Non Terrestrial Extra Terrestrials

These non-alien lifeforms look more alien than the aliens in Avatar. From gloopy ghosts, to glowing alien eyes, these animals may give us a hint at what could be in store for us on alien planets. Discover this and more as we answer the age-old question: is the holy grail just a pile of snot? 

Guest: Daniel Whiteson 

Footnotes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c6BwVI0pW24VOfG6DOK1mNc2hEIDR-jao4WzmlzusYc/edit?usp=sharing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 non Terrestrial Extraterrestrial. These non
alien life forms look more alien than the aliens in Avatar.
From gloopy ghosts to glowing alien eyes, these animals may

(00:31):
give us a hint at what could be in store
for us on alien planets. Discover this and more as
we answer the age old question it's the Holy Grail
just a pile of Snot joining me today is friend
of the show, particle physicist and host of Daniel and
Jorge Explain the Universe, Daniel Whitson, Welcome, Thank you very much,

(00:53):
happy to be here and happy to join in the blasphemy.
There's gonna be a lot of things spitting God's eye
on this episode, I believe. And we've actually talked about
this a bit. I've been a guest co host on
your show, Daniel and Jorgey Explain the Universe, and we've
chatted from time to time about maybe the possibility of

(01:16):
alien life. What do you think about that? Do you
think that it's plausible that there are aliens out there.
Are you a firm believer or are you a skeptic
or are you a hoper? I am both a skeptic
and a hoper. I think that it's quite plausible that
there could be alien life out there, just because of

(01:38):
the mathematics. We know that the universe is huge. I mean,
there are trillions of galaxies out there. Each one has
hundreds of billions of stars, and we now know that
most of those stars have planets, many planets, and frequently
they will have earthlike planets. So the sheer number of

(01:58):
places that lifelike hours could evolve is overwhelming. On the
other hand, we haven't found any of it, and we
don't really know what the chances are for life to
evolve on some earthlike planet. Is it one in two
is it one in a gazillion. We just don't know.
So I'd love for there to be life out there
to talk to alien physicists about the secrets of the universe,

(02:22):
but we just don't know. Well, here's a gotcha question.
If there's life out there, why haven't they called us?
I mean, they haven't called you. I've been chatting with
them for years, Katie. I knew I wasn't in the
intergalactic group chat. But it is a great question, it's
a deep question, and it's a famous question. It's basically

(02:43):
the Fermi paradox. Fermi, a physicist from decades ago, said, Look,
if there's so many planets and stars out there, and
the universe is quite old, billions of years old, plenty
of time for civilizations to flourish and explore the galaxy,
why has nobody contacted us yet? And of course here
we have to put in a corner all the theories

(03:04):
of maybe pilots seeing UFOs suggesting that they actually are here,
assuming that none of them have contacted us, it's a
great question, why haven't they? And there's a whole variety
of theories suggesting that maybe aliens are maybe alien civilization
is just sort of short lived, or maybe they're so
alien that they're contacting us in a way we can't

(03:26):
even imagine. Maybe their messages are washing over us right now,
we just don't hear them. I choose to believe that
whenever I'm missing a sock and I know I put
it in the washer and it's just gone. It's you know,
it's I put two in the washer and one comes out,
and I'm sure a lot of people have experienced this.
I believe that there is some kind of alien interference

(03:49):
there where they are trying to do some sort of
you know, flattening of a wavelength to communicate with us,
but then all they're getting is a pile of socks,
and so they think that we are a very sock
based society on Earth. And actually I have a physics
based explanation for your missing socks. Yes. No, I think

(04:11):
they've all been sucked up into the hose zone layer
in the upper atmosphere. Good. Yes, very good. No. It's
a really fun question whether they're aliens and what they're like,
and it also sort of reflects what we think about aliens,
like we are capable of thinking about aliens and searching
for aliens essentially only in the way that we can
think about aliens. But there's a possibility that aliens could

(04:34):
be much weirder than we could possibly imagine, biologically, technically, culturally,
in every sort of avenue. And I think that some
evidence to back that up is that we keep finding
stuff on our planet on Earth that is so alien
to us that they are like in those sort of

(04:56):
common depictions of aliens the most. You know, things that
I see are things like basically a humanoid but green,
with bigger eyes and maybe a huge head. You know,
there are some more creative portrayals of aliens. One of
my favorites actually is in the more recent movie Nope.

(05:19):
I don't know if you've seen that. Have you seen that, Daniel,
I've not seen. Highly recommend Nope to you because the
depiction of the alien is really fun, I think. I mean,
it's scary but also really fun because it is I'm
not gonna say too much because I don't want to
spoil it, but it's it's all They did somewhat base
it in marine biology, but you wouldn't necessarily know that

(05:43):
watching the movie, and it's it's it's just a very
delightful take on alien life. But yeah, our imagination is
often like, well, maybe it's like humans but blue and
tall and they ride pterodactyls, and as you know, that's fun.
I'm going to say that's a bad way to imagine things.
But maybe that's not what it's like, and we only

(06:05):
need to look at our own animals here on Earth,
especially the animals we find in the oceans, because they
have had a very different evolutionary path from us, and
it results in things that to us terrestrial animals look
very alien. And one I want to start with looks

(06:29):
I mean, it looks alien in sort of a like
I feel like in the sixties there were a lot
of illustrations of alien planets that were just kind of surreal.
Sometimes they'd be like covers to some weird book that
you'd find at like a used bookstore. And this one

(06:49):
kind of gives me that vibe of these just super
surreal imaginings of like it's an alien, but it's just
a bunch of weird flanges. And it is called the
malibe Veritas, and it well, I've shared an image of
it with you, Daniel, how would you describe this thing?

(07:12):
It looks like those toys used to throw against the
wall that would stick and then sort of roll down
the wall bit by. I mean, it just looks like
a sticky blob sticky hands, Yeah, sticky hands exactly. And
you know, your comment about it looking like the sixties
makes me wonder if our depiction of alien our imagination
of aliens, basically just depends on what the artists would

(07:34):
drug the artists recently, Yeah, I mean, I think it
is interesting, and maybe the drug is somehow stimulating parts
of the brain that haven't been active since we ourselves
were in the ocean and we were surrounded by things
like this. That's not very scientific, but I like to

(07:54):
think that way. But yeah, well, how long ago was
this discovered? How long have we been aware of the
middlibivorids and it's bizarre alien sticky hands. Now, we have
been aware of it since the late eighteen hundreds. I
believe that doesn't mean it is something that's well known.
So it is a new to brink, which is a

(08:15):
type of sea slug. Now, what I'm seeing here is
basically it is this pale green thing that has like
a flat, translucent pancake for a head, and then off
of that is a long tube, and then coming off
the tube are these like little paddles that kind of

(08:36):
go down its sides, and there's six seven seven of
them on each side. I'm just describing what I'm seeing
in this photo. And we're sure this thing is not
actually an alien. I mean, if aliens actually came to
Earth and land in the oceans, would marine biologists just
be like, look at the weird things our oceans can produce. Yeah,

(08:58):
I mean we would probably have no way of knowing
unless we could somehow trace any Like It's not like
we could necessarily find alien DNA and no, it's alien
DNA if they're using the same amino acids that we ease.
So yeah, I mean we wouldn't necessarily know. I'm going

(09:18):
to say the fact that they were able to track
it to other species of Neoda branks and sea slugs
means that it would have to be all or nothing,
Like every sea slug would have to be an alien
or none of them are, which you know, jury's out
on that. But and do we understand the form of this,
like why does it have a transparent pancake head? Can

(09:41):
we understand everything that this thing is about in terms
of like it's evolution, you know, it has to have
this kind of head to survive this kind of experience
or this kind of environment. Or is it really just
like the random walk that evolution can do through time. Well,
we don't know everything about it, but we do know
some things, and we do know about it's weird pancake head,

(10:01):
So it has this weird disc like protuberance on its
head and it's called the oral veil. So it has
actually lost its radula teeth, so ragula or like it's
like a little circle teeth that you find on things
like snails and slugs, and it does not have a ragula,

(10:21):
doesn't have these teeth, and so instead it uses this
disc of very thin flesh as a net, so it
kind of casts this out searches through the substrate. It
actually likes to be on the ocean floor, not the
deep ocean, but just like you know, sort of a
medium level ocean floor. It can swim freely, but it

(10:43):
spends most of its time snooting around in the substrate,
in the sand of the ocean floor, and it'll stick
this weird disc out onto the sand, onto the substrate.
And can it eat pancakes with its pancake head? That
would be a door. I don't know of it eating pancakes.
I think they'd have to be very small pancakes, maybe

(11:05):
like miniature crepes. But Communion Wafers commons this is well,
it's funny you mentioned this because there is a species
of Malibe that gets a little bit religious or at
least has a cult like following. So uh, but for

(11:26):
for most malibe, this oral veil, they lay it out there,
they're searching, and then it has all these papillae. So
popila are just sort of sensory buds on something. We
have papillae on our tongues. There's popila on a lot
of different things. Um, but these ones are specifically to
detect prey. And then once one of these are triggered by, say,

(11:49):
like a tiny crustacean, it quickly retracts its oral veil
like a big net that you're casting in, and it
pulls in its prey like a teeny tiny crustacean, and
it eats it. So it is a predator, which I
always I find it just a little extra creepy whenever

(12:10):
we find something that's weird looking that is a predator. Mm. Yeah,
it's very sneaky. It doesn't look ferocious. No, it looks
like you could just sort of step on it and
move on. I mean we could. But how big is
this thing? Is it like the size of a bathtub
or the size of your hand. Gosh, if it was,
I would just I would leave Earth. But no, it's

(12:34):
this one species very inside, this one, the voritus species
is about I think it's a Yeah, it's fifteen centimeters
long or around six inches long, so it's not that big,
but it's also not like microscopic, so it's it is.
It is a thing, right Like, I feel like six

(12:55):
inches is definitely a threshold for me where if I
find it crawling on me, I'm up set. Especially if
it hunts in packs, right, like, five thousand of these
things could probably take you down. Well, I don't know
that they hunt in packs, but they do congregate, so
especially for mating. Now, there are many species of Malibe

(13:16):
that are found throughout the Indo Pacific tropical oceans. One
of them is called Malibe leoneida. It is it can
vary from sort of a greenish color to a pinkish color,
and they can sometimes be found in these large clusters
in kelp forests. And they are probably clustered like this

(13:39):
because they are exchanging genetic information with each other and
a big party. They are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning that they
have both male and female gonads at the same time,
and like other species of malibe, they do mate together
and fertilize their eggs internally, which they will lay in

(14:00):
long ribbon like strands, so you know they have a
fun and free love life. And do biologists speculate that
if there are oceans on other planets that life may
have formed in that the same sort of structures may arise.
Do they think these things are inevitable? Like do we
see multiple convergent forms of evolution getting to this sort

(14:22):
of structure on Earth? Or is there just like one
example here and it may be weird? You know, it's
interesting because there are I don't think all biologists are
agree on this, but I have seen and I personally
kind of subscribe to this idea that there are things
that happen so frequently that if you have similar circumstances, Right,

(14:44):
if you have a planet that has conditions similar to
Earth and you're lucky enough to get that primordial soup
or like I've probably talked about on the show before,
it's probably more of a primordial baklava, just these layers
of mineral or rock in between which these little protein
chains kind of hide out and form these chains and

(15:06):
then are able to start to create sort of the
building blocks of life, the DNA strands. And so once
you have that, I think a lot of these structures,
given the same pressures, are pretty inevitable. So, for instance,
one of the I don't know if you can describe
it as alien because it's so familiar to us, but

(15:29):
it is very strange is the octopus. And when we
see the octopus, we're like, oh, it's like a little
noodly puppy that we found in the seat. Because it's
got these big eyes. It's very kind of curious. You
can sort of almost feel the octopus's emotions in a
way by watching its body language. There's this idea that

(15:51):
maybe they dream because they change their color patterns in
their sleep, and it seems to be like maybe they're
having a dream about hunting because the color patterns on
their skin they're chromatophores that change color, are do sort
of a hunting pattern while they're asleep, and then they play.
They like will toss objects in water over and over again,

(16:14):
which seems pretty indicative that they're doing it for fun.
And they have evolved completely independently from almost all life
on sort of the terrestrial part of Earth, Like we
diverged from octopuses back from like basically a flat worm stage,

(16:35):
like from this little tiny worm. So they evolved all
these things independently, like these complex eyeballs. They're complex brains.
They evolved that independently from all mammals, all reptiles, birds,
other fish. So this idea that isn't that like a
really hopeful sign for those of us who are looking

(16:56):
forward to talking to aliens and intelligence sort of evolves
in two different environments and ends up sort of similar. Yeah,
I think it is, and I think that I think
what we have to think about in terms of intelligence
is like when we communicate with other animals, it can
be really difficult, especially when we try to communicate using

(17:19):
human like communication methods. So there's these famous examples of
trying to teach primate sign language and so far really
hasn't worked that well. There's the stories of like Coco
the gorilla and nim Chimski the chimpanzee, And even though

(17:40):
there was a lot of sort of pr about Coco
of having the sign language work, it wasn't really clear
that it did. The project with nim Chimsky really didn't
work out that well. And I think the deploy on
Gnome Chomsky it is because it was actually they named
it as sort of a a tse, a little bit

(18:00):
of a jape making fun of Noam chompsy because they
were trying to, I think, prove Noam Chomsky wrong to
say that no chimpanzees could learn a human syntax, whereas g.
Noam Chomsky was skeptical of the idea that primate language
has some of the necessary characteristics that human language has.

(18:22):
And ultimately, I think in their their project wasn't very good.
It wasn't well designed. I mean, neither of these sign
language projects with either of these apes were particularly well designed,
so it's hard you know they were not. It was
not a good study. It was not like a double
blind study because like the caretakers really loved the like

(18:43):
Coco the gorilla, and so when they would interpret the signs,
they would maybe a lot of it would be sort
of what they are sort of interpreting in that situation.
So there was not really any evidence that the primates
could use sign language in the way that humans could.
But I think that it is a little bit of
hubris for us to think that we could communicate with

(19:07):
something by making them come to us and use like
our form of language. And like, Also, it was pretty
weird because the all the sign language studies were done
sort of without the input of people who actually use
sign language. So the death community was not super involved
with these experiments. And sign language is not just like

(19:31):
verbal language that's been put on your hands. It's got
its whole own unique syntax and like it's a very
unique language itself. And so we have this idea that
you can just kind of take another either form of
language or different type of intelligence and then plaster it
over our own or use some kind of translation technique

(19:54):
and then kind of just be able to understand it
or communicate by doing that. But I think we have
to be more flexible in that, and we would have
to figure out how to meet them at least halfway, right,
How do you communicate with a primate without forcing it
into learning a human language. How do we kind of

(20:15):
figure out what their communication style is? Can we actually
meet them somewhere in the middle there kind of like
I feel like anyone who owns a pet has experienced
this where it's like if you try to talk to
your dog using English, like, hey, don't do that. You know,
they don't know what you're talking about. You know, they
might respond your tone of voice a little bit, but
ultimately they don't understand. But if you learn kind of

(20:38):
their method of communication, right, Like I've learned sometimes when
my dog is upset, if I just sort of comfortingly
say like, oh, it's okay, like that doesn't do anything.
But if I do a dog body language thing like
do you sort of a play bow or do a
little sort of a play bark or something that actually

(20:58):
perks her up gets her to calm down more, because
I think we have to hear you speak, dog, what's
a playbark? Sound like? It sounds like and she loves that,
And so you're kind of like, so you're using your
and you know she's coming halfway to me, right because
she knows when I say sit, stay, you know, so

(21:19):
she's trying to understand me. So I owe it to
her to try to understand her. And I think that
is a lesson we can learn from our own animals.
If we're ever fortunate enough to actually come into contact
with aliens, I think we need to really understand that
we may have to work very hard to reach a

(21:40):
midway point where we can both be understood, and we
might still have to pick up their poop, even but
alien poop might be nice like smell like flowers or
pancakes or communion wafers or something. What if pancakes has
just been alien poops the whole time, But if pancakes

(22:02):
are aliens and we've been eating them and they're mad, No,
I think the takeaway is that you're saying intelligence may
not be that unusual, but even intelligence here on Earth,
it's hard to cross that barrier from our sort of
mental frame to theirs, which makes me less less enthusiastic
or less optimistic that we could learn to communicate with aliens, unless,

(22:23):
of course, we fall in love with them first. I'm
still optimistic that we could. I think it would just
take a It would take a kind of flexibility, like
we can't necessarily just expect to be able to decrypt
some kind of alien language. We may have to figure
out an entirely new method of communication. But I think

(22:43):
it can be done. Now back to this wonderful new
to brank. I did promise I was going to talk
about piles of snot and here we go. So Malibe Kolmani,
which is one of these weird new to branks, the
ones that look like a pancake mixed with one of
those like sticky hands that you throw at the wall.

(23:07):
They are found near Malaysia, and it is dubbed the
Holy Grail of newda Branks because a lot of nature
photographers think it is the weirdest looking thing also the
hardest to actually spot. It is described as looking like
a pile of strings or snot so. Its body is

(23:28):
actually mostly transparent, like really weirdly transparent, almost completely see through,
except for this network of tubes visible throughout its ghostly body.
It's kind of like do you know the Bodies exhibition
where they show like the human circulatory system just kind
of like on its own. It kind of looks like that.

(23:51):
I've never been to the Body's exhibit because it scares
the pants off at me. I couldn't. But this is
like that, Like you see this network of tubes and
it just it doesn't look like it has a body
because it's so translucent. The tubes that you're seeing are
actually digestive glands, and this see through appearance, and then

(24:15):
these digestive glands may act as camouflage, making the nutabrinc
look like just a pile of debris, nothing interesting. It
looks to me like some sort of delicate fungus, like
it might be good pizza. It would be a very
interesting mouth feel to eat one of these. I bet

(24:36):
what's interesting about this and makes me think of aliens
is that when you look at this, what all we're
really seeing are its digestive glands, because that's all we
can see, and so our understanding of what this creature
is is only based on the thing that we can see.
And I know that in astrophysics and particle physics sometimes

(24:59):
it's hard to to see something, or our perception of
the thing that we're seeing in the universe is made
more complex by the fact that we're only seeing a
part of the truth. And then the real meat of
the thing, whether it's like a black hole or a
planetary body, is only really defined by the stuff that

(25:20):
we see around it, the stuff that we see that
is visible. Like we can see the outline of this
sea slug by its digestive system, but we can't actually
see the flesh of the sea slug. It's sort of weird.
I always wonder why things become transparent, like evolutionarily, why
would you want people to get to see your inner bits.

(25:43):
It sort of makes you more vulnerable or like they
know like where to bite you to get you. It
seems to be like a. It's a nice defense layer
to not be transparent. It's an interesting idea because a
lot of times transparency helps as sort of pattern and disruption. Right,
So if you are, say neuter brank shaped, something that

(26:07):
sees you is going to have an instinct to go
after that pattern, like, this is a pattern. I recognize.
This slug shape is good. It's like when you see
something that is vaguely bagel shaped or spaghetti shaped, you're like,
that's food. I eat that. But then if it's sort
of transparent, but you only see the inner workings of it,

(26:29):
especially when it's kind of like huddled up somewhere, like
with these photos, the photographers are intentionally trying to get
it against a more neutral background so that you can
actually see what it is. But in the first photo
you can see it's kind of just intermingled with a
bunch of coral. And so because there's no clear pattern
to this thing, it's not necessarily going to register. So

(26:52):
even if you could technically see its inner workings, it
has disrupted the typical pattern that predators look for. And
so you actually see this also in frogs like glass
frogs that are transparent, like to us, it's like, oh, well,
you can see all of its little organs going like
you would know where to if you were a froggy murderer,
you'd know exactly where to stab. But if you're a predator,

(27:14):
you're not really looking for a frog heart. You are
looking for frog shape. And if that's not pattern matching
to what you imagine a frog to look like, you
are less likely to have your predator instinct triggered, and
then you are not going to go after it. So
tell me about this weird thing? What about this makes

(27:35):
you feel like aliens? One gives you an alien vibe?
About this just because it's weird? Or is there something
specifically about it that if you saw it, you think like,
is this extraterrestrial? I think what makes me think about
aliens is if we ever find an alien, there may
be parts of the alien that are not visible to

(27:55):
us or detectable to us, and only other only certain
other parts of the aliens. Like what if we are
only able to see certain aspects of the alien when
we think that we either don't recognize it as alien
life or don't recognize that, hey, this is just its
digestive system, whereas the rest of it is either not visible,

(28:17):
or some other kind of weird thing going on. I mean, like,
you know, there's a lot of weird stuff in the
universe like that I barely understand in terms of matter. Now,
in terms of biology, I find it difficult to believe
that an animal could exist on some other dimension than

(28:39):
just one. But you know, there's so much I don't
know about the universe, and especially like how life could
be presented in the universe, that I could believe that
we might if we ever see an alien. We might
only see sort of traces of it or evidence that
it's there, But then we can't actually see the alien
itself because it is not It exists in a way

(29:03):
that is not perceivable by our eyes or by our instruments.
And maybe even these weird little guys have aspects to
them that we can't see. Who knows. I mean, we
are always discovering new things about animals that we even
know about that are not visible to us. There are
animals that biofluoress that we are just discovering, not because

(29:26):
we lacked the technology to see it before, but because
we lacked the creativity to collect a bunch of roadkill
and then flash UV lights on it to see if
they glowed. And now that we're doing that, we're finding
a lot of animals biofluoress that we didn't realize that
they did, and we had no way of knowing until
we actually looked for it. What kind of roadkill? What

(29:48):
kind of road kill glues in the dark? Well, I
mean platypuses glow in the dark. I think wombats glow
in the dark. I think Tasmanian devils, sharks, some issues
of shark, some species of frog. So yeah, there's a lot.
It's a great lesson that even critters here on Earth

(30:09):
can do things that we can't imagine, and so of
course aliens might be doing even stranger things out there.
Right exactly, Well, we are going to take a quick break,
but when we get back, we're gonna look at a
pretty fishy alien. So we are talking now about anomalops

(30:31):
ketop tron. In the light of the day or in
a flashlight, this looks like a pretty normal fish. It's
not that exciting. So why am I bringing it up.
I don't know. I want to bore you. So it
grows to be about fourteen inches long or thirty five centimeters.

(30:52):
It has brownish scales, black fins, and other than having
pretty large eyes, it's really not that interesting looking. But
it doesn't really live in the sunlight. It is actually
found in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean at depths
up to one thousand, three hundred feet or around four

(31:13):
hundred meters, and it lives mostly in sort of dark caves,
and in the dark they look really spooky. They look
like fishy aliens with evil glowing eyes. It is also
known as the split fin flashlight fish, which shows you

(31:33):
that scientists aren't exactly always wordsmiths. We know scientists are
terrible at coming up with names for things, but this
one does look like a really creepy fish. It looks
like a fish somebody stepped on and it got mad. Yeah,
I mean. The thing that strikes me about the eyes is,
you know, sort of like our perception of what an

(31:58):
alien looks like the cartoon alien, it's like maybe a
gray head and then two sort of mean green glowing eyes.
They kind of have the spider Man mask look on them,
where it's like, you know, just these angry green eyes
and they're glowing and they're big, and this looks exactly
like that. This just looks like the angry alien eyes

(32:21):
that I see sort of in cartoonish depictions of aliens,
and that tells you something about like our whole vision
of aliens. You know, when people reach for the concept
of an alien, maybe they're really just thinking about the
weirdest kind of critter they've ever seen, which means we
haven't even really done the job imaginationally of coming up

(32:41):
with an idea that is truly beyond our planet. I
have a completely unverified theory about glowing alien, big glowing
alien eyes, and that I think it taps into maybe
a fear we had going way back of eyes that
we could see at dust or at night that would glow.

(33:03):
Have that it eyes that glow at night that belong
to like mammals, usually big cats. They glow because they
have something called the tepetum lucidum, and it's light kind
of enters the eye and it does this double refraction
so that you get more light in the eye so
they can see better, but also that light is reflected

(33:25):
back out and that's why the light glows. But a
lot of predators have this so they can see at night,
and so us as either early humans or human ancestors
like when you see big glowing eyes at night, that's
a predator probably looking at you. Especially if they're front

(33:45):
facing glowing eyes, that's probably from some kind of predator that's,
you know, stalking you. And so I think that big
glowing eyes probably inspire a bit of fear in us
that might go back way way before we ever even
had a concept of aliens. And so are you saying
if we meet the aliens and their eyes glow, they're

(34:07):
more likely to be predators. If their eyes face forward,
they're also more likely to be predators. So anything that
looks like us we should be afraid of. If humans
get off that ship, then run run. So these glowing
eyes are actually not eyes at all. These are glowing

(34:31):
sacks of bioluminescent bacteria. Yuck. Yeah, I mean, you know,
like a kombucha that kind of got out of hand,
am I. Let's say, yuck the kombucha also not on
the kombucha train. Look, I'm very sensitive to like strong flavors,
especially strong sour flavors. I can't deal with yogurt. I

(34:55):
think that I think it has I have some instinctive
response to something that taste spoiled, and I get a
kind of gag reflex, So now I get it. But
the weird thing about this, right, I just told you
that these aren't eyes, But if you look at that
gift that I sent you, I'll also make all of

(35:17):
these available in the show notes. It is blinking. It's
blinking that big glowing not an eyeball. So it actually
has a flap of skin and muscle that can contract
and blink. So you look at this and you're like, oh,
maybe this is just a bioluminescent patch, but then it
blinks at you and it really looks like an eyeball.

(35:42):
Now it is. It has puzzled researchers for a long
time as to why they can blink these eyes. There
are currently a few theories. But Daniel, do you have
any ideas for why they might want to blink this
bioluminescent patch. Yeah, I think they're charging up their laser
beams to fry you. I mean they do. I think

(36:05):
it's a fully I think it's a fully operational death fish.
I mean it looks that way. And also the eyes
look angry. They look not just angry, they look malevolent.
They look like little demon fish that are plotting our downfall. Well,
so this blinking is not done like how we blink
our eyes. So we blink our eyes mainly to sort

(36:27):
of remoisturize them to clean them so that we don't
go around and just get sticky dust and junk in
our very delicate, sensitive eyes all the time. This blinking
seems to be a mysterious morse code that changes depending
on what they are looking at, So it seems to

(36:49):
be both a form of communication, camouflage, and also to
be able to hunt their prey. Fortunately for us, they
hunt zooplankton at this time and not people. What if
some of your listeners are zooplankton, Now they're freaked out. Oh,
I apologize to all my zooplankton listeners, but they're so

(37:10):
small they can't rate my podcasts, so I'm not too
worried about that. They look downloads are downloads, all right.
So researchers have found that these fish blink at different
rates when presented with prey, with predators, and in the
company of their school, their group of fish. So these

(37:32):
blinking rates seem to have an impact on the behavior
of their school. So like they seem to blink at
different rates and that changes which direction the school goes
whether they stay or whether they kind of dart off
in another direction. And we haven't really decoded what the
flashlight fish is Morse code is, but we suspect it

(37:55):
has some kind of communication with its school. And it's
also blinked when a predators around to sort of put
it off its track, like blinking at a rate that
confuses the predator. And then it also blinks when it
is around it's prey, so that it can see the
prey but also doesn't scare off the prey. Well, I'm

(38:20):
glad there's some explanation for this creeping is. I love
the angle on these eyes, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, classic,
like classic bad guy, you know, glowing evil eyes. I
just I do love that we know they have a
Morse code, and we suspect that they are communicating with it,
but we don't know what it is yet. And I

(38:42):
really wonder what we will find out if we ever
decode this blinking language that these fish have and what
they've been saying about us behind our backs. Maybe we
should show it to gnom Chimski. Maybe the chimp can decoded, right,
Maybe all these other creatures on Earth has language that
we don't understand we're all talking about us. I do

(39:03):
love the idea of Nim Chimsky becoming a linguist but
also a chimpanzee at the same time. I want to
I want to see Chomsky versus Chimsky. I mean, if
Nim Chimsky wasn't I believe dead at this point, that
would be no contest that chimp would definitely win. I mean, Chomsky,

(39:25):
are you talking about? Chomsky is still sharp. We've had
him on our podcast in a debate maybe Noam Chomsky,
and when if it was a wrestling match, Chomsky would
be torn to shreds. That's terrible. I don't even want
to imagine wrestling a chimp. Oh my god. I know

(39:46):
if you've seen Noam Chomsky recently, he looks like a
very ancient Santa Clause, and I feel very protective. I
will protect him from chimps. I'm gonna go have a
communion way for to cleanse my mental power after that image.
Didn't you you got didn't you get a statement from
Nom Chomsky at one point for one of your books. Yeah? Absolutely.

(40:10):
He was on our podcast and we were talking to
him about how to communicate with aliens and whether they
are likely to speak our language or use mathematics. He's
a surprisingly responsive guy. You could just email him and
he writes back, Oh, that's so nice. He's such a
sweet guy. I feel bad that I even imagined chimpanzee
harming Nom Chomsky. You've offended me and all the Zooplankton listeners,

(40:36):
and really, who else is left? Please don't tell Noam
Chomsky that I had talked about no Chimsky tearing him
limb from limb. I don't think he would appreciate that.
We wish him nothing but the best, exactly. So now

(40:56):
on to our last alien looking animal. I'm actually not sure.
I feel like I'm between this looking like an alien
or looking more like a galaxy or a quasar. This
is the Lion's main jellyfish, and it is one of
the largest jellyfish in the world and one of the
longest animals in the world. How big is it? I

(41:17):
can see from the picture that it's like long and beautiful,
but I can't tell if it's like three inches long
or like thirty feet long. Yeah. So there's a whole
range of these jellyfish, and a lot of the jellyfish
that will be found will be smaller, but there are
ones that can grow to gargantuan sizes. So the bell,
which is that cuplike shape on the top of the jellyfish,

(41:41):
grows up to two point one meters or seven feet
in diameter, and it's tentacles can grow to be around
thirty seven meters or one hundred and twenty feet long.
Oh my gosh, wow. And they have over a thousand tentacles.

(42:03):
So it just looks like this forest of things. It
looks like I mean when you look when we look
at the colorized photos of other galaxies or you know,
just these like clouds of material in the universe. To me,
it kind of looks a little bit like this thing.

(42:24):
But if this thing is like meters and meters long
and there's thousands of them, then you're telling me it's
like tens of thousands of total tentacle for a single
for a single critter. So if each tentacle is like
thirty seven meters and there's thousands of them, then you
have like thirty seven thousand total meters. Yeah. Yeah, you

(42:44):
could probably wrap one of these guys around like the moon.
Not that I'm saying you should. That would be animal cruelty.
But yeah, and they do contain stinging cells, which sounds
like a super bad time. Fortunately, the lion Maine jelly's

(43:05):
sting is not that potent, so it's not that dangerous
to humans. In fact, in small amounts, it may just
feel kind of like a tingling, warm sensation maybe followed
by a bit of discomfort with a lot of contact.
Like if you just dive put your whole body into

(43:26):
the forest of its tentacles, then you're probably going to
have a bad time. You're probably going to experience a
good amount of pain, and you'll probably want to go
to a hospital, if not just to check in on
why you are diving into a forest of tentacles. But
these actually don't really kill people. It's really rare that

(43:49):
it hurts people that badly because they just really aren't
that potent. But they are so huge they can have
a number of victims that they annoy. A single Lion's
main jellyfish is so large. One specimen that kind of disintegrated,
it broke up, ended up stinging over one hundred and

(44:12):
fifty people at a beach in Rye, New Hampshire. So
this thing just kind of like broke up and all
of its stinging tentacles and everything started floating around, and
just one hundred and fifty people ended up in this
dead jellyfish soup and got stunned. Yeah. See, I'm telling
you it's kilometers of pain. Kilometers of pain. That sounds

(44:37):
like a really moody book by like by a jellyfish
alien exactly. Yeah. And when it's out of the water.
In the water, it just looks like this weird spectral
floaty ectoplasmic thing. And out of the water it kind
of loses its form. It's so gelatinous and so sticky,

(45:00):
it just kind of turns into what looks like a
pile of liquid jelly and it is. It's just very
it's a very strange looking thing. Now, if you google
Lion's main jellyfish, you might see a photo of it
that it's actually photoshopped, where like it's this tiny scuba

(45:21):
diver next to this giant jellyfish. I think that jellyfish
itself is a real photo. They've just like made the
scale make it look more impressive. But that photo is fake. However,
like I said before, they can get to be huge.
So I don't know why people put out fake stuff
about animals that are really actually extremely cool. Yeah, exactly,

(45:43):
the reality is weird enough people, exactly exactly, But like,
do you think, because like this thing makes me think
of just a an entire galaxy or quaisar if there
is an animal or an intelligence that arises out of
like a massive amount of material out there in the galaxy,

(46:07):
if they have some kind of communication or relationship in
terms of like physics, what like I think there's this
idea of like, well, what if you could have some
kind of consciousness that's like this big thing that arises
from these maybe planetary bodies or stars in space that
are responding to each other and communicating via these sort

(46:30):
of like the just the laws of astrophysics. Well, if
that's the case, it would be thinking extremely slowly because
remember there's a speed limit to how fast information can
move through the universe, the speed of light, And so
if something is really really big, it'd have to think
basically really really slow because like a thought would take
you know, a thousand years to cross from one side

(46:52):
of its brain to another if it's a thousand light
years wide. So it would be pretty hard to have
a conversation with like a galaxy sized jellyfish be like
talking to a tree in or something. I mean, that's
really interesting to be because you know, if that is
the case, you know, that would explain why we don't
have a galaxy talking to us like hey humans, yeah

(47:15):
we're over here. But it's also reminds me of in animals,
there is this concept of sort of a different way
that different animals experience time. So it's something called flicker
fusion rate, which is like the amount of information you
can receive before it all starts to kind of blend together,
so the amount of frames per second you can experience.

(47:38):
So something like a fly, one of the reasons you
can't catch it like smack it is that it can
experience a lot of frames per second, which actually slows
things down for it, and then having fewer frames of
a second actually speeds things up. So something like a
fly is experiencing things really slowly, so when you try

(48:01):
to slap it down, it sees your hand moving towards it,
you know, really slowly. This this is the theory behind
like flicker fusion rate, whereas something like an elephant actually
uh is seeing you know, potentially has a sees things
happening much faster. Around it, So, uh, it is maybe

(48:24):
seeing like smaller animals just kind of like you know,
going high speed around it, whereas it's moving very slowly
and it's got a lower frame rate and uh, and
it maybe is experiencing all the world around it going
really fast, um, whereas it's going at its own pace.
So it's that's an interesting idea for me to be

(48:45):
applied to. Like what if there are aliens out there
or some kind of alien intelligence that spans over some
large area in a in a non conventional way that
we we don't think of. Intelligence is something that could
happen outside of just like an animal or organic creature,

(49:06):
but there could be some huge intelligence. It's just thinking
so slowly and on such a slower rate we can't
really communicate with it. Yeah, exactly. I feel that way
as I get older, Like younger kids just like flipped
by me and I'm just like, what was that? Oh
that was my toddler. Yeah, Now that's that's how I

(49:29):
feel like with language, Like I used to be able
to catch on to slang a lot faster, but now
it's like, wait, we're not saying fleek anymore. Really, by
the time you and I are saying it. It's definitely
it's gone not cool anymore. In fact, it might be
because we're saying it that it's no longer cool. That's
how you know it's jumped the shark. Well, before we go,

(49:53):
we do have to play a little game called the
Mystery Animal Sound Game or Guess Who squawk in So
every week I play a mystery animal sound and you,
the guest and the listener try to guess who is
making that sound. It could be any animal on Earth

(50:13):
or outside of Earth. I'm not I'm just saying if
we ever hear aliens, they're fair game for this game.
So last week's mystery animal sound hint was this. This
is one peeved, pissed, particularly provoked pond paddler. Did you

(50:36):
hear that? I did? It sounds like some kind of
bird in distress. I'm gonna say it's a heron. You're
weirdly close but also weirdly far away because this is
the platypus. So congratulations to Antib and Joey P who

(51:00):
I think are the rating champions of the animal gissing game.
So the platypus is a monotrem found in Australia, like
a heron. It lays eggs, and it actually has a bill,
but unlike the heron, it is a mammal. These are
warm blooded mammals that lay eggs. This is the same

(51:24):
thing that other monotreams do. So montreams include platypuses and
a kidnas and in a lot of ways they are
like the rust of mammals, but in some ways they
are very strange, such as laying their eggs, and also
they do not have nipples, but they do provide their
young with milk, and they do that by releasing the

(51:46):
milk through pores in their skin. Another weird platypus thing
is that males have venomous spurs on their hind legs
that are incredibly painful, probably worse than the lion maine jellies.
So you have more to worry about in terms of
getting stung from a cute little platypus than you do

(52:06):
from a gargantuan jellyfish. So the best thing about platypuses,
in my opinion, is that they have electoral reception. They
can actually sense small electrical impulses through the water with
an organ in its bill, and it can locate prey
such as worms or other invertebrates, even in muddy water,

(52:27):
by detecting the electrical pulses of their muscle movements. So
that is an incredible thing with these platypuses, and it
makes me wonder if like there are aliens out there
that have senses that humans don't have that makes it
easier for them to see us, but we can't see them. Wow, exactly. Yeah,

(52:49):
there might be parts of the universe that they can
see that we can't, and so we might like weirdly
glow in their senses. I just I wonder if there's
like a corner of the universe where all other life
is and they're having a big old party they have,
like you know, an interplanetary convention, and we're just not
invited because we're too far away, I know, or maybe

(53:11):
we're just not cool. We're not saying you aren't kind
of sling. That's that is planetary levels of fomo. I
cannot handle that well. I do know from a physics
perspective that every time we look deep into the universe,
we find something weird and new and totally surprising that
nobody on Earth anticipated. So I expect that if we

(53:32):
ever do get to see the surface of alien planets.
The same thing will happen so onto this week's since
thory animals sound the hint is this a tiny wolf
or something else? So, Daniel, do you have any guesses
as to what that sounds like? A koala bear taking

(53:57):
communion as it gets on a ufore, maybe no idea.
You may be right, but you'll only find out on
next week's Creature Feature. Danielle, thank you so much for
joining me today, listeners. If you think you know what
this week's mystery animals sound is, you can write to

(54:18):
me at Creature Feature pot at gmail dot com. Daniel.
Where can people find out more about you and about
the universe? You can come check out our podcast at
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe of production of iHeartRadio
wherever you get your podcast. And thank you guys so
much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you

(54:42):
leave a rating or review, I read all of them,
I print them out, I plaster my walls with them,
and it is making my husband very nervous as to
how it's gone with me. And thanks, so be nice, y'all.
Be nice when you leave a rating. There's real people
out there reading the and thanks to the Space Classics

(55:02):
for their super awesome song Exo Lumina. Creature features a
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