Horny Bugs, Women are Stronger Than Men, Evil Monkey Backpack Trends

Casey Johnston joins the show this week to talk about how women are truly and actually stronger than men (all of which she details in her new book!). Plus, Laura talks about promiscuous fruit flies, and Rachel talks about capuchin monkey's version of a Labubu. Get Casey's book here! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/casey-johnston/a-physical-education/9781538773253/ 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 Go to https://LIQUIDIV. COM and get 20% off your first order with code WEIRDEST at checkout. Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and365 -day returns. Stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to https://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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 1:29Rachel 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. I'm Laura.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  And I'm Casey Johnston.

• 1:53Rachel Feltman?

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

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me. Yeah.

• 1:58Rachel Feltman?

  I've been a fan of your work for a long time, but for any listeners who don't know, would you tell us a little bit about yourself?

• 2:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I am a writer and author. I've covered tech, science, and health for interns for my whole career. And this most recent book I've written is about my experience getting into strength training.

• 2:23Rachel Feltman?

  Cool. And what's the book called?

• 2:25Speaker 04

  The book is called A Physical Education.

• 2:28Rachel Feltman?

  Excellent. It's great. Highly recommend it. And we're really excited to have you on Weirdest Thing. So let's get right into it. So on The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, we start by each offering up a 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. Sort of. Nobody wins anymore. It's just kind of, you know, we wrap up the show and then it's over. Laura, what's your tease?

• 3:03Speaker 05

  Horny fruit flies could save lives.

• 3:06Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, wow. I thought it was just going to end with horny fruit flies, but it got better. Wow. Great. Great. Casey, what's your tease?

• 3:16Speaker 04

  My tease is women are stronger than men.

• 3:20Rachel Feltman?

  Excellent. All right. Can't wait to hear more. All right. My tease is for young male capuchin monkeys on Hikaron Island in Panama, this year's hottest trend is cross-species kidnapping. It's that thing of when you wear a smaller monkey like a backpack. And this is real.

• 3:41Rachel Feltman?

  Laura, why don't you start us off with horny fruit flies today?

• 3:44Speaker 05

  Happily. That is a sentence I never thought anybody would ever say to me, but here we are. The beauty of being a science journalist. So fruit flies are an incredibly important species for medical science. They reproduce rapidly, have some fairly simple genetics, yet many of those genes are actually shared with humans, so they can be really good proxies in a lab. They're so important that six Nobel Prizes have been based on research with fruit flies. But like any living organism, they are not invincible. Every now and then, fruit flies and other insects get infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia.

• 4:27Speaker 05

  It's a parasitic bacteria that lives inside of insect cells and can drastically alter their sex lives and thus their ability to reproduce. Entomologists believe that it infects at least two out of every five insect species. And while that might not sound like a lot right away, these six-legged bugs pretty much outnumber all other life on Earth. There are at least 5.5 million insect species and counting. So, a lot of different species are susceptible to this specific parasitic bacteria. Understanding how even smaller organisms like bacteria affect insects could have some wide-ranging impacts on fighting mosquito-borne diseases in humans like malaria, dengue, and Zika.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  And that is what a study recently published in the journal Cell Reports is working towards.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Now, first and foremost, Wolbachia, bacterial parasite. So it has one primary goal, and that is spreading to more and more hosts. That's really what they live for. However, it can only pass from an infected mother insect to her offspring. So in order to kind of game the reproductive system and improve its chances of spreading, Wolbachia makes it so that infected females lay lots and lots of infected eggs. The bacteria also makes it so that an infected male fruit fly is completely unable to fertilize a female's egg if it's not infected. So, basically, an uninfected female would kind of mean game over for the bacteria.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  Since the same effect happens to males in other insect species, harnessing that power of the bacteria is what kind of has the potential for insect control, which we'll get to a little later.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  In females, it makes the bugs a little bit, how should I say this, kind of, you know, really ready to reproduce, makes them a little more horny. They are way more likely to mate more frequently and even will lay more eggs when they're infected with Wolbachia. The bacteria also makes them so much more inclined to mate that they will even accept other species of insects insects as mates and lay hybrid eggs.

• 6:43Rachel Feltman?

  Wow.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, yes. I mean, if we are running down the slippery slope of anthropomorphizing while also going with kind of like the unfair patriarchal standards for female behavior, it makes them more promiscuous. Don't like the word, but that's what's kind of happening here.

• 7:00Speaker 05

  And also, just like in humans, where women's health remains grossly understudied, we know far less about how the bacteria affects female insects while Wolbachia's effects on males are much more well-studied. Same in the insect world, gotta love it.

• 7:17Speaker 05

  Luckily, this new study kind of aims to be another step towards learning more about the effects on females by looking at what the bacteria is doing on their cells and how it's changing them. So to start with, to to kind of figure all of this out, we have to look at how these flies select their mates. In order to do that, female fruit flies rely on some key brain functions, including sensing and decision making. And when the team studied the brains of female fruit flies that are infected with Wolbachia, they found the bacteria in those regions of the brain that are responsible for decision making and sensing. So that means the bacteria is kind of in that perfect position to influence their mating

• 8:01Speaker 05

  mating choices and also mating behaviors.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  They then compared the proteins in both infected and uninfected female brains and found that the protein levels in the infected brains were clearly different. More than 170 proteins were changed to varying levels, some increased, some decreased. Now, when the team changed the levels of three of the proteins in the uninfected flies, what do you think they, the flies started to do?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Be horny.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  Yes, they began to act horny, just like the infected ones. Um, and then over the course of this work, they identified over 700 Walbakiya proteins in female fruit fly brains. And two out of that 700 interacted directly with the host flies proteins, which turns out to be the proteins that are tied to mating behavior.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Uh, how, do they specify how a female fruit fly acts horny? Is it just like more mating or like a mating dance of some kind? Or is there like a, what, what?

• 9:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Indicates?

• 9:09Speaker 05

  They didn't go too, too much into the, like the specifics, like with a mating dance or anything, but it was just that they were trying to reproduce more and then also having higher, arguably higher success because they were laying more eggs.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  So.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  I was just like, how do you know what she's thinking? Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. That's the danger in so many of these types of, you know, again, you can anthropomorphize so quickly and we'll never, well, I mean, I don't think we'll ever know their actual intent, but yeah, but based on those types of metrics as far as like observed sexual activity and also the amount of eggs that they lay, that's kind of the, the metric that we'll use.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  It would just be so crazy if like the actual thought process was like the bacteria, it makes you be like, I'm dying like right now and I have to reproduce. Not like, oh, you know what I feel like doing is?

• 9:54Speaker 05

  Right.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Reproducing, you know?

• 9:56Speaker 05

  Totally. Kind of like cicadas, you know, they basically, that's, that's their, their, their swan song. I mean, they basically, they live underground, they have interesting lives under there, they come up, they mate, they die. So I'd love to be able to track that, like for real, so we could finally like answer those questions, maybe one day, we'll see.

• 10:15Speaker 05

  Um, there's going to be a call and repeat, or there's going to be a part where I ask you to say something coming up. You'll definitely know the answer. Please don't leave me hanging. I don't want this to, I don't want this to fall. I meant to say that earlier. So the Wolbachia bacteria makes some nutrients for its, for its hosts, which might give the infected flies some kind of yet to be determined advantage. That's another sort of thing that we don't know is kind of like what these cells are doing. This pattern of a bacteria making something for its host that it can't make is not completely unheard of in nature, and it's actually seen in something you probably remember from sixth grade science class. Mitochondria, AKA the powerhouse of the cell.

• 10:58Rachel Feltman?

  Sorry, I got too excited.

• 11:00Speaker 05

  Beautiful. Yes. Mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, which kind of, I feel like that's like, like a sleeper agent line that every millennial has.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  I tried to work it into my book and I, then I was like, I have to take this out. But, because it wasn't really working, but I, I so badly wanted it in there.

• 11:16Rachel Feltman?

  Fun fact, Scientific American, the home of my other podcast, Science Quickly, coined that phrase originally. Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 05

  Whoa. Did they copyright it? Like, are we, do I need to pay them now?

• 11:28Rachel Feltman?

  I don't think we're infringing on anything. All right. It's just something that people at Scientific American are rightfully very proud of.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  I'd, I'd get, I'm not a tattoo person, but I'd get that tattooed to my forehead if I came up with something like that, that like an entire generation of people basically says instantly. So, so anyway, yes, the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. The mighty mitochondria that we all know and love initially began its tenure billions of years ago as a simple bacteria that infected cells. They made themselves so useful to the cells that they ended up be, they ended up powering them. The team believes that a similar process might be happening in Wolbachia. It's not saying that this bacteria is going to replace mitochondria in any way. It's just a similar process might be happening.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  So if we can harness the power of Wolbachia, we can power the earth.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  We could power, we could power the earth, or at least, I don't know, maybe make a female Viagra. That was one of my first thoughts was like, oh, would this be able to like, deal, you know, help with things like that during menopause and perimenopause. But we're so not there yet because we need to find, we need to actually learn more about both of those things first. But also importantly, how does this tie into preventing deadly mosquito borne illnesses? Some other research has shown that Wolbachia can actually block viruses like Zika and Dengue from ever growing in mosquitoes. However, the efforts to do that, again, those, those efforts to control dangerous diseases and reduce mosquito populations have been met with some mixed success.

• 13:04Speaker 05

  One of the authors of this new study about Wolbachia, Timothy Carr of Arizona State University, believes that one of the primary reasons that these, you know, that these solutions as far as mosquito and bug control haven't worked is because they don't really understand what's happening at that cellular and molecular basis. He said, quote, "To cure any disease, to perfect any technique in biology, you need to know who the players are and you need to know how they work." So that better understanding of how these Wolbachia proteins interact with their host proteins could improve some strategies to manage disease carrying insects and possibly even create safer pesticides to be used on crops.

• 13:45Speaker 05

  It's kind of like the even tinier cellular version of those studies where, you know, as far as like deactivating mosquito sperm so that the infected ones can't reproduce. Now, since it is mosquito season in many parts of the world, I do have to get up on my soapbox to wrap this up, just to reiterate some quick mosquito safety. The CDC recommends importantly, using an EPA registered insect repellent, wearing long sleeve clothing when you're walking in the forests and meadows and other places where they congregate. That also will protect you from the sun. So two for the price of one there. Make sure that your screen doors are patched and repaired to keep them from getting in

• 14:26Speaker 05

  and remove standing water that can collect in toys and garden tools at least once a week. Popsai also has a great step by step for creating a mosquito kill bucket to help reduce mosquitoes in and around your backyard without using pesticides. I actually have two going right now and so far, so good. And it's more than anything been a very fun conversation starter with the neighbors as to why I'm playing with these random buckets in my yard. So yeah, horny fruit flies could save lives by helping us learn how to control more mosquito reproduction.

• 15:02Rachel Feltman?

  Wow. Well, fingers crossed.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Right. This is, this is the kind of science I would, as, as a very mosquito bite prone person, this is the kind of, I, I, this is, and, and you know, in all seriousness, these, while not a huge problem in the United States, these diseases are incredibly deadly elsewhere and with climate change are only going to be growing. So any kind of research that we can do to, to sort of stem that would be excellent.

• 15:28Rachel Feltman?

  Absolutely.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Did you know, I didn't move this before, I didn't move this, I didn't, I didn't know this before I moved to California, but, and I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush because someone's going to email me and be like, you're wrong, but there didn't really used to be mosquitoes in Southern California. Like, it's, I'm from upstate New York where it's like, that's mosquito country, probably second only to like the south, you know, the swamps, but like, um, very mosquito-y, lots of lakes, it's moist, but they didn't have them here. And it's like, just recently, they've started to, like, I don't know if they're migrating here because it's more weather or whatever, but, um, I was surprised to learn that, you know, like when my husband was

• 16:14Speaker 04

  a child in Southern California, like, they just didn't have them and I never really thought about that.

• 16:20Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  That you could live a mosquito free existence.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  I kind of just imagine that, I'm from Southern New Jersey, just kind of imagine that they're everywhere. I guess maybe changes in monsoon patterns, something like that.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. We had a terrible mosquito problem in our backyard in, in New York too. It was really, really bad. So I've experimented also with like, creating toxic just mosquitoes, bodies of water to try and eradicate them. And I don't think it ever really helped, but.

• 16:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, this is my first year in this house. It's kind of my, the first thing I want to try before doing like anything else, just to see if it'll actually kind of work. But, you know, again, I've been outside a couple of times and so far, so good. We'll see.

• 17:02Rachel Feltman?

  Fingers crossed.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  Fingers, yeah, I'd really, I'd really like it to work.

• 17:07Rachel Feltman?

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

• 17:15Speaker 00

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• 17:45Speaker 01

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• 18:20Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Casey, I think you have something to share with us from your book.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Yes. So, yeah, my teaser was, women are stronger than men. And I don't mean emotionally, although that's also true. Or mentally, although that's also true. I do mean physically. So this section in my book, which covers a lot of different angles of what happens with our bodies when we start strength training and interrogating, it's interrogating a lot of the forces that lead us to even, or led me to buy into diet culture. It was like, why was I into this? And then how did it, what allowed me to sort of slowly work my way out of it? What was it about not just starting to lift weights, but what did lifting weights, what

• 19:11Speaker 04

  changes did it cause in me, sort of mentally, emotionally, and physically? So with that said, this is a pretty self-contained section in the book, but it follows a scene where I arm wrestle three different guys at a party, a drunken party, where I say to a friend, I've started lifting weights. And one guy overhears me and he's like, make a muscle. No, you're not strong at all. Like, arm wrestle me, prove it. And then it's the kind of thing where a lot of men, it's some absurd proportion of men think they can take a point off of Serena Williams. It's like, I think every guy thinks he can beat every woman at arm wrestling, but then I beat all three of them. So I was like,

• 19:56Speaker 04

  diving into the science of that a little bit here. So I'll just read the section and then, you know, stop me if you have questions, but here we go. "I could hardly believe my success at arm wrestling, even if it was only my three semi-wasted friends whom I'd beaten. But I'd wondered if I might be stronger than I looked, and even suspected that I might be, especially when it came to doing feats of strength over and over. I knew that, on average, the very strongest men could usually lift more weight than the very strongest women in a single go. But I'd also recently learned that this wasn't the only way of measuring strength. I'd always heard that women tend to have more of those type 1 muscle fibers,

• 20:37Speaker 04

  built for endurance tasks like running or doing thousands of crunches. Men, meanwhile, were purported to have more of the fast twitch type 2 muscle fibers, used for raw strength tasks like heaving boulders and carrying damsels to safety. In the fitness world, this was often flattened into, women should exercise like this, cardio Pilates, gentle bodyweight movements done for hundreds of reps, and men should exercise like that, lifting weights, hitting tires with mallets, picking up and carrying damsels to safety. Once again, science was being used to make it seem like women had no place struggling and straining with heavyweights, exerting force, or exhibiting strength. But when I

• 21:19Speaker 04

  looked closer, these stereotypes were bunk. Women tend to have between 7 and 23% more type 1 muscle fibers than men. That's all. Not three times as many, or twice as many, or even 50% more. Only a scant double digits percent more in most people." If I have 100 jelly beans and you have 7% more jelly beans than me, you would have 107 jelly beans. A random person looking at our two jars of jelly beans wouldn't even be able to tell the difference. This is not nearly enough of a difference to suggest that women ought to train night and day differently from men. More to the point, these differences mean women are weaker than men only if we measure strength in one extremely specific way. Because of the diversity in muscle fibers,

• 22:03Speaker 04

  women's muscles tend to have a higher density of capillaries and thus more blood flow than men's do. This, combined with the impact of higher levels of estrogen and progesterone, mean women tend to be more fatigue resistant, allowing them to do more overall work than men's fibers before getting tired. Not only that, women recover more quickly, meaning they can get up and do more all over again sooner. Is this female blend of muscle fibers, for certain definitions of work, superior to men's? Yes, actually, depending on how we define strength. Let's take an untrained woman of roughly the same height and starting weight of a similarly untrained man. Let both of them train hard lifting heavy weights for 10 years. At the end of that 10 years, that woman can deadlift 400 pounds.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  The man can deadlift 600 pounds. These are not world record-setting numbers, but enough to make both of them nationally competitive. But usually, we'd say that the man is way stronger than the woman because the way we usually define strength is whoever can lift the most weight. First, it would be ridiculous to say that a woman who can lift 400 pounds or even 100 pounds is not strong just because she may never be able to lift 600 pounds. To steer anyone away from lifting because they could only learn to lift a staggering 400 pounds instead of 600 pounds would be like telling someone they shouldn't go to math class because they might only become Neil Armstrong instead of Marie Curie.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  And then, sure, the man in this thought experiment can lift more absolute weight once in a single rep attempt. This is how strength is defined in lifting competitions. But why? As we noted earlier, women tend to have a greater potential to do more heavy work on the same day and recover faster. Maybe the man can lift 600 pounds once and he's wiped out for several days. But the woman is more likely to be able to lift 90% of her max, 360 pounds, for five reps in one go. In lifting, we would calculate the total tonnage of these reps as 5 times 360, or 1,800 pounds. The same man may only be able to lift 90% of his max for three reps,

• 24:07Speaker 04

  for 3 times 540, which is 1,620 pounds in tonnage. If the gold standard of strength performance were total tonnage and not one rep maxes, it's very likely that women would be topping the charts over men on a regular basis. Not only that, but women are more likely to be able to do five reps at that weight all over again the day after tomorrow, thanks to their superior recovery. The man, meanwhile, needs more days to lie on his fainting couch, waiting until his inferior muscles with less blood flow and less fibrodiversity can rally back to fighting form. What if the hardest task were not doing a difficult thing once and then having to lie down, but being able to do it over and over again, on more days of the week, week in and week out?

• 24:50Speaker 04

  But for a subtle shift in how we define our terms and how we set priorities in strength training goals, women are, in fact, better suited and more genetically predisposed to strength train and work with heavy weights. It doesn't wipe women out as much. They can do more reps in less time on more days of the week. Perhaps men should leave the scary weights that tire them out so much to women, who can handle it.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 25:12Rachel Feltman?

  I love that. So fun. And I'm such a fan of when we play with using the kind of language that is so ubiquitous when it comes to how we talk about women and fitness for men, because I was like, I can already feel some men somewhere being so angry.

• 25:35Rachel Feltman?

  The joke is very clear, actually.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Right, right. And it's like, none of these things should be considered like...

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Objectively better than one or the other.

• 25:47Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Like, there's, there's a place in the world for both of those types of strength.

• 25:52Rachel Feltman?

  Right.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  They're, not they're the ones, but like, there is a way we concretely think of it. Like, this is how competitions are structured for strength. There's no competition that I know of that's structured in the way that would

• 26:08Speaker 04

  facilitate women having better numbers.

• 26:11Rachel Feltman?

  Right.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  You know? So, but, but why?

• 26:14Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  We must ask.

• 26:16Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Well, it makes me think of, um, a while back, we had one of our frequent contributors and seasoned marathon runners, Claire Maldarelli, talked about how, once you get into ultra marathons, women start outperforming men. And a lot of people will be like, it's the, the, the mental fortitude. And it's like, that's, you know, it's not that it's a diss to say that these female competitors have mental fortitude, but, you know, there's also something very silly about dismissing any potential physiological explanation for being better at endurance sports than men.

• 26:53Speaker 05

  It, the same thing happens when you get to that ultra level with marathon swimming. You, I mean, Sarah Thomas is the record holder as far as four-time consecutive back-to-back English Channel swims. No man has come close to that. And very often with swimming, you get the, oh, women have more body fat argument. And while, yes, in cold water, certain types of body fat are absolutely going to help you and then pile on the mental fortitude, yes, that's part of it. But why can't it just be, no, there, we're just stronger swimmers when it comes to having to do something repetitive and keep going.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. I do want to say that the, the gender is, I, I have a note in the book somewhere that's sort of like gender essentialism.

• 27:39Rachel Feltman?

  Right.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  Aside, not that everyone can lay it aside, but I, but it's like, the, the gender-ness of this is sort of like. Two peaks on a spectrum versus like one group is like this and one group is like that. And there's obviously, if you look around the world, there are women who have, who, who build muscle much more easily, who have a, maybe a balance of their, their natural hormone profiles facilitate that. And, and the opposite can be true of men. It's like, there's not, I think I said, just as not every woman is taller, or not every man is taller than every woman, not every man is stronger than every woman.

• 28:22Rachel Feltman?

  Right, right.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  But all that said, I think there's also a huge dearth of research on women and any kind of physical training. There's also a part in the book where I talk about how for a very long time in studying strength and lots of types of exercise, women are basically minimized or abstracted to be considered smaller, small men, or as I think I call them, worse men. They're, they're men, men without the testosterone, basically, men without the muscle mass. But there has been very little study of the contributions of

• 29:01Speaker 04

  the stereotypical female genetic profiles, the contributions of higher estrogen, higher progesterone, for instance, to physical pursuits. We, like, women have not been studied specifically because they're considered, quote unquote, more complicated because of their menstrual cycles and a few other things. But the fact that they seem to not be stronger is because very, very little attention has been paid to what are the unique contributions of non- stereotypically male biologic, biological markers.

• 29:40Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it's it's an issue in so much, so much of the research on humans in general, where it's like if if your default specimen is a European man and everything is sort of being judged as, you know, be how different it is from that, you just you there are questions you won't even think to ask. There are

• 30:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 30:05Rachel Feltman?

  differences that you will never understand. And, you know, that's also why we don't know enough about female fruit flies.

• 30:12Speaker 05

  It all comes back to that.

• 30:15Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, though they look at animals and they say, oh, the hormones, though, as if as if male fruit flies don't have hormones.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  Or even body size, like the whole, you know, you know, you know, Darwin was like, oh, it's the bigger, it's the bigger iguana. That's definitely the that's definitely the male one. And a lot of species, the females are bigger.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. And yeah, like even the hormonal cycle, it's like there could be contributions of having lower hormones at one point and higher hormones at another point. But like, yeah, no one wants to look into that because they're just like, oh, it's quote unquote, more complicated. But what if it's more complicated because it's better in some way? Why is no one asking this question?

• 30:57Speaker 05

  One silver, like one little gleam of hope I've gotten in the past couple of weeks related to this is there are a couple of studies now being funded about ACL tears in soccer players and the menstrual cycle. If you follow women's soccer the way that I do, or even if you're just kind of a, you know, you know, a fan on the on the sidelines, their ACL tears are constantly taking women's soccer players out. There were, I mean, Midge Purse, I believe, had to miss the most recent World Cup. There are some amazing score. There are some amazing players who are taken out by these ACL tears at higher rates. So to finally have, you know, maybe to, you know, maybe finally have some answers could would be awesome for the game and just and awesome for then understanding injury prevention,

• 31:40Speaker 05

  even if you aren't a professional soccer player, if you're just casually trying to exercise because you like it and it feels good and it's good for you. So that was what when I saw that I was like, okay, everything's on fire now. But at least we're getting that study. Yay.

• 31:55Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, one at a time. Hopefully more are coming. All right, we're going to take another quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

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• 33:38Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back, and I'm going to talk about the kidnapping trend among male capuchin monkeys. It's the thing to do. Yeah, so I'll start with a disclaimer that this story will at times seem like it's going to be really cute, but it is actually horrifying, and I think the researchers behind it are genuinely hoping it will give you an existential crisis, so just... Bear that in mind.

• 34:01Speaker 05

  That's an existential, that's an existential crisis warning, not a trigger warning.

• 34:05Rachel Feltman?

  I mean, both, but you know. So this starts back in 2022, when a doctoral researcher named Zoe Goldsboro, she was part of a team who were reviewing camera trap footage from Hikaron Island, which is off the coast of Panama. And it's this very hard to get to, hard to navigate uninhabited island, though it is still covered in trash, as they noted in some of their supplementary materials. They were like, you may be wondering why our videos of this uninhabited island have trash. And that's just because the ocean is so full of trash, that even though humans don't come to this island, our trash still makes it there. So that's our first bummer note of several, sorry. But it's home to a population of white-faced capuchin monkeys that scientists find really fascinating because of their tool use.

• 34:51Rachel Feltman?

  So there are actually many capuchin species that use tools, but white-faced capuchins are in a genus that pretty much just doesn't do that. And the monkeys on Hikaron are a rare exception, and only the male monkeys there use tools, which is very interesting. So scientists want to understand how and why that came to be, but the island is pretty difficult for researchers to spend time on, hence the camera traps, which have been there since 2017. So it's 2022, and this researcher is reviewing the footage, and she sees something very weird. She sees a capuchin monkey carrying an infant howler monkey on its back, like a little backpack. Again, this is a moment where it seems like it's going to be really cute. Don't be fooled.

• 35:36Rachel Feltman?

  Now, the easiest explanation for this would be a cross-species adoption, which would be very cute. Those aren't super common, but they're also not unheard of. Back in 2004, a researcher in Brazil spotted a different species of capuchin caring for a young marmoset, like it was her own. And locals confirmed that, like, yeah, she does that. She's been doing that for a while. That's her baby marmoset. Yeah. And this can even happen with, like, radically different species. A lioness once famously seemed to adopt a group of young gazelles. Who knows what was going on there? But the general consensus about cross-species adoption is that, like, There is this innate caretaking instinct that can lead animals to sometimes just really want to care for a cute little thing

• 36:21Rachel Feltman?

  they see, even if it would traditionally be their prey. And, you know, love comes in all forms, so. But that's not what was going on here. There are some instances of males adopting members of their own species, especially if they're in same-sex partnerships, like we've talked about penguins doing in captivity. But scientists don't tend to see this cross-species caretaking behavior in males. If they do, it's generally because there's some obvious benefit for the young male, like making him get more attention from females of his own species, kind of like a Brooklyn dog dad in the park. Everyone's like, oh, my gosh, he's so cute, he's so paternal. Plus, this species of capuchin doesn't have particularly parental males.

• 37:04Rachel Feltman?

  They do do some parenting, but like their interactions with their own kids are like pretty minimal and basic. So it's highly unlikely that they're like practicing for parenthood or playing out some inescapable caretaking instinct, because like, these are not seahorses. Like, capuchin monkeys are not dads of the year. So the researcher took the weird footage to her advisor, being like, what do you think is going on here? And they decided she should go through a year's worth of video manually to see if she could construct some kind of narrative to explain this behavior. And, you know, going through the footage,

• 37:44Rachel Feltman?

  she ended up finding video of four different baby howler monkeys being carried around, mostly by this one young male she nicknamed Joker. But then the behavior disappeared. And they figured like, OK, this guy tried something weird and then he got over it. Maybe we'll never know why. Which animals sometimes do. Like, they, just like people, sometimes someone will just get a weird thought in their head and do a behavior. And if a human happens to see it, sometimes it'll cause a big hubbub. And then it's just like, oh, that was a thing that briefly happened to one guy. But then something surprising showed up on footage from five months later. They saw more baby howlers getting carried.

• 38:25Rachel Feltman?

  And in fact, there were now another four young male capuchins doing the carrying. So this is a trend. It's spread. And for 15 months, the five males, including the joker, carried around at least 11 different baby howler monkeys, sometimes kind of backpack style. Sometimes they would be clinging to their bellies. It was all like very similar to how the baby howlers would have instinctively clung to their mom. And these guys just went about their everyday business. They like used tools. They went around the island. They really didn't seem to treat the howlers as anything but living accessories. So in other words, it was like kind of a fashion trend or maybe a weird sport or both. But very bizarre and surprising.

• 39:10Rachel Feltman?

  And on the one hand, these capuchins don't seem to have particularly malicious intent. They're not hurting the howler monkeys in any outright way. But the howler babies are clearly there under duress, which, you know, I think some people might not realize if they come across this story and don't, you know, read past the first paragraph. Because when you see the photos, it's like the howler babies are clinging to them. But again, that's like a very instinctive thing. But the researchers did capture footage of the babies making these calls that they do when they're lost. And even they even heard their parents calling back for them on the tape. And they also even saw some instances of the howler babies trying to run away and getting like dragged back by the capuchins.

• 39:53Rachel Feltman?

  Sometimes one of the capuchins would set the howler down and leave like they were just over it. And then another of the male capuchins who were participating in the trend would come by and pick them up. Oh, wow. I see you dropped your backpack. I'll, I'll take that. And it's, it's pretty likely that this kidnapping trend ended badly for all of the howler monkeys involved. The researchers did see a few of the babies die of malnourishment. Again, the capuchins weren't hurting them, but they also weren't their mothers. So nobody was taking care of the babies. And they suspect that similar fates befell all 11 of them, though they didn't see them on camera. So like, we can hold out hope that maybe. Some of the howler monkeys got their babies back.

• 40:34Rachel Feltman?

  And that is not totally outside the realm of possibility for a reason I'll talk about in a minute. That's obviously tragic, but what happens next makes this even more kind of inexplicable. The capuchins haven't been seen eating or even playing with the bodies. One clip caught a couple of them sort of tugging at a baby howler, but the researchers say that behavior is identical to the kind of rudimentary wellness check they'd give to an ailing or dead member of their own species. So if the howler babies aren't meant to end up as snacks or playthings, why are the capuchins stealing them? The researchers also noted that the capuchins participating in this trend didn't get any new or different attention from other members of their own species.

• 41:17Rachel Feltman?

  The other capuchins seemed to completely ignore that this was going on. Capuchins and howlers don't eat the same food, so it's not like this was an effort to weed out competition. And howler monkeys, especially adult howler monkeys, are actually bigger than capuchins, especially adolescent capuchins. So stealing one of their kids could be dangerous, though that also gives us hope that maybe some of them were able to get their babies back. Though the researchers did say that while howlers are much bigger, they're also much slower, so they're not totally unevenly matched. But still, why is this happening? It seems like a lot of effort for something that they don't get a clear benefit out of.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  And something that they're not necessarily naturally geared to be doing anyway.

• 42:02Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, no, absolutely not. There's nothing natural about this for them. Well, there's maybe one thing about it that's natural, but I'll get to that in a second. The answer is probably the same as why the males started using tools, which is boredom. They are bored. There are no predators on Hikaron, and food is very plentiful. Males don't have much to do, especially before they've got kids of their own, so they try out weird stuff to pass the time, and sometimes those behaviors catch on. For whatever reason the Joker had for doing what he did, other males saw it, and it became a trend. And... One of the researchers said like they did occasionally see them being affectionate

• 42:43Rachel Feltman?

  towards the howler monkey babies or treating them like they were, you know, small members of their own species, but they said they, you know, it's like a kid with a jar of lightning bugs. Like, they can think it's really cool and like care about it, but it's still not a good situation for the lightning bugs. And the thing that the researcher said, that again, I feel it's really meant to make us have a little bit of an existential crisis is they said, "We show that non-human animals also have the capacity to evolve cultural traditions without clear functions, but with destructive outcomes for the world around them." Ouch. Um, yeah. And, you know, as I said, there is one aspect of this that, you know, may be linked to natural behavior. Males leave the group they were born into to find

• 43:28Rachel Feltman?

  a new group to try to sort of like take over there. But they need a lot of male allies to do that. So when they're young, they do a lot of things to try to bond with other young males. And sometimes apparently they'll sort of just grab an unrelated male infant and carry them around to be like, "Hey buddy, why don't you hang out with me?" And the thing is that when that happens with other capuchins, the mom will grab the baby back eventually because they're, you know, they're right there. They're like, "Give me back my son. Never speak to my son again." Right, right. But it's like, there is sort of this, even though it's very different in how it plays out, they do technically have sort of an instinct to kidnap infants. So it's possible

• 44:12Rachel Feltman?

  that that explains why this very weird thing happened once. And then just because the howler monkey mom didn't successfully get the baby back, it was like, "Oh, I guess this is the thing now. I guess I'm carrying this small, small creature with me forever now." We don't know if this is ongoing. The study's camera trapping period ran from January 2022 to July 2023. So they're still analyzing some data and, you know, we don't have the most recent data. They're really hopeful that it's not something that's going to continue because howler monkeys are not doing super well population wise on this island.

• 44:54Rachel Feltman?

  So it's really the last thing they need to have capuchins stealing their babies. But, you know, at least when they were looking at it, it seems like it was this small scale thing that was going to burn out. So fingers crossed, but yeah, animals are weird. We're weird. Trends are weird and it really, it really got me thinking about just why we, why we pick up on behaviors that we see other people doing. And maybe the next time you want to buy something or do something because you saw it on TikTok, you should be like, is this my kidnapped baby howler monkey? Maybe.

• 45:35Speaker 05

  It's just, and the boredom aspect I find kind of fascinating because, you know, yes, there's absolute benefits to boredom. Boredom spurs creativity. You need to be bored and, or, you know, every second of your day is not supposed to be stimulating and meant to be, you know, you're supposed to do that, but then, but then.

• 45:53Rachel Feltman?

  Not every idea you have is good.

• 45:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 45:55Rachel Feltman?

  Not everything to know.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  Not every idea you have is good and too much boredom can maybe lead to, maybe lead to not have some great ideas.

• 46:06Rachel Feltman?

  So I, you know, idle hands, devil's work, et cetera, et cetera.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, again, all about balance.

• 46:12Rachel Feltman?

  But yeah, I think it's, you know, the researchers were making a very clear connection to sort of, you know, late stage capitalism and people just kind of sitting around with every luxury in the world and being miserable and bored and dang, what, how astute. So good for them. But yeah, I'll be keeping an eye on this, this research project because I'm, you know, horrified and fascinated and very curious to see what did Joker gets up to next? What other trends will he start? He's a menace to society. Who knows?

• 46:42Speaker 05

  How long do capuchin monkeys live?

• 46:44Rachel Feltman?

  They, they live 15 to 25 years in the wild. So.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  Okay. So he's going to be doing this for potentially a while.

• 46:51Rachel Feltman?

  Though hopefully, you know, he was an adolescent and hopefully soon he'll find Occupation.

• 46:57Speaker 04

  So it's like stealing, it's like stealing cars when you're a teen and you're like, this is, this is, you know, I don't know what else to do with myself. I'm too young to be a kid or too old to be a kid, too young to be an adult.

• 47:07Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  No one lets me do anything. I'm going to commit a little crime.

• 47:10Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, exactly. We need some after school enrichment for, for these young male.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  An after school program of some kind. Make them learn a trade.

• 47:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yep. Yep. Rachel, not that you need any, you know, more on your plate, but I think your next book should be about like animal adolescence and teenagehood and all of the shenanigans that they get up to. Just.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  That's a great idea.

• 47:32Speaker 05

  Just throwing that out there into the world.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  No, I mean, it's not, it's not a bad idea. I will consider.

• 47:38Rachel Feltman?

  Well, this has been great. A lot of weird stuff today. Casey, thanks so much for sharing from your book. Would you remind our listeners what it's called so they can find it?

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, my book is called A Physical Education. The subtitle is How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting.

• 47:55Rachel 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.

• 48:28Speaker 00

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• 48:58Speaker 06

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