From the Vault: The Mighty Sarlacc

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today it's
not Saturday, but we're bringing you a vault episode. We
we missed a day of work this week, and to
cover for the time off, we're we're subbing in an
episode from last May. This is the one from May
I think twenty second called the Mighty star Lack. You

(00:27):
can guess what it's about. A creature from tattooed. That's right. Yeah,
this is this is really fun when we get into
you know, talk a little bit about just sort of
the Star Wars lore of the star Lack, but mostly
we talked about, uh, stuff in the real world, actual
terrestrial organisms that that are kind of parallel to this
imagined creature. Now, one thing that that definitely has changed

(00:50):
since we recorded this episode is the second episode, I'm sorry,
the second season of The Mandalorian came out and officially
brought Boba Fette back into the live action UM Star
Wars canon. So anything that I say in this regarding uh,
you know, Boba Fett being dead or if you should
stay dead, just take out that with a grainess of salt,

(01:11):
because he has come back, and uh he I thought
he was awesome, So I'm I'm very much in favor
of Boba Fett being alive again. Uh in the live
action played by Tamara Morrison, who of course played Django
Fat and played all the clones in the prequel trilogy. Now,
did we ever decide whether the burp was canon? Um?

(01:32):
I guess the burp is still in there, So I
guess the Bourp is canon. Yeah, far as I know,
nobody's nobody's corrected us on that. Okay, Now I'm not
sure where what that says about, you know, about the
digestive system of the creature. We still don't know how
how Boba Fett escaped. But when he shows up again
in uh uh in the Mandalorian, which I believe this

(01:53):
is also his first canonical appearance. Um, you know, um
after the star Lack incident, he is like visibly scarred up,
possibly by like digestive juices. So uh we we still
are going to have to await the full story when
he gets his own his own series this fall, the
Book of Boba Fett. That is the best scar story

(02:16):
I've ever heard, you know, that's like the scene in
Jaws where they're comparing their scar. I got this, you know,
thresher's tail. Uh more, A eel bit me through my
wet suit. Oh yeah, well I was partially digested by
a giant creature that lives in the ground. Yeah, but
you know, but Boba plays it cool, so if you
were to ask about it, he'd probably like be like,
I've gotten a scrape once. Anyway, let's go ahead and

(02:40):
jump into it. Then the Mighty Sarlac. And now for traffic,
we take you to week Way Ray in the Channel
five sky skiff. Hey, Jim, we're pretty clear of sandstorms
across much of the dune seed this morning, so that's
great news for sky hopper landspeeder traffic. So far, however,

(03:01):
we're already seeing a bit of pre boot to Eve
classic traffic heading into Moss aspect. Plus, things are dragging
to a halt out near the Great Pit of Carcoon
and the walt rafts are playing as it looks like
the huts are hosting another multi skiff Sarlac offering. Always
best to steer clear unless you've got an invite, especially
if you've got an invite. All too true. Ray. Now

(03:23):
let's check in with Merge surgeon on for a look
at this week's solar activity. Looks like we're in for
a double helping of solar flares. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you,

(03:43):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And here we are,
finally here in a galaxy far far away. I did
not think we would end up doing Star Wars content,
especially so close to May fourth, but not on it.
Things are getting strange. Yeah, Now, fittingly, we're recording this
episode on May the fourth, but that that just benefits

(04:07):
the two of us. The listeners are gonna get it
a little later. However, since the May the fourth like
sales begin before May the fourth, I think it's okay
to assume that May the fourth is just generally a
a you know, a multi day, even multi week affair
in which we celebrate Star Wars. Yeah, it's like Christmas

(04:28):
gradually creeps out to the edges. Yeah, the thirty days
of May the fourth or what have you. Uh. Now,
so you've been going on a Star Wars expedition in
your house, right, Yeah? Yeah, we've been watching all the
all the movies. We also watched The Mandalorian. I think
at this point we've watched everything except the most recent one,

(04:48):
and we're going to catch that one tonight because it
just dropped on Disney Plus. But yeah, we've been we've
been full, full blown into the Star Wars um and
it's been It's been pretty fun because I've I think
I've been personally been like several different stereotypical Star Wars
fans over the years. I was born in seventy eight,

(05:09):
so the original trilogy and their associated toys were just
a key part of my childhood and uh and just
as aspects of their structure were based on you know,
archetypes of comparative mythology. You know, these films introduced many
of us to some of these mythic energies. So I
remember loving these films as a child. I remember lapsing

(05:30):
somewhat during what I think of as like the Star
Wars Dark Age of the early and mid nineties. I
think that's when I was getting like the Star Wars
Insider fan magazine. Oh cool, Yeah, and he'd kind of gone,
uh underground. I mean, I don't want to say underground,
because obviously there was there was still tons of content
coming out, and you know, the Expanded Universe and so forth.

(05:52):
There were books, there were comics, there were there were games,
but it wasn't as as prevalent in the pop culture
at that time. But of course it was gearing up
because then came, uh, the the prequels, right um uh Now,
I I too remember reading some of the Extended Universe stuff.
I'm getting into that and the like the late nineties.

(06:14):
But then we had Phantom Menace, and I remember being
first of all, like super excited for it. And then
I was a bit of a prequel apologist there for
a bit regarding the Phantom Menace, and then I became
kind of a snarky fan who focused only on the
flaws of the prequel films. And I'd say I didn't
fully recover from that until I watched The Mandalorian with

(06:35):
my family, uh, and we all loved it. And then
we started watching all the films again. And and now
I'm I'm leaning into the force. I'm I'm I'm just
saying I'm enjoying all of them. I've enjoyed each film
that I've watched, and and she really kind of tried
to watch them you know, with my son, but also
kind of threw his eyes and it's been a blast.

(06:55):
What are his favorites? He tells me that his favorites
are The Phantom Menace and let's see Phantom Menace and
Return of the Jedi, but especially Phantom Menace. He in
fact requested that we watched that one again, and so
we watched half of it last night. Those It does
not escape my attention that those are the two that

(07:16):
have the highest quotient of cuteness content they do. They have,
They have cuteness, but then also they just have a
ton of creatures. And I think that's also key because
like The Phantom Menace, most of it takes place on
like a dinosaur ridden uh you know planet where there's
just you know, monster after monster after monster, and and yeah,

(07:36):
you have the comic elements as well, and you have
an actual child in it, which I think also is
adds to this kind of anchor for younger viewers, going
against what I was just saying about cuteness. Obviously, Return
of the Jedi is where we get the the e
walks the classic Teddy Bear planet. But the first half
of Return of the Jedi's just when we rewatched it
not too long ago. I was like, man, I loved

(07:59):
this wasn't when I was a kid. But the first
half of this movie is gross. It is full of
like just like like nasty, slimy critters everywhere and and
and horrible monsters and uh. And I would say, actually,
the thing maybe that stands out the most in my
mind is going to be the subject of today's episode,
which is the Sarlac. Yes, yes, the Sarlac features heavily

(08:22):
into this portion of the film, and it is It's
just something that just captures uh. It certainly captures the
young imagination, you know, here's this pit, here is this thing.
And I think it also played well with the action
figures growing up, because you could you could pretty much
make a sarlac. There wasn't. I don't think there was
a starlac um like action play set or anything, because

(08:44):
how wrong you are, really they had one, because I
was just thinking you just had you had dirt, you
had holes, you had things you could do with like
a bedspread, and you had instant Starlac. Robert, I want
you to scroll all the way down to the bottom
of our notes and have a look at the images
I've attached for you. All these would fill you with joy.
This comes from a board game that I found evidence

(09:05):
of on the internet late last night. I think, uh,
it's called Battle at Sarlas Pit. It was released at
the same time as the movie, or sometime around the movie,
I guess, to help promote it. And it is a
It is a board game with a sarlac like a
cardboard sarlac cone set up, and then it's got a
little barge or skiff on top where it looks like

(09:26):
you you. You play with miniatures of Han Solo, Luke, Skywalker, Chewbacca,
and I guess maybe that's also supposed to be Leia.
It's kind of hard to tell. The miniatures are not
super detailed, and you have to fight your way through these,
you know, green pig face guards and Boba fette to
to confront Jab of the Hut, and I guess if
you lose, you fall off into the starlacks mouth. Well

(09:49):
that it looks beautiful, I mean, especially the cover art
in this box, it's incredible, and in the set itself
is is pretty ingenious, especially given the time. I can't
obviously I can't speak for the actual gameplay, but it
looks intriguing. Yeah, I've never seen this before. Well, I
know you're a miniatures guy, so I was wondering if
you might end up looking this thing up. I might

(10:09):
have to the miniatures. It looks like the miniatures are
supplied poorly painted, or perhaps they're supplied unpainted. And what
we're looking at here is the work of a child
roughly painting. Then I can't tell, but yeah, I'm gonna
have to look into this more. This this is interesting.
If I had known this existed when I was a kid,
I would have insisted on it. So I guess we should.

(10:31):
We can assume that most listeners have probably seen Return
of the Jedi, don't The star Lack doesn't need a
lot of explaining, but just to do the very basics,
we should explain what happens in the movie. So the
role in the plot is you remember our heroes Luke Skywalker,
Han Solo Chewbaccah. They are sentenced to death by the
gangster Job of the Hut. He's the big slug guy

(10:52):
and job Job of the Hut says the method of
execution for these three heroes is going to be a
kind of alien desert. For version of the pirates walking
of the plank, right, you know they're gonna be forced
to walk the plank off of this floating barge or
this floating boat type thing into this hole in the desert,
and the droid C three p o translates job as

(11:14):
execution order. He says, you will therefore be taken to
the dune sea, this big desert, and cast into the
pit of Carcoon, the nesting place of the all powerful Sarlac.
In his belly, you will find a new definition of
pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a
thousand years. And I'm not gonna lie. That concept haunted

(11:37):
me as a child. I was like, slowly digested over
a thousand years. Wouldn't it be over sooner than that? Yeah,
there's this idea that it extends your suffering, that it
is to enter into the Sarlac is to kind of
enter into an underworld or an afterlife of pain. It's
like going to hell. Yeah, yeah, hell of digestion. And

(12:01):
I also love how in C. Three pos translation, there's
this idea, Yeah, that's that's not only the star Lak,
it is the all powerful Sarlac. There's this idea that
it is a thing that is revered that it almost
has a divine quality to it. And certainly, as we
see in the film, it's not something that is defeated.
It is not something that is really truly overcome. It

(12:23):
is just avoided and escaped at best. Well, it's not
really the enemy, right, it's kind of the setting. It's
the threat in the setting. It's kind of in the
way that in most zombie movies the zombies are not
really the enemy. They're more like a hostile environment in
which the drama between the characters is set. Usually in
the zombie movie, you've got a human villain, and the

(12:45):
same is true here. Clearly the villain is Jab of
the Hut, not the not the star Lac. And of
course so it's very satisfying when when Leah chokes out
Jab of the Hut, that's like a great you know,
defeat of the villain scene. But there's no need to
kill the Sarlac. It's just do in its thing in
the desert. That's right. Yeah, there's this It has this
quality where the Sarlac is kind of like a pet.

(13:07):
It's kind of like a pampered pet of of Java,
as much like the Rain Corps is that we see
earlier in the film, but it also feels like something
that is greater than Job and certainly it's something that
will will outlive Java. Yeah. So one thing I really
liked about this monster when I was a kid um
was something about the way that the monster was presented

(13:28):
visually the pit of Carcoon and the Sarlac. It was
that the monster wasn't just in a pit. The monster
was the pit. Uh And and so to explain this
a little bit more, it's kind of like a presented
visually as a bio geological hybrid, like a cave or
a hole in the ground that has tentacle tongues and

(13:50):
eats bounty hunters alive. You can't tell where the animal
stops and the earth begins. And as a point of comparison,
I think I'd used the appeal of like the biomechanical
artwork of hr Geiger that and how that influenced the
creation of the xenomorph in the Alien films. The xenomorph
is basically supposed to be an animal, but it has

(14:12):
tons of body features that look like parts of industrial machines.
It's an animal made out of tubes and hoses and
hinges and pistons, and I think I always thought the
Star Lac was cool because it was like this, but
with geology instead of machinery. Uh, it's it's a mouth
that is the earth. It looks like the teeth are

(14:32):
coming out of rock or coming out of the sand.
And uh. Of course this is all predicated on the
fact that I grew up watching the versions of these
movies before the special edition remasters. So the version I'm
used to seeing is the original, where it's just the
gaping mouth that blends into the earth and has these
rings of inward facing teeth and the tentacles that reach
out from who knows where and grab things. When the

(14:55):
remasters came, of course, they added a big c g
I beak poking up out of the pit it, which
sort of eliminates some of that bio geological magic. I
try these days not to be one of the guys
who's just constantly shrieking about how Lucas ruined things and
complaining about remasters and prequels and all that, but I
will say I do not like this change. I think

(15:16):
it's creepier in the original version without the c g
I beak. I like it when it's just the hole
in the earth, the cave with teeth. Yeah, I I
certainly grew up with the the unedited version as well,
and so that's that's probably the version that was that
It's cemented in my mind the most. And I used
to feel, I think a lot stronger about it where
I'm like, nope, original Starla only. But I don't know,

(15:40):
I can I'm okay with the redesign. I just wish
that the c G I would maybe get another, you know,
a fresh coat of paint to make it look a
little sleeker. But but still like I also, I understand
that they are part of the original concept was that
it would have those elements, but they weren't able to
make it happen because they just didn't have the the
budget of the technology to implement it at the time. Um.

(16:04):
But but I and I also think that the addition
of the plant like elements doesn't completely take away from
what you were describing, this idea of the monster as
as pit, the monster as earth. Um. There's something very primal,
primordial even about about the star Lac. And you know,

(16:25):
some people, I think a lot to like to criticize
Lucas and you know that they want to go all
in on this idea that well, Lucas depended on all
these other creative people and anything that he got right,
he only did accidentally. But I I suspect that, you know,
that he was really onto something with this idea of
the star lac Um. I think there there is something
intentionally primordial about it. And well, we'll get into that

(16:47):
as we go. Well, I think it just it suggests
the magical thinking that that that is so common in
human culture, that characterizes caves and pits in the earth
as a mouth. I mean that kind of that kind
of language is extremely common. Yeah, So before we get
a little bit more into some mythic parallels for the
star lac I want to talk just a little bit

(17:08):
more about its presumed biology and its biology is presented
uh in Cannon, and also just a little interpretation on
our part. So obviously, the vast majority of the star
lacks bulk is hidden beneath the sand, leaving only its spiked,
tentacled mouth exposed. Now, presumably the star lac just normally,

(17:29):
you know, waits there. It doesn't move, It just waits. First,
you know, some creature to fall into it. You know,
some of the mega fauna of tattooings such as the
do back or the bantha. You know, it just waits
for them to wander close enough to fall in or
succumb to those fast moving, grasping tentacles. And if this,
you know, seems rare enough for currents, we have to

(17:50):
consider that it's it has an alleged one thousand year
digestive cycle, so presumably it has a slow enough metabolism
that it doesn't need this regular feet gings. It can
get by on the odd bantha that just falls in.
And then on top of that, we have to consider
that this star lac might be in a privileged situation

(18:10):
as well, sustained by regular feedings from Job as pleasure barges,
because let's face it, Job is the type of fella
that's liable to just throw people into the sarlac on
a weekly or bi weekly basis, So we may not
be observing the sarlac in its natural environment. This this
could be a domesticated sarlac of sorts. Yeah, yeah, I

(18:31):
think we have to take that into into account now
in terms of like, you know, turning to the literature
for you know, explanations of something like the sarlac Uh.
That can be a bit confusing because, first of all,
you know, it's presented as it is in the movie,
and I think a fair amount of mystery about it
is ideal. Like, for instance, C three Po doesn't turn

(18:52):
to you and explain everything about the star Lak. He
doesn't go into a big ten minute monologue about it,
because you're supposed to do some of the work, right,
It's supposed to inspire you, right, Yeah, I mean what's
cool about it is that you can't see so much
of it. It's a mystery. It's hidden under the earth.
I think some of that would be spoiled if you've
got a better look at it, or you've got C
three po explaining its whole life history. As much as

(19:15):
I would have wanted that when I was a kid,
and we were talking recently about like children, you know,
being obsessed with Cannon and the stories they love and
like wanting to know all the details, I mean, I mean,
I bet when I was like eight, I would have
just wished that the Star Wars movies included like Star
Wars illustrated encyclopedia pages as as like scenes throughout them.

(19:36):
But yeah, it works better as a mystery. I think
that's my adult mind. Yeah. Now that being said, this
this sort of mystery has inspired lots of people, and
so you have you have a number of different uh
you know, expanded universe treatments of the Star Lac as
well as compendiums that attempt to explain to some degree

(19:57):
what the Star Lack is and you're gon to deal
with you know, conflicting accounts and uh and and so
forth if you start looking at all of those. But
I do want to touch on some ideas that were
presented in a relatively new book that came out, Star
Wars Alien Archive, which I've been reading with my son. Uh.
It's you know, it's basically a you know, a monstrous compendium,

(20:18):
a monster manual of Star Wars aliens, and it's pretty fun.
It has these fabulous illustrations in it, and it you know,
doesn't have everything that shows up in the Star Wars
films and TV shows, but it has quite a bit,
uh you know, everything from you know, from from from
major characters and and and major aliens to even a

(20:40):
few things that for instance, only show up in one
of the Ewoks movies. So it's a fun collection. Naturally,
of course, there's an entry on the Mighty star Lack.
So I just want to touch on a few of
the key points, uh that that are that are made
in this Lucasfilm Press book. First of all, it's described
as quote terrifying carnivorous beast, and this seems to fall

(21:02):
more on the animal side of interpretation. Some people try
and I guess explain the starlight is being more of
a plant, uh And it is sometimes described as reproducing
by spores, which leads in list to more of a
you know, fungal explanation. But of course none of this
is exactly limiting when we're ultimately talking about an alien

(21:22):
life form that may you know, easily skew the lines
that we draw on Earth between one kingdom and another.
That's exactly right, I mean, yeah, if we want to
be real technical sticklers, the difference between plants and animals
is an evolutionary division that you know, they are different clades.
You can sort their histories differently, and you know, animals
arising on other planets might be animal like and that

(21:46):
they might move around quickly or something like that, or
they might be plant like in that their sessile and
the photosynthesize or whatever. But but yeah, they would not
be descended from these kingdoms, so those sortings wouldn't necessarily
even make sense. Plus, oh man, there's a whole additional,
uh deep end we could get into if we tried
to figure out how we consider life in the Star

(22:08):
Wars universe, a universe where not only do we have
um life, you know, certainly arising on a plethora of
different worlds, but also you have interstellar life still life
that is clinging to asteroids. You have pan spermia and
colonization taking place that you know at you know, at
various points in galactic history. There's a lot to unpack

(22:31):
their deep space evolution. Yeah, that's right, the mine ox
they live in a vacuum. How is that possible? I
don't think a large animal would do that. Yeah, well
that would be a fun one to come back to
at some point, maybe maybe maybe some some people have
written on that topic. Um, okay, a few other points
from the Alien Archive book. Uh. They to point out

(22:51):
that the star lack of carcoon is sustained at least
in part by sacrifices and executions by the huts. But
they also say that adults are lacks such as this
one can also release an odor that attracts nearby herbivores
to the pit. Oh okay, so that answer I. I
that would answer a question that I had because I
was thinking about how a sarlac would normally eat If

(23:14):
it's just this, you know, sessile pit in the desert,
Most sessile trap predators have some way of assuring that
prey will fall in, Like sessile predators in the ocean,
will often try to maximize their catch by doing their
best to latch on in places where the current will
carry unfortunate prey animals right by them. Otherwise, trap predators,

(23:36):
like some that we'll talk about in a bit, like
insects that that lay traps in the ground, need to
find a place where, you know, the places that are
naturally trafficked by prey, places where you know, ants or
beetles or whatever going to be walking by. Another option
is to look more at the realm of of plants,
which you know, let's say, like carnivorous plants like the
picture plant that's not an animal, but it is a

(23:58):
predatory organ is um that functions as a trap pit,
and yeah, it uses smells to attract animals to it. Yeah,
so perhaps we might imagine that, um, you know, say
that the sarlac releases uh uh, some sort of odor
that mega fauno would associate with an oasis, you know,
or with with with plant life, and therefore brings them in.

(24:21):
It doesn't have to bring them in all the way, right,
because those technacles will do the rest of of the job.
The shifting sand will do, you know, the rest of
the work. But but perhaps this odor will be enough
to just bring in some food. That makes a lot
more sense than what I had in mind, Yeah, because
I was just trying to think. Okay, so it just
waits until a banthera wanders end. Seems like it could

(24:42):
be waiting a long time yea once a millennium. The
Alien Archive also points out that the creature has several stomachs,
which you know, I guess makes sense given a lengthy
digestive process. Also says that it's average length is of
one and this is interest thing. It contends that younger
star lacks are capable of moving about to capture food, which, um,

(25:06):
which is an interesting detail. But I think one that
you brought up is is kind of supported by an
old Super Nintendo game right, Oh, that's right. Yeah, So
I I was trying to remember, don't you fight a
star Lac in like the old Super Nintendo Superstar Wars game?
So I looked up the boss fight on YouTube. Robert,
did you watch it? I did. Yes, It's terrible. It

(25:28):
doesn't capture the Starlac magic at all because it's not
a pit. It's just like a big worm that comes
up out of the ground and it moves around and
spits rocks at you. That's not a star Lac. But
but maybe it's supposed to be a young Starlac a
different part of its life cycle, I guess. So if
we were, if we were to force ourselves to to
take that boss fight and incorporate it into into Star

(25:49):
Wars Cannon, I think that's the only way you could
go that. Basically we'd be looking at, uh, you know,
say a four part lifespan that goes like this. You
have a spore of a star Lac that's carried by
the you know, the dust storms. Then you have some
sort of burrowing larva, and then you have a sandworm
esque burrowing juvenile like we see in the Super in

(26:10):
ne S game. And then that eventually if it survives
will become a stationary adult like we see in Return
of the Jedi. That is very interesting, and it's also
interesting how that is going to be the exact inverse
of some examples. Will look at from the from the
natural world in a bit where there are things that
are only a trap predator for part of their life cycle,

(26:31):
but it actually comes at the beginning rather than the end. Yeah,
that's true. Uh, it's interesting that if we were to
really look for some potential real world analogs that match
this basic uh you know, four part transformation, I'd say
that something like this mostly resembles the life cycles, uh,

(26:52):
that we would see in say corals or perhaps a barnacle,
both of which we've discussed in depth on the show before. Um,
you know the idea that this is something that is
free swimming earlier in its development, but then initially eventually
puts down roots and stays there for the rest of
its life. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, well, maybe we need
to take a break, but when we come back, we

(27:13):
can talk about pit monster mythology and about pit trap
predators in the natural world. All right, we'll be right back.
All right, We're back now. Either way you look at it. Uh,
I'd say the star Lack is a creature with with
fittingly deep mythological roots. It is in essence as you

(27:34):
as you pointed out, the earth swallowing up the living,
with key ties to understandings and interpretations of earthquakes, sink holes,
just caves in general, but also other land based catastrophes.
So in preparing for this episode, I wanted to look
something up, something that I've always assumed because you see
it in movies. You know the scene in the movie

(27:55):
where there is an earthquake and the ground opens up,
there's this giant fissure, then everything just disappears super deep
into the earth. Uh. I was like, wait a minute,
does that happen in real life? Basically from what I
could tell most of the time, No, I think it's not,
in principle impossible. But generally in earthquakes there might be

(28:17):
you know, fissures that form in the ground, but they
don't You don't get these deep chasms going down into
the belly of the earth that you know swallow people
and buildings. Hold that if that happens at all, that
does not happen very often. Yeah, that that specifically happens
in the force awakens. Remember when Ray is having that
duel with Kylo Wren and then the the the earth

(28:37):
shakes and suddenly there's this this deep gulf between them,
which is you know, you know, awesome in a film,
but maybe not that likely in the real world. Yeah,
but it's interesting that. So if this doesn't actually happen
in reality, or at least doesn't happen often enough for
people to you know, really see it and make a
meme out of it and their culture, where does this

(28:58):
idea come from? Because it goes way back, the idea
that the earth like cracks open and swallows people whole. Right, Yeah,
I remember, like, well, first of all, I probably saw
it in various films growing up as well, but I
specifically remember having an illustrated um Bible Stories book and
it had an illustration of what I what I seem

(29:19):
to remember being the this episode from the Book of
Numbers in the Old Testament, which this is the King
James version quote, and the earth opened its mouth and
swallowed them up with their households and all the men
with Cora, with all their goods. Wow. Well yeah, that's
basically what the earthquake movie pictures. Yeah, so you know

(29:41):
it's it's I guess it's a pretty deeply set idea
in in that respect. So I was looking around to
see if I could come across any other like specific
ideas of monsters or gods or you know, the adventures
of a hero that involves something like the Sarlac. And
what I what I came a process maybe not a
you know, a directly related example, but but I think

(30:04):
once I explain it, people will see a number of
parallels that are pretty pretty interesting. This is from the
Mesoamerican mythology of the Aztecs, the earth goddess plow to
Kutli that is t l A l t e c
u h t l I and most translations and man,
she is a really interesting earth goddess. Yes, so for starters,

(30:30):
she embodies a typical primordial god goddess archetype of a
divided and dismembered form who scattered pieces constitute the world,
and we see that a lot in mythologies. But she
is also monstrous, incorporating amphibian and reptile morphology, and she
is also presented as an eater of the dead, so

(30:52):
the blood of human sacrifice flows into the earth to
feed her, and she is often depicted with a flint
knife between her teeth and or rivers of blood flowing
from her mouth. She's also seen as a boundary deity,
bridging the world of the living to Micklin, the world
of the dead, and her role here is essentially one

(31:12):
of of maintaining balance, and therefore sacrifices made to her
are about keeping into the balance of the world's together.
I mean, she is the Earth, and she is also
this bridge between our world and the world of the dead.
And when you look at likenesses of her, this is
also interesting. Her likeness was often carved into the base
of sculptures, you know, where humans could not see them

(31:35):
once the sculpture was in place where the sculpture touched
the earth, so you know, the living would not see this.
It's it's as if it was only to be seen
by her. Interesting now, her color was red, which is
of course the color for blood associated with sacrifice, but
red was also the color of sunset because at night
she was said to consume the sun. We think of

(31:57):
the you know, the setting sun uh aemingly to to
be consumed by the earth and then night sets in yeah,
and this is a motif we see in other mythologies
from around the world. I think there are the god
or the monster that eats the sun appears in Egyptian
mythology I believe in in Hindu stories. Yes, yes, indeed. Now,

(32:17):
if you look up some interpretations of this goddess uh,
you'll find at least a couple of different versions. One
is more of a uh, you know, more of a
just a monstrous feminine form. But there's another one that's
really interesting where it's kind of the squat toad like
creature with its mouth open skyword towards the eagle. And

(32:39):
and this one really makes me think of the star
Lac because it is like a mouth open wide towards
the heavens. Yeah, totally. Now, I think all this is
interesting in context of the star Lac because the star
Lac two is presented as something that is perhaps divine
and to some degree immortal uh and an entity that
demands sacrificial victims as well, and something of a gateway

(33:01):
between our world and a hellish underworld. Again, think back
to that that idea of a thousand years of digestion
in the belly of the sarlac Um. I remember this
was explored to a wonderful effect in a short story.
This was by um an author by the name of
Daniel Keys Moran published under the name J. D. Montgomery,

(33:24):
and it was in a short story collection called Tale
from Jabs Palace titled a bar of like that The
Tale of Boba Fette um And I haven't read it
since junior high school, but I remember really loving it
because it it kind of scratched that itch of like, oh,
I must know how Boba Fette escaped from the star Lak.
You know, you must write it for me, make it happen. Uh.

(33:47):
And so it succeeded in that, but it also presented
digestion in the Starlac as being this kind of sentient
immortality of pain. I have so many thoughts about this.
Uh So, first of all, I'm thinking about all of
the like sort of off label Star Wars fiction that
I read in the nineties. I didn't read as much
of it as some people did, but I do remember

(34:08):
I read some series of books that involved people who
had three eyes and like a whole bunch of weirdness.
But the other thing is, I'm sorry if this is
a is a frivolous side trail that. I've got to
ask you, Robert, do you have an opinion on the
belch the Starlac burp oh, after Fat falls in? Yeah,
it doesn't Fat fall in and then and then the

(34:29):
thing just it burps it. I'm not mistaken about this, right, No, No,
I believe it does burp pro burb or anti berb.
I guess I'm I'm pro burp. It's it's fun, it's funny.
I was probably there was probably a point that I'm
not specifically remembering in my Star Wars wors fandom wre
I probably thought I was above it and thought that
that belt should be edited out because I also didn't

(34:50):
want any indication that Fat was gone and that a
belt should be uh you know his um, you know
his tombstone. But I don't really have any st opinions
about it now. It seemed an ignominious end for this,
this much beloved minor character, and I think I think
it bothered me when I was younger, when I also
thought Boba Fette was so cool. I just gotta say,

(35:12):
I'm I'm about to earn us all the hate mail
we're going to get for the rest of the year.
Boats armor looks cool. But I don't actually get what
is just like mind meltingly amazing about him two people.
I just feel like he's a kind of cool looking character.
He's got like five lines. Yeah, yeah, I think it
comes back to like the less you know, right, there

(35:33):
was mystery about really all those bounty hunters and um,
you know who were these guys? What what was their deal?
You know? What what was the I like the one
that's got like insect dies like a fly's head, Yeah,
he's good. Or the reptilian one with the long arms,
and I'm sorry, I know they all have names and
species and uh, if if I had my alien archive

(35:53):
book in front of me, I would look them up.
But basically it's a wonderful rogues gallery. Well, I don't
have a position on the burp, but you know what,
I'll support you in your decision, so so have me
on board. I'm probb to. Yeah. I mean it's star
Lag getting a good laugh there. I I think I
think it was well received by my son. Now, I
want to talk a little bit more about mythology here

(36:15):
because I feel like there's an excellent connection to be made.
Um specifically, I'm thinking about a parallel here in Greek mythology,
where of course we have Skilla and Charybdis, the twin
oceanic dangers that Odysseus must sail between the very horns
of dilemma. Uh. These are magnificent monstrosities. Oh yeah, the classics.

(36:37):
I mean, like the ultimate sea monster. How could you
beat it? Yeah? So Charybdis. I think it's the most
obvious analog here, an underwater monster of varying description that
above water is just seen as this massive whirlpool that
threatens to swallow up any ship that comes near it. Meanwhile,
Skilla is this multi headed beast that plucks men from

(36:59):
their ships. Now the star Lack basically incorporates elements from
both of these monsters, because we have to remember that, Okay,
Tattooing is a desert world, but the dune sea has
all of these oceanic qualities to it as well. And
in fact, I mean the whole encounter in Return of
the Jedi is essentially the sci Fi mash up of
nautical and swashbuckling tropes. Oh yeah, I mean, I think

(37:22):
that's the thing people might not realize if they're not
familiar with the old Errol Flynn Pirate movies and stuff
like that. But clearly they're walking the plank off the skiff.
This is supposed to be boats on the ocean. Job
of the hut is an evil pirate captain. Yes, yes,
I mean it makes perfect sense that the Crybdis analog
here becomes very clear. And I should also point out

(37:44):
that for anybody out there who may be a Percy
Jackson fan. In uh, the film adaptation Percy of Percy
Jackson Sea of Monsters, it has a wonderful Crybdis in it. Uh,
Crybdis shows up and really takes on a very star
lackey an appearance, no doubt playing upon this connection. Yeah,
you attached an image. It is a very good looking

(38:05):
mall and it's got the inward facing spike teeth. I
like it a lot. Yeah, it's it's quite it's quite
a wonderful sequence. Like if you if you just want
to check it out for no other reason, check it
out for that. Uh, it's pretty fun as well. Uh. Now,
my son and my wife who have read the book
tell me that in the book both Skilla and carib
does show up, but in the movie we're just stuck

(38:26):
with the whirlpool. But still the whirlpool is fabulous. Now,
I think maybe it's time to turn to the natural
world and look at some animals that that, even here
on Earth somewhat mimic the star lac. Now, there there
might be one that you out there are already thinking of,
because it's it's it's quite monstrously close, though on a
much smaller scale. And that would be, of course, the

(38:48):
ant lion. Yes, uh, the ant lion is is certainly
the first place that my mind goes when I think
of the star lac, because it's also something that I
definitely remember encountering as a child. Getting to see the
ant lions in action. Uh, you know, and try and
you know, ultimately try and trigger them to you know,
try and get them to to eat the ends of
sticks and whatnot, which I'm not recommending you do, but

(39:10):
if if you get a chance to observe an ant
lion in the wild, it's worth checking out. Robert, where
did you encounter them? Were you in the Southwest? I know,
in Arizona or wherever? Uh this, I definitely remember encountering
them in Tennessee. Actually, yeah, like this would have been
um a north western Tennessee. I remember encountering them there.

(39:34):
Maybe my mind was primed for Arizona because I just
know that that's where they shot the sarlaxines. I think
it's near Yuma that they did that. But yeah, I
guess the range of the ant lion is much wider. Yeah,
I mean it needs sand or loose soil. But uh,
I understand it's fairly why I've spread. Now, I will say,
I am just recalling a childhood memory here. It is

(39:55):
entirely possible that I was observing something else and thought
it was an ant lion, or that my memory has
some other has become altered one way or another. But
I'm pretty sure I saw an antline. Oh, I'm not
doubting you. The ant lion, as we alluded to earlier
when we were talking about life cycles of of the
possible sarlac or or analogs in the natural world, the

(40:15):
ant lion, as we know it is, is actually mainly
one stage of the life of a certain insect. That's right,
it's the it's the larval form of a rather nondescript
of flying romillion today, insect of which there are some
two thousand individual species. So, in other words, the ant
lion the larval form here is a high is highly

(40:38):
interesting and unique, while the adult form is basically a
short lived I mean, very short lived flying nothing that
is far less studied. I mean, when you got you
got one stage of your life cycle where you become
a sarlac, You're just not going to get a lot
of attention for the part of your life where you
grow wings and fly around and land on plants. Yeah.

(41:00):
So let's talk about the larval form first. So the
larval ant lion, and I recommend looking at a picture
of this anyone if you you have seen an illustration,
because it's really gnarly. It has this globular abdomen, a
narrow head, and a set of vicious sickle shaped mandibles.
Some species, but not all, famously make their home at
the bottom of a shallow pit, a shallow pit trap

(41:22):
that they make themselves. Uh and then the and they
produced this by burrowing backwards in a circle, flicking loose
soil or sand out of the way as they go.
And then once they're situated, only those twin mandibles remain visible,
poking out of the bottom of the sand pit. Yeah.
So so they form this thing, like you're saying, by
sort of digging around in a conical in a conical shape,

(41:45):
going backwards, flinging the sand out until they've created this
pit that's got these sort of perfectly sloped conical sides.
It's like a you know, like a coffee filter sort
of uh. And it reminds me of the episodes we
did about spider web agmission, because um, you know, it's
interesting to think about the underlying algorithms in an animal's brain,

(42:07):
like in the spider's brain that produced the web, or
in the ant lion's brain that enable it to make
these perfect little conical pit traps. And I remember one
of the things we talked about in that other episode
about spiderweb cognissition was how beautiful and complex patterns emerge
in spiderwebs, even based on extremely simple algorithms for spinning, which,
of course, the spiders can vary to adapt to environmental conditions.

(42:30):
And I think there are some environmental variables that that
work on ant lions as well. This might include things
like the depth of the sand and the grain size.
I was looking at one study that said apparently ant
lions and a similar predator called worm lions tend to
prefer finer and deeper sand, the finer sand, I'm sure
better to trap you with exactly. So how does this

(42:53):
trapping work? Well? When ants or other small insects fall
into the pit, the ant lion throws more sand, like
flicks more sand up towards the would be victim in
order to keep them from escaping, and then they grapple
their victim at the bottom of that pit, piercing their
body with those mandibles and sucking out the fluids. Afterwards,

(43:15):
the ant lion flicks the desiccated corpse out and then
resets the pit for its next meal. Yeah, the and
you can look up video of this of them literally
just throwing like desiccated ant bodies out of their pit,
just chucking them off to the side, literally a dead soldier. Now,
I can't remember if we mentioned, but the antline does
have it does have chemicals on its side when it

(43:37):
attacks the victim that falls down to the bottom of
the pit. So it's uh, it's piercing mandibles. The it's
pincer type things inject a venom to the prey. But
then also they've got a digestive enzyme that they use
much like some of the spider feeding stuff that we've
talked about where they can inject the enzyme that sort
of melts the guts of the prey animal and then

(43:59):
allows some easy slurping. Now, like the star lac, the
anti lion benefits from a really slow metabolism. The ant
lion can go months without food and get this, does
not even have an anus. It simply puts off defecation
until it assumes it's a mature and final form. And
this is something we see in other larval forms as
well um elsewhere in the animal kingdom, where basically the

(44:23):
creature is an eating machine. It's just about eating and eating,
and it can in some cases just put off pooping
until it has reached that final morphological form that is
going to obtain. Yeah, let's stick on this for a second.
In case that just went by you, the ant lion
in its larval stage does not have an anus and
cannot poop, and this goes on for the entire larval

(44:46):
stage of its life cycle, which can last for up
to three years. Right, no anus, you got your poop
in for three years. So I guess imagine if like
we only grew an anus and became able to defecate
when we turned eighteen or something, you know, the parents
talking about how you know you'll poop when you're older,
you'll understand then, Oh man, I mean, I guess I

(45:07):
have mixed thoughts about that, because on one hand, not
having to poop is is I mean, it's really everyone's dream.
But on the other hand, being filled with an increasing
amount of poop is everyone's nightmare. So uh, I guess
it just comes down to that, like you either extreme,
you you don't want either extreme. You want the balance
of normal human pooping. Now, the funny thing is that

(45:28):
there are some skewed ways where we conceptualize animal life cycles,
insect life cycles and stuff. Because we're talking about how
when the antline is done with its pit trap larval
stage and then matures and becomes an adult. But this
adult stage lasts for a much shorter period than its
larval stage does, so in a weird way, you shouldn't

(45:49):
think of its adult phase as like it's normal life,
right right, Yeah, Because again you mentioned that the larval
stage will live like about three years, but the flying
adult stage lives for a mere twenty five days or so,
So really it's adult form is just its last hurrah.
You know, this is about it just well, I guess
finally pooping, but also and more importantly reproducing. Right, yes,

(46:14):
now this would sort of answer the question for me
that I had when we were beginning to work on
this episode. I was wondering, like, does a star lack
poop if its whole body is under the ground. If
it does poop, where does the poop go? And now
you hypothesized, Robert, You were like, well, maybe it doesn't poop,
just like the antline doesn't poop. But the airline's got
a poop eventually, it's got the next stage of its

(46:34):
life cycle. And as far as we know, the star
lack does not. It's not gonna eventually grow wings, grow ananus,
and then fly off somewhere to poop everything that has
accumulated over the thousands of years. So what's going on
with the star lac Well, it does make me think
it could. This is just me, you know, spitball in here.
But perhaps if there is anything it cannot digest, maybe

(46:56):
it spits it back out, kind of like an owl will,
do you know with something that you know that it
is swallowed, you know, the various bones and whatnot. Or
perhaps there is just like terminal digestion going on inside
the sarlac. You know, it's just digesting and digesting, and
at the end of this there's just nothing like maybe

(47:17):
it's just that efficient. I can see that. But I
also like the idea of the two way digestive system.
There are organisms like that that live in the ocean,
mainly like the hydra I believe has a has a
two way digestive system where it basically eats and poops
through the same opening. That's right, Yeah, I think we
went into that on our episode about the evolution of

(47:37):
the anus um. So yeah, there are there are various
models for this that we see throughout the evolution of
life on Earth. It could be, uh, you know, used
to explain it another way of looking at it would
be something down there under the ground is pooping for
the star lac, but we don't really know what sort
of underground environment it is pooping into. Like there could

(47:58):
be a pretty rich under underground world on tattooing, right,
I mean, there could be you know, organisms that depend
on the poop of the sarlac for food or or
for shelter in the same way that the poop of
of of large you know, megafauna are essential to the
life cycles of organisms here on the surface of Earth.

(48:19):
Here's one for you. Here's a here's my hypothesis. Okay,
the sarlac secretes an acidic compound that slowly over time
dissolves the bedrock, dissolves the sedimentary rock down below where
it is resting in the ground, and forms a karst
cavity in the ground, basically creates its own poop cave,
and then poops into the cave. Uh. What do you think?

(48:43):
I like it? I like it. You could have a
whole uh, you know, the whole aspect of Tattooine society
where like jawas are out there trying to dig down
to get those poop reserves from the sarlacs. You know,
like especially if it's like ancient poop reserves of the sarlac,
it's aged and you know, high valuable for something or another.
I'm sure. Uh, I've got it, the most sought after

(49:05):
fertilizer in the universe. Oh nice, Yes, the poop must flow. Yes. Now,
I mentioned earlier that not all ant lions um are
are going to be these these uh, these pit digging
um trap predators. You also have some that that that
have other modes of existence, and we see this also

(49:26):
with owl flies, which are uh an organism that look
very similar as larva and also live as ambush predators
in the soil. They look again a lot like ant lions,
but while it seems like they have been known to
obscure their lower bodies with sand and debris, UH the
al fly larva don't seem to engage in the sort
of robust, pit based and stationary ambush tactics that we

(49:50):
see with those most notable species of antlions. Now, I
mentioned earlier that there is a very similar pit trap
predator which has a hunting strategy almost identical to that
of the ant lion, and this is a winged insect
family called Vermilion a day known as the worm lions.
I think this might actually be an even closer parallel

(50:10):
to the sarlac because it is a striking worm and
in this way it kind of resembles the tentacles of
the carcoon uh of the star lack of the pit
of carcoon. So despite how similar their pit trap strategies are,
I was reading that the interestingly, worm lions are not
closely related to ant lions. This appears to be another

(50:31):
interesting example of convergent evolution where in totally different ways, uh,
different organisms have discovered basically the same way to to
make a living. And in this case, it's digging these
conical pit traps in the sand. Another thing I was
wondering is like, why do the conical pits look so
similar if the hunters are not closely related, wouldn't the

(50:53):
pits be kind of more different for these different animals.
Apparently has to do with mass or like the geometry
of how sediments lay at an angle. Uh. The angles
of the pit slopes are determined by what's known as
the angle of repose, which is the steepest angle at
which a sloping surface formed of a loose material is stable. Interesting,

(51:16):
so you'll see that kind of like on the edges
of mountains where there's sediments sliding down, it will settle
into a certain angle that is stable. If it gets
any steeper than that, it will start to collapse in
an avalancheal form. Yeah, that that makes sense. I should
also add that everyone should definitely look up a picture
of the worm lion because it is very very cool

(51:36):
looking at it has I think you mentioned like tentacle
like protrusions around its head. Uh, Like the image I'm
looking at here looks like four of them. Oh, and
that its body just itself looks like a tentacle. It
is the organism, but like when it's wrapping around an
ant or beetle or something that's falling into the trap,

(51:56):
it looks kind of like a sarlac tentacle. Yeah, it's segmented,
but but appears far more prehensile than you know, something
like a normal earth worm. But there is another organism
that's parallel to the sarlac in some ways I think
we should definitely talk about, and that is the predatory
polycute worm known as unicey afrodetois yes, also known as

(52:18):
a sand striker uh, and it has some other names
I'm not going to mention here on the show, but
that have been informally applied to it. But it's essentially
a rainbow colored marine deathworm, and it buries itself in
the sand, ready to strike at passing prey. They can
reach lengths of nearly nine point eight feeders or two pots,

(52:39):
but most of its segmented body remains coiled in the
sand and as an array of five antennae to help
it since prey a feature that I think is reminiscent
of of you know, this idea that the sarlac might
have a root like systems of system of feelers, spines
and tentacles, which you see in some of these illustrations
that try to get to the heart of the star lac.

(53:00):
But the sand striker here, it strikes with incredible speed,
whipping out its mandible studded farynx to capture prey. Yeah,
I think let's dwell on this just a little bit
more because this might have gone past really fast. This
is a predatory worm buries in the sand, attacks and
it grows to like ten ft long. This is a
ten foot long or you know, three meter worm that

(53:22):
preys on fish and other animals in the sea. So
it'll just have its little head poking out. But if
you were to keep pulling this worm up out of
the ground, you could end up with like the magician's
scarf situation where it just keeps coming out as ten
ft long. I was reading that sometimes it's it's pincer
attack is so powerful that it chops prey fish in half. Uh.

(53:46):
And I was reading a Scientific American blog post from
from by writer named Becky Crew about these animals, and
she drew my attention to this one story about how
back in two thousand nine, at a marine aquarium in
a town called New Key In in England, aquarium keepers
noticed that in this one tank, the coral on display

(54:09):
and some of the fish and stuff kept accumulating weird damage.
It was as if something inside the tank was like
chopping parts of the coral formation off and killing the animals.
And there was no obvious culprit in the tank, so
they had to like remove rocks and coral and plants
from this tank. Wanted a time to find out what
was causing the attacks, and a curator named Matt Slater

(54:32):
was quoted in the Daily Mail at the time talking
about what happened. He said, quote, something was guzzling our reef,
but we had no idea what. We also found an
injured tank fish, so we laid traps, but they got
ripped apart in the night. That were must have obliterated
the traps. The bait was full of hooks which he
must have just digested. Uh So, I don't know if

(54:55):
that's sounds kind of hard to believe, but if that's true,
it would kind of or the sarlac digestion thing. But
in any case, like it does seem to be the
case that they had one of these worms. One of
these worms burrowed down in the bottom of the tank.
So the workers discovered that there was a stowaway sarlac
like this predatory burrowing sea worm was hiding down in

(55:17):
the sediment at the bottom, and it had probably snuck
in among the coral that were transplated into the transplanted
into the tank years before and had just grown there
and hiding ever since. But this also made me think,
so this worm is fast, powerful, venomous, mostly hidden down
in the ground or down in the sediment, how can
prey animals defend themselves? Well, actually, I found an interesting

(55:40):
article about this where there is one strategy that's been
uncovered and it was published in Scientific Reports in It
was by jose La Shot and Daniel hog Walker Nagle
called novel mobbing Strategies on a fish population against a
sessile analid predator. And basically the authors here described this

(56:01):
weird thing where these fish a type of bream called
Scalopsis afinus. They would where like one fish would find
one of these worms would be near it and discover
it was there and would start spitting jets of water
toward the worm, and then other fish would join in.
These prey fish would join in this mobbing behavior where

(56:24):
they would all gather around and start spitting these jets
of water towards the worm, which apparently caused the worm
to retract down into the sediment. I'm not sure exactly
what's going on there. I mean, so obviously this is
some kind of group defensive behavior against a predator when
the predator's location is discovered. But it makes me wonder
if anything similar could go on with the sarlac or

(56:44):
would it even need to Like would you need to
have bantas like spitting jets of air at a star
lac or something, or could they just stay away from it? Yeah?
I guess that's the thing about a land based scenario
versus the marine scenario is that on the land once,
unless you are a you know, in a flying creature,
by the time you got close enough to the star

(57:04):
lac to really be in danger to really need to
spit at it, it's probably too late. Yeah, I mean,
I mean, I think part of this this behavior though,
might just be not necessarily in like harming the worm
or something, but in alerting the other con specifics to
its location. So you can imagine something like that for
trap predators too. I mean I would. I don't know

(57:25):
of any evidence like this, but I wouldn't be surprised
if there are some types of ants or other prey
insects of the ant lion that have some kind of
group defense strategy where when one species identifies an ant
lion pit, it can kind of like you know, sound
the alarm and alert the others to to to what's
happening there. I don't know of any evidence of that,

(57:45):
but I would not be surprised to find out something
like that. Yeah, so I you know, I think maybe
the banthers might have some sort of um, some sort
of the strategy to deal with that. Now. Um, Ultimately,
the sea is home to other atom dwelling ambush predators
as well, more than we could conceivably list in the
episode here. But you have things like the devil scorpion

(58:07):
fish and the ward eye star gazer, and if you
watch enough, um, you know, underwater documentaries, you'll see some
of these bizarre and wondrous creatures. All right, we need
to take another break, but we'll be right back to
discuss digestion for a thousand years. Thank alright, we're back. Okay.
So I think we need to finish up today by

(58:28):
talking about the idea of the star lacks really slow digestion.
Remember Cee three Po says that when you fall into
the all powerful starlac again, I'm not maybe things this
can come up again. I'm not quite sure why the
star lack is all powerful. It seems relatively powerful within
its own mouth and the range right around there, but
beyond its powers rapidly diminish. Um Uh. But see three

(58:53):
Po says in there in the belly, you will find
a new definition of pain and suffering as you're slowly digested.
Over thousand years now, we've already discussed the slow metabolism
and of the eating machine the ant lion. But I
want to look at another emblem of slow digestion, this
time of mammal. I think we should look at the sloth.

(59:15):
And now there are a lot of ways actually that
sloths have been observed to be generally slow. Right, the
name their English name is not a coincidence. Uh. And
this this slowness does extend not just to their movements
through the trees. You know, if you watch them climb something,
they tend to be very slow moving creatures. But their
slowness extends down to the chemical, the biochemical level within

(59:38):
their bodies. I was looking at a study by Jonathan
and Pauli, M. Zachariah Pierri, Emily D. Fountain, and William H.
Kerosov called arboreal folio wars limit their energetic output all
the way to slothfulness in the American Naturalist in six
and the authors here are trying to explore possible reasons

(59:59):
that animals they call arboreal full levorees animals that eat
tree leaves, hang out in the trees, eat leaves from trees,
why they are relatively rare compared to some other types
of animals and do not display as much adaptive radiation
as some other animals. And adaptive radiation here means, uh,
you know, diversifying of the species into different ecological niches,

(01:00:21):
basically like evolving into many different types and variations to
fill ecological niches. You don't see a lot of this
with animals like sloths. And so they point out that,
you know, like mature tree leaves, that the dietary, the
main diet source of these animals like sloths, and there
are other animals like this tu pandas, koalas and so forth.
Mature tree leaves are not a very high quality food.

(01:00:44):
They tend to be tough and woody. Often they've got
some kind of poisons or tannins or some kind of
unpleasant chemical in them. It's generally really difficult to live
by eating, digesting, and extracting energy from mature tree leaves,
but sloths do it. So maybe the energy constraints on
these animals have somehow controlled their spread and evolution. So

(01:01:08):
the authors here wanted to measure the metabolic rates of
sloths in Costa Rica, and they write, quote, we quantified
the field metabolic rate or FMR movement and body temperature
for sin topic two and three toed sloths, extreme arboreal
fulivorees that differ in their degree of specialization. Both species

(01:01:30):
expended little energy, but three toed sloths possess the lowest
FMR recorded for any mammal. And so the three toed
sloth lives on a on a field metabolic rate of
a hundred and sixty two killer jewels per day per
kilogram of body weight. Now that number alone might not
mean much to you. But comparing it to other animals, uh,

(01:01:51):
it's way lower than say the howler monkey, who who
has a field metabolic rate of five hundred and eighty
three killer jewels per day per kilo am of body weight.
It's lower than koalas at four hundred and ten. Even
the giant panda is more at five. The three toads
lost is the lowest ever measured, uh at a hundred

(01:02:12):
and sixty two kill a jewels per day per kilogram.
And so in a way, it is a profound evolutionary
experiment in slowing everything down. And this is historically in
a kind of funny and interesting way lad some thinkers
to view sloths as as some kind of like like
that there's a problem with their existence, that there's something

(01:02:35):
wrong with them. Like the Count de Buffon, you know,
George Louis la Clerk, Count of Buffon, who we talked
about in our Age of the Earth episode, because he
did some experiments trying to, uh, trying to determine the
age of the Earth based on I believe his idea
had to do with like how long it would take
the Earth to cool to its current temperature. But he
wrote this huge multi volume natural history work during his

(01:02:58):
life where he tried to become you know, the eighteenth
century uh plenty of the elder, you know, to catalog
all of the stuff in the world and tell you
all about it. And his section on sloths is kind
of hilarious. Are you ready for this, Robert, Yeah, let's
bring it on, Okay, So he says. These animals have

(01:03:19):
neither incisive nor canine teeth. Their eyes are dull and
almost concealed with hair. Their mouths are wide, and their
lips thick and heavy. Their fur is course and looks
like dried grass. Their thighs seem almost disjointed from the haunches,
their legs very short and badly shaped. They have no
soles to their feet, nor toe is separately movable, but

(01:03:41):
only two or three claws, excessively long and crooked downwards,
which move together and are only useful to the animal
in climbing. Slowness, stupidity, and even habitual pain result from
its uncouth conformation. They have no arms, either to attack
or defend themselves. No or are they furnished with any
means of security, as they can neither scratch up the

(01:04:04):
earth nor seek for safety by flight. But confined to
a small spot of ground, or to the tree under
which they are brought forth. They remain prisoners in the
midst of an extended space, unable to move more than
three feet in an hour. They climb with difficulty and pain,
and their plaintive and interrupted cry they dare only utter

(01:04:24):
by night. After some more moralizing about how awful they are,
he says, Uh, we have already observed that it seems
as if all that could be does exist, and of
this the sloths appear to be a striking proof. They
constitute the last term of existence in the order of animals,
endowed with flesh and blood. One more defect and they

(01:04:46):
could not have existed. Oh my goodness, Now, I think
this is funny because like in some ways, uh, you know,
Buffon was considered a very you know, learned man of
his day. But like just the amazing ignorance of this
is just like, given what we know about animals now,
and the Clark had all kinds of terrible ideas, you know.

(01:05:07):
He he endorsed scientific racism. He believed that like the
animals of the New World were somehow inferior to the
animals of the Old world. Uh, there's all this weird,
genuine disgust in his writing when he talks about animals
found in North and South America. So he had all
these extremely misguided theories. Because all this stuff that he

(01:05:28):
characterizes as defects with this species, I think we would
probably look at and say, I don't know, given our
modern evolutionary understanding, you are probably not understanding these correctly.
These are probably not actually defects, these are adaptations. His
His thinking falls prey to the naive version of survival
of the fittest, as you know, the fittest, not as

(01:05:50):
in best adapted to its environment, but as like the toughest,
the buffest, the biggest, sharpest teeth and so forth. Yeah. Absolutely,
I mean it's um in his his description of the sloth,
really it comes off like a like a dis track,
you know, against against the sloth. It also reminds me
a little bit of of Darwin's descriptions of the with

(01:06:11):
the marine iguanas, the iguanas of the club. I mean,
Darwin didn't normally fall into this way of thinking, but
occasionally there was some animal he didn't like. Yeah, but
the sloth, like the main like counter arguments. In addition,
to to what we said here about the true nature
of adaptation. I would also, you know, put forth at

(01:06:32):
first of all, sloths tend to be cute. That tends
to be our interpretation of them, especially babies sloths or
slothes if you're using the British pronunciation, but but also
the adults. There's a certain adorableness to them. And I
have to say when when I was in Costa Rica
with my family and we went on a hike, uh
through the forest there and we got to see got

(01:06:55):
the glimpse a wild sloth like where we you know,
had to stand there for several min it's and watch
what would presume to be a sloth finally move and
slowly confirm it's it's sloth hood Like that was a
genuinely magical moment. Like that has to be one of
one of my top interactions with wildlife ever. Like it

(01:07:15):
just it truly felt like magic and time was standing still. Um. So,
I you know, it's it's very difficult for me to
put my put myself in the mindset of of sloth
hating um worldview. I think Bufon would think you're a sucker,
But yeah, I think he was quite clearly wrong. Like
the sloths, including the extremely slow, yes, very slow, three

(01:07:38):
toed sloths, are incredibly well adapted to their environments in
very interesting ways. I was reading an article about this
on The Conversation from sixteen by a British zoologist named
Becky Cliff, who I believe she either currently works or
has worked in a sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica, so
you know, doing a lot of hands on work with
sloths um and so she's writing about these adaptations. She says,

(01:08:02):
of course, it's true that sloths are slow in pretty
much every way. At the sloth sanctuary she works out
in Costa Rica, they use these sloth backpacks two track
sloth movement in the wild. And yes, it's true they
move very slowly and they move very little. But there's
a reason for this. It's not weakness. It is strategic
in an evolutionary sense. Slow movement uses a lot less

(01:08:26):
energy than fast movement. Remember that metabolic discovery we were
talking about earlier. Three toad sloths have the slowest metabolism
of any known mammal. In a weird way, they're almost
like you can imagine them kind of like going through
a convergent evolution thing. But across kingdoms of life. They're
trying to slowly over the eons converge with plants. Uh,
you know, like so too. And to make this possible,

(01:08:50):
you know this this low metabolic rate. Of course, they
move very slowly, but they also regulate their body temperature
differently than most mammals, do you know. Mammals have their
warm blooded they have thermoregulation, they've got to keep their
body temperature up through internal chemical means. But sloths manage
a much lower body temperature than your average mammal. They
they tend to go it around thirty two point seven

(01:09:12):
degrees celsius or ninety one degrees fahrenheit. That's a full like, uh,
you know, seven or eight degrees lower than our average
body temperature. And uh. Cliff mentions that their metabolic rate
is somewhere between forty to seventy of what you would
expect for an animal of its body mass. So they're
they're they're going way underweight on energy needs. And so

(01:09:34):
the question might be, well, why live like this, why
would you be so slow have such a relatively cool
body and all that. Again, it's cheap, it's mega cheap.
Sloths require much less food, energy, than other mammals of
similar size. They can eat this, you know, this kind
of bad food. I mean, it wouldn't be bad from
their point of view, but it's low caloric density. This

(01:09:55):
food like tough, fibrous tree leaves, and they don't even
need to eat all the that much of it. Usually,
if you're an animal that's subsisting on tough plant matter,
you have to eat a ton of it to survive.
Cliff points out that howler monkeys, who also live in
the trees and eat tough leaves, they have to eat
three times as much food per kilogram of body mass

(01:10:15):
as the sloth does, and so requiring three times less
food than something else in your niche opens up all
kinds of possibilities for survival. So the sloth might not
be lean and fast moving in a physical movement sense,
but in a chemical sense, it is lean. It is
like it has a lot to work with. It's got
this wiggle room. But here's another thing we get to

(01:10:36):
with sloth. Sloth metabolism in a in a way that's
related to their very slow metabolism. They also digest food
really slow, and this brings us back to the sarlac.
Cliff points out research, saying, well, so we we don't
know the exact rate, uh, you know, the exact bounded
rates of sloth digestion, but there are estimates that it

(01:10:57):
takes food between like a hundred fifty seven hours or
up to twelve hundred hours to pass through the slots
digestive system. So the upper end of this estimate would
be like fifty days. Um, you can imagine, you know,
having having your food waste in your body for that long. Robert,
you said before we came on to record today that

(01:11:20):
you have actually watched video of a sloth pooping. You
people at home, if you have not seen this, you
should look it up. It's fair warning. It looks kind
of traumatic, like there's a lot coming out. Yeah, and
I mean, the other interesting thing about slots pooping is that,
of course they have to climb down to do it. Uh.
They don't just poop out of the branches. They return

(01:11:41):
to the earth to carry this out. Yeah. Uh and
so Cliff Rights quote. Unsurprisingly, the slots four chambered stomach
is constantly full, and so more leaves can only be
ingested when digesta leaves the stomach and enters the small intestine.
Food intake and critically, energy expenditure are likely limited by
digestion rate and room in the stomach. Indeed, the abdominal

(01:12:05):
contents of a sloth can account for up to thirty
seven percent of their body mass. So it's digesting for
days at a time, maybe you know, a month or
more at a time digesting food. It's maybe a third
of its body weight or more. Is the poop that
it's got inside it right now, and it you know,
hasn't purged yet. You can also imagine though that like

(01:12:25):
why would it hang on this long? I can also
imagine this having to do with what you're talking about,
that it has to come down to the forest floor
to do it, which is inherently a vulnerable activity. So
and because it's slow moving, you might want to limit
those trips down to the vulnerable position as much as possible. Yeah,
it's like if you live in a you know, a
walk up apartment in New York and you prefer to

(01:12:49):
to poop in the say the john, but choice down
on the street. I think that was the joke from
Dirty Rock. Toilet might limit how many times you go
to the jamba juice too exactly? Yes, yeah, you might
you might wait, Awhile, there was another interesting fact that
came up in this article, by the way, that the

(01:13:09):
Cliff mentioned that I had never heard about before. Um So,
you know, the obvious question might be, how does a
sloth of aid predators If it's so slow, it's not
a fighter, it doesn't run, it's a hyder. Uh. So
the sloths have to protect themselves via camouflage, and Cliff
mentions in an article that uh that all of the
sloth's major predators like jaguars, awesl lots, harpy eagles are

(01:13:31):
primarily visual hunters, so camouflage can actually go a long
way to protect you. And she points to an interesting
suggested symbiotic relationship with algae with between sloths and algae
that grow in the sloths fur, and this algae is
apparently passed on from mother to offspring. So it is

(01:13:52):
visual camouflage through inherited microbiota, which is pretty interesting. Yeah.
I do have to say that time that I got
to to see, not only see, but to find, uh
the sloth in the wild, like it wasn't pointed out
by a guide, Well, it was just the whole time
I knew based on what the guys that told us
that there might be sloths in the trees, we just

(01:14:13):
have to look really hard for them, and it did.
It took forever to see this, this creature, because you're
just kind of constantly on the lookout for possible movement,
possible lumps, uh you know, in the in these you know,
rich canopy of trees that might be a slot. And
most of the time I was wrong, or at least
I was unable to confirm that what I was looking

(01:14:34):
at at a distance was a living creature at all.
So so when really I was more lucky than anything.
I think that I was able to to zero in
on this this lump in the trees and then finally
see it move and finally make out the movements of
of an actual sloth. So yeah, I imagine they have
a you know, tremendous advantage versus predators that are doing

(01:14:55):
the same thing, you know, on constant lookout for, uh
for prey amid the tree limbs. I don't know this,
but i'd also guess that slower metabolism, slower movement would
make you less fidgety. Yeah, yeah, they're not fidgety, like
I remember. That was another thing. It's like the movements
where we're very slow and fluid and kind of you know,

(01:15:17):
far between, Like it wasn't it was wasn't like looking
for the movement of a traditional creature, you know, or
at least the kind of creatures that I tend to
find myself looking for, you know, like the movements of
say a squirrel or a or a chipmunk or a
bird of some sort. You know, it's a it's it's
a totally different animal. Can we imagine a sarlac evolving

(01:15:38):
over over a very long period, over millions of years,
from some type of sloth like creature, like a formerly
totally mobile creature that over time evolves too slow, its
metabolism and digestion down further and further and further in
order to you know, survive on maybe tough dietary material

(01:16:00):
like like plant leaves or something, uh, to support this
high efficiency of you know, a slow metabolism, highly efficient digestion.
I wonder if there are routes like that. I mean,
I have wondered before. Like one of the main things
we think of is characterizing intelligent animal life is fast movement.
But that doesn't you can understand why intelligence evolves from

(01:16:25):
fast movement in the history of animal life. But it
doesn't have to stay that way in terms of that association, right,
Like you could imagine that there could be an animal
with intelligence that just keeps evolving back down to have
less and less need to move its body around and
kind of becomes sessile, becomes plant. Like I don't know,

(01:16:45):
I mean maybe maybe millions of years in the future.
I'm just saying there there will be ant lions that
evolved from sloths and you know, fall into the pit
and you'll one day get to be a part of
their dramatic traumatic pooping. I like that. Yeah, the idea
of a far future sessile sloth. All right, So there
you have it. Did we expose all of the secrets

(01:17:07):
of the sarlac? Uh? No, we did not. The sarlak
retains its mysteries, which I think is is you know,
one of the key attractions to the creature to begin with. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
I mean you can't fully lift up the sarlac and
peek at what's under it, but we'll have to imagine
that there is a poop cave, yeah, or what if
there's just a NonStop party in there, you know, like

(01:17:27):
what if you had an alternate cut where Boba fett
Is is swallowed whole by the star Lac and then
he's just dropped into this stomach cavity that's actually just
to really happening hang out. You know that everybody that's
ever been eaten by it is just in there kind
of chilling, you know. And it turns out the Starla
doesn't digest people. Instead, it has like a symbiotic relationship
with you know, other organisms, you know, beneath the surface

(01:17:49):
of tattooin and everything like friends. Yeah, yeah, it gets lonely.
It's an intelligent creature. It gets lonely. It needs friends,
right well, Robert, this has been a lot of fun. Yeah,
this has been fun. Um. It is kind of hard
to believe this is the This is I think the
first Star Wars episode of stuff to blow your mind.
But hey, who knows. There's a lot of a lot

(01:18:10):
of stuff in the Star Wars universe. Maybe we'll maybe
we'll get up the energy to do another one of
the one of these one day. I'm game. In the meantime, obviously,
we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We know
we have a lot of Star Wars fans, general science
fiction fans, monster fans. Uh out there amid our listeners,
and yeah, we would love to hear your feedback on

(01:18:32):
this episode, on the Star Lac itself, your memories and
interpretations of the Star Lack. And indeed, if you think
there's a strong candidate for a future episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind related to Star Wars or any
other work of fiction, science fiction, et cetera, let us know. Um,
we'll tell you how to get in touch with us
here in a second, But if you just want to

(01:18:52):
support the show, best thing you can do is rate, review,
and subscribe wherever you get this podcast us banks as always,
who are excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hi, you can
email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot Common. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of

(01:19:22):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}From the Vault: The Mighty Sarlacc