Cosmic Queries – Animal Outlaws with Mary Roach

What happens when nature commits a crime? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Paul Mecurio discuss law-breaking animals with Mary Roach and her new book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks The Law. Can we hack nature?

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Bill deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to do a Cosmic Queries. Cosmic Queries with Mary Roach. If you don't know about her, you will by the end of this broadcast. I'll tell you that right now. But first, let me introduce my guest co-host for this episode, Paul Mecurio. Paul, always good to have you back, dude.

• 0:38Paul Mecurio?

  It's always great to be back. Great to see you.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're an Emmy and Peabody Award winner for your work on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

• 0:48Paul Mecurio?

  Yes, yes.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got comedy chops that are like authentic and bona fide and with street cred.

• 0:56Paul Mecurio?

  Well, they're not. They're his awards. I took them from his office. They're mine. They're mine now.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He had plenty of others. He won't miss it.

• 1:05Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, he's a tiny man. I wrestled him to the ground and took him from him. Yeah, no, we, yeah, we got, we got some awards for a bunch of kooky young guys just kind of messing around and they, yeah, it was crazy.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Congratulations and thanks for sharing some of that sort of comedic wisdom and insight with us on StarTalk.

• 1:25Paul Mecurio?

  Thanks.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as you know, Cosmic Queries, you're going to be bringing in questions to ask of our guest, Mary Roach. Mary, how the hell are you? It's been too long.

• 1:35Mary Roach?

  I know. It's been way too long. I'm fine. I'm good. I'm still alive.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been on the show a couple of times. One time, we talked about packing for Mars, getting ready for a Mars trip, but you're still here, so you didn't, you didn't go on that one. I was worried.

• 1:53Mary Roach?

  I'm on a waiting list.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Waiting list. Then one time, we talked about dead people and another one was about like sex and then, and then one on war and human. And so just, plus you like these one-word titles. So your latest one-word title is Fuzz, and I have no idea what that means.

• 2:15Mary Roach?

  Fuzz was my original title because fuzz, police, fuzz, fuzzy animals. Get it?

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, yeah, I didn't.

• 2:22Mary Roach?

  Oh.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I completely didn't get that.

• 2:25Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26Paul Mecurio?

  I love the, I love the titles of your chapters too. They're very clever. Like On The Road Again and Killing With Kindness.

• 2:34Mary Roach?

  Yeah, here's one that I bet nobody got. Well, Mall Cops. Hopefully people got M A U L. Mall Cops. Get it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was, okay, there was one about that we were counting cougars out in the boonies in California. So I called it Mercurial Cougars. Cause they're, you know, stealthy and hard to see. But that, I'm relying on people knowing that there was a car, the Mercury Cougar. Okay, how many?

• 3:02Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, I didn't get that part. Yeah. I'm such a narcissist. I thought it was a play on my name. I'm like, whoa.

• 3:10Paul Mecurio?

  Am I, am I getting any royalties on this book?

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what you've done here, Mary, it's, it tells me that you, you, you've taken laws of civilization as we know it, and then applied them to animals to see which animals in nature would break laws. Were they doing that in our civilization? Is that a fair characterization of your book?

• 3:31Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because animals are, I mean, they're basically just being animals. You know, they're, they gotta eat, they gotta crap, and they gotta find a place to live. And that, but, and so they're not really, to them, it's not criminal behavior, but they're doing it by breaking and entering, by trespassing, and sometimes by killing people. So, you know, you got murder, manslaughter, home invasion with bears. You got trespassing. You got littering, vandal, uh, jaywalking. I got a chapter on jaywalking deer and moose, which kill a lot more people than bears or lions put together. That is mountain lions. So, yeah, yeah.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you mean, wait, wait, wait, you mean deer don't wait for the green light to cross the street? Is that really?

• 4:14Mary Roach?

  Do you remember, do you remember there was this woman named Donna who calls, she called some Midwest radio show. She goes, I've got something to talk about. I'm really annoyed. I've been in two or three incidents where I've hit, or nearly hit deer. And, and that people are putting the deer crossing signs in these places where there's a lot of traffic. Why would they encourage the deer to cross in this dangerous place?

• 4:40Mary Roach?

  And they, they posted theirs as like silence. He's like, it sounds like you're thinking the signs are telling the deer where to go.

• 4:51Paul Mecurio?

  Well, everybody knows that deers can't, deer can't read, but they can decipher symbols. Everybody knows that.

• 4:58Mary Roach?

  Exactly. You know, and they have the image of the deer, so they recognize that and they're like, oh, cross here.

• 5:05Paul Mecurio?

  Well, in your jaywalking chapter, you talk about deer and you talk about how swerving from deers have caused as many or more deaths as actually hitting the deer.

• 5:15Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Paul Mecurio?

  Unless it's like, we were going through Wyoming, my wife and another couple, and we were in a huge Lincoln Town Car that we rented, I don't know why. We hit a deer and we didn't, it was a big deer and it hit the windshield and flipped over. And you mentioned that these moose especially will go through the windshield and that's when things really get dicey for people.

• 5:35Mary Roach?

  Yeah, the tall animals, like a moose or an elk or, what's the other one I'm thinking? Camel. Serious issues in Saudi Arabia with camels. Because what happens, you hit, you, the driver, you hit the animal in the legs rather than, you know, if it's a shorter animal, you'd hit the torso. So the legs go out from under and they cartwheel over. And if it's a tall enough animal, like this moose with the antler in there that comes through the windshield, you know, lands on your head. And so there's like some crazy amount of paralysis or death from hitting a tall animal.

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 6:10Mary Roach?

  Don't do it.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Camels, I can't picture camels hiding in the bushes and then running out unannounced. This is, the terrain is not the same where you have deer, where you don't even know the deer is there. How are you gonna miss a camel? How's that gonna work?

• 6:27Paul Mecurio?

  I mean, I've seen them in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They just jump out. They hide behind like, yeah, they hide behind a mailbox. Boom, there's a camel.

• 6:35Mary Roach?

  Well, there was an issue. That's a very good point that you make, Neil. Neil deGrasse Tyson, very good point. How do, I don't know. I can tell you though, that people going on those roads through the desert, because there's no curves and there's nothing to hit, they, people speed like a mother. They're going fast. So the camel, you know, just takes a left turn when you're not expecting it and suddenly it's in the roadway, I guess. I will say, there was in Saudi Arabia, they had a law whereby if a person hits a camel a- and kills it, the driver, even though the driver's probably now paralyzed in a wheelchair, the driver has to pay the camel owner for the ca- the loss of the camel.

• 7:18Mary Roach?

  And so, some of the camel owners would encourage, would the, sort of like encourage the camels onto the road so as to get the money. That was a whole thing.

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my god.

• 7:29Mary Roach?

  And it's in a journal article, like the Saudi Journal of Medicine, or I forget what, look in my back of my-

• 7:35Paul Mecurio?

  So if you're a camel and you're getting older, you better look over your shoulder because your owner's gonna be-

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody pushing you out into the street.

• 7:42Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 7:43Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:44Paul Mecurio?

  I, I don't wanna, I don't wanna get off the track too much, but if you don't mind, before we get to the queries, in that same chapter, you talk about how technology, evolution of the animals can't keep up with technology. That's why speeding cars, they can't get out of the way, but they have this innate ability, which is FID is the, if, uh-

• 8:04Mary Roach?

  Yes, exactly. Uh, FID, which I, I was saying FID and I got corrected.

• 8:11Mary Roach?

  But yeah, so, yeah, animals evolved this ability to look up from what they're doing, like say eating a carcass or whatever they're doing, and, and to look at, uh, they see a predator and they're like, uh-oh, but they're able to calculate, um, at what point do I need to flee? Like, how close can the predator come before I need to flee?

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Mary, Mary.

• 8:33Mary Roach?

  Yeah?

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mary, how many animals eating a carcass are being chased by a predator?

• 8:39Mary Roach?

  Alright, you got your, your vultures, you got your birds-

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but who's chasing a vulture? Like, nobody.

• 8:44Mary Roach?

  Uh, fox, uh-

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm just thinking-

• 8:47Mary Roach?

  Who eats meat?

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have an animal eating, eating berries, and then a predator comes. That's what I'm thinking. If I'm-

• 8:53Mary Roach?

  No, cause you're-

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I'm mauling a carcass, I, I, I'm, there's probably very little out there I'm worried about. That's what I'm saying.

• 9:00Paul Mecurio?

  Right, exactly. I'm not gonna mess with that guy, he's eating a carc-

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's eating a carcass!

• 9:05Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, who eats berries? You eats berries? A bear eats berries. Okay, carcasses, see a carcass is like, that's easy meat. You didn't even have to go and...

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so it's not a carcass that you were responsible for? Okay, fine.

• 9:19Paul Mecurio?

  But you make it relatable to the city, because you've mentioned that was why you can never hit a car in a city with a pigeon, but I could hit a pigeon with a car, because the pigeon instinctively knows how close that car is gonna get, and then takes, which is why I've been flooring it at these pigeons my whole life, and I haven't been able to kill one.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I got, wait, I got a fast story. Can I tell a story? Can I tell a story? Okay.

• 9:42Mary Roach?

  Okay, got it.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, I've been doing the same thing to great amazement, okay? I was completely amazed that pigeons are street savvy, okay?

• 9:55Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now, watch. Okay. Now, all pigeons, they're like gray, okay? They're the same color as the pavement. They're gray pigeons. I was driving north on Broadway, up near Columbia in Manhattan, and there was a white pigeon in the street. I'd never seen a white pigeon, okay, with other pigeons, but there was a white one. And I said, "Let me see if it can get out of the way if I speed up," like every other pigeon I've ever approached. So I sped up, and all the pigeons flew away, and I didn't see the white pigeon. It wasn't anywhere. And I looked back, I flattened the white pigeon, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, I killed a pigeon."

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I thought, "That's why there are no white pigeons."

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am an evolutionary force on the pigeons. All the white ones got smashed.

• 10:51Paul Mecurio?

  What is...

• 10:53Mary Roach?

  Oh my god.

• 10:54Paul Mecurio?

  Why couldn't they, why don't they have the same FID capability?

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know. I survived one data point, and I look back, and it's just completely, it was a fast death for it. But then I felt bad. So anyway, Mary, I hand you that story, okay?

• 11:09Mary Roach?

  Oh, alright. Here's, okay, so, here's what, you sped up, this is the key element here. You sped up, and you surpassed the species' evolved ability to calculate the FID.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's for damn sure I did, on that one.

• 11:25Mary Roach?

  It happened to be the white one and it was just a coincidence and that's what happened.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, because I don't see, they didn't know what white pigeons in Manhattan.

• 11:32Paul Mecurio?

  No, that white pigeon was known as the dumb pigeon in the group.

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  White pigeon can't jump, whatever, I did something.

• 11:44Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Paul Mecurio?

  But that's exactly right, and that's the point of that chapter is that there's this, was it the... They did a test at 204 miles per hour.

• 11:55Mary Roach?

  Yeah, so they're like, you know, up to, you know, however fast a predator can run, they're like, "I got it, he's coming, now I gotta go." But they didn't evolve to, you know, they look at a car as a predator, okay, and they're like, "Yeah, I can judge that, but the car's 60 miles an hour," and they're like, "Whoops, splat," so...

• 12:14Paul Mecurio?

  Their processor is like a tandy computer.

• 12:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Commodore 64, whatever.

• 12:22Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe that would have worked.

• 12:25Paul Mecurio?

  That's what that white pigeon had, the Commodore 64 processor. You don't have a chance against Neil Tyson on Broadway, my little chickadee friend. So we are at the end of this segment, we will jump to a little break here.

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, let's slip in one, let's get a question in.

• 12:41Paul Mecurio?

  Slip in one, okay.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to whet the appetite, go ahead.

• 12:43Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, this is from Chester Lipschels. Dear science brains, you don't have to compliment me like that, seriously, I... Dear science brains, is it possible that different species will be or have been driven to a point of unnatural alliances for their own survival in their human surroundings? Could we have created strange bedfellows that would otherwise not have happened if not for our dominance in the natural world?

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mary, why wouldn't that be like rats and mice and other things that we've cohabitated with ever since?

• 13:16Mary Roach?

  What was the question in there?

• 13:19Paul Mecurio?

  Uh, it's two parts. Uh, is it possible that different species will be or have been driven to a point of unnatural alliances for their own survival in the human surroundings?

• 13:30Mary Roach?

  Unnatural alliances in the...

• 13:33Paul Mecurio?

  Well, there's coexistence, right?

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Mary, presumably rats and mice predate humans, let's say, or some version of those rodents. But now rats are perfectly happy living among us.

• 13:48Mary Roach?

  They're commensal. That's the science brain word. They're commensal. They live with us.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And the mice, they love your barn, you know, and they love living in your basement. And so, isn't that cohabitating?

• 14:03Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not sure that's what he was asking, but for sure. I mean, the animals that we find annoying, that we call nuisance animals, are the ones that were smart enough to figure out, we got the food, we got the warm place to live, we're gonna help them survive.

• 14:19Paul Mecurio?

  I think this person is asking essentially, because the second part of it is, could we have created strange bedfellows that otherwise would not have happened if it weren't for our dominance in the natural world? You know, obviously, we've encroached on...

• 14:34Mary Roach?

  Sure.

• 14:35Paul Mecurio?

  You know...

• 14:36Mary Roach?

  Sure. We now, you know, we've got ski resorts, so we've gone into bear territory, you know, where there's lots of food for bears, and this is where they hang out. But now, we're like, there's a restaurant with a dumpster with all kinds of amazing, like, sustainably-farmed Sakuna salmon, and they're like, "We're gonna go down there at 3:00 a.m. because it's much better than a bunch of choke cherries and crab eyes."

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Paul. I imagine two bears, and they're eating the leftover salmon. It wasn't, "Don't eat that. That wasn't free range."

• 15:07Paul Mecurio?

  That was far. You're an animal. One bear goes to you, "You're an animal." Yes, I am an animal, and I am gonna eat this.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just happen to be an animal.

• 15:19Paul Mecurio?

  All right, we're gonna wrap up this segment.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, more StarTalk Cosmic Queries with friend of StarTalk, Mary Roach.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk, Cosmic Query. We've got Mary Roach, whose publisher just let her out of the cave one more time for her next book, When Nature Breaks the Law. I've got Paul Mecurio with me. Paul, how do we find you on social media?

• 16:31Paul Mecurio?

  At Paul Mecurio, all across the board. Just real simple.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 16:37Paul Mecurio?

  And my podcast, The Paul Mecurio Show, you can check me out there, too, which you've been on.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And who came up with that as a title for your podcast?

• 16:45Paul Mecurio?

  Well, we, you know, we spent a lot of time.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Paul Mecurio?

  I hired a research, a marketing firm. I brought in Donnie Deutsch from MSNBC and he worked the numbers and said...

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you focused?

• 16:57Paul Mecurio?

  I know, it's a tie. I know, it's, I don't like the, I can't come up with a good name.

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right, I'll help you. We'll work on it together, all right?

• 17:02Paul Mecurio?

  All right. Mary, you're very good with like play on words.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mary, yeah, talk to Mary. Talk to Mary.

• 17:08Mary Roach?

  Yeah. Talk to Mary. Mary's got the titles nobody understands. I got, I book Bonk. I had so many people go, you know what? I think it's Boink, not Bonk. Like I have a typo in my own title. So many people, and I would do book, I'd do book talks and I would have a little peel and stick letter I. I'd be like, if you want it to be Boink, here you go.

• 17:28Paul Mecurio?

  That's hilarious.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Bonk was all about sex, if I remember correctly.

• 17:31Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, bonking. Right? Bonking.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 17:34Mary Roach?

  They're like, no, it's Boinking.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when we left off, someone asked about sort of the symbiosis that might unfold with animals encroaching on our... Turf or we encroaching on theirs and because I told my pigeon story earlier, but I thought a lot about pigeons and I looked them up in the book and everything and they have an actual name, they're called rock doves.

• 17:56Mary Roach?

  That's right.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that that species lives in canyons where they swoop down and up against the the rock walls that surround them. And that's exactly what tall buildings are in New York City and Manhattan. They're the rock canyons and so they adapted beautifully to it, except for when they fly head on into the glass.

• 18:17Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That got me to laugh, but that, yeah, that doesn't work.

• 18:22Paul Mecurio?

  They, no, look pigeons don't have eye care plans, so they, you know, they can't afford glasses, they don't know where they're going and.

• 18:27Mary Roach?

  You know what bird always does that is the cedar waxwings. We, every single year they go and there's these berries on somebody's property in the next house over and they eat the berries and this is what I'm told, that they get drunk and they're flying in a group and they're either they're getting drunk or it's like the Blue Angels where you got, you got the main person and they're all just following the main guy, so the ones on the edge are like funk. So it's one of those two things.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay.

• 18:52Paul Mecurio?

  Drunk and following the leader, that's not a way to live.

• 18:55Mary Roach?

  But you know what pigeons? Yeah, I know.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to be drunk and follow no one, right? Just, just.

• 19:01Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly, exactly. Just wand, just wander into your, uh.

• 19:05Mary Roach?

  Yeah, pigeons, I have to say, I just read some, because I had blurb this book about pigeons by Joe Mankousa or something. So pigeons are actually, they were domesticated and they escaped. So these are, they're basically feral animals that, that they evolved in the presence of humans. They're, they're, so they hang around with us because they always hung around with us. So that's why we can never get rid of pigeons.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there's a specific variety, I'd say, that we have.

• 19:30Paul Mecurio?

  If there weren't the scraps of food in a city like New York, for example, would the pigeons be as plentiful? Would there be as many pigeons if, I mean, there's just.

• 19:39Mary Roach?

  No, no, no, yeah, they, they go where the food is. But they're, but they go where the food is and they're, they're not as afraid of people.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know who loves pigeons is falcons.

• 19:47Mary Roach?

  They're short fin.

• 19:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They introduced falcons into Manhattan. Oh my gosh, I was, I was. When I was getting my PhD at Columbia, they put the astronomers at the top floors of the building. So the roof was like, you know, six feet above my window. And there were these feathers just dropping off the side of the building. And I looked at, and there's this falcon just ripping apart a pigeon. And it's like, this is lunch. And I thought to myself, my gosh, if you're a falcon and you move to New York, your fat lunches are just sitting there for the taking, all in the park. And you don't even have to work for it.

• 20:27Paul Mecurio?

  The falcons are like, I can't go back to New York. Every time I go to that city, I put on like 20 pounds. And I gotta work out for like six months. I am not going back to that city.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  20 pounds of pigeons.

• 20:39Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly. Plus, I gotta compete with Neil Tyson. He's killing pigeons, I'm killing pigeons.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, give me more questions. What do you have?

• 20:47Paul Mecurio?

  Sure. This is Nicholas Godlove, which is an awesome last name. "My passion alongside my dream of being a marine biologist, a scientist, is to educate the public on the importance of apex predators in our respectful relationship with them. Why is it that certain humans demolish and hunt these species?" I'll start, I'll stop there. There's more to this question, but let's take it in part.

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do we have against apex predators?

• 21:12Mary Roach?

  Well, the apex predators are the ones that are very good at, you know, let's take mountain lion. They're very effective killers. They love to kill deer, but they'll also kill, you know, small cows and sheep and other things that you might be keeping and using for your livelihood. So anytime you mess with somebody's livelihood, you know, say if you're a sheep herder, you're a rancher, or even if you're somebody who keeps chickens in your backyard, and most of the people requesting kill permits in California are people with just a few chickens or goats in their backyard. They're not big ranches. We don't have a lot of that.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But who eats the goats? I guess the mountain lions eat the goats.

• 21:55Mary Roach?

  No, mountain lions eat the goats, or chickens, or pets, too. So that, people have an emotional attachment to their own animals. They're sort of an extension of themselves and their family, and they get very upset. And they, instead of taking...

• 22:14Mary Roach?

  Action like by building a better nighttime enclosure or trimming back the brush so there's not a place for the mountain lion to kind of sneak up, which it needs to do when it's hunting. They just call someone and say, get rid of it, or they shoot it themselves, so.

• 22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's because it's a merka.

• 22:29Mary Roach?

  Going on, there's a merka, yeah, and we profound it on.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If if shooting it can solve the problem, you do that first.

• 22:37Mary Roach?

  Exactly, these animals are varmints, they're varmints.

• 22:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you don't you don't box them in, you don't put a perimeter, you know, you shoot it.

• 22:45Paul Mecurio?

  You shoot it and walk away and have lunch, it's easy, it's simple, right?

• 22:49Mary Roach?

  This is just the American way.

• 22:50Paul Mecurio?

  In your book, you have this chapter, a spot of trouble, which it this question sort of reminds me of that. You you're really great in the book of doing these causal connections. And in that case, in the Middle Himalayas, after the 1918 pandemic, and there were all these corpses, and they couldn't cremate so many of them, they were throwing the bodies basically down the hill.

• 23:11Mary Roach?

  Toward the Ganges, yes.

• 23:12Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, and the leopards got used to human meat and made them more aggressive towards humans, which I thought was utterly fascinating, but speaks to.

• 23:21Mary Roach?

  That is the theory, yep.

• 23:22Paul Mecurio?

  Right, sort of Jim Corbett, right, brings that there, so it's sort of like, there's this, why are we attacking these animals? Well, we made them more comfortable. It's just part of us have to own the fact that we created this problem, right?

• 23:35Mary Roach?

  Yeah, and the other, yeah, the other thing going on there is so many people have left the villages up in the Middle Himalaya, they used to farm, they used to terrace and farm. And that's a really hard way to farm, you know, to get water there, and you got like carve out the mountainside. And a lot of people have left for the cities, so a lot of the, they call it rewilding, there's the brush has grown back, there's not as many people tending the livestock. If you leave your livestock out there, you know, the leopards are going to come in. So, you know, they've got fewer people, often children are tending to things, and most of the, you know, 41% of the kills by these leopards are kids. So, we presented opportunity, good hunting opportunities for these leopards, yeah.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see, so it's I will shoot them because otherwise they will eat me. I mean, that's the rationale, I guess.

• 24:24Mary Roach?

  That, yeah, that is, that is, you know, their their family members are getting killed, and they don't wait for the government to do something about it. They take, they trap them and kill them themselves sometimes, yeah.

• 24:38Paul Mecurio?

  Actually, there's a query about rewilding. Can I jump to that?

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. That's a new word for me, rewilding. I like that.

• 24:45Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah. Carrie Manneberg, my question is about rewilding. Some people think that a parcel of disturbed land, either urban or rural, can be a beautiful natural forest if we just simply leave it alone. I take the position that the land must be heavily managed by conservationists and friends in order to ensure a successful project. We must develop long-range plans. Which do you think is the best approach?

• 25:10Paul Mecurio?

  So do you leave it alone, or do you sort of be proactive?

• 25:12Mary Roach?

  This is in an urban area?

• 25:14Paul Mecurio?

  I don't know. I mean, you know, your scenario that you talk about in the book are on these sort of plateaus on the hill where it got so difficult to farm people, you abandon the plateaus. But I guess sort of in a general sense, the question is, do you let it sort of reestablish itself naturally, or are you proactive in some conservation?

• 25:34Mary Roach?

  Like, I'm not sure how you would, like, introducing animals, or culling animals that are in there?

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I were to vote, I'd vote just let it do whatever nature wants to do with it, and it'll figure something out. It'll, you know, life finds a way.

• 25:50Mary Roach?

  Yeah, I'm not sure if the concern is that it's going to attract a kind of animal that you don't want in an urban setting, whether you're going to have too many rodents, or you're, I'm not, I don't know, because I'm not a land management, wildlife management, urban area person at all. But, so, again, I don't...

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say if you look at forests and other heavily vegetated areas that require no help from humans, I think if nature wants to grow something in your, in your, in your empty lot, it's gonna, it's gonna do it. And, and, and have you driven by sort of abandoned old diners or something, and there's grass growing through the cracks of the parking lot and on the steps, and, you know, give it another couple of years, and you're not even gonna see the diner?

• 26:38Paul Mecurio?

  See the diner. It's gonna be a giant shrub.

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. It's just, it's just gonna be a shrub. And so, and that's after just a couple of years. And you realize that when you see something that's highly manicured, somebody's working on that sucker every day. Beating back the weeds and trimming the grass.

• 26:55Mary Roach?

  Well, you have that, I did talk about New Zealand in the book. In New Zealand, if you think of New Zealand as a really, really big vacant lot, which were for the purposes of this question. You have a situation where the wildlife didn't have natural land predator, the birds there. And it didn't have natural land predator, so they're flightless. A lot of them are flightless, not all of them. So now comes, a bunch of rabbits were brought in. Rabbits overpopulated. People thought, hey, let's bring in ferrets and stoats to kill the rabbits. Well, the stoats are like, you know what? The rabbits are not bad, but I'm really digging these eggs. And these little chickeny things, these are really good.

• 27:36Mary Roach?

  So the populated, like, all these bird species and reptile species are now gone because the stoats and the ferrets and the feral cats that were also introduced to kind of like control the rabbits, they've all gone out of control. So now New Zealand's like, hey, we're headed towards a point where all we have is rats, which were from ships, feral cats, stoats and possums, and that's going to be it. We're losing hundreds of our own really cool species. So, you know, that's a land management, conservation issue where, yeah, somebody early on should have gone, let's think this through, this whole stoat thing.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and people hardly ever think things through as much as they need to.

• 28:19Paul Mecurio?

  You know, you raised a good point in the book about that because that faced, you talk about sort of, it's hard, you say it's hard to know where to draw the lines, what to save and at what cost. Because then they started wiping out the stoats and the feral cats. And you're like, well, okay, who are we to decide what species to eliminate, what species to save? And so there's this, it's an unanswerable dilemma, right, on some level?

• 28:40Mary Roach?

  Right, and also you're talking about, where do you, I mean, the landscape is always evolving. Like, the guy there was talking about, there's people who, because deer were also introduced for the hunters to hunt. And the deer are, they're complaining, the deer are browsing the understory in the forest. So people are like, get rid of the deer. But his point was, you know what? We used to have moas, these giant flightless birds that ate the understory. So you're talking about the pre-moa, you know, this version of New Zealand that is, you know... One period in time. And I'm idealizing this one, this one snapshot of evolution and species interaction. So anyway, it's a, it's a tough call to make.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One thing I've noticed from the evolution of species on Earth is that nothing is ever constant. And we want to think of it, you know, from a conservationist standpoint, we think to ourselves, oh, let us stabilize the environment so that we, yet if you look through the history of things, it has never been stable, ever. And things are, what we think of as balance, it might be over a short period of time, but over a long enough period of time, nothing's in balance. Continental drifts, you strand species, you, the climate changes, not as quickly as we're currently changing the climate, but it has happened in the past. So, yeah. Yeah, the only thing that's constant is change.

• 30:03Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love that sentence. It's not spoken enough. Paul, we might have time for one more.

• 30:09Paul Mecurio?

  Okay. Uh, this is Taylor Prim. Hey Neil, here's a question about hacking nature. Have there always, have there been ways humans have hacked nature so that both humans and our neighboring wildlife individuals benefit too?

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Mary, did you come across any, any examples of that?

• 30:28Mary Roach?

  Yeah, there's, okay, here's a, here's an example that's kind of cool. This is, I have a chapter on danger trees, which is a term that kind of cracks me up.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Danger trees?

• 30:39Mary Roach?

  It's kind of like danger mitten. It's like, it's a tree.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The danger trees are in The Wizard of Oz where they throw apples.

• 30:47Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna learn from Mary Roach about killer trees. On StarTalk, Cosmic Quakes.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, Startalk Cosmic Queries. So we left off with, Mary, you were describing killer trees, no, bad trees, or what was it?

• 31:42Mary Roach?

  Danger, danger trees.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Danger trees.

• 31:45Mary Roach?

  This is, this is an official term, this is terminology, scientific terminology. Okay, so a danger, alright, so danger trees. Okay, a danger tree is a tree, yeah, that's, it's a big tree that's very old, it's diseased, it's leaning, you can tell it's gonna come down relatively soon, with trees relatively, relatively soon could be 10 years, 20 years, but anyway, so it's scary enough that somebody has to come in and deal with it, and when it's a really big tree, one of those giant redwoods or Douglas firs, what they do is they don't cut it down, they blast the top, they climb up, they insert dynamite, and they blow off the top, so now it's more stable, but it's such a big tree that it's still sort of beautiful, and people go, "Look at the giant beautiful tree."

• 32:30Mary Roach?

  But here's the thing, this is the hack that I'm getting to here, this is a question about hacks, so when you blow off the top, now you, you create this situation where water can collect there and you get top-down decay, so there's cavities formed that animals can go into and live in, so, so biologists love these trees that have been blown, the top's been blown off, because they, it, it creates habitats for other animals.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we blow stuff up and the biologists like it? Wow.

• 33:03Mary Roach?

  In this case, yes, they do, they do, they love it, because a dying, decaying tree creates lots of real estate for different species, and the raptors like it because they're just bare, bare branches, there's no leaves and foliage.

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So does it count, on Long Island, there are many places where they just, people have built this perch with a big sort of flat surface at the top, and many of them have bald eagles in these huge eagle nests, and so...

• 33:36Mary Roach?

  Yeah, right.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm thinking, doesn't the eagle know that, like, we did that? And don't they have any dignity?

• 33:45Paul Mecurio?

  They're sitting there going to each other, "Look at these idiots, they think we're buying into that looks like a tree."

• 33:51Paul Mecurio?

  That's a perfectly formed two by four from True Value Hardware. That is not a tree.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they do have sightlines because we tend to put them out in the middle and they like seeing what's coming. Not that eagles have predators, mind you, but nonetheless. So, I just wanted to, I guess that would be the eagles convincing us that we should build their homes. That's what that is.

• 34:17Mary Roach?

  That's like people bringing in, you know, nest boxes for owls so that the owls will kill the rodents, you know? That's a, you know, biological pest control kind of deal. I'm not sure if that's the hack that the person is getting at here.

• 34:31Paul Mecurio?

  Tell people, in this chapter, it's this chapter when the woods come down. And tell people about, like, I didn't realize that there was pine cones like this, the Colter pines and the durian trees and what they produce. And I'm afraid to walk in the woods now because of you. Explain what these things are.

• 34:51Mary Roach?

  Frickin' drops bowling balls on people. These are, these are giant, heavy pine cones. And they'll put, there are these signs that go, "Falling pine cone, proceed with caution." You know, like, who's gonna actually see that and go, "Oh my God, don't walk out of that tree." But then, like, people have been, and durian fruits, similarly, bowling ball kind of deal. Big, football-sized, but dense, heavy, plus spikes.

• 35:16Paul Mecurio?

  There you go. Neil? Imagine you're taking a walk, nice walk in the day, and you're hitting the head with a spiked fruit and that's how you die? That's not how you want to buy it.

• 35:27Mary Roach?

  They're like, and there's like photographs in the, like, the Indonesian newspapers, you know, like, every couple of years. Like, a guy lying there with, like, a bloody fruit next to his head. It's kind of tragic.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if I die, I don't want it to be because of a fruit assassin. I just, no.

• 35:43Paul Mecurio?

  A target of a fruit. Well, you also say, Mary, that we're irrational in our species-specific devotions, right? And talking about protect these trees, but these trees are killer trees. And that, you know, it's all sort of relative, right? The same thing with like the octopus. Somebody said that they don't want to kill an octopus because it's intelligent, but they'll eat pig and rats, which are also very intelligent. Like, there's this...

• 36:05Mary Roach?

  I don't know if they're eating the rats, but they're definitely eating the pig.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't know what kind of friends you have.

• 36:11Paul Mecurio?

  With the right barbecue sauce, Mary.

• 36:16Mary Roach?

  Probably is pretty tasty.

• 36:18Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, give me some more.

• 36:20Paul Mecurio?

  Jeff Johnson, with all the wildfires around the world, how much is that impacting wildlife? And what cascade effect does this have on the environment as a whole?

• 36:32Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mary, does wildlife just kill the animals? Or do the animals escape it and then they end up living somewhere else?

• 36:39Mary Roach?

  Apparently, they're pretty... I was talking to the guys doing the mountain lion project here in California, where he's like doing a census of the whole state mountain lions. He said, they're pretty good at getting out of the way. And it's not like they're getting burned up. I know bear, there's been such bear... I know there's been bears that have been burned because they're doing some sort of thing where they're using tilapia skin as a... They're putting fish skin on the ferns on some bears. I remember reading about that. So at least one bear didn't get out of the way. But, but the thing, I mean, here's the, you know, there was this... I was out with this person who's doing a census of the mountain lions in the state. We were up in Modoc, which is a huge swath of burned wilderness.

• 37:24Mary Roach?

  And I'm like, they're looking for mountain lions here? Are you crazy? It's just like a hellscape of charred sticks, you know? And he's like, actually, look more closely. All these green shoots are coming up. The green shoots are what the deer love because they're tender, yummy. You know, they eat the, that's what they do in your yard. You know, they eat the tender green shoots. So stuff springs back to life. The deer come in, the mountain lions are like, hell, deer, yeah, this is great. So it looks, you know, it looks like a dead zone. But in fact, it comes back fast. And you have this, you know, kind of rush to take advantage of it.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not decades, it comes back in years, right?

• 38:03Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was, this was quick, this was quick. So that's just...

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not nature's first rodeo when stuff burns?

• 38:10Mary Roach?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:12Paul Mecurio?

  It's a process.

• 38:13Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Paul, give me more.

• 38:16Paul Mecurio?

  Chaz, uh, Jen Corelli. I just read that around, uh,

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the best way to pronounce the man's Italian name.

• 38:25Paul Mecurio?

  Chaz Jen Corelli.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 38:28Mary Roach?

  Uh, yeah.

• 38:30Paul Mecurio?

  When we're done with this, we're gonna have a meatball parmigiana, and you're gonna like it, with a little side of spiked fruit.

• 38:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now you're getting racist, but okay.

• 38:37Paul Mecurio?

  No, wait, I'm Italian, I can do it.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you can do it, okay.

• 38:42Paul Mecurio?

  Uh, I just read that around cities and dense populations, where high-calorie human scraps are more widely available and predators are fewer, it was discovered that most of the mammal species studied, such as coyotes and raccoons, appear to be growing in size. What repercussions could we see from this?

• 38:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 39:01Mary Roach?

  Well, they, that's, yeah, absolutely. Uh, the more, the more food animals get, uh, that even though there's something called compensatory reproduction, whereas there's like lots of food available, the, uh, nature kind of takes advantage of that by, uh, bigger broods, like the litters are bigger, uh, and the gestation period shortens. So, with some animals, you've just, you know, they're like, "Hey, plenty of food, let's have more. Let's take advantage of this." And so you, you see this population boom. And the extreme of that is in Australia with those massive mouse plagues. Just, I mean, you've seen, there's, there's, uh, video from a hundred years ago.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The floor is roiling with mice.

• 39:42Mary Roach?

  Yes. Yes, they're like dropping from the ceiling. I mean, it is, they're intense.

• 39:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so nature's opportunistic. So, I, I read a book, and forgive me, I don't remember the name. It was something like After Humans on Earth. So What Happens? And, so, the...

• 40:00Mary Roach?

  Oh, yeah, by Alan, yeah, The World Without Us?

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It might be, there would be, there's been several in that genre. It's amazing that's even a genre. I'm impressed that that's a genre. Like, people are really trying to get ready for when we're not here. And who's gonna read the book when that happens?

• 40:15Mary Roach?

  That's right, who buys the book then?

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the question is, how come rats aren't bigger than they are? Because they're the right size to still escape from you in the pipes that we have for our sewage. If they're so big that their ass can't fit back through the thing, they die. Okay, so the, there's no evolutionary pressure to have big rats because they wouldn't be able to hide from us. But if we're not here, then there's, then they're not limited by the size of their ass relative to the pipe they want to crawl into. And they would just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And we know that mammals, mammals have hardly anything constraining their size.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, the biggest animal there ever was is alive today and it's a, it's a, it's a whale. Okay, this, the, the blue whale. And the biggest animal on earth, okay, is, is the African elephant. But now, I guess, uh, you know, some dinosaurs are bigger in the past, but mammals have no trouble getting big on the, in the evolutionary tree. So maybe it is our existence that's tamping down the size of rats.

• 41:31Mary Roach?

  I never thought about the importance of the size of the ass of a rat. I never contemplated this.

• 41:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever is their widest part, whether it's their ass. Actually, I think they have narrow asses.

• 41:45Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 41:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm talking about their midsection, perhaps.

• 41:47Paul Mecurio?

  No, whenever I see a rat, I'm like, could you turn around?

• 41:51Paul Mecurio?

  Wow, you need to go to the gym. That's usually what I say when I say.

• 41:55Mary Roach?

  Does this make my ass look big?

• 41:59Mary Roach?

  Does this fight make my ass look big?

• 42:03Paul Mecurio?

  Does the city's infrastructure make my ass look big?

• 42:09Paul Mecurio?

  But I, you know, the other thing you say in the book is that sort of like pretty animals, we tend to fight harder for like the, the mountain lion, the cougar, right? The California mountain, right? Sort of like, it's sort of the.

• 42:20Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:21Paul Mecurio?

  It doesn't necessarily need to be fought for, but because it's a kind of cuter and prettier.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't it just whether they have a furry tail? Doesn't it all come down to that?

• 42:28Paul Mecurio?

  It's really.

• 42:29Mary Roach?

  Yeah, because you look at a roof rat and you lock, you like face on till you can't see the tail. A squirrel and a roof rat, you cannot tell the difference. They're both really cute.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you see the hairless tail, then you don't like it immediately.

• 42:41Paul Mecurio?

  Right, well, what does that not, what does, what does that say about you, Neil, that you would judge the rat based on its look?

• 42:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't, I know, I'm talking about other people who do that.

• 42:50Mary Roach?

  He has, he's got a rat ass.

• 42:52Paul Mecurio?

  That rat has inner value, man. It has an inner sense of itself.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some people say they don't see color. I don't see species.

• 43:00Paul Mecurio?

  I just see big asses on rats and small asses on rats. Uh, should we do another one?

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, keep coming, a couple more.

• 43:07Paul Mecurio?

  Alright, okay. This is Quentin. "We all know that humans destroy nature to build cities and other infrastructure, but humans themselves are part of nature. Do you think it's even possible for an advanced civilization of at least our human capabilities to sustain a better balance between wildlife and the civilization itself?"

• 43:29Mary Roach?

  Oh yeah, I think we can do a lot better.

• 43:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Starting where?

• 43:32Mary Roach?

  Uh, just starting with, uh, you know, look at something like rats and raccoons. I mean, they're a problem when you've got something in your building, or your attic, or your garage, that they want, a place to nest, or something to eat. So get rid of that, figure out a way to...

• 43:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Raccoons have those creepy hands, you know?

• 43:53Paul Mecurio?

  Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like that guy that never can find his wallet at dinner, you know? The hands never go deep, like the little, like, yeah. It's like, yeah. But you know, you're right about that. We had something in our chimney and down, and it sounded, it was scratching, scratching, scratching. And it was like, oh my god, there's a rat in the thing. What did I do? I went and I got a baseball bat, and I was ready to, you know, beat it. It turned out to be a bird, but still, it freaked me out. And my instinct wasn't to be civil about it at all.

• 44:26Mary Roach?

  Right.

• 44:27Paul Mecurio?

  And here's my house, which encroached on its environment.

• 44:30Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 44:32Paul Mecurio?

  I crushed it though with the bat. Ooh, what a homerun I hit. No, I'm just kidding.

• 44:36Mary Roach?

  A little birdie. You killed a little birdie.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so we are quite, I think the word is speciesist, where we prefer some species over others. But like, I don't see species, so I'm...

• 44:49Mary Roach?

  Yeah, I mean...

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a wokeness that, I'm still waiting for the world to catch up to me.

• 44:54Paul Mecurio?

  You are so ahead on that whole thing.

• 44:56Mary Roach?

  I looked at, I looked at the endangered, there's like, there's hundreds of endangered or threatened fish, okay, they're like these species of sardine and sprat and, and like gillfish and lungfish, but it's like, nobody, nobody raises money for them.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:14Mary Roach?

  The endangered, because they're not very attractive and cute.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what gets me is, you know, they, they, they fish for tuna with nets and they accidentally grab a dolphin, and all these people trying to say, save the dolphins, only catch tuna with, with a line, line caught, and I'm thinking, what about the tuna? Is anybody worried about the tuna? They just, they just netted hundreds of tuna and you're worried about the one dolphin? I mean, so that's.

• 45:42Mary Roach?

  That's exactly, that's what the dolphins are saying. They're like, why? What is it? What did we do to them? What did we do to them?

• 45:49Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, but the dolphin's got that, you know, permanent smile on its face, but there could be like a bad, evil dolphin that really needs to be, you know, it's like.

• 45:56Mary Roach?

  It's all up front.

• 45:57Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, you know, like a really not that happy, like flipper dolphin.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're all okay eating a turkey sandwich, a chicken sandwich, a beef sandwich, a pork sandwich, but if someone served dolphin sandwich, oh no!

• 46:08Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, oh no. Oh my God, that's because it wasn't a TV show.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a TV show.

• 46:16Paul Mecurio?

  It's all about TV, if you can get your own TV show, animal, human, vegetable, no one's gonna mess with you.

• 46:23Mary Roach?

  You are set.

• 46:24Paul Mecurio?

  Just before we wrap up, you know, you have an interesting thing you say in the book, there's 2,000 species in 200 countries create acts that put them at odds with man. That's a pretty big number, I didn't realize that.

• 46:36Mary Roach?

  Yeah, you know, I kind of just pulled that out of my ass, that number.

• 46:38Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, it seemed that way.

• 46:39Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 46:41Paul Mecurio?

  Or, or did you pull it out of a big ass of a rat?

• 46:44Mary Roach?

  I pulled it out of a rat's, a rat's ass, as it was, because I was stuck in a pipe and I could get.

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a sign that we need to end this program.

• 46:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mary, it's a delight to have you. So, Mary, try to put fewer years between your books so we can have you on more often. I'll do my best. Your books are all fun, and I have so many of them on my shelf. And they're, you know, not many science writers decide to just sort of have fun with the intersection of humans and science. It's you and me, Neil, you and me. And still learn something for having written it. And this is what you're doing. And so you, as far as I'm concerned, occupy a unique niche in the science writing landscape. So, thank you for existing. Okay, now go back to work. Go back to your cave.

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mary, always great to have you, and thanks for being such a friend of our show. Oh, I love you guys. You've come to my office multiple times, and you're a wonderful guest. And we look forward to this book, which just came out. And who's your publisher? Just so people are publisher. WW Norton. W, I did not know that, because they have six of my books. All right, Paul, always good to have you back on. Thanks for coming into the business. Thank you, a lot of fun. Enjoy the book, Mary, it's a great book. Thank you, Paul, thank you so much. All right. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition, all about Mary Roach's latest book on the encroachment of animals into civilization and vice versa. Neil deGrasse Tyson here for StarTalk, as always.