Masochistic Trees, Lean Mean Sex Machines, Ancient Doodles

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian joins the show to talk about horny eels. Plus, Sara Kiley explains the tree that loves getting struck by lightning, and Rachel goes into detail about kids passing notes in ancient times. 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 Balint's Twitch: ⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/sciants_streams ⁠⁠ -- 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 Thanks to our Sponsors! Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince! Go to ⁠⁠https://Quince.com/weirdest⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to ⁠⁠https://www. Zocdoc.com/WEIRDEST⁠⁠ to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  When you shop Kroger delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. From delicious produce to everyday essentials, enjoy the convenience of delivery and the trusted selection you've come to know from Kroger. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. Right now, enjoy free delivery on orders of $50 or more with your digital coupon. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, host of the Hyperfixed Podcast. Each week, we take listeners' problems and try to solve them for them. Problems like, "I'm 30 and I'm scared to drive in New York," or, "Why can't I adjust the volume of my car stereo when I'm in reverse?" We also solve non-car-related problems. If you have a problem, not only will we fix it, we'll expose the hidden systems that caused that problem in the first place. That's the Hyperfixed Podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you find podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.

• 1:38Rachel 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 Feltman.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  I'm Sarah Kylie Watson.

• 2:01Speaker 05

  And I'm Patricia Kacian.

• 2:03Rachel Feltman?

  Patricia, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.

• 2:06Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

• 2:09Rachel Feltman?

  So I was really excited when I got a press release about your book. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about it and where they can find it?

• 2:17Speaker 05

  Sure. I have a book coming out on May 27th. It is called Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature. And you can find it anywhere you get your books.

• 2:30Rachel Feltman?

  Awesome. Wow. I love the title and I feel like it says a lot, but could you tell us a little bit more about what readers can expect to find inside?

• 2:38Speaker 05

  Sure. So I'm a scientist. I'm a mycologist. I study fungi. And I'm really interested in biodiversity and natural history. And then I also am interested in philosophy of science and queer theory. So this book sort of threads a lot of different topics from mycology and biodiversity and into queer theory and philosophy of science. So it's sort of like a collection of essays. Each is focused on different organisms or systems. And I dive really deeply into the natural history of those systems. And then also sort of try to explore our understanding of nature through the lens of like, what has been marginalized and what has been cast

• 3:19Speaker 05

  out of our scientific understanding and also of our sort of cultural acceptance. And I use my own experiences as a scientist and as a queer person to dig into these topics of like, what is normal and what is not normal, and you know, in quotes, in our society and in science more broadly, or in science and in society more broadly.

• 3:41Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, I love that. That is so cool. Obviously, listeners already know, listeners of this show already know that nature is very queer. But I have to say, I think mycology is the most queer, if I had to pick.

• 3:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, full of surprises.

• 3:56Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I hope listeners will check it out, but for now, let's get into talking about some weird facts. 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 that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more 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. Sarah Kiley, what's your tease?

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Okay, my tease is I'm talking about a tree that loves being struck by lightning.

• 4:33Rachel Feltman?

  I love that for that tree.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  I know, lucky tree.

• 4:39Rachel Feltman?

  My tease is that I'm going to talk about some historically significant doodles. Love some good marginalia. Patricia, what's your tease?

• 4:48Speaker 05

  So I'm going to talk about eels and their reproductive biology and their ability to use magnetic sensing to find their migratory pathways.

• 5:01Rachel Feltman?

  I love that. We love eels on the show. Never enough eels. Well, let's see. Well, Sarah Kiley, I feel like you've got such a great tease this week. I would love to learn more about trees that get hit by lightning and don't just become dead trees, which seems like sort of the the obvious result, so.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Yes. Okay, well, I'm very excited to talk about this one as well. So yeah, so getting struck by lightning generally is not a pleasant experience, whether you're a tree or an animal or even like a building. Like, it's just not nice. And it's especially true if you're the largest tree in your neighborhood of the forest. Research from back in 2020 estimates that like 83 million trees are struck by lightning every year and a quarter of those are like. 20 or 200 million die as a result. So not a fun thing, but let's start at the very beginning, as I like to do with talking about lightning itself. So basically, according to Noah, Noah, lightning is a spark of electricity that is buzzing around between clouds, the air and

• 6:05Speaker 04

  the ground. And in the early stages of development of lightning, air is kind of like acting like a cushion, keeping the positive and negative charges in the cloud and between the cloud and the ground. And when the opposite charges build up enough, the insulating capacity of the air just says, nope. And there's a rapid discharge of electricity that we know of as lightning. And basically, this lightning equalizes the charged regions in the atmosphere until they build up again. And so this happens in obviously thunderstorms, but it can also happen in all sorts of cloudy scenarios. So volcanic eruptions, intense forest fires, surface nuclear detonations, snowstorms, you get the picture. But yeah, so basically, like, electricity is getting revved

• 6:49Speaker 04

  up and it needs to go somewhere. And trees make for a perfect outlet for electricity trying to escape the cloud. And most of the ones that get hit are the big ones, because lightning kind of tends to aim for the path of least resistance. They're like, okay, perfect. Here it is. So the closer to the atmosphere, the better. And those big guys, they get shot with, with electricity and it goes right down into the ground. And so lightning can have a very serious impact on trees. So there's a lot of ways that this, this happens. So we'll start with the kind of the internal damage. Electricity generates a ton of heat. In some cases, lightning can heat the air around it up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So when that kind of like zap hits

• 7:33Speaker 04

  a tree, which is about 50% water by weight, it can get really messy. So the lightning bolt basically sends the temperature inside a tree zooming up, which vaporizes the moisture in there. And it turns to steam, which bumps up pressure. And sometimes trees literally explode, they split, they shattered, the tree bark looks nasty. You get the picture. And for trees with a lot of sap, if you know, if, if that initial explosion doesn't take you out, the heat inside of A tree, when electricity hits it, it makes the sap boil and it can weaken the internal structure of the tree. So if you aren't killed outright, you know, by the initial blast, internal structure gets all messed up, which gets leaves, these trees opens to disease and pests. So you've got kind of a weakened,

• 8:16Speaker 04

  like, slow death scenario there. And so let's say you make it past both of those scenarios. If you're a tree that gets struck by lightning, it can still mess up the root system. So basically that lightning hits all the way down until it hits the earth and it can kind of fiddle with the roots. And then you're having decaying roots that can't pick up nutrients anymore. And so, again, another really fun, kind of slow tree death by lightning. So yeah, like, sometimes you'll see a tree that looks totally fine, but it's been struck by lightning and it's going to probably die within like a year. And lightning does discriminate. They are always looking for the tallest thing in the vicinity of hit. So if you're the biggest tree in the forest and, you know, you got struck by lightning last week and it wasn't that big of a deal, like, you're probably, there's a chance you're gonna get struck again.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  So let's say you're one of the lucky ones that doesn't explode on impact, like, you're, if, say, your sap, you know, bubbled up and boiled and messed up your insides. A second lightning strike will make that way worse. So if you're a tall tree, beware. And the reaction to this kind of lightning strike really varies by the kind of tree and the location. In some places, like tropical forests, it's not like an explosion of death that you might get somewhere where there's like, a drier tree. But this is like a slow, they call it a crown dieback, which is when, like, basically, the tree begins to just say, like, I don't need these leaves anymore. I'm so stressed. I don't want to take care of these leaves. And if it keeps getting worse, they just

• 9:43Speaker 04

  keep getting rid of more and more of their, like, fluffy, like, leafy top. And they make more and more dead wood. And it's, like, kind of, like, it's trying to prune itself down because it's so worked up. And then, and then it just, it's a slow, sad death. And because of all of that, most scientists have for a while thought that like, yeah, lightning strikes are pretty much a bad thing for trees. And like, who's to blame them? All of this stuff sounds really horrible. And like, most of the time, the result is not pretty when lightning strikes, you know, pretty much anything. But there is an exception to the rule, which I feel like we unpack a lot on Weirdest Thing. So I'm here with a wonderful exception to the rule.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  And there's one type of tree that not only doesn't hate being struck by lightning, like, not only does it like survive lightning strikes and like move on with its tree day, it likes it. It's beneficial to the tree. It's like, yeah, this is amazing. And this is the Dipteryx olifera, which is also known as the Tonka bean tree. If you have any foodies out here, apparently they taste like almonds. I saw some Tonka beans in like a fancy little bakery near my, in my neighborhood. And I was, I was like, what a funny, what a funny connection. I know that you love lightning, but it's a really, really big tree. It grows up to 180 feet in height and it's native to warm tropical forests in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador. So we've got one of those tropical trees.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  And according to recent research published, like, I believe it was in March or maybe even this month, in New Phytologists, they love a little zap zap. And so we'll, we'll get into it. But the story starts in 2015 when Evan Gora, who is a forest ecologist at the Carey Institute of Ecosystem Studies, stumbled upon one of these Tonka bean trees that survived a strike with little damage, even though, quote unquote, "the jolt had been strong enough to blast the parasitic vine off of its crown and kill more than a dozen neighboring trees." So this tree got blasted and it's just like living its life. It killed all of its neighbors and it's just like, you know, going about it. And basically, so he and a bunch of ecology researchers spent several years following

• 11:52Speaker 04

  the post-lightning-strike lives of trees in the Barrow, Colorado Nature Monument in central Panama to figure out kind of what the story is here. So they found 93 specimens across multiple species, including nine directly struck Tonka bean trees. And for two to six years after, you know, this group of trees got zapped, the researchers followed their lives and deaths. And what they found is the Tonka bean trees survived direct hits with just a little bit of damage. And on the other hand, the other species that were directly struck by lightning were in bad shape, losing almost six times as many leaves on their crowns and more than half of them died within two years. So what? What in the world?

• 12:36Speaker 04

  And so it's not only that the Tonka bean trees survived after the strike, they thrived. In the case of one of these trees getting zapped, a whole bunch of beneficial stuff would happen. Their neighbors kicked the can. I mean, I guess, I don't know how a nice way to say the tree died, but basically all of their neighbors died. And on average, around 9.2 surrounding trees of other species just like got the second hand electricity from either like a branch touching a branch or electricity hopping over. And those guys died as a result, but the, you know, the main, the main tree was like, haha, it's fine. And what that means is basically there's less competition for the primo spot of exceptional sunlight at the top of the forest. So they're like, competition, bye.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  And then the next good thing that came out of a lightning strike for these trees is parasites begone. The most annoying thing other than nosey neighbors to a Tonka bean tree is a leona or a long stemmed woody vine that basically uses trees to like creep and crawl its way up to the top, like the juiciest, sunniest bits of the forest canopy to get those sweet sun rays. And they like, don't vampire suck the nutrients out of a tree. So they're not like directly like eating the tree or anything, because there are definitely some parasites that love to do that, but this isn't them. But they're just, again, making life harder for not just Tonka bean trees, any tree that is unlucky enough to encounter this situation. They make it harder for the tree to grow. You can't really get as much sunlight.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  It's harder to drop seedlings and grow your population. So it's just a pain in the butt. They hold them back, but these infestations don't really like survive lightning strikes either. And according to this new research, lightning strikes reduce leona infestations on Tonka bean trees by around 78%. So.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  We got two wins on top of surviving lightning strikes already for this delicious almond tree. And with all this uncovered, the scientists were like, oh, okay, let's like, look deeper at the tonka bean tree and its surroundings. And they kind of came across all of these aha moments. For one, tonka bean trees just typically have less lianas than their other woody neighbors. And about 40, like, there's 40 years of tree death analysis that they looked at. And it demonstrated that if a tree cozied up to a tonka bean tree, like, it became neighbors, they were about 48% more likely to die than if it had ended up in different real estate.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  So, wow, yikes. So, and then they uncovered also that tonka bean trees have evolved, like, likely to be taller, to choose to be smacked by lightning. So they're like, let me up there. I want to be the tallest, not only for those delicious rays, but because there's a chance that I'm going to be pummeled by 50,000, like, degrees Fahrenheit of heat, straight to the core.

• 15:34Rachel Feltman?

  I'm just imagining like, oh, no, I hope I don't get struck by lightning.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Literally.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  That would be horrible to get a facelift and all these lianas removed and my neighbors just disappear. Like, wouldn't that be horrible? But yeah, so they're literally like, and they also, on top of being the tallest, they have these big, wide crowns, which are pretty unusual. And they're basically like, just begging to hit, like, hit me with lightning. All of which, I mean, and it gives them about a 68% higher likelihood to be struck by lightning. So whatever they evolved to do, it worked. And who'd have thunk it? Their estimates also, like, showed that individual tonka beans are likely struck about once every 56 years on average. And trees are really old. So it's not like they, they're living for hundreds or even thousands

• 16:22Speaker 04

  of years. So they're regular getting like, a little, like, Botox zap of lightning. And one of these trees that they had been, like, poking around at in their research had gotten, like, zapped twice in a five-year period and was like, Fine. And so this like, just all goes to show how nature can surprise us. And like, there is a climate connection, because I'm always looking for the climate connection. Because so climate change and its related disasters are going to make lightning more common than it is. And we've known this for a while. This research came out in 2014 that lightning strikes would increase about 12% for every one, one degree of warming. And so

• 17:04Speaker 04

  they estimated back then that that would be about 50% more strikes by 2100. So that's a lot. And essentially with more water vapor in the air and the atmosphere, which happens when we have a warming planet, there's just like more thunderstorm fuel, like just like waiting around, waiting to become a thunderstorm. And not to mention, lightning and forest fires kind of have this toxic feedback loop where lightning starts about 10% of global forest fires. And the result of forest fires can be their own little like, weather patterns that create more lightning. So we've got a lot of lightning happening. And I think, who knows, maybe the Tonka bean tree will outlive us all and just be thriving in a

• 17:49Speaker 04

  zappy zappy world. So yeah, that's the story of the Tonka bean tree and their love, their kind loving relationship with being struck by lightning.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  Fascinating. Well, I like that you said, maybe they'll outlive us all. One of my like, coping mechanisms when considering climate change and these, the polycrisis that we're facing is thinking about which species might outlive us. And that's like, kind of a comforting thing to me is like, okay, the, maybe the Tonka bean trees, maybe the horseshoe crabs, you know, beetles of all's variety, you know, like, okay, maybe they'll be doing really well.

• 18:25Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, sounds like a chill planet, honestly. Like, I can't, can't knock it. Yeah, that is, evolution is so wild. Things just happen. And then you end up with a tree that is trying to, you know, a tree that relies on coaxing lightning.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  Like, please, please hit me.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  It's pretty metal.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  And that makes me want to go buy some Tonka bean like paste or something. Like, I'm like, okay, this is exciting. I'm going to need to start liking this even more.

• 18:57Rachel Feltman?

  It's like this is hardcore food now. I had no idea.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  And it's gonna, like, our coffee might be gone, our chocolate might be gone. But you know what? We can have some Tonka beans, it seems like. So it's all good.

• 19:10Rachel Feltman?

  It's all good. Um, okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  When you shop Kroger delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. From delicious produce to everyday essentials, enjoy the convenience of delivery and the trusted selection you've come to know from Kroger. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. Right now, enjoy free delivery on orders of $50 or more with your digital coupon. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger, fresh for everyone.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, host of the Hyperfixed Podcast. Each week, we take listeners' problems and try to solve them for them. Problems like, I'm 30 and I'm scared to drive in New York. Or, why can't I adjust the volume of my car stereo when I'm in reverse? We also solve non-car related problems. If you have a problem, not only will we fix it, we'll expose the hidden systems that caused that problem in the first place. That's the Hyperfixed Podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you find podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.

• 21:01Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Patricia, I would love to hear about some eels.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  Yes, super excited to talk about eels. They're really amazing animals. Admittedly, I did not learn about them this week, but I've been really a fan of eels for a few years now. In my book, I try to, all of the essays are about organisms I've had some personal encounters with, even sometimes very intensively. And eels are one that I spent some time with when I was a professor at Bard College in the Hudson Valley. And I took my students to help with the eel monitoring project that's run at a research station near the campus. And we were there to basically trap eels as they were making their migratory route up from the ocean, up the north on the river,

• 21:46Speaker 05

  and into sort of all the tributaries of the Hudson. And so we were just catching them in this large funnel, and then counting them, weighing them, and then helping them enter the streams. And when I saw them, I was really just absolutely blown away by how small they were at the time. They were just about one inch long. They were totally translucent. You could see their tiny little eyes and their little spines. And I was just completely blown away by how that tiny fish could swim for about one year from the Sargasso Sea where they were born, and find their way back up these rivers. And I know on a previous episode, you talked a

• 22:29Speaker 05

  bit about their migration and the mystery of the eels being organisms that people, you know, for many, many, really actually hundreds of years, people have been sort of fascinated by and sort of mystified by. And we still are, I think that's still true. We still are learning so much about exactly how they reproduce and how they make their journeys. But there's two sort of elements of eel biology that I was really drawn to. And part of it is their migration and how they do that, which I'll get into. And also, it's the fact that they live for most of their lives as intersex organisms. So they have, in a very direct way, a pretty queer reproductive way of being.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  So both of these components are so fascinating to me, but I'll sort of just tell the story of their just general life history and then I'll get into the details of their, the way that they use magnetism and the earth magnetic fields to migrate. So when they, when they're born in the Sargasso Sea, they then spread out, travel all along the eastern seaboard of North America into the rivers and tributaries. And it takes them, like I said before, about a year to do that on average. And they make their way back up to, you know, all, all sorts of little streams throughout the east coast. And then when they finally reach their destination, they will then spend many years,

• 23:53Speaker 05

  sometimes decades, living in the freshwater and they'll just sort of be eating and like slipping around in the muck and enjoying themselves. And as they, so they make that journey as these little glass eels, they're called, those little tiny eels. But then over time, they grow to be pretty large, they can be several feet long and they darken in pigment and they could become kind of matching, they basically match like the silt of a nice, soft, muddy stream. And as they're doing that, they're eating, they're being merry. And then essentially at some point, they're kind of called to, you know, so there's, there's some sort of like genetic signal of some sort that initiates their return to the Sargasso Sea,

• 24:38Speaker 05

  where they will have a beautiful night of sex and reproduction. It will take them a long time to get back as well, like, but not quite as long as the glass eel stage, because they're much bigger and stronger now. Sure. But so as they're like growing and living in the freshwater, they're, they're, they're intersex. They have the potential to develop reproductively in either ovarian tissue or testicular tissue, or they can actually just keep both and develop both later in life. But when they're triggered to go back to, for reproduction, that's when those tissues actually really develop. So all along there in the decades or years that are before, they're not like

• 25:21Speaker 05

  Expressing their secondary sex characteristics. So this fact was really puzzling to a lot of scientists, including a very, very well-known person, Sigmund Freud. And he actually, before he got into psychology and psychiatry, he was a interested in natural history. And, and so this little known aspect of his career was that he was really interested in, in eel biology. He was like many of us, sort of captivated by their mystery. But he was really fixated, maybe not surprisingly, on sort of finding eel balls or testicles. Yeah. And he, so he was like, he was, what he was doing is he's going to freshwater systems, collecting eels.

• 26:05Speaker 05

  And then it's kind of brutal, but just basically dissecting one after the next, because he was really bent on trying to find out, okay, why don't these eels have testicles? Where are they? How, like, what's going on here with their sex and their organs? What's going on? Like, why isn't, make it make sense. Where are the balls? It's none of your business, Floyd. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Stop murdering me. I know. It was pretty gruesome. And, but he, it took hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of eels before he actually even found one that had some sort of testicular tissue that had developed. And so someone close to him kind of posits that he may have, this, this whole like stressful

• 26:46Speaker 05

  situation for him may, may have led to the development of his castration anxiety theories, which is he's pretty well-known for. But anyway, he was really trying to fit, you know, eels into this binary box. They either have to be male or female. They either have to have ovaries or testicles. Like, there's not, but really that's, they have the possibility of both. They are containing both, right? They're, they're, they're not clearly in the binary. A lot of eels eventually do develop maybe one type of reproductive organ or another later in life. So when they're, when they're triggered to go back, that they actually repurpose all of their digestive organs that they've been using to nourish themselves and grow big and strong.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  And they kind of take all, all that energy and tissue is redirected into the development of their, their secondary sex characteristics typically. Wow. Yeah. So they, and they typically become. Basically, they're just these long, lean, mean sex machines that then swim back to the Sargasso Sea and reproduce. So they're they're no longer eating. They don't eat. They're done eating. They after reproduction, they're going to to die. Actually, that's their fine. It's the one last hurrah at the end of their life. And then their their offspring will then make the migration back to their sort of ancestral waters. So I I'm just really like captivated by their reproduce, you know, their intersex way of being and then the sort of like capacity to to repurpose their

• 28:12Speaker 05

  bodies at this time in their life to just be, you know, change their sexuality is this sort of like change, like it changes depending on the the phase of their life cycle. And all of that's just really, really fascinating to me. And the other aspect about it, which gets a little bit more into, you know, so in my book, I'm very interested in queer reproduction or lack of reproduction, but just queer sort of ways of being in a very literal sense, in a biological sense. But then I'm also interested in these in the way that like, science is produced, how like how information is kind of understood and channeled. And sometimes, like, obviously, I'm a scientist. I love science. I know this is a science podcast. So we're very science positive here. But also, like, you know, it's important to sort of think about, like, the

• 28:57Speaker 05

  historical and social forces that may have influenced the scientific process and how that might have limited our understanding of of like, information and and and systems. And so there's so many examples throughout scientific history where like, the sort of biases of of a culture of a of a society may have limited our understanding. And so I think that sometimes it can be, people might want to think that, like, by talking about like queer ecology or queerness in biology, we're like, imposing in a social agenda. But really, what how I see it is kind of going through the scientific canon and history and and actually looking for the biases that come before us and correcting them. And so that actually will with the intention of

• 29:42Speaker 05

  improving our knowledge, not not like sort of just trying to plaster some sort of like, I don't know, social agenda on top of it. It's actually like, let's, let's, how can we understand the world more fully and more completely by understanding how we were limited in the past? And so one, one really, I think, amazing example of this is the, is the work of Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist and a scientist who contributed really greatly to the understanding of endosymbiosis, the process by which like little organisms are absorbed by larger organisms and then gradually become interdependent and eventually a singular species. And so this is, we know this is like a, something that has happened many times throughout the tree of life,

• 30:24Speaker 05

  but it was poorly understood for a really long time. And Lynn Margulis was a scientist who, you know, in the eighties and nineties did a tremendous amount, or sorry, so I think going back to the seventies, started doing a lot of work to try to get the scientific community to understand that symbiosis, this sort of, these intimate associations between species are incredibly common. And this idea that we're all just like these totally distinct, discreet individuals is not really actually that scientifically valid. And, but that idea of the individual is really deeply rooted in Western philosophy and Western culture. Like we, deep in our cultural, like, of, like, understanding is this, like, notion of the individual.

• 31:08Speaker 05

  And so it was, it took a lot of evidence and time and really more evidence than it should have required to upend that notion that things are just totally, every species is totally like this own little block, an own little world. And then we have strategic relationships with other species occasionally. That's not really how it is, right? So when we think about our own cells, for example, we have organelles that, like, for example, our mitochondria, where it used to be free living bacteria and then they were absorbed into cells and then became of gradually, very gradually, you know, functional components of those cells, but they used to be free living bacteria. And so that's something that also applies to the bio, is relevant to the biology of eels and their migration

• 31:53Speaker 05

  and a lot, and the migration of a lot of other species as well. It's actually best studied in like salmon and other fish, not eels, but anyway, so, okay, so this is where I'm going with this. Back sometime many millions and millions and millions of years ago, there was a free-living bacteria that had little magnetite crystals in its body. And that probably happened just as a like kind of accident of metabolism that accumulated this magnetic material called magnetite. It's made of iron primarily. And over time, that the presence of that magnetite proved to be advantageous to this lineage of bacteria because it could kind of help that bacteria orient itself

• 32:37Speaker 05

  and move with through magnetotaxis. So like we have chemotaxis and phototaxis, but basically the ability to move in response to magnetism. So over time, that more like it evolved that there were more and more little magnetite crystals lining up in that cell, eventually forming these long little chains of magnetite crystals that almost operated like a compass or a needle. And it could orient itself more intention with more, I guess, sort of physiological control towards the magnetite, the magnetic fields of the earth. And so what the hypothesis is that this bacteria was then absorbed by some other like common ancestor of the animal kingdom.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  And that's why we have magnetotite, little packets of magnetotite called magnetostome, present in a lot of different lineages of animal life. So from insects to fish and even actually people have magnetite in our brains, but that's really poorly studied. And so in some cases, it may just be vestigial or an accident of sort of metabolism. But in certain lineages, we know for certain that that more evolutionary pressure has been exerted on this magnetotite and, or sorry, magnetite in the magnetostome, such that it has become integrated into like the sensory apparatus of the organism. So this is true in like salmon and eels, that there is magnetite in their brain, in and around their noses and faces and brains that they use to sense the magnetic field of the earth.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  And this actually guides their migration. And so what's fascinating to me is that like I love thinking about how Well, there's so many layers to this, but one is the fact that these tiny little random accidents of endosymbiosis could give rise to all of this incredible diversity that we have. The improbability of it all is just something that I can never really get over. I mean, that's true in so many areas of evolution, so many specific evolutionary events are just vanishingly improbable, and it's just kind of miraculous that anything has ever happened. And never mind the way that it has happened right now that we can witness. And then also just the fact that we are, in this way, like, really, the constituents

• 34:52Speaker 05

  of our own bodies and biology are attributable to microorganisms. And that, to me, is just this, what I, one thing that queerness, like, my understanding of it is, you know, I'm always, like, to be queer, in my use of the term, is not just to be not heteronormative, but it's also kind of invoking a notion of the collective, right, and interdependencies, right? So queerness as a term kind of came into use during the AIDS epidemic, and it was a rallying cry to kind of connect people and to, you know, understand collective power. And I think it's possible, you know, to, like, that's, so I'm interested also in extending that beyond the humans, right, into the other species, and seeing the interdependencies

• 35:37Speaker 05

  of other species, that not only are we just sharing a planet with these organisms, but we literally are them, and they are us too. And this type of way of seeing the world is something that I think can really help us build strong networks of diversity and a thriving planet. So the story of Lynn Margulis also is like, kind of, you know, she was someone who was, on her Wikipedia page, you can see that she's described as a vindicated heretic. She took, you know, it was a tremendous professional risk to put forward these ideas, even though they were very evidence-based, and kind of stake her career on that. And it came at great professional cost, like, she was not, and she did, she's no longer alive, but she did live to see her ideas be, like, become, like,

• 36:21Speaker 05

  respected, but it didn't, wasn't easy, and it took a tremendous Endous amount of like kind of conviction and willpower, which is unfortunately very common, especially for women and other people operating outside of like, you know, the mainstream sort of ways of thinking. So I, you know, she's a big inspiration to me also. So anyway, this, I love how all of this comes together in the eels, right? Their, their queer biology, their incredible migratory journey, their mystery of their like, where do they even reproduce and how does it function? And then the fact that these tiny little glass eels could use the, you know, magnetic field of the earth to find their way to like upstate New York from Bermuda is like just really incredible to me.

• 37:04Rachel Feltman?

  Wow. Yeah, I love that. What a great, what a great story. So many awesome threads. It makes me very excited to read your book. So

• 37:11Speaker 05

  Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much.

• 37:14Rachel Feltman?

  I recently, I was guest hosting for Science Friday and interviewed the author of this book called Slippery Beast that was about eels, but like surprisingly focused on eel crime, which I, I was like, not, I didn't see that coming. So yeah, if you ever want to read some stuff about eel crime and the incredibly complex and like surprisingly corrupted, dangerous world of eel, the eel industry, I recommend.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, that sounds amazing. I definitely want to read that. I mean, yeah. So I, part of why we were doing that monitoring project is because they, you know, they're, the populations of, of the, so this is mostly the American eel I was talking about, but there's also a few other species that are closely related that have all experienced really significant population crashes due to like overfishing and habitat destruction, pollution, et cetera. And so I do know that they're very expensive, you know, if you were to illegally procure them. So I can imagine how that would drive a whole underground industry, but I've never read anything about that. So I would love to, love to hear about, learn about it.

• 38:19Rachel Feltman?

  All right, we're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

• 38:29Speaker 00

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• 38:59Speaker 01

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• 39:33Rachel Feltman?

  OK, we're back. And I'm going to jump into my fact, which, as I said, is about some ancient doodles.

• 39:41Rachel Feltman?

  So dating back to at least the first century in various parts of the world, people have used birch bark as a writing surface. It's very soft and easy to scratch into with a stylus. And of course, if you live by birch trees, it's very easy to peel off. It actually peels off naturally as the tree gets rid of dead tissue. So it's altogether a very renewable writing resource and a very convenient one, especially before we had the mass production of paper as we know it. And in parts of Russia in particular, there are so many old manuscripts of all different kinds preserved on birch bark that there's basically like a field of study devoted to them. And as of 2018,

• 40:24Rachel Feltman?

  archaeologists had found about 1,200 birch bark specimens in Russia, and more than 1,100 of them were from this one place called Nevgorod. And then about half of the rest Were in locations that would have been considered the same region as Novgorod during the medieval era, which is what these texts date back to. So like, this is a real hotspot for writing stuff on birch bark. It actually seems like Novgorod was an extremely literate place for the time, because in addition to the fact that, you know, more than 1,100 of these birch bark writings have been found, and that's like, a huge percentage of the ones found around the world, they actually think that there are a lot more of them,

• 41:09Rachel Feltman?

  because less than 3% of the, what was the medieval settlement of Novgorod, has actually been excavated systematically. So some estimates suggest that there are probably more than 20,000 additional notes waiting to be discovered. And what's great about this place in particular is that there's this very heavy waterlogged clay soil, and it seems to have been really good at protecting the birch bark from oxygen and therefore decay. So yeah, all of these circumstances coming together to make this a real hotspot for finding notes from the medieval era, including in, you know, among people who are not, you know, like, writing

• 41:50Rachel Feltman?

  in monasteries on illuminated manuscripts. And another clue that Novgorod was extremely literate for the time is that while some of these notes use church Slavic, which was the language of the church in Slavic areas, most of them are actually written in a vernacular dialect. And many recount personal matters and everyday happenings. It seems like women and children were frequently writing on birch bark. So yeah, it seems like, just like, everybody was writing stuff, which is so cool and very different, I think, from what a lot of people's conception of that time period in Europe was like. But there are some of these birch bark writings that are particularly famous, and they all come from a single prolific

• 42:33Rachel Feltman?

  artist who lived there in the 13th century. He drew epic battle scenes and mythical creatures, and even rather abstract works, I would say, for the time. His name was Onfim, and he was a seven-year-old boy. Wow. And he was avoiding doing his homework. I love Onfim.

• 42:54Rachel Feltman?

  Onfim's birch bark scraps, there are many of them and they show signs of schoolwork. He wrote Psalms, he did like sort of like alphabet exercises. But they also show doodles that I think it's not at all surprising when you see them that they have become, you know, such a popular talking point in not just the archaeological world, but in the mainstream because they're really charmingly recognizable as like the work of a bored kid at school. Very little has changed. If you Google Onfim, you will, you will see some examples and I definitely recommend doing that because again, it is like so striking how much these could be on someone's fridge right now.

• 43:40Rachel Feltman?

  There's one where this very chaotic creature with like many legs and it, a lot of lines, there are a lot of lines. It's hard to tell what's going on, but it has a speech bubble that says, "I am a beast." And then that same piece of birch says, "Greetings from Onfim to Daniel." So presumably passing a note to a friend. He also drew himself standing on horseback and slaying some other person, which many people like to imagine was meant to be his teacher. I don't, I don't think we have any particular data to support that, but I, I understand the impulse for sure and it could be. That's hilarious. Okay.

• 44:20Rachel Feltman?

  And my favorite thing about Onfim's drawings is that he always drew people with hands like garden rakes. You'll see what I mean when you look at them. Oh my god. And he never drew them with the same number of fingers, which has led some people to point out that while he was quite literate, he perhaps had not gotten a great handle on counting yet, but he was only seven. So, you know, totally understandable. Give him a break. Yeah. Some of them remind me a lot of Teen Girl Squad from Homestar Runner. It's just, it's all very, nothing has changed again. Unfortunately, that's all we know about Onfim. I like to imagine that if we actually dug up those, you know, 20,000 or so scraps that are thought to be left in his hometown, that we'd see his like evolution as an artist and a scholar. Ooh. And, you know, see him grow up to be writing like-

• 45:03Rachel Feltman?

  Passive aggressive notes to his neighbor and stuff like that, which it seems like a lot of the the notes from his town were that sort of thing. But all that we can do is hope that Onfim grew up and, you know, continued to have such a delightful imagination and such a great relationship with the written word. I just, I love this because I think it's really cool when stuff that isn't of like traditional, great historical importance is preserved. I mean, we talked about this a lot in the show, and I know it's not like a novel concept, but you know, there, there is such a bias in sort of what gets kept in the historical record.

• 45:44Rachel Feltman?

  You know, we know way more about like how kings lived and how their subjects lived in so many cases. And so it's a great reminder that like, while of course, we do have this like excess of information on how elite wealthy people were living in any given time compared to everybody else, like we do have other stuff. I mean, in in my book, Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex, which you can still buy, there I talk about one of our sort of like best documentation of sort of how an

• 46:21Rachel Feltman?

  everyday person might have felt about homosexuality during, I think this was like the 1700s. I'm gonna have to look this up now. But just like it was some, we have like notes from some dude who was like a gentleman farmer who was like writing in his journal and being like, yeah, so I heard about this thing that happened. And like, I think it's fine. Like, I think people should mind their own business. Iconic of him. Yeah. And, you know, it's like, it's brought up by scholars a lot as an example of like, you know, whatever the sort of, whatever got written down as like law or what the people in power were saying was like the norm does not necessarily reflect what everyday people were doing and thinking.

• 47:04Rachel Feltman?

  But, you know, I love just little snippets we can find through through history. And apparently, these birch bark writings are a great source for that because, again, it was this very like. Weird confluence of circumstances where it seems like literacy was quite common in this area and because they wrote on birch bark, which was like so plentiful, people just wrote everything. It wasn't like a precious, I think, in a lot of cases, even when people were literate, you know, writing was something you did for like a special occasion.

• 47:36Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't really thought about that before.

• 47:40Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. So I think like the fact that they could just go peel off a piece of birch bark and, you know, shoot the [BLEEP] with their neighbors. We get a lot of cool stuff. And then, you know, the soil, the clay soil there seems to have been really good for preserving them. But we do have other, you know, examples of, you know, sort of delightfully pedestrian things that have been saved in history, like the so-called complaint tablet to Ianassar, which is a clay tablet sent to the city-state Ur sometime around 1750 BCE. It's often referred to as the world's first customer complaint, or the oldest Yelp review. Yeah, basically, a customer named Nani is complaining that

• 48:23Rachel Feltman?

  this trader sold them substandard copper and was rude to his servant. And it is very salty, and it goes on for a very long time, really just repeating the same facts about how this dude was a jerk and the copper's no good. It's, again, very relatable. And somebody, this was in cuneiform on a tablet, so somebody was really like chipping away.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, determined.

• 48:45Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  They wanted us to know.

• 48:48Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  I love thinking about being so furious, but only being able to chip it into a tablet.

• 48:56Rachel Feltman?

  Like a long tablet note?

• 48:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:00Rachel Feltman?

  I think maybe the internet would be less toxic if we all had to chip our words out.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  I agree. Yeah, you really have to really think it through.

• 49:10Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. And like halfway through, you'd kind of be like, I never lie. What am I doing? What am I doing with my life? I can go outside. Exactly. But not Noni. Noni stuck to his convictions. There's also a website, ancientgraffiti.org, where you can just randomly browse some of the ancient graffiti writing found around Herculaneum in Pompeii. Of course, I talked about Pompeii pretty recently. But, you know, not just known actually for the terrible volcano incident, but in fact, a place that was very horny, had a lot of art, a lot of graffiti. They did a lot of scribbling on the walls there. And there's some great surprising graffiti that you can look into. I mean, and also some that are just like wholesome.

• 49:54Rachel Feltman?

  There's some that are like, we're best friends and we'll be best friends forever. And our names are, you know, whatever and whatever. I wrote down a couple. There's Sabina's Handsome Guy, Hermeros Loves You. Then one where somebody wrote down, lovers like bees lead a honeyed life. And someone else wrote under it, I wish.

• 50:16Rachel Feltman?

  Which is so, such bathroom stall, back and forth. I really love it. But yeah, no, I mean, I think, again, like, I always love to think about how, I always love to think about how, you know, our view of history is, you know, colored, not just by the victors, but the people who could afford paper. And, you know, Anfim is a great example of, you know, just, I think people sometimes imagine that humans were fundamentally different in different eras. And I think, like, kids were kids when they, they made fun of their teachers on birch bark tablets that they threw at their friends. And I find that really, I found something comforting about that. Because I think- Yeah, that's soothing.

• 51:01Rachel Feltman?

  So, so little has changed. And maybe, maybe we'll make it after all. I don't know. This has been great. So many weird things learned today, from eels to lightning trees. I'm going to be thinking about the Tonka Bean for a while. Oh, yeah, me too.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Like, I have a lot of, I have a lot of space in my brain for the talk of being.

• 51:23Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's super cool.

• 51:26Rachel Feltman?

  Patricia, thanks so much for coming on. Would you remind our listeners what your book is called so they can find it?

• 51:31Speaker 05

  Oh, thanks so much for having me. This was really fun and enjoyable. My book is called Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature. It comes out May 27th, and anywhere you get your books should be, you should be able to find it. So, thanks so much in advance.

• 51:46Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, yay.

• 51:49Rachel Feltman?

  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.

• 52:20Speaker 01

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