February 7, 2012 • 28 mins
In medieval Germany it was a dire omen of plague-ridden doom. Today, it remains more of a grotesque cultural reference. Join Robert and Julie as they enter the lair of the rat king, and prepare to be shocked by the reality of microbial rat kings.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Tuchas Julian
know the Over the weekend, I received a call friend
of mine told me, Hey, um, I have a favor.
I've got this. Uh, this family member and his family
(00:26):
meat out of their house this weekend because of rats. Oh.
I thought, you're gonna say, witness relocation program. No, no, no,
this was in it'll well similar in some ways, but no,
this was this is a situation where they were in
the house and then they realized that there was a
serious rat problem, like like bad rat problem enough to
flee because there's so many. I mean, rats are are gross,
(00:48):
rats are disease carriers there, you know. And then we
have all these additional images of them, say, crawling into
cradles and eating babies at night and uh, you know,
or or firing up the oven and attempting to cook
things and causing house fires. These are common fears. Yeah,
are last howing you with their long long tails and uh.
(01:09):
In the midst of this that there was talk of like, oh,
the city's gonna come and demolish the house, like it's
that bad and the house is gonna be destroyed and
possibly burned, which a control burned, which sounded crazy to
me because it seems like if you burn a house
full of rats, you're just gonna send flaming rats out
into the surrounding neighborhoods. Now, I have to ask were
they keeping like cuts of meat in the basement or
(01:31):
just hanging on hooks? Yeah, I mean, I don't know
if there was like a cave underneath the house that
went to some secret rat underworld. But I had in
my mind the image of, like we were deprived the floorboards,
would we would we see there in the in the
darkness this uh, this this site like right out of
a German woodcut from the Middle Ages. Would we see
a rat king hole with all its little rats tangled
(01:55):
up in its tail? Yeah? A cluster kind of like
a what are those cookies where like clusters Google clusters?
You have like a Google cluster of rats. Oh my god,
that's disgusting. Yeah, it is disgusting. It's it's use. Somewhere
there exists a Google cluster of rats that's an edible
like street food. I mean, rats maybe good eating. That's
(02:18):
that's a that's a whole another issue entirely and h
and who knows ratkings maybe good eating. But but the
idea of the rat king I find so fascinating and
most people do because A it's grotesque, it's just purely grotesque.
And B it's uh, it's kind of a fictional, fantastic
exaggeration of humanities. Um long history with the rat because
(02:41):
as we've spread across the globe under nearly every continent,
I mean, well we've spread to every continent of obviously
at least one of those continents, is is more of
a just a foothold than anything. But the rats have
always come with us. They've come with us on our ships,
we've built cities, and they've moved in next to us.
They you know, anywhere we go, we're taking them with us.
And we're always waging wars with the rat to keep
(03:03):
it from invading our space and uh, living up the
fat of our land. Yeah. Yeah, And in fact, before
we actually get to rat kings and how horrific they are,
or maybe aren't get to that, um to your point
about infestation and how we've tried to keep them at
bay in seventeen eighty, a Japanese boat infested with sewer
rats shipwrecked off the Alaskan coast, and rats killed off
(03:26):
masses of residents, seabirds, and the island became known as
rat Island. Um. In two thousand and eight, could think
about them festering for for this song, right, the US
Fish and Wildlife Service code in the island with poisoned
grain because they were trying to get rid of them.
I mean, I'm not quite sure what the issue was. There.
Were they like paddling over in their boats to Alaska
(03:48):
and um, you know, scaring the townsfolk. But unfortunately when
they did that, they took down not only the rat,
but they also harmed all the other wildlife species. I mean,
obviously that's a good example of why rats haven't been
eradicated completely, right, because it's very hard to ferret them
out without ruining the entire environment. Yeah, they can eat
(04:08):
just about anything. They breed incredibly fast. Oh yeah, and
do you know why, because they don't care. They will
breed a mother in the in the newborn, will breed
a father and a sister, a brother and a sister.
I mean, it's kind of incest city when it comes
to rats, so and as humans we can't help but
be disgusted by that aspect of a ratdom as well. Yeah,
(04:28):
so that gives them many more breeding opportunities, and they
can live just about anywhere, I mean, aside from the
whole nearly every continent. They can live in cold climates,
they can live in hot climates. They can live in
your basement, they can live in your attic, they can
they can live in the most disgusting of circumstances, and
they're totally cool with it. They're like, Hey, I know
it's it's horrible in here, but we're gonna all breed
with each other anyway and eat everything we can well,
(04:50):
and not only just eat everything we can, but sometimes
mothers will eat their young as well, So there's infants
aside there, right, But as we've discussed our previous podcast,
we can't judge that too harsh way on a purely
economy of energy level, it just makes sense, well, and
it's not like the mother rats just sitting around going
nomenom nom, give me young. It's usually a case where
there's there's some sort of situation that is extraordinary and
(05:12):
that you know, some sort of food source is not available,
so she looks to her young. It's kind of like
the the rat equivalent of I'm not going to drink
all this water. I'm going to pour it out on
the plant kind of a thing. You know. It's just
it's it's it's sensible. A decision is that. And then,
of course the rat has a huge stigma for being
a plague carrier, the idea that these things are not
(05:33):
only living amongst us, but they are carrying diseases that
could wipe out whole cities. The rat becomes this dire
symbol of plague out of the Middle Ages. It's an
image that has never quite been able to shed well,
and people would look to the rat to try to ascertain,
you know, what the disease was doing, because if a
large population of rats were dying out, that was usually
(05:55):
a precursor to a plague coming and rolling down the street, right.
But it turns out the the rats were actually in
concert if you can say that with fleas. It was
really the fleas that we're carrying this and um reinfecting
the rats, which would then bring the plague to the
rat was really just a middleman in this whole plague business. Yeah, yeah,
it was. Yeah, you're right, I please please kind of
(06:16):
got away scot free here, um with the with the
old infant infesting of people's houses and streets and all
that good stuff. But you can imagine this medieval German
townsman looking into this, looking under the floorboards, prying him open.
Rats are scurring back, and he sees a rat king
down there. He sees, uh, say, I don't know, eight,
(06:36):
say ten, say thirty two? Um, rats with their tails
just intertwined into this vast, tangled knot of just grossness.
And imagine him seeing that and and knowing even then
that what this, what this might mean? You can just
you can you can imagine that being just such a
dire omen because it would mean you were living in
(06:57):
pretty close confines with a lot of rats, right well,
and that that cluster of rats could perhaps contain its
own bubonic plague, right Um. I mean that that would
be the fear, especially if that was the story that
was told you over and over growing up, particularly in Germany,
where apparently, um, well you know, some people have said
that a lot of these rat kings have been found.
(07:19):
And again, just to go back to this, we are
talking about a mass of rats entangled together, bound by blood,
fecal matter and other filth. Yeah, but of course aren't
we all uh yes, not today I took a shower. Well,
I mean on a figurative level, you know. But the
rat and Konig, the rat king, it's been a really
enduring image in Germany. You see it when you try. Well,
(07:41):
we'll get into sort of the possibilities of it existing
in real life and some of the arguments for and
against in a in a second. But right, but just
the idea of the rat king a again, I like
to think of it as an exaggeration of our attitudes
towards rats. B There have been some arguments that rat catchers.
Because you have a rat problem in the city, you
(08:02):
of course have a booming industry of rat catching, and
that is that's something that existed for along ago. It
still exists in the form of pet control, but they
tend not to call themselves rat catchers. Yeah, but that
kind of pestilence, thankfully, is not as widespread as it
used to be. But you would have rat catchers that
would catch a bunch of rats and sometimes they would
apparently tie their tails together as an easy way to
bring them in because you'd have kind of like a
(08:22):
rat bounty, like bring us, bring us eight rats, get
eight dollars. And I'm like, all right, well, I don't
have forgot my rats ack today. What am I gonna do?
I better string all their tails together and and bring
them in in a big grotesque heat. So there's that,
and then you have all these ideas, two very focal
ideas of the rats having some form of king or
(08:42):
having some form of queen. And in some of these
models of the king, the the rat king either is
this tangle of rats or it sets upon a tangle
of rat tails. And of course people have loved that
image to just in terms of of using that model
to apply to perceptions of crooked human rulers. Yeah. Yeah,
Martin Luther called the pope a lot of things. And
(09:04):
one of the things that he called the pope and
one of his many die tribes was a rat king
rat and coning, that's right, sitting on the backs of
his subjects, basically being well fed. So this again, yeah,
there's this image of this rat king sort of controlling
this swarm um and profiting from it. Really, right, And
even our beloved nutcracker ballet right, yeah, by some Yeah, yeah,
(09:27):
the rat king shows up there. Yeah, and the and
now in the versions that I had to sit through
a year after year as a child because my sisters
were all in ballet, the rat never had more than
one head. But apparently if you go back to some
of the older writings of the tale, uh, he'll have
more than one head. Calling back to this idea of
the true rat king, I'm going to say that some
producers sat down and said, you know what, this is
(09:49):
a great Pope tale, but maybe we should just have
one head because we really want to sell some tickets
to this and this is just way too nightmarish. All
the kids are like, ah, here's a foreheaded rat king. Yeah, well,
nothing around. I put it to anyone out there who's
involved in the ballet industry. Is it an industry? Would
you say, big industry? Yeah? That you know, the Nutcracker
(10:10):
is one of those things you hollowed every year because
it's a it's a guaranteed moneymaker. I think, and and
I think there is a tendency to maybe get lazy
with the Nutcracker suite. So the next time somebody staging
a performance, I say, do an old school rat king,
get eight male dancers out there, tie them together, and
have them dance throughout the play, or at least throughout
the first act before all the candy shows up. I
(10:32):
like this idea of doing this kind of a cob nutcracker.
Actually they should do it for adults, and it should
be a puppet show. I like it. Ok, we just
made it all right, all right? So those are some
of the ideas about the rat king as folk tale.
We should probably take a break, and when we come back,
we're going to get into some of these alleged examples
of real rat kings and what we can say about
(10:55):
their legitimacy. And also we'll go to the microbial level
and exact them in some some rather tiny rat king.
So let's pick with us, all right, we're back rat king.
Rat king. The earliest report comes from Germany in fifteen
sixty four, right, Yes, so they the sightings have been
(11:19):
around for a while. Um, but a credible sighting of
a live rat king has never really been confirmed, right.
I Mean, we have some stories here and there. There
was a really neat one out of Estonia. This was
the rat King of Sorrow. I like the references to
the rat kings as the rat king of as if
they actually had some sort of leaders dominion over. Yeah,
(11:39):
this was a really cool and we were reading an
article about from one Andre Milgun. This is January six,
two thousand five. You have this just sort of your
average Estonian and he finds one so allegedly finds a
rat king on the floor of his shed. Uh. The
animals are, you know, tither. They're unable to escape, So
the farmer's sun comes in with a stick and kills
(12:02):
it kills them. You know, it depends that you want
to frame that. But so apparently this cluster contains sixteen
rats and their tails were knotted together and get in
this lump that contained frozen sand and there had recently
been like a cold step And at the time that
they were discovered, only nine of the rats were live.
Three of the rats ended up falling off. The interesting
(12:25):
thing about this story is that the guy didn't immediately
call the newspaper. He thought it was weird. He put
it on a board and was like, hey, fellow Estonian villagers,
come check out this grossesque thing I found. I'm going
to leave it on the front porch for a little bit.
Come by and gock at it, and people came and
gocked at it. But then the zoologists found out about it, right,
was it like a cousin or something? Was a reporter
found out about it and hooked up a zoologists. Yeah,
(12:47):
so the next thing, you know, the zoologist come from
the museum at the University of Tartu and uh, this
is the natural history Zoological museum and they come and
collect it and preserve it. Now alcohol and you can
still apparently go and see this rat king, although if
I understand it right, some of them are missing because
other critters have come along and broken off a piece
(13:09):
or yeah, I think three of them were missing, and
all of them were kind of in they like some
of them have their brains eating out, like the thing
you know, which is gonna happen with a rat king here,
it's uh, it's just you have to offer it up.
And there were some other examples that he cited in
this uh that the Andreas cited in this article of
Estonian rat king's um there was one in nineteen seventy one.
(13:30):
The one in nineteen seventy one only because this of
three live rats allegedly, So that's that's pretty rating. Rat
king Yeah, like if you were to bring that to
a party, you would you would get some looks. Um.
And then there was another one in between nineteen fifteen
and nineteen twenty that was supposed to be more a
bust and Uh. The interesting thing about so many of
these accounts is like we're talking about the folk lore
(13:52):
aspect of it, and the initially you can't help but think,
um crypto zoology. You can't help it call be on
this because it's so it's so fantastic and so tied
in with myths and again our exaggerations of our fears.
It is essentially a monster of fantasy, or so it seems.
But then you look at these accounts and the guys
(14:13):
who are really into studying rat kings, and granted there
are not that many people who are into um empirically
studying rat kings, they tend to make into some arguments
for how this could actually happen. Yeah, you can tell
that they're really wishing that this were they could say
definitively rat kings exist, Right, There's there's some sort of
hope there in trying to explain it. But at the
(14:34):
same time they will look at the unlikeliness that these
conditions would actually exist for a rat king, um swarm.
I guess you could say to create itself. Yeah, Like
first thing, let's go go ahead and say it. Like
the most obvious thing was somebody faked a rat king.
Yeah right. All you have to do is get a
bunch of dead rats, which is not hard, especially if
(14:56):
you're a rat catcher. Right, if you're a rat catcher,
easy to get. I mean we could probably we could
build the rat king today if we needed to. We
could find them. We have a public comportation system. Yeah,
I mean, seriously, seriously, after the podcast, after the podcast,
we should we should do it, Okay, but yeah, you
just get a bunch of rats, dead ones, tie their
tails together. You're good to go. As it turns out,
(15:16):
you can't actually um and and apparently some people have
tried this, you can't tie rats tails together while they're conscious.
You would have to uh, you have to put them
under with something, which creates a whole lot more work
easier to just say if you beat them to death
of the broomstick. Well, and that just feels really serial
killer ishus on you're like some sort of crazed rat
(15:37):
serial killer. Yeah, I mean it's bad enough that you're
trying a bunch of dead rats together. Uh, at least
have them be dead rats. So so that's obviously one
huge possibility is that these are fabrications. This kind of
thing happens all the time with with any number of things.
That the Fiji Mermaid being in a classic example of this,
right right, Yeah, Fiji Mermaid. We talked about this um
in a previous podcast. And the Fiji Mermaids made up
(15:58):
of all sorts of different animal holes and you know,
part fish, you know, I believe there's some bird parts
in there. All. Yeah, some monkey school and it is
a wonderful looking creature. I mean, you look at you,
you think, God, I do wish that did exist, but
unfortunately it did not. They brought one to Atlanta's Fermbank
Museum a while back. Did you make it out to
(16:19):
that exhibit? I did not like the fantasy creatures thing.
Didn't you see one too at just like some sort
of roadside museum? Oh yeah, I think they had one
in the in a Bida Springs um uh, Louisiana. There's
an oddity museum that has a bunch of stuff like
that that's all assembled. Yeah. I remember getting the iPhone picture. Yeah, yeah,
(16:44):
they did. They definitely had a Fiji mermaid. They also
had all sorts of weird crocodile fish contraptions that the
owner had found at the mystery house, the Abta Springs,
the Abida Springs mystery house. Okay, so moving along from
the possibility that these are fake, what are some of
the the reasons this could actually happen? Right right? Okay,
(17:05):
So fear is one reason that's brought up, or they say,
you know, if if if you were happening, if you
happen to come upon these swarm of rats and they
were essentially just sort of cornered, that they might, in
fear all began to run the other way and tangle
up in each other, which seems kind of spacious, right right, Yeah,
(17:27):
especially since a lot of these are found supposally in burrows,
places where they're going to feel safe anyway, So like,
why when are they why would they be panicking? Exactly
exactly because when people found them right there, there was
plenty of room where they were. It wasn't like they
were just cornered. And and again there has never been
an account of a live rat king, so nobody's actually
(17:47):
been able to substantiate and say, oh, yeah, I found
it right here. I've got some some video, let's throw
it up on YouTube. Another possibility, and this was when
I ran across from the Natural History Museum in Altenburg, Germany,
which actually has a mummified specimen of thirty two entangled
rats on display that is supposedly dates back to the
argument they were going with is that rat pups are
(18:10):
still very naked in there, and their tails, but their
tails are very mobile, and so their tails are flipping
around and they end up getting entangled that way, and
then they can't leave and they starve again. That's kind
of suspect to whether whether that would actually happen or not. Right,
And then there's the frozen uh, this idea that that
they could be sitting there in a very cold environment,
(18:32):
huddling together and somehow their own in their own filth,
that's right. So we've got all sorts of mucus and
blood and and and just nesting materials there too. Anyone
who's ever seen a rat nest we talk about that's
a piece of our our language, the idea of a
rat's nest. It's just this random stuff. So there's all
sorts of things in there that could conceivably uh form
(18:54):
this google cluster of rat's tails, and and then suddenly
there's cold snap right right that they then that cold
snuff would have to be like a freeze dried cold snap, right, um,
not something that usually happens gradually. Uh you know, so again,
it doesn't really hold water. It doesn't really make sense
that they would just be flash frozen, which I think
brings this to the conclusion and most people that this
(19:15):
this is an animal of cryptozoology really and truly. Yeah,
it's really hard not to side with that. I mean,
the the article we were reading, the guy made a
really impassioned argument for this Estonian case because he was like,
this guy had no motive, he had no profit. He um,
he didn't attempt it to like it was falling apart
out of the tangles, like he wasn't trying to tighten
everything back up and retie the rat king. He also
(19:38):
didn't know about rat kings at all folklore and otherwise. Yeah,
but he wouldn't be the first. Like, you know, it's
an awesome idea. Sometimes people, you know, we've all had
that moment where we're like, dude, I just had this
awesome idea, what if what have I tied a bunch
of dead rats together? Yeah? And then people are like, oh,
you mean a rat king And you're like, oh, that's
already a thing, and they're like, yeah, that's kind of
been a thing for centuries. He's like, oh, man, yeah,
(19:58):
well what was what was I did? Do you want
to slow down the farm? So yeah, we tend we
tend to have to side with the with the whole
cryptosyological angle. I mean, granted, if rat kings do exist,
it's it's a rare, rare thing, and most of the
time we're not going to find it because these things
are gonna die, right because they can't. They can't really
um hunt or or forage for food in that condition,
(20:21):
and they would rot or be eaten by their fellow
rats or by other organisms. But still, from a science angle,
we have to side with the with the idea that
this is probably bunk. But you, sir, you ferreted out
the real Ramona, the real rat king, that's right. I
I refused to take no for an answer, even from
well even from science. Uh, when it comes to something
(20:42):
as interesting as the rat king. I was like, I
was thinking surely there's something that is equatable to this, right,
and sure enough, um, we do encounter something a rat
king like effect with trematodes. These are small parasitic flatworms
that use vertebrates as their definite hosts and mollusks as
their intermediate host. All right, we're talking about mollusks and birds, right,
(21:05):
So so yeah, they go through several of these parasites
go through several different phases, uh, several different forms. And
the form that goes through uh typically like you know,
like a bird or a duck is a circaria. Okay,
and these are larval forms, um and uh. They have
different ways of entering a species. UM. Some use their
(21:30):
little tails to swim for lack of a better phrase,
up into the duck. And then others have actually evolved
to have elongated tail so they can look like a prey.
And it's like kind of a fishing lure effect. You know.
I imagine one of those lures with the long wriggly tails.
The bird sees it, it eats it, and oops, you
just stay a parasite. Uh, it needs you to advance
out of this form. Well, there are some of these
(21:53):
um circaria. They have these long tails, and they will
actually intertwine with each other and form not not something
that not only looks kind of like a rat king,
but biologists actually call call it a ratt and cone
eg circaria, and and it's interesting one they do this,
the primary reason being it's the same reason that the
(22:15):
some of the circaria have the extra long tails to
attract the bird and make it think that it's um,
it's something good to eat. So if one is trying
to pull this out and trying to get a lot
of attention, better than a bunch of them cluster together, right,
retwine those little tails. And then they also use it
for increased mobility, which is rather interesting. That's right. They
also can conserve some of their energy if they all
(22:36):
work together. And I really like this idea of this
trojan horse sort of situation. You know, it's like, oh,
come here, ducky um, I have a delicious surprise for you,
and then unleashing all of these parasites upon the duck. Yeah. It.
This occurs across five different trematode superfamilies, and the members
(22:56):
of this um, of this uh, this rat king um. Again,
they rotate in the same direction, generating a current that
moves a batch up up to seven hundred circaria efficiently,
So there have seven hundred strong this particular triumatode rat king.
So I just find that that fascinating. Um, they're they're
(23:16):
a little yoked tales, I know, I'm telling you, it's
it's it's kind of frightening to think that parasites are
just so clever, Yeah, that you know that they could
cloak themselves and be like, yeah, look I am delicious. Yeah,
and of course I can't help but then apply that
model to rats and say like, well, all right, well,
was there any reason that rats could conceivably evolve any
kind of similar function, if not now, then eventually. But
(23:39):
but I don't think it really makes sense because hey,
they're not parasites. B there's no increased mobility or energy
conservation in forming one of these clusters, because it seems
like it's just a chaotic affair. If if rats were
to form into a rat king. I'm also thinking too,
that it would really inhibit their ability to um too,
(24:01):
squeeze themselves through sewer pipes up through your toilet, which,
by the way, they do because they follow the scent
of fecal matter. Yeah, So I mean you couldn't, But
wouldn't that be horrifying to open your toilet bowl and
a rat king? I mean that really is the stuff
of nightmares right there. Yeah, I mean, especially you have
your rooming with people. Come on, who left the rat
(24:23):
king in the toilet? Oh? I have so many um
digestive checks. Definitely a flush it down situation. Yeah, alright,
so rat kings. There you go. I hope everyone leaves
this podcast with a little more information about them. Uh
you know, maybe you've only heard about them in a
Terry Pratchett book or a reference on Dirty Rock, But
I dare say we went into unprecedented detail about the
(24:47):
rat king, and you know, the door is still open.
Maybe they exist, but most likely not. I'm going to
keep a keep my mind open a little bit. You know.
It was kind of like the big Foot. I tend
to doubt it, but maybe maybe one day. In the meantime,
we have microbial ones. All right, Well, hey, let's call
over the robots and see if we have any listener mail.
(25:07):
All right, we just heard from Lizzie and Lizzie right
then and says, hey, Robert and Jubi, I was listening
to your podcast today about hugging, and I was a
little bit surprised you didn't mention the hug shirt. I
was at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
back in August and saw this shirt on display. Being
a new transplant to Chicago and living over a thousand
miles from from my loved ones, I just thought about
(25:28):
how nice it would be to have a hug from
someone I missed. You send the hugs to a recipient
wearing their hug shirt by cell phone. It has somewhere
between fourteen fifteen centers all over the upper body to
simulate a real hug. I thought it was really neat,
and I was positive you were going to mention it
on the podcast and surprised that you didn't. And she
includes a video ironically, this is a how stuff orders
to go about this, right, Yeah, yeah, you know. Sometimes
(25:51):
awesome stuff also the tracks, and that's when we depend
on awesome folks to let us know about it. I
can't help but be reminded of the reading the the
idea of sending a hug dally like pushing a button,
and then someone gets a hug miles and miles away
on the other side of the globe of the this
Japanese device. It allows one to send a kiss over
the internet, and not just like the kind of smooth
(26:13):
you would give a child, but like a big, tuney kiss,
like a full blown French kiss. Wow. Yeah, So do
you put some sort of mouth piece on? Yeah, it's
like a mouth piece. It looks like something with dinnis
would put in your mouth in sexy already. Yeah, And
there's like an apparatus. It's look it's kind of like
a I guess it looks kind of like imagine a
joystick for a video game that you stick inside your
(26:36):
mouth and play with your tongue. And that's about what
this consists of. Wow, this this podcast really is the
stuff of nightmares right now. Rat kings and joysticks. Yeah,
but no, I think the hug shirt is pretty wonderful.
And I was thinking about how it's far less creepy
than the the other hug mechanism we were talking about,
(27:00):
in which it kind of looks like a mannequin that
you suction cut yourself with with the best that you
wear and it just sort of looks like the person's
molesting the mannequin. But I really love the idea of
having a hug shirt instead and having these pulses come
through from someone you know, it's just me being old passions.
It's a much more old fashioned and tamer version of
(27:20):
other remote control stimulation devices. So I think it's great.
There you go. That's that's love in the future right
there exactly. So, Hey, if you have anything you would
like to share about love in the future, about hugs
awkward or technological in nature, or about the mighty rat
king rat kings that you've known, rat kings that you've loved,
rat kings that you've found under your floorboards and burned
(27:41):
out of fear, let us know. You can find us
on Facebook and Twitter. We are below the Mind on
both of those, and you can send us an email
at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Works staff as we explore the most
(28:01):
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Tuchas Julian
know the Over the weekend, I received a call friend
of mine told me, Hey, um, I have a favor.
I've got this. Uh, this family member and his family
(00:26):
meat out of their house this weekend because of rats. Oh.
I thought, you're gonna say, witness relocation program. No, no, no,
this was in it'll well similar in some ways, but no,
this was this is a situation where they were in
the house and then they realized that there was a
serious rat problem, like like bad rat problem enough to
flee because there's so many. I mean, rats are are gross,
(00:48):
rats are disease carriers there, you know. And then we
have all these additional images of them, say, crawling into
cradles and eating babies at night and uh, you know,
or or firing up the oven and attempting to cook
things and causing house fires. These are common fears. Yeah,
are last howing you with their long long tails and uh.
(01:09):
In the midst of this that there was talk of like, oh,
the city's gonna come and demolish the house, like it's
that bad and the house is gonna be destroyed and
possibly burned, which a control burned, which sounded crazy to
me because it seems like if you burn a house
full of rats, you're just gonna send flaming rats out
into the surrounding neighborhoods. Now, I have to ask were
they keeping like cuts of meat in the basement or
(01:31):
just hanging on hooks? Yeah, I mean, I don't know
if there was like a cave underneath the house that
went to some secret rat underworld. But I had in
my mind the image of, like we were deprived the floorboards,
would we would we see there in the in the
darkness this uh, this this site like right out of
a German woodcut from the Middle Ages. Would we see
a rat king hole with all its little rats tangled
(01:55):
up in its tail? Yeah? A cluster kind of like
a what are those cookies where like clusters Google clusters?
You have like a Google cluster of rats. Oh my god,
that's disgusting. Yeah, it is disgusting. It's it's use. Somewhere
there exists a Google cluster of rats that's an edible
like street food. I mean, rats maybe good eating. That's
(02:18):
that's a that's a whole another issue entirely and h
and who knows ratkings maybe good eating. But but the
idea of the rat king I find so fascinating and
most people do because A it's grotesque, it's just purely grotesque.
And B it's uh, it's kind of a fictional, fantastic
exaggeration of humanities. Um long history with the rat because
(02:41):
as we've spread across the globe under nearly every continent,
I mean, well we've spread to every continent of obviously
at least one of those continents, is is more of
a just a foothold than anything. But the rats have
always come with us. They've come with us on our ships,
we've built cities, and they've moved in next to us.
They you know, anywhere we go, we're taking them with us.
And we're always waging wars with the rat to keep
(03:03):
it from invading our space and uh, living up the
fat of our land. Yeah. Yeah, And in fact, before
we actually get to rat kings and how horrific they are,
or maybe aren't get to that, um to your point
about infestation and how we've tried to keep them at
bay in seventeen eighty, a Japanese boat infested with sewer
rats shipwrecked off the Alaskan coast, and rats killed off
(03:26):
masses of residents, seabirds, and the island became known as
rat Island. Um. In two thousand and eight, could think
about them festering for for this song, right, the US
Fish and Wildlife Service code in the island with poisoned
grain because they were trying to get rid of them.
I mean, I'm not quite sure what the issue was. There.
Were they like paddling over in their boats to Alaska
(03:48):
and um, you know, scaring the townsfolk. But unfortunately when
they did that, they took down not only the rat,
but they also harmed all the other wildlife species. I mean,
obviously that's a good example of why rats haven't been
eradicated completely, right, because it's very hard to ferret them
out without ruining the entire environment. Yeah, they can eat
(04:08):
just about anything. They breed incredibly fast. Oh yeah, and
do you know why, because they don't care. They will
breed a mother in the in the newborn, will breed
a father and a sister, a brother and a sister.
I mean, it's kind of incest city when it comes
to rats, so and as humans we can't help but
be disgusted by that aspect of a ratdom as well. Yeah,
(04:28):
so that gives them many more breeding opportunities, and they
can live just about anywhere, I mean, aside from the
whole nearly every continent. They can live in cold climates,
they can live in hot climates. They can live in
your basement, they can live in your attic, they can
they can live in the most disgusting of circumstances, and
they're totally cool with it. They're like, Hey, I know
it's it's horrible in here, but we're gonna all breed
with each other anyway and eat everything we can well,
(04:50):
and not only just eat everything we can, but sometimes
mothers will eat their young as well, So there's infants
aside there, right, But as we've discussed our previous podcast,
we can't judge that too harsh way on a purely
economy of energy level, it just makes sense, well, and
it's not like the mother rats just sitting around going
nomenom nom, give me young. It's usually a case where
there's there's some sort of situation that is extraordinary and
(05:12):
that you know, some sort of food source is not available,
so she looks to her young. It's kind of like
the the rat equivalent of I'm not going to drink
all this water. I'm going to pour it out on
the plant kind of a thing. You know. It's just
it's it's it's sensible. A decision is that. And then,
of course the rat has a huge stigma for being
a plague carrier, the idea that these things are not
(05:33):
only living amongst us, but they are carrying diseases that
could wipe out whole cities. The rat becomes this dire
symbol of plague out of the Middle Ages. It's an
image that has never quite been able to shed well,
and people would look to the rat to try to ascertain,
you know, what the disease was doing, because if a
large population of rats were dying out, that was usually
(05:55):
a precursor to a plague coming and rolling down the street, right.
But it turns out the the rats were actually in
concert if you can say that with fleas. It was
really the fleas that we're carrying this and um reinfecting
the rats, which would then bring the plague to the
rat was really just a middleman in this whole plague business. Yeah, yeah,
it was. Yeah, you're right, I please please kind of
(06:16):
got away scot free here, um with the with the
old infant infesting of people's houses and streets and all
that good stuff. But you can imagine this medieval German
townsman looking into this, looking under the floorboards, prying him open.
Rats are scurring back, and he sees a rat king
down there. He sees, uh, say, I don't know, eight,
(06:36):
say ten, say thirty two? Um, rats with their tails
just intertwined into this vast, tangled knot of just grossness.
And imagine him seeing that and and knowing even then
that what this, what this might mean? You can just
you can you can imagine that being just such a
dire omen because it would mean you were living in
(06:57):
pretty close confines with a lot of rats, right well,
and that that cluster of rats could perhaps contain its
own bubonic plague, right Um. I mean that that would
be the fear, especially if that was the story that
was told you over and over growing up, particularly in Germany,
where apparently, um, well you know, some people have said
that a lot of these rat kings have been found.
(07:19):
And again, just to go back to this, we are
talking about a mass of rats entangled together, bound by blood,
fecal matter and other filth. Yeah, but of course aren't
we all uh yes, not today I took a shower. Well,
I mean on a figurative level, you know. But the
rat and Konig, the rat king, it's been a really
enduring image in Germany. You see it when you try. Well,
(07:41):
we'll get into sort of the possibilities of it existing
in real life and some of the arguments for and
against in a in a second. But right, but just
the idea of the rat king a again, I like
to think of it as an exaggeration of our attitudes
towards rats. B There have been some arguments that rat catchers.
Because you have a rat problem in the city, you
(08:02):
of course have a booming industry of rat catching, and
that is that's something that existed for along ago. It
still exists in the form of pet control, but they
tend not to call themselves rat catchers. Yeah, but that
kind of pestilence, thankfully, is not as widespread as it
used to be. But you would have rat catchers that
would catch a bunch of rats and sometimes they would
apparently tie their tails together as an easy way to
bring them in because you'd have kind of like a
(08:22):
rat bounty, like bring us, bring us eight rats, get
eight dollars. And I'm like, all right, well, I don't
have forgot my rats ack today. What am I gonna do?
I better string all their tails together and and bring
them in in a big grotesque heat. So there's that,
and then you have all these ideas, two very focal
ideas of the rats having some form of king or
(08:42):
having some form of queen. And in some of these
models of the king, the the rat king either is
this tangle of rats or it sets upon a tangle
of rat tails. And of course people have loved that
image to just in terms of of using that model
to apply to perceptions of crooked human rulers. Yeah. Yeah,
Martin Luther called the pope a lot of things. And
(09:04):
one of the things that he called the pope and
one of his many die tribes was a rat king
rat and coning, that's right, sitting on the backs of
his subjects, basically being well fed. So this again, yeah,
there's this image of this rat king sort of controlling
this swarm um and profiting from it. Really, right, And
even our beloved nutcracker ballet right, yeah, by some Yeah, yeah,
(09:27):
the rat king shows up there. Yeah, and the and
now in the versions that I had to sit through
a year after year as a child because my sisters
were all in ballet, the rat never had more than
one head. But apparently if you go back to some
of the older writings of the tale, uh, he'll have
more than one head. Calling back to this idea of
the true rat king, I'm going to say that some
producers sat down and said, you know what, this is
(09:49):
a great Pope tale, but maybe we should just have
one head because we really want to sell some tickets
to this and this is just way too nightmarish. All
the kids are like, ah, here's a foreheaded rat king. Yeah, well,
nothing around. I put it to anyone out there who's
involved in the ballet industry. Is it an industry? Would
you say, big industry? Yeah? That you know, the Nutcracker
(10:10):
is one of those things you hollowed every year because
it's a it's a guaranteed moneymaker. I think, and and
I think there is a tendency to maybe get lazy
with the Nutcracker suite. So the next time somebody staging
a performance, I say, do an old school rat king,
get eight male dancers out there, tie them together, and
have them dance throughout the play, or at least throughout
the first act before all the candy shows up. I
(10:32):
like this idea of doing this kind of a cob nutcracker.
Actually they should do it for adults, and it should
be a puppet show. I like it. Ok, we just
made it all right, all right? So those are some
of the ideas about the rat king as folk tale.
We should probably take a break, and when we come back,
we're going to get into some of these alleged examples
of real rat kings and what we can say about
(10:55):
their legitimacy. And also we'll go to the microbial level
and exact them in some some rather tiny rat king.
So let's pick with us, all right, we're back rat king.
Rat king. The earliest report comes from Germany in fifteen
sixty four, right, Yes, so they the sightings have been
(11:19):
around for a while. Um, but a credible sighting of
a live rat king has never really been confirmed, right.
I Mean, we have some stories here and there. There
was a really neat one out of Estonia. This was
the rat King of Sorrow. I like the references to
the rat kings as the rat king of as if
they actually had some sort of leaders dominion over. Yeah,
(11:39):
this was a really cool and we were reading an
article about from one Andre Milgun. This is January six,
two thousand five. You have this just sort of your
average Estonian and he finds one so allegedly finds a
rat king on the floor of his shed. Uh. The
animals are, you know, tither. They're unable to escape, So
the farmer's sun comes in with a stick and kills
(12:02):
it kills them. You know, it depends that you want
to frame that. But so apparently this cluster contains sixteen
rats and their tails were knotted together and get in
this lump that contained frozen sand and there had recently
been like a cold step And at the time that
they were discovered, only nine of the rats were live.
Three of the rats ended up falling off. The interesting
(12:25):
thing about this story is that the guy didn't immediately
call the newspaper. He thought it was weird. He put
it on a board and was like, hey, fellow Estonian villagers,
come check out this grossesque thing I found. I'm going
to leave it on the front porch for a little bit.
Come by and gock at it, and people came and
gocked at it. But then the zoologists found out about it, right,
was it like a cousin or something? Was a reporter
found out about it and hooked up a zoologists. Yeah,
(12:47):
so the next thing, you know, the zoologist come from
the museum at the University of Tartu and uh, this
is the natural history Zoological museum and they come and
collect it and preserve it. Now alcohol and you can
still apparently go and see this rat king, although if
I understand it right, some of them are missing because
other critters have come along and broken off a piece
(13:09):
or yeah, I think three of them were missing, and
all of them were kind of in they like some
of them have their brains eating out, like the thing
you know, which is gonna happen with a rat king here,
it's uh, it's just you have to offer it up.
And there were some other examples that he cited in
this uh that the Andreas cited in this article of
Estonian rat king's um there was one in nineteen seventy one.
(13:30):
The one in nineteen seventy one only because this of
three live rats allegedly, So that's that's pretty rating. Rat
king Yeah, like if you were to bring that to
a party, you would you would get some looks. Um.
And then there was another one in between nineteen fifteen
and nineteen twenty that was supposed to be more a
bust and Uh. The interesting thing about so many of
these accounts is like we're talking about the folk lore
(13:52):
aspect of it, and the initially you can't help but think,
um crypto zoology. You can't help it call be on
this because it's so it's so fantastic and so tied
in with myths and again our exaggerations of our fears.
It is essentially a monster of fantasy, or so it seems.
But then you look at these accounts and the guys
(14:13):
who are really into studying rat kings, and granted there
are not that many people who are into um empirically
studying rat kings, they tend to make into some arguments
for how this could actually happen. Yeah, you can tell
that they're really wishing that this were they could say
definitively rat kings exist, Right, There's there's some sort of
hope there in trying to explain it. But at the
(14:34):
same time they will look at the unlikeliness that these
conditions would actually exist for a rat king, um swarm.
I guess you could say to create itself. Yeah, Like
first thing, let's go go ahead and say it. Like
the most obvious thing was somebody faked a rat king.
Yeah right. All you have to do is get a
bunch of dead rats, which is not hard, especially if
(14:56):
you're a rat catcher. Right, if you're a rat catcher,
easy to get. I mean we could probably we could
build the rat king today if we needed to. We
could find them. We have a public comportation system. Yeah,
I mean, seriously, seriously, after the podcast, after the podcast,
we should we should do it, Okay, but yeah, you
just get a bunch of rats, dead ones, tie their
tails together. You're good to go. As it turns out,
(15:16):
you can't actually um and and apparently some people have
tried this, you can't tie rats tails together while they're conscious.
You would have to uh, you have to put them
under with something, which creates a whole lot more work
easier to just say if you beat them to death
of the broomstick. Well, and that just feels really serial
killer ishus on you're like some sort of crazed rat
(15:37):
serial killer. Yeah, I mean it's bad enough that you're
trying a bunch of dead rats together. Uh, at least
have them be dead rats. So so that's obviously one
huge possibility is that these are fabrications. This kind of
thing happens all the time with with any number of things.
That the Fiji Mermaid being in a classic example of this,
right right, Yeah, Fiji Mermaid. We talked about this um
in a previous podcast. And the Fiji Mermaids made up
(15:58):
of all sorts of different animal holes and you know,
part fish, you know, I believe there's some bird parts
in there. All. Yeah, some monkey school and it is
a wonderful looking creature. I mean, you look at you,
you think, God, I do wish that did exist, but
unfortunately it did not. They brought one to Atlanta's Fermbank
Museum a while back. Did you make it out to
(16:19):
that exhibit? I did not like the fantasy creatures thing.
Didn't you see one too at just like some sort
of roadside museum? Oh yeah, I think they had one
in the in a Bida Springs um uh, Louisiana. There's
an oddity museum that has a bunch of stuff like
that that's all assembled. Yeah. I remember getting the iPhone picture. Yeah, yeah,
(16:44):
they did. They definitely had a Fiji mermaid. They also
had all sorts of weird crocodile fish contraptions that the
owner had found at the mystery house, the Abta Springs,
the Abida Springs mystery house. Okay, so moving along from
the possibility that these are fake, what are some of
the the reasons this could actually happen? Right right? Okay,
(17:05):
So fear is one reason that's brought up, or they say,
you know, if if if you were happening, if you
happen to come upon these swarm of rats and they
were essentially just sort of cornered, that they might, in
fear all began to run the other way and tangle
up in each other, which seems kind of spacious, right right, Yeah,
(17:27):
especially since a lot of these are found supposally in burrows,
places where they're going to feel safe anyway, So like,
why when are they why would they be panicking? Exactly
exactly because when people found them right there, there was
plenty of room where they were. It wasn't like they
were just cornered. And and again there has never been
an account of a live rat king, so nobody's actually
(17:47):
been able to substantiate and say, oh, yeah, I found
it right here. I've got some some video, let's throw
it up on YouTube. Another possibility, and this was when
I ran across from the Natural History Museum in Altenburg, Germany,
which actually has a mummified specimen of thirty two entangled
rats on display that is supposedly dates back to the
argument they were going with is that rat pups are
(18:10):
still very naked in there, and their tails, but their
tails are very mobile, and so their tails are flipping
around and they end up getting entangled that way, and
then they can't leave and they starve again. That's kind
of suspect to whether whether that would actually happen or not. Right,
And then there's the frozen uh, this idea that that
they could be sitting there in a very cold environment,
(18:32):
huddling together and somehow their own in their own filth,
that's right. So we've got all sorts of mucus and
blood and and and just nesting materials there too. Anyone
who's ever seen a rat nest we talk about that's
a piece of our our language, the idea of a
rat's nest. It's just this random stuff. So there's all
sorts of things in there that could conceivably uh form
(18:54):
this google cluster of rat's tails, and and then suddenly
there's cold snap right right that they then that cold
snuff would have to be like a freeze dried cold snap, right, um,
not something that usually happens gradually. Uh you know, so again,
it doesn't really hold water. It doesn't really make sense
that they would just be flash frozen, which I think
brings this to the conclusion and most people that this
(19:15):
this is an animal of cryptozoology really and truly. Yeah,
it's really hard not to side with that. I mean,
the the article we were reading, the guy made a
really impassioned argument for this Estonian case because he was like,
this guy had no motive, he had no profit. He um,
he didn't attempt it to like it was falling apart
out of the tangles, like he wasn't trying to tighten
everything back up and retie the rat king. He also
(19:38):
didn't know about rat kings at all folklore and otherwise. Yeah,
but he wouldn't be the first. Like, you know, it's
an awesome idea. Sometimes people, you know, we've all had
that moment where we're like, dude, I just had this
awesome idea, what if what have I tied a bunch
of dead rats together? Yeah? And then people are like, oh,
you mean a rat king And you're like, oh, that's
already a thing, and they're like, yeah, that's kind of
been a thing for centuries. He's like, oh, man, yeah,
(19:58):
well what was what was I did? Do you want
to slow down the farm? So yeah, we tend we
tend to have to side with the with the whole
cryptosyological angle. I mean, granted, if rat kings do exist,
it's it's a rare, rare thing, and most of the
time we're not going to find it because these things
are gonna die, right because they can't. They can't really
um hunt or or forage for food in that condition,
(20:21):
and they would rot or be eaten by their fellow
rats or by other organisms. But still, from a science angle,
we have to side with the with the idea that
this is probably bunk. But you, sir, you ferreted out
the real Ramona, the real rat king, that's right. I
I refused to take no for an answer, even from
well even from science. Uh, when it comes to something
(20:42):
as interesting as the rat king. I was like, I
was thinking surely there's something that is equatable to this, right,
and sure enough, um, we do encounter something a rat
king like effect with trematodes. These are small parasitic flatworms
that use vertebrates as their definite hosts and mollusks as
their intermediate host. All right, we're talking about mollusks and birds, right,
(21:05):
So so yeah, they go through several of these parasites
go through several different phases, uh, several different forms. And
the form that goes through uh typically like you know,
like a bird or a duck is a circaria. Okay,
and these are larval forms, um and uh. They have
different ways of entering a species. UM. Some use their
(21:30):
little tails to swim for lack of a better phrase,
up into the duck. And then others have actually evolved
to have elongated tail so they can look like a prey.
And it's like kind of a fishing lure effect. You know.
I imagine one of those lures with the long wriggly tails.
The bird sees it, it eats it, and oops, you
just stay a parasite. Uh, it needs you to advance
out of this form. Well, there are some of these
(21:53):
um circaria. They have these long tails, and they will
actually intertwine with each other and form not not something
that not only looks kind of like a rat king,
but biologists actually call call it a ratt and cone
eg circaria, and and it's interesting one they do this,
the primary reason being it's the same reason that the
(22:15):
some of the circaria have the extra long tails to
attract the bird and make it think that it's um,
it's something good to eat. So if one is trying
to pull this out and trying to get a lot
of attention, better than a bunch of them cluster together, right,
retwine those little tails. And then they also use it
for increased mobility, which is rather interesting. That's right. They
also can conserve some of their energy if they all
(22:36):
work together. And I really like this idea of this
trojan horse sort of situation. You know, it's like, oh,
come here, ducky um, I have a delicious surprise for you,
and then unleashing all of these parasites upon the duck. Yeah. It.
This occurs across five different trematode superfamilies, and the members
(22:56):
of this um, of this uh, this rat king um. Again,
they rotate in the same direction, generating a current that
moves a batch up up to seven hundred circaria efficiently,
So there have seven hundred strong this particular triumatode rat king.
So I just find that that fascinating. Um, they're they're
(23:16):
a little yoked tales, I know, I'm telling you, it's
it's it's kind of frightening to think that parasites are
just so clever, Yeah, that you know that they could
cloak themselves and be like, yeah, look I am delicious. Yeah,
and of course I can't help but then apply that
model to rats and say like, well, all right, well,
was there any reason that rats could conceivably evolve any
kind of similar function, if not now, then eventually. But
(23:39):
but I don't think it really makes sense because hey,
they're not parasites. B there's no increased mobility or energy
conservation in forming one of these clusters, because it seems
like it's just a chaotic affair. If if rats were
to form into a rat king. I'm also thinking too,
that it would really inhibit their ability to um too,
(24:01):
squeeze themselves through sewer pipes up through your toilet, which,
by the way, they do because they follow the scent
of fecal matter. Yeah, So I mean you couldn't, But
wouldn't that be horrifying to open your toilet bowl and
a rat king? I mean that really is the stuff
of nightmares right there. Yeah, I mean, especially you have
your rooming with people. Come on, who left the rat
(24:23):
king in the toilet? Oh? I have so many um
digestive checks. Definitely a flush it down situation. Yeah, alright,
so rat kings. There you go. I hope everyone leaves
this podcast with a little more information about them. Uh
you know, maybe you've only heard about them in a
Terry Pratchett book or a reference on Dirty Rock, But
I dare say we went into unprecedented detail about the
(24:47):
rat king, and you know, the door is still open.
Maybe they exist, but most likely not. I'm going to
keep a keep my mind open a little bit. You know.
It was kind of like the big Foot. I tend
to doubt it, but maybe maybe one day. In the meantime,
we have microbial ones. All right, Well, hey, let's call
over the robots and see if we have any listener mail.
(25:07):
All right, we just heard from Lizzie and Lizzie right
then and says, hey, Robert and Jubi, I was listening
to your podcast today about hugging, and I was a
little bit surprised you didn't mention the hug shirt. I
was at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
back in August and saw this shirt on display. Being
a new transplant to Chicago and living over a thousand
miles from from my loved ones, I just thought about
(25:28):
how nice it would be to have a hug from
someone I missed. You send the hugs to a recipient
wearing their hug shirt by cell phone. It has somewhere
between fourteen fifteen centers all over the upper body to
simulate a real hug. I thought it was really neat,
and I was positive you were going to mention it
on the podcast and surprised that you didn't. And she
includes a video ironically, this is a how stuff orders
to go about this, right, Yeah, yeah, you know. Sometimes
(25:51):
awesome stuff also the tracks, and that's when we depend
on awesome folks to let us know about it. I
can't help but be reminded of the reading the the
idea of sending a hug dally like pushing a button,
and then someone gets a hug miles and miles away
on the other side of the globe of the this
Japanese device. It allows one to send a kiss over
the internet, and not just like the kind of smooth
(26:13):
you would give a child, but like a big, tuney kiss,
like a full blown French kiss. Wow. Yeah, So do
you put some sort of mouth piece on? Yeah, it's
like a mouth piece. It looks like something with dinnis
would put in your mouth in sexy already. Yeah, And
there's like an apparatus. It's look it's kind of like
a I guess it looks kind of like imagine a
joystick for a video game that you stick inside your
(26:36):
mouth and play with your tongue. And that's about what
this consists of. Wow, this this podcast really is the
stuff of nightmares right now. Rat kings and joysticks. Yeah,
but no, I think the hug shirt is pretty wonderful.
And I was thinking about how it's far less creepy
than the the other hug mechanism we were talking about,
(27:00):
in which it kind of looks like a mannequin that
you suction cut yourself with with the best that you
wear and it just sort of looks like the person's
molesting the mannequin. But I really love the idea of
having a hug shirt instead and having these pulses come
through from someone you know, it's just me being old passions.
It's a much more old fashioned and tamer version of
(27:20):
other remote control stimulation devices. So I think it's great.
There you go. That's that's love in the future right
there exactly. So, Hey, if you have anything you would
like to share about love in the future, about hugs
awkward or technological in nature, or about the mighty rat
king rat kings that you've known, rat kings that you've loved,
rat kings that you've found under your floorboards and burned
(27:41):
out of fear, let us know. You can find us
on Facebook and Twitter. We are below the Mind on
both of those, and you can send us an email
at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Works staff as we explore the most
(28:01):
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
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