Airborne Butt Cam, Snake Panic, Oops! All Cloacas

Sarah Gailey joins the show to discuss why one scientist put the cutest little monocles on a bunch of chameleons. (And also to talk about their new book, Spread Me, out now wherever you buy books!) Plus, Rachel talks about the great Missouri snake panic, and Lauren talks about an accidental butt cam that lead to some very useful 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! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Go check out Mary Roach's new book, ⁠⁠Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy!⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://maryroach.net/replaceable.html⁠⁠ 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 -- 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: Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Buy or sell your next car today with Car Gurus at https://cargurus.com Visit https://GrowTherapy.com/WEIRDEST today to get started. 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

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:43Rachel Feltman?

  I'm Rachel Feltman.

• 1:44Speaker 05

  And I'm Lauren Lefer. And I'm Sarah Gailey.

• 1:47Rachel Feltman?

  Yay, Sarah, welcome back to the show.

• 1:50Speaker 05

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

• 1:54Rachel Feltman?

  It's so great to have you back. And I asked you back because you have a new book out. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about it?

• 2:01Speaker 05

  Yes, my new book is called Spread Me. It is out September 23rd from At Night Fire, everywhere books are sold. And it's the story of a research team that's trapped at a remote research base with a specimen who's very interested in the research lead and doesn't realize that she shares that interest.

• 2:23Rachel Feltman?

  I'm really excited to read it. I've I've heard it described as like the thing, but horny. I need this. And that sounds great.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  That is exactly the pitch. It's John Carpenter's The Thing if the thing had a prurient interest in the research team.

• 2:49Rachel Feltman?

  Well, I've loved all of your books that I've read, so I I'm sure I'll love this one, too. But, you know, for today, we're excited to have you on to talk about some weird stuff you've you've learned in the course of your writing and life experiences. So thank you so much for coming back.

• 3:06Speaker 05

  Thank you so, so much for having me. I'm just I'm just amped. This is my favorite thing in the whole world is talking about weird stuff we know.

• 3:13Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. All right, let's get right into it. So on the weirdest thing I'm in 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, 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, except we don't do that last part anymore, as listeners know. All the weird things are good. They're all good and they're all weird and they we don't need to have a winner. Lauren, let's start with your tease.

• 3:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, my tease is that some seabirds are toilet trained.

• 3:54Rachel Feltman?

  But only some.

• 3:55Speaker 06

  That that science can tell us so far. It might be more.

• 3:59Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, well, that's exciting. And Sarah, what's your tease?

• 4:02Speaker 05

  My tease is that sometimes chameleons wear monocles.

• 4:07Rachel Feltman?

  Ooh, delightful.

• 4:12Rachel Feltman?

  My tease is that I'm going to talk about the time there was a snake panic in a small city in Missouri, just full on snake panic.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  Snake panic would be perfect knucktats if you have an extra finger on each hand.

• 4:30Rachel Feltman?

  That is so true.

• 4:31Speaker 06

  You calculated that so quickly.

• 4:36Speaker 06

  Constantly assessing two word phrases for if they would or wouldn't be good on knuckle tattoos.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  Okay, I really actually am because my friends and I have a horrible game we play. It will ruin your social group's life, which is best knucktats for if you lost one or more fingers in a horrible accident. So we spend a lot of time going over, like, you know, snake panic wouldn't be good because you would be down to what snack pan, like it's mid at best.

• 5:07Rachel Feltman?

  So it's kind of like you start with the full and then if you were to lose one or more, like it would still be good.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  Exactly. Like I have, I have knucktats, you can't really see them on this camera, that say good work. And if I lose a couple of fingers in like a horrible snake panic accident, I'll be down to goo walk.

• 5:25Rachel Feltman?

  Which is great.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a really good, that's a solid one.

• 5:31Rachel Feltman?

  I love that. Lauren, I want to hear about these potty trained seabirds. So please proceed.

• 5:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course. So I, I don't like all good things. It starts because two Japanese scientists were hoping to study legs and

• 5:45Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, of course.

• 5:46Speaker 06

  Specifically via the leg movements of streaked shearwaters, which are these really kind of like midsize to large Pacific seabirds that essentially run on the water to take flight, like Jesus style. I don't know. They, they run to get off, off the, the surface of the water. They look like giant gulls, but they're, they're actually petrels. I don't know if that distinction matters to anybody here. They eat fish, squid, et cetera, kind of like standard seabird lifestyle you might expect. So, so the scientists wanted to know exactly how the birds were moving their legs in the lead up to lift off. They kind of started with this biophysics question. Uh, so to answer it logically, they, they captured some of the birds, 15 to be exact, and they, they outfitted them with these small cameras,

• 6:31Speaker 06

  like approximately the dimensions of a toy matchbox car. And, and what's important to know here is that they strapped the cameras to the underside of the birds, kind of in the chest region and pointed backwards. So directed at the legs. And the setup did in fact, work great to, to record the birds fancy footwork, but it also inadvertently documented something else. So any guesses about what they got on their backwards facing cameras?

• 6:57Speaker 05

  I think it was probably really wholesome.

• 7:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, wholesome pooping. Both, both can be true. Yeah, so that's, that's right. They got a lot of poop footage. They like inadvertently invented seabird toilet TV. They got about 36 hours of, of video captured during the daytime. So like video that was legible and, and could be understood. And then like an alarming amount of it was birds crapping. So in those 36 hours, there were, there were 195 so-called excretion events, as the scientists described them in the study, which was published in August. So if you do the rough math, that's more than five proverbial bathroom trips an hour. Um, so in the, in the more like granular analysis the researchers did, they, they noted that individual birds seemed to poop at set

• 7:43Speaker 06

  intervals, plus or minus a couple of minutes. So, yeah, so, so they have their little routines. They're, they're so regular, like Jamie Lee Curtis Activia commercial, regular. I don't know if that's still a relevant reference, or if I'm like aging myself. I don't know if that's millennial cringe, whatever.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  We keep it in our hearts.

• 8:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, so they have their own individual set regular intervals. One bird might go every five minutes, another might go every 20. And aside from like short periods of diverging from that, they kept these like regular routines for the entire width of, width is not the wrong, for the entire span of recording. And the typical interval was between every four and 10 minutes. So one bird goes every four to 10 minutes. And I, I want to like, take a moment here to offer up some tangential, but like still important context for understanding this. Bird poop is actually a mixture of feces and urinary excretions. Birds do not have separate plumbing for poop and pee. Um, it all gets mixed together in like that familiar

• 8:44Speaker 06

  chunky white paste stuff and comes out of one hole, the glorious cloaca. That's not,

• 8:50Speaker 05

  we love a cloaca.

• 8:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, we love it. The all-purpose, all-purpose bottom hole. And it's not necessarily like, I don't know. You don't need to know that for understanding the science. I just think it's like worth remembering the marvel of nature's diversity, which is, you know, everybody poops, but not everybody poops the same. Um, yeah. So, so back to it. So they, they discovered the kind of astonishing regularity of birds, like clockwork bowels, I guess. But that wasn't the only weird thing they found. They also discovered another extremely notable pattern among the shearwaters, which is that the birds Never, or almost never, there was only one single exception. The birds never went while floating. So out of nearly 200 poop records, only one was of a

• 9:34Speaker 06

  bird going while on the water. The rest occurred in flight. And it wasn't just that the birds waited until they had some super important, long, flying, foraging journey to start, and then they dropped their waste cargo on the way up. It wasn't like preparing for a road trip or something and then you pee as a precaution at the start. It's that sometimes the birds would take off into flight, poop, and then immediately land again, like all within less than the span of a minute. So some flights are like, they look like they're basically just bathroom flights.

• 10:05Rachel Feltman?

  Interesting.

• 10:06Speaker 06

  I think it is. I think it's fascinating, Rachel. So shearwaters, they are really good at flying, but mostly that means they're really good at gliding. Like they're graceful, they're agile. Once they get going, they can kind of like go for a long time. But taking off is like far and away the most energy intensive part of flying. Leo Yasaka, the lead researcher I spoke to on this study, he told me it's comparable to human sprinting, but after watching some footage and thinking about it, I think it's like, I think it's harder than that because they have to run, which is the sprint, but they also have to flap their wings really hard at the same time.

• 10:41Rachel Feltman?

  Sure.

• 10:42Speaker 06

  So it's kind of like, it's like a full body HIIT workout, and they have to do it every time they gotta go. And again, it's not like once or twice a day, whatever. It's like more than five times an hour.

• 10:52Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Speaker 06

  They did some fun math where they put a couple of these shearwaters in a cardboard box to see like just how much poop they were releasing. And from the box estimates, they determined that the birds excrete about 5% of their body weight every hour.

• 11:08Rachel Feltman?

  It's so much.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  So much. I made a dinner the other week that was lentils and sweet potatoes. And the next day I felt like I had a cardboard box experience. But I don't think I could repeat that every hour.

• 11:23Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, no, certainly not. Yeah, absolutely not.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I liked it. It's like a continual unburdening, you know? They're like always on a cleanse.

• 11:35Speaker 06

  Seabird cleanse lifestyle. And you know, it actually, it has some kind of big environmental implications. Seabird guano, which is the preferred term for bulk poop, I think, is, is nature's marine fertilizer. It's super important for coastal terrestrial habitats and the ocean itself. Where and when seabird's poop can determine like how well coral reefs grow and like islands with coral reefs and seabird colonies have like way healthier, bigger, more robust reefs than islands without the seabird populations. Seabird poop is also really important for like terrestrial greening and coastal regions. And all of the previous estimates of seabird poop volume were kind of like taken from land estimates.

• 12:17Speaker 06

  So they look at kind of like, how, how fast does a seabird nest site get plastered in the stuff?

• 12:25Speaker 06

  And what the study authors here found is that all of those previous estimates were like vast underestimates because shearwaters that are in their floating stage of life or, you know, floating, flying marine stage of life, poop way, way more than all of those other estimates. It's probably maybe because they're like, when they're at their nest sites, they're not foraging as frequently. But when they're on the water, they're in their like feeding frenzy era. So if these new estimates are correct, the birds play a way bigger role in the nutrient cycle than previously thought. I don't have, have any of you ever heard of like the whale pump or the whale poop loop?

• 13:00Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, we, I talked about it on We're Just Thing a while ago.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  Oh my God, maybe I learned it from you.

• 13:05Rachel Feltman?

  I, it was around recently, you know, I don't know that it was from me. But yeah, no, the, the whale pee funnel, the, yeah, they just, they bring nutrients all over the world. I just, just poop it and pee it.

• 13:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, that is so the mark of a good, robust, long-term friendship is when you say to your friend, have you heard this thing? And they're like, I'm the one who told you that thing. This happened to me recently with my best friend and a television show that I watched on an airplane. And I landed and as soon as I landed, I was texting her, I was like, have you heard of this show? It's incredible. I think you'd love it. And she was like, I have been telling you to watch that show for three years.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  Oh no. Wait, what show was it?

• 13:44Speaker 05

  It's Hacks.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Hacks is great.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. She was like, my partner works on that show. I've been telling you to watch it. And I was like, well, I think you'd enjoy it.

• 13:56Speaker 06

  I made this show for you.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Anyway, hacks to whale poop to birds. Yeah. So, so anyway, shearwaters might be doing something akin to the whale poop loop. They're not quite sure on what scale or like what geographic range yet. The study authors are hoping to do follow up work where they add GPS tracking in addition to the little cameras to see if all the poop is concentrated in a specific area or pattern and might serve some local ecological purpose. But anyway, back to the shearwater specific flying toilet routine. Like now that the scientists know that the birds only poop on the wing, there is this really unresolved big question of why? Why they put all of that like sprinting, flapping effort into not pooping while floating?

• 14:44Speaker 06

  When the alternative is that they could just be sitting on like the world's biggest toilet, right? Like prepared to go at all times. Like who among us has not gotten into the ocean with the specific intent of peeing and then getting back to the sandy beach?

• 14:56Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, it's a feeling of pure freedom.

• 14:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. And like, why aren't the birds that free? Why do they put themselves through this? So there, there are a few hypotheses which I, I want to throw out there, but it's, you know, before I get anyone's hopes up, none of these have been settled yet. This is very initial pilot research. It was all an accident. Remember, they just wanted to film the legs.

• 15:21Rachel Feltman?

  They weren't trying to get into this freaky poop stuff.

• 15:24Speaker 06

  Yeah. Absolutely. The best science comes out of scientists trying to do only like marginally weird things and then ending up doing like far, far stranger things, stranger things. I don't know. I can't even say that. Is there a copyright against saying that? Anyway, the hypotheses, one is that maybe this is like the most logical, is that they just wanted to drop weight in preparation for every flight, like sort of self explanatory, but the waste can be heavy. There's no need to hold on to it. And, you know, in those flights that I mentioned earlier, where the birds took off and then landed really quickly after going, it's possible that those flights were aborted for some other reason. And maybe they weren't actually bathroom specific takeoffs, but you'd have to ask a bird to know, I guess.

• 16:09Rachel Feltman?

  It's just that poop and correlate. With fly.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is a correlative study, not a causational study. We cannot know the true answer. But an inverse possibility is that flying actually makes it easier to poop. So maybe the process of like bearing down, flexing wing, getting the run going. Maybe that triggers some sort of release reflex. But the counter to this is that when the birds are on land at their nesting sites, just kind of walking around, they do. They're they poop frequently just on their little feet. And so maybe the explanation that requires the least amount of hand waving is that it's like some sort of evolved version of bird hygiene. It might be that the birds really just prefer not to poop where they float.

• 16:52Speaker 06

  And, you know, that they're trying to avoid foraging, diving, swimming in their own muck. Although you might notice that like geese and ducks and other birds seem to have like no real problem with this.

• 17:03Rachel Feltman?

  They're fine with it.

• 17:05Speaker 06

  So, you know, maybe it's a species by species preference. One other thought, it might be a predator avoidance strategy. Like a big cloud of poop could be an immediate go ahead signal for a shark or seal to like. Chomp. That hand motion did not translate on audio.

• 17:23Rachel Feltman?

  But it was great.

• 17:24Speaker 06

  But thank you.

• 17:26Speaker 05

  The audience will know. They'll they'll they'll feel it.

• 17:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, the upward Pac-Man, whatever. I kind of vaguely Italian. But the predator avoidance thing, that would only make a difference if the birds are traveling far enough away from where they started before landing again. And and then the last kind of possible hypothesis that the study authors could come up with is that maybe. Maybe pooping into saltwater is simply like a little unpleasant. When a bird poops, it has to expose some sensitive cloacal tissue that's like usually internal. It's kind of like a sphincter opening. So it's possible that the saltwater irritates that, but there's there's no clear evidence suggesting one thing or over the other. Or a potential unknown hypothesis, and maybe maybe it's multiple. But the. Oh, yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Can I? I I want to just put my little like roulette chip on that last one because of a. Conversation I had with a friend of mine who has been trying so hard to convince me to do sensory deprivation. Tank time. She's like float tank would just be so good for you. And I'm like alone with my thoughts for a full hour. I would. I would choose death. I would choose death immediately first. And once when she was, I don't know how she thought this was gonna increase the chances of me doing this, but she was trying to convince me to do it. And she goes. It's really cool because it's it's saltwater and it's at a very specific like salinity so that you just float in the middle of it. And the only thing is, she was like, I'm gonna give you a tip right now. And I was like, I'm not gonna do this activity, so I don't need the tip.

• 18:57Speaker 05

  And she said, I'm telling you anyway, when you go in, bring some like Vaseline or Aquifer and put it on your ears and your nose and like around your eyes. And on your butthole, because the the saltwater is like very saline and it'll dry out your mucus membranes. It's uncomfortable. But if you put a little like occlusive layer, you won't have to deal with that. And I said, great, I'm not doing any.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  But if I was floating in a sensory deprivation chamber, because I don't know, I pissed off the villain from Saw somehow. I and I was pooping in there five times an hour. I have to imagine that, yeah, your your cloaca would dry out.

• 19:35Speaker 06

  Wow, I think you've maybe just solved this through like a very niche, personal experience.

• 19:42Speaker 05

  You're welcome, burn scientist.

• 19:44Speaker 06

  We need. It all makes sense to me. Yeah, this is why we need more representation in science. We need people who specifically have friends petitioning them to undertake saltwater deprivation tank experiences. That's the only way we'll know why the birds don't poop while they're floating. We got a Vaseline. We got a Vaseline for cloacas.

• 20:08Speaker 06

  I had like a little kicker thing I was gonna say, but I think I'm just gonna end it there.

• 20:16Speaker 06

  That's better. That's better than a pun.

• 20:21Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, wow, this is a great study. I definitely remember seeing it in the headlines and had no idea that it was a total accident.

• 20:30Rachel Feltman?

  And what a beautiful thing for scientists to discover inadvertently.

• 20:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you, the footage is out there. You can see it if you want.

• 20:40Rachel Feltman?

  Wow, I don't really, but I'm glad I have the option.

• 20:46Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.

• 22:18Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back and I'm going to talk about the snake panic in Missouri. Snake panic at the disco. Our story starts in August of 1953 in the very small city of Springfield, Missouri. It's like a city the same way the city I grew up in, Vineland is a city. It had like 60,000 people and something fairly routine happened. Someone found a snake in their yard and they killed it with a gardening hoe. Gardening hoes will be important to this story. Lot of hoes in here. Yeah, Missouri has dozens of native snakes. So again, the seeing one in your yard and having to dispatch it, not a huge deal. But this one did strike the resident as looking kind of funny.

• 23:02Rachel Feltman?

  Apparently before he struck this long black snake down, it had raised its head and spread its hood. Now, if your instinct is that none of the dozens of snakes in Missouri's casually have hoods, that would be correct. That is, that is not a thing that the chill snakes of Missouri have going on. So they did, he brought the carcass to a local pet shop and the pet shop owner said it was harmless. I will note that one news article is out there saying that he said it was a puff adder with a weird head, just like some weird looking puff adder and that that was nothing to worry about. And I was like, that's surprising to me because I think puff adders are really dangerous. And if you are researching this story and you too are confused, here's the explanation.

• 23:47Rachel Feltman?

  Puff adders generally refer to a highly venomous and notoriously aggressive snake from Africa, which definitely would have been both surprising and worrying in a small city in Missouri. But it seems that confusingly, Missourians sometimes use the term puff adder to refer to the eastern hog nose snake, an entirely non-venomous and non-threatening snake.

• 24:11Speaker 06

  So sweet.

• 24:12Rachel Feltman?

  I know. They're so cute. I, you know, obviously, you know, informal, unscientific names like there, there's a ton of overlap. Things can randomly have the same common name, but I feel like you shouldn't, you shouldn't use a name that's also the name of an entirely venomous snake.

• 24:28Speaker 06

  I have.

• 24:28Rachel Feltman?

  For a sweet little hog nose snake. It's like the, the incredibly deadly viper in series of unfortunate events.

• 24:34Speaker 06

  I actually, I spent a semester at the University of Cape Town when I was in college and the campus is beautiful and backs up to a national park. And I would often go on like hikes after classes and I once with a friend came upon like a puff adder like mating aggregation in like the middle of the trail. Oh, just to hay. And it was, I mean, it was cra- it was like three or four of them, I think, kind of like twisting and writhing. And we like sat there for a while wondering like, huh, like, what do we do here? And we were very close to the end of this loop trail that we were on, like, like a hundred meters away from the end of it. And instead of trying to figure out a way to cross what was happening.

• 25:12Rachel Feltman?

  You just went back.

• 25:12Speaker 06

  We, yeah, we reversed the whole.

• 25:14Rachel Feltman?

  That's probably, that's from what I have, from what I know of puff adders, that's probably smart. Cause again, not only are they venomous, but they are like one of those venomous snake species that it's like, yeah, this snake can just get pissed off at you.

• 25:29Rachel Feltman?

  Most of them, it's like, well, don't step on it and it won't bite you. But you know, every once in a while, there's one where it's like,

• 25:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, we.

• 25:34Rachel Feltman?

  It might want to bite you.

• 25:35Speaker 06

  We debated the leap over and decided it like simply was not worth it.

• 25:40Rachel Feltman?

  I think you probably made the right call.

• 25:41Speaker 05

  You know, I've been to parties like that where I like go to get my coat and I end up being like, I just gotta get out of here.

• 25:50Speaker 05

  There's a bunch of puff adders mating on the pile of coats.

• 25:53Rachel Feltman?

  I'll, I'll get a new coat. So back in Missouri, a week later, someone across the street also had to kill a snake. Basically a guy saw his bulldog attacking a snake in the bushes. So he rushed out, he pulled his dog away from the snake. Good pet owner. And then he grabbed his own garden hose and, and bashed the snake.

• 26:14Speaker 06

  He just, wait, he had it with him on a walk with his dog?

• 26:17Rachel Feltman?

  No, he wa- he was like in his yard.

• 26:19Speaker 06

  Oh, okay.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  Do you not take a full complement of gardening tools on your dog walks?

• 26:23Speaker 06

  I, you know, I try to be, try to be prepared for everything.

• 26:26Rachel Feltman?

  You might need to get some hoeing done. And presumably he had talked to his neighbor, I have to imagine.

• 26:35Rachel Feltman?

  You know, guys who lived across the street from each other in Springfield, Missouri, in the 1950s surely gabbed all the time. So he knew that this was the second weird looking snake that had shown up on their street in a week. So they actually called the cops and then

• 26:54Speaker 06

  Naturally.

• 26:54Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 26:58Rachel Feltman?

  Arrest this dead snake.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  They don't have hands. They can't be contained.

• 27:05Rachel Feltman?

  They took the snake, not to the pet store, but crucially, to a local high school science teacher. And that science teacher was like, my dudes, this is an Indian cobra.

• 27:18Rachel Feltman?

  So yeah, the species Najana is native to the Indian subcontinent. And it's actually, it is venomous for sure. And it is a member of the, the big four species that together are responsible for most of the snake bite cases in India and Sri Lanka. So not native to Springfield, Missouri, definitely a cause for concern. And yeah, they're really, if you're imagining like a stereotypical cobra, that's what Najana does look like. They are, they have the big hoods. They'll, they like stand up on their little bodies and wiggle around with their hoods open. They really, they are designed to make you go, oh, I think that snake could probably kill me.

• 28:02Speaker 06

  And the pet store owner had just been like, that's a weird looking hog nose snake.

• 28:06Rachel Feltman?

  That's a weird looking hog nose snake. Don't worry about it. Something, something's go, it has a weird head.

• 28:13Speaker 06

  Who among us doesn't have a weird head?

• 28:15Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 06

  You know, we can't judge.

• 28:19Rachel Feltman?

  So from then until that October, altogether, there were at least 11 Indian cobras captured or killed in Springfield, mostly with garden hose. Keeps coming up. One man did spot a snake in the road and hit it with a car jack. And then when that didn't work, he got back in his car and ran over it repeatedly. There were like, people were understandably very freaked out. So if they didn't have a garden hose on hand, which was apparently The go to for locals dealing with more pedestrian snakes. People just kind of threw whatever they had at it. At one point, a snake, one source I read said it was a seven foot long boa constrictor, but most just refer to it as another cobra.

• 28:59Rachel Feltman?

  So honestly, do not know what the snake was, but it was definitely a not native Missouri snake. It slithered under a house after the homeowner like threw a rock at it. And then he was like, oh no, there's a snake under my house. Like, we can't just keep living like this. So the police came again to arrest the snake. And they first tried to use some kind of lasso on a stick to catch the snake, but that completely failed. So then they threw a canister of tear gas under the house, which did-

• 29:32Speaker 05

  Classic police solution.

• 29:34Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah, which did get the snake out. But then, once it emerged, they fired five slugs at it. Some sources imply that having been shot five times, the snake was still alive. Others imply that they missed all five shots and that's why the snake was still alive. Unclear, but they definitely failed to kill it. And then supposedly a garden hoe was called in for backup and they took care of the snake. So unsurprisingly, all of these snakes caused a major panic. You know, kids were kept inside. The hospital in this random, small city in Missouri had to get a shipment of antivenom.

• 30:12Speaker 06

  Were all of the snakes that were being killed actually cobras?

• 30:17Rachel Feltman?

  So the 11 we're talking about, these were like, we saw them, we looked at them and we're pretty sure they're cobras. Of course, this having happened in the 1950s, it's possible some of them weren't. But actually, a lot of them were preserved. So we do know that like, there were a lot of Indian cobras running around this town. Surely some people just got freaked out by a regular ass snake because of what was happening. Totally understandable, but yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  This is what happens when a traveling door to door cobra salesman buys a cheap briefcase. And you know, he's walking from one house to the next and the latch comes undone. And all those cobras fall out and now what's he supposed to do?

• 31:02Speaker 06

  Infomercial style, I can't, I can't contain all these cobras.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  There has to be a better way.

• 31:11Rachel Feltman?

  And yeah, at one point, this guy Dell Kaywood, who was Springfield's acting city manager, he actually, he rented a van with a speaker system and played, quote, "Indian snake charmer music." Don't know what that would have sounded like, probably was just kind of racist, but police officers and a local snake militia would kind of prowl around as he played this music from the van, like carrying garden hose and other potentially deadly snake weapons. Many stories about this get a good chuckle out of being like, well, snakes are deaf, so that, that wouldn't have worked. Fun fact, that is not strictly speaking true. Snakes lack eardrums, but they do have inner ears, which can pick up on both vibrations in the ground and very low frequency airborne sounds.

• 31:55Rachel Feltman?

  They do have trouble with higher pitched sounds, so it's true that the snake charmer music would not have done anything in particular for them, though maybe the rumble of a, a truck and a bunch of people carrying garden hose might have gotten their attention. And also, speaking of snake charming, total, total BS, snakes look mesmerized because they're just tracking the movement of the charmer, the same way they'd track any potential threat. And the real trick of a snake charming act is not letting the snake bite you, which is generally managed in, in ways that are a bummer. Like sometimes they'll sew part of a snake's mouth shut so it can only stick its tongue out, or they'll keep them really hungry or dehydrated, so they're like too weak to strike.

• 32:38Rachel Feltman?

  So yeah, snakes, don't get charmed, definitely not by like racist music coming from an ice cream truck or whatever they had rented in, in Springfield, Missouri. But the point is, they really tried everything, and there were a lot of people out there, boots on the ground, trying to hunt down snakes. And again, you know, I've talked about like, I've talked about panics on the show before, you know, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon is a great one, where probably not much actually bad stuff was going on, and people were just freaking out. This is a situation where we do know there were, there was a non-zero number of non-native incredibly venomous snakes.

• 33:21Rachel Feltman?

  So I can really understand why they were, uh, just in a tizzy about it.

• 33:29Rachel Feltman?

  Luckily, no one was ever bit or otherwise injured, which really speaks to, I would say, the like baseline snake handling sensibilities of people in Missouri in the 1950s. So, good for them.

• 33:42Speaker 06

  Garden hose. This is a garden hose advertisement.

• 33:45Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, basically. And also, fortunately for all residents, no eggs were found. This did not become a perpetual problem. It's assumed that all of the escaped snakes were either male or were female. So, they did not get together in a mating tangle. And this was a self-limiting problem. And indeed, people calmed down as the winter approached because they were like, the snakes aren't going to survive. There were rumors until that following spring that there was a local quarry where there were some steam vents. And they were like, what if some of them made it in there? They could totally survive in there. They're going to reemerge come spring. But no, this problem went away as it got cold.

• 34:32Rachel Feltman?

  And also, you know, it wasn't all bad. You know, Springfield's residents capitalized on this thing, which became an international news story. A lot of area bars had Cobra cocktails. There were Cobra-themed bumper stickers and other swag. Springfield had already had a snake on its official city seal. And it was temporarily modified to resemble a hooded Cobra.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  So, plan to boost the local economy, release invasive, or not native, not native venomous snakes.

• 35:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, exactly. It turns out it works really well. And yeah, when one of these Cobras was captured and brought to the zoo, it was a huge hit, like thousands of people from the area came to look at it. So, yeah, you know, they made the most of it. But you may be wondering, how did this happen? You know, Sarah made a great point, traveling salesman with a shoddy briefcase, totally possible. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people blamed that pet store owner I mentioned earlier. And not just because he completely dropped the ball in a really embarrassing way on identifying the first deadly cobra, he did keep some pretty exotic animals. So they were like,

• 35:45Rachel Feltman?

  these random exotic snakes definitely came from this guy's pet store. He was adamant that he had not had a sudden loss of snake incident. Apparently, he, he lost his business permit and left town, and he maintained his innocence until his death in 1977. And it turns out, he was kind of responsible, but not in the way most people thought. So the truth came out in 1988, when a man named Carl Barnett, who had been convinced by a friend that people deserved to know the truth, and by a lawyer that probably nothing would come of it all these years later, he took the blame slash credit for the cobra incident. And it's a

• 36:29Rachel Feltman?

  pretty fantastic story, in my opinion. So, back in August of 1953, Barnett was 14 years old, and this guy Carl, he had a deal with the pet shop owner. He would go collect some of the, the many boring old local snakes that existed in Missouri that people killed with garden hose all the time. And he would bring them in, and he would trade them for exotic aquarium fish, which he was very interested in amassing. And at one point, they traded, and the fish died almost immediately. And Carl was super pissed. He was like, you, you cheated me. I collected all these snakes, and the fish is already dead. And apparently,

• 37:14Rachel Feltman?

  the pet shop owner was very unsympathetic, and told him, you know, tough luck. And Carl, who again was just 14 at the time, and had a, you know, a real sense of justice, he went around the back on his way out, and he saw a crate of snakes. I don't know how he knew the crate was full of snakes. Did it say snakes on it? Did he hear snakes hissing? Who knows? But he says, he just came across this crate of snakes, and presumably, he either thought they were the very snakes he'd captured, or he just figured like, an eye for an eye, a snake for a snake. So he let them loose, because he was like,

• 37:54Rachel Feltman?

  This is fair. You know, this guy cheated me out of a fish. I'm gonna, I'm gonna mess up his snake operation. And then he just forgot about it. I guess it didn't occur to him that these angry hissing hooded snakes that came out when he opened the crate were like not chilled to have roaming around. Or maybe he knew immediately and he was just like, uh oh, and left. But he, he, he moved on. And then as soon as news broke about the big cobra mystery, he was like, oh, no. And it seems like he just sort of got the sweats anytime another snake showed up. Um, there's a quote from him in the newspaper being like, I've never been so scared in my life. Once I realized what I'd caused, for years I was afraid they'd figure out it had

• 38:38Rachel Feltman?

  been me and off to jail I'd go. He said, it is definitely the biggest thing I ever was involved in, in my life.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  The biggest thing I ever was involved in. That's, but so, okay, the 14 year old kid, sure, he like released the snakes, but did that pet shop owner like have the permits for like a shipment of venomous cobras? Like, how did that work?

• 38:59Rachel Feltman?

  That's such a good question, Lauren. And the thing is, I have to say in 1953, I don't know what kind of permits there were for that.

• 39:07Speaker 06

  There wasn't like snake FDA or whatever?

• 39:09Rachel Feltman?

  I don't think, I don't think if there were laws about it, I do not think they were being enforced. I mean, this pet shop owner is definitely not without blame. He had a crate of cobras outside his shop and he definitely knew

• 39:24Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:25Rachel Feltman?

  that these cobras were his cobras.

• 39:27Speaker 06

  And he never, he never thought that was a weird hog nose snake. He knows what a cobra, he ordered the cobras.

• 39:32Rachel Feltman?

  He was like, crap, these are the snakes that went missing last week.

• 39:36Speaker 05

  They showed him that weird hog nose and he looked at it and he said, that looks so similar to the snake from the snake catalog that I ordered, that never showed up.

• 39:46Rachel Feltman?

  Never showed up.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, from Snake Seers.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  He's on the phone with customer service being like, I know you have to send me another crate of cobras. They never arrived. And then the bell over his shop door rings and this guy shows up with this dead snake and he goes, hmm.

• 40:08Rachel Feltman?

  What a coincidence. Yeah, exactly. It's like, if we're talking about sort of who is ultimately responsible for this having happened and gotten out of control, I do think it was the pet shop owner. But in his defense, they wouldn't have been all over town if not for this fourteen year old kid. And it seems like the pet shop owner, it wasn't like he wasn't trying to fix the problem. One of the reasons people suspected him is that after the like second snake sighting, he was seen like going around town with a sack, like trying to catch the snakes.

• 40:42Rachel Feltman?

  You know, it's, everybody knew they had come from this snake guy's place. They just didn't know the details until 1988, when Carl came clean. And yeah, one of the last snakes captured in this event is preserved at Drury University in Springfield, though it is no longer on display to the public. They moved it to a, a different area that's only accessible to students and, and faculty. And people were like, where's the cobra? So, you know, the, the mystery continues, though the answer to this one's pretty simple. It's just in a part of Drury University you can't see. But yeah, I, I think my favorite thing about

• 41:26Rachel Feltman?

  this story is just how, how good apparently people from Missouri were at killing snakes in the 1950s. And how much worse this could have been if they, if they did not have those garden hose gels. Like, the fact that no one was bitten is actually kind of incredible.

• 41:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, the American Southeast with like even more venomous snakes.

• 41:47Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 05

  I, it's also kind of miraculous that there weren't any eggs, not just if, I mean, if all of the snakes were male, then that would make sense. But if all of them were female, a lot of snake species can participate in parthenogenesis.

• 42:04Rachel Feltman?

  That is true.

• 42:05Speaker 05

  They clone themselves in spontaneous, they just go, there's, this place is so great. The only thing wrong with it is it needs more snakes. And then they just clone themselves into an egg and they, and they make more snakes.

• 42:15Speaker 06

  Well, and it's also, like, how hard is it to sex a cobra? Because I've, when I was a kid, I got two hamsters from the pet store that they assured me were certainly both female, and then they were not. And then I had 15 hamsters. So I feel that that couldn't have been, I don't know, maybe, maybe they were better at hunting for snakes than they were hunting for eggs. Maybe there were eggs, you know?

• 42:38Rachel Feltman?

  And, you know, winter did happen. So it's totally possible that just that is what fixed the problem. But they sure got through the worst of it, thanks to their garden hose.

• 42:50Speaker 06

  Visit a hardware store near you.

• 42:52Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  Wild.

• 42:57Rachel Feltman?

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

• 43:04Speaker 00

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 44:10Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Sarah, it's time for your fact.

• 44:13Speaker 05

  Before we go into my part, I do just want to share that I almost was also presenting a marine bird fact. When you were like, some seabirds are potty trained. I was gonna lose my mind if we had an all seabirds episode. It would have been so thrilling.

• 44:35Rachel Feltman?

  That would have been great.

• 44:36Speaker 06

  Well, wait, do we get like a teaser for the alt fact that wasn't? Or do we just have to wait for your next weirdest thing appearance?

• 44:43Speaker 05

  Oh, oh, I'll happily tease it. Marine birds have secret kidneys above their eyes.

• 44:50Rachel Feltman?

  That's such a wild place to have secret kidneys.

• 44:54Speaker 06

  So like in their foreheads?

• 44:55Rachel Feltman?

  My last guess.

• 44:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, above each eye, they have something called a salt gland that is a specialized gland that exists to remove salt from their bloodstream, which they then sneeze or drip out of their nose. It's a highly concentrated saline solution that allows them to drink seawater.

• 45:12Rachel Feltman?

  Whoa. Incredible.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  And that's not even the fact.

• 45:15Rachel Feltman?

  No, that's not even the fact.

• 45:17Speaker 05

  All right. So yeah, that's not even the fact. My fact is about another cloaca creature, which it is nice that this is an Oops All Cloacas episode.

• 45:26Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  I want to talk to you about one of my favorite creatures on the planet, the chameleon, and share some neat stuff with you about chameleon vision.

• 45:40Rachel Feltman?

  Incredible.

• 45:42Speaker 05

  So I have a warm up for this, which is also not quite the fact, but it's just cool. If you picture a chameleon in your in your mind palace, look at its face and look at the things that it uses to see stuff. And tell me, are you looking at the chameleon's eyeball?

• 46:01Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 46:02Rachel Feltman?

  I thought I was.

• 46:04Speaker 06

  It's got, maybe it's got like those, like a pen, they can.

• 46:08Rachel Feltman?

  Little like domes.

• 46:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, they can move them in a way that I cannot move my eyeballs, but there's still eyes in there, right?

• 46:16Speaker 05

  It is such a crime that this, that your listeners can't see. Both of you just were doing the hands from that Benicio del Toro.

• 46:24Speaker 06

  Oh, Pan Flaver, the baby eater. I think about him all the time.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  On your face. You're not looking at the chameleon's eyeball. You're looking at the chameleon's eyelid, which is fused shut over the chameleon's eye with only a pinhole for the pupil to see out of. Otherwise, their eyes are completely sealed behind a single fused eyelid.

• 46:48Speaker 06

  Wow. Okay, wait, I'm like revising my understa- so it's like you've got the, the scaly skin orb and then like a little hole and then over that it's like permanently covered by a lens. Or by, by a skin, by a lid.

• 47:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the scaly skin eyelid, so you have, you both have two eyes, just for listeners to be aware. You both have two eyes. If you close your eye, or if it's both eyes at once, as you please, then just imagine that you can't ever undo that motion. And so in order to see, you just get a little hole poked in your eyelid, right where your pupil is, so that you can look out of that.

• 47:27Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 47:29Rachel Feltman?

  What a system.

• 47:30Speaker 06

  That seems, I mean, that seems like it would be worse, but who am I to say?

• 47:37Speaker 05

  It's not my preference, but I'm not going to judge chameleons' choices. It's, you know, it's their body. Now we're warm and we're ready to think about chameleon eyeballs, so I'm going to take us into the wonderful world of chameleon vision modification. So you, as I said a moment ago, astute listeners may recall that you each have two eyeballs. As do I, personally. And we use those two eyeballs to engage in something called binocular vision. What that means is that our brains take input from left eye and right eye and use the disparity between what information comes into each eyeball to determine how far away things are. If you cover one of your eyes and then you reach for something,

• 48:21Speaker 05

  you're going to do a much worse job being able to grab it on the first try because you're only getting one input and you need that binocular vision for your brain to process the optical input into distance information. That's how our vision works. Chameleons' eyes are, they protrude laterally, so they come, they stick out of the side of the chameleon's head and they each move independently. That gives chameleons panoramic vision, which is pretty sweet. They can see in 360 degrees. But it means that their brains can't process information from their eyes using binocular vision processing. They're monocular. They see from one eye completely,

• 49:04Speaker 05

  but they don't process both of those inputs at the same time into like a depth perception amount of information the way that we do.

• 49:13Speaker 06

  So it's kind of like when I take a pano photo on my phone and everything is flattened and stretched and terrible and weird?

• 49:20Speaker 05

  Exactly, yes, except the chameleons like it that way. There's strong preference with their fused eyelids. Now, do either of you know what chameleons eat?

• 49:35Speaker 06

  Bug? Is it bug?

• 49:38Speaker 05

  It frequently, it frequently am bug. Sometimes very large chameleons, such as the Madagascan chameleon, eat birds. Which I find really alarming. I'm not sure exactly why it feels so objectionable.

• 49:51Speaker 06

  Cholera on Cholera crime.

• 49:54Speaker 05

  You should be doing that. I also like to think that I'm more like bird than I'm like bug. And so this is one step closer to chameleon meat.

• 50:02Speaker 06

  Sure, yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 05

  Which I don't prefer. Um, in order to catch their prey, chameleons ballistically launch their tongues into the air toward their prey to catch it. They have a tapered hyoid bone in their throat. That's your your hyoid cartilage is where your Adam's apple is. And they have a bone there that it's shaped like a ramp. And so they'll pull their tongue all the way back to their hyoid bone like a slingshot and then let it go. And it launches ballistically out of their mouth to catch their prey. Have you ever caught a flying bug with your tongue on purpose?

• 50:41Speaker 06

  Not on purpose. I have gotten kind of good at getting mosquitoes with my hand, but like out of the air. But no, not with tongue yet. But who's to say that I couldn't learn?

• 50:53Speaker 05

  I believe that you could. I love your skill catching mosquitoes out of the air, especially because I am allergic to mosquitoes. So every time someone kills one, I get to live another day. I think it would be a lot harder for you to catch the mosquitoes if you didn't have access to depth perception, though. And you're using your hand, which is very dexterous, and chameleons are using their tongue, which is like, it's like a tongue. Nowadays. So for a long time, scientists were asking the question, how chameleons do you do that? How do you catch the bug when your eyeballs work the way that they work? And for a long time, there was a hypothesis that they were using stereoscopic image processing.

• 51:35Speaker 05

  So that their, the idea was that their brains were taking these two completely disparate panoramic monocular views and somehow layering them over each other. But that hypothesis is just in the whole water because, again, chameleons process information completely independently from each eye. So they can be watching a bug with one eye and assessing a threat with the other eye. And those things just don't overlay. So in the 60s, an enterprising scientist, I believe Lindsey Harkness, but I need to double check my source material on that. So I will try to get that to you for the show notes. Designed an experiment. The scientist got his hands on a lot of chameleons.

• 52:21Speaker 06

  Maybe he went to the same pet store. Maybe he had the snake store hookup.

• 52:26Rachel Feltman?

  Lifted the chameleon crate in the back of the store.

• 52:30Speaker 05

  This scientist had a tropical fish that died way too soon. And he went to get revenge and found a big crate labeled chameleons. And he went, you know what? I'm gonna do some science on these. He had these chameleons in his laboratory. And he painstakingly crafted tiny monocles, half of which were your vision more far sighted and half of which were to make your vision more near sighted. So similar to when you go to the optometrist and they have the lenses over your eyes and they go like one or two. One or two. You know, those lenses, some of them make your focal distance closer and some make your focal distance farther away. And he created these miniature monocles

• 53:15Speaker 05

  and affixed them to the chameleon's eyes, one on each side of disparate focal length disruptions. And then he dangled bugs near the chameleons on either side. And the chameleons consistently mist the bugs with their tongues by the precise distance of the focal length change. So he used these monocles to prove that the chameleons were processing distance information separately with each eyeball.

• 53:49Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 53:49Speaker 05

  And using the results of that experiment, combined with probably non invasive, non painful, really pleasant means of finding out what's inside a chameleon's eye that the chameleons probably liked. And they were probably fine by the end of this.

• 54:06Speaker 05

  Scientists determine that chameleons combine having a concave lens inside their eye. That's called a negative lens and the shape of it is concave. Their cornea is convex. And they combine the concave lens with the convex cornea to create inside of each eyeball, a rangefinder. Wow. Just like on your fancy DSLR camera, or I assume on some kind of gun accessory. This rangefinder basically adjusts until the thing that it's looking at is in focus.

• 54:50Speaker 05

  And then uses that adjustment to determine how far away the thing is. Whoa. And that is how chameleons see bug in order to eat bug using their ballistically launching tongue. That's incredible.

• 55:06Speaker 06

  So they're like, is something within their eye actually changing in response? Like, is there like, you did this kind of like twisty motion with your hands. Is there some sort of physical telescoping, like telescoping change?

• 55:21Speaker 05

  I, okay, this is coming up against the limit of my eyeball knowledge. So I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say as close as I can get to understanding this, but it's not gonna be, it's not gonna get us all the way there. Tiny muscles inside your eye make minute adjustments to the, I believe, the position of your lens in your eye and to the shape of your cornea in order for you to focus on things that are near and far. This is part of why you can get eye fatigue and eye strain if you spend 100% of your time, for instance, looking at a computer monitor. I don't know anything about that.

• 56:04Speaker 05

  It doesn't sound like me at all. So I believe it, the twisty motion I was making was, it was, for listeners, it was kind of like a horizontal pepper grinder motion, and that's based on nothing. That's, that is just, that is me being like, is this how zoom lens works? I have no idea. I do believe that there are physical. Changes made inside the eye for any, anyone when you're focusing on something near or far. However, human eyes have a convex lens and a convex cornea, which we use to focus on things. So we're not using the disparity between our cornea and our lens to range find because we're using that binocular vision.

• 56:49Speaker 06

  But so we, so I mean, objectively, chameleon eyes are better than ours because they only need one eye to do what our two eyes do, which is discern depth. And so if we, if we were more highly evolved species, we might have, have two chameleon eyes or just one single big eye that did the same thing our two eyes did.

• 57:08Speaker 05

  I think one single big eye would be more aesthetically streamlined.

• 57:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 05

  But two eyes pointing in different directions would let us look at two bugs at once, which is kind of the dream.

• 57:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 05

  I do also just, I want us to acknowledge the amazing emotional and philosophical journey that you've taken within the last 15 minutes. Because when we were talking about fusing your eyelids shut and poking holes in them, you were saying that you thought that sounded bad to do and less good than the way that we do it. And now you're saying that you think chameleon eyes actually are better and superior. And that's just like amazing growth.

• 57:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've been convinced. They, they won the eye contest, which, okay, you, I am, I'm a pescatarian, which might sound completely unrelated, but as a pescatarian, I'm sometimes trying to convince my vegetarian partner that the foods that I'm eating are like, normal and good and like, maybe not as upsetting to him as some of them may be. And one of those foods is sometimes scallops. And the, I think the idea of eating a scallop is like uniquely upsetting because it's like a whole self-contained little guy to him. Like it's the whole guy and you're eating it all at once as opposed to like a piece of something larger. And one time in an effort to explain the scallops, it was, it was okay.

• 58:28Speaker 06

  For some reason, I brought up the fact that they have dozens of eyes, sometimes up to 200 eyes.

• 58:33Speaker 05

  That is not full piece of information for him, I'm sure.

• 58:36Speaker 06

  It didn't, it didn't help the situation. And in fact, continues to not be helpful to the situation. But the

• 58:43Rachel Feltman?

  Hundreds of eyes with everybody.

• 58:45Speaker 06

  A thing that I have come to realize is that describing them as eyes is maybe misleading because like, they're much more basic in terms of what they're seeing. They're really just light detectors. So like, I like, photoreceptors may have been better. Maybe that would have made them sound more like plants. I don't know. But I think it's fair to refer to all eyes as photoreceptors. I think we've kind of like, as humans, we've anthropomorphized the eye, what it does, what it means. But like, really, we just have fancy photoreceptors. And chameleons just have fancy photoreceptors. And so I think calling it the focal organ, yeah, I think we have to distance our emotionally distance ourselves from the eye.

• 59:21Rachel Feltman?

  Wow.

• 59:22Speaker 05

  I am now

• 59:23Rachel Feltman?

  I'm always trying to emotionally distance myself from the eye, personally. Ego death.

• 59:31Speaker 05

  I just now I'm just thinking, do I prefer eating a whole guy at once, or a piece of a guy? Which of course naturally makes me think of the mola mola, the sunfish, which is like a big floating circle and other animals will just come and take like, a chomp out of it from time to time.

• 59:50Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, they look really dumb after. But I mean, they kind of look dumb always. God bless them. But they look especially dumb after somebody's just taken a big chomp.

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  But like, is that preferable? Is it preferable to come take a chomp out of a mola mola than to eat a whole entire 200 photoreceptor having little guy?

• 1:00:10Speaker 06

  Does it regrow the chomp? Or does it stay like perpetual bitten sea pringle or something? Does it die?

• 1:00:18Rachel Feltman?

  I mean, I think they can, they can, they seem to be able to survive a good number of chumps. And I think they just sort of heal, but look battle scarred by chumps.

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  We've really like fact Ouroboris in on ourselves. We're like in a completely uncharted territory now.

• 1:00:35Rachel Feltman?

  Well, now we're getting into some really deep philosophical questions, which is maybe a good place to leave our listeners. But first, Sarah, would you remind them what your new book is called so they can go find it?

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. My new book is called Spread Meat. It is available everywhere books are sold. If you like, things that are scary, things that are horny, or hypothetical new forms of lichen, this book is for you.

• 1:00:59Rachel Feltman?

  Damn.

• 1:00:59Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:01:00Rachel Feltman?

  That last one really got me. All three, baby, all three. Sign me up.

• 1:01:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, only the Venn diagram where those three things overlap. That's where you'll find me.

• 1:01:10Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.