Zoohoplology (ANIMAL DEFENSES) with Ted Stankowich

Barbs. Spurs. Stinks. Scutes. Shrieks. Fashion. Drama. Animal behaviorist, evolutionary biologist, Cal State Long Beach professor, and your new favorite Zoohoplologist, Dr. Ted Stankowich, divulges about putting your dukes up or curling into a ball so you don’t die. Either/or, sometimes both. I went to his lab down at California State Long Beach, for a tour and a chat about armadillos, skunks, pangolins, horned lizards, wombats, coyotes, kit foxes, poodles, porcupines, tigers, deer and the will to keep living.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey. It's your mom's friend who's always vaping into his sweatshirt, Ally Ward. In this episode, it's about putting your dukes up or curling into a ball so that you don't die. Either or, sometimes both. Let's talk to an ologist I've known for years, an LA-area animal icon who invited me to the lab down at California State, Long Beach, where they're a professor, for a visit, a tour, and a chat about armadillos, skunks, pangolins, spikes, spurs, stripes, spots, and the will to keep living. So we'll chat in a sec, but first, thank you to all the patrons who support the show for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com/ologies. We also have brand-new merch about revolutions

• 0:41Alie Ward?

  and protests. It's up at ologiesmerch.com, designed by Andy Diaz, with proceeds benefiting the National Immigration Law Center. That's brand-new, again, ologiesmerch.com. And for $0, thank you for helping boost the show by leaving reviews, such as this very recent one from Jordan D. Friend, who wrote, "Five stars. It's great, but..." and it's a big "but." They write, "It's too damn interesting." They say, "I listen to the podcast as I fall asleep, and suddenly it's two hours later, I'm still awake, and I'm like, 'Damn, girl, beavers are interesting.'" Jordan D. Friend, thank you for that. I hope it's your real name, because friend, indeed. Also, thank you to sponsors of the show who let us donate to a cause of each ologist choosing every week. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your

• 1:24Alie Ward?

  gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas, so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair,

• 2:06Alie Ward?

  start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Picture this: years of guaranteed research support and a vibrant scientific community that has your back. If you are a PhD student, postdoc, or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage

• 2:50Alie Ward?

  with a people-not-projects approach, long-term support, and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. You can find your program at HHMI.org/ologies. Okay, this absolute gem studied biological sciences at Cornell, then got a master's and a PhD in animal behavior from Davis, and has taught at UMass Amherst, University of Mississippi, and Harvard, and has been a Darwin postdoc fellow. But above all that, if you know an animal biologist in LA, they know this guy, everyone loves him. Also, kind enough to help coin a term for this ology, since it's so specific. So, zoohopology it is. It combines zoo, animal, with the Greek root hoplorn,

• 3:35Alie Ward?

  which means arms or armor. So, animal armor and defense. The visit was also a visual feast as I walked past skunk pelts and tiger cutouts and sat under a whale skeleton.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  This is our new 3D printed whale. What kind of whale is that? It's a humpback whale, it's one quarter size. Every bone's been individually 3D printed. We just finished it like a month ago. No, aren't those leggies or hips? That's the pelvis. Nuts. Yeah. And this was a deer at one point. Quack. Yeah.

• 4:08Alie Ward?

  Also, rubber canids.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Who's this werewolf? This is Obi-Wan Coyote. Um, this is our coyote robot. This was to harass skunks. We can remote control thermal infrared cameras on the front. Um, it worked fine. However, we thought it was going to get sprayed all the time because we're harassing skunks. Never got sprayed once, so, and if we use it in the future, I'll actually use a taxidermy animal. And we can harass skunks with it. It's actually fun to drive it around and... Oh, God. You can, this is a good Halloween prop. Oh, it scares little kids. Like, they are running and hiding behind, like, some kids love it and want to play with it. Others are truly terrified of this thing. Yeah, it is scary.

• 4:47Alie Ward?

  I also left with swag. I got a T-shirt and this handy fridge magnet with advice on a skunk spray first aid because when you need it, you need it. More on that later. So let's get right into it. The things that keep critters, including yourself, safe. From quills to barbs to plates to rotting flesh smells to hair dye to impeccable acting, commendable drama, shrieks, spikes, stinks, and fashion. With animal behaviorist, evolutionary biologist, professor, defense mechanism expert, and thus your favorite Zoohoplologist, Dr. Ted Stankowich.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  My name is Dr. Ted Stankowich and I'm a he/him.

• 5:44Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. Stankowich?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Stankowich.

• 5:46Alie Ward?

  So kind of a W for the V.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  There's no V in it, it's just how it's spelled.

• 5:50Alie Ward?

  I always put a V there.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It used to be Stankowich in Russian. And then when my grandfather was here and he was a little boy in school, they mistranslated it and so it became Stankowich.

• 6:04Alie Ward?

  Oh, there you go.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  There.

• 6:07Alie Ward?

  Is that the pipe?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  So let's just pause for a second. It'll stop.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  How do you know that it's not a whale call? Coming from the beyond?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  It's a hunch, professional opinion, it's not a whale call.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  How long did it take you to realize that was a pipe and not a ghost?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Um, well, I guess I heard it the first time, like, what is that? And then it stopped, I'm like, okay, I guess we're fine. And it's been, I've been doing this for over 13 years now in this room, so everyone's always surprised by it, though.

• 6:35Alie Ward?

  Now, before he was a full professor and before he moved to the East Coast for a stint at Harvard, Ted was a California boy. He grew up southeast of LA in Hilly Whittier, which has its share of kind of suburban Americana and patches of landscape that are home to native and imported plants and animals, from cacti and wildflowers to some scaly and furry residents.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  What kind of critters did you see growing up in Whittier?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  So just squirrels, the occasional opossum in the backyard, occasional coyote. So normal urban mammals, a raccoon here and there. I wasn't a real outdoorsy kid.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  You weren't?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  No, I was, I was a nerdy kid who, who liked his books and liked to go to the museum and got into biology in high school eventually and then made a career out of it, yeah. So I was not a, a kid who was going to be spending every waking hour in the forest or in the field as a kid, yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Were your parents or siblings or aunts, uncles, were they outdoorsy at all?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Um, my mother was an educator and my dad was a high school teacher as well. But he did take us, when I think I was probably eight and then again when I was 10, cross-country and back by car, first time he saw national parks. And so that was my big, really early intro to seeing national parks all over the country. I've been to 48 of the 50 states. So that time was sort of very formative to see nature and really get that experience. And you sort of fall in love with the experience of that. So if you ever get a chance to drive across the country and, and see just national parks and amazing landscapes that are out there, it's, it's really a great experience. Especially you can take your kids. It's just a transformative type of thing that they'll experience, so, yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Which states haven't you been to?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Um, Hawaii.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  And South Carolina.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Ah!

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  I've been to 48. No New Mexico and no West Virginia.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  If anyone's listening to this.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  If there are talks in South Carolina or Hawaii.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Would love to come out. Yes, absolutely.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Where has your work taken you country-wise? I know you mentioned that you had seen a platypus in the wild.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  So, most of my field work with live animals has been in the States. I did spend on my sabbatical, I spent a month in Australia about five years ago, um, where I, I chased echidnas around for about a month by myself in the bush. It was really an amazing month, just mowing a truck and running around. They're the easiest animals in the world to capture by hand, um, when they're walking around. But I loved it and I do a lot of museum work where we measure skulls and skins and that kind of stuff. So that's been fun to experience other countries that way. Eventually I'd love to make it to Africa and work on pangolins or, or porcupines, or I can actually look for excuses to go out and explore.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Do you find that different continents or different regions or biomes have animals with stronger defense systems? Does it matter what kind of predators are around? Do you see then an evolution of different scales or spikes or stinks?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  You tend to see it more in warmer, more tropical climates, where things are just more biodiverse in general. I can speak for mammals in particular because that's what I know the best, but you see more defended species in areas that, that are more open, more visually exposed to predators and where there are larger predators that can kill you and not as much, you know, sort of Alpine or Arctic types of areas. It's more based on what aspect of your environment gives you a lot of risk from predators. How exposed are you to a threat?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  I always think like, okay, if there are big cats around, you're a little screwed. And is, is that like not the case? Are there smaller predators that you still would need a lot of defense for?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Depends how big you are.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  So if you're under, say, a kilogram in size, maybe like small rabbit to squirrel and below, um, you can usually hide and be cryptic enough to avoid most predators, just by your size alone. If you're above 10 kilograms, large dog and above, then you are too big for the vast majority of predators, especially birds of prey.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  If you're in that sweet spot between one and 10, you're big enough to want to eat. It's hard to hide because you're, you're, you're, you're large enough and most things can still kill you. So there's like a danger zone of if you live in a sort of exposed area in our like intermediate in body size, that's where the greatest amount of risk.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Well, okay, male deer, bucks.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Horns of, you know, eight point deer has like eight shivs coming out of its face.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  But a doe doesn't, but they're still vulnerable to like pumas, let's say. Are the horns used for defense or is that purely just mating? I would be inclined to say just mating, but can you ever stab back?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So deer have antlers and bovids have horns. So they're two different structures entirely.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Right, thank you.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Deer have antlers which are bony. There's no keratin sheath on top. They are shed every year. The only species where the female has them are reindeer and caribou. And then in bovids, so your antelope, your goats, your cows, gazelles, that sort of thing. All males have horns and some females, females of some species have horns. But to answer your question, absolutely yes, it's a great weapon to have for when you're fighting over mates, which is what the males primarily use them for. But it's also useful if you have a predator around, you're swinging those around and trying to stab them too. In fact, we did a study in 2009 and we're following it up now where we looked at why do female bovids have horns? Why do some species have them and others don't? So females can battle over territory themselves, which is not that common.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Or they are found in larger, more exposed species where they are more at risk of being cornered by a predator. So females can definitely use their horns to defend themselves for sure. They're usually smaller, straighter, more dagger-like compared to the males, but they are definitely useful as a defensive weapon.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Stay back. Run me down a menu. Let's say that you are a critter, you need defense and you have a menu of options. Scales, spikes, horns, stinks. What are, so what are some of the options that you can have?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  So the menu is interesting. If you're looking evolutionarily in terms of mammals, the options are spines, stinky sprays, stinky glands on your body that you can release, armored plates, claws, teeth.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Antlers, horns, toxins, some have toxins and poisons that they can use. That's what's helpful for defense if you are cornered, if you are attacked, that's what you can use. But most animals are cryptic, they are camouflaged, they want to avoid being seen at the start. That's the first line of defense, just avoid being seen entirely. So coloration is a really big one. And then rapid speed. So, most of the things that live in that sort of intermediate body-sized, open, exposed habitat area, a lot of your armored, quilled animals live in that area. The other things that live in that area are other carnivores that can defend themselves with claws and teeth, as well as rabbits and things that hop. So, high-speed escape, hopping is a very fast form of escape.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And so if you're living in this danger zone, as we called it, then having a high-speed escape is also a way out as well.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Right now, my ass is on the highway to the danger zone.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  When it comes to your PhD, you showed me that you had huge, life-size cutouts of tigers and a cougar. What, what did you study when it came to getting your PhD? Could you tell me a little about that?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Sure. I basically scared deer for six years. It was really a great experience. So, part of my PhD was walking towards or running towards deer to look at their escape behavior by, with speed, directness of approach, if I was holding a fake rifle or not, and looking at how they chose when to flee and how they chose where to flee. So, escape decisions were a big part of it. I was studying black-tailed deer up on the northern coast of California, and their only current large cat predator is a mountain lion. But historically, 600,000 years ago, they would have seen spotted cats, spotted jaguars. And now jaguars only come as far north as Arizona and New Mexico.

• 14:26Alie Ward?

  You need a big cats episode, I know that. And a few days ago, I recorded megaphenology with Dr. Imogen Cancelari, but you gotta be patient, my babies, it'll be up in a few weeks, I think. But until then, we have Ted's fieldwork hijinks with kind of like cardboard wooden cutouts, which I'm sorry, is very funny. Science is extremely funny.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  So, we exposed them to pop-up, two-dimensional, life-size models of a mountain lion, a spotted cat, a tiger, and another mule deer as a control. Essentially, I would have a student drive a car, and I would hide behind the car, we would drive past a group of deer, and I'd duck behind the bush. The student would go drive away and put a camera up to start to film, then I'd pop the model up over the bush from about 20 meters away, and we'd record their responses. And sometimes, they got really, really scared. Other times, they just stared at it like it was not there at all. And so we were looking how the coloration affected it. And essentially, what we found was that, not surprisingly, the mountain lion evoked the strongest response in terms of snorting, stamping, never running away, because those

• 15:30Speaker 01

  cats need to be about six to 10 meters away before they can really have a chance of capturing a deer. So they just were saying, I'm here, I see you here, don't come around, there's something over there. So apparently, the vertical stripes did not camouflage the big cat shape in that coastal California environment. So they treated the tiger just the same as they did a mountain lion. And the deer, they didn't respond to it all. In fact, I had some males try to approach me and with a very interested look on their face. A female deer had to abort those trials pretty quickly.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  It sounds like a Halloween haunted house, like pop up and does a zombie scare you? Does a vampire scare you? Does a guy with a chainsaw?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  I was at the field station, there was a weird guy laying on the ground with big cat models that everyone else was driving to their marine lab.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  When did you start to branch out in your studies and in your teaching into scales and spikes? And I understand in an armadillo, it's conglobation where they just go bloop into a ball?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  They curl up into a ball, yeah. Only, only one species can actually make it all the way into a ball.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Really?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, the three-banded armadillo is the only one that actually form a tight ball. The rest of them can maybe curl a little bit, but most of them just sort of hunker down and try to keep their shell over top of them.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  But yeah, I think as you progress in your career, you expand your horizons. So I, as a PhD student, I was all about deer and escape behavior and antipredator recognition. And then I started to get more into evolutionary work with bold coloration. We did a lot of work with Tim Caro, who is a well-known mammalian coloration biologist. We've published a bunch of papers now together. And then I got interested in skunks. And the great thing was, no one works on skunks. It's very uncommon to have anyone work on skunks. And those who do, usually are just doing coloring and tracking their movements. They aren't doing behavior. I'm a behaviorist to heart. And so I, I really honed in on the idea of looking at predator-prey relationships with a defended animal that advertises its defense, the black and white stripes, and their common predator, a coyote.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  So a lot of what we do is looking at how do skunks perceive fear? How do they respond to predators? And how do predators learn about those types of prey?

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Well, you know, that's prevalent too in poisonous insects. Like if you see, you know, a really brightly colored insect or a frog, it's likely that they're either poisonous or they're a mimic of one that is, right? Is that something that a predator learns from the first time? Or is that innate?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  It's a great question, and a lot of work has been done on that very question. And it varies depending on the type of animal you're talking about. We did a project where we trained coyotes to not attack skunks using skunk models. This was a captive colony in Utah. We sort of conditioned them to eat off of brown furry plates, take their normal food off of a brown furry plate. Then we gave them a skunk model with their food on it. And the vast majority had a really strong hesitation of what is that? Like that is something new, that like that's bold, it's striped. What is that? Some never even ate the food off those plates. Others, those models had a sprayer so we could spray them in the face with skunk oil when they attacked the plates. And some got sprayed one time in the face by skunk oil and never again went back.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Some got sprayed nine times and kept going back for food. So there's lots of variation in willingness to attack boldly colored animals. And so I think the answer to your question is it's there's both an innate aspect to it and a learned aspect to it.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Mercedes, our lead editor, told me about a dog they had up in Canada that went back and tried to chew on a dead porcupine numerous times. Numerous times, getting just tapped in the face. They were like, come on, man. But like, is it similar for spikes?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Yes, if you notice spikes or spines, if they are strong, dangerous spines, they are tend to be black and white. So porcupine quills tend to be striped, black and white. Those are warning signals. You're telling the predator not to do that. And most wild predators will not attack black and white spiky animals because they know. Your dogs are not quite as intelligent as as wild predators are. Plus, my thought is that dogs are they're artificially selected. And different breeds are selected to have what we call hypertrophied aspects of their attack sequence. So some breeds just love to chase and grab and bite. And that's just what they're bred to do because that's what we want them to do as part of whatever their job had been.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  And they get so much pleasure. And internal hormonal rewards from doing that, that no spike is ever gonna overcome that initial drive to wanna do that thing. So I think that some dogs can learn better than others, based on sort of what their background is, but some just can't help themselves, I think is the answer to that question.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  I saw it in my head to have it.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  The people who buy skunk chew toys for their dogs, I don't know why you would do that. I see those in the stores and say, "Don't do it." Why would you ever buy your training your dog to go after a skunk? You know?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Or a hedgehog, if you live in Europe, or, you know. So just be mindful of what toys you're giving your dog and how you're training them to chew. When I first got here, one of my very first grad students, her name was Holly Schiefelbein, very, very first grad student, her project was going to be, we made some robotic skunk models. You could drive these little animals around, there was a spraying mechanism in them that could spray, not skunk spray, but citronella spray, which is aversive, just the same. And the goal was to expose them to dogs and see how different breeds of dogs respond to skunks in different ways. And no one would let us work with their dogs, especially the purebreds. We wanted purebred dogs, we wanted to look at breed differences, and we couldn't find people who would let us use their dogs for it. And we couldn't find a park that would allow us to do that project in it.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So now what we do is we put out static prey models with our trail cameras, our wildlife cameras, and just see how opportunistically we get coyotes in that come and interact with the models, or if they contact, or if they stay away, and varying the coloration, or the pattern types, or the poses of the type of animal it is. You can do a lot in that respect.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  I can't believe I haven't asked this yet, but you work with skunk oil, you have some in a fridge, your last name does have the word stank in it. How often does that come up? In emails, in classes? I mean, it's perfect.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Very rarely.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Really?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  I did not even realize it until I was well into working with skunks. In fact, I remember when you, when you actually called me out on your aptonym episode, I think you mentioned me working with skunks. I didn't, had never even realized up until very late. And so there was no preconceived idea of it, and it's just a coincidence that...

• 22:11Speaker 02

  It's so good.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  That I, you know, I don't tend to draw attention to it.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  I know, but it's so good.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  But, you know, it happens. It's important to note that I don't... I'm not a stinky person.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Just what we work on is stinky. Yes. Okay.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Not at all. In fact, I've said several times and I'm like, I'm so surprised that this room smells so good for as many dead animals in it. Like this, I've actually noticed that. But yeah, there's a guy in England who is a reclamation hydrologist who is named Andrew Drinkwater. There is a planetary geologist I know named Raquel, who goes by Ra, whose name was Rocky, like her, that was her nickname. And I was like, do you ever notice that? And she's like, I've never thought about it, which is, I absolutely love that. I feel like that's a total spinoff podcast.

• 22:58Alie Ward?

  So we just discussed this in the assenology episode with donkey expert, Dr. Faith Burden, who yeah, studies beasts of burden. And she noted that taking on a job that's a pun, had, there's a name for that. It's nominative determinism. And also, if you want to hear Raquel Nuno, AKA Rocky, talk about planetary geology, you can see her selinology episode on the moon. And also, Dr. Drinkwater, I just emailed his office yet again. I've tried so many times over the years. So cross your fingers. If anyone personally knows Dr. Andrew Drinkwater, a hydrologist, please message me, send a pigeon, whatever it takes. But back to the utterly charming and warm Dr. Stankowich.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  When it comes to things like spikes versus scales, is there a different level of efficacy in terms of what is a better predator deterrent? Or does it totally depend on your environment?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  So I often get this question of, of why do some species evolve spikes, others evolve smells, others evolve armor? I don't think we can really assign a rhyme or a reason to it. I think it's just what you have available as your building blocks. So you think of the carnivores that all use stinky sprays or old odors, your skunks, your pole cats, mastelids, weasels, civets, you know, those types of things. Their ancestors had anal glands. And all carnivores have anal glands that they use for communication purposes. And so they had access to sort of stinky sulfur-based chemicals that they were using for communication that they co-opted in different ways and to different degrees to use for defense. So they had something, a building block already there. They were already emitting

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Kind of stinky stuff already in communication. You think about armadillos, there's evidence, fossil evidence that osteoderms, the bony plates that make up an armadillo's carapace, we can find bony osteoderms, individual ones, in the skins of fossil giant ground sloths.

• 24:55Alie Ward?

  What?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  So the ancestors of sloths and armadillos are in the same super order.

• 25:01Alie Ward?

  That's nuts. I didn't know that.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  There was probably a building block there that got enhanced in some way.

• 25:08Alie Ward?

  Just a side note, your teeth started out on the outside of your body. And there are still so many creatures who are studded with external teeth. But please enjoy the recent paleo histology episode with Dr. Yar Haridi to learn more on that. But osteoderms, that means bone skin, they're, yeah, like the scoots on the back of our armadillo friends. But there are more avenues to armor up. For example...

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Quills and spines are just modified hairs.

• 25:36Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Pangolin scales are, it's keratin, it's modified hairs. So they're taking what building block you have and modifying it away. And whoever comes up with a good way of using it evolutionarily, it just gets elaborated and exaggerated more and more and more. And I think it's just a, it's something that's fortuitous. Now, if you're talking about an animal that is arboreal, that lives in trees, you probably don't want a thick coat of armor because it's so heavy. Although pangolins, there are a bunch of tree pangolins, but they are smaller in size. So trees versus ground, you might not want to be as armored. There are spiny animals that live in trees. It's just a matter of what you had to begin with.

• 26:13Alie Ward?

  Are the more armored mammals, are they tend to be slower lopers? Do they not have that bunny hop, fast getaway? Like, the fact that an armadillo is related to sloths, you don't think of sloths for their, like, fast getaways. But do these all tend to be slower little dudes?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Most of the ones that have a big defense tend to be a little bit slower, a little bit more lumbering, because they don't need to be fast to get away. That's not their main defense.

• 26:42Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I noticed early on that, especially working with skunks, that... Skunks aren't the smartest animals in the world. Um, you know, I knew that armadillos aren't really the smartest animals in the world. So we had a question of, well, maybe having to carry around this big coat of armor or evolve this sneaky smell takes extra energy and there might be a trade off there. So we, I thought, well, maybe they have smaller brains.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  And so we did a study and we, we found lo and behold, that mammals that have more elaborate defenses, morphological defenses, have relatively smaller brain sizes.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  So you could say that, that those that have really strong defenses don't need to be as smart because they can hang out and not have a care in the world and know they're defended against most other mammals they find. And also there's this energetic trade off there, that there's a cost to, to growing, developing and carrying around a giant coat of armor on your back all day long.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  So their less brains, more kind of brawn in terms of, you know, not strength, but at least the strength of their defenses.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the more you invest in your defense, the dumber relatively you tend to be.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  You know, I'm, we're sitting in this lab full of penguin scales and armor and spikes and spines. And it occurs to me like how squishy humans are, how absolutely vulnerable. Does that ever strike you that you're walking around with no armor? Like we're wearing just like cotton.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing because we took a whole different route, right? Our evolutionary history, we became a little bit more cursorial, a little bit more able to, to run and outpace. And that's mainly in order to hunt, but we would use trees, escape into trees. But larger brains, that's the way out of it, right? And so the bigger the brain, the more able to avoid predators by using those brains that you are. But what strikes me more about humans is what happens when we do put armor on.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  And so I have lots of questions that I would love to explore someday about how do humans perceive fear, not just in general, but what happens to their perceptions of fear when they are wearing body armor or when they do have a weapon on them? And how does that change their thought process and their, their decision-making process?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Like, does their cortisol level go up or down?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Or down, yeah. Are they more brave? Are they more bold? Are they able to do more because they know they have this first line of defense if they are shot at, you know?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Well, getting back to humans, it's so funny that you mentioned human beings wearing armor. My husband has a black belt in jujitsu and he's a musician, a playwright. He's working on this piece right now and he's. Going to perform it in a full suit of armor. And we have a friend who is a prop maker who shipped us his suit of armor. They're about the same size and literally yesterday. My husband is putting on a full suit of armor in the living room. It's his dream.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Like he has wanted to put on this suit of armor forever.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  And that suits to fit a little different. That feels so good.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  And he's also clanking around and can barely sit down. He's like, how do people ride horses on this? And I'm like, well, are you more vulnerable wearing that? Then like, you know, if you got in a fight in that bar, like.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, I think you can explore, you know, some inner psyche of why your husband wanted that to feel that so much.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  I know.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  But it's the same idea of, yeah, if you're wearing a giant suit of metal armor, you are lumbering, you're slow, you're more vulnerable in that aspect, but you're also far less likely to be stabbed or shot by an arrow.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  You know, so there's definite trade offs. Maybe you just feel a lot more safe curled up in a cocoon of steel.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Um, so there's definitely some psychological process happening there of being, you know, wrapped in steel and feeling a bit safer and more at ease and less stressed, I would assume, yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  I have to ask him.

• 30:22Alie Ward?

  Okay, I asked him.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Most armor has a sort of compressing quality to it. And you know how dogs have thunder shirts sometimes? Like some dogs helps their anxiety for storms and fireworks to wear a thunder shirt. That's what armor feels like, you know, feels extra safe and cozy.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  The timing couldn't be more perfect.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Literally lumbering around in it. Just so happy yesterday, like his dream. Um, can I ask you questions from listeners?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 30:47Alie Ward?

  Just a heads up, Jarrett, your pod mother will be performing this musical live in LA in the next month or so. So follow him on Instagram at Jarrett underscore sleeper. It's J A R R E T T underscore sleeper, like someone who sleeps, where he'll be announcing it. It's so good. Also. He's just making some great content about the world in this time of chaos. Ward approved, would marry again. But before we hear your questions, patrons, let's take a quick break. We're going to donate to a cause of Ted's selection, which is the Pangolin Crisis Fund, which works to stop the poaching and the trade of and the demand for pangolin and pangolin products. And it raises the profile of the eight species of this little lone animal. They deserve their own multi-part episode sometime in the future because they're amazing

• 31:32Alie Ward?

  creatures. They're impacted so adversely by human trade. And so we have to find the best pangolinologist. And yeah, that is a real word. I just looked it up. And also they say 100% of any designated donation to the Pangolin Crisis Fund goes directly to the field. And we're really happy to make that donation on Ted's behalf there at pangolincrisisfund.org. We'll link them in the show notes. Thank you to Ologies sponsors for making these donations each week possible. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us.

• 32:08Alie Ward?

  So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F O R H E R S dot com slash ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site.

• 32:52Alie Ward?

  I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email. All in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it.

• 33:35Alie Ward?

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• 34:05Alie Ward?

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• 34:39Speaker 05

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• 35:08Speaker 02

  Also making the show possible are patrons at patreon.com/ologies who submit questions for ologists before we record. And this week, we had a great one from A Ortega, who asked about noises and communication used for certain types of dangers or threats or urgency. Olga Kolesnikova asked, is screaming actually a good defense mechanism? Screams internally. And Marla T. wants to know, do animals in the wild pick up on each other's warnings? Like, for example, do squirrels listen to warnings from birds when hawks or eagles fly over? Is there like being on blue sky where everyone's like, hey, this is going on politically, everyone? Like, like a meerkat, like, do they listen to each others?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely, they do. There's totally shared public information out there, and especially with alarm calls. There's lots and lots of studies looking at how species use information from other species about where food might be, where predators are, and even cases of deception where species will give false alarm calls. They will learn to give the alarm calls of other species in their area and give false alarm calls. So the animals, like a meerkat, might drop the bug it was foraging on, and the other animal, the bird, might fly in and grab it and take it.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  That's so mean.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Public information is a very well-studied aspect of behavior, and it's super common for animals to, of course, use calls and signs and visual information from other species.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you mentioned seeing possums when you were younger, and we're looking at, you know, armadillos that are kind of possum-sized. A lot of people wanted to know, Scalebar, The Cole, Gracie Maldonada, Brittany Corrigan, Jen Squirrel Alvarez, and Justin Bowen. Scalebar asked, does playing dead ever, like, backfire? Laying down in front of a predator seems kind of risky. And Justin asked, I wonder if fainting goats qualify as playing dead. So, possums don't have any armor on their bellies, but they just keel over, drooling.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Is that a defense? Is that a bug or a feature?

• 37:08Speaker 01

  It's absolutely a defense. It's called thanatosis. It's very hard to study because you just have to opportunistically see it in an animal, right? But it's really the last option and normally it's not the first option. You're running away, you're trying to get away, but it happens when the predator grabs grabs you. And you're in the jaws already. So what other thing, rather than trying to squirm or claw? If you just play dead, maybe they'll stop and drop you and look around and, and okay, this, this thing, I've killed it. I can make sure there's no other predators around that might steal this. And you can see videos online of predators dropping a possum on the ground. And start to walk around and look for things that might take it and the possum pops up and runs away.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Bye now.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  It's not a, a super common thing that it's successful, but at that point, what else do you have? So death feigning is a thing we see. Fear screams where screaming bloody murder to hopefully call in. Other members of your species that might mob the predator to help you out. So you'd be surprised at what animals might do is a last gasp to save themselves because what else do you have to lose?

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Eleanor Wall said,

• 38:17Speaker 06

  Hello, Ali and guest expert. This is Eleanor from New York. And the thing that I would like to ask you about regarding animal defenses is alarm calls. Whether sound based, light based, or chemical, or any other form.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  You mentioned anal glands. Does anyone spurt anything to like? Let other people know like there's some danger in the area?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  So chemical for sure, but what we know about the chemicals are in fish. So fish, when they are attacked, they will emit chemicals from their body. That once they're in the water, other fish use that as a, as a con-specific alarm cue or a alarm cue. That's something that death is happening here and you get away. And so it's found in so many different aquatic species that smelling death will cause other animals to swim away.

• 39:04Alie Ward?

  And if you have questions, like, is there a fish alarm cue? Luckily for all of us, there's a 2004 study from the Journal of Animal Behavior titled, "Is There a Fish Alarm Cue? Affirming Evidence From a Wild Study," which, yeah, noted that chemical alarm cues released from injured tissue are not released under any other context, and therefore reliably they inform nearby prey of the presence of a predator. And that both laboratory and field studies have demonstrated that most aquatic taxa show anti-predator responses to these chemical alarm cues. You can also see the 2022 study, "Attenuation and Recovery of an Avoidance Response to

• 39:46Alie Ward?

  a Chemical Anti-Predator Cue in an Invasive Fish: Implications for Use as a Repellent in Conservation," in the Journal of Conservation Physiology, and it found that these chemosensory alarm cues may prove to be an effective tool in guiding the movement of fish, especially invasive ones, for control, for conservation. So, conservationists could potentially use these odor cues, kind of like a gentler fish cattle prod made out of stress perfume, to guide the fish in order to control these invasive species. However, they did lab tests with sea lampreys, and if they're exposed to prolonged alarm

• 40:28Alie Ward?

  cues, like if they just keep smelling the danger scent over and over again, I guess the fish just figure someone's crying "literal wolf," and they're like, whatever. So, yeah, this might be called, say, flooding the zone. So, not only does it work to desensitize and numb captive fish, but it's also a political strategy employed by dictatorships. So, the term "flood the zone," meaning to overwhelm a population with so much bad news, or corruption, or fear, or misinformation, that they simply can't keep up, and then they tune out for survival. It was actually coined by our current president's chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who famously said that "the Democrats don't matter, the real opposition is the media," and the way

• 41:13Alie Ward?

  to deal with them. Is to flood the zone with shit. There you go. So whether you're a fish or a human person, this is handy news to keep hold of. But apparently, if the sea lampreys took some time away from the alarm odor, they were more attenuated and active in avoiding the threat. So maybe every day, read a romance novel, watch your favorite show for an hour or two, give your brain a break. That way you can stay angry and active. Right now, any skunks, if you're listening to this, you're like, okay, great. But what does this have to do with me?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  In mammals, in terms of spraying, it's so unstudied. Not many people study spraying skunks. I don't know why, they're so fun. But we don't know a lot about how animals respond to skunk odor in their environment. What we do know is skunks can spray, like they might spray your dog intentionally, liquid gets on their face, but they can also release a waft of smell. So sometimes if you're walking around your house and you smell skunk, it might not be that a skunk sprayed a predator or got attacked, it might just be that they got stressed out and at least a puff of odor, and it's lingering in the air and it's sort of staying around.

• 42:18Alie Ward?

  Is that you?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  That might be an inadvertent response, or it could be a warning to other animals in the area that something happened around here. There's some sort of scary thing. But again, we don't know that in mammals for sure.

• 42:33Alie Ward?

  Would that also warn a predator? Like if you're a coyote walking around, you're a bobcat and you start to smell skunk, would you be like, ugh, I'm out of here. This is like a restaurant that stinks.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  So our work with coyotes and their responses to skunk oil is kind of mixed. Generally speaking, they will avoid models that smell strongly of skunks. But we also use skunk oil in a mixture with other stuff as a lure for carnivores and predators. So if it smells like skunk oil and death, it can be an attractant. If it just smells purely like skunk oil and it's on a skunk model, like on a thing that looks like a skunk that does not look dead, they tend to shy away from it. So it's context dependent. But it's odd that we use the thing that they hate the most being sprayed with is what we use as a lure. To draw them in.

• 43:19Alie Ward?

  I know you want more on this, so you can please report to some cozy book nook and curl up with a paper, "Aversive or Attractive: The Effects of Skunk Oil on Predator Behavior" by Professor Holly Schifobine and our own Dr. Ted out of, yes, his lab at California State Long Beach. So this study notes that skunk carcasses have been encountered in which everything except the anal glands had been consumed by scavengers, like they were leftovers. And it notes probably coyotes, which could indicate an aversion to and avoidance of the oil contained within these glands. But the researchers in this study, they made skunk decoys out of tanned hides. And half of them, they kept black and white striped, and the other half, they dyed, they

• 44:03Alie Ward?

  bleached them, and then they paired some with a smell of skunk. So they wanted to see if the coloration in conjunction with the smell did anything. And the study found that scented models were less likely to be visited, indicating, yes, there was an avoidance of the oil. But some of my favorite passages of research papers in general are always hiding out in the methodology section. This one did not disappoint. So they had to makeover skunk pelts into a more neutral color, so that they had striped ones and that they had just drab brown ones. So the lab had to create the brown pelts via, it says, "Clarol Basic White Lightener and 40 Volume Cream Developer from Sally Beauty." And then they dyed them brown over that using permanent hair color in the shade Dark Blonde.

• 44:47Alie Ward?

  And if you listened to our pinupetology episode on seals and sea lions, or our recent marmotology episode about groundhogs, you will know human hair dye is part of a mammalogist's science kit more often than you would suspect. But I want to save some skunk facts for a future episode with another years-long quest for a very specific guest. I really need Jerry Dragoo of New Mexico. He's exceptionally hard to get a hold of. He is the only skunk expert who will do. I've had my eyes on him forever. Jerry, email me back. I love you. Also, no patrons asked this question, which was shocking to me. How about coyote vests?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  How about coyote vests?

• 45:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah, like spiky little vests. They have a lot of like, plastic bright colored spikes. They're so metal, even though they're plastic. But I have a 12-pounder.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:37Alie Ward?

  Who is... Not the sharpest, but also I'm sure delicious. Do they work?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  So the Coyote Vest is a Kevlar vest and some of them have metal spikes on them. Some have little plastic spines sticking up off the top. It's unclear. It seems like it couldn't hurt. You know, if you're a small dog and get chomped down on by something that's chomping on those spikes. It would certainly hurt to chomp down on those spikes. So I don't think that the creators have any direct scientific evidence of it working, but I can totally see it being a reasonable way to defend your animal. It's not a foolproof way, of course, because it doesn't protect the entire animal and the head is exposed. But it certainly would be a good first line of defense if you can intervene while they're dealing with that vest.

• 46:24Alie Ward?

  What about the neck? Like, does the neck have to be protected more than other areas?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  The neck is one of the most common areas that they go for because it's the way to kill the animal so quickly, either by breaking the spine or by cutting the jugular vein to bleed them out. So the neck is what you really want to protect. And so having a spiked collar there might be helpful, too. Although most small dogs, their body can be crushed by strong jaws of mountain lions or coyotes in a variety of ways. So that would be one of the most vulnerable parts, for sure.

• 46:54Alie Ward?

  And just a heads up, yes, many versions of this Coyote Vest, or I suppose it's really an anti-Coyote Vest, they feature like Sex Pistols-level spiked collars as well. And it was invented, I just read this, it made me so sad. It was invented by a Southern California man who was mourning his late 10-pound little white fluffy poodle named Buffy, who was stealthily stalked by a coyote while they were at this busy dog park. And the coyote pounced, grabbed Fluffy by the neck, shook her to death in front of her distraught owners, and then the coyote scampered away up a steep hill. They ran after. They couldn't catch this coyote with a limp, dead Buffy in its mouth. Buffy was never seen again.

• 47:35Alie Ward?

  And through grief and a lot of, I think, if I may self-blame, Buffy's owner created this Kevlar bite-proof spiked collar and vest, available at coyovest.com if you're looking. And there have been Many reports of attacks that were thwarted by these spiked little outfits. And my daughter, Gremlin, she's a delicious 12-pound meal waiting to happen, may need one of these. I was just shopping. I was like, do I get our pink one, yellow one? I can't decide, but the tap's open. If you're encountering a lot of coyotes in your neighborhood, though, especially now because it's coyote mating season, like January through March, there are some ways to scare them away. I found this 2023 master's thesis by Gabrielle Lejunesse,

• 48:18Alie Ward?

  and it was titled "Two Programs for Use of Aversive Conditioning to Manage Bold Urban Coyotes." So they lured coyotes with dogs or dog scents. The study also taught community members to stay on the lookout for coyotes and then haze them by running and screaming at them and throwing tennis balls their direction to cause them to retreat from humans. Or they had the high-intensity method, which involved a non-contact shot of a chalk pellet toward a coyote, like a paintball gun. And the verdict was the low and the high-intensity hazing caused coyotes to leave the immediate area, but only the high-intensity hazing, the paintball shotgun, demonstrated measurable changes in subsequent behavior by coyotes.

• 49:02Alie Ward?

  But the yelling, though, they say, may deter coyotes during conflict situations while increasing the sense of security in residential areas. Either way, haze coyotes when you see one for the good of the nearby pets, but also the coyotes because it keeps them safer. Even though they belong here as much, if not more than us, they were here before us. And if you have an outdoor cat, you're putting so much wildlife at risk because they love to eat lizards and birds and such, and you might be feeding the coyotes. So, real talk, keep your kitties indoors. But a leash is also a good idea.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  A leash, yeah. Honestly, if your dog's on a leash, it's close enough to you where you can hopefully protect it.

• 49:42Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  If you have your dog free roaming, then having a collar with some spikes on it might be a better idea.

• 49:47Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. We talked about stinky, stinky glands, and Andy Pepper and Emily Stoffer wanted to know. Emily asked, "I don't know if this would be part of thisology, but what is it with nervous poops? Is that a defense mechanism?" Andy asked, "Are there animals that poop for defense and not just out of fear, and does it matter?" Honorable mention to patron Biodiversity, who shared that they, quote, "know of two snakes, the Sonoran coral snake and the western hook nose snake, that use cloacal popping, basically farting on command, to repel predators." Biodiversity called them Ophidian flatulists, and wondered if any of Ted's research has caught wind of any other animals that employ farcial arts in self-defense.

• 50:31Alie Ward?

  Honestly, if you've ever been close to someone with IBS, you know it can certainly keep you anxiously ensconced in a bathroom stall when things get dicey. Our brains and guts.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Nervous poops might be a way to lighten your body load in preparation for a fast runaway, a fast escape. That's the one thing I can think of. It might help you. I don't know of any mammals that release a defensive compound in their poop that would in any way hinder an attack, but it would sort of lighten your load to help you escape a predator attack.

• 51:05Alie Ward?

  What about horned lizards? Hand the Bee, Lee Jacobstock, wanted to know, Jacob asked my question, "How the heck do some lizards straight up shoot blood out of their eyeballs? What would the evolutionary advantage of that even be?" But, yeah, the horned lizard, the horny toad, Hand the Bee said that they're native to their home state of Texas. Can we please discuss this bizarre mechanism?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  A number of things can shoot bodily fluids out of their body.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  And it's a somewhat common way of defending yourself. If it happened while being squeezed or being attacked or being pressed on and something squeezed out and shot the predator and it deterred it, that animal survives. So guess what? That animal's genes get to live on and be spread, and that trait gets to be spread. So if it's something that happened fortuitously, an animal is more likely to have stuff shoot out of its body when pressed on or squeezed. That gets to spread and more copies of it are found in the next generation. So that's how that thing happens.

• 52:03Alie Ward?

  All right, there's a glut of information available on this, but let's break down how to shoot blood from your eyes in case there's ever a weird guy staring at you at the bus stop. So first, be a horned lizard, which means eating a diet of mostly harvester ants. If you recall from our mimicology episode with Dr. Terry McGlynn about ants, harvester ants, the juicy ones that used to roam untouched lands are struggling because of invasive ant colonies, which means horned lizards are going hungry. But as for the blood, so these horned lizards are able to constrict some muscles around their eyes, which keeps the blood kind of shunted and dammed up in a few sinuses under the eyeball.

• 52:47Alie Ward?

  Then, as it's ready, it's like building up, the lizard further constricts those muscles really quickly and the blood has nowhere to go but out and they can shoot it up to four feet away. And this would be like you being able to say, like spit the entire length of a bowling lane. How often can they do this? Like if you were at a lizard party, just kind of goofing around. So there's some research out there. For example, the 2001 paper titled Blood Squirtin Variability in Horned Lizards, which exposed horned lizards to the presence of dogs. And they found that body mass of these lizards was positively correlated with the total number of squirts and the number of days in a row a lizard could continue squirting from its eyeballs.

• 53:30Alie Ward?

  There's this other stellar paper, 2004's banger, Responses of Kit Foxes to Anti-Predator Blood Squirtin and Blood of Texas Horned Lizards. And this study gave kit foxes some alive horned lizards to eat during which the lizards squirted blood from the tissues around their eyes. I'm guessing Jackson Pollock'd the foxes in the face with their blood. And then when the kit foxes were presented with more horned lizards to eat, the researchers say that the foxes displayed a learned aversion to them. They were like, I'm good, dude. Now, the study also suggested active anti-predator chemicals.

• 54:08Alie Ward?

  Are carried in the circulating blood as well as in squirted blood and that the lizards can tell a fox wants to eat his ass and it's worth doing the blood squirt. Now, fast forward a few decades to the October 2025 paper, Anti-Predator Blood Squirting and Seed Harvesting Ants in the Evolution of Mammacophagy or Ant Eating in Horned Lizards. So scientists now know that during digestion of these harvester ants, a compound from their toxin enters horned lizard blood, becoming a circulating anti-predator deterrent, the study says. Chemical warfare. Shot out your eyeballs. Also, I read too many studies about horned lizards for this aside, and I can tell you

• 54:53Alie Ward?

  that they were all authored by one guy, Wade C. Sherbrooke, who I was thrilled to find out is alive and well in Arizona. He wrote the book Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America, and he made a recent visit to the educational Cooper's Center, which made an Instagram post that said, "Today, our team met with the Wizard of the Lizard, Wade Sherbrooke." Wizard of the lizard. Folks, beauty's all around us if you just open your eyes, provided they're not filled with blood.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  It's definitely someone I would leave alone. If I could mug someone that was just sitting there or someone that was squirting blood at me through their eyeballs, I definitely would be like, I'm going to go for the more chill situation. Slowlorises. Allison Clark and Emily Z. wanted to know, Allison asked, "Pigme Slowloris, are they really the only venomous mammal?" Emily Z. said, "Can we talk about how Slowlorises have venomous elbows?" What? This was news to me also.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  So the Slowlorises will take the secretions of the gland from their elbow and spread it on their fur to make themselves toxic, distasteful, poisonous, or their bite can be very painful because it's in their mouth. However, shrews, salinodon, they all have poison glands in their mouth that they use to subdue prey.

• 56:09Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And they actually have grooves in their front teeth that they can inject the poison into prey. And the prey will become immobilized, they can catch that prey and, and store it and for a longer periods of time. So they're definitely not the only poisonous mammals.

• 56:22Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  And of course, platypus, male platypus have, have spurs on their, their hind legs that have venom in them that are used in male, male combat. Those are very painful if they stick you in the skin. So there are multiple things that are poisonous among mammals, but very few are, use toxins or poisons as an anti-predator defense.

• 56:40Alie Ward?

  We do have a fresh platypus episode for you, and in it, we go into depth on these venom spurs and exactly how bad they hurt, which is like a bitch. And also, most people who get barbed and like crumpled physiologically from these platypus Franken creatures, they were actually trying to help them, like scoot them out of the road, only to find that Mother Nature is as cruel as she is funny. They go to help and they get so barbed, so latered. So when you say poisonous, like if a slow loris gets eaten, would that venom get denatured in their stomach? Or would it cause like, ugh, illness? Or like, would it just taste, you know, in a deterrent to biting your fingernails, you put like really bitter stuff on it?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  I would imagine it would, it would just taste really bad.

• 57:23Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's usually, because you wouldn't want it to, to, wouldn't want it to happen in the stomach as much because by, by that point, you're dead.

• 57:31Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  So you'd want it to just be a really foul taste on your fur, and that's what caused them to spit you out, yeah.

• 57:36Alie Ward?

  That's good to know if there's any vampires. You just put like the gnarliest cologne on your neck and they're like, ugh, no.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Or some garlic, right?

• 57:44Alie Ward?

  Yeah, a little garlic, aftershave, you're good to go.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:47Alie Ward?

  We have a vampire episode, it's two parts. In it, we talk a lot about necks and garlic. Andy Pepper, Erin Burbridge, Brittany Brisenio, wanted to know, Brittany asked, I've seen videos of killdeers pretending to have a broken wing in order to distract and lure predators away from their nests. So wild, you gotta look it up. I did, and a killdeer, which is named for the sound of its shrieking call.

• 58:16Alie Ward?

  It's a shorebird. It's a type of plover and it looks kind of like a mix between a hawk and a quail, but smaller. And it sits on the ground with its wings spread and it taps one of them so convincingly in what appears to be like imperiled panic. It almost emotionally feels like it's trying to turn the ignition on a sputtering getaway car, like such panic. Absolutely Oscar-worthy. I have seen far worse acting on Netflix.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Erin asked, what about altruistic defense where one member of a group risks their own life, like Mother Birds faking an injured wing? Is that a defense mechanism?

• 58:54Speaker 01

  It's absolutely a defense mechanism to protect your prey. And it depends on how you want to define altruism. If you define altruism as something that puts yourself in more danger in order to help another, another individual, then yes, it's altruism because you're helping your offspring. Parents all the time will alarm call, they'll put themselves in harm's way to help protect their offspring because their offspring are their, are their genes. That's how you pass down your genes. Any behavior that helps to spread your genes and make your offspring survive will be favored by natural selection. However, if your idea of it is, is that there's a no benefit to the actor at all, then, then it would not be an altruistic act. But absolutely distraction behaviors, as they talked about,

• 59:37Speaker 01

  are a thing that happens in lots of different animals. And it would be very favorable to sacrifice yourself to protect your own offspring if there's a good chance those offspring were going to survive and live on. And taking into account what are your future reproductive opportunities? Would you do it to save your very first baby if you thought that, you know, you're, you're going to live a long life with multiple seasons of mating and reproduction again? Maybe it wouldn't be favored as much. But if you have one big shot at reproduction and there's not a good chance of surviving year to year, then helping this year's brood survive would certainly be a smart thing to do.

• 1:00:11Alie Ward?

  There are so many oldest kids in therapy for that same reason.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  As a youngest son, I appreciate that.

• 1:00:19Alie Ward?

  As a youngest daughter, I would like to apologize to my sister, Celeste.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  I would not like to apologize.

• 1:00:26Alie Ward?

  Claire Gemmoun wanted to know, can we talk about the sweet wombats armored butt? You've gotten to meet a wombat in situ, right?

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Yes, in the field, yeah, in Australia.

• 1:00:36Alie Ward?

  They have armored butts?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  I mean, it's thick in skin.

• 1:00:39Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Anything that sort of goes into a burrow to plug up a hole.

• 1:00:43Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Having armored part of your body would be super helpful.

• 1:00:47Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  My favorite example of an armored butt is, as though there's lots of examples of an armored butt. My favorite example of an armored butt is the pink fairy armadillo. They're one of the smallest armadillo species. Their only armor is a strip of armor along its back that's pink. And a plate over the butt that is pink as well.

• 1:01:06Alie Ward?

  Pink fairy armadillo is more than deserving of your Google image search. But since you might be, I don't know, refinishing a bookshelf or driving a wheat combine or changing a diaper that needs more immediate attention, or God forbid, maybe you're on a Lime scooter right now with no helmet, don't do that. I'm just going to share the visuals with you auditorily. So a pink fairy armadillo, it's like four inches long. It's tiny, absorb that. It's four inches long. It looks like a mole creature with huge, big scaly mitts for paws. It's got a furry blond stomach and then this blush colored plate of armor on its dorsal side.

• 1:01:48Alie Ward?

  It looks like if you draped an oblong pot holder on its back as it waddled away. It doesn't even cover its whole body. It also doesn't look like an earth creature. It looks like something scuttling in the corner of like starship troopers. I want to witness one.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  And very small, you can't imagine how that armor would really help them. However, the plate over the rear end is much thicker and harder to get through and they will go into burrows and that is the plug that helps to protect them from predators. In fact, the armor on the back is not very well hardened at all. It's very much more leathery. It doesn't show up well on CT scans, but the plate over the rump certainly does. So having armor on your rump is great for burrowing animals because it helps to sort of seal things up if a predator is trying to come down a hole to go after you.

• 1:02:39Alie Ward?

  It's like a trapdoor spider, kind of.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:02:41Alie Ward?

  There is a diptych of a pink fairy armadillo and a salmon sushi.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:49Alie Ward?

  These things look like land prawns. It's bonkers. So, yes, we need a whole armadillo episode because there is a pink fairy armadillo, but there's also a screaming hairy armadillo. And allow me to demonstrate via the YouTube channel of a guy named Joe. Joe has a pet screaming hairy armadillo who becomes vocal if he gets rolled into the wrong position for a nap.

• 1:03:18Alie Ward?

  And side note, this account, Joe, is Joe Furman. Furman. A guy with a hairy armadillo. People, I can't, I just can't. But anyway, Ted has one too, but it's dead and it's used for education and podcaster lab tours. Where do these guys live?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Uh, South America.

• 1:03:39Alie Ward?

  Oh, how beautiful.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  South America has all the armadillo diversity, yeah.

• 1:03:42Alie Ward?

  Wow, these little hairs.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  We've got one here in the States.

• 1:03:45Alie Ward?

  I love that it's a screaming hairy. Can I touch these? Oh!

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  They're sharp, aren't they?

• 1:03:51Alie Ward?

  Yes! That's like a bed of nails. That's like needles. It's like a pincushion reversed. That's cool.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  I think they're maybe a little softer when they're alive. I think they're maybe hard enough over time.

• 1:04:03Alie Ward?

  Oh, I'm in love. Uh, Ariel Van Zant had a great question. Are animal defenses done consciously or are they automatic or both?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  I think it depends on what defense you're talking about. There are defenses that are certainly automatic and subconscious. Other ones, like things that actively aim and spray noxious things that their predators are intentional because you have to aim and be mindful of what you're doing. Things that where you attack or stab. Porcupines, when they erect their quills and they turn and they are trying to stab you with their quills, that's certainly an intentional thing. But I can imagine armored animals curling up in a ball. You're just curling up in a ball, but you're not deploying the defense in any particular way. But in the end, it doesn't matter if it's intentional or not, whatever. If it works, it works.

• 1:04:49Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  We try not to anthropomorphize too much and to get into the minds of the animals because. Selection doesn't care about whether or not they think about it. All it cares about was how effective it was.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  It is what it is.

• 1:04:59Alie Ward?

  Well, a bunch of people wanted to know. Mark Rubin, Emily Krieger, Brooke A, Anne Over, Minnie Minnie, Cool Next Door, First Time Quest Askers, Mashed Tatoes, wanted to know, what are some modern human physiological responses or artifacts of defense mechanisms from our ape ancestors? Is it mostly just hiding, climbing, outwitting? We talked about how squishy we are, but like, what is keeping us safe?

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  That's right. Hiding, climbing, throwing things.

• 1:05:29Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Throwing objects at threatening animals for sure. When our hair stands up on our body, that's called piloerection. That's a common thing to make yourself look bigger. Animals do that all the time. When they get angry or when they get stressed, they make their hair stand up. Increased heart rate, even sweating to help make your hands a little bit tacky to climb trees better. So those are all the same things that we would have seen in our ancestors for sure.

• 1:05:55Alie Ward?

  You can thank a little nut shaped chunk of your brain called the amygdala for your fear and stress response. I like to call it your screaming almond of terror. And to learn more about anxiety and stress, how to fight it, you can see our widely loved Fearology episodes with Dr. Mary Poffenroth, who also just wrote the book Brave New You: Strategies, Tools, and Neurohacks to Live More Courageously Every Day. She's amazing. Everyone loves her. We'll link it on our website as a tool for your little ape brains.

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  Have you ever been attacked by something you've studied?

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  I've never been attacked. I've been sprayed by a skunk once.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  The very first day I was trapping a skunk on a release. I scared it while I was in a trap, went in to leave a trap, and it sprayed my hand as I was trying to open the trap again. But six years after that, I never got sprayed again. So as long as you respect them and can read their behavior, that they don't want to spray you.

• 1:06:48Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  I tell people, if you've been sprayed by a skunk, you've probably You know, tripped over it, didn't see it, scared it, or you've done something really dumb, because they will tell you well beforehand that they're going to spray you. Dogs don't listen to those same behaviors that we can. Have I ever been attacked by an animal? No.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Or I suppose been on the receiving end of a defense.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Well, so working with echidnas, we think of them as just curling up into a ball with their spikes sticking out. So you can pick them up and you can wear gloves, you pick them up and your hands are protected with leather gloves. When you're handling them, if they're, you're fully handling them, they will sort of clench their back muscles. And I call it bucking, where they're trying to clench their muscles and jab their spines into your hand. And so they would certainly do that while you're handling them. And you, even with leather gloves, you little spines get through the gloves and you get little tips in your fingers. But that's as closest to an attack I've ever experienced. I've been bitten by a rat during a capture one time, you know, while handling it. But otherwise, nothing that was ever life threatening. I'm, there's lots of people out there who go run and grab animals in the wild.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  A lot of herpetologists and entomologists will go grab their animals in the wild. That's not my thing. I, I just know the stress it puts on animals and I prefer to just observe. So I don't have a history of being attacked or bitten in retaliation for grabbing them. So, yeah.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  What'd you do about your hand?

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  So a skunk spray. It's an old myth that tomato juice will decent a skunk.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  It does not work. It just makes you smell the tomato juice. If there's a chemical reaction where you want to oxidize the sulfurous thiols in their spray, where if you use hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and liquid dish soap in a mixture, where if you mix those together, no water, that solution will oxidize those stinky chemicals and well, your animal will no longer smell. Bleach will do it too, but you don't want to put bleach on your pet. So when my hand was sprayed, I came back and rinsed it with that solution and it was immediately gone. So on your pet, it might take a couple of rounds of washing it because it gets in the fur and it's hard, you need to get that solution into their fur. Also, that solution can't be kept for a long period of time.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  It's not shelf stable, so I would keep those items on hand if you have a dog that's prone to being sprayed by a skunk.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. I have to tell my friend Simone, she's got a dog named Scraps that is real firecracker.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  I'll have to give you an extra magnet for her too. Yeah.

• 1:09:10Alie Ward?

  We've gotten that call late at night being like, oh no.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  There are commercial things you can buy as well that that work okay. But just home stuff at home peroxide baking soda, liquid dish soap. If you have a dog that is out and could be sprayed, just keep some on hand. Do not use water. Water, there's actually a third sulfur thioacetate in in skunk oil. That is not as stinky, but when you put water on it, when it mixes with water, it becomes stinkier. So you're just making it worse if you try to use water.

• 1:09:39Alie Ward?

  Okay, so the recipe is from Ted. Ready? Thirty two ounces of three percent hydrogen peroxide. That's a quart. One third of a cup of baking soda and a tablespoon of liquid dish soap. So you need to mix this up as soon as you can. You gotta get rid of it. The faster the better. And you gotta make a fresh batch of this stuff each time you need it because it doesn't keep well. So you take this mixture. You scrub it thoroughly into your pet's fur or your face, whatever the problem is. You gotta avoid eyes and mouths. And then you rinse yourself or the pet. And you repeat the process if you need to. And Ted notes that this remedy may lighten your pet's fur.

• 1:10:24Alie Ward?

  But it'll do wonders for reducing the stink. And also, everyone loves a makeover. So there you go. Once again, a quart or about a liter of three percent hydrogen peroxide. A third of a cup baking soda and a little dish soap, a tablespoon, right? Mix those up. Go to town. Good luck. And also, I always ask first the worst thing and then the best thing about people's jobs. And I don't know, I kind of accidentally did it out of order. But I wanted to make sure that Ted had a chance to say what his favorite was. So I shot Ted a note about what he loves the most in his work. And he said, the play part is accurate. Doing science is like going out to play. I love being able to explore how and why these amazing animals have evolved such powerful defenses.

• 1:11:09Alie Ward?

  I love being able to explore how and why these amazing animals have evolved such powerful defenses. And being able to mentor and study alongside fantastic and enthusiastic young minds. He continues, living a life of exploration and discovery, traveling the world and sharing my passion for wildlife with other scientists. And the public is deeply, deeply fulfilling. What sucks?

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  What's the worst thing about studying this? You've only been sprayed once. You haven't had a face full of spines and quills. What's the worst thing?

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  It's hard to find a worse thing about it.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Because I love what I do and it's such a fun, unique thing to study. My graduate advisor used to say that you should always, always feel like you're going out to play. When you pick a study, just go play, go do what, what sounds fun. And that's what sort of I tried to do in my career is explore the things that are fun. With that, the downside is more professionally is there's not a lot of people who do what I do and work on the things I work on. So there's not huge, huge fields of collaboration to be had. There's not gobs of funding for animal defense work and evolution of defenses. So that's the downside is more professionally. But in terms of, you know, my soul and what makes me happy and exploring, getting to study the things that I love and I find are cool.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  That's the biggest reward is to sort of, you know, answer the questions that come to my mind and just go out and play.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  You've never gotten an email from the Department of Defense being like, hey?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  I have not been contacted by the Department of Defense, the Department of War.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Oh, right. Oh, God.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  I've explored DOD grants, but a lot of that goes to more biomechanics type work on armor.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  It's so interesting because the Department of Defense and the Department of War are so different from an evolutionary perspective.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  They would be opposite of each other.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  It would take an evolutionary biologist to really get that.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Real different.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  It's like, what's your intention here?

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that is very, very different. Oh, what a world, what a world. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  This has been years coming.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  So ask knowledgeable people not knowledgeable questions and make some pals in the process. Also, leave the animals alone if you can. They don't want trouble. Neither do you. We're going to link to Ted's info in the show notes and you can follow him on Instagram at Dr.Ted Stankovich. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky on Instagram. I'm at Ally Ward, just one L in Ally on both. Ologies merch, including the new design, is at ologiesmerch.com. We do have shorter, kid-friendly episodes for you. They're in their own podcast feed. Search wherever you get podcasts. They're called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S.

• 1:13:55Alie Ward?

  You can join our Patreon if you want to submit questions ahead of time at patreon.com/ologies. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardwyer does the website. Our brave scheduling producer is Noel Dilworth. Susan Hale performs feats of strength each week as managing director and defending our edits every episode are editor Jake Chaffey and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn emitted the theme music. And if you stick around until the very end, you know, I may tell you a secret. And this week, a barometer for how well I'm doing or how much I have my shit together has always been that my desktop on my laptop, I don't know if this happens to you, but I got icons

• 1:14:38Alie Ward?

  galore on my laptop. They start just making a little pile, a stack in the upper right-hand corner. And I go, oh, God. It's like you look at your desktop, there's just files everywhere. Nothing's in folders. There's screenshots of shit you don't even care about anymore. And so I know that when my desktop is a mess, I gotta slow down. I gotta take a breather. I need a nap. If you relate, I urge you to just like make yourself a nice warm beverage. Sit down, organize that desktop. All right. You need as much mental clarity as possible now. I'm talking to myself. I'm talking to you too. Also, this one time, I think I told this in another episode, but it's so worth repeating. I was in a like a training kind

• 1:15:22Alie Ward?

  of conference at the Natural History Museum to get trained to go do SciCom in the Butterfly Pavilion with all the other volunteers. And we're all watching this presentation from this really awesome entomologist. And at some point, she goes to open a folder on her desktop with all this butterfly information, but she just labeled it butt stuff. And I don't know how many people in the room caught it. I don't even know if she still remembers. I should email her and see if she remembers that. But I sure do. It is so good. It's all butterfly facts. All right. Take a breath. Organize your desktop. Bye.

• 1:16:17Speaker 05

  Hey, don't mess with me.

• 1:16:20Speaker 07

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