August 15, 2024 • 47 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the curious biology of North America’s horned lizard – especially their ability to squirt blood from their eyes – as well as some culture and history surrounding their existence.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
Part two in our series on the horned lizards of
North America, also known sometimes as horned toads or horny
toads if you prefer, though they are in fact lizards
and not toads. The horned blizzard, of course, is a
genus scientific name Phrenosoma, meaning toad body, which contains about
(00:39):
twenty one species which have different geographical ranges, but they're
all found in western North America, from the southern tip
of Mexico up through parts of western Canada. Now again,
this is part two of the series. In Part one,
we focused mainly on the horned lizard's relationship with various
predators and their fascinating anti predator defense strategies which include camouflage, spikes,
(01:05):
and armored scales which can make them difficult and in
some cases quite dangerous to eat. We talked about some
eating related mishaps from various predators, and then finally, their
weaponized blood jets, the adaptation that allows them to shoot
streams of apparently foul tasting blood out of their eyes
when threatened by a dog. Rob in your words last time,
(01:28):
a way of deterring predation with the most aggressive and
unpleasant free sample in the world. That's right to refer
back to something that came up last time, that we're
still interested in this question of why the blood apparently
tastes so foul to dogs, and I read in some
cases maybe also cats, but not noticeably so to humans,
(01:49):
and certainly not to predators such as birds.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Now I want to throw in right here at the top.
We described the horned lizards in detail in the last episode,
and I hope that everyone has had a chance to
check out some footage or images on their own. At
this point in our research, I've looked at a lot
of images, a lot of footage, and I do have
to give them props for just being tremendous splooters. You
(02:13):
know they certainly the squirrels can splute like like none other.
You know, cats are great spluters, But man, I have
to say the horned lizard isn't natural as well.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Wait, I'm not understanding the word splute, then I thought
you were. You were meaning like squirting, like squirting the
blood out of the eye.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
That's all what means they're tremendous squirters as well. But spluting.
Spluting is when if you ever it's a hot day
and you look out and you see a squirrel like
laying on its belly like spluted out, you may see
it can't do much the same. Various other organisms will splute.
This is an unofficial terminology for what they're doing, but
I feel like that the horned lizard has this down
(02:52):
as well.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Splute seems like a variation on display when the whole
body like flat against the ground, all limbs outstretched.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Exactly, Yes, but the kind of PLoP to it as well.
You know, like there's a certain you got the organism
really needs to have a certain amount of like semi
liquid solidness to it to really deliver it. You got
to have that toad body, or you got to have
that slightly soft mammalian body to pull it off.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Oh, that's right. And of course the toad body, as
we talked about last time, is part of the horned
lizard's defensive camouflage strategy, like the spluting is indeed part
of what keeps them safe from detection by predators. They
try to lay flat against the ground so as not
to cast a shadow and to make it harder for
(03:39):
a predator, say a bird flying overhead, to see their outline. Also,
since we're just talking about reviewing the tape on horned
lizards since the last time we talked, I was watching
just more blood squirting footage since we recorded the previous episode.
And I don't know if I emphasized enough how much
it looks so alarming. If you haven't seen this, look
(04:03):
it up. The blood that the jets out of the
eyes somehow looks darker and thicker than I expected. And
it's also just weird how much blood is coming out
compared to the size of the animal, which is quite small.
It doesn't look like something that should be happening.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, it is quite alarming. It's redder and bloodier than
I think I was anticipating. It feels like a cuts
scene from Event Horizon.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah. Now, to get into the meat of today's episode,
I wanted to address just a few more lingering biological
facts about horned lizards, biological and ecological facts that we
didn't quite have time to get into last time. And
the first thing I wanted to talk about is the
horned lizard's relationship to water. Of course, horned lizards generally
(04:52):
live in dry places, deserts and semi arid ecoregions, where
the sun cooks you, the rain is scarce, water is
hard to come by, and horned toads, like all animals,
of course, need water to live, so much of their
biology has gone still suit mode. They are very efficient
at sourcing and preserving water. There is a great passage
(05:16):
about the horned lizard's relationship to water in a book
that I referred to in the last episode. That book
is Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America by Wade C. Sherbrook.
This was published by the University of California Press in
two thousand and three. The author, Wade Sherbrooke, was director
of the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of
(05:36):
Natural History. So, of course, losing water is just part
of having a body. It is impossible to avoid losing
some water content through ambient interface with the air. We
lose some water vapor from our lungs when we breathe.
We lose some water through evaporation from our skin, and
the same is true for horned lizards. To reduce water
(05:59):
law to evaporation. Horned lizards have some behavioral adaptations. For example,
sometimes they burrow underground or partially bury parts of their
bodies in the soil. This can reduce water loss from evaporation.
But they also have some clever ways to source water
from their environment. They will, of course, just drink free
standing water when they can get access to it. If
(06:21):
there are puddles after a rainstorm or something like that,
they will drink dew that collects on plants in the morning.
But much of the water that they get from external
sources comes from food like juicy juicy harvest or ants.
But here's where Sherbrook gets into something I found really fascinating.
One of these strate strategies they have for sourcing water
(06:42):
is that some species of horned lizards use their own
backs as what Sherbrook calls a rain harvesting surface. So
he singles out three species as examples, the Texas horned lizard,
the round tail horned lizard, and the desert horned lizard.
And when these animals sense that rain is about to fall,
(07:05):
they do the opposite of what humans usually do. You know,
we go inside. They go outside, They run out of
cover into the open and stand with their backs sort
of cupped like they raise up there, they raise up
on their legs, they flatten out their backs, and they
lower their heads. Now what does this do. It turns
the lizards back into a kind of combination rain barrel
(07:30):
and whatever you call that. You know, the beer drinking
helmet where you got the beers on the sides and
it's got a straw running to the mouth. So you
combine that with the rain barrel concept. Their back collects
water over the widest possible surface area, which is the
lizard's flattened out dorsal scales, and then it funnels the
water to the edge of its mouth for drinking. So
(07:52):
like my body is a catch basin and my mouth
is the receptacle.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I'm glad we're getting into this because as I was
looking into like the culture of the horned lizard, I
was hoping to find an example of cowboy poetry about them.
But my search came up largely empty. But I did
find an interesting blog post by Charlie Buck of the
University of Arizona Poetry Center about an elementary school exercise
where they brought in a herpetologist to talk about horned lizards,
(08:18):
and then a poet led the class in filling out
horned lizard worksheets with descriptive text to create concrete poems
or visual poetry. So it's like an outline of a
horned lizard and then you fill in with text. And
I included one example of this in our outline here.
Joe and folks can look up the blog posts and
see an example of this as well. And for instance,
(08:40):
written by one of the students in the head is
a horned lizard eats ants. I babysat horned lizards. I
can't read the rest of it. I spit my blood
out of my eye at snack, I drink water from
the sky. And then like later on one of the legs,
it says I eat ant every day. And then there's
(09:02):
also a part of the anatomy that says I drink
water from my back. So I read that before I
actually got to that point in reading about their biology.
So I was like, I wonder if that's true. Gonna
have to FA fact check this child.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Yes, this child's poetry passes fact check. The horned lizards,
at least some species do drink water from their backs
and It's interesting the way Sherbrook describes it. It's not
just like you know, water randomly running off the back
and some of it sort of getting into the mouth.
It seems like it has a fairly sophisticated system of
like this sort of this matrix of layers underneath and
(09:39):
between the scales absorbing water and then routing it by
capillary action down to the edges of the mouth where
the where the lizard then sort of sits there opening
and closing its jaws slowly to drink the water as
it trickles in from the corners of the mouth. And
so it's got a fairly sophisticated topography on the back
(10:01):
there to get the water to the mouth.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
It's a great system. You can't follow them.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Another interesting way that horned lizards can serve water they
do not urinate. Now, how is that possible. They're animals,
Surely their bodies produce and collect waste products like excess
salts and the nitrogen bearing compounds that are the byproduct
of animal metabolism, like uric acid common in reptiles. Well,
(10:28):
they do still have to purge these waste products, but
they purge them not as liquid urine but as a
semi solid substance rather than dissolved in water. So a
Schrberch writes, quote, water carrying uric acid from the kidney
is reabsorbed in the kloaca. From here, the uric acid,
mixed with some insoluble crystals of urate salts is voided
(10:52):
as a white mass attached to the end of the
fecal pellet. And I thought this was interesting because in
just a minute, I want to mention, and there was
a video I was watching, like a short documentary about
some conservation efforts with horned lizards, and it was showing
some of their feces that the researchers were finding in
the wild. And yeah, there fecal pellets did have these
(11:14):
interesting little white caps on them. So apparently that is
what the lizard releases instead of liquid urine solid P
and some solidness crystals of solid P. Also, as we
have discussed with some other reptiles in the past, horned
lizards can sometimes remove excess salts from the body, not
(11:37):
by urinating, but by sneezing. So salts accumulate in glands
around the nostrils where they are secreted. As this hyper
concentrated salty brine in the nose, which you can then
you just hank it right out, and Sherbrook says that
you can find horned lizard individuals with noses covered in
(11:58):
this salty white trust from the process. So the moral
of the story is when you don't pee, you poop,
and you sneeze. Different other anti predator considerations that we
didn't have time to talk about in the last episode.
We were talking about the advantages of the horned lizard's
armor for self defense, you know, the tough scales, but
(12:22):
especially the sharp bony spines around the crown of the
horned lizard's head. That these pieces of armor increase the
risk a predator has to take in trying to eat
one of these lizards. The predator has to make a
judgment call is it too big for me to survive
swallowing this? Will the head spikes split open my throat
(12:45):
or puncture my organs? That can actually happen. But in
the context of looking at another predator prey relationship that
we didn't talk about last time, Sherbroke had some interesting
thoughts on the evolution of these head spikes. So Sherbrooke
is talking about the Southern grasshopper mouse or ani Comis torridus,
(13:05):
and this animal will prey on some smaller horned lizard
species by biting the skull right over the eye socket.
So this is before you get to the crown of spikes.
This is the skull above the eyes. And when the
grasshopper mouse attacks other prey animals, most other vertebrate prey,
(13:27):
it bites in a different place. It bites at the
back of the neck near the base of the head,
attempting to damage and sever the spinal cord, and this
is apparently a common attack area for predators to target.
I was actually kind of thinking, I know, I've read
about big cats often targeting the back of the neck
(13:47):
and the base of the skull in those rare cases
where they happen to attack humans, and I was trying
to remember where I came across that fact, and finally
I realized it was from Mary Roach's book fuzz When
Nature Breaks the Law, which we interviewed her about on
the show. That was one of my favorite interviews we've done,
and it's from the part of the book where she's
talking about taking the class learning to identify different common
(14:11):
wound patterns from different types of animal attacks, and so
for example, she talks about how when a grizzly bear
attacks a human sometimes a lot of the injuries are
sort of face on. They're like to the face in
the front of the head, almost as if the bear
is fighting a human the way it fights a rival bear,
where they're both kind of like biting at each other's faces.
(14:33):
Whereas cougars are used to killing their prey with a
powerful bite to the back of the neck, which they
in these rare cases where a cougar attacks a human,
they will sometimes target the same sort of place on
the body, like the back of the neck, base of
the back of the head.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
I believe in Jurassic Park this is also how the
velociraptors are depicted as preying on humans, biting the back
of the neck.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
But anyway, coming back to the relationship between the southern
grasshopper mouse and the horned lizard, so these mice will
try to prey on the lizards, especially the smaller ones,
but they don't bite where they bite most prey because
in the lizard's case, this is right where the head
horns grow, so the mouse doesn't even bother trying to
(15:21):
attack this well, defended area. Instead, it has got to
kind of like awkwardly chew with the head over the eyes,
and Sherbrook speculates that these horns could have evolved from
what was originally a more modest kind of bony defensive
ridge at the base of the skull designed to protect
against this kind of attack to the back of the neck.
(15:42):
And studies have shown that the spines do protect against
predator attacks. And you can measure this because the size
of the spines around the head actually matters. Like research
has shown that lizards killed by birds tend to have
order spines around the head than lizards of the same
(16:04):
species in that area, so the ones that are picked
off the most and to have the shortest headspikes. Now,
there's one more thing we brought up in the last
episode that I did want to make sure we came
back to today because I wanted to clarify something about it.
(16:28):
This was when we were talking about the relationship between
horned lizards and the red imported fire ant or Solenopsis
in Victa. It came up that non native fire ants
in North America are thought to be a reason for
some horned lizard population declines, and this does appear to
be true. There are a number of horned lizards whose
(16:50):
ranges have been shrinking in recent decades. There are places
where you used to find them, you don't find them anymore.
Many of their populations are in decline, and in the
case the case with a lot of these species does
seem to be that the fire ant is playing a
role there, especially because the lizards have such an important
relationship with the native harvester ants, which are sometimes sort
(17:12):
of driven out by the fire ants. So while it's
true that the fire ants appear to be playing a
role in population and range declines for these horned lizards,
they're not thought to be the only factor, or necessarily
even the main factor everywhere.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
That's very much the case. Yeah, and reading about the
Texas horned lizard, like urbanization vast urbanization and Texas is
often singled out as one of the primary factors there exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, So the fire ant, the imported fire ant, seemed
to be one factor among many. And this came up
when I was watching a short documentary video that was
just delightful. I recommend people look this up. A documentary
video produced by Texas Parks and Wildlife in twenty twenty
one called Horned Lizard Homecoming, you can find on YouTube.
(18:01):
It is a video specifically that's focused on an attempt
by the San Antonio Zoo to breed Texas horned lizards
in captivity and then release them back into areas from
which they have largely disappeared since the nineteen seventies. Just
one of the many charming things in this short documentary
is that the conservation biologists are working with a lizard
(18:24):
sniffing dog. So you know, imagine the canine unit at
the airport, but instead of a drug sniffing dog or
a bomb sniffing dog, it's a dog that is trained
to find Texas horned lizards in the wild and not
to bother them by the way, not go like pick
them up in the mouth and harass them until they
get a blood squirt, just to signal from a safe
(18:47):
distance that they found one.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Ah. That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
It's also very cute that the lizard sniffing dog in
the video is sort of wearing shoes as it goes
about its business. I think this is probably because they're
you know, it's a very scrub area and there's probably
a lot of like thorns and stuff. That can get
stuck in a dog's paw around there. But anyway, the
conservation biologists and the parks and wildlife workers they interview
in this video, they talk about a few other things
(19:12):
that are affecting the range and population of Texas horned lizards.
For example, human attempts to eliminate harvester ants from large
areas of land. Of course, again, Texas horned lizards need
to eat harvest or ants. Without the ants, the land
cannot sustain the lizards. And then also things like replacing
native grasses with different grass types, so you replace what
(19:36):
are called bunch grasses with turf grasses. This is not
what the lizards are adapted to and they can't really
survive in it. Of course, as you mentioned, Rob, just
general urbanization and reformatting of a lot of land area
roads cutting through natural land ranges, which interferes with movement
back and forth. But there's another thing I just wanted
(19:57):
to mention from this video because I found it hilarious.
There's a part where they're showing a lab at the
San Antonio Zoo where they're trying to breed lots of lizards.
So it's sort of it's a lizard sex lab, and
they are trying to facilitate mating, and they will put
a male lizard into a female lizard's tank. And there's
one part where the technician is explaining that the head
(20:19):
movements that we are seeing back and forth between these
two lizards indicate that they are both interested in mating.
But it totally looks like two lizards on a log
just nodding back and forth at each other, like yep, yep,
it's great. It's a very Texas kind of nod as well.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, you can imagine like the little cowboy hats being
on their heads, right, yeah, all right, Well, at this point,
I'd like to get back into some cultural connections to
the hornet lizard, and in the last episode we teased
out some connections in Navajo culture among the Dnet people,
and I wanted to get into some of that. So
(20:59):
there are there several mentions of the horned toad in
the nineteen forty four book Navajo Witchcraft by Clyde Kluckhohon,
who lived nineteen oh five through nineteen sixty. I've talked
about this text a little bit on the show before.
The version I have is from nineteen eighty nine with
some additions made to it, and there are several mentions
of the horned toad's use as a key ingredient in
various alleged spells in Navajo witchcraft, which I want to
(21:23):
stress the term witchcraft is used here as shorthand, not
for mainstream religious rituals and practice, but rather for what
is described, as described by Kluckhohn as quote Navajo ideas
and action patterns concerned with the influencing of events by
supernatural techniques that are socially disapproved.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Right, So what would be viewed by the people as
a sort of illicit, outsider form of magic.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Right, right, And it's my understanding as I understand it,
these are not necessarily things that were practiced, but were
believed to be practic by these few individuals. So the
book outlines various alleged curses, including the placing of a
personal item or a bit of clothing from a man
you want to death, curse inside a grave or inside
(22:13):
the mouth of a dead man, in the cursing of
a pregnant woman. A personal item is placed inside the
body of a horned toad or a horned lizard, or
a purse made from its hide.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Oh, interesting, and.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So that these would again, these would be specialized alleged
uses practiced by these you know, these outsiders that are
practicing this kind of like co or said to be
practicing this kind of like negative magical system. But there
is a fragment of a story shared late in the
book that is indeed a reference to a major Navajo
story about the horned lizard, and it does get into
(22:48):
some aspects of its biology, as we've discussed. So this
is the quote that is included in a Navajo Witchcraft
as a commentary on something else that's reference to the
book quote. The story is about the holy toad who
eats ants that give him power. One day, he was
swallowed by a coyote who he had kindly given of
(23:10):
his best corn. So while inside, he asked the code
what all the things he sees are for, and finally
comes to the back brain and asked what it was for,
and the coyote said, that is what I live by.
Leave it alone. So the toad cut it into, killed
the coyote, and came out of his throat.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
So I looked up some other versions of this amazing story,
and there appear to be different versions of it, or
you know, there were different retellings of it. I was
reading a version from Navajo Religion, Volume one by Gladys A.
Reichard from nineteen fifty, and the way this one goes is, Okay,
there's a theft of corn. The corn belongs to the
(23:54):
horned toad, and coyote steals it, and then the horned
toad us is the cooty of the theft. But coyote
kind of laughs about it and says, well, yeah, I
am hungry, and then he eats the horned toad. But
then horned toad begins to move around inside the code
he's belly, and at first coyote thinks it's just the
corn that he ate, but then the toad begins to
(24:16):
talk to him. He's like, where am I? It's dark
in here, and he like kicks the inside of the
stomach just to you know, to sort of punish the
coote a little bit. But then he moves to the windpipe,
keeps speaking. Then he moves to the heart and this
is where he carves across in the heart and it
kills the code. He dead, and then he emerges from
the code. He's body in this telling or retelling of
(24:38):
it from the code he's anus.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
This is interesting in how it matches with the cases
we talked about from biology in the in the previous
episode about animals that died from trying to eat a
horned lizard that was too big and too thorny, like
the various birds and snakes all. You know, it's like
a dangerous proposition to get too greedy with attacking a
(25:02):
horned toad that they have really serious spikes and they
can mess you up from the inside.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Yeah, and so you can imagine the story being inspired
by observations of that having occurred in predators, perhaps including
the coyote. And then, of course, as we referenced the
last episode, this nugget about them getting their power from
the ants that they eat, Like, that's right on as
far as they're irritating blood is concerned.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Right, because the idea, as we talked about last time,
is that there is something in the harvest or ant
diet that causes their blood to have the properties that
make it foul smelling or foul tasting to canids like
foxes and coyotes.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah. Now, according to Navajo historian Wally Brown on Navajo
traditional teachings, This is a twenty twenty three video. The
grandfather horned toad is a symbol of protection, with the
spikes serving as arrow points that protect one. And he
also drives home that the horned toad is close to
the Earth, and which matches up with the way that
(26:01):
it lives its life, you know, not only being a
very terrestrial organism, but being solo to the earth, flattening
itself so that it doesn't cast that shadow as we discussed.
But he stresses that it can be used to bless
one's mind, to bless one's spirit, and to bless one's
physical well being.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
I am interested in the way that it seems that
at least two humans, the spiritual connotations of the horned
toad or the horned lizard are really taken as almost
entirely positive. Despite the fact that it is a very
spiky looking creature. There seems to be a kind of
tension there. You would think, you see a creature that's
(26:40):
all like spiky and thorny like that, and I don't know,
people might just be more inclined to attach a kind
of negative spiritual energy to it. But so we have
these traditions that can consider the horned lizard as like
a route for a blessing, a blessing of the mind
and spirit and the health of the body. But also
(27:01):
just if you read about people's personal relationships who grew
up around these lizards, people have overwhelmingly positive feelings about them,
like very positive feelings about catching them and handling them
as children and things like that. Do you know what
I'm talking about?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, yeah, And I was thinking about this as well.
I guess on one hand, it's worth stressing that like
they're they're not a direct threat to humans. You know,
it's not not even like a situation where you know,
they're Obviously there are a lot of like say, like
venomous snakes out there that are also not out there
in the game trying to have encounters with humans, but
(27:37):
it just happens, and you know, and you know, injuries
and so forth can can result. That's not really the
case here, Like, they're pretty much not a threat to us,
and so there's almost a certain like natural kinship with
them because they're out there in the world. They're dealing
with stress, stresses, they're dealing with predators, enemies, and they
have these natural defenses against them. But they also seem
(27:59):
very much like an underdog because they are small, and
you know it doesn't always work. Yeah. So there are
some other details on some of these traditions mentioned in
another book. I looked at Jane Manister's Horned Lizards. This
is a two thousand and two book from Texas Tech
University Press. The author here sites that at least in
(28:19):
some tellings of this the code is being punished for
stealing corn from the sacred stalk, that the horned lizard
is associated with inner protection, especially for warriors traditionally, and
then the author also cites that there may be a
Navajo taboo, or there may have been a Navajoa taboo
against including certain animals, including this one, in various rug
(28:42):
weaving designs, perhaps in deference to its special strength. Now,
I want to stress that Navajo traditions vary across time
and geography, as with pretty much any belief system, and
there are also aspects of Navajo traditions that are not
meant for me to know of. And I hope that
I've been respectful with what I've brought to the discussion here.
(29:02):
But I think this is always there's always a fascinating
relationship to be observed between a people's beliefs and a
people's natural environment. And I think that we see that
here with the horned toad or horned lizard, both as
a metaphor as well as an interpretation of what I
assume were observations of the horned lizard's biology in the wild. Now,
(29:31):
another source I looked at. I was looking at an
article by Joyce Gibson Roach writing for TCU magazine talking
about different cultural interpretations of the horned lizard, and this
author points to Spanish folk beliefs. So this would have
been you know, in Mexico for the most part, where
(29:51):
they would sometimes refer to the horned lizard as a
torrito dilo virgin or the little bull who protects the virgin.
And so this is there's kind of like two different
things going on with this this nickname. So we talked
about this in the last episode. How they may be
observed to charge like a bull and are sometimes referred
(30:12):
to as the little bull.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Oh yeah, yeah, like against an absurdly larger predator, like
against a human shoe. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
And I think that I think this again, this is
one of the things that makes this animal charming. You know,
it's an underdog stand in its ground, you know, and like,
how can you not want to be like the like
the humble, horny toad in this respect? But then where
does the virgin come in? Well, this seems to be
connected to various interpretations that what's going on here is
(30:41):
that the horned toad is crying tears of blood. So
there is a long, sometimes controversial, and also generally skeptically
debunked history of statues of the Virgin Mary weeping tears
of blood in Catholicism, and accounts of of weeping statues
in general, aiding back at least to the writings of
(31:01):
Plutarch in the first and second century see now. I
should also point out that humans can experience blood in
the tears or blood from the tear ducks or hematuria
for various reasons. So for instance, when my son was younger,
he had tubes put in his tear ducks to correct
a minor problem, and immediately after surgery he shed a
(31:21):
single tear of blood, which was pretty awesome. At the time,
we knew everything was fine, you know, and it was
just kind of like, oh, wow, that was a blood tear,
but only got the one agreed, if you know, not
to worry. That is pretty cool, all right. Now another
connection to the horned toad the horned lizard in culture.
(31:44):
This is one that was shared in that book by
Jane Manister Horned Lizards from two thousand and two. She
gets into a number of different traditions, at least mentioning
that there are a number of ideas about them being
tied up in weather predict and rain generation, which I
guess is understandable of a creatures that clearly is able
(32:06):
to thrive in a very arid environment, and we have
these unique observations, you know, concerning the way that they
catch rain and so forth. But then she also gets
into this account that some of you may have heard
of before. I believe stuff you missed in history class
did a whole episode about this last couple of years.
There's the story of Old Rip. This is a horned
(32:32):
lizard originally named Blinky, that was placed in an Eastland County,
Texas time capsule along with a bible, some coins, and
some newspapers. And then when the capsule was dug out
thirty one years later, the lizard was allegedly still alive.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
I don't know about that.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah, A lot of solid reasons to doubt this detail
of the story, but this is the main detail of
the story. So it's like everyone who's celebrating this, it's
like they're basically the idea being that they were saying
the cowboy lore is correct. This is a victory of
cowboy biology. They were right the cowboys when they said
(33:11):
that the horned toad could live for one hundred years
without food or water. Because clearly this particular horned lizard
was locked away for thirty one years and we just
got him out and he's still alive. Everyone and take
a look at him. So this was very popular at
the time. Old Rip toured the country, even met President
Coolidge at the White House, and ultimately died in nineteen
(33:33):
twenty nine. Now, various folks later took credit for switching
out lizards at the capsule's opening. So this is that
I want to stress that this is almost certainly a hoax,
and there's a lot of reason to believe it was
a hoax. This was not carried out with any kind
of like scientific rigger, but it was a big deal
(33:54):
and it was covered in the New York Times among
other major publications. In fact, I want to read to
you from the New York Times. This is from February twentieth,
nineteen twenty eight. Oh boy, toad alive after thirty one
years sealed in Texas cornerstone, Eastland, Texas, February nineteenth ap
hey hornage toad sealed alive in the cornerstone of the
(34:15):
courthouse here thirty one years ago, was alive when the
stone was removed yesterday. According to County Judge Edward S. Pritchard,
the old courthouse is being raised, and it goes into
some additional details, including this bit that I also have
to include. After the cornerstone was removed, the toad appeared
lifeless for some time, but in a little while it
(34:36):
opened its eyes. In about twenty minutes, it began to breathe.
The mouth, however, appeared to have grown together.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
What grown together?
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Yeah, yeah, so I was looking around. There's some other
takes on this as well that.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Oh, they're also saying they're going to open the mouth
by surgery and force it to eat food.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah. Yeah, that's also the New York Time story. So yeah,
this story, I should be clear, there were a number
of skeptics at the time that were like, that doesn't
sound right. Let me see this toad. I think there
was maybe there may be one or two support supporters
in the scientific community who are maybe like, well, it's possible.
(35:20):
I don't know, but generally people were very doubtful about this.
And then on the other hand you had others pointing out, well,
clearly the animal survived in the time capsule because there
was a Bible in there. The Bible sustained the lizard.
I guess the Bible also made the lizard's mouth grow together.
I'm not sure. I've read other accounts that it had
(35:42):
a broken leg and worn down horns but was otherwise healthy. Yeah,
and then others claim that their eyes were sealed shut
as well. There seems to be a certain amount of
drift in the telling and retelling of this this feat.
But here's what we actually know to be true. So
hornet lizards can live around five but normal lifespan in
the wild is not fully known, according to the Oklahoma
(36:04):
Department of Wildlife Conservation. But I think we can probably
take that as like a ballpark. According to Texas Monthly
in a twenty fifteen article by Alex Dropkin, the Texas
horned lizard species hibernates, or rather bermates between October and April,
and this is likely where that cowboy lore originated, that
(36:26):
these creatures can live without food or water for one
hundred years. And this is the lore that the folks
in Eastland, Texas decided to put to the test. This
is why they put a horned lizard inside of a
time capsule to test or I think, if we're being
rightfully skeptic here to prove that the cowboy lore was correct.
(36:47):
There is no evidence that horned lizards in the wild
choose hibernation spots based on the presence of biblical texts
or coins or newspapers. But I guess we should note
that long lifespans for lizards are not completely unheard of.
The New Zealand tuatara can live twenty five to thirty
five years, typical age ages to sixty or apparently common,
(37:11):
and one captive specimen apparently lived to be over one hundred. Meanwhile,
some wizards can go without food or water for weeks
or months. I think it's safe to say that the
accounts of Old Rip places the story so far outside
of anything reported or at least, you know, authenticated to
any reasonable degree that common sense leans us very strongly
(37:32):
in the direction of hoax here.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
You know, we talked not too long ago on the show,
we were doing some stuff about cave biology, and we
ended up talking about the cave dwelling amphibian, the olm,
which is notable for being one of the most sort
of sedentary creatures on Earth that it can live for
a long time. It's an aquatic salamander. It's found in
(37:56):
the dynaic alps in cave systems. It lives in the
dark for much of the time, and it is thought
that sometimes these creatures can go for like ten years
without food, and that in itself is incredible, but that
seems to be sort of the upper bound of where
you can where you can push push the slow motion
(38:17):
metabolism too.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah. Yeah, And so again this if this story of
old Rip were true, it would just it would, you know,
triple that that ten year record. So yeah, I think
we are very right to be highly skeptical of this.
And again, various folks came forward and claimed that they
were involved with the hoax and so forth. So there's
(38:40):
a lot of smoke there that suggests the fire. I
should also point this out. You know, we're talking about
in endangered status of hornet lizards. This particular incident was
so popular that it resulted in a horned toad boom,
so the yet specimens being harvested and then exported for
(39:03):
novelty's sake, hurting local populations in the process. But hey,
old rip is allegedly currently entombed in Eastland, Texas. I
think he's on display. So if we have any Eastland
listeners or visitors to Eastland, or folks who have been
to Eastland and can report on the body of old
rip rite in, we would love to hear from you.
I believe he has at least historically been stolen at
(39:26):
least once and returned.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Are you, County Judge Edward S. Pritchard, what criteria did
you use to judge that this was the real original lizard?
Speaker 2 (39:36):
All right? I have another interesting bit that I ran
across in these texts that I want to talk about.
This is from Manister's book as well, and it is
the horny toad Man, something that I know, on the
surface absolutely sounds like a cryptid or some American Western
horror story, and the fact that it's associated with the
railway I think only compounds this possibility.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, it sounds like he belongs alongside sasquatch and paramouth.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
A yeah. So. According to Manaster, the figure emerges in
response to a unique problem on a segment of the
Santa Fe railroad connecting Albuquerque and El Paso, a segment
of track that was dubbed the Horny toad a segment
where anything bad that ever happened on the railroad could
happen and had happened, including a unique problem first reported
(40:24):
apparently in the Jiorada del Niorto desert basin, and that
is trains losing traction on the rails due to the
grease and moisture of hundreds of squashed hornet lizards. What so,
Apparently it was so bad that brakemen and firemen aboard
the train would have to scramble down onto the tracks
(40:46):
and sweep it all off to get all this gunk
off the tracks, and it led to the idea, nay,
the ideal of the horny toad man. So, a horny
toad man is not merely like somebody that goes down
and sweeps off the rails in the scenario, this is
a railway man with eyes on corporate promotion, willing to
do anything and everything the company requires in order to advance,
(41:10):
and that certainly includes going out onto the tracks in
the desert heat and removing lizard guts from the rails.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
So this is a this is a railroad company version
of I'll get the boss's coffee, you know, I will
sweep the sweep all of the horny toad grease off
of the rails.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Right, And to put it in an alien context, since
we're talking about Alien in the last episode, you might
consider Burke from Aliens a horny toad man of sorts,
you know, a complete scoundrel, but he proves that if
nothing else, he is more than ready to get down
there on the tracks and get his hands dirty for
the company. He's a company man all the way.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
That's right, all right.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Now, In trying to understand this, I guess we do
have to acknowledge that hornet lizard populations would have been
greater back in this time period as opposed to you
know what they are now. Can't compare what we see
in the world today to what would have been happening then.
But I needed more clarity on why are there so
many horned lizards getting run over by trains? And I
(42:10):
found a possible answer here In a nineteen twenty two
paper by J. P. Givler, Givler writes, it is an
interesting fact that at such times horned lizards are very
abundant under the crossties of railroad tracks. Often they burrow
through into the area between the two rails. Here they
emerge and are literally trapped. The rails are usually too
(42:32):
high to be climbed over, and the lizards run up
and down frantically. Occasionally one climbs up on a rail
just in time to be crushed by a passing train.
Many live for the rest of the summer in this
uncomfortable pasture bummer. Now it doesn't come I mean, it
doesn't completely answer my question, but it at least puts
a lot of horned lizards in the vicinity of those
(42:53):
train tracks. And you know, he only mentions it as
being like an occasional squad. But may I guess that's
close enough to like a mass squashing that we can
consider this reality. Now, I look for any discussions out
there in the literature about loss of traction due to
animal railway mortalities, and I looked at it. At least
(43:16):
one full source on animal railway mortalities or one that
deals with this in depth titled railway ecology. And there's
no mention in this of tracks getting greased up by
dead animals or dead lizards. So if true, maybe this
was indeed more of a concern with an historic engine
and an historic local population of lizard. I'm not sure,
(43:39):
but I will add the following from another paper. I
looked up Experimental evaluation of effect of leaves on railroad
tracks and loss of breaking by Kumar at All. This
is in the Journal Machines in twenty twenty four. Quote
loss of traction results in either breaking of the train
or slip, which arises at lower track active coefficients. This
(44:02):
case occurs when there are third body layers that cause
reduce traction, such as in the case of leaves. Various
traction enhancers are adopted by the railway to improve adhesion
when the rail is contaminated.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Okay, so you can certainly imagine that leaves falling on
railroad tracks could reduce the traction between the wheels and
the rails. So yeah, you can guess that if like lizards,
especially not just like lizard body fluids, but whole lizard
bodies were on the rails that might interfere in some way.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
That's my guess. You know, if we're not dealing with
leaves here, we're dealing with lizard bodies and lizard guts
and lizard liquids. But I guess if there were enough
of them, and also dealing with the idea that these
are not modern trains, these are historic drain engines, can
I guess it's conceivable that there would have been some
sort of issue here, thus necessitating the horny toe man.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Horny toad man, we salute you.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
So yeah, I don't know if we have any anybody
out there who is, you know, verse more versed than
the history of locomotives and in the railway in America,
you know, right in we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
What's your company's version of the horny toad man.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yeah, I guess there's there's probably a horny toad man
in any business, in any corporation. So those were some
of the cultural connections to the horned lizard or a
horned toad or horny toad that I was able to
come across. But I'd love to hear from anyone out
there if you have some additional insights to share. Be
they related to something we discussed in this episode, or
(45:43):
something we missed altogether, be it you know something from
Native beliefs and traditions that you want to share, or
cowboy lore or indeed cowboy poetry. I'm still at a
loss that there's not at least one cowboy poem out
there on the Internet that deals with these guys.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Surely I'm gonna blame Google being bad now for the
inability to connect with that literature.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Yeah, all right, well we're gonna ahead and close out
this episode, but yeah, right in, we'd love to hear
from you. Let's see a little housekeeping here. Hey, if
you're on Instagram, look us up. We're STBYM podcast. That's
our handle. You can follow us there and keep up
with some of what's coming out in the old podcast feed.
And in that old podcast feed, we've got core science
and culture episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode
(46:29):
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious
concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway,
and special thanks to our excellent guest audio producer Chandler
may Is for sitting in with us today. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hi, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
(46:57):
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
Part two in our series on the horned lizards of
North America, also known sometimes as horned toads or horny
toads if you prefer, though they are in fact lizards
and not toads. The horned blizzard, of course, is a
genus scientific name Phrenosoma, meaning toad body, which contains about
(00:39):
twenty one species which have different geographical ranges, but they're
all found in western North America, from the southern tip
of Mexico up through parts of western Canada. Now again,
this is part two of the series. In Part one,
we focused mainly on the horned lizard's relationship with various
predators and their fascinating anti predator defense strategies which include camouflage, spikes,
(01:05):
and armored scales which can make them difficult and in
some cases quite dangerous to eat. We talked about some
eating related mishaps from various predators, and then finally, their
weaponized blood jets, the adaptation that allows them to shoot
streams of apparently foul tasting blood out of their eyes
when threatened by a dog. Rob in your words last time,
(01:28):
a way of deterring predation with the most aggressive and
unpleasant free sample in the world. That's right to refer
back to something that came up last time, that we're
still interested in this question of why the blood apparently
tastes so foul to dogs, and I read in some
cases maybe also cats, but not noticeably so to humans,
(01:49):
and certainly not to predators such as birds.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Now I want to throw in right here at the top.
We described the horned lizards in detail in the last episode,
and I hope that everyone has had a chance to
check out some footage or images on their own. At
this point in our research, I've looked at a lot
of images, a lot of footage, and I do have
to give them props for just being tremendous splooters. You
(02:13):
know they certainly the squirrels can splute like like none other.
You know, cats are great spluters, But man, I have
to say the horned lizard isn't natural as well.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Wait, I'm not understanding the word splute, then I thought
you were. You were meaning like squirting, like squirting the
blood out of the eye.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
That's all what means they're tremendous squirters as well. But spluting.
Spluting is when if you ever it's a hot day
and you look out and you see a squirrel like
laying on its belly like spluted out, you may see
it can't do much the same. Various other organisms will splute.
This is an unofficial terminology for what they're doing, but
I feel like that the horned lizard has this down
(02:52):
as well.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Splute seems like a variation on display when the whole
body like flat against the ground, all limbs outstretched.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Exactly, Yes, but the kind of PLoP to it as well.
You know, like there's a certain you got the organism
really needs to have a certain amount of like semi
liquid solidness to it to really deliver it. You got
to have that toad body, or you got to have
that slightly soft mammalian body to pull it off.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Oh, that's right. And of course the toad body, as
we talked about last time, is part of the horned
lizard's defensive camouflage strategy, like the spluting is indeed part
of what keeps them safe from detection by predators. They
try to lay flat against the ground so as not
to cast a shadow and to make it harder for
(03:39):
a predator, say a bird flying overhead, to see their outline. Also,
since we're just talking about reviewing the tape on horned
lizards since the last time we talked, I was watching
just more blood squirting footage since we recorded the previous episode.
And I don't know if I emphasized enough how much
it looks so alarming. If you haven't seen this, look
(04:03):
it up. The blood that the jets out of the
eyes somehow looks darker and thicker than I expected. And
it's also just weird how much blood is coming out
compared to the size of the animal, which is quite small.
It doesn't look like something that should be happening.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, it is quite alarming. It's redder and bloodier than
I think I was anticipating. It feels like a cuts
scene from Event Horizon.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah. Now, to get into the meat of today's episode,
I wanted to address just a few more lingering biological
facts about horned lizards, biological and ecological facts that we
didn't quite have time to get into last time. And
the first thing I wanted to talk about is the
horned lizard's relationship to water. Of course, horned lizards generally
(04:52):
live in dry places, deserts and semi arid ecoregions, where
the sun cooks you, the rain is scarce, water is
hard to come by, and horned toads, like all animals,
of course, need water to live, so much of their
biology has gone still suit mode. They are very efficient
at sourcing and preserving water. There is a great passage
(05:16):
about the horned lizard's relationship to water in a book
that I referred to in the last episode. That book
is Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America by Wade C. Sherbrook.
This was published by the University of California Press in
two thousand and three. The author, Wade Sherbrooke, was director
of the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of
(05:36):
Natural History. So, of course, losing water is just part
of having a body. It is impossible to avoid losing
some water content through ambient interface with the air. We
lose some water vapor from our lungs when we breathe.
We lose some water through evaporation from our skin, and
the same is true for horned lizards. To reduce water
(05:59):
law to evaporation. Horned lizards have some behavioral adaptations. For example,
sometimes they burrow underground or partially bury parts of their
bodies in the soil. This can reduce water loss from evaporation.
But they also have some clever ways to source water
from their environment. They will, of course, just drink free
standing water when they can get access to it. If
(06:21):
there are puddles after a rainstorm or something like that,
they will drink dew that collects on plants in the morning.
But much of the water that they get from external
sources comes from food like juicy juicy harvest or ants.
But here's where Sherbrook gets into something I found really fascinating.
One of these strate strategies they have for sourcing water
(06:42):
is that some species of horned lizards use their own
backs as what Sherbrook calls a rain harvesting surface. So
he singles out three species as examples, the Texas horned lizard,
the round tail horned lizard, and the desert horned lizard.
And when these animals sense that rain is about to fall,
(07:05):
they do the opposite of what humans usually do. You know,
we go inside. They go outside, They run out of
cover into the open and stand with their backs sort
of cupped like they raise up there, they raise up
on their legs, they flatten out their backs, and they
lower their heads. Now what does this do. It turns
the lizards back into a kind of combination rain barrel
(07:30):
and whatever you call that. You know, the beer drinking
helmet where you got the beers on the sides and
it's got a straw running to the mouth. So you
combine that with the rain barrel concept. Their back collects
water over the widest possible surface area, which is the
lizard's flattened out dorsal scales, and then it funnels the
water to the edge of its mouth for drinking. So
(07:52):
like my body is a catch basin and my mouth
is the receptacle.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I'm glad we're getting into this because as I was
looking into like the culture of the horned lizard, I
was hoping to find an example of cowboy poetry about them.
But my search came up largely empty. But I did
find an interesting blog post by Charlie Buck of the
University of Arizona Poetry Center about an elementary school exercise
where they brought in a herpetologist to talk about horned lizards,
(08:18):
and then a poet led the class in filling out
horned lizard worksheets with descriptive text to create concrete poems
or visual poetry. So it's like an outline of a
horned lizard and then you fill in with text. And
I included one example of this in our outline here.
Joe and folks can look up the blog posts and
see an example of this as well. And for instance,
(08:40):
written by one of the students in the head is
a horned lizard eats ants. I babysat horned lizards. I
can't read the rest of it. I spit my blood
out of my eye at snack, I drink water from
the sky. And then like later on one of the legs,
it says I eat ant every day. And then there's
(09:02):
also a part of the anatomy that says I drink
water from my back. So I read that before I
actually got to that point in reading about their biology.
So I was like, I wonder if that's true. Gonna
have to FA fact check this child.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Yes, this child's poetry passes fact check. The horned lizards,
at least some species do drink water from their backs
and It's interesting the way Sherbrook describes it. It's not
just like you know, water randomly running off the back
and some of it sort of getting into the mouth.
It seems like it has a fairly sophisticated system of
like this sort of this matrix of layers underneath and
(09:39):
between the scales absorbing water and then routing it by
capillary action down to the edges of the mouth where
the where the lizard then sort of sits there opening
and closing its jaws slowly to drink the water as
it trickles in from the corners of the mouth. And
so it's got a fairly sophisticated topography on the back
(10:01):
there to get the water to the mouth.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
It's a great system. You can't follow them.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Another interesting way that horned lizards can serve water they
do not urinate. Now, how is that possible. They're animals,
Surely their bodies produce and collect waste products like excess
salts and the nitrogen bearing compounds that are the byproduct
of animal metabolism, like uric acid common in reptiles. Well,
(10:28):
they do still have to purge these waste products, but
they purge them not as liquid urine but as a
semi solid substance rather than dissolved in water. So a
Schrberch writes, quote, water carrying uric acid from the kidney
is reabsorbed in the kloaca. From here, the uric acid,
mixed with some insoluble crystals of urate salts is voided
(10:52):
as a white mass attached to the end of the
fecal pellet. And I thought this was interesting because in
just a minute, I want to mention, and there was
a video I was watching, like a short documentary about
some conservation efforts with horned lizards, and it was showing
some of their feces that the researchers were finding in
the wild. And yeah, there fecal pellets did have these
(11:14):
interesting little white caps on them. So apparently that is
what the lizard releases instead of liquid urine solid P
and some solidness crystals of solid P. Also, as we
have discussed with some other reptiles in the past, horned
lizards can sometimes remove excess salts from the body, not
(11:37):
by urinating, but by sneezing. So salts accumulate in glands
around the nostrils where they are secreted. As this hyper
concentrated salty brine in the nose, which you can then
you just hank it right out, and Sherbrook says that
you can find horned lizard individuals with noses covered in
(11:58):
this salty white trust from the process. So the moral
of the story is when you don't pee, you poop,
and you sneeze. Different other anti predator considerations that we
didn't have time to talk about in the last episode.
We were talking about the advantages of the horned lizard's
armor for self defense, you know, the tough scales, but
(12:22):
especially the sharp bony spines around the crown of the
horned lizard's head. That these pieces of armor increase the
risk a predator has to take in trying to eat
one of these lizards. The predator has to make a
judgment call is it too big for me to survive
swallowing this? Will the head spikes split open my throat
(12:45):
or puncture my organs? That can actually happen. But in
the context of looking at another predator prey relationship that
we didn't talk about last time, Sherbroke had some interesting
thoughts on the evolution of these head spikes. So Sherbrooke
is talking about the Southern grasshopper mouse or ani Comis torridus,
(13:05):
and this animal will prey on some smaller horned lizard
species by biting the skull right over the eye socket.
So this is before you get to the crown of spikes.
This is the skull above the eyes. And when the
grasshopper mouse attacks other prey animals, most other vertebrate prey,
(13:27):
it bites in a different place. It bites at the
back of the neck near the base of the head,
attempting to damage and sever the spinal cord, and this
is apparently a common attack area for predators to target.
I was actually kind of thinking, I know, I've read
about big cats often targeting the back of the neck
(13:47):
and the base of the skull in those rare cases
where they happen to attack humans, and I was trying
to remember where I came across that fact, and finally
I realized it was from Mary Roach's book fuzz When
Nature Breaks the Law, which we interviewed her about on
the show. That was one of my favorite interviews we've done,
and it's from the part of the book where she's
talking about taking the class learning to identify different common
(14:11):
wound patterns from different types of animal attacks, and so
for example, she talks about how when a grizzly bear
attacks a human sometimes a lot of the injuries are
sort of face on. They're like to the face in
the front of the head, almost as if the bear
is fighting a human the way it fights a rival bear,
where they're both kind of like biting at each other's faces.
(14:33):
Whereas cougars are used to killing their prey with a
powerful bite to the back of the neck, which they
in these rare cases where a cougar attacks a human,
they will sometimes target the same sort of place on
the body, like the back of the neck, base of
the back of the head.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
I believe in Jurassic Park this is also how the
velociraptors are depicted as preying on humans, biting the back
of the neck.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
But anyway, coming back to the relationship between the southern
grasshopper mouse and the horned lizard, so these mice will
try to prey on the lizards, especially the smaller ones,
but they don't bite where they bite most prey because
in the lizard's case, this is right where the head
horns grow, so the mouse doesn't even bother trying to
(15:21):
attack this well, defended area. Instead, it has got to
kind of like awkwardly chew with the head over the eyes,
and Sherbrook speculates that these horns could have evolved from
what was originally a more modest kind of bony defensive
ridge at the base of the skull designed to protect
against this kind of attack to the back of the neck.
(15:42):
And studies have shown that the spines do protect against
predator attacks. And you can measure this because the size
of the spines around the head actually matters. Like research
has shown that lizards killed by birds tend to have
order spines around the head than lizards of the same
(16:04):
species in that area, so the ones that are picked
off the most and to have the shortest headspikes. Now,
there's one more thing we brought up in the last
episode that I did want to make sure we came
back to today because I wanted to clarify something about it.
(16:28):
This was when we were talking about the relationship between
horned lizards and the red imported fire ant or Solenopsis
in Victa. It came up that non native fire ants
in North America are thought to be a reason for
some horned lizard population declines, and this does appear to
be true. There are a number of horned lizards whose
(16:50):
ranges have been shrinking in recent decades. There are places
where you used to find them, you don't find them anymore.
Many of their populations are in decline, and in the
case the case with a lot of these species does
seem to be that the fire ant is playing a
role there, especially because the lizards have such an important
relationship with the native harvester ants, which are sometimes sort
(17:12):
of driven out by the fire ants. So while it's
true that the fire ants appear to be playing a
role in population and range declines for these horned lizards,
they're not thought to be the only factor, or necessarily
even the main factor everywhere.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
That's very much the case. Yeah, and reading about the
Texas horned lizard, like urbanization vast urbanization and Texas is
often singled out as one of the primary factors there exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, So the fire ant, the imported fire ant, seemed
to be one factor among many. And this came up
when I was watching a short documentary video that was
just delightful. I recommend people look this up. A documentary
video produced by Texas Parks and Wildlife in twenty twenty
one called Horned Lizard Homecoming, you can find on YouTube.
(18:01):
It is a video specifically that's focused on an attempt
by the San Antonio Zoo to breed Texas horned lizards
in captivity and then release them back into areas from
which they have largely disappeared since the nineteen seventies. Just
one of the many charming things in this short documentary
is that the conservation biologists are working with a lizard
(18:24):
sniffing dog. So you know, imagine the canine unit at
the airport, but instead of a drug sniffing dog or
a bomb sniffing dog, it's a dog that is trained
to find Texas horned lizards in the wild and not
to bother them by the way, not go like pick
them up in the mouth and harass them until they
get a blood squirt, just to signal from a safe
(18:47):
distance that they found one.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Ah. That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
It's also very cute that the lizard sniffing dog in
the video is sort of wearing shoes as it goes
about its business. I think this is probably because they're
you know, it's a very scrub area and there's probably
a lot of like thorns and stuff. That can get
stuck in a dog's paw around there. But anyway, the
conservation biologists and the parks and wildlife workers they interview
in this video, they talk about a few other things
(19:12):
that are affecting the range and population of Texas horned lizards.
For example, human attempts to eliminate harvester ants from large
areas of land. Of course, again, Texas horned lizards need
to eat harvest or ants. Without the ants, the land
cannot sustain the lizards. And then also things like replacing
native grasses with different grass types, so you replace what
(19:36):
are called bunch grasses with turf grasses. This is not
what the lizards are adapted to and they can't really
survive in it. Of course, as you mentioned, Rob, just
general urbanization and reformatting of a lot of land area
roads cutting through natural land ranges, which interferes with movement
back and forth. But there's another thing I just wanted
(19:57):
to mention from this video because I found it hilarious.
There's a part where they're showing a lab at the
San Antonio Zoo where they're trying to breed lots of lizards.
So it's sort of it's a lizard sex lab, and
they are trying to facilitate mating, and they will put
a male lizard into a female lizard's tank. And there's
one part where the technician is explaining that the head
(20:19):
movements that we are seeing back and forth between these
two lizards indicate that they are both interested in mating.
But it totally looks like two lizards on a log
just nodding back and forth at each other, like yep, yep,
it's great. It's a very Texas kind of nod as well.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, you can imagine like the little cowboy hats being
on their heads, right, yeah, all right, Well, at this point,
I'd like to get back into some cultural connections to
the hornet lizard, and in the last episode we teased
out some connections in Navajo culture among the Dnet people,
and I wanted to get into some of that. So
(20:59):
there are there several mentions of the horned toad in
the nineteen forty four book Navajo Witchcraft by Clyde Kluckhohon,
who lived nineteen oh five through nineteen sixty. I've talked
about this text a little bit on the show before.
The version I have is from nineteen eighty nine with
some additions made to it, and there are several mentions
of the horned toad's use as a key ingredient in
various alleged spells in Navajo witchcraft, which I want to
(21:23):
stress the term witchcraft is used here as shorthand, not
for mainstream religious rituals and practice, but rather for what
is described, as described by Kluckhohn as quote Navajo ideas
and action patterns concerned with the influencing of events by
supernatural techniques that are socially disapproved.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Right, So what would be viewed by the people as
a sort of illicit, outsider form of magic.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Right, right, And it's my understanding as I understand it,
these are not necessarily things that were practiced, but were
believed to be practic by these few individuals. So the
book outlines various alleged curses, including the placing of a
personal item or a bit of clothing from a man
you want to death, curse inside a grave or inside
(22:13):
the mouth of a dead man, in the cursing of
a pregnant woman. A personal item is placed inside the
body of a horned toad or a horned lizard, or
a purse made from its hide.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Oh, interesting, and.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So that these would again, these would be specialized alleged
uses practiced by these you know, these outsiders that are
practicing this kind of like co or said to be
practicing this kind of like negative magical system. But there
is a fragment of a story shared late in the
book that is indeed a reference to a major Navajo
story about the horned lizard, and it does get into
(22:48):
some aspects of its biology, as we've discussed. So this
is the quote that is included in a Navajo Witchcraft
as a commentary on something else that's reference to the
book quote. The story is about the holy toad who
eats ants that give him power. One day, he was
swallowed by a coyote who he had kindly given of
(23:10):
his best corn. So while inside, he asked the code
what all the things he sees are for, and finally
comes to the back brain and asked what it was for,
and the coyote said, that is what I live by.
Leave it alone. So the toad cut it into, killed
the coyote, and came out of his throat.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
So I looked up some other versions of this amazing story,
and there appear to be different versions of it, or
you know, there were different retellings of it. I was
reading a version from Navajo Religion, Volume one by Gladys A.
Reichard from nineteen fifty, and the way this one goes is, Okay,
there's a theft of corn. The corn belongs to the
(23:54):
horned toad, and coyote steals it, and then the horned
toad us is the cooty of the theft. But coyote
kind of laughs about it and says, well, yeah, I
am hungry, and then he eats the horned toad. But
then horned toad begins to move around inside the code
he's belly, and at first coyote thinks it's just the
corn that he ate, but then the toad begins to
(24:16):
talk to him. He's like, where am I? It's dark
in here, and he like kicks the inside of the
stomach just to you know, to sort of punish the
coote a little bit. But then he moves to the windpipe,
keeps speaking. Then he moves to the heart and this
is where he carves across in the heart and it
kills the code. He dead, and then he emerges from
the code. He's body in this telling or retelling of
(24:38):
it from the code he's anus.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
This is interesting in how it matches with the cases
we talked about from biology in the in the previous
episode about animals that died from trying to eat a
horned lizard that was too big and too thorny, like
the various birds and snakes all. You know, it's like
a dangerous proposition to get too greedy with attacking a
(25:02):
horned toad that they have really serious spikes and they
can mess you up from the inside.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Yeah, and so you can imagine the story being inspired
by observations of that having occurred in predators, perhaps including
the coyote. And then, of course, as we referenced the
last episode, this nugget about them getting their power from
the ants that they eat, Like, that's right on as
far as they're irritating blood is concerned.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Right, because the idea, as we talked about last time,
is that there is something in the harvest or ant
diet that causes their blood to have the properties that
make it foul smelling or foul tasting to canids like
foxes and coyotes.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah. Now, according to Navajo historian Wally Brown on Navajo
traditional teachings, This is a twenty twenty three video. The
grandfather horned toad is a symbol of protection, with the
spikes serving as arrow points that protect one. And he
also drives home that the horned toad is close to
the Earth, and which matches up with the way that
(26:01):
it lives its life, you know, not only being a
very terrestrial organism, but being solo to the earth, flattening
itself so that it doesn't cast that shadow as we discussed.
But he stresses that it can be used to bless
one's mind, to bless one's spirit, and to bless one's
physical well being.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
I am interested in the way that it seems that
at least two humans, the spiritual connotations of the horned
toad or the horned lizard are really taken as almost
entirely positive. Despite the fact that it is a very
spiky looking creature. There seems to be a kind of
tension there. You would think, you see a creature that's
(26:40):
all like spiky and thorny like that, and I don't know,
people might just be more inclined to attach a kind
of negative spiritual energy to it. But so we have
these traditions that can consider the horned lizard as like
a route for a blessing, a blessing of the mind
and spirit and the health of the body. But also
(27:01):
just if you read about people's personal relationships who grew
up around these lizards, people have overwhelmingly positive feelings about them,
like very positive feelings about catching them and handling them
as children and things like that. Do you know what
I'm talking about?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, yeah, And I was thinking about this as well.
I guess on one hand, it's worth stressing that like
they're they're not a direct threat to humans. You know,
it's not not even like a situation where you know,
they're Obviously there are a lot of like say, like
venomous snakes out there that are also not out there
in the game trying to have encounters with humans, but
(27:37):
it just happens, and you know, and you know, injuries
and so forth can can result. That's not really the
case here, Like, they're pretty much not a threat to us,
and so there's almost a certain like natural kinship with
them because they're out there in the world. They're dealing
with stress, stresses, they're dealing with predators, enemies, and they
have these natural defenses against them. But they also seem
(27:59):
very much like an underdog because they are small, and
you know it doesn't always work. Yeah. So there are
some other details on some of these traditions mentioned in
another book. I looked at Jane Manister's Horned Lizards. This
is a two thousand and two book from Texas Tech
University Press. The author here sites that at least in
(28:19):
some tellings of this the code is being punished for
stealing corn from the sacred stalk, that the horned lizard
is associated with inner protection, especially for warriors traditionally, and
then the author also cites that there may be a
Navajo taboo, or there may have been a Navajoa taboo
against including certain animals, including this one, in various rug
(28:42):
weaving designs, perhaps in deference to its special strength. Now,
I want to stress that Navajo traditions vary across time
and geography, as with pretty much any belief system, and
there are also aspects of Navajo traditions that are not
meant for me to know of. And I hope that
I've been respectful with what I've brought to the discussion here.
(29:02):
But I think this is always there's always a fascinating
relationship to be observed between a people's beliefs and a
people's natural environment. And I think that we see that
here with the horned toad or horned lizard, both as
a metaphor as well as an interpretation of what I
assume were observations of the horned lizard's biology in the wild. Now,
(29:31):
another source I looked at. I was looking at an
article by Joyce Gibson Roach writing for TCU magazine talking
about different cultural interpretations of the horned lizard, and this
author points to Spanish folk beliefs. So this would have
been you know, in Mexico for the most part, where
(29:51):
they would sometimes refer to the horned lizard as a
torrito dilo virgin or the little bull who protects the virgin.
And so this is there's kind of like two different
things going on with this this nickname. So we talked
about this in the last episode. How they may be
observed to charge like a bull and are sometimes referred
(30:12):
to as the little bull.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Oh yeah, yeah, like against an absurdly larger predator, like
against a human shoe. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
And I think that I think this again, this is
one of the things that makes this animal charming. You know,
it's an underdog stand in its ground, you know, and like,
how can you not want to be like the like
the humble, horny toad in this respect? But then where
does the virgin come in? Well, this seems to be
connected to various interpretations that what's going on here is
(30:41):
that the horned toad is crying tears of blood. So
there is a long, sometimes controversial, and also generally skeptically
debunked history of statues of the Virgin Mary weeping tears
of blood in Catholicism, and accounts of of weeping statues
in general, aiding back at least to the writings of
(31:01):
Plutarch in the first and second century see now. I
should also point out that humans can experience blood in
the tears or blood from the tear ducks or hematuria
for various reasons. So for instance, when my son was younger,
he had tubes put in his tear ducks to correct
a minor problem, and immediately after surgery he shed a
(31:21):
single tear of blood, which was pretty awesome. At the time,
we knew everything was fine, you know, and it was
just kind of like, oh, wow, that was a blood tear,
but only got the one agreed, if you know, not
to worry. That is pretty cool, all right. Now another
connection to the horned toad the horned lizard in culture.
(31:44):
This is one that was shared in that book by
Jane Manister Horned Lizards from two thousand and two. She
gets into a number of different traditions, at least mentioning
that there are a number of ideas about them being
tied up in weather predict and rain generation, which I
guess is understandable of a creatures that clearly is able
(32:06):
to thrive in a very arid environment, and we have
these unique observations, you know, concerning the way that they
catch rain and so forth. But then she also gets
into this account that some of you may have heard
of before. I believe stuff you missed in history class
did a whole episode about this last couple of years.
There's the story of Old Rip. This is a horned
(32:32):
lizard originally named Blinky, that was placed in an Eastland County,
Texas time capsule along with a bible, some coins, and
some newspapers. And then when the capsule was dug out
thirty one years later, the lizard was allegedly still alive.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
I don't know about that.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah, A lot of solid reasons to doubt this detail
of the story, but this is the main detail of
the story. So it's like everyone who's celebrating this, it's
like they're basically the idea being that they were saying
the cowboy lore is correct. This is a victory of
cowboy biology. They were right the cowboys when they said
(33:11):
that the horned toad could live for one hundred years
without food or water. Because clearly this particular horned lizard
was locked away for thirty one years and we just
got him out and he's still alive. Everyone and take
a look at him. So this was very popular at
the time. Old Rip toured the country, even met President
Coolidge at the White House, and ultimately died in nineteen
(33:33):
twenty nine. Now, various folks later took credit for switching
out lizards at the capsule's opening. So this is that
I want to stress that this is almost certainly a hoax,
and there's a lot of reason to believe it was
a hoax. This was not carried out with any kind
of like scientific rigger, but it was a big deal
(33:54):
and it was covered in the New York Times among
other major publications. In fact, I want to read to
you from the New York Times. This is from February twentieth,
nineteen twenty eight. Oh boy, toad alive after thirty one
years sealed in Texas cornerstone, Eastland, Texas, February nineteenth ap
hey hornage toad sealed alive in the cornerstone of the
(34:15):
courthouse here thirty one years ago, was alive when the
stone was removed yesterday. According to County Judge Edward S. Pritchard,
the old courthouse is being raised, and it goes into
some additional details, including this bit that I also have
to include. After the cornerstone was removed, the toad appeared
lifeless for some time, but in a little while it
(34:36):
opened its eyes. In about twenty minutes, it began to breathe.
The mouth, however, appeared to have grown together.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
What grown together?
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Yeah, yeah, so I was looking around. There's some other
takes on this as well that.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Oh, they're also saying they're going to open the mouth
by surgery and force it to eat food.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah. Yeah, that's also the New York Time story. So yeah,
this story, I should be clear, there were a number
of skeptics at the time that were like, that doesn't
sound right. Let me see this toad. I think there
was maybe there may be one or two support supporters
in the scientific community who are maybe like, well, it's possible.
(35:20):
I don't know, but generally people were very doubtful about this.
And then on the other hand you had others pointing out, well,
clearly the animal survived in the time capsule because there
was a Bible in there. The Bible sustained the lizard.
I guess the Bible also made the lizard's mouth grow together.
I'm not sure. I've read other accounts that it had
(35:42):
a broken leg and worn down horns but was otherwise healthy. Yeah,
and then others claim that their eyes were sealed shut
as well. There seems to be a certain amount of
drift in the telling and retelling of this this feat.
But here's what we actually know to be true. So
hornet lizards can live around five but normal lifespan in
the wild is not fully known, according to the Oklahoma
(36:04):
Department of Wildlife Conservation. But I think we can probably
take that as like a ballpark. According to Texas Monthly
in a twenty fifteen article by Alex Dropkin, the Texas
horned lizard species hibernates, or rather bermates between October and April,
and this is likely where that cowboy lore originated, that
(36:26):
these creatures can live without food or water for one
hundred years. And this is the lore that the folks
in Eastland, Texas decided to put to the test. This
is why they put a horned lizard inside of a
time capsule to test or I think, if we're being
rightfully skeptic here to prove that the cowboy lore was correct.
(36:47):
There is no evidence that horned lizards in the wild
choose hibernation spots based on the presence of biblical texts
or coins or newspapers. But I guess we should note
that long lifespans for lizards are not completely unheard of.
The New Zealand tuatara can live twenty five to thirty
five years, typical age ages to sixty or apparently common,
(37:11):
and one captive specimen apparently lived to be over one hundred. Meanwhile,
some wizards can go without food or water for weeks
or months. I think it's safe to say that the
accounts of Old Rip places the story so far outside
of anything reported or at least, you know, authenticated to
any reasonable degree that common sense leans us very strongly
(37:32):
in the direction of hoax here.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
You know, we talked not too long ago on the show,
we were doing some stuff about cave biology, and we
ended up talking about the cave dwelling amphibian, the olm,
which is notable for being one of the most sort
of sedentary creatures on Earth that it can live for
a long time. It's an aquatic salamander. It's found in
(37:56):
the dynaic alps in cave systems. It lives in the
dark for much of the time, and it is thought
that sometimes these creatures can go for like ten years
without food, and that in itself is incredible, but that
seems to be sort of the upper bound of where
you can where you can push push the slow motion
(38:17):
metabolism too.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah. Yeah, And so again this if this story of
old Rip were true, it would just it would, you know,
triple that that ten year record. So yeah, I think
we are very right to be highly skeptical of this.
And again, various folks came forward and claimed that they
were involved with the hoax and so forth. So there's
(38:40):
a lot of smoke there that suggests the fire. I
should also point this out. You know, we're talking about
in endangered status of hornet lizards. This particular incident was
so popular that it resulted in a horned toad boom,
so the yet specimens being harvested and then exported for
(39:03):
novelty's sake, hurting local populations in the process. But hey,
old rip is allegedly currently entombed in Eastland, Texas. I
think he's on display. So if we have any Eastland
listeners or visitors to Eastland, or folks who have been
to Eastland and can report on the body of old
rip rite in, we would love to hear from you.
I believe he has at least historically been stolen at
(39:26):
least once and returned.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Are you, County Judge Edward S. Pritchard, what criteria did
you use to judge that this was the real original lizard?
Speaker 2 (39:36):
All right? I have another interesting bit that I ran
across in these texts that I want to talk about.
This is from Manister's book as well, and it is
the horny toad Man, something that I know, on the
surface absolutely sounds like a cryptid or some American Western
horror story, and the fact that it's associated with the
railway I think only compounds this possibility.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, it sounds like he belongs alongside sasquatch and paramouth.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
A yeah. So. According to Manaster, the figure emerges in
response to a unique problem on a segment of the
Santa Fe railroad connecting Albuquerque and El Paso, a segment
of track that was dubbed the Horny toad a segment
where anything bad that ever happened on the railroad could
happen and had happened, including a unique problem first reported
(40:24):
apparently in the Jiorada del Niorto desert basin, and that
is trains losing traction on the rails due to the
grease and moisture of hundreds of squashed hornet lizards. What so,
Apparently it was so bad that brakemen and firemen aboard
the train would have to scramble down onto the tracks
(40:46):
and sweep it all off to get all this gunk
off the tracks, and it led to the idea, nay,
the ideal of the horny toad man. So, a horny
toad man is not merely like somebody that goes down
and sweeps off the rails in the scenario, this is
a railway man with eyes on corporate promotion, willing to
do anything and everything the company requires in order to advance,
(41:10):
and that certainly includes going out onto the tracks in
the desert heat and removing lizard guts from the rails.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
So this is a this is a railroad company version
of I'll get the boss's coffee, you know, I will
sweep the sweep all of the horny toad grease off
of the rails.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Right, And to put it in an alien context, since
we're talking about Alien in the last episode, you might
consider Burke from Aliens a horny toad man of sorts,
you know, a complete scoundrel, but he proves that if
nothing else, he is more than ready to get down
there on the tracks and get his hands dirty for
the company. He's a company man all the way.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
That's right, all right.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Now, In trying to understand this, I guess we do
have to acknowledge that hornet lizard populations would have been
greater back in this time period as opposed to you
know what they are now. Can't compare what we see
in the world today to what would have been happening then.
But I needed more clarity on why are there so
many horned lizards getting run over by trains? And I
(42:10):
found a possible answer here In a nineteen twenty two
paper by J. P. Givler, Givler writes, it is an
interesting fact that at such times horned lizards are very
abundant under the crossties of railroad tracks. Often they burrow
through into the area between the two rails. Here they
emerge and are literally trapped. The rails are usually too
(42:32):
high to be climbed over, and the lizards run up
and down frantically. Occasionally one climbs up on a rail
just in time to be crushed by a passing train.
Many live for the rest of the summer in this
uncomfortable pasture bummer. Now it doesn't come I mean, it
doesn't completely answer my question, but it at least puts
a lot of horned lizards in the vicinity of those
(42:53):
train tracks. And you know, he only mentions it as
being like an occasional squad. But may I guess that's
close enough to like a mass squashing that we can
consider this reality. Now, I look for any discussions out
there in the literature about loss of traction due to
animal railway mortalities, and I looked at it. At least
(43:16):
one full source on animal railway mortalities or one that
deals with this in depth titled railway ecology. And there's
no mention in this of tracks getting greased up by
dead animals or dead lizards. So if true, maybe this
was indeed more of a concern with an historic engine
and an historic local population of lizard. I'm not sure,
(43:39):
but I will add the following from another paper. I
looked up Experimental evaluation of effect of leaves on railroad
tracks and loss of breaking by Kumar at All. This
is in the Journal Machines in twenty twenty four. Quote
loss of traction results in either breaking of the train
or slip, which arises at lower track active coefficients. This
(44:02):
case occurs when there are third body layers that cause
reduce traction, such as in the case of leaves. Various
traction enhancers are adopted by the railway to improve adhesion
when the rail is contaminated.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Okay, so you can certainly imagine that leaves falling on
railroad tracks could reduce the traction between the wheels and
the rails. So yeah, you can guess that if like lizards,
especially not just like lizard body fluids, but whole lizard
bodies were on the rails that might interfere in some way.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
That's my guess. You know, if we're not dealing with
leaves here, we're dealing with lizard bodies and lizard guts
and lizard liquids. But I guess if there were enough
of them, and also dealing with the idea that these
are not modern trains, these are historic drain engines, can
I guess it's conceivable that there would have been some
sort of issue here, thus necessitating the horny toe man.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Horny toad man, we salute you.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
So yeah, I don't know if we have any anybody
out there who is, you know, verse more versed than
the history of locomotives and in the railway in America,
you know, right in we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
What's your company's version of the horny toad man.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yeah, I guess there's there's probably a horny toad man
in any business, in any corporation. So those were some
of the cultural connections to the horned lizard or a
horned toad or horny toad that I was able to
come across. But I'd love to hear from anyone out
there if you have some additional insights to share. Be
they related to something we discussed in this episode, or
(45:43):
something we missed altogether, be it you know something from
Native beliefs and traditions that you want to share, or
cowboy lore or indeed cowboy poetry. I'm still at a
loss that there's not at least one cowboy poem out
there on the Internet that deals with these guys.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Surely I'm gonna blame Google being bad now for the
inability to connect with that literature.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Yeah, all right, well we're gonna ahead and close out
this episode, but yeah, right in, we'd love to hear
from you. Let's see a little housekeeping here. Hey, if
you're on Instagram, look us up. We're STBYM podcast. That's
our handle. You can follow us there and keep up
with some of what's coming out in the old podcast feed.
And in that old podcast feed, we've got core science
and culture episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode
(46:29):
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious
concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway,
and special thanks to our excellent guest audio producer Chandler
may Is for sitting in with us today. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hi, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
(46:57):
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
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