Welcome to Creature future production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show, humans are the best at being the worst at healing ourselves. That's right. Research now confirms it. We are the suckiest at wound healing. And we're gonna get into it. Why are humans so bad at healing? Why is it not that big of a deal?
And we will look at an animal that is one of the most dead Pool esque critters out there with incredible healing skills that are it borders on the grotesque. So joining me today is I found one a medical professional host of the House of Pod medical podcast, doctor cave Hodo, Welcome.
We'd number one at being the worst.
Exactly human human pride at sucking h I just love it when a study comes out just to confirm what we've all already expected that we're not in basically every way except our ability to cooperate and pound one rock against another rock. We're really not great animals.
We're great at rock pounding, though, you're really good at that. We throw them good, we break them good. You just watch the Little Boy I have. I have young sons, and the just it's so funny. There is a very innate biological drive to throw and break rocks. Just watch it in them at a young age is picking up rocks and smashing them.
And it's fun. It is, you know, it's very fun and it's and we eventually broken enough rocks and one broke into the perfect shape of like, you know, an arrow head, a hammer and air, and we're like, wait a minute, huh, that's how that's how early evolutionary nail psychology works. Yeah. So the reason I brought you on and I want to talk about this is there was a there's a new review out by Matsumoto Oda at All which found that human wound healing is three times
slower than that of other primates. So yeah, it's we're not doing so great in terms of our ability to heal. Do you find with like this is a this is a question. You don't necessarily just deal with cuts and scrapes, but healing like recuperation times, say, between patients. Is there a lot of variability of between individuals.
There's lots of factors that go into it in humans. Again, I can't compare. I've never taken care of an ape or any sort of non human primate. But in humans, there is variation based on your other medical problems. You know, their age, medications they're taking, if they are taking things like steroids or ammusipressants, that will affect the way they heal. So there is quite a bit of variability in terms
of how humans can heal. And there is a lot of danger in the wounds becoming infected as they're healing. So there are large portions of the medical system that are dedicated solely to helping wound healing. There's lots of devices that we have, there's lots of medications, there's lots of techniques. There are wound care nurse specialists who have expertise in helping that. But yes, there is a wide variability and a lot of factors play into it for humans.
Yeah, and that's so interesting to me because there is also a lot of different strategies when you compare species. So even within say mammals, right, different animals will use different strategies for healing, including like say, superficial wounds, which is we're going to focus mostly on superficial wounds. You know, I think the medical terminology is booboos, so we're gonna
focus on booboos. And so even within species, though, different breeds, like within a species, can sometimes have vastly different methods of wound healing. So, for instance, ponies and horses, they're different breeds within the same species, have very different healing rates and methods. So ponies actually heal much faster than horses. This is great validation for Broni's you pick the right horse, they're really really fast healers. The ponies will deal with
wounds with something called wound contraction. The skin sort of like cinching shut, like I don't know, like sealing off a balloon or something. I'm trying to think of a good analogy for it. But the wounds sort of contract. So it's a technique that's really useful for wound healing because it reduces the amount of surface area exposed to bacteria and the amount of surface area that you have to heal.
Yeah, we don't do that great on our own. That's why we have stitches and butterfly tape and a whole other host of mechanism to approximate the edges of a wound. Although I will say again I'm not a booboologist, but I will say that there are times when you don't necessarily want to close off that wound right away. You want to make sure it stays clean, and you want to be able to debrid it. You want to be
able to get the bacteria out of it. But again, that's humans, and it actually can I be totally honest with you, Yes, I don't know if I said this on the last time I was on the show. This is really embarrassing, but it just goes to prove that really, literally anyone can be a doctor. Is I didn't until about a year ago, realized that ponies were not just young horses.
M I do, well, they are little horses, yeah, but I thought they were just like you thought they were. They would keep going, they would keep growing.
I thought eventually a pony would become a horse.
Yeah. I mean, you know, I can see the mistake because they are little ponies. But yeah, it's sort of like the difference between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua. Like the chihuahua is never gonna become a great day no matter how much it wants and puts it up on its vision board.
Well, I know it now I know that, like you know.
But it's the thing is like if when I'm selecting a doctor and I have a serious issue, like it doesn't really matter if they know that ponies are never going to become horses, Like, that's not that's not gonna help me necessarily.
Being vulnerable here with you and telling you the truth.
Right, And I'm reassured and I'm reassuring you that that when I when I have a if I'm going into surgery, like what I want to know is that they know, you know, which leg to operate on, doesn't matter to me. If they understand pony biology, I'm much better humans. Right, that's good.
About that's generally good.
But speaking of pony biology, yeah, ponies heal a lot faster than horses, which is really interesting. The skin is drawn together faster, it heals faster. Horses have a weaker inflammatory response. They are more dependent on a process called I'm going to pronounce this the first time I do it. Here we go re epithelialization. Does that sound right? Does that sound.
It's a tough one. No, that's you said it right, I stumble on it.
It's a lot. But that's as far as I understand, and please do correct me if I'm wrong, as I will correct you when you're wrong about ponies. It's like, rather than sort of cinching the wound shut, it's building a new surface layer of skin over the wound, kind of like brick, laying over the wound with new skin, like new skin cell turnover.
That's exactly right. It's just placing more epithelium and lighting there. That's exactly what it is.
Right, And so that's a slower process than the wound contraction because essentially you're like repaving the entire skin area versus sort of just pulling it taut drying it together
exactly exactly. And in general, animals that have looser skin, so skin that is less connected to the structures underneath the skin, rely more on wound contraction versus animals that have skin that is more tightly he's he'd one, am I trying to say tightly adhere to the underlying structures like our skin like have you if you've ever noticed an animal like if fly lands on them, they can do that cool thing where their skin just twitches and
chases off the fly. We can't do that. Our skin is too thick and it's too tightly secured to the underlying structures. So we're not the best at doing that wound contraction versus other animals.
Yeah, it'd be weird. I mean, there are some theories right about like hair human hair.
Oh, we're gonna get into that. We're getting into We're getting into the hair get hairy, We're getting hairy. Oh yeah, Because this is what's really interesting is that, in addition to the various factors that may play a role in faster wound healing in some animals versus others, like inflammatory response, the amount of blood vessels in the skin, how firmly attached the skin is to the muscle tissue, how thick the skin is, et cetera. Even behavioral things such as grooming.
There is this question of like, well, why do we heal slower than say, are really close relatives like chimpanzees, Like it seems like we should have about the same rate of healing, and yet chimpanzees and other apes primates that were related to heal three times faster than us
on average. But yeah, so, like you pointed out, one of the most notable things about humans compared to other land mammals is our lack of fur, so we don't have a lot of dense hair follicles, and each of our hair are I mean definitely varies between individuals, but for in general, when we're comparing ourselves to say other primates or other mammals, our hair is less thick and
it's less dense. So, you know, research have found that hairless rodents heal more slowly compared to rodents that have fur. So that's a very interesting thing. It's again it's not yet it's smoking gun though, right, because if you have a hairless rodent, there's a whole bunch of other factors that go into well, it's hairless, so maybe it's inflammatory response is sort of a more sensitive in terms of other things going on because it doesn't have this gene
for hair growth. There's a lot of potential factors. But yeah, so when we look at us versus chimpanzees, the interesting thing is that chimpanzees compared to say mandrels or baboons, heal a lot about the same rate, and chimpanzees compared to humans heal three times faster than us. But when you look at hair density, like follicular density, uh, chimpanzees and humans are about the same. That sounds weird, right, because it's like, well, no, chimpanzees are way hairer than us.
What do you mean that the hair density is about the same. It's that their hair is a lot thicker and longer than us, so they have bigger hair follicles than us, whereas we have we don't have anything.
We have the same nules.
Yes, they're okay.
They're bigger, yeah, exactly, so a similar number of hair follicles differently distributed, but also their hair follicles are bigger. So the idea is that potentially either having more hair of fault, either having more hair follicles or having thicker hair follicles could both be away that helps enhance wound healing because of the presence of stem cells in the
hair follicles. So sort of this theory is that when you have more hair follicles and or you have bigger hair follicles, you're able to recruit more stem cells from those hair follicles to help in wound healing.
As a Iranian male, I love where this conversation is going because I like to believe that that makes me a little bit more superhuman, right, Feeling wolverine was known to be a very hairy mutant. That is the lore.
Yeah, it was a here suit man.
That's very interesting. Now this is I'm sure way more depth than is necessary for this. But where are these stem cells? Are they sort of in the base of the follicle and do they are they released down to the skin around it? Like how is this working on an anatomic level?
Like I don't Yeah, I don't know that they know yet because they don't even know if this is how why this is enhancing the wound healing? Right, Like the the in terms of like the stem cells potentially migrat, like where the stem cells are along the hair follicle. I believe they are at the very sort of base of the hair follicle where they're sort of going through
the whole hair growth cycle. Right, they have some undifferentiated cells down there that then can be used to promote this hair growth and you know, turn into hair cells. But the in terms of how they would potentially be say recruited in nearby tissue to help in mound healing, I don't know, and I couldn't find research on it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. So someone please write to me tell me I'm dumb. I'm always welcome that.
But yeah, it's but it's also just not known for sure if hair follicles are the sort of like magical reason, the smoking gun of who heals better than others, but it is. It is a very interesting idea, and it's also kind of I really want to talk about he humans sort of making this trade off for why aren't we all that hairy, right, Like why did we lose all of our hair? Seems like if these hair follicles represent better wound healing, which we don't know yet, but
that's a theory. It just adds one more positive attribute to having fur, right, Like, if you have fur, you have a lot of hair. There's a lot of benefits. There's a warmth, there's a protective layer, it's like armor. There's also things like social signaling. Having different colored hair can help signal like sexual maturity, it can help signal fitness. So there's also the social aspect of grooming that is present in primates that can be really really good for
cooperation within a group of apes. So there's a lot of benefits to having hair, and yet we only have hair. We do have hair all over our bodies actually.
Big for yourself, my friend. No, that is fascinating to me because I always wonder that too. I'm like, it doesn't really make that much sense you think that having more body hair would be I mean, we take it for granted because we wear clothing. We have to wear clothing, that's our thing to stay warm in certain climates. But yeah, what benefit do we get? Why are we And also, I guess another question. I don't know if this is evolutionary or if this is a social sort of question.
Why is less hair considered beautiful? Has that always been the case? This might be like a more of an anthropology question, like are there cultures in the past where being her suit was considered more beautiful? Like, I mean, there's been times in our current modern day world where being hairy as a man, for example, has been good.
But yeah, like Gaston right, like remember right, he's covered every inch of them is covered in hair, and the ladies love it, and the men everyone, and the nbas.
I am what? I am curious? In general, I can't think of any culture offhand where the it's been considered a sign of beauty for women to be her suit, which seems unfair, but I get, and maybe there is one I just don't know. But I'm wondering why that is. I'm wondering, like why we are as a society sort of more and more over time trying to become less hairy, Like what it is about us? If there's some inherent biological need or desire to be less hairy, to be less furry.
It's interesting. So I would say that the the human like current human preference for less body hair is cultural, and it's it's not something that is static throughout time.
Women shaving their underarms really only popped up, I think, kind of in the nineteen around the nineteen twenties, and that had to do with fashion changing, because all of a sudden, women were actually wearing clothing where you could see your armpits and you could see some leg and so at that point there was this kind of like seeing armpit hair or leg hair as kind of a weirdly like sexual thing, and so shaving was introduced as like, well, this is good hygiene, right, you want to shave, you
want to be clean, so that it didn't have this kind of like it may have sanitized a bit this shift in women's fashion. You see it in also in like Greek sculpture, where a lot of Greek sculpture would have male body hair sculpted but no female body hair. That didn't mean women were shaving a lot back in ancient Greece. It actually was because a lot of sculptors saw female body hair as an apparently sexual thing, right,
so they wouldn't want to represent it in sculptures. So I would say, yes, today, our preference for doing a lot of shaping. Sorry, a lot of what am I trying to say a lot of landscaping is is more of a modern preference based on some interesting cultural shifts, based on fashion changes. So it's a it is. I wouldn't say, I can't think of any.
I mean, I'm sure it's not a biological imperative. It's like men deciding what is beauty on some level. Like it's funny that all these things they all kind of come down to men, or not just men, but women having to do the extra work, right A lot more well.
There is there is manscaping now. So I personally, I'm I'm of the brand of feminism where it's like we got to drag men down to you know, basically even things out so we gotta make more maandscaping gottah, you know, make pay win less, just pull you down to our like crabs in a bucket. Now. But the one, the one possible benefit to not having hair, both culturally right like shaving, and in terms of our evolutionary history is parasites, so ectoparasites, anything that would come and latch on, so
fleas and ticks. It's a much more hostile environment for them if they don't have body hair, because for the ticks, they can't really survive unless there's hair around them. They would dry out too quickly, and for the ticks they can they of course everyone's probably had some bad experience with a tick, but you can find it much easier if you're not covered in hair. And so, of course we still have ectoparasites. We have demodecks which get into
our eyebrows. It's a tiny horrifying looking thing if you've ever looked at it in a microscope. You have them on you right now, and they're not They look like sort of a monster from Dune. Not not great to look at. They're mostly harmless, but you know, head lice, pubic license are both things that we can have so there is, but is it sc Scabies is something that can affect the skin even when you don't have hair.
That's I'm sure that's true. I don't know.
Bed bugs. Bed bugs also can like it's it often you like the things that like. Things like bedbugs can survive because they don't actually live on you. They bite you, but they live in your bedding, which is super annoying. So we do still have ectoparasites. But there is a theory that by losing some of our hair, it made it harder for parasites to latch onto us. That's another sort of theory for why maybe grooming like pubic hair or grooming beard hair may have gone in and out
of fashion. Maybe it followed some sort of like when cities became more rife with, say, parasites. I'm not exactly sure. I think that explains everything, both culturally and in terms
of evolution. The theory to me that makes the most sense as to why human beings lost our hair as actually thermal regulation, because we moved from more of a kind of like a jungle habitat to the savannah, and we had to change our method of living quite a bit in order to do that, and one was that if we're living out in the savannah where it's very hot and we want to be able to eat anything that can possibly outrun us, we need to be able to thermoregulate and we need to be able to sweat.
So we potentially made a trade off where we instead of having been covered in a bunch of hair, we traded that hair for sweat glands. Because we can't any organ This is true of any organism. You can't just put infinity resources into everything, right. It's like when you're making a character in I don't know, Oblivion or Baldersgate or any kind of thing where you get the sliders
and you have to put points and stuff. That's basically evolutionary biology where there's sliders right when you turn the you know, the endocrine glands up and you have a lot of sweat glands, you gotta push down the hairiness slider of it.
Yeah. No, And I think it's been shown that people who sweat right are tend to be a little bit healthier overall. Like there is a study that I should have looked this up before orient but like you know, that showed the people who had a little bit more sweat a little bit more freely and quicker. Actually tended to have better exercise capacity, which makes sense for what you're saying. Actually, completely my.
Personal experience is that's true. I'm not much. It's interesting. I'm not much of a sweater when it comes to exercise. If I'm nervous, like then I start sweating, which is
really useful. But yeah, I like, I basically don't start to get over the hump, like if I'm hiking or doing some intensive exercise, until after I find my body finally catches on that, oh, I have to start sweating now, and then I'm Actually it's like such a relief when that happens, because then I feel better and I get over this sort of like hump of like just not just it's like I'm going to die, and then realizing I'm actually fine, I'm nowhere near death.
I just well, this is where I again, this is where I again am superhuman because I somehow man should be both hairy and sweaty. So that's the.
Ideal human form.
I am this.
Yes, it's peak peak human performance sweaty and hairy. But yeah, so we potentially traded a lot of that hair. The not just the hair density, because like I said, the champanzees actually may have a similar number of hair follicles, but we traded in the hair thickness for more sweat glands.
This is a theory. We we can't necessarily prove this, but that to me is one of the more convincing ideas, because there's other theories about like, well, we lost hair on our faces so that we could use social signaling like looking at people blushing or something, so we could tell if someone's like happy with us or angry. And I think that may have been a side benefit, right, and it may have influenced say like facial hair patterns, but I just don't think that would have been enough
to have us lose all of our hair. I think the thermal regulation it makes a lot of sense in terms of our evolutionary history from where we moved basically from these essentially like seeing like the difference between humans and a lot of primates is where we ended up moving to the savannah and away from these these more sort of like forest regions, although there are mandrils and baboons that also do.
This, but it is really it makes more sense on like a more basic level of what it does for your survival chances. Yeah, I get that.
It's such a It's like, it's such a dramatic change that it seems to me something dramatic like being able to thermo regulate in an environment that is very hot and hostile to something that cannot run effectively in the heat. That makes a lot of sense to me. And so we potentially lost our hair because of that, And so it's interesting because also that the thermoregulation idea and losing our hair may have actually resulted in our skin being
a bit thicker. Our skin is actually thicker than a lot of primates, and one of the potential reasons for that is without hair, now we don't have that armor, so we kind of have to make up for it
by having thicker skin. And then ironically, another theory is that with this thicker skin, that actually makes wound healing harder, so you can There's just so many odd trade offs that happen with evolution, and these theories really show how tricky it is, because you know, what do weigh better the ability to heal or to not be injured in the first place, And how do you kind of weigh both of those things and have them come into balance for an organism to be successful.
Yeah that I have to say. I'm surprised to learn that our skin might be thicker than that of other primates. But yeah, wondering like, have.
You ever tried to insult a chimpanzee?
They really roll with it. Yeah, give them credit. I mean, not great at roasting though, they don't seem to get it, but they do take a joke.
Well huh yeah, yeah, I don't know. I I personally don't want to insult a gorilla. I don't want to see what happens. They're generally nice.
But did you weigh in on the one hundred men versus you know, one gorilla thing? Have you? I'm assuming you've covered this at Nauvoom.
I mean, do the men like, do they have is this a is it one man at a time? Do they have weapons? Are they wearing the armor?
No, it's one hundred naked men. Okay, wine, well groom didn't clothed gorilla, all right, I have details.
One hundred naked men. I mean, okay, so obviously I think the men went in this situation. I think that it's gonna be. It's the it's gonna be sort of like the It's sort of like bees versus murder hornets, where the bees surround the murder hornets and wiggle until the murder hornets die and some bees may be lost in the process. This is how I imagine one hundred naked men versus a gorilla. They dog pile the gorilla. Of course, some of them are going to valiantly lose
their lives in the great gorilla battle. I'm also wondering, though, It's just like, but why gorilla is generally very nice, right, I mean, they're actually quite chill.
That is really, that is really the question is why are you thinking about this? Leave these poor gorillas alone, them alone, relatively non violent primates, and let them do the thing. I think exactly. I'm assuming it's a they're being attacked. They're the ones being attacked, and they're defending themselves.
In this scenario, the men are the gorilla. The gorilla glas being attacked. Yeah, I would assume that too.
I don't think the girl is starting the melee against the hundred.
I don't yeah, I don't think. Yeah. I think gorillas are too focused on leaf and termite to do that. You know, they just want to hang out and do leaf and termite, and men are going like writing on Twitter or whatever, going like I think I could beat a gorilla.
Guess what.
The girl is not even thinking about you, man, girl is not even thinking about you.
That's so sad. It's true. We're humans are the only species that would take the time to yeh about this.
Yeah, no, no, there they're out. They're living their best life while we're seething online. So keep that in mind. We're going to take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to talk about a tiny deadpool. This is really interesting to me because when I was reading this, this report on this new review of the studies, like, I couldn't help but think of one of my favorite little freaks of nature, which is the spiny mouse, which is such a strange Anneal, have you ever heard of this cave?
I have not heard of the spiny mouse. No, so.
We have talked about this on the show before, but it bears repeating if you haven't heard that episode. It also, I think is just so relevant because it's such an interesting connection to everything we've been talking about, the wound healing, the loose skin, the presence of hair. So there is this it's a genus, so there's multiple species within it.
It's these adorable little mice called spiny mice. They're more closely related to durbils than to the house mouse, but they look very much like mice.
I'm looking at a picture of them now, very cute. They almost look like the kangaroo, rat or something. They have a little longer nose than I expected, small nutsing spines, the spine, the aspect.
Of this they have. It's more. They should be called bristle mice, but I guess nobody put me in charge of naming things. They should. But you know, they you know, all right, But they have guard hairs that are coarser and a little bit sturdier. So their guard hairs make them less appealing of a prey versus maybe a little
rodent who has soft hairs. It's just like it hasn't reached the level of say like a porcupine or a hedgehog, where those those hairs have become really hard in stuff such that they really hurt and they can really pokey good. These ones, the bristles are unpleasant for predator and kind of pokey like if you've ever like with a hair brush or you know, something like or a piece of wheat, you know, like or grass or something, and you kind
of sticks on your hand. You're like, ah, it's not a great feeling, but it's not like hurry.
So that's.
If I'm really hungry, I'm eating a hairbrush. Yeah, exactly.
So.
So spiny mice are found in African deserts. They are these amazingly cute little guys. And then it just turns into this like horror show, which is that they have this cool trick if they do get caught, which is just letting their skin fall off, so they will wiggle around, and the strength of which their skin clings to the underlying structure is much weaker than other rodents and much
much weaker than like most other animals. So if you know, if you're like kind of holding the skin of this mouth and it's like wiggling it around, that skin just pops right off at a certain point. Yeah, and it's this is not this is not a mistake. This is a feature, not a bug, because this is essentially giving them a chance to escape. So the predator gets like a fistful of hair and skin and it's like, Okay,
I have something, and the mouse gets away. And so the question though, is now that it has this huge, gaping wound on its body, because it's skin just popped off, what does it do right. It seems like this would be a terrible strategy because now you're wounded, you risk infections. It's really nasty. Within a single day, that wound has already clotted, scabbed over, and the surface area has been reduced.
Using that we talked about, that wound contraction method of just sort of the wound cinching shut, it has already contracted by over half of the surface area that was exposed is now reduced by half. That's the first day of healing. In three days, new skin has already grown over the wound, including follicle regeneration, and even parts of their bodies that normally mammals in general can't heal very well,
like ear cartilage, which doesn't heal very well. That's one of the reason we can do piercings right and keep that hole in our ear. Those their ears can actually completely regrow, which is wild.
This is fascinating, especially because so it sounds like these spiny mice live in the desert and that's you're losing your skin along with the infection you're mentioning also just the risk of dehydration. Yes, your skin helps you maintain that hydration to lose that. I mean, it seems like such a counterintuitive skill set for an animal living out there to have. That's amazing.
Yeah, I mean it's something where yes, they could still die, but they will definitely die if they're caught by a predator and eaten. And so it's it's this trade off where their chance of survival seems to increase by having this like disconnectable skin, and then they compensate for all these risks by having this incredible healing process unlike anything
we really see in other mammals. So and yeah, so like essentially, in order to help protect them from that massive dehydration, they're sensing that moonshet as quickly as possible, reducing the surface area that's exposed to evaporation, exposed to bacteria. Uh and then yeah, immediately kind of like putting like they're sinching it. They're using the Okay, I'm gonna get this re epithelialization. Did they do that? You get it? Great?
Kay pronunciation? So uh, yeah, they they regenerate that really quickly and amazingly though. Not only are they fast, they don't generate a lot of scar tissues, so they actually have this kind of loose collagen matrix that matches the other tissues. So you'd think like they would just kind of you know, I compared them to Deadpool. They're actually
way better than Deadpool because of it. Instead of Ryan Reynolds basically having sort of like this patchwork face where he's still handsome but he looks kind of sunburned, but he's supposed to look really grotesque, they the.
Most beautiful man in the world.
Yeah, it's yeah, they didn't, you know. It's sort of one of those things.
All yeah, look at.
Me, I'm unlovable. I'm Ryan Reynolds with a bad subburn. Yeah, come on, guy. Anyways, but yeah, these mice, actually they're more I should say, they're more like Wolverine. Right, he's got the regeneration, right, I'm getting that. Please, I don't want to be attacked.
I will sidetrack this whole episode and to extended detail on the Wolverine weaponex lore. But yes, you are right. They both share a similar, if not the exact same regenerator properties.
Right, all right, it's only a short period of time where they do look kind of gnarly because like their skin just pops off in big chunks, which is, you know, a little bit of a nightmare. But yeah, So they are able to regenerate hair, follicles, epidermis, dermis, sweat glands, fat cells, nerves, muscles, cartilage, and they even have some evidence that they can regenerate parts of spinal nerves that
are really difficult for say, other mammals to regenerate. Right, Like, when we have a spinal energy, it does not regenerate very well.
No, this is fascinating to me, and I have the sinking fear that you're going to follow this up by saying that we have almost driven it to extinction and will never be able to stay to learn about how we as humans could benefit from this.
No, we're actually studying, like this is one of the rare cases where we are studying it and it's not it's it doesn't seem to be a near extinction.
It's fantastic because this is amazing. I'm just thinking about all the potential benefits from it. You're exactly right, Like just in terms of burn patients, in terms of patients with neurologic damage, nerve damage. To find as many ways possible as we can to learn to regenerate those things which are very difficult, as many options and as angles
we can find is fascinating. What's also fascinating to me is when I did google it once you started talking about it and spiny mouse comes up, the first question it offers to answer for you is why do spiny mice ment straight? I don't know why that is of all the things that we're talking about.
I mean, as as far as I know, they probably amin straight in this for the same reason every.
Every y mammal, unsuccessful pregnancy results into crosis, the shedding of the functional layer of the uterus, the endometrium. So I don't don't know why for the spike be bouse.
Fastening. There must but that must be that some that feels like it's too deep of a cut for like random people to be doing. There's got to be some like research intern who's like, wait, why is this dying thing menstruating all the time. I'm trying to study it.
A lot, just view.
Yeah that's wild. So yeah, I mean it's it's it's really amazing. It's healing ability is really amazing. So a couple of things are really interesting about this Uh. It also demonstrates a better cardiac healing than other mouse species, which again is very interesting. And so there's a few things going on with this mouse. I mean, let me preface it by saying, I don't know, and I don't think anyone knows exactly what's going going on with the
spiny mouse. It's mostly this sort of conjecture because they're working on research and hopefully at some point we will know more about them. But one of the things with the spiny mice is that when you look at their skin, right, they have really loose skin. So, like we talked about in the first part of the show, where you got loose skin, it's easier to kind of synch that up like a draw string bag and do a wound contraction. But they also have a really high density of hair follicles,
and they have really thick hair follicles. So they've got like everything going on that we've talked about earlier in terms of animals that have faster wound healing, right, loose skin, a lot of hair, and thick hair. But that obviously doesn't necessarily explain everything, right, because if they have faster cardiac healing. It's hard for me to imagine by what process their skin would help in that, right, Like I suppose there could be some weird migration of stem cells
from the skin to cardiac tissue, but I don't. I have never heard of anything like that.
It's probably a separate mechanism, but how it's related is interesting. What there are cells that line, you know, your cardiac the cardiac lining. I mean, I guess when you talk
about cardiac healing, I mean, what does that mean. Are they like injuring the heart or are they doing what humans do, which is like they plug up the arteries and then see if they can re epitheliize that or if there can be like new vasculature that forms, because what could I've done really just hand waving here, But you know, I'm wondering if what they're showing is that there is a growth of vasculature to feed blood vessels to the rest of the heart if one is injured,
for example, because that could make sense. That could be like stem cell active, causing more or hyper vascularization of the tissue of the heart. So that's fascinating. I mean, I would love to know about what they're actually doing
in regards to these studies, how they're studying this. I mean, because it sounds like we could learn not only the skin stuff, not only the wound healing, not only nerve damage, but we could also learn how to heal scarred cardiac tissue potentially from these animals.
Yeah, I believe it does have something to do with the revascularization around the heart. I think it might also have some ability to tolerate, say like heart attacks, and to heal the heart tissue after like an schema schemic event. I hope I'm saying that.
Yeah right, yeah event, Yeah, blood flow.
Right exactly, So damaged heart tissue as well as potentially healing more of the blood vessels. It might be sort of both things. They can't regenerate the tissue in the same way that they can regenerate their skin tissue. It's not like you can they can just like completely damage to the heart and then regrow the heart like they can with their skin. So it's there's definitely some separate
process going on. Another interesting aspect to the mices, when they look at one thing they do understand a little better is their their ear healing is they can see that they form again, really hoping I nail the pronunciation
of this. I think it's called a blastema, which is like this this cluster of undifferentiated cells like stem cells that form sort of this glob, and then from that glob it can start like you know, sit like these little undifferentiated cells move on out and start rebuilding whatever
tissue is needed in that area. And so you see similar actually similar structures in say salamander limbs, where salamanders can rea grow entire limbs, and so they also have a similar like it's just a blob of undifferentiated cells them forms in the area and then basically sends out like different units like Okay, you go over here and then you figure out like hey, I need to be this kind of tissue cell and then develops into it and then it can regrow entire limbs that way.
You know. I've heard about that with lizards that they're in going back to Marvel Lore doctor Connor's and the lizard and how he regrows his arm but becomes a monster, But I haven't heard about it much with mammals. I mean, in warm blooded creatures. Are there other mammals that can have the same sort of regenerative growth.
I mean, most mammals can to some extent have regenerative growth, but we can't do entire limbs. Don't know of any mammal that can regrow an entire limb, uh it has we we can partially regrow things though, right like, so with this spiny mice them regrowing entire skin structures is
pretty similar. That's maybe they're may be the most similar when you can compare mammals to salamanders, to lizards, but even like people, right like, if you it depends on like we can regrow structures to some extent, it just really the point at which you can chop an arm off for a human being to regrow is basically just the very tippy tippy tips of our fingers, right like, we can regrow a little bit of our fingertips, but any any further down where we can't. We can't handle that.
Whereas uh, salamanders essentially just have a much higher higher tolerance for having their limb regrowth start at like being able to have that limb bud essentially reform and then start developed being a new limb, which we cannot and other mammals cannot.
Do what a bummer.
I know, it would be great. I I wanna, I wanna have that ability. But I'd like it to be where you not only grow like a new limb, but like maybe an extra one. So every time you get hurt, like you get like a little hand that comes out of like that injury. That would be so cool.
You have to buy a new wardrobe like all the time though.
Yeah, but then imagine all the snacks you could hold in all the little hands that you have. Now fair, I think about this a lot. Yeah, yeah, So yeah, we got we got weird mice that are growing their skin, which could be uh if we player cards right which right now we don't seem to be, but it could be if we research them more, they may help us understand our own uh slow heat healing process and maybe how we can improve healing both boo boos and heart booboos.
Yeah cardio.
Sorry, the scientific term is cardiac booboo.
Yeah yeah, I mean, don't embarrass me in front of my doctor friends. That is what we call it. I know, I think that is That's fascinating. Again. One thing I love about coming on the show is just being introduced to these these animals that have all the the in vivo studies we could want right there, Yeah, to learn
more about ourselves, Like, I think it's a great way. Two, it's a great way to build the science is to to learn about these animals, you know, of course in an ethical way, and you know too, to learn a little bit more about their healing process and how different things can be. It's just nothing else. It opens up our minds to the possibilities of what we could be
doing with humans. I think that's really fun. It's really fun because if you get so as doctors, we get so like at some point locked into what we can do and what we do know and what happens currently with the human body. It requires people thinking outside of the box like this, to be like, Okay, what is this animal doing that's different, and then someone to take that information and to eventually work multiple steps, obviously to the point where how can this benefit us? Which I
know makes me sound like a monster. I do love animals, even if they can't help us. But I think it's really exciting. It's really exciting to another great reason why we need to be doing research.
Because I mean, I'm not an I'm not a vegetarian, So the idea that I would make draw the line at doing animal research as long as it's you know, done humanely, right that it's you know, I don't need to eat meat, but I think help people with survive heart attacks and stuff is very important. Yeah.
Yeah, it's really exciting. It's really fun to yeah, to see that and to be like this, to keep thinking of new possibilities. A lot of that the animals are fantastic.
Yeah, absolutely, and I mean hopefully also gives us more incentive to Like you said, even though the spiny mouse, there could be some species that are in trouble. I don't actually know if there are any that are endangered, but certainly a lot of species are not endangered. But I think it just when we keep our natural ecosystems functioning, and there's just like an incredible library of genetic knowledge
that is completely irreplaceable, right. Like we've talked about this before actually when I had you on, Like we talked about the gas rooting frog, this frog that has this amazing ability not to kill its own offspring that it has in its stomach and somehow its stomach acid doesn't
burn through its own offspring. And just the fact that that went extinct and we don't have that incredible sort of like you imagine if these spiny mice went extinct, right like this, this incredible ability that this animal has, So yeah, it's a I think it's it is something that really it's a good way to be humbled too, that like, look, humans are great, we're very very smart, but we can't just regrow a huge chunks of our
skin in like three days. We can't lose like sixty percent of our skin and then regrow it and be okay. So yeah, just respecting these little guys.
I mean, and we talked about this last time too. It is one of those things where I could easily see some politician saying, can you believe that we're spending a million dollars to keep a mouse alive in this environment? In you were like, yeah, there's a really good reason for that. There's a really good reason. It may not be obvious right away, but research is always good, you know, learning good research is always good for us. So whether or not it's obvious initially right away or not, it is.
I'm sure whoever started looking at the desert mouse, I'm sorry, not the spiny mouse didn't know at first all the potential benefits of what it can do or what it can be, and they just start studying it because they're interested. And now we know it can do these remarkable things.
So yeah, grant writers, just just include in your grant somewhere that this might help the libido of aging white men in Congress and you know that's there. You go, funding that's it.
All right.
Before we go, we got to play a little game called Guests, Who's Squawk and the Men the Mystery Animal Sound Game. Every week I play a mystery animal sound in you the guests, and you the listener, try to guess who is making this sound. It could be any animal in the world. Last week's Mister Animals sound hint was this found in eastern North America. You might find this little guy boogie wogging, and who can blame him with a call like this? Okay, here we go. Oh yeah, god,
I love this guy. Okay, Oh it's so cute. Favorite bird call the bird? Okay, Oh I dang, this is a first. I've never accidentally given a hint. I didn't mean to, but yes it is a bird.
So there you go.
Hint to new hint because I can't keep my mouth shut. But yeah, this ahe is so cute. COVID, you got any guesses for this adorable little sound?
Is that this week's or last week?
So that you're playing that's last week's that I'm flu fun.
It's okay. It's a bird and as like a little squeak, and I think blue jays are squeaky. Is it a blue jay?
No?
What is it?
It is the American woodcock. So congratulations to Chad F. Max and Laura W. Who guessed correctly. American woodcocks. Uh kind of you gotta google it. They're so cute they they make. In addition to that adorable little pink sound, they have these cute little bodies and they have long beaks that are way too big for their tininess. But another thing that they do that is just so adorable is they like to rock back and forth on the ground.
And if you've seen like a gift of a weird little bird doing what looks like the boogie woogie, that's an American woodcock because they and one of the theories for why they do this is that they're trying to coax earthworms up out of the ground, essentially by mimicking the vibrations of rain on the ground, which for worms would be bad news because when it rains, they come out of the ground because they can drown if they
stay in the soil. And so wow, one of the one of the theories, like, there are a few theories about why they do this, and this is one of them. And my favorite one is that they're doing this to try to coax worms up out of the ground with their little boogie woggeeing dance. It's adorable. They're so cute, very.
Poly trees of them.
It's like very like exactly if you walk with if you walk with rhythm, you will attract the worm.
Yeah, exactly. All right, let me let me let me hear the wine for next week. I think I'm gonna get this.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, ah yeah, all right. So the hint for this week's the ceria sound is this. This fierce little carnivore is like a wolf that you can fit in your pocket. All right. Can you hear that.
Very high pitched sound.
You do not need to adjust your headphones. It is that thing that sounds like something is wrong.
With the audio, guess, and it's wolf like.
I'll just repeat the hint. It is that this fierce little carnivore is like a wolf that you can fit in your pocket.
Okay, here one more time.
They hear it in a sentence, the sentences.
And then wolf. Okay, do you know what I think? That's a trick question. I think it's a wolf spider and somehow making the squeaky sound, which I don't know spiders can make a sound. That's between that and my pony reference. I think I have out of myself as someone doesn't know much about any animals.
That's an amazing guest. There are spiders who can make sounds, so that is not a bad guess.
At all, but it's not correct.
Fine, I can't tell you. Okay, no spoilers because you got to wait until next week when I answer who is making that sound? And if you out there think you know who that is, you can write to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com. That's right, you can compete directly head to head with an actual medical doctor. Tell your friends Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today.
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I always learned so much when I come on the show. It's so much fun. I really have in the recent months to year has really been trying to learn as much as I can about stuff because I feel like it keeps me young when I do. I'm trying to like reignite my love of education and learning, and this show is such a great way to do that. So I really appreciate that. Thanks for having me on and thanks for doing the show.
Yeah. Absolutely. Where can people find you?
I am on a podcast called The House of Pod. It is a humor adjacent, fun little medical podcast. You'll hear lots of people come on the show, from Peter Hotez and other world renowned infectious disease doctors and specialist physicians of all kinds, to musicians like Portugal de man or comedians like mos Er Browny or amazing podcast host Slash and well behavior offficionados like Katie Golden, who's going to be on as we speak, is on this week's episode.
By the time you hear this, it will be last week's. So go back and.
Listen to that's right, cross politics, cross pollination people.
That's right. So you'll if you like this show, we're sort of in a similar vein but more human y, and I promise I know more about human bodies than to animals. So but you're gonna like it. It's a similar vibe. It's like, you know, let's wear animals too. So if you like animals.
Exactly, as long as you stick to human doctoring and you don't do pony doctoring, then you should be fine.
But I.
I highly recommend the podcast. I actually, when I have to fly, like say, I'm visiting my family back in the US, that's one of my go to things to load up on my phone so I can just listen and learn stuff about medicine. But it's not intimidating because.
You know, I'm not not intimidating.
Yeah, you're not intimidating. I know what were until, right, So if you're if you're interested in medical topics and you're curious about stuff and you want to learn in a fun, friendly way, highly recommend that podcast.
Thank you so much.
Thank you guys for listening to the show. If you leave writing a review, I read every single one. Appreciate all the reviews. Thank to the Space Classics for their super awesome song. Ex Alumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio, app Apple podcasts are you guess what?
Where?
Have you listen to your favorite shows? I'm not your mother. I can't tell you what to do. But don't go out there and try to get bit by a radioactive spiny mouse. You're just probably gonna get real sick, mostly from the radiation and maybe a little bit from the mouse bite. So don't do that. We can all be. We can't all be Peter Parker. Some of us just get mad mouse tumors. So don't do that, all right, everybody, see you next Wednesday.