Unstable

Imports and exports sound like boring topics, but sometimes they can involve curious things.

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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.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. There's nothing quite like

(00:37):
a desert island hypothetical. What movies would you take with
you to a desert island? Or albums, or in particular
who There are a million variations of the same question
that all boil down to one thing. What's important in
your life? What can't you live without? What these questions
don't really consider, though, is that desert islands aren't a

(00:58):
place that you bring your reality too. There are places
that create their own reality. Today, let's turn our focus
to Sable Island in the North Atlantic. If you're Canadian,
you might have heard of it, but for those who haven't,
it's a narrow stretch of island about ninety five nautical
miles southeast of Nova Scotia. From a satellite POV, it
kind of looks like a thin snake or a single eyelash.

(01:22):
The name comes from the French word for sand, and
it's easy to see why. The parts of the island
that aren't beach are covered in dry grass with no
native trees. Throughout the age of sail, shipwrecks on the
island were frequent, thanks to thick fogs and the island's
deceptive sandbars. It's estimated that up to three hundred and
fifty ships wrecked themselves on the island. The most recent

(01:43):
confirmed wreck was in nineteen forty one, although it's possible
some ships struck the island as recently as the nineteen nineties. Again,
looking at the shape of the island from above, it's
not hard to imagine it's like a tripwire designed to
catch unwary or unlucky vessel. But those shipwrecked sailors didn't
stay there. Those that survive often wind up getting taken

(02:05):
to the mainland of North America. The ones who did
stay behind there, Beside the gray seals that inhabit the beaches,
were around five hundred wild horses. Now we don't know
exactly where they came from, but most likely these horses
were introduced to the island in the mid seventeen hundreds
without any natural predators. They became the most influential population

(02:27):
on the island. For over two hundred and fifty years,
they've maintained a small but relatively stable population pun intended.
Other domestic animals.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Have also been brought to Sable Island, but none survived
quite like these horses. Survival for an animal on a
desert island is not easy. Water sources are sparse, and
the horses on the east side of the island have
to dig in the sand to create little wells for themselves.
You would never mistake a Sable Island horse for a
mainland horse. Their coats are thicker, shaggy aar and have long,

(03:01):
unkempt manes. Complete isolation from their more domesticated relatives has
made them a scientific marvel of sorts. They've experienced what's
known as a genetic drift away from the horses we
see in Europe and North America. Basically, they've almost become
a small subspecies of their own. And what's even more
fascinating is that these horses are more well adapted to

(03:21):
the environment than any plants that humans have attempted to
introduce there. At one point in the nineteen seventies, a
single Scots Pine was planted on the island by the
park rangers who maintain this station there. They decorated it
for Christmas, and it even survived for a number of
years before finally dying and returning the island to its
original treeless state. The horses themselves pose an interesting question

(03:44):
for conservationists. They're clearly an invasive species, but they are
incredibly valuable to understanding how species adapt to hostile environments
and how a single population of animals can gradually reshape
the same environment. Removing them would perhaps be good for
the biodiversity of the island itself, But since the horses
have been on the island for so long that ship,

(04:07):
so to speak, has sailed. There's no buried treasure to
be found on Sable Island in spite of the prodigious
number of shipwrecks. But in a way, the march of
history has left its own strange fingerprint all the same.
Who would have thought that feral horses could thrive on
a thin sandbar thirteen square miles in area. But that's
the thing about desert islands. They always bring out the

(04:29):
unexpected in all of us. When there's nothing but you,
the sand and the ocean. You either need to escape
or adapt. You've probably heard people say that laughter is contagious,

(04:54):
but that isn't always just a turn of phrase. On
a January morning in nineteen sixty to a teacher was
writing on the chalkboard at a girl's boarding school in
the African republic of Tanganika. She heard laughter behind her
and turned around to see three of her students giggling uncontrollably.
This wasn't unusual for a classroom full of teenage girls,

(05:16):
but when the teacher asked them to stop, they didn't. No,
they couldn't. Beneath their smiles, there was a spark of
fear in their eyes, as if their laughter truly was uncontrollable.
The teacher sent the girls to the principal's office and
got on with the lesson. But at the end of
the school day, when she passed by the nurse's office,
she saw those three students and two more girls, all

(05:39):
doubled over in their chairs, all still laughing, with tears
streaming down their faces. It was hard to tell whether
they were amused or agonized. Their laughter hadn't stopped the
following morning, In fact, it was spreading several more girls
in the same dormitory had to skip class that morning
because their laughter was so intense that they could barely

(06:00):
sit still. Each girl's laughing fit could last for anywhere
from a few hours to multiple days, and after they
had finally stopped giggling, some of them would start up
again just a few minutes later. Within a week, almost
one hundred students at the school were afflicted. There was
no end in sight, and the staff had no idea
what to do. The students had been examined by doctors

(06:21):
and nothing appeared to be physically wrong with them. It
had to be psychological, perhaps induced by stress. If this
was a subconscious ploy to get out of doing homework,
it was working. With more than half of the school's
students doubled over in laughter at any given moment, it
was impossible to conduct class, and when the madness still
hadn't died down by March, almost three months after it began,

(06:44):
the administration was left with only one option. They decided
to close the school and send everyone home until they
got their giggles under control, and that was a mistake.
The students went back to their home villages and they
spread the laughter up add throughout the entire region. Over
the next two months, around one thousand young people over

(07:05):
one hundred mile radius were afflicted by laughter. Fourteen schools
had to be shut down, and the school where it
all started was slapped with a lawsuit for sending everyone
home to transmit the contagion. The laughter came and went
in waves for the next year and a half until
it gradually died out in the summer of nineteen sixty three.
Order was restored and schools were reopened, but experts were

(07:29):
never able to explain exactly why this outburst happened. Some
researchers speculate that it was a case of mass hysteria.
Just a month before the laughter started, Tanganika had gained
independence from Britain, which began a period of massive social upheaval.
On a subconscious level, maybe the girl's laughter could have
been a way of releasing stress and coping with the

(07:51):
chaos and confusion. But at the end of the day
it backfired. After eighteen months of NonStop chuckling, everyone could
agree the joke just wasn't funny anymore. I hope you
enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This
show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with

(08:14):
iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the Grim and Mild
team and produced by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the
show and the people who make it over at Grimandmild
dot com slash Curiosities. You'll also find a link to
the official cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores
and online, as well as ebook and audiobook. And if

(08:34):
you're looking for an ad free option, consider joining our Patreon.
It's all the same stories, but without the interruption for.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
A small monthly fee.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
Learn more and sign up over at patreon dot com,
slash Grimandmild, and until next time, stay curious.