The Salt Vampires of Star Trek

In this special Star Trek Week episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the salt vampires of M-113 from “Star Trek: The Original Series.”

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Episode Transcript

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 Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And my name is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Welcome to Star Trek Week right here on Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. Yesterday was Star Trek Day, so called
because Star Trek the original series debuted on September eighth,
way back in nineteen sixty six, and the episode in
question was The Man Trap, which sounds maybe like it's
going to be some sort of a dating based episode,

(00:41):
but it's not. It is really more of a like
a horror flavored creature feature episode.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
I thought it would be about a trap, like a
literal trap, it really doesn't. Is there a trap in it?
I don't recall one.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I think the title the title goes back to earlier
stages of the script. I'm to understand, where like the
basic ideas that there would be some sort of an
alien creature that was using various illusion based deceptions that
were essentially a series of traps.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
But this is actually the episode that we're going to
be talking about on the podcast today. Now, I got
to go full disclosure for all of Star Trek Week.
I think Rob, you're more of a Trekkie than I am.
I'm not like anti Star Trek. I've always liked Star Trek.
I just for whatever reason, never got deep into it
like a lot of people do. I think you have

(01:30):
maybe watched like a lot of the Next Generation at
least or something.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, I was definitely a Next Generation kid. I would
watch it every night on cable at like nine pm
before I went to sleep. So I watched tons of
Next Generation, quite a lot of Deep Space nine and
That's and then various films. But in terms of watching
the original series, is just really only one or two episode,

(01:54):
three or four episodes tops that I had ever seen.
That just wasn't part of my Star Trek diet.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah, I've seen a lot less than you. I've seen
like four or five episodes of the original series. I
watched all of the first season of the Next Generation,
which I'm to understand is not necessarily the cream of
the crop. And then I've seen most of the at
least the original series cast movies. So I guess throughout

(02:20):
this week in our Star Trek episodes, you're gonna have
to fill me in more where my Star Trek knowledge
has gaps. But anyway, I had the idea to do
this episode because I was reading about various Star Trek
creatures and I came across the idea of a salt vampire,
the creature that appears in the very first episode of

(02:41):
the show that ever aired. Right, because this one, The
Man Trap, went on air before the pilot.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Right right right the pilot episode The Cage wouldn't air
until I believe, nineteen eighty eight, after receiving a VHS
release in eighty six, So this was indeed the public's
first taste of Star Trek. Now, narratively speaking, there's no
particular reason this episode comes first. This is not one
of those episodes where it's like, how did Spock meet
Kirk or anything like that. Rather, I'm to understanding it

(03:09):
was largely the network's called. They're like, okay, here's one
that feel it's a little scary, it's a little dark. Yeah,
this is going to be the one we're going to
launch with. And it seems like it was the right
choice because it struck a chord with viewers, and also
the press seemed to like it, so it must have
been the right choice.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
There are some things about this episode that feel very
first episode. Though, one example, if you know what I'm
talking about, is that we would later get this dynamic
throughout the original series where Spock there are constantly references
to Spock being unemotional, and there are sort of jokes
about this where you know, he's kind of puzzled by

(03:48):
other characters having an illogical emotional reaction to something. In
The Man Trap, it actually goes a bit beyond that,
and there are moments where he seems confused by what
emotion are. It's like he's not even sure what you're
talking about when you explain having an emotion.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
That's yeah, that's true in a way that almost compared
to other episodes or movies that I've seen, it seemed
maybe that is Spock's relationship to emotions was less developed
at this point.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Yeah, that's why it feels distinctly early to me. It's
like there are some elements that feel like they're still
being worked out.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah. It's also interesting how, at least in my viewing,
it really didn't feel like Kirk was a centerpiece to
the episode at all. And I mean, in so far
as he's the captain, he's the centerpiece, but it really
wasn't a Kirk centric episode.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
It's very ensemble. I'd say, yeah, you get time with
a lot of the characters. You get time with with Kirk,
especially McCoy's kind of almost the centerpiece of it, but
also with Huah, with Sulu, with Spock, and with some
other characters we never meet again, or at least I
don't remember from other episodes.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
This episode was directed by Mark Daniels, who directed fifteen
episodes of the original Star Trek I believe, And it
was written by George Clayton Johnson, who had previously pinned
seven episodes of the original Twilight Zone and also he
wrote the story that served as the basis for nineteen
sixties Oceans eleven and then of course various remakes of that,

(05:21):
and he'd go on to co author the novel that
served as the basis for nineteen seventy six's Logan's Run.
So the Twilight Zone connection especially is often stressed in
discussions of this episode's darker take on things.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
Am I to understand that there are some similarities in
the story of this episode to a Twilight Zone episode
that he wrote.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yes, I believe you're right. There's an episode that he
pinned for the Twilight Zone Season one, episode thirteen, The
Four of Us are Dying that has to do with
a This is one that I may have seen, but
I don't remember it really strongly. But it has a
con man that I believe has a shape shifting ability,
and so you can see threat of that in the
form this episode ends up taking right, because.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
That's a major theme. It's like the main other thing
about the alien in this episode. It is a salt vampire,
but also it is a shape shifter. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Now I mentioned that this one has a darker tone,
maybe compared to some of the other original Series of
Star Trek episodes, and it is notable because, I mean,
there's plenty of darkness in the Star Trek universe, and
certainly if you start making a list of things that
are dark about it, you can make a pretty exhaustive list.
But as we've come to know it over the decades,

(06:34):
the franchise is light that often captivates us the most. Right,
it's that sense of optimism even in divided or troubled times,
be it nineteen sixty six or twenty twenty five. Because
Star Trek depicts a post scarcity world in which the
entire planet Earth benefits from a united government and serves
as a key member of a largely benevolent United Federation

(06:56):
of planets. And while we encounter plenty of philosophical nundrums
and ethical dilemmas, there's always this intense striving to do
right by everyone.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
You know. This weekend, I also, in addition to watching
this episode for the first time, I also watched the
first episode with the appearance of Ricardo montalban As con
he plays a spoiler alert for this old episode. He
plays a ruthless dictator, reawakened from the twentieth century, reawakened

(07:27):
far in the future, and he's sort of describing his
ideals to the crew of the Enterprise, and one thing
they tell him is basically, you're not going to like
the world you've just been awakened into. And there's a
little a nice bit of humor in there. It's kind
of like we've improved many things that make the world
less amenable to the ruthless dictators among us.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
That's a good point, and we'll come back to that
episode later on in the week.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
Now.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
How much of that optimism is present in this episode,
I would argue quite a bit because on one hand. Yes,
it's an alien threat episode, and the way they ultimately
deal with that alien threat is going to be on
par with the way alien threats are treated in most fiction.
Despite all of that, you know, they apply logic and
they apply compassion in a in what I would argue

(08:18):
would be, you know, the uniquely Star Trek way.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yeah, I would agree with that, and especially to zero
in on what you say about the the deployment of
logic in the execution of the plot. That's a thing
I like in a lot of the Star Trek that
I have seen, not just logic in the sense of
being the opposite of the being being the thing that
Spock possesses, you know, not thinking emotionally, but also logic

(08:45):
has a process like seeing the characters methodically work through
steps in how to solve a problem, something that's often
not depicted in you know, a lot of genre fiction
where it's all action. A lot of my favorite stuff
I've seen in our track are scenes of characters like
sitting around a table discussing what they're going to do

(09:05):
to solve a problem.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Yeah, and then as we see in this episode two,
discussing the ramifications of all that. So, yeah, it's the
kind of stuff that makes an episode like this more
memorable even after the dust is settled from the action itself.
All right, well, I'm going to provide a quick summary
of this episode, so you know, fair warning if you

(09:27):
haven't seen The Man Trap and you would like to
watch The Man Trap before we proceed with this episode,
and then get into some of the science, because ultimately
that's where we're headed with this. We're going to talk
about how we might interpret some of the plot elements
and the creature through the lens of natural world science.
But spoiler warning, if you want to dip out, now
watch the episode and come back, go ahead and do that.

(09:49):
All right, So, this is not an episode I'd ever
watched before, and in my opinion, it's a pretty fun one.
The episode having been digitally remastered, like the rest of
the original series, I believe it looks great and we
have some very vibrant colors as we orbit the mysterious
planet M one one three, as we venture into the
gel lit caverns on its surface, and even aboard the Enterprise,

(10:13):
we get to venture into the botany department, where we
have a bunch of really vibrantly colored plants on display.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
That was one of my favorite moments. Sulu has a
Sulu has a screaming pet plant in this episode. That's
really good. That kind of works like the dogs in Terminator,
like the plant begins to scream when something is not
right with one of the people in the room.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
But you're right, we do get some nice George to
Kay scenes here with his Sulu. We also get, as
we mentioned already, some nice scenes with Michelle Nichols Uhura,
and then some nice Bock scenes from with Leonard Nimoy
and then DeForest Kelly's doctor McCoy is arguably the centerpiece
of the episode, and as far as Shatner's Captain Kirk
is concerned, it's easy to look for all the cliches

(10:56):
in any given Kirk role, any Kirk performance, you know.
But but I don't know, I felt like he was
perfectly fine here, if not a little bit in the background.
Though I did find it amusing that the whole episode
and therefore all of Star Trek kicks off with him
being kind of a real jerk to McCoy. They're going
on this mission, as we're going to discuss, he's essentially

(11:17):
going to visit an X and he's a little nervous
about it, and so he says, shall we pick some flowers? Doctor?
When a man visits an old girlfriend, she usually expects
something like that, And I don't know, it just felt off, like,
oh my god, it seems like a little cruel Kirk.
By the end of the episode, I feel like maybe
they've grounded a little more in they're rapport but right
off the bat here it felt a little a little mean.

Speaker 3 (11:39):
If I have a critique, one thing I'll say about
the writing in this episode is that I think it's
pretty It's pretty good, decent to good when it's on
plot and when the characters are just chit chatting, and
that's not not some of the best stuff. Yeah, and
this is an example here, But yeah. One thing I
sometimes noticed when I go back and watch these original

(12:01):
series episodes is that, especially because I came to the
original series cast backwards, I saw the original series cast
movies before I really ever watched any of the show.
And as I said, I still haven't seen that much
of the show. But I'm often struck by how much
more hot blooded and emotional Kirk is in the movies

(12:25):
than he is in the show. Usually in the show,
it seems to me like he's closer to the Spock
end of the spectrum. He's kind of cool and logical
and methodical and occasionally a bit you know, acerbic or something.
But he's not like he is in the movies, where
he's more like a hot blooded, you know, just bursting
with feeling.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah. Yeah, he is rather casual in this episode, even
when things get stressful. You know, he's kind of cool
as a cucumber.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
And by the.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
Books, all right, So the basic plot summary goes as fall.
So the Enterprise is conducting a routine medical check in
with Professor Robert Crater played by Alfred Ryder and his

(13:15):
wife Nancy Crater played by Janine Ball on the desolate
planet of m one one three. So it's a task
that's low stakes, socially complicated again by the fact that
Nancy is McCoy's old flame from like a decade ago.
Our first hint of intrigue is that when Nancy's introduced,
she looks like a beautiful middle aged woman to Kirk,

(13:36):
but to McCoy, she looks at least ten years younger,
as young as he remembers her from their past relationship.
And you know that's all well and good, right. I
mean the music that there's a little music sting here
that makes us think something's not right. But still it's
subjective how you interpret someone's appearance. But then we have
this crewman Darnell with them, who is a total red

(13:56):
shirt even though he's wearing a blue shirt, and he
sees her as an entirely different woman, a blonde lady
that he met on Wrigley's pleasure planet.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
And yeah, he actually says this out loud, and he
is like scolded by Kirk. He's like, you can't say that.
He's sent outside to think about it, think about his sins. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
So we eventually come to learn that this creature killed
the real Nancy a year prior, but it took on
her form and continued on with the Professor. And I
think this is one of the more interesting wrinkles in
the plot here. So the professor knows this is not
the real Nancy. The relationship between the Professor and the
shape shifting alien is one of kind of consensual delusion

(14:39):
and ultimately real affection.

Speaker 3 (14:41):
Yeah, because the professor is So the creature begins killing
people in the enterprise, of course, and they are the
people that the crew members are found with these weird
modeled faces. They've got these circles on their faces. And
there's a mystery plot throughout the whole middle of the
episode where Kirk and everyone are trying to figure out
what's going on with these dead people. At first they

(15:03):
think that they have eaten a poisonous plant on the
surface of the planet, and then they rule that out.
They say that doesn't make sense, and they realize they're
being attacked by some creature, and they think the creature
is down on the planet threatening the Professor, but then
eventually they figure out, oh, it was there with him
all along, and when he is brought on board the Enterprise,

(15:24):
they're trying to get his help in capturing the creature,
which is shape shifting and blending in among the crew,
you know, trying to prey on members of the crew.
But the Professor doesn't want to help because he loves
the creature, the creature that killed his real wife but
in his lonely years there on the planet. Because this
creature can assume the shape of his wife. It has

(15:45):
just replaced her, it has just become.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Her to yeah, and so he's like, yes, I know,
it's just it's an alien shape shifter, but it's the
closest thing I have to the person I lost. And
there's a sense too that the alien loves him as well,
like needs them as well. Yea, So it's again, the
various other treatments of this basic idea would not have
included this much compassion. But of course, yeah, like you said,

(16:12):
there's a lot of running about in disguise on the
enterprise itself, chasing salt shakers around, even because that's what
it wants solved. And eventually we're going to get to
the point where McCoy has to put the alien down
with a phaser and in doing so reveal its true form.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
That's right, So through most of the episode, the creature
is a shape shifter, and we are only seeing it
in the forms it takes. It Basically, it tries to
take whatever form what it thinks would be most appealing
to the person it's dealing with, often someone from the
person's past, or someone who reminds them of someone from
their past or would seem familiar to them. And then

(16:49):
in the end you finally see what it looks like,
and it is somewhat more lockish. As we mentioned in
our episode on the Time Machine from nineteen sixty. It
kind of has a gray green skin, a kind of
puckered mouth with these fangs in it, and you would think, oh,
the fangs there, that's the vampire part, right, that's what

(17:10):
it's feeding. But now, remember the crew members who were
found dead have these circles on their skin, on their faces.
What's all that about. Well, we discover when we see
the creature's final form that the creature is using its
fingers for sucking the salt out of its victims. It
has suction cups like on the arms of an octopus,

(17:30):
and these are the cause of the circles and the
modeling on the face. It is attaching to the victim's face,
sucking all the salt out of the victim's body and
leaving them dead, which, by the way, I don't know
if salt can be extracted by itself in that way,
but that would absolutely kill you. You need salt to live.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of questions about the extraction
of mechanism here, but yeah, the idea that it would
be fatal absolutely checks out. Yeah, it's a pretty great
monster design, clearly steering firmly into the monster category. Sad
face gray here and fur suckers on those three fingers.

(18:10):
One wonders again what the teeth are for if it
feeds exclusively through its fingers, But I don't know, Maybe
the teeth stuck around for one reason or another.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
Well, as we will discover with some of the creatures
we'll get to in the scientific portion of this episode,
it may be that this creature actually has two different
feeding mechanisms that has one for salt and another for
the energy containing macronutrients that it consumes to live. So
maybe it's getting its energy from sugars or proteins or whatever.

(18:42):
But then it also has salt suckers on its fingers
for the salt that it needs to survive.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, at least on its fingers. I was wondering about this.
I was thinking, well, we never I don't think we
ever see its feet or that certainly the bottoms of
its feed Might it have salt absorbing suckers down there
as well? And I would argue I think it would
be reasonable to expect it might, especially if on some
level salt absorption through the hands and or the feet

(19:09):
here originally evolved as a kind of passive feeding or
sensing from at least a partially quadrupedal organism as it
traversed its environment before it became steadily became its presumably
primary mode of ingestion its primary diet. Because we can
look to various natural world organisms that can quote unquote

(19:30):
taste with their feet, and that includes as we'll be
getting into, butterflies, flies, bees, and crayfish. Additionally, we have
organisms that can absorb water through drinking patches on their skin,
as we see in amphibians. And we also have the
thorny devil lizard of Australia that can draw water up
from its feet via capillary action. So all it has

(19:51):
to do is touch water with any part of its
body and it can channel that water. The channels in
its skin will move that water up to its mouth.
So I don't know. I like to think that it
probably has suckers on the bottoms of its feet as well.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
I bet it's got suckers everywhere. I mean, why not.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
I included a few images of the monster in our
outline here, Joe. The fourth one you'll note is apparently
you can and listeners. You can find this as well
as if you go to like memory alpha and look
up the Salt Vampire. But apparently they did a redesign
of this creature for the two thousand and nine Star
Trek film but ended up not using it.

Speaker 3 (20:30):
Was it going to be major plot element or just
like a fan service cameo.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
I guess it was more of a cameo because it
seemed to have never made it into even any deleted
scenes as far as I know. But you can see
the design here and it looks obviously updated. Still I
guess true enough to the original concept, but I don't know,
lacking that signature sad face because we should get that
sense of sadness. It's a survivor and the last survivor

(20:56):
of a now vanished species.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
Well, yeah, and there are many sad things in this episode.
For example, I think we were talking about this off mic.
I think we haven't said this in the episode yet.
There is one scene where the leaders of the Enterprise
are sitting around a table discussing what to do. They're
aware now that the shape shifting creature is among them
on the ship and what they're going to do to

(21:21):
stop it and the creature in disguise I believe, As
McCoy suggests, why don't we just give this creature the
salt it needs and let it go away. Yeah, and
it's already killed many of their friends at this point,
so maybe he's not grasping why exactly that they wouldn't
want to just let it go. But at the same time,

(21:43):
you get a plea for mercy essentially from the monster's
own lips. It's just like, it just needs the salt
to survive. Why not just give it the salt and
let it go.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
Like it does what it needs to survive. And it's
also brought up we'll look at humans. Humans also historically
killed to survive and killed to eat, and so and
so forth. So yeah, we do get some nice logical
consideration here of everything. But but yeah, I kept coming
back to the idea. It's like this could have all
been avoided if we just had been honest about all

(22:12):
of this, and the Federation could have just supplied this
one creature with just unlimited salt. How much salt would
be required to keep it from killing people. Surely that
is a price that the Federation would be willing to pay.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
Yeah, And also I would say general plausibility question. I
feel like on a barren planet like you see with
M one one three. Here, it would probably be harder
to find food than it would be to find salt.
The food is in like, you know, energy containing molecules.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
And it's just also hard to imagine a world where
the salt has been used up. I was looking into this,
a little bit of salt. Yeah, where'd all the salt go?
Like again, salt is cheap and readily available in most places,
and I was reading about this in an article or
I guess this was a chapter in Chemistry in Science

(23:00):
Fiction from twenty twenty five by Carston Mueller, and the
author here points out that, yeah, we have to tweak
our interpretation of this to file it away logically. The
author here writes, quote, the salt requirement seems to be
so high that the species eventually became extinct because all
the salt on M one one three was used up
at some point. It can't really be used up no

(23:22):
matter what chemical reaction you do with salt. The sodium
and chlorine atoms from which it is built remain as such,
and the total amount on the planet does not change. Nevertheless,
it is conceivable that at some point all the table
salt is used up, in the sense that we use
up water. Water is not destroyed when washing and drinking.
It is still water. However, it becomes contaminated, meaning it

(23:45):
is dirtier after use than before it is used up,
in the sense that it is still there but can
no longer be used immediately. Something similar could have happened
with the salt on M one one three.

Speaker 3 (23:57):
So some kind of planet wide contaminate process by which
all of the salt is fouled throughout the whole environment.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
And I also get the sense maybe salt is more
delicious if you pull it out of a humanoid's face,
because because she only chases salt shakers around so much.
And I don't remember any comment of anybody saying that
the storehouses of salt on the enterprise have been completely depleted.
The replicators are all fried because somebody's been replicating NonStop salt. No,

(24:29):
it just goes straight for the face anyway.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
Well, in the same way that like a teaspoon of
salt by itself is disgusting, but a teaspoon of salt
on food with other natural flavors, with some sweetness and
some acidity balancing it all out, is delicious.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
You get some of the face oil in there, it
really flavors it up nicely. Right. All right, Well, let's
go ahead and make our transition out of the world
of science fiction and in to the natural world of biology. Right.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
So, I found the idea of a salt vampire so intriguing.
I had to wonder, as we often do, is there
such an organism in the real world on our planet.
I think there's nothing exactly like the salt monster in
the episode, but there are things that are close, and
there are a number of fascinating animal adaptations that have

(25:23):
evolved in nature's desperate quest for salt. Because, as we
mentioned earlier, in the real world, salt is very important.
Animals need salt. We need many dietary minerals in some quantities, magnesium, potassium,
and things like that, but sodium chloride is especially important
because salt is necessary for the proper functioning of nerves

(25:46):
and muscles. Sodium ions present in the water content of
our bodies. They help us regulate fluid pressure. So if
an animal has a serious enough deficiency of salt that
will kill it. It will suffer stematic collapse and eventually die.
So again, like it's shown in the episode, if you
suck all the salt out of a person that will

(26:06):
kill them. Salt deficiency is not usually a problem for
humans in industrialized societies because we tend to get a
lot of extra salt in our diet.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Oh yeah, like we're hardwired to want it because we
need it, and therefore we like a lot of it.

Speaker 3 (26:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Think about what you had to eat during the last
forty eight hours, and there was probably a fair amount
of salt involved in the process.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
Yeah, and a lot of foods we eat have some
salt content naturally, but then we add even a lot
more extra salt to that because, I mean, because it
tastes good, It boosts flavors, it makes things taste more
like themselves. You know, it's a great dietary additive. So
it's no mystery why chefs use a lot of salt.
You know, it is a great part of the pleasure

(26:52):
sensation of eating. But yeah, it's much more likely that
you're getting way more salt than you need than that
you're not getting enough. Yeah, But of course there are
exceptions to this. I mean, you can, for example, you know,
we've talked on the show before about hyponatremia, where maybe
you go out hiking, you're sweating a lot, you're drinking

(27:13):
a lot of water, and you find yourself getting oh,
experiencing unpleasant symptoms. Maybe you feel dizzy, you've got a headache,
you feel like, what am I dehydrated? So you just
keep drinking more water and that's not helping. In fact,
maybe you're feeling worse. And it turns out what sometimes
is happening in these cases is actually your body. You've
had too much water and not enough salt, and you've

(27:34):
been sweating a lot, so you're losing a lot of
salt and now your body is salt deficient. You're not
like in a state of death yet, but you or
you are critically low on salt and you need to
eat some pretzels or something. This has actually happened to
people I know while like hiking in the desert. You
know they were making very they're being very careful to
stay hydrated. Didn't think about the other end of the scale.

(27:56):
You need water in salt, but in Nate's sure also
you can run into real salt deficiency issues. And so
turning to nature, I would like to look at some
moths that crave salt and will go to shocking, disgusting
lengths to get it. So as a bit of background here,

(28:17):
moths are a large group of insects in the order Lepidoptera,
along with their cousins, the butterflies. Exactly how to taxonomize
moths is a problem that has existed for a while,
but the insects that we call moths are sometimes described
as like those species of order Lepidoptera that are not butterflies.

(28:39):
The reality is a little more complicated because it seems
basically that butterflies are a type of moth, like butterflies
are a branch from the moth family tree. There are
thought to be more than one hundred and sixty thousand
species of moths, most but not all, of which are nocturnal,
so generally moths are among the children of the night,

(29:00):
and along with butterflies, moths go through a multi stage
life cycle where they hatch from eggs, they become caterpillars,
which are these fat larval eating machines, and then, when
sufficiently fed, they find a place to chill out and
enter the pupa stage where their outside usually hardens into
a shell of some sort their insides basically turn into

(29:21):
full goo. This is called histolysis and then they reform
and emerge as a sexually mature moth with wings which
will fly around mate and if female, lay eggs and
eventually die, and then the cycle begins again.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Moths are amazing, and it is kind of interesting to
think about butterflies and moths from the human perspective. We often,
I think maybe it's because we see butterflies as denizens
at the day and moths as nuisances of the night.
You know, we tend to go gaga over butterflies, and
maybe we find the moths a little annoying. Quit trying
to come into my house when the doors open at night.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Get awakened on the light bulb beyond.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, get away from my light bulbs and all that.
But of course, I mean we've talked about some amazing
moths on here before, you know, ant colony infiltrators and
so forth. And you know, it wasn't It was just
maybe several weeks back my wife spotted a hummingbird moth
in our yard. And those are amazing. You know, at
first you think it is a hummingbird, that it is

(30:21):
in fact a moth. So there's so many amazing body
morphs and lifestyles out there among the moth kind.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
Absolutely true. And I like this you went to the
hummingbird moth because you know, one thing that the hummingbird
has that makes it notable, of course, is that long
needle like beak. And the studies that we're going to
be looking at here about moths are very concerned with
a moth body part that's equivalent called the prebosis. This
is the elongated appendage coming off of the animal's head.

(30:52):
It's sort of a tubular mouth part used for feeding,
like a big hollow needle or a biological straw. Many
will use a proboss to eat, for example, to suck
nectar up from inside a flower, and moths have a
pis as well, which is used for various things. To

(31:12):
kick off this spooky moth journey, I want to begin
by looking at some papers I found from the late
nineteen sixties by a Swiss entomologist named Hans Bonsicker, at
the time affiliated with the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich,
who seems to have specialized in moths. And this part

(31:33):
was what made me think we've really got to talk
about these papers specialized in letting moths access his own
personal body fluids with biological equipment that seems to come
from the hell raiser universe. So the first paper I
want to look at is from nineteen sixty nine. This
was published in the Journal of Medical Entomology by Hans

(31:54):
Bonsiker and a co author named Wilhelm Buteker, and it's
called Records of I Frequenting Lepidoptera from Man. The authors
start this paper off by discussing a curious observation among
a big family of moths. The first ones they identify
are the ones called the noctuids. A number of species

(32:16):
of noctuid moths have been observed swarming around the eyes
of large vertebrate animals. This is not just in one
place or in one species. It's a semi global phenomenon.
It's been documented among various noctuids in South Africa, in
modern day Tanzania, in Cambodia, Thailand, India, and elsewhere sins

(32:41):
throughout Africa and Asia. What kind of animalized do these
moths seek out? Well, they don't seem to be super picky,
as the ice warming has been observed in domestic cattle, sheep, deer,
water buffalo, pigs, antelope, mules, horses, and elephants. It seems
the most common observations are in bovines like cows, and

(33:03):
the authors note that there are some cases where you'd
come up on a single cow and it would have
literally a dozen moths crowded around the edge of a
single eye at one time. So it's like, imagine, you know,
animals crowded around a shrinking watering hole in the desert,
but just moths around a cow's eye. Now, why would
a moth want to land on a cow's eye or

(33:25):
a pig's eye or an elephant's eye and try to
hang out there, wouldn't delicate. Moths usually want to avoid
large animals entirely for fear of being eaten or swatted
or crushed. You would think this is the danger zone
for them.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, yeah, you would think stay away from the large
creatures that you know, they might not have opposable thumbs
and fingers to swat at their own faces, but they
still have ways of fighting you off. But you know,
an elephant that certainly can use that trunk.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
I mean they could certainly just shake around, yeah, I
mean yeah, they could roll over on you. Like, yeah,
these are big, These animals are big compared to you like.
It seems evident there must be something of value to
the moth around the animal's eye that would justify the
risk of doing like the human equivalent of parachute landing
on Godzilla's face. Yeah. So the authors note what the

(34:17):
draw for the moth seems to be, and it is
lachrymal secretions aka tears. These moths are crawling up to
the elephant's eye or the pig's eye to drink its tears.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
That it's suffering. They want the suffering.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
The suffering may or may not be incidental. Actually, the
suffering it does seem to me to be part of
the process, because because you've got to you've got to
kind of make sure that the eyes are watering enough.
So they also note that some species of lepidoptera have
been found with traces of blood detected in their stomachs.
We'll come back to that in just a bit, but

(34:58):
the real focus of this paper begins with a curious,
almost offhand comment. So Bonziger and Bueker write, quote, during
nocturnal field studies of the biology, behavior, etc. Of eye
frequenting lepidoptera infesting mammals, it often happens that such moths
fly about near the face of the human observer and

(35:18):
try to alight at its eyes. My god, I love
when I'm reading of like an older biology paper and
you get to a comment like this and it's like
at the beginning of the experimental section, and you can
start to feel it shifting. It's like, is this going
where I think it's going? Yes, it is. The rest
of this paper is about observations of these moths trying

(35:41):
to get access to human eyes and the author just
letting them going the extra step and seeing what happens
if he lets the moths go. So I'm going to
read from a few of these examples experienced by the authors,
mainly Bounziger himself, but also there's some experiences described by
his like his co authors and employees and collaborators. Warning,

(36:03):
there is some eye quick coming, and.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
I want to go ahead and front load a little
additional squick here. We'll get into this, but I just
want to remind everyone butterflies don't just land on flowers.
Moths don't just land on around light bulbs. These creatures
land on very gross things. So keep that in mind
when all the eyeball drinking takes place.

Speaker 3 (36:24):
That's part of this paper's conclusion. Actually, so yeah, So
first case he describes. This takes place in Waglek, which
is in central Thailand, in August nineteen sixty five. And
this is Hans Bonseiger talking about his own experience. He says, quote,
while I was collecting specimens of three different eye frequenting
species Lobocraspus greasifusa filodes ful of A dorsalus and Pionea

(36:51):
or Reo lalie in a herd of cattle. The latter
pyrolid made continuous attempts for several minutes to alight on face.
Finally it alighted on my left cheek near the nose
and started immediately to climb to the lower eyelid, where
it imbibed the lachrymal secretion for about fifteen seconds. The
probosis of the of the moth could be felt probing

(37:15):
over the eye's surface. The eye produced a considerable flow
of lachrymation, and the irritation caused by the moth was uncomfortable,
although not at all painful. The moth remained feeding for
fifteen seconds, after which it was collected for identification and fixation.
Prior to dissection, so joke's on you, moth. Then he

(37:37):
describes another case, this next one at the Chengmai Zoological
Gardens in northern Thailand. This is October nineteen sixty five,
where he says he's collecting some eye frequenting moths from
the enclosure of a sambar deer. He says one of
the moths suddenly landed on his lips Bonzicker's lips, not
the deer's, started trying to insert its probossis into his nose,

(38:00):
and then after trying this for a few seconds, it
crawled up to his left eye started stabbing his eyelid
and his eyeball with its psis at intervals of one
to two seconds, which caused Bensaker to tear up, and
then the moth drank the tears quote. The painful effects
could be described as resembling the pricks of minute pins
on the surface of the eye, not the lid, although

(38:22):
thes was felt on the eyelids too, and it drank
his tears for about three minutes and then flew away.
There are a lot more accounts, both again both firsthand
of the author and collaborators and employees, where the moth
attacks the eye. It inserts the feedings into or round
the like into the eye around the eyelid, it stabs

(38:44):
or scrapes for several minutes, causing varying degrees of pain, irritation,
and tearing up. And then eventually it gets enough and
it flies away.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Even in the name of science, it just feels like
you're being way too lenient.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
Here. There's one final case. I have to mention this.
This is the best one. This is the sixth case
he describes. This was in northern Thailand in October nineteen
sixty six. And I'm just going to read from his
description here quote in this experiment in my bungalow, I
kept he mentioned two species of eye frequenting moths in

(39:18):
my mosquito net for about fifty hours without offering them
any food.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Oh No.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
After having slept the entire night undisturbed by the moths,
I was attacked in the early morning by L. Grisifusa.
I suddenly tried to drive the moth away, but it
returned instantly and endeavored to attach itself near my nose,
lips or ears. After a few minutes of unsuccessful probing,
it located my left eye and immediately started to feed,

(39:43):
remaining quietly below the eyelid. I felt the usual irritating
stings of short duration and closed my eyes in order
to find out whether this would cause the moth to
withdraw its per bosses. Interesting experiment, close your eyes, see
what it does. I would have thought that he would
have closed his eyes in one of the earlier experiments,
like he was able to resist earlier. But he goes on.

(40:03):
He's like, I'm gonna try closing my eyes. See what happens.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (40:07):
However, the insect continued to suck from the eyelid from
whence I felt extremely sharp pain, which could be compared
with gradually penetrating stings. Whenever I opened my eyes, the
pains were felt on the surface of the eye. When
I closed them again, the moth resumed feeding on the lid.
The pains were relatively slight at the beginning of each
resumption of feeding on the lid, but they commenced immediately

(40:29):
and increased in strength considerably as feeding continued. The lacrymal
secretion was very much stimulated by the activity of the money,
so I cried a lot. I cried so much. After
thirty minutes, my eye was so irritated that I was
forced to interrupt the experiment. A red discoloration of the
eye and the inner side of the eyelid was then apparent.

(40:52):
The inflammation lasted for the entire day, during which difficulty
was experienced in keeping the eye open.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Oh my lord.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
And then he's got selfies in nineteen sixty whatever, this
is the sixties. It's got selfies of the author with
a moth in his eye with the preposis stabbing in.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
Oh yeah, and the second photo especially looking pretty rough.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah. Anyway, So the authors document a bunch of these
attacks on eyeballs of animals and humans, and they make
a few general comments at the end of the paper.
They say the attacks would be infrequent. You know, it's
not all the time, and it doesn't seem to be
all of the individuals of this species. Sometimes you might
get no attacks for weeks, sometimes multiple attacks in the

(41:36):
same night. Some species seem to explore the face more,
crawling around to various wet spots or spots of dried
secretions on the face. I think that would mean like
snot or sweat or saliva before tending to gravitate toward
the eye. Others are more like a heat seeking missile
straight to the eye, no funny business. Different species produce

(42:00):
different levels of pain, only some seem to be able
to attack through closed lids, like he was talking about
in the in the mosquito net example. And the authors
note the relevance of this behavior to animal and human epidemiology.
They say insects like this may actually be an important
vector for infection. They say, some of the moths that

(42:21):
feed on mammal eyes may also be sticking their PERBOSSI
if that's the plural, I guess their you know, nose parts,
their mouthparts, into animal dung, into decaying organic matter such
as rotting bodies. Those those tubes are going in all
kinds of stuff.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Yeah, yeah, they're gross. This is this is This is
butterflies and moths. By the way, so don't don't think
for a second that your daytime butterflies are are are
somehow immune to this behavior.

Speaker 3 (42:48):
My daughter actually has a children's book that we received
as a gift from our coworker, Tracy Wilson, of stuff
you missed in history class called butterflies are pretty gross.
That's about how they're pretty and they're gross.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
Oh that's awesome.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
Yeah, and it is a great book, and it has
all kinds of stuff about this in it. They are
pretty gross anyway. This tear drinking activity is known as lacrifaggy,
which comes from the words meaning tear eating tear consumption.
It is seen most often in moths and butterflies, but

(43:19):
it has also been observed in flies and some bees.
And while tears contain some amount of protein and other
dietary nutrients, entomologists generally think that one of the main
reasons for drinking tears. This brings us back to the
salt monster is to acquire sodium. Fluids that come from

(43:40):
animal bodies are salty. They have to be for the
reasons we talked about earlier. Salt is so important for
the functioning of muscles and nerve cells and fluid maintenance.
It is not very hard for carnivorous animals to get
the salt they need because animal bodies are salty, so
if you eat animals, get salt naturally from your diet. Herbivores,

(44:03):
on the other hand, are often at the more desperate
end of the quest for salt. Plants tend to be
low in sodium content, so herbivores have to find other
ways to acquire salt from the environment.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Yeah, and then that leads to the reality of salt
licks various herbivores seeking out salt even in caves over
vast distances. I imagine a number of you have seen
documentary footage at this point of elephants seeking out salt
and caves. It's quite remarkable. But yeah, when you understand

(44:37):
that it's just not as potent a part of their
natural diet, you understand why they have to supplement it
this way. And sometimes carnivores of course have to supplement
as well. But when they eat the meat they get the.

Speaker 3 (44:50):
Salt, right, But tears, drinking moss, if they eat anything
other than tears in their winged adult stage, they're herbivores,
so they need the salt. Now, of course, tears are
not the only way to get extra salt. There are
other places in insect could probe if looking for salt.
And that brings me to something called the vampire moth.

(45:13):
I think this might be the closest example in nature
to something like the salt vampire from Star Trek. The
term vampire moth has been used to refer to several
species of the moth genus Calyptra, most often the species
Calyptra the leak tree. These are moths mostly found in
tropical and subtropical Asia that yes, actually do drink blood.

(45:37):
And by golly, you know what, I found a paper
from the sixties where good old Hans Bonsinger is like,
what happens if I let one of these guys go
to town on my flesh?

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Oh? My god, he is just far too lenient. Of
course it's this guy.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
The paper is called Preliminary Observations on a skin piercing
blood sucking Moth. He gives the taxonomy in Malaya. This
is in the Bulletin of Entomological Research nineteen sixty eight.
So this paper starts off with the author talking about how,
among some of the eye frequenting moths discussed previously, dead

(46:13):
specimens have been found with blood in their stomachs. Remember
that it came up last time. How'd that get there?
What's that doing there? Well? Entomologists observed the answer in
field work in Southeast Asia between nineteen sixty five and
sixty seven, where they saw firsthand two different kinds of
blood consuming behavior in moths, what the authors call blood

(46:36):
suckers and skin lickers. Bloodsuckers have a strong probosis, which
pierces animal skin like a needle, allowing them to suck
blood out like a mosquito, except these moths are, of
course larger than mosquitos, so you know you're dealing with
a meteor kind of piercing organ. Usually, skin lickers, on

(46:59):
the other hand, tend to have a weaker incapable of
punching through an animal skin, and these moths instead get
their blood either by sucking it from an open wound
or by sucking up little droplets left behind on a
mammal's skin by mosquitos, kind of a mosquito cleanup crew.

(47:21):
And some of these skin liquors, by the way, also
drink tears from the eyes, like the ones we talked
about earlier, so they're multiple strategies. This paper is particularly
focused on a blood sucking moth called Calyptra eustragatta. This
kind has a powerfuls that can puncture skin and suck
blood directly, and these moths have been observed to drink

(47:44):
blood from large mammals like deer, antelope, water buffalo, and
the tapier. After cataloging field observations, the author is like
reaider Yes yes, I will let this moth suck my blood.
And so here once again, I just have to read
from Manziger's first hand account of how he gets it
to drink his blood. He says, quote by breathing upon

(48:08):
the moths, their attention was drawn to moistened fingers held
inside the cages. There's some kind of almost romantic about that,
I guess. Yeah. Anyway, as soon as the moth encountered
the fingers, it settled on one of them and began
to palpate the skin with its psis, and shortly thereafter
thrust the prosis vertically against the skin and tried to

(48:31):
pierce it. The spots most commonly pierced appeared to be
the pores of the hairs. The dagger shaped, sclerotized tip
of the psis was pressed against the skin, so the
whole posis became curved. At the same time, the moth's
head began to oscillate, rather like the balance wheel of
a watch. This movement induced the middle part of the

(48:53):
probosis to vibrate so rapidly that the whole resembled a spindle.
Whenever the skin proved impended trouble, the moth tried again
at another point nearby. As soon as the probossis successfully
perforated the skin, the subject felt strong, burning pines, which
were described as being like those caused by a hot needle.
Thereafter the rate of penetration was more rapid, probably because

(49:16):
the tissue encountered was softer and the sawing mechanism worked
more efficiently as the barbs of the possis gripped the tissues.
Once inserted, the probossis remained straight whilst the oscillating movements
of the head continued. It was possible to study the
working of the mouth parts with a magnifying glass. When
they were in operation. The two halves of the probosis

(49:37):
moved rapidly along their longer axis in opposite directions. This
mechanism was effective provided that the outset sufficient force could
be brought to bear to thrust the probossis into the tissues,
because one half of the probossis could then anchor itself
within the tissues whilst the other penetrated more deeply. It
goes on describing the action the oscillating motion of the head,

(50:01):
the boring action of the probossis going up and down
at regular intervals with a hole in the skin. There's
a lot of stuff about the fluids here, like sometimes
the moth is leaking some saliva out around the wound.
Sometimes some blood gets out, like it maybe regurgitates some
blood and then sucks it back up. He says, Yeah,

(50:21):
after the blood was regurgitated, it was quickly re ingested.
The sawing motion continues, So there's a lot going on here.
It is a laborious process from the moth's point of view,
and apparently feels like a hot needle going into the skin.
Bonseker did this twenty six times. In sixteen of those times,
the moth sucked his blood. In four the moth sucked

(50:44):
blood from an existing open wound that he made with
a knife. In six cases, the moth did not seem
to care. It either did not pierce his skin because
it wasn't trying or because it it wasn't able to. Eventually,
in each case the w would start to swell. He says.
The penetration was generally about six millimeters deep, and across

(51:05):
these different feeding events, bloodsucking went on anywhere from ten
to sixty minutes. Now, the really interesting thing about these
bloodsucking vampire moths is that they come from taxa from

(51:26):
insect groups that typically use their sharp mouth parts to
pierce and suck fruit, not animal flesh, and even Calyptra
eustrogata itself has been observed piercing fruit, so these are
also fruit suckers in addition to being bloodsuckers. The author
argues it is likely that these vampire moths evolved the

(51:50):
blood sucking behavior as a repurposing of adaptations that were
originally for fruit sucking, and there are a couple of
possible benefits to switching from fruit to blood, or at
least adding blood to the repertoire of your fruit piercing behaviors.
First of all, ripe fruit can in some cases be

(52:10):
seasonally limited. Animal blood is going to be available throughout
the year generally, and also blood has some things that
you don't usually get in fruit. It's likely to have
some protein that is not present in fruit, and precious salts.
So again, most moths are herbivores. As with other herbivores,

(52:30):
acquiring salt is a major concern, and whether through tears
or blood, animal body fluids are an excellent place for
otherwise herbivorous animals to stock up on salt. Now the
question is how did these different behaviors evolve. We looked
at the idea that blood drinking is probably an exaptation

(52:51):
of mouthparts originally used to pierce and suck juices from
ripe fruits. But when we go back to the tear
drinking example, a commonly accepted theory is that lacriphagia evolved
from mud puddling behavior, where these lepidopterrines, these moths and
butterflies would get salts and other nutrients by consuming mud

(53:12):
or damp soil because generally there is some salt in
the soil.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
Yeah, this is something you can observe on nature walks.
There'll be some like gross mud and the butterflies are
all over it or the moths are on it, you know.
And it's my understanding too that the term puddling is
kind of a catch all for not only like lighting
on mud and mud buttles, but also dung and carrion.
Like we've been discussing, that's right.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
I mean, even when it's just mud, it seems to
be it's it looks like they're intentionally choosing the grossest
patches of mud. When I've seen this in nature, it
always looks like it's somewhere really nasty. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
Yeah, like there's probably something dead in there too. Yeah.
So you can imagine you have these things are landing
on gross mud, and certainly if they're landing on rotting bodies,
it's not that big of a step to then move
on to just bodies or the bodies of scientists that
seem surprisingly inviting an open.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
Eyed So there are some more interesting things about this
I want to get into. So there's one last paper
I'm going to bring up. This one is by Sharon R. Hill,
Jennifer Zaspol, Susan Weller, Bill Hanson, and Richard Ignell called
to Be or Not to Be a Vampire? A matter

(54:26):
of Sincillum numbers in Calyptra Theilik tree. This was published
in Arthropods, Structure and Development in the year twenty ten.
A couple of things I want to discuss from this paper.
One is the purpose of the blood meal and the
second thing is what separates the vampire moths from non
vampires of the same species. So for the first question,

(54:51):
the authors get into this in their background section. Generally,
in the Calyptra species that suck blood, only the males
do it. That's interesting, and that's kind of an inversion
of things we've seen in other species like rob isn't
it the case with mosquitoes that generally only the females
consume a blood meal. This is true, yes, opposite thing

(55:12):
going on here in the calyptra only the males drink blood.
In the cases where they do drink blood, most insects
that suck blood are of course able to digest that blood.
That makes sense. You want to get nutrition from the blood,
so there's going to be protein content in the blood,
and you want your digestive system to break down that
protein and get energy from it, so you have these

(55:34):
enzymes called proteases. These enzymes break down and get energy
from proteins. But Calyptra moths do not express these proteases,
so they are not actually getting a caloric nutritional benefit
from the protein content of the blood they drink. The
author's right quote. And in fact, the majority of red

(55:57):
blood cells are found densely packed and intact in the
anal excreta from the male post blood meal, So they're
drinking blood, but they're not getting protein nutrition from the blood.
They're just pooping out the red blood cells on the
other hand, male moths have been found to be incredibly

(56:17):
efficient at storing salt contents from various sources, from a
blood meal or from other sources, preserving up to ninety
five percent of the salt consumed. Like males of other
moth species have been observed keeping internal salt caches from
things like tear drinking. Now we know that salt is

(56:38):
important for organisms that you need it for various things
in the body, but what are the males doing with
all that stored up salt. Well, some researchers named Adler
and Pearson in nineteen eighty two proposed an answer here,
and it's called the male dowry hypothesis, or what you
might call like romantic salt gift the sexy salt. Under

(57:02):
this model, in habitats where access to sodium through the
moth's normal plant diet is limited, sequestered salts held in
reserve by a male moth are transferred to a female
during reproduction as a gift to help the female replenish
salts that she's going to lose during the production of eggs.

(57:24):
And the authors of the paper here cite Bansaker for
the idea that this general principle is also what's seen
in the sequestration of salts by male Calyptra moths after
a blood meal, So it seems very possible that's what's
going on here when these male Calypto moths come up
to a guy and they pierce his finger and drink
blood from it. Yet again, they are hoping to be

(57:45):
able to store this up as a as a gift
for a future mating partner to help her replenished salts
lost during of a position. Oh wow. Now that second
question I posed was what separates the vampire moths from
the non vampires of the same species. To set that up,
I'm going to read from the author's abstract here because

(58:07):
they sort of explain how they get to this question quote.
The mechanisms by which blood feeding and insects has evolved
are unclear, primarily because there has been no access to
species in which there is a mixture of same sex
blood feeding and non blood feeding individuals. The discovery of
a subset of male Calyptera Thilik tree that blood feed

(58:29):
under constrained experimental conditions, while the majority of these males
do not, provides a unique opportunity to investigate members of
the same species for potential root mechanisms leading to the
ability to blood feed. I like that two word verb there,
blood feed. So what made the difference here? Why do
some of these moths eat blood and some don't. Previously,

(58:52):
researchers could not find any morphological differences between males that
drank blood and those that did not. But in this experiment,
the authors did difference. They found that males that drank
blood had differences on their antennae which made them less
sensitive to particular olfactory compounds. They were less sensitive to

(59:14):
certain smells. What smells are those? Well, the volatiles associated
with vertebrate animal bodies. Things the authors mentioned like ammonia
and short chain carboxylic acids. These are compounds that I
guess they're gonna be hovering in the air I think
around most vertebrates, and the normal reaction of a moth

(59:35):
to these chemical cues in the air is repulsion. I
smell a godzilla, I smell a big thing around me
out yeah, get away from it. Avoid this thing. It
could hurt me because the big animal is usually only
a threat, not an opportunity. The morphological difference in blood
drinking moths of the same species is that they are

(59:57):
the ones that are less sensitive, apparently to big vertebrate
animals smell. Thus the repulsion reaction is less likely to
be triggered. Thus they're more likely to just land on
you and start probing around for salt juice. So I
like that too. You might have imagined a different mechanism

(01:00:18):
making the difference. I don't know, like a special need
for salt or something else, but it seems like maybe
the big difference here is that all these moths could
benefit from getting some extra salt, and they have the
you know, the needle like mouth parts to jab in
through the skin and get to it. But some of
the moths are more fearless than others. They are less

(01:00:38):
afraid of the to them god Zilla sized vertebrate animal
wandering around. Oh wow, So tear drinking moths and blood
drinking moths. I propose these as the best real world
counterpart to the salt vampire of Star Trek.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Wow. I think so. I think that's a pretty solid luck,
and hopefully everyone will look at moths a little differently
now too. Again, not all moths do this, but yeah,
but you know, now you might imagine them on their
behavior a little differently. Man. In this, this whole bit
about doctor Hans Bonzigger fascinating. I had to look him up.

(01:01:16):
I couldn't find I think he might still be with us. Really, Yeah,
it looks like he was, at least as recently as
twenty twelve, he was still active, living in Thailand, be
getting up in age. I could not I did not
find anything concerning his obituary. So maybe he's out there
right now, still discovering and chronicling new species of moth.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
In the wild. Maybe I didn't follow up on his biography.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Yeah, there's a there's an interesting article titled titled Vampire Moths,
Dastardly Orchids and tearsipping Bees Doctor Hans Banziger's fascinating fines
And this was in this was a published in City Life.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Chang, Man, Oh, you'll have to share that in the chat.
I want. I want to read that after we've done
recording here.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's brief. It goes over some
of the stuff we already talked about here, but gives
a little more biographical information about him. So I do
recommend it. Well, you know, i'd say I don't have
too much else to say about salt vampires other than
in the Star Trek episode, coming back again to its

(01:02:21):
desire and maybe need to be loved. I couldn't help
but think about the way various non human animals, but
especially dogs and cats, worm their way into our affection
by essentially mimicking lovable or cute features that we find
admirable and human infants, you know, the cat and certainly

(01:02:41):
the kitten kind of looks like a baby. The puppy
feels like a baby, and so they managed to hijack
our emotions. The salt vampire engages, though obviously in a
more direct form.

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
Of this, right, because the salt vampire doesn't just have
to resemble a human baby in some kind of you know,
in physical appearance or affect. It can literally look exactly
like your actual family members or loved ones. Yeah. Yeah,
and I well, you know what I was gonna say.
I wonder if there is anything like this in nature.

(01:03:12):
But there are things like this in nature, especially in
the insect world. Yeah, you know, I didn't research this
going into the episode, but I know I've read before
about in fact, some lepidopteranes. I believe there aren't there
butterflies and caterpillars that can mimic the scent of an
ant queen and be taken into the ants hi for
colony and be accepted as the queen like I am

(01:03:34):
the one you really care about.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
Absolutely. Yeah. And another example is of course the famous
Death's Head mock, the deaths Head hawk moth. This is
the silence of the lambs moth. For those of you
who are unfamiliar, these are famous infiltrators of beehives.

Speaker 3 (01:03:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
Yeah, So there's all manner of deception that goes on
in the moth world. All right, we're gonna go ahead
and close things up here, but stay tuned. Star Trek
Week continues. Tomorrow's Monster Fackted episode is of course going
to be Star Trek themed. We're going to be back
on Thursday with another Star Trek themed core episode, and
then on Friday on Weird House Cinema, we will discuss

(01:04:14):
a Star Trek motion picture, and based on some of
the things we discussed in this episode, you may already
be able to guess what that movie is going to be.

Speaker 3 (01:04:23):
Huge. Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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 hello.
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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(01:05:05):
or