Osedax: Sex Life of an Ocean Bone Worm

Enter the world of the osedax worm, where mouthless female scavengers liquefy the bones of dead whales with acid-drenched roots -- and where each female's body contains a harem of tiny, sperm-producing males. Robert and Christian discuss the bizarre lives of the osedax worms and invite "Sex in the Sea" author Dr. Marah J. Hardt for a discussion on this and other fascinating modes of deep-water reproduction.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetopwork dot com.
Hey wasn't stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Seger, and we
have we have quite an episode here for you today
because it involves the sex life of an ocean bone worm,

(00:25):
particularly the orthodox. Yeah. It was, um, you know, we
cover a lot of things that some people would label
as gross. Uh, and this is the first time that
I think we've been researching something that my stomach kind
of turned a little bit and I was like, well,
I don't know, I don't know. And I had just
gotten done writing about autopsies for another one of our shows,
and I was like, perfectly fine talking about like cutting

(00:47):
bones open and uh, lifting rib cages and removing organs
from human beings. But then we get into the Osadax
and it is a truly alien creature. It is something
that would give nightmares to to HP Lovecraft and uh,
you know the creators of the Alien movie. You know. Yeah,
it is beautifully grotesque and uh, and we'll make sure

(01:08):
that to include some some images of this creature on
the landing page for this episode is Stuff to Blow
Your Mind dot com and speaking of which we should
probably take a moment just to mention all the places
you can get the show and to interact with us. Yeah,
so Robrich just mentioned stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
That's our home base. That's where you can find all
the other stuff that we do other than the podcast,
and including the podcast. We've got our blog posts up there,

(01:29):
the articles that we write, all links to our social
media accounts and the videos that we've done as well. Uh,
And you can get to those social media accounts where
we are on Facebook, Twitter, and tumbler uh and all
those are blow the Mind. That's our handle there. Now.
I blogged in the past about some of the scientific
findings regarding the austdects, but I kind of rediscovered it

(01:50):
through this factless new book, Sex in the Sea Our
Intimate Connection with Sex Changing Fish, Romantical Ofters, Kinky Squid,
and other Salty Erotica of the Deep by Jay Hart.
I like the cover because the X is two seahorses
rubbing up against each It is pretty great. And at
the end of this episode, uh Dr Hart is actually

(02:10):
going to chat with us for a few minutes about
the ostodox as well as some other creatures that are
covered in the book. Yeah, I really enjoyed the stuff
that was inside here. And she had like a fairly
irreverent tone for, you know, an academic professional when she
was talking about just the general overall importance of sex
in the ocean. Yeah, it's a great read. Dare I say,

(02:31):
a great beach read. So before we get into the
particulars of this creature itself, we should describe the ecosystem,
the specialized ecosystem in which it thrives, something that really
scientists have only begun to understand in the past few decades,
something known as whale fall. Yeah, and I knew what

(02:52):
this was, but I didn't know it was referred to
as such as whale fall. And whenever I hear the term,
I hear the theme song from the Bond movie Skyfall
with a dull singing and just let the whale fall,
let it crumble, that kind of thing. Uh So, it's
kind of it kind of works. It kind of works.
Maybe James Bond will go down to the bottom of

(03:14):
the ocean and swim around in some whale skeletons. Yeah,
I mean the falling and the crumbling that that is
exactly what's happening. Because whales is most people are familiar.
These are the largest animals on Earth, in fact, the
largest animals that have ever lived. And it's such their
bodies are like, it's like a starship of biological riches, right, yeah,
I mean think about like how much sustenance they provide

(03:35):
just floating, even when they're alive. Actually, but then when
they die and they're at the bottom there they're just
it's it creates a whole ecosystem, yeah, because these things
are just yeah, they're just an industry of just organic wealth, right,
They're just that. They're just the thriving system, organic system.
And then for most of their adult lives, they don't
have any natural predators except for you know, unless you

(03:56):
want to count humans. Enormous creatures long life. And then
of course they die, and that's when the carcass sinks
to the bottom of the ocean, down into this deep
sea waste land, and here it becomes an oasis, and
in a way a true oasis, as will explain as well. Yeah,
this is an interesting because one thing, like I don't
know about you, but I never think of whales dying.

(04:18):
I don't really think of any marine life, like just
kind of swimming along and outside of being devoured by
a predator, just stopping and dying and floating to the bottom,
right like right, well, because that's the way for so
many things and for most creatures, right especially creatures in
an ecosystem like the ocean, because it's a it's a
it's an eater be eaten world, so something most creatures

(04:40):
are facing the unavoidable fate of winding up in something's belly,
probably killed by that creature exactly. In whales are just
so huge that that you know, they don't really have
that issue. Although we'll find out it's kind of interesting,
like we as human beings haven't really known a whole
lot about this up until recently because they float to
the bottom. And it's turns out like we may even

(05:01):
have like missed out like on an entire evolutionary process
that's been going on at the bottom of the ocean
based on these whalefalls. Yeah, whale falls were first really
truly recognized in the nineteen eighties. They were, and this
was following decades of of incidents in which new species
of muscles and mollusks were discovered on whale bones. Um

(05:23):
even even a small whale serves as just a luxurious
bounty of nutrients. And so for a while we were
discovering like, oh, we just discovered a whole bunch of
new species and it's all related to this whale corpse.
And as it turns out, yeah, the dead whale serves
as just an explosion of bioeconomic activity. And this is cool,
like like an actual oasis. They may serve as stepping

(05:46):
stones for creatures traveling from one far flung aquatic ecosystem
to another. Yeah, and that gets into the osadax that
we're going to talk about primarily today. We're just this
is the preamble. We're setting you up. But yeah, we
haven't discovered osodax until the last like what fifteen years,
And they primarily think that's true because they're they're moving
around at the bottom. We're not at the bottom, at

(06:08):
least not until recently. But they have these like way
stations basically at all these whale carcasses. Yeah, and we're
continuing to discover new varieties of osodex to still a
very active area of scientific exploration. So at a whale
fall um is we'll explain here. It tracts quite a
rogues gallery of scavengers, both generalists who are just kind

(06:29):
of you know, passing by its like, oh, dead wale,
I'll take a bite of that, and specialists who are like,
dead whale, that's my thing, call me when it's ready
from my expertise level. And that's our buddy, the osodax.
That's right. But before we get to the osod X.
So there's there's several phases that go on with these
whale falls, right, It's not just like thump whale falls
and just everybody in like one day just eats the

(06:51):
whole thing, right, that's right. There are three identified stages.
The first is the mobile scavenger stage. So this is
pretty basically the carcass hits the sea floor, the hag fish,
which the hag fish itself is a wonderful, grotesque, creepy Yeah. Yeah,
we're really getting into some of the grotesque ys a
marine life here. Yeah, I mean, this is it's a
scavenger's feast. This is when all the girls come out, right,

(07:14):
the hagfish tunnel into the meat just apparently just riding
hordes of them sleeper sharks stuff come by. They grab
some mouthfuls of the flesh and steadily descrab scavengers strip
away all the soft tissue, leaving basically eating a small
humans weight in whale flesh a day for up to
two years, depending on the whale side. Right. Yeah, wow,

(07:36):
that's fascinating. Uh yeah, we should really like look into
the hagfish. Because as I was doing the research for this,
one hagfish kept popping up over and over again. I
was like, that's pretty gnarly as well, Like, yeah, they are, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um.
So there's a second stage, and that's the enrichment opportunist stage, right,
And this is when you get these high density, low

(07:56):
diversity communities of bristle worms and crustacean and so these
are really the bottom dwellers, right, U colonizing around there
from the surrounding sediment and they feed on the leftover
blubber and the soft scraps for another two years. So
we're looking at like a four year process at this point, right.
And then comes the third and longest stage, the soulpophilic stage,

(08:19):
and this last between fifty years and a solid century,
depending again on the whale side. And this is all
about the lipid rich bones of the whales. Specialized bacteria
anaerobically breakdown lipids containing the bones, and this is also
where the opodox begins to show up. But before we
get into that, I want to mention the oasis theory

(08:41):
of whalefall real quick. So, given all of this that
we've discussed here in the phase, and just the the
long period of time it takes to completely break down
a whale carcass, According to marine ecologist Craig Smith, around
sixty nine thousand great whales die every year, so there
might be uh six in ninety thousand skeletons of the

(09:02):
nine largest whale species out there at any given tossed
all over the place. And these are just a little communities.
This is very um China mia Ville. I don't know
if you've ever read any of his like fantastic boss
log fiction, but like I think in one of his stories,
like the City Had, the city that all these creatures
live in is built under the bones of a giant

(09:23):
creature like and then they also like at one point
like Harness a giant whale like thing and have it
pulled them around and it dies, and then they have
to go down and look at its corpse and everything
it's kind of interesting, huh. Guierma del Toro did kind
of a neat take on that in the Pacific Realm movie,
more alluded to than explored, but just the thriving economy

(09:45):
of a massive dead creature. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, those
were very similar. Um So, all right, Osadax. Before we
get into the details, I'm gonna this is a very
visual thing. And so I printed out a photo of
an Osadax worm here, and we're gonna try to, I
guess describe it to from our perspective, but you should
certainly go do an image search O S E. D

(10:08):
A X. These are really weird looking creatures, and I
guess the best place to start is it looks like
a cloud, right like kind of like a pink red cloud.
I'm assuming those are like the filaments, but just at
the scale, it looks like a cloud of mist uh
and and little bubbles and stuff all floating around on
one end and coming out of that is one tentacle

(10:31):
tendril thing that then branches off into several other tentacles. Uh.
And they're sort of translucent and pink looking and scary
like it looks it looks like a lovecraft monster, like
something somebody would draw for like a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Yeah,
and it's pretty crazy that we're also recording an episode
today about the Medusa nebulas yea a Nebula photo printed

(10:55):
out as well. And there's actually a fair amount of
comparison to and the scale they scale is so uh
so different, so infinitely different, that it's it's mind bubbling.
But we've seen them both because we're humans and we're industrious.
Speaking of scale, uh, when we're talking about the size
of this creature, we're looking at a cinemeter or lesson lanes. Yeah,
they're tiny. Yeah, it's a finger lane. And let's keep

(11:17):
in mind that's the female, right, Yes, the females are
a centimeter in length. We'll get to the males later,
but they're much tinier now. The name is itself derives
from the Latin for bone devour, because of course that's
what it's done. It does, but you'll also find it described,
of course as as as a mirror ocean bone worm
or a zombie worm. Yeah, and and so the Latin

(11:38):
breakdown of this OHS is Latin for bone and dax
is Latin for devour. It's like the most metal animal
in the c I think, oh, yeah, there's surely got
to be some metal band called Osadax by now, But hey,
we've only known about them for fourteen years. So they
were discovered in two thousand two. Uh, first described in
two thousand four from Monterey Ay, where they found a

(12:01):
whale there that was experimented on, and then they also
did further experiments in Sweden and Japan and Antarctica. So
in two thousand three, scientists purposely sank a dead mink
whale down a hundred and twenty meters off the Swedish
coast and they monitored this whale fall. Uh. And so
you know, like we just mentioned whale falls, really the

(12:21):
ecosystem goes on for up to a hundred years, so
who knows, they're probably still monitoring it. But within you know,
that span of time, they did see that by recovering
the bones in two thousand four that there were these
worms in the bones, and these were the Osada sworms,
and they were usually up until then only found in
the Pacific, so this was kind of a surprise. They
didn't think they were going to find them in northern

(12:43):
waters like this. Then in two thousand thirteen. They do
the same thing, this mink whale test. Right, I don't
know where you just get ahold of a mink whale carcass,
but who knows. Uh. And they repeated this in Antarctica
and they dropped it all right off the coast of
Antarctica and the same thing there too. They found that
there were Osodax worms there as well. Now this is

(13:04):
an important distinction. The Osodax is a genus, right, these
were all different species. Every time they were doing these tests,
they were finding different species of Osadax. That's right. And
I believe currently there at least eleven known species of Osdax,
and of course that's changing as a research continues to
to to roll out. Yeah, so they're really at this point,

(13:26):
we think they're found all over the world at depths
around four thousand meters which I'll do a quick conversion
that's thirteen thousand, one d twenty three feet um. And
they're they're real gross um. They're covered in mucus um.
In fact, I've heard some heard I've read some articles

(13:47):
that refer to them as snot flowers. Did you see that, No,
I didn't see. Apparently, like the part of them that's
not boring into the bones with the part that's exposed
to the sea water, it's covered in this like mucus
like bubble. Maybe that's what we're seeing here with the
cloud stuff that we're looking at. And uh and because
of that mucus, some people call them snot flowers. I'm

(14:11):
gonna stick to bone worms and osdax. Yeah, I mean,
no matter how you go, they're kind of gross. Like
one of the things I was thinking about yesterday is like,
then this is where mine my mind goes when we
research stuff like this, is like what if you could
take an osdax uh and make it You make it larger,
and then you speed up its life process and then

(14:32):
you throw it at your enemies. So you've got like
an osdax grenade, right, and you you throw it at somebody,
they get splattered with osedax worms and the worms just
start burrowing right into your bones and you've got all
these little snot flowers sticking out of you. That would
be a pretty bad way to go, right, That would
be a bad way to go. So these uh guys
are gals to be technical about the whole thank you.

(14:53):
The bores are mainly gals. They they are mouthless and gutless.
They have no digestive tract, they have no anus uh,
and they have little appendages that stick out into the
water column for gas exchange, but can be retracted uh
into a mucous tube if disturbed. The mucous tube. Now

(15:14):
on the real business end, though, you have ton of
They tunnel into whale bone with green, fleshy roots. They're
often described as like not quite pinnacles, more like roots,
and they grow into the bone and they break it down.
So it's in a way, it behaves a lot like
a plant, and it's feeding technique here. And that's how

(15:35):
Heart kind of describes it in her book as well. Yeah,
it's kind of taking I think she she says that
it takes a page from the plant playbook, if you will. Yeah,
so this is vile. Just what do you think about it? Right,
Like these tentacles drill into the bones, then they create
a root network, and then on the outside, presumably I guess,
like drawing in nutrients or something from the sea water

(15:57):
around it, there's this mucacy cloud, gross tube thing. Uh. Yeah,
they're pretty horrifying. I have a quote here from Heart
uh in Sex and the Sea she says. Even more strange,
these roots grow from around the ovisak, like a fibrous
network of food factory sprouting out of the worm equivalent
of fallopian tubes. Yeah, that would definitely upset Lovecraft even

(16:19):
more like the just the genuine feminine nature of these
things would also be upsetting for him. So you've got
two for two in the Lovecraft column. The uh, the
sea life, and then also just his general fear of women.
And we haven't even gotten to be acid yet, because
the worms use a a proton pump to secrete acid
through the roots into the bones. According to a two

(16:40):
thousand thirteen Swedish study, the creature pumps out this bone
melting acid into the tunnel as it tunnels its way
in after all that delicious collagen and all those lipids.
But here's where he gets even more amazing. According to
to this particular study, the process is very similar to
how mammals repair and remodel bones, specifically human so it's

(17:01):
it's only in reverse. So essentially they're ungrowing the bones
with their with their acid, which is wonderful. Yeah, And
it's so it's similar to humans in the way that
like our kidneys basically handled blood and urine function, right,
but it's just the opposite. Uh yeah, yeah. The the
the acid secreting enzymes you find are are are similar
in some ways to those found in human kidneys that

(17:23):
handle blood in urine functions. But then, of course, how
do they actually consume the nutrients. Scientists are still studying
this area of osodox biology, but it seems that the
symbiotic bacteria in the worms plays a key role. It's
possible that the symbiotic bacteria metabolize the bone derived collagen
into other organic compounds, and that the worm just digest

(17:46):
the bacteria after it feeds. So it's yeah, imagine this
situation where the symbiotic relationship with the bacteria in side.
At the bacteria is benefiting from the initial feeding and
then the osodox is feeding on the bacteria inside it. Yeah,
it's a it's a clean we can say that much
outside of it being covered in mucus. But you gotta

(18:06):
when you see something like this, we discover something like this,
you gotta go like wow, you know, this is one
of those instances where like we're looking for alien life,
we wonder what alien life is gonna look like. And
then We've got this just sitting on our back door,
stepped down at the bottom of the ocean, and you
gotta wonder, like, how how did such a thing evolve?
And also like the cleanliness of the mechanism, right, like

(18:27):
the perfection of this mechanism. Um, they're they're apparently related
to those same you know, we've we've talked about these
a lot on the show before, like those giant tube
worms that live near like the super heated vents. Uh,
they're like that, And this gives more rise to that
theory what I was talking about earlier. Uh, it's it's
similar to the oasis theory, the idea of whalefalls as

(18:47):
service stops. Right, that these life forms are all just
kind of moving along the ocean floor. So maybe they
evolved or adapted out of those tube worms, right, and
then somehow, you know, found their first whale falls nervist stop.
But they really evolved alongside whales, which is pretty fascinating. Uh.
And here's where it gets interesting, right, because human beings

(19:10):
have been devastating the whale population for the last I
don't know what two d years. Uh, that there's a
theory that this has curtailed the activity of creatures like
the Osadak's worm because there's less for them to feed
on the ocean floor. So it's possible that there has
been an extinction of certain bottom dwelling organisms that we've

(19:31):
never seen and there's no evidence of them left over. Yeah.
Because you remove a whale from the ocean, you process
it for whaling purposes, you are stealing its environment from it.
It's uh, the ephemeral environment. So maybe there is something
even grosser and weirder, devouring, devouring whale bones before we

(19:51):
started hunting whales, but now we don't know, We don't
know what was down there. Yeah. Now, so there's a
lot of genetic evidence that really gets into this whole
idea that they they co evolved with whales, that they
are essentially about forty million years old. Uh, And then
there's some genetic evidence to back this up. But according
to a two thousand fifteen study from the University of Plymouth,
there's actually fossil evidence that the osodox fed on bones

(20:16):
of marine reptiles during the age of dinosaurs, So that's
at least a hundred million years ago as opposed to
forty to forty five million years ago. Yeah, I read
an article about this and they said that the scientists
involved used a CT scanner on a pleosaur and a
sea turtle fossils and they found the exact same boreholes
that we find from Osadax worms in whale bones. Now,

(20:37):
they matched the patterns almost exactly. So it's possible. Here's
another thing that will blow your mind. Uh, it's possible
that there were skeletons down there of species giant water
species that we had we didn't discover because the osadax
worms and similar entities devoured the whole thing clean up

(20:57):
the Yeah, and they're not part of We don't have
those to be part of the fossil record now, so
we don't know. Maybe there are other things like plesaurs
down there. I'm sorry I said that wrong. Please us
or it just reminded everybody. You know that the fossil
record is, by its very nature incomplete. Especially the circumstances
have to be just right for fossilization to take place.

(21:20):
It's something that that keeps scavengers from completely erasing it.
For instance. Yeah, we actually just did a brain Stuff
episode about that. I believe Joe is involved in the
writing of that. It's about why some skeletons become fossils
and some don't. So if you want to learn more
about that, go check out brain Stuff. We'll make sure
to include a link to that on the landing page
for this episode. It's suffitability in mind dot com. But hey,

(21:40):
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(22:44):
so you have a great phrasing system. I think that
you've got maybe from heart. For this particular section where
we're gonna talk about the sex lives of the Osdax
bone worm, you call them a harem of the osdax.
Sounds like a Doctor Who episode title, it does, or
like a grown up Dr SEUs episode. Yeah, so that

(23:06):
you have the harem of the osodox. It's um. I
believe Hart was the one to use the term the harem,
or at least that's where I saw it first. So
remember that quote earlier from her about the fibrous network
of food factory sprouting out of the worm equivalent of
fallopian tubes. Well, that probably makes you think. And we
already alluded the fact that that osodox as we typically
encounter them are all female. So where are the males?

(23:28):
That was a question scientist asked as well. Males had
to exist because they looked at the females and they
contained plenty of sperm or they seem to contain plenty
of sperm cells. And then they found their answer. Those
were not male sperm cells at all. Those were tiny
dwarf males, a harem of microscopic males. Inside the female.

(23:49):
In each of these males is a hundred thousand times
smaller than the female imprisoning them. So imagine this because
we just talked about the scale, right, So there's females
are about a cent to me eater long, and then
the males are each a hundred thousand times smaller than
that and all live inside of a female. Yeah, it's it.

(24:10):
It might be the most outrageous example of sexual dimorphism
on the planet. And it's well beyond the whole like
like think of the old B movie Attack of the
fifte you know, like right, Yeah, the scenarios so like
a hundred fifty feet tall may not even be big enough.
You have to be a hundred thousand feet all. Like,

(24:30):
even that is nothing compared to the sexual dimorphism we
see with with most osodox worm. Yeah. And I guess
just thinking about it from the general perspective, as we
humans normally do of our own you know, experience, right,
so thinking about our reproductive process, I don't I still

(24:51):
don't quite see how that works. If there's a hundred
thousand males living inside one female, how does that work.
I wouldn't even think that their sperm would be able
to to do anything. What's the theory there, Well, it
breaks down like this apparently. So larval astodox worms arrive
at a whale fall, they cover the bones just completely.
They sink their roots in, They feed, they grow, they

(25:14):
produce eggs. Later, larval astodox worms arrive and they land
on the larger established females. It's already coated. There's no
room left to establish. These famous females then transform into males. Okay, okay,
so we've got they're able to um do like some
kind of gender morphing. Yeah, in their larval stage, they

(25:34):
morph in the males and they crawl inside the females
and they start producing sperm. So this is an example
of environmentally controlled sex determination. We see varying degrees. This
occur in many other animals and also in fictional places
like Jurassic Park. Oh yeah, well maybe they right, Maybe
that was You still haven't seen Jurassic World yet, how

(25:55):
I have? Well, yeah, maybe that's how they created their
super duper dinosaur and that or whatever. Like, wasn't it
able to like self replicate or something like that? Oh no,
that's from the original dress. They've got some osadax worm
genes in there or something, right, I'd like to see that.
Here's something that I read about the mail transformation that
made it even weirder for me. Okay, this is the description.

(26:16):
When they become mail, a long go nattle duct extends
from their rear and out of a poor just above
their brain, so they basically become little penises. All development
at this stage again, it's they're trapped in this larval
stage and all development save testies, development just halts from

(26:37):
that point on because they're there. They've arrived that if
the mail is just a a necessary mutation that you
need to deliver its share of the reproductive package, the
package is delivered, just cut out everything like for efficient.
It's incredibly efficient. Yeah. Can you imagine if our lives
were that much easier, right, Like we didn't have to

(26:59):
go through the whole like like cording, mating rituals and
all the cultural stuff that we've set up around sex.
It's just like, oh, there are already women here, Okay,
I'm gonna turn into a man. Yeah, it would it.
Life would be a lot easier, wouldn't It would make
things easier little maybe a little interesting. So the males
carry on inside the female they eventually died, so she

(27:19):
has to keep obtaining new males for the harem will
and by the end of her life, a female osodox
worm may have several hundred males insider. But then of
course the whale bone riches eventually give out and everything dies. Yeah,
so then this is where I have and i'd love
you know, I know that this study is just in
its infancy, but I'd love to figure this out. So
how do they then get to another whalefall? Right? Like

(27:42):
if they their whole lives are spent on this one
set of bones and they're going through their reproductive system
that way, I wonder how the other ones then then
move on and find their way to another set of
whale bones. Well, I would imagine the larva have to
set off across the desert, right, we're back to the oasis. Yeah,
they have to drift on until they find the next

(28:04):
carried on a current or something like that, until they
land in the right place. Yeah. It's my understanding that
this is also an area where the research is still
ongoing to to figure out, because there's one thing to
be able to study them at the site where you
know they're going to be. But in other mysteries about
their reproductive cycle. Again across several different species of osodox
remain and there and there's still like this is we're

(28:27):
really in like the first not even two decades of
Osodax research, right, and so uh tons of new species
are being discovered all the time, like and like they
give them like kind of cool names, like I think
it's like Osadas antarcticus or something like that, like the
one where they found in Antarctica. And I actually read
that there are some where the males are not that tiny.

(28:47):
There are some species that have been discovered where the
males are a little bit larger. But we don't really
fully understand this whole thing just yet some of its guestwork.
So I imagine, you know, as we move on over
the next couple of years, we're gonna keep hearing more
and more giblets of Osadax research coming out. Yeah, that
the one you alluded to already. H That that one

(29:07):
came from a two thousan fourteen study from the University
of California UH San Diego, where they revealed this new
species where the males were larger and they can move
and actually consume bone on their own they can stretch
out their bodies to find new worms, and they say
this all amounts to an evolutionary reversal to an ancestral state.
So the genes for the larger males were still there

(29:29):
and this species of Osodox employs them. Um, which is
which is interesting. Um. Again, the scenario they're still exploring.
But I wonder to what extent that has to do
with the species having to to roll with the with
the changes in the environment, such as decades and decades
of fewer whale carcasses out there. Well, maybe we'll be

(29:49):
able to get some of these answers from our discussion
with doctor Hart based on her book. Now there's a
whole section about the Osodox worms in this book, but
I gotta tell you, this book is like way more
than that. I mean, it's about the sex lives of
everything that's under the sea. I'm hearing Sebastian the Lobster
from from The Little Mermaid in the back of my head. So, um,

(30:11):
maybe we can ask her about some of those things
and get some answers. Well, hey, welcome to the show.
We just finished discussing the Osodox and it's curious mating
and feeding habits here in the show, based on a
handful of papers and your coverage of the the Osodex
chronicles in your book, Um So Wonderful, tell us where

(30:32):
does the sex life of the Osodex rank on the
spectrum of the beautifully weird in your book? I would
say that it ranks definitely in the very, very weird category.
In fact, I often I often use it as an
example when I talk about how sex is so important

(30:55):
and really the driver of diversity on the planet, but
that some of these systems, when we're looking at them,
we don't even realize, you know, what it is that
we're looking at for quite some time, because it's so
different from what we think of as sex. Autho Sacs
as my example of that, it is just so completely

(31:15):
foreign to you know, first of all human reproductive habits,
but certainly even mammals and most of the animals most
people are familiar with. So I would say it's it's
definitely on the really strange side of the spectrum um.
But what's really beautiful about it is it does give

(31:35):
us a little bit more insight into this idea of
you know, female control really and a little bit more
of a female dominant side of the sexual equation, and
often we tend to think that sex is and we
see this a lot with mammals again, that males tend
to seem to be dominating things and controlling the situation.

(31:57):
And so here's a wonderful example of how females are really,
um really the ones in charge with what's going on.
That's a perfect lead in for my next question, Mara.
So in the book you refer to Austdax males as
being sex slaves. Do we know yet if they serve
any other purpose other than reproduction? We don't. And because

(32:22):
they are sort of duck in this uh sort of
pre pubescent state, they you know, they can't really engage
in the world in many other ways. Now that I
should say, there's one caveat here, So there's one Austotax.
This is why I refer to it as the Autodax chronicle,

(32:43):
because I think, you know, what we're finding out about
these species just keeps evolving over very rapidly. Over time.
We're finding out more and more. So there is one
species where the males are independent. Yeah, the one that
has just discovered off of San Diego and fourteen. Yes,
it's oxid that I think it was San Diego, So

(33:05):
is that I'm going to say hesitant, yes, but yes, yep,
and they they so they're they're an exception to the rule.
And there's some really neat things about that story in
and of itself. But you know, to answer your question around,
you know, do we know if they save any other purpose?

(33:27):
They live off their yolk stack. Um, so they you know,
are independent in terms of their nutrition, and it seems
like the only truly functional component is their mature testies
and they just sort of shoot the sperm out through
these tubes that are up from the tops of their
heads and live inside the female. So um. I don't

(33:49):
know when they die whether or not this female can
make use of the little bit of you know, organic
matters if they leave behind. They're so so tiny. But again,
she can have rams of hundreds, so this is complete speculation.
But maybe. But again because the AdEx, the females have

(34:12):
no mouth and no gut, and they're really just subsisting
off these weird symbiotic bacterial relationships they have. I don't
know if they can digest the males um. So yeah,
I mean they're contributing um. Genetic genetic inputs, and I
don't know much else. Um As specifically regarding that other

(34:35):
species we were talking about, the one with the larger males,
how do they breathe the same way even though the
males are larger, they're just there's less of them, I'm assuming, right, So,
um they What happened is the males can independently you know,
they have these similar roots structures to the females, so
they will independently attached to the bone of the worm,

(34:58):
and they grow a similar size tube and then they
basically reach they We think, again this is a really
new discovery, so there's ongoing research here, but we think
that they use their tube kind of as a giant
sallust and they reach that tube into the other females
around them and deposit the sperm. Because for what we

(35:21):
can understand, that's far especially given the females that have
the dwarf males. They they're internally fertilized, right, So the
sperm is released inside the female, it fertilizes her eggs,
and then she releases these fertilized eggs into the into
the sea. And so we think that what happens with
the males is that they sort of arc their tube

(35:43):
over to the females nearby and can deposit the sperm
that way. But again, this is pretty pretty new stuff. Um,
but I'll check sort of in the background as we
chat here. But I think that that's part of the name,
is that the name has something to do with having
this okay body that serves as a fallust. But I

(36:04):
could I could be mistaken now now I have. I
remember reading that there's a there's some thought that this
is kind of a reversion to a more archaic form
in this particular species. Is yeah, yeah, I couldn't help.
But wonder does this have anything to do with the
impact of human whaling activities on their their naturally occurring

(36:26):
ecosystems or when I jump into conclusions there, right, So
that's it's a good question, and um, the answer is
likely no. And this is because it would be very
fast in evolutionary time to have a species be able
to do this really pretty significant reversal. So basically, when

(36:48):
we see in a species this, it's called patamorphs. This
is what the males are defined as in science, and
it means a larval state but with mature reproductive parts. Right,
So it's really weird, right, you have something that's basically
frozen in its development, but for whatever reasons it you know,
in the case of assatas the test, these can mature

(37:11):
and that takes um some pretty significant uh selection for
that kind of a male female pattern to evolve and
to reverse that. This is the only case where scientists
thus far have found a species that has a sister species,
you know, closely related cousin or sister species that came

(37:34):
from the sort of the ancient ancestor had the patamor
had this this arrested development in the males, but then
evolved a species that where that male was actually able
to break free from that kind of um those those
those bonds and actually bloom into a fully mature, independent

(37:56):
living individual. So that would have taken much longer than
the you know, two hundreds of three hundred years of
whaling pressure that we have put on. And it's not
just whales. So Authodex can live off of bones of
other species too. They've been found on carcasses of other animals,

(38:16):
so it's you know, they're used to be the shemeral
food supplies. So I don't think so um. So there
is a rash now that they think might be behind us.
So but but just to jump in, so I was
remembering correctly, okay, which is that the preas the species
name for this independent for the species with the independent male,

(38:39):
comes from the Greek for um, one of the gods
of procreation, So it basically has to do with personification
of the fallus. So the fact that they have these
these tubes that they are likely using to insert into
the female um is kind of where the name name
came from. So another like and I know, I recognize that,

(39:01):
like that, we are just barely scratching the surface of
what we know about this genus. But do you do
you have any insight into when a female Osadax dies,
do the males inside her die as well? Or do
they move on to like another female host. So they're
still trying to figure out, you know, what um, So
where these males you know, come from and what sort

(39:24):
of the dispersal is a guess of the larvae you know,
and the eggs as they go out. But basically the
males have very short lifespans compared to the females because
again they are subsisting entirely off their yolksack. So again
their their larvae, right, and so once they run out
of that yolksac they die. So she's constantly having to
collect more and more male as she's on on these

(39:48):
whales um and and uh feeding off these these dis
whale carcass and again, you know, I would have fast
um dr ralph. I'm not sure what with the lifespan
of the female is. I would imagine it's a few
weeks maybe a few months, until they've literally scavenged everything

(40:10):
um and the and they don't move. So each female
is sort of rooted to her spot on the whale.
And so once she is sort of um sucked dry
all the nutrients in those bones, then she's got she's
got nothing left and I'm not yeah, so she can't
she can't move location. They sort of route down, or

(40:32):
at least we think they sort of route down, and
these huge colonizations they degrade, um the carcass, it deteriorates,
you know, just like um we see with uh you
know bugs, you know, uh, you know, ants doing on
dead bugs or things like that. They kind of chew
them down and then when there's nothing left, that's it.

(40:53):
And so but the males, because they're subsisting entirely off
of the foods that they get from their mama's They
go much quicker. So we know that as the female
grows and grows in size and age, her harem gets
bigger and bigger, but she's also having to replace the
males that have expired inside her. Okay, okay, Now in

(41:16):
your book you mentioned a couple of other sea creatures.
They are known for their sexual dimorphism and their unique
treatment of males, including one of one of my favorites,
uh from a new about in the past. Can you
amaze our listeners with at least a brief tale of
the angler fifth? Ah? Sure, the angler fish. So English
fish are wonderful deep sea fish, and there's one group

(41:41):
of anglerfish in particular that have this really unique sexual strategy.
And the males in this group are born with no
ability to feed themselves. So they are these tiny little fish,
often no bigger than you know, half the size of
your your thumbnail, sorry, your your knuckle, you know, sort

(42:03):
of an inch maybe less. And they're swimming through the
ocean and they have a fantastic sense of smell, and
they are on a mission because they can't see themselves,
and so they have to find the female before they
run out of steam. So they're shooting around in the
deep sea in the dark, trying to find these females.
And the females are much much larger than they are,

(42:26):
and the females are hunters. And they're called angler fish
because they have these structures off the tops of their
heads that often have a bioluminescence or glow that attracts
fish to them. And then they have these giant mouths
and they sort of open their mouths and suck suck
these little fish in and and so they're they're these
sort of ambush predators of the deep, and they can

(42:48):
look pretty spooky, lots of big teeth. And these tiny
little males are swimming around and they're honing in on
the female by her scent. And when they find the female,
rather than being uh intimidated by her her kind of
menacing look, they are wildly attracted and they zoom into
her and then they actually will will bite onto her

(43:10):
side or her belly, and over this really cool process,
the male will then basically his his jaws will disintegrate,
his um, his foreheads will sort of sink into her body.
Their tissues fused, so that their circulatory systems actually connect

(43:33):
and become one, and he sort of becomes this um
parasitic extension of the female. So his independent life disappears
and he is now literally physically fused to the female.
Many his internal organs disintegrate, except for his testing. His
testies continue to grow and develop and they become these

(43:57):
fantastically large firm factories the female. In this way, the
female now has attached to her basically sperm on demand.
So in some species we've been able to see that
when the male attaches, or we think that at the
point when the male attaches, it triggers some chemical and
harmonous transformations inside the female, and that often the female

(44:20):
will not mature and start reproducing start producing eggs until
the male has attached. And then once that happens, it's
sort of like the signal to her that she's got
this reliable sperm supply, so it's time for her to
put the energy into making the eggs. And this works
out really really well for both of them, even though
it might seem a little um, a little bit like

(44:41):
the male gets the short end of the it works
out great because in the deep sea it's very hard
to find a mate. Food is very, very scarce, and
the ability to actually pump out lots of offspring is
pretty rare. So here you have both male and female
connected in a way that ensures that as a female
releases her eggs, the sperm is right there to fertilize

(45:03):
those eggs. The male nose, his sperm is going to
be put to good use, and they can kind of,
you know, swim off into into the darkness doing doing
the deed when when it's needed. That is utterly insane.
That's that's even crazier maybe than the X one. So
I have to ask now then, Like I'm jumping a
head on our notes a little bit here, But so,

(45:24):
based on that story, what is the weirdest creature you
covered in your book? Any It sounds to me like
that that might be weirder than the osod x? Is
there anything even weirder? Gosh, it's oh my goodness, it's
so the sand tiger's reproductive strategy is really weird and
kind of gruesome. So they're but they're not a weird species, right,

(45:47):
so that they're sharks, um, but they have some really
funky stuff going on. Um, there's you know, there's the
species of Pinafore, which is a small plank in it's
it's um. They're known as comb jellies and they're hunters
and the plankton, and they're related to jellyfish. But they
have this really weird thing where it looks like the

(46:10):
egg and sorry, the the nucleus of their eggs actually
selects the sperm. Is totally crazy. Yeah, I mean that's right.
It's it's it's a part of a single cell. So
it's like, you know, the nucleus is an organelle, so
it would be like imagining your liver is picking your date. Right.

(46:32):
That's wacky, totally wacky. So um, there are a really
interesting story and they're one of the few exceptions to
the rule which is normally, by and large, when an
egg um, eggs work really hard to ensure that only
one sperm makes it in through their sort of powder barrier.
If they have multiple sperm, and it's called poly spermy,

(46:56):
it's normally fatal to an egg. So this tina four
has this completely opposite approach whereby you know, three four
sperm may enter the egg and then the eggs nucleus
like kind of moved around and it literally will go
and check out, moved to each of the sperm within

(47:16):
that cell, looking at them doing something we don't know what,
and then sort of picks the one that it actually
will fuse with. And that's just to me, that blew
my mind. That's so weird. And you know, this is
operating not even at the sperm egg interface, but within
this single cell, So that was pretty cool. Um trying

(47:38):
to think other other weird ones. Um Dinophilus is another worm,
and they make the sort of parasitic male thing even
more extreme in that they lay two kinds of eggs,
a large egg and a small egg. The large ones
are females and the small ones are males, and they're
laid inside this cocoon and and the eggs hatch and

(48:01):
the males we'll meete with their sisters inside the cocoon,
and then they die and that's it. And then the
females break free of the cocoon and go off to
kind of live and lay their eggs which have been
fertilized by their brothers. So that's a little bit, you know. Yeah,
I think the usual. I think that one leads well
into our question about oceanic orgies. Yeah, as as much

(48:24):
as as much as human beings can gauge these things.
Which species hosts the most interesting oceanic orgy most interesting?
And I'll out of sidebar onto this that might help out,
which is that I'm curious about. You mentioned cea orgy
tourism in the book, and so I'm kind of curious

(48:44):
about that as well, like like maybe it's more along
the lines of like which species orgies are are people
going to watch the best to watch? Okay, So that's good,
so of interest to us. So some of the most
dynamic and really sort of exciting I think are in
species such as um snappers or grouper um. And in

(49:08):
those species, let's take Nassau grouper for for example. So
this is an endangered species first of all. So it
is really rare and really really cool to get to
see a spawning aggregation because in one location you might
have three or four thousand fish that you know are
the only three or four thousand fish, say, for an

(49:29):
entire island. And this is some work that the group
of Moon Project has been working on off of a
little Cayman that's the last large remaining spawning aggregation we
know of in the Caribbean for this species they used
to gather. They used to gather in tens of thousands,
maybe even hundreds of thousands. We're now down to about
three or four thousand. About about six seven years ago,

(49:51):
that population was eight thousand, and fishers over the course
of about three or four years hammered it down to half,
which is why it is now being studied and protected. Um.
But what's really cool to watch is that it's happy. Actually,
what was the full moment was only about two days ago,
I think so literally, as we're talking, these fish are

(50:12):
leaving their home territories where they normally stay all year round.
They're very aggressive fish, so they don't tend to play
nicely with their fellow nasaw grouper. And at this one
window of time, for about a week they leave their
home territories, they change their coloration. So they'll shift from
sort of this desert camo into a two toned color

(50:34):
where they're sort of dark brown or black on top
and white bellied. Some of the females will go all black.
So I like to think of this as their black
tie affair. And they they're they're in their good duds
and and it's probably a cue. It's a signal that like, hey,
I'm friendly now, Like I get it. We're gonna get together,
We're gonna have some action. It is okay to hang

(50:56):
out by me, because otherwise, right you have these really
aggressive fish, and if you were to approached fishes is
not in the mood. That's not gonna help your orgy
be very productive. So they change their colors and they
create these like caravans, and they flow down to the
southern tip of the island and they sort of will
leave their territories and hover at the edge of the
reefs and they'll wait until other NASA groupers to sort

(51:18):
of start passing by, and they'll sort of feed into
this funnel kind of like tribute charies off the river.
You know, they're all like going down the stream. And
we know this from acoustic data. So many of these
um individuals have been tagged and the researchers have put
listening stations around the island, and so they can see
through listening where they're going because there's these paves, and

(51:40):
they can pick up the fish as they go, and
they get bigger and bigger in their schools and they
caravan down south and they form these giants swirling balls
like like I said, three to four thousand fish and
other species. It's even even higher thousands and thousands, and
right around dusk for whatever reason or he's in the

(52:00):
sea are often coordinated with with sunset. It's very romantic,
I guess, very um. It helps them kind of truly,
it helps them coordinate their timing because at the signal
they can all sort of tune into and they'll get
really agitated. They'll start swimming around and bumping up against
one another, and then the females their their bellies will

(52:22):
be swollen with eggs. I mean, they literally look pregnant,
and the females will all of a sudden start to
sort of lead these um smaller groups out from the
big swirling school and they rock it up towards the surface,
and when they're within about at the surface, they'll do
this giant arc and at the peak of their sort

(52:42):
of sort of climb, they'll release a giant puff of eggs.
The males then will follow the female's frantically trying to
get as close to her as possible, and they'll release
their sperm right after she releases the eggs. And so
you get these guysers of fish are resting out of
this swirling school and these huge puffs of egg and

(53:04):
sperm that start to turn the water really cloudy, and
it's just it's really it's really crazy. And one of
the researchers I talked to at Dolman named Brad Arisman said,
it's like organized chaos because you have these fish swirling
around below. You're surrounded by all these thousands of fish.
They're rushing up to do these little spawning births. Meanwhile,

(53:28):
depending on where you are and which species you're studying,
there's a lot of predators in this in this space too,
because these fish are very preoccupied. They're they're focusing on
getting their deeds done. Yeah, there's fish take advantage of that.
There are also lots of silfter feeding animals, whether it's whale,
sharks or smaller fish, who feed off the sperm and

(53:51):
the eggs. Right, this is like abundance of energy and
fatty goodness that is just being passed out into the sea.
And so not all of those fermin eggs find one
another and make the next generation. Many of them get
gobbled up. So you've got all these fish darting in
whether to hit the fish or to hit the eggs
and sperm, and then you've got the spawners themselves going off. Oftentimes,

(54:15):
these are multiple species aggregations, so you'll have one species
kind of concentrated in a small area and another species
somewhere else, and they might have slightly different timing or
slightly different locations, but they're all kind of erupting somewhat
near each other. So it's um yeah, as a bad sense.
He's like, it's like organized chaos and things are just

(54:36):
flying by your mask and your face and your fins
and you know, trying trying to to watch all of
it is it's really He's like, it's wonderful to watch,
it's really hard to study. The next time our listeners
are in the Cayman Islands, I guess then they should, uh,
they should go rent a body suit and and I'm
assuming you can get like a guide or something like
that for this. Yes, So this is something that is

(54:58):
just now starting to develop, and in some cases the
location is one that's really accessible and countries are starting
to encourage fishers um in particular, though other you know,
eco tourism operators are jumping on board too, to say,
you know, rather than catching these fish and disrupting the
spawning behavior and the process. Let's protect them while they're spawning.

(55:22):
Let's close down fishing, and instead you can earn an
income by taking people out to watch. And this has
started started to gain some traction, and the idea there
is that this is again the only time of year
that these fish get together to breed. This is it.
And if we go in fish while they're trying to reproduce,
you know it. There's lots of disruption that can happen.

(55:44):
There's subtle signaling going on to coordinate these individual bursts.
These animals may have a bit of social hierarchy, We're
still not sure. So any kind of fishing or interruption
where certain individuals are being pulled out of the population,
it just disrupts that coordination. The other problem is that
when you're surrounded by thousands and thousands of thousands of fish,

(56:07):
it is really hard to really see how much damage
you're doing. So again, like I said, this population off
of Little came In had about eight thousand fish and
within three years it was down to four thousand. But
you know, if you're a fisher and you're looking down
there and you're seeing all these fish it seems like
there's plenty. It seems like there's tons, and every year

(56:29):
they keep grouping up. So the ability for us to
manage that well is really really difficult, and we have
a absolutely dismal record. We have just pretty much all
known spawning aggregations have been hammered really hard. Many have
completely have been completely fished out, where the fish no
longer show up. There's just none left. And it's just

(56:51):
you know, um, I like to say, you know, don't
come a knock and when the beds are rocking, that's
crazy cold, and and orgies, orgies like this or that's
it right, Like, let's just like let them spawn and
then we'll figure out management for the rest of the
year because I know that that next generation is coming.
But they think that some tourism and watching and observing
some of these um could could work in some places

(57:13):
to help provide fishers with alternative income, which is great
because you know, they do. Many of these fishers have
depended on spawning aggregations for a huge, huge portion of
their income because it's so lucrative. Uh So it's hard.
It's hard to say we're going to shut them down,
but it really is what's what's needed. Um So, the
tourism is is one one potential there. Um So those

(57:38):
are the fish I think people would love that. The
other one is coral spawning. Coral spawning is just awesome
and it's easy to witness as well, and it's beautiful.
It's like being in a snowstorm. Um So we can
talk about that if if you wish, but um that
would be my that would be my second vote. I
guess well, I wish we had had more time to

(57:59):
just us that because I actually just visited Jamaica and
got to do some snorkeling and so I'm super interested
in coral now. So maybe we'll have to get back
in touch with you about that. But for one last
question here on this episode, I just wanted to to ask,
you've heard you talk about this in some other shows,
just where the idea for sex in the sea came
from and what you really set out to accomplish with

(58:20):
this book. Sure, so, successful sex is the heart of sustainability.
When we think about all of the amazing abundance and
diversity that exists in the ocean, it all comes from sex.
We have to have these animals successfully reproducing in order
to have the amazing prolific oyster reefs and coral reefs

(58:45):
and giant schools of beat fish that feed the giant
schools of tuna that then feed us. So it really
all does come down to these animals being able to
successfully date inmate. But the idea sort of came about
UM when I was in graduate school and I was
seeing some of the declines on coral reefs in particular,

(59:07):
and I knew that ocean issues weren't um you know,
they're not top of mind from most of the public.
There's a lot of other important stuff where ocean issues
are competing with And so I was looking for a
way that would engage folks and the interesting and fun,
but also be able to tell the message that you know,
we're having an impact in a way that we often

(59:27):
don't realize. And I was at a cocktail party. I
was talking with a bunch of friends over some drinks,
and we were bemoaning sort of the differences and lack
of understanding between guys and girls basically, and a friend
of mine sort of said, you know, I just wish
for one day I could be in the body of
a guy and know what that was like like know

(59:48):
what they're thinking, you know, what's going on, and I,
being a total nerdy biologist off hand, just like I know,
if only we could be like parrot fish. And you know,
I got I was met with sort of this like
you know stairs, and it got very quiet, very quickly,
and I said, oh, well, you know, parashige can change sex.

(01:00:10):
They start this female and they turn in the mail,
so like they know, they know what it's like. And
it was still quiet, you know, they were they were
sort of like, I don't know where you're doing with
this Morrow. And so I then you know, went on
to explain that shrim through this oyster and through this
you know, it's really common strategy. And then I sort
of lent into the fact that you imagine how much

(01:00:32):
more complex that makes it for us to try to
manage these animals, because now it's you're fishing all the
biggest fish, which we tend to like to do, and
you're fishing a sex changing population. You're not only taking
out large numbers, but you're also totally skewing the sex
ratio right, which makes it really hard for a female
to find a date when all the males have just

(01:00:52):
been scooped up so I was able to have this
conversation and people were listening, and they were engaged, and
they were asking me quite shans. And afterwards I went
to go get another drink at a different part of
the house and I heard someone I had been talking to.
This is probably about half an hour later, and someone
I had been talking to was relaying that story to

(01:01:12):
somebody else. They were like, did you know fish change sex?
And they're crazy? And I literally it was like at
that moment that that's it. That's how we can talk
about it sex. Even if people don't admitte, they're curious
about it. And there's so many amazing, wonderful strategies in
the ocean that we're just starting to learn about, and
it's so critical to sustainability. That's the perfect, perfect way

(01:01:35):
to tell these stories and hopefully get more people to
be enthralled and inspired by the ocean as as I am,
and I also get get a few I mean, it's
really the goal is to recruit wonderful minds to help
us solve these problems. And I think that that's going
to come from more than just the scientists. We need
smart business folks and policy folks and artists and you know,

(01:01:58):
everybody out there um to help us thinks through the
ways that we can better interact and sustainably manage our
sees and hopefully sex and the se'll help, yeah, help
get into the lapse of some people who might not
otherwise think about it. So there you have it, the
osodox The Sex Life of an Ocean bone Worm. And

(01:02:19):
thanks once again to Dr mar j Hert, author of
Sex in the Sea, for chatting with us a little
bit about her book. So if you want to get
in touch with us, maybe you've seen the osodax up
close and personal. Maybe you've got some fan art that
you want to share with us, maybe some some Osodax
fan fiction. You can always reach out to us on
our social accounts, Facebook, Twitter, and tumbler. Uh. Sometimes, you know,

(01:02:43):
I like to post like an image of just like
what we're working on, like a day or two before
we record these episodes. Yesterday I I put a picture
of an Osodax up and somebody got somebody did somebody got?
When I checked in on it, nobody hit guess, Yeah,
it was just this morning that I saw somebody nailed it,
like they knew exact clear that it was an Osadax.
It wasn't just like, oh that's a marine worm. They've
had it all right. So hey Osadax fans out there, Uh,

(01:03:06):
let us know what you think and hit us up
on Facebook, Twitter, and tumbler at blow the Mind And
where can they reach us the old fashioned way? Oh
you can reach this via email. That is blow the
Mind at how stuff Works dot com. Well more on

(01:03:29):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
Works dot com? Little