January 18, 2023 • 41 mins
Animals who live the trash lifestyle, pretend to be trash, live inside trash, or are generally having a crappy day (and that's how they like it)!
Guest: Pallavi Gunalan
Footnotes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p-rA_E9WjWna6pEsuDmkfa9ZkFZ22m7myHd3_GUSB-k/edit?usp=sharing
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Creature future production of I Heart Radio. I'm
your host to Many Parasites Katie Golden. I studied psychology
and evolutionary biology, and today on the show I'm Trash,
we're talking about all the animals who intentionally make themselves
look like garbage. These animals want you to just ignore
them because they're normal litterd nothing to see here. Those
(00:27):
some have sinister purposes. Discover this and more as we
answer the age old question why do so many bugs
want to look like poop? Joining me today is friend
of the show, comedian and producer of The City Council
Show podcast, Polo V. Goodlandlan Welcome. Hello, I'm super excited
to be on this episode. Yes, I like, I feel
(00:50):
like so many people also to disguise themselves as trash exactly. Yeah.
I sometimes like you just want to kind of appear
like trash so you can float through the world and
not have any anyone interacts. Do you have a question?
Do you ever feel like a plastic bag? Wow? That's beautiful.
(01:12):
Did you come up with that? Yeah? Just now, I
just that's that's such a beautiful sentiment. I love that. Yeah,
I mean I do sometimes feel like like tarash. I
don't know what I'm how I'm approaching that word, but
I feel like trash sometimes. I'm really excited to see
like a fish that looks like a Derrito's bag, you know,
(01:33):
just like trash. I was like picturing like human trash,
and I was like, that's crazy that there there is
a like a lizard that looks like a water bottle.
That's the wild I mean, give them, give them like
a few more million years of evolution and it'll happen. Yeah.
But yeah, So we are talking about animals who disguise
(01:54):
themselves as garbage for a variety of fun reasons. The
first one I want to talk about is the cockatoo
wasp fish, also known as a Blabby's tain nineous. Okay,
it was gonna be like fish, get your own animal name,
because it's like cockatoo wasp fish, you know what I mean.
(02:15):
I feel like it's appropriating very many different animal cultures
and it's good to know it has its own name. Yeah,
which is a Blaby's taying ninan. Notice. Yeah, it is
a six inch or fifteen centimeter fish found in the
West Pacific near Japan, Australia, and Fiji. They are typically
(02:36):
found on the sandy sea floor or in sea grass
um and they basically their whole lifestyle is don't mind me,
I'm a dead piece of gross kelp, ignore me. Help
the trash of the sea other than the trash that
we also put in the sea, Yeah, that's also trash.
(02:58):
It's like, yeah, but you know, KELP is sort of
like the dead leaves of the seas, nature's trash um
and they really commit to the bit. Uh. I've provided
you with a couple of YouTube links if you would
be so kind of check those out. That'd be so
(03:20):
weird if I clicked on this YouTube link and I
started getting ads from fish new heably Oh whoa, there
was one in the foreground that I didn't even see. Wow.
They're very good at it. And they're doing the whole
like lazing around getting moved by the water water which
(03:40):
is wind of the sea, the wind of the sea water. Yes, damn,
that's such a chill life, just like and just relaxing
and trash. Yeah, I mean it's they are doing a
method acting of the of the dead. KELP really going
for who was the succession guy, Jeremy what's his name?
(04:04):
Jeremy Strong could never, Jeremy Strong could never, Daniel day Lewis,
who else does? Yeah, like Jared Litto leto Jared a
bunch of strangely ego tripping men, right, more like Jared
lefo this guy there we go. But watching the second
(04:27):
clip one second? Do they like? Help is different colors? Right, Yeah,
I mean brown green mostly, So I'm wondering if, like
the kelp in the area wherever these are, like, if
they if they reflect the color of the kelp there. Yeah,
probably I would imagine, so like there's there's a great
(04:48):
deal of this color of brownish sort of reddish brown kelp,
so they would blend right in with the kelp force
you know where they are. Um and yeah, I really
just appreciate how committed they are to acting like kelp.
They swim in a way where they kind of make
it seem like they're drifting, so it looks just like
(05:09):
they're kelp kind of floating in the current, but they
are intentionally moving, so like their swim styles, like I
just kind of swim over here like they're floating. Uh.
And but they are covered in poisonous spines. Um, yeah,
venomous spines. So unfortunately they if you step on one
(05:31):
of these. They have a bunch of venomous spines, and
it's fun because they make themselves intentionally look just like kelp.
So yeah, and then you're gonna spine me. It's a fault, right,
Good luck with that. Uh. And and even like more
toxic of them is that their predators, and they will
(05:51):
each shrimp in small crustaceans, and this form of mimicry
is not just to evade detection from editors, it is
to evade detection from their prey. So they just act
like a dead piece of kelp, float along and then
ambush some unsuspecting victim and suddenly this kelp is trying
(06:14):
to eat you. That would give me so many like
I would have so many trauma responses to vegetation after that. Yeah,
I mean it's you don't expect like basically the limp
salad of the sea to attack you. That's the last
place you would expect violence from, like essentially sea salad.
So essentially, the only clue you have that this thing
(06:38):
is not some dead kelp drifting on the sea floor
is its eyes. And their eyes are really weird because
I don't know if you noticed in that video, but
they kind of like stabilize, like as they're floating, their
eyes remain kind of like gyroscopically stable, so they can
continually scan their surroundings for prey. It's like in those
(07:00):
videos of like people like moving chickens arounds and their
heads too in the same spot. It's exactly like that,
except the chicken is covered in venomous spines and looks
like sea salad. Maybe they would do better on land
if if they did look like that. Yeah, yeah, I guess,
(07:22):
I mean, I guess we would like that would be
very effective. Camouflage for a chicken is like a salad
because then meat eaters are like you a salad. I
don't want that to be like, oh taste dress like chicken.
I hate myself, OLIVI is it just me? Or do
(07:44):
you ever just like dress up in garbage when you
don't want to be bothered, like you put on into Yeah,
just like the you'r were your most off putting sweater
or jeans, like and an intentionally placed Marinara sauce stains
somewhere just so you know, Yeah, it was intentional, sure,
(08:09):
artfully artfully designed stains um so that when you go
outside people will give you like a wide berth. Yeah,
for sure. I mean that's like when I walk my dogs,
I'm always just like dressed in whatever I'm at in
at home, and it's very like not attention. It's like
it's unfortunately attention grabbing in a wrong way, like in
that it's like so mismatched. But luckily in Hollywood nobody care, right,
(08:32):
But yeah, I have a lot of my whole, my whole.
That's like this the Billie Eilish thing where she wore
a bunch of like baggy sweatpants and stuff so people
wouldn't look at her body. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, it's
just sometimes you don't want to be noticed. And it's
frustrating because I live in Italy and people actually dressed
very nicely a lot of the time, and everywhere except
(08:54):
the US, people dressed very nicely a lot of the time.
It seems that way. Yes, I go to and yet
I'm like, oh, I'm going out to dinner. Are usually
in the US, I would just like wear a T
shirt And they were like, you would wear just a
T shirt outside of your home? And I was like yeah,
and they're like that's disgusting. Yeah. When I went to
an Italian language class. I like was in there with
(09:14):
like jeans and hoodie and she's like, oh, did you
just come back from the gym. It's like, no, I'm
just wearing clothes. You're welcome that I'm here. But the
kind of the commitment to loungewear, to wearing garbage so
that you're not noticed is done by the humble crab
(09:37):
who I don't know if you've heard of this idea
of carsonization where animals repeatedly evolved to be crab shaped.
But all I'm saying is we are sort of headed
towards crab form eventually. And so isn't that what the
that movie was about the crab or the lobster? What
was it that Jake jill and all moving no idea.
(10:01):
I've never heard of this, but I would love it
if there's a Jake Jillenhall movie called the Crabs. It
might have been calling Ferrell. They're kind of the same
time Ferrell. It wasn't a movie called the Lobster, That's
what it was. Where you have to like I think
you have to like find you have to marry someone,
(10:22):
or you turn into an animal when you turn like
forty or something, and that's where we're all going. A
single woman. This is up exactly where I'm headed. I'm
about to turn into this crab. I think going crab
is not so bad. Honestly, you can scuttle a lot more.
Scuttling is nice. It's a good it's a good form
(10:45):
of locomotion. Anyways, I would I would dig a crab lifestyle,
especially decorator crabs, because decorator crabs are. Yes, they're basically
like I am small and cute and edible, so I'm
just gonna put a bunch of junk on my bodies
(11:06):
so nobody notices me, mm hmm. So they decorate themselves. Exactly.
How come it's called decorator crabs and not like defender crabs.
It's because they're cute, toxic, their their life, their survival
skills or little arcs and crafts to you scientists, pinterest crabs. Yes,
(11:33):
so there are at least fifteen species of crabs known
as decorator crabs, who will pick up junk they find
from the seat and place it on tiny little vil
crow like hooks on their bodies. They're literally covered in
vil crow and so they can just pick that's crazy.
(11:56):
The hooks are called sete, and sete are just it's
just a science see word for like hair like bristles.
So they can basically pick up any kind of seed
junk that could stick to sort of a sticky vill
crow thing. Um. They'll use things like kelp, broken bits
of coral shells, pebbles. Some species of decorator crab even
(12:19):
choose to attach toxic bits of scrap onto their bodies
like little an enemies. I said that wrong. Anemonies. That's
that's a word that does not feel good in my mouth.
So it's thought that the enemonies may benefit by being
able to taxi around and find food, while the crab
(12:41):
benefits from the enemonies toxins. Mm hmm. Wow. That's like
having like one mean friend. Yeah, It's like they benefit
because they get access to all the places you go
because you're nice, but then you benefit when goes down
and you need to like throw that mean friend at
the situation. Exactly. It's like your mean friend is always
(13:02):
sort of strong army in you into driving them around,
but then we need them to really release some They
will fight someone for you, they will, right exactly. I
love that. I love this friendship for them. So decorator
crabs will use whatever they find in their environment, which
makes sense because they want to blend in best where
they are. But that means that if a decorator crab
(13:25):
finds itself near human garbage, it will cover itself in
human garbage. But it's so good. So there are a
little derrito's bags wandering around the ocean pretty much, pretty
much so. A crab found near a sump system by
photographer Michael Bach at a research station was covered in
(13:48):
little pieces of plastic and netting that was in a
filter system he had crawled into. So thankfully this wasn't
like pollution in the ocean. There was like a filtration
system that was supposed to keep stuff from getting out
into the ocean, but this little crab got in there.
It was like great free junk and he put them
on all on himself. Ones man, one man's trash is
(14:12):
another decorator crabs. Michael's arts Michaels is like the number
one generator of just stuff and junk. Like there's I
feel like in a few if we last a few
more hundred thousand years, unlikely, but if we do, there's
just gonna be like a fine sedimentary layer of like
(14:34):
Michael's stuff like sequin Yeah, fillers, pipe cleaners, yeah, yeah,
felt eyeballs, those little like weird styrofoam shapes. Yeah. So Unfortunately,
this habit of wearing human trash is not only found
(14:58):
with decorator crabs. It is a so found with hermit crabs.
So hermit crabs will wear trash if they end up
finding that instead of an adequate seashell. So hermit crabs
will use the abandoned shells of other marine life rather
than producing their own shells. And as they grow, they
need to move into bigger shells, so they're always on
(15:21):
the hunt for a nice sustainable kings look at them, yeah,
whatever they have incredible reuse, recycle um literal grain houses
is what they're doing, right, scuttle reuse, recycle crab life.
So finding the right size shell is difficult, So if
they're surrounded by human garbage, they will wear that garbage
(15:44):
like bottle caps, broken lightbulbs. Uh. This photographer Sean Miller
captured a bunch of photos of hermit crabs on a
litter covered beach in Okinawa, and they're just they're with
their little bottle caps and ran garbage that they're wearing, Like,
it's no big deal. But if we're not going to
(16:04):
use it, they should, you know what I mean. Yeah,
it is like so I'm like, no, We're like, we
don't need to. We've we've made we're such consumers, we've
like endowed the consumer lifestyle and the capitalist culture onto crabs.
They're like they're they're like work pilled. Yeah, they're like, yeah,
(16:28):
they're going to be shopping at Cole's next. It's it's
a problem. It's a big problem. Yeah. I mean it
is a problem though, because trash is I'm the whole
not helpful for crabs. First of all, it's not an
ideal home for them. Um. But also there is something
called a cascade of death that can happen to hermit crabs,
(16:50):
which I do. I mean, this is bad, but I
do like the name of it. I love it when
scientists are just like, this is a cascade of debt death,
this is a whirlpool of suffering. It's like a scientist
who didn't get into writing school, right, you know what
I mean, this is your one shot? Yeah, exactly, So
(17:13):
this cascade of death can happen to hermit crabs. Who
get stuck inside plastic bottles that they're rooting around in.
So they can sometimes go inside a plastic or glass
bottle because they're looking for water. They think maybe it's
a home, but it turns out just to be a
big bottle. But then they keep yeah, and they can
get stuck inside because the sides are so smooth they
(17:34):
don't get traction with their little hermit crab feet and
so it's unable to get out, and so it'll die.
And then it emits a smell that other hermit crabs
can detect and which lets them know that there's a
dead hermit crab around. And when other hermit crabs smell that,
they know there is an available shell. And so yeah, yeah,
(17:59):
So normally what this means. Normally this means that it's
just the hermit crab going to the dead hermit crabs
estate sale, doing a little bit of harmless grave robbing
and getting a nice new home. M But what happens
now when they are inside this bottle is that these
other crabs go in smelling they're like, hey, free home,
(18:20):
I'm dead smell, and then they get trapped too, and
then they die, and then another crab smells them, and
it's just this vicious cycle of crabs dying and sending
out like I'm dead, now, come take my shell sent
out to other crabs until these bottles can be like
full of dead hermit crabs. Okay, how do we do this?
(18:44):
But with like billionaires just luring immediately, like how can
we weaponize this? I'm better than other people. Lure them
into buying social media companies and dunk on them more
and more. This is the owt that that they're like,
it's affecting so many hermit crabs makes me so upset.
(19:05):
It's also like, I don't know, like people are always like, oh,
like marine life gets trapped, and it's like you don't
think about the little like insect like creatures to people
think about like turtles and stuff. It's really like the
whole the whole food chain is affected. Yeah, it's the
little guys too. I love hermit crabs. I had a
(19:25):
pet terrestrial hermit crab um when I was a kid,
and the best pets, but that makes sense, Yeah, they're
not great pets. I owe a lot of pets as
a kid that like as an adult I would advise
against because partially because it's like they're not great pets,
and also it's not necessarily the best life for them
(19:47):
to be manhandled by a child. Your your hermit crab.
You had that chimp that ate someone's face, talk about anymore, Yeah,
you had a whole slew of pets, Yeah exactly. Yeah,
but this this hermit crab did try to eat my face,
or at least my armpit. It like crawled into my
armpit one time and then just clamped down really hard
(20:10):
and I couldn't get it, and it was just it
sounds like it was very painful. I was conscientious as
a kid, and I didn't want to like rip it
off because I was worried I would hurt its little arm.
So I just was like, well, this is my life now,
and I had to wait until it decided to let go.
I just had a hermit crab in my armpit for
(20:30):
like half an hour. Oh my god, what if you
had like a cascade of death from that, like you
accidentally and then it died. And then all of a sudden,
all these hermit crabs like appeared out of your apartment.
And it's like and then it's like someone's like, wow,
it smells like a bunch of hermit crabs crawled up
and died in your armpits. I'm like, well about that,
about that, USA, That's why POLIVI. I'm sure we've both
(21:03):
experienced the feeling of just feeling like crap and sort
of like, you know, just just dressing like crap, just
sort of embracing being crapped for a day, you know
what I mean, similar to this trash theme. Yeah, I
mean it's like there are days where, like, at least
for me, I sometimes just like I feel kind of
(21:25):
crappy and I just go with it. It's like, all right,
I'm having a crap day. I'm just gonna be crap today.
That's fine. Well, lots of arthropods also love to be crap. Uh.
In fact, they're very committed to looking exactly like poop um.
So this is something that happens in multiple different like
(21:50):
insects and arthropods, and it is some of them like
it's yes, it is kind of gross looking, but it's
also ridiculously elegant evolution. So it's very gross looking. But
it is like you have to be really good at
mimicry to do it exactly. I mean, this is it's
(22:11):
like I don't know. I feel like it's high like
when in like really high fashion, sometimes they do this
like disheveled look where it's like, wow, that outfit looks
like garbage, but it's very fancy and well thought out garbage.
I guess yeah, it's like the casual look. It's really
(22:31):
well crafted. Actually right, it's the sloppy bun. I've never
been able to like, I've never been able to do
a sloppy bun. Why is a sloppy bun? Okay, but
a frizzy bun isn't like let me have let me
be a frizz ball. I come into fashion style. Come on,
I have extremely frizzy like Girl before the Makeover and
(22:55):
teen movies hair literally literally in middle school. I after, okay,
I was still sticking with me. This is how much
it's a like a chip on my shoulder. I went
to swimming class because we had like gym rotations, and
one of them was like swim learning how to swim,
And then afterwards one of my male friends was like,
(23:16):
you look like the before picture and Rachel looks like
the after in a shampoo commercial. Oh my god. First
of all, but I didn't know how to articulate that
at the time, No, everybody just laughed, and I was like, okay,
because I didn't have like a voice at that point.
You know, I was by all these white people in Utah,
but I was. I literally like in the morning, like
(23:37):
I won't One thing that I do love about myself
is that I won't look in the mirror in the
mornings and I like go walk the dogs and just
like leave immediately. So no idea what I look like.
And I'm just like if I tie my hair up,
it's like first ball fris Ball, Like it's just like
there's no I can't. I'm not going to put condition
under my hair when my dog needs to take you
know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, big same. I When
(24:02):
I try to do sloppy bun, I look like a
Victorian era woman who's been like put in the asylum
by her husband for speaking her mind. We're lootomy right exactly.
Um on Sunday's post lobotomy. On Sunday's pre lobotomy. But yeah,
it's just it doesn't look great. So I feel like
(24:24):
with the with the like stylish, messy bun, it's something
that I have to imagine people work at this craft. Similarly,
the bird poop spiders great segue perfect, So you're so
gross looking, this is disgusting. They really do look like
(24:45):
bird poop. So spiders love to pretend to be poop,
and there are actually many species who do it. So.
For example, there is the Selenia excavata, or bird dropping spider,
who lives in Australia and looks literally like a little
globule of bird poop. It is a splotchy white and
(25:06):
brown and it's disconcertingly glossy on the white part. It's
very uncomfortable. Yeah, it looks literally like a bird dropping. Uh.
They smell like them too. I don't think these ones do.
There are some bird poop uh imitators who do emit
a foul odor to really sell it. Um so yeah
(25:34):
they also Daniel day lewis it. Uh. They method act
by holding their legs tucked in and staying still to
really give it that authentic poop performance. And some in
Law and Order as a corpse right now, I would
love it. Oh my god, if we like lived in
a magical world where animals, you know, like in the Flintstones,
(25:57):
where animals were all employed as stuff, and like you
had to have like bird poop in a movie. So
you cast one of these as the bird poop and
then you paid them a fair wage. Yeah, I mean,
I think the most unreal union podcast, right, the most
unrealistic part of that scenario is someone being paid a
fair worge. Yeah, we both were like, what a dream
(26:21):
of fair wage? What a dream? I mean, sentient spiders.
Maybe we'll get there soon. Fair wage not a chance?
So so yes, Uh, they grow to be about half
an inch or a little over a cinameter wide. So
while they're not like super teeny tiny, they're definitely pray
for birds. So what better way to keep a bird
(26:43):
from eating you than looking like a piece of poop? Yep,
So they are hunters as well. They are spiders, and
they actually go from day to night using a different
kind of mimicry. It's like, day look is poop, night
look is something else. So, um, I mean, who amongst us,
(27:03):
you know, when we go out at night look much
different than the poop look during the day exactly. So
they hunt for their favorite food at night, which is moths,
and at night it's not so much that they change
their appearance, but they definitely put on a deceptive perfume.
(27:24):
So the bird dropping spider releases a pheromone that mimics
that of a female moth. So the horny male moths
will come right up to the spider who smells like
a sexy female, and then the spider eats the male.
I think the female moths are in on it. I
think there are ones who are like, They're like, here,
(27:44):
take this perfume and then murder my husband. Yeah. I think, yeah,
like this, this male moth just made fun of my antenna.
Here's some perfume. Do what you will. This is like
the Chicago movie Music, but moth and birth. I would
I would definitely pay to see an insect version of Chicago. Yeah,
(28:10):
can you like Katherine Sada Jones is like a spider.
That'd be great. Yeah. So yeah, it goes from being
a piece of poop during the day to a fem
fatale at night, which I love. It's what we all
dream of. Hell yeah, so there are many other spiders
and insects who use the poop defense. So, uh, one
(28:33):
other type of insect. I want to talk about our moths.
So the You'drea is book You'd Rise? I have no
Oh my god, You'd Raise you'd raise Grata moths a
k a. Beautiful wood nymphs found in the US have white, brown,
black and green splotches on their wings, and when their
(28:56):
wings are actually wide open, they're quite lovely. They look
like pretty moths. They don't look like anything gross or strange.
But when they fold their wings and they splay out
their front legs, so their front legs are kind of fuzzy,
like covered in like white fuzz, which is cute. But
(29:17):
when they like splay them out and fold their wings up,
they look like a bird poops bladder. It's because it
goes from white to like slightly green to brown. It
looks like how a bird poop like crusts over. Yes,
So when they're like folded up like that, it looks
like a drip of bird poop in like the positioning
and then also in like the gradient. But then when
(29:39):
they're open they look so pretty. Yeah. I love that.
I love that they can transform from pretty moth to like, nope,
I am a splatter of nasty, crusty bird. Do do
moths contain multitudes? Indeed? And uh, there's another moth known
as macro silics I found in Malaysia and they are
(30:02):
perhaps the most impressive bird dropping mimics. Uh. Their wings
actually feature an entire painting not only of splattered bird poop,
but what seems to be a couple of flies eating
the poop. Oh my god, holyh that looks crazy, right.
It looks like a cartoon, like somebody drew it. Yeah.
(30:25):
But also the bird poop also looks like a penis
part of it, because it's like symmetricals right, so like
when they pulled it right bo and penis coming up
along the spine. It's it's the first known of mimicry
and pornography. So not much is known about why this
moth has this impressive mimicry, but it is likely it's
(30:48):
to ward off predators who are not particularly interested in
a bunch of bird poop and a couple of flies
eating that bird poop. Do you think flies get tricked
by it too? You know what? I bet they do.
I bet they like go up to this moth's ass
and they're like, hey, what's going on here? And they
(31:10):
wanted to smell? Right, It's just not it's not working
out for them, it is, I really, there's like, not
surprisingly not that much research on these things. And I
really want there to be more because this is so
it's so ridiculous. Like you can see the outline of
the flies, you can see their little red heads, you
can see sort of different segments of their bodies. It's
(31:34):
crazy like it it literally looks like a cartoon, like
it's filed. Do you think there are other moths that
we haven't discovered with like other things on their wings
that would make you a verse to coming up to them,
Like a moth with a a drunk bachelor rep party
scene on their wings, like, you know, like a moth
(31:54):
with a red maga hat, right, a moth with the
guy doing street magic. Yeah, I think I think definitely
there are moths like that out there. Um, we have
to we have to do the research to find them
right exactly. That would probably be like that would be
my choice for like like if we could wear camouflage
(32:15):
city camouflage. That's just like things that would keep you
away from you, Like, oh, if you just wear this
is mean because I do like green peace. But if
you wear like a sweater sweatshirt with green peace on it,
people help clipboard and have a clipboard, people will leave
you alone because everyone like dodges out of the way.
(32:38):
But then there's like that one weirdo who really wants
to talk about it, and then you're the mark, you
know what I mean, right, And then that and that
weirdo is me. It was me the whole time. I
think that's a view and me discovering that we have
the ability to wear whatever we want, you know, right.
I think that's full episode, and that's being like, let's
take inspiration from these insects and yeah, express ourselves time
(33:01):
we want to express our though. Yeah, I mean if
I wear a shirt with a bunch of bird duty
printed on it, then I can get pooped on by
a birden it won't make a difference. Yeah, that sounds
like a Mentos commercial. Actually, it's like like remember the
one where he like he sits down on like a
painted bench and he's like, oh no, and then he
(33:21):
makes this striped suit out of oh oh yeah, that
was like a really old one from Yeah, that's that
one all the time, because it's like in my memory, yes,
like a Mentos you sit on bird poop and there's
a bunch of like just a bird poop covered bench
and you're like, oh man, I got bird poop and
then you roll around and then someone's like nice Jackson Pollock. Yeah,
(33:47):
I think we figured out fashion. We figured it out
packing in Milan, packing in Paris. We've got the fat,
the fashion down. The fashion is bird crap. So mimicry,
animal mimicry exactly. So before we go, we've got to
play a little game called the Mystery Animal sound game
(34:09):
or yes, Who's squawking? Every week I play a mystery
animal sound and you the listener, and you the guests,
try to guess who's squawking. The rules is it's any animal,
and I give you a little hint. Uh. Some weeks
it's very tricky. Some weeks it's maybe less tricky. I
(34:29):
don't know. Usually it's quite tricky, and this one is
no exception. Uh. So last week's mystery animal sound hint
was this. It says, if this little guy has stolen
the voice of another animal, So did you get that
(34:55):
little bim baby baby. Yeah, so it sounds like a bird,
but that makes me think it's not a b bird,
because you're saying it's stole the voice of another animal.
So it makes me think it's like like some sort
of insect, like a cricket or something to pretend like
it's a bird. Interesting, very interesting logic. Well, you're definitely
on the right track. There is that, your final guests, Yes,
(35:20):
so you are very close. You're right that this is
not a bird and it's something that sounds like a bird,
but it's not an insect. This is actually a tree frog.
So this is yes, this is the bird voiced tree frog.
That's its name. Just bird voice tree frogs. Okay. Sometimes
we get names like cascade of Death and sometimes we
(35:41):
get bird voice tree frogs. Sometimes yeah, sometimes it's like
turtle who is green and also brown and knows his
pointy Yeah, and we clearly know who double major in
English major like. So, the bird voice tree frog is
found in swamps, wet and forests in the United States.
(36:02):
It is a small green and gray frog who spends
almost all of its life in the trees. It really
only leaves the safety of the trees to mate and
lay their eggs. And what you have just heard is
the call of the male, and like bird's song, it
is used to track females. So it's interesting because it
sounds similar to bird's song and it's used in essentially
(36:22):
the same way. So you know, little frog has big
bird dreams. Yeah. I love that it's like raised by birds.
Do you remember remember that book Stella Luna about the
bat ah Man. It was such a good It was
a children's book about this bat raised by birds because
(36:43):
it like got lost separated from its mom and landed
in like a bird's nest and it tried to like
sit up straight and like eat bugs and do all
these bird things, but it was having struggling really hard.
And then find it's like mom finds it again, and
then it gets to live the bat life and eat fruit.
(37:04):
It's a great book, very cute. But yeah, I like
to think that this frog got like raised by birds
once and it's like pass this information on to the
other frogs of hey, guys, this is actually pretty cool.
Now they're all doing it all right, Onto this week's
mystery animal. Sound. The hint is whoever named this animal
(37:26):
was being a bit judgmental. It feels kind of like
(37:49):
you're in Jurassic Park, right, Yeah, that was weird. So
there's multiple of them, and they did it in a
way that sounded like a pack or something, but it
also a kind of bird like mm hmm, infusing. I
think when you said it was judgmental. I feel like
that there's gonna be something in the name that's like
(38:09):
like mean about how it sounds like this, like this,
this shrill something, the stupid, the nagging, the stupid voiced goat. Yeah,
it'll be interesting. So you got any guesses? Um? Yeah,
I want to go with them the I think Oh
(38:31):
so for a type of animal? Oh god, now, because
the other one was a frog, I'm like, are these
like some weird like box or h Well, foxes are
more on their own, right, m I'm wondering if it's
some sort of like mammalian thing instead of like a
bird or something interesting interesting thing. Yeah, my face, my
(38:55):
face is a is a mask of complete neutrality. Yeah,
I guess we'll have to tune in to find out.
We will have to tune in to find out next
Creature Feature or I will reveal to you who this
mystery squawker is. If you think you know who it is,
you can write to me at Creature Feature pot at
(39:17):
gmail dot com. Hallo v. Thank you so much for
joining me today. Tell the people where they can find you. Yeah.
So I do have a podcast called City Council Um
and it spelled c O U N s e L
is my genius way of telling city council. Yeah, it's
like counselor like we all need to council the city. Um.
(39:41):
But yes, so that's my podcast. I have a Patreon
on for it. If you want to support um he
greund dot com for a slash city Council show and
you can find that everywhere podcaster found. You can find
me at calaviganalen p A l l A b I
g U n A l a n everywhere. And yeah,
I'm doing shows again. I write for love it or
(40:02):
leave it. I am just chugging along here in l
A while you're in a very cold but beautiful place.
And thank you guys so much for listening. You can
find me, you know, on the internet. I'm so bad
at social media, but you know I'm on Twitter at
Creature feet Pod. That's f a T not f e T.
(40:25):
That is something very different. I'm on Instagram at Creature
Feature Pod. And again, if you think you know the
answer the Mister Animal sound game or you have a question,
you can write at Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com.
And thank you guys if you leave a rating or review,
I love them all. I read them all. I print
them all out and compiled them in books. I book
(40:46):
bind them and put them on a huge bookshelf and
then just read it by the fire every day. That
is my life. And thanks thanks to the Space Classics
for their super awesome song Exo Lumina of Creature. Feature
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
like the one you just heard was the I heart
(41:06):
Radio app Apple Podcasts or Hey guess what where have
you listen your favorite show? See you next Wednesday.
Welcome to Creature future production of I Heart Radio. I'm
your host to Many Parasites Katie Golden. I studied psychology
and evolutionary biology, and today on the show I'm Trash,
we're talking about all the animals who intentionally make themselves
look like garbage. These animals want you to just ignore
them because they're normal litterd nothing to see here. Those
(00:27):
some have sinister purposes. Discover this and more as we
answer the age old question why do so many bugs
want to look like poop? Joining me today is friend
of the show, comedian and producer of The City Council
Show podcast, Polo V. Goodlandlan Welcome. Hello, I'm super excited
to be on this episode. Yes, I like, I feel
(00:50):
like so many people also to disguise themselves as trash exactly. Yeah.
I sometimes like you just want to kind of appear
like trash so you can float through the world and
not have any anyone interacts. Do you have a question?
Do you ever feel like a plastic bag? Wow? That's beautiful.
(01:12):
Did you come up with that? Yeah? Just now, I
just that's that's such a beautiful sentiment. I love that. Yeah,
I mean I do sometimes feel like like tarash. I
don't know what I'm how I'm approaching that word, but
I feel like trash sometimes. I'm really excited to see
like a fish that looks like a Derrito's bag, you know,
(01:33):
just like trash. I was like picturing like human trash,
and I was like, that's crazy that there there is
a like a lizard that looks like a water bottle.
That's the wild I mean, give them, give them like
a few more million years of evolution and it'll happen. Yeah.
But yeah, So we are talking about animals who disguise
(01:54):
themselves as garbage for a variety of fun reasons. The
first one I want to talk about is the cockatoo
wasp fish, also known as a Blabby's tain nineous. Okay,
it was gonna be like fish, get your own animal name,
because it's like cockatoo wasp fish, you know what I mean.
(02:15):
I feel like it's appropriating very many different animal cultures
and it's good to know it has its own name. Yeah,
which is a Blaby's taying ninan. Notice. Yeah, it is
a six inch or fifteen centimeter fish found in the
West Pacific near Japan, Australia, and Fiji. They are typically
(02:36):
found on the sandy sea floor or in sea grass
um and they basically their whole lifestyle is don't mind me,
I'm a dead piece of gross kelp, ignore me. Help
the trash of the sea other than the trash that
we also put in the sea, Yeah, that's also trash.
(02:58):
It's like, yeah, but you know, KELP is sort of
like the dead leaves of the seas, nature's trash um
and they really commit to the bit. Uh. I've provided
you with a couple of YouTube links if you would
be so kind of check those out. That'd be so
(03:20):
weird if I clicked on this YouTube link and I
started getting ads from fish new heably Oh whoa, there
was one in the foreground that I didn't even see. Wow.
They're very good at it. And they're doing the whole
like lazing around getting moved by the water water which
(03:40):
is wind of the sea, the wind of the sea water. Yes, damn,
that's such a chill life, just like and just relaxing
and trash. Yeah, I mean it's they are doing a
method acting of the of the dead. KELP really going
for who was the succession guy, Jeremy what's his name?
(04:04):
Jeremy Strong could never, Jeremy Strong could never, Daniel day Lewis,
who else does? Yeah, like Jared Litto leto Jared a
bunch of strangely ego tripping men, right, more like Jared
lefo this guy there we go. But watching the second
(04:27):
clip one second? Do they like? Help is different colors? Right, Yeah,
I mean brown green mostly, So I'm wondering if, like
the kelp in the area wherever these are, like, if
they if they reflect the color of the kelp there. Yeah,
probably I would imagine, so like there's there's a great
(04:48):
deal of this color of brownish sort of reddish brown kelp,
so they would blend right in with the kelp force
you know where they are. Um and yeah, I really
just appreciate how committed they are to acting like kelp.
They swim in a way where they kind of make
it seem like they're drifting, so it looks just like
(05:09):
they're kelp kind of floating in the current, but they
are intentionally moving, so like their swim styles, like I
just kind of swim over here like they're floating. Uh.
And but they are covered in poisonous spines. Um, yeah,
venomous spines. So unfortunately they if you step on one
(05:31):
of these. They have a bunch of venomous spines, and
it's fun because they make themselves intentionally look just like kelp.
So yeah, and then you're gonna spine me. It's a fault, right,
Good luck with that. Uh. And and even like more
toxic of them is that their predators, and they will
(05:51):
each shrimp in small crustaceans, and this form of mimicry
is not just to evade detection from editors, it is
to evade detection from their prey. So they just act
like a dead piece of kelp, float along and then
ambush some unsuspecting victim and suddenly this kelp is trying
(06:14):
to eat you. That would give me so many like
I would have so many trauma responses to vegetation after that. Yeah,
I mean it's you don't expect like basically the limp
salad of the sea to attack you. That's the last
place you would expect violence from, like essentially sea salad.
So essentially, the only clue you have that this thing
(06:38):
is not some dead kelp drifting on the sea floor
is its eyes. And their eyes are really weird because
I don't know if you noticed in that video, but
they kind of like stabilize, like as they're floating, their
eyes remain kind of like gyroscopically stable, so they can
continually scan their surroundings for prey. It's like in those
(07:00):
videos of like people like moving chickens arounds and their
heads too in the same spot. It's exactly like that,
except the chicken is covered in venomous spines and looks
like sea salad. Maybe they would do better on land
if if they did look like that. Yeah, yeah, I guess,
(07:22):
I mean, I guess we would like that would be
very effective. Camouflage for a chicken is like a salad
because then meat eaters are like you a salad. I
don't want that to be like, oh taste dress like chicken.
I hate myself, OLIVI is it just me? Or do
(07:44):
you ever just like dress up in garbage when you
don't want to be bothered, like you put on into Yeah,
just like the you'r were your most off putting sweater
or jeans, like and an intentionally placed Marinara sauce stains
somewhere just so you know, Yeah, it was intentional, sure,
(08:09):
artfully artfully designed stains um so that when you go
outside people will give you like a wide berth. Yeah,
for sure. I mean that's like when I walk my dogs,
I'm always just like dressed in whatever I'm at in
at home, and it's very like not attention. It's like
it's unfortunately attention grabbing in a wrong way, like in
that it's like so mismatched. But luckily in Hollywood nobody care, right,
(08:32):
But yeah, I have a lot of my whole, my whole.
That's like this the Billie Eilish thing where she wore
a bunch of like baggy sweatpants and stuff so people
wouldn't look at her body. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, it's
just sometimes you don't want to be noticed. And it's
frustrating because I live in Italy and people actually dressed
very nicely a lot of the time, and everywhere except
(08:54):
the US, people dressed very nicely a lot of the time.
It seems that way. Yes, I go to and yet
I'm like, oh, I'm going out to dinner. Are usually
in the US, I would just like wear a T
shirt And they were like, you would wear just a
T shirt outside of your home? And I was like yeah,
and they're like that's disgusting. Yeah. When I went to
an Italian language class. I like was in there with
(09:14):
like jeans and hoodie and she's like, oh, did you
just come back from the gym. It's like, no, I'm
just wearing clothes. You're welcome that I'm here. But the
kind of the commitment to loungewear, to wearing garbage so
that you're not noticed is done by the humble crab
(09:37):
who I don't know if you've heard of this idea
of carsonization where animals repeatedly evolved to be crab shaped.
But all I'm saying is we are sort of headed
towards crab form eventually. And so isn't that what the
that movie was about the crab or the lobster? What
was it that Jake jill and all moving no idea.
(10:01):
I've never heard of this, but I would love it
if there's a Jake Jillenhall movie called the Crabs. It
might have been calling Ferrell. They're kind of the same
time Ferrell. It wasn't a movie called the Lobster, That's
what it was. Where you have to like I think
you have to like find you have to marry someone,
(10:22):
or you turn into an animal when you turn like
forty or something, and that's where we're all going. A
single woman. This is up exactly where I'm headed. I'm
about to turn into this crab. I think going crab
is not so bad. Honestly, you can scuttle a lot more.
Scuttling is nice. It's a good it's a good form
(10:45):
of locomotion. Anyways, I would I would dig a crab lifestyle,
especially decorator crabs, because decorator crabs are. Yes, they're basically
like I am small and cute and edible, so I'm
just gonna put a bunch of junk on my bodies
(11:06):
so nobody notices me, mm hmm. So they decorate themselves. Exactly.
How come it's called decorator crabs and not like defender crabs.
It's because they're cute, toxic, their their life, their survival
skills or little arcs and crafts to you scientists, pinterest crabs. Yes,
(11:33):
so there are at least fifteen species of crabs known
as decorator crabs, who will pick up junk they find
from the seat and place it on tiny little vil
crow like hooks on their bodies. They're literally covered in
vil crow and so they can just pick that's crazy.
(11:56):
The hooks are called sete, and sete are just it's
just a science see word for like hair like bristles.
So they can basically pick up any kind of seed
junk that could stick to sort of a sticky vill
crow thing. Um. They'll use things like kelp, broken bits
of coral shells, pebbles. Some species of decorator crab even
(12:19):
choose to attach toxic bits of scrap onto their bodies
like little an enemies. I said that wrong. Anemonies. That's
that's a word that does not feel good in my mouth.
So it's thought that the enemonies may benefit by being
able to taxi around and find food, while the crab
(12:41):
benefits from the enemonies toxins. Mm hmm. Wow. That's like
having like one mean friend. Yeah, It's like they benefit
because they get access to all the places you go
because you're nice, but then you benefit when goes down
and you need to like throw that mean friend at
the situation. Exactly. It's like your mean friend is always
(13:02):
sort of strong army in you into driving them around,
but then we need them to really release some They
will fight someone for you, they will, right exactly. I
love that. I love this friendship for them. So decorator
crabs will use whatever they find in their environment, which
makes sense because they want to blend in best where
they are. But that means that if a decorator crab
(13:25):
finds itself near human garbage, it will cover itself in
human garbage. But it's so good. So there are a
little derrito's bags wandering around the ocean pretty much, pretty
much so. A crab found near a sump system by
photographer Michael Bach at a research station was covered in
(13:48):
little pieces of plastic and netting that was in a
filter system he had crawled into. So thankfully this wasn't
like pollution in the ocean. There was like a filtration
system that was supposed to keep stuff from getting out
into the ocean, but this little crab got in there.
It was like great free junk and he put them
on all on himself. Ones man, one man's trash is
(14:12):
another decorator crabs. Michael's arts Michaels is like the number
one generator of just stuff and junk. Like there's I
feel like in a few if we last a few
more hundred thousand years, unlikely, but if we do, there's
just gonna be like a fine sedimentary layer of like
(14:34):
Michael's stuff like sequin Yeah, fillers, pipe cleaners, yeah, yeah,
felt eyeballs, those little like weird styrofoam shapes. Yeah. So Unfortunately,
this habit of wearing human trash is not only found
(14:58):
with decorator crabs. It is a so found with hermit crabs.
So hermit crabs will wear trash if they end up
finding that instead of an adequate seashell. So hermit crabs
will use the abandoned shells of other marine life rather
than producing their own shells. And as they grow, they
need to move into bigger shells, so they're always on
(15:21):
the hunt for a nice sustainable kings look at them, yeah,
whatever they have incredible reuse, recycle um literal grain houses
is what they're doing, right, scuttle reuse, recycle crab life.
So finding the right size shell is difficult, So if
they're surrounded by human garbage, they will wear that garbage
(15:44):
like bottle caps, broken lightbulbs. Uh. This photographer Sean Miller
captured a bunch of photos of hermit crabs on a
litter covered beach in Okinawa, and they're just they're with
their little bottle caps and ran garbage that they're wearing, Like,
it's no big deal. But if we're not going to
(16:04):
use it, they should, you know what I mean. Yeah,
it is like so I'm like, no, We're like, we
don't need to. We've we've made we're such consumers, we've
like endowed the consumer lifestyle and the capitalist culture onto crabs.
They're like they're they're like work pilled. Yeah, they're like, yeah,
(16:28):
they're going to be shopping at Cole's next. It's it's
a problem. It's a big problem. Yeah. I mean it
is a problem though, because trash is I'm the whole
not helpful for crabs. First of all, it's not an
ideal home for them. Um. But also there is something
called a cascade of death that can happen to hermit crabs,
(16:50):
which I do. I mean, this is bad, but I
do like the name of it. I love it when
scientists are just like, this is a cascade of debt death,
this is a whirlpool of suffering. It's like a scientist
who didn't get into writing school, right, you know what
I mean, this is your one shot? Yeah, exactly, So
(17:13):
this cascade of death can happen to hermit crabs. Who
get stuck inside plastic bottles that they're rooting around in.
So they can sometimes go inside a plastic or glass
bottle because they're looking for water. They think maybe it's
a home, but it turns out just to be a
big bottle. But then they keep yeah, and they can
get stuck inside because the sides are so smooth they
(17:34):
don't get traction with their little hermit crab feet and
so it's unable to get out, and so it'll die.
And then it emits a smell that other hermit crabs
can detect and which lets them know that there's a
dead hermit crab around. And when other hermit crabs smell that,
they know there is an available shell. And so yeah, yeah,
(17:59):
So normally what this means. Normally this means that it's
just the hermit crab going to the dead hermit crabs
estate sale, doing a little bit of harmless grave robbing
and getting a nice new home. M But what happens
now when they are inside this bottle is that these
other crabs go in smelling they're like, hey, free home,
(18:20):
I'm dead smell, and then they get trapped too, and
then they die, and then another crab smells them, and
it's just this vicious cycle of crabs dying and sending
out like I'm dead, now, come take my shell sent
out to other crabs until these bottles can be like
full of dead hermit crabs. Okay, how do we do this?
(18:44):
But with like billionaires just luring immediately, like how can
we weaponize this? I'm better than other people. Lure them
into buying social media companies and dunk on them more
and more. This is the owt that that they're like,
it's affecting so many hermit crabs makes me so upset.
(19:05):
It's also like, I don't know, like people are always like, oh,
like marine life gets trapped, and it's like you don't
think about the little like insect like creatures to people
think about like turtles and stuff. It's really like the
whole the whole food chain is affected. Yeah, it's the
little guys too. I love hermit crabs. I had a
(19:25):
pet terrestrial hermit crab um when I was a kid,
and the best pets, but that makes sense, Yeah, they're
not great pets. I owe a lot of pets as
a kid that like as an adult I would advise
against because partially because it's like they're not great pets,
and also it's not necessarily the best life for them
(19:47):
to be manhandled by a child. Your your hermit crab.
You had that chimp that ate someone's face, talk about anymore, Yeah,
you had a whole slew of pets, Yeah exactly. Yeah,
but this this hermit crab did try to eat my face,
or at least my armpit. It like crawled into my
armpit one time and then just clamped down really hard
(20:10):
and I couldn't get it, and it was just it
sounds like it was very painful. I was conscientious as
a kid, and I didn't want to like rip it
off because I was worried I would hurt its little arm.
So I just was like, well, this is my life now,
and I had to wait until it decided to let go.
I just had a hermit crab in my armpit for
(20:30):
like half an hour. Oh my god, what if you
had like a cascade of death from that, like you
accidentally and then it died. And then all of a sudden,
all these hermit crabs like appeared out of your apartment.
And it's like and then it's like someone's like, wow,
it smells like a bunch of hermit crabs crawled up
and died in your armpits. I'm like, well about that,
about that, USA, That's why POLIVI. I'm sure we've both
(21:03):
experienced the feeling of just feeling like crap and sort
of like, you know, just just dressing like crap, just
sort of embracing being crapped for a day, you know
what I mean, similar to this trash theme. Yeah, I
mean it's like there are days where, like, at least
for me, I sometimes just like I feel kind of
(21:25):
crappy and I just go with it. It's like, all right,
I'm having a crap day. I'm just gonna be crap today.
That's fine. Well, lots of arthropods also love to be crap. Uh.
In fact, they're very committed to looking exactly like poop um.
So this is something that happens in multiple different like
(21:50):
insects and arthropods, and it is some of them like
it's yes, it is kind of gross looking, but it's
also ridiculously elegant evolution. So it's very gross looking. But
it is like you have to be really good at
mimicry to do it exactly. I mean, this is it's
(22:11):
like I don't know. I feel like it's high like
when in like really high fashion, sometimes they do this
like disheveled look where it's like, wow, that outfit looks
like garbage, but it's very fancy and well thought out garbage.
I guess yeah, it's like the casual look. It's really
(22:31):
well crafted. Actually right, it's the sloppy bun. I've never
been able to like, I've never been able to do
a sloppy bun. Why is a sloppy bun? Okay, but
a frizzy bun isn't like let me have let me
be a frizz ball. I come into fashion style. Come on,
I have extremely frizzy like Girl before the Makeover and
(22:55):
teen movies hair literally literally in middle school. I after, okay,
I was still sticking with me. This is how much
it's a like a chip on my shoulder. I went
to swimming class because we had like gym rotations, and
one of them was like swim learning how to swim,
And then afterwards one of my male friends was like,
(23:16):
you look like the before picture and Rachel looks like
the after in a shampoo commercial. Oh my god. First
of all, but I didn't know how to articulate that
at the time, No, everybody just laughed, and I was like, okay,
because I didn't have like a voice at that point.
You know, I was by all these white people in Utah,
but I was. I literally like in the morning, like
(23:37):
I won't One thing that I do love about myself
is that I won't look in the mirror in the
mornings and I like go walk the dogs and just
like leave immediately. So no idea what I look like.
And I'm just like if I tie my hair up,
it's like first ball fris Ball, Like it's just like
there's no I can't. I'm not going to put condition
under my hair when my dog needs to take you
know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, big same. I When
(24:02):
I try to do sloppy bun, I look like a
Victorian era woman who's been like put in the asylum
by her husband for speaking her mind. We're lootomy right exactly.
Um on Sunday's post lobotomy. On Sunday's pre lobotomy. But yeah,
it's just it doesn't look great. So I feel like
(24:24):
with the with the like stylish, messy bun, it's something
that I have to imagine people work at this craft. Similarly,
the bird poop spiders great segue perfect, So you're so
gross looking, this is disgusting. They really do look like
(24:45):
bird poop. So spiders love to pretend to be poop,
and there are actually many species who do it. So.
For example, there is the Selenia excavata, or bird dropping spider,
who lives in Australia and looks literally like a little
globule of bird poop. It is a splotchy white and
(25:06):
brown and it's disconcertingly glossy on the white part. It's
very uncomfortable. Yeah, it looks literally like a bird dropping. Uh.
They smell like them too. I don't think these ones do.
There are some bird poop uh imitators who do emit
a foul odor to really sell it. Um so yeah
(25:34):
they also Daniel day lewis it. Uh. They method act
by holding their legs tucked in and staying still to
really give it that authentic poop performance. And some in
Law and Order as a corpse right now, I would
love it. Oh my god, if we like lived in
a magical world where animals, you know, like in the Flintstones,
(25:57):
where animals were all employed as stuff, and like you
had to have like bird poop in a movie. So
you cast one of these as the bird poop and
then you paid them a fair wage. Yeah, I mean,
I think the most unreal union podcast, right, the most
unrealistic part of that scenario is someone being paid a
fair worge. Yeah, we both were like, what a dream
(26:21):
of fair wage? What a dream? I mean, sentient spiders.
Maybe we'll get there soon. Fair wage not a chance?
So so yes, Uh, they grow to be about half
an inch or a little over a cinameter wide. So
while they're not like super teeny tiny, they're definitely pray
for birds. So what better way to keep a bird
(26:43):
from eating you than looking like a piece of poop? Yep,
So they are hunters as well. They are spiders, and
they actually go from day to night using a different
kind of mimicry. It's like, day look is poop, night
look is something else. So, um, I mean, who amongst us,
(27:03):
you know, when we go out at night look much
different than the poop look during the day exactly. So
they hunt for their favorite food at night, which is moths,
and at night it's not so much that they change
their appearance, but they definitely put on a deceptive perfume.
(27:24):
So the bird dropping spider releases a pheromone that mimics
that of a female moth. So the horny male moths
will come right up to the spider who smells like
a sexy female, and then the spider eats the male.
I think the female moths are in on it. I
think there are ones who are like, They're like, here,
(27:44):
take this perfume and then murder my husband. Yeah. I think, yeah,
like this, this male moth just made fun of my antenna.
Here's some perfume. Do what you will. This is like
the Chicago movie Music, but moth and birth. I would
I would definitely pay to see an insect version of Chicago. Yeah,
(28:10):
can you like Katherine Sada Jones is like a spider.
That'd be great. Yeah. So yeah, it goes from being
a piece of poop during the day to a fem
fatale at night, which I love. It's what we all
dream of. Hell yeah, so there are many other spiders
and insects who use the poop defense. So, uh, one
(28:33):
other type of insect. I want to talk about our moths.
So the You'drea is book You'd Rise? I have no
Oh my god, You'd Raise you'd raise Grata moths a
k a. Beautiful wood nymphs found in the US have white, brown,
black and green splotches on their wings, and when their
(28:56):
wings are actually wide open, they're quite lovely. They look
like pretty moths. They don't look like anything gross or strange.
But when they fold their wings and they splay out
their front legs, so their front legs are kind of fuzzy,
like covered in like white fuzz, which is cute. But
(29:17):
when they like splay them out and fold their wings up,
they look like a bird poops bladder. It's because it
goes from white to like slightly green to brown. It
looks like how a bird poop like crusts over. Yes,
So when they're like folded up like that, it looks
like a drip of bird poop in like the positioning
and then also in like the gradient. But then when
(29:39):
they're open they look so pretty. Yeah. I love that.
I love that they can transform from pretty moth to like, nope,
I am a splatter of nasty, crusty bird. Do do
moths contain multitudes? Indeed? And uh, there's another moth known
as macro silics I found in Malaysia and they are
(30:02):
perhaps the most impressive bird dropping mimics. Uh. Their wings
actually feature an entire painting not only of splattered bird poop,
but what seems to be a couple of flies eating
the poop. Oh my god, holyh that looks crazy, right.
It looks like a cartoon, like somebody drew it. Yeah.
(30:25):
But also the bird poop also looks like a penis
part of it, because it's like symmetricals right, so like
when they pulled it right bo and penis coming up
along the spine. It's it's the first known of mimicry
and pornography. So not much is known about why this
moth has this impressive mimicry, but it is likely it's
(30:48):
to ward off predators who are not particularly interested in
a bunch of bird poop and a couple of flies
eating that bird poop. Do you think flies get tricked
by it too? You know what? I bet they do.
I bet they like go up to this moth's ass
and they're like, hey, what's going on here? And they
(31:10):
wanted to smell? Right, It's just not it's not working
out for them, it is, I really, there's like, not
surprisingly not that much research on these things. And I
really want there to be more because this is so
it's so ridiculous. Like you can see the outline of
the flies, you can see their little red heads, you
can see sort of different segments of their bodies. It's
(31:34):
crazy like it it literally looks like a cartoon, like
it's filed. Do you think there are other moths that
we haven't discovered with like other things on their wings
that would make you a verse to coming up to them,
Like a moth with a a drunk bachelor rep party
scene on their wings, like, you know, like a moth
(31:54):
with a red maga hat, right, a moth with the
guy doing street magic. Yeah, I think I think definitely
there are moths like that out there. Um, we have
to we have to do the research to find them
right exactly. That would probably be like that would be
my choice for like like if we could wear camouflage
(32:15):
city camouflage. That's just like things that would keep you
away from you, Like, oh, if you just wear this
is mean because I do like green peace. But if
you wear like a sweater sweatshirt with green peace on it,
people help clipboard and have a clipboard, people will leave
you alone because everyone like dodges out of the way.
(32:38):
But then there's like that one weirdo who really wants
to talk about it, and then you're the mark, you
know what I mean, right, And then that and that
weirdo is me. It was me the whole time. I
think that's a view and me discovering that we have
the ability to wear whatever we want, you know, right.
I think that's full episode, and that's being like, let's
take inspiration from these insects and yeah, express ourselves time
(33:01):
we want to express our though. Yeah, I mean if
I wear a shirt with a bunch of bird duty
printed on it, then I can get pooped on by
a birden it won't make a difference. Yeah, that sounds
like a Mentos commercial. Actually, it's like like remember the
one where he like he sits down on like a
painted bench and he's like, oh no, and then he
(33:21):
makes this striped suit out of oh oh yeah, that
was like a really old one from Yeah, that's that
one all the time, because it's like in my memory, yes,
like a Mentos you sit on bird poop and there's
a bunch of like just a bird poop covered bench
and you're like, oh man, I got bird poop and
then you roll around and then someone's like nice Jackson Pollock. Yeah,
(33:47):
I think we figured out fashion. We figured it out
packing in Milan, packing in Paris. We've got the fat,
the fashion down. The fashion is bird crap. So mimicry,
animal mimicry exactly. So before we go, we've got to
play a little game called the Mystery Animal sound game
(34:09):
or yes, Who's squawking? Every week I play a mystery
animal sound and you the listener, and you the guests,
try to guess who's squawking. The rules is it's any animal,
and I give you a little hint. Uh. Some weeks
it's very tricky. Some weeks it's maybe less tricky. I
(34:29):
don't know. Usually it's quite tricky, and this one is
no exception. Uh. So last week's mystery animal sound hint
was this. It says, if this little guy has stolen
the voice of another animal, So did you get that
(34:55):
little bim baby baby. Yeah, so it sounds like a bird,
but that makes me think it's not a b bird,
because you're saying it's stole the voice of another animal.
So it makes me think it's like like some sort
of insect, like a cricket or something to pretend like
it's a bird. Interesting, very interesting logic. Well, you're definitely
on the right track. There is that, your final guests, Yes,
(35:20):
so you are very close. You're right that this is
not a bird and it's something that sounds like a bird,
but it's not an insect. This is actually a tree frog.
So this is yes, this is the bird voiced tree frog.
That's its name. Just bird voice tree frogs. Okay. Sometimes
we get names like cascade of Death and sometimes we
(35:41):
get bird voice tree frogs. Sometimes yeah, sometimes it's like
turtle who is green and also brown and knows his
pointy Yeah, and we clearly know who double major in
English major like. So, the bird voice tree frog is
found in swamps, wet and forests in the United States.
(36:02):
It is a small green and gray frog who spends
almost all of its life in the trees. It really
only leaves the safety of the trees to mate and
lay their eggs. And what you have just heard is
the call of the male, and like bird's song, it
is used to track females. So it's interesting because it
sounds similar to bird's song and it's used in essentially
(36:22):
the same way. So you know, little frog has big
bird dreams. Yeah. I love that it's like raised by birds.
Do you remember remember that book Stella Luna about the
bat ah Man. It was such a good It was
a children's book about this bat raised by birds because
(36:43):
it like got lost separated from its mom and landed
in like a bird's nest and it tried to like
sit up straight and like eat bugs and do all
these bird things, but it was having struggling really hard.
And then find it's like mom finds it again, and
then it gets to live the bat life and eat fruit.
(37:04):
It's a great book, very cute. But yeah, I like
to think that this frog got like raised by birds
once and it's like pass this information on to the
other frogs of hey, guys, this is actually pretty cool.
Now they're all doing it all right, Onto this week's
mystery animal. Sound. The hint is whoever named this animal
(37:26):
was being a bit judgmental. It feels kind of like
(37:49):
you're in Jurassic Park, right, Yeah, that was weird. So
there's multiple of them, and they did it in a
way that sounded like a pack or something, but it
also a kind of bird like mm hmm, infusing. I
think when you said it was judgmental. I feel like
that there's gonna be something in the name that's like
(38:09):
like mean about how it sounds like this, like this,
this shrill something, the stupid, the nagging, the stupid voiced goat. Yeah,
it'll be interesting. So you got any guesses? Um? Yeah,
I want to go with them the I think Oh
(38:31):
so for a type of animal? Oh god, now, because
the other one was a frog, I'm like, are these
like some weird like box or h Well, foxes are
more on their own, right, m I'm wondering if it's
some sort of like mammalian thing instead of like a
bird or something interesting interesting thing. Yeah, my face, my
(38:55):
face is a is a mask of complete neutrality. Yeah,
I guess we'll have to tune in to find out.
We will have to tune in to find out next
Creature Feature or I will reveal to you who this
mystery squawker is. If you think you know who it is,
you can write to me at Creature Feature pot at
(39:17):
gmail dot com. Hallo v. Thank you so much for
joining me today. Tell the people where they can find you. Yeah.
So I do have a podcast called City Council Um
and it spelled c O U N s e L
is my genius way of telling city council. Yeah, it's
like counselor like we all need to council the city. Um.
(39:41):
But yes, so that's my podcast. I have a Patreon
on for it. If you want to support um he
greund dot com for a slash city Council show and
you can find that everywhere podcaster found. You can find
me at calaviganalen p A l l A b I
g U n A l a n everywhere. And yeah,
I'm doing shows again. I write for love it or
(40:02):
leave it. I am just chugging along here in l
A while you're in a very cold but beautiful place.
And thank you guys so much for listening. You can
find me, you know, on the internet. I'm so bad
at social media, but you know I'm on Twitter at
Creature feet Pod. That's f a T not f e T.
(40:25):
That is something very different. I'm on Instagram at Creature
Feature Pod. And again, if you think you know the
answer the Mister Animal sound game or you have a question,
you can write at Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com.
And thank you guys if you leave a rating or review,
I love them all. I read them all. I print
them all out and compiled them in books. I book
(40:46):
bind them and put them on a huge bookshelf and
then just read it by the fire every day. That
is my life. And thanks thanks to the Space Classics
for their super awesome song Exo Lumina of Creature. Feature
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
like the one you just heard was the I heart
(41:06):
Radio app Apple Podcasts or Hey guess what where have
you listen your favorite show? See you next Wednesday.
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