Underwater Songbirds, Tea Bagging for Science, Um Yes Hello it's Spooky Lake Month!

Geo Rutherford joins the show to talk all things spooky lake month! Plus, Liz Clayton Fuller returns to explain how one songbird dives underwater, and Rachel talks about soiling undies... for science. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tweet at us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Click here to learn more about all of our stories! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to all of Jess' content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.jesscapricorn.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Jess Boddy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Popular Science: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/PopSci⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme music by Billy Cadden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rachel Feltman?

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• 0:45Rachel Feltman?

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• 1:23Speaker 01

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• 1:56Rachel Feltman?

  At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feldman.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  I'm Liz Clayton Fuller.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  And I'm Gio Rutherford.

• 2:20Rachel Feltman?

  Gio, welcome to the show.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:24Rachel Feltman?

  Would you tell our listeners, who, some of whom will instantly know you, because I did get at one listener, I have had at least one listener request your presence on this show, but just in case, would you tell them a little bit about who you are and what you get up to on the internet?

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Oh, this might help a little bit. All right. Yes, hello, my name is Geo Rutherford, and it's Spooky Lake Month, where we're doing 31 days of haunted hydrology. I do Spooky Lake Month, which is kind of a universal internet thing at this point. It started on TikTok in 2020, but I've since kind of tried to do other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. So it's 31 days of strange, mysterious wet things, as I like to say, because I've kind of broadened out from just lakes. I think I only did lakes the first year, and then ever since then, I've kind of just allowed anything wet to kind of pass the criteria. And because of that, because of accidentally getting famous on the internet over water,

• 3:23Speaker 03

  I was able to write and illustrate spooky lakes and a new book called Spooky Rivers.

• 3:28Rachel Feltman?

  Nice.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Amazing. That's so cool. You have such an iconic voice intro. I hope that you feel very cool that when you do your intro, when I hear, um, yes, hello, I'm like, yay, I'm gonna learn something cool.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  It is satisfying. It worked out for me, and it was thanks to a listener, actually, is the one who said I should do, and 31 days of haunted hydrology. So shout out my amazing, um, uh, fans who love Spooky Lake Month.

• 3:56Rachel Feltman?

  As do we all. Well, we're here in the spookiest month of the year to talk about some weird things, some wet, some not. So let's, let's get into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera. Decide which one we absolutely have to hear about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was in a very non-competitive way. We're often, we don't even really reconvene at the end. That's fine. Liz, welcome back to the show. Always great to have you.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Thank you. I feel like, at this point, I don't know if this is fair to say, but I feel like, in a very affectionate way, I'm like the weirdest thing substitute teacher, like roll in the TV and talk about birds.

• 4:46Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh, absolutely. Speaking of birds, what's your tease for today?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Okay, I did, I did choose a wet bird in honor of Gio. So my tease for today is a songbird that swims. It's more likely than you think.

• 5:04Rachel Feltman?

  Ooh.

• 5:07Rachel Feltman?

  My tease is, these soiled underpants went from clothing to science to haute couture. Yeah.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  I'm intrigued, to say the least.

• 5:19Rachel Feltman?

  Yep.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  I mean, they're, they are wet.

• 5:22Rachel Feltman?

  It's true. It's true. I said my fact wasn't wet, but there's water involved. Gio, what's your tease?

• 5:30Speaker 03

  I guess my tease is the deepest and oldest lake in the world, which is something that I did not learn about this week, but I, maybe you guys will learn about it this week. So we thought that would be a fun one, and a shout out to my audience who loves to talk about it.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:49Rachel Feltman?

  I can't wait. Let's see, where should we begin? Liz, why don't you kick us off today?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. So in honor of Gio, I wanted to tell everybody about the earth's aquatic songbird, the dipper. So there's only one dipper in the United States. It's the American dipper, and there are only five species of dipper worldwide. And if you're familiar with birds at all, like, most birds have many, many, many of one species, right? Like woodpeckers, ducks, et cetera. Dippers, only five, so really not too many. They are members of the bird family Sincleidae, and in the US, our dipper's Latin name is Sincless Mexicanus. And I really like that Sincless sounds like sinkless, like an unsinkable bird.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  When I was learning about them, I was like, yes, the unsinkable songbird. So for context, the most closely related family to Sincleidae is the thrush family, which is Turdidae, which is also a really good family name. And that has 194 bird species in it. So this is a very, very small family of birds. So what is so special about the dipper? These are cute, round, charcoal gray, chunky, little, unassuming songbirds, not quite as big as a robin, kind of ring-shaped with stalky little tails. And something very cute and interesting about them is that they have a totally white eyelid. So when they blink, they kind of look like they have cartoon ghost eyes, which is really adorable.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  And spooky.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. Perfect for this month. So most songbirds, you know, you picture them flying around, floating through the forest canopy, or the meadow, or the grassland, but not the dipper. Dippers are hardcore. They dive headfirst into freezing, glacial, fast-moving meltwater and walk along the bottom of river and creek beds in search of their food. So these birds have a very unique lifestyle and a lot of incredible adaptations that help them live this way. So fascinatingly, unlike a lot of other diving birds, you can think of ducks, penguins, boobies, puffins, they all have webbed feet. The dipper does not. They have actually really long toes.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Not till they call out their toes, "Dippers, I love you, you're perfect and beautiful", but they have very, very long toes that are not webbed, and they use their little long toes for kind of grabbing into the rocks on the bottom of the river and creek bed so that they can walk along the bottom. They also have short, stout wings, and they work like little oars to propel them underwater. So basically, they just hop in headfirst and then push to the bottom and then grab onto the bottom, and then that's where they start foraging. So it's really fascinating to see. They also have evolved solid bones to reduce their buoyancy. So we've always thought about birds as having hollow bones.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  I learned, you know, I'm an artist first and bird lover, enjoyer, second. So I thought, when people said hollow bones for a really long time, I was picturing like a straw, you know? It's like, it's just empty on the inside, but bird hollowness is more of, there's lots of air pockets in the bones, so they're very light, but they're not actually hollow. But dippers have solid bones to reduce their buoyancy. And other diving birds have the same adaptation, which is really cool. And I genuinely, that was a, I know a lot of bird stuff, and that one was a new one for me when I was looking into the dipper. Speaking of solid bones, I learned that kiwis have solid bones as well, and that's just

• 9:37Speaker 02

  for their terrestrial lifestyle. They don't fly, so they don't need to have hollow bones, so they don't. So kiwis, nice and solid.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  I wonder if they started out hollow and then became solid as they didn't need to fly anymore.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, I wonder that, too. Like, when did the bones become solid? But, so our dippers additionally have a large preen gland for waterproofing their feathers. Do y'all know about preen glands?

• 10:05Speaker 03

  No, I don't know much about birds. This is all new information.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  This is all new, okay. Geo's learning the 50 new things as I go through this list. So, most birds have preen glands that are located at the base of their tail. I kind of think if you were envisioning yourself as a bird, it would be like where your tailbone is, kind of. So it's at the top of their tail. And it's described, and I'm so sorry for this description, as a nipple-like nub. And it secretes preen oil. So if you've ever seen birds preening and they're like turning all the way around and kind of like pecking at the top of their tail, they could be getting preen oil in their beak and they're running their beak down their feathers to encase them in oil.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  So that's why birds have to preen regularly to sort of continue to waterproof themselves. So, some families of birds don't have preen glands at all. This is another thing that I learned. And just use a different means to stay clean and dry, like dust baths. And also, they simply just don't go plunging into rivers. So it's not really a problem for them, like woodpeckers, for instance. So our dipper, we talked about their, I, I put their toes on blast. They have long, sharp, sharp claws, long toes to hold on to the rocks and swift currents as they walk along the creek and the riverbeds to forage. Additionally, another adaptation they have is that their eyes have extremely strong focus muscles

• 11:36Speaker 02

  that can change the curvature of their lens to enhance their vision underwater, which just is very badass of them, honestly. And they also have nasal flaps to prevent water from going in their nostrils. I just picture a little kid at the pool with the things shoved up their nose, you know, wrapped around the back of their head and goggles. That's a dipper to me.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  They also have a high hemoglobin concentration in their blood that allows them to store oxygen greater than that of other birds, allowing them to remain underwater for 30 seconds or more. They also have a slower basal metabolic rate, approximately one-third slower than typical terrestrial passerines of a similar mass, passerines being songbirds. So what are they eating down there? What are they doing? Why are they in the rivers? So they're eating yummy little insects. So it's the nymphs or larvae of a bunch of different species of flies, like mayflies, stoneflies. And they also eat little fish and fish eggs and sometimes little tiny crustaceans as well. So, why are they named dippers?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  You can kind of guess that it's because they take a dip in the water. But, they also do a dip out of the water. So if you see them on sort of the side of a creek, they're often doing this, imagine their legs are still, but their body is just doing a little, a little bounce, like up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. They're just doing this little dip dance. Constantly.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  You should definitely look up a video of it because it's extremely cute. And they're just kind of bobbing, jamming all the time. And there are a few theories about why they are dipping. And it's not 100% clear yet, but the sort of prevailing theory is that because they are occupying these areas of fast-moving water, that maybe they're signaling to each other with their dips, because perhaps the babbling, rushing water would drown out their song. So, there, again, are only five species of dipper. Three of them do a lot of diving and the two dippers that live in South America

• 13:57Speaker 02

  do a lot more rock climbing. They kind of climb up the walls where the water is running down, like in waterfalls, and they dip less. So I think the jury is sort of still out on what are, what is the dip? Is it just a cool dance? Nothing in birds is usually just a cool dance. It's either for communication or sexual selection or something, but they're still kind of trying to figure out the dip. And for me, I was lucky enough to see a dipper when I lived in Seattle on a hike, one of my favorite hike in the Cascades. And they were just doing their dip thing. And then I ended up doing a painting of them and that painting got me a bird art internship that totally started my bird art career.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  So dipper's very significant to me. Love those little freaks.

• 14:48Rachel Feltman?

  That's really nice.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  I looked it up and they really do look like songbirds. Like you would never think, oh yeah, this bird's about to like go underwater for 30 seconds. Looking at the picture of it.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Yes, you would maybe see them dive in and be like, please don't. And they do have long toes, like really long.

• 15:08Rachel Feltman?

  Really long toes. Yes, they really, really do.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Do you know what their maximum depth is? Like how deep do they go?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  It's pretty shallow, I think.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, because they look like creek, they're like creek and burb, babbling brook kind of birds.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah, I have to imagine it's like a couple feet. Because I also have to imagine that the flies are not, maybe their larvae's not even getting deeper than that. Like it wouldn't make sense for them to forage deeper, I'm not sure. But it's not too deep, but it is often like glacial runoff or mountain snow melt. And so the water is cold. So that's why they're so perfectly round and shielded. So they've got their like waterproof feathers on the outside and dents down on the inside, keeping them very warm and cozy as they do their little dives.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  My god, Liz, make sure you ask me about the Baikal insect, which is the deepest living insect in the world. It's like this, and it also has a hemoglobin thing where it's like bright red. And it, it's, it's larvae sink to the very bottom of Lake Baikal.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  And then they think, they're not sure, but they think that the like larvae pupa, whatever the next stage is, they ride bubbles up Lake Baikal to get back to the surface. So it's kind of, I actually did find out about that last year and made an entire separate video about it because it was so fascinating and weird.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  God, yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  So yeah, love a little, love a little larvae at the bottom of a cold freshwater environment.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  That's incredible. Yeah, there's going to be a dipper that adapts to scuba dive to get to those.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  That would be so impressive, yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  But yes, that is our aquatic songbird, the dipper.

• 16:49Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, the dipper.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:51Rachel Feltman?

  Wow, little dipper. They're little guys.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, little dipper.

• 16:55Rachel Feltman?

  We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

• 17:02Rachel Feltman?

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• 17:47Rachel Feltman?

  The contrast is really fun. And they are great at actually protecting my eyes, which some of my sunglasses definitely are not. If you need prescription lenses, Zenni has so many options. They've got single vision, progressives, readers, bifocals. There are tons of options for blocking UV rays. They've got night driving lenses designed to reduce glare from headlights. Customizing my sunglasses was super easy, super fun, and super affordable. Check new glasses off your list today with Zenni. Go to zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off, plus free shipping over $65. Style sell out, so don't wait. That's Z E N N I dot com slash podcast.

• 18:30Rachel Feltman?

  Promo code PODCAST15. Zenni.com slash podcast code PODCAST15. I recently did a big seasonal closet clean out. I don't know how my closet gets so out of hand, so fast, so often, but it does. And even though I've been really careful not to shop excessively, I still ended up with a pile of clothes that I haven't worn in a long time and I know I need to get rid of. If you also have a pile of clothes that you would like to turn into some extra cash or if you're looking to find unique items at great prices, Vinted makes all of that super easy. Vinted is a secondhand app that makes it easy for people to buy and sell pre-loved fashion. I've used a few resale apps, but Vinted has no seller fees,

• 19:15Rachel Feltman?

  which means I get to keep everything I earn. But it's still really well-designed and really simple to use. Just download the app for free, list your items on Vinted, which is super simple and takes no time at all. Then once an item sells, Vinted will create a prepaid shipping label so you can send your old clothes off to their new home. If you're feeling ready to clean out your closet and make a little extra money, download the Vinted app for free and start listing today. There are no seller fees, so you'll get to keep every dollar you earn.

• 19:47Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back and I'm gonna get into my fact, which as I said, is about underpants. Okay, so on our previous episode, I think it was literally just our last episode, I mentioned some Ig Nobel winning research and I of course focused on scientific inquiries into the evolution of smooching in that episode, but I also, but I also talked briefly about some science involving briefs. Ah, so

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 20:16Rachel Feltman?

  Today, I'm gonna share some more delightful details about that. For those of you who were not with me a fortnight ago, or who have filled your heads with so much knowledge since then that you need a reminder, one of this year's Ig Nobel Prize winners was a study out of the University of Zurich where scientists had folks bury tighty-whities in the name of investigating soil health. And I think a lot of us in the world think of dirt as being kind of inert, but as any proud plant mom or lover of nature can tell you, soil is a very complex ecosystem teeming with life. I read somewhere that a teaspoon of soil can contain more organisms

• 21:00Rachel Feltman?

  than there are people living on the planet.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 21:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah, healthy soil, it has billions of microorganisms and that abundance of life is how soil supports plant growth, how it filters and manages the flow of water, how it acts as a huge carbon sink, and how it sustains the habitats of loads of important macroorganisms. So it's very complicated, very important, very alive. And that kind of complexity is hard to build, easy to lose. It takes hundreds or even thousands of years for an inch of topsoil to form. And then it takes further centuries before it's, you know, fertile, healthy in

• 21:45Rachel Feltman?

  the way we're talking about soil being healthy, where it fuels and supports all of these processes. And if soil health declines and it loses, you know, that life, it can lose its ability to support life and cycle nutrients and do all of the other things that we really rely on it for. And before I get into the fun research, I do just want to spend a little bit of time on why this is so important. Cause again, I think people, people don't be thinking about the dirt.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  They don't.

• 22:16Rachel Feltman?

  So yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  And I'm guilty of that too, sometimes.

• 22:19Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, I mean, me too. I mean, it's, I think it's, we take it for granted because it's so ubiquitous. Yeah, soil degradation is a natural part of the planet's life cycle, but of course, as is the case with so many things that are natural and good, humans make it happen way too fast and when it's not supposed to. Um, yeah. So intensive farming practices, construction, you know, other things where humans come in and knock down trees, go all over the dirt, dig up the dirt. It disturbs the top layer of soil and that leaves the soil more vulnerable to wind and water erosion. Compaction can also be a problem. So if there's too much

• 23:02Rachel Feltman?

  water, if there's heavy weight on the soil, which of course can happen in large scale farming with, you know, heavy machinery, that compression can squeeze, you know, little tunnels and pores that are in the soil and push out the air, which makes the soil less habitable for organisms that live there. Other problems, excess irrigation and groundwater extraction can both increase salt in soil, which of course throws things out of whack, can be bad for stuff trying to live there. And yeah, this is happening all over. I saw one estimate that a third of the world, I saw one estimate that a third of the world's soil is moderately to highly degraded. The European Union actually has a huge, I think like billion euro initiative

• 23:47Rachel Feltman?

  towards getting better about recognizing and supporting soil health. And when things get really bad, because, you know, we can degrade soil health, we can do things to improve it, but it is possible to truly let soil get to a place, a point of no return. Um,

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Okay, I feel like I'm gonna squeeze in because I took a native plant class a couple months ago and we were talking about sort of converting an area of grass in your yard to become native plant area, right? Like, you're like, okay, we don't need a lawn, right? Let's make it native plants. And I said, can I just like till up the soil and replant stuff? And the instructor was like, so soil, she's talking to me about soil as its own living thing. And here I am, just trying to like churn it up. And basically she was like, if you churn it up, you're taking away the structure of it and all of these things. And

• 24:54Speaker 02

  like, you're also tilling probably the seeds back into the soil. So it's really not the best way to do it because it's so disruptive to the dirt. And I was like, dang, I wasn't even thinking about the dirt. And I felt bad about it.

• 25:08Rachel Feltman?

  Well, and that's so real. And I mean, that it is such a, a good thing to, to try to do to like replace your lawn with native plants.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  And I was coming from a good place.

• 25:20Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, intuitively, again, the sort of the way I think most of us think about dirt, you're like, yeah, the lawn's bad. So we just rip up lawn and let everything get back to being chaotic and beautiful. But unfortunately, tilling is not, not that, that it looks chaotic and beautiful to us, but it is in fact, very disruptive to the dirt.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  I didn't know that.

• 25:48Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  And I live right next to a farm. I'm literally watching the farmer pull up our soybeans that are across the street from us right now. And so that's kind of a fascinating fact for sure.

• 25:59Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and so when soil gets to this point of no return, that's often referred to as desertification. Um, it's so damaged, it's not bouncing back, almost nothing can grow. And that's actually, that's part of what happened in Haiti. You know, every once in a while, speaking personally, someone I know will go to the Dominican Republic or just, you know, be consuming media about that island and then be like, wait, wait a second, why are Haiti and the Dominican Republic so different? The answer broadly speaking is colonialism. But in more detail, one of the things that happened there is that on the

• 26:41Rachel Feltman?

  side of the island that is now Haiti, there was widespread colonial logging and monoculture. Soil nutrients were totally exhausted. France was stripping Haiti bear with a super extractive slave-based plantation economy. The other half of the island, the Dominican Republic, you know, not to be a Spanish colonial apologist, but in this particular case, they were mostly interested in mining gold and then they did cattle ranching and other less intensive agriculture. So it did maintain the tree cover and the overall soil health. There's, there are a lot of complicating factors in here. The, the microclimates are slightly different.

• 27:22Rachel Feltman?

  And also, once Haiti was so much more poor, it created this cycle of people needing wood and charcoal for fuel. So there's an ongoing deforestation issue while the Dominican Republic had the resources to focus on alternative sources of energy, but

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say the satellite image of Haiti versus Dominican Republicans is crazy.

• 27:44Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  It's like completely two different islands on the same piece of land.

• 27:48Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. It's really shocking. And like I said, they have, there's some microclimate differences, but there was a time when the island did not look like two different islands on one piece of land. And, you know, soil health and desertification was a major part of that process. This is also what happened in the US during the Dust Bowl. Farmlands overtook prairies, you know, huge swaths of grassland were destroyed so that people could farm. And people didn't realize that those grasses had literally been holding the topsoil down. And so then that was already bad. That was not so good. And then there was also a drought

• 28:30Rachel Feltman?

  and just the wind was able to strip the dirt straight off the ground because

• 28:37Speaker 02

  So wild.

• 28:38Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  And like, I think we need to make grassland conservation sexy.

• 28:42Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Because we, I feel like the, the forests and the wetlands are getting the spotlight and I do want them to also be in the spotlight, but I, we really, the grasslands for bird populations as well. It's so important for so many reasons. Yes. We make dirt conservation sexy.

• 29:03Rachel Feltman?

  No, and on my other show for Scientific American, Science Quickly, I interviewed a turf expert before the World Cup. And I was like, I've been a fool, man. I didn't know, I didn't know there were so many grasses that are just what I would call grass. And I didn't know, you know, grassland grass. I grew up in, you know, an area with a lot of wetlands. I know there's many types of grass, but when we're talking about grass that I would look at a lawn and say, that sure is grass. He was like, in my intro class, I'd probably teach you about 70 different types of grass. And I was like, oh no. I'm a fool who's thought at turf, but not at all. Yeah. And again, the, the Dust Bowl

• 29:46Rachel Feltman?

  is a great reminder that we gotta, we gotta pay attention to the, the complexity of ecosystems that look just kind of boring and simple to us. Because go figure, when you're rolling up to a place where you have not lived and acquired generational knowledge about the ecology.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:05Rachel Feltman?

  And your main focus is make money.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yes, deplete and profit.

• 30:11Rachel Feltman?

  Stuff that's not just bad morally, but also stupid ecologically. So

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:17Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. And just to, you know, one last note on, on the, the Dust Bowl, this was like, for folks who didn't have a weird girl literature era where they read You know, the Dear America diaries about the Dust Bowl.

• 30:35Rachel Feltman?

  These things were really bad. There were these storms called black blizzards were just dust that would block out the sun was engulfing everything for hundreds of miles. There was such a blizzard on what's called Black Sunday, which was April 14th, 1935. And it started in the plains, but it blew east at 60 miles per hour. And it ended, it went 200 miles out into the Atlantic. There were, you know, even though obviously the Dust Bowl was like putting people's actual lives at risk in, you know, places like the Southwest and the Midwest. But these storms did send dust out to the East Coast. Apparently the White House got dusty sometimes.

• 31:18Rachel Feltman?

  It was, we, it, people messed up. It was not good.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  This just makes me really want to talk about anoxic soil environments where nothing can decompose and a human body is like preserved for eternity as a soap body with a adipocere.

• 31:32Rachel Feltman?

  We've talked about soap bodies.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  I love soap, I love soap mummies. Those anoxic environments are always really fun.

• 31:38Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. I, I do just want to, just as an aside, because I think this was such a great concept for a horror movie and I feel like no one else watched it. Okay. It's 40% Rotten Tomatoes. People are allowed to have different opinions. I thought it was a good idea. There's a Dust Bowl horror movie called Hold Your Breath, which stars icon Sarah Paulson. It was on, it's on Hulu.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Love Sarah Paulson.

• 32:00Rachel Feltman?

  And listen, would I, is it a great movie? Apparently most of the internet thinks not. I do think it did make me say like, wow, there should be more horror about living in the Dust Bowl because it was a scary time. The dust could, you could just be engulfed in dirt.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  It's like, especially considering people's favorite movie in the world is Interstellar, which is about a futuristic Dust Bowl that's going to get us.

• 32:24Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  So.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yes. We need to go back to our roots.

• 32:31Rachel Feltman?

  Okay. So this is why we care about soil, but why do we care about underwear?

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Wet underwear in the soil.

• 32:39Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. So one important function of soil that is also pretty straightforward to test is decomposition, which, you know, you can kind of think of as the soil digesting something. And, you know, by breaking this material down, it releases those nutrients back for use by other organisms. We love decomposition. It's so good. We also love soap bodies. It's fun when decomposition doesn't happen in a specific weird way. But we like, we like most things to decompose. We don't like that plastic doesn't decompose, et cetera. So decomposition, pretty straightforward to study. Good thing to make sure your soil is doing. So it comes up a lot, especially in sort

• 33:21Rachel Feltman?

  of like citizen science projects or just, you know, research that's otherwise meant to be like a very low barrier to entry in terms of ways we can check in on how soil is doing. Cotton strips have been used to monitor decomposition in studies for decades. And in 2013, there was a study out of the Netherlands and Austria that developed the Teabag Index, or TBI, basically standardized a decomposition scale for commercially available teabags. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So quick segue to teabags before we get back to underwear. The TBI uses green and rooibos tea because green tea is all leaf. So that's very easy for microbes to decompose.

• 34:04Rachel Feltman?

  But if you take a woody or tea, then that decomposes at a slower rate. So you can bury a teabag of each type and then compare their decomp levels. And, you know, maybe get more precise data on the state of the soil there. Realistically, I think often the takeaway is that kids doing the experiment can learn an extra thing about how one of them decomposes faster than the other. But I'm sure that also the researchers who created this index found some interesting data points that they could triangulate with that. If you want to see an interactive map of people who have used this protocol or get instructions to do it yourself, the researchers are not actively collecting the data anymore.

• 34:46Rachel Feltman?

  But there is, if you go to teabag, if you go to teabagindex.org,

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 34:51Rachel Feltman?

  You can participate and log your data. There's also, there's, they have a separate site, teetime4, number four, teetime4science.org. If you want to just see a bunch of stories about different people who have done this over the years.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Okay. It's a very cute map. There's little teabags on the map.

• 35:09Rachel Feltman?

  It's really cute.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  I love an interactive map.

• 35:12Rachel Feltman?

  And also there's, listen, finding the exact tea you're supposed to use can be difficult because for, you know, to standardize things, it's like specific Lipton tea that they use. And they do note in their instructions that the teabags have changed slightly over the years and that they like, you know, tried to learn some stuff from that. But of course it, it does make it less standardized. That being said, you can totally do this for yourself for fun, uh, using whatever teabags, then make sure you're not using a teabag that has plastic in it. Fun fact, a lot of teabags now have plastic, which I think is really rude and annoys me.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Not good.

• 35:52Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. So keep an eye on that for your own self, but also if you're going to bury them in the ground.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Yes, definitely.

• 35:59Rachel Feltman?

  Anyway, the researchers behind this latest study, they were like, okay, as universally simple as the Teabag Index is, um, is there anything we can do to make it even easier to execute and more visually appealing? Cause when you pull the teabags out, the way you check the decomposition rate is you weigh them to be like, how much leaf is left in this teabag? And they were like, is there something we could do where when you pull it out, there's going to be like an instant, like whoa, so much decomposition has happened? And they noted that something that had been used to illustrate soil decomposition, though, quote, "without scientific rigor," was the burial of cotton underpants.

• 36:43Rachel Feltman?

  And indeed, I don't know who came up with this for the first time, but the Montana Office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service does have a soil your undies challenge, which is really good.

• 36:58Rachel Feltman?

  Well done, guys.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Wow. Thank you for that.

• 37:01Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Did you say Montana?

• 37:03Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, Montana.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Thank you, Montana.

• 37:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, thank you, Montana. And that urges folks to test their soil health by burying underpants. It gives people basically everything they need to know to do this at home. But again, it wasn't a lack of scientific rigor. This was not about sending in your results and having a scientist analyze them. So these researchers in Switzerland were like, in the name of creating a true underwear index, we're going to standardize things. They sent 1,000 individuals or around 1,000 individuals from throughout Switzerland, two pairs each of the same underpants. They were organic cotton from a Swiss supermarket chain. They were men's, white, size small. Yeah. Everybody also received 12 teabags of the proper type for TBI analysis.

• 37:48Rachel Feltman?

  They got a sampling bag to collect some soil and of course detailed instructions in several different languages. So the participants picked a spot, dug a hole, they collected a little bit of soil, and then they planted two underpants side by side. And basically they were instructed to sort of partially refill the hole, then put the teabags next to the underpants and then fill it up the rest of the way. They marked the spot. 30 days later, they went back, got the first pair and teabags. Then they got the rest after 60 days. They air dried it all and they mailed it in for analysis. There wasn't a accompanying app that people could use to mark more data, you know, about the characteristics of, you know, the land where they buried it.

• 38:33Rachel Feltman?

  People did send in photos. There are some delightful photos in the study, which I'll link to you at popside.com/ weird of people's reactions upon seeing their underpants.

• 38:44Rachel Feltman?

  Because yeah, the underpants got pretty holy as you want to happen.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Right. This is good.

• 38:51Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. The underpants, you know, they're mostly organic cotton. They have these, you know, elastic edges. So that was also a great demonstration because those synthetic materials obviously were not going to decompose, certainly not anywhere close to the rate of the organic cotton.

• 39:09Rachel Feltman?

  And as for what they did with this data, the researchers, you know, received the underpants. I think they further dried them a little bit. They then weighed them, removing debris by hand, but they were like, the weight isn't very accurate because some soil particles remained. Um, you know, I think washing the underwear obviously would have, you know, created too much opportunity for further degradation, as anybody who's washed really a too well-loved t-shirt knows.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  As a parent of a less than two-year-old, I'd be doing laundry literally constantly.

• 39:47Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Those little shirts are getting real soft.

• 39:49Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, when the shirts, three threads just crossed over each other. That's the whole thing.

• 39:55Rachel Feltman?

  So they also did an area-based assessment. I'm just gonna pretty much read directly from the paper because it's just a delightful little method section. Okay, so they, they cut the underpants open along the sides, spread them on a blue background, and then photographed them from above from a fixed height. Then they analyzed the images using a particular program called ImageJ. Basically, it removed the blue background and then used an RGB filter to quantify the remaining underpants material in pixels. Area loss was calculated relative to the area of new underpants and expressed as percentage decomposition. There's a formula. I'm not going to read it out, but they calculated how much underpants was

• 40:39Rachel Feltman?

  left in these photos and used that to actually quantify decomposition. They also got daily temperature and rainfall data for whatever meteorological stations were closest to where they were buried, and they did full chemical analysis of the actual soil samples that were sent. They had to do some quality filtering because obviously if you send out underwear to a thousand people, some of them are not going to do it right or remember to send them back to you. After all that, they analyzed 780 samples, which is pretty good. So while they showed that the findings aligned with the established Teabag Index, so underwear

• 41:17Rachel Feltman?

  index is as good for studying soil degradation. And they also found, interestingly, that private gardens showed the highest rates of decomposition. Fifty-eight percent of the cotton undies were gone there after two months. Lawns were the worst. They had only forty percent decomposition at that time. Unsurprising. Fields and meadows.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  I can only hope that my garden would decompose an undie good.

• 41:41Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, you have to. Yeah, that's the hope. Yeah. Fields and meadows were somewhere in between. One thing that's interesting is that the fact that home gardens were highest makes sense, and it's not necessarily that that soil is truly the healthiest. It means it's the most fertile, because people are adding nutrients.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Like amending it. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Compost and fertilizer and things like that.

• 42:09Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly. So it's like, ideal soil health for the, the ecosystem as a whole might actually be slightly less fertile than you want your home garden to be. But yeah, very, they did a lot of work with these underwears. One researcher said in a LinkedIn post that it was one of the most intense but also most rewarding experiences of his scientific career so far.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  That's really nice.

• 42:31Rachel Feltman?

  We're almost done, but I did, I did promise couture. And here it is. So the Edie Lu Studio, which is a designer in Zurich, actually used the underwear from this study as the material of a Rococo-inspired ball gown. Yeah, here, I'm gonna.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  I'm gonna see a photo of them.

• 42:51Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Let me see what I can do.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  Rococo is so specific. Love that.

• 42:59Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Really, really specific. Yes.

• 43:01Rachel Feltman?

  Here, I'm gonna share my screen.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Is it Rococo? Just makes me think of that girl on the swing. Isn't that Rococo?

• 43:07Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  There we go. Wow.

• 43:10Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. So, very elaborate ball gown. I will share links that pops out of com slash weird. And yeah, because holy underwear is not the most robust material, they used a deadstock silk taffeta as the base. For listeners who don't know, deadstock fabric just means that something was made for some particular commercial use and then not used. So it's new fabric, but it was saved from waste, and often there's not a lot of it to do a commercial run of something. So when somebody talks about using deadstock fabric, they mean they kind of rescued it from the bin. The, and this is from the designer, that they, they integrated the textiles into the garment in their post-soil state without

• 43:52Rachel Feltman?

  aesthetic correction. I think that means unwashed, but I don't know exactly. Obviously, this is sort of a runway piece, not really a ready-to-wear, so I guess it's fine if it's dirty. And it's dirt, you know, these weren't worn by people. But, you know, it's different, it's soiled in a way that is.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Soiled in a different way.

• 44:09Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, different way. Because they wanted the microbial, mycelial, and environmental effects to, you know, determine the, the condition, the color of the piece of fabric. And they also, they purposefully kept synthetic components like the rubber waistband. They purposefully kept those visible to, you know, show that those were resistant to decomposition and have a very different ecological impact. Also, one fun fact about it is that they had to construct custom panniers for it, you know, the big, the big guys on the sides of it, and reinforce them with metal components because conventional panniers couldn't actually

• 44:52Rachel Feltman?

  support the substantial weight of these many pairs of underpants piled onto the dress. And this is again from the designer, "While the spectator asks, 'What is this?' The garment has already begun its work of transforming scientific data into cultural understanding." So yeah, all the way from being cheap underwear in a supermarket destined to go on some size small man's butt in Switzerland, to a scientific endeavor, to the runway. What a journey for the, these underpants.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  What a journey for those undies. Yeah. Incredible.

• 45:29Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're gonna take one more break, and then we'll be back with one more fact.

• 45:37Speaker 01

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• 46:41Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Jill, let's talk about some spooky water, please.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Hmm. I love following up underpants. I feel like this, this, I don't know if it'll compete, honestly. Because that's, that's great. Yeah, I, I mean, I picked for the show, I picked the one that I talk about the most, the one that is kind of the one I'm most familiar with, and I have a lot of random memorized facts.

• 47:05Rachel Feltman?

  Awesome.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  I do, I was thinking like, man, I could have talked about the Congo River, which is kind of viral right now, because there's a guy who's gonna kayak on it. There's all sorts of other topics that I feel like are really fascinating, but I always end up coming back to Lake Baikal, which is kind of my go-to way to get people into the concept of spooky lakes. Because spooky lakes, if you're not familiar, is not about ghosts or ghouls or conspiracy theories or true crime. It's about this, this, the world being spooky all by herself. It's about the way that we interact with that world. And I think Lake Baikal is the perfect example of, you know, Mother Nature just being weird and doing weird stuff.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  So I always come back to her because she like, it's, to me, it's a really wonderful lake to talk about. So, and maybe you guys are familiar already, so I don't know how much you know about Lake Baikal, but maybe, maybe I'll have at least one fact of something that you did not know about this lake. So I think Rachel, if you were on Science Quickly, maybe we talked about it already once.

• 48:07Rachel Feltman?

  Perhaps. But I'm, honestly, my mind is a sieve.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, just like letting stuff come and go. Yeah, for sure. So of all the lakes in the world, obviously, the definition of lake being a body of water surrounded by land. So usually you think of the largest lake in the world being the Caspian Sea, but the Caspian Sea isn't actually that deep. It's around three, a little over 3,000 feet deep. So Lake Baikal is 5,387 feet deep, which means it's over a mile deep. For context, Lake Superior, which is often considered kind of what our North American, like giant lake, is 1,333 feet deep. And Crater Lake in Oregon, which is the deepest lake in the

• 48:55Speaker 03

  United States, is 1,900 feet deep. So just for context, like Lake Baikal is truly so much deeper than most lakes of the world, like by far.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  A mile deep, actually, when I try to conceptualize that, makes my heart beat faster. Like, it is spooky to me.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, if you wanted to, like, walk down to the bottom of Lake Baikal, as if it was kind of like a vertical treadmill, it would take you, potentially take you 20 minutes just to be able to walk down to the bottom.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  That's wild.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Over a mile, yeah. So that, it's different though in a lot of different ways, or a lot of other ways, because it's also the oldest lake in the world. So it's 25 million years old or thereabouts. And usually lakes will have died. We have, we don't have that many ancient lakes in the world. I actually did a whole series just on ancient lakes because there's not that many of them. But Lake Baikal is more ancient than even the other ancient lakes. And that's because it's on a rift zone. So it's on the Baikal Rift Zone between two plates. It's between the Mongolian and the Siberian plates. And it's actually pulling apart. And so even though it has 300 rivers that are depositing sediment into this giant

• 50:11Speaker 03

  lake, all of that sediment is building up in this crack in the earth. So the, the true bottom of Lake Baikal is underneath all of that sediment layer. It's over 20,000 feet. So it, that's why it hasn't died yet. You know, that's, it hasn't filled in because it's kind of been constantly filling in and pulling apart at the same time.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Is that why other ancient lakes died? Is because they filled in? Okay.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of lakes will die as they, because they just fill in with sediment over time. But you also have lakes that, there's a lot of lakes that are on different pull-apart basins or different rift zones. So like the African Rift Valley has a lot of the oldest lakes in the world because that's kind of been pulling apart. The Dead Sea is on a weird, a tectonic location, and that's why it's super old and super, super salty. That one's dying more just because of the environment being so hot that the, it's just evaporating super quickly. But Lake Baikal is a little different. It's also one of the only lakes that at the very bottom, we've actually found these vents that are pumping up from within the earth's crust. So you have these mud volcanoes and you have these hydrothermal vents,

• 51:23Speaker 03

  which is something you normally just see in the ocean. It's not something you see in a freshwater lake, but that's because it's deep enough that it's kind of connected within our earth's crust to these different geothermal activities. And because of that, most other lakes, like the other deepest, one of the deepest lakes in the world is Lake Tanganyika, which is in Africa. And Lake Tanganyika has an entire bottom half of the lake, thousands of feet are anoxic, where there's nothing living on the bottom half of the lake. That's, and that's called, um, lakes that are, uh, they don't like circulate. So you're not getting a yearly circulation. So like Lake Superior and Lake Michigan and a lot

• 52:06Speaker 03

  of our Great Lakes, every year around the turn of the season, they kind of flip over and they circulate. So you get more oxygen that gets circulated to the bottom of the lake, but not Lake Tanganyika, but Lake Baikal, it circulates, but also because of these hydrothermal vents, it's oxygenated, the lake is oxygenated all the way from the top to the very bottom.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Very cool.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Which is really cool because that's why you can have these really cool creatures like the Baikal insect.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  You know, that lives all the way at the bottom of this lake. And that's why 80% of the creatures in Lake Baikal are endemic to the lake and they live there, can only be found at this lake, which takes us to the animals. We love to talk about animals. Animals are so fun because there's so many creepy animals in Lake Baikal. We have, I think you always want to start with the cute one because then you can kind of devolve into the spookiness, but you start with the Lake Baikal Nerpa seal, which Nerpa means seal. So it's kind of like saying seal, seal, but the Baikal Nerpa is the only exclusively freshwater seal in the world, or one of the only exclusively freshwater seals in the world. And it arrived at Lake Baikal supposedly around two million years

• 53:17Speaker 03

  ago, 2.5 million years ago, and it has evolved to live at Lake Baikal. So it's the smallest seal species in the world. We don't know how it got there. We don't know its common ancestors. That's how kind of strange it is. The other freshwater seals in the world that live in Finland and in Alaska and in Canada are, are seals that potentially got separated from their saltwater ancestors during the last ice age, but the Baikal Nerpa, we don't really know when it got separated. It's really weird.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  They are so cute.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  I know, they're super cute.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  And they have the biggest anime eyes. They're adorable. My god.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  And, and hey, on the bright side, like we have a lot of sad stuff, like we were just talking about with the soil.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  And bad things happening, but the, the Baikal Nerpa population is doing really well. So.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  That's, that's great. I think it's partly just because it's, the lake itself is super isolated in the far reaches of, of Russia's Siberia. It's hard to get to. It's surrounded by these giant mountains and it's not like there's huge populations of people living alongside the lake. So the lake is actually like doing pretty well compared to some lakes of the world, even though it has been experiencing. Exactly. I'm always just, people are like, where do you want to go? I'm like, Lake Baikal. But also, should we be going to Lake Baikal? Like, there's a part of me that feels like I shouldn't go there just because I feel like that, the, the lack of tourism is also what's protecting it, um, from stuff. But anyway, so we have the Nerpa seal. We have

• 54:50Speaker 03

  the, one of my favorites, which is the Baikal Golem Yanka, which is this oil fish that can be found all the way at the bottom of the lake. It's, it's, uh, can deal with the extreme pressure at the bottom of the lake. It births live young and it is cannibalistic. So it also eats its own young, which is fun. And it is, it has little wings. I don't know if you're looking at a picture of it, but it's very, it's kind of a cool looking fish. It's kind of a weird, strange looking fish. And I just like, I just like the name by Golem Yanka. I feel like that's such a perfect spooky fish name.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  I did just give a, take a stab at the spelling and I got images of Golem, but then I figured.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. They're not that dissimilar though. I do feel there's some similarities.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  We do share some sort of vibe between each other.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, and then the other one that I really like, I like to talk about all the different ways that your body would decompose in these different lakes. If you died in Lake Superior, you become a soap mummy. If you die in Lake Natron, you become an actual mummy, a dried out husk. But if you die in Lake Baikal, you are going to be eaten by thousands upon thousands of amphipods, which have experienced gigantism in the lake, which means that they're much, much, much larger than a normal amphipod. So they're huge, like the size of your hand.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Oh, god.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  They're giant and they're kind of like these little gross looking crustaceans. Like, I just love looking at them. They're kind of creepy looking and they have a great relationship with the Nerpas. So the Nerpas like to eat the crust, the, the amphipods. This entire ecosystem is like very complex. The, I could talk for an hour about the Baikal sponge, which is like this unique sponge that's thousands of years old and it lives at the bottom of the lake. And anyway, the, the whole lake has this really wonderful kind of circulating ecosystem. But I love the amphipod because I like to, I always joke that, mom, when I die, you gotta throw me in Lake Baikal so I can be eaten by amphipods.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. I want to be eaten by this spiky shrimp. Yeah, they're, they're very cool looking.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that's what, that, that, those are just some of the things that kind of like stand out to me as far as like things that are fascinating and strange about Lake Baikal and how weird it is compared to most lakes of the world.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Did you, like, was Lake Baikal, like in the birding world, we have like your spark bird. It's like the bird that got you into birds. Is Lake Baikal like your spark lake?

• 57:21Speaker 03

  I'd say my spark lake was probably Lake Superior because I also, I always feel guilty talking about Lake Baikal as if she's my favorite girl, but really, I, I also love Lake Superior.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  You don't want Superior to feel left out.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. They're different though, because Lake Baikal has all of this kind of natural spookiness because it's, because of the fact that it's so old and so deep, it kind of has this environmental factor, which just makes, makes it weird. But Lake Superior is spooky because of us, because humans have been taking these giant freighters onto that lake for over a hundred years. And there's all of these crazy shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. There's like 10,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes and some 30,000 people have died there. So I feel like even though the, the critters in the Great Lakes are a little less, um, horrifying as the, as the Baikal critters, the, what in the end, the

• 58:17Speaker 03

  thing that makes the Great Lakes so fascinating is our human history with those lakes. Um, so it's interesting. I feel like I'm, I'm, I love both of them. And, but I would say that Baikal definitely sparked my fascination with how weird lakes can be, like the potential for the weirdest lake in the world. Um, and just recognizing that people on the internet hadn't really caught on to the weirdness of lakes, which is why I think I was able to kind of succeed in this weird niche of talking about how strange lakes are. Even more so, I mean, I just wrote this book about rivers and I love talking about rivers, but there's something about lakes kind of holding on to stuff. They don't really, they, they have

• 58:58Speaker 03

  this ability to kind of contain and to, and to hang on to things in a way that rivers don't. Rivers in the end are just like destructive monsters. And a lot of the, the rivers in my book, I had to, I had to like really pick and choose, ooh, which terrible flood would I like to talk about?

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  You know, which, which horrendous rapids am I gonna, am I gonna look at for this book or for my, for my videos? So in the end, like lakes are just, you know, because they're kind of holding on to stuff, they're just kind of fascinating.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's so cool.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  That's really cool.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  I can't stop looking at the amphipod from Lake Baikal.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  There's also the Baikal om and the Baikal sculpin and the Baikal flatworm. There's like all these different creatures that can only be found in Lake Baikal, which is so cool.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  How do you spell om?

• 59:47Speaker 03

  O M U L, which is their white fish. It's kind of like their, that's the fish that they actually like go fishing for and they, and they, it's like a huge fish for the local population of people that live there.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  So, so yeah, it's kind of cool. Also, there's some cool history with Lake Baikal. I don't know if you guys know any like the weird, like there's, there's old myths that the Russian czar's gold is at the bottom of Lake Baikal. But the one thing we know for sure is that the bottom of Lake Baikal is train carcasses, like trains that have fallen into the lake. And that's because in 1904, they built a train track across Lake Baikal, um, which just appreciate, I didn't really say this before, but the, even though Lake Baikal is not as big as Lake Superior's surface area, it's still 40 miles across the surface of it, which is crazy. Um.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  And on top of that, I don't know if I said this either, but Lake Baikal has more water than all of the Great Lakes combined. So it's like this massive amount of water. Yeah. So in 1904, they actually built a train track across the lake. They had been building this Trans-Siberian Railroad and they hadn't finished it yet. And they had kind of like ended it at the edge of Lake Baikal, but they needed to get supplies across the lake to be able to fight Japan in this Russia-Japan war of 1904. And so they decided, the lake freezes completely solid in the winter. And as a result, they were like, it's safe enough to kind of build these train tracks on it. And they would, they built the train tracks and then they would pull the trains across the lake with horses.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  And it's kind of a fascinating piece of history. There's not a lot of information about it as, as a lot of Russian stories end up going is like, where's your, you know, I had to dig into a pretty heavy duty Cyrillic search to be able to find information about this piece of history. And then my favorite part of it is actually the Japanese woodblock propaganda prints, which are so beautiful and fascinating of these trains and these Russian soldiers like crashing and disappearing into the lake. Yeah, those are, if you look up Baikal train, you know, Japan war, then I'm sure you'll come across it. I actually loved that print so much that I, there's only, there's one particular one I'm thinking of, that I loved it so much that I actually bought, I found

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  the original print from 1904 and bought it. Loved it so much. And I included my own version of this print with credit in my book as well, where I got to paint this train kind of crashing into the, into the water. Yeah. So it's kind of, Baikal also has like a, some human history, which is kind of fascinating as well.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  It's like Ukioe, like era Japanese printmaking. That's really cool.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I have to admit, I didn't know, I'm not, wasn't confident pronouncing that, but yes, that's.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Please correct me, anyone who's listening, if I got that wrong, but I think I'm close. I hope.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. So yeah, Lake Baikal always ends up being the one that I want to talk about.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Really cool. What a great, what a great lake. Not one of the Great Lakes, but a great lake.

• 1:03:09Rachel Feltman?

  Well, Gio, thanks so much for coming on. And Liz, always a pleasure to have you. Would you remind our listeners what your book is called so they can go find it and read it?

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. My, my book, first book was called Spooky Lakes, The 25 Strange, Mysterious Lakes That Dropped Our Planet. And then the second book, which is about terrifying rivers, is called Spooky Rivers, 25 Strange and Mysterious Rivers That Snake Across Our Planet. So those are the two books that are kind of accumulation of a lot of research in the last five years.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  That's so cool. Congrats. That's awesome.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  And illustrated by you.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  And yeah, painted with gouache.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  With gouache.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Our, uh, shared love of gouache paint. Yeah. No, it was really fun to paint them.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Word out there.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think it's becoming more popular. I've been like slowly, but surely I think people are figuring it out.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  I think so too.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  It just, you know, the one thing that sucks with it and the thing that's the hardest aspect, the thing I wish that I could figure out is I can't figure out how to do transparent smoke. It just does not work very well. Like you get one chance to do it. And then if you get it wrong, then it's very hard to fix it.

• 1:04:17Rachel Feltman?

  A little unforgiving. Yep.

• 1:04:21Speaker 05

  The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.