Why Are Whale Strandings Still a Mystery?

at some point this year. Chuck, I'm psyched. We're kicking off in Toronto on August eight at the Dan fourth Music Hall. It's going to be great. And then the next day we're gonna be in beautiful Chicago on August nine at the Harris Theater. Uh. And then the next day, August nine at Dan fourth Music Hall in lovely Toronto, Canada, North America, Planet Earth. And then we're too next so I don't know, how about Vancouver on September and then the next day we're gonna be a min Neapolis on September.

Those are gonna be awesome, that is correct. Then we are going to take a nap, and then we're going to wake up on October ten in Austin Texas, wonder how the heck we got there, and remember that we have to be at the Paramount Theater for our show. Yeah, that's called the Austin Wake Up. And then Chuck, the next day, we're going to be for the first time ever in beautiful Lawrence, Kansas at the Liberty Hall on October eleven. That's gonna be huge. And then equally huge

is what's next. We have a special three night second home stand. We call it our second Home that's because it's the Bellhouse in beautiful Brooklyn, New York. October. We're gonna be there three nights in a row. And finally we're gonna wrap it up in true stuff you should know fashion here in Atlanta at the Bucket Theater on November four, and there's gonna be a very special show. Stay tuned for more details. But it is going to

be a charity benefit show. And not only are we donating of our dough, uh, we got our booking agent, in venues and promoters and everyone is chipping in to donate large portions of their dough as well. So I'm pretty excited about that. Yep. So it's gonna be a great tour, Chuck, We need to go get our rest. Yes, and you can go to s y s K live dot com to get all your details because that is our touring home on the web and tickets are going on sale this Friday, June ninth, So visit s y

sk live dot com for ticket links. And if the ticket link doesn't happen to be there, do not fret, Just go to the theater home page and you can find out all about it there. We'll see you on the road. Welcome to Stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Mr Charles W. Chuck Bryant and roundly liked fella and uh another roundly like person Jerry Jerome rolling me. People can take a lad me. What

a weird start. Yeah, it's weird, but this is a weird episode. Man, you think sure it's mysterious at least that's mystery is weird? Uh, yeah, mystery is weird. There, that's a T shirt. Prove my point, man, it's I've been a long time since we came up with a T shirt. Well, yes, since we pointed one out. Yeah for sure. Yeah, mystery is weird. Josh Clark, that's y sk s right, or some people say s U s K, I've never gotten that. Well you knew the text version.

I don't know. I guess I think it's just a mistake. I think so too. It looks weird. To each his own, that's another good T shirt. Yeah, well that's our motto here stuff you should know to each their own. That's right, So chuck um. Back in February of this year, and not too terribly long ago, down in New Zealand at a beach called Farewell Spit in Golden Bay. It's on the top of the South Island of New Zealand. Okay um, they had a huge, huge mass stranding of whales, pilot

whales to be specific, about six hundred. Imagine that. It's a satisfy thing. You can see. Well, yeah, there's one of them. There's a I was reading an article I think it was from The Guardian that it was basically on location interviewing people down there. They were like, this is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.

It's alver experienced anything worse than this. Is dead pilot whales everywhere, dying pilot whales everywhere, and apparently the local authorities put out a call to people living in the area saying like cancel school, calling sick to work, like we need your help down here. And there's this group called Project Jonah that's a New Zealand basically a whale

rescue group. And it's pretty appropriate that they're from New Zealand because from what I understand, New Zealand has the highest incidents of whale strandings or I think even cetacean strandings, which you know is an ending up on a beach um in the world. But the as an International Whaling Commission puts it, any country with the coastline has is going to have a problem with mass strandings of whales. In Germany it did happen, which is not landlocked. It

turns out. Yeah, it's just heartbreaking to see these beautiful, humongous creatures, uh, just laying there dying an awful, awful death. And um, there's a a lot of, like I said, mystery to the whole thing. We're not entirely certain why whales end up stranded, especially on mass um. There's a lot of pretty good hypotheses, some of which are probably true. It's there's probably multiple explanations, but there is definitely some

some weirdness to it still. And then there's a lot of debate about what exactly you should do during a whale stranding. Should you help them, should you kill them? Um? And then should you kill him? Yeah, exactly. And then then there's a lot of debate also about what exactly you should do with a dead whale stranded on the beach, because those things, you don't just flush them down the toilet. They're pretty big. Yeah, And when I said dying in awful death, um, they well, there's a lot of things

that happen. Uh. Their skin burns, yeah, they have very soft sensitive skin. Yes, So just to be out there in the sun like that, they equated it to like a third degree burn on a human just laying there in the sun. Um. Seagulls come in and don't even wait for them to die, and apparently have a thing for going for the eyeballs. So a dying live whale being having its skin burned and eyeballs picked out, Yep,

that's a big problem. And then you also, I didn't think about this, but so a whale is a marine mammal, right, they come up to breathe but they're there equipped to be in the water where gravity is is less. Yeah, they're they're huge, and so they need that water to uh well, when they go and land, big problems happen. Yeah, they encounter the pressure of gravity um pressing down and then they actually start to to suffocate under their own weight.

The big problem is while they're laying there on the beach, they it takes them a very long time to suffocate. They have a tremendous obviously tremendous reserve of blubber, so they don't starved to death first, and they very infrequently do so. Over the course of days, possibly even weeks, they're laying there suffocating under the weight of gravity, being crushed by the their own blubber, yeah, and their their own organs being crushed under their own weight. So it's

a bad jam. It's a pretty bad scene. Yeah, it's just really really sad. And to fully understand how to help whales and other cetaceans from becoming stranded in the first place, we have to understand why they become stranded. And there's a a lot of investigation into this, but apparently it's nothing new from from what I've seen as far as long as humans have been keeping records, there have been reports of mass whale strandings all over the world. Yeah,

and you cobble together quite a few articles for this. Um. One of the really good ones was what causes mass? Uh? What causes whale mass strandings? From the conversation by Robin Grace and um she points out that you know, like you said, this has been going on forever since people have been writing it writing it down. And um, lots all different kind of species of whales this can happen to,

and dolphins and other cetaceans. But um, it says she said, short finn pilot whales are the most frequent or he. I guess it could be like that guy from Cheers. It is r O B y N. That's that's always a she? Right, No, Robin Hitchcock spells his name with a Why doesn't he? Oh? What a confusing world. I talked to him in an elevator. Uh, the sketch best that last year? Really? Yeah? What are the Egyptians with him? No? Wait, wasn't he in the band? What band? The band? Oh?

What was the in? Originally? I don't know he was in like a what major band like that first, I wonder he's definitely not the band. He's English. Um, sorry, where were we? Oh? Yeah, yeah, So pilot whales short finn pilot whales are the most frequent U strand strand ease I guess um false killer whales, melon headed whales, uh, melon headed whale and that name uh, the Cuvier beaked whale and sperm whales. Um. These these are all very

much deep sea dwellers, very social fish. And this is one of the problems as they hang out together in the hundreds and so um, one of the thoughts, uh, Like you said, there are a lot of different hypotheses, but one of the thoughts when they see these mass strandings is whatever. And we'll talk about what might get that first whale there, whether it was just sick or confused or out of its depth trying to go for some prey, uh like, out of its comfort zone its deep. Yeah,

but maybe the other hundreds are just tagging along. Right. So there's this there's this big drive, especially among environmental protection groups, to say this is human caused in large part, and there is a whole branch of strandings that probably are that actually almost certainly can be accounted or chalked up to human activity. But there's also a big wide portion of animal strandings, cetacean strandings that appear to be

natural in nature. Right. And so some of those hypotheses are that initially, like one whale or something was sick or maybe injured, um, and came in toward shallower water so it could come up to surface for air more easily, and when in a little too shallow and got trapped there. Um. It's possible that a pod of whales were chasing some very valuable prey into areas that they weren't familiar with that were too shallow, um, and they got stranded there

as well. And there's there's a couple of uh parts to this that that makes the whole thing makes sense a little more. One is that echolocation that is part of it's basically the number one sense that um marine mammals use. Uh. It's it doesn't work very well in shallow waters, right. Yeah, So they do their navigational aid, they get into these shallower waters, like you said, maybe they were chasing something to eat. All of a sudden

they find themselves out of place. They don't know which way to go, So they inadvertently swim towards the shore and accidentally beach and maybe they've got hanging out with twenty or thirty pals because their social because which makes it all so sad. That's a big cue though, or a big clue that, UM, these are deep sea marine mammals that strand on gently sloping sandy areas. Yeah, and they found some uh, I guess anecdotal evidence. UM, some whales in the North Sea that were beached or stranded

had recently digested oceanic squid. So they thought, well, you know, maybe they had gone in chasing the squid, had just eaten it and didn't know which way to go to get out of there. Yeah, they got confused. And that's another thing that UM, people who have been on the scene of mass whales strandings report is that the whales often seemed to be disoriented or disorientated, depending on where you're from. Oh, that's right, wasn't that a thing on

the show? I think it's u kaish is disorientated. Uh should we take a break now? All right, we'll take a break, and UM talk a little bit more about the natural causes and also about potential man made causes, So Chuck. One thing that you you hit upon, um,

is that the whales are very, very social. Yeah, and so there's this idea that if one becomes stranded, especially if this is a leader that's leading a pod, if they become lost or disoriented, as long as they're stranded, the other members of the pod, of this extremely social, tight knit group are going to hang around and stick with that one. There's also an idea that ones that they are sick are injured if they go off and

become stranded. That even if the ones that follow them aren't lost, they're there because of the social bonds, like they're there to provide support or because they care. It's called the social caring hypothesis. This idea that whales allow themselves to become stranded because a member of their pod has been come stranded and they're worried about them. Basically Yeah.

Uh So obviously there are a lot of people around the world that care a lot about this and are trying to work to just learn more about how to handle this and uh and last year there was a workshop held to discuss, you know, how to practically handle these strandings. Uh and so it concluded UM that they had a uh an International Strandings Network they were going to establish this, and I guess they're in the process of doing that now, basically stranding experts from all all

these different countries where it happens. Partnering up was something called the Entanglement Network UM to basically share information on best practices and just get a little more organized with how they can best help this situation. So you know,

it's good that they're doing something about it. One of the other things that UM very recently, I think within the last year two has been finally handled was this longstanding issue of whether or not sonar that's used by like navies around the world UM it leads to strandings of whales. Yeah, this was the first time this connection was made. There was a NATO military exercise off the coast of Greece which coincided with the stranding of twelve

UH Cuvier's beaked whales. UM. Another one in May two thousand in the Bahamas UM loud loud mid frequency sonar stranded a number of whales and for those they did some UH examinations and found hemorrhaging in them in the inner ear that indicated acoustic trauma, which is just devastating, right, And there were NATO or either NATO or U S Navy sonar exercises that had been conducted right there, right, Yeah.

And then in two thousand two, a group of beaked whales landed in the Canary Islands and UM, they were examined and this has raised a really big mystery as well. Some of them showed signs of what we would call the bends submersion sickness, which you would not think that marine mammal would ever have a problem with. No, because they've developed UM, well they've adapted to be able to

die very quickly and rise very quickly. But they think that probably something about acute sonar, which is basically just getting hit by a blast of high frequency, short duration sound waves UM causes them to either swim away. This is the current hypothesis. There was a New York Times article called the Search for Clues to What causes Whale

strandings and UM. It talks about this study that was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in two thousand seventeen, and the study UM, who's carried out by Terry Terry Williams basically says that sonar goes off nearby some whales or cetaceans, they try to get away as fast as they can. As they do, they expand about double the amount of energy they normally would swimming, and they they

lose oxygen to their brain. In the meantime, carbon dioxide starts to build, which allows bubbles to form in their tissues, including their brain, which is bends decompression sickness, which so it's not like sonar causes the bends, but indirectly, they think leads to the bends by disrupting that the whale or cetaceans ability to dive or rise very quickly without decompression sickness. Yeah, and this um, that study was pretty important because they I think for for a long time

people just thought, well, they're fish. They can swim endlessly and it's not a problem because their marine mammals or fish and they just that's what they do. But it's sort of a no brainer that they can get tired just like anything else, and they confirmed that in studies. You know, if they if they sprint, basically, um, they

are essentially getting tired. And if they're sprinting to avoid sonar, then that's a problem, and so as a result, the Navy entered into an agreement to not conduct these trials or sonar exercises or underwater explosions UM between around Hawaii or southern California, which are extremely important UM reproducing and feeding grounds for whales of all types, and there's some

resident populations there. But they finally said, okay, alright, fine, we're not going to do that anymore around there, which was a big deal. Yeah, seaquakes or another uh UM underwater sound UM like really intense thing that can can affect them beyond sonar. So it's not always just man made sounds, no, but there another type of man made

sound that's a big problem called chronic underwater noise. That UM is created by things like UM shipping or industry, that kind of thing where it's not necessarily this high intensity, but it's it's pretty much constant, and it can drive cetaceans nuts because again, like we use our eyes, they use their ears, and if you have a huge loud sound or a constant loud sound, it makes it difficult for you to do things like you know, hit on

a lady whale when you're when it's time to reproduce. Well, yeah, and we've we've mostly been talking about whales, but there was this one um anecdotal story of these dolphins short beaked common dolphin that this one researcher found and this kind of lends itself to the to the fact that they will travel together if one of them is hurt. And this is at the Tife Estuary, West Wales, and he found these two dolphins on the beach and one of them was sick. Uh postmortermobile had a heavy long

parasite infection that affected its breathing. But the other one apparently was not sick but remained close to uh it's little buddy in distress, like whistling frequently. So um man, that's just like heartbreaking. It was like ted Ted, stay with me, his ted Ted's the dying dolphins. Okay, I thought that was a references something just Ted the dolphin. Yeah, gotcha. Did you ever hear about the researchers. Surely we've talked about that, the dolphin researcher who like took acid with dolphins,

like gave acid to dolphins and dropped it himself. I don't think so build a house, and I think the Bahamas that could be flooded to the dolphins could come live in the house with them. M I believe tried to or successfully. His research assistant did it with the dolphin, had sex with a dolphins. That's another way to put it. This is real. I've definitely never heard this story. Yeah, we I think that one might deserve its own episode. It's it happened the man who did acid and did

sex with dolphins. I think his research assistant, a female, uh, did it with dolphins, or at least came close. There was like a this wasn't a fever dream. It sounds like it must have seemed like it down in the Bahamas at the time. Yeah, well, we'll do an episode on it. Okay, so we It feels like a science is hot on the trail of cetacean stranding, so figuring out what causes it. There's a lot of different causes. Yeah,

it's probably all that stuff. I think, probably, um, but there's a big issue still to be discussed, and that is that if you have a dolphin stranding or a whale strain ending, and you've got some that have died naturally, but you still have some that are alive, what do you do well. There's this that group in New Zealand called Project Jonah. They have guidelines for like the average person of how to how to keep a citation that's been stranded or beached, how to keep it comfortable, how

to keep it alive. Ye, a dolphin obviously is more savable, uh and um, more savable, not only because they're smaller, but there it's frankly, it's an unsafe to go too close to a beached whale, right. That's why I was really surprised that this group was putting out guidelines telling you how to care for a beach to whale. It's an extremely dangerous thing to get near a beached whale, especially by the tail. Yeah, I mean an accident can

easily happen. And they're so strong, sure, and they're agitated, they're scared out of their minds. It's a it's a dangerous thing. So there's a lot of a lot of discussion about you know, what do you do well? Some people say, well, you refloat them, you get them out there as fast as possible, but it is hard to do and also to an untrained person, you can't really spot a gravely injured internally injured citacean just by looking

at it. So you may be pushing it back out to sea and being like, go go live, when really they're going going to have a long, prolonged death at sea because they're dying of internal injuries. The The prevailing idea, it seems like, at least among scientists, is that you should probably euthanize, especially a whale. Dolphins, Yeah, you can probably refloat them. A whale once it becomes beached, it's probably a goner, so say most scientists that I've come across,

And so you you would euthanize them. But then this raises the whole issue how do you humanely kill a whale? Where do you get a guillotine that big? Uh? Yeah, and you know what, we'll talk about what they've come up with right after this. All right, So where we left off was the um Sadly, oftentimes the most humane thing to do would be to put one of these whales out of their misery, uh immediately or you know, as quickly as possible. Uh. And so how do you

do this safely? Um? They've tried a variety of drugs over the years, UM, some degreater success than others. UM. One drug they tried was good old phena barbital um. The problem with feena barbital is that it's uh, it doesn't just leave the whale immediately. It can It can stay in the whale system and then go into other places like a dog. Yeah, it doesn't break down in the environment. And there was a case of a dog being fed whale meat and falling into a coma because

of the bar the barbituous that had. I mean, like, it takes a truckload of barbituous to euthanize a whale, right, so this dog eating this meat and falling into a coma, it was to be expected. Luckily the dog recovered after having its stomach pumped twice. But I mean, what a cluster of a day that was all around kind of euthanize a whale and then your dog falls into a comma when you feed at the whale and you're just

trying to complete the circle of life, you know. Well, yeah, and don't you need special permission to use fena barbers all anyway? Yes, it's not like the kind of thing you can just you know, No, these are like significant drugs. And actually there was a there's a protocol that was recently developed and published in the Journal of a sequence of drug administrations that keep that will kill a whale, but it will do it very humanely and actually quite safely.

To these very clever scientists figured out how to use drugs to kill a whale. And it's very much like the drug cocktail that they give to prisoners in the United States when UM for the death penalty. Yeah. I mean it's taken them a while to find the correct mix of drugs that won't um that are safety use, that won't agitate the whale further, that will kill them quickly. Uh So a lot of like kind of experimentation has gone on, and what they finally came up with was

for drugs uh medas a lamb. I think that's like at a van okay, thumbs up on that um as a promosine. I think that's like bear okay, uh excellent excelazine that's ecstasy and potassium chloride that is UM special K the cereal and that needs to be administered sequentially. I believe in that order, correct, Yeah, because one of them, what was the one with the X uh except excelazine Okay, so that one excelazine, Yeah, maybe orig is zelazine. Anytime

something starts with three consonants, I just get throne one. Um. But that if you just give that to a whale, it's a sedative, I believe. Right. No, it's a pain killer. I'm sorry. But it can cause thrashing. That is extremely dangerous. You Like, the whale's tail is already dangerous enough when it's stranded. If you give it a drug that makes it involuntarily thrash, you're you're in big trouble. But they found that if they administer that stuff after the other two,

it won't cause thrashing, but we'll have the pain killing effect. Yeah. So the medazzolam and the aspromazine. Uh, they use already in veterinary services for horses and dogs to calm them down. And you know when when you have a dog put down, they don't give just one shot. That's a couple of shots. Yeah yeah, ideally, Yeah, they don't even give humans a

couple of shots these days. Yeah, So they do this, you know with dogs, they give one to kind of calm the dog down, and then wanted to stop the heartbeat, right, and the potassium chloride, the final thing is the one that stops the whale's heart. I believe. Yes, the exazzoline is the pain relief and anesthesia, and then that final potassium chloride is what does it. So the the guys who came up with this UM protocol also developed needles,

like industrial sized needles that can be used. They're attached to gardens sprayers. Yeah, that's nuts, right, So you put all the drugs in these gardens prayers and then you attach a needle to it. And the great thing about the needles is that you can insert the needles into the veins that are around the fins. You don't need to go near the arteries, which which the main artery

connects the tail of the body. So it's much safer to administer these drugs because you're working by the fin, which is much less dangerous than say, working by the tail. And apparently UM, I don't think that they've actually used this protocol on any cetacean yet, but UM brand new. It is brand new, but they they are feeling pretty pretty good about it, as good as you can feel about coming up with a cocktail of drugs to kill a whale. But that's just one way of euthanizing whales.

There's there's other ones. People shoot them with shotguns. Yeah, they're certainly more primitive attempts. Uh, that are primitive. Yeah, it is. And and there's actually a protocol for shooting a whale, and you want to use very high caliber bullets projectiles, and if you don't, you're just going to hurt that whale because they have a really really strong skull. Yeah,

that's really tough to penetrate. Um. So there's this thing that's been developed called the sweed, the sperm whale euthanasia device. Sperm whales have a very thick goal. They're huge whales, and this thing is a modified World War two fourteen point five millimeter Russian anti tank gun that's been developed just to euthanize sperm whales by shooting them in the head with this thing. Yeah, I'm gonna go with the

drug cocktail. There's also exanguination, which is if you don't have a drug cocktail and you've got a whale, you don't have an anti tank gun, you don't have a drug cocktail. The the the preferred method is to exanguinate the whale by cutting that major artery that connects the tail to its body and basically just letting it bleed out, which is sad, but it's better than dying while your skin is is burning off, you know. Uh. And so we'll finish with um kind of the problem of what

to do with that dead whale. Uh. And something that happened in November nineteen seventy November twelve, specifically in Oregon. A lot of people think that it was a made up story that they blew up a whale, but it really happened, right, And there's actually grainy footage of it on YouTube seventy news footage from w no k A t U t V right because it's west right, so it's k oh is that what that is? W's the east,

Kay is the west? I never knew that. Uh. So you've got um an eight ton forty ft long sperm whale. This from Snopes correct. Yes, um. And apparently snobs did the real research because there was this long published article that everyone kind of referenced over and over as people do on the internet. UM, and they realized, you're, like, no one ever really called the people that actually did this,

so let's do that. And they did talked to a guy named Ed because it kept coming up on the internet and people thought it was number one and it just happened, and then number two that it was a hoax and an urban legend and an actual urban legend developed out of the real thing. Correct. But the real story is that on November twel eight to forty ft long sperm whale which was dead, washed up on in Florence, Oregon, and um it was. You know, a dead whale eventually

will smell a lot. That's a big problem. And not only that, it's it poses a big problem. And that if if you have a whale that's like still partially in the surf, those sharks come of calling to feed on it, and they'll attack anything around there. So it's a huge public health problem if you have a big dead whale on your beach. Ye. So, um, they think, like, all right, we need to get rid of the thing. What do we do? Who do we call? Um? The

Oregon Beaches Public right of Way. So oddly enough, they went to the State Highway Division to clean this up. Uh So they consulted the Department of the Navy, and the Navy said blow it up. Yeah. This guy named George Thornton was the guy whose shoulders that fell on. He was with the Highway Division, and he was like,

all right, we'll blow it up. I mean they it made sense of the time they blew up huge boulders that weighed about the same and that's how they that's the what they used to calculate how much dynamite to blow this whale up. Yeah, I mean, in the weirdest way, it did make sense. It totally did. Like they calculated that they would need a half a ton of dynamite twenty crates worth, and they thought, well, if we stuff this stuff on the landward side of the whale, it'll

blow it out to see how to see. Basically, no must know, fuss gonna blow it the smithereens and we'll just leave it for the seagulls and you know, the crabs. And I think the quote was the crabs and the seagulls and what not to eat the tiny particles of blubber, Like you said, no fuss, no must. So on November twelve, uh, there were a group of a couple dozen onlookers who came to see this. Word got out around Florence, Oregon

that they were going to blow a whale up. That was a pretty fun thing to do in Florence, Oregon that day, right, so people people came out to see Channel two ka t used. Paul Lindman reported on the scene, and he did the whole thing, very tongue in cheap. This is right out of the gate. They're gonna blow a whale up with half a ton of dynamite. This guy got the hilarious nous inherent in the idea right

out of Anchorman pretty much. Uh, And so he called it and everybody went and hid behind the dunes about a quarter of a mile away, not far enough. No, they blew the thing and you got to see this footage just just look up exploding whale on YouTube. It was a huge explosion and everybody's watching and they're like, yeah, somebody goes we and then all of a sudden they're like oh some I think a woman says, oh God,

as whale parts just start raining down on everybody. Yeah, it's like that scene in Tremors when they finally blew up one of the tremors and they just start, you know, getting Of course in Tremors, it was that kind of orange blood orange pulp, one of the grab boids. So they were called that's what. Oh well, that's what the the store owner, the little store owner guy called them. They were trying to think of what he called me. He's like, what about grab boids? Great movie? Um? Yeah,

So it basically rained down whale blubber. Uh, some in larger pieces than others. And it's remarkable nobody got hurt because a three foot by five ft piece landed on a buick owned by Walter uman Hoffer and they showed the car. It crushed his car. Had he been sitting in there, he would have been dead as a doornail. Like, it's really lucky no one got killed. Yeah, that could

have squashed somebody easy, sure. And so everybody is sitting there wiping whale blubber and guts and and gristle off of their faces and they look over and most of the whale is still there. It definitely vaporized part of the whale, but most of it was still there. So they just buried it on the beach, which is one thing you can do with the whale. You can bury it on the beach. You can take it to a lion fill. You can drag it out to see that's the preferred thing, but out and then let it, let

it sink, which is the natural thing. There's something called a whale fall which creates like a temporary ecosystem on the seafloor that attracts a bunch of different organisms that eat the whale. Right. Um, But it's illegal in the US to to tow a whale that's been put down with barbiturous out to sea because remember those don't break down, so you've got secondary toxicity. So if you put a whale down with the cocktail in the US, you have to render it, burn it, or bury it in the landfill.

You can't take it out to sea. But if you just shoot in the head, you can drag it out to sea and and let it. Say, there's a lot of math to be done with dragging it out to sea because ostensibly you would tie a rope around its tail, pull it out where it would drag along the sea floor. Well,

hopefully it would float, would it, Sure it wouldn't. The reason why is another reason why a dead whale is super dangerous because as they decompose, gas builds up, just like they do in a decomposing human, and then they explode on their own sometimes too that you don't want to be standing near either all right, So I guess it has to float because otherwise eventually it would start pulling that boat down with it, at which point you would definitely want to cut bait. Yes, literally, you got

anything else? No, it's um it's a very sad thing, and I'm glad that there are people who dedicate their lives to this kind of thing. Yeah, if you're into that, If you hear that as a call and go check out Project Jonah's website. They will be right up your alley. You'll probably end up moving to New Zealand, which I can attest is a great, great place to visit. I want to go. It's great, And I hear it's friendly

and safe. Yes, and like i've heard it compared to like the United States in the nineteen fifties as far as like friendliness and safety. Yeah, and just sort of a bit of a throwback in like the best ways. That's what friends of mine have said. Or maybe they just mean everyone's drunk all day long, maybe and uh, doing drugs and having a good time. This is all that happened in the fifties. There's a town in there that was built in art like completely art deco in

the nineteen thirties. But they're talking about that they use art deco to to describe it. No, this is just New Zealand as a whole. Okay, well check it out. We'll have to go there on tour someday. Absolutely. Okay. Well, since I said we'll go there on tour someday, it's time for listening email. I'm gonna call this general email of interest. That's a good one. Hello, Josh, Chuck, and Jerry. I cannot remember the name of the podcast where there's

a crazy doctor. I remember what this was, Um, not Uncle Shlomo Um who got run out of multiple towns, starts up multiple practices and possibly loses his license multiple times. I know if I could remember exactly what he was doing to get run out of these towns, I would remember the podcast. But the right page of twenty it is lost. Do you remember it? No? I was hoping that you would know and that we could delight this listener. I think this guy's confusing us with stuff to blow

your mind. What's the lady? I think? Do you think I don't know? It happens from time it's hot. I'm gonna finish the email anyway. Um, I know that It's on my list of favorites amongst Satanic Panic of the eighties, great one, Operation Mincemeat another good one, how Bars work, to listen to public Relations and Kitty genevese Boy, those are all some of my favorites too. Uh. And of course the time you guys partied with Billy Boy Gates.

That was a great party. Uh. You guys always brighten my day and lead me to become a person whose slogan is so I heard on this podcast dot dot dot there's a t shirt. I'm an architecture student from Auburn University War Eagle even if you don't want to Tigers. Uh. Yeah, see, that's just weird dumb to make up your mind Auburn. Uh. And I've listened to you all to keep me going through countless late hours, early mornings and days. But I don't ever leave my studio desk. Also, I have forced

many of my classmates to listen to you. Shout out to fellow listener and classmate Corey Subsessic pronounced Sue Basic Subsassic and not through all kinds of letters in there, Corey Sue Basic if you read the son the listener mail. Uh, shout out Corey and I always suggest I always suggest the Satanic Panic as the first episode. That's a good starter. Yeah, I agree. Anyway, guys, please help me remember my favorite episode and have just a remarkable day. Best of luck

to you all in your perspective children and spouses. I don't think she means perspective children. Does she thinks she's been in architecture too long. That's a perspective. Children mean children that have yet to be born. I don't think that's happening anytime soon. Uh. That is from Olivia Barrett, she says, signed note Birmingham, Alabama would love to have you. We performed in Birmingham. It was a great show. It was a great show. Maybe we'll come back in day

to the great work play eater there. It's a very warm reception. Um, I can't remember. So what I'm hoping is someone writes in to about the crazy doctor who got run out of multiple town start to multiple practices and possibly was this his license multiple times? So idea, So I mean, not a clue. If anyone can remember that and write and tell us will answer Lidia back again on the air and then read jrtan Now, oh well, there you go. That's a heck of a deal. Chair.

You know. Well, if you have Livia's answer, you can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can also hang out with me. I'm at josh um Clark on Twitter. You can I Alway Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast, the How Stuff Works dot com and as always, too us to home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com