf and seals to lions. But then with these French heads,
which I find really interesting. Of course we don't know, and so this is a little bit it's out of my butte university, but kind of like an educated butt, so you know, take from it what you will. It seems like they have kind of come up with maybe a like a symbolic display of fitness, right with like jaw size, right, because jaw size is a that would be like a fairly honest signal of fitness in a
lot of ways. But their jaws are very like ornamental and weird in a way that it makes it seem like they're kind of trying to send a strong signal to each other of like, hey, I'm really tough, to the point where it's become very much like a ritualistic dance where they almost have it seems like they've almost completely done away with the any kind of realistic fighting and it's more like a sports game, right, and then the loser of this like weird kissing sport goes off,
and then the winner gets the nice house. So it's I think it's really interesting. There's definitely some kind of communication going on here where they have sort of traded in actual weaponry for kind of a more symbolic like hey, like the flag I'm waving is bigger than yours, so like that's how we're gonna settle this.
I've just been watching this video of them on loop. It's in the New York Times rite up of this paper, which I didn't write. It's by Jason din But the video is just like they're in a little tank, the two fringe heads. They are like approximately the same size, and one of them is in this like really sweet looking house, which is a shell, and the other one doesn't seem to have a house, and so the one without a house is like, ugh, fine, I guess I
better try to go get a house. He goes up to the shell, and the one in the shell just kind of like rises out of the shell and it's like it is time for me, like you said, to perform the ritual and just like opens his mouth like waw, and the other one's like fine, and it's like wah,
and they just press their mouths together. And then the one, the loser who doesn't live in the shell, it doesn't take that long for him to be like okay, like I had to try, you know, like you said, it's not really like a It doesn't seem that high stakes. It seems a little bit more like there's two guys in the weight room and one of them isn't done with his reps yet, and the other one's trying to get on the bench, and they have a little like right yeh, and then order is restored.
It's like a little dance you do when you're on the sidewalk and you're both kind of like figuring out who shouldn't do exactly left versus the right. I'm really bad at that. I do that all the time. But yeah, it's it's really it is really funny to me how they've you know, like again, we like Kara was saying, we don't exactly know why they do this, but it definitely seems like some kind of ritualistic, symbolic placeholder for actual aggression, actual fighting, some form of communication that is
helping them to resolve conflict, which is I think really nice. Yeah, a nice, nice lesson. We can learn from them totally.
And the advice that we have for them is, if you can solve it with fighting, you can probably solve it with smooching exactly.
I agree with that.
I think the world needs more giant tint flap smooching versus fighting. We're going to take a quick break and then when we come back, we're gonna head deeper down into the Twilight Zone, which is not just the rod Sterling Show, but an actual part of the ocean, and then even deeper as we discuss some of the amazing animals.
From Kara's book.
All Right, so now we're in the twilight Zone, just a little darker. There's still light there, but it's definitely getting a little dimmer. But the one I want to talk about is the sea elephant, which not to be confused with like elephant seals or elephant nose fish. These are snails and they're really I found one photo of it being held by I guess like a fisherman who found it, and it's got the doofiest little face like
in the water. Like when they're in the water, they are kind of hard to see because they're very transparent, and they're kind of they looked sort of like this ghostly outline. They they don't even look three dimensional really. They look like a weird light pencil sketch of some kind of weird globby snail shaped critter. And they don't
have shells, so they're just like all blobular. But then when this guy has them in his hand, it's like looking directly into the camera and you can see a little face and they've got these long proboscises that look like elephant noses. But it just looks like this weird little elephant cartoon. Yeah, just the stupidest looking animal I've seen in a while. So, uh, do you want to talk a little bit about the elephant snail?
Yeah, I mean sorry, the sea elephant.
Yeah, the sea elephant.
Something truly amazing about doing research for this book was like I had no idea like how many different sort of tiny, little translucent guys are just like floating around like hoping.
For the best in there.
Kind of just like okay, like I can move in three dimensions, I being tossed about.
I have few defenses, and I'm just gonna try to make this work. Yeah, and the sea elephant is one of them.
And so yes, long time back and evolutionary history, these guys had shells and presumably they lived, you know, on the bottom or somewhere else where gravity would pull them down and they had the protection of their shell, but they evolved to live in the open water instead, totally shellless.
They have this really funky long nose.
Like you said, which is super cute, and they kind of just like tumble around in the water column and even though they don't have a shell to curl up inside, they still curl, which I think is really cute. They're in sort of like a summersault shape most of the time. And so the advice that they are giving is remember your roots, remember the snail times, even if you're in a evolutionary stage that is maybe a bit more scary and free falling.
I'm always trying to be humble and remember the snail time.
Yeah, but yeah, I.
Mean, they're interesting because they're movements. They even if they don't like ambulate really fast in one direction, their movements can be surprisingly like they're they're moving around quite a bit, like if you compare it to say terrestrial snails movement or even like a c snail's movement, Like they can move around quite a bit, it just doesn't seem to like propel them much in one direction. There's a lot
of like floundering, which I think is really cute. But yeah, that the the the sort of like, well, why would they like shells seem really helpful?
Why did they lose their shells?
That actually happens quite a bit in the ocean, where you'll have something that starts out with a shell and
then loses it, like with a lot of molluscs. So like cephalopods, like squid and octopuses, they used to have like their common ancestor had like a shell that was pretty weird like for some of them, like some of these, like squid ancestors had like a giant conical shell that looks like this like sort of giant unicorn horn type thing that when you look at it, it's like all right, I mean I get it, but it's a little much.
And so thought is that. I mean, you still have nautiluses that have their shells, but for them, you know, like for squid and octopuses, they don't have them and they just probably like they got out competed by predators that came along that had better defenses, and so they went into the niche of being squishy, being to fit into things and being able to hide under stuff, and then as predators being to squished themselves into narrow passages that.
They can get stuff out of.
So I could not I found scant information on the clephant. It seems like these are one of the ones where we basically know they exist, that they're weird, and they have eyes, we know that, but otherwise what exactly they're up to is a little bit of a mystery. They're one of these one of these weird guys that we kind of know that what they look like, we know they have eyeballs, uh, and that they used to have shells. But then otherwise we're like, what do you doing, little guy?
And it's like, I don't know, just being being a little guy, being a transparent little guy, trying not to get eaten.
A lot of these, I mean, you mentioned this, a lot of these snails and these shellless snails are also like very ferocious predators. Like supposedly this c elephant is a ferocious predator. It's just kind of hard to imagine. Yeah, there's always going to be a smaller, more translucent guy than you around to eat in.
These Yeah, there, schnalls is a little bit vacuum like, so I can because they've got mouth parts at.
The very tip. So if you're if you're.
Like a little planktonic creature, I could see this being intimidating. But to me, it is a premium goofass, So it's really hard to imagine them as predators. Before we move on to the deeper zones of the ocean, I want to talk about the fire breathing shrimp. Yes, honestly, it looks more like they're barfing up sort of like supernatural ecdoplasm. But let's talk a little bit about their very very unique defense mechanism totally.
So one cool thing about the ocean is that some creatures can like either create or use bioluminescence, which is like biologically produced light because they're especially when you get deeper in the ocean, there's not a lot of natural light that makes its way down there. So if you can make your own light, or you can get like a bacteria to make light that you can use.
That's my preferred method. Get the bacteria to do the work for me.
You can kind of have this cool signaling like goo that you can use however you want. And you know, the anglerfish famously sometimes use it to like lure other fish by just having like a little beacon and the fish come over. But the fire everything shrimp, who I agree, they gave him a very dignified name, but he's really just barfing. He stores up this bioluminescent blue colored goo in an organ called the hippato pancreas, which I don't believe that humans have, but I guess I'm not sure.
And then when for.
Sure we do, I don't know if we have a hippado pancreas.
If we do, maybe it's filled with glowing goo, so that could be a cool thing to discover at some point. But this guy, he stores this, uh, this goo in hishippato pancreas, and he if he gets scared or threatened, he's just like blah.
And then the blue gooo comes out. When it hits the water, it lights up.
It's almost like if you crack a glow stick right that triggers the light. And then the predator is like, WHOA, where the bluegoo come from? Gets freaked out, and this scrimp shrimp can escape.
So it's a really good Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a similar like you do see that with Like so squid have the the ink that they can release, which is a similarly defensive like, ah, you're threatening me, Like here's a distruction, you know, like if anyone watches King of the Hill, it's the dale Gripple's pocket sand that he throws at you, like pocket sand you know, gets away.
Uh.
Terrestrial animals there are forgot what they're named. They're there the there's a few baby birds actually who use either projectile vomiting or pooping to ward off predators where it's like, ah, you know, like you're coming at me, here's like some startling vomit.
Uh.
So it is.
It is a technique, but I don't think I know of any other defensive vomitters who bio use bioluminescence. Like certainly you can use bioluminescence as sort of defensive distracting posturing. That usually have seen that in animals that have actual structures on their body that contain the bioluminescent gel. Whereas these guys just like they have it you know, in their in their patto pang grease and then vomit it up, which is a very unique method of distracting predators. It's
it's very it's pretty. It's the prettiest vomit I think I've seen.
Yeah, it's very pretty.
So now let's move down to the midnight zone. Just to briefly mention the Ping Pong tree sponge seems like it might have almost accidentally caused an international incident because it is this is one of those things where it's like, it looks like it comes from one of those sort of pulp sci fi books where they imagine an alien landscape, and this is like the alien tree you'd find on an alien planet, which also, for some reason, also has
beautiful women on it, and that's never explained. But this is like, this is a really weird looking thing that does not look it neither looks like a living creature. It looks artificial, nor does it look like an animal, which it is.
It has a wonderful name, the Ping Pong tree sponge, because that's what it looks like. Yes, so what you hinted at is that I read that when US Navy officers first saw the Ping Pong tree sponge in underwater surveillance photos, they thought that it was like a Russian device that was spying on the ocean. Granted I saw this only in one source, but I felt like I had to include it because I really want to know more. I looked so hard for more information. I might have
to do like a Foyer request or something. So if anybody knows about the near international incident caused by the Ping Pong tree sponge, please get in touch with me, because there's nothing I want to know about more. But the website I found it on is like a government website, so I do believe it.
But I just couldn't find anything.
Else, you know.
I mean, I just assume there's a lot of like things during the Cold War where we almost almost blew each other up and pass because of some kind of weird sea creature where we're like, it's a Russian, a Russian weapon, but it just turns out to be a weird little sea sponge. It also, to me, it looks kind of like a lamp you might buy in the seventies.
It's very it's very cool looking. But yeah, the the you're mentioned in the book, like the structure of it is actually not just like decorative obviously, but it's to capture tiny crustaceans, tiny animals on these actual balls which have like a bunch of little you can't really see them from far away, but they have a bunch of tiny little like hooks to catch little guys onto these balls.
So it's a it's functional, even though it looks like something some kind of ikea lamp that would be called like a bog or something.
Yeah, it's got they're like little birds, I think, right.
Imagine, sponges are so cool because they are also predators. They have to eat other stuff, but they can't move when they're adults, so they need to come up with all these weird strategies like being covered in hooky ping pong balls.
Yeah, no, it's amazing. They're sessile usually meaning that they stick in one spot. But yeah, they still got to eat, and so they've got all sorts of like weird weird uh food gathering techniques that so now we're going to go down to the abyssele zone. Talk about another weird food gathering technique, the tripod fish. I love these guys so much. They're very weird to see on a deep
sea camera. They look like lawn ornaments because it looks like someone took something that's a pretty normal fish shape, maybe a little longer. They do also have a pair of fins that kind of look like rabbit ears, ghostly rabbit ears, but otherwise it just kind of looks like a fish. It's not that weird. But it also looks like someone stuck them on like three rods, like two coming from the front, one coming from near its table, from from its tail, and then stuck them on the
ocean floor like ornamentation. Like they look like something weird you could pick up at a discount like a home supply store, where it's like these aren't selling well because nobody wants a decorative fish, but it's these are alive.
They aren't.
They are real fish, and they are doing this on purpose.
So these fish are very crafty.
They also have to eat, but they don't want to have to swim around and hunt for stuff. So presumably evolutionarily they started out without these weird long feet, but eventually they evolved because like if you sort of are in the ocean sort of hanging out and you just open your mouth, like the current will bring some food to you, and what these guys eventually figured out on an evolutionary timescale is like if they're about three feet off the sand and they're opening their mouth, there's more
food because the current is like stronger up there. It's like a sweet spot, so it's gonna bring more food into your mouth. So they just yeah, they have developed these tripods that allow them to kind of just like stand three feet above the sand.
And yeah, when you see these.
Deep sea videos or photos of them, they're so funny because they're just like weird. It's like you said, it's like someone just stuck them in the sand and they're like hanging out with their mouths open, just eating.
It looks like a prank. It doesn't look like something that does naturally occur, right, It looks like someone, as a prank, stuck a bunch of fish on like weird tripods on the seafloor just to like give researchers with their deep sea cameras kind of a scare. But no, they're real. Uh it's uh yeah, it's in like those legs are like kind of fin extensions that are that somehow managed to be like these kind of like tough
protrusions that keep them stuck up there. Just like I love, yeah, I love the I love the like they say that necessity is the mother of invention. I think laziness is a huge contributor to invention and I really appreciate it. The advice that is in your book is that you should stretch yourself as much as possible, especially when reaching for snacks. Yes, as as the as the wife of a very tall person, I have developed my own evolutionary technique to reach snacks that have been placed high up,
which is tongs like arm extensions. So when my husband, like he's not trying to keep the food away from me, he just like puts things up high because that's like where he like, that's where he's at, you know, that's his that's his zone. And then I'm like down here in the abyss zone going up. But so use I use tongs. So I feel like me and this fish, I mean, this tripod fish can relate to each other really well.
I just wanted to mention I learned about the tripodfish because I was writing about Costa Rican Deep Sea Expedition. And on this expedition and a lot of expeditions that go through the Schmidt Ocean.
Institute do this.
They brought artists on board to kind of like be part of it and create work that would help people see what everybody was seeing on board. And there was this painter, Carlos Hiller, who was painting all the stuff they found, and he has really beautiful, sort of like funny but also very moving tripod fish paintings.
That I really love. So that's what got me into this fish and I recommend looking him up.
All right, Yeah, I got I gotta do that because I love I mean, I love the art in the book. It's also because like I would when I was looking at these animals, uh, I would also like look at photos of them. It's like no, like they they because I was like, maybe, like this artist is interpreting that dumb little look on this fish's face, like his kind of creative interpretation. Like I was like, no, he got it. He got the the stupid little look of this tripod
fish just waiting for food. It's very funny.
I do.
I do very much recommend this book. It's a it's really a beautiful book that you can flip through and then learn all these amazing facts.
So I love it.
But before we go, we got to play a little game called Guess Who's squawking the Mystery Animal sound game. Last week's Mister Animal sound hint was this, This poisonous animal is a fantastic survivor, which is bad news for anything in its path. So that should strike fear into the hearts of many a invertebrate or small mammal carea. Do you have any any guesses?
Oh man, is this some kind of Is it like a poison frog.
That is very close? You're so warm, You're so warm?
Is it like a venomous toad?
Yes, it is, so this is the cane toad. This is the beautiful call of the cane toad. It is well known for being invasive in Australia. I think it's often viewed as kind of a villain because it does destroy so many innocent marsupial lives. But it doesn't. It's not its fault. It's from South and Central America. There was no way this guy was going to get to Australia without our help.
So yeah, it is.
It's it had no intention of being a menace until we intervened. They are both poisonous and toxic. They're quite large for a toad. They can grow to be around half a foot to up to two feet in length. I mean like usually they are somewhere between there. They're not usually two feet long and that huge, but they can get to be that big, and they have just
the most voracious appetites. You can look up There must be videos of this with cane toads as well, but you can look up videos of frogs and toads where you put like an iPhone or an iPad game in front of them, where like little things come up on screen and they will try to eat stuff off of the screen, like they never seem to learn that that's not food. So they are really just like mouths with a brain that can like operate the mouth, and not a whole lot else going on, So that makes them
a big problem. They were introduced to Australia because they had been previously introduced to islands like Pco to control cane beetle populations. And although I still think it's not good that they introduced them to these other islands, it was more of a quote unquote success story because they were able to control the beetle population that was ravaging the sugar cane field. So in terms of you know, human industry, it worked. In terms of the local wildlife.
Not a great idea, but in Australia it was a double whammy because not only did you just introduce this venomous, toxic toad that's giant and hungry to an island where the animals have never seen this thing before in their entire revolutionary history. It also didn't work to control the dang beetles because the cane beetles in Australia lived on the very tops of the sugar cane where the cane toad just like, I don't know, doesn't think to look up there. Like these cane toads are very simple. If
they see something, they eat it. They're a little like pac men. But if they're not seeing the beetles and it's not like, you know, directly in front of them, they're not going to do anything about it. So the beatles were fine, and then the cane toads had to eat, so they went off and start eating everything in their path, and so huge nightmare. But you know, also because like predators would try to eat them, and they're toxic and poisonous, and they hadn't co evolved with them, so they had
no defenses. They did not know, you know, they hadn't learned that these toads are toxic. So just awful, an awful nightmare. Not the toad's fault, though, The toad's just the toad is just doing what it was born to do, which is to eat and not be eaten. It's they're innocent, sweet little creatures.
That are destroying Australia.
So onto this week's mystery sound. The hint is this. You could find this animal in Karajaimo's book. It's not a bird and it is not a superhero sidekick.
All right, I hope you guys could hear that. It's that little like.
Sound. So, Kara, this maybe this is maybe this is unfair or too much pressure on you, but uh, do you have any.
Guesses as to what this is?
I know this one all right.
Uh.
I'll bleep you out if you get it right, so everyone will know that you've won, but they won't know how you've won.
This is this?
Yes, absolutely correct?
I found there's there are like what you can hear.
This is a video of one.
It's not. Here's another hint. It's really not happy to be where it is right now in this video. So it's making this sound more out of a protest. But yeah, you can find this animal in Kara Jaimo's book, Carol, Why don't you tell them where they can get the book.
Yeah, you can get this book pretty much anywhere. I think you can buy it online. Hopefully they'll have it at your local bookstore. I'm imagining or hoping also that it will be in like some aquariums and stuff like that. But yeah, just wherever you tend to find books, take a look, and I hope you enjoy it if you grab.
One, absolutely, I know I did, and I found mine in the ocean. That's not true unless you unless you define the Internet as the ocean of information. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you leave a rating or review, those really do help me and I read all the reviews. And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song. Exolumina Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like
the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are Hey, guess what wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm not your mother. I can't tell you what to do. I can tell you that if you see something weird in the ocean. Probably don't pick it up. It could vomit, glowing stuff at you, or cover your hand in mucus, or poison you. Any of those things could happen. You don't know, but do admire it because the ocean is beautiful. I'll see you next Wednesday.