Uncovering the mysteries of the animal kingdom

From the bugs in our backyards to prehistoric reptiles, animal biology and behavior are full of puzzles and conundrums. On this episode, we hear from experts solving the mysteries of the animal kingdom. Original broadcast date: July 14, 2023. Guests include paleontologist Dean Lomax, biochemical engineer Saad Bhamla, herpetologist Gowri Shankar and conservation biologist Patrícia Medici. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. http://plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  You just don't know what you're gonna find.

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  Challenge you.

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  And even change you.

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  Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Anoush Zomorodi, and we're going to start today's show by going back in time to meet a girl named Mary Anning.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Where do I begin with Mary Anning? Let me tell you. So Mary Anning, this is way back in 1811, 1812.

• 1:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Dean Lomax.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  She was just 11, 12 years old and walking on the beach with her older brother, Joseph, at a seaside town called Lyme Regis here in the UK.

• 1:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  Lyme Regis is known for its harbor, its fishing, its shipbuilding, and its craggy beachside cliffs. And that is where Mary grew up.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  You imagine these really tall, what today we would consider Jurassic cliffs, that were just constantly crumbling away, being eroded and smashed by the waves. And as a result of that constant erosion, you'd have rocks falling down that would contain fossils. And not only would you have the fossils preserved in the cliff face itself, you'd get them on the foreshore. So you'd have young Mary Anning and her family looking for these things. Often, they'd find the remains of shellfish-like animals like ammonites and bullet-shaped baleenites.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  And it kind of was a case, it was kind of come rain or shine, whatever the weather, they would be out there collecting these things. It became, for the family, it became massively important for their survival.

• 2:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Important because their father, Richard, had recently died.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  They were already quite a poverty-stricken family, but the fact that Richard passed away when she was so young and left them in so much debt, they had to find another way to survive.

• 2:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  And so, to make ends meet, Mary and her brother would dig out, carefully clean, and sell fossils to gentlemen scientists visiting the coast.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Because at this time, paleontology was really in its infancy, and people had began to question kind of what came before, you know, question the story of the Bible and things like that. And people had began to try to work out if animals were on the planet before, you know, was the age of the Earth a lot older than they thought?

• 3:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  And one day...

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Mary and her older brother, Joseph, they made a remarkable discovery that would change the world of paleontology, and to a large extent, the world as we know it today. They found the remains, they found this gigantic skull over a metre long with a massive, what we call sclerotic ring, this giant ring of bone inside the eye socket of this animal, which we call an ichthyosaur.

• 3:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ichthyosaur, Greek for fish lizard.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Now, ichthyosaurs are a curious group of animals.

• 3:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  For one thing, they look somewhere between a dolphin and a shark, but kind of reptilian.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Some of them were the top of the food chain predators in the oceans. They had these giant jaws, massive teeth, easily, some of them up to about eight centimetres, ten centimetres long. They're often misidentified as swimming dinosaurs, but they're not dinosaurs. They're an entirely different group. They lived entirely in the ocean whilst the dinosaurs were walking on land.

• 4:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  Prior to this discovery, people didn't know what ichthyosaurs were. There wasn't even an official name for them yet, which is what made Mary's finding so important. That skull, four feet long, was attached to a much, much longer skeleton that Mary discovered months later. It was the very first complete ichthyosaur skeleton ever unearthed.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  This discovery was that important and that it complete and so different to anything else, that it caught the attention of the gentlemanly scientists of the day, who were really eager to study this fossil.

• 4:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mary Anning spent the rest of her life uncovering fossils. She discovered the first ever pleseosaur remains, the first pterosaur fossil found in England. She even pioneered the study of coprolites, basically fossilized poop.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  You know, today, she's considered the mother of paleontology. And, you know, it's quite amazing, because in her lifetime, often many people, usually men, would never give her the credit, you know, for what she discovered and the science that she was doing at the time. You know, she really was a scientist. People traveled from far and wide to come and see her. And her little, as one person put it, her little dirty shop in Lyme Regis filled with fossils.

• 5:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  Centuries later, there are still so many biological mysteries yet to be solved. From better understanding those ancient reptiles that swam in prehistoric seas, to the anatomy of bugs living in our own backyards right now. So on this episode, animal enigmas, the chance findings, near-death experiences, and long hours of observation that it takes to piece together nature's puzzles.

• 6:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  For paleontologist Dean Lomax, Mary's discoveries had an especially significant impact.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  So Mary Anning was my real childhood hero growing up. I remember quoting that she'd found the ichthyosaurs and the plesiosaurs and really sparked the imagination of so many people at the time. And that's really what it did for me.

• 6:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  Today, Dean is maybe the go-to ichthyosaur expert, sometimes studying the very fossils that Mary Anning first unearthed. And in 2021, Dean had his own big discovery, but it didn't happen in a museum or while walking on the beach. It started with an email. All right, Dean, so what was so special about this email?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in 2021, I was sitting at my desk typing away, and I thought, oh, what could this be? Because, you know, I gotta be honest, Manoush, I get lots of emails and messages on social media from people who say, hey, we found this dinosaur, we found this fossil. And often, it just turns out to be an odd-shaped rock. And so I was like, OK. I had a quick read of this email. I was like, OK, interesting. And then scrolled down, and then I was like, oh, OK, this changes things. So in the attachment was a couple of images of some fairly large, sort of dinner plate-sized vertebrae, so parts of the spine of what I immediately recognized as ichthyosaur vertebrae.

• 7:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  Dean Lomax continues his story from the TED stage.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  After speaking to fellow marine reptile expert Dr. Mark Evans, we decided to visit the site in February, where the ground was literally frozen right beneath our feet. After spending so much time meticulously removing the Jurassic clay from around the skeleton, we were blown away because we revealed what appeared to be a gigantic skeleton, unlike anything ever found in Britain before. Clearly, this was a big deal. But we had to be very quick to contain our excitement because, due to the damp, wintery conditions and the fact that this was a super fragile skeleton, it meant it wasn't the right time to collect this ichthyosaur.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  So unfortunately, it might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but we had to rebury the ichthyosaur. And then waiting for what felt like millions of years.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  In six months, we were back on site, but this time with a superb team of paleontologists.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  We spent fourteen and a half days all together, and this was also working very long hours from sunrise to sunset to remove the skeleton out of the ground.

• 8:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh my gosh, waiting for six months, then digging for two weeks. After all that, what did you and your team uncover? What did this ichthyosaur look like?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Well, what we managed to do at this point was reveal the entire thing. We have pretty much ninety, probably ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent, maybe even a hundred percent when we can analyze it fully, of the entire skeleton. And this animal is, you're talking ten meters long, so over thirty foot. It represents the largest, most complete skeleton of any prehistoric reptile ever found here in the UK. Of course, now, fully uncovered, it's time to literally get this Jurassic giant out of the ground. Much easier said than done when you're dealing with such a complete and very heavy fossil weighing several tons.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  The first port of call was to create a trench all the way around the skeleton. And the reason for that is that we needed to get right on underneath the skeleton so that we could begin the process of plaster jacketting. We use these protective plaster jackets that essentially care for and secure the bones and the surrounding matrix so that we can take them out of the field and into the lab so that we can analyze the fossil and the matrix and work out what's going on. After various challenges on site, we finally managed to remove the entire skeleton after dissecting it into several more manageable blocks. And this was an interesting moment for the team because it's quite an emotional moment because we'd spent and invested so much time and energy into this ichthyosaur excavation

• 10:27Speaker 02

  that this moment captured that final piece where we're removing this from its final resting place one hundred and eighteen million years ago.

• 10:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  So what happens next? What do you do with a fossil like this?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  But once you got it out of the ground, the next thing then was for the entire skeleton to go to our colleague Nigel Lark into his lab. He'll be the person who will be cleaning the entire skeleton now. So but what he'll have to do is flip the entire thing over and then we'll see the underside because the underside should be, in theory, the best preserved side because that's what was laying down in the seabed. So no animals could scavenge that, you know? And I really hope we're going to have an impressive, beautiful set of teeth with maybe a big eye sitting there staring back at us.

• 11:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ah.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  I can't wait for that moment.

• 11:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, when is that gonna happen?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  We're hoping that the cleaning phase should be completed in somewhere between 18 to 24 months. So, once it's fully cleaned, it'll allow me and my team to do all the, if you like, the CSI of this animal. Why did it die? How old was it? You know, do we have something in there in the stomach contents? Is there its last meal? Is there any embryos in there? And, you know, things like that is what we're trying to work out. But above all, once it's fully cleaned, it's all been agreed that it will return to Rutland.

• 11:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  And we should say Rutland is nowhere near the coast. It is in the middle of England.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. We know 100% not only because of our giant Rutland sea dragon, but we also have the remains of shellfish-like animals called ammonites and bits of corals and sea creatures called crinoids. All these types of animals, we know that were living in a marine environment. And so this indicates that roughly 180 million years ago, this area was deep underwater.

• 12:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  What do you think Mary Anning would have made of this incredible find?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  I think Mary would have been quite thrilled to have seen that a discovery of these creatures that she'd been collecting for so long had been made in somewhere quite unusual for Jurassic fossils like this in landlocked Rutland. For Mary, knowing full well that her kind of legacy that's so intertwined with ichthyosaurs continues right to this day, and we still can make such remarkable discoveries, she would be overwhelmed with that.

• 12:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Dean Lomax. He's a paleontologist and visiting scientist at the University of Manchester. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, animal enigmas. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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• 14:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joyrides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there, because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI.com. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, animal enigmas, the quest to solve some of today's biological mysteries, including how insects pee.

• 15:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  I have a beautiful backyard.

• 15:04Speaker 05

  You know, we could finally have like a nice house with backyard for the kids and the dogs to play. And of course, the southeast, because of its nice weather, has so many, so many different types of bugs, basically all year round.

• 15:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Saad Bhamla is a professor at Georgia Tech, and he researches all kinds of insects, including those in his backyard.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  We have an old water fountain feature. And every day as I walk out, my three-year-old son and I will kind of peek into it. We'll see tiny flies that are both flying in the air, but then they land on the water surface and skim and glide. We walk amongst the grass and see lots and lots of tiny insects that are hopping. And now it's spring, so we'll observe these carpenter bees. And you can see these fine shavings of wood as these bees are digging in. I don't know, it just goes on and on.

• 16:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  We should point out, Saad is not your typical bug and animal researcher.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm trained as a chemical engineer on paper. All my degrees are in chemical engineering. I didn't even know I loved bugs till my young adult life. And I slowly started to look at them through this lens of physics and mathematics and engineering. I just realized there are so many puzzles.

• 16:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  You see, it sounds like you see the world very differently than most of us who would be worried about finding a tick between our toes or swatting at mosquitoes. It's a wonderland, it's a lab for you, just waiting for experimentation.

• 16:48Speaker 05

  Just what you said, isn't I feel so lucky because I had like wool in front of my eyes. And one day, it struck me that the entire world is your lab, like the Amazon rainforest is your lab, the backyard is a lab. That's where science happens, and all you need is this perspective, and it changes everything, and you can do science 24/7.

• 17:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  Saad Bhamla continues from the TED stage.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  I love bugs. I think of them as nature's tiny engineers because they come up with the most extraordinary and incredible solutions to life's problems. And I just love observing them because they're so full of surprises and curiosities. Today, I'm going to tell you a story about one of nature's most extraordinary engineers that pushes the limits of fluid mechanics and bioengineering and arguably solves their number one problem: how insects pee? Sit back and relax. You're in for a treat.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  A few years ago, my student, Elio Chilida, and I observed this tiny insect having a private moment in our own backyards in Atlanta. And we couldn't believe our eyes. This insect was peeing for hours. And we were blown away. We had never seen anything like this.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  So I observed this bug, and it was flicking droplets. It was very far, so you could hardly see it. But you could feel it on your hands, and it would make you question yourself whether it was just raining under a tree, if that makes sense.

• 18:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you were standing there in your yard, looking at a tree. And you could see, even though it was really quick and really small, you could see it flicking something.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Right, because we all carry a beautiful scientific instrument in our pockets. So I just had pulled up my iPhone.

• 18:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ah.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  And you can do two great things. I can buy a $5 magnifying lens and put it in front of my camera. And so now you've got essentially a pretty decent microscope, especially for bugs. And the second feature is you can switch to slow motion. And this is remarkable, right?

• 19:06Speaker 05

  So I recorded a video and I was like, hey, there's something happening. There's a droplet at its butt and it's flicking it. And you know, I was like, all right, challenge accepted, bug.

• 19:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Saad needed to figure out how the insect peed.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  Right, so this was a glossy winged sharpshooter, Homo ludisca vitrepannis. And these are sap feeders. And it's, you know, a system. You have to think about feeding and excretion. What goes in must come out.

• 19:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hence the pee, which of course, plenty of insects do.

• 19:41Speaker 05

  Lots of insects pee and they do it in so many different forms and they do it on the fly. They do it while sitting.

• 19:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  And most of them pee more or less like us, you know, in streams.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 19:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  But the glossy winged sharpshooter is the only one that flings little pee missiles. And Saad had a hunch that complex physics were involved. So he and his student, Elio, brought these sharpshooters into the lab.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  So we take our high speed cameras and we measure them. And then I tell Elio, just ask a simple question is how fast are these droplets moving? We realized that this insect forms a droplet of pee and then it flings them at extreme accelerations of 40 G forces. That's 40 times faster than the sprint of a cheetah. These insects are really packing a punch from their butts. And we wanted to, we wanted to take a closer look at this flicker. So we took a look under a microscope at its business end. And this beautiful structure has a scientific name. It's called a butt flicker.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  And this is what we discovered. We realized that this insect had evolved springs and latches, just like a catapult, so that it could efficiently hurl its droplets of pee repeatedly at these high accelerations. Now, we wanted to measure the speed at which this flicker was moving and the droplets. So we measured the speed of both, the droplets and the flicker. And this is where we made a puzzling observation. The speed of the droplets in air was faster than the flicker. So if you take a ratio of that, we were expecting it to be 100%, but turns out that the speed of the droplets are about 150 to 200 percentage faster than the flicker itself.

• 21:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why didn't it make any sense? What was puzzling you? Like personally, I would have said, wow, he has a butt flicker, as you call it, on his body. That's amazing enough. But then what was it that made you think like, huh, there is a mystery to be solved here?

• 21:47Speaker 05

  Right. So as a scientist, we're greedy because the butt flicker was great. Okay, so we know something about the anatomy. And it's flicking and, okay, that's great. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could unravel much more interesting physics? And so the speed mismatch was bothering us because if a Yankees pitcher throws a baseball and they'll say, oh, it's going at, what, 100 miles an hour? At some point, the pitcher's fingers had to be traveling at 100 miles an hour. Because if I throw a baseball, let's say 30 or 40 miles an hour, and in midair, this

• 22:30Speaker 05

  baseball is now moving at 100 miles an hour faster than my fingers or arm, that doesn't make sense because where does that extra energy come from? And we expect that energy balance to match. Things cannot move faster than the object that propels them.

• 22:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  Unless, like, it would say, has an extra bit of force added.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  Precisely. Or some storage of energy somewhere in that process that was unclear to the eye at first glance. So to solve this puzzle, we went back and looked at our videos. And we realized that unlike a baseball that's rigid, these tiny droplets are squishy. And we had an aha moment. We were wondering if this insect is storing energy to do the surface tension just before launch. And to test this, we did naturally what any of us would do. We converted our kitchen tables into a lab. So now we're going to place droplets on a speaker to squish them at high speeds. And this is what we discovered. We realized that water that flows in our faucets, like a liquid, at these tiny scales,

• 23:35Speaker 05

  due to surface tension, with the right timing, can get a kick, store energy. And if you time it just right, you can launch these off at extremely high speeds, just like a child on a trampoline.

• 23:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, so kids on a trampoline and they're jumping. And if they get their timing just so, they can catch a bigger bounce. And so with your analogy, the butt flicker is like a trampoline. And the kid is like the droplet of pee getting a turbocharge.

• 24:07Speaker 05

  Right. And so the droplets were actually acting like a liquid spring. And so maximizing this can allow us to really fly far off.

• 24:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  So explain how that's happening here, Saad. I think you need to walk us through the butt flick, as it were.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  Sure. So the droplet is rested and cradled in this gorgeous butt flicker. It's about 100 microns in diameter. It's the most beautiful pee you've seen, right? It's this gorgeous drop, perfectly spherical. And then it cocks its butt flicker because it's got this tiny resilient spring. And like a catapult, maybe by 10 or 15 degrees more, it'll cock it. And then it starts to rotate. And as it rotates, you can observe the droplet squish because of surface tension. And the flicker will reach the end of its trajectory. And then the droplet takes off, just like a tiny, tiny spherical elastic rocket.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  And this whole thing happens in 100 milliseconds.

• 25:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, wow.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Your blink of an eye is like maybe 200 milliseconds. So it's faster than the blink of an eye. The fact that it's doing all of this is baffling.

• 25:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, but you solved the mystery. I guess the question is, though, what does this tell you about the evolution of this bug?

• 25:28Speaker 05

  That nature has had far more time to tinker than us. Goodness. But there are two reasons. So these are xylem sap feeders. You know, that's what this particular sharpshooter feeds on. And xylem is just 95% water. It just has a few minerals. So they have to glug 300 times their body weight. So the reason they are drinking- So much is because they need energy, right?

• 25:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 05

  But they have to come up with an energy efficient way to excrete this. And if they made jets, it would be four to eight times more expensive energetically. And because they're living on this frugal diet, every, every part of their energy extraction ways is trying to minimize how much energy they waste.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  These things are tiny. They're smaller than my pinky. In fact, surface tension that enables them to store energy in these droplets to launch is actually an impediment because gravity doesn't matter. And surface tension sticks these droplets to their bodies. So they actually have to flick these droplets away. It's actually very difficult for these tiny bugs to pee. And that's why I just love studying bugs. This tiny engineer has figured out to survive on barely just water through this asylum fluid. And it's figured out to do so, it has to drink a lot and pee a lot. In that sense, it's not so different from other engineers I know on a Friday night at a bar.

• 27:00Speaker 05

  But to do so, it's figured out this, it has to evolve this catapulting structure and fling these droplets at high speeds.

• 27:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm just trying to get in the head of the listener here, Saad. But there will be people who think that's so great. Saad, thank you so much for this illumination of how these bugs pee. But really, in the grand scheme of things, why should we care?

• 27:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, why should we care? So this is how I live my life and maybe I'll change it in the future. But I have two halves to my life. And one is all about organisms. And the other half, I actually put on my engineer's hat and we build $1 hearing aids. We built a 20 cent paper centrifuge for malaria diagnostics. We've just spun out a company using barbecue lighters for mRNA vaccine delivery to make it accessible to 4 billion people who still don't have access to it. And that's the engineering part. I love it too, right? I think it's important and I use taxpayer money and try to do good. And we train students how to do frugal science.

• 28:07Speaker 05

  But there is a joy in the other half where we just study bugs. And the application there is it just makes it's the joy of discovering things. The application is making other people be able to appreciate nature. You know, holy smokes, you can look at insects and study fluid dynamics. To me, we need more of that. That's a good enough application for me because if you solve a puzzle, it's just such a great advance for humanity.

• 28:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Saad Bhamla. He's an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His student, Elio Chalita, just officially got his PhD on the sharpshooter. To watch Saad's full talk, go to ted.com.

• 28:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  On the show today, animal enigmas. Stories about elusive, mysterious, and even dangerous species like the king cobra.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  I've caught king cobras from the roof. You know, I climbed up the roof. I've carried like two meters, three meters king cobra. Got king cobras from the wells.

• 29:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Gowri Shankar.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  From trees, climbed up the trees, balancing.

• 29:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, are you crazy, Gowri? This is what's going through my mind right now. What's going through yours?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  I'm calm. I'm very calm in front of king cobras.

• 29:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gowri is calm because he's a herpetologist. He lives and works outside of Bangalore, India, and clearly loves his job.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  I live in the forest, my field station in the Nagumbe. So the internet is really bad.

• 29:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  And if you haven't guessed, his obsession is the majestic king cobra.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  King cobra, for me, it's a beautiful animal. One of the longest venomous snake in the world. King cobras can grow to five meters. The maximum record is six meters. Ten kilo snake with speed and an attitude. The king-like size packed with venom.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  And the special thing about the king cobra, they specialize in eating other snakes.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  They don't eat rodents, they don't eat frogs, no mammals, nothing. They just specialize eating other reptiles, particularly snakes.

• 30:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  Meaning king cobras act as exterminators, which is especially important in India because.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  About sixty thousand people die every year in India due to snake bites.

• 30:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Compared with these other venomous snakes, king cobra bites are very, very, very low. They are not dangerous. They are as gentle as a puppy or a cat in your home. Because they don't want to bite you. Given a chance, they just move away from you.

• 31:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  But not everyone knows this. In many places, the king cobra sparks deep fear.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  They just kill them with spears or even a knife, or sometimes people have guns, they shoot them.

• 31:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  So Gowri has made it his mission to study the behavior of king cobras and educate as many people as possible about when to leave the snake alone or to call someone like him to take it away.

• 31:29Speaker 04

  Whenever there's a snake, when people call to check with them where exactly the snake is within the house or outside the house. If even about hundred meters from the house, we don't capture it. If it's in the kitchen, bathroom, sometimes their snake will be twice the size of the room. So it's very dangerous for me. I need to gently bring him out, put him in a king cobra bag.

• 31:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  What, you don't pick up the snake by the end of its tail and shove it in there?

• 31:54Speaker 04

  I do that.

• 31:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, do you?

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, that's how I do. Just hold a snake by tail and I have a hook. So I need to direct him towards a pipe or the bag where I place the bag and bag him.

• 32:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gotcha. And then you take your cobra in a bag out into where it usually lives?

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah, from the village, we take them away about two.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Kilometers or three kilometers and release the snake back into the wild.

• 32:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  So they are able to live peacefully with the king cobra?

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Very peacefully, very peacefully with this huge so-called dangerous snake in the world.

• 32:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  Amazing.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  They coexist.

• 32:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gauri has successfully rescued about 400 king cobras.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  About 400 times. I think no one in this world has done so many king cobra rescues.

• 32:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  But there was this one time when things went horribly wrong.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  So I was shocked. How did I get bitten?

• 32:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  How a near-death experience upended what people have assumed about the king cobra for 185 years. On the show today, animal enigmas. I'm Manoush Zamirodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stick with us.

• 33:17Speaker 00

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• 34:02Speaker 00

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• 34:08Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 34:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, animal enigmas. We were just talking to herpetologist Gowri Shankar about his mission to study and rescue king cobras.

• 34:52Speaker 04

  You'll find very few people like me where there's a combination of both the scientific mentality and, at the same time, be a good snake handler.

• 35:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mostly a good snake handler. About 15 years ago, there was an incident when Gowri was called to a village to remove several snakes.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  I had three king cobras in one place. This was happening right in the middle of the village. I wasn't prepared, like, I had one king cobra bag. The first two snakes, I managed to put them in the bag. And the third one was in a small bag, which is very, very tiny. So I tried to squeeze him in. That's when he bit me through the bag.

• 35:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  Through the bag?

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Through the bag, he bit me.

• 35:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wait, so there's, there is no, like, if you are bitten by a king cobra, that's that, pretty much?

• 35:40Speaker 04

  That's it. King cobras have neurotoxic, so they'll shut down all your nervous system. Your heart will eventually stop pumping blood and the whole system is shut down.

• 35:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  The only hope Gowri thought he might have was a vial of antivenom from Thailand that had never been known to work in India. But he thought, why not try?

• 36:02Speaker 04

  With that hope, I carried the Thai antivenom, went to the hospital. As a scientist, I just wanted to record everything. I have that data with me. Every five minutes, I was telling what was happening in my body. I said, look, no one has this kind of data of a king cobra bite in India. Please, in case if I die, try to publish this, you know? This is our test, this is our test, you know? And I was writing it down. That's what I was thinking as a scientist, what if I'm alive?

• 36:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, my gosh. So you were excited, actually, despite the terrible situation that you were in?

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 36:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  The antivenom from Thailand seemed to do nothing. Gowri could feel the venom from the snake bite seeping throughout his body.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Complete swelling and a lot of allergic reaction. Painful. When I say painful, so it was like that kind of a burning pain.

• 37:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  But despite being in agony, Gowri didn't die. It turns out that the cobra bag had sort of protected him by stopping the king cobra's fangs from completely sinking into his flesh.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  He didn't inject enough venom to kill me. The whatever venom was there, that got into my body, which put me off for three days in the hospital. But I survived.

• 37:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  In the haze of his pain, Gowri started thinking, why didn't the antivenom from Thailand work? And why was developing an antivenom for king cobras in India so hard? For over 185 years, it was assumed that there was only one king cobra species. But maybe not.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  The entire Southeast Asia, from India all the way to Philippines, it's one species, but the antivenom doesn't work. So that means there should be different species. So that's when I came up with this thing. Okay, let me work on their genetic part. I need to figure out whether they're different species or one species.

• 38:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Herpetologists had suspected there were different kinds of king cobra species because some have different stripes.

• 38:15Speaker 04

  But no one proved it. So I took that as my PhD project and then started working on it. Collected over 200 samples across their distribution from India all the way to Philippines.

• 38:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  What did you do next?

• 38:28Speaker 04

  To put it in a very simple way, I wanted to figure out how different these populations are for the general public to understand what is this genetic variation.

• 38:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  After eight years of researching the genetic variation of king cobras, Gowri proved there are four king cobra species.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  So that's the difference we found, where I declared to the world that it's four species, it's not one.

• 38:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you set the snake world, snake studying scientist world on fire. But why do you think that people living in your community, throughout India, throughout Southeast Asia need to know about this? That there are four distinct species of king cobra?

• 39:08Speaker 04

  That's a very good question. See, if people knew the different species, they could have come up with antivenom. Just imagine number of people in Southeast Asia. Every small island, people are coexisting and living with these dangerous snakes. They work in the paddy fields or the agricultural land, they do get bitten. So what if they think, okay, Thailand king cobra antivenom will work for us? No, it doesn't work in Borneo. It might not work in Sumatra. It might not work in Luzon. Right? So to mitigate human-animal conflict, we have to understand whether they're different species. Or even if you want to conserve them or protect them, you have to know which species you're protecting. It's really important to understand how different these populations are.

• 39:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  Why do you think that the king cobra has remained such a mystery for so long?

• 40:02Speaker 04

  It's a huge-sized snake, and people have so many stories or myths. They just want to keep away from the snake. Even the scientists, for example, the researchers, nobody wants to work on them because it's quite dangerous to work with them. Even the people who handle cobras and crates and other snakes, they are afraid of this species because of the sheer size and the venom and the attitude.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  But for me, I love them. I love the species. I love the way they behave. And the way he moves is a majestic animal. If you, if, I don't know. And if you should come and see the king cobra in the wild, then you will fall in love with this animal.

• 40:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was herpetologist Gowri Shankar. You can watch his talk at ted.com.

• 40:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  For our last story, we're heading to Brazil and the world's largest tropical wetland known as the Pantanal.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Why do I keep coming back to the Pantanal? Wow, this is a wonderful question. First of all, because I love it here. It's a phenomenal place that everybody should get to see at least once in their lifetime.

• 41:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Patricia Medici. She's a conservation biologist.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  You have to see this place. It's wildlife. Everywhere you can probably hear the birds around me here. Hyacinth macaws all over the place, jabiru storks and four species of deer, two species of peccaries. We have puma in this part of the Pantanal.

• 41:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  And there's another animal that keeps Patricia coming back to this region. It roams the floodplains at night, covering vast distances, munching on leaves and fruit.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  It's a large animal, the largest terrestrial mammal in South America. It can weigh up to 250, 300 kilos. It's half the size of a horse. Looks a little bit like a rhino with a probosis, a bit of a flexible trunk. So they're big. They're big, big, big.

• 42:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  This big brown fuzzy mammal with a short trunk and long forehead is a tapir, specifically the South American lowland tapir. And if you don't know what a tapir is, you're not alone.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  So some people think that they're related to elephants. Some people get confused when they see tapirs. They think they're giant anteaters. Some people think that they're pigs, that they're capybaras. So lots of people still don't know what a tapir is.

• 42:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  Even the noises the tapir makes can be mistaken for other animals.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Yes, they have a very large repertoire of vocalizations. But it's funny, I always laugh because if you listen to their vocalizations, they sound almost like a bird.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  So it's little whistles and little clicks

• 43:22Speaker 00

  that the babies do if they want to make sure that they can locate their mom. It's just weird that such a large animal sounds almost like a little bird.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  This is tapir paradise. This is tapirs as they should be. The Pantanal is an open lab for us.

• 43:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  Patricia has dedicated her life to studying and protecting tapirs. But tapirs can be tricky to track down, and weather can make getting to the Pantanal difficult. So when Patricia had an opportunity to head back into the field recently, she was not available for an interview. But she recorded some audio postcards for us instead, because she really, really loves tapirs.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  The moment that made me feel like tapirs were amazing was when I found out how important they are for the maintenance of biodiversity. They're herbivores, and 50% of their diet consists of fruit. And they eat the fruit, they swallow the seeds, and they're wide-ranging animals. They move a lot. And when they do that, they defecate, of course, and they disperse those seeds through the habitat. So tapirs are known as the gardeners of the forest. And I think that's just really, really special, that it's just incredible that an animal can have that kind of a role in shaping and maintaining diversity.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Tapirs are mostly found in tropical forests, such as the Amazon. And they absolutely need large patches of habitat in order to find all the resources they need to reproduce and survive. But their habitat is being destroyed, and they have been hunted out of several parts of their geographic distribution.

• 45:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Patricia Medici on the TED stage.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  If you think about it, the extinction of tapirs would seriously affect biodiversity as a whole. I started my tapir work in 1996, still very young, fresh out of college, and it was a pioneer research and conservation program. At that point, we had nearly zero information about tapirs, mostly because they're so difficult to study. They're nocturnal, solitary, very, very elusive animals. And we got started getting very basic data about these animals. But what is it that a conservationist does? Well, first... We need data, we need field research.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  We need those long-term data sets to support conservation action. And I told you, tapirs are very hard to study, so we have to rely on indirect methods to study them. We have to capture and anesthetize them so that we can install GPS collars around their necks and follow their movements, which is a technique used by many other conservationists around the world.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  And then we can gather information about how they use space, how they move through the landscape, what are their priority habitats, and so much more. Ultimately, we conservationists, we must be able to apply our data, to apply our accumulated knowledge to support actual conservation action. Right now, 2015, we expanded our tapir conservation efforts to the Brazilian cerrado, the open grasslands and shrub forests in the central part of Brazil. Today, this region is the very epicenter of economic development in my country, where natural habitat and wildlife populations are rapidly being eradicated by several different threats,

• 47:15Speaker 00

  including cattle ranching, large sugarcane and soybean plantations, poaching, roadkill, just to name a few. And somehow, tapirs are still there,

• 47:28Speaker 00

  which gives me a lot of hope. But I have to say that when you drive around and you find dead tapirs along the highways and signs of tapirs wandering around in the middle of sugarcane plantations, where they shouldn't be, and you talk to kids and they tell you that they know how tapir meat tastes because their families poach and eat them, it really breaks your heart.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  The situation in the cerrado gave me this sense of urgency. I am swimming against the tide. Maybe I realize that despite two decades of hard work trying to save these animals, we still have so much work to do if we are to prevent them from disappearing. We have to find ways to solve all these problems.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  What changed between 2015 and now is that...

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Instead of putting a lot, a lot, a lot of energy into studying the ecology of tapir and all these different sites, we decided to shift the focus and start applying that information into really, really trying to solve those problems.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  We had talked a lot about tapir roadkill and the highways in the state of Matogrosso do Sul, here in Brazil. And since then, we have been using all the data we collected during the monitoring of the highways to develop roadkill mitigation plans for the most critical highways in the state of Matogrosso do Sul.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  If we think hunting, which is another threat, we have been focusing on spreading the word about, you know, that hunting is illegal, it's a crime, you can go to jail, and so on and so on, for the different threats.

• 49:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  But Patrícia says she'll never stop studying tapirs. She's still gathering data, still has so many questions about them, which is why she keeps going back into the field.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  This is it. This is where we're going to get the data we're still missing. I like to say this is the place where we come to think. You know, we check traps in the morning, we collect samples, we monitor the animals. But we also spend quite a bit of time sitting in our lab, you know, crunching data and thinking and discussing and organizing what we have and what we're still missing. And so this is where we actually, we do good science. This is it, this here in the Pantanal.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  I have a pact with tapirs. I know in my heart that tapir conservation is my cause. This is my passion. I'm not alone. I have this huge network of supporters behind me, and there's no way I'm ever going to stop. I will continue doing this, most probably for the rest of my life. And I'll keep doing this. For Patricia, my namesake, one of the first tapirs we captured and monitored in the Atlantic forest many, many years ago. For Rita and her baby Vincent in the Pantano. And I will keep doing this for the hundreds of tapirs I've had the pleasure to meet

• 50:53Speaker 00

  over the years and the many others I know I will encounter in the future. These animals deserve to be cared for. They need me. They need us. And you know, we human beings deserve to live in a world where we can get out there and see and benefit from not only tapirs, but all the other beautiful species now and in the future. Thank you so much.

• 51:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Patricia Medici. She is a conservation biologist and founder of the Lowland Taper Conservation Initiative. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our episode on animal enigmas. This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye, Matthew Cloutier, Fiona Giren, Harsha Nahada, and Andrea Gutierrez. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Monteleone, and Lane Kaplan-Levenson. Beth Donovan is our executive producer.

• 52:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our audio engineers were Neil Tevalt, Kwasi Lee, and Gilli Moon. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Bellarezzo. I'm Anush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.