@GaryAndShannon- StrangeScience

#STRANGESCIENCE – The Hidden Talents of Nature’s Unloved Animals, A 100 ft 'mega tsunami' could hit the US at any moment. And that’s only the beginning.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's time for strange science. I'm asking you too much.
I know that's it's like weird science, but strange. So
some animals get a bad rap, don't they. The vulture

(00:20):
is one of them. Has to be one of the
most reviled creatures on Earth. The very word vulture is
an insult, greedy exploiter. And I understand the bad reputation.
They're not cute, they're not cuddly. They've got that stooped posture,
should sit up straight, beady eyes. And then there's the
whole dead animal thing. I mean, they spend their days

(00:42):
eating dead animals, and they do so in a not
so appetizing way. They enter the corpse at its soft parts,
the mouth, the nose, the anus. According to National Geographic
Explorer Darcio Ganda, vultures definitely have an image problem because
here is the thing, there are real world consequences that

(01:07):
come with not having them. The vultures play a vital
role in our ecosystem, and this is the whole point
behind the National Geographics deep dive here on the superpowers
of nature's most unloved animals. They really are superpowers. Without vultures,
bad things happen vultures act as nature's cleaners. They hover

(01:30):
up those rotting carcasses. They prevent the spread of disease.
Just look at India alone. About thirty years ago, vultures
nearly disappeared. Many of them were accidentally poisoned by the
medicine that they were using on cows and as a result,
the countryside was just littered with these rotting, germ filled
animal corpses. They were infecting the rivers, the drinking water.

(01:52):
They amplified the population of feral dogs carrying rabies. It
was a disaster. The decline in vultures correlated with more
than half a million excess human deaths in India between
two thousand and two thousand and five. And that is
the thing. Cuteness a powerful draw because of our brains programming,

(02:15):
Like why we want to feed babies when they act
like they do, It's because they're cute. But you know,
some of our animal kingdom's outcasts need our attention, They
need the conservation dollars. You're not gonna give a bunch
of money to the vulture society, are you. The three

(02:36):
toad sloth is another one. Slow moving animals got a
bad wrap from the get go. One nineteenth century account
labeled them imperfect monsters of creation, adding equally remarkable for
their disgusting appearance and helpless condition. My god, slots can't

(02:56):
help that. Several species of algae grow and the grooves
of their course matted fur, giving that giving them that
green sheen. But this is a secret weapon, a superpower.
The algae helps camouflage all of the creatures that live
in those canopies. The leopard slug. This is an animal

(03:21):
that doesn't have a spine, and that's hard to get behind,
isn't it. But they have a surprisingly useful set of adaptations.
A crown of four wriggling feelers atop the leopard slug's
head allow them to sense their surroundings, and their gooey
ooze helps them mate. The slug mucus. By the way,

(03:44):
here's where you come in. It's made from water, proteins, enzymes,
other compounds. It is where we came up with how
to develop workable surgical adhesive. Is from the leopard slug.
It's quite the your superpower. There's a bunch of them.

(04:05):
We'll post a picture. I'm running out of time. But
the Probuscus monkey, the African bullfrog, honey badgers. They all
play a role in keeping us alive, and so maybe
we start some sort of ugly animal charity around here.
My favorite is the hairy frog fish m a toadlike creature,

(04:27):
the most grotesque of all the fish. According to one
nineteenth century naturalist. They're covered in a web of stringy
spineles that help them blend in among algae coated rocks
and coral while hunting prey. They're very cool and very ugly,
all right. Coming up next the story that Mason Deborah

(04:51):
Mark home early one hundred foot megasunami that could hit
the United States at any moment, and as the headline says,
that is only the beginning. What fact a strange science? Okay,
the tsunami that's going to hit at any time. What
if the tsunami hits before Biver's album drops. I'm just
putting it out there. I know I hate it too.

(05:13):
I hate it, and I don't think it's gonna happen.
The Cascadia Subduction Zone is what we're worried about. This
is a massive fault line stretching from northern California to
British Columbia, and it has been This is Deborah's least
favorite thing, eerily quiet for three hundred years. When it
finally ruptures, the Cascadia subduction zone is expected to trigger

(05:37):
a colossal earthquake that could rattle the Pacific Northwest for minutes.
Think about the earthquakes you've felt have only really been
seconds long, and they felt like minutes, didn't They. Even
worse than that earthquake that would last for minutes is
the tsunami wave. Nay, Tsunami waves Z up to one

(06:00):
hundred feet would crash ashore, unleashing devastation along the coast.
But according to a new study published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, that would only mark
the beginning of Cascadia's cataclysm. The new analysis reveals that

(06:21):
land along the coast could drop by more than eight
feet in a matter of minutes. Eight feet. That's two DeBras.
That's true. I measure I measure things by how many deborahs.
The lead author of the study is Professor Tina Dora,

(06:44):
and she says, we talk about climate driven sea level rise,
which is occurring at three to four millimeters a year,
and that does eventually add up. But here we have
two meters of sea level rise in minutes. She wonders
why we're not talking about this more well, Professor Tina.
Probably because we can't do jack s about it, Tina.

(07:04):
Probably because it makes Deborah worried for four to six days. Tina, Yeah, Tina, Yeah,
What the hell are we supposed to do, Tina? Build
up some sort of massive fence, Like, how do you
prepare for an earthquake? You cannot in an earthquake this
size at last minutes, in a tsunami that's one hundred
feet high. You're just screwed, Tina. You're screwed at that point.

(07:28):
You know, we all know that there's a chance that
an asteroid could fly into the system and just take
us all out. But why would we spend more time
thinking about that? We have no control over it. The
Cascadia subduction Zone marks the boundary where the oceanic Juan
Dai Fuca Plate is slipping beneath the North American plate,

(07:52):
and as they lock together, because they don't move slowly,
these plates, they tend to get stuck, and when they
locked together, the strain accumulates over centuries, and then when
it finally releases, boom. There goes the earthquake. You're not
going to want to listen to this part. It's produced,

(08:13):
it's capable. Cascadia is producing quakes of multitude nine or more,
major events thought to strike every four hundred and fifty
to five hundred years. The last one occurred on January
twenty sixth, seventeen hundred. Its magnitude was between an eight

(08:35):
seven and a nine to two terrifying. So we're new.
I've told you that, you have said over and over
again you have we are due. Yes, and it's not
going to be pretty. It's not. No, no, we will
not be here to talk about it. We will not.
I mean John Cobelt gets excited about well it's a

(08:57):
dark person. Oh I know, but he'll be smashed. It's
a broken soul, which is not true, by the way, John,
That's it's all an act. He's such a great he's
a very good person and very soft inside. He is.
You know, he's like one of those hardshelled. I don't know.
You know, he's sitting right here and he has this look.

(09:18):
He's going to end it. He's going to end it all.
This will be my last show. He's getting a kick
out Shannon is singing your praises, John, Yes, she is