Pod Insights Unexplainable Animals in the year 20202025 About this episode What do scientists think animals might be like millions of years from now? (First published in 2021)
Guests: Benji Jones, senior correspondent at Vox; David Willard, ornithologist at Chicago's Field Museum; Liz Alter, marine biologist at San José State University; Jingmai O'Connor, paleontologist at the Field Museum; Sharlene Santana, biologist at the University of Washington; Julia Sigwart, malacologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute
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Transcript 4,694 words · 16 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:27 Noam Hassenfeld? About 40 years ago, David Willard was working at the Field Museum in Chicago, this famous natural history museum, when he heard something strange.
1:36 Speaker 03 A person at another institution in Chicago just mentioned casually that birds often hit the windows at the big convention center called McCormick Place, which is a building that's right on the lake and has a lot of glass.
1:52 Noam Hassenfeld? So one morning in 1978, David went to check it out.
1:57 Speaker 03 I walked down in the morning and just kind of blatantly trespassed around the building out of pure curiosity, not expecting anything.
2:07 Noam Hassenfeld? And sure enough.
2:08 Speaker 03 I found three or four dead birds around the edge of the building, having hit the glass, and brought them back to the museum.
2:16 Noam Hassenfeld? David and his colleagues went back again and again, and they'd usually find more birds on the ground.
2:21 Speaker 03 We'd walk around the edge of the building with a plastic bag for dead birds, and we would take four measurements from each bird, putting the information into big ledgers.
2:33 Noam Hassenfeld? Over the last few decades, David and other volunteers have collected over 100,000 dead birds across downtown Chicago.
2:41 Speaker 03 When it first started, it was just a thought that, here are these dead birds, we might as well at least make them useful for research and bring them back to the museum.
2:51 Noam Hassenfeld? But he started to realize, this was a serious opportunity.
2:55 Speaker 03 It was only as the sample grew that we realized there were a lot of interesting questions that could be addressed using them.
3:02 Noam Hassenfeld? And when scientists examined this huge amount of data, they started to notice something weird.
3:08 Speaker 03 Birds over the last 35 years have shrunk.
3:12 Noam Hassenfeld? And this wasn't just one type of bird.
3:17 Speaker 03 The most amazing thing that they observed is that on all of the species, whether it was a thrush, a warbler, a sparrow, they were showing this declining size. And the question of just exactly why is an open one.
3:32 Noam Hassenfeld? I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, why are birds, and a whole bunch of other animals, shrinking?
3:55 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay, Benji Jones, you wrote about these shrinking animals for Vox. How much shrinking are we talking about here? Is this like birds are barely shrinking? Or is this more serious?
4:05 Speaker 04 It's pretty significant. So they found that birds, on average, over this 40-year period, lost about 2.6% of their mass. And a part of their leg, which they used to measure the change in size, also shortened by an average of 2.4%.
4:21 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah, I assume those kind of changes, I mean, like a 2.6% change, we would normally expect to see that over like, a much longer period than 40 years, right?
4:28 Speaker 04 I mean, I think so. Like, when I think about evolution, for example, in the animal kingdom, I mean, that often takes place over thousands of years, certainly not over 40 years. So it's pretty wild.
4:39 Noam Hassenfeld? Is it only happening in birds?
4:41 Speaker 04 It's pretty widespread. So it's not just birds that are shrinking. I've come across studies that show salamanders are shrinking over time, fish, wood rats, deer, sheep, common toads. There are lots of things that seem to be getting smaller over time.
4:58 Noam Hassenfeld? Do scientists have any idea why animals are shrinking? What's going on here?
5:03 Speaker 04 So, there's no one answer for all these animals. There's still a lot we don't know. But scientists do have some guesses that might explain what's going on.
5:13 Noam Hassenfeld? Huh. So what's the best guess we have to explain the shrinking here?
5:17 Speaker 04 There's been a fair amount of research on birds, and some studies on mammals as well, that appears to link these shrinking animals to global warming, to climate change. Literally, just the world is getting hotter, and that is what's causing the shrinking effect.
5:33 Noam Hassenfeld? How does climate change make animals smaller?
5:37 Speaker 04 There is this principle in ecology called Bergman's Rule. Essentially, across the range of a warm-blooded species, like a kind of bird or a kind of mammal, you will see smaller versions of that animal in hotter climates, and larger versions of that animal in colder climates.
5:58 Speaker 04 One explanation for this has to do with how easy it is to get rid of heat. In a hot climate, it's just much easier to cool down if you're small. And you can think about it like recipes that call for softened butter, which always drives me crazy because I'm never planning ahead when I'm cooking. And so I'm like, damn it, I have to soften this butter quickly. And I'll often like cut it into little cubes. And tiny cubes of butter soften faster because there's more surface area versus one larger stick.
6:31 Noam Hassenfeld? So if you want to get rid of heat, it helps to be smaller and have more surface area relative to how big you are. And I assume not being able to get rid of heat is bad, right?
6:41 Speaker 04 Exactly, in a hot environment, because you would potentially overheat.
6:47 Noam Hassenfeld? Where does this get complicated? Why is that not just, you know, okay, case closed? It's getting hotter, animals are getting smaller.
6:53 Speaker 04 One of the things that makes it complicated is that Bergman's rule applies to warm-blooded creatures. So these are things that create their own heat. But it seems that there's also this trend that cold-blooded animals, so things like insects and amphibians, are also shrinking in response to warming. So it's not just about warm-blooded creatures.
7:18 Noam Hassenfeld? So Bergman's rule wouldn't explain why some cold-blooded animals are also shrinking?
7:23 Speaker 04 Exactly. And when you start to ask kind of why, why, why? That's when there are lots of different theories that potentially apply, and we don't have that great of an idea.
7:32 Noam Hassenfeld? Why could cold-blooded animals be shrinking?
7:34 Speaker 04 So if you look at something like frogs, what researchers have found is that when it's hotter, their metabolism speeds up. That means that they are actually kind of growing faster, transitioning through life stages faster. So a frog goes from tadpole to baby frog at a faster rate, which just means that they are smaller by the time that they're adults, and they don't grow much beyond there.
7:59 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay, so is that the only thing that makes this shrinking animal question kind of hard to answer, that both warm and cold-blooded animals are shrinking?
8:07 Speaker 04 Well, some animals are actually not shrinking and getting bigger as the climate warms, according to some research at least.
8:15 Noam Hassenfeld? What kind of animals are getting bigger?
8:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, so there hasn't been a ton of research, but I have seen a couple of studies. One was on the American marten, which is this cute ferret-like animal, and then another was on the Eurasian otter, also a very cute animal. And one theory for why they could be getting bigger is that there's either more food available because there's longer summer or spring periods where food grows, or it could even be just because they're spending less energy trying to keep themselves warm because it's just more of an ambient, comfortable temperature outside.
8:44 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay, so then why wouldn't that just lead to birds getting bigger, too?
8:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's a really good question. So it's just really hard to say why there is this variation. I think these examples are just helpful because they kind of poke a hole at this being this overall effective shrinking. Like, it's just not the case.
9:00 Noam Hassenfeld? So it seems like global warming could be changing the shape of animals over time, but we don't really know which rules apply to which specific animals and exactly how they apply. That's all, like, still unknown.
9:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.
9:14 Noam Hassenfeld? And for the animals that are shrinking, do we know if we're watching evolution happen here? Like, birds are evolving to be smaller, that somehow it's better for them?
9:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, so that's the other big unknown, right? Like, I have seen some research that suggests that this is an evolved trait for some birds. In some way, being smaller is going to benefit them in a warmer world, which gets back into Bergman's rule. But for some animals, we know that when it's warmer during their development, they'll just get smaller. So that's not evolved, it's just happening as they're growing. So for frogs, for example, and other amphibians, that seems to be the case. And we know this because scientists can alter the temperature in a lab setting, for example, while they're just growing these different animals, and they see that they just don't get as big.
9:55 Noam Hassenfeld? Got it. So this isn't, like, passed down to future generations like Bergman's rule, right? This is just happening to these particular hot frogs?
10:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, and that would be what scientists call, like, a plastic change. And so for cold-blooded creatures, it seems that these kind of, like, within-lifetime changes might be responsible for the shrinking effect.
10:18 Noam Hassenfeld? And I assume it's important to figure out kind of which one is happening here, whether a certain shrinking is evolved or whether a certain type of shrinking is during an animal's lifetime, right?
10:27 Speaker 04 Exactly, exactly. And so if it's happening during an animal's lifetime, such as with frogs, that definitely can come with some serious consequences. When it's evolved, like what scientists think might be happening with birds, it's probably a little bit less scary. But it's important to keep in mind that there are still limits of adaptation. And the climate is warming really, really fast right now, much faster than it's warmed in the past. So can these birds evolve to live in warmer climates fast enough? We don't know. And even more importantly is that some animals are getting smaller at a faster rate than others. Some animals are even getting bigger, and that creates big problems at an ecosystem level.
11:07 Noam Hassenfeld? Do you think more and more animals are going to start shrinking? Or is this just too hard to predict?
11:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, this is like a question that I feel like I... Every time I write a story about how climate change intersects with biodiversity, I get to this point in the story where it's like, climate change is having way more complicated impacts than we imagined, and they're really hard to predict. And I feel like this is a perfect example of that. Like, it is just... It's so hard to understand how warming temperatures are going to affect these really complicated ecosystems. And so trying to predict what will happen to a given species is really, really difficult.
11:55 Noam Hassenfeld? After the break, we try out some really, really difficult predicting. And not just 40 years in the future. We're going much, much further. That's next.
12:16 Noam Hassenfeld? Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music.
12:23 Noam Hassenfeld? All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room. You gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple of speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall.
12:48 Noam Hassenfeld? I get in here to the kitchen, and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.
13:05 Noam Hassenfeld? And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy, and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp. They've got great bass. And I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So I don't know, if I want to
13:38 Noam Hassenfeld? head outside for a minute.
13:41 Noam Hassenfeld? It's super easy and yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.
13:56 Speaker 00 Support for the show comes from TikTok. Being curious is endlessly rewarding. There are few better feelings, in my opinion, than asking a question and then having that question lead you down a rabbit hole. Might even be the beginning of a new set of interests that was not on your radar beforehand. Maybe you're looking up at the night sky one night and you start to wonder what the most distant thing you can see with a naked eye is. One place to start searching for answers to a question like that is TikTok. First, you might discover a video about the Andromeda Galaxy. And then, next thing you know, you're learning how to find different stars,
14:38 Speaker 00 or how to identify constellations, or how different astronomical discoveries got made, or how constellations got their names. You don't need serious equipment to make serious discoveries. Start with a simple question, and suddenly, you're somewhere you never expected to be. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. At tiktok.com/discovermore.
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15:52 Speaker 06 Birds, birds, birds, birds, birds, birds, birds.
15:58 Noam Hassenfeld? It's Unexplainable. We're back, and I'm here with producer Mandy Nguyen.
16:01 Speaker 07 Hey.
16:01 Noam Hassenfeld? Mandy, you've been hard at work producing this Shrinking Animals episode. And when we left off, we were talking about how hard it is to predict how these animals might end up changing in the future.
16:13 Speaker 07 Yeah, but I really wanted to try and predict it anyway.
16:16 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay.
16:17 Speaker 07 Obviously, it's hard to predict the future, and it's harder the further you go out. But I spoke to a bunch of scientists about what future animals might look like, and I had some fun with it, and I made a little nature documentary of the future.
16:32 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay, let's hear it.
16:39 Speaker 08 The Earth, millions of years in the future. This blue planet still teems with life forms, but humans are not among them. Our dominion has ended, and other creatures have filled the open spaces that we have left behind.
16:55 Speaker 09 The vast pools of carbon dioxide that we produced were retained in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, and that has resulted in a renaissance of green plants. And then, without humans around to harvest them, plant life has flourished and diversified. And so, we now have an atmosphere that's richer in oxygen than the one that we have now.
17:17 Speaker 08 Plants have flooded the atmosphere with oxygen, reshaping life on the Earth's surface. Insects are especially affected.
17:26 Speaker 09 Insects breathe not with lungs like we do, but with tiny tubes called trachea that are found throughout their body. And researchers hypothesize that after insects reach a certain size, they can't get enough oxygen through their trachea because of a problem with surface area-to-volume limitations.
17:43 Speaker 08 But with more oxygen in the atmosphere, those limits may not apply. This is what happened millions of years ago in the late Carboniferous Period.
17:53 Speaker 09 Around 300 million years ago, we know there were dragonflies that were around the size of hawks and ants as big as hummingbirds.
18:01 Speaker 08 Now, in the world of the future, history repeats itself.
18:06 Speaker 09 Imagine that you're in a tropical forest in the future. As you stumble through this forest, all of a sudden, you see an animal that you recognize as a praying mantis, but one the size of a cocker spaniel. It has all the same features as the praying mantis that you know: triangular head, the large, compound eyes that are following you around, but it's just much, much bigger than you're used to.
18:30 Speaker 08 The praying mantis crouches, camouflaged against a tree trunk. Motionless, she lies in wait for her prey.
18:39 Speaker 09 It can hunt small to medium mammals. It can hunt lizards, birds, and even fishes, but it actually specializes in giant cockroaches that roam the forests and are around the size of Pomeranians.
18:53 Speaker 08 A herd of cockroaches amble by, their long antenna prodding the forest floor. One of the roaches strays to the side, unaware of the hungry mantis.
19:05 Speaker 08 The praying mantis flashes her claws and grabs hold of the flailing roach. Her grip is strong and she takes a clean bite out of its head.
19:15 Speaker 08 A delicious victory.
19:18 Speaker 08 But the world of the future has more than just insects.
19:24 Speaker 08 Since the Anthropocene, many large mammals have gone extinct. And in their absence, survivor animals like rats have taken centre stage.
19:34 Speaker 10 The groups of mammals that do survive, like rodents, are going to occupy the ecological niches that are vacated by all these other animals.
19:44 Speaker 08 Animals like whales and sea lions. These marine animals, many of which have gone extinct, evolved from land-dwelling ancestors.
19:53 Speaker 10 Like seals and sea lions, seem to be two different, independent lineages of mammals that evolved to be aquatic and semi-aquatic, you know, respectively.
20:02 Speaker 08 What was once an ocean devoid of large marine animals is now home to creatures displaying evolution's creativity. Creatures like the whale rat.
20:14 Speaker 10 So this whale rat has evolved to become fully aquatic. So it's lost its fur, it's lost its whiskers, you know, it's all gone. Its tail has maybe become more like an eel's tail. It's become really compressed so it can help with swimming. And its arms and its legs have both evolved into flippers.
20:34 Speaker 08 In this future world, whale rats are the size of porpoises, sleek and fully at home in the water. The coastlines in spring are a playground for restless young whale rats. The pups tussle in the shallower waters while their families rest nearby.
20:55 Speaker 08 High above them, a bat spreads its six-foot wings and soars over the waves. But this is no ordinary bat. This is a sailing bat.
21:06 Speaker 11 It's a bat that lives in the ocean and has evolved a very extreme anatomy to sail and soar on ocean air currents for very long distances.
21:19 Speaker 08 Years of sea level rise have forced this bat far out of the niche occupied by its ancestors in search of a nourishing meal.
21:27 Speaker 11 Their wings are long and narrow. They're stiff, allowing these bats to glide.
21:34 Speaker 08 To conserve energy, the sailing bats glide instead of flat, traveling sometimes for hundreds of miles without landing. As they soar, they chatter at the waves, listening for their next meal.
21:48 Speaker 11 They have long faces with conical teeth that allow them to snatch prey off of the surface of the water as they forage for aquatic prey using a very sophisticated echolocation system.
22:06 Speaker 08 The sailing bats catch the ripples in the water made by the young whale rat and descend for a closer listen. As they approach, they send out fewer pulses of sound with large intervals in between. They're listening for the exact location of their prey. The whale rat pups have given themselves away. The sailing bats dive, snapping their long mouths at the water's surface. The sailing bats make short work of the whale rat pups. Soon, they soar off again, traversing across a planet that is still rich with wonders,
22:51 Speaker 08 wonders that may be familiar to us or perhaps entirely different.
22:58 Speaker 12 And this is the beautiful thing about evolution, because you can have the same starting conditions and just one, one little change to the DNA, one little happenstance about what predators are around, what pollinators are around, and it can change everything in the course of what's going to happen over the next many millions of years.
23:25 Speaker 07 That's as far as I got, but I hope you enjoyed it.
23:29 Noam Hassenfeld? I mean, that was amazing. I loved it. But like, how realistic is this? Is this science fiction or is this kind of reasonable prediction?
23:38 Speaker 07 It's definitely more speculation than definitive prediction. But a lot of the scientists' answers were rooted in science. You know, I posed the question as something that was like a fun and interesting question. But I was pleasantly surprised at how seriously they took this question.
23:56 Noam Hassenfeld? When scientists are thinking about a question like this of what animals could look like in the far future, what's their starting point to answer a question like that?
24:06 Speaker 07 They approached it in a few different ways. You know, some started by thinking about what animals they thought was most likely to survive that far in the future. So this is where the rats came from.
24:16 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah, they're just really good survivors, right?
24:19 Speaker 07 Yeah, so they're hardy, they do well, living with humans, and they're probably going to make it. Some other scientists, they started by envisioning what the future environment would look like and then working backwards. And that's how we got animals like the sailing bats or the whale rats with things like rising sea levels.
24:36 Noam Hassenfeld? Or like the huge insects because of the high oxygen levels.
24:39 Speaker 07 Exactly. And some scientists, when they were answering this question, some of them went completely outside of Earth.
24:46 Noam Hassenfeld? Like aliens?
24:48 Speaker 07 Not aliens in this case. We're still talking about life from Earth. Specifically, we're talking about slime molds.
24:55 Noam Hassenfeld? Slime molds?
24:57 Speaker 07 Yeah. Slime molds are these weird organisms, like they're not a plant or an animal or a fungus. And the scientist I spoke to, her name is Tiffany Taylor, she was speculating about a future where humans brought slime molds to Mars.
25:11 Speaker 13 They were taken to Mars as part of sort of early experimentation. But unfortunately, there are a few escapees that managed to get out onto Mars's surface and explore.
25:20 Speaker 07 They're already these really strange creatures and can take so many shapes and forms, and they might become even weirder on another planet.
25:27 Speaker 13 Should they encounter an organism that they need to run away from, they can change their shape such that they might acquire legs and might start, you know, running off very quickly. So their adaptability is absolutely their strength. They have no set form. They can adapt to whatever their environment requires.
25:43 Noam Hassenfeld? Wait, these slime molds are sprouting legs in this scenario? Are we still in like real science mode?
25:50 Speaker 07 We were definitely getting a little sci fi and joking about the slime mold sprouting legs and running away. But it was really fun to think about how life might evolve away from Earth, because those processes are not something that we really know about at all.
26:02 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah, Darwin never got a chance to figure out what would happen on Mars.
26:05 Speaker 07 Yeah.
26:06 Noam Hassenfeld? You know, there are all these different ways that scientists are answering this question. It certainly sounds like they had tons of fun answering this. But you also said they took it really seriously. Like, what is the ultimate point of this exercise? Is it just sort of like a way to stretch our brains about what's possible? Or is there something more important here?
26:28 Speaker 07 Yeah, I was also curious about what scientists took away from this exercise. And one of the scientists, Liz Alter, she gave me an answer that I really liked.
26:36 Speaker 09 So evolutionary biologists are very used to thinking about long time scales in the past, but it's somehow a lot harder to envision the future, which is interesting. And I think that's, you know, it's partly because humans have just been this tiny blip in evolutionary history, right? Our species is only, you know, a few hundred thousand years old, but in that short time that we've been on the planet, we've completely altered these basic aspects of geochemical cycling. And so as a consequence, how evolution proceeds for the Earth's inhabitants has changed as well.
27:11 Speaker 07 Life is probably going to persist, and any future animal or ecosystem that exists is going to be impacted by what happens today.
27:18 Speaker 09 You know, it makes it a very sobering thing to think about the long future, you know, what that long future will look like. But I do think it's a really useful and important exercise, especially because we're at a point as a species where we're going to have to make some hard choices to avoid a future Earth that's uninhabitable, at least for us.
27:37 Speaker 07 No one can say what the future's going to be. So I think it's worth then asking, like, what future animal and future environments do we think might exist? Like, what future is possible?
27:48 Speaker 09 I think that it would be really, really cool to see giant bugs.
27:54 Speaker 09 But it would just be nice if humans are actually around to see them.
28:14 Speaker 07 Thank you to all the scientists who spoke with me for this episode, including Liz Alter, who spoke about the giant praying mantises, Jingmai O'Connor, who talked about whale rats, Sharlene Santana, she spoke about the sailing bats, Tiffany Taylor, who brought the slime molds on Mars, and Julia Segert, who shared some big reflections on evolution. And an especially huge thank you to James Barham, our very own David Attenborough. This episode was produced by me, Manning Nguyen, with help from Meredith Hoddinott and Byrd Pinkerton. There was editing from Noam Hassenfeld and Brian Resnick. Scoring was done by Noam and Meredith. Fact checking was done by me. And the sound design was from the always brilliant Christian Ayala. We spoke to a ton of scientists for this episode,
28:58 Speaker 07 and we didn't have space for all of them. But I just wanted to give a big, big thank you to Corey Evans, Tanisha Allen, Alexis Macailo, Jessica Ware, Myrene Belisi, Zahas Bhavav, and Danielle Edwards. Email us at [email protected] if you have any thoughts on the show. And if you feel like leaving us a nice review or a rating wherever you listen, we'd all really appreciate it. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next Wednesday.
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