Animal Lies: Six Tales of Mimicry and Deception

What are the shadiest lies in the animal kingdom? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, join Robert and Joe as they explore six different organisms and the fabulous ways they deceive each other and rival species. Meet cuckoos, cuttlefish, mountain alcon blue butterflies, nursery web spiders, femme fatal lightning bugs and the death's head hawk moth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stup
works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
McCormick and Robert. I was just thinking this morning about dogs.
I've got a dog. I'm a big dog fan. Y'all

(00:23):
don't have a dog. Now we're a cat household. Well,
I was thinking about how dogs, too many people feel
like such morally pure creatures. They're sweet, innocent, loving, Like
my dog seems so sweet and innocent to me. And
this is really incongruous with the evidence of my senses,
because consciously I know that he thirsts for blood. Literally,

(00:47):
the happiest day I can ever like, the happiest I've
ever seen my dog was the morning he successfully killed
a baby chip monk in our backyard. He like got
it in its jaws and he shook it to death,
and then he looked up with such joy in his
eyes as tail wagon so hard he seems like he
might break in half. And yet he still somehow seemed
to me like this pure, blameless, innocent creature. Uh. And

(01:11):
in a way he was right, because dogs, you know,
they're just following their instincts. It's not like they know
better than to do that. But I think one difference
in how we think about dogs that do destructive things
versus how we think about like people that do destructive things,
is that you usually think of a dog as something
that can't lie to you, right, this is this is true? Yeah,

(01:32):
I mean, cats, dogs, any animal you encounter, they are
an honest and pure version of what they are. What
else could they do being what they are? Yeah, But
it's like it's like lying is sort of the the
film that coats every other bad thing we think about
when we think about people, Like all the ways that
people can be bad somehow involve lying, you know what

(01:56):
I mean. And so it's this thing that that plants
the seed of distrust between people. I know, you've probably
you can think of times where you have this totally
otherwise good relationship with a person, but if you find
out they've lied do you one time, it really undercuts
the whole thing. It puts this poison pill in the relationship, right, Yeah,

(02:16):
I mean with with cats, for instance, having more experience
with cats, you think about the times that your cat
has been quote unquote bad. Generally, this is a case
where the animal has there has not behaved in a
way that fits your altered version of their existence. Like
you've taken this animal that needs to live outside and

(02:36):
hunt small creatures, and you have made it live indoors
in an environment mostly devoid of small creatures, and of
course it's going to be crazy. Of course it's gonna
run around and scratch things inappropriately and hunt your feet
in the mornings in the evening, that sort of thing.
And we get mad at them and we say bad cat,
or and then we say bad dog. But really they

(02:57):
are just being what they are and there's not there
no deception going on. It's just a pure act by
a creature that cannot be anything else. I have this
thought a lot. I thought like I think, even when
Charlie has done something bad and I have to yell
at him, I feel so guilty having to yell at
him or or discipline him or whatever. And I always think,
at least he'll never lie to me. But despite how

(03:20):
strongly I feel this, I think maybe it isn't really true,
because dogs might not have complex enough cognition to really
understand the fact that they're lying or understand what they're doing.
But just as one example, so, if my dog Charlie
has been fed dinner by one member of the household,
he will sometimes seem to try to convince a different

(03:42):
member of the household that he hasn't had dinner yet.
My cat does a similar thing. And maybe I'm just
projecting imagined motivations or strategies on like a generalized begging behavior,
but it certainly seems real. It feels real, and if
it were real, if he were actively trying to deceive
us and cheat another meal out of us, he would

(04:03):
not be alone in the animal world. True. But on
the on the other hand, like a dog's just gonna
eat whenever it can eat, a cat's gonna eat when
whenever it can eat, even if it just ends up
puking because it's eating too much. Well, whether or not
that's actually a good example. The point is that animals
other than humans absolutely can lie and deceive. Some make
an entire way of life out of it. Many can't

(04:25):
live without it. Um And I guess we should be
clear that animal deception isn't exactly the same as human lying, right,
There's some kind of difference there that's important. Well, we're
certainly not talking about a conscious act We're talking about
something that's more primitive, something that really I think is
beneath the surface of human deception, like the the the

(04:46):
natural evolved action that are human lies or just a
human exaggeration off. Yeah, exactly. And we so we don't
want to draw one to one comparison between animal deception
and human lying, but it is interesting sometimes how instinctual
animal deception tactics often take place for like the same

(05:06):
reasons and the same types of motivations that you see
humans consciously engaging in deception with other members of their
own species. You know, creatures deceive, whether by instinct or
whether consciously, in order to gain advantage, right for food,
for mating privileges, for just pure survival though the kind

(05:26):
of thing that in human activity they just sort of
spring out of the moment. But in the natural world
we see them emerge via natural selection over vast periods
of time, right, And so there is this vast world
of animal deception to explore, and that's what we're gonna
do today. We've decided for today's episode just to take
a few of our favorite examples of interesting, amazing, sometimes

(05:49):
funny animal deception and talk about them. And if this
episode works out, maybe well, maybe we can make an
ongoing series of this, kind of like our Dangerous Foods episodes. Yeah,
is what we're gonna get into a lot of mimicry,
of course, and mimicry is probably one of my my
favorite topics in biology on one hand, because it almost
always lines up with some sort of a fictitious monster. Right,

(06:12):
there's so many monsters that pretend to be something that
they are not, usually that they're pretending to be a human, right,
But it matches up with so many examples, so many
just wonderfully um grotesque and intricate examples of creatures pretending
to be other creatures or somehow mimicking behavior. Well, you
can really see in all of these stories of human

(06:35):
or monsters that pretend to be humans, the shape shifting monsters,
you can see things that look like biological training algorithms.
Like when you have stories about the succubus having like
messed up looking feet that you should be able to
notice so that you can avoid the succubus. That is
a fictional story about an imagined monster. But it feels

(06:58):
very much like the way that there are going to
be deceptive, aggressive mimicry examples in the natural world, where
an animal has to become a tune to one particular
part of the body of another animal to understand the
difference between it and the harmless animal or the predator
or whatever that it's pretending to be. Indeed, now, now,
I like this approach for the podcast because there are

(07:18):
so many wonderful examples of deception and mimicry in the
animal kingdom, especially, so we could just do episode after
episode looking at some of these examples. In fact, with
this first example I want to talk about, we could
probably do a whole series of episodes just on this
one type of bird. But I want to start with
this example of the cuckoos. Now, Robert, I'm sure you've

(07:42):
touched on cuckoo's a bit in the podcast before, right, Yes,
we did cover cuckoos in an older episode. But it's
just such a fascinating biological example. Uh, let's definitely revisit
it here. We we are cuckoo for parasites. So cuckoos
are a family of birds. There are more than a
hundred and thirties species of cuckoos, more than fifty of
which are brewed parasites. So here's the low down on

(08:06):
brood parasitism. Evolution selects for you to have as many
future descendants as possible, but for some species it takes
a lot of work to raise them. So what if
you could trick another animal into raising your offspring as
its own so that you don't have to put the
investment in So, brood parasites developed biological strategies for exactly this,

(08:30):
to sneak their young into the care of some other
animal so they can avoid the resource investment of raising them. So,
in the case of cuckoos and some other avian brewed parasites,
this usually breaks down into a three stage strategy. The
first stages you want to get access to the unguarded
nest of a host bird. Second step is lay your

(08:51):
eggs among the eggs of the host, and then the
third step is often kill or remove the other eggs
or siblings from the nest. And this is to maximize
all of the parental attention that's going to go to
the parasitic invader. And on paper, just looking at the
pure economics of survival, this this makes sense. Yeah, and
it it often leads to this evolutionary arms race between

(09:14):
parasites and hosts, with the host birds evolving defenses against
the cuckoos and the cuckoos evolving better and better tactics
for their brood parasitism game. Example, here's a question. If
you're a cuckoo and you want to gain access to
a local nest, how do you get to it without
the parent bird catching you in the act. Cuckoos are

(09:35):
actually not especially strong or agile birds, and they can
be injured or killed by attacks from host parents. So
if you were a cuckoo, you need some way of
getting the host parents safely away from the nest while
you lay your eggs in there. So how do you
do that? Well, some cuckoos appear to have evolved a
really ingenious solution to this. They evolved to look like predators,

(09:59):
specifically raptors like sparrow hawks. So the cuckoos look like
sparrow hawks in several ways. They're similar in size and shape,
like having a long body and then similar shaped wings
and a tail. And also in the plumage they've got
these similar colorations to the sparrow hawks, but then also
barred patterns on the plumage of the underside of their bodies.

(10:22):
Uh and then also I've read that there their swift
direct flight has a role to play in their mimicry
of hawks. So you've got this barred pattern on the plumage.
If you're a hawk, a barred pattern is probably useful
because it's camouflage, right. It helps you hide among the
branches and leaves, so you can get close to your prey.
But if you're a cuckoo and you look like a

(10:42):
predatory hawk, you can get birds to think you are
a predatory hawk, meaning they fly away and avoid you.
You drive the host parents away, and then you gain
access to the nest. Of course, then you've still got
this back and forth of the evolutionary arms race going on.
So some common hosts of parasitic cuckoos, like read warblers

(11:03):
or Acrocephalus sci passus, they've developed the ability to tell
the difference between cuckoos and genuine hawk predators. So you
put a stuffed sparrow hawk in front of them and
they will fly away, they'll avoid it. But if you
put a stuffed cuckoo in front of them, they'll often
mob it and go nuts attacking it. And then again
the trickery of avian brewed parasites can go in exactly

(11:24):
the opposite direction, driving the evolutionary arms race to the
other end of the spectrum. So to to cite a
paper here from Proceedings of the Royal Society b and
UH by Phoene at All, the authors tested the hypothesis
that female cuckoo finches or anomalous spizza embarbus uh, that

(11:45):
this is another parasitic bird, a brewed parasite bird, that
they aggressively mimic harmless bird species in order to gain
undetected access to the nests of their hosts, which are
tawny flanked prinia. So under this hypothesis us the parasites
disguised themselves as a harmless bird called Southern red Bishops,
and the results seemed to bear this out by showing

(12:07):
that the cuckoo finch plumage pattern was closer to that
of the Southern red Bishop than it was to the
parasitic finch's own closest relatives. Also, the authors noted that
the host birds the printia, were equally aggressive to the
parasites and to actual Southern Red bishops, actually harmless birds. Essentially,
this is kind of like if burglars uh one time

(12:28):
got into your house by disguising themselves as the milkman.
And then after that, every time you see the milkman
you scream and attack him. Yeah, And of course it's
important to note the obvious and all of this, and
that is that this is taking place at the speed
of natural selection. So we when we see the development
of of of coloration that matches a predatory bird, this

(12:49):
is something where the cuckoos that had UH coloration that
lined up with predatory birds, they were the more successful.
They were the ones that were producing offspring. Right. And
still in all these cases going to be a question
of percentages, you know, It's not like something is gonna
work or fail every time. It's going to be a
question of how often it works. Yeah, with kind of

(13:09):
a tug back and forth, as you've explained here, I
can't help but think of say, fashions and trends. Here
it's like, oh, predatory cuckoos are in this season, uh,
and then the next season out and now now it's
the the ones that look like harmless birds. That's what's
the what's actually getting success, and then it's having an
impact on the subsequent generations. Right. But in in real time,

(13:31):
of course, what it's going to be is mostly it's
going to be divergent, like you'll you'll pick a niche
one or the other and then split off into these
different paths over time. But yeah, you could see potentially
in the future the paths converging or going back in
the opposite direction, depending on what's beneficial. Now, we could
probably do a whole series of episodes just on the
arms race between a v and brood parasites on their

(13:53):
and their hosts, like disguising the eggs to look like
host eggs so the host parents don't roll them out
of the nest, and then once the egg does hatch,
a cuckoo chick will often immediately push the other eggs
out of the nest so that it alone can benefit
from its host parents feeding and protection. And sometimes people
note the like how ridiculous this can look to outside observers,

(14:14):
where like, a tiny parent will be feeding a gigantic
cuckoo baby as if it thinks it's its own young um,
and and so like, this is getting extremely large and fat,
but it looks weird to us because we don't see
bird chicks the same way birds see bird chicks like birds,
seabird chicks through these certain types of things they recognize,

(14:36):
like the shape of the open mouth and and that
being a trigger for their instinctual feeding behaviors. But I
also want to mention a very different and very amazing
kind of brood parasite that is also found in nature,
the ant queen with butterfly wings. So I've got a
strategy to improve my lot in life. Let me know

(14:56):
what you think about. Okay, I'm gonna walk up to
the eight outside the White House with a suit on.
I'm gonna say, hey, I'm the President, and I'll like,
maybe i'll do a voice impression of the president, and
then hopefully they'll be like, Mr President, what are you
doing out here? Let's get you inside and get you
all kinds of luxury items. Okay, Well, I mean it

(15:17):
seems like people have gained access to the White House
with with with less of a complex plan in mind.
But I see some problems with this one. Yeah, you
don't think it's gonna work. Well, you're not gonna look
like the president. You're just saying you're the president, and
unless you just caught everybody unawares, they're probably not gonna

(15:38):
let you in. Yeah, it's absolutely true, based on how
humans identify other humans, that would probably not be a
good strategy. I would probably need some kind of surgery
or really really good mission impossible mask to totally look
like a convincing copy of the real president by sight. Right, Yeah, Like,
even if you look at a professional lookalikes a very

(16:00):
celebrities or politicians like you could maybe make a case
for some of these individuals having a good shot at
getting in there, you know, like their impression and their
appearance is spot on, and maybe if everyone was just
a little bit lax, they could wander in. But generally,
we just have so many caveats that we're looking at
to identify somebody. Well, right, But that's because we are humans,

(16:22):
and it's because we identify by sight and by sound primarily. Now,
what if I didn't actually smell like the president? Would
that matter? Probably not? Right? Well, I guess it depended
on what you smelled like, and it depends on how
how strong all the other sensory deceptions were, you know,
because it was one of those things where your hair

(16:43):
didn't look quite right. But then also you smelled say
like kale Like, I'm just a strong kale odor And
they might say the president has never smelled like kale before.
And then you know, now that I think about it,
the hair looks a little weird today. And then they said,
then it's like a an avalanche of of of revelation
and they to say, oh, it's actually an alien visitor.

(17:06):
Is that what I am? In this example? Now? Did
I become an alien? I don't know, it just got it.
It spiraled out of control to now I'm imagining a
Kale based alien organism that impersonates world leaders. Take me
to your leader has become make me your leader. Well, so, yeah,
so we've identified that sight and sound are the main
things humans would go by, but different animals go on

(17:27):
different types of senses. And so if you're an insect,
a good way to get access to the insect White
House might be something other than looking right. It might
be smelling right, and it might be sounding right. Okay, Well,
what would be an insect world equivalence of the White House?
A highly protected uh stronghold really uh, the kind of

(17:50):
place where generally to break into it, you would think
you'd have to pull some real mission impossible shenanigans. Oh,
it's got to be an ant colony, right, The ant
colon is the fortress or the castle of the insect world.
It's got powerful resource distribution channels, it's got powerful protective systems,

(18:10):
it's got you know, armies to protect you and do
your bidding, and selfless, selfless soldiers in its service. You have.
They talk about the secret servicemen will take a bullet
for the president, but at a worker ant will definitely
take a bullet for the queen for the colony. Totally
gaining access to the benefits of an ant colony without
having to give anything back to the ant colony. That

(18:32):
would be the insect equivalent of hitting the jackpot. Yeah, totally. Yeah,
the call was coming from inside the colony the whole time.
And there is a species of butterfly that is an
example of there are many types of insects, actually, I
believe thousands of types of insects that have evolved to
parasitize ant colonies through the brood parasitism method. And so

(18:55):
there's a species of butterfly that's one of these insects
called the mountain alcon blue or acculine A rebelli. Maculanea parasitizes.
A type of Eurasian aunt called mermica skeen key or
skeen key C s h E N c k I,
and the caterpillar stage of this maculania butterfly uses chemical

(19:15):
signatures to convince the ants that it is an aunt larva.
So they're like, oh, one of our aunt lava is
out here, we need to take it inside, get it safe,
at which point so the ants carry the caterpillar back
to the nest and take care of it. But it
gets better. A two thousand nine study by Francesca Barbera
at all in Science found that mermica queen's partially demonstrate

(19:39):
who they are to the workers in their colony by
making distinctive acoustic sounds quote that elicit increased benevolent responses
from workers, reinforcing their supreme social status. So this parasite
is able to convince the ant colony through this deceptive
tactic and through making this type of noise by it's

(20:01):
it's like a friction based noise that it makes with
rubbing its body parts together, that it is not only
welcome in the colony, it's not only a larva that
should be taken care of, but it's a queen and
it's got to be given ultimate deference, status, resources and
all that, and this works so well. Did the parasitic
butterfly puts on the vast majority of its adult weight
while being fed by its aunt servants? That is that

(20:25):
is quite a cool This would be just like if
you showed up at the gates of the White House.
He sounded like the president, you smelled like the president,
and then they took you in and they started feeding
you all of the President's favorite foods. Right, So this
is an amazing example and it's funny. So we've been
doing this anthropomorphizing thing because I think it often makes
these examples even more amazing and funnier to try to

(20:48):
think of what the human analogy would be. But anytime
there's stuff about, for example, you know, weird invertebrate courtship
behaviors which we're gonna get to in a bit, or
anything like that, people want to say, hey, maybe that's why,
and then inserts something about real human behaviors there. And
to be clear, it's not why. Like it's fun to

(21:09):
anthropomorphize these examples just because it can be funny. But
you know, we're talking about other types of organisms, birds, arachneids, insects,
which are not close relatives of ours, distantly removed in
evolutionary history, and it's pretty safe to assume that their
behaviors are independent of ours. So this extends to all
the things we'll be talking about today. Some of them

(21:30):
might be really interesting, were funny to consider when you
pour them up to some kind of human analogy, but
we should remember that these animals aren't humans. We humans
are not these animals, and their behavior doesn't necessarily or
even likely explain our behavior, and vice versa. I do
do not take any inspiration from these animals. Alright, we're

(21:53):
gonna take a quick break and we come back. We
will dive into the world of cuttlefish. Alright, we're back.
So you've promised me cuttlefish, Yes, and I will deliver cuttlefish.
I'm a big cuttlefish fan. If there is a video
or a giff involving cuttlefish, if I'm in an aquarium
and they're cuttlefish, then I Am definitely going to stare

(22:16):
long and deep into their their pulsating coloration, the way
they just kind of float there like an apparition. They're
just gorgeous, beautiful, holy, blameless creatures. Or we're back to
the blameless, right, Yeah, well, there's it's something angelic about
the cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are your dogs kind of Yeah. I

(22:36):
don't have to clean up after him though, but so yeah,
I do. I do see them with a certain amount
of purity. How do you feel about the nautilus compared
to cuttlefish? I mean, the nautils is is cool. Who
who doesn't love the vaulted nautilus? But and the cuttlefish
is is far more elegant. Okay, take me there, all right,
So cuttlefish are typically loners, but every year do have

(23:00):
to abandon their solitary lives and they have to gather
together to mate. And then you see, you see a
lot of behavior at this point that is less cute.
You know, that's at least to us are human eyes,
because you have a very similar scenario going on here.
You have males staking out smaller females, and they're expressing

(23:20):
both their desire to mate with the females and their
desire to fight off rivals. And they do a lot
of this through a complex flash of colors, changing of
their shapes. One of the mini tropes of science fiction
and fantasies. Of course, shape shifting organisms, things that can
change their shape to deceive. In this case, Uh, we

(23:44):
definitely see the change of shape and the change of
coloration as a way to communicate with each other. Um,
it's kind of a language of intent. And these changes
they happen to like a fraction of a second, and
it does at times just seem pulsating and hypnotic. And
there there have been studies that have looked at it
even a sort of hypnotic approach to capturing prey, just

(24:06):
throwing the prey off with some sort of complex coloration pattern. Again,
there's almost something supernatural about seeing one of these organisms
sort of paralysis by like baffling sensory overload. Right. Yeah,
But but when males encounter each other, basically they're just
they're flashing their colors, uh, saying, hey, don't mess with me,

(24:27):
don't try and get my mate, because I will fight you.
And then of course they end up actually fighting each other,
lashing out each other with with flashes of their yawning tentacles.
They lash onto each other, They tug, they grapple, they
roll around for dominance. It's dramatic. Uh. But but the
physical violence itself is the last resort. Now, this whole

(24:50):
stair down phase that occurs is really interesting, especially when
we're talking about deception because, according to a two thousand
seventeen study from the Marine Biological Laboratory, UH, it may
match up with the mutual assessment model of game theory. Okay,
what's that? So in this each individual considers their next
action based on their adversaries ability and their own ability

(25:13):
to prevail instead of just proceeding based on an evaluation
of your own strengths. So you're like constantly measuring yourself
against your opponent. Yeah, so one cuttlefish is saying, Hey,
this is me and this is what I'm gonna do.
The other cattle fish is saying the same thing, and
it's it's about who is going to back down? I mean,
that's why this behavior evolves, because it is it is

(25:36):
a way to give your opponent every opportunity to back
down before physical violence has to ensue, which can result
in damage, et cetera. Yeah, you know, one thing that's
worth pointing out is that backing down happens a whole
lot in the natural world. Like a lot of times
you see rival dominance displays between aggressive or territorial males

(25:57):
or something like that, and all kinds of species, different
family lays. You'll very often see an attempt to avoid
actual fighting. Right now, we have to bring in the
human element here because everyone's probably thinking of of some
very cliche tropes of of of men in like nineteen
fifties beach movies trying to pick up women. Uh So,

(26:19):
imagine a muscle dude on the beach. Muscle dude on
the beach, Yeah, trying to pick up the ladies. And
then there's another another muscle dude and maybe they start
like doing a muscle showdown. You know, they're kind of
doing mr universe poses, different flexes and all um or
just generally you know, busting out a bunch of of
macho bs. So in the human realm, we know, we

(26:40):
we we know just from nothing else from our stories,
that sometimes an individual is bluffing. Sometimes they are putting
on a show of potential physical violence or dominance, and
they're not gonna be able to back that up with
say actual fighting skill or a or an actual willingness
to engage in physical islands. Right, Like, what do you

(27:01):
think when somebody's like, I'm a black belt in karate,
do you believe them. Do real Do real people who
have actual martial arts training say that very much? I
don't know. Of course, that's a great example too, though,
because someone could very well be a black belt in karate.
But does that mean they really have the I mean,
are they actually trained? Are they just saying it? And

(27:21):
even if they are trained, are they going to back
it up? Are they going to be willing to actually
spring into action? So? I mean, we could go back
and forth on on the human ankle of that all day,
But where it applies here is you have to ask
the question, well, are there cases where a cuttle fish lies?
Does a cuttlefish say hey, I'm big and scary and
I can fight you. I mean, to a certain extent,

(27:43):
they are, because they're positioning their body and sort of
making themselves look threatening. But a two thousand sixteen study
published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, they argue that cuttlefish
do not bluff when they signal agitation through this colorful display.
They are really agitated. Displays reliably predict the chances of

(28:05):
any physical aggression. Now that being said, they again they
did probably evolve to communicate varying levels of aggression to
give their rival multiple chances to back down. But it
seems to be an honest display. So they really are
a black belt in karate. Yes, yeah, they have not
developed the technology to lie about their karate training. Now.
At the same time, with the cuttlefish, we do see

(28:27):
an amazing example of of mimicry in this mating, because
you know, what do you do if you can't match
up to these aggressive displays. Well, Fortunately for the smaller males,
the cuttlefish made in game isn't completely dominated by brash
displays of power and these aquatic wrestling matches um. Because again,
they are intelligent creatures. They have to be to control

(28:49):
all of these uh, these various coloration patterns and the
and the the the inner workings of their body. Uh.
And they have a talent, natural talent for disguise. So
what we see happening is, in order to get to
the closely guarded females, some of these smaller males will
engage in uh a kind of gender dancing. They'll they'll

(29:11):
scrunch up their tentacles, they'll change their colors and then
and suddenly they don't look like a rival at all.
They look like a female cuttlefish. Oh okay, so this
would be going the route of trying to make yourself
appear harmless. Well not not even it goes beyond harmless.
They may even look desirable that the male will not
only let them in and think, oh, here's another female

(29:32):
I can mate with. Sometimes they will try and mate
with the disguised cuttlefish. So the sneaky cuttlefish, the the
gender dancing cuttlefish sneaks in mates with the female and
then makes an escape. Uh. And then the female cuttlefish
doesn't play favorites either. She fertilizes her head with the
sperm of both males, and uh. And I should know

(29:53):
that it's not merely a proximity game here. It's not
just a matter of whichever male gets closest is going
to be the one to mate, because the female is
going to reject something like seventy of her suitors according
to a two thousand six Marine Biological Laboratory study. And
then this carries on into just the evolutionary advantage, because
essentially there is there is a survival and an advantage

(30:14):
for cuttle fish in general to have not only the
genes of of big scary cuttlefish, succeeding, but also the
genes of stealthy, sneaky cuttlefish. I think it's interesting. It's
like imagining a Dungeons and Dragons party. You can't just
have barbarians, you know, You've got a thief. Yeah, you
gotta have a rogue. You gotta have a thief. Somebody's
got to do the sneaking, uh, because otherwise how are

(30:36):
you going to best the dragon? So anyway, that's one
of my favorite examples of mimicry deception uh within a species. Uh.
And anytime I get to talk about cuttlefish, I'm definitely
gonna go for it. Well, I want to go to
another example of deception in mating practices and courtship. Uh.
So I want to talk about the deadbeat spider suitor.

(30:58):
So there is a behavior that has evolved multiple times
independently in different animal groups, especially in spiders and insects,
known as nuptial gift giving. And in these cases, an animal,
generally a male that wants to mate with a female
of species needs to show up with a gift, often
a piece of nutritious food. This can get pretty weird because,

(31:21):
for example, insects like some crickets, and moths will not
go get you a piece of food, but they will
out of their bodies generate a nutritional spermatophor. So imagine
like an ampule of sperm cells for a human analogy,
cushioned in the middle of a delicious lasagna. So they

(31:42):
bring you the lasagna, soy, like, here you go is
for you. There there is some genetic material in there,
and I hope we can produce offspring together. This just
became a very dangerous episode too to listen to while eating.
But but, but no, if we strip away all of
our human complexities here, this is just a matter of
energy and economics. Uh, it's going to take a certain

(32:04):
amount of energy to to produce the eggs to produce
the young. And the mail is saying, well, here, here
is some energy. I will give you this along with
my genetic material. Yeah. So in reality, this lasagna is
the spermatophylax. It's a ball of gelatinous goo made by
the male's body which surrounds the sperm ampule, and it's
rich with proteins and other nutrients. And in some cases

(32:27):
the quality of the nutrition and the spermatophore can help
the female decide which males are worth mating with. Right, Like,
a healthier, better potential mate is going to produce a better,
more nutritious spermatophilax or or other structure on the spermatophor.
So in general, this gift giving can be good for
the male because a big nutritious meal for his mate

(32:48):
often means a better future for the offspring that they're
about to have together. Just like you were saying, sometimes
a male who wants to mate needs to bring the
female a dead animal. So I want to talk about
a spy. He called Pisara mirablous, the nursery web spider.
This is a species of spider known for courtship feeding
and male nuptial gift giving. When a male approaches a

(33:09):
female with the intention to mate, he often brings with
him a nuptial gift of an insect cocooned in silk. Then,
while the female is inspecting or even trying to eat
the gift, the male mates with her, which he does
by using his petal palps to deposit sperm in her
sperm storage organs on the underside of the abdomen. Now

(33:30):
it's possible for a male spider to initiate mating without
the gift, it's just a lot less likely to be
successful and he's more likely to get rejected or even worse.
And we can discuss the worst in a minute. So far,
no deception, right, this is just like it's a gift
giving relationship. This is an evolved relationship to help facilitate

(33:50):
the mating process, to help the male get more nutrition
for his future offspring. So it seems to work out fine,
yea very businesslike, very professional. But what if you're a
male nursery webs spider and you can't find a juicy
fly to give to the female across the way? Or
maybe what if you're a male nursery web spider and
you found a fly, but you got so excited that
you sucked all the fluids out of it yourself. What

(34:13):
do you do then? Well, I mean it sounds like
you should die out right, I mean, because you don't
have you don't have what it takes to win over
the female. Well, maybe you just need a little bit
of deception. So in a two thousand eleven paper and
BMC Evolutionary Biology by Maria J. Albo at all Uh,
the author studied the phenomenon of spider nuptial gift giving

(34:34):
under exactly this scenario. So there's an interesting observation. I
mentioned that the male nursery web spider often wraps the
gift in silk. Why does he wrap the gift in silk?
Why not just bring it straight up that's in it?
Because it's easy to initially just think, well, it's wrapped
in the silk anyway, because that's what spiders do with
things that they've trapped. But that's not necessarily the case here, right,

(34:59):
They're like they're wrapping for some other reason. Right, So
wrapping a dead flying silk, this is one answer, helps
make it easier for the spider to carry, to carry it,
to handle it and control it, whether the spider is
gripping it with the chilis array or the feet claws.
And this not only makes it easier to carry, it
also makes it harder for the female to grab the
gift and run away with it without mating, So it's

(35:21):
easier for the male to maintain a grip on it.
Sometimes the female tries to do that, she'll try to
grab it and run off. You know, I wonder if
that's ever involved. Uh, I wonder if that's ever part
of our own gift giving. You know, we never think
about it consciously, but like, I'm really going to wrap
the heck out of this Christmas present because I want
I want the moment to last as long as possible,
you know, I don't want the recipient to just instantly

(35:44):
have the gift and then they're off installing batteries in it.
That's interesting. Uh, I do think we need to remember,
as we were saying earlier, not to not to take
literal anthropomorphizing, but but it was like a similar like
a stalling tactic, Like that's the necessity involved here is
I don't want the the recipient to have the actual

(36:07):
gift too quickly, because then I am forgotten exactly. So
here's another answer though. At least one study found that
relatively brighter gifts were more attractive to females, And so
perhaps a silk wrapped gift looks like a higher value
piece of food because it's got greater reflectivity of light,

(36:27):
and this means the gift bringer as a better shot
at success just because it looks like a more nutritious gift.
Just better packaging, better marketing. Third option. The authors note
that a possible advantage of silk wrapping is as follows. Quote.
Male spiders have a unique opportunity for gift manipulation through
the gift wrapping trade, for example, by preventing female assessment

(36:50):
of the gift content nice and euphemistic. But what that
means is wrapping it in silk helps the spider trick
you with a fake gift. So Psara mirabilous is notable
because reports have been indicated that sometimes males show up
for mating with this silk wrapped package. But what's in
the package is empty. It's a drained arthropod skeleton usually,

(37:16):
or maybe just some pieces of plant parts. Uh to
quote from the study quote, dissection of sixteen gifts carried
by males in the field showed that sixty two percent
contained fresh prey, so good nutritious gifts, while the remaining
thirty eight percent contained empty arthropod skeletons i e. Prey
already sucked out, probably by the mail itself. So almost

(37:40):
forty of the time, the male who shows up with
a gift has killed an insect, eating all the good parts,
taken the skeleton, wrapped it up in silk, and said
she'll never figure this out. You know, we see a
lot of from the human perspective, jerky behavior on the
part of insects and the rachnids. But this is really jerky. Yes,

(38:00):
this is debat behavior if it were humans, but you
know it's it's spiders. So the experiment in question in
this paper I mentioned, they tested mating success in the
following four groups. You had a protein enriched fly gift,
so that's like a fly that's even better than a
normal fly nutrition wise, a regular fly gift, a worthless gift,

(38:21):
or a male who shows up with no gift. And
here are the results. The males that brought fake gifts
got about the same amount of mating success as the
males who brought real nutritional gifts. Both of these groups
had a lot more success than males who showed up
with no gift. This suggests there's a strong pressure on
gift bringing that sometimes selects for males to get fake

(38:45):
gifts and bring them along. Now, on the other hand,
males who brought worthless fake gifts tended to get their
mating sessions cut short sooner than males who brought real gifts,
and this leads to less sperm deposition. So there is
a cost for males who show up with fakes. As Ventually,
it looks like if you bring a present, whether it's
real or fake, you're more likely to get to mate

(39:05):
at all. But if the present is fake, you're probably
gonna get cut off sooner. Here's another question, how did
this kind of nuptial gift giving relationship evolved in the
first place, right, like, why in this species does the
male show up with a gift and why would the
male fake it. To answer that question, researchers Maria j Albo,

(39:28):
who was the lead researcher on the last paper I mentioned,
and Sore and Taft performed an experiment which they published
in the Royal Society Biology Letters in T and So.
The main existing hypothesis to explain the origin and maintenance
of food gifts during mating was that for females the
benefit is obvious, it's the extra nutrition you get without

(39:48):
any extra work and it helps increase fecundity. And for
males it was thought that the possible benefits would be
twofold number one, that it's a parental investment which increases
the number the quality of offspring, and it also is
a mating effort. It allows the male to obtain access
to mating opportunities. Both of these factors could actually play

(40:09):
a role. The author's right quote. A third hypothesis applying
to predatory and cannibalistic species proposes that nuptial gifts may
act as physical protection against sexual cannibalism from aggressive females.
Uh and they said this hypothesis at the time of
their paper hadn't yet received any support, but they were

(40:30):
about to demonstrate some support for it. So first they
collected a bunch of spiders before their maturity molt, and
then once the spiders reached adulthood, the females were sorted
into groups of well fed and poorly fed spiders. And
then they staged mating encounters between females and males and
recorded whether the males were carrying a nuptial gift with

(40:50):
them or not. And they recorded several possible outcomes. There
was successful mating, there was rejection of the male. There
was cannibalism where the female eats the male, and then
there was gift stealing what we mentioned earlier, where the
female grabs the gift and then runs away with it
without mating. So females that did not cannibalize were tested
again on the following days up to eight times. And

(41:13):
the results were interesting because you'd guess that the poorly
fed females would cannibalize the males more often. Right, They're
really hungry, so there they'd be more likely to eat
the male spider who wants to mate. She needs the energy.
There is energy in the in the male's body, and
the male has out of his usefulness exactly, and that conversely,

(41:34):
well fed females would not bother eating potential mates. But
they found this was not true. There was no statistically
significant relationship between how hungry the females were and how
likely they were to eat the males. Instead, cannibalism was
more powerfully determined by whether the male brought a gift
or not, they said. Quote, female staged with no gift

(41:56):
males were on average more than six times as cannibalistic
his female stage with gift carrying males. Of seventy five
female stage with no gift males, fifteen or nineteen percent
cannibalize their partner, whereas only one of twenty eight females
or three point six percent, cannibalize gift carrying males. So
the males who show up with gifts tend not to

(42:17):
get cannibalized. Always bring a gift. What we can learn
from the spiders here, Well, but here's where the fake
gifts come in the author's right quote. The use of
fake gifts by males may thus be a way to
get access to receptive females, but considering the results of
the present paper, it may also serve to reduce the
risk of cannibalistic attack. Well, you know, maybe so it

(42:40):
makes the male look a little bit less like a
deadbeat if he's if he might get eaten if he
doesn't show up with it. I mean, he has his
genetic programming is I must mate and if he made
he there's a good chance he's going to be killed
and eaten. So it's a it's about survival really, it's
just about maybe if I just wrap up this, uh,

(43:01):
this piece of dirt and and hand it to or
then that'll that'll give me just enough time to escape
with my life. Yeah. Now I should add that among
nursery web spiders, sexual cannibalism is not super common. So
even the males who showed up without a gift didn't
get eaten, like all the time, it wasn't you know,
just if you don't have a gift, you will get eaten,
but the chances, even though small, were much higher than

(43:23):
if you show up with a gift. I want to
add one more layer of deception in the nursery web
spider mating. Sometimes in the nursery web spiders, males play
dead during this process, so it's like a whole other
thing going on. From a paper by Elbow in two
thousand eleven. Sometimes during mating, the female nursery web spider

(43:45):
is going to attempt, as we've said, to grab the
nuptial gift and run away with it. And sometimes if
the female attempts to terminate copulation early to run away
with the gift, the mail will resort to the trick
of thanatosis, or playing dead. So the death feigning behavior
involves going rigid and stretching out the legs and grabbing

(44:05):
tight hold of the gift he brought with his chilisarae.
So while she's trying to run off with the gift,
he's dead and clutching the gift, So she has to
drag this apparently dead male spider along with her, and
then once she gets tired and stops moving, the mail
revives and then tries to mate again. I mean it's

(44:27):
really almost kind of comic. Yeah. Now, the nursery web spiders,
i should point out, are not the only animals who
have been noted bringing fake nuptial gifts. The mail dance
fly will sometimes bring empty, worthless gifts to a potential mate. Uh.
And there is another spider species called Paratrichalea or nada,
and some researchers found that seventy percent of males in

(44:49):
the species tried to initiate mating with worthless gifts like
the same drained leftover prey skeletons, the worst gift of
the arachnid world. That this is all fascinating because when
you start breaking it down really and when you try
as much as as possible to cut out the human
layer of interpretation here, you see just how these things emerge.

(45:13):
It's just like a like like an economic byproduct of
these these complex mating relationships. Yeah. Well, it's one of
these things where there's like a deep economy of animal
behavior that we would never even understand unless there were
people doing these detailed studies. I mean, there's so much
to consider in the costs and benefits of how you
bring a dead thing wrapped up in silk, or whether

(45:35):
you choose to do so or not. Alright, well, on
that note, we're gonna take one more break, and when
we come back we will discuss some thim fatals than Alright,
we're back. So one of my favorite acts of animal deception.
And if anyone has seen any of the old monster
science videos that that I did, then you're you're already

(45:56):
familiar with this one. But I'm gonna addle a little
extra to it as well. Uh but but I find it.
I find it very much like the idea of a
beautiful vampire luring human victims in with the promise of sex,
only to kill them and drain them of their precious blood.
Only this example is even cooler, and it comes from

(46:17):
the world of lightning bugs. Yeah. So you have a
few different varieties of lightning bugs out there, but the
one we're talking about here, if I can interrupt, lightning
bugs seem like the most innocent of bugs. Oh yeah,
yeah about animal innocence. My dog is innocent, cuttle fish
are innocent. Lightning bugs are so sweet. Yeah, It's something
that children go around trapping in a jar and then

(46:39):
hopefully releasing, you know, they're they're this this kind of
magical creature afloat in the wilderness. They're they're the magic
of summertime when you're a child in the twilight. Yes, now,
of course all that that that that lighting that they're
doing out there there, the little patterns they're forming, this
has to do with mating. And then this is where
the email photourists lightning bug enters the picture, also known

(47:04):
as the fim fatale lightning bug. So what she does
is she goes out there and she mimics the flash
signals of a mating female Photinus. Lightning bug is a
different species but related for poturists and Photinus, so the
fim fatal is fo tourists. And then she is mimicking, uh,

(47:26):
the the the lighting displays of a Photinus. Right, So
the thing here is she doesn't want to mate with
Photinus males. She wants to kill them and consume their nutrients,
especially this defensive steroid that they have in their bodies
called luci Bithagin's which provides protection against predatory jumping spiders.

(47:50):
So the fim fatal bugs she can't produce the steroid
on her own. She has to seduce and kill these
these other lightning bugs in order to acquire it, and
in fact she attracts males of four different species of
lightning bugs with with distinctively different flashed responses. Now, this
behavior was first observed in nineteen sixty five. It was

(48:11):
suspected prior to that, but for the most part it
is only fairly recently that we've been able to understand it.
Now at this point you might wonder, though, hey, what
do you do if you're a male for tourists lightning bug?
What did they do to attract their mate when their
females are out there praying on the males of another species. Well,
according to a nineteen eighties study published in Science, the

(48:34):
males have their own mating displays, you know, that are
their key to their species. But they'll also mimic the
male mating displays of other species in order to attract
their own females. So, so think about this. Anyone who's
seen from dustal down. You know Selma Hias vampire queen character. Okay,
so imagine her, She's out there luring bikers into her

(48:57):
deadly embrace. Meanwhile, you have cheech Marin's character Chet, who's
another vampire. Uh say he wants to mate. What's he
gonna do to get her attention? She's going around, uh
tearing bikers apart, maybe he has to disguise himself as
a hapless biker in order to attract her attention. Wow,
that's like that's some matrix stuff. That's several several levels down. Yeah,

(49:19):
it's it's it's it's just it can sound dysfunctional, I guess,
but you know it's you know, every every couple has
their thing. But the crazy thing here is that, as
best I can tell, and based on a couple of
the papers I looked at, there's no known parallel in
other animal communicative systems. It's just this, this this weird

(49:40):
scenario of of the parasitic lover and her parasitic mate
uh in the in the mail, having to actually pretend
to be her prey in order to mate with her.
It's phenomenal. I love it. That is amazing. Alright, So
for the next animal to fever here, I want to

(50:01):
talk about a creature that has really become kind of
an icon of of horror and doom, and that is
the Death's Head hawk moth. Oh, this is one from
Silence of the Lambs, Right, Yeah, most famous for a
showing up in Thomas Harris is The Silence of the
Lambs and the film adaptation, so to refresh Serial Killer,

(50:21):
Jamie Gum places the insect and the throats of his victims.
And it seems like a fitting calling card, right because
on one love we have this this theme of metamorphosis.
He's trying to transform himself, and here is a creature
that is defined by its transformation. But it's also nice
and thematic because the moths feature coloration on their backs.

(50:44):
Did hauntingly look like a human skull. Yeah, it looks
like on the day that that animal was created the
gods who were really into Megadeath. Yeah. Yeah. They they're
very gothic looking and and it's people have been noticing
this for ages. They're African myths that involved the death
head hawk moth is being you know, a a token
of doom there that you also have it showing up

(51:06):
in the works of John Keats. It shows up in
bron Stoker's Dracula. Dracula sends them to Renfield. Yeah, uh,
and uh, they're just really cool looking moss that they're
pretty big too. There's one variety known as the Arcarantia sticks,
which can grow to between three and five point eleven
inches in wingspan. And they're also the world's fastest moth

(51:29):
at thirty miles per hour or forty eight kilometers per hour,
so they're they're pretty impressive species, even if you don't,
you know, count the little miniature skull or at least
abstract skull on their backs. Now you might notice that
name was kind of interesting. Arcarantia sticks uh, named after
not one but two rivers in Hell. And then there's

(51:52):
another one, Arkarantia tropus, named for one of the rivers
in Help, but then also a tropics, one of the
three fates and Greek mythology. So they're just they're just
really death metally from just throughout their appearance. Their their
official scientific names, but it goes, it goes well beyond that,
because you if you if you get past their just

(52:13):
basic appearance and h and a lot of the superstitions
about them, you might ask, well, what does a what
does a hawk moth eat? What is a death's head
hot moth hunger? For I would guess, I don't know,
does it like desiccated skeletons that are being taken as
gifts by all these nursery web spiders. You think, yeah,
I think it would be more fitting if they if
they fed on carry I eat the bones of insects.

(52:35):
But they don't. They're like Pooh. They're like Pooh Bear.
They love honey. Oh. For a second, I thought you
meant they like Pooh. No, no, they are like Pooh
the bear. It just Pooh Bear likes honey. They love honey.
In fact, it's pretty much all they eat, the delicious
food stuff. So the bees, that's all they want. Okay,
well how do they get it? Well, this is where

(52:55):
it gets interesting because we come back to the similar
scenario with the ants. Sure that high is full of
delicious honey, but the bees don't make it for moths.
They make it for people. No, wat, they make it
for other bees. They make it. Yeah, and they protect
it fiercely. They have stingers. It is a dangerous place
to go. Uh. I'm reminded of an old Donald Duck cartoon.

(53:17):
I don't know if you ever saw this one growing up,
but Donald dresses up like a giant bee to go
into the bee hive to collect the honey. Does it work?
It does until Chip and Dale like screw with his
plan and lots of stinging and quacking and sue. Uh,
But it's basically what's going on here, there's there's there's
some form of mimicry going on with the Death's Head

(53:39):
moth when it enters a hive. Basically it it waltz,
is in, it hangs out, it eats honey, and then
it leaves at its own leisure. And it's only rarely
stung by the bees and seems to be only weakly
affected by the venom. Uh. Actually entering the hive seems
to be the only real choke point in the plan.
This is when they received the most attention. But once

(54:02):
they they're in, they tend to stay still on a
comb while they feed and nothing really bothers them. Well
how do they achieve that? Well, for a while it
was a mystery, so some theorized that it was the
creature's ability to squeak. This is kind of a call
back to where we're talking earlier with the with the
use of sound in the ant callin the butterfly that

(54:22):
that sings a song that says I'm the ant queen, right. So, uh,
these death said moss have been observed to squeak upon
a rival at a hive, and the theory is that
they might mimic the queen's call for worker bees to freeze.
Plus the squeaks may be adapted to particular types of bees.
But some researchers aren't as fond of this theory, and
at the very least they tend to believe that there

(54:44):
is there's more going on than mirror sound. Now, as
an as an aside, it is interesting when you start
looking at how they make that sound. So they apparently
modified they're they're sucking over time to better slurp all
of that vic his honey. Okay. Uh So once these uh,
these modifications were in place, according to German researcher Gunnar Brem,

(55:08):
they were able to develop an ability to produce squeaking
noises by inflating or deflating the pharynx or the epipharynx
at the base of the robostis. They emit this sound
also to ward off predators, and it seems to work
so well that they have very few additional defensive capabilities
except for some thorns on their legs. Uh. And I've

(55:29):
seen the process of creating the sound compared to the
playing of an accordion and then there's a there's another theory,
and this one is that the death's head marking resembles
a worker bee's face. Yeah, but that one doesn't seem
like a very popular theory at all. I'm no entomologist,
but it's a little too donald duck. I feel McDonald

(55:50):
duck puts on a fake stinger and paints himself yellow
and black fools the bees. It's it seems like it's
on that level. But now more recent researcher reveals that
they screet an odor that contains the same compounds present
in honeybee odor. And this is again something we see
in various ant mimics and ant colonies as well. Produced
the appropriate smell, and you have a real leg up

(56:13):
on surviving your infiltration of the enemy compound. Just like
we could probably do a whole episode or series of
episodes on brood parasitism and birds, so you could probably
do a whole episode or series of episodes on ant mimics. Yes, yeah,
because they're not. Actually, when we were putting this episode
together and we were selecting organisms, I had originally selected

(56:34):
another ant mimic. And then when when you told me
you were doing an anti mimic, I was like, oh, well,
I should do the death said moth, because I wanted
to research this, uh this creature for years. But yeah,
ant mimics are so cool. But this is another example of,
like the ant mimics, something that exploits the teamwork of
a social species. Indeed, now, of course it's probably raises

(56:54):
the question from any listeners, what's the deal with that skull?
Like right, and I should drive home that if you
look at different images of the skull, sometimes you have
to squint a little bit or and it's sometimes that
you have to realize that it is an abstract skull
at best. And aside from the worker be face theory

(57:16):
and the and the general trend in mimicry to have
something resembling eyes or a face somewhere else on your anatomy,
there's not actually a lot out there on the purpose
of the skull, and I think part of it is
on us. I mean, we as humans were obsessed with
our own countenance, were obsessed with death. We we we
see our faces everywhere and when we obsess about our mortality,

(57:39):
and then we see see skulls in my breakfast cereal. Yeah,
I mean we kind of love skulls. It's it's it's
it's what we're into. And then this thing on this uh,
this moth's back kind of looks like a skull, and
we just go way overboard with it, you know. We
to quote T. S. Eliott, we see the skull beneath
the skin, and uh, that seems to be the best

(58:00):
explanation I can find, uh thus far for the death,
said mock. If anyone out there has found any additional
scholarship on this question, do share it with us. I
would love to read it. Well, let's just say that
it's a design to accommodate the needs of future thriller writers, Yeah,
or or to distract us from the the the other
aspects of the species, because that's the thing we we

(58:21):
think of the death, said moth. And we just think
of that the poster for the silence of the lambs,
or you know, or some other usage of the creature
to to portray a sense of of weird doom. But
they're they're a fascinating organism in their own right. Their
their ability to to to conquer the colony and uh
and and fatten themselves with honey and and get out

(58:45):
without anybody even really noticing that they were there, and
then they and they can squeak. Very few moths can squeak.
I've never heard of moll squeak in my life, neither
have I. But apparently there are a few other varieties. Uh.
The materials I looked were primarily concerned with the death
head hawk moth. But but there are some other squeaky

(59:05):
mots out there. Man. It is always a little bit
disturbing when an invertebrate makes audible sound. Oh, yeah, like
with hissing cockroaches. Yeah, or like if you've seen those
killer spider movies where the killer spider squeals or screams
or something like that. I don't think I've ever heard
of spider make actual noise in real life. Or really,
any summer day in in the South, especially, you walk

(59:29):
out and you hear this, this thunderous sound, and at
times it's easy to forget, Oh that is the That
is the roar of untold insect legions in our midst
rubbing their hard little parts. All right. So there you
have it, just to taste of some of the deceptions
some of the mimicry out there in the animal kingdom.

(59:49):
If you liked this selection. Let us know, because we
can totally come back and cover some more fascinating organisms
in a future episode. And I want to stress yet again,
as fun as it is to anthropomorphize these examples and
imagine what it would be like if a human tried
to do this, I stress yet again, do not try
to use any of these examples to explain what you

(01:00:10):
think humans do in life. Yes, do not paint the
face of a of a of a bank employe on
your back and walk try to walk into the vault.
It's not gonna work. That's probably not gonna work. No.
More specifically, I'm trying to think about, like you see
people do this, Like you'll see a study comes out
that talks about some mating behavior in some animal, and

(01:00:30):
then people will be like, oh, that's why men are like,
or oh that's why women are like when when you're
dating and it's it's just not well, we can't help
but compare ourselves to animals, and and there there's a
certain amount of fun that we had there. Any I mean,
it can be enlightening. We've been doing it as long
as we've had human culture. But on the other hand, yeah,

(01:00:52):
at times, it's it's like you missed the whole point
of the study. You just took the fun part of
the study and went wild with it, and you're you're
missing the the insight into actually what's actually happening with
the mating behaviors of this organism. Yeah, what's interesting about
it is what it says about that particular animals niche
in way of life. Yeah. In the meantime, head on
over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's

(01:01:14):
where you will find all the podcast episodes. You'll find
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always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Torry Harrison.
And if you want to email us, our address is

(01:01:35):
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, does it
how stuff works dot com. Bl b bad twinty four

(01:02:06):
ft part proper fo