Mini But Mighty

All creatures great and small are on display in the Cabinet today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
When you think of the strongest animal in the world,
what comes to mind. Maybe you imagine the blue whales.
Clocking in at over one hundred feet long and weighing
around two hundred tons, they're the largest animals to have
ever existed on Earth. Their hearts alone can weigh up
to four hundred pounds, and the ventricles inside are big
enough for a human being to crawl through. Or maybe

(00:57):
you think of elephants. The African bush elephant is the
law or just land mammal on the planet. They can
grow up to twenty four feet long, thirteen feet tall,
and weigh up to eleven tons. They also have a
life span of about seventy years, which is longer than
any other mammal except humans. Or perhaps you think of ants.
The common American field ant is pound for pound stronger

(01:18):
than any body builder out there. They can lift up
to five thousand times their own body weight. That's like
a two hundred pound man lifting a million pounds. So
when it comes to the world's most industrious animal, there's
some seriously tough competition. But the organism that tops the
list might surprise you. It was discovered in seventeen seventy
three by a German naturalist named Johann august Ephrium goes

(01:42):
And that's kind of a mouthful, so we're just gonna
call him Johan. Now, Johan discovered an organism that defied
everything scientists knew about life on Earth. You see, he
was really into studying water, and specifically the microorganisms that
lived in water. Well, one day he was looking at
some liquid under a micros and he noticed this tiny
little thing wriggling around beneath the lens. It had eight legs,

(02:05):
translucent skin, and a tube for a mouth. Johann thought
this was curious. This aquatic being looked kind of like
a miniature bear, and so he named it a wasser bear,
that's water bear in German. And Johan noticed something very
interesting too. When the water bear was taken out of water,
it dried up, but it did not die, it entered

(02:27):
a sort of sleep like states, kind of like an
actual bear going into hibernation. As soon it was back
in water, it woke back up good as new. Now,
even in the seventeen hundreds, this discovery definitely caught the
attention of the scientific community. An Italian clergyman named Lazzaro
Spalanzani began studying the animal, and he noticed that it

(02:47):
moved really slowly, so he gave it the name ill
tartegrado or slow stepper in Italian. In English we would
call the animal the tartar grade. Since it was first found,
scientists have done a ton of re search on tartar grades.
Here's what they've discovered so far. When a tartar grade
is in the water, it seems like your standard microorganism.

(03:07):
It only has a life expectancy of a few weeks.
But when it dries out and enters that hibernation, which
the scientists call the ton state, it becomes nearly indestructible.
And I'm not exaggerating either. In the Ton state, tartar
grades can withstand temperatures as low as one degree above
absolute zero and as high as the boiling point of water.
They can get blasted with thousands of times the radiation

(03:30):
that would be fatal to a human and be totally fine.
They can even go into the vacuum of space with
no high tech astronaut gear. Might I add, and return
to Earth unscathed. Basically name an apocalyptic scenario and the
tartar grades will probably be aok. Oh, And I should
also mention they can stay in the Ton States with

(03:50):
no food or water for thirty years. Now. Based on
the fossil record, scientists believe that tartar grades have been
around for about six hundred million years. That means they
existed four hundred million years before the dinosaurs, and they
survived the mass extinction that made the t rex a
thing of the very distant past. Because of their incredible strength,

(04:10):
tartar grades can be found on every continent, including Antarctica.
If you scoop up some water from a nearby ponder lake,
chances are you might be able to find one swimming
around inside. Of course, it won't surprise you to know
that scientists are very interested in what exactly makes the
tartar grades so resilient, and they found something that might
actually prove useful for humanity. It turns out. Tartar grades

(04:32):
have a protein in their body that experts call damage
suppressor or d SUP. D SUP is able to bind
to DNA inside the tartar grade's body and protect that
DNA from damage, which is at least partially what makes
the tiny water bear so massively strong. This is all
relatively new science, by the way, but it's possible that

(04:53):
the desup protein could eventually have a medical use in humans,
and who knows, maybe one day we'll be able to
make our selves as strong as those curious little creatures.

(05:17):
We all love our pets, sometimes a little too much.
We don't just spring for the gourmet food and expensive colors,
but there are also those little outfits the treats, and
they usually hog our covers at night as well. The dogs, cats,
ferrets and lizards in our lives aren't just animals, they're
members of the family. And Francis Henry Egerton, the eighth

(05:37):
Earl of Bridgewater, treated his family very well. Egerton was
born in seventeen fifty six in London. His aristocratic family
was well known and well respected, with members having served
within the military and the English government. Francis was sent
to Eton and Christ's College Oxford for his schooling. Nearly
fifty years after graduating with the Bachelor of Arts degree,

(06:00):
he inherited his title of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater,
and of course a lot of money from his late
brother John. But as with most rich aristocrats, Egerton was
known for being a little eccentric. He was a lifelong bachelor,
and in his later years he abandoned his familial home
in Hertfordshire for three point thirty five rus sent on
Aree in Paris. This property was originally a hotel, but

(06:23):
its new owner renamed its hotel Egerton, and got up
to some wild hygiinks while living there. For one, he
loved animals. Egerton kept a number of dogs, cats and
birds in his home, and he didn't just adore his pets,
he pampered them. His dogs had their own personal footmen
who would put little leather boots on their paws and
fasten a linen napkin around each of their necks. At

(06:46):
meal time, every pooch had their own seat at the
dinner table, where they would sit patiently while they were
served a gourmet meal on silver platters. As I said,
the man was eccentric, but not every dog had his
day with the Earl of Bridgewater. Two of the man's dogs,
named Bijou and Beesh, were less obedient than their other siblings.
When they misbehaved, he would sequester them in a separate

(07:08):
room of the hotel for one week, devoid of attention
from their doting owner. And when he wasn't having dinner
parties with his dogs, Egerton was keeping a close eye
on his footwear. He wore a different pair of shoes
every single day. At night, he would take them off
and line them up in one room next to the
pair from the previous day. By the end of the year,
he had three hundred and sixty five individual pairs of

(07:30):
shoes that could tell him what the weather was like
on a particular day of the year, or how muddy
it had been. Apparently he had never heard of an
almanac or a journal. Of course, he may have had
his strange behaviors and spent his money on frivolous things
like a year's worth of shoes, but Egerton was no fool.
In fact, he'd been a Fellow of All Souls at

(07:50):
the University of Oxford, and in seventeen eighty one he'd
been made a Fellow of the Royal Society, a designation
reserved for people who'd made a significant contribution to the
fields of men and science. He also did not stand
to be pushed around by anyone. When Napoleon Bonaparte came
to Paris to rearrange the city according to his plan,
the would be emperor didn't stay long at hotel Egerton,

(08:13):
the Earl kicked him out, and he did the same
thing to the Duke of Saxe Coburg, who tried to
take the hotel for himself. On that occasion, Egerton armed
thirty of his servants ready to go to war over
his home. The Duke wound up leaving empty handed. But
not all was right in the City of Lights. The
Earl longed for his days back in England when he

(08:33):
would go out with his hounds and hunt wild game.
You might think hunting would be impossible inside a hotel,
but you'd be wrong. Egerton held small hunts on the property,
complete with English hounds and an English fox. As he
got older and couldn't walk so well, his servants would
help him by putting a gun in his hands and
holding him up to shoot pigeons, rabbits and partridges. When

(08:56):
Francis Henry Egerton died on February eleventh of eighteen twenty nine.
He left a collection of sixty seven manuscripts about French
and Italian literature to the British Museum. He also bequeathed
them twelve thousand pounds to start a fund so they
might acquire additional manuscripts in the future, and he left
eight thousand pounds to the President of the Royal Society.

(09:17):
The money was to go to any authors chosen to
write a treatise on the power, wisdom and goodness of God,
as manifested in the Creation. Eight such treatises were composed
between eighteen thirty three and eighteen thirty six. As the
Earl of Bridgewater, Edgarton was no stranger to side eye
or rumor. He lived his life the way he wanted,

(09:38):
which is something most of us only dream about, and
he did it with style and flare and some really
well dressed dogs. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities Podcast.

(10:01):
The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works, I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television
show and you can learn all about it over at
the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.