May 7, 2025 • 53 mins
Nightmare noodles! Terror tubes! We talk about some of the strangest, creepiest, most ghoulish caterpillars and worms in the world! From the dreaded bone collector with a morbid fashion sense, to worms with a mouth full of copper. Discover this and more as we answer the age-old question: who is a squid's midwife? Joining me is friend of the show and comedy writer for American Dad, Soren Bowie!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome the 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 Upsetting Spaghetti. These are tubular
creatures that just don't feel right, but maybe they'll worm
your way into your heart. From a morbid fashionista to
(00:27):
an obg wormman, these worms are a bit odd, and
one of them is definitely metal. Discover this and more
as we answer the age old question why not live
your life in a bag? Joining me today is friend
of the show, writer for American Dad and the Soorin
part of Quick Question with Soorn and Daniel Soren. Booie, welcome, boo,
(00:50):
boo boo.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
We hate him.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
We're booing sorn Or.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
We're booing I'm going Sorn.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I like to imagine that the very worst of my
haters listen, and then I win them back. So right,
I psack myself up by booing myself to begin.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
That makes a lot of sense. I psych myself up
by booing you as well.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
It feels good, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I just feel really good. I suggest everyone try it,
Booing Soren, so Soren. Today we are talking about it's
not just worms. That's why I'm calling them spaghetti because
they're they're the animals that come in tube form. And
there's a lot of different types of tube anels.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Terrible tubes, the terrible nightmare noodles.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Nightmare noodles. That's a good one. That's a really good one.
And this first story is one that you might have read, actually,
because it's in the New York Times, which is like a.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Little pretty much guarantee I didn't.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
You're more of a Wall Street Journal kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Then I like to say that I am. I do
tell people frequently when I find out new facts that
I read it somewhere, when what I really mean is
that I was scrolling through TikTok and.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
So yeah, yeah, well, this is a this is a
it's a newspaper, which is sort of a okay, both
a physical sometimes an online medium where there's like words
on a page and sometimes pictures. And this time they
had pictures of something pretty horrible looking called a bone
(02:36):
collector caterpillar, a bone collector.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
There's a movie called The Bone Collector. Yeah, there is.
Let's see right.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Now, bone collector.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Let's see if I'm right about this. I think it's
a Denzel Washington movie.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
You're correct about that, and in it he is.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
It's tough to say. Maybe he's an undertaker who's secretly
really good at fighting. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Uh, well, no, it's close. But he's a forensics expert
whose bed bound after an accident left him paralyzed from
the neck down. So you know, close.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
And not doing the same job as No. Yeah, apparently
in Nightmare Noodles, close is cigar?
Speaker 1 (03:21):
So close is cigar? That is? I've heard that expression
actually before. So the bone collector caterpillar was featured in
the New York Times because it's one of these animals
that does freak stuff that we all love, and there's
this one. Is It's interesting because there are actually a
lot of caterpillars like this that will craft a case
(03:47):
around themselves. It's a protective case. And we'll get into
what the bone collector does specifically. But first of me
just talk to you about bagworms for a bit. Can
I talk to you about bagworms. I've been dying to
talk to you about bagworms.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I'd love to hear about bagworms. First. I'm going to
put a little pin in my bone collectors and i
want to hear.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
We will get back. We'll get back to the bone
collector after this brief announcement from bagworms. So, there are
quite a few species of moths who when they are
in their larval juvenile form, they build elaborate cases around
themselves using some of their sticky silk, sometimes poop as
(04:25):
like an adhesive and then you know the old poop
adhesive trick, and then silk, and they will make it
out of basically whatever is most common in their environment.
It can be sticks, it can be sand like in
whatever they have available to them, and they craft these
very elaborate cases like this, almost like a house, around
(04:47):
themselves to protect them. And they're really interesting because the
males do what you would think are typical of moths.
They pupate inside of these cases and they burst out
and their little moths and they go around. But the
females don't bother with any of that. They stay in
(05:08):
the case that they make for life, don't bother pewpating
going out exploring the world. They just stay in their bag,
and the males come and find them and mate with them,
and the females lay their eggs in the bag and
then they're like well, I've done pretty much everything I've
set out to do in life, and they die, and
(05:29):
so they spend their entire life in this bag that
they create. Yeah, just chilling, and while the males are
kind of going around doing all the active moth stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
I can't do that, I guess. I mean, I've definitely
been on trips before, I've been in a sleeping bag
and in the morning night they're like, we got to
get up, and I'm like, you know what what I
just what if I lived here forever?
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah? What if I lived here, laid some eggs and
then died. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
People just came to me and like, right, I got
all the stuff done in the world that I need
to do from the sleeping bag.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
It's I've heard, like I'm I'm not super up to
date with what the kids are talking about on TikTok,
but I know there's this idea of girl rotting where
it's you spend all day in your bed. I read
about that, yeah, on on the New York Times.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yep, they write they write an impact bold on the
New York Times, right.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Right, right, Yeah, they definitely do with an outline and
with like a penguin in the middle of it. The Yeah,
so this, I think this we all got to pack
it up. Girl rotting is over because these bagworms have
already mastered it. So it's it's over. We've done it
peak girl rotting. So onto the bone collector caterpillar. So
(06:40):
similar to bagworms, they build a case around themselves out
of materials that they have available. Those materials just happen
to be their own murder victims. So this is found
on the beautiful island of Hawaii. Bone collector caterpillars are
the juvenile form of hyposmoke coma moths, which when they're adults,
(07:04):
they just kind of look like, I don't know, little
tiny scrappy moths. They're not very impressive to be honest. Yeah,
but the moth larvae are carnivorous and they basically do
an ed geen thing where they use the corpses of
their victims as a costume that they wear.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I'm looking at it now, it just got it's a
it's just wearing trophies of the things.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
That yes, yes, and it does. It does this in
a very meticulous way. It doesn't just slap them on.
It kind of makes sure it's rotated correctly and it
puts it on and even cuts them down to size.
If it's too big, they sort of well like, ah,
this head's a little bit too big. Chew, chew, chew. Okay,
now it's small enough, and I'll put it on where
(07:49):
it is a brooch?
Speaker 2 (07:51):
How is it getting it on its back like that?
Speaker 1 (07:54):
So it just like the other bagworms. It uses sticky
milk maybe feces to as an adhesive, and then it
kind of creates this It's almost like a cocoon, except
it lives in it and it can move around in it.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
It crawls around. Yeah, man, So what I'm looking at here,
it's a lot of legs. First of all, they are
leg heavy. There's like a lot of like looks like
cricket legs, and yeah, stuff like that. And then some
weavil heads and things, and they've covered their entire entire
body in the limbs of their enemies or like whatever
they killed.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
And then the moth itself, I mean you just undersell it.
It's got some kind of like fringy wings. It's yeah,
like a beautiful white fringe coming off of them.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
It's a little a little bit late, I can see that.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, yeah, certainly one is more or less horrified than
the other.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
El say that much for sure, And so they create
these elaborate cases out of the the exoskeletons of victims,
and the whole reason they do this is really really
weird and interesting. So they are carnivores, but they like
to work smarter, not harder, because they essentially they're moving
(09:12):
around relatively slowly in this big case that they make
around themselves, and they hang around spider webs, and they
the spider essentially does all the work right, creates the web,
catches insects in them, and the bone collector will go
up to a dead or dying insect and be like
(09:33):
great free lunch and either kill it or just eat
whatever the spider hasn't eaten or eat before the spider
has a chance to eat it. And then it takes
that dead insect or whatever it is arthur pod, and
once it's all sucked dry, it arranges it artfully on
(09:54):
its case, and now it looks like a pile of
dead bugs, which is totally not out of play on
a spider web, so essentially tricking the spider into thinking
that it's just a bunch of trash from its own
prey that it's eaten.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Our beautiful death mosaic, something nice to lighten up the
spider web. Yeah, why isn't Why aren't these maybe you
don't know the answer. Why aren't these caterpillars sticking to
the web?
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Well? They that's a really that is actually a good question.
I would think that given they are also a silk
producing animal, that they just have the skills to sort
of traverse the silk with their little little claws.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
They're wearing the right gloves.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
They've got the right gloves there. It is interesting because
they're The case that they build around them doesn't really
stick to the web. But I assume they're able to
just drag that along. They have the strength to drag
it along with their little bodies. Whereas an insect that
gets trapped in the web, probably it's going really fast,
not looking where it's flying, and then it's trapped in
(10:57):
there struggles gets even more wrapped up where the whereas
the bone collector is cool, it's collected, yeah, and you know,
isn't isn't it's it is expecting the sticky web and
probably knows how to navigate it.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
That makes sense. So there are a lot of caterpillars
that make sort of light, and I think it was
what you were describing. They make that like it is
a webby home. It's like a webby almost looks like
a snot. But I'll tell you a quick story. We're
camping in the desert, speaking of sleeping bags. We're camping
in the desert, and you put down a ground tarp
when you can't, but you always necessarily need something on top.
(11:33):
But the ground tarp is just a big piece of
waterproof plastic. But when stuff hits it, it makes obviously
a noise. And we're going to sleep one night and
we're just hearing this umbum on all the ground tarps,
and we're like, what is that noise? And we put
on our headlamps and realize that we are covered in caterpillars. Yes,
tons and tons of caterpillars on us, and like, oh,
(11:53):
they're falling from the sky. And then we looked up
and the tree above us, the tree was just in
taste in like basically one giant web and there were yeah,
hundreds of thousands of caterpillars in it, just falling from it.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
That's so, what did these caterpillars look like? Were they fuzzy?
What was their color? No?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I think so these were not. They were hairless, and
in my memory they were either brown or green, but
I can't remember which. And they're long, I mean they're
like pretty long, guys. They're probably like two inches two
and a half inches. But and they're in the deserts
of Utah. Okay, you know what any ideas I mean
(12:34):
I think and they sound like this.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
They sound like, oh my god, there's weird underneath her. Yeah,
they I mean I believe they would be a type
of social caterpillar. It's yeah, which social what it sounds like? Well,
I mean like that would be what they're called scientifically
as well, not just to compliment to them, like you're
a real social caterpillary, but in terms of their specific species,
(13:06):
I don't know exactly what species had live there, but yeah,
they're they're essentially called the type of caterpillar that is
are called a social caterpillars. And they do tend to
form large groups in trees, and some species do create
sort of almost like funnel like webs and stuff in
the trees.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah. Okay, and then and now I need to also
hijack your podcast to get to tell you a different
story about a nightmare caterpillar. There's there's something. There's an
elm tree in our neighbor's yard that uh this basically
come on this podcast to make sure that you can
answer questions for me that I sure.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Go for it if you have. If you have questions
out there that you would like me to answer, you
can write to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail
dot com and I'll answer all your caterpillar questions too.
Now go for it, soar and let's see if I
can answer this one.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
There's, uh, we have an elm tree that's near us,
and there's some type of caterpillar that really loves it,
loves it, and I know that it eventually will become
this black butterfly with maybe like some tinge on the
end of its wings that it's either white or yellow.
But when they're young there, when they're a caterpillar. There's
(14:17):
a bunch of them. My son found one and we
were like, let's let's get it to form its Let's see,
they're butterfly, so it would be a crystalist. Le's get
them to the form of their chrystalist in this jar.
And he was like he had it in the house
and he did definitely form into a chrysalis, and we're
just sort of waiting for it to hatch. While we
were waiting, it's this really menacing looking chrystalis. It has
(14:38):
like spikes on it and stuff. It looks really horrifying.
And while we were waiting, I broke my toe. My
daughter split her face open. I got it, had to
get an appendectomy on a Father's day. You gotta try it. Yeah,
(14:59):
and the kids do it. It's really fun. I hadn't ever.
And so while I was at the hospital waiting to
get my app indeck to me to call my wife
and I was like, is that is that chrystalis in
the house And she was like yeah. I was like,
please remove it. And I had this real feeling of
dread surrounding this because of all this confluence of terrible
(15:21):
events h and I wanted it gone. I wanted it
out of the house. And now I won't let my
son collect those a Another detail of these is that
they do form on the ouse they put they're on
in the eaves of our house. The caterpillars love to
set up their chrystals is there, and when they hatch
from them. They bleed out of it. So there's drops
of a really dark red blood all over the ground,
every underneath each one of these.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
That sounds like a good omen though.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Right I would, Yeah, you'd think so blood's always good, right,
that's a good omen.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
So that it's so that the Moses version of God
knows not to steal your children. Yeah, so that I
think that's the spiny elm caterpillar or it's they are
also which a fun thing is they're also known as
morning cloak butterflies. Yeah, so which is it seems really
(16:10):
also like a good omen to me.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, these are them, these are this is definitely the butterfly.
Let me see their crystalist too, morning cloak butterfly.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
They're like they're red and black, and the caterpillars themselves
are kind of spiny as well.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah yeah, yeah, this criz is the crystalist. These are horrifying.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, this is the thing. This is the thing that
broke my toe and made me take it curs organs
out of my body.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
It cursed you for uh imprisoning its chrysalis, by the.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Way, that would never even hatched. It was just there.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
It just remained a very vengeful goo inside.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, so I guess my question is is that that's true? Right?
They're bad, They're bad luck those ones, are they? You know?
Curse you? Well?
Speaker 1 (16:57):
You know, when caterpillars turn into a goo, they retained
some of their neural crust cells and they can remember things.
So I do believe that one cursed you in goo
form because it had a grudge.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I think probably. Yeah, I took it away from the
elm tree that it was on in our neighbor's guard
and we put it in a jar. Okay, I'm not
doing that.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Again, precious elm. That's right. So the the bone collector caterpillar,
the bagworm like caterpillar, they essentially they just cover themsells
in skulls of their enemies, which are you know, the exoskeletons.
So the spider doesn't recognize that it's a thing that
(17:39):
has a delicious treat inside and just chills with the spider,
steals its food and lives a great life. Apparently sounds great.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
I'm I love the idea of collecting. If I'm going
to be a dude, like a D and D campaign,
I'm collecting something from my enemy, I'm collecting some sort
of trophy and I'm wearing it the rest of the time.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
I like the idea of your armor just being a
bunch of skulls piled together, not just just you know,
your your entire chest breastplate is just a bunch of skulls,
your legs covered in a bunch of skulls, sort of
like the Michelin man. But it's all like skulls.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, and to leave just like you leave one open, right,
And then whenever you're fighting an enemy, you're like, this
is this is your spot. That's where you will go
exactly when I remove you from your bones?
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Right? Wait, no, remove your wait, who's the U?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
You're right though, just a horrifying way of putting it.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I think I just kind of thing where it's like, wait,
but are you wouldn't you be the bones? And it's like, no,
you're not the bones and the stuff in the bones? Yes, right, Well, man.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
See you off of these whoa.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
This is as trippy as when I saw the x
ray of my wisdom teeth trying to break into my
sinus cavities. I'm like, whoa, whoa, man, look at that
my own soul is betraying me and trying to kill me.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
You have swung a door open onto like a part
of your life I didn't know existed it, just like
you realize when you hear these things from other people.
Life has so many chapters.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
So many chapters, like the chapter where all four of
my wisdom teeth had to be removed and two of
them were growing into my sinus cavities with a vengeance,
trying to reach my brain in time before I got
rid of them.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
What a story. Yeah, right, that they were trying to
kill you, that's right.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
They were like, we will, we will find your brain.
And the orthodontist was not concerned at all. If you're wondering,
if you thought, like maybe he would be concerned that
my wisdom teeth were trying to grow into my sinus cavities.
Like I see it all the time. It happens all
the time. Don't worry about them, Like, am I gonna
have holes in there? Oh? Not serious ones?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah I had.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
He couldnt be less concerned. Yeah, we all take these out.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
They've seen it all. I had a lism teeth only
on the bottom. But when I tell the X ray
you see it obviously from silhouette from the side profile.
I mean, and one of them you could see, like
basically in the topography of the top of a tooth
coming directly at you. Yeah, And I was like that
seems wrong, and they're like, yeah, it's coming out sideways.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
I was like, Okay, they're so silly. Those are some
silly teeth. Yeah, wisdom.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, you don't know which Tame'm gonna come for you.
I'm ironically named. All right, Well, we're going to take
a quick break and then we're going to talk about
a more positive but equally disgusting worm tale.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
If I'm being honest, we're not going to get there.
I've got a lot more.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Stories sour in. There is a worm out there that,
without really meaning to, acts as a midwife to squits.
Do you need me to repeat that sentence or did
you get it the first time?
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Well, I guess I'm curious as to because they don't lactate,
so how what would we be doing to help raise
the young.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
I mean, no, they don't lactape. That's a really good
call when it comes to squids.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah, people always said about me every time I talk
about how squids dn't lactate. Yeah, calls good call.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Call, really you really, uh, you really nailed that squid fact. So, yeah,
it's it's a worm that helps the basically the young
squid in the birthing process like a like a midwife.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
And oh, I see, I see. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
So let's first talk about the squids, because the squid
themselves are freaks. They're called opalescent squid. They're found all
along the western coast of America from Mexico to British Columbia.
They're pretty common, and they're very squid like squids. They're
kind of gray, sort of opal esson. I suppose they
grow rapidly from two millimeter big hatchlings to about the
(21:53):
size of like a banana or a subway sandwich foot long,
which is like less than a foot long. Right, it's
definitely not a foot long, but it's the size of
the subway sandwich, so to about which takes them about
six to nine months, which is their lifespan. And so
they are similparius, which means they mate only once and
(22:15):
then they die. They mate in an ocean mash pit
situation where they all come together in this giant frenzy
and they all essentially exhaust themselves in this mating frenzy
and die shortly after.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
So orgy to death, big.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Orgy to death. And this is a surprisingly common tactic
among animals, particularly yeah, aquatic animals. So they the males
will grab the females with their tentacles, which flush red,
which is likely both a signal to the female being
like hey, I'm mating with you, how's it going, But
(22:53):
it's also a signal to the other males to back off,
where it's essentially like a red occupied sign. You know,
you go to the bathroom, the green turns to red,
a little occupied.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Occupied occupy.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Well, they're squid. It's close. It's very close. It's so
close though.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I'll go.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
So they yeah, they it's just a big mess. They're
all trying to mate with each other, and they the
male will when it's like it sounds really rough and intense,
but the actual mating is really innocent because the male
just hands the sperm packet to the female where he's
like here you go. Mel was like, okay, thank you,
(23:35):
and I can use it to fertilize her eggs.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Transaction complete, goodbye, yeah, transactional turn my limbs back to
their normal color.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Now, yeah, exactly. And so then they then the females
fertilize the eggs, and the eggs kind of come in
these white, kind of oblong cases, and they're just it
looks like a weird forest of all of this stuff.
It looks like a weird kind of coral like growth happening.
But it's all these egg cases. These females are laying
(24:06):
and then they all die, okay, and it's like a
feeding frenzy for scavengers because they are all these dead
squid that just did it. They've completed their life story.
They had lately their eggs and they're just like, well,
I'm I am extremely tired. I think I will just
take a nap, and by that I mean stop existing. Uh.
(24:30):
And so what happens is you have all these baby
squid and they just don't have any living parents who
are there for them. And it's the egg cases themselves
are have a smile the toxin in them which makes
them unpalatable. So that's why they don't all get eaten
on masks. Some animals, I think try to eat them.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
I mean, there's a real lesson there in terms of
like people who engage in orgies when they still have
when they have children in their life. You're just taught
impossible to be there for your kids when that's your lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
I mean, yeah, especially when it's underwater.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Mmm.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You know that's the key, that's I think a key
problem in this situation. So yeah, So for most right,
these egg cases are completely unappetizing except for a worm
called Capitella ovincola, which are small, white, pinkish. They're called polykeets.
(25:29):
These are marine worms that are just a couple millimeters long,
and after the eggs have some time to kind of ripen,
these are actually really attractive to these worms, and that
sounds like it would be bad news for the baby squid.
You have this worm, it's like, ooh, delicious egg cases.
But as it turns out, the worms will break into
(25:50):
the eggsack itself and they completely ignore the baby squid.
They're not at all interested in eating those. What they
do is they eat this gelatin like substance that separates
each squid embryo from the other. So it's like it
within the egg case are sort of smaller eggs inside,
and so the worm is eating the outside of these
(26:12):
smaller egg divisions within the egg case. And when the
squid is about ready to hatch. This allows the seawater
to come into the egg case and it oxygenates them.
It also helps weaken the basically the membrane of the
(26:32):
egg case, and it makes it easier for the little
squid to hatch, because otherwise it would be tough to
kind of punch their way out of the egg case.
So these worms, which don't at all hurt the squids,
just go in. They are like, ooh, snack and they
start eating what's essentially kind of like the placenta of
(26:53):
the of the squid. And then that helps the squid.
That helps the squid break free of their egg case.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Oh that's awesome. It's greazingatic relationship. I don't think that.
It's sort of sad to me that they will never
know the other one. You know, Yeah, the worm just
knows that here's a meal, and like and then then
the squid comes out. I was like, fuck, that was easy. Yeah,
life's gonna be good. Life's easy. Neither one of them
never know will know how much they helped the other, which.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Is like I'd like to think that there's like at
least a few of them who are preternaturally smart, and
they wave to each other like hey, what's up. I
know what's going on here. You and I we both
know what's going on here.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
The worm just waves its body.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, no one will know. No one will ever know.
They actually have all these like little bristly appendages all
along their bodies, so they could wave some of those
in a truly disturbing manner.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
But I didn't ate the outside of your chicken eggshell.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's a it's a beautiful symbiotic,
mutualistic relationship between these two.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
You need more of that in the world.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Right, Yeah, I'm saying more eaten membranes and less building walls.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Less. I don't want to see seagulls swooping down and
eating baby sea turtles. They just pick them up, lick
off the viscera, and just carry them gently to the sea.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Ah yeah, yeah, licking like I think that would be
nice if they, you know, licked off the viscera.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, all those eggshells they are full of that. Great still, just.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Like just have the viscera part, right, the sort of
the afterbirth, if you know, and you're.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
It's an investment honestly for those seagulls, because now you've
got more sea turtles that are gonna lay more eggs.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Right, and exactly. There's actually a fishing strategy for certain
types of squid where fishermen go towards the end of
their life cycle like this with the with the squid
where it's like, hey, after they've laid their eggs and
they're all going to die anyways, that's when we go
fish them because they're all going to die anyways, and
(29:07):
why not you.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Know, Yeah, they put them to good use, that's right here. Yeah,
I invite those in fight, all these creatures to eat
my body when I'm dead. Yeah, well you're welcome to it, squids,
because I also want to be cast into the sea.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, you know, turn about spare play right with the squid?
They like do you think they have little bibs but
with us on it when we are when when our
bodies are at sea?
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Yeah, and like they're already they've already got forking knife
in their hand that they're working with while they're tying
the bib on.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, they're tying a little bib that has like a
person shape on it.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Oh, I like that a lot.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Do you think they have those little lemon scented hand
wipes for their little pincers.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
I mean guarantee right right for.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
The try divors when they're like going to town on
a whale carcass, Like, well, let me just wipe my
little hands off here.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
That's a that's like a Red Lobster specific thing.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Like I've been I've been known to. Uh. I have
never once in my I have never been to a
Red lam Katie.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
You got you got just for the cheddar Bay biscuits
I've heard.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I've heard those are very good. But you know, my
cousin once made them just by herself. As like, these
are very good. I don't need to go to Red
Lobster because my cousin made them.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah, but you want to get them from the source.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
It's like, I'm going to tell my cousin that you
said you just negged her biscuits.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
I really appreciate that she did it and then she tried,
but I'm going to tell you those were dogs.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Oh thank goodness. They don't listen to my podet. So uh,
we're going to take a quick break and when we
come back, we're going to talk about blood worms. Oh god,
So this is very metal worm and so my husband
is super in the metal and I told him. I
(31:09):
was doing an episode on worms and he was like,
you should talk about lord Worm, and I forgot. Uh.
He's like a I don't know what he does in
the band, but he he's like a like he was
(31:30):
part of the group Cryptopsy. Cryptopsy, which is a metal
metal band. Yeah, and so lord Worm. H I God,
I have the Wikipedia, but it's in Italian. This is
very frustrating to me. Okay, so he's all right, he's
the singer of Cryptopsy.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yeah, he left after the nun So Vile tour in
nineteen ninety seven. That's just a lot of information about it.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Anyways, my so, what my husband wanted me to say
about this guy is that he apparently would eat worms
on stage as part of his act, and that thus
his name was Lord Worm.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
He took a look at Ozzy Osbourne. He was like,
you ate that off a bat. I don't do well
with big animals just eating them live. I think, yeah,
I can eat a worm. I think that I could
recreate how to eat fried worms.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
I do think. I do think it's probably better in
terms of zoonotic diseases to go for the worms rather
than the bats. So I gotta say it's more sustainable
to eat the worms.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Maybe he's just more ethically responsible.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Right, He's like, you know what, it's way more sustainable
to eat worms than bats.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
So I'm looking at him, and I really wanted this
guy to look really impressive, and he just.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
He just seems like some guys. This is what's This
is what is very funny about a lot of metal
is it has some name like death Bloat, corpse Parade,
and then you look at them and they're all sort
of just like I work at a library in my
spare time, just these five eight guys with a goate
It does look a little bit like Gary Oldman.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah he does. He's got, you know, to his credit,
he has that early Gary Oleman and Dracula look.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
He does. He does. He's got the early Gary Oldman
and Dracula look, which is very specific. I just I
think that it's if you're gonna do, I just hope
that these worms were of an edible grade. I don't
know how you make sure worms are edible, but there's
gotta be somewhere, right, because don't don't go around just
(33:43):
eating a random bugs you find in your backyard, because
that's a good way to get like a weird parasite.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Oh my god. I didn't even consider the possibility that
those bugs would have parasites and them that could affect me.
I'm gonna stop doing that.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Random if you eat random slugs you can get it's
like rat lungworm, which is really bad.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah, I so.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Also, my assumption would have been, like you eat crickets
off the ground or something, which obviously don't.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Do it, but you could get anymatoad.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, but you I assume it would also be like
the stuff that they're carrying, or like worms that they've got.
There's wriggling around in some pretty filthy soil. I imagine
I could get some equal eye or something from just
the outside of a worm.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
I mean you probably could. There's at least like what
I mean, you're not supposed to just have eat dirt
rot dirts, right, Yeah, I'm supposed to eat rod dirt
because of the disease is like hysteria you can get
from that. You can get hysteria. Apparently you can't garden
when you're pregnant unless you're wearing gloves because of the
(34:50):
lhysteria on the soil.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Oh my god. All I know is about turkey meat.
They're like, don't eat cold cuts. But I never said
anything about don't grow roses or anything.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
You know, you're not allowed you're not allowed to have fun.
You're not allowed to uh, you're not allowed to play
in the dirt or eat worms. It's frankly ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
So which has no fish.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
No, no dirt, no much.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Cheeses, no cheese, nothing.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
No cheese nothing. Well, you know I thought that, Wait
is it the opposite? I thought pasteurized cheeses.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Okay, yeah, I think maybe that's okay, it's the stinky ones.
It's like you're not supposed to have, like the those
French cheeses. Oh boy, I can't remember now all this
information leaves you immediately.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Cheeses. That's what they call them, the gym sock cheeses,
the French gym sock cheesus.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, let's get off this topic and get onto blood
worms advertising.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
So they are also called glyceara dibrayan chiata. What a
wonderful phrase. Which they grow a little over a foot long.
They are blood red and horrible looking. These are also
like remember the nice little midwife worms we talked about earlier,
(36:06):
That are polykeets. These are also polykeets. It's a type
of marine worm. It's a huge group of worms, so
it's not they're not super closely related. And so they
are a little over a foot long. They are venomous.
They have copper fangs, and they're irritable.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
I'm looking at their fangs right now. Oh man, wait,
so they will they it would bite me. It wouldn't
like me.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yeah, they wouldn't like you. They're irritable. They're like boo sore.
And that's also how they pump themselves up is booing you.
So they are found all along coastal North America. They're
predators and they like to hide in the sand and
ambush their prey with those horrible little things on their proboscis.
(36:56):
So let's talk a little. You want to talk about
proboscis just for a minute. Let's talk about love to
love to talk about a proposcos So it's kind of
like a balloon like extrusion. Preposcus is in general an extrusion. Yeah,
And the there's this I read this New York Times
article on this blood worm, and there was this great
(37:18):
quote from a researcher at UC Santa Barbara. His name
is William Wonderley. Uh, and he told The New York
Times quote, you can't imagine if your head was a balloon.
Normally it's sucked inside your body. I'm like, oh, yeah,
of course, in my head's a balloon, it's normally sucked
inside my body. Of course I'm already there. Yeah. Then
(37:40):
when you want to eat, you inflate it and bite
and then suck it back in, and it's like, of course,
yeah that It's like you can imagine this, right, You've
always you've thought about it, if your head's a balloon,
and then but it's normally inside your body, but then
you inflate it and you bite down so that it
stays inflated. Uh, and then you suck it back in
once you get food through your your sort of balloon mandibles.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Yeah, anyways, apparently that's how it works.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
I'm looking at it, and I mean, there's obviously, oh
way more apt descripsion than that this guy is clearly avoiding.
And it's clear that that's exactly what he was thinking
about the entire time, because he was like, don't say,
don't say foreskin, don't say.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Yeah you can't.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, yeah, it's the head of your your body, the
head of your body, how you know, it expands out
like a balloon and eats and then and then goes
back in Yeah, oh god, and then just runs off
into the woods. He just leaves the interview.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
This is a very this is a very foreskin like creature. Uh.
And then at the end of the tip of it
is our four little things.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Just like a normal penis.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's the thing is what's funny is
there's so many penis like marine animals. There's more than
one species that are not related called penis fish. Anyways,
we're not here to talk about them. We're here to
talk about the bloodworm. So they will inject venom into
their prey off in small crustaceans. It's enough to paralyze
(39:10):
or even kill them. For humans, it's not so bad.
It's kind of like a beasting. Some people might be
allergic in the same way some people are allergic to beastings,
but for most people it's not deadly. It's just very
painful because it's like also, I feel like it would
be more traumatic than a beasting, because you get stung
by a bee. I feel mostly bad for the bee
(39:33):
because I'm like no, why did you waste your life
on me? Like I was not going to hurt your queen.
You've made a terrible mistake. But for this thing, it's
just this awful creature that looks so bad in every way.
It's it's just I wouldn't if I saw this like
(39:55):
coming out of my I don't know, if it like
bit me on the leg, I wouldn't assume first that
this is an animal that's biting me. I would assume that,
like my leg is exploding, and.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Like, yeah, it looks like internal organs.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Yeah, like like that my like leg guts are coming out,
Like I think that there's like leg intestines that I
have that are coming out or something. It looks very
intestine like. It's not a good it's not a good
looking animal. I think spiders are cute, so I am
pretty generous when it comes to finding animals cute, and
this one just looks it does not. It's very visceral.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Yes, it's that's exactly right. It's a very visceral looking
animal at every turn. It's also because it's so like
flesh colored. It's just yes, it's it's just it really,
it's tough to look at It reminds me of if
if people can't see this obviously, if you that remake
of King Kong when they all fall into that pit
and like they get eaten by those worms. They look
(40:55):
kind of like those worms.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Oh yeah, it was the one with the gull with
gollum in it. Yeah, what's normal person?
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah he's he's a cook in that. Yeah, but yeah
he gets eaten by those worms. He gets like sloiced
devoured by them. Those have a lot more teeth. These
only have four teeth that are like teeth is wrong, obviously,
they're fangs. And the fangs don't even like sit together. Well,
it's not like well designed like a shag like a snake,
where like the fangs like, oh, they retract and they
pull up and then they bite. These are just like
(41:25):
poorly placed four fangs that just sort of over each other.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
It just looks it looks very It looks like it
would be a painful existence to be this thing, right,
Like it hurts looking at it because it feels just
like a raw scab that is alive somehow. So apparently though,
those things are really interesting because they have a very
(41:49):
high copper content, more so than I think any other
kind of organic animal part. And apparently they are made
out of melanin, copper, and a small protein melanin. I
know you're thinking like, well, that's like the pigment, which
is correct. Melanin is usually a pigment, but blood worms
(42:12):
have turned it into sort of an anchor for the copper.
It adheres to a copper ion that in this whole
process is facilitated by some little protein, and then it
creates this fang mostly made out of copper, and then
these other weird little facilitative proteins in the melanin.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
We should be stripping them.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
We should be These are valuable worms.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
I'd love to see some people take these words down a.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Peg, right, Such a tiny amount of copper in there,
but you know, still you need I'm trying to think
of how many worms you'd need for a penny. Yeah,
I'd say fifty worms for a penny.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
That feels like south of what I was thinking. These
are so tiny, these fangs. I feel like I need
get pure copper. Yeah, I think one hundred maybe even like.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Huns were coming, we'll try it, you know, we're coming
for you. Glisarah di bran Kiata.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Even they don't know that that's them. They're like, what,
Oh was that me? Is that my name is so complicated?
I can't if that one's me.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, that's why. That's why we just call them blood worms.
There's got to be a band called blood worm. There's
probably multiple bands band surely called blood worm. Blood worm.
Yeah there's yeah, yeah, there's like a few of them.
Oh and they look exactly expect them to look pink
(43:47):
and slimy and yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
There's just it's just a bunch of guys with balloon heads.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Yea. They have a very foreskin forward sort of Yeah,
you know, I mean I think that it's it is, Uh,
it's we on the show. I try to appreciate everything
for what it is, and I gotta say, for to
(44:16):
this worm's credit, it spends most of its time buried
under the sand. So I feel like that's really something
that we could admire and appreciate about this thing, Like
it's horrible to look at, but most of the time
it's it has the self awareness to bury itself.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah, that's my first thought too. As soon as you
like it spends most of the times waiting the sand,
I'm like.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
Good, yeah, yeah, it's like say there, yea, we know,
we know.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
That is how it sounds like trying to talk around
those stupid fangs. We for trying not to poke themselves
in their own face, their own pink raw face with
their fangs. Will they talk?
Speaker 1 (44:58):
Yeah, it's really it's it's quite awful looking. And yeah,
just imagine that's the last thing you see coming at you,
Just this thing that looks apologetic for existing. It's like,
so we anyways, before we go sour, and we got
(45:18):
to play a little a little gom he'll go. We
gotta play a game called Guess who Squawk, a mystery
animal sound game. Every week I play a mystery sound
for you and you the listener, and use the guests
trying to guess who is who's making this sound. It
can be any animal in the world. The hint was
(45:39):
this last week. It is that this bird has one
of the loudest calls in the world.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
All right, horrifying.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
You know, you go out in the nature to relax
and then some bird comes up to you and goes.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Ah, yeah, it's like a siren. Almh. Yeah, I'm trying
to identify even what that sound is. Okay, you said
the loudest bird My first thought was like a parrot
or a cockatoo. Those are so loud, But that does
not sound like either of those things. And it did
sound like context clues. It did sound like it was
(46:24):
near body of water, like rushing water, or it was
in the rain, which means that this bird lives somewhere wet.
I don't think it's a sea bird. I think it's
something inland.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Can you try, can you try to guess the country
or the region?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
All right, I'm gonna say South America.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
All right, well, sir, you are correct that this is
in South America. This is a bird that has a
call that is one hundred and twenty five decibels or more.
It is as loud as having your head right next
to a jet engine during takeoff. This is the white
bell bird.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Uhl bird. Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
It looks like a dove, except for it has this
like big wattle that goes from its beak down hangs down.
It's quite long, sort of wardy looking wattle, and it
has a giant mouth. And it apparently, even though it
has such a loud voice, and it's thought like this
(47:28):
is so that it can be heard over really long distances.
It also screams really loudly as soon as a female
is nearby, so that's not it doesn't explain everything about
why it's so loud, because it seems to scream the
most when a female is next to it, and then
it's just like listen to this and just air horns
(47:49):
right in her ear, and she apparently finds that attractive.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
So you got you've got the chop, you got the pipes,
my boy?
Speaker 1 (47:56):
Yep, uh yeah this.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
I'm really disturbed by this wattle. It looks like if
I saw a burn a tree, I would think it
was carrying a worm in its mouth, but it just
like hangs off the top like a turkey's. Yeah, it's
sporting a rat tail on the front.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
There's a taxidermy of one of these where someone just
had a dead one and didn't know what they looked
like when they were alive, so they just assumed it
was like a unicorn worn just this like straight up
taxidermy of this like pointy horn like protrusion on this
bird because they didn't realize it was so floppy.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
How could you have predicted it would be this silly?
Speaker 1 (48:30):
Yeah? Yeah, So, according to researchers, the bellbirds have the
facial anatomy of a trombone because their mouths open so wide,
and that's how one of the reasons they are so loud,
so you know, but why exactly they have to be
that loud. It doesn't seem to be known because again
they yes, it helps them communicate over long distances, but
(48:54):
as soon as the female is like right there, they're like,
all right, let me again. Yeah, here's an encore and
just shrieks in her ear. And they also don't know
exactly how they don't have hearing loss. Yeah, because they're
doing it, you know. I mean, maybe they just don't
live long enough for the hearing loss is set in
(49:14):
a full I'm not really sure.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
Yeah, because to themselves.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
Yeah, exactly, having.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
A gun next to their own face every single.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Yeah, that's uh, you know, that's why you gotta wear
your protection if you like to go to concerts a lot,
because otherwise you start to lose it, yeah, damage your hearing.
But yeah, they don't. They don't seem to be affected.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
That's a fun one like that when the answer is
something that I've never heard of, and then I get
to look at it and what the is it wearing? Yeah,
you do.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
Like, I do highly recommend looking at a video of
these guys because they'll like shriek and then kind of
like move their head around in that bird like way,
and it's like, all right, onto this week's mystery animal sound.
The hint is this found in eastern North America. You
might find this little guy boogie woogieing and who can
blame him with a call like this? Sh sh.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Oh, my god, that's a cute sound.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
They're so goofy. We don't do another one.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
That's that's such an adorable sound.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
It's so cute and okay, another hint, the actual animal
behind them is equally super cute. This is not a
deceptive sound. They are as cute as the sound is. Oh.
I love these guys so much.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
They sound to me like I don't know the name
they had. There's like that little round frog. It's like
a frog that almost looks like a dime. And this
is what I thget it's a frog.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
Well, we will find out next week if sorn is
correct or not. You can write to us at Creature
Featurepod at gmail dot com with your guests, or your
questions or your disgusting caterpillar stories. Sorn, thank you so
much for joining me today, you guys pleasure. Where can
people find you?
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Oh, you can find me on Blue Sky hang out
there a lot and do some jokes, jokes and what
you can find it. You can find us on our
podcast I think that I do with Daniel O'Brien called
Soren and Dan. No, it's not called that, it's called
Quick Question with Soorn and Dan. Uh and uh. That's
pretty much it. Or you can just watch my episodes on
American Dad. Yeah, or as.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
I like to call it, family, Dad's family Dad, family Dad.
He's everyone's family and everyone's dad. All right, Well, thank
you guys so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast,
please do leave a rating or review. I read them
all and I look at all of the the ratings
as well, each individually, even when it's just like counting
(52:05):
all the little stars each separately. So it gives me
something to do. And I appreciate that we all need
we all need stuff to do in our lives. And
that's that's one thing that I do, and I appreciate
your participation in that. And thanks for the song that
is called ex Alumina by the Space Cossacks. And you
(52:27):
can find the I am usually on autopilot for these outcomes.
I have just suddenly become self aware of what I'm saying.
I don't like it.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
I do not like it.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like
the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or Yes, what where have you listen to your
favorite shows? I do not judge you. I'm not your mother.
I can't tell you what to do, but don't go
around bothering blood worms. They're just gonna bite you, and
they don't want to be seen, and you don't want
(53:02):
to see them. Respect that. You've gotta respect that. I'll
see you next Wednesday, you guys,
Welcome the 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 Upsetting Spaghetti. These are tubular
creatures that just don't feel right, but maybe they'll worm
your way into your heart. From a morbid fashionista to
(00:27):
an obg wormman, these worms are a bit odd, and
one of them is definitely metal. Discover this and more
as we answer the age old question why not live
your life in a bag? Joining me today is friend
of the show, writer for American Dad and the Soorin
part of Quick Question with Soorn and Daniel Soren. Booie, welcome, boo,
(00:50):
boo boo.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
We hate him.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
We're booing sorn Or.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
We're booing I'm going Sorn.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I like to imagine that the very worst of my
haters listen, and then I win them back. So right,
I psack myself up by booing myself to begin.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
That makes a lot of sense. I psych myself up
by booing you as well.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
It feels good, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I just feel really good. I suggest everyone try it,
Booing Soren, so Soren. Today we are talking about it's
not just worms. That's why I'm calling them spaghetti because
they're they're the animals that come in tube form. And
there's a lot of different types of tube anels.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Terrible tubes, the terrible nightmare noodles.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Nightmare noodles. That's a good one. That's a really good one.
And this first story is one that you might have read, actually,
because it's in the New York Times, which is like a.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Little pretty much guarantee I didn't.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
You're more of a Wall Street Journal kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Then I like to say that I am. I do
tell people frequently when I find out new facts that
I read it somewhere, when what I really mean is
that I was scrolling through TikTok and.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
So yeah, yeah, well, this is a this is a
it's a newspaper, which is sort of a okay, both
a physical sometimes an online medium where there's like words
on a page and sometimes pictures. And this time they
had pictures of something pretty horrible looking called a bone
(02:36):
collector caterpillar, a bone collector.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
There's a movie called The Bone Collector. Yeah, there is.
Let's see right.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Now, bone collector.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Let's see if I'm right about this. I think it's
a Denzel Washington movie.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
You're correct about that, and in it he is.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
It's tough to say. Maybe he's an undertaker who's secretly
really good at fighting. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Uh, well, no, it's close. But he's a forensics expert
whose bed bound after an accident left him paralyzed from
the neck down. So you know, close.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
And not doing the same job as No. Yeah, apparently
in Nightmare Noodles, close is cigar?
Speaker 1 (03:21):
So close is cigar? That is? I've heard that expression
actually before. So the bone collector caterpillar was featured in
the New York Times because it's one of these animals
that does freak stuff that we all love, and there's
this one. Is It's interesting because there are actually a
lot of caterpillars like this that will craft a case
(03:47):
around themselves. It's a protective case. And we'll get into
what the bone collector does specifically. But first of me
just talk to you about bagworms for a bit. Can
I talk to you about bagworms. I've been dying to
talk to you about bagworms.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I'd love to hear about bagworms. First. I'm going to
put a little pin in my bone collectors and i
want to hear.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
We will get back. We'll get back to the bone
collector after this brief announcement from bagworms. So, there are
quite a few species of moths who when they are
in their larval juvenile form, they build elaborate cases around
themselves using some of their sticky silk, sometimes poop as
(04:25):
like an adhesive and then you know the old poop
adhesive trick, and then silk, and they will make it
out of basically whatever is most common in their environment.
It can be sticks, it can be sand like in
whatever they have available to them, and they craft these
very elaborate cases like this, almost like a house, around
(04:47):
themselves to protect them. And they're really interesting because the
males do what you would think are typical of moths.
They pupate inside of these cases and they burst out
and their little moths and they go around. But the
females don't bother with any of that. They stay in
(05:08):
the case that they make for life, don't bother pewpating
going out exploring the world. They just stay in their bag,
and the males come and find them and mate with them,
and the females lay their eggs in the bag and
then they're like well, I've done pretty much everything I've
set out to do in life, and they die, and
(05:29):
so they spend their entire life in this bag that
they create. Yeah, just chilling, and while the males are
kind of going around doing all the active moth stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
I can't do that, I guess. I mean, I've definitely
been on trips before, I've been in a sleeping bag
and in the morning night they're like, we got to
get up, and I'm like, you know what what I
just what if I lived here forever?
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah? What if I lived here, laid some eggs and
then died. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
People just came to me and like, right, I got
all the stuff done in the world that I need
to do from the sleeping bag.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
It's I've heard, like I'm I'm not super up to
date with what the kids are talking about on TikTok,
but I know there's this idea of girl rotting where
it's you spend all day in your bed. I read
about that, yeah, on on the New York Times.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yep, they write they write an impact bold on the
New York Times, right.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Right, right, Yeah, they definitely do with an outline and
with like a penguin in the middle of it. The Yeah,
so this, I think this we all got to pack
it up. Girl rotting is over because these bagworms have
already mastered it. So it's it's over. We've done it
peak girl rotting. So onto the bone collector caterpillar. So
(06:40):
similar to bagworms, they build a case around themselves out
of materials that they have available. Those materials just happen
to be their own murder victims. So this is found
on the beautiful island of Hawaii. Bone collector caterpillars are
the juvenile form of hyposmoke coma moths, which when they're adults,
(07:04):
they just kind of look like, I don't know, little
tiny scrappy moths. They're not very impressive to be honest. Yeah,
but the moth larvae are carnivorous and they basically do
an ed geen thing where they use the corpses of
their victims as a costume that they wear.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I'm looking at it now, it just got it's a
it's just wearing trophies of the things.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
That yes, yes, and it does. It does this in
a very meticulous way. It doesn't just slap them on.
It kind of makes sure it's rotated correctly and it
puts it on and even cuts them down to size.
If it's too big, they sort of well like, ah,
this head's a little bit too big. Chew, chew, chew. Okay,
now it's small enough, and I'll put it on where
(07:49):
it is a brooch?
Speaker 2 (07:51):
How is it getting it on its back like that?
Speaker 1 (07:54):
So it just like the other bagworms. It uses sticky
milk maybe feces to as an adhesive, and then it
kind of creates this It's almost like a cocoon, except
it lives in it and it can move around in it.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
It crawls around. Yeah, man, So what I'm looking at here,
it's a lot of legs. First of all, they are
leg heavy. There's like a lot of like looks like
cricket legs, and yeah, stuff like that. And then some
weavil heads and things, and they've covered their entire entire
body in the limbs of their enemies or like whatever
they killed.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
And then the moth itself, I mean you just undersell it.
It's got some kind of like fringy wings. It's yeah,
like a beautiful white fringe coming off of them.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
It's a little a little bit late, I can see that.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, yeah, certainly one is more or less horrified than
the other.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
El say that much for sure, And so they create
these elaborate cases out of the the exoskeletons of victims,
and the whole reason they do this is really really
weird and interesting. So they are carnivores, but they like
to work smarter, not harder, because they essentially they're moving
(09:12):
around relatively slowly in this big case that they make
around themselves, and they hang around spider webs, and they
the spider essentially does all the work right, creates the web,
catches insects in them, and the bone collector will go
up to a dead or dying insect and be like
(09:33):
great free lunch and either kill it or just eat
whatever the spider hasn't eaten or eat before the spider
has a chance to eat it. And then it takes
that dead insect or whatever it is arthur pod, and
once it's all sucked dry, it arranges it artfully on
(09:54):
its case, and now it looks like a pile of
dead bugs, which is totally not out of play on
a spider web, so essentially tricking the spider into thinking
that it's just a bunch of trash from its own
prey that it's eaten.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Our beautiful death mosaic, something nice to lighten up the
spider web. Yeah, why isn't Why aren't these maybe you
don't know the answer. Why aren't these caterpillars sticking to
the web?
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Well? They that's a really that is actually a good question.
I would think that given they are also a silk
producing animal, that they just have the skills to sort
of traverse the silk with their little little claws.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
They're wearing the right gloves.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
They've got the right gloves there. It is interesting because
they're The case that they build around them doesn't really
stick to the web. But I assume they're able to
just drag that along. They have the strength to drag
it along with their little bodies. Whereas an insect that
gets trapped in the web, probably it's going really fast,
not looking where it's flying, and then it's trapped in
(10:57):
there struggles gets even more wrapped up where the whereas
the bone collector is cool, it's collected, yeah, and you know,
isn't isn't it's it is expecting the sticky web and
probably knows how to navigate it.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
That makes sense. So there are a lot of caterpillars
that make sort of light, and I think it was
what you were describing. They make that like it is
a webby home. It's like a webby almost looks like
a snot. But I'll tell you a quick story. We're
camping in the desert, speaking of sleeping bags. We're camping
in the desert, and you put down a ground tarp
when you can't, but you always necessarily need something on top.
(11:33):
But the ground tarp is just a big piece of
waterproof plastic. But when stuff hits it, it makes obviously
a noise. And we're going to sleep one night and
we're just hearing this umbum on all the ground tarps,
and we're like, what is that noise? And we put
on our headlamps and realize that we are covered in caterpillars. Yes,
tons and tons of caterpillars on us, and like, oh,
(11:53):
they're falling from the sky. And then we looked up
and the tree above us, the tree was just in
taste in like basically one giant web and there were yeah,
hundreds of thousands of caterpillars in it, just falling from it.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
That's so, what did these caterpillars look like? Were they fuzzy?
What was their color? No?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I think so these were not. They were hairless, and
in my memory they were either brown or green, but
I can't remember which. And they're long, I mean they're
like pretty long, guys. They're probably like two inches two
and a half inches. But and they're in the deserts
of Utah. Okay, you know what any ideas I mean
(12:34):
I think and they sound like this.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
They sound like, oh my god, there's weird underneath her. Yeah,
they I mean I believe they would be a type
of social caterpillar. It's yeah, which social what it sounds like? Well,
I mean like that would be what they're called scientifically
as well, not just to compliment to them, like you're
a real social caterpillary, but in terms of their specific species,
(13:06):
I don't know exactly what species had live there, but yeah,
they're they're essentially called the type of caterpillar that is
are called a social caterpillars. And they do tend to
form large groups in trees, and some species do create
sort of almost like funnel like webs and stuff in
the trees.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah. Okay, and then and now I need to also
hijack your podcast to get to tell you a different
story about a nightmare caterpillar. There's there's something. There's an
elm tree in our neighbor's yard that uh this basically
come on this podcast to make sure that you can
answer questions for me that I sure.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Go for it if you have. If you have questions
out there that you would like me to answer, you
can write to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail
dot com and I'll answer all your caterpillar questions too.
Now go for it, soar and let's see if I
can answer this one.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
There's, uh, we have an elm tree that's near us,
and there's some type of caterpillar that really loves it,
loves it, and I know that it eventually will become
this black butterfly with maybe like some tinge on the
end of its wings that it's either white or yellow.
But when they're young there, when they're a caterpillar. There's
(14:17):
a bunch of them. My son found one and we
were like, let's let's get it to form its Let's see,
they're butterfly, so it would be a crystalist. Le's get
them to the form of their chrystalist in this jar.
And he was like he had it in the house
and he did definitely form into a chrysalis, and we're
just sort of waiting for it to hatch. While we
were waiting, it's this really menacing looking chrystalis. It has
(14:38):
like spikes on it and stuff. It looks really horrifying.
And while we were waiting, I broke my toe. My
daughter split her face open. I got it, had to
get an appendectomy on a Father's day. You gotta try it. Yeah,
(14:59):
and the kids do it. It's really fun. I hadn't ever.
And so while I was at the hospital waiting to
get my app indeck to me to call my wife
and I was like, is that is that chrystalis in
the house And she was like yeah. I was like,
please remove it. And I had this real feeling of
dread surrounding this because of all this confluence of terrible
(15:21):
events h and I wanted it gone. I wanted it
out of the house. And now I won't let my
son collect those a Another detail of these is that
they do form on the ouse they put they're on
in the eaves of our house. The caterpillars love to
set up their chrystals is there, and when they hatch
from them. They bleed out of it. So there's drops
of a really dark red blood all over the ground,
every underneath each one of these.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
That sounds like a good omen though.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Right I would, Yeah, you'd think so blood's always good, right,
that's a good omen.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
So that it's so that the Moses version of God
knows not to steal your children. Yeah, so that I
think that's the spiny elm caterpillar or it's they are
also which a fun thing is they're also known as
morning cloak butterflies. Yeah, so which is it seems really
(16:10):
also like a good omen to me.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, these are them, these are this is definitely the butterfly.
Let me see their crystalist too, morning cloak butterfly.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
They're like they're red and black, and the caterpillars themselves
are kind of spiny as well.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah yeah, yeah, this criz is the crystalist. These are horrifying.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, this is the thing. This is the thing that
broke my toe and made me take it curs organs
out of my body.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
It cursed you for uh imprisoning its chrysalis, by the.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Way, that would never even hatched. It was just there.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
It just remained a very vengeful goo inside.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, so I guess my question is is that that's true? Right?
They're bad, They're bad luck those ones, are they? You know?
Curse you? Well?
Speaker 1 (16:57):
You know, when caterpillars turn into a goo, they retained
some of their neural crust cells and they can remember things.
So I do believe that one cursed you in goo
form because it had a grudge.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I think probably. Yeah, I took it away from the
elm tree that it was on in our neighbor's guard
and we put it in a jar. Okay, I'm not
doing that.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Again, precious elm. That's right. So the the bone collector caterpillar,
the bagworm like caterpillar, they essentially they just cover themsells
in skulls of their enemies, which are you know, the exoskeletons.
So the spider doesn't recognize that it's a thing that
(17:39):
has a delicious treat inside and just chills with the spider,
steals its food and lives a great life. Apparently sounds great.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
I'm I love the idea of collecting. If I'm going
to be a dude, like a D and D campaign,
I'm collecting something from my enemy, I'm collecting some sort
of trophy and I'm wearing it the rest of the time.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
I like the idea of your armor just being a
bunch of skulls piled together, not just just you know,
your your entire chest breastplate is just a bunch of skulls,
your legs covered in a bunch of skulls, sort of
like the Michelin man. But it's all like skulls.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, and to leave just like you leave one open, right,
And then whenever you're fighting an enemy, you're like, this
is this is your spot. That's where you will go
exactly when I remove you from your bones?
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Right? Wait, no, remove your wait, who's the U?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
You're right though, just a horrifying way of putting it.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I think I just kind of thing where it's like, wait,
but are you wouldn't you be the bones? And it's like, no,
you're not the bones and the stuff in the bones? Yes, right, Well, man.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
See you off of these whoa.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
This is as trippy as when I saw the x
ray of my wisdom teeth trying to break into my
sinus cavities. I'm like, whoa, whoa, man, look at that
my own soul is betraying me and trying to kill me.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
You have swung a door open onto like a part
of your life I didn't know existed it, just like
you realize when you hear these things from other people.
Life has so many chapters.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
So many chapters, like the chapter where all four of
my wisdom teeth had to be removed and two of
them were growing into my sinus cavities with a vengeance,
trying to reach my brain in time before I got
rid of them.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
What a story. Yeah, right, that they were trying to
kill you, that's right.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
They were like, we will, we will find your brain.
And the orthodontist was not concerned at all. If you're wondering,
if you thought, like maybe he would be concerned that
my wisdom teeth were trying to grow into my sinus cavities.
Like I see it all the time. It happens all
the time. Don't worry about them, Like, am I gonna
have holes in there? Oh? Not serious ones?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah I had.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
He couldnt be less concerned. Yeah, we all take these out.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
They've seen it all. I had a lism teeth only
on the bottom. But when I tell the X ray
you see it obviously from silhouette from the side profile.
I mean, and one of them you could see, like
basically in the topography of the top of a tooth
coming directly at you. Yeah, And I was like that
seems wrong, and they're like, yeah, it's coming out sideways.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
I was like, Okay, they're so silly. Those are some
silly teeth. Yeah, wisdom.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, you don't know which Tame'm gonna come for you.
I'm ironically named. All right, Well, we're going to take
a quick break and then we're going to talk about
a more positive but equally disgusting worm tale.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
If I'm being honest, we're not going to get there.
I've got a lot more.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Stories sour in. There is a worm out there that,
without really meaning to, acts as a midwife to squits.
Do you need me to repeat that sentence or did
you get it the first time?
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Well, I guess I'm curious as to because they don't lactate,
so how what would we be doing to help raise
the young.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
I mean, no, they don't lactape. That's a really good
call when it comes to squids.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah, people always said about me every time I talk
about how squids dn't lactate. Yeah, calls good call.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Call, really you really, uh, you really nailed that squid fact. So, yeah,
it's it's a worm that helps the basically the young
squid in the birthing process like a like a midwife.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
And oh, I see, I see. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
So let's first talk about the squids, because the squid
themselves are freaks. They're called opalescent squid. They're found all
along the western coast of America from Mexico to British Columbia.
They're pretty common, and they're very squid like squids. They're
kind of gray, sort of opal esson. I suppose they
grow rapidly from two millimeter big hatchlings to about the
(21:53):
size of like a banana or a subway sandwich foot long,
which is like less than a foot long. Right, it's
definitely not a foot long, but it's the size of
the subway sandwich, so to about which takes them about
six to nine months, which is their lifespan. And so
they are similparius, which means they mate only once and
(22:15):
then they die. They mate in an ocean mash pit
situation where they all come together in this giant frenzy
and they all essentially exhaust themselves in this mating frenzy
and die shortly after.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
So orgy to death, big.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Orgy to death. And this is a surprisingly common tactic
among animals, particularly yeah, aquatic animals. So they the males
will grab the females with their tentacles, which flush red,
which is likely both a signal to the female being
like hey, I'm mating with you, how's it going, But
(22:53):
it's also a signal to the other males to back off,
where it's essentially like a red occupied sign. You know,
you go to the bathroom, the green turns to red,
a little occupied.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Occupied occupy.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Well, they're squid. It's close. It's very close. It's so
close though.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I'll go.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
So they yeah, they it's just a big mess. They're
all trying to mate with each other, and they the
male will when it's like it sounds really rough and intense,
but the actual mating is really innocent because the male
just hands the sperm packet to the female where he's
like here you go. Mel was like, okay, thank you,
(23:35):
and I can use it to fertilize her eggs.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Transaction complete, goodbye, yeah, transactional turn my limbs back to
their normal color.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Now, yeah, exactly. And so then they then the females
fertilize the eggs, and the eggs kind of come in
these white, kind of oblong cases, and they're just it
looks like a weird forest of all of this stuff.
It looks like a weird kind of coral like growth happening.
But it's all these egg cases. These females are laying
(24:06):
and then they all die, okay, and it's like a
feeding frenzy for scavengers because they are all these dead
squid that just did it. They've completed their life story.
They had lately their eggs and they're just like, well,
I'm I am extremely tired. I think I will just
take a nap, and by that I mean stop existing. Uh.
(24:30):
And so what happens is you have all these baby
squid and they just don't have any living parents who
are there for them. And it's the egg cases themselves
are have a smile the toxin in them which makes
them unpalatable. So that's why they don't all get eaten
on masks. Some animals, I think try to eat them.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
I mean, there's a real lesson there in terms of
like people who engage in orgies when they still have
when they have children in their life. You're just taught
impossible to be there for your kids when that's your lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
I mean, yeah, especially when it's underwater.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Mmm.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You know that's the key, that's I think a key
problem in this situation. So yeah, So for most right,
these egg cases are completely unappetizing except for a worm
called Capitella ovincola, which are small, white, pinkish. They're called polykeets.
(25:29):
These are marine worms that are just a couple millimeters long,
and after the eggs have some time to kind of ripen,
these are actually really attractive to these worms, and that
sounds like it would be bad news for the baby squid.
You have this worm, it's like, ooh, delicious egg cases.
But as it turns out, the worms will break into
(25:50):
the eggsack itself and they completely ignore the baby squid.
They're not at all interested in eating those. What they
do is they eat this gelatin like substance that separates
each squid embryo from the other. So it's like it
within the egg case are sort of smaller eggs inside,
and so the worm is eating the outside of these
(26:12):
smaller egg divisions within the egg case. And when the
squid is about ready to hatch. This allows the seawater
to come into the egg case and it oxygenates them.
It also helps weaken the basically the membrane of the
(26:32):
egg case, and it makes it easier for the little
squid to hatch, because otherwise it would be tough to
kind of punch their way out of the egg case.
So these worms, which don't at all hurt the squids,
just go in. They are like, ooh, snack and they
start eating what's essentially kind of like the placenta of
(26:53):
the of the squid. And then that helps the squid.
That helps the squid break free of their egg case.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Oh that's awesome. It's greazingatic relationship. I don't think that.
It's sort of sad to me that they will never
know the other one. You know, Yeah, the worm just
knows that here's a meal, and like and then then
the squid comes out. I was like, fuck, that was easy. Yeah,
life's gonna be good. Life's easy. Neither one of them
never know will know how much they helped the other, which.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Is like I'd like to think that there's like at
least a few of them who are preternaturally smart, and
they wave to each other like hey, what's up. I
know what's going on here. You and I we both
know what's going on here.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
The worm just waves its body.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, no one will know. No one will ever know.
They actually have all these like little bristly appendages all
along their bodies, so they could wave some of those
in a truly disturbing manner.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
But I didn't ate the outside of your chicken eggshell.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's a it's a beautiful symbiotic,
mutualistic relationship between these two.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
You need more of that in the world.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Right, Yeah, I'm saying more eaten membranes and less building walls.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Less. I don't want to see seagulls swooping down and
eating baby sea turtles. They just pick them up, lick
off the viscera, and just carry them gently to the sea.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Ah yeah, yeah, licking like I think that would be
nice if they, you know, licked off the viscera.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, all those eggshells they are full of that. Great still, just.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Like just have the viscera part, right, the sort of
the afterbirth, if you know, and you're.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
It's an investment honestly for those seagulls, because now you've
got more sea turtles that are gonna lay more eggs.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Right, and exactly. There's actually a fishing strategy for certain
types of squid where fishermen go towards the end of
their life cycle like this with the with the squid
where it's like, hey, after they've laid their eggs and
they're all going to die anyways, that's when we go
fish them because they're all going to die anyways, and
(29:07):
why not you.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Know, Yeah, they put them to good use, that's right here. Yeah,
I invite those in fight, all these creatures to eat
my body when I'm dead. Yeah, well you're welcome to it, squids,
because I also want to be cast into the sea.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, you know, turn about spare play right with the squid?
They like do you think they have little bibs but
with us on it when we are when when our
bodies are at sea?
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Yeah, and like they're already they've already got forking knife
in their hand that they're working with while they're tying
the bib on.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, they're tying a little bib that has like a
person shape on it.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Oh, I like that a lot.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Do you think they have those little lemon scented hand
wipes for their little pincers.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
I mean guarantee right right for.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
The try divors when they're like going to town on
a whale carcass, Like, well, let me just wipe my
little hands off here.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
That's a that's like a Red Lobster specific thing.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Like I've been I've been known to. Uh. I have
never once in my I have never been to a
Red lam Katie.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
You got you got just for the cheddar Bay biscuits
I've heard.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I've heard those are very good. But you know, my
cousin once made them just by herself. As like, these
are very good. I don't need to go to Red
Lobster because my cousin made them.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah, but you want to get them from the source.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
It's like, I'm going to tell my cousin that you
said you just negged her biscuits.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
I really appreciate that she did it and then she tried,
but I'm going to tell you those were dogs.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Oh thank goodness. They don't listen to my podet. So uh,
we're going to take a quick break and when we
come back, we're going to talk about blood worms. Oh god,
So this is very metal worm and so my husband
is super in the metal and I told him. I
(31:09):
was doing an episode on worms and he was like,
you should talk about lord Worm, and I forgot. Uh.
He's like a I don't know what he does in
the band, but he he's like a like he was
(31:30):
part of the group Cryptopsy. Cryptopsy, which is a metal
metal band. Yeah, and so lord Worm. H I God,
I have the Wikipedia, but it's in Italian. This is
very frustrating to me. Okay, so he's all right, he's
the singer of Cryptopsy.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yeah, he left after the nun So Vile tour in
nineteen ninety seven. That's just a lot of information about it.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Anyways, my so, what my husband wanted me to say
about this guy is that he apparently would eat worms
on stage as part of his act, and that thus
his name was Lord Worm.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
He took a look at Ozzy Osbourne. He was like,
you ate that off a bat. I don't do well
with big animals just eating them live. I think, yeah,
I can eat a worm. I think that I could
recreate how to eat fried worms.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
I do think. I do think it's probably better in
terms of zoonotic diseases to go for the worms rather
than the bats. So I gotta say it's more sustainable
to eat the worms.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Maybe he's just more ethically responsible.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Right, He's like, you know what, it's way more sustainable
to eat worms than bats.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
So I'm looking at him, and I really wanted this
guy to look really impressive, and he just.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
He just seems like some guys. This is what's This
is what is very funny about a lot of metal
is it has some name like death Bloat, corpse Parade,
and then you look at them and they're all sort
of just like I work at a library in my
spare time, just these five eight guys with a goate
It does look a little bit like Gary Oldman.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah he does. He's got, you know, to his credit,
he has that early Gary Oleman and Dracula look.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
He does. He does. He's got the early Gary Oldman
and Dracula look, which is very specific. I just I
think that it's if you're gonna do, I just hope
that these worms were of an edible grade. I don't
know how you make sure worms are edible, but there's
gotta be somewhere, right, because don't don't go around just
(33:43):
eating a random bugs you find in your backyard, because
that's a good way to get like a weird parasite.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Oh my god. I didn't even consider the possibility that
those bugs would have parasites and them that could affect me.
I'm gonna stop doing that.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Random if you eat random slugs you can get it's
like rat lungworm, which is really bad.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah, I so.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Also, my assumption would have been, like you eat crickets
off the ground or something, which obviously don't.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Do it, but you could get anymatoad.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, but you I assume it would also be like
the stuff that they're carrying, or like worms that they've got.
There's wriggling around in some pretty filthy soil. I imagine
I could get some equal eye or something from just
the outside of a worm.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
I mean you probably could. There's at least like what
I mean, you're not supposed to just have eat dirt
rot dirts, right, Yeah, I'm supposed to eat rod dirt
because of the disease is like hysteria you can get
from that. You can get hysteria. Apparently you can't garden
when you're pregnant unless you're wearing gloves because of the
(34:50):
lhysteria on the soil.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Oh my god. All I know is about turkey meat.
They're like, don't eat cold cuts. But I never said
anything about don't grow roses or anything.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
You know, you're not allowed you're not allowed to have fun.
You're not allowed to uh, you're not allowed to play
in the dirt or eat worms. It's frankly ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
So which has no fish.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
No, no dirt, no much.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Cheeses, no cheese, nothing.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
No cheese nothing. Well, you know I thought that, Wait
is it the opposite? I thought pasteurized cheeses.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Okay, yeah, I think maybe that's okay, it's the stinky ones.
It's like you're not supposed to have, like the those
French cheeses. Oh boy, I can't remember now all this
information leaves you immediately.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Cheeses. That's what they call them, the gym sock cheeses,
the French gym sock cheesus.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, let's get off this topic and get onto blood
worms advertising.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
So they are also called glyceara dibrayan chiata. What a
wonderful phrase. Which they grow a little over a foot long.
They are blood red and horrible looking. These are also
like remember the nice little midwife worms we talked about earlier,
(36:06):
That are polykeets. These are also polykeets. It's a type
of marine worm. It's a huge group of worms, so
it's not they're not super closely related. And so they
are a little over a foot long. They are venomous.
They have copper fangs, and they're irritable.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
I'm looking at their fangs right now. Oh man, wait,
so they will they it would bite me. It wouldn't
like me.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yeah, they wouldn't like you. They're irritable. They're like boo sore.
And that's also how they pump themselves up is booing you.
So they are found all along coastal North America. They're
predators and they like to hide in the sand and
ambush their prey with those horrible little things on their proboscis.
(36:56):
So let's talk a little. You want to talk about
proboscis just for a minute. Let's talk about love to
love to talk about a proposcos So it's kind of
like a balloon like extrusion. Preposcus is in general an extrusion. Yeah,
And the there's this I read this New York Times
article on this blood worm, and there was this great
(37:18):
quote from a researcher at UC Santa Barbara. His name
is William Wonderley. Uh, and he told The New York
Times quote, you can't imagine if your head was a balloon.
Normally it's sucked inside your body. I'm like, oh, yeah,
of course, in my head's a balloon, it's normally sucked
inside my body. Of course I'm already there. Yeah. Then
(37:40):
when you want to eat, you inflate it and bite
and then suck it back in, and it's like, of course,
yeah that It's like you can imagine this, right, You've
always you've thought about it, if your head's a balloon,
and then but it's normally inside your body, but then
you inflate it and you bite down so that it
stays inflated. Uh, and then you suck it back in
once you get food through your your sort of balloon mandibles.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Yeah, anyways, apparently that's how it works.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
I'm looking at it, and I mean, there's obviously, oh
way more apt descripsion than that this guy is clearly avoiding.
And it's clear that that's exactly what he was thinking
about the entire time, because he was like, don't say,
don't say foreskin, don't say.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Yeah you can't.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, yeah, it's the head of your your body, the
head of your body, how you know, it expands out
like a balloon and eats and then and then goes
back in Yeah, oh god, and then just runs off
into the woods. He just leaves the interview.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
This is a very this is a very foreskin like creature. Uh.
And then at the end of the tip of it
is our four little things.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Just like a normal penis.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's the thing is what's funny is
there's so many penis like marine animals. There's more than
one species that are not related called penis fish. Anyways,
we're not here to talk about them. We're here to
talk about the bloodworm. So they will inject venom into
their prey off in small crustaceans. It's enough to paralyze
(39:10):
or even kill them. For humans, it's not so bad.
It's kind of like a beasting. Some people might be
allergic in the same way some people are allergic to beastings,
but for most people it's not deadly. It's just very
painful because it's like also, I feel like it would
be more traumatic than a beasting, because you get stung
by a bee. I feel mostly bad for the bee
(39:33):
because I'm like no, why did you waste your life
on me? Like I was not going to hurt your queen.
You've made a terrible mistake. But for this thing, it's
just this awful creature that looks so bad in every way.
It's it's just I wouldn't if I saw this like
(39:55):
coming out of my I don't know, if it like
bit me on the leg, I wouldn't assume first that
this is an animal that's biting me. I would assume that,
like my leg is exploding, and.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Like, yeah, it looks like internal organs.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Yeah, like like that my like leg guts are coming out,
Like I think that there's like leg intestines that I
have that are coming out or something. It looks very
intestine like. It's not a good it's not a good
looking animal. I think spiders are cute, so I am
pretty generous when it comes to finding animals cute, and
this one just looks it does not. It's very visceral.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Yes, it's that's exactly right. It's a very visceral looking
animal at every turn. It's also because it's so like
flesh colored. It's just yes, it's it's just it really,
it's tough to look at It reminds me of if
if people can't see this obviously, if you that remake
of King Kong when they all fall into that pit
and like they get eaten by those worms. They look
(40:55):
kind of like those worms.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Oh yeah, it was the one with the gull with
gollum in it. Yeah, what's normal person?
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah he's he's a cook in that. Yeah, but yeah
he gets eaten by those worms. He gets like sloiced
devoured by them. Those have a lot more teeth. These
only have four teeth that are like teeth is wrong, obviously,
they're fangs. And the fangs don't even like sit together. Well,
it's not like well designed like a shag like a snake,
where like the fangs like, oh, they retract and they
pull up and then they bite. These are just like
(41:25):
poorly placed four fangs that just sort of over each other.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
It just looks it looks very It looks like it
would be a painful existence to be this thing, right,
Like it hurts looking at it because it feels just
like a raw scab that is alive somehow. So apparently though,
those things are really interesting because they have a very
(41:49):
high copper content, more so than I think any other
kind of organic animal part. And apparently they are made
out of melanin, copper, and a small protein melanin. I
know you're thinking like, well, that's like the pigment, which
is correct. Melanin is usually a pigment, but blood worms
(42:12):
have turned it into sort of an anchor for the copper.
It adheres to a copper ion that in this whole
process is facilitated by some little protein, and then it
creates this fang mostly made out of copper, and then
these other weird little facilitative proteins in the melanin.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
We should be stripping them.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
We should be These are valuable worms.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
I'd love to see some people take these words down a.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Peg, right, Such a tiny amount of copper in there,
but you know, still you need I'm trying to think
of how many worms you'd need for a penny. Yeah,
I'd say fifty worms for a penny.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
That feels like south of what I was thinking. These
are so tiny, these fangs. I feel like I need
get pure copper. Yeah, I think one hundred maybe even like.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Huns were coming, we'll try it, you know, we're coming
for you. Glisarah di bran Kiata.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Even they don't know that that's them. They're like, what,
Oh was that me? Is that my name is so complicated?
I can't if that one's me.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, that's why. That's why we just call them blood worms.
There's got to be a band called blood worm. There's
probably multiple bands band surely called blood worm. Blood worm.
Yeah there's yeah, yeah, there's like a few of them.
Oh and they look exactly expect them to look pink
(43:47):
and slimy and yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
There's just it's just a bunch of guys with balloon heads.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Yea. They have a very foreskin forward sort of Yeah,
you know, I mean I think that it's it is, Uh,
it's we on the show. I try to appreciate everything
for what it is, and I gotta say, for to
(44:16):
this worm's credit, it spends most of its time buried
under the sand. So I feel like that's really something
that we could admire and appreciate about this thing, Like
it's horrible to look at, but most of the time
it's it has the self awareness to bury itself.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah, that's my first thought too. As soon as you
like it spends most of the times waiting the sand,
I'm like.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
Good, yeah, yeah, it's like say there, yea, we know,
we know.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
That is how it sounds like trying to talk around
those stupid fangs. We for trying not to poke themselves
in their own face, their own pink raw face with
their fangs. Will they talk?
Speaker 1 (44:58):
Yeah, it's really it's it's quite awful looking. And yeah,
just imagine that's the last thing you see coming at you,
Just this thing that looks apologetic for existing. It's like,
so we anyways, before we go sour, and we got
(45:18):
to play a little a little gom he'll go. We
gotta play a game called Guess who Squawk, a mystery
animal sound game. Every week I play a mystery sound
for you and you the listener, and use the guests
trying to guess who is who's making this sound. It
can be any animal in the world. The hint was
(45:39):
this last week. It is that this bird has one
of the loudest calls in the world.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
All right, horrifying.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
You know, you go out in the nature to relax
and then some bird comes up to you and goes.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Ah, yeah, it's like a siren. Almh. Yeah, I'm trying
to identify even what that sound is. Okay, you said
the loudest bird My first thought was like a parrot
or a cockatoo. Those are so loud, But that does
not sound like either of those things. And it did
sound like context clues. It did sound like it was
(46:24):
near body of water, like rushing water, or it was
in the rain, which means that this bird lives somewhere wet.
I don't think it's a sea bird. I think it's
something inland.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Can you try, can you try to guess the country
or the region?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
All right, I'm gonna say South America.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
All right, well, sir, you are correct that this is
in South America. This is a bird that has a
call that is one hundred and twenty five decibels or more.
It is as loud as having your head right next
to a jet engine during takeoff. This is the white
bell bird.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Uhl bird. Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
It looks like a dove, except for it has this
like big wattle that goes from its beak down hangs down.
It's quite long, sort of wardy looking wattle, and it
has a giant mouth. And it apparently, even though it
has such a loud voice, and it's thought like this
(47:28):
is so that it can be heard over really long distances.
It also screams really loudly as soon as a female
is nearby, so that's not it doesn't explain everything about
why it's so loud, because it seems to scream the
most when a female is next to it, and then
it's just like listen to this and just air horns
(47:49):
right in her ear, and she apparently finds that attractive.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
So you got you've got the chop, you got the pipes,
my boy?
Speaker 1 (47:56):
Yep, uh yeah this.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
I'm really disturbed by this wattle. It looks like if
I saw a burn a tree, I would think it
was carrying a worm in its mouth, but it just
like hangs off the top like a turkey's. Yeah, it's
sporting a rat tail on the front.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
There's a taxidermy of one of these where someone just
had a dead one and didn't know what they looked
like when they were alive, so they just assumed it
was like a unicorn worn just this like straight up
taxidermy of this like pointy horn like protrusion on this
bird because they didn't realize it was so floppy.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
How could you have predicted it would be this silly?
Speaker 1 (48:30):
Yeah? Yeah, So, according to researchers, the bellbirds have the
facial anatomy of a trombone because their mouths open so wide,
and that's how one of the reasons they are so loud,
so you know, but why exactly they have to be
that loud. It doesn't seem to be known because again
they yes, it helps them communicate over long distances, but
(48:54):
as soon as the female is like right there, they're like,
all right, let me again. Yeah, here's an encore and
just shrieks in her ear. And they also don't know
exactly how they don't have hearing loss. Yeah, because they're
doing it, you know. I mean, maybe they just don't
live long enough for the hearing loss is set in
(49:14):
a full I'm not really sure.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
Yeah, because to themselves.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
Yeah, exactly, having.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
A gun next to their own face every single.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Yeah, that's uh, you know, that's why you gotta wear
your protection if you like to go to concerts a lot,
because otherwise you start to lose it, yeah, damage your hearing.
But yeah, they don't. They don't seem to be affected.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
That's a fun one like that when the answer is
something that I've never heard of, and then I get
to look at it and what the is it wearing? Yeah,
you do.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
Like, I do highly recommend looking at a video of
these guys because they'll like shriek and then kind of
like move their head around in that bird like way,
and it's like, all right, onto this week's mystery animal sound.
The hint is this found in eastern North America. You
might find this little guy boogie woogieing and who can
blame him with a call like this? Sh sh.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Oh, my god, that's a cute sound.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
They're so goofy. We don't do another one.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
That's that's such an adorable sound.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
It's so cute and okay, another hint, the actual animal
behind them is equally super cute. This is not a
deceptive sound. They are as cute as the sound is. Oh.
I love these guys so much.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
They sound to me like I don't know the name
they had. There's like that little round frog. It's like
a frog that almost looks like a dime. And this
is what I thget it's a frog.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
Well, we will find out next week if sorn is
correct or not. You can write to us at Creature
Featurepod at gmail dot com with your guests, or your
questions or your disgusting caterpillar stories. Sorn, thank you so
much for joining me today, you guys pleasure. Where can
people find you?
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Oh, you can find me on Blue Sky hang out
there a lot and do some jokes, jokes and what
you can find it. You can find us on our
podcast I think that I do with Daniel O'Brien called
Soren and Dan. No, it's not called that, it's called
Quick Question with Soorn and Dan. Uh and uh. That's
pretty much it. Or you can just watch my episodes on
American Dad. Yeah, or as.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
I like to call it, family, Dad's family Dad, family Dad.
He's everyone's family and everyone's dad. All right, Well, thank
you guys so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast,
please do leave a rating or review. I read them
all and I look at all of the the ratings
as well, each individually, even when it's just like counting
(52:05):
all the little stars each separately. So it gives me
something to do. And I appreciate that we all need
we all need stuff to do in our lives. And
that's that's one thing that I do, and I appreciate
your participation in that. And thanks for the song that
is called ex Alumina by the Space Cossacks. And you
(52:27):
can find the I am usually on autopilot for these outcomes.
I have just suddenly become self aware of what I'm saying.
I don't like it.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
I do not like it.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like
the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or Yes, what where have you listen to your
favorite shows? I do not judge you. I'm not your mother.
I can't tell you what to do, but don't go
around bothering blood worms. They're just gonna bite you, and
they don't want to be seen, and you don't want
(53:02):
to see them. Respect that. You've gotta respect that. I'll
see you next Wednesday, you guys,
Creature Feature News
Host
Katie Goldin
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Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.