Listener Questions #27

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about birthing multiple species, mental imagery, and face mites! 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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• 0:35Speaker 02

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• 1:05Speaker 03

  My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for United Healthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters. There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  I'm Ben, and I work at United Healthcare. I am just one piece of a larger puzzle, but every piece matters. It's more than just work. We want to make the healthcare system better for everyone. I care because I want to make a difference. That's what committed to care means to me.

• 1:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  One mom gives birth to two species. Hit the news today. Evolution, you're crazy. That's all I have to say.

• 1:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Do physicists see the universe in their mind's eye? Or is it easier to understand it if they're mentally blind?

• 2:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mites live on your face and mate there at night. Why would evolution do that? It's just not right.

• 2:06Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 2:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or it'll creep you out even more. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.

• 2:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I think the universe is beautiful and creepy.

• 2:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hi, I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I study parasites and space and I think the universe is also beautiful and creepy and sometimes creepy is beautiful and it's all complicated.

• 2:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Have you met a parasite, Kelly, where you're like, mm, that's too gross. I wish this didn't exist in the universe? Or can you find some beauty in every single wriggly, crawling, disgusting thing?

• 3:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  I can find some beauty in everything, but I would rather not be in the room with Ascaris lumbricoides. It's a really long, really thick nematode. It really grosses me out. And when we talked about screw worm a couple of weeks back, maybe a couple of months back now.

• 3:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm still scarred from that conversation, yes.

• 3:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I looked at the photos and that was-

• 3:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't do that, people.

• 3:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, nobody else do that. We actually had a listener write us to say they did that and they were like, I should have listened to you when you told me not to.

• 3:31Daniel Whiteson?

  I have not Googled screw worm and I think I've protected my mental health for that reason.

• 3:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Do not Google screw worm. It is super gross. So yeah, there's some parasites that I don't want to be in the room with. I once watched a presentation, I was studying a parasite that lives on the brains of California killyfish. And so I spent like literally all day working with brains. But then I was watching an anthropology talk and they went to a country that was like selling monkey brains and there was a table filled with monkey brains. And I was looking at just the picture and the room started to spin.

• 4:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Whoa.

• 4:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I was like, I'm gonna throw up. And so, and I was like, but I can't have everybody see me throwing up over brains. I work on brains. And anyway, I like just kind of looked down and hoped nobody could see me and I managed to get through it. But it's weird the things that set us off.

• 4:18Daniel Whiteson?

  The universe certainly sets us off. And I have the same kind of reaction to, you know, astrophysical stuff. On one hand, a supernova is amazing. On the other hand, it could like sterilize a whole portion of the galaxy with incredible radiation, right? It's terrifying. The universe is beautiful and incredible, but also violent and destructive and crazy. So it is an extraordinary universe we live in, isn't it?

• 4:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is. And it's also, I gotta say, a confusing universe we live in. And that kind of brings us to our first question, which was really hard to unpack. This question was an amazing question from a listener, Jamie, who often writes us and sends us articles to be like, does this make any sense?

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it's always fun to dig in. And this paper was particularly fun. So the headline is "One Mother for Two Species Via Obligate Cross-Species Cloning in Ants."

• 5:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Whoa, one mom giving birth to two different species? I thought that was impossible. Anyway, let's hear Jamie's question and then dig in.

• 5:27Speaker 06

  Hello, professors. This is Jamie Pfeffer from Westfield, New Jersey. I would be grateful for your help understanding an article that I read in the New York Times. It reports on a study in Nature where scientists said that queens from one species of ant produced male offspring of a different species. The scientists then said that it's like a human having chimp babies and then using the babies as a source of sperm for giving birth to human chimp hybrids as a source of labor. What on earth is going on here, please? It sounds like a chapter from one of Professor Kelly's books. Thank you very much.

• 6:05Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, Kelly. So set us up for why this is a fascinating question. My understanding of what a species means is that individuals can mate and give birth to like live offspring that isn't sterile. And so how can you give birth to two different species? How's that possible?

• 6:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it's crazy, right? So, okay, so you can get like a donkey and a horse. They can mate together and make a mule and the mule is sterile. And so you can get like pretty distantly related species that mate and produce something different.

• 6:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, for example, my dog has Chihuahua and German Shepherd ancestry and nobody knows how that happened. And I also won't suggest Googling that, but you know, it did happen and he exists.

• 6:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Don't think too hard about it. But, but, but so that, those are different breeds, not different species. And so the equivalent here would be like, you know, so I gave birth to two human children. It would be like, I gave birth to one human children and then the next one was a chimpanzee. And that's, that's confusing and unexpected.

• 7:09Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you always expect every child is going to be different, but not that different.

• 7:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. That's pretty different. And the species, so we're talking about ants in this example, and species one, this is the species that gives birth to two species. She, the queens, not only give birth to their own species, as you would expect, but they're also able to give birth to males of a different species that they've been separated from for five million years.

• 7:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. All right. So this is like dogs give birth to dogs and occasionally a cat.

• 7:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. I mean, I don't know how long dogs and cats diverge. That's probably more than five million years. But, but yes, your point stands. And so, okay, so here's what's happening. So first, ant mating systems are crazy.

• 7:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 7:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're not going to go into loads of detail because it's super complicated. But what you need to know is that females are diploids. So what that means is that they have two sets of chromosomes, just like humans. We have two sets of chromosomes.

• 8:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 8:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  But to make males, they only have one set of chromosomes. So a female doesn't have to mate with another male if she wants to lay dude eggs. She just takes one set of her chromosomes, sticks them in the egg, and now you've got males. So she doesn't have to mate. She can make males on her own.

• 8:29Daniel Whiteson?

  But to make a female, she needs a contribution from another member of her species?

• 8:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. So to make a female worker, she needs to mate with another male.

• 8:38Daniel Whiteson?

  But having these complicated relationships between the parents and the kids, doesn't that mean that like the siblings' relationships are complicated and like your evolutionary interests are intermingled in complicated ways? If I remember, like ants have really complicated sibling math.

• 8:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, they do. Okay. So the bottom line is that the sisters share about 75% of their genetic material with each other, whereas usually sisters share about 50%.

• 9:02Daniel Whiteson?

  So like human sisters share 50%, you're saying?

• 9:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Yeah. And ant sisters share 75%. And we think that this plays a role in why ant colonies work so well together. So you can think of ant colonies as like a super. Organism. You've got the queen who's laying a bunch of eggs. And then all of the females work to support the queen. And you would maybe not expect such selfless behavior unless individuals were super closely related to each other. Which means that when the queen is making a lot more babies. They're essentially making individuals who are very genetically similar to you. And so from a genetic standpoint and from an evolutionary standpoint. This is great news. So maybe you're willing to not mate. Because your mom is making so many super genetically related sisters and it's awesome. Does that kind of make sense?

• 9:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm. That makes sense. Yeah.

• 9:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 9:51Daniel Whiteson?

  So that explains like how the siblings are related to each other. Why don't we need to understand that to understand how you can give birth to another kind of species?

• 9:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so the thing that you want to know is that this ant that was all over the news recently. When she's giving birth to a new species, she's giving birth to sons in particular.

• 10:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 10:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, and so here is what happened. If you're in Europe and in Asia. You will find these two species of ants. One of them is called Mezor Ibericus and one is Mezor Structor. But we're never going to keep those straight. So I'm going to call them species one. That's Ibericus. And species two, Structor. All right, in part of their range, they overlap. And in part of their range, they don't. So there's some areas where you just find species one, some areas where you just find species two. And some areas where you find colonies of species one and species two. In addition to all of the ant reproductive weirdness with the females being diploid and the males being haploid.

• 10:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  This system has another weird trait, which is called sperm parasitism. So here's what happens. The workers in the nest are females. But instead of mom mating with a male of her species. Mom mates with a male of a different species.

• 11:14Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 11:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. So they're closely related enough that they can still mate with each other, but they produce. I believe infertile offspring that become workers. And so why would that evolve? The reason we think that that evolved is because. Yes, it's nice that all the sisters are 75% related to each other. But every once in a while, one of the workers will get it in their heads. And I'm being super anthropomorphic here, but they'll get it in their heads that maybe it would be better if they just laid their own eggs.

• 11:41Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 11:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  And now you've got a competitor with the queen. But if all of your workers are these hybrids that are sterile, they can't make their own eggs anymore. And so the queen essentially has this extra layer of control over her colony because none of her workers are even able to compete with that with her. It's just not even a question.

• 12:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Fascinating.

• 12:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And so there are, you know, a handful of different ant species we know of that do this thing called sperm parasitism, where they make these hybrid sterile workers by mating with males of a different species.

• 12:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And why exactly is it called parasitism?

• 12:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think the idea is that, uh, so for species two, the males that are impregnating the queen, they're essentially wasting their sperm. So they impregnate the queen of species one.

• 12:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And all of those offspring are sterile, so they don't go anywhere. So the males of species two have made this sperm, paid the cost to make it, and it's genetically, evolutionarily not going to end up, you know, contributing to more offspring for them.

• 12:44Daniel Whiteson?

  And when Jamie asked you this question, do you think he knew there was a parasite angle on it? Or is that just like a happy bonus for everybody?

• 12:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know. It might've just been a happy bonus, but I'm, I'm excited either way. Jamie knows us pretty well, so maybe this was a gift for me.

• 12:57Daniel Whiteson?

  I didn't realize that even sperms can be parasites. That's incredible.

• 13:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no, no, no. The sperm is being parasitized.

• 13:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, right.

• 13:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. So the queen is essentially like extracting the sperm for her own purposes.

• 13:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 13:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  But not benefiting species two.

• 13:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Is there an evil cackle that happens along the way, you think?

• 13:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, no, but they're little ants, so it's gotta be a little high pitched voice. Try that, Daniel.

• 13:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I can't do that. I can't do that.

• 13:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, well, all right. So that was amazing. That's already weird, okay? But so for species one, it has now actually become a requirement that the queen mates with another species. She can't produce these workers anymore unless she finds species two males.

• 13:46Daniel Whiteson?

  The thing you thought you were going to do just once turns out to be a habit, and then now you can't live without it.

• 13:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. That's right. We've all been there. Uh, and so for me, it's coffee, but, uh... So.

• 13:58Daniel Whiteson?

  For other people, it's sperm paraticism.

• 14:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. To each their own, right? So, okay, so you might remember that I told you that there are areas where you only find Species One, or you only find Species Two, right? So if Species One has to mate with Species Two, how does Species One manage to persist far away from Species Two?

• 14:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  And there's one spot where it's known that there's 1,000 kilometers between the nearest Species One and Species Two nests. All right, so there's no queens of Species Two in the area, but if you find a Species One nest and you dig it up, you'll find that there are still hybrid individuals in there. So there's still the hybrid workers. And so the question is, how the heck is she managing to produce these hybrids when there's no males of Species Two around?

• 14:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  The answer is going to be that she makes Species Two males.

• 14:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 14:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which is crazy, right? So let's go through the process that the scientists went through to sort of study this. So first, they opened up Species One nests, and they looked very carefully at everybody who was in there in an area where you shouldn't find any Species Two. And they did find some Species Two males in the nest. And they were like, okay, that's really weird. And so then they looked at the genetic information inside of Species Two, and they found that Species Two had mitochondria from Species One. And if you know anything about mitochondria, you might remember that mitochondria are only inherited from mom.

• 15:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 15:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  So that means that these Species Two males must have come from a mom of Species One. Because they've got her mitochondria. And they went over to areas where you find Species Two normally, like in their own sort of colony, and they confirmed Species Two males usually have mitochondria from Species Two moms. And so this was weird.

• 15:58Daniel Whiteson?

  So you can tell the difference between Species Two males that come from Species One or Species Two by their mitochondria?

• 16:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 16:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 16:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, very cool. But they wanted to make 100% sure that the queens were the ones who were laying the eggs that had the males. And so they took queens and workers and they brought them into the lab. And some of the workers that they brought into the lab, these were from species one, they went ahead and they did lay some of their own eggs. And what they found was that 9% of the eggs made by queens of species one produced males of species two.

• 16:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 16:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. Super weird. And when the workers of species one made some eggs, none of them were species two. It's just the queen who's doing this. Okay, so then they monitored a colony that they brought into the lab for a year and a half. And they found that the mom produced species one and species two males. They both survived to reproductive age. And they looked genetically and they confirmed, okay, one queen is definitely making species one and species two males. How is she doing that?

• 17:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  So one possibility here is that a lot of invertebrates are able to store sperm. So you can mate with a male and a couple of months later, you can be like, oh, I'm gonna take that sperm that I was storing and now I'm gonna fertilize my eggs. And even though there's no males around, I can go ahead and have some extra babies.

• 17:26Daniel Whiteson?

  I didn't know it lasted that long. I thought it had a short lifespan, like 24 hours or 48 hours or something.

• 17:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know exactly how long it is, but it's more than 24 or 48 hours. But by having them in the lab for 18 months, they were able to like, pretty conclusively say, okay, the females probably aren't like flying 1,000 kilometers to go find a species two male mating with him and then coming back. Like, she's been in the lab the whole time.

• 17:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Or maybe they're like actually aliens and they have wormhole technology and they're like teleporting over there.

• 17:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 17:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Not a hypothesis they considered?

• 17:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, you know, they didn't have a physicist on the team, probably.

• 18:01Daniel Whiteson?

  I know that you always need a physicist, right?

• 18:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 18:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, you're not even gonna agree with me on that one, huh?

• 18:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 18:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Head your bet on that one. All right.

• 18:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Probably. Almost certainly.

• 18:11Daniel Whiteson?

  At least we should consider having a physicist on every project.

• 18:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sure, right. And are you gonna consider having a biologist on every project to make sure you all stay down to earth?

• 18:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I already do.

• 18:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 18:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I already do, of course.

• 18:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, okay.

• 18:24Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so they saw this essentially happen in the lab and controlled conditions, so they knew that she was actually generating species to herself.

• 18:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. They also looked at like genetic diversity of species two males in their native range and in these species one nests. And they were very low diversity, which you would expect, you know, if there was something weird happening and the males were just like a very small subset of their genes were being passed through species one over time. So here is what they think is happening. Females are somehow cloning males. And all cloning means, and you might remember this from a past conversation where we talked about cloning, like in our episode about the dire wolf that was made by colossal. So essentially what you do is you take an egg and you like extract the genetic information from the egg, except

• 19:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  you can leave the mitochondria in there. And then you put new genetic information into that egg. And then what hatches is the species or the individual associated with the new genetic information. Does that make sense? So somehow, the females seem to be taking genetic information from species two, plopping it into their own eggs, and producing species two males. They don't know exactly how that's happening. But the way that it could work in theory is that you've got a queen from species one in an area where the species overlap. She mates with a male from species two and stores that sperm. She migrates away from the area where the species overlap and

• 19:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  goes and starts her new colony somewhere completely different. She uses that sperm to make males. And then she mates with those males to get her hybrid workers.

• 20:08Daniel Whiteson?

  That's pretty icky, though. She's like mating with her own sons.

• 20:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, I mean, nature has a lot of uncomfortable stuff happening.

• 20:15Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm sure we can find some beauty in that also.

• 20:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nope. And so, no, moving on. It's so hard no. So, uh, okay. So she's got, she can mate with these males that she made. And now she's got her hybrid workers. But when it's time to make a queen, a new queen, she can mate with the other males that are of her species. And then those queens can mate with the males of species two that are already in the colony with them. They can acquire that sperm and then they can bring that sperm with them even farther away from the initial area that they lived. So even farther away from where you usually find species two.

• 20:56Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is a mechanism for extending your colonies beyond the boundaries of species two. They like need species two, but it's not always available. So they evolved this mechanism to basically cut them out of the loop and make them themselves.

• 21:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, yes. And then they also have this amazing ability to, to like, instead of combining genetic information, they, they just take the male's genetic information and like, and clone them, which is totally crazy. And, and to be honest, the authors were very clear. We do not know the mechanism to explain what's happening here. And so this is just like a hypothetical. But they compared it to domestication. It's kind of like domesticating species two and sort of taking it with you for your own purposes. And I'm not quite sure that I buy the comparison, but it's an interesting way to think about it.

• 21:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that is fascinating. They're sort of raising it and co-opting it for their own purposes in that sense. But when we domesticate cats, there's no like interbreeding. I mean, not usually that I'm aware of.

• 21:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, more absolutely not okay.

• 21:54Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, when people say cat lady, I don't think that's what they mean, right?

• 21:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, gosh. Oh, not safe for work. So, uh, the authors propose a new word, changing the subject. The new word is xenoparis, meaning they, quote, "need to produce individuals of another species as part of their life cycle."

• 22:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 22:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Xeno means like strange or different. And parity means like to give birth. So anyway, giving birth to something different.

• 22:17Daniel Whiteson?

  So does this mean we should again broaden our concept of what a species is, that the lines are even fuzzier than we thought before? The biology is amazing us at how messy it is again?

• 22:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you let's let's hold that answer because I am working on a whole episode on how do you define species and all of the like weird things evolution does that makes our job really difficult. It's going to be like a philosophical discussion, which I think will be right up your alley. Yep. Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 22:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  So tune in for the answer in a future episode and let's see if Jamie feels like I managed to figure this paper out.

• 22:54Speaker 06

  Wow. All right, let's hear from Jamie.

• 22:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks, Jamie.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  Thank you very much for explaining the article. I'm glad there was at least some form of parasitism in there for Professor Kelly. I look forward to your episode on defining a species. A story like this makes me wonder if maybe our categories are too rigid, or perhaps they don't apply to all creatures equally. Thanks, though. I'm really grateful for the explanation.

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• 25:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so from ants to aphantasia, which I reliably produced incorrectly, I'm sure.

• 25:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Me ouch on that one there, Kelly. All right, so we are answering questions today. We love getting questions from listeners. If you have a question about the nature of the universe, or really anything about this beautiful, incredible, disgusting cosmic violence that we have and that we live in, please write to us to [email protected]. We will get back to you. And here's a question about visual imagery in the mind and how it enables or disables people to do physics.

• 25:57Speaker 09

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I recently found out that I have a trait called aphantasia, which is the inability to consciously pull up visual imagery in my mind. I do dream, though, but finding out others can picture an apple in their head with their eyes open or closed was mind-blowing. And I've gone most of my adult life without even knowing this. Imagine my continued surprise when I discovered that it's not limited to visual information, but can also include auditory, smell, and even taste. I enjoy reading sci-fi and fantasy, but my experience and your experience must be worlds apart. And that leads me to my question.

• 26:40Speaker 09

  As a physicist, how do you use imagery on a day-to-day basis? Are you writing equations on a chalkboard? And if so, are you holding the chalk? Thanks so much.

• 26:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh my gosh, this is such a fascinating question. And this question reminded me of Temple Grandin. So when we got our son's autism diagnosis, I read every biography I could find, written or autobiography written by someone who's autistic, so that I could try to understand like what his life would be like. And I guess Temple Grandin has this amazing ability to sort of imagine what it's like to be. So she works with livestock and tries to create ways to make their lives better and to have more humane practices. And she's amazingly good at like envisioning what it must be like to be a cow and what it is that they're seeing. And she clearly can imagine things way better than I can.

• 27:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it sounds like this listener is on the other side where they're able to envision even less than I can. And I think this spectrum is totally fascinating.

• 27:41Daniel Whiteson?

  It is really amazing. And it's something we only understood like in the last, you know, 10 or 15 years that there is a variation between people and their mental imagery. Essentially, we've been communicating with each other about this kind of stuff for thousands of years and not realizing that we're having very different experiences internally. And I read this excellent article in the New Yorker very recently about Afantasia from late October, I really recommend it. And it begins with a story of a physicist who, in his late 30s or early 40s, finally realizes that when everybody else is talking about having images in their minds, they're being literal about it. He thought forever that everyone was just sort of like using metaphors, like, I mean,

• 28:25Daniel Whiteson?

  you say you're thinking about that, you're seeing that in your mind, but you're not literally like seeing it, right? And it was only like recently, the dude is like totally grown up when he realized people are being literal, that some people can close their eyes and imagine an apple from yesterday and like see it be green and shimmery and, you know, really visualize these things. He thought everybody was being figurative.

• 28:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  What do you think it would be like to realize that as an adult? I mean, I think animal behaviorists think about this kind of stuff all the time, like, you know, that animal can do something I can't. And but it must have been a crazy moment to realize.

• 29:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, I think everybody is a little different. And as you're growing up, you discover like, wow, everybody thinks that swimming is fun and I hate the beach, or everybody else loves chocolate, but I think it's gross, or watermelon tastes like cilantro. So it's not unusual to find something that makes you different. But it is amazing how such fundamental parts of what we think of as the human experience can be different from person to person. And you know, this is a question like philosophers have been debating for thousands of years. Like, what is it like to be a bat? Do we see the same color red? And so sort of incredible that it's only recently people have been studying this in detail.

• 29:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And this article goes into the history of the study of it, which is only about 150 years old. There's a guy Francis Galton, who's also sort of a famous eugenicist.

• 29:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 29:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Did some early research and found a bunch of examples of scientists who, he says, quote, "have feeble powers of visual representation." So scientists in particular tend to not be able to imagine things in their minds, which I think is, you know, the impetus for today's question. And that's surprising because it feels like visual imagery is so important to physics. Like, think of the story of Einstein coming up with relativity. He says that he was imagining or trying to imagine pulling up alongside a photon. And in realizing that that was impossible, he understood how photons have no reference frame. And Einstein's work is filled with these like examples of trains and passing each other in light. And like clearly, he's imagining visual situations, right?

• 30:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:34Daniel Whiteson?

  And in chemistry, there's lots of examples, like how did somebody figure out the structure of benzene? They had like a dream of a snake biting its own tail. It's like very vivid visual imagery. So it's easy to imagine that having vivid mental imagery would be essential for doing science, right?

• 30:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but Galton was wrong about a lot of things, was a lot of things, a lot of important things. Was he wrong about this too?

• 30:59Daniel Whiteson?

  So we don't have enough data to know. And the field has really gone back and forth. Like in the early 1900s, the widespread belief among psychologists was that mental imagery didn't exist. There's a movement of behaviorism led by a guy named J B Watson, who says, quote, "What does a person mean when he closes his eyes or ears and says, I see the house where I was born? Touching, of course, but sheer bunk. We are merely dramatizing. The behaviorist finds no proof of imagery in all of this." So psychiatrists felt like, no, you're not really feeling these things. You're not really seeing these things, which is bizarre because some of them must have been experiencing it, right? But, you know, that was just the movement. It's, science is weird that way.

• 31:43Daniel Whiteson?

  It follows these trends and these fads and eventually it zigzags towards the truth, but it can go down some weird rabbit holes.

• 31:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and it can get stuck in them for a while.

• 31:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and so it was only the early 2000s when a Scotsman had a cardiac procedure. And after that, discovered he could no longer picture anything. Like, he used to be able to. And then he had this procedure done and all of a sudden he like couldn't have a mental image of, you know, his wife's face when she wasn't there. He like lost this ability.

• 32:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  What was the tie in with the cardiac procedure? Did part of his brain not get enough oxygen as part of the procedure?

• 32:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so he went to a neurologist and this neurologist had always been interested in this kind of stuff anyway. And did a study and showed that part of this guy's brain had been like weakened, probably because of this cardiac event. And he was trying to call these mental images up, but that part of his brain was not activating. So he found the part of the brain that was like activating when other people were making mental images. And in this guy was now failing. And so he wrote an article about it. This is like a new discovery. And then a bunch of people wrote in and they were like, oh my gosh, that describes my experience. And so it turns out this wasn't just like one random Scotsman who had an injury, but it was fairly common. And so he decided to call this aphantasia.

• 33:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Fantasia was defined by Aristotle as the ability to conjure an image in your imagination. So aphantasia, meaning you can't do it. And Carl Zimmer wrote an article about this in Discover magazine, which got a lot more attention and then a lot more people wrote in. And they were like, wow, this is actually quite widespread.

• 33:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Huge Carl Zimmer fan, let me just say.

• 33:24Daniel Whiteson?

  I know, and I love when science journalism helps propel the science, right? Gets the right attention to it. People are like, hey, everybody should know about this. This is kind of a thing. And a lot of people, it turns out, discover that they have this condition only when reading about it or hearing about it described on the radio. Like their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing things or imagining things or visualizing beaches or whatever. And they just assumed that these were idioms, that they were like, kind of being hyperbolic, they were exaggerating, really, that they weren't really seeing it. And only when hearing this described, that this was a condition that you could have, that they'd been deeply and profoundly misunderstanding everybody else's experience.

• 34:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  I wonder if they're more likely to doodle, because if I'm trying to keep track of things in my head, but I couldn't do that, I feel like I'd want to doodle it out on paper to keep. And anyway, I'm getting, this is amazing.

• 34:17Daniel Whiteson?

  No, it's fascinating. And in the article, they interview some artists, and there are some artists who have a phantasia, and they hear other artists say like, the picture didn't come out as crisply as it does in my mind. And these artists with the phantasia are like, what are you talking about? And there's the opposite condition called hyperphantasia, where you have exceptionally detailed mental images, which sounds awesome, but some people describe it as like, graphic and inescapable. You know, where you like, if you watch a horror movie, you just like, can't escape having those terrible scenes in your mind. You know, we don't fade the same way we do for others.

• 34:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  I can totally imagine that not being good. Like those pictures of screw worm that I looked at, I've kind of forgotten them. It would be awful if I could still see them right now.

• 35:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, somebody with hyperphantasia said that, for example, if somebody just like, mentions skateboarding, then he gets like, an avalanche of vivid memories of every skateboarding experience he's ever had, being in like, stuck in virtual reality and having like, a 360 degree video of a thousand skateboarding experiences forced on you. So he's sort of at the mercy of what people say, because his, his brain is so visual.

• 35:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  That feels like two problems, though. Like, being able to really visualize something and having too many memories coming in. That seems, that seems like two things.

• 35:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. So this is something we're still understanding. It's like it's the brain, so it's complicated. But it's amazing to me that it's only recently we've even recognized that this is an issue, that there really is a difference. And there's this meme that's going around now online, you've probably seen it, which shows like a person with like a crisp image of an apple in their mind, and then gradations all the way down to a person with no image at all. And you should look at that and you should ask yourself like, what do I see in my mind's eye? And there really is a huge spectrum. There are people who just cannot visualize stuff in their brains, and people can have like exceptionally crisp photo quality images in their minds, which might feel weird to you as well. And I thought about this myself, and I'm a very visual person. I can really imagine a crisp apple,

• 36:16Daniel Whiteson?

  not quite photorealistic, but with a lot of detail. How about you, Kelly? What kind of images do you see in your mind?

• 36:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think I'm somewhere in between. Definitely not photorealistic, but I can see stuff.

• 36:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is fascinatingly connected to thinking about science, because we talked earlier about how it might be really important to have these visuals in your mind to do science. But Oliver Sacks did this fascinating experience, which you'd love, Kelly, because it involves self experimentation. He had almost no mental imagery, but then he decided to take heroic quantities of amphetamines. And while he was doing this, he could see images in his mind. It like activated this part of his brain so he could do it. But then he could no longer think about abstract stuff. So it was sort of a trade off. So it might be that people who are exceptionally visual can't think as abstractly. And people

• 37:05Daniel Whiteson?

  who think better abstractly can't think as visually. And so to the question, like what's crucial for doing physics, it might be that not being constrained by visual imagery makes you better thinking about complex things like 11 dimensional manifolds that you need to solve string theory, right? Maybe being unshackled from the reality of our intuition, the dominance of our physical world and its implied limitations makes it easier to think about complex numbers and all sorts of crazy things, which a lot of us find counterintuitive because we don't see them reflected in our reality. And so I think the answer to the question Is that there's a whole spectrum of experience and there's different kinds of physicists.

• 37:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Like for me, when I think about physics, I think very geometrically. Even if we're talking about like weird abstract math, I like see it in my mind as shapes like fitting together or not fitting together or clicking or pulling on each other. Like when I think about quantum fields, it's very visual and geometric. And I always struggled with equations like I can do the math. Obviously I know how to manipulate equations, but I don't think in terms of equations. I don't look at an equation and understand intuitively. I have to translate it into sort of geometric concepts in order to understand how the pieces are pulling on each other and how they interplay with each other. So I think there's probably a whole different spectrum and different kinds of brains are good at different kinds of things. And I'm glad that we have a diversity of brains in physics and in biology and in the world.

• 38:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely, but now you've got me wanting a survey of different fields and having them do that, that like

• 38:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 38:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Gradient of photorealistic apple to like hazy apple and seeing if different kinds of fields have different average scores on that test.

• 38:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, right. Would be fascinating. Exactly. But it's, it's good that we have all these different kinds of brains. I wonder how hereditary it is, you know, if like, if you have apple pictures as parents, does that mean you can picture apples? And if not, and how random it is. Anyway, it's amazing the way the world is and the way we image it and how bad we are at understanding other people's internal experience. And what else are we not understanding because we're using these clumsy words?

• 39:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Even within our own species, right? And then you try to figure out what's happening with another species. And it's amazing we understand anything at all.

• 39:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

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• 41:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from you, from listeners just like you, who had a moment of curiosity that they couldn't scratch themselves. And so they wrote to us and we are here to scratch that itch.

• 41:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and speaking of scratching, we're going to talk about little mites that live on your face.

• 41:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, boy.

• 41:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so Lunar on Discord had this question for us.

• 41:36Speaker 11

  Good morning, Daniel and Kelly. How are you? This is Lunar from Discord. So my question is pretty simple. Why does a thing like Demodex feliculorum actually exist? I understand nature is strange and life is beautiful, but why do these things exist? Why do I now know that there are itty-bitty little mites living on my face and getting jiggy with it all through the night? It kind of sort of makes me want to bathe in pesticide. So can someone put my mind at ease and just? Let me know, let us know, let the people know that these things aren't causing us any harm. And they might just very well be living out their best life.

• 42:19Speaker 11

  So what's up with these little face invaders? Thanks.

• 42:24Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, I'm a big believer in scientific education and knowing stuff, but wow, I'm not sure. I really want to know about all the gross stuff that lives on my face.

• 42:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Too bad. Here it comes. Okay, so Demodex is a genus of mites and mites are related to arachnids. So they're related to spiders and ticks, but like they're their own sort of thing. And they live on our faces. There are two species that you tend to find on your face. Demodex feliculorum and Demodex brevis. Feliculorum lives in like our smaller hair follicles and like your eyelashes and stuff. And so your hair follicles are like, you know, the holes where the hair shaft sort of goes in there. They live inside of them. They're a social species and they eat skin cells that they find in there. The other species usually lives near oil glands and stuff in hair follicles also.

• 43:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  And they're eating like the greasy stuff that our oil glands make.

• 43:19Daniel Whiteson?

  So that mean that they're really small, they're like smaller than the width of a hair. So they can like crawl into these follicles and have a snack.

• 43:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Super tiny. You can't see them. They're less than half a millimeter. The brevis one is particularly small. So without a microscope, you can't see them. You can't feel them.

• 43:34Daniel Whiteson?

  But if you have clear visual imagery, now you're thinking about them and you're imagining them crawling all over your face.

• 43:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, but they save the crawling over your face for nighttime. So right now they are in your pores, eating their dead skin buffet and their grease buffet.

• 43:52Daniel Whiteson?

  All you can eat dead skin buffet.

• 43:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  But when you fall asleep, they come out of your pores and your follicles and they mate on your face.

• 44:04Daniel Whiteson?

  They mate on your face.

• 44:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  They mate on your face.

• 44:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. I guess for some people that's good news, you know, to eat your own. I don't know. There are so many jokes we could make here, but we're not going to because you're already imagining them. So we don't have to.

• 44:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. Okay. So we had a listener ask us in the past, how do pinworms know it's nighttime? How do face mites know it's nighttime? I looked this up and first of all, it turns out they can detect light. So probably even from inside your hair follicles, they can tell if the lights are on or the lights are off.

• 44:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So they can just like notice it's getting dark and they're like, ooh, it's time for some romance.

• 44:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right.

• 44:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Somebody's turning down the lights, putting on the insect, putting on the algae.

• 44:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. I've been really trying. I'll stop. So.

• 44:50Daniel Whiteson?

  We are keeping that, Matt. That's gold.

• 44:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no. All right. So, okay, so it could be the light, but they also, and this is sort of interesting, a couple of episodes back, many episodes back now, maybe, we talked about circadian rhythms. And we talked about how circadian rhythms are this like interplay between proteins that are made by your genes. And some of them are made more at night and some of them are made more during the day. And they help you keep these 24 hour cycles. Somebody looked, a group of researchers looked at the genome of demodex that live on our face and they're missing a lot of the genes that you'd need to make the proteins that make circadian clocks. And so they think that actually the mites are sort of bathed in the melatonin that we make. And so instead of trying to do their own circadian clocks,

• 45:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  they're like, oh, the human is oozing melatonin. Time for them to go to bed. Time for me to get it on. And so they don't need to do it on their own. Anyway, that's just a hypothesis, but there are other parasites that sort of queue into what host hormones are doing and use that information for their own purposes.

• 45:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So they don't have their own internal clock, but they have all these external triggers that tell them like when it's algae in time.

• 46:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 46:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Can't get enough of your face, baby.

• 46:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, gosh. All right. That's enough. That's enough. Okay. So, so where do your mites come from? This is an interesting question. So actually, most people, by the time they're adults, have mites.

• 46:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 46:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  And a lot of kids have mites too. And so somebody did a study to try. To figure out. So imagine that you have a family living together. You have two moms and two kids. The two kids, if they were breastfed by one of the moms, they are much more likely to have hermites than the mites from the other mom, because another place where you find these mites is on nipples. And so the mites, you know, probably like jump off the nipples and onto your face. And so you get your face mites from your mom. And if you were to look at the other mom in that couple, her face mites probably are more like her mom's face mites. Does that all make sense?

• 46:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 46:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Something else you can thank your mom for.

• 47:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And are these bad in any way? Or are they good? Or are they just totally neutral?

• 47:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, good question. So other species have demodex mites too. Some of them can be sort of parasite like. But it looks like our mites are usually not a problem. And maybe they're sort of evolving in a trajectory away from parasitism. But for most of us, we've got these mites on our face, we'll never notice it. But if you end up being immunocompromised, sometimes you will start having problems with these mites. If you're immunocompromised, it seems like they're able to reproduce even more. And if you have rosacea, they can make your skin feel even more uncomfortable. They don't cause the rosacea. But if you already have like a, you know, problem with your skin getting irritated, having a bunch of mites on your face is probably not going to help anything.

• 47:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  They also contribute to what I think is called, here's, here's another opportunity for me to mispronounce something.

• 47:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Love it.

• 47:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Blepharitis? Have you heard of blepharitis, Daniel?

• 47:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Never heard of it, or maybe it's not pronounced that way, but it doesn't ring a bell.

• 48:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, it's probably not pronounced that way. But so it's essentially like you get this like crusty stuff on your eyelids. And they think that the mites living in your eyelashes could be contributing to that. And this tends to particularly be a problem in elderly folks. And so, you know, this also could maybe be an immunocompromised sort of situation contributing to it. But for most of us, the mites aren't bad.

• 48:25Daniel Whiteson?

  It's amazing. You can have this whole ecosystem living on your face and snacking on your skin and not really hurting you at all. They're just like friendly neighbors.

• 48:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Do they benefit? Do they like help clean stuff up? Like all this dead skin? Would it be bad if you didn't have somebody munching on it?

• 48:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I don't think so. I didn't, I didn't come across anything saying that the mites are helpful. And, you know, especially these days where we've got like soaps to wash our face, we've got ways to exfoliate. I don't think we really, they're not really contributing to the like cleanliness of our faces. And you see similar things happening in dogs. So dog species have their own demodex mites. And sometimes you'll get bald patches on puppies because their immune systems aren't good yet. They're just developing. And those bald patches will be areas where the mites are sort of getting out of control. But if you just wait long enough, in a lot of cases, it'll clear up because the puppy's immune system will mature and they'll get those mite populations back under control. And that patch will sort of grow back in again.

• 49:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 49:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  But Daniel, I bet you are wondering, does demodex poop?

• 49:30Daniel Whiteson?

  I was wondering if we could complete the D K E U bingo and have either poop or cannibalism. So which way are we going?

• 49:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're going poop.

• 49:38Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 49:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I didn't find any evidence that they eat each other.

• 49:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so for a long time, the going knowledge was that demodex doesn't poop. They store up all of the waste that they make. They only live about three weeks. And so actually, if you live to be about 73 years old and your demodex each live three weeks, you're probably host to something like 1,200 generations of mites.

• 50:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 50:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Throughout your life, which is just crazy, but.

• 50:06Daniel Whiteson?

  I have an input output question. They have inputs.

• 50:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 50:09Daniel Whiteson?

  They have no outputs. Are they just getting bigger and bigger and bigger? Or what's going on?

• 50:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so the idea was, you know, three weeks is not a long time. They just, they store it. They do get a little bit bigger. And then when they die, they just kind of like, you know, release everything.

• 50:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Um, so they just like die in a big poopy corpse in your face?

• 50:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. But actually, some very good sleuthing in 2022 with some great photos, found an anus.

• 50:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yay.

• 50:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is why you fund basic science, people.

• 50:41Daniel Whiteson?

  I want to use very powerful telescopes to look for tiny anuses.

• 50:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, tiny anuses have been found. They also found a tiny penis on their head. So that's where the males have their, their wieners. So anyway, all kinds of important information, but we haven't actually answered the listener's question yet, which is.

• 51:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh yeah, I've lost track. What was the question again?

• 51:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why? Why would you have this horrible thing? And I actually, I, I feel like it's obvious, like we are a super abundant species. We are very close to our offspring, you know, sometimes they sleep next to us, we breastfeed them. It is very easy to imagine transmitting this, you know, parasite or symbiote, if it's not bad for us, like this, this critter from one organism to another, we are a super abundant species. And you know, they're so tiny that we don't even know they're there. So we're not attacking them or anything like that. I mean, it seems to me like we are a great ecosystem for a little critter like this. And so, you know.

• 51:44Daniel Whiteson?

  So you, why not? Basically?

• 51:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Evolution fills any niche that it can find that it's got a path to, and our faces were one of those paths.

• 51:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And is there like a whole ecosystem there? Are there predators that gobble these things? Or do they live a predator free lifestyle?

• 52:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know. That's a good question.

• 52:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Because they sound delicious.

• 52:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sure. Okay. I feel like they, they probably have parasites also that infect them or something.

• 52:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. Exactly. Maybe they have face mites.

• 52:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe they do have face mites.

• 52:17Daniel Whiteson?

  It's face mites all the way down, isn't it?

• 52:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh my gosh. We figured it out. Yeah. So I, I didn't find any stories about them having parasites or predators, but I would love to know. And, you know, we are probably their biggest problem when we wash and exfoliate our faces, but, uh, but they hang in there inside our pores.

• 52:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we have brought you up to speed to the forefront of human knowledge on face mites. Let's check in with our listener and see if we have scratched lunar's itch.

• 52:46Speaker 11

  All right. Hey, thank you very much for that. Excellent answer, Kelly. And I greatly appreciate, uh, knowing that these little creatures are just simply getting by. Um, it's a, still a little bit weird to know that, uh, they get up some interesting nocturnal activity. At least someone's having fun.

• 53:07Daniel Whiteson?

  And thank you very much, Daniel. I will never listen to Barry White the same way again without having a certain mental image of little mites and their heads having fun on my face. Thanks a lot, guys. I appreciate it. Keep up the good work. You guys rock.

• 53:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you so much, everybody, for your questions. We appreciate them so much. There are so many topics that I would love to have the time to dig into, and when you ask about them, I get to. I appreciate you all so much.

• 53:35Daniel Whiteson?

  We do. We love hearing from you. I love opening my email in the morning and seeing all the incredible diversity of curiosity and questions and wondering and joy. We love hearing from you. It makes this podcast a conversation between us and you, not just between me and Kelly. So thanks, everyone, for joining in.

• 53:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you. Until next time.

• 54:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 54:08Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 54:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 54:20Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org.

• 54:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 54:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 54:40Speaker 12

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• 55:08Speaker 13

  This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. 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 can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 55:39Speaker 01

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