The Gila Monster, Part 1

with me as a kid. I mean, you had Cookie Monster, you had the HeLa Monster, So there is a natural attraction there, though there to be clear, as we'll be discussing, there are plenty of other reasons to love these.

pudgy scan around it that. I'm sure we'll discuss that in more detail later, but that was a real shocker for me when I in this episode came across a CT scan of a HeLa monster head. It's got some stuff going on.

but still visually very interesting. They have that signature pink slash orange and black colorization, and their general character, at least in my opinion, is this is kind of adorable, kind of comfy. There's something kind of laid back about these lizards.

They've lived there since nineteen sixty nine, and they've always been very active and outdoorsy, you know, going on hikes, horseback riding, that sort of thing, you know, always getting out there, and they're still getting out there, and I had to ask them both about it, texting them earlier in the week, and each of them has only ever seen a HeLa monster once in the wild. One of them saw a HeLa monster on a hiking trail, crossing the trail, and then another saw one sunning itself on

some rocks during a morning horse ride. So I think this is just a small sample size, and I'd love to hear from any other people who've spent significant amounts of time within the range of the Heela Monster. But I think it does speak volumes for how secluded these creatures tend to be.

reasons that we will discuss now. I've of course been visiting Arizona for I think it this point almost twenty years, and I've certainly never seen one of these creatures in the wild. It's always been in the back of my mind It's like a helo monster episode would be good. But it was actually on my recent visit to Denver, Colorado, that I decided, oh yeah, definitely need to pull the trigger on this. This is a place well outside the

HeLa monsters range. But there was a great volunteer led exhibit at the museum titled Nature's Medicine Cabinet, which featured helo monsters among various other profile organisms that had either been traditionally used in human medicine generally plants as well as animals that had come into play had come to

play a key role due to advancements in peptides. Of note, while helas don't naturally live in Denver, the city played host to the only known human fatality from a helo monster bite in the last century, when a man who kept them as pets in Denver suffered a fatal bite.

monster is quite a cocktail, it is incredibly potent. It There are a lot of documented helo monster bites and almost none of them have resulted in death, So very potent, something you absolutely do not want to experience for reasons that we will talk about, but usually not fatal.

thee of the HeLa monster. There's a long list of things that are more dangerous to you ahead of that.

Richard G. Zwiffel. Also a nice text. And we're also going to refer to some more recent studies concerning the HeLa Monster, because one of the amazing things that I've seen pointed out is that despite the fact that the HeLa Monster is pretty famous, it is like a sports mascot, and you know, and everybody knows about it. It's shown up in numerous films, sometimes at least once, well more than once in the starring role, not necessarily Oscar worthy pictures.

But you can't blame the Helo Monster. That's more the agents of fault forgetting the Helo Monster these gigs. But movies, Yeah, that's sort of they and some more recent films in that sort of vein. But yeah, despite it being such a well known creature, there are certain aspects of its biology that are as yet not fully understood or certainly where we've been catching up in recent years figuring exactly how they work. All right, Well, let's dive into it

a bit more. What sort of lizard is the HeLa monster. Let's narrow it down. They're technically beaded lizards of the family helo dermat today and its sole genus Heloderma. It's a small family, small genus with previously, I believe only five recognized extant species native to the Americas, including the HeLa monster, the Mexican beaded lizard, and the Guatemalan beaded lizard. Historically, we thought there were only two Mexican beated lizard and

the Helo monster. So many older sources are going to reflect that all of them are venomous, the only venomous extant lizards, and the Helo monster is generally singled out as being the only literal venomous lizard native to the United States.

its primary function is. So there is some other venom in lizards out there, but these in some special way are like the most primarily venomous lizards.

its blood thinning properties. So, like you know, a komodo dragon bites its prey, it inflicts a pretty dire wound, and a wound that is also going to drain out a lot faster.

recent research has turned against it. So I was reading some articles about this, quoting a toxicologist named Brian Frye at the University of Queensland who talks about how actually komodo dragon mouths are not especially they don't have a specially dangerous bacteria in them. In fact, they're relatively clean

as far as animal mouths go. Kimodo dragons spend a lot of time cleaning their mouths, kind of licking and smacking their lips and rubbing their heads on things in the environment, like rubbing their mouths against leaves to try to clean them off after meals. So you have this old idea of the kimodo dragons with rotting meat in their teeth or something, and this kind host bacteria that will infect the prey animal after it gets a bite from the komodo dragon. That seems to be not really

the case. Their mouths are not really different from the mouths of other carnivores, and fry says that they just don't have enough bacteria in their mouths to really harm an injured animal anymore than you would expect a bite of any animal too.

They take care to sling out the contents of intestines before they eat them, and their small young avoid cannibalization by their gigantic elders, in part by rolling around in such filth.

a lot of reptile species that we've discussed. So there's there's still going to be a mismatch, and you're gonna have these situations where komodo drag the large ones have taken down prey and or are scavenging prey, and so there's some sort of large, smelly feast to be had. The big dragons are going to have primary access to that. The younger dragons, the ones that are there, they're big enough to come down from the trees, but they're not

big enough to get in on the buffet. They're going to go around in this circle, this kind of uh, this circle of that's like a nervous circle that's going around the feeding area, an appeasement circle, I believe it's sometimes referred to as where they're just kind of hanging around making it clear that they are not contesting the kill at all, They are not attempting to get in, but they are ready to do clean up after the

main meal has taken place. So, yeah, kimodos in and of themselves instant endlessly fascinating as well, you know, enormous predatory lizards and yeah, so I guess the other thing thinking about this whole this this again this idea that there was harmful bacteria in their saliva, which you see that in the older sources and even in not so

old sources. They so kind of you see, kind of like a halfway holding onto that concept where they're saying, Okay, there's a toxin, there's a venom in play, but also the bacteria. But you know, when you look at the full equation of what they have, their strength, their teeth, their anticoagulant, venom, they certainly don't need a bacterially potent bite to get the job done. I suspect some of this also goes back to prior interpretations of the Komodo

dragon as being primarily scavengers. In part this may have been due to the fact that you would see them, you know, all hanging out around this rotting kill. But nowadays we know that they are very capable hunters, bringing down things like water buffaloes and deer, and they are in fact apex predators in their environments.

number of early mispronunciations as we talk about the Gila monster. Perhaps, but it is HeLa and it is named for the HeLa River basin of New Mexico and Arizona, where it was once plentiful. The scientific name is Heloderma suspectum, which translates to suspicious wart skin, with the suspart coming from nineteenth century paleontologist and biologist Edward Drinker Cope. Some of you may remember that name. He was one of the key individuals in the paleontologist Bone Wars.

were venomous or not. It wasn't until around the nineteen twenties, by Beck's reckoning, that enough evidence had been marshaled to convince basically everybody in the field that they were truly venomous, and yet the species name stuck. So I think it's funny that HeLa monsters are in their scientific name forever suspected, even though they are one hundred percent guilty, poor critters.

these things, which are epic to read. But I wanted to note another interesting thing about their scientific names. So the genus name again is a Heloderma. The species name suspect them. Suspect them because they were suspected of being venomous, and they were. But the the genus name can be interpreted, like you said, as wardy skin, though more literally it comes from the Greek that means skin of nails or

skin of studs. This will relate to a biological feature we'll talk about in a minute called the osteoderms, but so heloderma. The derma of course means skin, but the helopart comes from the Greek word helos, referring to a nail or a stud, or more specifically, the flat head of a nail, So these are nail skin. There are pin head lizards in a way. I'm thinking of Doug Bradley.

lizard can. I frequently see it compared to various medieval armors such as chain mail, you know, pretty obvious thing to compare it to, though this can be confusing as osteoderms do not overlap. I've read the lizards also have scales atop these osteoderms as well, and osteoderms can fuse with the skeleton and with the Helo monster, they specifically fuse with their skulls, creating just a very memorable skull

if you were an easy skull. Yeah, if you were not behind the wheel of a car, or I don't know, non jury do it. I don't know whatever you're doing. Or you shouldn't look at your phone or your computer screen. If you are able, look them up. Look up some images of Helo monster skulls alongside Helo monster fleshed heads, and it's pretty pretty memorable, and I would say pretty metal.

you top view, bottom view, lateral view. Especially the lateral view of the head. It doesn't look real. It looks like an illustration of a dragon. Because so you have these osteoderms, like we've been talking about, these kind of bulbous little beads, these wardy shaped, little bony patches covering the entire head, and then also a little bit less densely grouped but also covering the neck. And then the head just terminates in these empty eye sockets and these

teeth that look like something out of a fantasy. They're a horrible, just long, spiny, spear tip looking teeth that look more like a drawing than like nature.

Even the helo monster who if you again, if you certainly, if you've seen them at the zoo or in some sort of you know, enclosed environment like that, they don't really look like they're going to be scaling a lot of trees. They look like they are very ground based and certainly under round based. But you have to consider what their favorite meals are, and so they're they're foraging,

but what are they foraging for. They're generally looking for eggs and young prey, so young mammalian prey generally like rodents or I believe baby rabbits also come up as a favorite.

on vertebrate nest contents. They'll eat other things as well, but vertebrate nest contents that's what they go for.

that's when they're going to produce. But also if you are eating mostly eggs or the young, these are prize commodities, a lot of energy goes into creating them, and then this could and then a lot of energy is going to go into either secreting them away or actively protecting them. So so that is also a factor. And to even find them, especially if they're hidden in some way, you have to be pretty sensitive to their uh, to to

their their their their their chemical signal. You have to have a very chemically sensitive organism and in organism that has a pretty good memory. So so again you have to factor that into the evolutionary direction that monitor that these uh, these beaded lizards and specifically uh, the HeLa monster have gone uh, so you have to have you end up with a devoted egg eater slash baby eater, nest rat or that has to go for long stretches

without being able to eat. And indeed we see that with the Helo monsters diet again, eating five to ten times a year, and those meals are not going to be evenly spread out now they get at their Their activity also ticks up during other key moments, of course, during breeding season and mate selection season. This is when the males of the Helo monsters are going to compete through what is often described as fierce combat, though I'm

to understand it's mostly intense wrestling with some nibs. So they're going to bite each other, but they're not going to go full on venom inducing bites. These are going to be I'm not going to say loving bites. They're still done in an offensive way. They're still competing, but yeah, not going to be full on bites. The mating takes place in late spring, resulting in up to a dozen eggs, which require ten months before hatching.

nibbing at each other with their mouths. But when females fight each other, and they may fight each other for a few different reasons, you know, territorial defense, an acquisition, mate defense, parental care slash cannibalism prevention. When the females fight, they really don't hold anything bite. They're full on bites here, which is which is interesting, Like they're not going it's

like they're not competing for mating here. They are just all out like for instance, defending their young and or preventing cannibalism from occurring. Because again, helo monsters are nest raiders, they are not above rating other heelo monster nests.

a ritualized system for handling intersex conflict. So because they have this system of competing with one another for mates, they have this ritualized wrestling type of thing where they can sort of have a proxy for all out fighting by competing to show endurance in wrestling or these displays, which is another interesting example of something we've talked about on the show before of like a lot of the things we see in nature that we think of as

fighting or aggression are actually ways of avoiding fighting or aggression.

downstream version of a similar scenario. It's like like, okay, we can sort of go fifty percent in this battle, and then we know how a full one hundred percent battle between the two of us would go. But we don't need to go there. You know, the winner wants to go on in mate, the loser would like to go on and successfully mate and or win other competitions. It serves everyone's best interest if this is how it plays out.

in the female female aggression. Was so they will bite, do it full on biting, and also will do this thing they call lateral rotation. Did you get to this part here where they're like they compared it actually to the crocodilian death.

wildly in the water. And so in the study, I thought it's interesting that even though these lizards are not super closely related to crocodilians, they have a similar impulse. I guess maybe you know, they are these elongated reptiles, so they grab hold and then they just start spinning around.

but a warning close up. A warning, of course, of their venom, which, at least in their current form, contrary to every reptile outside of the heloderm lizards, has no offensive or predatory purpose. It's purely defensive. You know. You can contrast this again with the komodo dragons, who you know, they have venom, but it aids to some degree in bringing down their prey helo monsters. And there can they just have this really powerful, full chemical weapon on hand

as a defense. And it's kind of puzzling, right. It's like if you showed up at someone's house and the house and you're like, hey, what's that over there, it's like, oh, yeah, that's my self defense system. It's saren gas. I just keep it on hand. It would raise questions like why do you have sarin gas as a like a home defense system? Like did you have it for some other purpose originally and you just have kept it around for this. It's an odd choice.

for that later, and they're pretty interesting. But I wanted to talk briefly about the heel a monster bite and its venom So again, one of my main sources is going to be that book by Daniel Beck, The Biology of HeLa Monsters and Beaded Lizards, But I was also reading some other sources we can talk about as we go along. As we mentioned earlier, the Heloderma lizards are known for being among the few, or depending on your definitions,

the only venomous lizards on Earth. But it took a long time to get to full agreement among everybody in the specialist sort of herpetology community that these lizards were actually venomous. Beca gives this kind of chronicle of the history of this controversy, talking about how in the later half of the nineteenth century you did have inklings of venomousness, some people had made reports of this kind. He says that some of the sources at this time comment on

the quote vile nature of Heloderma. I love these, you know, in the older sources they're not as clinical and they're not as clinical and reserved as modern sources are, and talking about these reptiles, they make kind of moral judgment from the animals they talk about, but also that you know, some authors in the late later nineteenth century looked at things like, well, it's teeth have these grooves in them, what are those grooves for? That could be for delivering

venom of some sort. And then in the eighteen eighties there were some dissections of Hiloderma looking at their venom glands and experiments which showed that Heloderma saliva was toxic to other animals. But this did not settle the matter, because then more research was published later in the same decade showing that Heloderma saliva had no toxic effects. Beck thinks that this false negative about the toxicity of the saliva was probably a result of samples being collected wrong.

He doesn't elaborate, but I wonder if this means somehow that the researchers were collecting saliva that did not have venom in it, because as we'll mention, it's you know, the venom is sort of is injected from glands into mouth. In the eighteen nineties, researchers extracted venom directly from heloderma venom glands and injected it into small vertebrates, which resulted in death. But then others remained skeptical. Here's the thing

I alluded to earlier. There was this one researcher named Snow, last named Snow who got a helo monster bite, and he was like, Eh, no big deal. I don't think they're venomous. So maybe he just got a dry bite with little or no venom delivered unclear, But Beck also quotes an author named Goodfellow, writing in the year nineteen oh seven, who says, you know, at this point the case is closed. It is not venomous. It can be conclusively demonstrated. Quote that the bite of the monster is innocuous.

Per se as we know this was completely wrong, And in nineteen thirteen a book was published by the Carnegie Institute of Washington that had details on extensive experiments by eleven different contributors on the venom of Hiloderma, and this book and then subsequent papers in the following decade finally had everybody convinced that the lizards were venomous. So it seems like by the nineteen twenties. Everybody's on the same page. Okay,

yes they are venomous. So to picture how Heloderma in venomation works, it helps to contrast it with the other venomous reptile you're probably thinking of, which is venomous snakes. In a venomous snake, the venom glands and the venom

conducting teeth the fangs are in the upper jaw. In most venomous snakes, the fangs will produce deep puncture wounds with a bite, and then the snake's venom glands, often located sort of behind or under the eyes, inject venom through ducts into the wound through holes in the hollow fangs.

On the other hand, in Heloderma suspectum, the helo monster, the venom glands are in the lower jaw, and the venom conducting teeth are mostly the lower teeth, So the venom conducting teeth here are not going to be injecting venom like the fangs of a cobra. If you see the venom glands of Heloderma illustrated, they sort of make the lizard look a bit jowy. There's a Don Corleone thing going on and the venom glands. So there are

these multi lobed little protuberances on the lower jaw. They line the lower jaw and you can see them in like three or four lobes down there, and each little plump lobe is connected to the gums via a duct. So the HeLa monster has very sharp, long teeth with grooves running up the teeth from the base, and when the lizard bites, venom is expressed from the glands out through the ducts, flooding around the base of the teeth, and then it is conducted up the teeth and into

the wounds of the bite victim via capillary action. So the same way that if you have a very thin straw, you can see liquid just natured truly climb up the straw, even without any suction being applied. It's just the capillary action caused by the surface tension of the liquid it wants to climb up through the very narrow channel. Same thing happens. It climbs up through the teeth and is

conducted into the wound. But there's also just getting venom into the wound through good old fashioned mashing and grinding.

keep your distance. But if something approaches, a threatened or agitated helodermal lizard will often open and close its jaws repeatedly at whatever is bothering it, exposing, for one thing, sort of showing off the inside of the mouth, exposing this pink, purple white inside of the mouth is very different color is usually than the outside of the animal, so that can be kind of visually shocking to see when it spreads its jaws wide, and this is often

interpreted as a threat display, but Beck mentions that it might have another function, which is that the opening and closing of the jaws could serve to express venom from the glands into the mouth and then to better coat all the teeth with venom rather than only the pairs of teeth in the middle lower jaw that have the venom ducts right beneath them.

range of toxic effects. And there are some sources that indicate it might be a more than the some of its parts kind of situation where scientists have done a lot of work isolating individual toxins from the Helo Monster's venom and trying to understand them and trying to see what they do. Of course, this will have major implications for pharmaceuticals that we can probably discuss in the next part in the series or at some point in the series.

So a huge array of interesting and powerful bio active agents throughout this venom, but in some cases it has been found that certain toxins within the venom are more potent within the venom at what they do than they are when they're isolated. So again, it might be more than the sum of its parts. And of course some of these things found in the venom or have been

the source of revolutionary drug discoveries. Again, we'll come back to that, but I want to talk first about just what's it like to be bitten by a HeLa monster. First of all, incredibly unbelievably painful. People often describe it as like being on fire. There is a fire that you can't put out in your flesh. Another simile that I have seen multiple times is molten hot lava has entered your bloodstream. It's like something is burning hot and

it is flowing inside you now. And this is because in many cases, the excruciating pain is not only localized at the the source of the bite. It is there, but it also tends to radiate back toward the core of the body. So, for example, people who are bitten on the hand often describe a sense of extreme, unbearable burning pain that climbs up the arm and into the shoulder, which creates distress in itself because there's this feeling of how far is it going to go and when is

it going to stop. People who have experienced it usually say it is the worst pain they have ever felt. Beyond that, there are a bunch of systemic effects that have been documented, some frequently, some occasionally, so it's not always exactly the same array of effects, and I can't list every reaction ever documented, but the large list includes reduction in blood flow through the carotid artery, which is going to mean reduced blood flow to the head and

the brain, a drop in blood pressure. Tachycardia is a rapid heart rate when resting, and just general cardio weirdness messing with your heart rate and your circulation. General trouble breathing, a lot of different kinds of strange breathing, maybe shortness of breath or difficulty with breathing in different ways. Edema, which is swelling caused by fluid retention in body tissues. I think this is going to be especially around the

area of the bite. Hypothermia which is a drop in core body temperature, nausea and vomiting and other gastrointestinal distress and internal hemorrhage and major organs, and the lungs, eyes, digestive tract and other organs. I've seen people who suffered helo monster bites talking about blood in their urine, so surprisingly, despite how alarming that list is. We mentioned this earlier, but it's kind of hard to believe that human death

from heloderma bites is very rare. There are only a couple of possible cases of fatal bites and humans in the past century. One of them is in dispute. Another one was that one that's pretty recent that we talked about, the one in twenty twenty four, the man in Colorado who was bitten by a pet. And in cases where death occurs, it seems usually to result from disturbances to breathing.

bottle of whiskey. Have some whiskey for that helo monster bite. It's just going to accelerate the venom.

saliva is not constant. But it just seems like, you know, venom lots that are taken from these animals in nature are just not going to be of a consistent level of potency.

used for predation. It can be used for defense as well, but it's necessary for predation because the venom is used you subdue and either kill or immobilize, and then sometimes to digest prey. This is important because venomous snakes often prey on animals that are relatively large and could be dangerous to the predator, as in, they could inflict injuries on the snake if they were able to fight back.

So in many venomous snakes, venom tends to cause things like low blood pressure, blood clotting, and just tissue destruction enzymatic destruction of tissue, often the tissue lining the blood vessels. Some venomus snakes also make use of neurotoxins that can cause muscle paralysis, and this can first of all, it can immobilize prey, but it can also kill prey by

halting respiration, leading to death. And Beck mentions that some snake venom may also play a role in helping snakes pre digest their meals, which is beautiful.

a bite. While brutally painful, it tends to be a little more locally concentrated in its effects, has less of a tissue destroying effect, and so Beck argues that Heloderma venom seems less specialized for subduing prey and thus is probably more important for defense than for predation, because, again coming back to what we talked about earlier, looking at their ecology, how do they survive and interact with their environment?

Heloderma lizards are nest rating specialists. They attack eggs or the helpless young of other animals, primarily birds and small mammals. So there are you know, just you don't need a venom to subdue a baby cotton tail rabbit or to subdue an egg. You know these prey are they're not very large, they're not very dangerous, and thus there's not a big reason to see why lizards would need venom in order to bring them down.

I mean, so you might bite and then back off and then attack or bite and then wait before trying to swallow. But Beck talks about how you know the heel monsters they're gonna eat baby rabbits or something, they just go in and just swallow them. You know, there's not like chewing, pumping, when the kind of stuff you would see when a snake needs to envenomate a prey

animal in order to get it down. Beck does mention that in captivity sometimes he's observed HeLa monsters chewing on already dead mice that they're being fed, but that you know, that might be something else that might be a captivity induced behavior or something reflexive. But generally it just observations don't lend themselves to thinking that it has a feeding

or predation function. He says, maybe it might have more of a predation function for juvenile lizards, Okay, like a much smaller HeLa monster going after say again a young rabbit.

of lizards do. Most lizards, if they're caught out in the open, will just sprint away from the threat because they can move pretty fast. Heloderma lizards they're not fast movers. They are large, sluggish, relatively slow moving and yes, in fact, there are helo monster on a treadmill tests with peak speed clocked by Beck at one point seven kilometers per

hour wo, so not super fast movers. Instead of running, they rely on a secondary defense, which is hiding in plain sight, so their color patterns can help camouflage them against the background, at least when the potential predator is at a distance. So if a predator comes with within the range the lizard senses them, the lizard will often

freeze and press their bodies flat to the ground. However, if a predator already saw it and kept coming, the lizard would not be able to get away quickly enough. So now it makes ecological sense for them to have a third line of defense, which is venom. So the prescription here is bite, clamp, and hold on. Usually flood the venom up from the glands into the ducts around the teeth, flood the venom into the wound, and then chew more venom into the wound for the bite victim.

This leads to the kinds of effects mentioned before, excruciating pain, drop in blood pressure, weakness, lethargy, internal hemorrhaging. It is not a pleasant experience. Now, Beck does note an interesting paradox if the venom is designed to drive predators away by making the prospect of tangling with a heloderma lizard super unpleasan why does the lizard clamp on and continue to risk injury? While the bite victim is fighting to remove it seems kind of counterproductive if the lizard's goal

is to deter the predator and escape unharmed. Despite the apparent paradox. Here Beck discusses existing recorded observations of HeLa monsters biting both humans and dogs, and in both cases, the bite victim does not usually react by injuring the lizard. They will usually immediately panic and just try to get away to get the lizard off, which the bite victim eventually does, and in most cases this happens without the

death or serious injury. Without the death of the lizard or serious injury, A couple of recorded cases have resulted in lizard deaths, so apparently the biting and clamping is in the field not one hundred percent safe for the lizard, but it does. The lizard usually does get away alive, and I think one way of interpreting this is that there is just sort of a calculus a trade off

that the lizard's biology is making here. So if the lizard can hang on longer and can chew more venom into the wound, you are more likely to produce an intense and overwhelming reaction in the bitten predatory animal, which I think thereafter reduces the effect that the animal comes back and still tries to kill or eat the lizard

a second time. So, even though there is risk to the lizard from clamping on and continuing it to attack, it doesn't have a fast, efficient venom delivery system like the you know, the fangs of a viper or like a snake that can bite quickly, inject tons of venom really fast, and then run away. It has to sort of keep chewing and grinding to get more venom in there.

And the evolutionary calculus has concluded that sometimes it makes sense for the lizard to have an instinct to bite and hold on and deliver more venom, even if that's going to keep the lizard initially exposed to the predator for longer. I think because a more venomated predatory animal is going to be less dangerous to you after the bite is released.

of animals that have been bitten. It could produce evolutionary learning instinctual learning, where like animals, the predatory animals that avoid lizards that look like this are favored evolutionarily and thus eventually the predator species are less likely to mess with them.

monster like to get into. There are various sort of frontier myths about them as well that are pretty amusing and in some cases maybe insightful into the way humans were interacting with them. And then we're going to get into their role in pharmacology totally. All right, Well, in the meantime, I do write in if you have anything already you want to share with us about HeLa monsters field reports if you will. We're also open to any kind of info you want to send in regarding Helo

monsters popping up in movies. There's a website that we always love to check out anytime that the subject of herbs and film comes up, and it's California herbs dot com. They have a whole section where you can look up. You can see what herbs have been in what movies, and what they were doing in them, how they were treated, and they have a listing for the HeLa monster, and it's an interesting selection of films. I was looking at this, and of course you have concerning Helo monsters and Beat

of the Lizards. You have some pretty obvious inclusions there, but also like some classic westerns are just popping up in as part of the sort of background you know Frontier World. They pop up in Butch Casting The Sundance Kid, for example. No, I forgot about that. Yeah, what do they when?

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