Listener Questions #50

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about scent dialects, drilling through the ice above the oceans of Enceladus, and why some animals have penises. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:34Speaker 02

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• 1:19Speaker 02

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• 1:42Speaker 03

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• 2:24Speaker 03

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• 3:05Speaker 03

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• 3:13Speaker 04

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:45Speaker 05

  This week on Game Recognize Game with Breonna Stewart and me, Myles Turner, we talk with two-time WNBA All-Star and current ESPN analyst, Cheney Agumike, about tearing her Achilles tendon while playing in China, and how a deep connection with her sister Nekka helped the recovery process.

• 4:00Speaker 06

  Nekka claims to have felt something while she was sleeping, and that's why she was up when I called. And I was like, oh, my gosh, Nekka, I'm hurt, and I think this is a problem.

• 4:08Speaker 05

  Listen to Game Recognize Game with Stewart and Myles on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, everyone. The last question on today's episode has to do with the birds and the bees, which we only mention in case there are young ears around, which you'd prefer to temporarily shield from this information. So FYI.

• 4:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Dialects can be heard in birds from different places. Do animals have scent dialects if they live in different spaces?

• 4:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Can a nuclear heater melt through the crust and dive for Europa's ocean or come up bust?

• 4:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Now, I'm not complaining, because it certainly is fun, but other animals lack a penis, so why do I have one?

• 4:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  I get the best questions.

• 5:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 5:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night, even that one, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it all right.

• 5:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to Listener Questions, episode number 50.

• 5:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Fifty.

• 5:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Fifty.

• 5:32Daniel Whiteson?

  We've almost hit my age in Listener Questions episodes.

• 5:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought you were 100.

• 5:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because you always round up. You look, you know, 30, 35.

• 5:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see. Okay. Well, then I can round up Listener Questions episode to 100 also. See? At some point, the differences just don't matter.

• 5:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Sure, yes, we've done 100 of these, and they've all been great.

• 5:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Just like, you know, at some point, you stop counting your baby's age in days, right? And then you stop counting in months. So why don't we ever stop counting in years?

• 6:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sure. It's a lot to keep track of.

• 6:09Daniel Whiteson?

  You agree with me.

• 6:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Every episode from here on out will be episode 100, so that it's easy for us to remember.

• 6:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Until we hit episode 1,000, you know, it should be logarithmic. Anyway, welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe Listener Questions, episode number a lot.

• 6:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  We have some really fun questions today. I'm excited.

• 6:30Daniel Whiteson?

  For those of you new to the podcast, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I love answering questions from listeners.

• 6:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I am a parasitologist. I study parasites, and I also love answering questions from listeners, even if they're not about parasites.

• 6:46Daniel Whiteson?

  I got an email test this week.

• 6:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Go on.

• 6:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Somebody wrote in and said, Kelly says you answer emails within 30 seconds. So here I'm writing to you. And I wrote back in about 24 seconds and answered their question.

• 6:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  No way. I mean, I totally believe it, but that's amazing.

• 7:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I happened to be looking at my inbox when it landed, so I was like, ooh, can't miss this opportunity to prove Kelly right.

• 7:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. And I guess unfortunately, now might be a time to remind listeners that I am not taking new questions until sometime in 2027. I'll let you know when, but you all ask so many amazing questions that are outside of the wheelhouse of parasites, that I need a little time to catch up on all of them. I'm about six months behind.

• 7:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Because everybody out there is just so curious about the universe. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. It's extraordinary, and it invites curiosity. You can't help but wonder how this works and how that works, and why this doesn't work this other way, when you just live and take in the universe. It's wonderful. It's wacky. There's lots of things we'd like to know.

• 7:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I love the kinds of questions where a listener listens to one episode, and it got them wondering about something tangentially related.

• 7:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 7:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so our first question today is from Zach, who heard us talking about dialects, and he started wondering, are there dialects of scent, like smells, for animals that communicate by smell? Let's go ahead and hear his whole question, but I was super excited, because I didn't know the answer when I read this question. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Zach from Atlanta, Georgia. Thank you so much for taking my question. I'm stoked. I feel honored, and I love everything that you guys talk about on the pod. So thank you for all that you do for science communication and for my daily commute. So here's my question. I'm a speech therapist, so I'm often thinking about communication, in particular verbal communication, where we're using our mouth and our ears, but I don't really know anything

• 8:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  about olfactory communication and communicating via scent and pheromones and that, those sorts of mechanisms. So I'm very curious if those forms of communication across the animal kingdom have something akin to dialects in the same way that we have variety across our spoken languages. I want to know if there are different ways of smelling, or tossing our scent, or shaking about and sharing our pheromones, that is communicatively meaningful across different communities of the same species, and if there's anything that looks something like dialects in those forms of communication. I'm very excited for your answer. I've been wondering this for a long time, and I thought the pod would be the perfect place to get an answer. So thank you in advance.

• 9:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Great question. You're right. I love this generalization. You know, this thing happens in speech. Why doesn't it also happen in dance or in smell or in something else? It's exactly the way we make progress in science. It's like bring two ideas together and see, do they click or do they clash?

• 9:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and this is why I always try to encourage graduate students that I mentor to read broadly. Because you never know, like when you're reading something that's not at all related to what you're doing, like what questions it could bring to mind that you had never thought of that are actually very much related to what you're working on. And so, yes, you should read broadly because it gives you lots of cool ideas.

• 10:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely.

• 10:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I don't know too much about scent communication, but I found two papers that found stink dialects in mammals and I was very excited.

• 10:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Can we back up and just be like, what is scent communication? I mean, I have an odor, but I don't like control it. It's not like I'm deciding to smell this way or that way on a certain day.

• 10:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right.

• 10:24Daniel Whiteson?

  How do animals in general use scents to communicate?

• 10:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, ants, I think, are famous for using scents for like just about everything. But in general, animals can use scents for things like marking territory. So for example, lots of big cats will leave their scent so that other cats know, hey, this is mine. Sometimes it's used for things like mate attraction. There have been some speculation that humans have pheromones and we sort of queue into each other's smell and that can impact attraction. But I think when we actually dug in and looked for like scientific evidence, we don't see a lot of evidence for that. But in other species, sometimes mate choice decisions are to some extent impacted by how an organism smells. And for example, like moths, we had Andy C. on the show the other day talking about how female moths can release scents that then males can detect from really far away.

• 11:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then they know that there's a receptive female out there somewhere. I just need to follow this scent to get to her. So it's used for a lot of different things in the animal kingdom. It's a little foreign to us because we as a species don't use scent nearly as much as some other animals do.

• 11:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Although I realize I don't do it biologically in the sense that I can't like control it internally. But obviously I do use it technologically. I mean, I wear deodorant to control scent or some people put on a certain perfume to communicate X or Y or Z. And that must be cultural as well. So obviously humans must use scents to communicate. I don't know what I was talking about. Anyway, tell us.

• 11:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  But we're not using our biological scent. Like we're trying to tamp down our biological scent and we don't want that getting out there too much. But yes, you're right. Like deodorants or perfumes or whatever.

• 11:57Daniel Whiteson?

  So tell us about animals.

• 11:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So this question is trying to figure out if scents differ between the same species that live in different areas. And there's a couple of different reasons you could imagine that happening. So for example, if you have the same species living in two different environments, those environments might impact the way their scent works. So for example, if you're in an area that has, I don't know, more humidity or different temperatures than another group of individuals in your species, maybe it's harder to get your scent from one individual to another when the humidity is like 99% and the temperature is 110 degrees Fahrenheit or something.

• 12:35Daniel Whiteson?

  So are you suggesting more broadly that having dialects, having variation in the behavior across a species is always in response to environmental differences? Because like, do people in the South have this particular way of talking? And people in New Jersey speak that way because of what it's like to live in New Jersey? Or can't it also be explained by just like random evolutionary walk?

• 12:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely. So this is one of three hypotheses.

• 13:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 13:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And there's probably even more. But so the idea behind this first one is that if you live in an environment where, for example, it's hard to get your scent out there, you might be selected to be stinkier or have a particular sort of scent that sort of cuts through, I don't know, the humidity or whatever better.

• 13:17Daniel Whiteson?

  So that does explain New Jersey.

• 13:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, funny New Jersey story. I was born in New Jersey and I love New Jersey, right? And my husband loves picking on New Jersey.

• 13:29Daniel Whiteson?

  It's just so easy.

• 13:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. And we stopped at a rest stop in New Jersey and I was like, they're going to see how great New Jersey is, right? And as soon as we step out to the rest stop, it smells like urine. And I don't know how, most rest stops don't have the overpowering scent of urine, but this one did. And then the sign that we parked in front of said something like, this is a waste cleanup area. Please stay on the sidewalks. And I was like, oh man, totally failed here. I still love New Jersey, but that New Jersey didn't show up for me on that day, the way I wanted it to.

• 14:03Daniel Whiteson?

  We took our kids to New Orleans once and we like had beignets. Then we took them to hear music and we saw the art, et cetera. And then we asked them, what did you think of New Orleans? And Hazel said, it smells like vomit.

• 14:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 14:17Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true too.

• 14:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's a little of that also, but all right. So off of stinky cities, we're states and back to animal communication. So you said, you had pointed out that you can have like sort of random differences. So you can have like genetic drift where populations sort of change genetically over time. Maybe not necessarily in response to like an environmental pressure, but they just sort of like drift in different directions. And maybe when those populations come back together, it would be hard for them to notice each other's scents or they'd have different dialects.

• 14:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 14:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Another reason you could have a dialect is if you have different kinds of microbes that are impacting your smell and different areas could have different microbes.

• 14:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. Makes sense.

• 14:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  So those are some reasons why you might expect there to be dialects in stinkiness between populations of the same species.

• 15:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Very cool.

• 15:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So I found two studies that I thought would be fun to talk about today. The first one was looking at otters in the United Kingdom. And otters have-

• 15:15Daniel Whiteson?

  That otter be interesting.

• 15:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, but a bum. Can you put but a bum or but a ch in there, Matt, for us? Okay. So otters have anal sacs on either side of their butthole. And these anal sacs produce scents. And when the scent comes out with the poop, they call that spraint.

• 15:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And I'm sorry, they call it spraint? That's a word?

• 15:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is a word. And I put that in bold in my outline because I was like, I have to make sure that everybody knows the word spraint.

• 15:47Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's weird that it sounds like a combination of spray and paint, but it's neither. But it does get sprayed?

• 15:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  It gets deposited with feces. I don't know how far it sprays from the location. But yes, it helps scent the feces.

• 16:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Because the feces don't scent enough otherwise?

• 16:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I guess this is, you know, this is meant to tell other otters that, hey, this is my territory. It also has information about the sex and the age of the individual. So you can, so the spraint of a reproductively mature male otter. I love it.

• 16:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I love it though. It's a wonderful, wonderful word, the spraint.

• 16:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Right. So you could tell a reproductively mature male and a reproductively immature female, for example, by their spraint. So there's a lot of information in that spraint. But the United Kingdom tends to have about four different populations that are genetically similar. And the reason you've got these four populations is because there was a time when the otter population went way down and it tended to recover in these four areas. And then there were reintroductions and it sort of has grown back out from there. So you've got this like genetic structuring with four different populations.

• 17:02Daniel Whiteson?

  You had a bottleneck and now the populations are based on those surviving small populations. Got it. Okay.

• 17:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Plus some reintroductions and maybe some, yeah, other introductions and stuff like that. And so there are these four different genetically somewhat distinct populations in different parts of the United Kingdom. And so they thought that maybe you would get dialects. And so what they did was-

• 17:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Spraint dialects we're talking about here.

• 17:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  We are talking about spraint dialects. We are indeed. Yes. Presumably they thought that it would be a bit rude to catch the otters and express the spraint from their anal glands. And so what they did instead was they serendipitously took advantage of situations where unfortunately an otter had died. They managed to get their hands on the carcass before the otter had started to decay. And they put everything in a freezer. And then when it came time to do the analysis, they removed all of the anal glands from these frozen specimens and they analyzed them all at once. And what they found was that there does seem to be dialects in spraint scent between these four different populations.

• 18:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  And they tried to see, does it differ geographically? So like, you know, within a population, how much variability is there? And if you're looking at two different populations, is the spraint profile more different for individuals that are farther apart in these two populations relative to individuals that are like living closer together, even though they're in separate populations? And there wasn't a clear sign of geography? And so it looks like something about genetics has resulted in different spraint dialects in otters in the United Kingdom.

• 18:40Daniel Whiteson?

  So for example, if you took an otter from one of the populations and put it into another one, it probably would retain its original dialect. Its otter friends would be making fun of it at school for the way that it spraints.

• 18:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, that is a reasonable hypothesis, but this study did not look at behavioral impacts of these differences.

• 19:00Daniel Whiteson?

  So does that mean that we don't really know how important it is? Like, you know, we haven't seen otters from one population reacting weirdly to New Jersey otters or the equivalent. And so it might just be like ignorable differences?

• 19:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it could be, or at least if there were follow-up studies, I didn't, didn't find them. But you know, I don't think that New Jersey otters are crossing the ponds to go to the United Kingdom. But there, there could be, you know, communication implications within the United Kingdom for these different spraint profiles.

• 19:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I wonder if they find, you know, foreign spraints exotic and attractive? Or just like weird enough putting?

• 19:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could be, could be. I don't, well, we have the answer to that question in Himalayan leaf nose bats because they did do those follow-up studies.

• 19:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Tell us about the bats.

• 19:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  I would love to. So here, the scents are not coming from glands on either side of the anus. These bats have glands like in the middle of their forehead where they secrete this stuff that is kind of stinky. It's a, the, the paper said it was a thick, black secretion and so gross. But it's used for things like territorial defense.

• 20:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Life on earth can sometimes seem so alien.

• 20:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know, but I love it. I mean, and that's why it's so much fun studying this stuff. You know, you think like, these animals have such different social lives, you know? Like if I was talking to you and I got too close to your house and you started secreting this black thing from your forehead to let me know that I got a little too close, I would call the cops or something, you know? Like, it's very different.

• 20:34Daniel Whiteson?

  That's just how we roll here in California, Kelly. You gotta get used to it.

• 20:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I prefer Virginia, I guess. And so I know how to communicate with people here a little bit better.

• 20:43Daniel Whiteson?

  And so do bats from different populations secrete different stuff?

• 20:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. And so they looked and they found that there were distinct compounds that were produced in bats from different areas. And so like, there was still some overlap and some of the scent stuff, but there were a handful of populations where there were very distinct things that were being produced in those populations.

• 21:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Of the same species, though?

• 21:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Of the same species. Yep.

• 21:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so they wanted to know, does this seem to be genetic? Is this a response to different environments? Or is this the result of their microbes? And their evidence suggested that actually, this is probably because of different microbes that they harbor that like ferment the ooze coming out of their head in different ways.

• 21:24Daniel Whiteson?

  It's kombucha.

• 21:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's, oh, face kombucha. Amazing. Katrina has to try to, to sell that. But then they did some follow-up questions to ask, does this matter? And it does look like males can discriminate between the scent that comes from their colony and scents coming from other colonies. And if you give females the opportunity to interact with scents from their colonies or scents from other colonies, they prefer the scents from their own colony. And so it does seem like there's a behavioral implication of these dialects where in this case, they're sort of preferring what is familiar.

• 22:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Is there a cool scientific name for this? Or is it just face secretions?

• 22:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, I didn't find a word like spraint. And so let me see, they have a forehead.

• 22:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, then let's call it scambucha. How about that?

• 22:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh, it's kombucha. Or is it fumbucha for like face kombucha? Cause I feel like you want to get the face part, because that sounds super gross.

• 22:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, svambucha.

• 22:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. I found another paper saying that song sparrows also have a gland that produces these oils that they use when they're preening. And the microbes that they have seem to impact the scent. And so this microbe impacting dialects thing might happen in other places. But it's worth noting that I found another bat species paper on a closely related bat species. And they didn't find that the changes in scent between populations were associated with bacteria. So there's probably a lot of variability in why different populations stink in different ways. And I think we're still trying to understand the implications of this, at least in mammals. But the answer is, there are stink dialects, which is cool.

• 23:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it's really fascinating if the male secretes a certain flavor of svambucha, grapefruit or whatever. And a female from the same population prefers that because that makes you wonder if there's like a code genetic source of that, like the same gene codes for the male to secrete the flavor that the female likes.

• 23:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 23:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Or if that's a learned thing, you know, culturally, you grow up smelling grapefruit svambucha until you look for that, you know, in your mate.

• 23:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Or it could be that like, maybe you don't even recognize as a mate bats that smell different. Because part of just like how you recognize your species is by this like particular smell. And you're like, no, you don't smell right. I'm not sure what's going on there. And they just avoid them for that reason. But yeah, there's, there's lots of different possible explanations. It's fun to think about.

• 23:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I have a friend who works on fruit fly mating.

• 24:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 24:02Daniel Whiteson?

  And there they sing songs and they're very regional. And so like the male has to sing the right song for the female to choose them. It's fascinating.

• 24:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the females, do they prefer the songs that they grew up with? Or do they prefer songs from males that have new, interesting tunes?

• 24:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, they don't like those weird New Jersey imports. Actually, wait, no. All of this research is happening in Princeton. So it's all, New Jersey is local there. So.

• 24:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Those are the good ones.

• 24:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Those are the good ones. Yeah, it's a way to select your population. Yeah, it's fascinating.

• 24:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, totally. All right. So let's go ahead and send this answer to Zach and see what Zach thinks about svambucha.

• 24:46Daniel Whiteson?

  And spraints.

• 24:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  And spraints. Thanks for the fun question. Naturally, I'm going to try my darndest to include the word spraint in all of my future Scrabble games, just for the opportunity to explain to my friends what that is. And I'll try to throw scambucha in there as well. So thank you for that. And especially thank you for providing me with that fascinating answer. It got me thinking about how useful these forms of communication must be for the organisms that use it across the animal kingdom. It's really helpful, of course, that we can use our voice to speak and our hands to sign.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  But those types of communication are very fleeting. And so for animals that in some cases can use communication that literally sticks around, has to be so informative for those species. So thank you very much for giving my question a sniff. I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel. That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. Regardless of how everyone else buys into this, I believe in this and I'm gonna push. To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience. Whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents, I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is Jonas Knox from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Ford Ability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road, ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes us special. Then it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games. Down the sideline, touchdown. It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy. A 10-foot skeleton? Sure. A full-size fog machine? Why not? Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy? It happens. Which brings me to the Chase Freedom Flex Card, the savvy decision that will earn you more cash back on the everyday purchases, plus the extraordinary Halloween tricks and treats. With Freedom Flex, you earn even more treats on your Halloween and everyday needs. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  That's no tricks, all treats. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, N A member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply. Sometimes the most important safety decision happens before you even know you're in danger.

• 29:25Speaker 05

  Someone had called in, had a young family and had a job displacement, was talking about canceling their service. Our agent walked them through, helped them meet a goal financially that they could still maintain. It was no more than 24 to 72 hours after they had a carbon monoxide leak.

• 29:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  Family of four, five or so. If it would have been shut off, that leak wouldn't have been detected. And the story could have gone significantly worse there.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  And being a grown up means making sure your home and family are protected. This week, we show you how that's done in an episode sponsored by ADT Blue.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  We want people to be protected and we want to work with people to make sure that they're protected. Life throws curveballs at you, but what's most important is keeping people protected as much as we can.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Listen to new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we're answering amazing questions from listeners that give us a chance to go off and read about things we've also always been curious about, but never had an excuse to dig into. And so today, we're literally gonna drill in to a listener question.

• 30:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or things that we did not know that we would be interested in, and because it hadn't occurred to us before. So many reasons to thank the listeners for sharing their curiosity with us. And let's go ahead and do a question for Daniel from Paul from Lemoore, California. Hello, Daniel and Kelly. I'm Paul from Lemoore, California. My question is, when humans finally land on icy moons like Enceladus or Europa, would something similar to a fuel

• 31:11Daniel Whiteson?

  rod for a nuclear reactor be used to melt through the icy crust instead of using a drill? I appreciate you taking the time to listen to my question. Thank you. Do you think Lemoore is like French, like l'amour?

• 31:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  L'amour? I don't know. Yes, I imagine it is a very romantic place to live.

• 31:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, let's hope so. But today, we're not speculating about the romantic lives of Californians. We are taking our brains out into the solar system to imagine where aliens might be living and where they might be having their own kind of romance right in our backyard.

• 31:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, I want to know what's happening on Enceladus so bad. Like, I really want video from underneath the oceans in Enceladus.

• 31:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. Let's spend a minute to remind people why we might go to the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. And the reason is that they're an excellent, excellent candidate for life, for alien life, right here in our solar system. You might be thinking, aliens, if they're out there, are way, way out there. We'll never find them because you have to travel to a distant star. But the truth is, we haven't finished looking in our own backyard. Yes, we've driven rovers around Mars, and we think Venus is probably uninhabitable. But if you look a little bit further out, there are places where life can start that are very different from the brackish waters of primordial earth. And these are under miles of ice on these frozen moons.

• 32:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can you imagine there being like, I don't know, fishy type things swimming around under there? Like, how cool would it be to see that? Yes. Oh, yeah, of course you have.

• 32:48Daniel Whiteson?

  And we can go there. And the reason this is so exciting is that under that ice is not just like some frozen rocky core, but oceans. We think miles and miles of water. And that's because these things are close to giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, and they're squeezed by the tidal forces of those planets. Remember, a tidal force comes from gravity, but gravity doesn't just pull on the whole planet or the whole moon. It pulls on the closer bit harder because it's closer, and the far away bit weaker because it's far away. And so it tends to make something like into a football, the way that like, the moon makes the oceans on the earth kind of into a football shape. It piles them up near

• 33:29Daniel Whiteson?

  the moon, and on the opposite side, it makes the oceans thinner on the edges. And then as the moon moves around the earth, the tides follow. In the same way, as these giant moons around Jupiter and Saturn move, they get squeezed by Jupiter and Saturn's intense gravity, and that imparts a lot of heat. And so these oceans can stay unbroken, they can stay liquid, under this thick crust, which means that, you know, it's a great place for life to perhaps begin.

• 33:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, but unfortunately for us, it's not an easy place to get to. Yeah. Because you have to get through, as you said, kilometers of ice.

• 34:05Daniel Whiteson?

  After you go through billions and billions of kilometers to get there, right?

• 34:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, right. Yes. Yeah. So what do we have to overcome to get ourselves to that ocean?

• 34:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So, I mean, just to get there requires getting to Jupiter or Saturn, which is not easy. And we recently had a whole episode about chemical rockets, et cetera, et cetera. First, you've got to convince your government to build this thing. And the whole thing is going to cost hundreds of millions. And then you've got to get it there. But even once you get there, let's just skip over all the political issues and the launch issues and the space travel issues. Say you are lucky enough to land on Europa. Now you're sitting on kilometers of ice, and the amazing alien payload is on the other side of that ice. So you got to drill. And drilling is hard. Even here on earth, drilling is hard. You know, if you've like, tried to drill into your wall, you know, or if you

• 34:58Daniel Whiteson?

  work like on an oil rig or whatever, it's dangerous. Mechanical drilling is really hard. You have to have a drill bit, drill bits can break. You have to have an engine, but the engine can choke if you hit something hard. And so you need like transmissions and like, basically, no drill works without some expert babysitting and constantly repairing it. But we're not sending people to Europa or Enceladus, not yet at least. So we need some sort of autonomous drill. And that's why the fact that this is ice and not rock is actually a big advantage.

• 35:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because you can melt it.

• 35:30Daniel Whiteson?

  You can melt it. Exactly. So instead of like mechanically trying to cut through it, you just melt it, and then it becomes liquid, and you can slide through it. And you might think, that sounds crazy and extra hard. And shouldn't we figure out how to do that first here on earth? And the answer is yes. And we've done it. We have done this in the ice of Antarctica. We have this amazing experiment called Ice Cube.

• 35:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's a great name for our project. Did Ice, oh, no, it's Ice Tea. I'm getting my, I'm not very cool.

• 36:02Daniel Whiteson?

  No, Ice Cube is a rapper. Yes.

• 36:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, wait, there's Ice Tea and Ice Cube?

• 36:06Daniel Whiteson?

  There's Ice Tea and there's Ice Cube. Absolutely.

• 36:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is there Ice Pops?

• 36:14Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, there's some rule of the internet where like, whatever you can imagine, there's probably a rapper with that name.

• 36:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. That's not how I remember the rule going, but.

• 36:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I adapted it for this family friendly.

• 36:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, great, great.

• 36:28Daniel Whiteson?

  But Ice Cube is an experiment that instruments a cubic kilometer of ice in Antarctica.

• 36:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 36:34Daniel Whiteson?

  It's to look for cosmic ray neutrinos and muons and all sorts of stuff. Where you have super fast particles going through the ice faster than light can go through the ice and making this Cherenkov radiation, this blue cone. And to capture it, you need cameras in the ice. So you got to drill down through a kilometer and leave these cameras in the ice. So you got to drill through a lot of ice in tough conditions, right? And so they've done this, and they didn't use a big mechanical drill. They used high pressure hot water. Basically, they just melt the ice. And then they have this string of cameras. It's a kilometer long. It's basically like a long tether, and it's got these glass spheres on it. Inside the spheres is all the delicate particle physics detectors and experimental

• 37:19Daniel Whiteson?

  devices and electronics and stuff. And so they melt it, and then they drop this tether down, and then they just let it refreeze.

• 37:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 37:27Daniel Whiteson?

  So that you have this equipment down through the ice, and they've instrumented a cubic kilometer. It's amazing. It's such a huge experiment. I love it. It's like science fiction, but it's real. And the hole there goes through two and a half kilometers of ice, and it's about 60 centimeters wide.

• 37:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. And so are our plans on Enceladus, do they involve hot water? Because Paul wanted to know if we were going to use like radioactive materials. The Antarctica solution seems like it would be difficult to port over to Enceladus.

• 37:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. I mean, it teaches us that this is possible, that you can do it as long as you have a heat source. And the crucial thing to understand is that you're just letting it refreeze. You're not trying to keep the whole column liquid, right?

• 38:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 38:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Just the part that you're digging out as things slide down. And that's going to turn out to be crucial. And so in the case of drilling through one of these moons, you're not going to have some easy source of hot water. You need to bring some sort of power with you. And so of course, the best option is some kind of nuclear power, because that's the densest sort of fuel. And there are a few different options here. One is you can have just like, direct nuclear heating. Like, if you have some sort of isotope, like plutonium 238, it just decays, and it gives off particles at like, 10,000 miles per second. And so if you surround that with, you know, some sort of liquid, it will get

• 38:47Daniel Whiteson?

  heated up. And that's like, directly nuclear decay, turning into heat. No power generation, no fission, just like directly radioisotropic decay into heat. And that's pretty cool because you don't need complicated fission equipment. You don't need to send a nuclear reactor. You don't need to generate electricity, which is very inefficient. It's very nice, and it generates heat. And so that's like, a really strong option, just like directly produce heat.

• 39:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I've got two questions. So one, you said something about, we're not going to have an easy source of hot water on Enceladus. But we didn't have an easy source of hot water probably in Antarctica. And so how did they make the hot water? Did they just bring like, a generator fueled with gasoline to heat it up? And?

• 39:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So the point there is, of course, you don't like, have geysers. It's not like Iceland or something, where you have an easy source of hot water that way. But you are connected to some kind of existing infrastructure, right? There is power, you can get fuel delivered. It's not that far away. As you guys point out in your book, Antarctica is actually like, a lot easier than space.

• 39:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? Even though it's uncomfortable and unpleasant, and I would never want to go there, it's a lot easier to live there than it is to go to space. And in the case of Ice Cube, they use fuel power generators to run heaters and melt the snow and spew it out in high pressure streams. And that's not an option. You can't send diesel fuel to the moons of Jupiter.

• 40:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you can send a radioisotropic heat source. And so then my other question is, like, so for the Antarctica experiment, they had to like, heat quickly, like, all the way through, and then put their equipment in, and then let it freeze?

• 40:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 40:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does a radioisotropic heat source, is that going to heat all the way through fast enough so that you can put your equipment in there? Like, does it give out that kind of heat?

• 40:33Daniel Whiteson?

  No, but it doesn't have to.

• 40:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 40:35Daniel Whiteson?

  And so it just needs to melt the part that's in front of it, right? And so it can refreeze behind it as it goes. So it needs to like, unspool a tether. So it needs to bring with it like, three kilometers of line, and then unspool it as it goes, and let it refreeze behind it. And so it only needs to be able to melt the bit that's right in front of it. So it like, melts a bit of ice, it moves into that liquid, and the liquid it was just in, refreezes behind it. So like, there's no going back. It's a pretty claustrophobic experience.

• 41:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  But we're such a clever species. That's awesome.

• 41:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's pretty amazing. The issue with radioisotropic decay is that it's efficient because it turns a lot of the original energy into heat, but you also need power for other things, right? You don't just need heat. You are a little device. You need electronics. You need electricity. And so it's tempting to also include something which will produce electricity. And you don't even have to go all the way to fission reactors for that. You can just use an RTG, which is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. So again, not yet all the way to fission reactors, use thermocouples. So these have no moving parts. It's just essentially solid state and it turns radiation directly into electricity, but it's very inefficient. It turns like 6% of the heat into electricity. But you know, if you need some electricity,

• 41:52Daniel Whiteson?

  then that's a nice addition. So you might have like both a radioisotropic heater and you might turn some of it into electricity to run your system. Or if you want to go whole hog, just build a full on fission reactor, right? These days, the fission industry is really focusing on miniaturization, building small modular reactors. And so the idea is to bring a small one that can actually generate enough electricity that you could both power a heater and you could power the device itself. But it's like a lot more mechanical complexity and weight. And you know, you can't repair it if it's not working.

• 42:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and do we have actual like plans on the books to go do this? Or is this all hypothetical?

• 42:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I wish that we had plans on the books, you know? We do have some plans to visit these planets. Like there's the Europa Clipper, which is en route. It's like heading there right now. And it's going to arrive in 2030. Yay. But it's just going to do flybys. Like people are curious about this moon. Like, let's take more pictures. Then there's the JUICE, which stands for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, which is going to go into orbit around Ganymede in 2031. Also very, very cool. But again, these are just orbiters. They're going to take pictures, going to help us understand the surface. We want to get on the surface and dig down. We want to meet those alien octopi, right? We want to see what alien spraints are all about.

• 43:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Drill, baby, drill.

• 43:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And so now we're into the regime of proposed experiments. There's the Europa Lander, which is supposed to land on the surface and like scoop up some of it and study it. Cause like, we've never even been there. Who knows what it's made out of. Even more exciting is the Insolatus Orbalander, which is not going to land, it's going to sample the geysers because Insolatus has a lot of activity. It sprays its innards out into space. So you might capture like an alien microbe or something just by flying by and flying through one of those plumes and gathering it and then analyzing it onboard. Very cool. Not yet approved. So neither of these two, the Lander or the Orbalander are approved.

• 43:56Daniel Whiteson?

  There are plans for something called PRIME, which is a lander with a driller. And also, as it drills, it brings a miniature submarine with it.

• 44:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 44:06Daniel Whiteson?

  So that it drills down through this hole. It has a tether to go back up to the surface so you can send data, right?

• 44:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nice.

• 44:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And then when it gets through the ice, it releases into the water, a submarine to go off and explore, which then communicates back with the lander, up the tether and sends us the glorious information about everything it's discovered.

• 44:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  I need that to get approved.

• 44:27Daniel Whiteson?

  I know. Write your congressperson or your member of European Parliament or whatever, because we can do this, people. We have the money. We have the technology. We know how to do it. We're just choosing not to know these things about the universe because we want to build more aircraft carriers or whatever. So this experiment is called PRIME. It's not yet approved, which means we haven't started building it. We haven't, it's not on its way, which means the earliest this could happen is like, you know, unfortunately 15 years away.

• 44:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah.

• 44:58Daniel Whiteson?

  By which point we'll all be 100.

• 45:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. That's right. Well, let's go ahead and send this answer to Paul and see if we have answered his question.

• 45:08Daniel Whiteson?

  I hope he l'amours it.

• 45:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, but a bunch.

• 45:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, Daniel. Hi, Kelly. Daniel, thank you for explaining a few different ways of melting through ice to explore the subterranean oceans of the icy moons of our solar system. I'm looking forward to reading about the Europa Clipper mission in the next few years, but I agree with Kelly and I'm wanting to see some video footage of underneath the ice. I like to imagine bioluminescent alien creatures swimming around in the black background of the dark sunless ocean. Thank you again. I appreciate both of you for taking the time to answer my question and sharing your knowledge with all of us listening to your podcast.

• 45:43Speaker 04

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Sheik. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.

• 46:26Speaker 04

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life, regardless of how everyone else buys into this. I believe in this and I'm gonna push. To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 46:41Speaker 05

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents, I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Colin Cowherd from the Colin Cowherd Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Ford ability. All starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or a half ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest lasting trucks. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. For a great deal today to a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes it special. Then it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games. Down the sideline, touchdown. It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy. A 10 foot skeleton? Sure. A full size fog machine? Why not? Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy? It happens. Which brings me to the Chase Freedom Flex Card, the savvy decision that will earn you more cash back on the everyday purchases, plus the extraordinary Halloween tricks and treats. With Freedom Flex, you earn even more treats on your Halloween and everyday needs. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. That's

• 48:57Speaker 02

  no tricks, all treats. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, NA, member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply. Sometimes the most important safety decision happens before you even know you're in danger.

• 49:26Speaker 05

  Someone had called in, had a young family and had a job displacement, was talking about canceling their service. Our agent walked them through, helped them meet a goal financially that they could still maintain. It was no more than 24 to 72 hours after they had a carbon monoxide leak. Whoa. Family of four, five or so. If it would have been shut off, that leak wouldn't have been detected and the story could have gone significantly worse there.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  And being a grown up means making sure your home and family are protected. This week, we show you how that's done in an episode sponsored by ADT Blue.

• 50:01Speaker 05

  We want people to be protected and we want to work with people to make sure that they're protected. Life throws curveballs at you, but what's most important is keeping people protected as much as we can.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Listen to new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:16Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners. And the one next is super fascinating. He asks a really penetrating question, don't you think?

• 50:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. And this is where we remind people that we are about to talk about sex. So yes, Josh had a very penetrating question. Let's go ahead and hear what Josh had to say. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I was thinking about the way that humans, and I guess probably a lot of other species, have sperm cells and egg cells. And the fact that some of us have a penis and others a vagina. I'm also familiar with some extreme examples of this, like the pig's corkscrew penis and the arms race of convolution in duck.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Sexual organs. But this made me think, how do we get here? What are the evolutionary stages to get to each reproductive strategy? What are the different ways to do sexual reproduction? And what evolutionary drives mean some creatures such as plants just sort of spray their sex cells into space and hope, while others have these interlocking parts and specialized cells.

• 51:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I followed up with Josh to make sure I understood the question. And pretty much the question is, where did weiners come from?

• 51:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which is a great question.

• 51:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Especially to somebody named Weiner Smith.

• 51:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. I am clearly the right person to send this question to. And so I will note that my research for this question involved reading a book called Fallacy. And autocorrect turned the spelling correct, but the book is P H A L L A C Y. Something like that. Anyway.

• 52:01Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, I've been to the Phallus Museum in Iceland. It's quite impressive.

• 52:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  I really want to go there to see, they've got the penis bone from a whale there, and I amongst other amazing penis related memorabilia. And I would like to see all of them.

• 52:16Daniel Whiteson?

  There are so many things to mention from that, including, for example, they have molds of the penises of Iceland's most successful Olympic athletes ever.

• 52:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 52:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Which is, I think, the Icelandic handball team, who got the bronze medal or something. And then they have a picture of the whole team. And then they have molds of all the penises arranged in the same order as the team. So you can be like, oh, interesting.

• 52:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like that's totally unrelated to handball, but congratulations to those people.

• 52:42Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, there's an obvious handball joke to make there. But I think the most interesting sociological part of that museum is the history of it. It started in some guy's garage and then apparently took over his house. And his wife was like, out. Cannot have this in my house. And so he had to move it into a museum.

• 52:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, out to him and the specimens or just the specimens?

• 53:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Didn't say, at least the specimens are the minimum. But back to the biology, tell us, Kelly, how long have we had penises on earth? When was the first penis?

• 53:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  I did not get when was the first penis? Because actually, what is a penis is a complicated question. And so instead of talking about penises in particular, we're going to talk about intermittent organs. And so the point here is there's a couple of different ways of mixing sperm and eggs. A lot of fish do what's called external fertilization, where a female will essentially like excrete some eggs into the environment and a male will plop some sperm on top of that. And that's how everything gets fertilized. When you do that, those fertilized eggs now need to be guarded in a lot of cases because they're like delicious snacks for a lot of other organisms. So it's not very safe for the offspring to do things that way, unless you've got someone who's willing to stay there and watch them. Another problem is when you're doing external fertilization,

• 53:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  when the male releases his sperm onto the eggs, often other males called sneaker males or satellite males will like come by and deposit their sperm as well. Sort of unwanted, but they snuck in there and they got it. So this is another problem with external fertilization. A third problem with external fertilization is that it works really well in wet or moist environments. But if you have eggs and sperm meeting together in an open area, like on land, they dry out really quick. And so the way that amniotes have solved this problem is that fertilization happens inside of the female. And then we can either like slap, you know, a calcium shell on there for the birds and then send it out into the environment and it's fine.

• 54:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or, you know, in mammals, we've got a placenta and everything sort of happens inside the mom until the baby's ready to go. So we have found solutions for that like environmental problem by having a lot of the stuff happen inside of mom. And that's what we call internal fertilization. There's a couple of different ways to do internal fertilization that don't involve anything that's weiner like. One of them is what's called a cloacal kiss. Which is not as romantic as you might imagine. So some birds have openings called cloaca, which I think is the Latin word for sewer. Because not only do like sperm and eggs come out through here, but also so does feces and urine and all of the waste.

• 55:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's like an all purpose hole for birds. And when they want to reproduce, they will stick the cloacas together. And the male will, you know, excrete some sperm and then just kind of hope that it ends up where it needs to go up inside of the female. But you can imagine that having an appendage that allows you to place the sperm in a little bit more specific way could be helpful for increasing the probability that your sperm actually fertilized an egg.

• 55:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Aim it a little bit.

• 55:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Aim it a little bit. Right. And so throughout the animal kingdom, there are lots of different ways that animals accomplish this.

• 56:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Though anybody who's like cleaned a bathroom that men use, know that having a penis does not mean you can aim.

• 56:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no. I mean, if you're paying attention, you can aim. My first job was I was a bagger at Kroger's. And my job also was often to clean the restrooms. And there is just, there is feces in places that you just, I can't even fathom how they got there. Our species is disgusting. And you know, I always, I didn't like cleaning the ladies room, but I really didn't like cleaning the men's room. You guys are gross. I don't know what's happening in there. It was, it was like a different species.

• 56:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Criticism accepted. I have no defense. Absolutely. Totally agree. Dudes are gross.

• 56:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, super gross. All right. And so millipedes, for example, have what are called gonopods, which are like weiner feet. And so their eighth pair of legs actually is able to take sperm and insert it into the female. And so that's not like technically a penis, but I don't know, maybe it is. There's actually some debate about, you know, how do you define the term penis? But the broader term is intermittent organ.

• 57:08Daniel Whiteson?

  So are there conferences where people like have shouting matches about this?

• 57:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Probably. I don't know. We get upset about all kinds of stuff.

• 57:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Whatever it is, there's some academic conference where they argue about it. That's the new internet rule.

• 57:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely. Yes. Then there's other ways of getting the stuff up there. So for example, males.

• 57:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Such a delicate way to put it, Kelly. Thank you.

• 57:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I went to school for animal behavior. We just, we don't take this stuff very, I mean, we take it seriously, but we don't like have any reverence for the topic. But so you can make things called spermatophores, which are packets of sperm plus other stuff that can be like placed in the environment temporarily. And then the female will, in some cases, take it up by like, I don't know, squatting over it and then sort of pulling it up into her body. Or males have like organs that help them sort of insert it into her body. And so that's another way of like getting sperm inside of a female. One of the benefits for the female of internal fertilization though, is that females have evolved very complicated ways to either store sperm for when they need it. If they found like a really great guy, but they're not really ready to have babies yet,

• 58:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  they can hold on to that stuff for when the moment feels right. Yeah.

• 58:20Daniel Whiteson?

  For how long?

• 58:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  It depends on the species, but I definitely days for some species. I think there were some where it was weeks or months. It can be a really long time. And then there's also some that have like extra compartments where they can choose, like they can mate with multiple males. And afterwards, they can pick their favorite and use the sperm from that one and not use the sperm from the others.

• 58:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Dating is so complicated. And in other species, it's even more complicated.

• 58:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Although, you know, you never, you don't really know if you were rejected in that case. Right? And so that's nice, I guess.

• 58:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So the lady can swipe right or left or whatever it is, even after you're done.

• 58:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. Life is good. And I should note that in this book, Fallacy, Emily Wellingham makes the point that we've studied penises a lot. Vaginas are almost certainly equally interesting, but have been massively understudied relative to penises. So I wanted to get a plug in for vaginas while we were here. And the fascinating things that we learn about animal behavior when we study female vaginas.

• 59:24Daniel Whiteson?

  If you are a young scientist trying to figure out where in this wide world you want to devote your energy, Kelly suggests the vagina.

• 59:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think we have loads left to learn about vaginas. Cornucopia of data left to collect there. So, so, anyway, so, so the question is like, why, why do we have internal fertilization? And why in particular, uh, do we have devices that are used to insert sperm into the female? Uh, one of the hypotheses is this idea of like a lock in key. So if you're trying to figure out if you have picked a member of your own species to mate with, then seeing if a penis fits in a vagina is one way to, to do that, to make sure that you're mating with the right species. Should say the evidence for this hypothesis is kind of mixed. You see plenty of closely related species mating with one another anyway.

• 1:00:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  It doesn't seem like this lock in key is very specific, but there's some idea that this is a first pass at trying to make sure that you're mating with a member of the right species. Another benefit of internal fertilization, which we've talked about, is that now you've got it in an environment that is sort of moist. So the sperm and the eggs aren't going to dry out. But in particular, if you have a penis, then you can increase the probability that you actually get the sperm into the female at the right spot relative to something like a cloacal kiss, which, you know, does work a lot of the time, but it might be nice to have a little bit of extra confidence that it's getting to where it needs to go. Another nice thing about internal fertilization is that, uh, the eggs tend to be bigger and especially if the females are holding on to the offspring inside of them until the offspring

• 1:00:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  are bigger than when you finally release them into the environment, they have a better chance of survival. So there's lots of benefits to internal fertilization. Some of them are even more beneficial when you have a device that can insert right up into the vagina, uh, but plenty of organisms make do without it. They just kind of come up with some clever ways of doing it. So do you feel like, uh, that, that answered the question? Do you understand why, uh, penises exist to some extent?

• 1:01:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I do. I think it gives me an idea for why there are penises. And also though, I don't think you talked about this, it helps me understand why there's like a plethora of kinds, you know, like we're exploring evolutionarily, like what things might work. And I, I know there are like long ones and spiral ones and, you know, multi tipped ones or whatever.

• 1:01:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ones with horns, lizards and snakes have hemipenies. They have two penises that they can alternate between which one they use.

• 1:01:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 1:01:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 1:01:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Evolution is the greatest experimenter.

• 1:01:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Yeah. So intermittent organs have popped up, if you will, multiple times throughout evolution. And yeah, they've got lots of different shapes, lots of different forms. And again, because this is ecology, the answer is it depends. So we were talking about how if you're in an aquatic environment, it's fine to release sperm and eggs out into the environment because it's wet there. But there's plenty of fish species that have organs that allow males to place sperm inside of a female. And we think that that, you know, increases the probability of fertilization, increases certainty that you're the only one, uh, at least in that moment, who is attempting to fertilize the eggs. Uh, and so, you know, even in aquatic environments, you find organisms that have intermittent organs because nature is complicated.

• 1:02:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Nature is complicated. All right, let's send this answer back to Josh and see if your answers have gotten up in there to the place where his questions were waiting.

• 1:02:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Josh, let us know if you're okay with that.

• 1:02:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello again. Thank you so much for sharing the ins and outs of this fascinating topic. The world of reproductive organs is even more varied than I realized, and I'll definitely be checking that book out. All right. Thank you, everybody, for your amazing questions. I know I had a ton of fun today, probably more fun than should be legal. Yeah, thanks for sharing your time and your curiosity with us.

• 1:03:13Daniel Whiteson?

  And if you have a question about how the universe works, it's sprint too late to send it to us.

• 1:03:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm sorry, remember it's sprint too late to send it to Daniel. Kelly's on hiatus for a little while, but, uh, looking forward to catching up so I can get new questions from you all soon.

• 1:03:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Stay tuned, everyone.

• 1:03:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 1:03:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:03:53Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:04:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:04:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 1:04:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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