Pod Insights The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week Surfing Bats, Deep Sea Bologna, Environmental Trolley Problem About this episode Lauren Leffer joins the show to explain how silver carp are creating an environmental trolley problem. Plus, Laura divulges the story of the surfing bat, and Rachel talks about scientists that ate an ancient bologna sandwich.
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1:33 Rachel Feltman? At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman.
1:54 Speaker 04 I'm Laura Bises.
1:55 Speaker 05 I'm Lauren Leffer.
1:57 Rachel Feltman? Lauren, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you back on.
2:00 Speaker 05 Thank you. It's so nice to be here after years away.
2:04 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, it's been years. Yeah. Why don't you tell listeners what you're up to these days?
2:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, of course. So currently, I am a contributing writer for Popular Science and for Scientific American. I also freelance for other outlets. But yeah, I write about all sorts of different tech and science and environmental subjects. I'm like a perennial generalist and I can't help it. No one can make me focus on any one thing. They just can't do it.
2:30 Rachel Feltman? I am with you on that. I didn't become a science writer because I wanted to focus on one thing.
2:36 Speaker 05 No, then I would have.
2:36 Rachel Feltman? On one thing, I could have been a scientist.
2:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. I would just would have stayed in research.
2:40 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Well, it's great to have you and we are psyched to talk about some weird things today. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was in like a chatty, non-competitive way, where sometimes we don't even discuss what the weirdest thing was. Sometimes the show's just over and that's fine. Uh.
3:18 Speaker 05 I'm here to win.
3:20 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. We're here to make friends. We really are. Laura, what's your tease?
3:26 Speaker 04 Bats can surf.
3:29 Rachel Feltman? First they can.
3:30 Speaker 04 Why not?
3:31 Rachel Feltman? Good news. Um, I feel like a surfing bat is, that's a great vibe because you're a little spooky.
3:38 Speaker 04 Little spooky, but also very chill and relaxed.
3:41 Rachel Feltman? Very chill, sporty. Yeah.
3:43 Speaker 05 I'm picturing, I'm picturing the bat in sunglasses, even though presumably it's nighttime.
3:50 Speaker 04 And in the ocean, or maybe, maybe goggles.
3:52 Rachel Feltman? Oh, cute.
3:54 Speaker 04 Little swim cap.
3:55 Speaker 05 I know nothing about surfing, if that wasn't apparent.
3:58 Rachel Feltman? My tease is that I'm going to talk about a submarine sandwich. And I'm from South Jersey, so you know, I'm not talking about a hoagie. Uh, this is something else.
4:08 Speaker 04 I was gonna say hoagie. You knew it was coming. Come on.
4:11 Rachel Feltman? Lauren, what's your tease?
4:13 Speaker 05 My tease is one sentence, simple. What if pollution was preventing a river monster invasion? Wow.
4:21 Speaker 04 River monster invasion.
4:23 Speaker 05 Yeah. Great.
4:25 Speaker 04 I'm picturing like a bunch of, you know, soda bottles and, you know, like instead of like a ship in a bottle, it's like a Godzilla in a bottle. Something, something kind of along those lines. I cannot wait for this one.
4:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:36 Speaker 04 Well,
4:37 Speaker 05 sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was gonna say, if you trap the Godzilla in the bottle, then it can't wreak havoc upon Tokyo. Yeah, absolutely. Everybody knows that.
4:45 Speaker 04 Problem solved.
4:46 Speaker 05 Laura, why don't you get us started with surfing bats?
4:50 Speaker 04 Happy to. So we know that dolphins can surf. We've, there's plenty of videos of them kind of like surfing along the waves and even dogs. Basically, like the early YouTube days were full of viral videos of dog surfing. And there's also a very, very fun little sequence in the credit sequence to the twenty, to the two thousand and three cinematic classic Blue Crush that shows some surfing dogs. Um, not that I've, not that I've seen that movie a lot, like three times in the theater, but here nor there. Apparently bats can surf too. But not exactly in the way you might be thinking. They can surf on air. Um, a study published earlier this month in the journal Science
5:33 Speaker 04 found that when some of these winged mammals take on long haul journeys, they will surf along warm fronts of storms. This enables them to make it a little bit further while spending less energy. Um, they've essentially harnessed the whole idea of working smarter, not harder. And they're taking advantage of the air in order to travel at a longer distance with a lot less work. Um, and that is always something I even double checked right before coming on to the show. Bats are mammals. They're the only mammals that can really sustain long flights. And I think that that's always like one of those fun facts to share at parties. Cause I think sometimes people assume that they're birds or maybe something like a platypus, where they're kind of in the middle of both worlds, but they are in fact mammals. And they are one of the larger groups of mammals.
6:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, they're fuzzy little guys.
6:18 Speaker 04 They are.
6:19 Speaker 05 So when you say surf on air, like, are there videos of this? Have you seen it? Like, what is it? Can I still picture the sunglasses on the little board under their legs?
6:30 Speaker 04 I don't, I'm not in the business of dashing dreams. So I'm going to say, yes, you can still picture that, but we will get to that as far as like, if we can actually see this just yet. So for the, for the, you know, going forward, picture whatever you want. Picture, you know, they can be on boards, just maybe not at the beach, but they could still have the sunglasses on. I think that's acceptable. They're super sensitive to light. Of course they would need them. So this particular study looked at a group of common noctual bats. These bats are found across parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and they're one of only four bat species that are known to migrate across all of Europe. So they can kind of spread along the whole continent. They're pretty small. They're roughly the size of a human palm, although if you're scared of bats, that might seem kind of big. They
7:14 Speaker 04 have these broad brown ears and a distinctive like mushroom shaped nose. I'll be sure to include some pictures in the show notes because they are pretty darn cute if you are, if you are like me and you like bats. They also have these long, narrow wings that they use to fly in a fairly straight line up at higher altitudes and speeds. And these wings are apparently pretty good for surfing. So that dream dash number one, I think they pretty much can rely on their wings and no surfboard, unfortunately. But who knows? We still don't, we might
7:44 Speaker 05 For now.
7:45 Speaker 04 For now, that maybe they just haven't found the right surfboard shaper. Who knows?
7:49 Speaker 05 There's much to discover.
7:50 Speaker 04 There's much to discover with surfing bats. So every spring, female noctual bats migrate for up to a thousand miles from parts of Northern Europe down to Southern Europe where they roost, and then they fly back north. In the past, biologists have tried using drones, weather radar, and even ultrasonic sound recordings to examine this migration. But there's been some mixed success with those methods. In this new study, they decided to try something different. A team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior tracked 71 bats. They took these tiny little sensors that weigh about a gram and attached them to the bats with a temporary surgical glue. The sensor stayed on for roughly 14 days, about two weeks.
8:34 Speaker 04 And in that time, they recorded all sorts of data. So the bat's acceleration and their core temperature. They also assessed their activity levels and some environmental conditions like wind and temperature data. And these sensors were pretty, pretty sensitive. They were taking these recordings up to a thousand times per day. So even though two weeks doesn't seem like a huge, huge time period, a thousand times a day over two weeks, roughly 14,000 readings there. So you can kind of get it. So you can kind of make some detailed patterns with that. So they attached these tags every spring for about three years. So multiply it even more by three years to a group of bats that are based in Switzerland. And they focused exclusively on those migratory females.
9:18 Speaker 04 The sensor data revealed that changes in air temperature had a strong association with their migratory flight. The bats were much more likely to begin their movements just before warm fronts came in, leaving on nights where the air pressure dropped and the temperature spiked. So they were basically leaving before incoming storms and then surfing along the air movements that come from warm fronts. These are things like drops in barometric pressure, temperature, and better wind. If you've ever surfed, waves come in sets, sets of about seven, depending upon where you are. And a lot of time is spent kind of waiting to examine and figure out maybe which wave in the set is best. Is it that fourth one? Is it that fifth?
10:01 Speaker 04 This is kind of along those lines, but a little bit obviously in the air, not the water. It has more to do with how, with some of the cues actually in the air and not just so much visual. You know, it's kind of a feeling. Now, this isn't to say, this isn't to say that they were exclusively going surfing before storms, which is also not something I can endorse. That's very dangerous. Don't go out and do that, whether you're a bat or a human. Do not, you know, they're, they're calling.
10:29 Rachel Feltman? Any bats listening.
10:31 Speaker 04 Any bats listening.
10:32 Rachel Feltman? Do not make perilous journeys.
10:35 Speaker 04 Do not make perilous, don't swim in the sea and don't take risks.
10:38 Speaker 05 We'll have to release like a translated high-frequency echolocation version of the morning.
10:42 Rachel Feltman? That's the dream.
10:43 Speaker 04 I'll get on that. That's, that's actually brilliant.
10:45 Rachel Feltman? My list of, you know, possible translations and transcriptions I could get going for me to sing. Bat, high on the list.
10:53 Speaker 05 Bat and whale, both end of the spectrum.
10:55 Speaker 04 I was gonna say, it could be like, instead of Dory speaking whale, you know, we could be, we could be speaking bat. I mean, we should be at this point in, in society.
11:04 Rachel Feltman? The old men who email me about vocal fry are gonna love this.
11:08 Speaker 05 Yeah. Tired of vocal fry, try shrieking.
11:14 Speaker 04 Oh, the complete opposite end of vocal fry. I love it. So yes, bats listening, you know, might be a little perilous. Humans listening do not go out surfing before a storm. You know, unless you're super duper experienced. So they weren't, this isn't to say that they can't migrate when the air temperature might be colder or there's less wind support, but it means that they're wasting up some of that precious energy. And kind of in addition to this surfing ability, the sensors showed a little bit more about their elusive migrations. Lauren, this kind of goes to your first question about video. Unfortunately, we didn't have a video of this.
11:46 Speaker 05 Thankfully, this is an audio medium.
11:49 Speaker 04 Exact, right, right. I used to work in video and some, the stress of, oh my gosh, do I, can I cover this? Do I have footage of this? Still wakes me up at night. And also, you know, we don't quite know about their migrations in general because they are so much more, they are more difficult than even whales to track. And whales are pretty darn tough to track, but bats are even harder. And also, unlike birds and whales, they don't have a standard migration corridor. It's not like, they're not quite as seasonal where they leave one place right away. Their migratory patterns are a little bit more vague. Even like the authors on the study had assumed that they were following some sort of a, some sort of a unified path, but they found that they were actually moving in a more generalized northeast direction.
12:33 Speaker 04 I'm not even pointing northeast in my own house. It's just a hand motion. Let me start that. This, I'm literally pointing southwest.
12:42 Rachel Feltman? The fact that you know that incredible. I would, I would have to spend a lot more time thinking about that.
12:47 Speaker 04 I'm very excited about gardening. So I've been track in the spring in the new house. So I've been tracking where this, I've been like meticulously looking because I want to know what I can put where, but that's another, that could be a whole series right there. Like city girl, shore girl meet turned city girl gardens. Anyway, weird tangent. So they thought, they thought that the bats might be going in some sort of a prescribed path, the way that whales and some birds will go. But they were going in a more general north, northeast directions. And they also found that the bats are alternating these migratory flights with frequent stops. And that's not just because they really like visiting various rest stops and seeing what sort of food items. It's just because they need to feed continuously. They eat.
13:30 Rachel Feltman? That's also why I visit rest stops.
13:32 Speaker 04 I mean, I'm more of a, if I really have to use the bathroom than a food rest stop visitor, but I, I feel you. I mean, I've driven the opposite direction to go to a rest stop with better food. So.
13:45 Speaker 05 Personally, I like a little roadside attraction. Like there's that stretch in Iowa, I think that has like the biggest rake in the world or something. I stopped to see that once. It was fine.
13:55 Rachel Feltman? The last time I stopped for a roadside attraction, it was for what used to be the biggest garden gnome, gnome Chomsky. He was up in upstate New York. Um, yeah, he's great. I, I do think that if I'm remembering correctly, he is no longer the largest gnome, but he's.
14:12 Speaker 05 Because he's drunk or someone made a bigger one?
14:14 Rachel Feltman? Someone made a bigger gnome. Um, you know, they could not let gnome Chomsky just live.
14:20 Speaker 04 That gnome competition is fierce. I mean, I was, I was going to guess Lucy, the elephant, but then I was like, no, that's nothing for you.
14:28 Rachel Feltman? Oh yeah. I mean, I, I definitely saw Lucy, the elephant, but it's been a long time. I actually, I was at the winter train show at the New York botanical gardens, which is a great time if folks haven't been. The one up in the Bronx, not the one in, in Brooklyn.
14:42 Speaker 05 Which is also great. Don't just.
14:44 Rachel Feltman? Oh, also great. No, also great. But I feel like there are a lot of people who live in Brooklyn and people don't pay as much attention to the botanical park garden in the Bronx. And they have this awesome train show where they do miniatures of a bunch of New York attractions made out of plant materials. It's great. If you want to see like the Empire State Building made out of acorns. It's amazing. Lot, lot more artistically profound than it might sound. But anyway, the point of this tangent is that I walked in this year and there was a giant beautiful elephant and I was like Lucy the elephant is in New Jersey, not New York. Why should care? And then of course, my husband was like, Rachel, there's also a
15:25 Rachel Feltman? giant elephant that used to be in New York. It was a hotel. And I was like, well, whatever.
15:32 Rachel Feltman? They probably copied Lucy.
15:34 Speaker 05 This is like a Russian nesting doll of tangents. I like, I totally remember how we got here.
15:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
15:40 Rachel Feltman? Neither.
15:41 Speaker 04 I got it.
15:41 Rachel Feltman? Roadside attractions.
15:43 Speaker 05 You're gonna surf the surf.
15:44 Rachel Feltman? Rest stops.
15:45 Speaker 04 I'm gonna surf.
15:46 Rachel Feltman? Stopping for snacks.
15:47 Speaker 04 I'm gonna surf this tangent and get us back. Watch. Just watch. In three, in three, two, one. They also found that the bats were having to stop fairly frequently. And this wasn't for a roadside attraction like the largest garden gnome or the beloved Lucy the elephant in South Jersey. It was to do everyone's arguably favorite rest stop activity, but for eating. Nocturnal bats eat a wide variety of insects like most bats, and they must refuel at least once and sometimes twice per night. Unlike other animals with their migrations, they do not gain a bunch of weight beforehand to sustain them. So they need to stop and feed and their quick little metabolisms just take all of that lovely
16:32 Speaker 04 protein from the insects and gobbles it right up. This also makes their migration pattern look a little bit more hoppy, kind of like a bunny, and not a nice little straight shot like if they were riding a current or something like that. The other last little fun thing that they found is that they were flying a little bit further than expected in one, in one leap. They can make it up to 238 miles in a night, much further than the previous estimates.
16:57 Rachel Feltman? That's better than a Tesla on a single charge.
16:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, really, seriously. And, you know, while these sensors are a big leap in understanding the species, we're still, we're still a ways away from tracking their complete yearly cycle. And also, like Lauren alluded to, getting some lovely surfing video of them. According to the authors, this was the first time that they had, that they, that we have this ability to harness this seemingly invisible wind energy and how it is supporting how these bats moves. Now, they're also not the only bats that have been recorded doing this. So this study also complements another one that was recently published in Movement Ecology that looked at another migratory bat species in Europe. It also surfs on warm fronts as it crosses the English Channel into Europe. When and if I ever swim across the English
17:44 Speaker 04 Channel, I would like that as well, although something tells me I will get flagged for cheating if I try to, if I try to fly across.
17:51 Rachel Feltman? Maybe the thing to hope for is that you'll look up and a bat will be surfing along with you.
17:55 Speaker 04 Right above me and I'll be able to be like, hello, I advocated for you. And it'll help me get across faster. But that's way, way, way down the road. When these bats do this across the English Channel, it more than doubles their speed from that study. So all of these studies on this elusive bat migration, depending on the species, can have implications for bat conservation. Bats are one of those species that can run into wind turbines and Europe has a lot of wind energy and it's only growing. So if we know a little bit more about when and where they're, where the bats are going to be, the turbines could maybe turn off for a little bit so that they can avoid collisions. Now, I love ending my segments with a question because I'm that annoying journalist. And so if you
18:40 Speaker 04 could tag along on any animal's migration, what animal would it be?
18:45 Rachel Feltman? Ooh, that's a really good question.
18:51 Speaker 05 I guess it depends what you want to get out of it because there are, there are, I guess if you're trying to go for like distance, there are definitely some birds that I would be like really interested to track. Oh God, I need to think of the name really quick. Godwitz. There are Godwitz that breed in the Arctic and spend the off season in New Zealand. And I, I said Arctic, not Antarctic. So they're literally doing like a trans global migration, pretty crazy, thousands of miles. That'd be pretty sick to follow along. I'd have to get in better shape though, I think.
19:32 Rachel Feltman? The only thing I can think of is like the, the turtles from Fijian Nemo. Suddenly I've forgotten every other migratory animal, but it does seem like that would be a really fun one. So.
19:44 Speaker 04 Also, also very surfy and.
19:46 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, very surfy.
19:47 Speaker 04 Mine's definitely Pacific humpback whales, not so much Atlantic, because I like how they feed in Alaska and then kind of Cav and hang out in Hawaii. So kind of like what Lauren was saying, it depends on what you want to get out of it. You can be in, you get to spend your time in very different climates. And I love seasons. I love that kind of change. So I think that swimming along with them would be wonderful.
20:12 Rachel Feltman? Actually I might follow eels since we don't know what they're doing.
20:16 Speaker 05 You'd find out, you'd solve it.
20:17 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. And I would like promise not to tell. I'd be like, you guys, it'll go to the grave with me. I just want to know.
20:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
20:25 Speaker 04 So that's developing, developing that eel technology, that's after bats though, right? We're going to develop this speaking bats first and then we'll go to eels. We just have to, I just want to, I just want to make sure.
20:36 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, no, it's. Listen, perhaps I'm already working on eel communication. I wouldn't, there would be signs, but I wouldn't say anything.
20:45 Speaker 04 You heard it here first, folks.
20:47 Rachel Feltman? Well, what a great image. Looking forward to the day when we can finally capture some, some video of these little guys. But in the meantime, I'll just look up pictures of them and imagine them on surfboards.
21:00 Speaker 05 Have you, have you seen the video though of the bats on the treadmills?
21:04 Rachel Feltman? Yes. Yes.
21:06 Speaker 05 Because that, that is a really wild video that you can watch.
21:09 Rachel Feltman? Any, any research video involving animal on treadmill is probably going to be a good time. You kind of can't go wrong. The like tinier and weirder the animals are, the better. Sea slug on a treadmill. Oh, my gosh. It'd be one slug treadmill. I don't think that sea slug's gonna do what you want it to do. Roll off.
21:31 Rachel Feltman? Hey, listen, maybe that's, maybe there's some important science in there. Who am I to say? You'd never know. We're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.
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22:51 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back and I'm going to jump into my fact, which as I said, is about a submarine sandwich, not a hoagie. So let's set the scene. You may think of the year 1969 as, you know, a year when humans explored new heights. But really, October-
23:11 Speaker 04 I have a song about it.
23:11 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah.
23:12 Speaker 04 We went to the moon in 1969. That's when we made a landing that was lunar.
23:19 Rachel Feltman? Alright, I'll stop.
23:20 Speaker 05 What a, what a beautiful voice, Laura.
23:22 Speaker 04 Oh, thank you. Thank you.
23:25 Rachel Feltman? So, the truth is that it was October 16th, 1968, when some intrepid explorers really set off on a journey that changed the course of humankind. So, these three intrepid explorers were about to take a submersible named Alvin for a spin off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. Alvin had just had its first dip a little more than three years earlier, and this vessel was no stranger to adventure. In 1966, it had been used to locate a submerged 1.45 megaton hydrogen bomb that had been lost in a US Air Force midair accident over Spain.
24:09 Rachel Feltman? That's a big oopsie, but thanks, Alvin. Then in 1967, this is great, it was attacked by a swordfish at 2,000 feet deep. And I guess that was enough of it to do that it got written down. The swordfish did get trapped in some of Alvin's hardware and was brought back up with Alvin and then was cooked for dinner.
24:32 Speaker 05 I mean- Yeah, swordfish lost that one.
24:35 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
24:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, I was gonna ask who won that battle.
24:37 Rachel Feltman? No, Alvin won, swordfish zero. But this was not gonna be Alvin's day, October 16th, 1968.
24:47 Rachel Feltman? So this vessel, which was under the purview of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was being lowered into the water. They were going to look for some whales, a pretty chill assignment for Alvin, given all of the like H-bomb and Swordfish adventures that it'd been on. But then a cable snapped and it started to slide into the water. This was a very slow sinking situation. And luckily, the hatch was still open, so everyone got out. Apparently, the pilot sprained his ankle, but that was like the worst of it. But unfortunately, the hatch was still open, so Alvin dipped under the water, sank 5,000 feet down, and
25:27 Rachel Feltman? settled at the bottom of the sea. Not so great. And it would actually take almost a year for Alvin to make it back to the surface. There was like some poor weather, and then there was some difficulty getting a hold of an appropriate rescue vessel. I guess it just wasn't super urgent to save this, this very like embarrassingly sunk submarine. And then finally, you know, a little less than a year later, I think it was like Labor Day, Alvin comes up, mostly unscathed, definitely in need of an overhaul because it had been waterlogged for a year, but-
26:01 Speaker 04 Kind of amazing that it would work at all after that, you know, after being so down for so long and at such a depth.
26:08 Rachel Feltman? Yes. Well, I'm sure, I'm sure like all of the like radios and stuff like that had to, had to be totally replaced. But I think like, you know, structurally, it was mostly intact. In fact, it's actually still operational today, though apparently it's had, at this point, all of its parts swapped out over time.
26:27 Speaker 05 Theseus's submarine.
26:28 Rachel Feltman? Yes. I was like a very literal ship of Theseus kind of situation.
26:32 Speaker 05 Amazing.
26:33 Rachel Feltman? So it's arguable whether Alvin still exists, but the Alvin is still in operation. Anyway, we're not here to talk about the Alvin submarine or philosophical paradoxes. We're here to talk about some sandwiches.
26:49 Rachel Feltman? When those three crew members set out in October of 1968, they had packed lunches to eat when they were, you know, down there in the drink.
26:58 Speaker 05 Very important.
26:58 Rachel Feltman? And then when folks took a peek inside Alvin on Labor Day of 1969, they found that lunch was in surprisingly pristine condition.
27:09 Speaker 05 Wow.
27:10 Rachel Feltman? No. Yeah. So there was this metal lunchbox where the food was stashed. And when they opened it, they found some apples. They found bologna sandwiches wrapped in... Everything says wax paper, but in the pictures, it looks like there was also some plastic wrap, which did exist at the time. So I think there was also plastic wrap on there. And there were also these thermoses full of beef bouillon. Delicious. Y'all.
27:34 Speaker 04 Maybe it had got more salty.
27:36 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, well, actually, I will get into that in a second.
27:39 Speaker 05 Okay, please do.
27:41 Rachel Feltman? So there's a picture of a, the late Woods Hole researcher Cliff Winget, who, side note, according to his 2006 obituary, lived in Sandwich, Massachusetts. So thank you for that, Cliff. R.I.P.
27:54 Speaker 05 It's all connecting.
27:55 Rachel Feltman? It's all, yeah, it's all connected.
27:58 Speaker 05 It's gonna be the foundation of a great new conspiracy theory.
28:00 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
28:01 Speaker 04 This was destined to the day he was born.
28:03 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, completely.
28:04 Speaker 04 This is perfect.
28:05 Rachel Feltman? Or did he move to Sandwich, Massachusetts after this incredible day? Who knows? But, um, so there's a picture of him holding up one of those sandwiches, possibly having just taken a bite. Like, the picture kind of looks like it's been nibbled on. Cannot confirm or disprove this. But we know that they said that the broth tasted fine, so they certainly weren't opposed to sampling the goods.
28:31 Speaker 05 That's so, that's always my first question when, like, archaeologists find, like, a 2,000-year-old cask of wine. I'm like, what did it taste like?
28:38 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, exactly.
28:39 Speaker 05 I'm so glad that these... Oceanographers, or whatever they were, decided to do some real science and tell us how the bouillon tasted.
28:47 Rachel Feltman? Exactly. There's a note that, you know, "From general appearance, taste, smell, consistency, and preliminary bacteriological and biochemical assays, these food materials were strikingly well-preserved." So, they said it themselves, "Somebody tasted it." The thermoses themselves had actually been partially crushed by the pressure of the ocean, so the, like, seal of the thermos had been compromised, and they noted that there was actually, like, some salt water had gotten in there, so yeah, it was, the bouillon was probably even saltier. But they were like, "Yeah, this, this bouillon still tastes like broth that we would drink."
29:28 Rachel Feltman? They did say that the apples looked pickled, their words, not mine. I don't really know what a pickled apple looks like, but I think, you know, it was the, kind of like, wrinkly and waterlogged, but like, not rotten, is what I would imagine. And there were six sandwiches, they were just slightly soggy, otherwise seemed pretty unchanged. The baloney had gone gray on the outside, but was still pink in the middle.
29:54 Speaker 05 Okay, so wait.
29:55 Speaker 04 Like, sounds like a bullseye?
29:56 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Unclear.
29:59 Speaker 05 When you say slightly soggy, like, the, I mean, these were, like, submerged in water, right? Like, they had to be, like, fully...
30:07 Rachel Feltman? So, that was one of my main questions. I think what happened is that they were in this metal lunchbox, and then they were wrapped in both plastic and wax paper, from the photos. So I think it really was, like, the lunchbox was not full of water.
30:27 Speaker 05 Okay.
30:27 Speaker 04 It was maybe just some excess moisture that wouldn't have gotten in.
30:31 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Or maybe it was full of water, but they were wrapped well enough that the sandwiches apparently had not been fully soaked.
30:40 Speaker 05 This is an advertisement for cling wrap, I think.
30:43 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
30:43 Speaker 05 Or, like, the...
30:44 Rachel Feltman? For real.
30:45 Speaker 04 It reminds me of, like, last year when the Stanley Cup craze started, and somebody had posted a picture of, like, their Stanley surviving a car ac- you know, like, coming out unscathed in a car accident, and it's like, hey, buy this thermos, it can withstand. Ridiculous amounts of pressure and, you know, being 5,000 feet under the water.
31:04 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
31:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, the gray baloney and like slightly soggy sandwich, though, makes me question exactly why the scientists may have taken a bite, but.
31:13 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
31:13 Speaker 05 That's okay.
31:14 Rachel Feltman? Agreed.
31:14 Speaker 05 Between him and God.
31:15 Rachel Feltman? Agreed, exactly.
31:16 Speaker 04 I would hope that there was, you know, some sort of medical professional seated right next to him.
31:21 Rachel Feltman? I seriously doubt there was.
31:23 Speaker 04 But, ugh.
31:25 Rachel Feltman? Based on what I knew know about dudes doing science in the 60s, I bet there was not.
31:30 Speaker 04 There was not, no, no.
31:31 Rachel Feltman? But they did, you know, they didn't just, you know, giggle and take a bite and write down some notes. There is a 1971 paper in Science about this lunchbox because
31:42 Speaker 04 Amazing.
31:43 Rachel Feltman? they did everything they could think of to study it. And this is a quote from the paper, "The food exhibited a degree of preservation that, in the case of the fruit, equaled that of careful storage and, in the case of starch and proteinaceous materials, AKA baloney, appeared to surpass by far that of normal refrigeration." First of all, love proteinaceous materials for baloney.
32:08 Speaker 04 Yeah. Talk about a way to really, you know, beef up your.
32:13 Rachel Feltman? Oh, no.
32:14 Speaker 04 Talk about a way to really beef up your meat.
32:17 Speaker 05 Unfortunately, it does sound like one of the phrases that was used in like the Boar's Head Listeria documentation.
32:23 Rachel Feltman? Oh, yes, so true. And yeah, then they stored the food in like normal refrigerator conditions and everything spoiled within a few weeks as if it had started out fresh. And so they were like, what, what was going on down there? Why didn't this food go bad in the ocean? And they confirmed that there was a normal amount of oxygen in the water of the sub. They even confirmed that there wasn't anything leaking that could have served as like an accidental preservative. And then they checked, you know, that the seals of the thermoses had broken under the pressure of the water. So like the contents hadn't even been isolated. So they were like, okay, what's up with this? And based on all of their testing.
33:06 Rachel Feltman? They figured out that the spoilage had been happening at 1% of the rate it would have at the surface, and that was when they controlled for temperature. But why? They were like, are there, they were like, are there fewer microbes down there? Or like the wrong kinds of microbes? Or was it something to do with the cold and/or the pressure? And the truth is, they like, didn't really come up with an answer. But we have some ideas. It was probably the pressure. And researchers now, I was reading an article by Gregory Barber in Wired, there's a lot
33:50 Rachel Feltman? of, this article was about sort of like, why this interesting scientific question is relevant to our interest today? And I was like, I don't really care, I just want to talk about the sandwiches. But it is true. Understandable. Yeah, yeah. It is true that scientists are very interested in sort of how microbial decay works in the ocean, specifically with regards to carbon sinking, you know, carbon sequestration, because, you know, when things decompose in the ocean, you know, that's like, part of how carbon gets released back up. And pretty recently, researchers were like, studying this, and they found that when they
34:34 Rachel Feltman? pulled water up to the deck of a research vessel to like, measure microbial activity, they were seeing like, pretty normal microbial activity, very like, hungry microbes. And they were like, we know there aren't actually enough nutrients to feed microbes that hungry in the deep ocean, so what, we know that that's like, that some kind of mismatch is going on. So, pretty recently, researchers started sending autonomous instruments to actually like, incubate microbes down in the deep, to see what goes on there. And they found that very few of them, like around 10%, sort of thrive in extreme pressure, and the rest are not very good at living at that pressure, so they don't like, metabolize as much material. So probably those are microbes that are adapted to live closer to the surface and just kind
35:19 Rachel Feltman? of float their way down. But then there's this relatively small percentage of microbes that like, are happy and hungry, which is how you get, you know, like, a whale fall decomposing at the bottom of the ocean. So- The best guess is just at the pressures of, you know, 5,000 feet under the sea, there just weren't enough microbes that were up to the task of making this food decompose. But we don't like really know for sure. There's still so much we don't know about how the ocean works in this regard. Um, which is kind of wild.
35:58 Speaker 04 Logically, that would make some sense because it, you know, not to anthropomorphize some microbes here, but you know, they might be like, ugh, I don't know what that is. I don't want to eat it. That's not in my, that's not, you know, in my dietary repertoire, you know? Baloney? What's baloney here? You know, so it logically without-
36:15 Rachel Feltman? Like a Victorian child getting a flaming hot chido.
36:18 Speaker 04 Exactly. Yeah. Like it would, it would kind of make some sense that they were, you know, that they, they wouldn't have eaten it just purely out of like, I don't know what that is. Therefore I'm not going to take a bite of it. You know, they're, you know, they weren't as curious as the scientists. So.
36:31 Rachel Feltman? Sure. Yeah.
36:32 Speaker 04 You see a little, I could see that working maybe.
36:34 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Yeah. And also just, you know, not a lot of microbes that are thriving at that, at those pressures. So less, less activity, less stuff going on. Um, what's cool is that, you know, even though in the sixties, they, they weren't really talking about, you know, the carbon sink of the ocean. People were talking about fertilizing the ocean by like sending organic waste down there as a way to rebuild fish populations. And the researchers very wisely saw this sandwich as, you know, a cautionary tale against that idea. They were like,
37:15 Rachel Feltman? listen, we don't really know how it works down there. And if this sandwich didn't decompose, maybe all of our trash would not decompose and we should not just put it down there as a way to feed the fish.
37:27 Speaker 05 I love that just like a goofy baloney sandwich is like what prevented us from filling the deep oceans with trash.
37:34 Rachel Feltman? Right? Yeah.
37:35 Speaker 05 People are like really incredible for just what we're willing to do.
37:40 Rachel Feltman? So true.
37:42 Rachel Feltman? That is so true. So yeah, that's, that's the whole story of this sandwich. I was really hoping I could get more information on the, how the taste test happened, how it proceeded. You know, longtime listeners know, I love talking about people being willing to pop weird stuff into their mouths and that ending up in scientific papers, like the Kentucky meat rain. And so, yeah, we'll probably not get more information on that, but there are a delightful number of, you know, institutional blog posts and of course, this one scientific paper about the submarine sandwich. So yeah, I love it. Thank you, Alvin Baloney Sandwich. Thank you.
38:24 Speaker 05 Yeah. My big takeaway from this is that I should replace my refrigerator with just like a portal to the deep ocean.
38:30 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, absolutely.
38:32 Speaker 05 Just sending down a fishing line anytime I want to snack.
38:36 Rachel Feltman? And occasionally a swordfish will come up and try to mess up your day and maybe you'll win.
38:42 Speaker 05 I could take him.
38:43 Rachel Feltman? You could take him. Oh yeah. My money's on you, Lauren. All right, we're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact.
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40:28 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And Lauren, start talking to me about some monsters, please.
40:35 Speaker 05 Absolutely. Will do. So we're gonna, I'm gonna start this off with like a little kind of visual guided meditation. I am bringing visuals to the audio medium, kind of like bringing a knife to a gunfight, but it's going to be a good idea this time. Okay, so just go with me. Imagine that you're, it's a beautiful sunshine day. You are getting into a motorboat on a wide green river with like all of your bros, you know, you're gonna go fishing with your pals. You've got a cooler chock full of brewskis. Everything is going so well. And then, as soon as you start moving your boat along the surface of the water, you are bombarded by these 20 to 30 pound fish
41:16 Speaker 05 catapulting up in every direction. They're landing on your boat. One or two might like clip you in the shoulder or head. Your cooler gets knocked. Your beer, it spilled. It's just like a total maelstrom of massive flying fish. Obviously, your leisurely afternoon fishing is canceled. Now you're in survival mode. You just have to escape fish storm. So this is a 100% completely scientifically accurate description of what it looks like when silver carp take over a waterway.
41:47 Speaker 05 So silver carp, they're an invasive species in the US originally from East Asia. And in their natural habitat, this like level of fish-based violence and chaos doesn't happen because they're a species kept in check by other species in beautiful ecosystem web. But in the US, in the rivers they've been introduced to, they've outcompeted native fish, multiplied prolifically for decades. And basically, the river population just becomes all silver carp. And these fish, again, are big fish. We're talking Up to three feet long, like, record holders above 50 pounds. When they jump at you, it's like a serious, it gets serious. I don't
42:29 Rachel Feltman? I remember
42:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
42:31 Rachel Feltman? I remember a few, covering this a few years ago, and a researcher compared it to being hit in the face with a bowling ball, which I had stayed with me.
42:40 Speaker 04 Yeah. That'll do it.
42:42 Speaker 05 So these giant invasive fish, they, contrary to what you might think, are not predators. The reason that they outcompete native fish is because they're just so darn good at eating everything. They eat plankton and phytoplankton and algae. They're, they're basically grazers at kind of the surface section of a water body, because that's where all the photosynthesis is happening. That's where all the light is. That's where all the tasty stuff to eat is. But unfortunately, all of those tiny plankton also form the fundamental base of the food web for every other species. And so by being the biggest fish at the buffet, they unfortunately prevent other fish from getting their plate full. So anyway, big invasive fish obviously
43:25 Speaker 05 causes some major problems for recreational boaters, but maybe more critically than that, causes environmental and ecological mayhem. And their invasions can cause populations of native species to crash. The whole ecosystem changes. And to add insult to injury, silver carp don't even taste good. So we can't eat our way out of the problem. They basically have no economic or culinary value. It's, it's a big bummer all around. You can't boat, and even if you could, the fish you were planning on catching, they've been outcompeted, they've been replaced by these gross dive bombing carp. So
43:58 Speaker 04 I famously can't cook at all, but my competitive side is like, no, I'm gonna make that carp. I want, I want to solve the problem by coming up with a recipe to make this taste good. Won't happen, because there cannot cook at all, but wow.
44:13 Speaker 05 I mean, look, if if a man can eat just the grayest, soggiest bologna sandwich for science, then you can try and cook a carp.
44:21 Speaker 04 Have they tried feeding the carp the bologna sandwiches instead of the natural things in the ecosystem to maybe, is that a solution we've looked at? I'm just asking questions.
44:30 Speaker 05 We're, we are over here innovating. And that's why, that's why we're also going to invent ways to talk to bats. So, so these, these silver carp, they're already present in a bunch of major US rivers. They were introduced in kind of the mid 20th century in the US and actually intentionally because of their super voracious appetite, they were introduced to the US so that they could be in agricultural ponds and like wastewater treatment facilities and eat up algae that was like clogging wastewater treatment centers or just making cow ponds gross, I guess. But, um, surprise, surprise, they escaped containment and now they're in the Mississippi River, the Ohio River, the Missouri River,
45:12 Speaker 05 like the biggest rivers in the country have a carp problem. And they are on the cusp of another huge territory gain. Silver carp are very close to entering the Great Lakes and from there, all other adjoining rivers, yeah, the Great Lakes Basin, big stuff in freshwater. So yeah, they're, they're on, or the carp are in the Illinois River and they are less than 50 miles from Lake Michigan. If they clear that last gap, they can spread through all of the lake's shallows and then like the entire watershed is slowly gonna be, or maybe not even that slowly, will be invaded by these fish. I'm just watching Jess's face.
45:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, Jess is not happy.
45:53 Speaker 05 Just in Chicago, right? Oh, man. So thrilled for you. Um, yeah. So obviously, big problem. But here's the kicker. They've been stuck in the same spot almost. 50 miles from the Great Lakes for about a decade now. It's been 10 years, which is plenty of time for a spit for a fish species to make it 50 miles. So what's the deal? Skill issue, I would say. Yeah, skill issue. You just gotta train them up. Well, so scientists have been confused by this too. And increasingly, they're becoming convinced that what's holding the fish back is, drumroll please, the city of Chicago and specifically the city's urban water pollution problem.
46:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, Chicago pride, right there.
46:38 Speaker 04 You should be so proud, Jess.
46:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, so a few studies have looked into this, have looked into like the water quality around the Chicago area and tried to see how it's impacting these carp. One of the most recent, which was published last year in Scientific Reports, evaluated how these fish react to water collected from the Chicago area in the labs. So researchers, well, I mean, like, kind of, yeah. The researchers took a bunch of these carp. They raised them up in nice, clean water and then suddenly exposed them to a tank full of Chicago area water. And the fish like literally froze. They stopped moving. Their metabolic rates skyrocketed up. It was like a very clear stress response.
47:22 Speaker 05 Their bodies started working very hard just to compensate for whatever was present in the water. Cause they actually didn't even isolate specific compounds or anything. They didn't like formulate this water to be fish repellent. They just took it from Chicago and then suddenly it was like the fish could not deal. Wow. In this study, they also had a control species, which was a native species called golden shiners. And these fish, they like seem to deal with whatever's happening around Chicago just fine. That doesn't necessarily mean that like pollution is fine for all native species, but it does signal that there is like something about the silver carp or there's some sensitivity there that isn't uniform among all fish species.
48:04 Speaker 05 And a previous study from 2019 from the same lab, they actually like collected carp from different points along the Illinois River. And the closer they got to Chicago, they started finding signs of liver damage in the fish. And so, so clearly like whatever is in the water is having an effect. And you know, this is kind of, there's been some debate, but the, the science is building to say that actually pollution is, is playing a role here. And fortunately, or unfortunately, that inadvertent barrier is maybe disappearing because the Illinois River is getting a lot cleaner. There have been infrastructure updates as well as focused water quality efforts that
48:48 Speaker 05 have made Chicago's waters less polluted in recent decades. And like, we love it. We love a good environmental effort and like remediation and water recovery. But soon, you know, there might not be enough pollution to hold the silver carp back. And again, before you get the wrong idea, that doesn't mean that like any environmental expert is like, we have to keep polluting the river.
49:11 Rachel Feltman? We can't stop silver carp anymore because of woke.
49:17 Speaker 05 Hold the presses, like, release the sewage. We gotta, we gotta keep those fish back. But no, I talked with Corey Siski, who's a scientist at the University of Illinois, who was responsible for those two studies I mentioned. And he said emphatically, quote, "We're not promoting pollution as carp control." But he, you know, he added that-
49:35 Rachel Feltman? It's sad that they have to say it, but I, I understand.
49:39 Speaker 05 At this day and age, you do have to specify. But you know, he added that it, it does mean that as we continue to clean the river, which hopefully we do, we, we have to plan ahead and prepare and have some course of action. Otherwise, we're just gonna, you know, leave one environmental catastrophe behind for another one.
49:56 Speaker 05 And the Great Lakes, they're the, they're the biggest freshwater system in the world. So to, to, you know, subject them to yet another terrible species invasion would be, you know, more, more than just a bummer. It would be like a massive environmental cost. There would be economic costs. It's really expensive to manage invasive species once they've made it into a waterway. There's a really long history of this in the Great Lakes, too. If you want, you can look up in your own time what happened with the introduction of sea lampreys into the lakes. But- Illinois.
50:29 Speaker 04 Didn't Illinois also try electrified gates?
50:33 Speaker 05 Oh, I'm getting to that.
50:34 Speaker 04 For them? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
50:36 Speaker 05 We're getting to, we're getting to electric fences.
50:38 Speaker 04 I just wanted to make sure it was the same one. I was like, wait, this can't be this, this can't be more than one.
50:43 Speaker 05 Well, there is actually, there are more that there's, there's so many invasive carp.
50:46 Speaker 04 Okay, nevermind, nevermind, nevermind.
50:48 Rachel Feltman? Well, and in addition to it being an ecological disaster, what if flora gets hit with a carp? Unacceptable. So.
50:55 Speaker 04 Unacceptable.
50:56 Rachel Feltman? Full stop. We gotta, we gotta do something about it.
50:59 Speaker 05 You know, the fish are a legitimate safety hazard. I mean, like, maybe we can link video in, in the show notes, but there's, I mean, you can watch people just get like whacked with these things. So, yeah, the point is, like, pollution's going away. It's been holding the carp back, we think. We need something else to hold them back in its place because we can't just keep putting raw sewage into our urban waterways. So I guess a caveat to that is we don't actually know if raw sewage is the problem. It could be industrial pollution. There's all sorts of things that could be in the water preventing the carp from moving.
51:33 Speaker 04 The dye from when they dye the river green at St. Patrick's Day.
51:36 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah, that's entirely it. We don't need any more science. We've solved it.
51:41 Speaker 04 Again.
51:42 Speaker 05 And there are other tools available, you know, besides pollution that could help prevent the carp from entering the lake. There is already this big electric barrier, basically also 50 miles south, southwest of Chicago. I'm also trying to figure out directions now with my hands. But in southwest of Chicago and Illinois, there is this electric fence that is specifically in place to try and keep invasive species like silver carp and a handful of other invasive carp species from entering the lakes. Other research has suggested that, like, existing locks and dams can just kind of naturally slow carp progression, although.
52:23 Speaker 05 Some newer studies indicate that they can just kind of jump over them depending on the size of the fish. There's also been a culling program in place for a while now, where basically wildlife managers just go out and kill as many carp as they can. And it's kind of like, has that been working as well as it needs to? Unclear, but they're going to keep doing it. And then more recently, there's also been bubble nets and sound barriers that people are trying to use to try and deter the carps in like, the least environmentally damaging way possible. But in my conversations with Corey Suskey, he's, he basically said that like, moving forward, we might need to keep innovating newer solutions and, and keep trying things out because there might not be any single silver bullet to stop the
53:07 Speaker 05 silver carp. Yeah. And I, I just, I mean, the thing that really strikes me about this is that it's kind of like an environmental trolley problem, right? Like, I, you know, as a conservation manager, how do you weigh the cost of something like cleaning up a river system, or allowing a fish to go on its way and cause mayhem? Yeah.
53:30 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
53:30 Speaker 05 But that's not my job to decide. Right? I just get to talk about it on a podcast.
53:36 Rachel Feltman? I'm not from Chicago, but like, I feel like it, you know, has, there's a lot of vibe overlap with Philly. And if, if we had a similar situation in the Schuylkill, there would be a real sense of pride that our water was too gross to let these fish in. So that I love that.
53:55 Speaker 07 I was gonna say, it feels like when tourists come to Chicago and they're like, this is too cold. I can't be here. And all of us were like, we're like, wearing shorts and UG boots. We're like, this is normal, dude. Come on.
54:07 Speaker 04 You know, I've done one swim in the Schuylkill, and it was one of the only swims I ever quit because it was too hot. Cause it's a very shallow river. And it was like 90 degrees outside. The water was like 80. And I like, had to take an ice bath. I literally thought I was gonna die. But it was, it was cleaner than I was expecting.
54:25 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
54:25 Speaker 04 I'll give it that.
54:26 Rachel Feltman? One of my favorite things is being present when somebody who's not from the Philly area learns how "skookle" is pronounced for the first time.
54:33 Speaker 04 That's a good one, yeah.
54:34 Rachel Feltman? Good, it, it, it, it always hits right.
54:36 Speaker 04 It does, it does. It's a cool river. I'll, I'll, you know, I'll, I'll have to.
54:40 Speaker 05 Well, it's, it's a hot river.
54:41 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
54:42 Speaker 04 It is so hot. Like, again, this was also like, late August. I mean, it was a hot day. Yeah, like, it was, I, yeah, it was, it was, it was only eight miles. It was not a long one, but I was still just like, ready to, you know, pass out after that. Almost gave up, but I, I didn't.
54:56 Speaker 05 Eight miles, not a long swim is like.
54:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm, I'm a weirdo. It's okay.
55:02 Speaker 05 Ah, that's incredible. But yeah, I guess the school kill is not like, ideal conditions for preserving sandwiches, then.
55:08 Rachel Feltman? No.
55:09 Speaker 04 No, definitely not. Definitely not.
55:13 Rachel Feltman? Ho, Hoagie is, Hoagie is just completely fall apart there. Well, thanks so much for a great episode, you guys. So many great weird facts today. Always a pleasure to have both of you.
55:26 Speaker 05 It's so good to be here. Thank you so much.
55:29 Speaker 04 Thank you, and thank you, Bloaty Sandwich.
55:32 Rachel 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.
56:05 Speaker 02 When everything feels nonstop, movement becomes the pause. So give Lululemon this holiday season. Smooth, seamless running gear builds momentum through every mile.
56:17 Speaker 02 Comfortable workout styles clear the way for locked-in focus. And dynamic stretch expands presence through every pose.
56:29 Speaker 02 Give the feeling. Shop in store and on lululemon.com.
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