Creature Classic: Whale of a Tale

New episodes starting next week! But here's one of my favorite classics dug up from the dirt! 

We’re taking on scary urban legends about animals, and showing you that there’s nothing to fear! Well… okay, maybe there is, but it's not what you think! Join us with special guest Maggie Mae Fish.

Footnotes:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zPY_hNdmrgUy8GgrctKEBmwielWQNYfv080KVAxzjDo/edit?usp=sharing

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Creature future production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host
of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology,
and today on the show, we're talking about some scary
urban legends about animals and showing you that there's nothing
to fear. Well, okay, maybe there is, but it's not
what you think. From getting swallowed by a whale to

(00:28):
a small fish going where no fish has gone before,
we're going to see what you should really be scared of.
Discover this more as we answered the asual question, wow,
are you telling me that Gray's anatomy might have stretched
the truth? Joining me today is someone who puts the
legend in urban legends, video essays, and snake lover Maggie

(00:49):
may Fish. Hello, Katie, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
I'm actually really excited for this episode because I'd.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Like to be at greatly afraid. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
I don't like to be afraid of things that I
don't need to be afraid about, but I like being afraid,
so I like to aim it at those responsible in
this case animals.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Right exactly, Like when I see a bear, I'm like,
can I see, like how big your teeth. Let me
measure your teeth, Let me measure your class. See if
I really should be afraid of you?

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Okay, are you still cub or?

Speaker 3 (01:22):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Are you hadn't?

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Oh? I see that you've like bitten my arm off.
All right, you're right, you met criteria. You've even that
I am afraid of you. Yes, indeed. Yeah. I mean
I think that there are a lot of urban legends
about animals. Some of them are not really the truth,
but there is something out there that is just as scary.

(01:44):
So which is always funny to me, because I think
it makes sense why we have urban legends, because you know,
it's fun to be scared or rationalizing our already existing fears.
But then when there's something that's real that actually does
those things, that doesn't quite make it to be an
urban legend, it's like, well, okay, it's right there, you

(02:05):
got the truth. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
So, I don't know if you've seen this story yet,
but someone in Cape Cod, a lobster diver, said he
was swallowed by a whale.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
I did see this, and I saw that his fellow
fisherman backed him up instaid.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
I absolutely believe that he was swallowed by a whale. Yeah,
what do you think, Katie.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
So he said that he was completely inside the whale
and that the whale shook its head a few times
before spitting him back out. So I'm not going to
call this man a liar, first of all, because he's
a lobster diver in Cape Cod, and I don't that's
not the demographic I want.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Mad at me precisely.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
You could be the next gate that they put.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
But also I don't think.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
He really is lying. I think that, but I think
he may have misinterpreted what actually happened to him, or
at least maybe someone who was interviewing him put words
in his mouth. I don't know, but I don't think
he was actually swallowed by the whale. I think he
was sort of swished around in a whale's mouth like
some listing.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, I was gonna say the way that he described it.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
The first image that came to mind is like wine tasting,
you know, like like like the whale was curious and.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Was like this human.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
You know, depending on where he's from, it could be
very salty, human, could be very sweet, could have some
undertoned So it seemed like he was just you know, uh,
test tasting.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, this guy was like in his fifties, so it's like, yeah,
this is this is kind of an aged human. It's
got a nice bouquet, you know, swished it around his
mouth and spat him out. Yeah, because there's actually no
way for a humpback whale to actually swallow you whole.
That's just not really gonna happen, at least not an

(04:00):
adult like that. So humpback whales are not They are carnivores,
but they don't want to eat humans because they actually
eat little tiny things like krill and small fish. So
anything the size of a human is not going to
mean food to them, right.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
They would see it as like a floatation device, maybe
a safety and floatation device.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Right right, right exactly, some kind of strange curiosity to
maybe taste but not eat. In fact, they don't really
typically want to taste you. Even we're kind of just
joking about the whale somalie thing. Probably what happened was
a mistake. So probably it was taking in a big
gulp of water to try to get some krill or

(04:45):
get some small fish because they have baling. They don't
even have teeth to bite you, and baling is like that.
It's like it's got a bunch of brooms in its
mouth or something, and it's it's not teeth, it's to
filter out. They suck in a huge volume of water
and then goosh it out, push it all out, and
then trap all the fish uh in the uh in

(05:07):
the balens. So like when it's a human, they can't
even really bite your teeth, so they're not going to
chew you up and swallow you. It's a total mistake.
And their throat just can't accommodate a human. Like typically
the throat is only about the size of a human
fist like in diameter. It can ex yeah, especially for

(05:33):
a huge whale that is beat because it's just for
krill and tiny fish. It can expand to about the
size or diameter of a pizza, And that's like the
biggest it can really expand. And so for a human
to fit through that like it would be a struggle
because if it's about fifteen inches wide, like about the

(05:56):
size of a pizza, human shoulders are about fifteen inches
wide if not wider, and so to get down the
whale throat you'd have to kind of like like put
your arms forward, like.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah, yeah, you'd have to treat it like a slide, right,
you have to like dive into it and like probably
lubricate yourself a little bit so that you go down
coat yourself in butter.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
And then probably the whale is gonna be highly resistant
to this because it's not used to having something so
big in its throat. So I feel like the human
would have to be the one really trying to get
down there for whatever.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
I'm already in the mouth, but I'm getting the stomach
is not gonna be a story.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah, get down. Yeah. So, in fact, there's really only
one whale in the world who could without chewing, just
easily swallow a human hole, and that would be a
sperm whale who can and have swallowed giant squid, and
they've found like hold giant squid in their stomachs. But

(07:01):
you're probably never ever going to be swallowed by a
sperm whale simply because they don't live where humans can
easily survive.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
So I didn't even think about that. It's a huge os. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, not only are they probably not going to pursue
humans as prey because they just wouldn't really recognize the
human as normal prey that they would encounter, but they
also live. The reason you've like when you go whale watching,
you typically don't see a sperm whale is they live
at around ten thousand feet or a little over three
thousand meters under the sea. So encounters with yes. We

(07:38):
Actually it's a problem for biologists because we don't know
that much about sperm whales, given they live so deep
in the ocean, and it's not very easy to observe
their behaviors, like I don't even think we know exactly
like how their mating goes and all these things. There
are a lot of mysteries about sperm whales and another
deep sea living whales, and they do come up to

(08:03):
breach to the surface, but they spend a lot of
their time very deep in the ocean. So a human
diver would have a lot more problems to worry about
if they're hanging out at ten thousand feet under the
ocean and getting.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Swallows by way pressure. Yeah, yeah, sinking into their goals.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
I mean, their lungs and internal organs would turn into
a kind of jello salad at that point. So the
furthest a human can dive without getting their lungs crushed
is about sixty feet or eighteen meters compared to three
thousand meters or ten thousand feet, So you'd be very
you'd already be pretty dead at that point. You'd be

(08:42):
extremely dead.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
You'd be big dead. You'd be big dead, big.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
Dead hashtag big dead. Yeah. So, I mean, like the
only time you would really encounter a sperm while is
one of the rare times they come up to you know,
because they are mammals, they do need to breathe, but
I don't think that they would particularly be in a
hunting mood at that at that time. You know, they're
they're like coming up to take a breath and then

(09:06):
they'll dive back down. They don't like hang around and like, ah,
who's this is this lobster dive? Alt try this out? Yeah,
So that's why people don't typically get swallowed by sperm whales.
So I mean, and I'm thinking about like Pinocchio, that
whole thing. If Geppetto got swallowed by monster or whatever

(09:27):
that whale was, like again, he would already be super
dead and jellyfied at those depths, right Pinocchio, though, he's
like made out of wood, so he could potentially go
down to ten thousand feet under the sea without immediately dying.
But as soon as his wish is granted to be
a real boy, he would just instantly be crushed, yeah,

(09:49):
by the weight of the ocean.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
So you're saying in the film Pinocchio and geppetto actually
die within the whale and everything after that is yeah,
just a fever dream of a puppet wooden boy.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah. Also, yeah, I don't think a whale's stomach is
a big, empty, air filled cavern with fire.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
There's like, right, with a little fire and a pull.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
The problem with that is actually a whale deep diving whales,
like sperm whales, will push out all air that isn't
like all the air and their lungs and certainly like
they're not going to have a lot of air in
their tummies so that when they go down and come up,
they don't get the bins, which as a result of
like the the dissolving of air into the blood stream.

(10:34):
It's it's not it's bad, bad for your cells, bad
for your tissues. And then it's also their their lungs
and because they do have lungs again, they breathe there
when they come up, they exhale and then inhale with
their blowholes, and they do fill their lungs up, but
they have such a huge volume of blood their blood

(10:54):
gets oxygenated, and then as they go down, they'reungs can
collapse and then push out all the air so that
but by that time their blood is already super enriched
with oxygen, and their lungs are also their rib cages
and lungs are sort of designed to collapse and expand,

(11:15):
so so they can withstand that, whereas we we can't.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
Are frail bodies.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Now it just becomes sort of I mean, like the
exterior of our body probably won't look that weird. Uh,
like maybe our eyes will like blood vessels in our
eyes will burst or something, but inside it's gonna be
a hor show. Yeah. Yeah, so actually, so do you
know I sperm whales are called sperm whales.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
I feel like maybe I've been told, but I don't
know what the truth is.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
Quite frankly, Katie, Well, I'm gonna admit that I just
learned this, so don't feel don't feel bad about obed.
And I was thinking, like, there's got to be like
an innocuate because like it's like a little sperm whales.
Oh you know, can yeah, go for it.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Okay, I think maybe it has something to do with
this thing, like their blubber resembles sperm.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
You're very close. You're very very close. Yeah, ok yeah
they are. Actually they used to be called, uh, spermachetti
whales because inside the whales head cavity because like their
heads are very fatty, they have uh, it's not just
skull and like they have a lot of sort of
area around their skull. They have an waxy, oily white

(12:35):
substance called spermachetti. And it's called spermachetti because people thought
this was the whales semen.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Wow, it's not.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
Wow, it is not. Uh. It is in fact a
sort of waxy, oily substance that has nothing to do
with reproduction. But because they were dirty sailors, they called
them spermachetti whales and they made candles and stuff out
of this. It was it's so crazy because they're like, oh, yeah,

(13:08):
this is probably the whales sperm, let's make some candles
out of it.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Candles, family.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
But it is actually probably used by the whale as
a resonance chamber in their head to aid in echolocation,
or it could also in addition help with buoyancy. So
regulating buoyancy because again, like a lot of animals, not

(13:35):
just whales, but fish as well that are deep sea divers,
they don't want any like gases inside their bodies because
that is a problem when you're under those pressures and
then you you know, so.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
So burst out your head instead of your body.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, they get they get too well, they get too compressed,
and then you can get the bins and so it
just doesn't really work. So so fish off and instead
of a swim bladder full of a gas like like
fish that are more near the surface might have, they
have like oily substances in it. So similarly, these sperm

(14:11):
whales there, if they need to regulate their buoyancy, they
don't want to have any like air filled chambers. They
want to have an oily substance, a liquid that because
liquid can't get that compressed, but air and gases can
become compressed, and that's a big problem underwater.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Hence sperm in the head.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
Hence sperm in the head exactly sperm the head. So
basically you don't need to worry about being swallowed by
a whale. It's not gonna happen, and this guy again,
he was probably swished around in the whale's mouth, not
really swallowed, you know, the.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
Whale in honor actually at the end of the day.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Right right, the guy was. The guy was a good
sport about it too. He's like, I just like to
apologize to the whale for like having to taste me.
So yeah, I don't, I don't really necessarily, I know that, like,
you know, fishermen like to tell fish tales. But I
think he probably something did happen. He probably did have
an encounter with a humpback whale, but it was just

(15:15):
a little it was a little love nibble by the
by the whale or you know, a mistake. Probably It's
like when you get a fly in your mouth. You're like, oh, yeah,
that's what we are to whales. But can we be
swallowed whole by an animal? Is there such a thing? Yes,
we could be swallowed whole by a reticulated python.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Boy snakes. Yeah, I love game.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
I know you do. You have a little python of
your own, not a reticulated python. But uh, he's a
ball python, right, yep, yep, baby, yeah, yeah, he's not
gonna he's not gonna swallow you whole anytime soon. But
the reticulated python, while this is very rare, they can

(16:03):
swallow a person whole, and in fact they have so.
Giant reticulated pythons in Indonesia have been known to once
in a while swallow a person and kill them. These
pythons can grow up to twenty feet or six meters
long and way up to one hundred and sixty five
pounds or seventy five kilograms, and their jaws can expand

(16:27):
as far as its skin can stretch, So they don't
have the same hinge joint that human jaws have. They don't,
and I think it's often said that their jaws like dislocate.
That's not really true because they're never located in the
person place.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
They've never been located right right, They just aren't.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
They aren't connected like a human jaw. So they can
expand their jaws much as their mouthskin can stretch, and
they can swallow enormous prey such as pigs and even
small cows sometimes. Eh. Yeah, Unfortunately, this means they can
also swallow a human. In twenty eighteen, a fifty four

(17:10):
year old woman was killed and swallowed whole by a
reticulated python, and there have been other cases of farmers
and kids potentially getting swallowed whole by these pythons. It
is very rare. So again, even if you live in
an area where there are reticulated pythons, your chances of

(17:31):
being killed by one are very low. But when it
does happen, it is very horrifying. So you might wonder like, well,
how can you know, how could they just swallow a person? Like,
how could they? Because you know, you would imagine like
you'd run away, right, you know if a python's just
like try, I.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
Feel like you try, right, you know, maybe h right?

Speaker 1 (17:54):
But they actually it doesn't seem like a python could
like outrun a human. But they're actually ambush predators and
they kill their pay Yeah, they kill their prey by
suffocating their victims. So they sneak up on you and
then they strike at their prey and bite down, not
to inject venom because they don't actually have venom, but

(18:17):
just to hold you in place. Well, they very like
surprisingly quickly can wrap their coils around you, and then
once you're in those coils, you're kind of doomed unless
you have a machete and you have the strength to
like fight it off where there are people around who
can help extract you. If you're on your own and
you don't have any means to defend yourself, you're kind

(18:40):
of doomed because once those once it gives you that
hug of death, it will literally crush you until you
can't breathe and then you will asphyxiate. Which, yeah, it's
very scary. It's a little less scary than like being
swallowed alive, I think.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah, say it kindly puts you out of your misery, very.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
Sweet of it, very kind of it. Yeah, well, kindness
has nothing to do with it. It just doesn't want
you to choke it, like to wiggle and fight while
it's still inside of you, because that can kill. That
can kill a reticulated python.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
You know, from the python's point of view, what a
masterful way to eat you. Just you kill it, You
crush until it's just a tiny little tube of you know,
like you can stuck it down like a yogurt a gogurt.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
Well, to be fair, they don't. When they crush their
their victim, often the body is actually pretty intact. In fact,
this is a little bit horrible. But when they cut
open a python. They can find bodies completely intact if
they haven't started digesting them. And this includes unfortunately, human

(19:51):
victims who they find their bodies intact, but they are
sadly already passed away because they have been asphyxiated. So
they actually swallow their prey head first because that's just easier,
easier to cow.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
And when I feed my snake, yeah, always eats the
head first.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, you see it, like make it makes sense, you know.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah. The body, well, it's like it's the arms, you know,
it's it just kind of smooshes down pretty easy, and
they have very strong muscle contractions to get it down
into their very expandable bellies. Like you see one of
these pythons, and when it has a big meal, it
doesn't have to be a human. It can be like

(20:33):
a pig or a deer or something like. It's just
there's this huge bulge in its stomach and then it
can like not eat for like many many months like
it like if it has a big I think it
can even like hold off for like over a year
like once it has a big meal like that. Yeah,
So unfortunately, both for the human and for the snake, uh,

(20:58):
if it does eat a human. This is ideal for
the reticulated python. Obviously it's not ideal for human either,
but clothes cannot be digested, so it will actually kill
the reticulated python if like often it is actually killed
by by humans because like they're looking for a missing person,

(21:19):
they find a python with a suspicious bulge and then
they kill the python. And when they do that, they're
actually probably sparing the python a lot of misery because
they are not going to be able to digest all
of that all of those clothes, and they'll get a
stomach impaction. They can digest bone, though it's not necessarily
that they can like digest bone completely, but they like

(21:42):
they can, like they goose it out, like they they
push out sort of, they'll like regurgitate sort of the
skeletal remains.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
That it too graphic, but yeah, when my uh little
python goes to the bathroom, there's like he's regular a poop,
but then there's like a little ball of white which
is like, yeah, like fur and bone kind of a
just yeah congewoled together, right exactly.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
I think they can actually poop it all out. I
think they only regurgitate things if it's like too big
or something. There's actually been problems with pet pythons when
they eat like accidentally, like I think a towel is food,
and then they eat it and then they have to
be taken to the vat for the towel to be
pulled out.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
I've seen that video.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yeah, baby, baby, of course, we feel so sorry for
for the python that ate a human. I mean no,
I also I feel very very bad for the human victims.
It's just a sad it's a sad thing all around,
Like the python shouldn't be eating the people, and it's
it's a it's just it's just it's a tragedy every

(22:50):
way you look at it. When I say, like this
is what you really should be afraid of, not really,
it's such a rare event. It's so newsworthy because in
the last decade, I think only like a hand, like
you know, you could count on one hand the number
of people who have been swallowed by a python. Uh
so it's it's really not something that you have to

(23:11):
worry about too much. But you know, if a python
like starts to like wrap around you, you gotta take
that seriously.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah you guess there, you know, at that moment, Yeah,
you gotta start thinking.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
But it's but when it happens to human it's actually
it's like you may think, like, well, why don't they
like try to get away, It actually does happen surprisingly fast.
So once they like bite down on you, especially if
you're like a if you're older or smaller, like, as
soon as they bite down on you, and they can
get around you really quickly, and it can be really
difficult to get away. So it's a really, really terrible situation.

(23:45):
So next time you you feed your cute little.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Snake, remember that.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, but you know, I don't I don't want people
to be to hate snakes. They're they're really cool, really
cool animals. This only happens very occasionally.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Yeah, and it's more like they you know, they don't
know what they're not, you know.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Yeah, they don't understand. They don't you know, they just sneak.
They're just little noodles who like to eat, you know
what I mean. They don't know that they're eating someone's grandma.

(24:27):
So we talked about snakes, and now we're going to
talk about spiders, two of the people's most favorite animals. Yeah,
spiders are often really maligned. There are a lot of
stories about spiders how scary they are. Typically though they're
really not out to get you.

Speaker 3 (24:45):
Right they eat mosquitoes, which I have always seen as uh,
you know, very positive.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yes, we're typically the ones that are actually out to
get spiders. There's this recent story in Perth, Australia. Police
were called by a neighbor of someone who heard a
man yelling why won't you die and the sounds of
a crying toddler. So police rushed to the house and

(25:14):
it turned out the man was just trying to kill
a large spiders.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
Oh that is really funny, he apologized to police.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
He said he had a rachnophobia and was panicking, and
of course the toddler was crying because daddy was scared
and there was a giants.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
There was a giant spider.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah. Yeah, So I think I think it's somewhat relatable thing.
I don't like to kill spiders, but when they are
really large, like alarmingly large, and I know they're gonna
startle me, I try to at least get them out
of the house because they're like, you know, it's like
I don't like to be startled by a spider. I

(25:57):
don't like to sort of look down and there's like
one on my arm.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
That freaks me out, right, right if you Yeah, if
there's one big enough in the house that I notice it,
I would like it out of.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
The house, presumably.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, if it's smaller than a quarter, you can hang out, buddy,
it's fine, you know what, let's just chill.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
He doesn't want to be found at that point.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
But there is a myth about spiders actually a couple months.
One is that like you eat spiders in your sleep,
which it's just not going to happen. Spiders don't want
to be eaten by you. They don't want to get
in there. No, So that's that's there's really not truth
to that. The other one is that spiders will lay
eggs in your ears or your brain.

Speaker 3 (26:42):
Very popular scary stories to tell in the dark story.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, like a spider lays eggs in someone's
skin or something. Is that the one?

Speaker 2 (26:53):
Yeah, she like thinks she has his it.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
It's just spiders. Yeah, yeah, So spiders. Fortunately, all the
spiders out there, they don't want to do that. They
don't want to be inside you. That's the last thing
they want. Very rarely a spider might crawl in your ear.
That is not because they want to lay eggs. They're
not gonna lay eggs in your brain. They're not gonna

(27:17):
like drill a hole into your skull. They just think
your ear is like a little cozy spot. They mistake
it for like a little nook or cranny. They don't
realize you're alive. If they did, they would freak out.
Like it'd be like if you were seeking refuge in
a cave and then you realize the cave is like
the ear of a gargantuan monster, you would freak out,

(27:40):
you'd be scared. Yeah, this doesn't happen very often, but
when a spider crawls into someone's ear, it's a complete mistake.
They're not there to lay eggs. And if that ever happens,
or if any bug crawls in your ear, do not panic.
Don't like try to dig it out with your fingers.
Don't go in there with tweezers or like a cotton
swe because that can either damage your ear or you

(28:03):
can like scare the insect and it will actually crawl deeper,
not because it's trying to like get into your brain,
because you're scaring it because you're like right, like if
you're again. Imagine, you know, go take a trip down
to imagination station. Imagine you're in a cave. It's like
it's kind of cold outside, and you find this cozy
little cave. You go inside, and it's nice and warm.

(28:24):
In fact, it's like weirdly warm. You're like, oh, this
is nice and cozy. And then suddenly you like hear
this low rumbling and then this giant appendage come in
to try to like grab you. You're gonna like run
deeper into the cave and then like the giant monster
and side is gonna freak out even more. So what
you should do is just go to a doctor.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
What you should do.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah, So if you think there's like a bug in
your ear or something, go to a doctor and they
will be able to remove it without like shoving anything
probably in your ear. Usually I think what doctors do
is or they might put something in your ear, but
they're a doctor and they're allowed to do that. So
usually what they will do is they'll actually flush it
out with some sailine and the little spider or whatever

(29:12):
insect will just come out surfing on a wave of sailine.
Because that way, that way just like kind of flushes
it out and then it's it will also like want
to get out, like it'll swim to the surface of
the sline if there's water in there. And it's just
a much less traumatic way to get a bug out
of your ear than to go after it with tweezers.

(29:33):
But also this is probably never going to happen to you.
It's extremely rare. I mean, this is why it's newsworthy,
Like it's very very rare bug goods in your ear.
So you don't need to be afraid of spiders. They
don't they don't lay eggs under your skin. They don't
lay eggs in your ears. But before you breathe a

(29:54):
sigh of relief, okaty, there are insects that will do
this and one of the one of the creepiest ones
in my opinion, are screw worms. So you know, this
is the part where I warn you this section is
gonna get a little gross. You know, if you want

(30:15):
to skip ahead, like if you have trip of phobia
or fear of like insects, like parasites, human you know,
kind of parasites, you can join back in at part three.
At we're actually in part three, we're going to talk
about a fish that allegedly swims up people's urethras. So
if that also sounds too gross, maybe the rest of

(30:36):
this episode isn't for you, and I'll see you next week.
But if you want to skip the screw worm section
and you want to come back just for the penis
fish one, you know, join us back in at this
time stamp take it away, Future Katie, pretty one, all right,
So for those of you Katie, thanks, thanks to you, Katie,

(30:59):
and now back to past Katie. So now we're going
to talk about screw worms and how horrifying they really are.
So these are New World screw worm flies which are
found throughout the humid areas of the Americas. So the
adult version looks benign, just like a standard fly. I

(31:21):
in the show notes, I have included a picture of
the adult in the larva and absolutely no other pictures
of what happens with screwing.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
You for that, thank you for If you're.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Curious what they look like but you don't want to
see like body horror stuff, you can look at the
dock link below and there's no body horror stuff, just
the fly and just the maggot. If you're curious to
see what they look like. I recommend against googling if
you are grossed out by you know, medical pictures and
body horror stuff, you don't want to see that. Again,

(31:55):
the adult looks pretty innocuous, just like sadies.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
Both look very Yeah. Normal, You got a normal larva,
a normal fly.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, And they're called screwworms because the law you can
see the larva is kind of like segmented, so it's
like kind of I guess screw like in a way.
It's sort of like tapered and it's got like it
looks maybe like it has screw threads or something, but
it's not. It's not that alarming looking really, no, not
at all.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
I just all that going around, I'd be like, checks out,
that's a book.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
That's fine, you know, not start to worry about it
getting inside your body, but you probably should. So. Female
screwflies will lay their eggs in the wounds or bodily
openings of animals, including on occasion, humans, So the eggs
only take about twenty four hours to hatch, and the

(32:46):
larva will start to feed on the flesh and fluids
of their host. So on at least one occasion, they
have gotten into a human ear and on multiplesis they
have gotten inside human skin. Usually like if you have
a a open wound or something. Uh, it's the The

(33:08):
flies don't like bite you and put it inside you,
but they look for an opening, like a literal opening,
wait for a literal opening. But this could even be
something like in newborn animals. Often like the infect livestock
and so a newborn calf or something, they go for
the the belly button because they're attracted to the smell of.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
Blood.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yes exactly, so like for they don't they won't typically
go for like an adult's belly button because that's healed over.
But for a newborn calf, it's like it still smells
kind of bloody. They go in there and it's it's gross.
You don't want to see it. This condition of a
larva living inside human tissue is known medically as miasis,

(33:55):
and it is gross and bad and you don't want
it to happen bad And my official medical opinion it's
gross and bad.

Speaker 3 (34:06):
Agree in my official non medical opinion, it's gross and bad.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah. So, the way that screw worms differ from most
maggots is that screw worms actually feed on live tissue,
not just dead necrotic tissue.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
So I was gonna say, because like you know, growing
up in Michigan, every once in a while, yeah, you'd
see like a roadkill or something, and speaking from mixer your.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Kid, you go over look at the roadkill. Yeah, it's
like covered in maggot.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
You put a stick and you're like, hey, yeah, i'm learning,
I'm learning. Yeah, So maggot infested wounds, while disgusting, is
not necessarily a horrible problem. In fact, maggots can actually
help with wound healings sometimes, not that I recommend letting

(34:58):
your wound get to the point where it's they eat
maggots without dead flush, if they just eat the dead flush.
And in fact, there are like medical grade maggots that
are like sterile that on occasion, very rarely that it's
not the typical use of them, but if you have
some necrotic tissue problems where it's hard to hard to
it's called debriding the the necrotic tissue. So it's like

(35:20):
when there's dead tissue and uh, you want to like
get rid of the dead tissue so it doesn't become infected.
And so they can actually use medical maggots to to
get rid of that dead tissue. So so uh, Magots
in general, while disgusting, are not really that dangerous actually,
but screw worms will eat healthy tissue and that's very

(35:44):
very bad. So uh. Screw worms will inside their host,
which is typically not humans. Humans are not their primary target.
It's usually other mammals. It can even be smaller mammals.
The if it's a small enough mammal like something like
a rodent or like a baby livestock or something, they

(36:07):
can even feed on the live tissue of their host
until their host dies.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Whoa.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
And very rarely humans can die of screw worm infections.
Usually that's it's because of not because they've like eaten
away at too much tissue, but it's because of getting
an infection and the result from that. Before you panic,
The US eradicated screw worms in nineteen eighty two, So

(36:36):
screw worms are endemic to the Americas, so mostly like
in sort of the southern areas of the US and
in South America. Again, so in nineteen eighty two, the
US eradicated screw worms. They actually use something called the
sterile insect technique where sterile males so males that can't reproduce,

(37:02):
are released to flood the dating pool. Yes, oh wow,
and they steal mates from fertile males. So it's basically
like you release all these infertile males and then they
compete with fertile males, and so some of these females
will mate with the sterile males and then blow their

(37:24):
chance to have offspring, and then the next generation there's
less of them, and then you repeat this over and
over again until you can like basically decimate a population.
There was actually an outbreak of screworms in Florida in
twenty sixteen, So just because we got rid of them
for the most part doesn't mean that they don't sometimes
come back. I think that it was a pretty pretty

(37:45):
good good job for eradicating Yeah. Yeah, which, you know,
I don't know enough about the sort of you know,
food pyramid of screworms to know like what effect that
would have or had on the environment. So it's like
it's one of these things where it's like you balance
like the human need.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
Of these right over the nature you know, creating worms
that can you know, burrow into.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
Yeah, And it was like a big problem with livestock too,
not just like humans so big, big problem with like
our food chain. But on the other hand, it's it's
sort of like I wouldn't say I don't think that
these insects should go extinct, because I think that would
represent a big problem. But on the other hand, I
don't think they ever will. So it's kind of like

(38:34):
with It's kind of like with mosquitoes, when we control
mosquito populations, it's like, well, mosquitoes are actually very important
for UH to sustain a lot of species that eat
them as food. But I also don't think we're ever
gonna They're never gonna go extinct. But but it's important
to be careful because this like sterile insect technique is

(38:55):
very powerful.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
Right, we definitely don't want to overheat.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
Yeah, it's only use it on a species that you know, Yeah,
yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Wasn't asking for it, Yeah no.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
And so Guatemala, Belize, and El Savador also eradicated their
screwworm population. Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and Jamaica are
still fighting to eliminate their populations. So it's not as
much of a problem as it used to be in
the past, but that doesn't mean there's zero chance of
having an issue with them. There's actually what's really interesting

(39:27):
is there was a nineteen seventy seven short story called
The Screwfly Solution by Alice Sheldon. It was a sci
fi short story that described a horrific epidemic of men
murdering women, and men starting these cults that were like
these religious cults saying like women are evil and would

(39:49):
murder them for these religious reasons, whereas other men just
like would do it randomly, and some men who were
like good people like isolated themselves to try to prevent
themselves from murdering women. But eventually, like, only a few
women are left surviving on Earth. Those major spoilers for

(40:11):
the short story if you want to just read it
instead of listening to me describe it. One of the
women discovers that the cause of this murder epidemic is
that an alien species is using a version of the
sterile insect technique on humans. So an alien species is
causing men's sex drives to turn into murderous impulses because

(40:35):
the aliens want to eradicate humans so they can live
on Earth instead.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
So oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I'm not against it.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
God, wait a minute, how many eyes do you have, Maggie, or.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
How many normal landing for.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
It's It was also used in another's inspiration for another story.
In Carmen Mola's twenty eighteen detective novel Nova, Gitana describes
the screwworm being used as a very slow murder weapon
by the murderer inserting eggs into a victim's body.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, it's like a fun like you know, it's a
fun villain.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
Yeah, yeah, weapon, Yeah yeah, No. I love it's interesting
because I think that they have been a great inspiration
for for some some fun, fun stories, fun light hearted stories,
you know, a little little light romp about aliens killing
off humans and and you know, flesh eating larva being

(41:46):
used as a murder weapon. Real fun stuff. Yeah, it
checks out, It all checks out. Well. When we get back,
we're actually going to talk about something a little less gruesome.
Simply a fish that supposedly swims up your urethra.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
That'sidy stuff.

Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yeah, and eats penises. It's totally fine.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Just you know what, I don't happen, so this is Yeah,
I'm not.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
Worried at all. So, Maggie, I think a lot of
people have heard of the Kanduru penis fish. Uh. It
is a fish that allegedly will swim up your peace

(42:36):
stream and go inside of your peahole. Uh. I think
it's typically the idea is that it goes inside a penis.
So if you have a penis and you go to
a river in the Amazon where these fish live, allegedly,
the story goes, you pee, You've got a nice I guess,
a nice strong stream of urine. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
I say it's warm, so presumably that's part of it.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
But you must it's gotta be like a steady stream.
I guess. It can't be like drunk peeing right where
you just spread. Yeah, and then this little fish, apparently,
according to legend, will swim up this pea stream, go
right inside your pea hole. Maybe you don't even notice it,

(43:22):
I guess, and then grow inside there and either eat
your penis or just hang out in there. That part's unclear.
This was made popular by an episode of Grey's Anatomy
noted very accurate medical show.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
Very accurate. I actually only watched that show to diagnose. Yeah,
not even my friends to me yet.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
I'm basically like a doctor now, and I think you
have a rare case of necrotizing fasciitis. It's like I
have a headache. Yeah, I think you should go to
the hospital.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Also, there's any hot doctors just hanging out.

Speaker 1 (44:03):
Yeah, it is kind of. It does give you the
sense that like every doctor is gonna be super super hot,
where it's like not to say doctors aren't hot. Most
doctors are just your regular you know, like all right, well,
let's take a look at you, you know, and now
hand me the four steps. Wow, it's getting hot in here.
I'm gonna have to unbutton my lab coat.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
Well I take out the fish that's in your penis.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
So a little background, A man comes in with like
he's unable to urinate. He's got some swelling and some
pain and the whole you know, sort of penis area.
And the doctors are scratching their heads like what's going on?
And so they had they could they ruled out some
other common urinary problems, and so they took an X

(44:53):
ray and they're trying to make sense of this X ray.
And here here it is. Here is there very realistic
doctor discussion.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
The penis fish.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Sorry, so let me wind it back a little longer.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Amazing peanuts fish.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
All right, I'm gonna wind it back just a little further.
Mm hmm. Looks like some kind of foreign object. Ouch.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
That almost looks like a skeleton. It's skeleton, like, definitely
skeleton those barbs.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
No, it can't be.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
It could be. It looks like a teeny tiny catfish.
See there, those of spines. This is a kangaroo fish.
The penis fish. This guy has the penis fish in
his in his.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
The penis fish. This guy has the pus fish. It
is pis h he's got the penis fish. Yeah, beauty
the music as well, record scratch. I bet you're wondering

(46:17):
how I got here.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
That's me.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
She's zooming on the extra of the fish. It's like,
you see that, that's me. I'm the kangaroo. I wonder
how I got here? Well it all started when God. Yeah,
So it's this is this real? Uh? It's this is
a real fish. What's going on? What are these fake
doctors talking about? Well, so the kangaroo is a very

(46:46):
real fish, but the rumors of its affinity for the
human penis may be slightly overstated, or maybe greatly overstated.
It's a bit of a puzzle. So the kangaroo is
a small then catfish found in freshwater rivers of the Amazon.
It's also called a toothpickfish because they're so slender. So

(47:09):
they can grow up as adults to be up to
seven inches or two point five centimeters long, but younger
ones can be very small and thin, so maybe just
a bit thicker than a toothpick. So the idea is
that while they're little, they could like get up inside
of your urethra if you're constantly terreen. Yeah, if you well,

(47:31):
we'll talk about that in a line. Okay, So what
do we absolutely know about kangaroos. They are bloodsuckers. They
will enter the gill cavities of fish and suck on
the fish's blood. So to anchor themselves, they will actually
erect spines that they have on their own gills to
stick inside the gills of their victims so they can

(47:52):
go in there and suck on blood. And it's actually
kind of weird because they can sort of like a leech,
like it becomes sort of engorged with blood. Start off
really thin, and then they get like this full belly
of blood. It's pretty weird, but you know, onto the
legend it's that they will swim up your I guess,
very healthy peace stream and into your urethra if you

(48:15):
have a penis. Now, this legend has been around for centuries.
In the nineteen or in the eighteen hundreds, biologist CFP.
Von Martius, who was, I guess, a German biologist studying
stuff in the Amazon, he was told about a fish
that was attracted to the smell of urine and may

(48:37):
swim up your peehole. Now, the problem with this legend
is that there's no evidence that kangaroos are attracted at
all to urine, and they seem to hunt by sight,
not by smell, so that doesn't really check out. Yeah.
In eighteen fifty five, another biologist was regaled with tales

(48:57):
of a fish that would swim up pea stream. But
the explanation of the fish being able to traverse the
stream of urine actually defies the laws of physics. That's
not possible.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
That's not possible.

Speaker 3 (49:11):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
It would need a type of propulsion. The fluid dynamics
of it don't make sense. Yeah, that no note of sense.
It's this idea that like a salmon, could you know,
like like salmon's who like jump up a waterfall? But
somehow you could do that, like in a stream of pea,
and it would just like swim up. It actually impossible

(49:34):
from a fluid dynamic and fish physics perspective. It's not
that maybe this aspect of the legend comes from fish
gathering at the site where the pea enters the water,
because like if you're peeing in the water, it creates
this little disturbance on the surface of the water and
fish may swim up to it. Not because they like

(49:56):
the smell of pea like their little freaks, or that
they want to swim up your peace stream magically using
their magic fluid dynamic stuff. It's actually just because any
kind of small disturbance on the surface of the water
may attract some fish because they're like, oh, you know,
is this like a fly or something that got stuck
on the surface of the water. What is it? They're curious.

(50:17):
They think maybe it's food, Maybe it's something of interest
to them. Could a kangaroo ever swim inside of your urethra?
I don't think it could do it by traveling up
a peace stream if you're like in the water, could
it potentially get inside like a penis's peahole? Maybe, but

(50:41):
it's not certain whether we really have any documented evidence
of this. We're going to talk about the only case
that maybe the evidence of that in a little bit.
But one thing we do know is that despite this
being sort of pitched as something only people with penises
have to worry about, if you've got of age, you're
actually much more likely to have to tingle with the canda.

(51:04):
It's not that it's gonna go up your urethra, because
you know, female anatomy, the vagina is not the urethra.
The urethra is separated from the vagina. The entrance of
the vagina just goes up into the vaginal cavity and
then there's the cervix that blocks that from the uterus.
So there are a few documented cases in the late

(51:27):
eighteen hundreds of the kangaroo entering the vagina, but it
was easily extracted, didn't really harm the person at all,
And that's a bit easier to accomplish than going up
a narrow urethra.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
There's a little more loom, you know, right exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
Little mirror. And again this was probably a mistake. The
kangaroo was thinking that it was going in the gills
of a fish, that it normally preys on. But oops,
it's you know, a vagina.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yep, oops, yeah, dang it.

Speaker 1 (52:06):
So in nineteen ninety seven, the only documented case of
a kangaroo entering a penis occurred in Brazil. The twenty
three year old man claimed a kangaroo jumped from the
river into his penis as he was urinating. This incident
is contentious for a number of reasons, which were thoroughly

(52:28):
examined by American marine biologist Steven Spotty, who investigated and
wrote a book in two thousand and two called Kandaroo
Life and Legend of the Bloodsucking Catfishes. So he looked
at this story and examined some of the problems with
how the incident was presented. He didn't say like, oh,

(52:50):
this is a total lie or anything. He just these things,
these aspects of the story don't quite make sense. So
either there's some mistakes in like how this this uh
was recorded, or some misunderstandings, or maybe some aspects of
it were made up. You know, people have been known

(53:12):
to lie about things.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
On to be human is to err yeah, describing what
came up, to be humanist.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
To yes, to be humanists, to err on what went
up your penis hole. So the victim claimed that the
kangaroo leapt out of the water via his peace stream
into his urethra. So this is the typical story in
the folk tale. But again, like we described earlier, this

(53:39):
version has been thoroughly disproved.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Just by p physics.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
It can't really happen. The more likely way of this
happening would be if you are waist deep in your
your penis is actually in the water, then perhaps like
it could go up inside. It would have to be
very small a juvenile. But you know, maybe, but this

(54:04):
isn't what he described. So either he was just mistakenly
thought that's when it went up, like maybe it got
in earlier and he didn't realize it got in when
he was like submerged, and he just assumed this is
how it happened, or he was like not telling the truth.
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and just say,
like he this is what he figured happened, but it's

(54:26):
that's not what really happened. Like it must have happened
when it like went up when he was like submerged
in water. So not necessarily lying, but there's no way
for it to actually go into the peace stream, so
he would be mistaken about that, right. Another weird thing
is that the fish specimen from the alleged incident was preserved,
but its head was too big to fit inside a urethra.

(54:51):
So the timeline is off because he was saying he
had this happen right after, like, like, he went to
the doctor pretty quickly after this incident, so in order
for the fish to get inside it would require way
more force than the fish would be capable of doing. Again, like,

(55:12):
the only way for this to happen without without it
just being completely made up, would be this person mistakenly
thought this was when he was infected with it, but when,
in fact, a lot earlier, a small like a baby
one went up in and then like grew inside of
him somehow worse worse, which again is just conjecture because

(55:34):
I'm not sure that's possible, right, But I'm just again,
I'm trying, I'm trying to present the version of events
in which like, it's not just like a big lie,
it's just a misunderstanding, which often happens when it comes
to you know, when a penis or a fish goes
in your penis. Yeah, the doctor who documented the case

(55:56):
claimed that the kangaroo is attracted to urine, which again,
that's a myth that has long been debunked. So already
this doctor has made a mistake in you know, his
own understanding of the situation. The same doctor claimed that
the kangaroo had chewed its way into the victims scrotum,
but a kangaroo does not have the jaw wars to

(56:17):
do such a thing. So again there's a couple of
fishy things. No pun intended with what the doctor is
claiming here, So uh, doctor Penish fish again. Oh, I
forgot to mention the doctor and the Grayson Out of
Me episode that the urologist who is examining this was
called doctor Fish or.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Mm hmmm yo, no, wow, that's pretty awesome. Actually, yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Your name is Mayfish. So obviously you have to become
a urologist and specialize in the kangaroo fish because that's
how it works.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
That's how it works. And actually it's pretty excited to
find my calling.

Speaker 1 (56:54):
Right and now this video essay, you have a great
calling on YouTube, But like, was that really your true
calling or was it penis?

Speaker 2 (57:03):
It was all just set up for me to discover this.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Yeah, that like, absolutely a penis fish.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
He's got a pus fish. His penissh penis fantastic.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
In this like quote unquote real life incident, the doctor
again made another spurious claim, saying that he had to
clip the fish's spines to extract it. But all of
those spines were intact on the preserved specimens, so that's
not lining up either. So there was a sistoscopy video.

(57:41):
So a sistoscope is a small camera in light that
goes into tight body spaces for surgeries or exams, and
there is a video of it. But in this video,
it shows the fish carcass being pulled out by forceps,
which the author of this book contends would be impossible
given the deserve specimens spikes being intact, because they would

(58:03):
like kind of snag on something. So maybe the specimen
is not the actual one or something something is going on,
But this video does exist, So it's like, well, what
what is like did they like fake this video to
go along with all this stuff or are there only
certain aspects of the story that are that are not

(58:23):
quite being told accurately. So I don't know if this
is conclusively disproving the Candoro story, because I'm not really
sure why both the doctor and patient would make everything up,
like just for attention or something, and they'd have to
be working together to make it all up. So I'm
not sure it's like a hundred percent hoax. It could be,

(58:46):
but my my guess would be it's like it's only
partially true and then there's you know, some exaggeration going on.
I think this may be, I mean, it could. It
could be a hoax though, because again, this is a
this is a folk tale that has long been you know,
so it's got this sort of popularity. But sometimes folk

(59:10):
tales have a grain of truth in it, so there
could be, uh, you know, this could have an origin
not just in complete like like some so you could
have some truth to it. Right, So if the kangaroo
goes up, you know, if you're like submerged in the
water and then it enters that way and then it's
like it goes in when it's really small and then
it just gets stuck and then gets bigger or something

(59:32):
later on. Maybe that's what happens, and then these other
aspects of the myth are are made up just because
that's people assume this is what happens that you like uh,
that that it swims up your peace stream or something.
But I don't I don't know, because like I don't
even like how would if something is like growing inside,
like a little fish is growing inside, Like it seems

(59:54):
like that was still obstruct you're, uh, you're urinary flow,
so it seems like you'd have problems for while. I
just don't know. I I'm very skeptical, though, I'm skeptical, right, like.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
Freaking animal freak accidents happened, but yeah, this seems like
you know, yeah, yeah, it'd be hard if you fish.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Yeah, but it's certainly it's not a fish that hunts
down human penises and goes inside to hit the penis.
That part is absolutely not true. If it does happen,
it's an accident. But there is such a thing as
parasitic castration. It's just not something that happens to humans.

(01:00:36):
Thank god.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
Oh, thank goodness. That revealed terrible.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
If you're a crab or another type of animal, this
may happen. Uh, and we'll probably even like we've talked
about on the show Carsonization, like the universe trends towards crabs.
Maybe one day will evolve into crabs and we're going
to have to worry about the crab going at eating parasite,
the Seculina carcini. So the Seculina carsony is a parasitic barnacle.

(01:01:07):
I know, you wouldn't think like barnacles could be parasites.
They seem like harmless little things that like sit on
a whale and stuff. But there are types of barnacles
because like the barnacle itself, it's not always just this
like sort of hard shell that it forms. It is
like a free swimming, little like sort of worm like thing.

(01:01:28):
And so this one, the Seculina carcini, can take over
a crabs intestines, stomach, and nervous system near its underbelly
and feed on nutrients from the crab. And what this
does is, even though it doesn't like only specifically eat

(01:01:49):
its gonads, by depriving like siphoning off all these nutrients,
the gonads fail to fully develop inside of these poor crabs.
So males will actually grow up to look a bit
more like females because they don't have the fe male
hormones that would be produced in their their gonouts, and

(01:02:11):
females will actually like they can also be infected. They
just end up being a little more narrow than other
females because of the nutrient depletion. But it's really interesting
when they infect males because it changes their behavior in
a very strange way.

Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
So, oh, that's wild.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
Somehow this parasitic barnacle causes the crab to help raise
the brood of these little parasitic barnacles, grooming them like
it's their own brood of eggs, which is strange because
they're a male and they would not naturally ever have eggs,
so clearly there's some kind of like male like these

(01:02:51):
male crabs still have the capacity to have these like
female crab instincts. It's very interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
WHOA.

Speaker 1 (01:02:59):
So they'll groom them like they're their own brood sack
and then release them like like because crabs do this
thing when they're ready to release eggs where they kind
of like go up in the waves and kind of
like bob and shake and shimmy to get the eggs
off of their abdomen and they kind of like usher
them on for their own eggs. But they do this

(01:03:20):
the males will do this for the parasitic barnacle all same,
which is it's like very strange, very strange.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
Hormones are fascinating and wild.

Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
Yeah, so it is an kind of heartwarmingly messed up situation.
Yeah it is. It is.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
You know, it's like kind of cute in a way, like, well,
I guess I'm a mommy, you know, and then they
can do their thing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
I'm a zombie mommy.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
Yeah, zombie mommies. Yep. Very very strange, very interesting. But
I'll probably talk about more cases of parasitic castration on
another episode, but I think I think we only need
to do one example of the press that is.

Speaker 3 (01:04:06):
That that's probably the wildest animal fact I've heard in
a wild Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:10):
Yeah, it's so good. Sites are. They're fascinating because when
they modify their host's behavior in such a strange way.
It's like with screwflies, like they are a parasite, but
they they're just gross and bad and they hurt you. Yeah,
it's like, okay, I get it. But when you have

(01:04:30):
these very devious parasites, they are like you're the mom now,
and it's like I'm a mom parasites all right. Yeah. Yeah,
it's so strange, so so very strange and interesting. But yeah,
we don't really need to fear the kangaroo. We don't
even need to fear these parasitic barnacles until the inevitable

(01:04:53):
day that we evolve into crabs.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
So yeah, I mean I'm looking forward to that day.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Yeah, you know what, scuttling, I feel like scuttling is
underrated and I want to do more of it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
I want to scuttle. I want to scuttle about.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
Suttling is fun? You ever scuttled? Ever got kind of
good scuttling?

Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
I skip, which I guess is like the human equivalent
to a scuttle. I've also rolling down hills, which also
feels kind of like yeah, yeah, and I scuttle.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
Yeah. You know, when I was actually a kid, I
learned about this is kind of a tangent, but like
I learned about how lemurs because they kind of like
hop side to side. They do this like sash shat
kind of thing, and it looked really fun, so I
started doing it, and then I found it's actually a
really easy way to get around. So, you know, do
this little lemur sacheting through the house. And my parents

(01:05:44):
just thought I was just like dancing around. Was like, no,
this is actually very efficient method of like emotions.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
I'm walking better than other humans are onto something.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
You guys. Yeah, yeah, so you know, scuttling it's pretty
good as long as you don't get in fected by
a barnacle parasite that's gonna gotta make your nads kind
of not work.

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
That's the downside.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
That's a little bit of a downside. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
you know, I think we've busted some some folk tales
and unbusted some not yet folk tales. But you know
that probably should be some you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Yeah, like you said, like this, you know, I feel
like you went through a lot of things.

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
That I had heard that I should be afraid of.
And yeah, I think we have all correctly aligned ourselves
to be afraid of, uh those little zombie.

Speaker 1 (01:06:37):
Craw Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like it's a it's
I like to reassure and then unassure, you know what
I mean, don't get too comfortable. Now that I've reassured
you this is okay. Now here's here's here's a little spice,
here's the alternative that, here's the milk, and now here's

(01:06:58):
the spice. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being
on today and for patiently listening through some of the
more horrifying things we talked about. Hey, where can people
find you on the internet? Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:07:10):
Yeah, if people want to find me, uh, you can
look me up on Twitter and YouTube.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Just at my name Maggie may fish m A. That
is how you spell not the month. Yeah. On its Twitter,
I'm usually just making jokes.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
And on YouTube I do some fun at film analysis,
So check it out if that's your thing.

Speaker 1 (01:07:36):
Yes, do check that out. She's got a very good
video on cam. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:42):
If you're into animals, that one might be the one
to hear you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
Yeah, And you can find the show on the internet
at Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, at Creature feet Pod
on Twitter. That's eight not et you very different And
if you want to send me in your questions, your
pet pictures, your your crab pictures, Creature Feature Pod at
gmail dot com is the place to go. And thank

(01:08:08):
you so much for listening to the podcast. Really appreciate it.
And if you're enjoying the show and you have like
a spare minutes to press some buttons, if you leave
a rating and review, that actually really really really helps.
I know I say this every week, but it truly does.
And every time I read a new review, it makes
my day so thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

(01:08:31):
And thanks to the space Cossics where there's super awesome song.
Ex Alumina Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more
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Apple Podcasts or Hey, guess what worry you listen? If
this knows wherever you listen to your favorite shows, I
don't judge you. I'll see you next Wednesday.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
Bye guys,