From the Vault: Squirrels, Part 2

together and they were very popular. Everyone seemed to love them, so we thought, well, it's time to bring them out of the vault again, and so indeed, I look forward to the renewed um onslaught of squirrel related listener mail. Bring it on. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back for part two of our two part exploration of the world of scugs.

That's right, squirrels, squirrels. If you did not listen to our last episode, our most recent episode about squirrels, go back and listen to it because it will. It will provide some necessary, horrific revelations about the squirrel that you really need going into this episode, and we should warn at the beginning that, uh, if you didn't listen to the last episode you want to listen to this one anyway,

you should be forewarned. This is going to be one of the most gruesome things we've ever explored on the show. I think how squirrels, I would say that the last episode, which largely dealt with the fact that squirrels eat meat and do actually stalk prey like, that's an episode I would listen to with my six year old son, and I wouldn't have any problem with it. I've talked about the topics on that episode with him. This episode I would probably not listen to a nice year old son. Yeah,

I didn't think it would roll out this way. But but our exploration of squirrels is one of the most inappropriate for children of all things we ever we've ever explored here. Yes, but we're walking in deep truth tonight, children, so so stick with us as we explore more horrific facts about squirrel behavior. So again, last episode, we talked about squirrels eating meat, squirrels stalking to pray, squirrels messing around with snakes. Uh, squirrels and their relationship with the

Benjamin Franklin this time. Now. In the last episode, we talked about certain myths about Benjamin Franklin and the reality of Benjamin Franklin having a pet squirrel named Mungo who he wrote analogy for when it was killed by a dog. UM. This time, I want to start off with another possible myth, possible fact that that dwells in that hazy middle world of rumor. I want to know, Robert, if you've ever heard the same rumor I have. It's a horrifying rumor.

It's one I've heard for years, and it's about the competition between squirrels. And the rumor goes something like this, When two adult male squirrels come into conflict over food, over territory, over mating, or whatever. The two squirrels fight with a horrible aim, and that aim is to castrate the other by biting off its squirrel testicles. I had

never heard of this before. I would say the closest thing i'd heard was, you know some details about a competition between chimpanzees, Yeah, biting biting off Well, I just know that genital attacks um have have have been reported among chimpanzees. Uh, but I don't know with what degree of frequency. But it's the kind of thing where I heard about it in relation to chimpanzees and now makes me look at chimpanzee is a little uh, well, there's a lot with chimpanzees to be you know, a little

concerned about. But but I've never heard about this with squirrels. Well, I I've heard about this for years. I don't remember where I heard at first. It might have been from some old, some good old Tennessee woodsman somewhere who spoke wisdom of the forests into my ears. But this is important for us to remind all of our listeners, is that Joe and I both grew up with with with

with access to the Tennessee woodlands. Yes, so there is a lot of I'm rather surprised that I didn't hear this story from from from people who wandered out of the out of the Tennessee of forests with tales of

the skug. Well, if you want to hear about the horrors of skug castration from the lips of the true speakers, you should go to YouTube, because there will be many a video of some bearded hunter standing there and Camo talking into his phone in the middle of the forest, saying, here's what happens when these here squirrels buy it off each other's nuts. But it turns out there are many

variations on this base rumor. So one is that you've got one squirrel species that supplants another in an area by castrating all the males of the other squirrel species. Sometimes this version goes, you've got gray squirrels doing it to red squirrels. Sometimes they say it's red squirrels doing it to gray squirrels. Sometimes the fox squirrel is thrown in there somewhere. And so what we want to look at is is there in each truth to this? Is it true? Or is this just a horrible woodsman myth?

My uh guess, of course, would be that it is a myth, because it just doesn't sound like behavior one finds in animals, especially against another species. You know, it is a certainly strange targeted behavior, one thing that I wanted because because you don't have to castrate another species to drive it off. We see plenty of examples of one one species driving off another from resources, competing for the same resources, or of course, uh, two members of

the same species competing for resources or mates. But you can drive. They will drive each other off through through fighting, through displays, much more conventional means. Yeah, usually genital mutilation doesn't come up. Yeah, it doesn't seem like a necessary step. But then again, we'll we'll come back to this, will weigh the pros and cons later on. So one of the best things about this myth is that it doesn't just come from the woodsman and Camo talking into his

phone by a forest stream. There's a rather crazy back and forth about this in several volumes of the Journal of the American Medical Association in JAMMA for more than a century ago. So in the year eight, for some reason, JAMMA got a little bit obsessed with rampant squirrel castration. So it started when the American surgeon Edmund Andrews wrote an article for the journal in eight about unux and

about the physiological effects of castration. And in this article Andrews Puts together sort of a round up of what he knew about the natural effects of castration and many different animals, and one of those animals was the squirrel.

And he writes quote naturalist state that the black or gray male squirrels in fighting seek to castrate each other with their teeth, so that many of those taken by hunters are thus mutilated, as they do it only an adult life, it does not materially change their general development, because he was talking about this in the context of, well, what happens if a young animal is castrated? How does that change the way it develops into an adult? Okay, so the the the idea here is that it is

it's reached material. Yeah. Unfortunately Andrews does not say who these naturalists are and makes me wonder, especially given the time, is this is this real empirical data or is he just repeating the eight version of an urban legend or maybe a rural legend, just against somebody wandering out of the woods saying, yep, squirrels in there. They're buying each other's nuts, and they're they're they're buying the next year.

That's good that you call to mind. In the last episode, we talked about some rumors about squirrel attacks that seemed very unlikely to be true about like in Borneo Hunters talking about squirrels taking down deer and killing them seems hard to believe. But so this first mention is just this one off in in Andrew's article about Eunix in general. And Andrews comes back to this in another volum of Jamma with an article called do adult squirrels cast rate

each other? So Andrews writes, in this article, remember we asked who that naturalist was or the natural square that he got his information from. He says he got the information about squirrels from quote a distinguished naturalist, but he still doesn't say who it is. Good good lessons, cite your sources with possible folks. Apparently he got a contradictory response to this claim from a doctor named Dr. A. S.

Allen of Mercy Hospital, Chicago. And Alan claims, first of all, about a third of wild squirrels captured by hunters are found to be castrated. I assume he means one third of male squirrels, but it doesn't say. I hate to be the slow brow, but I'm I'm wondering if mistaking dead female squirrels for dead male squirrels could be causing

some confusion among some hunters here. Perhaps perhaps Alan says he thinks that this castration is not done in fighting between adult males, as Andrews did in his original article. Here it's quote He says that a number of gray squirrels lived protected in these trees above his former residence. A female raised a litter of young in a tree

close to the house. One day, when the young were about one quarter grown, he observed the male trying repeatedly to enter the nest, but the female, which in that species is the largest of the two, fought him off and drove him away. This repeated several times, and the male finally desisted. Sometime later, the female went away, apparently to gather food. Before she returned, the male reappeared, entered the nest and created a great disturbance there, so that

the doctor climbed the tree and examined the young. He found four young quarter grown males and one or two females. Three of the young males had been freshly castrated, the old male squirrel having bitten their squartum and testes cleanly and smoothly off with his sharp incisors. That's terrifying, that

is gruesome. So Alan claims that he's had a career of squirrel hunting, and he has found castrated a adult males, but never freshly castrated adult males, and so Andrews considers that it would be difficult for an adult male squirrel to hold another adult male still enough to bite off his testicles, but this might be easier if the victim is a juvenile. Thus, he seems to think that Dr. Allen's story is probably a better explanation for why hunters

report finding so many castrated squirrels. On the other hand, he thinks this is very weird in light of natural selection, since it quote would hardly tend to benefit or perpetuate the species. Not to be condescending, but this indicates to me a kind of poor understanding of the level at which natural selection acts. Like members of a species are constantly doing things that do not benefit other members of that same species. Right there is that there is a

great deal of selfishness. Again, we talk about males that are competing with each other for mates, or just members of the species in general that are competing with other members of the species for resources. Right, But that is not at all I think a good argument that this is really going on. I'm not sure exactly how to explain what Alan claims he observed in this nest of assuming the story is true, but there are a few

other reports so uh. In Spratling's follow up, again in the Journal of the American Medical Association, quote how squirrels become unux This is another volume of jama and there is just a flurry of letters about squirrel castration. The this really seemed to get the turn of the century physician engines revving like they were like, oh, I've got

a squirrel castration story, and they wrote in. One is from Dr William Spratling of New York, and Spratling writes that he spent a lot of years squirrel hunting in eastern Alabama with an experienced squirrel hunter in his sixties, and one day he shot a young male squirrel to discover it had a fresh castration wound. His companion said it must have been done by an older male, and that he had often found young male squirrels like that sometimes still in the nest. Spratling asked him why the

older males did it. His companion replied that Spratling should ask the squirrels. Okay, you have to kind of wonder if he just shot the squirrel. Perhaps it could have been injured in the shooting, but who knows, And of course there are a number of different ways of squirrel could be injured, you know, let's let's not limit the ways that a squirrel can could lose its scrowed them too near you know, you know, hunting practices, or the the teeth of a rival male. Sure, here's another one.

This one's a really choice. So this is from Dr. E. H. Smith of Santa Clara, California. First, I should know this guy. His whole writing style and everything. He sounds a little off. So Smith writes that he observed plenty of squirrels in southwestern Michigan, and he claims that the adult males do indeed fight in order to castrate, looking for opportunities to dive beneath one another and bite off the rival squrowed um.

He says this is primarily the red squirrels that do this, and they do it to other kinds of squirrels for heat. For the red squirrel quote is the hardest fighter of them all. And Smith says he tested this out by putting a red squirrel and a ferret in a box with each other, quote, expecting, of course, that the ferret

would make short work of the squirrel. Instead, he said that the squirrel went right for the ferrets testicles, and it was only by Smith intervening to protect the ferret with a stick that he avoided the doom chomp of the red squirrel. And I just wonder, like, what is worse if the guy made this up or if he's telling the truth. Yeah, and I do not really like this experiment that he claims to have performed. That is not a good experiment, That is not rigorous, and it

is it's also not nice. I'm more comforted by the fact that this guy that maybe this was just some fourteen year old writing Dajamma making up a fake identity

in a story. One last letter from a doctor Samuel J. Ford of Elliott City, Maryland, and Fort writes that he'd been hunting squirrels for years and has never noticed any castrated squirrels, though he admits he hasn't been on the lookout for this in particular, and he doubts that the biting off procedure could really be done leanly in a way that the victim usually survives, given the shape of squirrel incisors, Like if you think about picturing them, they're

more like, you know, they are kind of chompy, but they're narrow. Yeah, the survivability of the wound is something that I in my mind keeps turning to because we're talking about a pretty grievous injury, but one for for enough males to survive, and then, you know, so that hunters could comment on them, they would need to not die of either blood loss or or secondary infection. And yeah, that's a very good point. And also think about this again.

We we mentioned this earlier, but why would there actually be any incentive for an older male to do this? Why not just kill the rivals, Like if you're actually fighting and there's some kind of serious competition, why not just injury or kill? Why this very specific, targeted type of injury that's so sillacious and the kind of thing that a hunter might repeat in rumor to another. But Ford gives a couple of rival explanations for the discovery

of neutered male squirrels. He says, quote, could it not be congenital ab sense of the organs or failure of the organs to descend into the scrotum? I think forts maybe onto something there, and we can come back to that later on when we discuss possible explanations for these stories.

But he also says, quote the theory has been advanced by many hunters I have met that during the absence of the mother squirrel, the young utilize the male appendages as teats and in their in their kind effort to produce something that is not there, causing time and atrophy of the organs. Oh, I don't know. I don't know if he is he making a joke there, I can't maybe I'm not reading through the writing style, or he has been uh or if he's been a victim of

a hoax on this one or somebody else's joke. I mean, one thing that that I keep thinking too with each of these doctors is that, yes, these appear to be medical doctors, assuming their real assuming they're real, But then also just because their medical doctors do not mean that they are really They're not biologists with any expertise in observing uh squirrel behavior. This scene is very or it

snacks very much of amateur biology. Yes, they're even from someone who who should, by all rights, you know, be familiar with the scientific method to to a significant extent. These are people who practice human medicine and human medicine in the eighteen nineties. These are not not squirrel experts, They're not zoologists. They're not animal behaviorists. Um yeah, I don't know so though. On the other hand, we do have to deal with Okay, well, at least people are

making these reports. What do these reports mean? That they could certainly be mistaken, But we've got plenty of reports of people who claim to have one heard stories about squirrel castration from people who deal with a lot of squirrels, seen lots of examples of castrated squirrels, both young and old, and a few kinds of dubious seeming claims of witnessing castration from adult squirrel fights. So despite the claims of people to have witnessed it themselves, that this really does

have all the hallmarks of an urban legend. To me, I believe people will have found squirrels missing their genitals, but I'm not sure I buy the causes people have proposed. And I keep coming back to this idea, why this one particular gruesome kind of attack, Why not just a general fighting attack, an attempt to injure or kill the other squirrel? All right, Well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back,

we will look for more answers concerning this myth. Alright, we're back okay, So I found a book by a former National Wildlife Federation executive Warner Shed called Owls Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind and Naturalists Debunks our Favorite fallacies about wildlife, which addresses a version of this claim

about squirrel castration. So, first of all, Shed is writing about this in the context of a chapter on squirrel myths, specifically the myth that red squirrels drive out gray squirrels from any area they inhabit, and Shed writes that while it isn't necessarily true that red squirrels will drive gray squirrels out of a forest, it is true the red squirrels tend to be very territorial, and if any animal like a gray squirrel, gets too close to the red

squirrels hidden cash of nuts, the red squirrel will sometimes get aggressive and try to chase the gray squirrel off. And Shed says that this territorial chasing tendency might be somehow linked to the version of the castration claim that says red squirrels castrate gray squirrels, which he claims is simply the result of quote an overheated imagination or quote a deliberate tall tale, and he argues that it makes no sense for a squirrel to bite another squirrels testicles off.

Merely consider the facts the gray squirrel generally weighs from two to three times as much as the little red. Even what are normally the most peaceable of animals will fight savagely if necessary to protect themselves. Nor could a red squirrel, with its little teeth neatly snip off the testicles of the gray with one or two bites. The notion that the much bigger gray would allow its testicles to be gnawed off by this little relative is preposterous.

Long for where that happened, the gray would make squirrel hash out of the offending red. And that has an exclamation point on it, by the way, that is like, so he's really he's really driving it home. He also adds that if in general Red's had a successful strategy of sterilizing grays, grays would tend to disappear in areas where reds existed, And he says this is not the case,

So it's Shed's judgment. That that's his judgment. But if he's correct, and squirrels do not castrade each other, what should we make of all these reports in Jamma and elsewhere? Of people finding squirrels with castration wounds all over the place. Now, of course it's possible some of these could be lies or hoaxes, and I think with some of them, even a couple of those letters into Jamma, you have kind of have to wonder. I mean, these these supposedly are

doctors writing in but I don't know that's smith guy. Well, we've discussed time and time again that even very educated individuals can either be the perpetrators of hoax hoaxes or the victims of hoaxes. And then also there's that interesting relationship between the the the the what, the hoaxer and the hoax e um. Karl Sagan talks about this in the demon Haunted World and points whether it's like a

magic trick. A magic trick, is it is something that exists because of a silent pact between the magician and the audience. Yeah, people don't want to admit they've been tricked. If they've been tricked, even momentarily, they kind of don't want to admit that they fell for it, and will fight to defend the reality of the illusion. But then again, I don't think I would explain all of these cases

in terms of hoaxes, deliberate hoaxes or tricks. I think in a lot of cases you're probably going to be dealing with people who were mistaken about what they saw or who were interpreting misinterpreting something. So that brings us to the question of what else could cause a squirrel to appear incorrectly to have suffered this type of injury or attack. Now there's one hypothesis that's pretty far out there. It's not exactly a perfect fit, but it is kind

of worth a look. And this is an explanation put forward by Ernest Thompson Seton, who was an early influence on the formation and mythology of the Boy Scouts of America. Uh Seton noted that there is a species of parasitic bot fly that is an obligate of tree squirrels and tends to lay eggs in the squirrels groin, and these eggs hatch and the larva erupt from the skin, and it's gross, but the squirrel can usually survive it. It doesn't really benefit the bot fly to kill its host.

And if this larva eruption were to happen in the groin, as it apparently sometimes does, hunters seeing wounds of this kind might think that the squirrels had had their groins violently attacked. And this bot fly does exist. It's called coutarebra emasculator, or the tree squirrel bot fly and bot flies on their own are fascinating subject. We we could

return to them endlessly. Oh yes. The bot fly, also known as the he'll fly, the gad fly, or my favorite and especially as it relates to squirrels, is the warble fly. Now why is that your favorite as it relates to squirrels, Because you will sometimes see what is often described as a lumpy squirrel. If you spend as much time looking at squirrels as we have, and certainly any kind of like rural southern environment, then I bet you've either seen or heard of a warble squarble squirrel,

a lumpy squirrel. It I remember seeing one when I was young and find it found it rather grotesque. Why is that squirrel lumpy? What is going on with that squirrel? And you're saying a warble fly is a good explanation? Y Oh yeah, I mean it is. It's it's the explanation. So but again, there are a lot of bot flies. They're like something like a hundred fifty species worldwide, and

most of their larva are obligant parasites of mammals. Their maggots grow in the flesh, usually the skin of the animals, sometimes in the gut. South America's human bot flew i or Dermatobia home menace is the only species that routinely grows it's young and human flesh. And if you're a big time podcast listener, like a lot of you are, I'm sure you've heard accounts of these infections, particularly on

w n y c's Radio Lab. In particular, evolutionary biogists Jerry Coin observed the growth of a bottfly larva in his own scalp and uh and he remarked on how it was not just growing inside of him, but out of him. The resulting creature was, in a strange way, part of him. It was like like his offspring. I actually read about this in a fantastic book in one

of my high school biology classes. It was a book called Tropical Nature by Adrian Forsyth and Kin Miata, and they had a chapter on this incident called Jerry's Maggot. That's all about Jerry having the bot fly growing out of it. I think it was. It was out of his head, right, yeah, his scalp um. I remember that. That was an eye opening read when I was like

fourteen or whatever. But that's the human body fly. We should get back to this specific squirrel a bot fly that we're talking about here, right, kuderebra emasculadder, the tree squirrel bot fly. So it's a parasite of tree squirrels and chipmunks. It's found throughout eastern North America. There are multiple species of kudaebrabot fly which infect different hosts and emasculator as you can kind of hear something going on

in the name there. It was named by the entomologist Asa Fitch based on his mistaken belief that the larvae of the species ate the testicles of hosts squirrels, and the hypothesis about this being the explanation for apparent squirrel castration is not as strong as it once was. Maybe isn't as strong now as when um Seaton proposed it, since scientists actually no longer believe that the grubs of

the bot fly eat the squirrels gonads. I was reading more recent stuff about the spot fly, and it looks like there's not any particular tendency or attention of the spot fly to concentrate in the groin or the genitals or anything. But then again, it need not actually eat the gonads to be interpreted as such. I UM like about an average like hunter or even a medical doctor who just picks up a squirrel or sees one trotting around on the defense, right, right, so maybe say, oh,

that's a kind of a bloody scrotum. I wonder what's going on there? The explanation must be, uh, this weird squirrel scrotum attacking explanation, Right, So maybe they just see about fly some kind of weird growth or protruberance that looks a nasty somewhere on the underside of a squirrel, and they're like, oh, what happened there? But I don't know.

So it's possible this could explain some occasional observations of genital injuries and squirrels, But I would say this doesn't really seem like a good general explanation for all of the observations. Now, Joe, I do have to return to the Tennessee and aspects of this story for a second. Um. I worked for a small Tennessee newspaper back in two thousand four, and I definitely remember information pieces that we published covering this vital question, is it safe to skin

and eat a lumpy squirrel? That's some service journalism. It is given the You've given the people what they need and what they need to know. Um which I remember being horrified by this because I'd seen a warrib old squirrel and my first thought was, I wonder if I can eat that. I would think I'm going to pass on the war bold squirrel and maybe go with one of these non warb old squirrel specimens. Squirrel fritters are on the menu tonight, and I'm I've got a hurt

and for some squirrel meat. Will this do in a pinch? Yeah? Well, so I looked into it a little bit to see if I could find some more recent examples of this same kind of of journalism, and I did run across the one from two thousand seven in the Chattanoogan Chattanooga, Tennessee. And there's a quote in it in the peace from wildlife biologist Alex Kohley, Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division, and he says, quote, the good news is that the

lumps many hunters are observing are not tumors. In fact, they are caused by warbles, which are bought fly larva growing just under the squirrel skin. Robert, why are you making me wait to find out if I can eat it or not? All right, well, hold on, Joe. The Wildlife Resources Division or w r D here advises squirrel hunters across the state. The consumption of affected squirrels is safe. Once the squirrel is skinned. The parasites come off with the hide. Because the larvae are strictly on the skin

of the squirrel. The squirrel meat remains unaffected unless there is a secondary infection. But do you trust yourself to know if there's a secondary infection? I guess not, But you know, I think that the other Another take come here, is that eating bot flies isn't actually that crazy. There's actually evidence from Paleolithic art that indicates that early humans may have eaten reindeer bot flies rather routinely, and the

practice seems to have survived among Inuit people. I was reading a book titled The Nature of Paleolithic Art by our Dale Guthrie, and Guthrie writes there are thousands of images that can give us a more rounded view of Paleolithic people in their times images that are not customarily shown in coffee table volumes. Take, for example, these little worm like creatures from Paleolithic art Eskimo from northern Alaska.

To light in eating the large spring maggots or larvae of the reindeer warble fly, I suspect your Asian people did the same in the Paleolithic. This is one of the few insects eaten by the Northern people. When the reindeer are killed, the highe is skin back and the warbles are exposed on the underside. They are fat and salty, a spring treat. I have tried them several times during this time of year. Many people in the village have

sore throats from the raspers of the maggot sides. I'm struggling here because I make a strong effort not to stigmatize what other people eat, but the image of the raspers scraping the inside of the throat is disturbing me. It is it's a little it's a little much to take um, but I mean, I do not have any issue with with eating insect because I think eating insects has been a practice by human beings for a very

long time and very sustainable, very sustainable. It will, I think, invariably become part of increasingly a part of our diet as as we continue to figure out how to survive in this world of of exhaustible resources. Uh So it's a very good and clever thing to do. I think I have an irrational bias against it. Yes, but it's the raspers, yeah, and the throat that that is a

little a little bit much to take. So yeah, we kind of this has been kind of a detour from the basic squirrel castration um discussion, but I think we needed a detour, even though this one was a little bit gruesome in its own. Yeah, we needed to depart from the nastiness of squirrels and discuss something refreshing like bot fly consumption. So let's solve this mystery. What is it? Okay, So we think that the the bot fly on the squirrels growing might explain some sightings, but probably not all

of them. Another thing that that occurred to me as a possibility is you've got this thing called squirrel parapox virus or squirrel pox, which can cause swelling or the appearance of tumors or lesions around parts of the squirrel's body, including the genital area, but this disease has only been observed to exist in the past few decades. It does

not seem like a very good explanation either. But then there is one explanation that is heads slapping lee simple, and while it doesn't necessarily explain all of the supposed observations people have claimed, if you assume they're telling the truth about what they saw, it does seem to explain a lot. It probably explains a lot. This is from Mammals of the Eastern United States by John O. Whittaker, William John and William John Hamilton's from Cornell University Press.

In this is there much more mundane explanation quote. Many people think that red squirrels, even though smaller, dominate gray squirrels and drive them out of their territories, and even that they castrate them. The latter story probably a rows from someone's observing how often red squirrels chase gray squirrels.

This goes along with what shed was saying about their territoriality, but picking up in the quote then linking that observation with the apparent lack of test ees in gray squirrels which are abdominal in the non breeding season, so testicular attraction. This is very smart strategy for plenty of animals in the time when you don't need them on the outside, they come up on the inside. This would also make sense given the the The idea that we've seen presented

here is that the testicles have not been freshly chewed off. No, they must have been chewed off earlier and the animal has healed. Yeah, and so this does not seem to explain the direct observation of wounds that a few of the authors here have claimed to witness. If again, if we assume those accounts are true, But this does seem like a really good explanation for why hunters who don't

necessarily know better would find male squirrels without testicles. Uh, they only descend into a temporary scrotum during the breeding season anyway, So during the non breeding season, the organs were tracked up into the abdomen. Hunter maybe shoots one, picks it up, doesn't see anything, and it's like, WHOA, something weird happened to the squirrel. Must be related to that gruesome rumor I heard years ago. It's sort of like saying, what is chewing the landing gear off of

these airplanes? It must be grimlins because I don't see them at all, So I think, I don't know. I think that's a pretty good explanation. I am fairly convinced by that one that that probably explains most of what people have seen. So maybe some combination of seeing squirrels with just naturally occurring injuries, seeing squirrels with some kind of bot fly growth in the growing area, and then just lots of hunters finding squirrels in the non breeding

season without external test ees. It seems like you put all those together, and you add in a little bit of whiskey in the woods, and this turns into hunters telling a story about gruesome castration rituals which do not exist. And it's ultimately a story that that makes more sense in light of what we know about little squirrel behavior,

but just also the general behavior of territorial animals. Now, as for those first hand accounts in jama where they say, no, I saw this happening firsthand, I saw them do it. I don't know. Maybe some of these wounds could be explained by random fighting having a weird kind of outcome, but I don't know. As we said earlier, some of those doctors writing in just sounded a little bit off, like,

I don't know if you should believe their stories. I don't know if we really need to bother with E. H. Smith and his his ferret and red squirrel in the box experiment. I'm gonna I'm just gonna hope that he made that up and it didn't really happen. I'm just gonna assume that as well, Joe, that it was just

just a fanciful story that he made. But anyway, so if you had your vision of squirrels marred by the discovery that they will sometimes eat carry in or sometimes hunt prey in the last episode, maybe you should rest a little bit easier now if you'd previously heard the Castre san myth and thinking it's probably not true. All right, we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back, we have two more tidbits about the squirrel, neither of

which is violent. So stay tuned. Alright, we're back now, I said, Neither of the examples we're gonna look at here violence. I guess one is by some definition self violence. But well we'll see, we'll see we'll see. So I do want to talk briefly about hibernation and ground squirrel neuroplasticity. That sounds interesting now. In our recent episode, uh, in our two thousand one Space Odyssey episode, we talked a

little bit about that. Yeah, we were talking about space hibernation and how this isn't really a possibility for humans yet. We haven't discovered any kind of technology that will allow

us to hibernate for long space journeys. But you talked about the idea of hot sleep and how that relates to squirrel hot sleep, that being a some terminology from the science fiction of Orson Scott Card, the idea that you have the individuals in the sci fi world and they're they're put into an artifici wal uh slumber for long trips, but it's not pleasant. It's it's like the sweating ordeal. And what we're gonna discuss here actually reminds

me a lot of that. So Arctic ground squirrels have long been of interest to science for their hibernation abilities, and we've mentioned them on the show before. Back in Zoo, physiologist Brian Barne of the University of Alaska, he commented on how the hibernation of the Arctic ground school is more like a month's long bout of insomnia. That sounds horrible. Yeah, it sounds like hot sleep to make He pointed out that they lowered their body temperature below freezing but they

but they don't stay that way. They undergo cyclical rewarmings once or twice a month. And the rewarming must be important because it uses roughly eight of the fat stores uh in order to do it. So a lot of energy is expended to come out of of of the freeze and then go back down into it again. So we're not just talking about rewarming at the end of hibernation.

So barnes theory at the time was that they had to warm up to actually sleep, that cold brains can't sleep, that the torper might stave off sleep for days or weeks, but they'd eventually be forced to warm up in order to get that vital slumber. Uh. He's worked with the Institute of Artic Biology ever since and has devoted a

great deal of research to mammalian hibernation. Uh. If if you look up like squirrel hibernation um on the Internet and you look for for peri of your papers, you will run across his work, he's taken the creature's temperatures, he's measured their activity along their neural pathways as well, and he's found that the creature's brain is quite resilient, as you might expect from such a cheater of death

as the as the Arctic ground squirrel. During hibernation, the neuron shrink and connection shrivel, but the creature's brain makes up for this by undergoing growth spurts that multiplied neural links back to previous levels and even beyond it. Oh weird. So this is a very strange alternate version of the neuroplasticity model. Yeah, yeah, this is This is kind of a wonder species for people who are researching neuroplasticity in

ways to potential potentially boost it in humans. Now we know, like in humans, the neuroplasticity model you often you have is that children tend to make a whole lot of connections in the brain, and then over time those connections are sort of pruned back, limiting potential as as time goes on and maturity develops in the body and the child eventually becomes more neurostable. But here you're seeing a renewal of a type of infantile neuroplasticity in the adult

ground squirrel as it hibernates. Yeah, I mean basically, it boost neuroplasticity in order to repair everything that it loses during this hibernation process. So, no matter what you think of other squirrels and your distrust of other squirrels, the artic ground squirrel is is a very attractive species to

scientists where a number of reasons. Cracking the inner workings of its hibernation adaptations could allow us to engineer neuroplasticity treatments to improve organ transplantation, and devise ways to place human space travelers into some form of of hot sleep for a prolonged space mission. Oh good, that sounds great. Thanks, thanks squirrels. All right, we'll have one more bit of squirrel data to share with everyone. Is it going to

be something shocking? I hope it's Lit's not. I mean, I don't think there's anything left that can truly shock us at this point in our squirrel exploration. This one's more humorous. So cape ground squirrels have a scrowed them that takes up their body length with a penis twice as long as that You know, so it's another product

of the the evolutionary mating arms race. The males have been observed to engage in auto fallacio and consume the ejected reproductive murial material, which of course only makes sense. We've discussed animal cannibalism in the same light. It's energy. What what what do you? What do you what you do with it? Why just waste it? You got to like put it back into the business. Right, So that makes sense. But but ultimately people ask well why do

they do that? Indeed, why does any species engage in masturbation? Well, there's the sexual outlet hypothesis that arousal must be dismissed. Uh, And that makes sense, right, You've just got this arowse squirrel. It's got to do something with all this uh this, you know, this energy that it has now, and it might as well release it so it can get on

with nut collecting and what have you. But then there's another idea that it might be because they has to flush out the old sperm so that the creature has fresher sperm that it can utilize for mating. Is there an expiry date on that? Essentially, it would be like an innate knowledge of the expiration data, I guess. But

then uh. Biologist Jane Waterman weighed in on the matter, uh and uh, at least as it concerns cape ground squirrels, and pointed out the dominant male actually do this the most, the ones who shouldn't have to masturbate if the sexual outlet view is correct. They also did it more after sex than before, seemingly a blow against the sperm quality hypothesis.

She also dismissed the ideas that it's done as as a as a signal to potential mates or to competitors, because the pattern wasn't there, so you just don't see them doing it at the times where it would makes sense if it was about communicating to other squirrels. Well, so, what is Waterman's explanation, Her explanation or her by hypothesis here is that they masturbate and in doing so reduce

the odds of catching an std. She points out that the human males may urinate after sex sort of clean things out, and that cape ground squirrels rarely urinate due to their desert environment. So what's what's a squirrel to do If it doesn't urinate frequently, what can it possibly do to clean out that tract. Masturbation provides an answer. It seems like a reasonable explanation, though I truly did

not know we would end up in this place. Yes, I think it's it's kind of a happy ending for these two episodes that we should end not with visions of meat eating squirrels or scrowed them chewing squirrels, squirrels engaging in mortal Kombat with snakes, but instead simply a masturbating squirrel in the desert, trying to stay healthy. Yeah,

just staying healthy sounds good to me. Now, we do hope these episodes have helped you look at squirrels in a different way, to see them not just as you know tree rats running around in your yard, but something that is in its own right and evolutionary marvel, something that's engaged in a struggle for survival and and faces that struggle with a lot of alarming and surprising tools. But we certainly do not hope that you will go away from this with any kind of animus towards squirrels

or any desire to harm them. We don't want to encourage that squirrels are part of the natural world too, and that they don't deserve any kind of vilification, even though it might be kind of shocking to learn the truth about them since we see them so off fen but usually don't suspect these things, right, Yeah, don't go hurt any squirrels on our account. But of course, if you were already killing and eating squirrels, uh, let us

know how that goes for you. If what's your experience with squirrel hunting and warbles and uh in in various bits of you know, urban or rural legend about squirrels biting each other? Did you hear the squirrel castration urban legend? Where did you hear it? And what variant on and what sort of explanation was presented to you? We would love to hear about any of that. In the meantime, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all the episodes of the podcast,

going all the way back to the beginning. You'll find links out to our various social media accounts where you can follow us and keep up with what we're doing, including Facebook, where we have that fabulous Facebook group, the discussion module that is a really great place if you want to uh, you know, get into conversations with other listeners about the topics we've covered, about topics we could cover about unrelated things. Ask ask ask ask us questions.

Go check it out. That's the stuff to Blew your Mind discussion module. And hey, while you're at our website, click on that store button at the top of the website because that's where you'll find all these cool T shirts and stickers and coffee MUDs, any just about anything you could put our new logo on. It is available to you. Yeah, merch up, get yourself a Sphere Catastrophe T shirt. Yeah, that one's really really rad. I recommend it big. Thank you as always to our wonderful audio

producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with this directly to let us know feedback on this episode or any other, to let us know if you've ever heard any squirrel castration, urban legends or anything like that, to suggest a topic for a future episode, or just to say hi, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff Works out um Yo far f