Listener Q's: Potoos!

I answer your questions, from potoos (aka, GHOST BIRDS), to bees who like perfume! If you have an evolutionary biology question you'd like answered, write to me at [e-mail] 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to Creature Feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host
of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology,
and today on the show, it's a listener questions episode.
You send me your questions to Creature Feature Product gmail
dot com and I answer them from questions about pets
to evolutionary biology to random animal questions. I do my best,

(00:33):
so let's get right into it. First question is from
Will h who sent me a TikTok video and asked
is this real or AI slot? So thank you for this,
Will and anyone else out there. If you see something
online about an animal that looks weird or too good

(00:57):
to be true or too strange to be true, or
you're trying to tell the difference between something that's fake
and real, send me an email and I will try
to help you out with that. So I really feel you.
Because there's so much AI slop out there. It is
getting harder to tell the real animals from the fakes,
which isn't great. But fortunately the video that Will scent

(01:22):
is very real. It depicts this bird that certainly looks
like a Jim Henson muppet. It does not look real.
So this is a species of po to bird. These
birds have huge, gaping mouths, they have giant eyes. They're
mostly nocturnal. They look like owls sort of, although they

(01:43):
are not owls. They have these beautiful camouflage feather that
looks like tree bark, which allows them to perch on
stumps to blend in. They'll even lift their little heads
up at an angle so that their sharp profile looks
like a split piece of wood jutting out from the stump.
And they will lay their eggs on these stumps, which

(02:06):
kind of sounds stupid, except that they carefully select a
stump that has a cranny or a nook that they
can wedge in the egg and when they're incubating the
egg and using this amazing camouflage that makes them look
like they're part of the you know, like when you
see some wood and a tree's fallen or snapped in half,

(02:27):
and the wood's uneven and there's like parts of the
bark that kind of are jutting up. The po two
mimics this look by using kind of the angles of
its body and then its coloration to look like a
piece of bark. It's very convincing and so when it's
incubating the egg, the egg's completely hidden from sight. I
think I've also read that the egg can kind of

(02:48):
look a bit like maybe some fungus on the on
the bark, so that might help it, like say, if
a parent is not sitting on it. So in the
video that will sit and it looks like. This is
a great po two which is found in South America,
and they have this really creepy call, which I'm going

(03:09):
to play for you right now. Ah. So that's a
call that was recorded in Colombia. Here's another recording that
was done in Brazil, so you know that would be

(03:32):
sort of disconcerting to hear at night. And then when
you look at them, they are also pretty creepy. Their
iris is dark brown, but when their pupils are expanded,
it looks like they have these huge, solid black eyes,
like a doll's eyes. They're about a foot long in
height with a wingspan of over two feet. They are

(03:54):
predators and they chase after mainly large flying insects that
they'll find in the rainforest, or even the occasional bat
or small bird. Whatever flies in the air and can
fit in their mouths. The po too will try to eat.
It's kind of terrifying to think of if you were
that size, like if you're a little fairy. There's this

(04:15):
thing that perfectly blends in with a stump, just looks
like a piece of wood, and then it sits there
until you fly by, and then jumps out at you
with this giant, gaping, muppet like mouth and just eat
your right up. So I would think, given that this
bird is so strange looking and has such a kind

(04:36):
of creepy call, that it would have a few sort
of like myths about it cultural stories about it, and
I did find some. So one is that parts of
its body are sometimes uses charms to ward off seduction,
which I guess, you know, if we listen to that
call again, Yeah, I can kind of see how that

(04:59):
would be considered a ward against seduction. It's not a
very seductive call. But there's also apparently a story told
by the Shuar group a it's a group of indigenous
people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Now, I unfortunately struggle to
verify whether this is actual folklore. I could only find

(05:22):
references to this on sort of the Park National Forest
Lodge websites, So I apologize if this is not culturally accurate,
but this is what I read. In the story. A
husband tries to get space from his wife by climbing
up a vine, and then she follows after him, and

(05:44):
he is frustrated with her following him, so he cuts
the vine, which causes her to fall, and she's so
hurt by his actions that she turns herself into a
bird the po two and starts to cry out in
the night, my husband husband or I shearu, I shearu.
I'm not sure if this is the actual story, but

(06:10):
it's thought that this, like the call, is this mournful
cry of this wife who was spurned by her husband.
So yeah, I mean, it's a It's a fascinating looking bird.
It is very real though, and it does look like
something out of some strange fairy tale, a weird puppet
or maybe AI, but it is absolutely real. Just a

(06:33):
sort of a tip with identifying AI animals, you kind
of want to look for a lot of like weird smoothness,
the lighting being like really perfect for a strange animal
you've never seen before. Sometimes those are giveaways, right, because
if there's a newly discovered animal, it's unlikely that it's

(06:54):
going to be in perfect studio lighting. But you know,
on occasion there are animals that are well documented to
have really good photos taken of them that are absolutely bizarre.
So yeah, it's getting harder and harder to tell. So
go ahead, and if you have any questions about things
that you're not sure whether it's true or not, I'll
try to look into that. Next listener question, Hi, Katie,

(07:16):
I'm not sure if you ever want to discuss this
issue on the show, because it's very dark and controversial.
I was wondering if you had any great academic resources
or studies on the topic, though too many I've found
have an agenda. I volunteer at an open intake municipal
kill shelter with the dogs. The city requires SPAE and neuter,

(07:36):
but it is a secondary charge, not animal control. Walking
around checking to see I am in the South. She
means the Southern United States. How has the North conquered
this problem? We have a partner shelter that takes at
least one hundred dogs from US a year and they
get adopted anyway. What are the reasons that SPAE and

(07:56):
neuter campaigns never took hold down here in the South?
I read we have more strays because we have milder winters.
I know animal cruelty and hoarding exist outside this region.
Attached are some shelter pups. Thank you, Caitlin. Hi, Caitlin.
First of all, all the doggie is so cute, so cute.
I hope they get adopted. I understand how challenging it

(08:17):
must be to work at a shelter knowing that not
all your animals will find homes, and in order to
be humane, some of these animals have to be put down.
And I know there is this stigma against kill shelters.
I mean, the name itself sounds very violent. It's important,
I think, for people to recognize that shelter workers never

(08:38):
want to have to put animals down. They're not doing this,
you know, for any other reason except that there's simply
not infinite resources, infinite amount of space, and so if
these animals aren't adopted out fast enough, you know, rather
than letting this animal starved slowly to death and suffer,

(08:58):
the decision is made to humanely put them down, which
is very sad. Of course, I don't really like the
term kill shelter and no kill shelter. It just I
think it would be more accurate as Caitlin kind of
phrased it to say open and take shelters, or with
the no kill shelters. I think a more accurate name
would be limited admission private shelters, because what the no

(09:23):
kill shelters often do is they'll reject animals coming into
their shelter that they know will probably not be able
to be adopted or if they don't have space, which
is of course in their right. I'm not saying that
these limited admission private shelters shouldn't exist. I think they
can do good work. But these animals that get rejected

(09:45):
from the limited admission shelter have to go somewhere, and
often that is like a municipal shelter also known as
like a kill shelter, because they take in all of
the animals that come in off the streets and because
they don't again and have unlimited resources, infinite amount of space,
and they can't adopt them all out. Rather than keeping

(10:07):
these animals in like confined conditions where they're all in
tiny cages where they can't move around or they don't
have enough food, they are they're euthanized, which is which
is really sad, I think, but it's not it's not
done out of cruelty, it's done out of compassion for
these animals. So onto the issue of how to different

(10:33):
shelters manage to when we're talking about like municipal shelters,
like why do have some have lower rates of euthanasia
than others? And it's usually resources issue and the number
of strays, And of course the best way to reduce
the need for euthanasia and shelters is spaying and neutering programs.
As our listener pointed out, so you know animals that

(10:57):
are both strays and those with home being sterilized. Preventing
an overflow of animals like so spain and neutering programs
as well as the habits of owners fixing their own
pets will very regionally. Uh. There was a survey that
looked into this discrepancy. There's a paper by Carrol Glasser

(11:20):
called Attitudes towards Spay and neuter in the US population
Urban versus Rural Cat Dog and Demographic Differences, And there's
some interesting results from this survey which found that there
wasn't as much of a discrepancy in attitudes between oral
populations and rural populations as was expected. Set there seems

(11:42):
to be maybe more of a generational generational difference. So,
for instance, millennials, surprisingly that's my generation. They're less likely
than older generations to understand spain and neuter programs like
what why they're important there, or to understand what the

(12:03):
process is. They're also more likely to be concerned about
the health effects on their pets, and they're also less
likely to see it as morally positive to have it
done to their pets than older generations. So there seems
to be sort of this like shift in attitude towards
spang and neutering to be less favorable. There's also a

(12:23):
slight gender difference, so women are more likely to find
spang and neutering to be more moral than men. I
can't say why. I don't really know why that is,
but I think it is interesting because the main thing is,
this survey doesn't really seem to indicate that there's a
difference between say, an urban setting, or a huge difference

(12:44):
between an an urban setting and a rural setting in
terms of attitudes towards spang and neutering. But you know,
this is one survey, So in terms of answering Caitlin's question,
I looked into a some other research. So the first
thing is to confirm that Caitlin's observations reflect a wider

(13:06):
trend of there being more stray animals in the South
versus the North, and in fact that does seem to
be the case. So there was a twenty eighteen review
called Dog Population and Dog Sheltering Trends in the United
States of America. This is by Andrew Rowan and Tamara Kartal.
They are affiliated with the Humane Society, so you could

(13:27):
argue that they may have some bias, but they did
observe that quote. While New Hampshire and New Jersey have
low intake and euthanasian rates and have significantly lower numbers
of stray dogs, other states, especially in the South, report
much higher numbers. So this does seem to back up
Caitlin's personal observations as someone who works in a shelter.

(13:51):
So also, according to this review, in places like New
Jersey where they have lower euthanasian numbers, there are eight
wide low income spay and neuter programs, So the decrease
in euthanasia seems to be driven by lower levels of
animal intake to shelter. So what that means is if

(14:14):
there's less animal intake to shelters. Usually that means there's
less of a stray population. Uh So that seems to
be driving the euthanasian numbers down, which would mean there's
fewer strays in these areas, which might indicate that these
spay and neuter programs that are funded by the government

(14:36):
and low income areas for low income families with pets
for strays does seem to be having an impact on
the amount of straight dogs in the area, And adoptions
have also risen slightly, but they just don't account for
the majority of the decrease in the euthanasia rates. So
I would say, given that, like you know, these both

(14:59):
these studies seem to indicate that it's possibly more of
a policy issue rather than say a cultural difference, I
would say that the most likely driver for the difference
between the North and the South is whether there are
these statewide spaying neutering programs that cover the cost for

(15:19):
low income families or low income areas. Probably, if we
want to see if you're animals being euthanized, we would
have to increase funding for these spaying and neutering programs
in these states. There might be more I'm not really sure.
I'd love to hear from people who are more familiar
with the politics regarding these issues in the South, but

(15:40):
there might be more political resistance to bills that fund
these programs. Maybe there might also just be more poverty
in some of these states, so that would compete with funding.
So that would be my educated guests, But I am
definitely not an expert on this topic. I think it's
really important to talk about though, thank you Caitlin for

(16:03):
writing in. I think it is a sensitive question, but
I think that even though it's sad and it's kind
of difficult to discuss, I think it is really important. Otherwise,
powerre we ever going to figure out how we can
get those the shelters less full of dogs that can't
be adopted, Like we can't just sweep it under the rug.

(16:24):
And I think it's also really important to note that
for so called, you know, like kill shelters, like, it's
absolutely not morally wrong to adopt from these shelters that
euthanize animals. In fact, by adopting from those shelters, you
are helping to reduce the number of animals that are
in the shelters. And then that leaves up more space

(16:46):
for animals, and that keeps the euthanasia numbers lower as well.
So please don't just avoid municipal shelters because they use euthanasia,
because those animals also need to be adopted. And it's
again like the private shelters that are no kill shelters.

(17:07):
I'm I don't have a problem with those, but it's
the animals that they reject, like they don't take in,
will ultimately end up going to a municipal shelter. So
it's not really that they you know, I don't know
that other than the fact that these private shelters may
increase capacity for their being more shelter space for dogs,

(17:29):
they're not it's not necessarily that, you know, they are
just voluntarily not killing dogs. They are just in a
position where they are able to not take in all
the dogs off the streets, so they are able to
not employ euthanasia. So you know, that's that's the situation.

(17:49):
It's a it's a sad one, but yeah, I think
it's a it's a really important thing to discuss, and
I really appreciate you writing in and anyone else who
is familiar with these issues or works in shelters or
has an opinion on it. Please feel free to write
to me. I'd be really happy to hear from you.
All Right, on to the next listener question. Dear Katie. Today,

(18:12):
in an orchid house in Estepona, Spain, I learned about
the parfumier bees U Glossini. I would love to know
more about them, and about other artisanal wars Bauer birds
and a few other artisanal courtiers I know a bit about,
but more is good, So back to Uglossini. According to
Wikipedia quote, the male Euphresia proparata is highly unusual among

(18:36):
insects and seeking out and collecting large quantities of insecticide.
Dressler discovered in nineteen sixty seven e Proparada collecting aldrin
and Roberts in nineteen eighty two observed them collecting DDT
in huge amounts from houses in Brazil, amounting to several
percent of the bees weight without suffering any harm from

(18:56):
the activity. Exclamation point always a fan. This is from
mary Ann. Hi, mary Ann, this is a really cool topic.
Thank you so much for writing to me about it.
I think as much as it's important for us to
reduce our the amount of pollutants like pesticides that leach
out into the environment. I always find it fascinating when

(19:19):
animals manage to adapt to the nasty stuff that we
come up with. It's really really interesting. So orchid bees
uglossini are a group of brilliant jewel like bees. They
have this beautiful metallic coloration. There are many species, including
Euphresia preparata, so these are found in the Amazon basin

(19:41):
in South America. They are this metallic green and indigo bee.
And as listener Mary Anne pointed out, it is attracted
to insecticides, including DDT, which is normally really bad news
for insects and also birds. So orchid bees, the orchid

(20:02):
bee species in general, collect scent producing compounds from flowers.
So basically the males create a perfume for themselves to
attract females, storing them in their leg baskets, so they're
behind legs like a lot of bee species have these
little divots in them where they can store pollen among
these kind of like grooves, and in these bees, the

(20:26):
males will store basically compounds that create perfume scents and females.
These these leg baskets that the males have like they
act as like diffusers sort of incense diffusers, and the
females prefer males with a good cologne, and they're more

(20:47):
likely to successfully entice a female to mate with them
if they have perfume in their little leg baskets. So
Euphresia proparata seems to find DDT and other types of
pesticide compounds to have that genesicua poffume that smells good
to these bees. So it's similar enough to orchid compounds

(21:12):
that they typically for them to also use that to
try to attract females. And because the bees only collect
a specific broken down compound from say DDT or these
other pesticides, and they also don't consume it, they store
it in their leg baskets, the compound does not seem
to harm them physically. Now, what I don't know is
how successful it is with the ladies, whether they prefer

(21:35):
actual orchid compounds or this kind of like pesticide knockoff.
I don't know. I'd be really interested to find that out. So, guys,
these were fantastic questions. I really love them. They help
me learn as well, by the way, Like I have
to do research for these questions to make sure I'm
giving you the right answer and that helps me on
my learning journey. I hope I helped you a little

(21:57):
bit on your learning journey. Do you have any evolutionary
biology animal related questions photos of your pets? You can
write to me at Creature Feature pod at gmail dot com. Again,
thank you so much for these questions, and thanks for
the space classics where there's super awesome song Exolumina. Creature

(22:18):
Feature is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like
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your favorite shows? I can't judge you, just don't go
spraying DDT on yourself and expecting your date to go well,
it only works for bees. See you next Wednesday.