The Mighty Sarlacc

Few places in the Star Wars universe are regarded with as much horror as the Great Pit of Carkoon, within the Dune Sea of Tatooine. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the mighty Sarlacc and compare what we know about this organism to denizens of the natural world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
And now for traffic, we take you to week Way
Ray in the Channel five sky skiff. Hey, Jim, we're
pretty clear of sandstorms across much of the dune seed
this morning, so that's great news for skyhopper and land
speeder traffic. So far, however, we're already seeing a bit
of pre wunt to eve classic traffic heading into moss Aspec. Plus,
things are grinding to a halt out near the Great

(00:25):
Pit of Carcoon and the walp rats are play and
as it looks like the huts are hosting another multi
skiff Sarlac offering. Always best to steer clear unless you've
got an invite, especially if you've got an invite. All
too true. Ray. Now let's check in with Merge surgeon
on for a look at this week's solar activity. Looks
like we're in for a double helping of solar flares.

(00:49):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
here we are finally here in a galaxy far far away.
I did not think we would end up doing Star

(01:10):
Wars content, especially so close to May fourth, but not
on it. Things are getting strange. Yeah. Now, fittingly, we're
recording this episode on May the fourth, but that that
just benefits the two of us. The listeners are gonna
get it a little later. However, since the May the
fourth like sales begin before May the fourth, I think

(01:34):
it's okay to assume that May the fourth is just
generally a a you know, a multi day even multi
week affair in which we celebrate Star Wars. Yeah, it's
like Christmas gradually creeps out to the edges. Yeah, the
thirty days of May the fourth or what have you. Uh. Now,
so you've been going on a Star Wars expedition in
your house, right, Yeah? Yeah, we've been watching all the

(01:58):
all the movies. We also watched The Mandalorian. I think
at this point we've watched everything except the most recent one,
and we're going to catch that one tonight because it
just dropped on Disney Plus. But yeah, we've been we've
been full, full blown into the Star Wars um and
it's been It's been pretty fun because I've i think

(02:19):
I've been personally been like several different stereotypical Star Wars
fans over the years. I was born in seventy eight,
so the original trilogy and their associated toys were just
a key part of my childhood and uh and just
as aspects of their structure were based on you know,
archetypes of comparative mythology. You know, these films introduced many

(02:40):
of us to some of these mythic energies. So I
remember loving these films as a child. I remember lapsing
somewhat during what I think of as like the Star
Wars dark Age of the early and mid nineties. I
think that's when I was getting like the Star Wars
Insider fan magazine. Oh cool, yeah, and he'd kind of
gone uh underground. I mean, I don't want to say

(03:02):
undergund because obviously there was there was still tons of
content coming out and the you know, the Expanded Universe
and so forth. There were books, there were comics, there
were there were games, but it wasn't as as prevalent
uh in the pop culture at that time. But of
course it was gearing up because then came, uh, the

(03:22):
the prequels, right um uh. Now, I I too remember
reading some of the extended Universe stuff and getting into
that and the like the late nineties but then we
had Phantom Menace, and I remember being first of all,
like super excited for it, and then I was a
bit of a prequel apologist there for a bit regarding
the Phantom Menace, and then I became kind of a

(03:43):
snarky fan who focused only on the flaws of the
prequel films. And I'd say I didn't fully recover from
that until I watched The Mandalorian with my family, uh,
and we all loved it. And then we started watching
all the films again. And and now I'm I'm leaning
into the force. I'm I'm I'm just saying, I'm enjoying
all of them. I've enjoyed each film that I've watched,

(04:05):
and and she really kind of tried to watch them,
you know, with my son, but also kind of threw
his eyes. And it's been a blast. What are his favorites?
He tells me that his favorites are the Phantom Menace
and let's see Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi,
but especially Phantom Menace. He in fact requested that we
watched that one again, and so we watched half of

(04:27):
it last night. Those it does not escape my attention
that those are the two that have the highest quotient
of cuteness content they do, they have they have cuteness,
But then also they just have a ton of creatures.
And I think that's also key because like The Phantom Menace,
most of it takes place on like a dinosaur ridden uh,

(04:47):
you know planet where there's just you know, monster after
monster after monster, and and yeah, you have the comic
elements as well, and you have an actual child in it,
which I think also is adds this kind of anchor
for younger viewers, the going against what I was just
saying about cuteness. Obviously, Return of the Jedi is where
we get the the e Walks, the classic Teddy Bear planet.

(05:08):
But the first half of Return of the Jedi its
just when we rewatched it not too long ago, I
was like, man, I love this wasn't when I was
a kid. But the first half of this movie is gross.
It is full of like just like like nasty, slimy
critters everywhere and and and horrible monsters and uh. And
I would say, actually, the thing maybe that stands out

(05:30):
the most in my mind is going to be the
subject of today's episode, which is the Sarlac. Yes, yes,
the Sarlac features heavily into this portion of the film,
and it is it's just something that just captures. Uh.
It certainly captures the young imagination, you know, here's this pit,
here is this thing. And I think it it also
played well with the action figures growing up, because you

(05:53):
could you could pretty much make a star lack there was.
I don't think there was a star lak Um like
action play set or anything, because how wrong you are,
really they had one because I was just thinking you
just had You had dirt, you had holes, you had
things you could do with like a bedspread, and you
had instant Sarlac Robert. I want you to scroll all
the way down to the bottom of our notes and

(06:14):
have a look at the images I've attached for you.
I thought these would fill you with joy. This comes
from a board game that I found evidence of on
the internet late last night. I think. Uh. It's called
Battle at Sarlac's Pit. It was released at the same
time as the movie, or sometime around the movie, I guess,
to help promote it. And it is a It is

(06:34):
a board game with a Sarlac, like a cardboard Sarlac
cone set up, and then it's got a little barge
or skiff on top where it looks like you you
you play with miniatures of Han Solo, Luke, Skywalker, Chewbacca,
and I guess maybe that's also it's supposed to be Leiah.
It's kind of hard to tell. The miniatures are not
super detailed, and you have to fight your way through these,

(06:57):
you know, green pig face guards and Boba that to
to confront Jab of the Hut, and I guess if
you lose, you fall off into the star Lack's mouth. Ha.
Well that it looks beautiful. I mean, especially the cover
art in this box looks incredible, and then the set
itself is is pretty ingenious, especially given the time. I
can't obviously, I can't speak for the the actual gameplay,

(07:18):
but it looks intriguing. Yeah, I've never seen this before. Well,
I know you're a miniatures guy, so I was wondering
if you might end up looking this thing up. I
might have to the miniatures. It looks like the miniatures
are supplied poorly painted, or perhaps they're supplied unpainted, and
what we're looking at here is the work of a
child roughly painting them. I can't tell, but yeah, I'm

(07:39):
gonna have to look into this more. This this is interesting.
If I had known this existed when I was a kid,
I would have insisted on it. So I guess we should.
We can assume that most listeners have probably seen Return
of the Jedi, don't the star Lack doesn't need a
lot of explaining, but just to do the very basics,
we should explain what happens in the movie. So the
role in the plot is you remember our heroes Luke Skywalker,

(08:02):
Han Solo, Chewbacca. Uh, they are sentenced to death by
the gangster Job of the Hut. He's the big slug
guy and Job Job of the Hut says the method
of execution for these three heroes is going to be
a kind of alien desert version of the Pirates walking
of the plank, Right, you know, they're gonna be forced
to walk the plank off of this floating barge or

(08:24):
this floating boat type thing into this hole in the desert,
and the Droid C three p O translates job as
execution order. He says, you will therefore be taken to
the dune sea, this big desert and cast into the
pit of Carcoon, the nesting place of the all powerful
Sarlac in his belly. You will find a new definition

(08:45):
of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over
a thousand years. And I'm not gonna lie that concept
haunted me as a child. I was like, slowly digested
over a thousand years? Wouldn't it be over? Are sooner
than that? Yeah, there's this idea that it extends your suffering,

(09:06):
that it is to enter into the star Lack is
to kind of enter into an underworld or an afterlife
of pain. It's like going to hell. Yeah, yeah, a
hell of digestion. And I also love how in C
three pos translation there's this idea, Yeah, that's that's not
only the Sarlac, it is the all powerful Sarlac. There's

(09:27):
this idea that it is a thing that is revered,
that it almost has a divine quality to it. And certainly,
as we see in the film, it's not something that
is defeated. It is not something that is really truly overcome.
It is just avoided and escaped at best. Well, it's
not really the enemy, right, it's kind of the setting.
It's the threat in the setting. It's kind of in

(09:48):
the way that in most zombie movies the zombies are
not really the enemy. They're more like a hostile environment
in which the drama between the characters is set. Usually
in a zombie MOVI, you've got a human villain, and
the same is true here. Clearly the villain is Jab
of the Hut, not the not the Sarlac. And of
course so it's very satisfying when when Leah chokes out

(10:10):
Jab of the Hut, that's like a great you know,
defeat of the villain scene. But there's no need to
kill the Sarlac. It's just doing its thing in the desert,
that's right. Yeah, there's this It has this quality where
the star Lac is kind of like a pet. It's
kind of like a pampered pet of of javas much
like the rain corps is that we see earlier in
the film. But it also feels like something that is

(10:32):
greater than job and certainly it's something that will will
outlive Java. Yeah. So one thing I really liked about
this monster when I was a kid um was something
about the way that the monster was presented visually the
pit of Carcoon and the Sarlac. It was that the
monster wasn't just in a pit. The monster was the pit. Uh.

(10:55):
And and so to explain this a little bit more,
it's kind of like a presented visually as a bio
geological hybrid, like a cave or a hole in the
ground that has tentacle tongues and eats bounty hunters alive.
You can't tell where the animal stops and the earth begins.
And as a point of comparison, I think i'd i'd

(11:17):
use the appeal of like the bio mechanical artwork of
hr Geiger that and how that influenced the creation of
the xenomorph in the Alien films. Xenomorph is basically supposed
to be an animal, but it has tons of body
features that look like parts of industrial machines. It's an
animal made out of tubes and hoses and hinges and pistons.

(11:39):
And I think I always thought the Starlac was cool
because it was like this, but with geology instead of machinery. Uh.
It's it's a mouth that is the earth. It looks
like the teeth are coming out of rock or coming
out of the sand. And Uh. Of course this is
all predicated on the fact that I grew up watching
the versions of these movies before the special edition remasters.

(12:00):
So the version I'm used to seeing is the original,
where it's just the gaping mouth that blends into the
earth and has these rings of inward facing teeth and
the tentacles that reach out from who knows where and
grab things. When the remasters came, of course, they added
a big c g I beak poking up out of
the pit, which sort of eliminates some of that bio
geological magic. I try these days not to be one

(12:22):
of the guys who's just constantly shrieking about how Lucas
ruined things and complaining about remasters and prequels and all that,
but I will say I do not like this change.
I think it's creepier in the original version without the
c g I beak. I like it when it's just
the hole in the earth, the cave with teeth. Yeah.
I I certainly grew up with the the unedited version

(12:45):
as well, and so that's that's probably the version that
was It's cemented in my mind the most, and I
used to feel I think a lot stronger about it
where I'm like, Nope, original Starla only, but I don't
know I can I'm okay with the the redesign I
just wish that the c G I would maybe get another,
you know, a fresh coat of paint to make it

(13:05):
look a little sleeker. But but still like I also,
I understand that they are part of the original concept
was that it would have those elements, but they weren't
able to make it happen because they just didn't have
the budget of the technology to implement it at the time. Um.
But but I and I also think that the addition
of the plant like elements doesn't completely take away from

(13:28):
what you were describing, this idea of the monster as
as pit, the monster as Earth. Um, there's something very primal,
primordial even about about the star lac And you know,
some people, I think a lot to like to criticize
Lucas and you know that they want to go all
in on this idea that well, Lucas depended on all

(13:49):
these other creative people and anything that he got right
he only did accidentally. But I suspect that you know
that he was really onto something with this idea of
the star Lac. Um. I think they're there is something
intentionally primordial about it. And well, and we'll get into
that as we go. Well, I think it just it
suggests the magical thinking that that that is so common

(14:10):
in human culture that characterizes caves and pits in the
earth as a mouth. I mean that kind of that
kind of language is extremely common. Yeah, So before we
get a little bit more into some mythic parallels for
the star Lac, I want to talk just a little
bit more about its presumed biology and its biology is
presented uh in Cannon, and also just a little interpretation

(14:32):
on our part. So obviously, the vast majority of the
star Lacks bulk is hidden beneath the sand, leaving only
its spiked, entacled mouth exposed. Now, presumably the star Lac
just normally, you know, waits there. It doesn't move. It
just waits first, you know, some creature to fall into it.
You know, some of the mega fauna of tattooings, such

(14:54):
as the do back or the bantha. You know, it
just waits for them to wander close enough to fall
in or succumb to the fast moving grasping tentacles. And
if this, you know, seems a rare enough occurrence, we
have to consider that it's it has an alleged one
thousand year digestive cycle. So presumably it has a slow
enough metabolism that it doesn't need just regular feedings. It

(15:17):
can get by on the odd banthera that just falls in.
And then on top of that, we have to consider
that this star lac might be in a privileged situation
as well, sustained by regular feedings from Job as pleasure barges,
because let's face it, Job is the type of fellow
that's liable to just throw people into the sarlac on
a weekly or bi weekly basis, So we may not

(15:40):
be observing the sarlac in its natural environment. This this
could be a domesticated sarlac of sorts. Yeah, yeah, I
think we have to take that into into account now. Um,
in terms of, like, you know, turning to the literature
for you know, explanations of something like the sarlac, uh,
that can be a bit confusing because, first of all,

(16:02):
you know, it's presented as it is in the movie,
and I think a fair amount of mystery about it
is ideal. Like, for instance, C three Po doesn't turn
to you and explain everything about the star lack. He
doesn't go into a big ten minute monologue about it,
because you're supposed to do some of the work, right
it's supposed to inspire you, right, Yeah, I mean what's
cool about it is that you can't see so much

(16:22):
of it. It's a mystery, it's hidden under the earth.
I think some of that would be spoiled if you've
got a better look at it, or you've got c
three po explaining its whole life history. As much as
I would have wanted that when I was a kid,
and we were talking recently about like children, you know,
being obsessed with Cannon and the stories they love and
like wanting to know all the details, I mean, I

(16:42):
bet when I was like eight, I would have just
wish that the Star Wars movies included like Star Wars
illustrated encyclopedia pages as as like scenes throughout them. But yeah,
it works better as a mystery. I think that's my
adult mind. Yeah. Now that being said, it this, this
sort of mystery has inspired lots of people, and so
you have you have a number of different, uh you know,

(17:06):
expanded universe treatments of the Star lac as well as
compendiums that attempt to explain to some degree what the
Star Lack is. And you're gonna deal with, you know,
conflicting accounts and uh, and and so forth if you
start looking at all of those. But I do want
to touch on some ideas that were presented in a
relatively new book that came out, Star Wars Alien Archive,

(17:30):
which I've been reading with my son. Uh. It's you know,
it's basically a you know, a monstrous compendium, a monster
manual of Star Wars aliens, and it's pretty fun. It
has these fabulous illustrations in it, and it you know,
doesn't have everything that shows up in the Star Wars
films and TV shows, but it has quite a bit, uh,
you know, everything from you know, from from major characters

(17:54):
and and and major aliens to even a few things that,
for instance, only show up in one of the e
Walks movies. So it's a fun collection. Naturally, of course
there's an entry on the Mighty Sarlac. So I just
want to touch on a few of the key points,
uh that that are that are made in this Lucasfilm
Press book. First of all, it's described as quote terrifying

(18:16):
carnivorous beast, and this seems to fall more on the
animal side of interpretation. Some people try, and I guess,
explain the Starlac as being more of a plant. Uh,
and it is sometimes described as reproducing by spores, which
leads in list to more of a you know, fungal explanation.
But of course none of this is exactly limiting when

(18:37):
we're ultimately talking about an alien life form that may
you know, easily skew the lines that we draw on
Earth between one kingdom and another. That's exactly right, I mean, yeah,
if we want to be real technical sticklers, the difference
between plants and animals is an evolutionary division that you know,
there they are different clades. You can sort their histories differently,

(18:58):
and you know, animals arising on other planets might be
animal like and that they might move around quickly or
something like that. Or they might be plant like in
that their sessile and the photosynthesize or whatever. But uh,
but yeah, they would not be descended from these kingdoms,
so those sortings wouldn't necessarily even make sense. Yeah. Plus,
oh man, there's a whole additional, uh deep end we

(19:20):
could get into if we tried to figure out how
we consider life in the Star Wars universe, a universe
where not only do we have um life you know,
certainly arising on a plethora of different worlds. But also
you have interstellar life still life that is clinging to asteroids.
You have pan spermia and colonization taking place that you

(19:43):
know at you know, at various points in galactic history.
There's a lot to unpack their deep space evolution. Yeah,
that's right, the minox they live in a vacuum. How
is that possible? I don't think a large animal would
do that. Yeah. Well, that would be a fun one
to come back to at some point, maybe maybe, maybe
some some people have written on that topic. Um okay.

(20:04):
A few other points from the Alien Archive book. Uh.
They to point out that the star lac of Carcoon
is sustained at least in part by sacrifices and executions
by the huts. But they also say that adults are
lacks such as this one can also release an odor
that attracts nearby herbivores to the pit. Oh okay, So
that answer I I that would answer a question that

(20:26):
I had because I was thinking about how a sarlac
would normally eat if it's just this, you know, sessile
pit in the desert. Most sessile trap predators have some
way of assuring that prey will fall in like sessile
predators in the ocean will often try to maximize their
catch by doing their best to latch on in places

(20:47):
where the current will carry unfortunate prey animals right by them. Otherwise,
trap predators like some that we'll talk about in a bit,
like insects that that lay traps in the ground, need
to find a place where, you know, places that are
naturally trafficked by prey, places where you know, ants or
beetles or whatever going to be walking by. Another option

(21:07):
is to look more at the realm of of plants,
which you know, let's say, like carnivorous plants like the
picture plant that's not an animal, but it is a
predatory organism that functions as a trap pit. And yeah,
it uses smells to attract animals to it. Yeah, so
perhaps we might imagine that, um, you know, say that
the sarlac releases uh uh, some sort of odor that

(21:31):
mega fauno would associate with an oasis, you know, or
with with with plant life, and therefore it brings them in.
It doesn't have to bring them in all the way, right,
because those tentacles will do the rest of of the job.
The shifting sand will do you know the rest of
the work. But but perhaps this odor will be enough
to just bring in some food. That makes a lot

(21:52):
more sense than what I had in mind. Yeah, because
I was just trying to think. Okay, so it just
waits until a banta wanders and seems like you'd be
waiting a long time yea once a millennium. The Alien
Archive also points out that the creature has several stomachs,
which you know, I guess makes sense given a lengthy
digestive process. Also says that it's average length is of

(22:13):
one and this is interesting. It contends that younger star
Lacks are capable of moving about to capture food, which, um,
which is an interesting detail. But I think one that
you brought up is is kind of supported by an
old Super Nintendo game, right, Oh that's right. Yeah, So
I I was trying to remember, don't you fight a

(22:35):
sarlac in like the old Super Nintendo Superstar Wars game?
So I looked up the boss fight on YouTube. Robert,
did you watch it? I did. Yes, It's terrible. It
doesn't capture the star Lac magic at all because it's
not a pit. It's just like a big worm that
comes up out of the ground and it moves around
and spits rocks at you. That's not a star Lac.
But but maybe it's supposed to be a young Starlac

(22:58):
a different part of its life cycle. I I guess.
So if we were, if we were to force ourselves
to to take that boss fight and incorporate it into
into Star Wars canon, I think that's the only way
you could go that Basically we'd be looking at, uh,
you know, say a four part lifespan that goes like this.
You have a spore of the star lack that's carried

(23:18):
by the you know, the dust storms. Then you have
some sort of burrowing larva, and then you have a
sandworm esque burrowing juvenile like we see in the Super
in ne S game. And then that eventually, if it survives,
will become a stationary adult like we see in Return
of the Jedi. That is very interesting, and it's also
interesting how that is going to be the exact inverse

(23:39):
of some examples. Will look at from the from the
natural world in a bit where there are things that
are only a trap predator for part of their life cycle,
but it actually comes at the beginning rather than the end. Yeah,
that's true. Uh, it's interesting that if we were to
really look for some potential real world analogs that match
this basic uh you know, four part transformation, I'd say

(24:04):
that something like this mostly resembles the life cycles uh
that we would see in uh say corals or perhaps
a barnacle, both of which we've discussed in depth on
the show before. Um, you know the idea that this
is something that is free swimming earlier in its development,
but then initially eventually puts down roots and stays there

(24:25):
for the rest of its life. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, well,
maybe we need to take a break, but when we
come back, we can talk about Pitt monster mythology and
about h pit trap predators in the natural world. All right,
we'll be right back. Than alright, we're back now. Either
way you look at it, h I'd say the star

(24:45):
Lack is a creature with with fittingly deep mythological roots.
It is in essence as you as you pointed out,
the earth swallowing up the living, with key ties to
understandings and interpretations of earthquakes sink whole just caves in general,
but also other land based catastrophes. So, in preparing for

(25:05):
this episode, I wanted to look something up, something that
I've always assumed because you see it in movies. You
know the scene in the movie where there is an
earthquake and the ground opens up, there's this giant fissure,
then everything just disappears super deep into the earth. Uh.
I was like, wait a minute, does that happen in
real life? Basically? From what I could tell most of

(25:27):
the time, No, I think it's not, in principle impossible.
But generally in earthquakes there might be you know, fissures
that form in the ground, but they don't You don't
get these deep chasms going down into the belly of
the earth that you know, swallow people and buildings. Hold
that if that happens at all, that does not happen
very often. Yeah, that that specifically happens in the Force Awakens.

(25:49):
Remember when Ray is having that duel with Kylo Wren
and then the the the earth shakes and suddenly there's
this this deep gulf between them, which is, you know,
awesome in a film, but maybe not that likely uh
in the real world. Yeah, but it's interesting that So
if this doesn't actually happen in reality, or at least
doesn't happen often enough for people to you know, really

(26:11):
see it and make a meme out of it in
their culture. Where does this idea come from? Because it
goes way back, the idea that the earth like cracks
open and swallows people whole. Right, Yeah, I remember, like, well,
first of all, I probably saw it in various films
growing up as well, but I specifically remember having an
illustrated um Bible stories book and it had an illustration

(26:34):
of of what I what I seem to remember being
the this episode from the Book of Numbers in the
Old Testament, which this is the the King James version quote,
and the earth opened its mouth and swallow them up
with their households, and all the men with Cora, with
all their goods. Wow. Well yeah, that's basically what the

(26:55):
Earthquake movie pictures. Yeah, so you know it's it's I
guess it's a pretty deeply set idea in that respect.
So I was looking around to see if I could
come across any other like specific ideas of monsters or
gods or you know, the adventures of a hero that
involves something like the Sarlac. And what I what I

(27:16):
came across is maybe not a you know a directly
related example, but but I think once I explain it,
people will see a number of parallels that are pretty
pretty interesting. This is from the Mesoamerican mythology of the Aztecs,
the earth goddess tlou Tekutali that is t l A
l t e c u h t l I and

(27:37):
most translations, and man, she's a really interesting earth goddess.
And yes, so for starters, she embodies a typical primordial
god goddess archetype of a divided and dismembered form who
scattered pieces constitute the world, and we see that a

(27:58):
lot in mythologies. But she is also monstrous, incorporating amphibian
and reptile morphology, and she is also presented as an
eater of the dead, so the blood of human sacrifice
flows into the earth to feed her, and she is
often depicted with a flint knife between her teeth and
or rivers of blood flowing from her mouth. She's also

(28:20):
seen as a boundary deity, bridging the world of a
living to Micklin the world of the dead, and her
role here is essentially one of of maintaining balance, and
therefore sacrifices made to her are about keeping into the
balance of the world's together. I mean, she is the earth,
and she is also this bridge between our world and

(28:42):
the world of the dead. And when you look at
likenesses of her, this is also interesting. Her likeness was
often carved into the base of sculptures, you know, where
humans could not see them once the sculpture was in
place where the sculpture touched the earth. So you know
that the living would not see this. It's it's as
if it was only to be seen by her. Interesting. Now,

(29:03):
her color was red, which is of course the color
for blood associated with sacrifice, but red was also the
color of sunset because at night she was said to
consume the sun. We think of the you know, the
setting sun. Uh seemingly too to be consumed by the
earth and then night sets in Yeah, and this is
a motif we see in other mythologies from around the world.

(29:24):
I think there are the god or the monster that
eats the sun appears in Egyptian mythology I believe in
in Hindu stories. Yes, yes, indeed, Now, if you look
up some interpretations of this goddess Uh, you'll find at
least a couple of different versions. One is more of
a uh, you know, more of a just a monstrous

(29:45):
feminine form. But there's another one that's really interesting where
it's kind of the squat toadlike creature with its mouth
open skyward towards the eagle and uh. And this one
really makes me think of the starlight because it is
like a mouth opened wide towards the heavens now. I
think all this is interesting in context of the star

(30:05):
Lak because the star Lak two is presented as something
that is perhaps divine and to some degree immortal, and
an entity that demands sacrificial victims as well, and something
of a gateway between our world and a hellish underworld. Again,
think back to that, to that idea of a thousand
years of digestion in the belly of the star lak Um.

(30:29):
I remember this was explored to a wonderful effect in
a short story. This was by um an author by
the name of Daniel keys Moran published under the name J. D. Montgomery,
and it was in a short story collection called Tale
from Jabas Palace titled a bar of like that The
Tale of Boba Fette Um And I haven't read it

(30:51):
since junior high school, but I remember really loving it
because it it kind of scratched that itch of like, oh,
I must know how Boba Fette escapes from the star Lack.
You know, you must write it for me, make it happen.
Uh And so it succeeded in that, but it also
presented digestion in the Starlac as being this kind of
sentient immortality of pain. I have so many thoughts about this.

(31:14):
Uh So, first of all, I'm thinking about all of
the like sort of off label Star Wars fiction that
I read in the nineties. I didn't read as much
of it as some people did, but I do remember
I read some series of books that involved people who
had three eyes and like a whole bunch of weirdness.
But the other thing is, I'm sorry if this is
a is a frivolous side trail that I've got to

(31:36):
ask you, Robert, do you have an opinion on the
belch the star Lac burp oh after fat falls in? Yeah,
it doesn't fat fall in? And then and then the
thing just it burps it. I'm not mistaken about this, right, No, No,
I believe it does burp um pro burb or anti
berb I guess I'm I'm pro burb It's it's fun

(31:56):
it's funny. I was probably there was probably a point
that I'm not specif typically remembering in my Star Wars
worst fandom, where I probably thought I was above it
and thought that that belt should be edited out because
I also didn't want any indication that Fett was gone
and that a belt should be uh you know his
um uh you know his tombstone. But you know, I
don't really have any strong opinions about it now. It

(32:18):
seemed an ignominious end for this, this much beloved minor character,
and uh, I think I think it bothered me when
I was younger, when I also thought Boba Fette was
so cool. I just gotta say, I'm about to earn
us all the hate mail we're going to get for
the rest of the year. Boba Fette's armor looks cool,
but I don't actually get what is just like, mind

(32:39):
meltingly amazing about him. Two people, I just feel like
he's a kind of cool looking character. He's got like
five lines. Yeah, yeah, I think it comes back to
like the less you know, right, there was mystery about
really all those bounty hunters and um, you know, who
were these guys? What what was their deal? You know what?
What was the I like the one that's got like

(32:59):
in sec dies like a fly's head. Yeah, he's good.
Or the reptilian one with the long arms. And I'm sorry,
I know they all have names and species and uh
I if I had my alien archive book in front
of me, I would look them up. But but basically
it's a wonderful rogues gallery. Well. I don't have a
firm position on the burp, but you know what, I'll
support you in your decision, so so have me on board.

(33:22):
I'm probb too. Yeah, I mean it's star Lag getting
a good laugh there. I I think I think it
was well received by my son. Now, I want to
talk a little bit more about mythology here because I
feel like there's an excellent connection to be made um Specifically,
I'm thinking about a parallel here in Greek mythology, where
of course we have Skilla and Charybdis, the twin oceanic

(33:45):
dangers that Odysseus must sail between the very horns of dilemma. Uh.
These are magnificent monstrosities. Oh yeah, the classics. I mean,
like the ultimate sea monster. How could you beat it? Yeah?
So Charybdis. I I think it's the most obvious analog here.
An underwater monster of varying description that above water is

(34:06):
just seen as this massive whirlpool that threatens to swallow
up any ship that comes near it. Meanwhile, Skilla is
this multi headed beast that plucks men from their ships.
Now the star Lack basically incorporates elements from both of
these monsters, because we have to remember that, Okay, Tattooing
is a desert world, but the dune sea has all

(34:27):
of these oceanic qualities to it as well. And in fact,
I mean the whole encounter in Return of the Jedi
is essentially the sci Fi mash up of nautical and
swashbuckling tropes. Oh yeah, I mean, I think that's the
thing people might not realize if they're not familiar with
the old Errol Flynn pirate movies and stuff like that.
But clearly they're walking the plank off the skiff. This

(34:48):
is supposed to be boats on the ocean. Job of
the Hut is an evil pirate captain. Yes, yes, so,
I mean it makes perfect sense that the cryptis analog
here becomes very clear. And I should also point out
that for anybody out there who maybe a Percy Jackson fan.
In uh, the film adaptation Percy of Percy Jackson Sea

(35:09):
of Monsters, it has a wonderful crybdis in it. Uh,
Crybta shows up and really takes on a very star
lackey in appearance, no doubt playing up on this connection. Yeah,
you attached an image. It is a very good looking
mall and it's got the inward facing spike teeth. I
like it a lot. Yeah, it's it's quite it's quite
a wonderful sequence. Like if you if you just want

(35:30):
to check it out for no other reason, check it
out for that. Uh, it's pretty fun as well. Uh. Now,
my son and my wife who have read the book
tell me that in the book, uh, both Skilla and
cryb does show up, but in the movie we're just
stuck with the whirlpool. But still the whirlpool is fabulous. Now,
I think maybe it's time to turn to the natural
world and look at some animals that that even here

(35:52):
on Earth somewhat mimic the sarlac. Now, there there might
be one that you out there are already thinking of,
because it's it's it's quite monstrously close though on a
much smaller scale, and that would be, of course, the
ant lion. Yes, uh, the ant lion is is certainly
the first place that my mind goes when I think
of the star lac because it's also something that I

(36:14):
definitely remember encountering as a child. Getting to see the
ant lions in action. Uh, you know, and try and
you know, ultimately try and trigger them to you know,
try and get them to to eat the ends of
sticks and whatnot, which I'm not recommending you do, but
if you get a chance to observe an ant lion
in the wild, it's worth checking out. Robert, where did
you encounter them? Were you in the Southwest? I know,

(36:36):
in Arizona or wherever? Uh this, I definitely remember encountering
them in Tennessee. Actually, yeah, like this would have been
um north western Tennessee. I remember encountering them there. Maybe
my mind was primed for Arizona because I just know
that that's where they shot the star Lac scenes. I

(36:56):
think it was near Yuma that they did that. But yeah,
I guess the rain ing of the ant lion is
much wider. Yeah, I mean it needs sand or loose soil.
But uh, I understand it's fairly widespread. Now, I will say,
I am just recalling a childhood memory here. It is
entirely possible that I was observing something else and thought
it was an ant lion, or that my memory has

(37:17):
some other has become altered one way or another. But
I'm pretty sure I saw an antline. Oh, I'm not
doubting you. The ant lion, as we alluded to earlier
when we were talking about life cycles of of the
possible sarlac or or analogs in the natural world, the
ant lion, as we know it is, is actually mainly
one stage of the life of a certain insect. That's right,

(37:40):
it's the it's the larval form of a rather nondescript
of flying romellion today, insect of which there are some
two thousand individual species. So, in other words, the ant lion,
the larval form here is a high is highly interesting
and unique, while the adult form is basically a short lived,
I mean, very short lived flying nothing that is far

(38:02):
less studied. I mean, when you got you got one
stage of your life cycle where you become a sarlac,
you're just not going to get a lot of attention
for the part of your life where you grow wings
and fly around and land on plants. Yeah. So let's
talk about the larval form first. So the larval ant lion,
and I recommend looking at the picture of this anyone
if you you have seen an illustration, because it's really gnarly.

(38:25):
It has this globular abdomen, a narrow head in a
set of vicious sickle shaped mandibles. Some species but not all,
famously make their home at the bottom of a shallow pit,
a shallow pit trap that they make themselves, uh. And
then they produce this by burrowing backwards in a circle,
flicking loose soil or sand out of the way as

(38:48):
they go. And then once they're situated, only those twin
mandibles remain visible, poking out of the bottom of this
sand pit. Yeah. So, so they form this thing, like
you're saying, by sort of digging around in the con
goal in a conical shape, going backwards, flinging the sand
out until they've created this pit that's got these sort
of perfectly sloped conical sides. It's like a you know,

(39:11):
like a coffee filter sort of uh. And it reminds
me of the episodes we did about spiderweb cognition because, um,
you know, it's interesting to think about the underlying algorithms
in an animal's brain, like in the spider's brain that
produced the web, or in the ant lion's brain that
enable it to make these perfect little conical pit traps.
And I remember one of the things we talked about

(39:32):
in that other episode about spiderweb cognition was how beautiful
and complex patterns emerge in spiderwebs, even based on extremely
simple algorithms for spinning, which, of course, the spiders can
vary to adapt to environmental conditions. And I think there
are some environmental variables that that work on ant lions
as well. This might include things like the depth of

(39:54):
the sand and the grain size. I was looking at
one study that said apparently ant lions and a similar
prejuctor are called worm lions tend to prefer finer and
deeper sand. The finer sand, I'm sure better to trap
you with. Exactly, so, how does this trapping work? Well?
When ants or other small insects fall into the pit,

(40:15):
the ant lion throws up more sand, like flicks more
sand up towards the would be victim in order to
keep them from escaping and then they grapple their victim
at the bottom of that pit, piercing their body with
those mandibles and sucking out the fluids. Afterwards, the ant
lion flicks the desiccated corpse out and then resets the

(40:36):
pit for its next meal. Yeah. The and you can
look up video of this of them literally just throwing
like desiccated ant bodies out of their pit, just chucking
them off to the side. Yeah, literally a dead soldier. Now,
I can't remember if we mentioned, but the antline does
have it does have chemicals on its side when it
attacks the victim that falls down to the bottom of

(40:56):
the pit. So it's uh, it's piercing mandibles, the it's
pincer type things injective venom to the prey. But then
also they've got a digestive enzyme that they use much
like some of the spider feeding stuff that we've talked about,
where they can inject the enzyme that sort of melts
the guts of the prey animal and then allows some

(41:16):
easy slurping. Now, like the sarlac, the ant lion benefits
from a really slow metabolism. The ant lion can go
months without food and get this does not even have
an anus, it simply puts off defecation until it assumes
it's a mature and final form. And this is something
we see in other larval forms as well, um elsewhere

(41:37):
in the animal kingdom, where basically the creatures an eating machine.
It's just about eating and eating, and it can in
some cases just put off pooping until it has reached
that final morphological form that is going to obtain. Yeah,
let's stick on this for a second. In case that
just went by you, the ant lion in its larval

(41:57):
stage does not have an anus and cannot poop, and
this goes on for the entire larval stage of its
life cycle, which can last for up to three years. Right, no,
anis you got your poop in for three years? So
I guess imagine if like we only grew in anus
and became able to defecate when we turned eighteen or something,
you know, the parents talking about how you know you'll

(42:19):
poop when you're older, you'll understand then Oh man, I mean,
I guess I have mixed thoughts about that, because on
one hand, not having to poop is is that mean
it's really everyone's dream? But on the other hand, being
filled with an increasing amount of poop is everyone's nightmare.
So uh, I guess it just comes down to the
like you either extreme you you don't want either extreme,

(42:41):
you want the balance of normal human pooping. Now, the
funny thing is that there are some skewed ways where
we conceptualize animal life cycles, insect life cycles and stuff.
Because we're talking about how when the antline is done
with its pit trap larval stage, it then matures and
becomes an adult. But this adult stage age lasts for
a much shorter period than its larval stage does, so

(43:04):
in a weird way, you shouldn't think of its adult
phase as like its normal life right right, yeah, because
again you mentioned that the larval stage will live like
about three years, but the flying adult stage lives for
a mere twenty five days or so. So really it's
adult form is just its last hurrah. You know this
is about it just well, I guess, finally pooping, but

(43:26):
also and more importantly reproducing. Right, yes, Now, this would
sort of answer the question for me that I had
when we were beginning to work on this episode. I
was wondering, like, does a star lac poop if its
whole body is under the ground, if it does poop.
Where does the poop go? Now, you hypothesized, Robert, You
were like, well, maybe it doesn't poop, just like the
antline doesn't poop. But the airline's got a poop eventually,

(43:49):
it's got the next stage of its life cycle. And
as far as we know, the star lac does not.
It's not gonna eventually grow wings, grow ananus, and then
fly off somewhere to poop everything that has accumulated over
the thousands of years. So what's going on with the
star lac? Well, it does make me think it could
this is just me, you know, spitball in here. But
perhaps if there is anything it cannot digest, maybe it's

(44:13):
spits it back out kind of like an owl will
do you know with something that it you know that
it is swallowed, you know, the various bones and whatnot.
Or perhaps there is this just like terminal digestion going
on inside the star lac. You know, it's just digesting
and digesting, and at the end of this there's just

(44:33):
nothing like maybe it's just that efficient. I can see that,
But I also like the idea of the two way
digestive system. There are organisms like that that live in
the ocean mainly like the hydra I believe has a
has a two way digestive system where it basically eats
and poops through the same opening. That's right, Yeah, I
think we went into that on our episode about the

(44:54):
evolution of the anus um. So yeah, there are there
are various models for this that we see throughout the
evolution of life on Earth. It could be, uh, you know,
used to explain it another way of looking at it
would be something down there under the ground is pooping
for the sarlac, but we don't really know what sort
of underground environment it is pooping into. Like there could

(45:15):
be a pretty rich under underground world on tattooing, right,
I mean, there could be you know, organisms that depend
on the poop of the sarlac for food or or
for shelter in the same way that the poop of
of of large you know, megafauna are essential to the
life cycles of organisms here on the surface of Earth.

(45:36):
Here's one for you. Here's here's my hypothesis. Okay, the
sarlac secretes an acidic compound that slowly over time dissolves
the bedrock, dissolves the sedimentary rock down below where it
is resting in the ground and forms a karst cavity
in the ground, basically creates its own poop cave and

(45:56):
then poops into the cave. H what do you think?
I like it? I like it. You could have a
whole uh, you know, a whole aspect of tattooing society
where like jawas are out there trying to dig down
to get those poop reserves from the star lacks, you know,
like especially if it's like ancient poop reserves of the sarlac,
it's aged and uh you know, highly valuable for something

(46:18):
or another. I'm sure. Uh oh, I've got it, the
most sought after fertilizer in the universe. Yes, the poop
must flow. Yes. Now, I mentioned earlier that not all
ant lions um are are going to be these these uh,
these pit digging um trapped predators. You also have some

(46:38):
that that that have other modes of existence. And we
see this also with owl flies, which are uh an
organism that look very similar as larva and also live
as ambush predators in the soil. They look again a
lot like ant lions, but while it seems like they
have been known to obscure their lower bodies with sand

(46:58):
and debris. The al fly larva don't seem to engage
in the sort of robust pit based and stationary ambush
tactics that we see with those most notable species of antlions. Now,
I mentioned earlier that there is a very similar pit
trap predator which has a hunting strategy almost identical to
that of the ant lion, and this is a winged

(47:19):
insect family called Vermilion a day known as the worm lions.
I think this might actually be an even closer parallel
to the sarlac because it is a striking worm and
in this way it kind of resembles the tentacles of
the carcoon, uh of the star lack of the pit
of carcoon. So despite how similar their pit trap strategies are,

(47:40):
I was reading that interestingly, worm lions are not closely
related to ant lions. This appears to be another interesting
example of convergent evolution where in totally different ways, uh,
different organisms have discovered basically the same way to to
make a living, and in this case it's digging these
conical pit traps in the sand. Another thing I was

(48:03):
wondering is like, why do the conical pits look so similar?
If the hunters are not closely related, wouldn't the pits
be kind of more different for these different animals. Apparently
has to do with maths or like the geometry of
how sediments lay at an angle. Uh. The angles of
the pit slopes are determined by what's known as the
angle of repose, which is the steepest angle at which

(48:26):
a sloping surface formed of a loose material is stable. Interesting,
so you'll see that kind of like on the edges
of mountains where they're sediments sliding down, it will settle
into a certain angle that is stable. If it gets
any steeper than that, it will start to collapse in
an avalancheal form. Yeah, that that makes sense. I should
also add that everyone should definitely look up a picture

(48:49):
of the worm lion because it is very very cool
looking at It has I think you mentioned like tentacle
like protrusions around its head. Uh, Like the image I'm
looking at here looks like four of them. Oh, and
that it's body just itself looks like a tentacle. It
is the organism, but like when it's wrapping around an

(49:09):
ant or beetle or something that's falling into the trap. Uh,
it looks kind of like a sarlac tentacle. Yeah, like
it's segmented, but but appears far more prehensile than you know,
something like a normal earthworm. But there is another organism
that's parallel to the sarlac in some ways I think
we should definitely talk about, and that is the predatory
polycute worm known as unisy afrodetois yes, also known as

(49:35):
a sand striker uh, and it has some other names
I'm not going to mention here on the show, but
that have been informally applied to it. But it is
essentially a rainbow colored marine deathworm and it buries itself
in the sand, ready to strike at passing prey. They
can reach lengths of nearly nine point eight feeders or
two pots, but most of its segmented body remains coiled

(49:58):
in the sand as an array of five antennae to
help it since prey, a feature that I think is
reminiscent of of you know, this idea that the sarlac
might have a root like systems of system of feelers,
spines and tentacles, which you see in some of these
illustrations that try to get to the heart of the
star lac. But the sand striker. Here it strikes with

(50:19):
incredible speed, whipping out its mandible studded farynx to capture prey. Yeah,
I think let's dwell on this just a little bit
more because this might have gone past really fast. This
is a predatory worm buries on the sand, attacks and
it grows to like ten feet long. This is a
ten ft long or you know, three meter worm that
preys on fish and other animals in the sea. So

(50:42):
it'll just have its little head poking out. But if
you were to keep pulling this worm up out of
the ground, you could end up with like the magician's
scarf situation where it just keeps coming out as ten
ft long. I was reading that sometimes it's it's pincer
attack is so powerful that it chops pray fish in half. Uh.

(51:03):
And I was reading a Scientific American blog post from
from by writer named Becky Crew about these animals, and
she drew my attention to this one story about how
back in two thousand nine, at a marine aquarium in
a town called New key In in England, aquarium keepers
noticed that in this one tank the coral on display

(51:25):
and some of the fish and stuff kept accumulating weird damage.
It was as if something inside the tank was like
chopping parts of the coral formation off and killing the animals,
and there was no obvious culprit in the tank. So
they had to like remove rocks and coral and plants
from this tank one at a time to find out
what was causing the attacks. And a curator named Matt

(51:48):
Slater was quoted in the Daily Mail at the time
talking about what happened. He said, quote, something was guzzling
our reef, but we had no idea what. We also
found an injured tank fish, so we laid traps, but
they got ripped apart in the night. That worm must
have obliterated the traps. The bait was full of hooks
which he must have just digested. Uh So, I don't

(52:12):
know if that sounds kind of hard to believe, but
if that's true, it would kind of mirror the sarlac
digestion thing. But in any case, like it does seem
to be the case that they had one of these worms.
Uh One of these worms burrowed down in the bottom
of the tank, so the workers discovered that there was
a stowaway sarlac. Like this predatory burrowing sea worm was

(52:33):
hiding down in the sediment at the bottom, and it
had probably snuck in among the coral that were transplated
into the transplanted into the tank years before and had
just grown there and hiding ever since. But this also
made me think, so this worm is fast, powerful, venomous,
mostly hidden down in the ground or down in the sediment.
How can prey animals defend themselves? Well, actually, I found

(52:57):
an interesting article about this where there is one stress
rategy that's been uncovered and it was published in Scientific
Reports in It was by jose La Shot and Daniel
hog Walker Nagle called novel Mobbing Strategies on a fish
population against a sessile analid predator And basically the authors

(53:17):
here described this weird thing where these fish a type
of bream called Scalopsis athanus. They would where like one
fish would find one of these worms, would be near
it and discover it was there and would start spitting
jets of water toward the worm, and then other fish
would join in. These prey fish would join in this

(53:39):
mobbing behavior where they would all gather around and start
spitting these jets of water towards the worm, which apparently
caused the worm to retract down into the sediment. I'm
not sure exactly what's going on there. I mean, so
obviously this is some kind of group defensive behavior against
a predator when the predator's location is discovered. But it
makes me wonder if anything similar go on with the

(54:00):
sarlac or would it even need to Like, would you
need to have Banta's like spitting jets of air at
a starlac or something, or could they just stay away
from it? Yeah? I guess that's the thing about a
land based scenario versus the marine scenario, is that on
the land once, unless you were a you know, in
a flying creature, by the time you got close enough

(54:21):
to the star lac to really be in danger to
really need to spit at it, it's probably too late. Yeah,
I mean, I mean, I think part of this this
behavior though, might just be not necessarily in like harming
the worm or something, but in alerting the other con
specifics to its location. So you can imagine something like
that for trap predators too. I mean, I would. I

(54:41):
don't know of any evidence like this, but I wouldn't
be surprised if there are some types of ants or
other prey insects of the ant lion that have some
kind of group defense strategy where when one species identifies
an ant lion pit, it can kind of like you know,
sound the alarm and alert the others to to to
what's happening there. I don't know of any evidence of that,

(55:02):
but I would not be surprised to find out something
like that. Yeah, so you know, I think maybe the
banthers might have some sort of um, some sort of
the strategy to deal with that. Now, um, Ultimately, the
sea is home to other bottom dwelling ambush predators as well,
more than we could conceivably list in the in the
the episode here. But you have things like the devil

(55:23):
scorpion fish and the ward eye star gazer, and if
you watch enough, um, you know, underwater documentaries, you'll see
some of these bizarre and wondrous creatures. All Right, we
need to take another break, but we'll be right back
to discuss digestion for a thousand years. Thank Alright, we're back. Okay,
So I think we need to finish up today by

(55:45):
talking about the idea of the star lacks really slow digestion.
Remember C. Three p O says that when you fall
into the all powerful starlac again. I'm not maybe things
this can come up again. I'm not quite sure why
the star lack is all powerful. It seems relatively powerful
within its own mouth and the range right around there,
but beyond its powers rapidly diminish. Um Uh. But c

(56:10):
P says in there in the belly, you will find
a new definition of pain and suffering as you're slowly digested.
Over a thousand years now, we've already discussed the slow
metabolism and of the eating machine, the ant lion. But
I want to look at another emblem of slow digestion,
this time of mammal I think we should look at
the sloth. And now there are a lot of ways

(56:33):
actually that sloths have been observed to be generally slow. Right,
the name, their English name is not a coincidence. Uh.
And this this slowness does extend not just to their
movements through the trees. You know, if you watch them
climb something, they tend to be very slow moving creatures.
But their slowness extends down to the chemical, the biochemical

(56:54):
level within their bodies. I was looking at a study
by Jonathan and Pauli ms Karaiah Peery, Emily D. Fountain
and William H. Kerasov called arboreal foliovores limit their energetic
output all the way to slothfulness in The American Naturalist
in sixteen. And the authors here are trying to explore

(57:15):
possible reasons that animals they call arboreal folivores animals that
eat tree leaves, hang out in the trees, eat eat
leaves from trees, why they are relatively rare compared to
some other types of animals and do not display as
much adaptive radiation as some other animals. And adaptive radiation
here means, uh, you know, diversifying of the species into

(57:37):
different ecological niches, basically like evolving into many different types
and variations to fill ecological niches. You don't see a
lot of this with animals like sloths. And so they
point out that, you know, like mature tree leaves that
the dietary the main diet source of these animals like sloths,
and there are other animals like this two Pandas Koalas

(57:57):
and so forth. Mature tree leaves are not a high
quality food. They tend to be tough and woody. Often
they've got some kind of poisons or tannins or some
kind of unpleasant chemical in them. It's generally really difficult
to live by eating, digesting, and extracting energy from mature
tree leaves, but sloths do it. So maybe the energy

(58:20):
constraints on these animals have somehow controlled their spread and evolution.
So the authors here wanted to measure the metabolic rates
of sloths in Costa Rica, and they write, quote, we
quantified the field metabolic rate or FMR, movement and body
temperature for syn topic two and three toed sloths, extreme

(58:42):
arboreal fullivorees that differ in their degree of specialization. Both
species expended little energy, but three toed sloths possessed the
lowest FMR recorded for any mammal. And so the three
toed sloth lives on a on a field metabolic rate
of a hundred and sixty two kill a jewels per
day per kilogram of body weight. Now that number alone

(59:04):
might not mean much to you, but comparing it to
other animals, uh, it's way lower than say the howler monkey,
who who has a field metabolic grade of five hundred
and eighty three killer jewels per day per kilogram of
body weight. It's lower than koalas at four hundred and
ten even the giant panda is more at five The

(59:24):
three toads lost is the lowest ever measured uh at
a hundred and sixty two kill a jewels per day
per kilogram, And so in a way it is a
profound evolutionary experiment in slowing everything down. And this is
historically in a kind of funny and interesting way lad
some thinkers to view sloths as as some kind of

(59:48):
like like that there's a problem with their existence, that
there's something wrong with them, Like the Count de Buffon,
you know, George Louis la Clerk, Count of Pafon, who
we talked about in our Age of the Earth episode,
because he did some experiments trying to uh, trying to
determine the age of the Earth based on I believe
his idea had to do with like how long it
would take the Earth to cool to its current temperature.

(01:00:10):
But he wrote this huge, multi volume natural history work
during his life where he tried to become you know,
the eighteenth century uh plenty of the elder, you know,
to catalog all of the stuff in the world and
tell you all about it. And his section on sloths
is is kind of hilarious. Are you ready for this Robert, Yeah,

(01:00:32):
let's bring it on, Okay, so he says. These animals
have neither incisive nor canine teeth. Their eyes are dull
and almost concealed with hair. Their mouths are wide, and
their lips thick and heavy. Their fur is course and
looks like dried grass. Their thighs seem almost disjointed from
the haunches, their legs very short and badly shaped. They

(01:00:54):
have no soles to their feet, nor toe is separately movable,
but only two or three claws like sessively long and
crooked downwards, which move together and are only useful to
the animal in climbing. Slowness, stupidity, and even habitual pain
result from its uncouth conformation. They have no arms, either
to attack or defend themselves, nor are they furnished with

(01:01:17):
any means of security, as they can neither scratch up
the earth nor seek for safety by flight. But confined
to a small spot of ground or to the tree
under which they are brought forth, they remain prisoners in
the midst of an extended space, unable to move more
than three feet in an hour. They climb with difficulty
and pain, and their plaintive and interrupted cry they dare

(01:01:40):
only utter by night. After some more moralizing about how
awful they are, he says, uh, we have already observed
that it seems as if all that could be does exist,
And of this the sloths appear to be a striking proof.
They constitute the last term of existence in the order
of animals endowed with flesh and blood. One more defect

(01:02:02):
and they could not have existed. Oh my goodness, Now
I think this is funny because like in some ways, uh,
you know, Bafon was considered a very you know, learned
man of his day. But like just the amazing ignorance
of this is just like, given what we know about
animals now. And le Clark had all kinds of terrible ideas.

(01:02:23):
You know, he he endorsed scientific racism. He believed that
like the animals of the New World were somehow inferior
to the animals of the Old world. Uh, there's all
this weird, genuine disgust in his writing when he talks
about animals found in North and South America. So he
had all these extremely misguided theories. Because all this stuff

(01:02:45):
that he characterizes as defects with this species, I think
we would probably look at and say, I don't know,
given our modern evolutionary understanding, you are probably not understanding
these correctly. These are probably not actually defects, these are adaptations.
His his thinking falls prey to the naive version of
survival of the fittest, as you know, the fittest, not

(01:03:07):
as in best adapted to its environment, but as like
the toughest, the buffest, the biggest, sharpest teeth and so forth. Yeah. Absolutely,
I mean it's um in his his description of the sloth,
really it comes off like a like a dis track,
you know, against against the slot. It also reminds me
a little bit of of Darwin's descriptions of the with

(01:03:28):
the marine iguanas. Oh yeah, the iguanas of the glob.
I mean Darwin didn't normally fall into this way of thinking,
but occasionally there was some animal he didn't like. Yeah,
but the sloth, like the main like counter arguments. In
addition to to what we said here about the true
nature of adaptation, I would also you know, put forth,

(01:03:49):
at first of all, sloths tend to be cute. That
tends to be our interpretation of them, especially baby sloths
or slothes if you're using the British pronunciation but but
also the adults there's a certain an adorable nous to them.
And I have to say when when I was in
Costa Rica with my family and we went on a hike,
uh through the forest there and we got to see

(01:04:11):
got a glimpse a wild sloth like where we you know,
had to stand there for several minutes and watch what
was presumed to be a sloth finally move and slowly
confirm it's it's sloth hood Like that was a genuinely
magical moment. Like that has to be one of one
of my top interactions with wildlife ever. Like it just

(01:04:32):
it truly felt like magic and time was standing still. Um. So,
I you know, it's it's very difficult for me to
to put my put myself in the mindset of of
sloth hating um worldview. I think Buffon would think you're
a sucker, But yeah, I think he was quite clearly wrong.
Like the sloths, including the extremely slow, yes very slow

(01:04:55):
three tote sloth, are incredibly well adapted to their environments
in very interesting ways. I was reading an article about
this on the Conversation from sixteen by a British zoologist
named Becky Cliff who I believe she either currently works
or has worked in a sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica, so,
you know, doing a lot of hands on work with sloths.

(01:05:15):
Um and and so she's writing about these adaptations. She says,
of course, it's true that sloths are slow in pretty
much every way. At the sloth sanctuary she works out
in Costa Rica, they use these sloth backpacks two track
sloth movement in the wild. And yes, it's true they
move very slowly and they move very little. But there's
a reason for this. It's not weakness. It is strategic

(01:05:39):
in an evolutionary sense. Slow movement uses a lot less
energy than fast movement. Remember that metabolic discovery we were
talking about earlier. Three toad sloths have the slowest metabolism
of any known mammal. In a weird way, they're almost
like you can imagine them kind of like going through
a convergent evolution thing, but across kingdoms of life. They're

(01:05:59):
trying to slowly over the eons converge with plants. Uh,
you know, like so too. And to make this possible,
you know, this this low metabolic rate. Of course, they
move very slowly, but they also regulate their body temperature
differently than most mammals. Do you know. Mammals have their
warm blooded they have thermoregulation, they've got to keep their

(01:06:19):
body temperature up through internal chemical means. But sloths manage
a much lower body temperature than your average mammal. They
they tend to go it around thirty two point seven
degrees celsius or ninety one degrees fahrenheit. That's a full like, uh,
you know, seven or eight degrees lower than our average
body temperature. And uh. Cliff mentions that their metabolic rate
is somewhere between forty two seventy four per cent of

(01:06:43):
what you would expect for an animal of its body mass.
So they're they're they're going way underweight on energy needs.
And so the question might be, well, why live like this?
Why would you be so slow have such a relatively
cool body and all that. Again, it's cheap, it's mega
chi Sloths require much less food energy than other mammals

(01:07:04):
of similar size. They can eat this, you know, this
kind of bad food. I mean, it wouldn't be bad
from their point of view, but it's low caloric density.
This food like tough fibrous tree leaves, and they don't
even need to eat all that much of it. Usually,
if you're an animal that's subsisting on tough plant matter,
you have to eat a ton of it to survive.
Cliff points out that howler monkeys, who also live in

(01:07:26):
the trees and eat tough leaves, they have to eat
three times as much food per kilogram of body mass
as the sloth does, and so requiring three times less
food than something else in your niche opens up all
kinds of possibilities for survival. So the sloth might not
be lean and fast moving in a physical movement sense,
but in a chemical sense, it is lean. It is

(01:07:48):
like it has a lot to work with. It's got
this wiggle room. But here's another thing we get to
with sloth. Sloth metabolism in a in a way that's
related to their very slow metabolism. They all so digest
food really slow. And this brings us back to the sarlac.
Cliff points at research saying, well, so we we don't
know the exact rate, uh you know, the exact bounded

(01:08:11):
rates of sloth digestion, but there are estimates that it
takes food between like a hundred and fifty seven hours
or up to twelve hundred hours to pass through the
slots digestive system. So the upper end of this estimate
would be like fifty days. Um. And you can imagine,
you know, having having your food waste in your body

(01:08:31):
for that long. Robert, you said before we came on
to record today that you have actually watched video of
a sloth pooping. You people at home, If you have
not seen this, you should look it up. It's fair warning.
It looks kind of traumatic, like there's a lot coming out. Yeah,
And I mean, the other interesting thing about slots pooping
is that, of course they have to climb down to

(01:08:54):
do it. Uh. They don't just poop out of the branches.
They return to the earth to carry this out. Yeah.
Uh and so Cliff rights quote. Unsurprisingly, the sloth's four
chambered stomach is constantly full, and so more leaves can
only be ingested when digesta leaves the stomach and enters
the small intestine. Food intake and critically, energy expenditure are

(01:09:16):
likely limited by digestion rate and room in the stomach. Indeed,
the abdominal contents of a sloth can account for up
to thirty seven percent of their body mass, so it's
digesting for days at a time, maybe you know, a
month or more at a time, digesting food. It's maybe
a third of its body weight or more is the
poop that it's got inside it right now, and it

(01:09:38):
you know, hasn't purged yet. You can also imagine though
that like why would it hang on this long? I
can also imagine this having to do with what you're
talking about, that it has to come down to the
forest floor to do it, which is inherently a vulnerable activity.
So and because it's slow moving, you might want to
limit those trips down to the vulnerable position as much
as possible. Yeah, it's if you live in a you know,

(01:10:01):
a walk up apartment in New York and you prefer
to um to poop in the say the jobba juice
down on the street. I think that was the joke
from Dirty Rock toilet image. You might limit how many
times you'd go to the jobba juice to poop exactly. Yes, yeah,
you might. You might wait, Awhile, there was another interesting

(01:10:23):
fact that came up in this article, by the way,
that the Cliff mentioned that I had never heard about before. UM, So,
you know, the obvious question might be, how does a
sloth of aid predators. If it's so slow, it's not
a fighter, it doesn't run, it's a hider. Uh. So
the sloths have to protect themselves via camouflage, and Cliff
mentions in an article that uh that all of the

(01:10:44):
sloth's major predators like jaguars, awesl lots, harpy eagles are
primarily visual hunters, so camouflage can actually go a long
way to protect you. And she points to an interesting
suggested symbiotic relationship with algae with between sloths and algae
that grow in the sloths for and this algae is

(01:11:05):
apparently passed on from mother to offspring, so it is
visual camouflage through inherited microbiota, which is pretty interesting. Yeah.
I do have to say that time that I got
to to see, not only see, but to to find, uh,
the sloth in the wild, like it wasn't pointed out
by a guide. Well, it's just the whole time I
knew based on what the guys that told us that

(01:11:27):
there might be sloths in the trees, we just have
to look really hard for them, and it did. It
took forever to see this this creature because you're just
kind of constantly on the lookout for possible movement, possible lumps,
uh you know in the in these you know, rich
canopy of trees that might be a slot. And most
of the time I was wrong, or at least I

(01:11:48):
was unable to confirm that what I was looking at
at a distance was a living creature at all. So
so when it really I was more lucky than anything.
I think that I was able to to to zero
we in on this this lump in the trees, and
then finally see it move and finally make out the
movements of of an actual swath. So yeah, I imagine
they have a you know, tremendous advantage versus predators that

(01:12:11):
are doing the same thing, you know, on constant lookout for,
uh for prey amid the tree limbs. I don't know this,
but I'd also guess that slower metabolism, slower movement would
make you less fidgety. Yeah, yeah, they're not fidgety like
I remember. That was another thing, is like the movements
were We're very slow and fluid and kind of far between,

(01:12:35):
like it wasn't It was wasn't like looking for the
movement of a traditional creature, you know, or at least
the kind of creatures that I tend to find myself
looking for, you know, like the movements of say a
squirrel or a or a chipmunk or a bird of
some sort. You know, it's a it's it's a totally
different animal. Can we imagine a sarlac evolving over over

(01:12:55):
a very long period, over millions of years, from some
type of sloth like creature, like a formerly totally mobile
creature that over time evolves too slow its metabolism and
digestion down further and further and further in order to
you know, survive on maybe tough dietary material like like

(01:13:17):
plant leaves or something, uh to support this high efficiency
of you know, a slow metabolism, highly efficient digestion. I
wonder if there are routes like that. I mean, I
have wondered before. Like one of the main things we
think of is characterizing intelligent animal life is fast movement.
But that doesn't you can understand why intelligence evolves from

(01:13:41):
fast movement in the history of animal life, but it
doesn't have to stay that way in terms of that association, right,
Like you could imagine that there could be an animal
with intelligence that just keeps evolving back down to have
less and less need to move its body around and
kind of becomes sessile, becomes plant. Like Yeah, I don't know,

(01:14:02):
I mean maybe maybe millions of years in the future.
I'm just saying there there will be ant lions that
evolved from sloths and you know, fall into the pit
and you'll one day get to be a part of
their dramatic traumatic pooping. I like that. Yeah, the idea
of a far future sessile sloth. All right, So there
you have it. Did we expose all of the secrets

(01:14:24):
of the star Lak? Uh? No, we did not. The
Sarlak retains its mysteries, which I think is is, you know,
one of the key attractions to the creature to begin with. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
I mean you can't fully lift up the sarlac and
peak at what's under it, but we'll have to imagine
that there is a poop cave. Yeah, Or what if
there's just a NonStop party in there, you know, like

(01:14:44):
what if you had an alternate cut where Boba fett
Is is swallowed whole by the star Lac and then
he's just dropped into this stomach cavity that's actually just
to really happening hang out. You know, everybody that's ever
been eaten by it is just in there kind of chilling,
you know. And it turns out the Starla does digest
people instead. It has like a symbiotic relationship with you know,
other organisms, uh, you know, beneath the surface of tattooin

(01:15:07):
and everything like friends. Yeah, yeah, it gets lonely. It's
an intelligent creature. It gets lonely. It needs friends. Well, Robert,
this has been a lot of fun. Yeah, this has
been fun. Um. It is kind of hard to believe
this is the This is I think the first Star
Wars episode of stuff to blow your mind. But hey,
who knows. There's a lot of a lot of stuff

(01:15:27):
in the Star Wars universe. Maybe we'll maybe we'll get
up the energy to do another one of the one
of these one day. I'm game. In the meantime, obviously,
we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We know
we have a lot of Star Wars fans, general science
fiction fans, monster fans, uh out there amid our listeners,
and yeah, we would love to hear your feedback on

(01:15:48):
this episode on the Star Lac itself, your memories and
interpretations of the star lack and indeed, if you think
there's a strong candidate for a future episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind related to Star Wars or any
other work of fiction, science fiction, et cetera, let us know.
Um we'll tell you how to get in touch with
us here in a second, But if you just want

(01:16:09):
to support the show, the best thing you can do
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Hughes thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hi, you can email us at contact that Stuff
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(01:16:37):
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(01:17:01):
had a time tack about a prone