Pod Insights Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks The Humboldt Squid - A Dance with El Diablo Rojo About this episode To kick off the scariest month of the year, Wes thought it appropriate to bring some tentacles into the equation. This intrigued Jeff.
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Transcript 16,348 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Wes Larson? Hey everyone. I'm really excited to tell you about a podcast that's actually very near and dear to my heart. It's called Risk. And this is a podcast I started listening to in like 2014. I listened to it while I did bear work. I listened to it all the time, like hundreds and hundreds of hours of it. And it's a storytelling podcast where people tell really real stories they never thought they'd dare to share. For example, there's one about a young man that was kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel. There's one where a young woman discovered the guy she was planning kinky playdates with was her dad. There's tons of stories. And for me, this podcast was really important. It was during a time where I was really only hearing stories from my community. And it really helped me expand my worldview. And to be completely honest with you, there was a story on this podcast
0:44 Wes Larson? that really helped me during a time where I was going through some difficult changes and I just needed to hear other perspectives. So for that reason, Risk has always been a really important podcast to me. I can't recommend it enough. I've listened to so much of it and I absolutely love it. So if you love hearing people tell real stories about their lives, listen to and follow Risk wherever you get your podcasts.
1:18 Jeff Larson? Hello, everyone. Welcome to Tooth and Claw Podcast. We have our wildlife biologist, bear biologist, and CNN regular Wes Larson with us. That's me.
1:30 Mike Smith? Fat bear correspondent.
1:31 Jeff Larson? Wes, you think it's beautiful when grizzly bears kill each other, huh?
1:36 Wes Larson? That's kind of what I said in front of an audience of millions of people. Yeah. I'll be honest, I, I really like it when news companies contact me to be a bear expert for them. If there's one aspect of bears that I don't love talking about on those kinds of shows, it's Fat Bear Week. It's like the one thing. Yeah, I just, I really like Fat Bear Week. I think it's great. It's just like, it's fluff, you know? And it kind of, I just kind of get tired of talking about it. I don't know. But I was glad they reached out to me.
2:08 Mike Smith? All right. We won't bring it up anymore then.
2:11 Wes Larson? No.
2:11 Jeff Larson? Were they glad they reached out to you, though?
2:14 Wes Larson? I don't know. They might be because the the producer that reached out said they might want to have me back on to talk about the winner. But yeah, it didn't seem like they loved my answers to some of their questions. So I was a little surprised that she said.
2:29 Jeff Larson? Yeah, they're like, look how cute bears can be. And you're like, yeah.
2:32 Wes Larson? They kill each other sometimes.
2:34 Jeff Larson? Babies.
2:36 Wes Larson? And I think that's beautiful. Uh, yeah.
2:40 Jeff Larson? And then we have me. I'm Wes's little brother, Jeff Larson. Uh, I'm a bit of a bear biologist myself. And then we have Mike Smith, our sound guy.
2:50 Wes Larson? Two percent bear biologist, Jeff.
2:52 Jeff Larson? Uh, one percent. I got a little bit in me.
2:56 Wes Larson? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Welcome to the episode, everyone. Today we're talking about a weird critter. We're going to talk about something weird. Yeah, well, this is the first of our October episodes. And Jeff, you may remember this. We like to get a little spooky around here during the month of October. You don't remember much, do you? Okay. Mike, do you remember that?
3:17 Mike Smith? I do. Yeah. Um, I think it's a pretty natural human response. The leaves start falling down. You're like, I want to start talking about dead things.
3:27 Wes Larson? Yeah, it gets a little spookier outside. It's darker. The leaves fall off. Things are dying. And we just start getting a little spooky.
3:34 Mike Smith? Right.
3:34 Jeff Larson? This is when I like talking about sex because like deer and elk and moose are all rut in season.
3:41 Wes Larson? And you like spooky sex.
3:43 Jeff Larson? Sure. Yeah.
3:45 Mike Smith? Who are you talking to about it? Because it's not me.
3:48 Wes Larson? Yeah. And you don't have anyone else to talk to.
3:50 Mike Smith? Yeah.
3:53 Mike Smith? Anonymous online forums.
3:55 Wes Larson? Hey, anyone else here?
3:57 Mike Smith? R slash elk sex.
3:59 Jeff Larson? I'm one of those comments. You're so beautiful.
4:04 Jeff Larson? Under the girls who post on there.
4:06 Wes Larson? The rut community.
4:07 Jeff Larson? Any chance you'd ever go out with a guy like me? That's kind of what I said.
4:13 Wes Larson? That your pictures of.
4:14 Mike Smith? I mean, actually, I'm going to look right now if there is there a R slash rut.
4:19 Wes Larson? Rut. Rudding, probably.
4:21 Jeff Larson? Trying to hunters.
4:23 Mike Smith? I'll keep researching that and get back to you guys.
4:26 Wes Larson? Anyway, uh, we like to do some spookier episodes this month. Last year we did one of like one on werewolves. I think we did some creepy crawlies. We had Sammy from too scary didn't watch. We'll probably have Sammy back on this month, too.
4:39 Mike Smith? Is that short for Samwise?
4:41 Wes Larson? Uh, I have to assume so.
4:43 Mike Smith? It's gotta be.
4:44 Wes Larson? What else would it be short for? Yeah.
4:46 Mike Smith? Yeah.
4:46 Jeff Larson? I maybe it's long for Sam, like her own, her name is only Sam.
4:51 Mike Smith? It's true. Sometimes people do lengthen them. Yeah.
4:53 Wes Larson? Yeah, I'll text her after this and ask her both of those questions. What was I about to say about Sammy?
4:59 Jeff Larson? Samwise gamgee.
5:01 Wes Larson? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Okay.
5:03 Mike Smith? We like her.
5:04 Wes Larson? That's probably it. Yeah. Great guest. We love having her on, so we'll probably have her on. But this first episode is one that was kind of unexpected.
5:11 Jeff Larson? I'm not holding back this year with her.
5:14 Wes Larson? Okay, what are you gonna say?
5:16 Jeff Larson? Oh, man. You'll just have to find out.
5:19 Wes Larson? All right.
5:20 Mike Smith? You're bringing a weird energy so far on this episode. It's a little creepy.
5:26 Wes Larson? Been spending too much on R slash rut. All right, but this is kind of, it's good that he has that creepy energy, Mike. Cause this is kind of a creepy animal to a lot of people. And it's one that I've been wanting to cover for a long time. And then this week I was like, maybe we should finally do them. And then I was like, you know what? This is perfect because it's October and these guys are kind of, they look like space aliens. They look like a creepy space alien, which.
5:53 Jeff Larson? Are you sure about that?
5:54 Wes Larson? Yeah. Do you think aliens?
5:56 Jeff Larson? You are.
5:57 Wes Larson? Are part of horror? Yeah, I'm sure. That's what they look like. Positive.
6:01 Mike Smith? Wait, what?
6:02 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I think it's possible. We just base space aliens off a strange looking animal that lives on earth.
6:09 Wes Larson? I mean, it's possible. That does make more sense, but I'm pretty sure these guys look like aliens. Uh, or like elder gods. So do you guys, when you guys watch like horror movies, do you count space horror? Like is sci fi horror in your horror back pocket?
6:28 Mike Smith? I do for sure. Like Event Horizon. I, that's, that's a horror movie to me.
6:33 Wes Larson? Yeah.
6:33 Mike Smith? Like sci fi horror. I don't know.
6:34 Wes Larson? Yeah, but that, but that one like involves like demons and stuff too.
6:38 Mike Smith? Yeah, it's sweet.
6:39 Wes Larson? Yeah.
6:39 Jeff Larson? I think aliens for sure horror.
6:42 Wes Larson? Okay. I only ask because there in, when I lived in Salt Lake, there was this, uh, it was called an October evening. And they did it in the Masonic, the Masonic temple. And am I saying that weird Masonic? Okay, like the Mason temple.
6:56 Mike Smith? It's kind of like
6:56 Wes Larson? Anyway.
6:57 Mike Smith? Milady, but for Sonic the Hedgehog.
7:00 Wes Larson? Masonic.
7:01 Jeff Larson? Masonic.
7:02 Wes Larson? When I'm spreading my coat out over a puddle for Sonic.
7:07 Mike Smith? That's gotta be the worst move. You put your whole coat just in a puddle and you
7:11 Wes Larson? Just so she can still get her feet wet.
7:14 Mike Smith? I know. And then your coat's just soaked.
7:17 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's a terrible move.
7:19 Jeff Larson? I would, I
7:20 Wes Larson? I'd do it for Sonic.
7:21 Mike Smith? He already had gone way too far.
7:24 Jeff Larson? It's such a silly move that I kind of want to try it.
7:28 Mike Smith? I just
7:29 Wes Larson? Do it with like a really nice coat.
7:31 Mike Smith? She would just be like, what are you doing?
7:33 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
7:33 Mike Smith? What? It just wouldn't even register to like
7:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
7:37 Mike Smith? Anyone with common sense, they'd be like
7:39 Jeff Larson? Refuse to even walk on it.
7:40 Mike Smith? I could just take like one step to the right and go around it. Maybe that's the better move.
7:46 Wes Larson? No, they can't. You need to sacrifice your coat. Anyway, they would do this, this Halloween horror night. It was always really fun. They had really cool presentations. They'd show short films by local filmmakers. I looked forward to it every year. And then one year it was all sci-fi themed and it was like just aliens and it really sucked the energy out of it like big time. So since then I've kind of wondered if aliens count as like an October scary thing, but today they do.
8:14 Mike Smith? Okay.
8:14 Wes Larson? Cause we're talking about Humboldt squid.
8:17 Jeff Larson? You don't think that movie Paul is a horror movie?
8:20 Wes Larson? No, I don't at all. But Alien I think is a horror movie.
8:24 Mike Smith? Or when the blob comes from outer space, but I think that's only the original one. That's spoilers for 1957, the blob.
8:33 Jeff Larson? Don't you think demons are kind of aliens? Don't they come from like other dimensions?
8:38 Wes Larson? Yeah, they come from hell though. Yeah, I don't know. I guess the lines is a little blurry.
8:42 Jeff Larson? In earth, you think? I mean, the movie The Core, they didn't see any aliens.
8:47 Mike Smith? I think they missed it.
8:48 Jeff Larson? They didn't see any demons. I mean, yeah.
8:50 Wes Larson? All right. I think we're getting a little off the rails here, but another way, another way that we can tie this to Halloween is that in a lot of the countries where this squid is found, they call them the red devil, especially in Mexico. El Diablo Rojo. So what do you guys think is the creepiest bodily feature that an animal can have?
9:10 Mike Smith? Ooh.
9:11 Wes Larson? Like, what gives you the willies on an animal more than anything?
9:15 Jeff Larson? To me, it's like a mouth that looks like a smile with a bunch of teeth.
9:19 Wes Larson? Like a shark?
9:20 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
9:21 Wes Larson? Okay. I thought you don't like eyes with lines in them, like a snake's eyes.
9:25 Mike Smith? Ooh, yeah. What about that?
9:27 Jeff Larson? Snakes scare me, yeah.
9:29 Wes Larson? Mike, what do you say?
9:30 Mike Smith? Like a proboscis, any kind of like weird long nose gives me the willies, I think.
9:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
9:36 Mike Smith? Or, yeah, like a mosquito needle. If I really think about that, I'm starting to willie out.
9:41 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think for me, it's the more legs they have generally, kind of the creepier they get. And tentacles for me.
9:48 Jeff Larson? It's more snake mouths for me.
9:50 Wes Larson? Okay, they're mouths.
9:51 Mike Smith? You must be really afraid of Jeff with his three legs.
9:55 Wes Larson? He's got three legs. Oh, was that a... Never mind. All right.
10:02 Wes Larson? Where do tentacles rank?
10:03 Jeff Larson? Thank you.
10:04 Mike Smith? Yeah, sure. I got you, bro.
10:08 Wes Larson? Where do tentacles rank for you guys on creepy bodily features?
10:12 Jeff Larson? They don't really get me, like they do some people.
10:15 Wes Larson? Yeah.
10:15 Mike Smith? I mean, they're obviously something I don't want to come into contact with, but yeah, they're not super high on my list either.
10:21 Jeff Larson? See, I would disagree with that. I kind of want them to suck me on my skin a little bit.
10:27 Wes Larson? All right, so you kind of get, Jeff, you were really on a roll. All right, well, our animal today may be one of the only tentacled animals in the world that poses any real danger to humans without using venom. And we're gonna start with a story. You guys ready?
10:44 Mike Smith? Yes.
10:45 Wes Larson? All right, on an October night in the late 1980s, a lone Mexican fisherman took a small panga, the little boats, past the small waves of the Sea of Cortez and out into the inky blackness of the open sea. The stars were stretching out almost endlessly overhead. The October air finally had a chilly bite to it after months of stifling heat. You guys have been to the Sea of Cortez. It gets pretty hot in the summer. It's gotta be a relief when fall comes around.
11:10 Mike Smith? Yeah.
11:11 Wes Larson? Does it even cool off that much? I think it does. Yeah, it does. As this fisherman navigated over deeper water, he slows the boat and coast to a stop. He unspools a long length of handline and fastens a shiny oblong jig, covered in hooks to the end and drops it into the water. He then points- Is this at night? It's at night. Wow. He then points a bright light down into the depths so that the jig would light up as he makes it bounce and dance through the water. And it doesn't take long before the line goes tight and he has his first catch. The fisherman wasn't looking for fish, though. He was trying to catch El Diablo Rojo, the red devil or the Humboldt squid. And as he pulls in the first squid, its ink shoots all over the bottom of his boat and he knows that it's gonna be a successful night.
11:56 Wes Larson? And he immediately has another squid on the jig after tossing it back in the water. At one point, the action was so strong that the squid were literally hitting the bottom of his boat as they swirl around in the water and the fisherman has to steady himself not to fall in. He's heard the tales of these red devils and he knows how they've earned their names. About forty minutes in, he's already pulled in enough squid to completely cover the bottom of the boat. And as he's pulling in the last squid of the night, the tension on the line suddenly increases. He struggles to pull the squid to the surface and when its body finally breaks the surface, he leans over to pull it into the boat. But what he didn't notice was the much larger red devil that was attacking and feeding on the smaller hooked squid.
12:40 Wes Larson? And as he reached down, it wraps its tentacles around him defensively, shoots backward in the water and pulls him out of the boat and into the water.
12:49 Mike Smith? No way.
12:50 Wes Larson? The panicked fisherman starts swimming for the boat and he had just grabbed onto the side when the squid and other squid grab him from underneath with teeth-lined suckers and bite into them with his razor-sharp beak. The man screams out into the night air and continues gripping onto the boat with all of his strength. But the squid pulled down once again and the screams are cut off with a gurgle. And all the man left behind was a bloody handprint and some of his fingernails in the wood of the boat. Not long after, another pongo would arrive and they find the still dying catch of all the squid on the bottom of the boat and the fingernails on the side of the wood. All right. So Scott Castle sat around a fire in San Ignacio, Mexico,
13:33 Wes Larson? and listened to this tale as fishermen told the story of the Diablo Rojo and the night that they found that empty boat. And as he listened to this, he studied their faces, listened to their hushed tones and realized that they were not exaggerating or lying to him. All right. So quick break. This was a story that this guy heard, just in case you didn't gather that from Mexican fishermen. We should have had that guy on this podcast instead of you. Scott Castle? Yeah. Yeah, we should have because pretty much the whole episode is about him. And he probably would have loved to told his own story, but he had been diving since he was 13. He'd lived a life that was full of adrenaline and risk-taking. When he was 18, in order to escape his alcoholic father, he joined the army
14:17 Wes Larson? and learned how to fly helicopters. And he became a special ops medic, where he took part in a lot of the shadowy and kind of covert missions that were happening in Central America during that time. Yeah. In his later life, he actually would like never really talk about his years in the military. But he did drop a lot of hints that he saw a lot of gnarly shit during his time in uniform. He was in the shit, Jeff, this guy.
14:41 Jeff Larson? He's getting in the mix. There's a lot going on in Central America.
14:45 Wes Larson? There was. We're buying weapons from him and stuff. Yeah. Noriega, freaking Ronald Reagan, stirring up that pot, you know?
14:55 Jeff Larson? Volcanoes.
14:56 Wes Larson? Volcanoes. Let's not forget about volcanoes. Someone, if you bring up volcanoes around Scott Castle, he will shut that conversation down. I don't know what you're talking about.
15:07 Jeff Larson? Squids.
15:08 Wes Larson? Yeah. I don't know. I've never heard of volcanoes.
15:14 Wes Larson? Don't talk to me about volcanoes. When he left the military in the mid 90s, he was still sporting the military muscles and haircut, but his life turned toward being underwater once again. He started work as a commercial diver and instructor as well as an underwater filmmaker and security consultant. And it's during this time that he heard this campfire story from the Mexican fisherman. It would be one of many such stories that he would hear from fishermen throughout his years when he's obsessed with Humboldt squid. After hearing this first one, though, he was immediately intrigued and decided he wanted to dive with Humboldt squid, which for me seems like a very interesting reaction to that particular story.
15:52 Mike Smith? Yeah. What part of the story got him like excited? Was it the fingernails embedded into the side of the boat? He's like, oh, yeah. Oh, nice.
16:00 Jeff Larson? Probably.
16:00 Wes Larson? That's something I need to do.
16:02 Jeff Larson? Tentacles on the guy's skin.
16:04 Mike Smith? Yeah, he's a little like you, maybe.
16:06 Wes Larson? What's that called in like those Japanese books with all the octopuses and stuff?
16:11 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah.
16:12 Wes Larson? There's certainly a word for it. Yeah, probably.
16:14 Mike Smith? I don't know if there's a specific word for it.
16:17 Jeff Larson? Akentai.
16:19 Mike Smith? There you go.
16:21 Mike Smith? That's gotta be it. Akentai.
16:23 Jeff Larson? I mean, it's just like hickies. You guys don't like hickies?
16:26 Wes Larson? Uh, no, I don't.
16:28 Jeff Larson? Interesting.
16:29 Wes Larson? I like, I think, I actually like think hickies are kind of rude sometimes, but that's weird. That's kind of a weird take.
16:36 Mike Smith? Like when you don't, when you don't consent?
16:38 Wes Larson? No, I just feel like you know, if you're gonna give someone a hickey, like you know that, like that line. And it's kind of like, oh, now there's like, they have to like have this mark on them that they're gonna be embarrassed about, you know?
16:50 Mike Smith? Sure.
16:50 Jeff Larson? Well, then you put it on a spot where they, they can choose to show it off if they want or to hide it.
16:56 Wes Larson? Yeah, that's why I said sometimes, because I think they can be appropriate. But if it's like on a neck or something, then I think they're kind of embarrassed.
17:02 Jeff Larson? Well, and they could just say like, yeah, I was diving and a giant squid came up to me.
17:08 Wes Larson? Yeah, Humboldt squid got me.
17:09 Mike Smith? Have you had tentacles on you, Jeff?
17:12 Jeff Larson? No.
17:13 Mike Smith? Okay, I'm just, I was just wondering.
17:15 Wes Larson? Little tiny ones.
17:16 Jeff Larson? I was.
17:17 Wes Larson? All right. Well, let's make it happen, Jeff. They just felt like little tiny sticky.
17:21 Jeff Larson? I'm sure you thought it was kind of fun.
17:23 Wes Larson? Sure. Yeah, but it didn't do anything for me.
17:26 Jeff Larson? I'm not saying sexually. I just think it feels kind of good.
17:30 Wes Larson? Feels that way.
17:31 Jeff Larson? Well, that's your own perverted.
17:32 Mike Smith? Yeah, that's, that's us hearing what we want.
17:35 Jeff Larson? That's on you guys.
17:36 Wes Larson? All right.
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20:36 Wes Larson? So Scott makes his way to La Paz in Baja, Mexico, and he had heard that the Sea of Cortez was a hotspot for finding Humboldt squid. And basically what he decided to do was dive under a boat that was fishing for squid. And you know what? He got a little bit more than he bargained for.
20:53 Jeff Larson? Oh, really?
20:54 Wes Larson? Yes. But before we get into that, we're actually going to go over their biology.
20:58 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I was wondering what size and stuff they are compared to like a giant squid.
21:03 Wes Larson? That's why I wanted to do it early because I feel like this is an animal that a lot of people don't really have a mental image of, aside from just like a squid. So I want to talk a little bit about what they're actually capable of. All right, so basically before we get into the sizes and whatnot, I want to lay out a couple of terms that we're going to say a few times, just so you understand what a squid's body looks like. The majority of the squid's body is composed of its mantle. So the mantle is kind of that torpedo shaped part of the squid. Um, it's that oblong part of its body that has the fins on the end of it. Below the mantle, you'll find the siphon, the eyes and the mouth of the squid. For all intents and purposes, this would be the squid's head, because it's where its mouth and its eyes are and stuff.
21:46 Wes Larson? Below the head are eight arms that are covered in suckers. And then two longer tentacles that are primarily used for feeding and they only have suckers on the end of them. We'll get more in, yeah.
21:57 Jeff Larson? So they have ten tentacles?
21:59 Wes Larson? They have ten appendages. Technically, they only have two tentacles and eight arms. But we're going to talk about that in a second. I just want you guys to have a mental image of all these, these different things. All right. So these Humboldt squid.
22:13 Jeff Larson? You think I could have just said tentacles there?
22:16 Wes Larson? Ooh.
22:17 Jeff Larson? And save time?
22:18 Wes Larson? Yeah, a little more efficiently.
22:21 Jeff Larson? Oh, you'd need an explanation if I did that.
22:24 Wes Larson? Uh, I probably would have needed a, a short explanation. All right. So these guys are often known as jumbo squid and as far as squid are concerned, they're very big. Their mantle can grow to about 1.5 meters or five feet. And at that size, they would weigh about 50 kilograms or 110 pounds. But according to Scott, who at this point is probably the person that has seen the most Humboldt squid underwater. They can get quite a bit bigger. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. But let's talk a little bit more about their bodies because this is one of those animals that the more I learned about it. The more I was just really amazed that they even exist on the same planet as us because they look like aliens, Jeff.
23:05 Jeff Larson? Hmm. They probably think that about you.
23:07 Wes Larson? Okay. They have eight arms, eight arms and two tentacles. But again, like Jeff said earlier, if you were to call all 10 of these appendages tentacles. I wouldn't correct you. I think it'd be kind of silly if someone corrected you because colloquially we see tentacles as like long snake-like appendages with suckers on them.
23:28 Jeff Larson? Yeah, if it has suckers on them, it's a tentacle.
23:31 Wes Larson? It's a tentacle. Sure. Each of the arms.
23:33 Jeff Larson? Common man.
23:35 Wes Larson? Yeah, each of the arms has between 100 and 200 suckers on it. Each of these arms and each of those suckers has a ring of chitinous teeth on it. So chitin is kind of like, it's similar to keratin or like the stuff that beetle exoskeletons are made out of. And that, that ring of teeth has up to 36 teeth per sucker. So that means a single squid can have up to 72,000 teeth in its suckers.
24:03 Jeff Larson? That's amazing.
24:05 Wes Larson? That's too many. Or their most.
24:07 Mike Smith? Braces would be so expensive.
24:09 Wes Larson? The dental bill. Yeah. They're mostly used for gripping, but they can also cause lacerations and cuts. And when you see photos of like sperm whales, they eat a lot of giant squid and colossal squid. You'll see just tons of cuts on their noses from the tentacles of these squid wrapping around their noses.
24:29 Mike Smith? Does that make it sound better or worse for you, Jeff? You want a little nibble?
24:34 Jeff Larson? I don't like, no, I don't like that too much.
24:36 Wes Larson? You don't want to get a little cut?
24:38 Jeff Larson? I don't know. I'll think about it.
24:39 Wes Larson? Okay. The two tentacles are longer and they only have suckers on the end. But the teeth on these tentacles are often more pronounced like hooks. And they use these tentacles to lash out and capture prey, bring them in toward the arms and then the mouth. Uh, the tentacles are actually quite elastic and they can extend further than their resting length. Um, they're lightning fast with their tentacles. Yeah.
25:03 Mike Smith? Are they able to autonomously control the teeth or are they just kind of stationary? They're just there.
25:09 Wes Larson? I think they, I think they are just there, but I'm not sure. Yeah.
25:13 Jeff Larson? They're like the sticky hands you get from a quarter machine.
25:16 Mike Smith? The quarter machines, right?
25:17 Wes Larson? I think the teeth kind of naturally, when the sucker flexes, the teeth kind of naturally grab.
25:23 Mike Smith? Oh, yeah, sure.
25:25 Wes Larson? And again, those teeth are mostly just for gripping. They're not really like dismantling anything.
25:29 Jeff Larson? Pull something in.
25:30 Wes Larson? Yeah.
25:31 Mike Smith? Gotcha.
25:32 Wes Larson? The beak is their main weapon. It's large, hard, large and hard.
25:36 Mike Smith? Large, yeah.
25:37 Wes Larson? And razor sharp.
25:38 Mike Smith? Three legs.
25:39 Jeff Larson? I'm, it's you guys who the ones on one today.
25:43 Mike Smith? That's true. I kinda usurped that throne from you.
25:48 Wes Larson? There's anecdotal evidence that the Humboldt squid has a really incredibly powerful bite force. That could be even stronger than 1,000 PSI. But that, that evidence from what I've read is like very anecdotal. So I would take that with a grain of salt.
26:03 Mike Smith? Those beaks are what are the most creepy about squid to me. Much more so than the tentacles.
26:09 Wes Larson? It looks like, it looks like the beak of a macaw, like it's a big black beak. Like in the middle of all their like fleshy.
26:17 Mike Smith? Yeah.
26:18 Jeff Larson? They should do like that hydraulic press, uh, social media videos they do, you know, where they crush everything?
26:26 Wes Larson? Yeah.
26:26 Jeff Larson? They should do that with their beaks.
26:28 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah. Just put stuff in there and see if they can crush him. Sure.
26:31 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
26:32 Wes Larson? Uh, so a big squid would be able to bite an orange sized chunk of flesh out of its prey. And Scott Castle says he has seen them bite through the skull of a tuna like it was nothing.
26:44 Mike Smith? Whoa.
26:45 Wes Larson? They propel themselves through the water with a siphon, which is essentially just a jet that blasts them in the opposite direction that it's facing. That siphon, yeah, the siphon is flexible, so it's not like they can only move backward. They can kind of move the siphon around and move in different directions.
27:01 Jeff Larson? Ah.
27:02 Wes Larson? And then they have these two small fins on their mantle and they use those fins to steer and move around in the water. And it doesn't seem like a particularly great way to move around like jetting, but they're very fast. And it allows them to be really explosive and agile. They're actually like really effective at their movement through the water.
27:21 Mike Smith? Like one of the coolest. The Mario water levels, the bloopers, they like somehow always know where you're gonna be. They'll just bloop right at you. They're agile, get pretty realistic, it turns out. Mario.
27:32 Wes Larson? Yeah. One of the coolest things about Humboldt squid is the way they change color and the reasons behind it. When you watch videos of them, you can see them rapidly changing their whole body color from red to white. It's pretty spectacular. We'll, we'll clip in a video of that. Uh, they do this through specialized cells called chromatophores. Those cells are found right below the surface of the skin and picture those cells as kind of like an elastic balloon with a little bit of inky pigment in the middle. And Humboldt squid, when these cells expand, that red pigment is spread out along the cell and it becomes brighter. And when they contract, that cell is essentially transparent and you can see their white muscle tissue below.
28:15 Wes Larson? So that's why they always kind of look like they're flashing between red and white. Because they're expressing those chromatophores, they're expanding them and and then retracting them. And that's why they look red and white. It's really, really cool. It's amazing to see the videos of it. It looks like someone's like. Flashing one with the strobe, but it's cool when you think, no, that's its actual color that's doing that.
28:36 Mike Smith? Yeah, awesome.
28:37 Wes Larson? They flash the colors at different speeds and it's thought that it's used for both communication and camouflage. But we don't totally understand the reasons behind their flashing yet. They're very large pronounced eyes. Their eyes are similar to ours in the basic construction, but they're much better at light collection. And they have pretty much the same resolution that ours, our eyes have, or maybe even better resolution than us. Plus, they can regrow their eyes.
29:04 Mike Smith? Whoa.
29:04 Wes Larson? Which I think is crazy because for us, it's like when you lose your eye, it's you don't get that back.
29:10 Mike Smith? It's like such a sophisticated piece of like biological hardware. It seems to be really hard to get that built back just the right way. That's really cool.
29:19 Wes Larson? Yeah. So basically their eyes seem to be better than ours in just about every way. Aside from maybe like aesthetics.
29:27 Mike Smith? I've always wondered if Elijah Wood or Christina Ricci, what they're saying, if they're seeing the world a different way with their big old eyeballs. You know, you think they can see like a different color than we can. Cash Patel, the FBI director. Yeah, that guy's gotta be seeing so many colors.
29:46 Wes Larson? Guys, guess how many eggs these creepy little fuckers lay throughout their lives?
29:51 Mike Smith? Seven hundred trillion.
29:52 Wes Larson? That's a little high.
29:56 Mike Smith? I'm just sick of low balling these guesses. So I, yeah. I guess seven thousand.
30:03 Wes Larson? Okay, it's a little low. A female squid will mate multiple times during her short life. They only live about a year. And each time she'll lay a big mass of eggs after mating. Each of these masses can have more than a million eggs. And it's thought that a single female Humboldt squid can lay over 20 million eggs during her life. Wow. Which is more than any other cephalopod. So cephalopods are like octopi, squid. Mike was close.
30:31 Mike Smith? I was, yeah.
30:32 Wes Larson? Yeah.
30:34 Mike Smith? How, what did I, I was a little.
30:36 Wes Larson? You said like 70, 100 trillion. Trillion.
30:38 Mike Smith? Price is right. I probably lost. Yeah.
30:42 Wes Larson? They reproduce through internal fertilization.
30:44 Mike Smith? You were like infinitely, infinitely closer than I was almost.
30:48 Wes Larson? Yours felt closer though.
30:50 Mike Smith? I know. Mine sounded maybe a little closer, but.
30:54 Wes Larson? Cause that alien in it. They reproduce through internal fertilization. So they have, they, they have sex, these squids.
31:01 Mike Smith? Good for them.
31:02 Wes Larson? But it hasn't really been documented. So they think they're doing it in really deep water. They have a developed nervous system. They're thought to be intelligent critters, especially for cephalopods. And people like Scott that have spent a lot of time around them seem to think that they're much more intelligent than we realize. They can be somewhat social and often travel in shoals in numbers over 1,000. So they can be in really big groups. But those social groups have a dark side too. Yeah. Bullying. They do have a dark side. Cannibalism is very, very bullying, cyber bullying. Cannibalism is very common in Humboldt squid, and there are tons of observations of them attacking each other as they feed on other prey.
31:43 Wes Larson? So the, what kind of happens is when one squid goes to attack something, the rest of them rush in to maybe try and get at that food. They often end up just biting and attacking the other squid. In one study in Chile, they determined that other Humboldt squid was the main food source of the local Humboldt squid population. So there's like some populations where this is their main thing that they eat are other Humboldt squid. On purpose? Yeah, on purpose. Aside from each other, they eat fish, crustaceans and other cephalopods. They catch their prey with their lightning fast tentacles, bring it into their arms and beak. Their mantle is composed of their organs, a thin internal shell and an ink sac.
32:25 Wes Larson? We forgot to talk about these. These little bastards love shooting ink all over the place.
32:30 Mike Smith? An internal shell?
32:32 Wes Larson? Yeah, there's like a thin internal, it's like a bone in their mantle. That's the only really hard thing they have besides their beaks and those little teeth.
32:40 Mike Smith? Okay.
32:41 Wes Larson? Yeah, I don't really know too much about it.
32:43 Jeff Larson? Mainly for like sharks?
32:45 Wes Larson? Yeah, the ink is for a lot of different things, but if you're fishing for squid, I wouldn't wear that tux you just rented for that big gala, because there's a good chance a squid is gonna jizz some ink all over it.
32:57 Mike Smith? Yeah.
32:58 Wes Larson? Yeah, so don't, don't wear your tuxes if you're squid fishing.
33:04 Mike Smith? Good tip.
33:04 Wes Larson? Okay?
33:05 Mike Smith? I won't.
33:05 Jeff Larson? Alright.
33:06 Wes Larson? Alright. The ink comes out of your, their siphon. It's pretty crazy and it's something they do a lot. Like I think when you hear about these kind of defense systems, like with horn lizards, for example, we've all heard that they can shoot blood out of their eye. It's so rare that they ever do that because it's like so energetically costly and they just have to be like pushed to such a high level. Squid are inking all the time. Like when you watch videos of them being caught, they are just shooting ink everywhere. Uh, it's something they do quite a bit and it's used to deter predators and it can be really effective.
33:40 Mike Smith? Hmm.
33:40 Jeff Larson? That's cool. They got good defense and offense.
33:43 Wes Larson? They do.
33:44 Mike Smith? Yeah, that's true. Is that ink a byproduct of something in their diet? Or is it some other process that's making it?
33:51 Wes Larson? It's mucus and melanin are the main two things in it. I don't know how they, how they make it.
33:57 Jeff Larson? Mike, who has the best defense and offense?
34:01 Mike Smith? What? Like in basketball?
34:03 Jeff Larson? I don't know. Doesn't have to be. Could be Travis Hunter.
34:07 Mike Smith? Yanis? Travis Hunter, that's a good call. It's gotta be Travis. Two-way player, yeah. Or Otani, pitcher and batter extraordinaire.
34:16 Jeff Larson? They're the Tonys of the ocean.
34:19 Mike Smith? Right. And you know, Otani, he's, he's, he likes those tentacles too. You have to assume, right? He's Japanese.
34:29 Jeff Larson? Alright.
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38:15 Wes Larson? They have a lot of interesting things about these humble squid. We could probably talk about their biology for hours, but we're going to get back to our story. So Scott jumps in the water in his wet suit and dive equipment. And because this boat has been fishing for squid, there's already a bunch of squid in the water around the boat. And like we talked about, when one squid finds food or is in distress, a lot of the other squid in the shoal are going to follow it and also try to get that food or to cannibalize the squid that's injured. So basically, because this boat was already catching squid, there were a bunch of squid in the water. And when he entered, he was immediately transfixed by them. We talked about those chromatophores, but really, it's worth watching a video because it seems like
38:57 Wes Larson? something that animals just shouldn't be able to do. And Scott was immediately witnessing it firsthand. And it was like, it was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. He was so overwhelmed by what he was seeing, that he didn't really notice that all of these huge three to five foot squid were swarming all around him. And when he pulled his camera up and started recording, the first squid rushed in, immediately attacked his camera, and wrapped those toothy tentacles around the bulky camera, and pulled it toward its razor sharp beak.
39:27 Jeff Larson? Whoa.
39:28 Wes Larson? But this isn't a show about animals attacking cameras. So you better believe the story doesn't end there. The squid that attacked the camera pushed backward and smashed the camera against Scott's face. That immediately shocked him out of his daze. And as he looked around, he realizes that he's completely surrounded by squid.
39:47 Jeff Larson? Wow.
39:47 Mike Smith? It's a good move when celebrities, a paparazzi guy has the camera in their face, and they just shove it right back into their eyeball. I think that should be allowed. I think there should be no, like, not even in the people's public court of opinion, should we ever feel bad for paparazzi?
40:04 Jeff Larson? Paparazzi shouldn't be allowed.
40:05 Mike Smith? That's what I think, too.
40:07 Wes Larson? Yeah. I think everyone should have like, a four inch buffer zone, that if that in, if that four inches gets invaded, you're allowed to do whatever.
40:16 Jeff Larson? I don't think that covers it, though.
40:18 Wes Larson? Yeah.
40:19 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Because the paparazzi will just yell at the celebrities still.
40:24 Mike Smith? Yeah.
40:25 Wes Larson? Another squid rushes in and wraps his head and right arm up in its tentacles, ripping his arm backward and dislocating his shoulder. A third wraps its tentacles around his body and bites into his chest with its beak. Easily tearing through his neoprene wetsuit.
40:41 Jeff Larson? Oh, wow. So like, once, once one squid goes for him, they're all just like game on.
40:46 Wes Larson? Yeah. And basically what they're doing is they are just trying to figure out if he's food. Like they're just rushing in and kind of exploring to figure out if he's food or not.
40:56 Jeff Larson? They weren't mad that he was invading their privacy with his camera.
41:00 Wes Larson? I don't think so. Yeah. Uh huh. At this point, he has three large squid wrapped around him. His shoulder is dislocated. He's bleeding from a bite and he can feel those sucker teeth ripping at his wetsuit. And to make matters worse, the squid were pulling him deeper and deeper without him really realizing it. But something was about to make him figure out that fact. He went from forty to seventy feet so quickly and without equalizing that his right eardrum exploded in his ear. I guess there used to be footage somewhere of this whole thing. I couldn't find anywhere. But you can hear him scream at the moment that his eardrum explodes.
41:38 Jeff Larson? Underwater scream.
41:40 Wes Larson? Yeah. Underwater, no one can hear you scream, except for the squids.
41:43 Jeff Larson? That's not true.
41:44 Wes Larson? That's the thing. And everyone watching the video. All right.
41:48 Wes Larson? So basically he found himself in the middle of what felt like an underwater dive bar brawl. And he was getting the shit kicked out of him by some of the rowdy locals.
41:57 Jeff Larson? He had thirty arms on him.
41:59 Wes Larson? Yeah. He managed to pry the tentacles off his body, separate himself from the squids. And when he pulled them off, they just floated there and flashed their colors and stared at him. And he realized that the squid were studying him and he could see the incredible intelligence behind their eyes. Like these squid were taking in all the information and kind of strategizing their next move. He's shaken from this attack and he doesn't really give them the chance to rush in again. He surfaces, climbs back onto the boat. He's injured and in a lot of pain. But the main thought running through his head was how beautiful and intense the experience had been. And he was totally hooked on humbled squid.
42:38 Jeff Larson? So for all intents and
42:40 Mike Smith? A curious reaction to the events of the day.
42:43 Jeff Larson? I mean, it gives a lot of, it gives a lot of credit to what I've been saying all episode.
42:49 Wes Larson? Yeah, that once you get tentacles on you, you need them again.
42:53 Jeff Larson? It's just a cool feeling.
42:54 Wes Larson? Uh, this dude's just a different breed. Like he really likes adrenaline, you can tell. And now for all intents and purposes, he becomes the expert on filming Humboldt squid underwater. He's been a part of a number of different documentaries that feature red devils. During that time, he upgraded his armor. So he uses like molded guards that are made out of Kevlar. He kind of looks like a stormtrooper. Um, sometimes he dives with full chain mail underneath that Kevlar. So and during these years of filming, he's had a lot of other crazy experiences with squid.
43:26 Jeff Larson? Does he have the ink bags?
43:28 Wes Larson? Just to like shoot and squirt away. Yeah, he has a little siphon too. Uh, no, he doesn't. That'd be a good idea, though. You should dive with him. Another one of his stories I wanted to tell was from the 2000s when he decided to descend to 250 feet below the surface to try and film Humboldt squid as they fed and hunted in the darkness. So he straps on his armor, he rolls into the water with the weight, and he slowly descends deeper and deeper until it's almost too dark to see. As he sank, he's transfixed by the sight of squids swimming in and out of a cloud of plankton. And then as it gets darker and darker, he has to turn on a halogen light for illumination. And he looks up and he sees all these bioluminescent jellyfish. And he feels like he's like in space from all these jellyfish that look like stars above him.
44:13 Wes Larson? And then something happens in the darkness that really terrifies him. As he's sitting there watching these jellyfish, he sees a huge trail of bubbles in his light, like in the distance, rising up from the deep. And it's moving toward him. It moves closer and closer until it passes through him and then continues moving beyond him. So basically like, he's 250 feet down in the pitch dark and he knows there's a huge animal somewhere below him that's making this bubble trail. And he can't see it. He has no idea what it is.
44:46 Mike Smith? Oh, man.
44:47 Wes Larson? That would scare me. Like, there's not a ton that scares me. But if I'm in like dark water and I see a massive bubble trail like move toward me and go through me, that would freak me out. So I don't blame him for being a little terrified.
45:01 Mike Smith? Bubbles and paranormal activity. That's what gets worse.
45:05 Wes Larson? Yeah. They better not make paranormal paranormal activity bubbles.
45:11 Jeff Larson? Dude, that would be so bad for you.
45:13 Wes Larson? I will not watch it. All right. So he's already on edge. He's sitting there waiting for squid. When suddenly he looks up to see about thirty squid approaching him. And as he turns in the water to watch them, they all of a sudden shoot away. So he knows something scared them off. His mind immediately turns to whatever deep sea monster made these bubbles. And he's bracing himself for an attack from some unseen predator. When he realizes that as he was turning in the water, his peripheral vision picked up a big dark shape behind him that he hadn't really registered at the time. Slowly, he turns around and he imagines it being maybe a false killer whale or some other undersea predator. And he's shocked to see the biggest Humboldt squid he's ever seen.
45:58 Wes Larson? Simply floating there and watching him. To him, this was the first true Diablo Rojo that he'd seen underwater. And it was the kind of squid the fishermen would tell stories about. He guesses it's like a seven to eight foot squid. It's floating in the water about ten feet away. And as they both study each other, Scott's locked in a trance when suddenly it shoots forward and slams into him, knocking the air out of him. The arms wrap around his body in his camera. And he can feel and hear the beak as it bites at his chest plate. And he hears the scraping sound of the thousands of these little teeth as they scrape over his makeshift armor.
46:37 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah.
46:38 Wes Larson? The squid backs off. I know, just getting a huge hug from like an eight foot squid at two hundred and fifty feet of water. Yeah, the squid backs off again. And now behind the big squid, Scott can see dozens of four to five foot squid hanging out at the edge of his light. And he wonders if maybe he's dealing with like a dominant alpha squid or something. He has no idea. This big squid is holding all the little ones at bay.
47:04 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
47:05 Wes Larson? I know. I know very little about squids, so I'm not going to say like, oh, they don't have alphas or whatever. I have no idea. For all I know, this is a dominant squid.
47:12 Jeff Larson? It would make sense at least that the bigger one's really good at. Getting food and the other ones can like join in when it's feasting or something.
47:21 Mike Smith? Yeah, scavenging or something.
47:23 Wes Larson? So this squid is absolutely massive. It's mantle, he says, is more than three feet thick. It's too big for him to get his arms around. He guesses it probably weighs about 250 pounds. It's covered in injuries and scars, so Scott names it Scar, and they continue staring at each other. And after hundreds of experiences with Humboldt squid, this is the first time one has stuck around after trying to feed on him, because that first like contact was it, trying to figure out if he's food. Usually after they do that, they kind of just take off. So I want to read from his own account what happens next. This is from an article he wrote on a website called Deeper Blue, and the article's titled Dancing With Demons. So this is verbatim from Scott.
48:06 Wes Larson? "He swims slowly around me in a circle, keeping close enough to touch during the entire circumference. Although his closeness was a bit unnerving, I find him fascinating. For the first time, a giant Humboldt squid paused to explore me instead of trying to feed on me, then leave. I reach my hand out to him and I could see his huge eye focus on it. He stops and slowly turns toward my hand and eases closer to it. He begins color flashing, which was the most intense and dramatic I've ever seen. His color patterns move from tail to arm tips, with waves of red and white resembling ripples from a pebble dropped in the water. He reaches out his right outer arm to touch my hand. Inches away, we both pause, staring at each other. What will the other do? We both seem to be testing the other.
48:52 Wes Larson? My hand is outstretched to a true Diablo Rojo. My heart is pounding. Had this giant ever seen a man before? What does he want to know? Why isn't he attacking me repeatedly like the others? For 12 incredible minutes, we circle, reach out, withdraw, touch, and test each other. His color flashes are never the same twice, and he shows no fear of me. By this time, I am being surrounded by up to 100 very large Humboldt squid, but they all stay away. Scar seems interested in my camera housing, so I show it to him. He comes up and spreads his arms completely over it and bites the lens. Scar is so huge, his arms engulf the entire camera housing and reach beyond it to lay upon my hands, forearms, and head."
49:36 Wes Larson? Scar tenses his whole body instantly as he detects the difference between the housing and me. A second later, he withdraws and stops cold. His eyes stare at my forearm and camera housing as if he realizes the difference for the first time. He flashes the unique pattern I have come to know. He flushes deep red, then blanched bright white and stays that way for several seconds. The blanched white pattern has preceded many a retreat after attacks on me. What does this revelation mean to Scar? Whatever the reason for his blanched white reaction, his behavior changed. Begins a more purposeful series of circling and touching, touching my arms, CCR cover, legs, fins, and finally my face. It occurs
50:18 Wes Larson? to me this might well be the first encounter of its kind for both species. I can only describe it as a dance, dance of peace, curiosity, and discovery. Scar and I have just completed the dance of such beauty that my words fall short of explaining it. Two intelligent beings from entirely different worlds, separated by extremes of morphology, behavior, space, and time. So basically, this continues and then Scar looks at him one last time and jets off. It's an insane experience. For me, it must be just about the closest thing a person can feel to making contact with an alien, because these look exactly like space aliens. Right. And I don't know, but no, like truly, I feel like this has to be an otherworldly.
51:03 Jeff Larson? It does sound very alien.
51:05 Wes Larson? Yeah.
51:05 Jeff Larson? It's amazing. Especially if you take him at his word. I do kinda question it a little bit as far as like he's saying that it just wanted to learn.
51:16 Wes Larson? Yeah.
51:16 Jeff Larson? What he is. And to me, it's like, yeah, it did try to like bite you five different times and it's using its tentacles and he has like this makeshift armor. So to me, part of why it's studying him is just to see if there's any way it can eat him.
51:31 Wes Larson? Yeah, he's definitely anthropomorphizing. He's definitely like. Saying that he thinks he understands its thought process, you know, but it's still
51:41 Jeff Larson? There's probably some curiosity and for sure. And like, knowledge, there's, it's probably somewhere in the middle.
51:47 Wes Larson? Yeah. So he's buzzing from this interaction, but what he doesn't realize is now this big alpha squid is gone and nothing is stopping the hundred or so other squid from checking to see if he is food or not.
51:59 Jeff Larson? Oh, no.
52:00 Wes Larson? Almost instantly, he has the air knocked out of him again as he's slammed in the side by a huge squid and feels its tentacles wrap around him. Another wraps up his arm and he can feel the beak biting through his armor and into his wrist as he tries hard as he can to pry these squid off of him. And then another grabs his fins and starts tugging him down deeper. Whenever Scott would move to pry off one of the squid, it would open up another spot for another one to latch on to him. And in a matter of seconds, he's in the middle of a writhing mass of squid and the sound of them biting and scraping at his armor, camera and dive equipment is deafening. It's the only thing you can hear.
52:38 Jeff Larson? That's insane.
52:39 Wes Larson? He tries to shake them off, but as he does it, his halogen light is like flashing all over the place and creating this strobe effect, which just makes the whole thing even more nightmarish. And dozens of attacks are launched and he realizes he needs to get out of there and he starts quickly ascending. And luckily, when he gets back to this plankton cloud, the squid stopped their attack.
53:01 Jeff Larson? It's like when Agent Smith just dog piles on Neo.
53:05 Wes Larson? Yeah. Or all those like squid, those squid like monsters from the Matrix that attacked them. The machines. Yeah.
53:13 Jeff Larson? Sentinels.
53:14 Wes Larson? Yeah. As he nears the boat, he realizes that blood is leaking from his wetsuit and the bite on his wrist had actually gone all the way through his chain mail and his armor. And the beak had split the tissue on his wrist from the immense pressure of the bite.
53:28 Jeff Larson? Wow.
53:28 Wes Larson? But he considered a worthwhile price for probably the most memorable undersea interaction of his entire life.
53:35 Jeff Larson? One of the most probably in history of any.
53:38 Wes Larson? Yeah, yeah.
53:39 Mike Smith? Yeah. There was footage of that, you said, at least partially.
53:42 Wes Larson? He has some footage of Scar. Yeah, but I don't know if I saw this exact footage or not. I didn't, I didn't dig too much. I probably should have. He's logged over 300 dives with Humboldt squid. And in all of the interviews I've read with him, he states pretty emphatically that he is confident Humboldt squid definitely have the ability to kill a human. And that he's interviewed dozens of fishermen, he's heard their campfire stories. And he 100% believes them. Some of them say they firsthand saw people got like killed by Humboldt squid or pulled underwater and died. A lot of squid experts are quick to say that from their experience,
54:23 Wes Larson? the squid are merely investigating potential food and wouldn't actually kill a person. But what Scott says to that is that these experts have never dove with the really big Diablo Rojos. And then if you went to Africa and only saw cubs, you probably wouldn't think that lions could kill people either. So that's kind of what he's saying about the squid that they're interacting with are the small ones. So shots fired squidologists.
54:48 Mike Smith? Yeah. Squid experts. Yeah.
54:50 Wes Larson? All right.
54:50 Mike Smith? Grow a pair and go swim with the big ones.
54:53 Jeff Larson? I mean, the bigger lion cubs I would think would.
54:57 Wes Larson? Could probably kill a person. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
55:02 Mike Smith? Well, take that, Scott.
55:04 Wes Larson? Yeah.
55:04 Mike Smith? Yeah.
55:05 Wes Larson? Shots fired at Scott now.
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59:01 Wes Larson? Okay. So that's the story and the biology, but because it's spooky season and because squid are often featured in some of, I think mankind's oldest nightmares. I wanted Mike to do a quick Mike Smithology moment and talk about the most famous squid cryptid, which is the kraken.
59:21 Mike Smith? Glad you asked me to do this, Wes, because I found some really cool stuff out about them, but I'm just going to stick to the basics and prompt anyone who wants to learn more, just type kraken into an internet search engine. Plenty of material out there to read and learn from, you know?
59:37 Jeff Larson? Yeah. So. It'll probably come up just like right when you have crack.
59:42 Mike Smith? Right.
59:42 Jeff Larson? It'll probably start, you can just go from there.
59:46 Mike Smith? So that's an interesting proposition because that's where, exactly where I'm going to start with this. So there's an old Norse word, krake, K-R-A-K-E, meaning a twisted or unhealthy animal, which likely served as the inspiration for the name of the kraken. So Jeff, you're, I hesitate to give you credit for being right, but.
1:00:06 Mike Smith? On a technical level, you were right. So I have to, I have to. So the legendary sea monsters origins lay off the coasts of Norway and Greenland, where the inhabitants would tell tales of ships and sailors who mysteriously disappeared while at sea. In Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore, the kraken was depicted most often as a giant octopus or squid with tentacles that were so big, strong and long that they could wrap around an entire ship and drag it under the water. One of the earliest written references to the kraken appears in the 13th century Icelandic Orkar Odur saga, where the kraken is described as being so large that it could be mistaken for an entire island. And sailors who got too close to what looked like landfall would be stunned to see it, an island rise from the water and reveal itself as a living creature and then
1:00:51 Mike Smith? pull the ship down into the depths. This is the one I found super interesting just because of, I'm a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the first three even. The first one obviously is the best, but I have a lot of time for two and three. So, a common myth from Scandinavian folklore paints the kraken-
1:01:08 Jeff Larson? You used to ride hard for four too.
1:01:10 Mike Smith? Did I? I don't hate it-
1:01:12 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I used to be like, I really like number four. That's the Penelope Cruz one?
1:01:16 Mike Smith? I don't remember ever being that person. I remember being that for The Matrix 4. Is that what you're thinking?
1:01:22 Jeff Larson? I know that, I know that you used to ride for Pirates 4.
1:01:26 Mike Smith? Okay, I'm just gonna let you paint me as a person who really likes that mediocre movie, but sure. So, a common myth from Scandinavian folklore paints the kraken more as a cunning predator, controlling fish up towards the surface, which in turn would tempt sailors to come closer towards what looked like a fruitful fishing spot. But when their ship was right where the kraken wanted it, it would create a huge whirlpool right underneath them, which would drag the boats under the sea before anyone had a chance to escape. Just like in Dead Man's Chest, the third Pirates movie, like that big climactic whirlpool. That is actually, that has its origins in actual folklore and mythology. So.
1:02:04 Mike Smith? This is something, well, so unlike Odin and Thor, the kraken was not revered as a god to these Norse folk, but instead served as a reminder of the power and the danger of the sea and the relationship between humans and nature. So that's the genesis of the myth of the kraken.
1:02:21 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:02:21 Mike Smith? It's really cool. It's really cool stuff.
1:02:24 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I like.
1:02:25 Mike Smith? And you can see how a story like that would evolve and turn into what it has, but.
1:02:29 Jeff Larson? Yeah, it sucked to like be at sea forever and see an island and then you go up to it and it's just a kraken.
1:02:36 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:02:38 Mike Smith? Just a huge kraken. Yeah, there is a, so one of a book that was written in the 13th century. Apparently the narrator in this book, he posits that the kraken is infertile because otherwise we'd see a bunch of them, right?
1:02:51 Jeff Larson? More krakens.
1:02:53 Mike Smith? Yeah, more, many more kraken is.
1:02:57 Jeff Larson? I think it's just a Humboldt squid that got really big.
1:03:01 Wes Larson? It, so I mean, there are giant squid and colossal squid, which are much bigger than Humboldt squid. And we'll talk about them at some point. Not that they attack people, but at some point we'll do another Humboldt squid.
1:03:12 Jeff Larson? Are they one of those animals that just keep growing if they don't die?
1:03:16 Wes Larson? I don't know. We know very little about them, like only recently have we gotten any footage of living.
1:03:22 Jeff Larson? So it is possible that one was as big as an island and they thought it was an island and then it ate their whole boat.
1:03:30 Wes Larson? Sure.
1:03:30 Mike Smith? Yeah, maybe one sailor is just a really dumb one and there's like a kind of a thing in the water. And he thinks it looks like an island for some reason.
1:03:39 Jeff Larson? Yeah, or their ship was like tiny.
1:03:41 Mike Smith? Right. Yeah, maybe, maybe that, maybe the sailor was tiny, like a baby sailor.
1:03:47 Jeff Larson? Ship handed it. It's just a ship of babies.
1:03:51 Mike Smith? Yeah, right.
1:03:54 Wes Larson? Oh, baby Vikings. That's a show that someone should make. All right, let's get into our categories. Uh, the first one is your favorite squid from pop culture.
1:04:04 Mike Smith? It's gotta be Squidward, right? For me at least, he's a.
1:04:08 Jeff Larson? I figured you might take it, so I chose someone different. Maybe, maybe it's the same. But I chose handsome Squidward.
1:04:18 Mike Smith? Handsome Squidward.
1:04:19 Wes Larson? Handsome Squidward.
1:04:21 Mike Smith? It's important.
1:04:21 Jeff Larson? Or that painting of Squidward's really good too. So I could do that.
1:04:25 Mike Smith? Bull, what is that? What do they call it? Bold and something? That's so funny.
1:04:32 Jeff Larson? You could do the Mario Squids. That is pretty good.
1:04:35 Wes Larson? Oh, that's a good pick. Yeah.
1:04:36 Mike Smith? Bloopers.
1:04:37 Wes Larson? I never really watched SpongeBob, so I didn't pick Squidward. I was either, I was either gonna pick the Kraken in Pirates of the Caribbean. Or like a kind of weird, I thought of Old Boy, but that was an octopus, not a squid that he eats.
1:04:52 Mike Smith? True.
1:04:53 Jeff Larson? The Boys, too.
1:04:54 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah. One that I thought of, though, that's kind of a weird one is, did you guys ever see the Watchmen TV series? The one that was on HBO?
1:05:01 Mike Smith? No.
1:05:02 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:05:02 Wes Larson? I really liked it and there's like squid rain that happens in that world.
1:05:07 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:05:07 Wes Larson? Sometimes it would just rain squid on them and in the Watchmen universe, there's like a huge squid that attacked New York in the eighties. And killed like three million people. So I just kind of like that.
1:05:18 Mike Smith? That's cool.
1:05:18 Wes Larson? This universe that's kind of grounded in reality, there's also just like squid that rain out of the, the sky. So, I don't know.
1:05:26 Mike Smith? Do you think one of those squid hit Building Seven? People like, why aren't people talking about that?
1:05:30 Wes Larson? Probably. Makes more sense than the story they're telling right now. Ah, favorite use of tentacles in a movie?
1:05:39 Jeff Larson? I went with Pirates of the Caribbean number two. Was it Deadman's Chest?
1:05:45 Wes Larson? Yeah, Davy Jones.
1:05:46 Jeff Larson? Where he has his tentacles play the piano.
1:05:49 Wes Larson? That's a great.
1:05:50 Jeff Larson? I like that.
1:05:51 Wes Larson? That's, that's a good pick.
1:05:53 Mike Smith? In the first Independence Day movie, The Weird Scientist at Area 51, he gets the tentacle coiled around his neck. And then the alien is like talking through.
1:06:02 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah.
1:06:03 Mike Smith? The scientist through the window to Bill Pullman, the president.
1:06:05 Wes Larson? That's a good one.
1:06:06 Mike Smith? It was so, I love that movie so much.
1:06:09 Wes Larson? Yeah. So mine, I would say, I picked The Mist. Do you guys remember the movie The Mist?
1:06:14 Mike Smith? Sure.
1:06:14 Wes Larson? It's probably because I'm in horror movie mode right now, but there's the part where like, I just think it's a fun part of the movie because no one really knows what's going on yet. And then the tentacle comes under the garage and kills that one kid who's being all cocky. And you see it like touch him and lift off a bunch of flesh and stuff from the hooks and the tentacle.
1:06:35 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:06:36 Wes Larson? And I, I really like that part of the movie because it's still when like some of the people in the store don't believe them, but the other people had seen this tentacle do this. So it's kind of an interesting part of it. Anyway, it's a great movie.
1:06:50 Mike Smith? You're right. So the second Pirates is Dead Man's Chest. I think the third one is At World's End. I got that confused earlier. So correction.
1:06:57 Jeff Larson? And the one you like is, what's it called again?
1:07:00 Mike Smith? Uh huh.
1:07:01 Jeff Larson? The fourth one?
1:07:01 Mike Smith? Fourth. Four. It's called four. What is that one called? I don't know. I think they even made a fifth one. I have not seen.
1:07:08 Wes Larson? The one with Penelope Cruz is what I call it. Yeah, they did. I've seen them all. The fifth one was really bad with Javier Bardine.
1:07:15 Mike Smith? All right. Ian McShane was Blackbeard in four though. I know that.
1:07:18 Wes Larson? Oh yeah, you're right. You're right. Where does, uh, where does calamari rank on your appetizers? Like if you're ordering appetizers, where is it on your list?
1:07:27 Mike Smith? Jeff and I actually just got an order not too long ago and that was the first time probably, I can't even remember. I rarely ever get it. I do like it, but it's just, I don't like it enough to, yeah, it's pretty low.
1:07:38 Jeff Larson? I liked it when me and Mike got it, but it is honestly just like fried. So it's mainly just the fry that tasted good. Like it wasn't so much that is calamari.
1:07:50 Wes Larson? Yeah. Yeah. It's really low on mine. I don't like it at all.
1:07:53 Mike Smith? You don't eat seafood, which is great.
1:07:55 Wes Larson? Yeah, but I mean, like squid, squid are pretty sustainable, but I've kind of just lost my taste for seafood because I haven't been eating it for so long.
1:08:03 Mike Smith? I want to issue another correction corner real quick. So
1:08:06 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:08:06 Mike Smith? in the subscriber episode I did, we just recorded yesterday, ironically called an island a flaccid doughnut. When in reality it was closer to a calamari ring. So that's, I apologize. You guys called me out and I can't, can't blame you for doing that.
1:08:23 Jeff Larson? I can't blame you for just seeing donuts and everything.
1:08:26 Wes Larson? Donuts are delicious.
1:08:28 Mike Smith? Yeah, I'm glad we could meet somewhere in the middle on this one because I really felt like I was being attacked. And I deserve to be. This is where I landed, you know?
1:08:36 Wes Larson? All right. This category is called I'm just squiddin', or I'm just squiddin' around. Would you rather uncontrollably shoot a bunch of ink out of your butt whenever you even get slightly scared? And I'm talking like a bunch of ink, like you have to go change your pants and there's ink everywhere.
1:08:52 Mike Smith? Yeah, this second option is gonna have to be real bad.
1:08:54 Wes Larson? Would you rather have your body start flashing red and white really bright, like very noticeable? Whenever you're even slightly turned on?
1:09:03 Mike Smith? Oh, I'm going option two for sure.
1:09:05 Wes Larson? You'd rather just announce to the entire everyone you're around that you're turned on?
1:09:09 Mike Smith? I spend most of my time out of the eyesight of everyone else in the world anyway.
1:09:13 Wes Larson? Yeah, that's fair.
1:09:14 Mike Smith? So it would make for kind of like some awkward video conference calls when we're recording podcasts remotely. You guys would be like, why? We're talking about bear attacks right now. Why are you horny?
1:09:24 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think the key to this is do you get scared more often or to get horny more often, you know?
1:09:30 Mike Smith? Right.
1:09:31 Jeff Larson? Definitely scared a lot. Or I'm sorry, definitely horny, get horny a lot more often. So what? We're just JS in here?
1:09:40 Wes Larson? Yeah, what's JS in?
1:09:41 Mike Smith? Just squiddin'.
1:09:43 Wes Larson? Just squiddin' around. Yeah. Which would you pick?
1:09:47 Jeff Larson? I think, yeah, so I don't get scared too often. And if I do get scared, I think it would actually be something I want. Because I only get scared for a good reason. So then it might help me out.
1:09:59 Wes Larson? So you want to squirt me?
1:10:00 Jeff Larson? Pull my pants down real quick and ink them.
1:10:03 Mike Smith? Now we're squiddin'.
1:10:04 Jeff Larson? You know?
1:10:05 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think I would do the flashing red and white.
1:10:08 Mike Smith? Are we talking, is startled the same thing as scared? Because I don't get scared very often either. But I do kind of get startled a lot.
1:10:16 Wes Larson? Even slightly scared is what I said. So I'd say startled counts.
1:10:20 Mike Smith? I'm going the horny one.
1:10:21 Wes Larson? I think so too, but it's a hard pick. All right. The next category is called squid pro quo and the phrase.
1:10:29 Mike Smith? Great work, Wes.
1:10:30 Wes Larson? Squid pro quo.
1:10:31 Mike Smith? Really good work here.
1:10:32 Wes Larson? Quid pro quo means something for something essentially like you are trading something for something. So squid pro quo in this one means you have to trade two body parts with a squid for four daylight hours each day. Which body parts are you picking and during what hours?
1:10:51 Jeff Larson? Wait, sorry, I don't understand.
1:10:53 Wes Larson? You have to trade two body parts with the squid for four daylight hours each day. So you can't just say like, I'll do it at night.
1:11:01 Jeff Larson? And then what happens?
1:11:03 Wes Larson? You just have you, you have those squid parts.
1:11:05 Mike Smith? Can I just not make the exchange? I'm gonna not make the exchange at all.
1:11:09 Wes Larson? Every day you have to do this exchange.
1:11:12 Jeff Larson? Can I just keep the parts?
1:11:14 Wes Larson? No, they trade back and they're, they're functional. You can use those parts as like a squid would use them. So which body parts are you picking and during which hours?
1:11:25 Jeff Larson? Do technical, do like the arms and tentacles count as all of them or one?
1:11:30 Wes Larson? You could, you could trade like one arm, one human arm for one squid arm.
1:11:35 Jeff Larson? Not all of their squid arms for one human arm?
1:11:38 Wes Larson? No, one for one squid pro quo.
1:11:41 Jeff Larson? Take their two best squid arms for my two arms.
1:11:46 Wes Larson? Yeah, okay. All right. I like that. What hours of the day are you gonna do it?
1:11:50 Jeff Larson? Uh, I think it's better. So I'll go peak hours. Let's go noon to four.
1:11:57 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:11:57 Mike Smith? So wait.
1:11:58 Wes Larson? You can go to the gym and do some really cool stuff. You only get four hours.
1:12:01 Mike Smith? Four hours. How many body parts?
1:12:03 Wes Larson? Two body parts.
1:12:04 Mike Smith? Oh, yeah.
1:12:05 Wes Larson? That messes me up a little.
1:12:06 Jeff Larson? I won't go to the gym. I'll go to the gym with my arms.
1:12:09 Mike Smith? I'm gonna go from six to 10 because that's when I'm gonna be watching the most movies. And I'm gonna take one tentacle and the beak so I can really munch down on some treats. Like with pistachios, I wouldn't even really need to shell them. I just crunch them all up.
1:12:23 Jeff Larson? Oh, I kind of want one of their eyes.
1:12:25 Wes Larson? Yeah. So I picked the eye and the siphon and the eye, just because I want to experience what it feels like to see out of a squid's eyeball and just have like improved eyesight. And then the siphon, so I can just swim really, really fast. And I would do it peak day as well because that's when I like to swim the most.
1:12:47 Jeff Larson? Do your arms go on the squid?
1:12:49 Wes Larson? Yeah. So you trade them. So.
1:12:51 Jeff Larson? Oh, I'll switch mine then.
1:12:53 Wes Larson? Uh, okay.
1:12:55 Jeff Larson? I want to switch my brain so that my brain is in the squid for four hours. I got full squid for four hours.
1:13:03 Wes Larson? I like that. Alright, okay. Uh, the next category is what would Mike and Jeff do? Let's say you are, you jump in the water, you're suddenly attacked by multiple squid. They're latching on to you. What are you doing?
1:13:16 Jeff Larson? Barrel.
1:13:17 Wes Larson? Barrel roll?
1:13:18 Jeff Larson? Okay, for sure, bear. To get all the tentacles off.
1:13:22 Wes Larson? You want the tentacles off now.
1:13:24 Jeff Larson? I'm not wearing the chain mail. Yeah, that's why I'm not wearing the chain mail.
1:13:27 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:13:30 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I think I just keep spinning so they can't keep latched on to me.
1:13:34 Wes Larson? You're just barrel rolling the whole time. I like it. Okay, Mike, what are you doing?
1:13:39 Mike Smith? I'm gonna throw scuba tanks into all their beaks and shoot them like Brody does in
1:13:44 Wes Larson? Smile, you son of a bitch.
1:13:45 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:13:46 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:13:47 Mike Smith? They're gonna have to be like little mini tubes, though, that can fit in their mouth, their beaks.
1:13:51 Wes Larson? Like bear spray, like little bear sprays.
1:13:53 Mike Smith? That's it.
1:13:54 Wes Larson? So what Scott Castle says you actually should do, and I do think he's probably the leading authority on this, is just act the least like prey possible, which what he says is really just kind of staying as still as possible. You can peel them off of you if you need to, but what you don't want to do is like thrash through the water because then they kind of feel like they're attacking prey. So you don't want to thrash around a lot. It's the main thing.
1:14:20 Mike Smith? Early Metallica would not survive.
1:14:22 Wes Larson? No, you would not survive if you were also at a Metallica concert at the same time.
1:14:28 Mike Smith? Right.
1:14:29 Wes Larson? Okay, a couple listener questions. I got a few from Patreon here. This one's from Sky. Sky says, squid related question. Giant squids have the biggest eyes in the animal kingdom. What do you think are the prettiest eyes in the animal kingdom? And which would you want if you had to replace your own?
1:14:45 Mike Smith? It's Wes's, Wes's eyes are the prettiest.
1:14:48 Wes Larson? Oh, thanks, mine.
1:14:48 Mike Smith? You guys see me? Oh, my gosh, transfixing. Holy mackerel.
1:14:52 Wes Larson? Alright, now you're just scaring us. What do you guys think are the prettiest eyes? Mike, you already answered. Jeff, what do you think?
1:15:00 Jeff Larson? Man. Probably a type of cat, like a jaguar, leopard, or lion. Like some hazel, big hazel eyes.
1:15:09 Wes Larson? Yeah, I like the dark kind of gray of a snow leopard's eyes. That might be my favorites. I think frogs have really beautiful eyes, too, though.
1:15:17 Mike Smith? The red eye, the red eyed tree frog?
1:15:19 Wes Larson? Not the red eyed ones as much, but those are cool, but.
1:15:22 Mike Smith? I even think that when they go like all black, I think that's pretty. It's just a really cool, pretty look.
1:15:28 Wes Larson? I think if I had to trade with an animal, though, it'd probably be a snow leopard.
1:15:32 Jeff Larson? Do panda eyes, do you count the black marking around their eyes?
1:15:36 Wes Larson? No.
1:15:37 Jeff Larson? Never mind.
1:15:38 Wes Larson? Just the eyes. Yeah. All right, if you guys, this is from Ravioli. If you guys can make a hybrid of any two bear species, what would it be and what would you name it?
1:15:47 Mike Smith? I'm a big fan of this listener's work.
1:15:49 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:15:51 Jeff Larson? I would combine a polar bear and a black bear and I'd name it a panda bear.
1:15:56 Wes Larson? Okay, not very, not very enlightened there, but I like it.
1:16:01 Mike Smith? I'd combine a panda bear and another panda bear because they gotta be having more sex, in my opinion.
1:16:06 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah.
1:16:07 Jeff Larson? Then you just have one white bear and one black bear.
1:16:09 Mike Smith? You think that's what would happen?
1:16:11 Wes Larson? Or like a really spotted black.
1:16:15 Mike Smith? Oh, I misunderstood the question, I think. I'm not changing my answer, though.
1:16:19 Wes Larson? I think I would combine a sloth bear and a polar bear. Because I just would want to see what that looks like and I would name it a sloth or a poth bear. I'd name it a poth bear.
1:16:33 Mike Smith? Poth.
1:16:33 Jeff Larson? Would you have a huge sloth bear or a hairy polar bear?
1:16:37 Wes Larson? I think you'd have a big old hairy polar bear that's kind of like gray.
1:16:42 Mike Smith? That'd be cool.
1:16:43 Wes Larson? All right, one more from Yash. Yash says, thoughts on the movie Paranorman?
1:16:48 Mike Smith? Big fan.
1:16:49 Wes Larson? I love Paranorman. I love all the like, uh, animation movies.
1:16:53 Mike Smith? I think it's my favorite out of them.
1:16:56 Wes Larson? I think, I think Kubo and the Two Strings is my favorite.
1:16:59 Mike Smith? Kubo's good.
1:17:00 Jeff Larson? What do you mean favorite out of them?
1:17:02 Wes Larson? From that studio.
1:17:03 Mike Smith? Yeah, I forget, what it, Lakai, Lakai, something like that.
1:17:06 Wes Larson? Yeah, Laka or whatever. They did Coraline, Paranorman, Kubo, Missing Link, Box Trolls.
1:17:15 Wes Larson? I think that's it. Um, what's your favorite of those, Jeff?
1:17:19 Jeff Larson? What, that one strong guy in Paranorman is gay, right?
1:17:22 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think he's gay.
1:17:24 Jeff Larson? Like, he starts out not gay, and then at the end he's gay. That's funny.
1:17:28 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:17:28 Jeff Larson? It was funny.
1:17:29 Mike Smith? Is he not gay at the start? I thought the joke was just like she keeps trying to hit on him, but the whole time he's just like not interested.
1:17:35 Wes Larson? I think he's gay. She just doesn't know that he's gay.
1:17:38 Jeff Larson? Maybe I, the audience, doesn't know, too.
1:17:42 Mike Smith? Yeah. Death to the author, you know? Jeff, you could interpret it however you want, and it's valid.
1:17:47 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:17:48 Jeff Larson? I think you're probably right.
1:17:50 Mike Smith? Okay.
1:17:51 Wes Larson? All right. I think that's it for Patreon questions. Jeff, did you get any listener ones?
1:17:55 Jeff Larson? Sure enough, did.
1:17:57 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:17:58 Jeff Larson? From Dizzy Konski, can animals choke?
1:18:02 Wes Larson? Yeah, but I think we choke more than they do. But they can choke.
1:18:06 Jeff Larson? Like a lion eating a huge chunk of meat can choke on it?
1:18:11 Mike Smith? Yeah, like Greg Norman at the end of a golf tournament. Can they do that? Like, they're so close to... They can probably choke.
1:18:17 Wes Larson? Yeah, they can choke.
1:18:18 Jeff Larson? Like a cheetah.
1:18:20 Wes Larson? That Jaguar we saw in Brazil.
1:18:22 Jeff Larson? Finally chases a gazelle down and then misses its jump or something.
1:18:26 Mike Smith? Yeah, right.
1:18:26 Wes Larson? That Jaguar we saw in Brazil that moved its foot a tiny bit and then came and got away.
1:18:32 Mike Smith? Joke.
1:18:33 Wes Larson? And Jeff yelled out, "Choke!"
1:18:37 Jeff Larson? Kaidirt Claude asks, can a rattlesnake slither and rattle at the same time? Or they have to be coiled up?
1:18:44 Wes Larson? No, they can slither and rattle. Yeah. But it's more, it's more common they do it when they're coiled.
1:18:49 Jeff Larson? Mike, you can answer this one, too. Aaron M. 58. Wes, you can too, if you want.
1:18:55 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:18:55 Jeff Larson? Uh, Kobe or LeBron?
1:18:57 Wes Larson? LeBron for me.
1:18:59 Mike Smith? Like, who do I like more, or who do I think is better?
1:19:01 Jeff Larson? Just says Kobe or LeBron, question mark.
1:19:04 Mike Smith? LeBron, period.
1:19:06 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Do you like him more?
1:19:08 Mike Smith? I think I do, yeah.
1:19:10 Wes Larson? I think I, I think both. I like him more, and I think he's better.
1:19:14 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I don't know Kobe Kobe got five.
1:19:18 Mike Smith? Yeah, five rings.
1:19:19 Wes Larson? Kobe went out like he died like a good time, you know?
1:19:23 Mike Smith? Good public sentiment.
1:19:25 Wes Larson? It's a bad time to say it's bad to say that, but I feel like
1:19:28 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:19:29 Wes Larson? His legacy was cemented, you know, and LeBron's been in the league for so long now that it's kind of hard not to think about like old LeBron when you think about his whole career.
1:19:39 Jeff Larson? LeBron needs a helicopter crash.
1:19:41 Wes Larson? Yeah, if LeBron were to die right now, we would all think he's the greatest of all time. Like without a doubt. Yeah.
1:19:48 Jeff Larson? Tibbetts thirteen asks a place you have vacationed or visited that pleasantly surprised you in the lower forty eight?
1:19:55 Wes Larson? I had my answer and then you threw in that lower forty.
1:19:58 Mike Smith? Lower forty eight, huh?
1:19:59 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:20:00 Mike Smith? I had a great time when I went to Santa Fe last year.
1:20:03 Jeff Larson? Oh, that is surprising.
1:20:06 Mike Smith? Yeah, randomly it was it was in June, so there was this huge pride parade going on and they shut down this. Yeah.
1:20:12 Wes Larson? I was thinking about saying New Mexico as well.
1:20:14 Mike Smith? All right, well, go ahead.
1:20:15 Wes Larson? Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you.
1:20:16 Mike Smith? No, you go ahead. Say New Mexico and then we can move on.
1:20:20 Wes Larson? No, I want to hear the rest of your story.
1:20:22 Mike Smith? That was about it. They just had a sweet parade that I just happened to be in town for.
1:20:26 Wes Larson? Was it the zebra? Was it the little redheaded demon that they worship in Santa Fe?
1:20:30 Mike Smith? I didn't catch that particular detail, but maybe.
1:20:33 Jeff Larson? In your head, is it just like Santa Fe every single day has huge gay pride parade? Because the one time you went there, they had one. Like this is how every day is out here.
1:20:46 Mike Smith? Amazing. Great food, too. I had some amazing Mexican food there.
1:20:51 Wes Larson? I think North Carolina is mine. I never I had kind of slept on North Carolina and then when I went there, I was like, it is beautiful here. Just like gorgeous. The towns I think are really quaint and beautiful. The food was good. I really liked North Carolina.
1:21:06 Jeff Larson? I'm gonna go with Pittsburgh. Now, granted, it was one of the first bigger cities I'd ever visited, so I was probably influenced by that. But I sat thought it had a lot of like old charm to it.
1:21:17 Wes Larson? Yeah, a really distinct feel. I feel like whenever a movie is filmed in Pittsburgh, I immediately can tell that it's filmed in Pittsburgh.
1:21:24 Mike Smith? Right.
1:21:24 Jeff Larson? Uh, Matt dono Huey asks, what's the deadliest animal of all time? Don't say humans, though. That's dumb.
1:21:32 Wes Larson? I mean, it's mosquitoes, then. It'd be either mosquitoes or rats, probably.
1:21:36 Mike Smith? Oh, the rat black plague?
1:21:38 Jeff Larson? Do like a do like a predator. What's the most deadly predator of all time?
1:21:42 Mike Smith? Yeah, probably crocodiles.
1:21:44 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:21:45 Jeff Larson? Like a saltwater crocodile.
1:21:46 Wes Larson? Yeah, and then like venomous snakes are more than anything, but.
1:21:51 Mike Smith? What if crocodiles had malaria and they could pass that on like mosquitoes? Double whammy, you get killed and get malaria?
1:21:59 Jeff Larson? That sucks. A lot of listeners wanted our thoughts on the new anaconda trailer.
1:22:06 Wes Larson? I'm not interested at all. I watched the trailer and it made me honest. I like, I hardly could make it through the trailer.
1:22:12 Jeff Larson? Made you?
1:22:12 Wes Larson? I know I sound like a curmudgeon. It just, it just felt like schlock to me. It didn't seem fun. The anaconda was like eighty feet long, like a dragon. And then I, I'm just kind of tired of Jack Black, to be honest.
1:22:26 Jeff Larson? Hmm.
1:22:27 Wes Larson? I've kind of had my fill, you know?
1:22:29 Jeff Larson? Did you see, did you even see Minecraft?
1:22:32 Wes Larson? No.
1:22:33 Mike Smith? Chicken jockey?
1:22:34 Wes Larson? I don't think you, I don't know if you could pay me enough to see Minecraft. Yeah.
1:22:37 Mike Smith? That's crazy.
1:22:38 Wes Larson? You easily could.
1:22:39 Mike Smith? I'd see that for like five bucks.
1:22:41 Wes Larson? It wouldn't even be that much.
1:22:41 Mike Smith? No. I, so that was my knee jerk reaction too. It was like, oh my gosh, how could we like, we're defiling sacred ground here? And then I remembered, we're not exactly talking about high art here with the original. So go for it. If it ends up being great, awesome, then.
1:22:56 Wes Larson? For me, it has nothing to do with the fact that it's like anaconda and they're ruining anaconda. It just looks stupid to me. It just doesn't look good.
1:23:05 Mike Smith? Yeah, I think if we could though, look through Virgin Eyes at that original movie's trailer, we'd probably have a similar.
1:23:12 Jeff Larson? Yeah, you can't complain about how the snakes look because it's not like they ever looked good.
1:23:17 Wes Larson? But they're like five times bigger in this new movie and I just don't know why they need to do that.
1:23:22 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Well, did you see the video of all the snakes in the Amazon that was viral like six months ago?
1:23:30 Wes Larson? No.
1:23:31 Jeff Larson? There's like, the snakes were as big as the river.
1:23:34 Wes Larson? Yeah, that was, that was AI. It was.
1:23:36 Jeff Larson? That was for real?
1:23:38 Mike Smith? Yeah, you got, you got AI'd.
1:23:40 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:23:42 Mike Smith? You got crossed up by AI.
1:23:43 Jeff Larson? Last, last question.
1:23:45 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:23:45 Jeff Larson? Kobe.
1:23:48 Wes Larson? I'm all.
1:23:48 Jeff Larson? Heather XX.
1:23:52 Jeff Larson? Ass. What's one thing you'll never do again?
1:23:55 Mike Smith? Frisbee golf.
1:23:58 Wes Larson? I will never, I don't think I could ever work a sales job again. Like if something happened to our current situation and like I had to get a different type of job. I don't think I could ever do another sales job. I hate sales.
1:24:13 Mike Smith? You know.
1:24:13 Wes Larson? You know, more power to the people that can do it, but for me, I just can't.
1:24:17 Mike Smith? Yeah. In a literal sense, I did, one time I did a drive, a 32 hour straight drive from San Diego or Louisiana. Yeah, San Diego to New Orleans. I just think I literally couldn't.
1:24:29 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:24:29 Mike Smith? Like I got lost a little bit and had to make, it was longer than it needed to be by about five hours. And I was just like, I can make it. No problem. I just had like a Mountain Dune was good for 12 hours at a time. But I think my body just couldn't do that anymore.
1:24:42 Wes Larson? I don't think I could do that either. Jeff, what's your answer?
1:24:45 Jeff Larson? I don't know.
1:24:46 Wes Larson? Okay. All right.
1:24:48 Mike Smith? Jeff couldn't come up with an answer to a listener question ever again.
1:24:52 Wes Larson? Yeah, one thing you could never do again is this question.
1:24:55 Jeff Larson? I'm the only one that had it beforehand.
1:24:58 Mike Smith? Yeah, that's amazing.
1:25:01 Jeff Larson? All right. I do, maybe you scared me a lot of like when I would go to Hawaii doing like evening swims in the ocean. But I think I might do it again.
1:25:13 Wes Larson? Okay. All right. We're gonna move on. Conservation corner.
1:25:16 Mike Smith? Never fall in love again.
1:25:17 Wes Larson? As far as Humboldt squid are concerned, they're data deficient when it comes to their IUCN listing.
1:25:22 Mike Smith? Oh, that sounds good.
1:25:23 Wes Larson? But there are likely a lot of Humboldt squid in the world. Probably many, many more than there actually even should be.
1:25:30 Jeff Larson? That sounds bad, Mike.
1:25:32 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:25:33 Mike Smith? Data deficient, deficient connotes bad.
1:25:36 Jeff Larson? A ton of them that.
1:25:37 Wes Larson? No, he said it.
1:25:39 Mike Smith? Well, Wes is now saying there's too many, so I don't know.
1:25:42 Wes Larson? There's probably too many because we've removed a lot of their predators from the ocean. Stuff like sharks, dolphins, marlin, large tuna, things that are caught in our internets.
1:25:56 Wes Larson? So their populations are probably higher than ever and they're spreading into places with historic, where historically they weren't found. And that's because as currents change and as the oceans warm, we see them move north and into waters where they typically didn't frequent. And when they show up in new places, they actually can be really devastating to the local fish populations. I read an article about a Humboldt squid explosion, a population explosion in California. I was gonna say. I knew I had to catch myself there.
1:26:25 Mike Smith? Now that sounded bad.
1:26:27 Wes Larson? And in California, when they showed up, the salmon fishery had an almost eighty percent reduction in salmon essentially overnight. And the squid there. Salmon fisheries are bad. Not necessarily. Good they did. Not if they're managed well. And the squid contributed to the collapse of a one point four billion dollar fishery. So when they show up in new places, they can wreak a lot of havoc. So they seem like they're doing just fine. Okay. All right, let's give them our claw ratings. New animal claws.
1:26:57 Wes Larson? I'm gonna give them seven. I think I would really like to dive with Humboldt squid. It sounds like a real experience. And I think that their flashing and all that stuff they do is really cool. So I didn't think I would ever give a squid this high of a ranking, but I think they're a pretty solid seven for me.
1:27:13 Mike Smith? That's where my brain went.
1:27:14 Wes Larson? You think they're the best squid? I think they're the squid I would most want to see besides like a giant or a colossal squid. So no. Top three? No.
1:27:24 Mike Smith? That's not bad.
1:27:25 Wes Larson? But I think the giant and colossal, it's more just that they're so rare that I'd want to see them.
1:27:29 Mike Smith? I think squid generally are really interesting.
1:27:31 Wes Larson? I think I'll give them a six. Yeah, I agree.
1:27:34 Mike Smith? I'll go seven. Even, even the small ones, well, I guess we're talking about Humboldt, but like Jeff and I saw a couple of squid when we were diving down.
1:27:42 Wes Larson? That's cool.
1:27:42 Mike Smith? Freaking sweet. Yeah.
1:27:44 Wes Larson? Yeah. I saw some in the Great Barrier Reef. I saw them in Bonaire. When you see them, they are really cool. How they kind of just like hover in the water and then shoot off.
1:27:53 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:27:54 Wes Larson? They're really neat. All right, we all like squid here. We're pro squid. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening. It was a fun episode to put together. And as always, we teased it already in this episode, but if you want more content, check out our Patreon. Mike just did an episode on Amelia Earhart and how she may have died a very terrible death by animals. It's very interesting. We've had some really fun episodes on there lately. So check out our Patreon. It's 10 bucks a month and you get access to absolutely massive catalog of bonus episodes of subscriber episodes and some really fun extra content. And if you want it just to show right up in your Apple feed, do our Apple Grizz Club instead. Same price, super convenient.
1:28:39 Wes Larson? Exact same content. No one gets anything else the other doesn't. Well, at least as far as audio content. Episodes. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. All right.
1:28:47 Jeff Larson? All right.
1:28:47 Wes Larson? Thanks, guys. We'll see you later.
1:28:49 Jeff Larson? Love ya. Gray wolves are the biggest canine species in the world.
1:28:54 Wes Larson? I don't think that's true. I guess they're the heaviest and tallest. Yeah, they're not the tallest, but they're the biggest. Okay.
1:29:00 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:29:01 Wes Larson? Because Maine wolves are the tallest. Okay.
1:29:03 Jeff Larson? They're bigger than Maine wolves.
1:29:06 Wes Larson? Nice one, Jeff. Yeah, because bigger is like weight and height. Okay. All right. Love you. Bye.
1:29:11 Jeff Larson? Bye.
Previous A Grizzly Encounter in Yellowstone - A Roundup of Recent Animal Encounter News Including a Violent Bear Attack in Yellowstone, an Elephant Pants-ing a Tourist, Big Cats in Thailand, and More Next Polar Bear Attack - A Violent Post-Party Polar Bear Encounter Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated