Listener Questions: Do Mosquitos Never Sleep!?

I answer your animal biology and behavioral questions. Do mosquitos sleep? The mystery of a crocodile with an s-shaped spine. And how do cuckoos know they're cuckoos? 

If you have an evolutionary biology or animal behavior question, you can email me at [e-mail] 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
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 guys, send me your questions about evolutionary biology, animal behavior, pets, birds, worms.

(00:27):
You send those to Creature Featurepod at gmail dot com
and I do my best to answer them. And I
love this because it always sends me on really interesting
or thought journeys research. So let's get right into it. Hey, Katie,
I have a question and a conundrum for you in
tech behavior question. I know bugs must rest somehow and sometime,

(00:50):
but it seems like there's always a type of mosquito
around day or night. Are there specific times of day
when bugs, or at least those awful zebra mosquitoes will
be so that I can sit outside in peace. I
also wanted to ask your philosophy on naming pets. Below
er some pictures of my new friend. The name this
shelter gave him didn't fit, so I've been referring to

(01:12):
him as my guy, but all I know he thinks
his name is Hey. Personally, I think I feel like
a name needs to be at least three levels of meaning,
but I've got a mental block theories, ideas, scathing, derision.
Thanks for the creatures and the features, Andrew, Thank you
so much. Andrew. First of all, I think Hey or

(01:33):
Guy is an absolute cutie. My philosophy on pet naming
is basically anarchy. I think, whatever you want to name them,
you know, it's sometimes it's good to have like a
name that you can definitely say in like a friendly
upbeat tone. But usually my pet names are two syllables.

(01:56):
They have like an E sound at the end. That's
just my thing. Like I had it Pete the parakeet,
Poppy the parakeet, Binkie the cat, Stewie the hamster, Mousey
the mouse, which one of my more creative namings, and
of course Cookie the dog, and I had just thought about, like, well,
why do I do this? Why do I always have

(02:16):
it and in an E sound? And I think it's
because my name is Katie, so I'm just used to
name sounding like that with an E at the end.
But I don't think all pets need to be named
that way. Really, it's just if the name has a
positive association for you, that's the most important part, because

(02:39):
pets can understand tone of voice, but they can't really
understand words so much. We can teach them a few words,
but your dog's not gonna know. Really the difference between
being named like no Stradamus or being named guy as
long as you're saying it with a lot of love.
So that's that's it. Onto the question about most squitos.

(03:05):
Do they ever sleep even though it seems like they don't,
because believe me, it really does seem that way, they're
always around, they do actually sleep, so researchers have studied
mosquitoes sleep in several species and found that sleep deprived
mosquitoes would choose rest over blood meals, so they do

(03:26):
need sleep. They will even sometimes prefer sleep over biting you,
but that's only when they're sleep deprived. The problem is
that they're not always sleep deprived, so mosquitoes are really
easily roused from rest by the smell of a nearby
food source, and if they're not sleep deprived, they'll happily

(03:48):
wake up to try to bite you. University of Cincinnati
researchers had to take this into account when designing their
research on mosquitoes, because mosquitoes tend to wake up and
become active when human researchers walk in the room because
basically they smell like a banquet, and so they had
to isolate their mosquitoes that they were doing sleep studies

(04:10):
on from passers by. So that's one reason it seems
like they don't sleep, you see. Assistant Professor of Biology
Joshua bin Watt said, quote, it's really hard to quantify
sleep and mosquitoes when as soon as you walk in
the room, you're considered their Thanksgiving dinner. So that's one problem.

(04:32):
Mosquitoes are great at waking up, smelling us, and then
wanting to bite us. Another problem is that different species
have different sleep schedules. So if you're in a mosquito
rich area, the chances are that you have multiple species

(04:53):
there and some species that are going to be active
at different times a day, and some of that means
even during the daytime hours and then even at night
there may be mosquitoes that are active. So for instance,
the striped mosquitoes Adias elbow pictus, also known as the
Asian tiger mosquito, are those black and white banded mosquitoes.

(05:17):
I think some people call them zebra mosquitoes. They're found
in tropical areas as well as the south and southwestern US.
They are real menaces. They can spread danga and zeka
in areas where the disease is prevalent. They're not inherently diseased.
They can only spread the disease if the pathogen is

(05:38):
present in that environment and in that country. That's why
mosquito related deaths are worse in some countries. They like
to feed during the day, primarily in the morning and
the evening, while resting at night. Now, at the same time,
common mosquitoes kulex are more active and tint to bite

(06:00):
at night, so those are also the ones that make
more sound buzz in your ear. So this is why
it seems like mosquitos never rest. They do, but usually
at least one species is on the clock. And also
even though they might be resting, they're very sensitive and
they can detect carbon dioxide emissions so easily that we

(06:23):
make while we're breathing that they can wake up, find
you and eat you. They are just really good at it.
And I'm sorry, there's no better there's no good news
I can tell you about mosquitos. They're just amazing at
finding us and biding us. All right, on to the
next listener question. Dear Katie, could you kindly focus your

(06:47):
powers of research and deduction on this poor creature? So
I was sent a video of what appears to be
a crocodile with a deformed S shaped spine. All right,
now back to the email. What happened to them? Where
in the world are they? Are they being well taken
care of? Are they suffering? Is this common among crocodilians?

(07:08):
A huge fan of the show, and we'll give you
a million good reviews if you can find any answers
about this little guy, who I think is my new
spirit animal, at least a million good reviews. Thanks for
all you do. Keep up the good word, Susie. Thank
you so much for your question, Susie. So I can
tell you what happened to them and about their care,
I can't. I couldn't figure out where this specific crocodile was.

(07:35):
But let me get into what's going on with this guy.
Just a description of the video. It's a very It's
a crocodile that looks like it has a really really
severe like scoliosis. It's spine is shaped like an s.
It's kind of like it looks a little bit scrunged
up in a way, and it is alive and it's
walking and it's an adult, but it's moving pretty awkwardly

(07:57):
due to this huge s and spine. This unfortunately seems
to be a crocodile with cayphoscoliosis, which is a curved
deformation of the spine caused by osteomalicia, which is kind
of the word for quote, soft bones. This is due

(08:17):
to improper mineralization during development, so it starts when they're
baby crocodiles. This is a disorder primarily found unfortunately in
captive crocodiles, because when they're young, what can happen is
they're not getting enough calcium and other minerals in their diet,

(08:38):
so they start to develop these symptoms. Other symptoms are translucent,
glassy teeth, inflexible jaws. They call them rubber jaws in
the medical literature. It's just these jaws that they don't
have enough of the calcium and these other minerals to
have the strength in their jawbones, and so that can

(09:01):
also cause spinal deformities. So when crocodiles are only fed
meat without bones or other supplementation, like say, just fed chicken,
raw chicken with no bones. No, they're supplements, no other vitamins.
They don't get enough calcium in their diet to properly

(09:22):
grow their bones. In the wild. They don't just eat
deboned chickens you'd get in the grocery stores. Some captive
crocodiles are fed, but they'll eat entire animals, including bone, skin, joints,
all the things that wild crocodilians can break down and
use as nutrients. They also get a variety, right, they

(09:43):
don't just eat chickens. They eat a variety of different
animals which give them a variety of nutrients. So it
can be treated in young crocodilians with calcium supplementation which
will save their lives. But any spinal deformation is likely permanent,
so if they start to get a spinal deformation as

(10:05):
a baby crocodile, they'll just have that throughout their whole lives,
as can be seen in the adult crocodile in the
video that Susie sent to me. So without treatment, though,
they will lose the ability to walk, lift their heads,
and eventually this is fatal. So this is why wild
animals like crocodiles, alligators. All crocodilians are really not good pets.

(10:29):
I mean, it's pretty obvious, right because once they grow
up they can also eat you. But beyond sort of
the you know, an adult crocodile, an adult alligator is
not a good pet because they are an alligator and
a crocodile, and they are built to be eaten swimming machines,

(10:52):
not pets. The other factor is that they have very
specific dietary and behavioral needs which are typically not feasible
for the average pet owner. They may be adorable as babies,
they are really really cute babies, but they're predators. They're
not only driven to dangerously try to eat prey, which

(11:13):
is not great in the suburbs, but they must do
so for their own health. So even if you keep
your pet crocodile from eating the neighbor's dog, it's gonna
be unhealthy, probably because it's not getting the full diet
that it needs. It's actually this is kind of tangential,
but it's one of the reasons I cringe sometimes when

(11:34):
I see tiktoks of people giving their dogs or cats
completely raw diets. Sometimes that's okay, but if you're not
an expert and you're not being guided by a veterinarian.
Giving your animals more quote unquote like natural foods isn't

(11:54):
necessarily good because unless you're getting all of the nutrients
that they need, and you could be missing something, right,
Like if you feed your dog just chicken every night,
like cooked chicken, that's not enough. So kibble has a
lot of problems. I agree with that. Kibble's definitely not perfect,
but good kibble is nutritionally balanced with these components that

(12:20):
your dog or your cat needs. So if you don't,
if you're not an expert, kibble's pretty good and that
will get your dog and your cat the nutrition that
it needs. And so unless you really know what you're doing,
you can actually paradoxically deprive your pet of nutrients if

(12:40):
you say, feed them raw meat only right, you may
have the best of intentions wanting to have a healthy
animal and actually accidentally give them a nutritional deficiency. Dogs
in particular, are very different from their wild wolf counterparts
and have different dietary needs. So looking at what a
wolf feeds is not necessarily gonna help a dog. They've

(13:03):
evolved to be able to eat eat near our human
tables and our food supply. They actually have evolved to
be able to digest grain in a way that wolves can't,
so it is it's tricky. I'm not saying that fresh
meat raw diets are always bad and that you shouldn't
ever do them, but it's really important to do it

(13:24):
with a guidance from a veterinarian so you can find
out make sure that you're not accidentally depriving your pet
of key nutrients. It's also good in terms of like
individual animals will have out food allergies sometimes, right, so
some people actually do have to put their pets on
a specific diet, sometimes a raw diet because of food allergies,

(13:46):
but those are guided by a veterinarian. They're probably also
being given vitamin supplements. So yeah, anyways, trying don't just
feed your dog or cat raw sheet every night, that's
not a good situation. And don't feature pet crocodile, just
raw chicken, and don't have a pet crocodile is the

(14:09):
main takeaway. So unfortunately, Yeah, I feel really bad for
this crocodile in Susie's video. Not fair, not a great situation, unfortunately.
All right on to the next listener question, Dear Katie,

(14:29):
I am reading a marvelously gospy British bird book and
hit a puzzle to quote my commonplace book. Okay, So,
a female cuckoo seeks to lay an egg in the
nest of a bird of the same species it hatched
in quote from the book. Having contracted out the care
of it's young to a series of foster parents. The

(14:49):
cuckoo's breeding season comes to an end as soon as
the eggs are laid, or in the case of the male,
as soon as the females are no longer soliciting for copulation.
Cuckoos have no need to hang out out and find
out the fate of their progeny. The youngsters have an
internal clock and will and compass that will help them
make their way under their own steam to the wintering areas.

(15:09):
Thus their task completed, Some adult cuckoos migrate south as
soon as they can. Amazingly, this means that some reach
their winter quarters even before their offspring leave the foster nest.
This is domin Nick Kuzin's twenty twenty four The Hidden
Life of Garden Birds, the unseen drama behind everyday survival

(15:30):
that sounds like a great book. By the way, I
probably need to read that right back to the email,
and that's it in the book, leaving me to figure
figuring that first year migrating cuckos learn how to be
cuckoos really only when they reach their winter quarters, the
shyness with which they must approach other cuckoos for the
first time. I wonder how comparable it is to homeschool

(15:50):
students arriving out of college campus. Typically, birds learn the
songs of their species by hearing them in the nest
and for some birds local groups. They're often human discernible
regional variants. In doing a light web search to find
out what has been found out about this processing cuckoos,
I've found research on Chinese blackbirds learning cuckoo calls and
teaching them to other blackbirds in the vicinity. Can you

(16:11):
elucidate Thanks in advance, Mary Anne. What a thoughtful, well
researched email. This is really impressive. Thank you so much
for this. This is a great conundrum. So essentially the
question is how do cuckoos learn how to be cuckoos
if their parents abandon them to care abandon them In
the care of these foster parent birds foster parents is

(16:34):
kind of a nice way of putting it. Really, these
are brewd parasites, right, Birds that lay their eggs in
the nests of unsuspecting birds to the detriment to these
other birds real offspring, and so they're considered parasitic. And
the quote unquote foster parents are host parents, right, it's

(16:55):
not sort of a consensual adoption happening happening here. So
but nevertheless, this problem remains, right the cuckoo, how does
it learn to be a cuckoo or a cowbird? Write
another brood parasite, how does it learn to be a
cowbird when it doesn't have a cuckoo parent or a
cowbird parent there to teach it? And we know a

(17:18):
lot of birds learn, so they learn complex songs from
their parents. The songbirds are fascinating because they present a
really interesting case of both the power of pre programmed
behaviors learned behaviors. They've been studied a lot by linguists
because of their ability to learn complex songs, but also

(17:41):
have the framework that they're built with to learn complex songs.
But brood parasites like cuckoos and cowbirds are really interesting.
They share something in common, so they have really strong
pre programming that keeps nature in a sense stronger than nurture.

(18:05):
So there was a study done on cowbirds where the
sounds of a host species and their own species were
both played to them from a young age. The cowbirds
instinctively had a preference for the sounds of their own species.
So this means they have a built in schematic for
what cowbirds are meant to sound like, so they are

(18:27):
born within their brains basically a framework that will recognize
the call of a cowbird and know that is a
cowbird call and something they should pay attention to versus
the call of their you know, quote unquote foster parents.
Another interesting study found that they have a preference for
birds who share the color of their own plumage, so

(18:51):
they're looking at their own plumage, they see the color
and they're drawn towards that type of plumage. The way
they found this out was by painting brown cowbirds black
and raising them in isolation, and they would find that
these cowbirds will incorrectly prefer birds with black plumage, So
that part they are learning, but it's self referential and

(19:12):
they're programmed to know to look at themselves rather than
their foster parents for cues on who is going to
be their appropriate mate. There's also some research that finds
that they self reinforce with their own song. Right, They're
pre programmed with an ability to do a song, and
then they listen to themselves, and then that this kind
of creates a reinforcement loop of knowing what song to

(19:35):
recognize as a cowbird song or a cuckoo song. So
basically cowbirds and cuckoos, these brood parasites are born with
brood parasite dot ex right a program, a strong program
that tells them that they should learn either from them

(20:00):
themselves or not from their host species, and it gives
them certain bits of data right about like what does
the sound of a cowbird? What is that? And what
should I look for in plumage And basically it prevents
them from imprinting too much on their host species. Also

(20:24):
something to note is like, compared to songbirds, their calls
are really simple, like the cuckoo call cuckoo. You might
have heard it. It's like, oh, you know, very simple call.
Cowbirds I can't really do. It's kind of this gurgling
sound and a chatter, even though it's sort of hard
for me a human to do. It is not a

(20:47):
long complicated song, nor do they have a repertoire of
many different songs like some songbirds do. And those kinds
of songbirds absolutely have to learn that repertoire, so to
be pre programmed. Essentially, you do need relatively short and
simple songs. The birds that have the really long complicated

(21:10):
songs vast repertoires do need to learn them. So as
versatile and as plastic as human brains are, right, we're
great learners. We are so affected by our environment. We
definitely don't seem like little preprogrammed robots, right, and I
wouldn't say we are, but we are born with certain

(21:32):
schematics and there's a lot of weird pre programming that
we have because essentially, when you are first born, you
have to come out being able to identify your own species.
Other humans got to be able to eat, and you
got to be able to cry make sound when you're
in distress. But what's really interesting is that newborn babies

(21:55):
have a rough schematic for what a human face looks like,
and from a young age seems to know that there
is the facial parts are supposed to fall in certain places, Essentially,
they are more likely to look at correct facial diagrams,
like a simple drawing of a face, and they're less

(22:16):
interested in random patterns or diagrams of faces that have
been scrambled around, like a nose on the forehead and
eyes and places they're not supposed to be. They're really
drawn towards a facial schematic of eyes essentially where they're
supposed to be nose mouthed in relatively the correct proportions.
So it's a bit spooky to consider that. Even we

(22:40):
come with a lot of pre programming, but it's necessary
for our survival to come prepared to eat recognize members
of our own species. Also, even for the things that
we learn, right, we have certain frameworks for learning. We're
not completely blank slates. Were kind of like a canvas

(23:02):
that has like basic schemas already penciled out a little bit.
And then as we're growing, we are just absorbing so
much information and we're learning so much. And this is
a little different from like a cowbird or a cuckoo,
who is probably learning, you know, of course they are

(23:23):
some things, but they're not learning a whole lot from
their host species. They're basically pre programmed with the edict
that you know this, this bird that is feeding you
is not your own species. You don't need to pay
attention to them too much. You need to pay more
attention to your own plumage. And then they've also got
these handy calls. So is it like being homeschooled and

(23:46):
going off to college for the first time. I can't
speak to homeschooling. I haven't experienced it, so I don't know,
but I would say that these birds probably are a
lot more comfortable meeting members of their own species for
the first time in a way then say, you know,

(24:06):
we would write because they do come with so much
pre programmed schema where it's like, ah, yes, I had
these instructions to seek out a bird that has this
call and a bird that has this kind of plumage,
and there they are. So I don't think they're necessarily confused,

(24:26):
but it is a little spooky maybe to think of
them as these robots that come with programming. But that's
what happens with a lot of animals, animals that come
right out of the shell, having a lot of behaviors
that they just can go right into, like sea turtles
kind of following the light of the moon, sort of

(24:49):
reflecting on the ocean, knowing to go towards that ocean
water that just is in them right as they hatch.
No learning, just they gotta go. So uh yeah, it's
a it's an interesting thing. I guess it's kind of
nice to be an animal that has a lot of
stuff that we get to learn and shape us that

(25:12):
we're not inherently born with. So yeah, we're not like
a cowbird or cuckoo. Although I guess being able to
just leave your kid with some hapless victim and have
them raise it, is that a good thing. I don't know.
I like kids, all right, guys, So thank you so
much for all your questions. If you have an animal

(25:34):
related question that you'd like to send to me, you
can write to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail
dot com. I'm definitely gonna do a few more of
these episodes. I'm kind of taking like a quasi summer break,
but I still want to have some freshness in here,
and I feel like having listener questions episodes is a
good way to do it. I hope that you're liking them,

(25:57):
and I will see you next Wednesday. Two features a
production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts like the one you
just heard, Visit I heard Radio, app Apple podcasts, or Hey,
guess what? What? Have you listened to your favorite shows?
I can't judge you and thanks to the Space Classics,
but they're super awesome. Song Excellana, I think I did
the outro in the wrong order, but you know, only

(26:19):
God can judge me. See you next Wednesday.