October 23, 2014 • 31 mins
The wild kingdom is filled with examples of animals that can camouflage themselves into their environment, but the means and the methods are also wildly varied. Learn about the ins and outs of blending in through this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Hooray that makes
this stuff. He should know. That's right. How's it going.
(00:23):
It's going well great. You got your candy soda canned
diet soda with um. Unfortunately it contains then old keytoe nerrics. Yeah,
there's a big problem. Have you looked into that well,
I mean I don't drink that stuff is a rule
because of all the junk in it. No, but have
(00:45):
you ever looked into that condition It's a metabolic conditioning
where it's like you can't have protein basically, but you
also have to live interesting. Yeah, it's it sounds terrible.
I know. You can clean a toilet with candy soda
and you can make a penny shiny overnight. Yeah. You
can loosen um rusted nuts and bolts. Yeah, or you
(01:07):
can drink it. Right. That's the most delicious move is
go juice. It is go juice of the type you
know me, I like my orange soda every now and
then they'll like the wippony lou that in a root
beer is about all roos. Great. What about cream soda? Yeah,
you're not a big cream soda now, it's fine. I'll
(01:27):
have I have one of those every two years. I'll
have it's about five root beers a year and about
teneam in your fridge with like a little bit of
masking tape so they're numbered. No, I don't buy them
to keep them in the house. They just you should.
It's probably cheaper by Yeah, and this is not a
big statement on health and wellness. My family didn't buy
(01:51):
that stuff growing up because we were you know, they
were teachers and we didn't have a ton of money
and would drink water, just water, a lot of water
to real especially in restaurants. We'll just have water. Yeah,
that kind of deal because the other stuff costs money.
But in retrospect, I'm glad, you know, because I never
developed a big affinity for SODA's. Yeah. No, it's pretty
(02:12):
great for your mom. Yeah, so thanks mom for the
for the milk and water way to go. So Chuck,
I would say this is a perfect segue to what
we're talking about today. Animal camouflage. Yeah, we covered a
little bit of the uh this in the Coolest Animal Ever,
The Octopus podcast. Yeah. We also talked about your descence
(02:34):
I think, yeah, and how to butterfly wings get their color? Yeah,
that was you know when people say, like, what's an
episode that that everybody overlooks that you thought it was great?
There's like fifty of them at least more like Um,
but I would say that the butterfly wings episode is
a really startling example of that where it's just like,
(02:55):
you think it's gonna be boring, but it led us
into all sorts of stuff optics, color, butterflies, migration, like
all sorts of really cool stuff light. Yeah. Um, that
one turned out to be really neat. Yeah, and you
know what you just reminded me. Um, we should mention
that we have close to seven hundred podcasts now, we're
really close and a lot of people that maybe find
(03:17):
us via iTunes or another pod player, thank you, might
we might only have like three hundred. Yeah, it's funny
to see that triumphant tweet, like, just listen to all
three episodes of Steven should know my life is completely like,
oh boy, I'm so sorry. You got a long road
to home. But you can find all those we have
an RSS if you just google stuff. You should Know RSS,
or go to our website Stuff you should dot Com
click under podcasts. We have all seven hundred of them there. Yeah,
(03:40):
you can also search stuff you Should Know archive and
it should bring up the archive page on our website,
which has every single episode of Stuff you Should Know ever,
and I think you can download them there too, can't
you think? So who knows in this day and age
twenty one century, it's right, So animal camouflaged chuckers. Yes. Also,
I want to give a shout out to a board
panda um article twenty amazing examples of animal animal camouflage.
(04:06):
It's nuts. Some of the stuff these animals are doing
these days. It's pretty cool. And you know, I because
they want to live. Yeah, it's natural selection at work,
which is kind of like it's happening right in front
of our eyes. We've covered natural selection at length in
that episode, in the Darwin episode. But as we all know,
if an animal gets munched on or stomped on, it's
(04:29):
not gonna be around. So it adapts into the world
around me and says, hey, I think I might want
to look like that twig or might want to blend
in color wise, then I won't get eaten and I'm
gonna pass that down to my kids and they won't
get eaten, and all of a sudden, we're a healthy,
thriving species. Yeah. And through natural selection, an animal that
has a trait that keeps it from being eaten allows
(04:51):
it to, say, blend in. It raises the likelihood that
it will live long enough to reproduce to pass it on.
And on the other hand, an animal that say, rightly
colored and stands out in its environment, it's probably gonna
get picked off early on won't have a chance to reproduce,
so whatever traits it has won't necessarily be passed along. Yeah,
and that's why almost every animal that you'll see on
(05:14):
the planet Earth has some sort of blending in capability. Um.
Not always. You know, you'll see a big blue bird
in the middle of the woods obviously you're a cardinal,
but you'll also see a lot of deer and squirrels
and ground mammals that are sort of browny and gray. Yeah,
it's not because they're just drabbed, because there again trying
(05:34):
to survive exactly. They blend in with those earth tones.
And if you look in the ocean, um, you will
see some crazy fluorescent things, but you're also going to
see a lot of blue grayish coloring um and sea
creatures because they'll blend into the light, that soft light
under the water. And one of the reasons why animal
camouflage is so widespread and adaptation is because it doesn't
(05:56):
just help you from being hunted yourself. It helps you
to hunt. You can use it to capture prey as
well as hide from predators. So it's just really versatile
and great fantastic stuff can help you kill and not
be killed exactly, just the whole key. So Um, there's
a couple of different ways where there's some factors involved
(06:19):
in how animal camouflage will develop within a given species. Um.
First and foremost, it depends on how the animal behaves,
and it's physiology. Yeah, like, uh, if your mammal, obviously
your fur is gonna play a large part. If you're
a fish or an amphibian, your scales, your skin might write.
(06:41):
If you're traveling big packs, you might use that to
your advantage, or if you're a solo flyer, you might
find a way to work that into your routine, your
survival routine. Yeah, So I mean the animal itself, the camouflage,
it develops what type of animal it is and how
it behaves. Those are going to have a huge impact.
So too will the environment. Probably more than anything else,
(07:03):
the environment will um predict how the animals camouflage will develop,
because what you want to do is blend into the background,
and so the natural habitat, the environment that the animal
lives in will become the model for the camouflage. Yeah. Like,
if you're surrounded by green, you're probably gonna be green
(07:23):
um or you might be dead soon. Uh. The other
is the final way is the physiology and behavior of
the predators and prey that seek those animals out for lunch. So,
for instance, if the your main predator is color blind,
then you're not gonna mess with changing color. You might
alter over time, just like maybe the stripe pattern on
(07:45):
your body, or it's about pattern not color necessarily. So
the your own physiology and behavior, the behavior and I
guess physiology of your predators or your prey, and then
the actual environment that you and have it. These are
the big three when it comes to determining animal camouflage. Yeah,
(08:05):
and most of the camouflage that we see around us
all balls under the banner. Of blending in to your
surroundings just being casual. Um. And then there's basically two ways.
Colors is huge, it's not the only thing, but it's
one of the bigger points of animal camouflage. And then
(08:25):
there's two ways that color is produced here on planet
Earth by animals, and it's either chemically or physically. And chemically,
colors are produced through pigments, that's right, biochromes their microscopic
natural pigments, and they are they produce these colors chemically,
and for instance, your chemical makeup might absorb some colors
(08:48):
of light reflect others. That's gonna make you appear to
be a different color or be a different color, right exactly. So, Like, um,
I looked up human pigment, human pigmentation to see if
that was an example of camouflage. Couldn't find anything. It
wasn't like one of those ones where you do a
Google searching you're like, oh, this is obviously a dumb question.
(09:09):
This was like there just hasn't been a lot of
academic study on it or whatever for humans. Yeah, like
if brown skin or peach skin, yeah, interesting. I think
what it is ultimately is just an adaptation to the
exposure to the sun rather than trying to blend in
with your environment. That makes sense, but I wondered I
got my answer. I guess through the fact that there
(09:30):
wasn't an answer, all right. The other way you mentioned
was actually physical structures, and these are also microscopic and
they act like prisms. And one example they gave in
the article was polar bears, who actually have black skin,
but they have translucent hairs, and the translucent hair turns
(09:50):
all visible light into a rainbow, which is why polar
bears look like rainbow colored. Well, I don't think that's true.
It's like on the Pink Flood album cover. Yeah, that's
a polar bear, right right, that's a polar bear hair
that prism. Not true. No, but apparently they have black
skin underneath, but their hair manages to bend and reflect
(10:13):
all light, almost all lights, so they appear white and
the nuts. But it's almost like, why why not just
have the darker skin evolve out just because the hair
made it so it didn't need to. Maybe I wonder
if it serves some other purpose. Yeah, maybe this good
question polar bear experts. Yeah, but just someone's gonna know,
(10:35):
please let us know. Um, Butterflies also have um physical structures.
Scales are also a physical structure because they do crazy
things to light. And then some animals have both chemical
and physical structures that create their camouflage. Apparently a lot
of reptiles are green because they have physical structures that
(10:57):
bend light and reflect light except up for say yellow.
But then they have pigments underneath the skin that create
blue or vice versa. Probably now that I say it
out loud, and then you put the two together and
you have green, which helps for a snake that lives
in bright green trees. Yeah, and all of these um,
(11:19):
all these animals have their own method I guess, and
with their physiology, like obviously mammals have their fur um,
fish um, amphibians, reptiles, they're gonna use their scales, birds
have their feathers, and even insects use their exoskeleton um,
which can actually like the texture of the exoskeleton can
(11:40):
be changed over time to better blend in. Yeah, right,
Like think about the the wings on grasshopper. They look
a lot like a leaf, right, But one of the
reasons they look like a leaf is not just because
of the color, but because of the texture it's got
kind of this math thing. If they were like a
high shine polish, the thing would stand out pretty pretty clearly.
(12:01):
So it's not just color. It's also texture as well
and patterns as we'll see. But color is probably the
most widespread part of animal camouflage. And apparently a squirrel,
the squirrels fur is rough and uneven to resemble the
texture of tree bark. Makes sense. Yeah, I never really
noticed that I can spot a squirrel a mile away though.
(12:23):
Well that's because there's like a zillion of them in
Atlanta because I hate them. Woh, that's right. So we'll
talk more about animal colors and all the neat stuff
that can happen right after this message. All right, we're back,
(12:44):
and we are talking about changing of the seasons now,
because animals will change themselves depending on the change of
the seasons. They can actually adapt to the seasons to
blend in. Do you see how acutely fought are Look
how cute that foxes? That's the same type of fox.
I love foxes like. So, the Arctic fox lives in
(13:07):
a u an environment, a habitat where some of the
year it's snowy, other parts of the year it's um Well,
woody and muddy. Yeah, and so as a result, the
Arctic fox has evolved to change its coat depending on
the season. Yeah, that's a sharp adaptation. It's pretty awesome.
And it's actually triggered by hormones. The the animal senses
(13:29):
the changing in the season because of like the shift
in daylight, maybe shifts in temperature, and they'll release hormones
and there'll be a reaction and all of a sudden,
there are different biochromes being produced in that little fox
can change color right there. They're making different pigments. Pigments.
The thing is um and some bird species do this too,
but well, not a lot of mammals, but some mammals
(13:51):
will change their coat. The thing is that you can't
or the fox or the bird can't do anything to
change its actual coat. Once the oat has grown out,
it has to shed its coat or malt its feathers
and then regrow new ones that better match the new things.
So that's why um. Apparently a lot of mammals malt
(14:12):
is to change the color of their coat. Yeah, that's
pretty awesome. It is pretty awesome. Have you ever seen
the videos of the pet foxes on the internet. Yeah, man,
they're very cute, little fluffy tails wagon and like those
little chirpy noises they make when they get betted. Yes,
that one in particular adorable. Uh and then chuck. Um.
Have you heard about the peppered moth. I don't think
(14:34):
so you have. It's the sterling example of natural selection
in practice. But it's based on um camouflage. So in
London during the Industrial Revolution that's London, England. Yes, okay,
it became so sooty that um the white bodied peppered moth,
which is exactly what it sounds like. It's kind of
(14:55):
peppery looking. It looks like if it landed on the
side of a birch tree, you know, the white ones,
it would just blend right in because of this mixture
of white and black. The thing is, is there so
much soot produced during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
in London that this these moths that had any white
to them would stand out like a sore thumb and
(15:17):
we're predated eaten. Uh. There was a variation on this
called the black bodied peppered moth didn't change because of
the soot. So the thing is is the animal itself
didn't change. Different varieties of the same species. One was eaten,
one thrived because of the change in the amount of soot,
(15:38):
but it happened very quickly. How do they know they
just weren't white moss covered with soot. They're they're pretty
sure they weren't. And then now that the soot has
been whipped largely in London um, the white bodied pepper
moth is now predominant again because it can blend in
a lot more easily because there's less soot because London
(15:59):
cleaned up act in some ways? What way says it not?
I don't know. They like to drink a lot, they
really they do. But don't they stop at like eleven? Now?
I don't just remember we started drinking at four and
then they drink for several hours, but then they stopped
at eleven, like the bars aren't open all night or something. Yeah.
The only time I went to London, I just remember thinking, man,
(16:22):
they really do drink a lot. This is great. And
I remember buying beer can beer in the store and
I was like, oh, they've got its tall boys and
they're like, what's the tall boy? Right, Like we just
call that a beer that's a short Yeah, that you
should see our tall boys. You call them kegs. I
can't wait to go back. We're hoping, spoiler, We're hoping
to maybe come to London for a show. Fingers crossed.
(16:45):
All right, So where were we? Oh, we were talking
about bio biochromes. Uh, those are the cells on this
near to the skin surface, or in the case of
the octopus or the cuttlefish, you can have deeper cells
called chromatophors, which we talked about at length in the
octopus episode, and those are amazing. Those are pigmented cells
that the octopus and the cuttlefish can basically manipulate these
(17:08):
cells and contract and expand these things, like the surface
area can expand up to when they want to show
that particular pigment. Yeah, and a good uh. I don't
know if we had mentioned this and the last octopus one,
but a good way to see this in action is
to take like a balloon, like a red balloon, and
just blow it up a little bit and tie it off.
(17:28):
You know, if you squeeze that balloon, it's gonna change
its color, it's gonna become lighter. And then when you
unsqueeze it or let it go, it's gonna go back
to that dark red. And that's kind of the same
thing that's going on with the manipulation of the caromatophor, right,
And that's different shades of it's of the same color,
but they have different camatophores of totally different colors and
then call up what they want, right. Yeah, So if
(17:49):
they want like all black, they could reduce the size
of everything but black and just show the black. But
they can also mix and match to create colors that
are basically a bland and of their different colored chromatophores.
So if they are blue and yellow and they're showing
those equally, they'll have a nice healthy shade of green overall.
And with cuttle fish in particular, they've done some recent
(18:11):
study and they found that not only do they have chromatophores,
they have two other structures that help too. They have lucophors,
which scatter light very efficiently. Then they also have aritophores,
which produce iridescence. So that's why it's not just like
a flat color change. It's like these are it's like magic.
When you see an octopus quick change color or cuttle fish, Yeah,
(18:34):
it looks like they it looks like it's just become
a completely different animal, not just colorwise, but texture and
all that is all just optical illusions. Yeah, the the
octopus can shape texture and color. And a second, it's
not like I mean, if you've seen the video, it's
not the kind of thing that's like, oh it's changing now.
I mean you blink your eyes and it's a underwater plant. Exactly.
(18:55):
What's nuts, though, Chuck, is they've studied the cuttle fish
and it's just color they're changing. Maniac cuttle fish are
color blind. They have no idea. They know that it's
visually driven because they've deprived it of visual cues before
and shown that it's not quite as adept at changing
its colors, so they know that it's it's visually driven,
(19:17):
but they have no idea how a cuttle fish can
tell what color to change too, because it's color blind.
Isn't that cool? Well? Maybe I don't know. There's no
mirrors down there. Maybe they don't even know what color is.
Maybe not. Maybe it's all some other sense that we've
yet to discover. Yeah, the cuddle sense cuddle, Um, I
(19:37):
guess we can. I know we mentioned this in another
one about the chameleon that may have been or is
that it don't be dumb episode that chameleons don't change
their color to blend in. They actually change color depending
on their mood. I've not done that one. I heard that,
I think for the first time a couple of years ago.
I had always thought, like a lot of people, that
the chameleon, you know, lands on something green, it's gonna
turn green. As far as any paink commercial I've ever
(19:59):
seen for through chameleon, that's the story, you know. Yeah,
But they, like I said, they change when their mood changes. Um,
and not necessarily depending on their surroundings. Right, so they're
basically showing like I'm happy, I'm fluorescent orange. Right now,
let's go uh, let's go to happy hour. Um. So,
so far, we've got hormonal changes to either changes in
(20:21):
temperature or changes in sunlight leading to molting or shedding
a fur in a new coat. Um, you've got some
sort of visually driven behavior in some pretty amazing animals
like the octopus or the cuttlefish. Um, you've got chameleons
changing based on their mood, which again I guess would
(20:43):
probably be hormonally triggered. And then you've also got some
that changed their color their camouflage based on diet, like
the nudy branch, or as I like to call it,
the nudy brand, the nuty branch. Did you look at these? No? Amazing.
It's one of those like super brilliant, fluorescent, very colorful things. Um.
(21:05):
And they are sea creatures and they alter their diet
depending on what kind of coral um they are near.
They will eat that coral and deposit that pigmentum from
the coral into their skin and their intestines, and it'll
just change the color to blend in with what they're eating. Basically, yeah,
because what they're eating is also what they're living on.
So when they eat a specific type of coral and
(21:27):
that changes their color, they blend in with their surroundings.
Pretty ingenious, smart nudy branches. Way to go. There are
also fish who change color without changing their diet um,
and that is sort of like the malting and mammals
and birds the fish and this this is something that
happens over time. It's not like I'll eat and change colors.
(21:49):
But if the fish changes environment as a species, it's
going to get new queues and look around and say, well,
I might want to think about turning a little more
green over time as a specie, and I want to
think about that. So I'm gonna release some hormones and
maybe over time, my my sons and my son's sons
might eventually really blend in well. And oh grab when
(22:11):
it comes to shark yah hide exactly have you heard
of the glass frog? Uh, it's neat. It's translucent, so
you can see its internal organs very clearly. Um. But
I was like, what what adaptation is that? Seriously, like,
how does that figure with with animal camouflage? And um, no,
one's sure, there's no definitive answer, but it seems like
(22:33):
the best theory I saw was that, Um, it's translucent
skin makes it invisible. Oh really, uh huh, which makes
sense because it's guts are green and I think it's
a tree frog, so it's it's invisible, I guess to
some predators, or maybe it just wants to be a
part of the body's exhibit really badly. It looks like
that it's the frog version of the invisible man man.
(22:55):
I'll have to check that out. So we'll talk more
about some other uses for camouflage. Right after this, we
talked about coloration and stuff, like that, but they're also designs.
(23:15):
Um the animals can use to blend in, and that
is the model pattern that they're using. Like let's say
a zebra stripes. They have those vertical stripes. Yeah, and
it's black and white. And if you go on a safari,
probably the first thing you would ever notice is a
zebra sticks out like a sore thumb. Look like crazy,
(23:37):
we're looking horse that can never be domesticated because they're
too wild and too met Um. The thing is, the
zebra is not camouflaged for you. It doesn't care about
you or your family. It cares about the lions that's
funding it. And lions are color blind, so they can't
see that a zebras black and white and the leaves
(23:58):
and grass that's blending in with our own and khaki
and greens, or it just sees the pattern, which is
the whole point. Yeah. And then the other cool thing
about zebra stripes is they are specific to the zebra.
It's like a fingerprint, so they help them identify each
other or maybe the pack like, oh, look at that pack,
that's not my pack because those stripes are not my stripes, right,
(24:20):
is pretty interesting? Or this is uh king seraphon king
of the zebras, and I can tell it's him because
of his stripes. And by the way, I when I
say pack, I mean heard, heard, You're right to save
your emails. Well, what's neat is so zebras do work
in herds or live in herds, and they use stripes
(24:41):
to identify one another, like a mom will be able
to keep an eye on her kid. Chure full um
from a ways off, because to a zebra, it's plainly
obvious that that's our kid. It doesn't look like anything
else to us, you know, it looks exactly the same. Um.
But another another adaptive measure of the animal camouflage of
(25:04):
zebras is that since they do exist in herds, it
makes it really hard for a lion to pick out
what the heck is going on when you've got a
herd of zebras, because their stripes are running into each
other and you can't tell which zebras ends where, begins where,
and uh, it makes it harder for them to pick
(25:25):
out like the weak and the injured. Yeah, and that's
the same truth a lot of stripe fish. Um. A
shark might just see a big blob of stripy things
and not realize. And that's why it's you know, they
travel in schools, not the only reason, but to help
themselves look larger and just sort of blend in as
a big gelatinous stripe e fluorescent thing exactly because they're
kind of like, well, there's no way that a shark's
(25:47):
not going to see the school of fish, or there's
no way a lion is not gonna see this herd
of zebras. But we can make it really difficult for
this predator to create a good attack strategy because this
is very confusing, that's right, And that's called disruptive coloration.
It's pretty neat um trick that they use. Another thing
they can use is what they call visual disruption. Visual Yeah,
(26:10):
I see that, funny. That's typically how it's pronounced. It
sounded weird coming out of my mess. Yeah. Uh. This
is when patterns are out of line with the body's contours,
so it looks like, um, someone has thrown some sort
of projection, uh, superimposed on top of that animal, right,
or it looks like it really just blends in with
(26:31):
the the grasses or whatever that it's walking along, rather
than if it did follow the contours would be like, oh, well,
look at that zebra right there standing in the grass,
right exactly. Another cool thing that animals can do is
imitation or mimicry. And this is when they say, you
know what, I I can't manage being ignored. I'm not
(26:53):
that good, but at least I can um be seen.
I can't manage to not be seen because I'm not
that good. But maybe I can manage to be ignored. Yeah, Like,
I'm a walking stick insect. And they're so cool because
they look so much like twigs and sticks, and that's
what they're trying to do. They're like, well, I know
you see me, but hopefully you just think I'm a stick.
(27:16):
It's funny. It looks like a stick with the head
of a beaker from the Muppets. Yeah. Um, the Katie
did is another one. You ever seen those? They look
like leaves? Yeah, like really green leaves. Yeah. Um? Did
you see the hawk moth caterpillar? Yeah, that's one of
my favorites. It is awesome. I was like, what do
you mean it looks like a snake? Come on, And
then I did a Google image search. Yeah, it looks
(27:39):
exactly like a snake. Like I would be freaked out
thinking it was a snake and I'm a smart human. Yeah,
there's certain photos I've seen. I think maybe the one
you found where it compares a snake to this thing. No,
I didn't see one compared. It was just on its face. Yeah,
team of facey pretty amazing. Yeah, and that is the
hawk moth caterpillar or our favorite moth caterpillar. Oh. Another
(28:03):
thing that they can do sometimes if they live in
an ecosystem where UM a lot of times, like super
poisonous animals are really brightly colored, the non poisonous animals
will be like, you know what, everyone's ignoring that guy
because if they eat it, he will die. So over time,
let's ourselves evolved to have bright colors even though we're
not poisonous, so we can look like that dude that
(28:24):
is poisonous. False flag camouflage brilliant, brilliant color mimicry. So, chuck,
you got anything else? I got nothing else. That was
animal camouflage. One of our great UM animal episodes. Those
are always fun. They made me feel like a kid. Yeah,
I mean, I agreed. You know, Uh, if you want
(28:46):
to learn more about animal camouflage, you should type those
words into the search bar, how stuff works dot com.
Don't forget the you. And since I said that, it's
time for listener mail Greetings from Connecticut. That's what I'll
call this, because Christina lives in Connecticut, or as I
like to say, Connecticut, and so I'll remember how to
(29:09):
spell it. Why does that see in there? It's sort
of weird. M. I don't know. Yeah. I want to
thank you guys for your podcasts on bipolar disorder. I've
struggled with this since I was first diagnosed at eighteen
with bipolar two. I always said I got the short
into the stick and disorders, as I suffer from only
small bouts of highs and long bouts of loads. Most recently,
(29:31):
I suffered a nervous breakdown due distress from work. I'm
currently on medical lead from work. My bipolar has progressed
to hallucinations, which are not fun. I see something that
my mind is trying to tell myself isn't really there,
but the anxiety and fear that uh, it's really there
overcomes me. My family's old school and chooses to ignore it.
(29:52):
Old school. That's one way to say that, um, and
act like it isn't happening. UM. I should also add
but I come from a family of medical professionals and therapists. Wow,
that doesn't make sense. No, that's very surprised. They're like, absolutely, honey,
there's a clown with a knife coming at you. For sure.
That doesn't seem like a good strategy. No, not at all.
(30:12):
I set your podcast to my family, though, and it
allowed us to have an open conversation about what is
going on. I'm a little alarmed that her medical professional
families needed our show, right, But we saved the day, though,
so we did. Your podcast truly is a wonderful tool
for anyone that wants to explain to someone what we
struggle with on a day to day basis. You guys
are great and often keep me company while I paint
(30:32):
during my hypomanic episodes. So she is eternally grateful, and
that is Christina and Christina, I wrote you back, but
hanging there of your family's more understanding now and I'm
glad we could help. Yeah, for real. Thank you very
much for letting us know about that, Christina, We appreciate it. Um.
If we have helped you through a tough time or
fostered conversation that panned out, well, just the ones that
(30:54):
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(31:15):
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it how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Hooray that makes
this stuff. He should know. That's right. How's it going.
(00:23):
It's going well great. You got your candy soda canned
diet soda with um. Unfortunately it contains then old keytoe nerrics. Yeah,
there's a big problem. Have you looked into that well,
I mean I don't drink that stuff is a rule
because of all the junk in it. No, but have
(00:45):
you ever looked into that condition It's a metabolic conditioning
where it's like you can't have protein basically, but you
also have to live interesting. Yeah, it's it sounds terrible.
I know. You can clean a toilet with candy soda
and you can make a penny shiny overnight. Yeah. You
can loosen um rusted nuts and bolts. Yeah, or you
(01:07):
can drink it. Right. That's the most delicious move is
go juice. It is go juice of the type you
know me, I like my orange soda every now and
then they'll like the wippony lou that in a root
beer is about all roos. Great. What about cream soda? Yeah,
you're not a big cream soda now, it's fine. I'll
(01:27):
have I have one of those every two years. I'll
have it's about five root beers a year and about
teneam in your fridge with like a little bit of
masking tape so they're numbered. No, I don't buy them
to keep them in the house. They just you should.
It's probably cheaper by Yeah, and this is not a
big statement on health and wellness. My family didn't buy
(01:51):
that stuff growing up because we were you know, they
were teachers and we didn't have a ton of money
and would drink water, just water, a lot of water
to real especially in restaurants. We'll just have water. Yeah,
that kind of deal because the other stuff costs money.
But in retrospect, I'm glad, you know, because I never
developed a big affinity for SODA's. Yeah. No, it's pretty
(02:12):
great for your mom. Yeah, so thanks mom for the
for the milk and water way to go. So Chuck,
I would say this is a perfect segue to what
we're talking about today. Animal camouflage. Yeah, we covered a
little bit of the uh this in the Coolest Animal Ever,
The Octopus podcast. Yeah. We also talked about your descence
(02:34):
I think, yeah, and how to butterfly wings get their color? Yeah,
that was you know when people say, like, what's an
episode that that everybody overlooks that you thought it was great?
There's like fifty of them at least more like Um,
but I would say that the butterfly wings episode is
a really startling example of that where it's just like,
(02:55):
you think it's gonna be boring, but it led us
into all sorts of stuff optics, color, butterflies, migration, like
all sorts of really cool stuff light. Yeah. Um, that
one turned out to be really neat. Yeah, and you
know what you just reminded me. Um, we should mention
that we have close to seven hundred podcasts now, we're
really close and a lot of people that maybe find
(03:17):
us via iTunes or another pod player, thank you, might
we might only have like three hundred. Yeah, it's funny
to see that triumphant tweet, like, just listen to all
three episodes of Steven should know my life is completely like,
oh boy, I'm so sorry. You got a long road
to home. But you can find all those we have
an RSS if you just google stuff. You should Know RSS,
or go to our website Stuff you should dot Com
click under podcasts. We have all seven hundred of them there. Yeah,
(03:40):
you can also search stuff you Should Know archive and
it should bring up the archive page on our website,
which has every single episode of Stuff you Should Know ever,
and I think you can download them there too, can't
you think? So who knows in this day and age
twenty one century, it's right, So animal camouflaged chuckers. Yes. Also,
I want to give a shout out to a board
panda um article twenty amazing examples of animal animal camouflage.
(04:06):
It's nuts. Some of the stuff these animals are doing
these days. It's pretty cool. And you know, I because
they want to live. Yeah, it's natural selection at work,
which is kind of like it's happening right in front
of our eyes. We've covered natural selection at length in
that episode, in the Darwin episode. But as we all know,
if an animal gets munched on or stomped on, it's
(04:29):
not gonna be around. So it adapts into the world
around me and says, hey, I think I might want
to look like that twig or might want to blend
in color wise, then I won't get eaten and I'm
gonna pass that down to my kids and they won't
get eaten, and all of a sudden, we're a healthy,
thriving species. Yeah. And through natural selection, an animal that
has a trait that keeps it from being eaten allows
(04:51):
it to, say, blend in. It raises the likelihood that
it will live long enough to reproduce to pass it on.
And on the other hand, an animal that say, rightly
colored and stands out in its environment, it's probably gonna
get picked off early on won't have a chance to reproduce,
so whatever traits it has won't necessarily be passed along. Yeah,
and that's why almost every animal that you'll see on
(05:14):
the planet Earth has some sort of blending in capability. Um.
Not always. You know, you'll see a big blue bird
in the middle of the woods obviously you're a cardinal,
but you'll also see a lot of deer and squirrels
and ground mammals that are sort of browny and gray. Yeah,
it's not because they're just drabbed, because there again trying
(05:34):
to survive exactly. They blend in with those earth tones.
And if you look in the ocean, um, you will
see some crazy fluorescent things, but you're also going to
see a lot of blue grayish coloring um and sea
creatures because they'll blend into the light, that soft light
under the water. And one of the reasons why animal
camouflage is so widespread and adaptation is because it doesn't
(05:56):
just help you from being hunted yourself. It helps you
to hunt. You can use it to capture prey as
well as hide from predators. So it's just really versatile
and great fantastic stuff can help you kill and not
be killed exactly, just the whole key. So Um, there's
a couple of different ways where there's some factors involved
(06:19):
in how animal camouflage will develop within a given species. Um.
First and foremost, it depends on how the animal behaves,
and it's physiology. Yeah, like, uh, if your mammal, obviously
your fur is gonna play a large part. If you're
a fish or an amphibian, your scales, your skin might write.
(06:41):
If you're traveling big packs, you might use that to
your advantage, or if you're a solo flyer, you might
find a way to work that into your routine, your
survival routine. Yeah, So I mean the animal itself, the camouflage,
it develops what type of animal it is and how
it behaves. Those are going to have a huge impact.
So too will the environment. Probably more than anything else,
(07:03):
the environment will um predict how the animals camouflage will develop,
because what you want to do is blend into the background,
and so the natural habitat, the environment that the animal
lives in will become the model for the camouflage. Yeah. Like,
if you're surrounded by green, you're probably gonna be green
(07:23):
um or you might be dead soon. Uh. The other
is the final way is the physiology and behavior of
the predators and prey that seek those animals out for lunch. So,
for instance, if the your main predator is color blind,
then you're not gonna mess with changing color. You might
alter over time, just like maybe the stripe pattern on
(07:45):
your body, or it's about pattern not color necessarily. So
the your own physiology and behavior, the behavior and I
guess physiology of your predators or your prey, and then
the actual environment that you and have it. These are
the big three when it comes to determining animal camouflage. Yeah,
(08:05):
and most of the camouflage that we see around us
all balls under the banner. Of blending in to your
surroundings just being casual. Um. And then there's basically two ways.
Colors is huge, it's not the only thing, but it's
one of the bigger points of animal camouflage. And then
(08:25):
there's two ways that color is produced here on planet
Earth by animals, and it's either chemically or physically. And chemically,
colors are produced through pigments, that's right, biochromes their microscopic
natural pigments, and they are they produce these colors chemically,
and for instance, your chemical makeup might absorb some colors
(08:48):
of light reflect others. That's gonna make you appear to
be a different color or be a different color, right exactly. So, Like, um,
I looked up human pigment, human pigmentation to see if
that was an example of camouflage. Couldn't find anything. It
wasn't like one of those ones where you do a
Google searching you're like, oh, this is obviously a dumb question.
(09:09):
This was like there just hasn't been a lot of
academic study on it or whatever for humans. Yeah, like
if brown skin or peach skin, yeah, interesting. I think
what it is ultimately is just an adaptation to the
exposure to the sun rather than trying to blend in
with your environment. That makes sense, but I wondered I
got my answer. I guess through the fact that there
(09:30):
wasn't an answer, all right. The other way you mentioned
was actually physical structures, and these are also microscopic and
they act like prisms. And one example they gave in
the article was polar bears, who actually have black skin,
but they have translucent hairs, and the translucent hair turns
(09:50):
all visible light into a rainbow, which is why polar
bears look like rainbow colored. Well, I don't think that's true.
It's like on the Pink Flood album cover. Yeah, that's
a polar bear, right right, that's a polar bear hair
that prism. Not true. No, but apparently they have black
skin underneath, but their hair manages to bend and reflect
(10:13):
all light, almost all lights, so they appear white and
the nuts. But it's almost like, why why not just
have the darker skin evolve out just because the hair
made it so it didn't need to. Maybe I wonder
if it serves some other purpose. Yeah, maybe this good
question polar bear experts. Yeah, but just someone's gonna know,
(10:35):
please let us know. Um, Butterflies also have um physical structures.
Scales are also a physical structure because they do crazy
things to light. And then some animals have both chemical
and physical structures that create their camouflage. Apparently a lot
of reptiles are green because they have physical structures that
(10:57):
bend light and reflect light except up for say yellow.
But then they have pigments underneath the skin that create
blue or vice versa. Probably now that I say it
out loud, and then you put the two together and
you have green, which helps for a snake that lives
in bright green trees. Yeah, and all of these um,
(11:19):
all these animals have their own method I guess, and
with their physiology, like obviously mammals have their fur um,
fish um, amphibians, reptiles, they're gonna use their scales, birds
have their feathers, and even insects use their exoskeleton um,
which can actually like the texture of the exoskeleton can
(11:40):
be changed over time to better blend in. Yeah, right,
Like think about the the wings on grasshopper. They look
a lot like a leaf, right, But one of the
reasons they look like a leaf is not just because
of the color, but because of the texture it's got
kind of this math thing. If they were like a
high shine polish, the thing would stand out pretty pretty clearly.
(12:01):
So it's not just color. It's also texture as well
and patterns as we'll see. But color is probably the
most widespread part of animal camouflage. And apparently a squirrel,
the squirrels fur is rough and uneven to resemble the
texture of tree bark. Makes sense. Yeah, I never really
noticed that I can spot a squirrel a mile away though.
(12:23):
Well that's because there's like a zillion of them in
Atlanta because I hate them. Woh, that's right. So we'll
talk more about animal colors and all the neat stuff
that can happen right after this message. All right, we're back,
(12:44):
and we are talking about changing of the seasons now,
because animals will change themselves depending on the change of
the seasons. They can actually adapt to the seasons to
blend in. Do you see how acutely fought are Look
how cute that foxes? That's the same type of fox.
I love foxes like. So, the Arctic fox lives in
(13:07):
a u an environment, a habitat where some of the
year it's snowy, other parts of the year it's um Well,
woody and muddy. Yeah, and so as a result, the
Arctic fox has evolved to change its coat depending on
the season. Yeah, that's a sharp adaptation. It's pretty awesome.
And it's actually triggered by hormones. The the animal senses
(13:29):
the changing in the season because of like the shift
in daylight, maybe shifts in temperature, and they'll release hormones
and there'll be a reaction and all of a sudden,
there are different biochromes being produced in that little fox
can change color right there. They're making different pigments. Pigments.
The thing is um and some bird species do this too,
but well, not a lot of mammals, but some mammals
(13:51):
will change their coat. The thing is that you can't
or the fox or the bird can't do anything to
change its actual coat. Once the oat has grown out,
it has to shed its coat or malt its feathers
and then regrow new ones that better match the new things.
So that's why um. Apparently a lot of mammals malt
(14:12):
is to change the color of their coat. Yeah, that's
pretty awesome. It is pretty awesome. Have you ever seen
the videos of the pet foxes on the internet. Yeah, man,
they're very cute, little fluffy tails wagon and like those
little chirpy noises they make when they get betted. Yes,
that one in particular adorable. Uh and then chuck. Um.
Have you heard about the peppered moth. I don't think
(14:34):
so you have. It's the sterling example of natural selection
in practice. But it's based on um camouflage. So in
London during the Industrial Revolution that's London, England. Yes, okay,
it became so sooty that um the white bodied peppered moth,
which is exactly what it sounds like. It's kind of
(14:55):
peppery looking. It looks like if it landed on the
side of a birch tree, you know, the white ones,
it would just blend right in because of this mixture
of white and black. The thing is, is there so
much soot produced during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
in London that this these moths that had any white
to them would stand out like a sore thumb and
(15:17):
we're predated eaten. Uh. There was a variation on this
called the black bodied peppered moth didn't change because of
the soot. So the thing is is the animal itself
didn't change. Different varieties of the same species. One was eaten,
one thrived because of the change in the amount of soot,
(15:38):
but it happened very quickly. How do they know they
just weren't white moss covered with soot. They're they're pretty
sure they weren't. And then now that the soot has
been whipped largely in London um, the white bodied pepper
moth is now predominant again because it can blend in
a lot more easily because there's less soot because London
(15:59):
cleaned up act in some ways? What way says it not?
I don't know. They like to drink a lot, they
really they do. But don't they stop at like eleven? Now?
I don't just remember we started drinking at four and
then they drink for several hours, but then they stopped
at eleven, like the bars aren't open all night or something. Yeah.
The only time I went to London, I just remember thinking, man,
(16:22):
they really do drink a lot. This is great. And
I remember buying beer can beer in the store and
I was like, oh, they've got its tall boys and
they're like, what's the tall boy? Right, Like we just
call that a beer that's a short Yeah, that you
should see our tall boys. You call them kegs. I
can't wait to go back. We're hoping, spoiler, We're hoping
to maybe come to London for a show. Fingers crossed.
(16:45):
All right, So where were we? Oh, we were talking
about bio biochromes. Uh, those are the cells on this
near to the skin surface, or in the case of
the octopus or the cuttlefish, you can have deeper cells
called chromatophors, which we talked about at length in the
octopus episode, and those are amazing. Those are pigmented cells
that the octopus and the cuttlefish can basically manipulate these
(17:08):
cells and contract and expand these things, like the surface
area can expand up to when they want to show
that particular pigment. Yeah, and a good uh. I don't
know if we had mentioned this and the last octopus one,
but a good way to see this in action is
to take like a balloon, like a red balloon, and
just blow it up a little bit and tie it off.
(17:28):
You know, if you squeeze that balloon, it's gonna change
its color, it's gonna become lighter. And then when you
unsqueeze it or let it go, it's gonna go back
to that dark red. And that's kind of the same
thing that's going on with the manipulation of the caromatophor, right,
And that's different shades of it's of the same color,
but they have different camatophores of totally different colors and
then call up what they want, right. Yeah, So if
(17:49):
they want like all black, they could reduce the size
of everything but black and just show the black. But
they can also mix and match to create colors that
are basically a bland and of their different colored chromatophores.
So if they are blue and yellow and they're showing
those equally, they'll have a nice healthy shade of green overall.
And with cuttle fish in particular, they've done some recent
(18:11):
study and they found that not only do they have chromatophores,
they have two other structures that help too. They have lucophors,
which scatter light very efficiently. Then they also have aritophores,
which produce iridescence. So that's why it's not just like
a flat color change. It's like these are it's like magic.
When you see an octopus quick change color or cuttle fish, Yeah,
(18:34):
it looks like they it looks like it's just become
a completely different animal, not just colorwise, but texture and
all that is all just optical illusions. Yeah, the the
octopus can shape texture and color. And a second, it's
not like I mean, if you've seen the video, it's
not the kind of thing that's like, oh it's changing now.
I mean you blink your eyes and it's a underwater plant. Exactly.
(18:55):
What's nuts, though, Chuck, is they've studied the cuttle fish
and it's just color they're changing. Maniac cuttle fish are
color blind. They have no idea. They know that it's
visually driven because they've deprived it of visual cues before
and shown that it's not quite as adept at changing
its colors, so they know that it's it's visually driven,
(19:17):
but they have no idea how a cuttle fish can
tell what color to change too, because it's color blind.
Isn't that cool? Well? Maybe I don't know. There's no
mirrors down there. Maybe they don't even know what color is.
Maybe not. Maybe it's all some other sense that we've
yet to discover. Yeah, the cuddle sense cuddle, Um, I
(19:37):
guess we can. I know we mentioned this in another
one about the chameleon that may have been or is
that it don't be dumb episode that chameleons don't change
their color to blend in. They actually change color depending
on their mood. I've not done that one. I heard that,
I think for the first time a couple of years ago.
I had always thought, like a lot of people, that
the chameleon, you know, lands on something green, it's gonna
turn green. As far as any paink commercial I've ever
(19:59):
seen for through chameleon, that's the story, you know. Yeah,
But they, like I said, they change when their mood changes. Um,
and not necessarily depending on their surroundings. Right, so they're
basically showing like I'm happy, I'm fluorescent orange. Right now,
let's go uh, let's go to happy hour. Um. So,
so far, we've got hormonal changes to either changes in
(20:21):
temperature or changes in sunlight leading to molting or shedding
a fur in a new coat. Um, you've got some
sort of visually driven behavior in some pretty amazing animals
like the octopus or the cuttlefish. Um, you've got chameleons
changing based on their mood, which again I guess would
(20:43):
probably be hormonally triggered. And then you've also got some
that changed their color their camouflage based on diet, like
the nudy branch, or as I like to call it,
the nudy brand, the nuty branch. Did you look at these? No? Amazing.
It's one of those like super brilliant, fluorescent, very colorful things. Um.
(21:05):
And they are sea creatures and they alter their diet
depending on what kind of coral um they are near.
They will eat that coral and deposit that pigmentum from
the coral into their skin and their intestines, and it'll
just change the color to blend in with what they're eating. Basically, yeah,
because what they're eating is also what they're living on.
So when they eat a specific type of coral and
(21:27):
that changes their color, they blend in with their surroundings.
Pretty ingenious, smart nudy branches. Way to go. There are
also fish who change color without changing their diet um,
and that is sort of like the malting and mammals
and birds the fish and this this is something that
happens over time. It's not like I'll eat and change colors.
(21:49):
But if the fish changes environment as a species, it's
going to get new queues and look around and say, well,
I might want to think about turning a little more
green over time as a specie, and I want to
think about that. So I'm gonna release some hormones and
maybe over time, my my sons and my son's sons
might eventually really blend in well. And oh grab when
(22:11):
it comes to shark yah hide exactly have you heard
of the glass frog? Uh, it's neat. It's translucent, so
you can see its internal organs very clearly. Um. But
I was like, what what adaptation is that? Seriously, like,
how does that figure with with animal camouflage? And um, no,
one's sure, there's no definitive answer, but it seems like
(22:33):
the best theory I saw was that, Um, it's translucent
skin makes it invisible. Oh really, uh huh, which makes
sense because it's guts are green and I think it's
a tree frog, so it's it's invisible, I guess to
some predators, or maybe it just wants to be a
part of the body's exhibit really badly. It looks like
that it's the frog version of the invisible man man.
(22:55):
I'll have to check that out. So we'll talk more
about some other uses for camouflage. Right after this, we
talked about coloration and stuff, like that, but they're also designs.
(23:15):
Um the animals can use to blend in, and that
is the model pattern that they're using. Like let's say
a zebra stripes. They have those vertical stripes. Yeah, and
it's black and white. And if you go on a safari,
probably the first thing you would ever notice is a
zebra sticks out like a sore thumb. Look like crazy,
(23:37):
we're looking horse that can never be domesticated because they're
too wild and too met Um. The thing is, the
zebra is not camouflaged for you. It doesn't care about
you or your family. It cares about the lions that's
funding it. And lions are color blind, so they can't
see that a zebras black and white and the leaves
(23:58):
and grass that's blending in with our own and khaki
and greens, or it just sees the pattern, which is
the whole point. Yeah. And then the other cool thing
about zebra stripes is they are specific to the zebra.
It's like a fingerprint, so they help them identify each
other or maybe the pack like, oh, look at that pack,
that's not my pack because those stripes are not my stripes, right,
(24:20):
is pretty interesting? Or this is uh king seraphon king
of the zebras, and I can tell it's him because
of his stripes. And by the way, I when I
say pack, I mean heard, heard, You're right to save
your emails. Well, what's neat is so zebras do work
in herds or live in herds, and they use stripes
(24:41):
to identify one another, like a mom will be able
to keep an eye on her kid. Chure full um
from a ways off, because to a zebra, it's plainly
obvious that that's our kid. It doesn't look like anything
else to us, you know, it looks exactly the same. Um.
But another another adaptive measure of the animal camouflage of
(25:04):
zebras is that since they do exist in herds, it
makes it really hard for a lion to pick out
what the heck is going on when you've got a
herd of zebras, because their stripes are running into each
other and you can't tell which zebras ends where, begins where,
and uh, it makes it harder for them to pick
(25:25):
out like the weak and the injured. Yeah, and that's
the same truth a lot of stripe fish. Um. A
shark might just see a big blob of stripy things
and not realize. And that's why it's you know, they
travel in schools, not the only reason, but to help
themselves look larger and just sort of blend in as
a big gelatinous stripe e fluorescent thing exactly because they're
kind of like, well, there's no way that a shark's
(25:47):
not going to see the school of fish, or there's
no way a lion is not gonna see this herd
of zebras. But we can make it really difficult for
this predator to create a good attack strategy because this
is very confusing, that's right, And that's called disruptive coloration.
It's pretty neat um trick that they use. Another thing
they can use is what they call visual disruption. Visual Yeah,
(26:10):
I see that, funny. That's typically how it's pronounced. It
sounded weird coming out of my mess. Yeah. Uh. This
is when patterns are out of line with the body's contours,
so it looks like, um, someone has thrown some sort
of projection, uh, superimposed on top of that animal, right,
or it looks like it really just blends in with
(26:31):
the the grasses or whatever that it's walking along, rather
than if it did follow the contours would be like, oh, well,
look at that zebra right there standing in the grass,
right exactly. Another cool thing that animals can do is
imitation or mimicry. And this is when they say, you
know what, I I can't manage being ignored. I'm not
(26:53):
that good, but at least I can um be seen.
I can't manage to not be seen because I'm not
that good. But maybe I can manage to be ignored. Yeah, Like,
I'm a walking stick insect. And they're so cool because
they look so much like twigs and sticks, and that's
what they're trying to do. They're like, well, I know
you see me, but hopefully you just think I'm a stick.
(27:16):
It's funny. It looks like a stick with the head
of a beaker from the Muppets. Yeah. Um, the Katie
did is another one. You ever seen those? They look
like leaves? Yeah, like really green leaves. Yeah. Um? Did
you see the hawk moth caterpillar? Yeah, that's one of
my favorites. It is awesome. I was like, what do
you mean it looks like a snake? Come on, And
then I did a Google image search. Yeah, it looks
(27:39):
exactly like a snake. Like I would be freaked out
thinking it was a snake and I'm a smart human. Yeah,
there's certain photos I've seen. I think maybe the one
you found where it compares a snake to this thing. No,
I didn't see one compared. It was just on its face. Yeah,
team of facey pretty amazing. Yeah, and that is the
hawk moth caterpillar or our favorite moth caterpillar. Oh. Another
(28:03):
thing that they can do sometimes if they live in
an ecosystem where UM a lot of times, like super
poisonous animals are really brightly colored, the non poisonous animals
will be like, you know what, everyone's ignoring that guy
because if they eat it, he will die. So over time,
let's ourselves evolved to have bright colors even though we're
not poisonous, so we can look like that dude that
(28:24):
is poisonous. False flag camouflage brilliant, brilliant color mimicry. So, chuck,
you got anything else? I got nothing else. That was
animal camouflage. One of our great UM animal episodes. Those
are always fun. They made me feel like a kid. Yeah,
I mean, I agreed. You know, Uh, if you want
(28:46):
to learn more about animal camouflage, you should type those
words into the search bar, how stuff works dot com.
Don't forget the you. And since I said that, it's
time for listener mail Greetings from Connecticut. That's what I'll
call this, because Christina lives in Connecticut, or as I
like to say, Connecticut, and so I'll remember how to
(29:09):
spell it. Why does that see in there? It's sort
of weird. M. I don't know. Yeah. I want to
thank you guys for your podcasts on bipolar disorder. I've
struggled with this since I was first diagnosed at eighteen
with bipolar two. I always said I got the short
into the stick and disorders, as I suffer from only
small bouts of highs and long bouts of loads. Most recently,
(29:31):
I suffered a nervous breakdown due distress from work. I'm
currently on medical lead from work. My bipolar has progressed
to hallucinations, which are not fun. I see something that
my mind is trying to tell myself isn't really there,
but the anxiety and fear that uh, it's really there
overcomes me. My family's old school and chooses to ignore it.
(29:52):
Old school. That's one way to say that, um, and
act like it isn't happening. UM. I should also add
but I come from a family of medical professionals and therapists. Wow,
that doesn't make sense. No, that's very surprised. They're like, absolutely, honey,
there's a clown with a knife coming at you. For sure.
That doesn't seem like a good strategy. No, not at all.
(30:12):
I set your podcast to my family, though, and it
allowed us to have an open conversation about what is
going on. I'm a little alarmed that her medical professional
families needed our show, right, But we saved the day, though,
so we did. Your podcast truly is a wonderful tool
for anyone that wants to explain to someone what we
struggle with on a day to day basis. You guys
are great and often keep me company while I paint
(30:32):
during my hypomanic episodes. So she is eternally grateful, and
that is Christina and Christina, I wrote you back, but
hanging there of your family's more understanding now and I'm
glad we could help. Yeah, for real. Thank you very
much for letting us know about that, Christina, We appreciate it. Um.
If we have helped you through a tough time or
fostered conversation that panned out, well, just the ones that
(30:54):
panned out, Well, we want to hear about those. Yeah,
I don't want to hear if you've got in a
fist fight because it's something we said. No, it's not
our fault unless you won. You can let us know
about all this stuff and more by tweeting to us
at s Y s K Podcast, by hanging out with
us on our Facebook page at Facebook dot com, slash
stuff you Should Know, or by sending us an email
(31:15):
to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. And
don't forget our great website or home on the web,
the Internet clubhouse known as Stuff you Should Know dot
com for moral, this, and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff Works dot com.
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