Radiolab for Kids
Welcome, nature lovers, to the home of the Terrestrials podcast and family-friendly Radiolab episodes about nature. Every other week, host Lulu Miller will take you on a nature walk to encounter a plant or animal behaving in ways that will surprise you. Squirrels that can regrow their brains, octopuses that can outsmart their human captors, honeybees that can predict the future. You don’t have to be a kid to listen, just someone who likes to see the world anew. You’ll hear a range of nature stories on this podcast. Sometimes these will be brand new Terrestrials episodes, full of original songs (by “The Songbud” Alan Goffinski) that tell a fantastical-sounding story about nature that is 100% true. Sometimes these will be our very best, shiniest, furriest, leafiest Radiolab episodes about animals or plants or nature. The stories that drop here will always be family-friendly and safe for kids. They will always be sound-rich and full of the vivid, gripping storytelling you’ve come to expect from Radiolab. They will always transport you to the beyond-human world: into the depths of the ocean, into jungles, prairies, forests, space, snow, wildflower fields and beyond. Sometimes we’ll encounter something so wild we just have to break out into song about it! Don’t worry, good voices not required. Join us on this adventure!
Episodes
Sloths are the slowest mammals on Earth. How can a creature that moves so slowly survive in a world that moves so fast? Zoologist Lucy Cooke helps us rethink everything we know about sloths and their slowness. We follow a sloth named Nacho from a rainforest to a nightclub, trek deep into mangrove swamps to find a rare pygmy sloth and uncover the secret that allows sloths to evade even the deadliest predators. Hint: it has to do wit...
What is a rainbow? An optical illusion? Or a thing out there in the world? For centuries, cultures around the world believed that rainbows were bridges - pathways to gods and to the afterlife. Then in 1665, during a plague, a young Isaac Newton made a discovery that changed everything : sunlight is made of many colors. He counted 7. But artists, poets and curious children weren’t convinced. How could a rainbow only have seven colo...
Artist Ashley (Ash) Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people. Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where they spent hours exploring, scavenging, and collecting — eventually discovering lichen. They began painting portraits of lichen’s wild, colorful, and fuzzy shapes.
In time, Ash learned that lichen is actually a composite organism, a mixture of tw...
Lulu is hosting a holiday meal. She’s invited the characters from her extended kids podcast family - Wow in the World and Circle Round - for an epic kids podcast crossover special. It’s a potluck of stories and on the table is a turducken. Yes, a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. Each show brings a wild story about one of these creatures. We learn about a chicken’s unexpected journey back home, a duck mystery in t...
In the game of life, every species is like an action figure. You got your dogs and your dung beetles, your bald eagles and your blueberries. And for a long time scientists believed it was pretty much impossible for those action figures to mix and make a new kind of action figure that was able to have its own babies (dog beetles? Baldberries? Nah). But, today we tell the story of a four-legged beast in Kentucky whose existence is up...
This Halloween, we’re going to the dark side. Deep in the darkest tropical forests, some of the world’s most elusive bats hang upside down in their winged sleeping bags. On a quest to find one of these flying mammals, Producerbud Ana ventures into a Puerto Rican forest and the back corridors of the American Museum of Natural History with Dr. Angelo Soto-Centeno. Why? Because while they may be scary and look kinda like Dracula, with...
Maggots are disgusting, right? Lulu has a hard time even saying the word maggot.
But in this episode, we’re asking you to join us in setting our “ick” aside. If you stick with us, we promise that you’ll go from thinking these bugs are the grossest things ever to actually kinda liking them. Maybe even loving them.
ER doctor Avir Mitra leads us down a rabbit hole of scientific discovery, explaining how these revolting critters have a...
In 1971, a red-headed, tree-loving astronaut named Stu ‘Smokey’ Roosa was asked to take something to the moon with him. Of all things, he chose to take a canister of 500 tree seeds. After orbiting the moon 34 times, the seeds made it back to Earth. NASA decided to plant the seeds all across the country and then… everyone forgot about them. Until one day, a third grader from Indiana stumbled on a tree with a strange plaque: "Moon Tr...
Few mammals have a bigger positive impact on the planet than the beaver. With its bright orange buck teeth, the creature is an expert engineer that brings life wherever it waddles and even fights fires. Our story begins in the Bronx river, once known as the “open sewer” of New York City. After some humans decide to clean it up, we meet one of the river’s residents - José the beaver. We learn about the US government parachuting bea...
Over a billion lightyears ago, in the darkness of outer space, a collision of black holes sent out a fleet of invisible waves that were headed right toward planet Earth. The waves were so powerful they could ripple spacetime but most people on Earth didn't believe the waves were real. SPOILER ALERT: The waves are called gravitational waves and…they are real! Astrophysicist Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced tells the story of what happened when...
Pizza is one of the world’s most beloved foods. But as much as we love the way it tastes, the secrets of its ingredients are even yummier to discover. We explore the surprising sounds tomatoes make when they’re stressed, how wheat became integral to human survival and how mold is sometimes... delicious? This episode also features live tap-dancing, mind-melting cheese facts and what might be the Songbud’s catchiest song yet.
We’re back with an episode from the Radiolab archive. Horseshoe crabs have been around for a long time. They outlived the dinosaurs, survived all mass extinctions and witnessed the sprouting of the Earth’s first trees. The secret to their longevity? Their baby blue blood. Which has been saving both their lives and ours.
Lulu and Radiolab co-host, Latif Nasser, head to one of these bleeding facilities to learn how horseshoe crab bl...
A color-changing creature many people assumed to be brainless outsmarts his human captors. SPOILER: The creature is an octopus! Author Sy Montgomery tells the story of one octopus named Inky who makes us question who we consider intelligent (and kissable) in the animal kingdom.
Learn about the storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials...
Today, we splash into the Hudson River Park with our Songbud to meet all kinds of crabs. With Siddartha and Carrie from the Hudson River Park, Alan puts on waterproof rubber overalls, gets his hands dirty in the river and dives into the secret lives of Hudson crabs.
Plus, CRAB WEEK is going on right now in New York City! It’s an annual shell-ebration that highlights the crabs of the Hudson River. Scuttle by for crabtastic activitie...
Today we’re bringing you a live episode we taped in Boston. It’s about clam chowder. We’re sharing it now because we’re doing ANOTHER LIVE SHOW at Little Island in NYC on August 6th + 7th - and that one’s about PIZZA! The show’s free. There will be pizza. Join if you’re in NYC (or make this the reason you visit). Check out all of our other performances here.
Lulu is a Bostonian who has never had clam chowder. Read that again. For so...
The Greenland shark is ugly. Its eyes look cloudy and dead. Its snout and fins are stubby. Its meat is poisonous. And that may be part of why most people have overlooked these sharks for so long. But there was a rumor circulating among Greenland villagers that this deepsea dweller could survive for centuries. Scientist John Steffensen went on a hunt to see if this was true and discovered that the Greenland shark can live for more t...
We’re doing a bunch of LIVE SHOWS at Little Island in NYC on August 6th-7th. For free. Come join! Check out all of our performances here.
Today we’re bringing you an episode we taped LIVE at The Greene Space at WNYC. In a room filled with all types of critters — scorpions, hissing cockroaches, a tarantula named Isabel and our main star… the jumping spider. Entomologist and bug lover Dr. Sebastian Echeverri tells us all about his lov...
On the outskirts of the Nevada desert, a young dog named Hades jumped his fence and ran away from home. His family lost hope, until one night, they saw Hades on the news. For almost seven months, he had been sleeping, eating and howling with a pack of coyotes.
We usually view coyotes as vicious, bloodthirsty beasts. But turns out, they can be pretty friendly. They form unlikely alliances with other animals all the time. They’re so f...
Coquí frogs are synonymous with Puerto Rican identity. Residents of the island doze off to the high-pitched calls of coquís from dusk to dawn. There are even playlists of hours of coquí calls that lull listeners to sleep.
That’s why ProducerBud Ana, a proud Puerto Rican, was confused when she saw a poster calling for the eradication of coquí frogs at a Hawaiian airport. Turns out, residents of Hawaiʻi see coquís as a nuisance, disr...
Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole, spending her afternoons scavenging for ancient treasures on the ground. One day, she found something the size of a potato chip. Turns out, it was a three and a half million year old chunk of bone. SPOILER ALERT BELOW.
Keep reading if you’re okay with us spoiling the surprise.
It...
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