December 11, 2018 • 48 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, guest Katie Goldin from the podcast 'Creature Feature' drops in to chat with Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick about weird biology and maybe a monster or two.
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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 Joe McCormick. In Today,
we're bringing you a special conversation with another host in
our network. That's right, We're gonna be talking to Katie Golden.
(00:23):
She's the host of Creature Feature. And yeah, this is
just a fun opportunity for us to support a new
science show in our general network and chat with just
a very knowledgeable host. Yeah, Creature Feature is a is
a great new show. Katie knows a lot about animals
and biology and evolution and psychology and uh, and so
(00:44):
we we wanted our listeners to go check out that show.
Get into that too. I think it'll be right up
your alley. Yeah. She chats with guests about, you know,
curious tidbits regarding animal biology, animal behavior, and it publishes
every Wednesday. It was kind of sandwiched in between Stuff
to Blow your Mind episodes like that, Right for all
those people who are like, where can I get more
(01:04):
leeches and bat sex between my two weekly episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind? This is where you go.
All right, We're gonna play a trailer before we jump
into our interview with Katie, and I also just want
to let everybody know if you want to check this
out online. The website for Creature Feature is Creature Feature
pod dot com. All right, let's have a listen to
(01:25):
that trailer. Humanity has spent a long time distancing ourselves
from the animal Kingdom. We wear clothes over our nakedness,
use the stock market, and go to the bathroom and
specially designated areas. But if you take a closer look
at the animal Kingdom, you'll find blood, bands and treachery
(01:48):
that make Game of Thrones seem like a dumb show
for babies. I'm Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary
biology at Harvard and I pretend to be a bird
on Twitter and my new podcast, Creature Feature brings you
tales of love, murder, sex, betrayal, and deception and the
lives of both animals and humans. We asked the questions,
(02:12):
what is going on in the brains of people who
suffer the delusion that they're a living corpse? How does
a romantic relationship work out between a man in a car?
What do you do when you find out your lover
wants to move in to your body. On Creature Feature,
we view nature in man from a new perspective each episode,
(02:32):
asking a comedian to get inside the minds of animals
so we can explore the startling connections to human psychology.
Join us every Wednesday starting on Halloween and subscribe on
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your sick auditory kicks.
All right, well, let's go ahead and have a chat
with Katie Golden, host of Creature Feature. Welcome to Stuff
(03:03):
to blow your mind. Hey, great to be here. Could
you introduce yourself to the audience out there. Yeah, So,
I'm Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology at Harvard,
and I run the Twitter account pro Bird Rights, where
I pretend to be a bird activist, and I host
(03:23):
the new show from How Stuff Works called Creature Feature,
where we take an animals eye view at human behavior
and a humans eye view looking at animal behavior. So
I love this particular angle because, yeah, we can't help
but but look at the animal world, and we on
one level, we can't help but see them as as
(03:44):
little or large versions of ourselves, and then we can
freak out a bit when they do something that is
totally in human. Yeah, I just think it's it's interesting
because there's either the tendency to other over anthropomorphizes or
under anthropy morph us. So, UM, we'll see an animal
behavior that we think, oh, they're feeling a certain way, like, um,
(04:08):
if an insect is uh is stalking, something like like
the bullet spider likes to capture its prey by swinging
a piece of of its web with the sticky bullus
on the end, which is like this this bulb that uh,
you know, it's it's fashioned after it. It's kind of
like that weapon, which is like a string with those
(04:30):
two heavy weights, and then you swing it and you
capture your prey. And then that's what the bullet spider does.
So when you're watching him do that, you're thinking, oh,
he's thinking, oh, here we go, gonna try to get
this fly and oh, shoot, I missed, and then he
looks disappointed. But of course it's a spider, so it's
very unlikely it feels things like disappointment. But on the
other hand, I feel like more intelligent animals like especially
(04:55):
dogs um who have co evalved with us and chimpanzee
is and other primates and uh uh. Sea mammals that
are pretty complex do actually feel um emotions and and
it is reasonable to attribute human esque feelings to them.
And uh so, I think that's really interesting. I think
(05:17):
one of the reasons that the whole like human pretending
to be an animal on Twitter, one of the reasons
that is so interesting is because it tends to tell
us more about like humans in the nature of social
media that does about animals. Yeah, I mean so, one
thing is I find birds to be innately funny because
(05:40):
they seem so self absorbed if you watch them. I
used to own a couple of pair of heats. I've
been an avid bird watcher since I was a toddler. Really,
my mom used to say I would chase birds and
get really disappointed because they wouldn't make friends with me.
So I've always had an interest in birds, and they
just they they The way they carry themselves is it's
(06:00):
with such arrogance and with such self confidence and the
little head bob that they do, and the preening and
the fluffing up, and I feel like they kind of
I think when our relationship with social media is at
times really great, it can be used for wonderful things,
but often it's very egotistical, very self indulgent. And so
(06:24):
that's why I feel like a bird is a great
character to have on Twitter and social media because that
like self preening, uh just comes so naturally to birds.
And it's really fun to explore the kinds of self
centeredness that I think we we all have to a
certain extent where everything is about us. We're uncomfortable when
(06:47):
we're talking about things that aren't about us, and uh
so it's it's just fun to explore that from a
little acute, little bird. Another thing I love about human
contemplations of the animal, Uh it comes to into these
sort of folk ideas that we have about like, say
what certainly what our pets are, but also regarding things
(07:07):
like the squirrel. Uh. This is something that we we
talked about on on our show recently about uh getting
down into the meat eating habits of the of the squirrel,
and also some of the ideas about squirrel predation about
not just eating, uh you know, not just scavenging for me,
but actively pursuing prey at least in certain certain circumstances.
(07:28):
And it really throws our sort of folk mentality for
what this animal is out the window and we either
have to embrace or run from this this new idea
that the science gives us. Yeah, that's really interesting. Um.
When I was in school, I did this study that
made me seem really weird amongst my peers because what
(07:48):
we had to do is go out there with our
clipboards and study the squirrels on campus. Um. And so
you're just sitting there watching a squirrel eating nuts for hours. Um.
And one thing, they're so highly programmed to get maximum calories.
So if they find a nut that has a hole
(08:11):
in it, they're going to eat it immediately because they
have figured out uh that that whole means that there's
a larva in there for a type of moth that
if they just bury it, that larva is going to
eat the meat of the nut. Uh. And if they
eat it now, they get that extra protein that the
meat of the insect uh, in addition to the meat
(08:35):
of the acorn. But if they bury it, they don't
get anything. So they've learned to hedge their beds there
and eat it immediately, whereas pristine nuts they will bury
and say for later. So they're extremely opportunistic. And um,
I don't find it surprising that they actively go after
meat because they're just so there. They require so many
(08:57):
much caloric intake that they will do what they can.
And I think that's kind of an interesting um. I mean,
it's this is not they aren't actually the link evolutionarily,
but you can kind of see how that sort of
shrew like mammal can be a link but from or
before an insectivore to uh the omnivorous um mammals that
(09:22):
that are like badgers and uh ferrets and so on,
that that can evolve from those more harmless seeming mammals.
I love how the squirrel carnivory and squirrel predation thing
reveals that there's just like people think. I mean, people
in places where squirrels are common think they know everything
(09:43):
there is to know about squirrels just by looking out
the back window or something, because you see them all
the time. And then when you suddenly become aware that
they're they're doing these bloody things. Not all the time,
but sometimes they're doing these bloody things that you had
no idea about, it sort of makes you realize that
there's so much to nature that you are completely blind to,
even when you think you're looking at it a lot. Yeah,
(10:05):
it's sort of that weird shock moment you get when
you see like a heron with a rabbit or a
mammal like in its mouth and you're like, whoa that
bird is? Because like we think of when we think
of birds of prey, we think of raptors, so hawks, eagles,
osprery's the ones with the you know, the menacing looking ones.
(10:27):
Herons look beautiful and elegant, like, you know, these these
exquisite pretty creatures. But they'll they'll eat a go for
for sure. I think we were talking about the example.
It's it's in one of the David Attenborough documentaries of
these horrible sites of pelicans just gobbling up baby birds,
(10:48):
just cramming them into their beaks and their little wings
and feet sticking out all over the place, eating them
like popcorns. Yeah. Funny, Yeah, that's uh, they'll yeah, I mean,
they got a lot of space in those beaks, might
as well fill it up with baby birds. Yeah, I
mean a lot of it, A lot of it. Especially
these these acts of predation. They do come down to
the the raw economy of of life. I mean you
(11:12):
see it, especially in examples of say, cannibalism um. And
and also we've talked a bit about this on the
show with the coprophagiah the consumption of poop, which which
once you boil away, boil down, you take away so
many of the human complications associated with the topic. You're like,
well that makes sense for an animal. Yeah, You're you're
(11:33):
being efficient. You're recycling food, digesting it and then saving it,
so a lot for a lot of animals. It's also
like the special poops that aren't really pooped, they're like
food poop. Uh, specifically like in guinea pigs and wombats
and stuff, they make the little food poops pops. Yeah. Yeah.
And also with the cannibalism, I think it can be
(11:55):
really counterintuitive. So like filial cannibalism, um seem like, well
why would you do that, You're you're gonna be an
evolutionary dead end. But with fish, um, when they practice
eating their own babies, um, they're actually picking out the
ones that are the least fit, so the slowest to develop,
(12:16):
and then that way they can spend all their time
investing in the baby fish that are most likely too
mature to adulthood. So they're um, they're both benefiting from
the extra nutrition from eating their babies, and then also
the time um focused on the most likely to succeed.
(12:37):
So it's this very cruel capitalist, uh like economic um
cost benefits analysis that these fish do. They don't really
have any sentiment for their own offspring, going all in
on the best ones exactly. H doesn't help that they're
called fries, which sounds delicious. Baby fish are called fries sous.
(13:00):
Yesterday I was listening to a couple of recent episodes
of your show, which I I must say, I really enjoyed.
I was listening to the ones about animals who are
worse at sex, and there was one that we've talked
about on the show before that I really thought might
come up, but but y'all didn't mention. And it's the
male nursery web spider. Do you do you know about
(13:21):
this one? Tell me a little more about it. The
it's the one that so they bring nuptial gifts that
in order to yeah, to woo the female spiders. The
males bring like a package that's supposed to be a
food item wrapped in silk. But the way that the
bad gift giving comes in is that a lot of
them try to pass off a insect husk that they
(13:41):
have already drained of all the delicious fluids, or like
a little or like a little twig. Yeah, yeah, just
like nothing, and they're they're trying to cheat and such
dirt bags. It's yeah, So I've actually I have heard
of this and I've done a little bit of reading
about it, and it's it's so interesting because they'll do
a really elaborate wrapping jobs. So it'says if someone hands
(14:03):
you this beautifully wrapped gift with bows and ribbons and spangles,
and then uh, it takes you, like it takes you
a long time to unwrap it, and as you're unwrapping it,
there like making the moves on you, and like by
the time you open the gift and it's like a rock,
they've already copulated with you. And then you're like, hey,
(14:23):
get back here, but then they're they're running off laughing.
I think we did read a study, just off my memory,
I think we were a study when we talked about
this that found that the ones who brought bad gifts
were more likely to be the victims of sexual cannibalism afterwards.
That's right, So, like I mean, it makes sense too.
(14:44):
So if you've brought a you're you're taking a big
risk there because while you are getting rid of the
cost of hunting for a piece of food, Um, once
they open it and nothing's there, they're gonna go to
prey mode because or pre it or more mode because
they don't have a snack. So you know, they're like, oh, hey,
(15:04):
well there's a snack over there that was just having
sex with me, so I'll eat that. Do you do
you have a favorite example that you wanna tell the
stuff to blow your mind crowd about from the Bad
Sex episode? Well, I think my favorite is, um the
uh the new to branch uh having disposable penises, because um,
(15:31):
it's really interesting. So uh they will have, uh, they'll
copulate and then after copulation, they'll just shed their penis.
Um and oh, by the way, new tole branches are
these really interesting? They look like um, uh they're a
marine animal that looks like a sort of beautiful snails
(15:56):
or slug with all these colors and there are pretty
neat looking um and so uh it'll once it sheds
the penis, it grows one back within twenty four hours
because it actually has this big coil of um of
genital material uh inside of its body, and so it's
(16:19):
like a fruit by the foot that just kind of
like um keeps coming out. And the reason it does this,
it actually has a really good reason. So it's too
basically ensure that when it copulates, it's given like it's
all fresh um uh sperm material. So it's all its
(16:42):
own sperm material, and it's able to um. It's like
decreases the chance that it's going to get uh sperm
from a previous copulation with the other new to branch
on its penis, and then if it sheds, it puts
a new one in. Then it's like guaranteed that that
(17:03):
this is gonna be all its own genetic material. And
it's like the lysol wipe method of mating. Yeah, I
was thinking when I was listening to that of like
those things where you tear a ticket off at the
at the deli counter or something number forty two, servicing
(17:25):
number forty two. These are beautiful creatures, though I was
just looking at images of them. They look kind of
like eighties glam rock slugs. They really do um. They
and there's so many different kinds. Some of them look
like dragons. Some of them look like a scrunchy from
the eighties, like you were saying, they're uh, they're beautiful.
(17:49):
Animals are also hermaphrodites, so they they have the capability
of having both sexual organs, which is really interesting. All Right,
we need to take a quick break, but we will
be right back with more of our conversation with Katie.
Thank thank Alright, we're back now on Creature Feature. It's
(18:10):
it's of course, not only just about animals. It's also
about the guests that you have on to discuss these animals. Uh.
So each episode has a particular guest in a particular
theme or topic in place. How do you go about
putting those two together, Like which comes first, the guests
or the topic? Well, so all right, it's usually the
topic first, so I'll write my notes, and then I
(18:33):
kind of tried to think about guests who might fit
best with that topic. So, for instance, I was really
interested in looking at vices in um uh in the
animal world, so drug use drinking, birds who get drunk, uh,
animals who seek out natural highs um and so the
(18:55):
guest I chose. Robert Evans has written a book on
the history of advice and he talks a little bit
about the evolutionary history of getting drunk and uh so
he was perfect for that episode also because he's tried
out some really interesting drugs. Yeah, he's He of course
is also the host of Behind the Bastards. That's right,
(19:15):
that's right, it's a great podcast. So earlier you mentioned
that when you were a child you were not able
to actually make friends with birds. And on the show
on Creature feature you interview humans. But if you could
have one bird on the show as a guest, and
you could actually speak to that bird and ask you questions,
which bird species would you choose? Oh, that's a really
(19:38):
good question. I think, uh, any species of parasitic birds,
so cuckoos or cowbirds or honey guides because they're so sneaky.
Um if for those of you who don't know, cuckoos
will uh lay their eggs in the nests of host
(19:59):
species these uh and trick them into raising their own young.
And they use a lot of different strategies, like sometimes
the baby chicks have voices that sound like a bunch
of baby birds, So then the host species feels compelled
to feed it way more food than they would normally
feed a single baby bird. They also push out the
(20:21):
babies from the nests. Um. And when we'll kill the
host species, real babies. Um. And sometimes the cuckoo parents
will disguise themselves as raptors, so have the uh have
stripes on their bellies and curved beaks that will look
make them look like predatory birds. Um. And they're so
(20:42):
devious that I feel like it would be they would
be really interesting to interview, like like interviewing criminal or
something where it's just like like why why do you
do this? And um, uh like how how could you
so like a hard hitting sixty minutes styled Yeah, yeah,
(21:05):
like Frost v. Nixon like me versus Birdston, Like why
did they always keep going back into the prison to
interview Charles Manson again? It's like is he going to
have something good to say this time? Yeah? Like a
true bird crime podcast where yeah, like like why do
(21:26):
you do these crimes? Birds? Stop it? So I've got
another question along those lines. I assume you have the
same kind of uh attitude in general toward animal life
that we do, which is like we try not to
have negative emotions about animal behaviors and and always just
like have a sense of wonder about the natural world
(21:47):
and positive feelings about animals, even when they do things
that if humans did then we would find them disgusting.
But is there an animal that you find you you
can't separate your emotional reaction from, Like there's just some
animal that you can't help but feel contempt for even
though you know you shouldn't. Yeah, So I think it's
interesting because a lot of animals that normally you would
(22:10):
feel discussed for, like spiders or even even things like
parasitic wasps that are really disgusting, I'm too interested in
to find truly disgusting, So I think, in all honesty,
even though I understand that like that cockroaches and then
(22:31):
other pests and and things like parasites. So when my
dog gets fleas or a tick, or when she was
a puppy she had round worm, as a lot of
puppies have the disgust I feel for those kinds of
insects is too much for me to overcome, because while
I find parasites actually really fascinating, when it's affecting my dog,
(22:54):
who I love, you know, it's I just feel so angry.
So when I would capture a tick guy would be
like cursing at it and and be like, you know
you messed up now, buddy, because I messed with the
wrong dog. Um. And it's really the only time that
I because like I don't I don't like to kill
spiders that are in my house, So like I'll I'll
(23:17):
capture them and release them outside and give them like
a little snack of tiny sandwich to take with them
because I care about them. But like finding a tick, yeah,
finding like fleas, I really get so angry that I
have to kill them because it's like, how dare you
hurt my dog? What did she ever do to you? Well,
(23:38):
they are these are the animals that are still the enemy.
I mean it's you can't look at ketos and ticks,
mosquitoes ticks and it's like guinea worm. I mean, these
these things are still enemies of humanity. If there's anything
that truly deserves our hatred and contempt in the animal world,
I think that's probably it. Yeah. I mean, like I
can't even though find my way to eating like rats,
(24:01):
because I mean I'm afraid of them. I don't want
them in my house. But once one got in my
heating vent and like lived there for a while, and
I kind of halfheartedly put some traps in there because
it's like, well, I can't have this rat in here,
you know, pooping in my and where the air comes in.
(24:22):
But um it in a trap went off, and I
felt kind of like, h huh, that's I'm sad. I'm
I'm relieved, but sad. I feel bad that I killed
a rat. And then I opened up the vent and
there was the trap with like a tuft of hair
in it, and the rat was nowhere to be found.
And I was like, at that point, I was like,
you've deserved it, buddy. He deserved to survive. So I
(24:44):
didn't mess with it anymore. Eventually it went away, but
it was just like, you know, I just had this
rat living in my vent. It's like, oh, there's Mr
Wiggles doing his thing. I find that I have complex
emotions regarding like rats and mice and so forth in
our urban environments, because on one level, I'm like, you're rat,
you're not supposed to be here. But then I have
(25:05):
been by I mean, you know, humans, we've done so
much to unbalance the environment by building a house here,
by having all these uh these these artificial food sources
in the area. Uh, it's really on us that that
they're here at all anyway, And so then I end
up feeling guilty for for having to put out the traps,
(25:25):
even though they're the ones that are breaking into my home. Right,
it's not to them, it's not our our homes. It's
like this is their natural environment because they've learned to
they've learned to survive in human environment. And that's so
interesting because for most animals, when humans move in, they
(25:46):
just die off or move out. And for the animals
that can actually adapt to human society and thrive, we hate.
We hate them for being able to do that. We
resent them for invading our bass even though you know,
if anything, were the invaders that are encroaching on most
(26:06):
animal territory and typically just breaking havoc and wiping them outain.
And we have these these scamp few hero animals that
are able to live with us, and then we're we
have the goal to hate them for it. Hating hating
a rat for getting into your pasta boxes or whatever.
It is almost like hating a dog for loving, you know,
(26:29):
it's just like what we made them do, right, right,
they co evolved with us over thousands and thousands of
years dogs and rats and somehow rats are the bad guys.
You know. We actually talked about this in a couple
of episodes we did UM earlier this year about the
(26:50):
idea of urban evolution, ways that animals are adapting to
urban landscapes. And there's a lot of fascinating stuff going
on with animals in urban spaces, like the idea that
in some cases, uh, that urban spaces might be selecting
for personality traits and animals like neophilia, where like a
racu raccoon has a better chance of surviving in a
(27:13):
city if it's the kind of raccoon with a personality
that wants to approach unfamiliar objects rather than regard them
with caution. Yeah. Yeah, that's It's very interesting because you
can take an animal that is feral and over you know,
just a few generations start to find surprisingly uh tame traits.
(27:38):
So there you know that experiment with UM the silver
foxes in Russia where uh they were breeding them for
they're testing to see if they could breed in these
more tame traits and UM over, I mean it was
like a couple of decades, but uh, just a few
(28:01):
like several generations of these foxes, they would do the
ones that had that neophilia where it's not that they
were fearful of humans or aggressive towards humans, but sort
of politely interested in humans. And then they kept selecting
those foxes, and then they started having patchy fur, like
having spots and patches like dogs do on their coats.
(28:24):
And then there the cartilage in their ears became softer,
and so they would have ears that would fold down, uh,
like in dogs. So it's really interesting to see how
those tame characteristics that we see in dogs have some
there must be some shared genetic links where some the
(28:45):
genes responsible for a more curious, tame personality can also
be linked to something just superficial like ear cartilage. Uh So,
I think that's really I wonder if raccoons had enough
generations of these tame, more curious raccoons, if they would
start to, you know, like look cuter in some way.
(29:07):
Like we actually hypothesized that in the episode. We were like,
I wonder if over many generations, city dwelling animals will
tend to become cuter. Raccoons kind of have a leg
up on the situation because they are already pretty cute.
I mean, have you seen the video of the raccoon
trying to wash cotton candy? Yes? Always sad, heartbreaking, it's
(29:29):
the human condition. It's a modern day sisyphis because the
ra the sorry, the raccoon has this piece of cotton candy,
it's given and so because it's a raccoon and they
like to wash their food because they're so fastidious that
he went into the river and tried to wash it
and it dissolved and he's like, what is this? What
(29:52):
is this witchcraft? He gets a new piece of cotton
candy but does the same thing and he doesn't learn.
I know, poor baby. So Katie, uh we again, we
talk a lot about biology on the show, and one
of our favorite topics as well is monsters, both in
terms of the biological hybridity that is often on display
(30:12):
with them and because no matter how bizarre the monster noot,
no matter how weird the creature, and a you know,
science fiction film happens to be nature usually has it
beat for weirdness. So we were wondering, do you have
any favorite monsters or film or fiction that invoke real
world biology in some way, shape or form. Mm hmm. Yeah,
(30:34):
actually I do. So do you know that video game
The Last of Us, So they have the I guess
the monsters in the game are the people that have
been infected with this zombiesque virus um. But it's not
actually sorry, it's not a virus at all. Um. It's
(30:55):
a fungus. So it's called courtis Ups in the game.
And it's really cool because I think the game designers
were paying attention to actual evolutionary biology because Court of
Steps is a type of fungus that does in fact
infect the brains of insects. So in the game, this
(31:16):
fungus creates spores that you will breathe in and it'll
affect infect your brain, causing you to be aggressive. Um.
And then some of the later monsters are have this
like really creepy overgrowth of fungus, just like sprouting out
of their heads and growing over their bodies. Um. And
(31:37):
in fact, like court a scepts in real life, this
fungus will uh grow sprout out of the heads of
ants and other insects and cause them to kind of
go a little cookie, so they will leave. They'll either
be carried off by fellow ants who are like, oh,
(31:59):
this is uh, this is a zombie ant, so they'll
carry it off, and those ants that actually carry the
infected ant will go on a suicide mission because they're like, well,
we're going to get infected too, so we don't want
to risk the rest of the colony um which is
also very kind of like a trope from um zombie movies.
(32:20):
But so the the infected ant, once it's off on
its own and it's in the final stages of this infection,
it will have this this like instinct to climb up
either a plant stalk or up a branch as high
as it can and then clean bite down on it.
(32:40):
Do this like death grip, a literal death grip, because
it dies and then the fungus sprouts out of its
head and then it will produce spores that will spread
and hopefully infect another insect. So it's controlled this insect
to become like an incubator for more spores, just like
the in the Last of Us, which I think it's
(33:03):
really one of my favorite I know it's a video game,
but it's like, to me, beats a lot of the
zombie movies or zombie genre because it's so cool and
how carefully they constructed this zombie scenario. I'm not a
big gamer, but I've played that game multiple times. I
think it's really excellent, and I love the mythology there.
(33:23):
It reminds me a little bit of of a nineteen
sixty three Toho movie from Japan called Matango, not in
a way where I think there's actually any connective tissue
between the films, And I don't think Metango has a
lot of science in it. It's got mushroom, has mushroom monsters,
and like the mushroom spores turn humans into like into
(33:44):
gradually more mushroom e creatures. That's interesting, that's so cool.
One of the things that's so fascinating about stuff like
the Court accepts parasite, though, is the specificity of the
behaviors that generates, you know, like you can imagine very
(34:04):
it feels more natural to say, okay, you could get
some kind of parasite that would have a very very
broad kind of effect on your behavior, like maybe the way, Oh,
what's the toxoplasma one the idea that it that it
toxoplasma toxoplasma Gandhi. I think it's called that it uh.
It reduces the fear and caution and inhibitions and mice,
(34:27):
so that they're more likely to go out and be
eaten by a cat, and it increases their attraction to
the what the smell of cat urine or something like that, Right,
there's a lesion between the parts of the brain responsible
for arousal and fear, and so it it it's like
it it actually rewires their brains, so they associate that
(34:49):
that fear response from the smell of cat urine with
a arousal Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's like the the excitation
part of anxiety without the being repat old part of anxiety,
right right, But but that's easier for me to just
internalize and understand because it seems like that's actually a
very broad and kind of easy change to make to
(35:11):
the brain. In a way, it's fascinating the specificity of
the ant behaviors that are created by the parasite in
the case of corticeps, yeah, and there's other other um
examples of that. So the parasitoid wasp will infect or
weaver spiders um with their larva, So the wasp will
(35:36):
attack the or weber spider and then lay it's larva
either h inside of the spider or just on top
of the spider and it clings to the spider and
um it makes it do what seems like this really
specific behavior, So instead of weaving its normal pretty web,
(35:56):
it will start weaving like this cocoon, an extra strong
cocoon that will eventually become sort of this cradle for
the parasites offspring UM so that it can be it
can safely develop and kind of in to twist the knife,
the the larva will eventually eat the host spider and
(36:19):
just discard its carcass uh and so it's it's really
interesting because it's hard to imagine how is this larva
controlling the brain of this spiders so that it weaves
It's in a cocoon that seems so specific, so detailed,
And what researchers have found is it there's a hormone,
(36:42):
a chemical that the larva produces that is actually associated
with the orb weavers spiders one of its molting stages.
So when it's molding, it wants to create a cocoon
made out of these especially strong fibers and they're also um.
They they have this sort of ultra violet UH light
(37:06):
so that other insects won't fly into it. While it's molting,
and that protects it when it's vulnerable so high the
larva hijacks the orb beaver and makes it think it's molting.
But it's even stronger than um normally, so it's like
it's pumping it full of this chemical that it's almost
(37:27):
goes into this super molting stage where it creates an
extra safe and protective cocoon that eventually the parasite will use,
uh at the expense of the poor little spider. That's fascinating.
I guess what it really means is that a lot
of the behaviors we think of as very specific and
(37:49):
very complex are actually just much easier to trigger by
exploiting existing hormones and circuitry and stuff than we would think. Yeah,
and I think that's why you find it in insects
much because they have while they do have very complex behavior,
their brains are a great deal smaller and I think
easier to reprogram. And I mean the same thing with rats.
(38:14):
I think that it would be a lot more difficult
to say too, reprogram primate to do a very specific behavior,
although you could argue that with rabies, the some of
the behaviors like aggression and excessive drooling and hydrophobia are
all uh beneficial for the rabies virus to spread, so
(38:39):
so you know it is it can happen. All right,
hold that thought, because we're gonna take a quick break
and be right back with more of this interview than Okay,
we're back alright, Katie. One question that we we have
frequently asked guests on the show, especially if they have
any interest in biology at all, is this, what is
(39:00):
your favorite dinosaur or prehistoric creature. Ah, that's a really
good question. Uh. I would have to say archaeopterics because
it's the predecessor to birds. It's uh that that first
gliding dinosaur that uh, and it's so it's really interesting
(39:26):
to see that transition from um, the the kind of
raptor esque dinosaurs that had no no interest, no need
to fly, and then the archaeopterics what couldn't fly exactly,
but it did glide, so it would kind of climb
up a tree and then really clumsily glide from one
(39:48):
tree to the other. And I just think that's it's
so cool to me how flight has independently evolved, uh
in so many different species that you just never spect
so uh, you have flying squirrels, which is sort of
like the arc the optics of animals because they do
(40:09):
the same thing where they kind of have um developed
that gliding um ability. And then obviously there's also bats
who have developed that more a little more um efficiently.
And uh. In insects, flight evolved from actually like their
wings sprouted from their lungs tissue, and so you see
(40:33):
like with dragonflies there how wings are very close to
where their their gills and lungs are and it's it's
just I find it so cool that dinosaurs just you know,
decided to become birds eventually. Uh. Speaking of other versions
of evolving gliding, we just recently talked about flying snakes,
(40:55):
which which is fascinating the way that they can flat
their bodies out into a concave shape to create that
kind of wing that they undulate in the air to
to help prolong their gliding period. Yeah, and that's so
cool because they do have Snakes have these really interesting
muscle skeletal structures that allow them to contract their muscles
(41:19):
and expand them in the act of swallowing food. So well,
I don't I don't know this for a fact, but
I would assume that the that gliding those gliding snakes
have kind of they use those same muscles that are
so good at swallowing and pushing food down through their
very long trachea and bodies to digest, they can use
(41:41):
that same those same kinds of structures to be able
to flatten themselves and achieve the gliding structure. Do you
guys know if that's that's the case. No, I didn't.
I haven't read anything about that, but that's a very
good point. I would assume that's probably true. It seems
like it is. It's kind of but I know for
a fact. Yeah. So, speaking of feather dinosaurs, do you
(42:04):
do you also get worked up when you see dinosaur
movies and there's not a feather to be found. Yes, yeah,
I think that. Here's the thing is, I think this
is such a good opportunity now that we know. I'm
fine with classics like Jurassic Park that the dinosaurs don't
have feathers because we just didn't know back then. So
that's fine. But now we do know, and people I
(42:26):
hear people say like, oh, it would look so stupid,
and I don't think so. No, exactly, birds don't look stupid.
They look amazing. So can you imagine like a a
raptor with fully feathered it would look glorious. Uh. And
you know, it's interesting there's this habit of UH artists
(42:48):
who recreate animal images from fossils of doing what's called
I think it's called shrink wrapping, where you ignore, you
don't know, muscle and fat tissoe precisely, so there's a
tendency to underestimate how plump something is and how fluffy
it is. So uh and I've seen there's this really
(43:10):
cool image online where this artist made examples of it
by uh working backwards from like a swan skeleton to
create yeah, to create that like swan like animal, as
if as if the swan skeleton were a dinosaur fossil,
and and what it would look like if it was
interpreted in the way that dinosaurs are. And it's horrifying
(43:33):
and swans are lovely. So I feel like we should
be giving, you know, just giving real dinosaurs have curves,
is what I'm saying. Wow that, Yeah, I've never thought
about that, it would even modern skeletons. But I think
we're all three totally on the same page. And I
think even if you're not going to make them beautiful
(43:54):
if you're trying to make them terrifying. Can you imagine?
I think that the predators would be more frightening if
they were covered in feathers. Isn't imagine being eaten by
a giant bird? That makes even less sense than eaten
by a lizard. Oh. I mean, since since I was
a kid, I've been I was always intrigued by these
paleo art illustrations of terror birds snatching up um I
(44:14):
forget the scientific name, but the dawn horses, the miniature
prehistoric horses. Just the idea of this already large bird
eating small horses, uh just filled me with dread and
uh and I would love to see well, like where
the terror bird movies. It seems like like this is
an untapped area of riches here. Yeah, I mean I
(44:38):
feel like if you try to imagine lying on your
stomach and looking up at like a chicken, because if
you look at it from that perspective, it's actually kind
of scary. They have those dead reptilian eyes, sharp claws,
and just this look of anger. There's a Werner Herzog
(45:02):
quote about chickens about how I can't from memory just
do the exact quote, but it's something about how chickens
are just so innately achingly stupid in me, he says,
when you when you look into the eyes of the chicken,
the the immensity of the stupidity is breathtaking. Uh. And
(45:26):
if you if you make Verner Herzog feel despair, it's
you've got something going on, because that man is is
a nihilist two and all nilism. Well, Katie, do you
have anything coming out soon on the show that you
specifically want people to watch out for and and listen
(45:49):
when it when it hits the feed. Yeah. So I'm
looking into evil in the animal and human world, and
there's this really fascinating concept in criminal psychology called the
dark tetrad, and I look at the animals and humans
that best exemplify this evil behavior and it's it's really cool.
(46:12):
It's it's actually kind of metal. So I'm excited for it.
And can you remind all of our listeners here where
they can find Creature feature when it publishes, and where
they can find you on social media? Yeah. So it
publishes every Wednesday. Uh. And you can find it on
the I Heart radio app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, pretty much
(46:34):
anywhere you can get your podcasts um. You can find
us on Twitter, Facebook, and our website is Creature Feature Pod.
Our Twitter is Creature Feet Pod. Not feet as in
you know, animal feet, but feet as in they have
achieved a great feat. All right, well, it has been
(46:55):
a delight to talk to you today, Katie. Thank you
so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having all right,
so there you have it again. The show is Creature Feature.
The host is Katie Golden. You can find them at
Creature Feature Pod dot com. As for Stuff to Blow
(47:15):
your Mind, you can always find us at our mothership
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll
find all the episodes of the podcast. You'll find links
out to our various social media accounts. You'll find that
cool store button at the top of the page. That's
where you can go to our t public page and
buy some cool merch with our logo on it, with
our cool skug King of the Rats design, or our
(47:35):
Cambrian Life logo or of course all hell the Great Basilisk.
These are all fine uh purchases you can made, especially
make especially as we get into the holidays here, and
it's a great way to support the show. And if
you want to support the show in a way that
doesn't cost you any money at all, simply rate and
review us wherever you have the power to do so.
So yeah, thanks again to Katie for joining us today.
Big thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex
(47:58):
Williams and Try Harris. For a way to get in
touch with us, you could email us. You can email
us ideas for new episodes. You can email us feedback
on this episode or any other. You can just email
us to say hi, let us know where you listen from,
how you found out about the show, all that kind
of stuff at our account. Blow the mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(48:29):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
B
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 Joe McCormick. In Today,
we're bringing you a special conversation with another host in
our network. That's right, We're gonna be talking to Katie Golden.
(00:23):
She's the host of Creature Feature. And yeah, this is
just a fun opportunity for us to support a new
science show in our general network and chat with just
a very knowledgeable host. Yeah, Creature Feature is a is
a great new show. Katie knows a lot about animals
and biology and evolution and psychology and uh, and so
(00:44):
we we wanted our listeners to go check out that show.
Get into that too. I think it'll be right up
your alley. Yeah. She chats with guests about, you know,
curious tidbits regarding animal biology, animal behavior, and it publishes
every Wednesday. It was kind of sandwiched in between Stuff
to Blow your Mind episodes like that, Right for all
those people who are like, where can I get more
(01:04):
leeches and bat sex between my two weekly episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind? This is where you go.
All right, We're gonna play a trailer before we jump
into our interview with Katie, and I also just want
to let everybody know if you want to check this
out online. The website for Creature Feature is Creature Feature
pod dot com. All right, let's have a listen to
(01:25):
that trailer. Humanity has spent a long time distancing ourselves
from the animal Kingdom. We wear clothes over our nakedness,
use the stock market, and go to the bathroom and
specially designated areas. But if you take a closer look
at the animal Kingdom, you'll find blood, bands and treachery
(01:48):
that make Game of Thrones seem like a dumb show
for babies. I'm Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary
biology at Harvard and I pretend to be a bird
on Twitter and my new podcast, Creature Feature brings you
tales of love, murder, sex, betrayal, and deception and the
lives of both animals and humans. We asked the questions,
(02:12):
what is going on in the brains of people who
suffer the delusion that they're a living corpse? How does
a romantic relationship work out between a man in a car?
What do you do when you find out your lover
wants to move in to your body. On Creature Feature,
we view nature in man from a new perspective each episode,
(02:32):
asking a comedian to get inside the minds of animals
so we can explore the startling connections to human psychology.
Join us every Wednesday starting on Halloween and subscribe on
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your sick auditory kicks.
All right, well, let's go ahead and have a chat
with Katie Golden, host of Creature Feature. Welcome to Stuff
(03:03):
to blow your mind. Hey, great to be here. Could
you introduce yourself to the audience out there. Yeah, So,
I'm Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology at Harvard,
and I run the Twitter account pro Bird Rights, where
I pretend to be a bird activist, and I host
(03:23):
the new show from How Stuff Works called Creature Feature,
where we take an animals eye view at human behavior
and a humans eye view looking at animal behavior. So
I love this particular angle because, yeah, we can't help
but but look at the animal world, and we on
one level, we can't help but see them as as
(03:44):
little or large versions of ourselves, and then we can
freak out a bit when they do something that is
totally in human. Yeah, I just think it's it's interesting
because there's either the tendency to other over anthropomorphizes or
under anthropy morph us. So, UM, we'll see an animal
behavior that we think, oh, they're feeling a certain way, like, um,
(04:08):
if an insect is uh is stalking, something like like
the bullet spider likes to capture its prey by swinging
a piece of of its web with the sticky bullus
on the end, which is like this this bulb that uh,
you know, it's it's fashioned after it. It's kind of
like that weapon, which is like a string with those
(04:30):
two heavy weights, and then you swing it and you
capture your prey. And then that's what the bullet spider does.
So when you're watching him do that, you're thinking, oh,
he's thinking, oh, here we go, gonna try to get
this fly and oh, shoot, I missed, and then he
looks disappointed. But of course it's a spider, so it's
very unlikely it feels things like disappointment. But on the
other hand, I feel like more intelligent animals like especially
(04:55):
dogs um who have co evalved with us and chimpanzee
is and other primates and uh uh. Sea mammals that
are pretty complex do actually feel um emotions and and
it is reasonable to attribute human esque feelings to them.
And uh so, I think that's really interesting. I think
(05:17):
one of the reasons that the whole like human pretending
to be an animal on Twitter, one of the reasons
that is so interesting is because it tends to tell
us more about like humans in the nature of social
media that does about animals. Yeah, I mean so, one
thing is I find birds to be innately funny because
(05:40):
they seem so self absorbed if you watch them. I
used to own a couple of pair of heats. I've
been an avid bird watcher since I was a toddler. Really,
my mom used to say I would chase birds and
get really disappointed because they wouldn't make friends with me.
So I've always had an interest in birds, and they
just they they The way they carry themselves is it's
(06:00):
with such arrogance and with such self confidence and the
little head bob that they do, and the preening and
the fluffing up, and I feel like they kind of
I think when our relationship with social media is at
times really great, it can be used for wonderful things,
but often it's very egotistical, very self indulgent. And so
(06:24):
that's why I feel like a bird is a great
character to have on Twitter and social media because that
like self preening, uh just comes so naturally to birds.
And it's really fun to explore the kinds of self
centeredness that I think we we all have to a
certain extent where everything is about us. We're uncomfortable when
(06:47):
we're talking about things that aren't about us, and uh
so it's it's just fun to explore that from a
little acute, little bird. Another thing I love about human
contemplations of the animal, Uh it comes to into these
sort of folk ideas that we have about like, say
what certainly what our pets are, but also regarding things
(07:07):
like the squirrel. Uh. This is something that we we
talked about on on our show recently about uh getting
down into the meat eating habits of the of the squirrel,
and also some of the ideas about squirrel predation about
not just eating, uh you know, not just scavenging for me,
but actively pursuing prey at least in certain certain circumstances.
(07:28):
And it really throws our sort of folk mentality for
what this animal is out the window and we either
have to embrace or run from this this new idea
that the science gives us. Yeah, that's really interesting. Um.
When I was in school, I did this study that
made me seem really weird amongst my peers because what
(07:48):
we had to do is go out there with our
clipboards and study the squirrels on campus. Um. And so
you're just sitting there watching a squirrel eating nuts for hours. Um.
And one thing, they're so highly programmed to get maximum calories.
So if they find a nut that has a hole
(08:11):
in it, they're going to eat it immediately because they
have figured out uh that that whole means that there's
a larva in there for a type of moth that
if they just bury it, that larva is going to
eat the meat of the nut. Uh. And if they
eat it now, they get that extra protein that the
meat of the insect uh, in addition to the meat
(08:35):
of the acorn. But if they bury it, they don't
get anything. So they've learned to hedge their beds there
and eat it immediately, whereas pristine nuts they will bury
and say for later. So they're extremely opportunistic. And um,
I don't find it surprising that they actively go after
meat because they're just so there. They require so many
(08:57):
much caloric intake that they will do what they can.
And I think that's kind of an interesting um. I mean,
it's this is not they aren't actually the link evolutionarily,
but you can kind of see how that sort of
shrew like mammal can be a link but from or
before an insectivore to uh the omnivorous um mammals that
(09:22):
that are like badgers and uh ferrets and so on,
that that can evolve from those more harmless seeming mammals.
I love how the squirrel carnivory and squirrel predation thing
reveals that there's just like people think. I mean, people
in places where squirrels are common think they know everything
(09:43):
there is to know about squirrels just by looking out
the back window or something, because you see them all
the time. And then when you suddenly become aware that
they're they're doing these bloody things. Not all the time,
but sometimes they're doing these bloody things that you had
no idea about, it sort of makes you realize that
there's so much to nature that you are completely blind to,
even when you think you're looking at it a lot. Yeah,
(10:05):
it's sort of that weird shock moment you get when
you see like a heron with a rabbit or a
mammal like in its mouth and you're like, whoa that
bird is? Because like we think of when we think
of birds of prey, we think of raptors, so hawks, eagles,
osprery's the ones with the you know, the menacing looking ones.
(10:27):
Herons look beautiful and elegant, like, you know, these these
exquisite pretty creatures. But they'll they'll eat a go for
for sure. I think we were talking about the example.
It's it's in one of the David Attenborough documentaries of
these horrible sites of pelicans just gobbling up baby birds,
(10:48):
just cramming them into their beaks and their little wings
and feet sticking out all over the place, eating them
like popcorns. Yeah. Funny, Yeah, that's uh, they'll yeah, I mean,
they got a lot of space in those beaks, might
as well fill it up with baby birds. Yeah, I
mean a lot of it, A lot of it. Especially
these these acts of predation. They do come down to
the the raw economy of of life. I mean you
(11:12):
see it, especially in examples of say, cannibalism um. And
and also we've talked a bit about this on the
show with the coprophagiah the consumption of poop, which which
once you boil away, boil down, you take away so
many of the human complications associated with the topic. You're like,
well that makes sense for an animal. Yeah, You're you're
(11:33):
being efficient. You're recycling food, digesting it and then saving it,
so a lot for a lot of animals. It's also
like the special poops that aren't really pooped, they're like
food poop. Uh, specifically like in guinea pigs and wombats
and stuff, they make the little food poops pops. Yeah. Yeah.
And also with the cannibalism, I think it can be
(11:55):
really counterintuitive. So like filial cannibalism, um seem like, well
why would you do that, You're you're gonna be an
evolutionary dead end. But with fish, um, when they practice
eating their own babies, um, they're actually picking out the
ones that are the least fit, so the slowest to develop,
(12:16):
and then that way they can spend all their time
investing in the baby fish that are most likely too
mature to adulthood. So they're um, they're both benefiting from
the extra nutrition from eating their babies, and then also
the time um focused on the most likely to succeed.
(12:37):
So it's this very cruel capitalist, uh like economic um
cost benefits analysis that these fish do. They don't really
have any sentiment for their own offspring, going all in
on the best ones exactly. H doesn't help that they're
called fries, which sounds delicious. Baby fish are called fries sous.
(13:00):
Yesterday I was listening to a couple of recent episodes
of your show, which I I must say, I really enjoyed.
I was listening to the ones about animals who are
worse at sex, and there was one that we've talked
about on the show before that I really thought might
come up, but but y'all didn't mention. And it's the
male nursery web spider. Do you do you know about
(13:21):
this one? Tell me a little more about it. The
it's the one that so they bring nuptial gifts that
in order to yeah, to woo the female spiders. The
males bring like a package that's supposed to be a
food item wrapped in silk. But the way that the
bad gift giving comes in is that a lot of
them try to pass off a insect husk that they
(13:41):
have already drained of all the delicious fluids, or like
a little or like a little twig. Yeah, yeah, just
like nothing, and they're they're trying to cheat and such
dirt bags. It's yeah, So I've actually I have heard
of this and I've done a little bit of reading
about it, and it's it's so interesting because they'll do
a really elaborate wrapping jobs. So it'says if someone hands
(14:03):
you this beautifully wrapped gift with bows and ribbons and spangles,
and then uh, it takes you, like it takes you
a long time to unwrap it, and as you're unwrapping it,
there like making the moves on you, and like by
the time you open the gift and it's like a rock,
they've already copulated with you. And then you're like, hey,
(14:23):
get back here, but then they're they're running off laughing.
I think we did read a study, just off my memory,
I think we were a study when we talked about
this that found that the ones who brought bad gifts
were more likely to be the victims of sexual cannibalism afterwards.
That's right, So, like I mean, it makes sense too.
(14:44):
So if you've brought a you're you're taking a big
risk there because while you are getting rid of the
cost of hunting for a piece of food, Um, once
they open it and nothing's there, they're gonna go to
prey mode because or pre it or more mode because
they don't have a snack. So you know, they're like, oh, hey,
(15:04):
well there's a snack over there that was just having
sex with me, so I'll eat that. Do you do
you have a favorite example that you wanna tell the
stuff to blow your mind crowd about from the Bad
Sex episode? Well, I think my favorite is, um the
uh the new to branch uh having disposable penises, because um,
(15:31):
it's really interesting. So uh they will have, uh, they'll
copulate and then after copulation, they'll just shed their penis.
Um and oh, by the way, new tole branches are
these really interesting? They look like um, uh they're a
marine animal that looks like a sort of beautiful snails
(15:56):
or slug with all these colors and there are pretty
neat looking um and so uh it'll once it sheds
the penis, it grows one back within twenty four hours
because it actually has this big coil of um of
genital material uh inside of its body, and so it's
(16:19):
like a fruit by the foot that just kind of
like um keeps coming out. And the reason it does this,
it actually has a really good reason. So it's too
basically ensure that when it copulates, it's given like it's
all fresh um uh sperm material. So it's all its
(16:42):
own sperm material, and it's able to um. It's like
decreases the chance that it's going to get uh sperm
from a previous copulation with the other new to branch
on its penis, and then if it sheds, it puts
a new one in. Then it's like guaranteed that that
(17:03):
this is gonna be all its own genetic material. And
it's like the lysol wipe method of mating. Yeah, I
was thinking when I was listening to that of like
those things where you tear a ticket off at the
at the deli counter or something number forty two, servicing
(17:25):
number forty two. These are beautiful creatures, though I was
just looking at images of them. They look kind of
like eighties glam rock slugs. They really do um. They
and there's so many different kinds. Some of them look
like dragons. Some of them look like a scrunchy from
the eighties, like you were saying, they're uh, they're beautiful.
(17:49):
Animals are also hermaphrodites, so they they have the capability
of having both sexual organs, which is really interesting. All Right,
we need to take a quick break, but we will
be right back with more of our conversation with Katie.
Thank thank Alright, we're back now on Creature Feature. It's
(18:10):
it's of course, not only just about animals. It's also
about the guests that you have on to discuss these animals. Uh.
So each episode has a particular guest in a particular
theme or topic in place. How do you go about
putting those two together, Like which comes first, the guests
or the topic? Well, so all right, it's usually the
topic first, so I'll write my notes, and then I
(18:33):
kind of tried to think about guests who might fit
best with that topic. So, for instance, I was really
interested in looking at vices in um uh in the
animal world, so drug use drinking, birds who get drunk, uh,
animals who seek out natural highs um and so the
(18:55):
guest I chose. Robert Evans has written a book on
the history of advice and he talks a little bit
about the evolutionary history of getting drunk and uh so
he was perfect for that episode also because he's tried
out some really interesting drugs. Yeah, he's He of course
is also the host of Behind the Bastards. That's right,
(19:15):
that's right, it's a great podcast. So earlier you mentioned
that when you were a child you were not able
to actually make friends with birds. And on the show
on Creature feature you interview humans. But if you could
have one bird on the show as a guest, and
you could actually speak to that bird and ask you questions,
which bird species would you choose? Oh, that's a really
(19:38):
good question. I think, uh, any species of parasitic birds,
so cuckoos or cowbirds or honey guides because they're so sneaky.
Um if for those of you who don't know, cuckoos
will uh lay their eggs in the nests of host
(19:59):
species these uh and trick them into raising their own young.
And they use a lot of different strategies, like sometimes
the baby chicks have voices that sound like a bunch
of baby birds, So then the host species feels compelled
to feed it way more food than they would normally
feed a single baby bird. They also push out the
(20:21):
babies from the nests. Um. And when we'll kill the
host species, real babies. Um. And sometimes the cuckoo parents
will disguise themselves as raptors, so have the uh have
stripes on their bellies and curved beaks that will look
make them look like predatory birds. Um. And they're so
(20:42):
devious that I feel like it would be they would
be really interesting to interview, like like interviewing criminal or
something where it's just like like why why do you
do this? And um, uh like how how could you
so like a hard hitting sixty minutes styled Yeah, yeah,
(21:05):
like Frost v. Nixon like me versus Birdston, Like why
did they always keep going back into the prison to
interview Charles Manson again? It's like is he going to
have something good to say this time? Yeah? Like a
true bird crime podcast where yeah, like like why do
(21:26):
you do these crimes? Birds? Stop it? So I've got
another question along those lines. I assume you have the
same kind of uh attitude in general toward animal life
that we do, which is like we try not to
have negative emotions about animal behaviors and and always just
like have a sense of wonder about the natural world
(21:47):
and positive feelings about animals, even when they do things
that if humans did then we would find them disgusting.
But is there an animal that you find you you
can't separate your emotional reaction from, Like there's just some
animal that you can't help but feel contempt for even
though you know you shouldn't. Yeah, So I think it's
interesting because a lot of animals that normally you would
(22:10):
feel discussed for, like spiders or even even things like
parasitic wasps that are really disgusting, I'm too interested in
to find truly disgusting, So I think, in all honesty,
even though I understand that like that cockroaches and then
(22:31):
other pests and and things like parasites. So when my
dog gets fleas or a tick, or when she was
a puppy she had round worm, as a lot of
puppies have the disgust I feel for those kinds of
insects is too much for me to overcome, because while
I find parasites actually really fascinating, when it's affecting my dog,
(22:54):
who I love, you know, it's I just feel so angry.
So when I would capture a tick guy would be
like cursing at it and and be like, you know
you messed up now, buddy, because I messed with the
wrong dog. Um. And it's really the only time that
I because like I don't I don't like to kill
spiders that are in my house, So like I'll I'll
(23:17):
capture them and release them outside and give them like
a little snack of tiny sandwich to take with them
because I care about them. But like finding a tick, yeah,
finding like fleas, I really get so angry that I
have to kill them because it's like, how dare you
hurt my dog? What did she ever do to you? Well,
(23:38):
they are these are the animals that are still the enemy.
I mean it's you can't look at ketos and ticks,
mosquitoes ticks and it's like guinea worm. I mean, these
these things are still enemies of humanity. If there's anything
that truly deserves our hatred and contempt in the animal world,
I think that's probably it. Yeah. I mean, like I
can't even though find my way to eating like rats,
(24:01):
because I mean I'm afraid of them. I don't want
them in my house. But once one got in my
heating vent and like lived there for a while, and
I kind of halfheartedly put some traps in there because
it's like, well, I can't have this rat in here,
you know, pooping in my and where the air comes in.
(24:22):
But um it in a trap went off, and I
felt kind of like, h huh, that's I'm sad. I'm
I'm relieved, but sad. I feel bad that I killed
a rat. And then I opened up the vent and
there was the trap with like a tuft of hair
in it, and the rat was nowhere to be found.
And I was like, at that point, I was like,
you've deserved it, buddy. He deserved to survive. So I
(24:44):
didn't mess with it anymore. Eventually it went away, but
it was just like, you know, I just had this
rat living in my vent. It's like, oh, there's Mr
Wiggles doing his thing. I find that I have complex
emotions regarding like rats and mice and so forth in
our urban environments, because on one level, I'm like, you're rat,
you're not supposed to be here. But then I have
(25:05):
been by I mean, you know, humans, we've done so
much to unbalance the environment by building a house here,
by having all these uh these these artificial food sources
in the area. Uh, it's really on us that that
they're here at all anyway, And so then I end
up feeling guilty for for having to put out the traps,
(25:25):
even though they're the ones that are breaking into my home. Right,
it's not to them, it's not our our homes. It's
like this is their natural environment because they've learned to
they've learned to survive in human environment. And that's so
interesting because for most animals, when humans move in, they
(25:46):
just die off or move out. And for the animals
that can actually adapt to human society and thrive, we hate.
We hate them for being able to do that. We
resent them for invading our bass even though you know,
if anything, were the invaders that are encroaching on most
(26:06):
animal territory and typically just breaking havoc and wiping them outain.
And we have these these scamp few hero animals that
are able to live with us, and then we're we
have the goal to hate them for it. Hating hating
a rat for getting into your pasta boxes or whatever.
It is almost like hating a dog for loving, you know,
(26:29):
it's just like what we made them do, right, right,
they co evolved with us over thousands and thousands of
years dogs and rats and somehow rats are the bad guys.
You know. We actually talked about this in a couple
of episodes we did UM earlier this year about the
(26:50):
idea of urban evolution, ways that animals are adapting to
urban landscapes. And there's a lot of fascinating stuff going
on with animals in urban spaces, like the idea that
in some cases, uh, that urban spaces might be selecting
for personality traits and animals like neophilia, where like a
racu raccoon has a better chance of surviving in a
(27:13):
city if it's the kind of raccoon with a personality
that wants to approach unfamiliar objects rather than regard them
with caution. Yeah. Yeah, that's It's very interesting because you
can take an animal that is feral and over you know,
just a few generations start to find surprisingly uh tame traits.
(27:38):
So there you know that experiment with UM the silver
foxes in Russia where uh they were breeding them for
they're testing to see if they could breed in these
more tame traits and UM over, I mean it was
like a couple of decades, but uh, just a few
(28:01):
like several generations of these foxes, they would do the
ones that had that neophilia where it's not that they
were fearful of humans or aggressive towards humans, but sort
of politely interested in humans. And then they kept selecting
those foxes, and then they started having patchy fur, like
having spots and patches like dogs do on their coats.
(28:24):
And then there the cartilage in their ears became softer,
and so they would have ears that would fold down, uh,
like in dogs. So it's really interesting to see how
those tame characteristics that we see in dogs have some
there must be some shared genetic links where some the
(28:45):
genes responsible for a more curious, tame personality can also
be linked to something just superficial like ear cartilage. Uh So,
I think that's really I wonder if raccoons had enough
generations of these tame, more curious raccoons, if they would
start to, you know, like look cuter in some way.
(29:07):
Like we actually hypothesized that in the episode. We were like,
I wonder if over many generations, city dwelling animals will
tend to become cuter. Raccoons kind of have a leg
up on the situation because they are already pretty cute.
I mean, have you seen the video of the raccoon
trying to wash cotton candy? Yes? Always sad, heartbreaking, it's
(29:29):
the human condition. It's a modern day sisyphis because the
ra the sorry, the raccoon has this piece of cotton candy,
it's given and so because it's a raccoon and they
like to wash their food because they're so fastidious that
he went into the river and tried to wash it
and it dissolved and he's like, what is this? What
(29:52):
is this witchcraft? He gets a new piece of cotton
candy but does the same thing and he doesn't learn.
I know, poor baby. So Katie, uh we again, we
talk a lot about biology on the show, and one
of our favorite topics as well is monsters, both in
terms of the biological hybridity that is often on display
(30:12):
with them and because no matter how bizarre the monster noot,
no matter how weird the creature, and a you know,
science fiction film happens to be nature usually has it
beat for weirdness. So we were wondering, do you have
any favorite monsters or film or fiction that invoke real
world biology in some way, shape or form. Mm hmm. Yeah,
(30:34):
actually I do. So do you know that video game
The Last of Us, So they have the I guess
the monsters in the game are the people that have
been infected with this zombiesque virus um. But it's not
actually sorry, it's not a virus at all. Um. It's
(30:55):
a fungus. So it's called courtis Ups in the game.
And it's really cool because I think the game designers
were paying attention to actual evolutionary biology because Court of
Steps is a type of fungus that does in fact
infect the brains of insects. So in the game, this
(31:16):
fungus creates spores that you will breathe in and it'll
affect infect your brain, causing you to be aggressive. Um.
And then some of the later monsters are have this
like really creepy overgrowth of fungus, just like sprouting out
of their heads and growing over their bodies. Um. And
(31:37):
in fact, like court a scepts in real life, this
fungus will uh grow sprout out of the heads of
ants and other insects and cause them to kind of
go a little cookie, so they will leave. They'll either
be carried off by fellow ants who are like, oh,
(31:59):
this is uh, this is a zombie ant, so they'll
carry it off, and those ants that actually carry the
infected ant will go on a suicide mission because they're like, well,
we're going to get infected too, so we don't want
to risk the rest of the colony um which is
also very kind of like a trope from um zombie movies.
(32:20):
But so the the infected ant, once it's off on
its own and it's in the final stages of this infection,
it will have this this like instinct to climb up
either a plant stalk or up a branch as high
as it can and then clean bite down on it.
(32:40):
Do this like death grip, a literal death grip, because
it dies and then the fungus sprouts out of its
head and then it will produce spores that will spread
and hopefully infect another insect. So it's controlled this insect
to become like an incubator for more spores, just like
the in the Last of Us, which I think it's
(33:03):
really one of my favorite I know it's a video game,
but it's like, to me, beats a lot of the
zombie movies or zombie genre because it's so cool and
how carefully they constructed this zombie scenario. I'm not a
big gamer, but I've played that game multiple times. I
think it's really excellent, and I love the mythology there.
(33:23):
It reminds me a little bit of of a nineteen
sixty three Toho movie from Japan called Matango, not in
a way where I think there's actually any connective tissue
between the films, And I don't think Metango has a
lot of science in it. It's got mushroom, has mushroom monsters,
and like the mushroom spores turn humans into like into
(33:44):
gradually more mushroom e creatures. That's interesting, that's so cool.
One of the things that's so fascinating about stuff like
the Court accepts parasite, though, is the specificity of the
behaviors that generates, you know, like you can imagine very
(34:04):
it feels more natural to say, okay, you could get
some kind of parasite that would have a very very
broad kind of effect on your behavior, like maybe the way, Oh,
what's the toxoplasma one the idea that it that it
toxoplasma toxoplasma Gandhi. I think it's called that it uh.
It reduces the fear and caution and inhibitions and mice,
(34:27):
so that they're more likely to go out and be
eaten by a cat, and it increases their attraction to
the what the smell of cat urine or something like that, Right,
there's a lesion between the parts of the brain responsible
for arousal and fear, and so it it it's like
it it actually rewires their brains, so they associate that
(34:49):
that fear response from the smell of cat urine with
a arousal Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's like the the excitation
part of anxiety without the being repat old part of anxiety,
right right, But but that's easier for me to just
internalize and understand because it seems like that's actually a
very broad and kind of easy change to make to
(35:11):
the brain. In a way, it's fascinating the specificity of
the ant behaviors that are created by the parasite in
the case of corticeps, yeah, and there's other other um
examples of that. So the parasitoid wasp will infect or
weaver spiders um with their larva, So the wasp will
(35:36):
attack the or weber spider and then lay it's larva
either h inside of the spider or just on top
of the spider and it clings to the spider and
um it makes it do what seems like this really
specific behavior, So instead of weaving its normal pretty web,
(35:56):
it will start weaving like this cocoon, an extra strong
cocoon that will eventually become sort of this cradle for
the parasites offspring UM so that it can be it
can safely develop and kind of in to twist the knife,
the the larva will eventually eat the host spider and
(36:19):
just discard its carcass uh and so it's it's really
interesting because it's hard to imagine how is this larva
controlling the brain of this spiders so that it weaves
It's in a cocoon that seems so specific, so detailed,
And what researchers have found is it there's a hormone,
(36:42):
a chemical that the larva produces that is actually associated
with the orb weavers spiders one of its molting stages.
So when it's molding, it wants to create a cocoon
made out of these especially strong fibers and they're also um.
They they have this sort of ultra violet UH light
(37:06):
so that other insects won't fly into it. While it's molting,
and that protects it when it's vulnerable so high the
larva hijacks the orb beaver and makes it think it's molting.
But it's even stronger than um normally, so it's like
it's pumping it full of this chemical that it's almost
(37:27):
goes into this super molting stage where it creates an
extra safe and protective cocoon that eventually the parasite will use,
uh at the expense of the poor little spider. That's fascinating.
I guess what it really means is that a lot
of the behaviors we think of as very specific and
(37:49):
very complex are actually just much easier to trigger by
exploiting existing hormones and circuitry and stuff than we would think. Yeah,
and I think that's why you find it in insects
much because they have while they do have very complex behavior,
their brains are a great deal smaller and I think
easier to reprogram. And I mean the same thing with rats.
(38:14):
I think that it would be a lot more difficult
to say too, reprogram primate to do a very specific behavior,
although you could argue that with rabies, the some of
the behaviors like aggression and excessive drooling and hydrophobia are
all uh beneficial for the rabies virus to spread, so
(38:39):
so you know it is it can happen. All right,
hold that thought, because we're gonna take a quick break
and be right back with more of this interview than Okay,
we're back alright, Katie. One question that we we have
frequently asked guests on the show, especially if they have
any interest in biology at all, is this, what is
(39:00):
your favorite dinosaur or prehistoric creature. Ah, that's a really
good question. Uh. I would have to say archaeopterics because
it's the predecessor to birds. It's uh that that first
gliding dinosaur that uh, and it's so it's really interesting
(39:26):
to see that transition from um, the the kind of
raptor esque dinosaurs that had no no interest, no need
to fly, and then the archaeopterics what couldn't fly exactly,
but it did glide, so it would kind of climb
up a tree and then really clumsily glide from one
(39:48):
tree to the other. And I just think that's it's
so cool to me how flight has independently evolved, uh
in so many different species that you just never spect
so uh, you have flying squirrels, which is sort of
like the arc the optics of animals because they do
(40:09):
the same thing where they kind of have um developed
that gliding um ability. And then obviously there's also bats
who have developed that more a little more um efficiently.
And uh. In insects, flight evolved from actually like their
wings sprouted from their lungs tissue, and so you see
(40:33):
like with dragonflies there how wings are very close to
where their their gills and lungs are and it's it's
just I find it so cool that dinosaurs just you know,
decided to become birds eventually. Uh. Speaking of other versions
of evolving gliding, we just recently talked about flying snakes,
(40:55):
which which is fascinating the way that they can flat
their bodies out into a concave shape to create that
kind of wing that they undulate in the air to
to help prolong their gliding period. Yeah, and that's so
cool because they do have Snakes have these really interesting
muscle skeletal structures that allow them to contract their muscles
(41:19):
and expand them in the act of swallowing food. So well,
I don't I don't know this for a fact, but
I would assume that the that gliding those gliding snakes
have kind of they use those same muscles that are
so good at swallowing and pushing food down through their
very long trachea and bodies to digest, they can use
(41:41):
that same those same kinds of structures to be able
to flatten themselves and achieve the gliding structure. Do you
guys know if that's that's the case. No, I didn't.
I haven't read anything about that, but that's a very
good point. I would assume that's probably true. It seems
like it is. It's kind of but I know for
a fact. Yeah. So, speaking of feather dinosaurs, do you
(42:04):
do you also get worked up when you see dinosaur
movies and there's not a feather to be found. Yes, yeah,
I think that. Here's the thing is, I think this
is such a good opportunity now that we know. I'm
fine with classics like Jurassic Park that the dinosaurs don't
have feathers because we just didn't know back then. So
that's fine. But now we do know, and people I
(42:26):
hear people say like, oh, it would look so stupid,
and I don't think so. No, exactly, birds don't look stupid.
They look amazing. So can you imagine like a a
raptor with fully feathered it would look glorious. Uh. And
you know, it's interesting there's this habit of UH artists
(42:48):
who recreate animal images from fossils of doing what's called
I think it's called shrink wrapping, where you ignore, you
don't know, muscle and fat tissoe precisely, so there's a
tendency to underestimate how plump something is and how fluffy
it is. So uh and I've seen there's this really
(43:10):
cool image online where this artist made examples of it
by uh working backwards from like a swan skeleton to
create yeah, to create that like swan like animal, as
if as if the swan skeleton were a dinosaur fossil,
and and what it would look like if it was
interpreted in the way that dinosaurs are. And it's horrifying
(43:33):
and swans are lovely. So I feel like we should
be giving, you know, just giving real dinosaurs have curves,
is what I'm saying. Wow that, Yeah, I've never thought
about that, it would even modern skeletons. But I think
we're all three totally on the same page. And I
think even if you're not going to make them beautiful
(43:54):
if you're trying to make them terrifying. Can you imagine?
I think that the predators would be more frightening if
they were covered in feathers. Isn't imagine being eaten by
a giant bird? That makes even less sense than eaten
by a lizard. Oh. I mean, since since I was
a kid, I've been I was always intrigued by these
paleo art illustrations of terror birds snatching up um I
(44:14):
forget the scientific name, but the dawn horses, the miniature
prehistoric horses. Just the idea of this already large bird
eating small horses, uh just filled me with dread and
uh and I would love to see well, like where
the terror bird movies. It seems like like this is
an untapped area of riches here. Yeah, I mean I
(44:38):
feel like if you try to imagine lying on your
stomach and looking up at like a chicken, because if
you look at it from that perspective, it's actually kind
of scary. They have those dead reptilian eyes, sharp claws,
and just this look of anger. There's a Werner Herzog
(45:02):
quote about chickens about how I can't from memory just
do the exact quote, but it's something about how chickens
are just so innately achingly stupid in me, he says,
when you when you look into the eyes of the chicken,
the the immensity of the stupidity is breathtaking. Uh. And
(45:26):
if you if you make Verner Herzog feel despair, it's
you've got something going on, because that man is is
a nihilist two and all nilism. Well, Katie, do you
have anything coming out soon on the show that you
specifically want people to watch out for and and listen
(45:49):
when it when it hits the feed. Yeah. So I'm
looking into evil in the animal and human world, and
there's this really fascinating concept in criminal psychology called the
dark tetrad, and I look at the animals and humans
that best exemplify this evil behavior and it's it's really cool.
(46:12):
It's it's actually kind of metal. So I'm excited for it.
And can you remind all of our listeners here where
they can find Creature feature when it publishes, and where
they can find you on social media? Yeah. So it
publishes every Wednesday. Uh. And you can find it on
the I Heart radio app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, pretty much
(46:34):
anywhere you can get your podcasts um. You can find
us on Twitter, Facebook, and our website is Creature Feature Pod.
Our Twitter is Creature Feet Pod. Not feet as in
you know, animal feet, but feet as in they have
achieved a great feat. All right, well, it has been
(46:55):
a delight to talk to you today, Katie. Thank you
so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having all right,
so there you have it again. The show is Creature Feature.
The host is Katie Golden. You can find them at
Creature Feature Pod dot com. As for Stuff to Blow
(47:15):
your Mind, you can always find us at our mothership
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll
find all the episodes of the podcast. You'll find links
out to our various social media accounts. You'll find that
cool store button at the top of the page. That's
where you can go to our t public page and
buy some cool merch with our logo on it, with
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(47:35):
Cambrian Life logo or of course all hell the Great Basilisk.
These are all fine uh purchases you can made, especially
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it's a great way to support the show. And if
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review us wherever you have the power to do so.
So yeah, thanks again to Katie for joining us today.
Big thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex
(47:58):
Williams and Try Harris. For a way to get in
touch with us, you could email us. You can email
us ideas for new episodes. You can email us feedback
on this episode or any other. You can just email
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(48:29):
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