It's a Trap!

they're just going about their business. All they want to do is protect their young and lay more if they're young, inside your belly. And can you blame them? I know, I mean it's especially on a cold day like this, that's the warmest place to delay them your your brood of eggs. Yes, seventeen degrees in the south here, all right. So what we're talking about, if you guys are picking up what we're putting down here, are traps, Yes, because you know, as humans were pretty good tool users, we

create traps all the time. But out there in nature there's stuff going on. Yeah, I mean, human traps are almost limitless. I mean, you can start with the really basic stuff, like you just take a like a tiger pit. You know, here's a pit, cover it with some some brush. After I've dug it out, something walks across the top, it falls in. Now I've caught myself a tiger or

a person or what have you. There's a and then if you want to up the anti, maybe you have a sticks at the bottom of it, a sharpened stick so that someone falls in, then they're going to potentially be impaled upon those sticks. You have simple animal traps. Have you ever used one of these, like to catch wild animals or cats for Spade in the Neutering No, we we My wife and I did a little of that at our previous house. And it's, uh, it's it's

pretty wild stuff because you'll catch multiple things. We were trying to At one point we were trying to catch a dog that like a puppy that was in the neighborhood and it was, you know, sweet little dog but clearly had no owner, was eating garbage and we gotta catch this dog. We can, we can do some good for this dock. But ultimately that dog was too wary. Instead,

we caught like three different possums. We caught two different stray cats, and that eventually led into doing some spandar during with those guys, and then we caught our own cat twice. Was this just a day of like catching things? Was just like, hey, we're gonna go out and we've got this trap. You know, just set it up in the night, you catch a possums, set it up in the day, you catch your own cat, that kind of thing. Yeah, and then then ideally that I think the county would

come and take it away. But but yeah, that's a fun little trap. But then there are there are far less fun traps that we've devised. Of course, when you get into the world of land mines, we create explosive devices, uh that that that you know triggered one one steps on them or when you know, some proximity mind of some kind, and and those are of course, uh, pretty deadly and pretty horrible inventions. But throughout all of this we we tend to think, well, hey, that's humans were

tool users. We make things, We make things that react to the presence of others. We create all of these, uh, these traps. Be it's something rather simple like a little box of a twig or or something advanced like a landmine. We're wildy, we're clever. Yeah, there couldn't be any other animal or insect or arachnid out there that could be

as clever as us. Uh, that is not true. We're wrong. Yeah, And specifically in this podcast, we're going to talk about arachnids and insects creatures that we can't We generally just think there's no way that these guys are up to anything on the level of human beings. And you know, I couldn't help but think of Charlotte's Web when we were looking at this material. Because spiders obviously are featured pretty well in this area of trapping things, we tend

to think about them as these passive trappers. But I was thinking about Charlotte A cavodica in in Charlotte's Web, and how when Wilburt figures out that she's like basically sucking the blood out of these insects, He's just recoils and Horror doesn't necessarily want to be friends with her, and then she kind of lays it down for him, like, look, this is how I survive. You get things brought to you in a piale you, you lucky pig. I I have to use my wits, and I come from generations

and generations of trappers. Yeah, and I don't think a pig has a lot of room to judge a spider really. I mean, pigs are not above doing a little killing for their their food. Well, sure, but in this instance, and particularly in this story, it was it was this great moment where it's like, you know, you can't necessarily judge another person, animal insect for the behavior because they're

just doing what survival needs them to do. And so that is what I think is so interesting about spiders and their traps, because it's fascinating these these webs that they create, and as you have pointed out in an earlier conversation with me, sometimes they don't even have a web. Yeah, that's one thing about spiders. I mean, Cope, we have to go to spiders first, because they are They're the animal you think of when you think of an a

will laying a trap. I mean, the spiderweb itself is kind of a metaphor for any kind of a trap or enscarement, or some sort of complex system of ensnaring someone or something. But yeah, a lot of a lot of spiders are don't actually spin webs, so they don't use their silk and hunting at all. They're just using them as building materials um or you know, to create a nursery. Or they're using them as a drag line. It's sort of, you know, a mountain climbing a line

to use in the navigating their environment. But then there are a number of spiders that do use their web, and we we generally, we generally go to the orb web spiders first because that's the more um iconic spider web, that big orb shaped web. Flies fly into them and uh, and then the spider comes and and creeps across the web and fix them off and and generally that's our When we think of giant spiders in fantasy and sci fi,

they tend to be a giant orb spider. But that's just one of the many different ways that different species of spiders use their webs, generally in some sort of hunting or trapping scenario. Yeah, and this is from the article how Spiders Worked by Tom Harris. I thought this was such a great description of spiders. He says, spiders are predators above all else, so hunting and killing is where they really shine in the bug world. Spiders are

fairly fearsome animals. They're the tiny equivalent of wolves, lions, or sharks. Yeah, they're basically second only to the wasp because the wasp is just gonna rule over the spider every time. It's true. And we recently were talking about how if you could just somehow, through the power of alchemy,

I don't know, uh, miniaturize us humans. I would have to say that if we if right now, if I were just about, you know, a fourth of an inch tall, if a spider was coming at me, this would be the thing that I dreaded the most, more than a cockroach or really anything else. Yeah, I mean the spiders would be fighting over you. It's the thing. Yeah, in

that sense, you have a certain amount of power. You'd be like you'd be like the wife of Ulysses, where you have all the suitors coming for you, right and you get to you get to make ridiculous demands of your various spider suitors, which one will get to devour you. And still I would not take it as a compliment. Let's do a quick anatomy of a web, because, as

you say, you know or spiderweb classic here. Um, if you look at how a spider constructs a web, it all begins with silk line that is cast out into the wind. And when the spider census it's caught upon something, it will sense a starting point and use that connection as a bridge. And this is really cool. Um. You can actually see how this works in an article called

how spiders Work. And when that spider crosses that bridge, it actually drops another loose thread and it climbs down on this thread and creates a kind of y configuration. And from here on out it will start to create these, um, you don't know, I guess you could call them anchor points, and you have the sort of V configuration, and then it starts to lay out these radius points from the center of the web to the thread. So now you

have these non sticky auxiliary spirals that it creates. And the reason why it creates these non sticky parsons because that's the part that it's going to actually travel on the web, and then it creates another spiral that is sticky. So it's amazing to me is that it's created this complex web, but it has also given itself a pathway on which to to tread. It Yeah, it's it's really fascinating.

One of the things that's top and overlooked is that indeed, not all spider web is sticky, and they're in some of these structures that we're going to discuss, some of these traps and uh and web environments that are not even sticky at all. So um so, yeah, the orb orb web spider, the orb webs, the big iconic web. But then there are a number of other ones we're gonna go through. Some of these, uh, some bear more

mentioned than others. For instance, triangle spiders make triangular webs, and these are essentially like imagine the orb web, and imagine if you cut a pizza sized uh slice of that web, that would essentially be a triangle whip. Otherwise, it's basically the same idea, just on a smaller scale. Now where it starts getting a little more interesting to

get into the world of funnel spiders. Now, funnel spiders they make a sheet of silk and then they wrap them up and they to make this funnel, you know, just like taking a newspaper and rolling it up right, uh. And the funnels have a big opening on one end, and that's so where they catch the prey. And they also have a small opening in the back and that's the escape hatch in case the spider needs to run

for it. Okay, and it's not sticky, but the idea here is that the spiders can move around really easily in this uh, this funnel environment. They've basically made a you know, home turf killing room where they have a maximum ownership over their prey. So that in itself is pretty pretty amazing. It's not not exactly a trap, but it's a It's they've created an environment that they have just absolute control over and uh and and an outsider is going going to be an outsider in that that

web of death. And I like thinking about it in that way because it moves this idea from spiders is creating these passive traps to really being tool users and really premeditating the kills that they exact. Yeah, it's like if a like if a serial killer was that was the kind of would bring somebody back to his or her apartment, and they knew exactly where they had the uh, you know, their murder weapon stashed, where they had the

various instruments, where the escape routes were going to be. Again, a complete home turf advantage, and that's what the funnel spider creates here. Now, another thing is that a lot of these webs will have a kind of anchor thread, and this anchor thread sometimes is used to get on and off of that spider web, but in most cases it actually used is used as a kind of um

trip wire. And it's so sensitive and the spider can tell so much from the movement that it can actually know if it's a leaf that's hit it, or if it's just the wind, or if it is indeed the vibrations from an insect. Yeah, So they wouldn't fooled to, say, by a child's finger poking in or something. Yeah, probably not. They would probably know pretty soon that they were about to be scooped up, put under a magnifying glass and

then set on fire. Now, a number of different spiders these webs that are far less complex their cobweb spiders, you know, and then everyone knows what a cobweb is. It's just a small random mess of silk strings. Just throw it together and see what gets caught in it. Right. Mesh web spiders very similar. You'll find often find these

in grassy fields, under stones and dead leaves. Uh. Their sheet web spiders that basically make webs that are formed out of the different sheets of the silk and there's just sort of jumbled together and not a lot of large gaps to be found there though. One interesting type

of sheet web spiders are the bowl and doily spiders. Now, what the spider does in this situation is it makes an inverted dome shaped web, kind of like a you know, like a bowl, all right, and that's suspended above a horizontal sheet web, and that's the that's the doily, and the spider hangs from the underside of the dome and attacks prey. So you have to look at pictures of that one, because it's a pretty pretty phenomenal looking web. It just looks like some sort of crazy space structure.

And I like that there's a doily like a nod to your grandmother's coffee table drink on top of it. Um that reminds me of something called a net casting spider. And this can be found across the world in tropical and subtropical regions, and it's also known as the ogre faced spider because of its distinctive really big eyes and that helps them to see prey during the nighttime. But what's notable about this is that they build cobweb sacks that are held open with their front legs and they

have an anchor threat on it. Okay, and there's that anchor thread that acts as a trip wire. And the really cool thing is that when this spider sensus a vibration, it will drop that net that it's holding with its leg over the insect and a thousands of a second. It's good. It's amazing. There's some really cool footage of this on BBC. But it kind of reminds me of like a character out of a mob movie. It's just like throwing a hood over, you know, unpecting person and

drag them off and hit them with a bag of oranges. Now, another that type of spider that does something just really amazing with its web are the the Ceclosu spiders. And these these guys they make a they make a more or a standard web and and so you know, you're not really impressed by that, but they make a decoy

of themselves in the web. They craft this out of leaves, bits of dead insects, you know, the normal type of craft that a spider is gonna find and in some of these cases it even has the correct number of legs, like it will even have eight legs on it. So what they've created here is the decoy to confuse predators, and if the spider is disturbed, it vibrates the web. It vibrates its body, which vibrates the web, which causes

the decoy to vibrate and look even more lifelike. So in other words, if it senses that there's a predator round, it'll start to say, it'll start to shake it. Yeah, the decoin be like, hey, I'm over here, I'm over here. And in most times these decoys are much larger than the spider itself. Yeah, so it can easily hyeah. That's the other thing. It's a much larger spiders, a scarier vision of the spider than it's than it actually creates itself. But the amazing part of that, I mean, just stop

for second to think about this. This is interacted, lowly iracted, and it has created uh an artistic interpretation of itself. Essentially, That's what I was sitting here thinking that it has the ability to understand what it looks like. And presumably it's not sitting around with a mirror, you know, looking inside the mirror, maybe a giant water droplet and looking at the reflection. But in some way it can figure out the dimensions of itself and recreate them. You know.

It brings to mind that that episode we did on the Cracking and where we discuss the controversial theory that these there is some prehistoric um cephalopods that would take prehistorics sea creatures and crunch their bodies and create basically a work of art that resembles themselves, which if you if you just look at it that way, then yes, it's mind blowing but also a little potentially a little crazy.

But the but the idea that that this particular squid, this prehistoric squid might have been making a decoy of itself out of the bodies of its victims, well that is a little more in keeping with what we're seeing here with the spiders. So I'm not saying it makes me, you know, fall behind that cracking theory, but I feel like it gives it a little more, a little more beef. So yeah, I mean that that's a spider as an artist,

but what about as an architect, as an engineer? Ah? Yes, And in this we get into the world of the trap door spiders. These guys really up the anti here because what they are doing is they're they're kind of like taking the the idea of the you know, the funnel web, but they're they're they're taking it to the next level. So trapdoor spiders are essentially large spiders that are close relatives of tarantulas. And they build these two black tunnels in the side of of of a bank. Okay, uh.

They dig the tunnel, then they reinforce it with a mixture of earth and saliva, and then they add a layer of silk on top of that. So it's not just I dug a hole and I'm gonna hide in it. No, They've crafted a hole. This is like the kind of tunnel of you know, you would hear about in the Great Escape, where there's all this like structuring behind it. Right,

they've smoothed out the tunnel. And the reason for this is that because eventually this tunnel could be used for bringing up some young uns right right, and and just ease of movement through it. They again, it's kind of like the idea of the funnel. They won't have maximum control over this environment, maximum maneuverability within it. So they have this uh, this this hole, this fancy tunnel on the side of this bank. But then they add the final touch, and the final touch is they add a

trap door. Now there are two types. There's like a court type trap door, which is thick and it's fitted, and then there's this wafer type door, which is basically just a sheet of silk and dirt. But either way, they're both hinged like a like a really elaborate web hinge. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's amazing just to think that they could fit the trap door in there, and by the way that that one that's fit has a beveled edge, actually fits in there. But it's that hinge that makes it

so amazing. And that's when you sit there and say, how could you say this is not a tool user. Yeah, you know, they've used granted they've used something that's come out of their own body, but they combine that with elements of the world around them to create this totally

artificial environment. Yeah. I mean, they've created this hatch that they can surprise prey with because they feel the vibrations of that prey coming along and then say ha ha, here I am snatch you and I'm gonna take you down into my tunnel, and maybe there's even some little children here that would like to eat. Yeah, and then sometimes it depends on this the exact species, but sometimes they are there are branching corridors in the tunnel. Sometimes

they are multiple trap doors. It's essentially they build a hobbit hole. It's like if if if you had a hobbit hole, and then if you got too close to the door, Froda would jump out and drag you inside and suck all your blood out. Why is that terrifying? I mean, Froda is not typically terrifying, but why in that context, just because he's up to no good? He's sneaky,

you know. Yeah, I feel like there's some sort of distent memory from Sin City that has melded with that to sor Yeah, well, he's always playing creepy rolls these days. He's in that remix of Maniac. I think it is all right. Well, let's take a quick break and when we get back, we will continue just to to take out this house reports in the form of insects and traps. We're back, Robert, did you know that there is a terrible creature roaming the hundred Agar Woods. This is where

the backs and fell backs. And yes, that's where Winnie the Pool lives, along with his friends and Christopher Robbins and some mythical creature they made up called the Backs. And I don't remember the facts. I remember the jagular Jack. You are, yes. And of course all these plots I have discovered, um, you know, reading these to my child and watching the movies. It's all based on miscommunication, isn't

it comedy of errors? It's very shakespeareance. But in this instance, the backson is a misreading of a note that says back soon. Uh. You know, all the characters from the hundred Acre Woods think that Christopher Robbins has been taken by this backs, And so they create a pit, of course classic, and they cover the pit with a picnic blanket. They anchor it with stones, and they put an empty honey jar in the middle. Oh, I see where this is going, all to trap the Bacs in. But of

course what happens. We need to poose the backs and all along. No, we need the Pooh, being a bear of very little brains eat great huge heart, knows that that honey pot is empty, and yet he still falls for it. He still sees it and he goes for it. Anyway. The point is traps abound everywhere. Children's imaginations, arachnids, and in something called ant lions. Yes, the ant lion has

long been a favorite of mine. I remember when I was a kid living in rural Tennessee, we would, uh we I would go down to the to this sort of sandy spot near our house, and I would watch the ant lions in action and kind of and try to poke a little sticks down to rile them up. Uh. If you're not familiar with what an antline is, um, they are essentially the star Lac from Star Wars. Like basically that's the concept, except on a much smaller level.

And they're just the perfect creature for the twelve year old boy and all of us. Um. By the way, my daughter calls me star like when she's mad at me. Really, so, the ant lion is actually the larval creature here. It's he's one of these situations where it's this particular species is most famous in its larval stage and it's incomplete stage. Uh, it eventually becomes an aunt griffin. Nobody really cares about

the ant griffin because it's just kind of boring. It flies around, uh and you know, and and and breeds and all the important things that an adult insect needs to do. But this larval ant lion is the one that blazes and a pretty impressive trap. What the ant lion does is it digs a pit, all right, and it places itself at the bottom. So in the same way that a human might create a tiger pit with steaks at the bottom, it's doing a similar thing, except

it is the steak all right. So if it were in the Winnie the Pooh plot, it would have been Tigger who jumped into the pit and waited for the facts. And I guess, yeah, pretty much. So these these guys are pretty amazing to look at two, because they have this really globular abdomen, you know, there's very much in keeping with a with a larval creature. But then they

have this flattened head and these huge sickle shaped jaws. Okay, so they'll dig their way down into this hole with their you know, butt first, so that their heads are at the top, all right, and then they'll you know, they're so they're burrowed in at the bottom of this little pit. So an aunt comes along slides into the hole, crawls into the hole, and then they'll start flinging sand up one side of the pit, using upward jerks to their heads, making it difficult for the ant to escape.

And then when the ant falls to the bottom, bam, they pierce them with those sickle shaped jaws and they suck them dry. Right, So you're probably thinking, why so fierce, why so silent? So the lambs here with this pit. The reason is that their larval stage is three years long. I mean that's a long time to be in that sort of stage where you know that you're you needed a lot of protein, a lot of energy to to

grow out of. So think about newborn babies. Were they to remain in that stage for three years, they'd have to learn to do it on their own a bit. Yeah, they would. They would grow a very fierce set of mandibles, and they might start hunting woodland creatures with these pits. And you can kind of understand why they go to such lengths to trap prey. Yeah, because I think of

the caterpillar, right. The caterpillar has to eat a lot of material in order to gear up for that metamorphosis into its next stage, into its its final stage of of life. But it gets to just eat, you know, limitless leaves to to. In order to to reach that point, the ant lion has to feed off a flesh and therefore it has to have these amazing sickle shaped jaws. It has to have this really cool um pit based hunting style and just laser in ambush to to suck

itself some some some ants. The next guys are going to kind of make these these horrible fierce mandibles look like nothing, look like a dream. These are the Amazonian ants. And we're talking about a torture rack here. Yes. Uh. The the way that I would like to set this up for everyone is imagine you were at Chuck E Cheese or a carnival or some variation of a carnival or Chuck e Cheese. Right, what they always have they always have the whack a Mole area. Well they have cheese,

but they have the whack a Mole game. Right. The whack amole game, of course, has is this this platform has all these holes and then these moles, these cartoon moles will pop up. And what happens when a mole pops up, Well you take this hammer and you just slam it, or you attempt to you. Of course, it's too fast usually for you to actually get the mole, and it's frustrating and you won't get your ticket and be able to turn that ticket in for a toy.

This it's okay, Julie's okay. So this will make you feel better or maybe worse about the whole scenario. Imagine that you went up to one of these whack a Mole games and when you got too close, and let's say you reach out and actually touch the surface of it, several of the moles came out and grabbed your limbs and held you in place against the whack a Mole game. You can't move, you're struggling, but they're just holding on tight.

They're pulling you tighter and tighter. And then a whole bunch of other moles emerged on the other side of the machine, and they have hypodermic needles loaded with poison, and may you start jabbing you with those things and injecting you, and then suddenly you're paralyzed. They drag you away to their their din and do god knows what with you. They tear you limb from limb ah. This is the Amazonian aunt, my friends. This is basically what

it goes on with these guys. I mean, instead of the little whack a mole platform, they're just using some plant material. Yeah, but they but they definitely constructed. And that's the amazing that they basically build their own whackamole machine here. Uh, they're torturous whackamo machine. They cut hairs from the stem of the plant that they inhabit, and they use the tiny fibers to build this spongey snare and uh, and indeed it's kind of like a torture

rack because anything that walks across that surface. They It's important to know that they also drill the whackamole holes in the surface and if your lag, if you're an insect, and your leg will fit into one of those holes. When you walk across it, they will grab onto it because they're lurking underneath there. They'll grab onto it, hold you in place, and once they have you secured, a whole bunch of other ants will come up and have

at you. Yeah, they'll sting you into paralysis. I really like this description from this BBC article called fierce ants build torture rac Once the prey is well secured by jaws fastening all its extremities. It has stretched over the platform like an ancient sacrifice to the gods. Yeah. I like that. I like a clearly that, like the the author was just in total awe of this, uh this, uh the situation, and by all rights they should have been, because it's it's it's amazing and you have to I

mean answer pretty amazing. Anyway, We've seen plenty of examples of ants. You know, they build these these fabulous colonies. In many cases, they're they're they're farming, they're they're bringing leaves back in order to to grow their own food within the you know, the belly of their colony. So we we know that answer pretty advanced. We know, we we've covered before some of the various ways that they

wage war, that they that they build their societies. And here's just another example of their amazing ways of working together to uh to pull something off, in this case the limbs of another creature. Yeah. I was just thinking, I think I'm going to revise, uh, my my idea of being you know, uh, becoming a little little futition Julie, a little tiny Julie and meeting my fate with a spider. Um, I don't think that would be the most fearsome thing. I think it would be these guys, you think so, yeah,

being torn as under? Yeah, stretched, m m, yeah yeah. I'd be hard pressed to decide which which one I would I would find the most nightmareck to encounter. I guess I tend to side with like the ant lion or the trapdoor spider, just because both of them are the idea of falling into something, falling into an environment where where you have no control and then you're consumed by the monster and you know, it's like a dark

space or pit. I don't know it, just those those ideas feel me with with more dread fair enough, but I guess I would hold up. I feel like maybe I would have a better chance against the ant lion just because it's it's a little simpler trap, whereas the spider is going to outmaneuver me at every turn. So I'm going to say the trapdoor spider is the the one that scares me the most. You write the antline, they really have to rely on their ability and move from dirt quickly your way to try to get you

off course. So you might have a chance there you know, mentioning the star Lac and the antline. I wonder, And I know there's a lot of expanded Universe material out there about Star Wars, and I know some of our listeners have probably read it. Has anyone ever formulated an idea of the star Lac? That the star Lac is a larva and that it is eventually, if it eats enough, like you know, Jedi and Goblinman, that it's gonna you know, sprout wings and fly off and be some sort of fabulous,

beautiful creature. I don't know, but I will now when I get home, consult my daughter's Star Wars encyclopedia to see what they have to say on the matter. That is, how big is that thing? I think I saw something like two characters, and don't She'll rattle off a bunch of them. I mean, I know a good amount of them, but there are some that seem extremely obscure to me. And uh, it's amazing. She'll tell me the species the home planet. Yeah, what's her? What's her absolute favorite? Starts

Star Wars subject to talk about? Um subject? Well, it's Darth Vader. I mean, she's completely preoccupied by his duality, you know, that that he was Anakin and became Darth Vader. And I think a lot of kids are intrigued by that because they begin to understand this idea of good and evil forces. Yeah, I remember, you know, being into

Darth Vader as a kid. I think that was something that really attracted you to because it's like that first villain character that you you you realize it is not just this well of darkness that there is, uh, that

they fell from grace. I mean it's you know, in that since it's kind of a satan character, but it's actually broken down a lot easier for you to consume than than the devil is at at that stage in your mental development, right, And he's been transformed armed in now he's sort of even um, he's even sort of trapped in his own I would say, not his design, but Emperor Palpatine's design, and he's sort ofly half man

half droid. Yeah, he's he's a fabulous It's easy to overlook how fabulous the Darth Vader character is when you know, you see him in commercials and stuff nowadays and you've grown up with him, but you know, certainly a fabulous character, for sure. There's a really funny book out. I don't know if it's exactly for kids, but it's about like Darth Vader and his relationship to his teenage daughter. I wish I could remember the title right now, but it's

a very funny stuff. Awesome. I'll have to post it on the old Facebook. Well, there you go. It's a trap and it's a good thing. We ended up talking about Star Wars because we got the title for the episode from from Star Wars when they when they were fun. It's a trap, right exactly. So hey, do we have time for listener mail. Yeah, let's toss one out there. Okay, well, let's call over our droid, our mail droid, and see what we have to read here. All right, here's one

that comes to us from Colin. Colin, right sin in response to our Uncanny music episode we did around um October and around Halloween. He says, Hi, Julian Robert, I was catching up on the podcast and I felt I absolutely had to suggest a soundtrack relating to the Uncanny Music episode. The Eerie soundtrack, produced by Jene Paptiste de lab Companies the two thousands seven French film Water Lilies. Robert, I think you will really like this album. Thanks for

the podcast. PS. I do believe the film is available on Netflix. I actually I checked this out and uh and the the artist on this I believe he records under the name peril One and it's available. This is a soundtrack is available in full on SoundCloud from the artist himself, and it is really good. I listened to it like four times in a row when I was working the other day. So so thanks Colin for that music recommendation. Pretty cool. We've got a quick one from Jacqueline.

She says, this is a wonderful show and I'm always left wishing it was longer. I just listened to the Normalcy Bias podcast. It was excellent and I'm fascinated to learn more. I was inspired to hunt down the episode on the rat King, which we referenced. In that episode, she says, I used to work at a semi secret underground animal testing lab. I was a rat keeper. It was under a complex of cutting edge hospitals. On breaks and lunchtime, the hazmat cleaner would come down and eat

with us. He was an extremely eccentric man, but one of his rants was about the rat king. We never understood one on Earth he was talking about, and now it's making so much more sense after all these years. It's wonderful to have to have it come full circle and find out he wasn't as much of a loon as we thought he was l o L. I had never even considered that there was extant folklore or documented

clusters of rats. I just thought it was something his mind concocted as a result of his fairly traumatic job. As always, I learned so much. Thank you for your work and the entertaining show. There's so much I love about this um. There's a semi secret underground animal testing. There's the Hasmat person who now I want to go to my my nearest has Matt person and find out all the secrets of every building. Perhaps I don't want because I love this because I'm inagining like an underground complex.

And then there's like the break room and the mister room, and they're having uh, you know, lunch with this dude in a full hazmat suit. Who's who's really breaking down the seriousness of the rat king threat? Right? And they're like, oh man, he's gonna say he's gonna bring up the

rat king. Good stuff. Thank you so much. Jaqueline. All right, So hey, you want to get in touch with us, You want to share your thoughts on topics that we've covered before, thoughts topics that we might cover in the future. If you want to check out our various blog posts, our videos, just about anything we might be up to, links to our social media accounts, go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. I can't stress that enough.

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