Endless Thread - Lazy Geoff

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

A Twitter thread about a fox named “Lazy Geoff” drew the attention of thousands online. But can a fox really be lazy? Our search for an answer revealed a surprising shift in how humans understand animals and, maybe, the fate of nature. ****** Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell and Ben Brock Johnson. Sound design by Emily Jankowski. Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell are the co-hosts.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. About a decade ago, when Danny Rabiotti was in college, she signed up for a research project studying red foxes. Not the glamorous foxes you see in nature documentaries, Disney movies on Instagram. I'm talking about urban foxes in the UK. kind of mangy, trash-hungry. At night, they roam cities like London and Bristol. And Danny says they'll show up anywhere.

Anywhere. One night I was putting my bins out. I turned around and there was a fox in my hallway inside my house. And I just yelled really excitedly, there's a fox in the hallway, which obviously then scared the fox and it ran away. The point of the project was to track what the foxes were doing, where they were going.

But back then in 2012, tracking an animal wasn't as easy as pinning a GPS on its back and watching from your iPhone. Foxes had to be trapped and fitted with bulky, expensive radio collars. And then it helped if you had a car. They kind of kitted us out with this antenna

that you stuck it on the top of the car. And they kind of gave us a really brief intro to radio tracking. Really brief. Like, drive around the city and tell this thing starts to beep. That's basically it. The beeping means you're close. Knowing the demo was like, beep, beep, beep, beep.

Each team tracked a specific fox. That's how Danny ended up meeting this one fox that would get a name and is actually the reason we called her up. Because much later, this fox would get a little famous on the internet. Foxes, by the way, are nocturnal and do not hibernate, which meant that after a long day of classes, Danny would suit up for near-freezing temperature nights, grab her tracking device, and head out with her search party. The first night, though, didn't start out so well. The receiver sounded kind of weird.

It would just make this like... Yeah, that did not sound like a beep. But, you know, details. After a few hours of, it started getting loud. They stopped the car, plunged into the cold, and kept going on foot. Just a couple of college kids triangulating a fox in the dark. You know, normal stuff. Then the static came to a roar.

And we pinpointed this fox to one particular garden. They couldn't see the fox, but they could tell he was in the garden behind someone's house. Danny was excited to see where he'd go. But as minutes turned into hours, nothing happened. Danny's team just stood there, awkwardly camped by this random house in the cold. Eventually the homeowner spotted them pointing their antenna his way. And he thought we were trying to get him arrested for not having a TV license. Danny explained, we're just looking for a fox.

He was like, oh yeah, that fox is always in my garden. He's always sleeping under the shed. And this study, the idea behind this study was that, you know, we were supposed to look at what this fox was doing. And basically what this fox did was it sat under this man's shed. I think the scientific term for this is that the fox was straight chilling. Yeah, it can't be overstated, though, how unusual this seemed. Urban foxes have to do a lot to survive. They spend their nights running around, hunting, eating, mating, mating, fighting, fighting, fighting,

and yet. This fox was not eating, it was not screwing, and it was not fighting. No, he was just chilling under this bloke's shed. They thought, maybe we just caught him on an off night. The next night they did it all over again. Wrap up classes, get dressed,

drive around, trudge. And they ended up back in the same spot, the garden shed. Another night, same place. After a week, week, same place. I was like, is he dead? Like, why is this fox not moving?

But the guy assured us he was still under the shed. And it was true. They checked. Not dead. Just under the shed. But after six weeks of tracking, as the other undergrads turned in complex webs of fox traffic, Danny had close to nothing. All because of this one lazy fox.

We named him Jeff. I don't remember why, but that was his name. He didn't go anywhere. So we coined the term lazy Jeff for him. What Danny didn't know at the time, and what she would later discover, is that the world is full of lazy Jeffs. They are everywhere, in all kinds of species. And most of the time, researchers don't really know why they're

so lazy or appear lazy, they just are. And this is because for hundreds of years, Western science, at least, has denied their existence. I'm lazy Dean Russell. I'm lazy Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Threat. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Today, producer Dean Russell and I bring you the story of a fox that it turns out may actually represent a long, unspoken, somewhat viral phenomenon in the animal kingdom.

And what that story reveals to us about a gigantic shift in how humans understand our fellow creatures, and maybe the fate of the world. No pressure. Today's episode, Lazy Jeff. So, Dean, you may be surprised to learn that I'm not really a part of research scientist Twitter. Is this the part where, like, I guess. I can't believe you haven't finished your dissertation on the geometric shapes of wombat poop. You're not a scientist yet.

Yeah, I'm not a scientist. But I did always kind of want to play one on TV. Really? That surprises me. What's your character name? I think I'd be like Dr. Bartholomew Wicket Whistle? Probably. Amazing.

Yeah. Okay. And yet, this story has come to your doorstep. How? Through the mysteries of my incessant scrolling, of course, Dean. If it goes huge in the Twitterverse, I'm likely to see it. Though Danny Rabiotti already has a pretty decent following on Twitter. I was involved in a few viral hashtags, one of which was Does It Fart, which actually resulted in a book, which became a New York Times best seller.

Yeah, I know that book. Yeah. A hundred percent, not surprised that you knew this. Does It Fart Book, Ben? Oh, come on. It's a famous book, Dean. I actually, so I didn't know about this book, but I did actually know about Danny's other work.

Oh, get off your high zebra. I'm serious. I'm serious. I mean, so she works at the Zoological Society of London, otherwise known as ZSL. ZSL represent. She doesn't study red foxes anymore. She studies a different canine, endangered African wild dogs, and how they're adapting to climate change, which short answer is not great.

Yeah. Anyway, a few months ago, Danny had these two seemingly lazy wild dogs in her data. And she was reminded of Jeff, the urban fox. And so she sent out a tweet that turned into a pretty giant thread. An endless thread, if you will. The first tweet reads, My favorite thing is when people stick trackers on animals and wonders literally nothing interesting

and sits in one place 99% of the time. And then the researchers are like, oh yeah, that weird data point is lazy Jeff. He doesn't ever do anything for reasons we don't entirely understand. Lazy Jeff was not a term anyone knew. Danny had made it up for her Jeff. But for some reason, this thread went wild on science Twitter. And then far beyond science Twitter.

thousands of retweets, about 35,000 likes, and beyond the appreciation of the original tweet, something else started to happen. Other researchers started weighing in with their own stories of unusual animal characters in their own research. Were you surprised at the response to the Twitter thread? I was surprised by how much the public loved it

and how much the, like, people found it hilarious that animals can just be so lazy. There are so many stories in this thread about lazy Jeffs. Tunas that chill by a plastic buoy for no apparent reason. An aberrant tarantula that is perfectly happy to loaf around. Lazy sharks. Lazy mice. Lazy leopards.

Everyone seemed to have a story that sounded a lot like Danny's. So, yeah, when I read the tweet, I was like, oh, yeah, that's still a sea lion. Dudley. One of a couple of black bears that I was working with. One particular frog popped into my head. Dudley had one of the expensive tags. I'm just picturing a bunch of frogs with fanny packs on. No, that's pretty accurate.

And there's like this rock. And it's just sitting on it looking at us. Plenty of the other pups we were studying. We're off adventuring in the ocean, eating herring, doing all kinds of adventures. and you could always depend on Dudley to just be hanging out. And she would just be in the same spot over and over and over, as if she'd never left that spot. All of the scientists we talked to

described their lazy Jeffs as comical. Also a bit frustrating. Often, you only have the budget to track a handful of animals. So if one's a Jeff, it can feel like a waste. More than that, lazy Jeffs are somewhat baffling. Because if nature documentaries have taught me anything, lazy doesn't fit with a huge tenet of Darwinian logic. Wild animals have to work hard to survive. If she delays, the whole family will risk starvation.

The victim is overwhelmed by hungry turtles, and it's soon over. She's vulnerable. The entire school dies. The midwinter dance is done. only corpses remain for the sand d'am. Man, I got to go watch a nature doc. I can definitely say that they are wonderful yet grim. Anyway, these lazy Jeffs, who no one ever really studied before,

we had to know. How could they exist? Why do you think this is a thing that happens? Why are there so many lazy Jeffs? Well, I think at the end of the day, it comes down to animals have personalities. and some animals are more willing to take risks. Some animals are going to be more scared of other animals. Some animals are just going to be mega chill about everything

and not really move around a lot. And that's just kind of what we see across species is you always get the odd one that just doesn't really do anything. You might have missed it right then. But what Danny just suggested is actually a pretty controversial idea. Animals, non-human animals, have individual personalities? I mean, if you have a hairless sphinx named Smeagle or a bunny named muffin top, you're obviously going to say, duh. Think broadly, though.

We often compartmentalize how we think about animal personalities if we think about them at all. The chicken that is your chicken nuggets, the lobster on your lobster roll, the possum squashed on the highway. Personality? Mm-mm. No way. My cat? Your dog? Of course.

Danny told us that among scientists, especially those studying wild animals, the compartmentalization is real. And the suggestion that all those animals have different personalities has long been very taboo. I think it's kind of discouraged to think about in that way. Describing a hawk as neurotic or a worm as conscientious or a fox as lazy is usually seen as anthropomorphic, a projection of humanness onto non-humans. And this idea, thou shalt not anthropomorphize, it goes back centuries. Descartes claimed that animals are automaton's, machines. Pavlov, the dog experiment guy, he said,

no way do animals have subjective experiences. In the 1960s, Jane Goodall was accused of committing the, quote, worst of scientific sins when she gave her chimps names. This is particularly an issue now, when a large portion of the internet is pandas having tantrums and TikTok lions hugging people. You can get the wrong idea. But Danny told us in the last decade or so, a growing number of scientists have been getting more comfortable with anthropomorphism, at least when it comes to animal personalities. Animalities? Anyone that spent any time around animals knows that they have personality.

and they are different. Even fish. Okay, I love animals, but I can honestly say, I have never once thought about the personality of a fish. Really, a lot of wild animals. That's because you have a cold dead heart, Dean. But even if you're on board with Danny, how do you prove it? And if you can prove it, what does that tell us about why animal personalities exist?

in a world where natural selection reigns, survival of the fittest, what good is a personality, especially a lazy one? We decided to look into it a little more. So we found a guy, and he invited us north. We're in what I would describe as a beautiful forest on a beautiful sunny day, driving down a semi-shaded, dappled dirt road. What? Is this not accurate?

No, a dappled dirt road. That's good. That's good. The story from there proved more complicated than we had imagined. How animal personalities shaped the world. And how they may be harnessed for good in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry.

But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing. Or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless.

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the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnership. team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at wbUR.org slash creative studio. Dean and I wanted to understand whether individual animal personalities exist in the wild and why. And how lazy Jeffs could actually be lazy. So we arranged to join a few scientists running field tests at a remote site in central Maine. the one person who's parked here are going to be weirded out if I park right next to them. We park in a dirt clearing by what I can only assume was an abandoned vehicle, and we notice

the flies are everywhere. Do flies have personalities? Two flies have personalities. I'm really not going to try to not find that out, because I will kill a fly without even thinking twice. Some flies are jerks, so. Some flies are jerks? That's, well, This is the Pinabscot Experimental Forest. If you don't know what an experimental forest is, you're not alone, neither did I. But it's just a forest where scientists run experiments. After a few minutes, one of those scientists shows up. Hello!

A trim guy in glasses, shaved head, fragrance of deat, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Maine named Alessio Mortoletti. Thanks for coming. So good and bad news. The good news is there are some captures. The bad news is we had probably either a raccoon or a bear attack. Wait, we're walking towards the bear attack? Alessio does indeed lead us deeper into the woods. And in the shadow of these enormous oaks and white pines,

the jerk flies are replaced by very tenacious mosquitoes that suck. I guess we make for pretty easy target, slow bushwhacking through the bramble. But we get to a small glade, a couple of Alessio students. They're planning to test the personalities of rodents, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, voles, because Alessio preaches, yes,

wild animals do have personalities, even the small ones. Did you say all animals? Yes, pretty much all animals. Like even an earthworm may have its own sort of more. He tells us this field of animal personality research is still pretty young, 10 to 15 years old.

And he and his students are on the, forefront. What kind of equipment to people at the forefront of their field use? As an Italian, I'm proud to say the Ferrari of the small mammal traps. Okay. And you've got one, two, three, four. We have a hundred laid out. You have a hundred? About many were. One hundred tiny Ferraris. These tiny Ferraris look like shoebox-sized metal containers with hinges and doors. They're humane traps. Sometimes the traps get raided by bears, hence the attack.

Alessio mentioned, but today it looks like we have, I don't know, a couple dozen that came back fine with rodents inside. A highly scientific process of shaking, shaking the trap into a burlap what is, it like seems like a burlap sack. IVN, a PhD student, shows us a deer mouse. What's his name or number? He is 98209-106-29-29-297-2708. Wow, that was impressive. That was impressive. 98209-106-297-2708 has a microchip ear tag and...

And it looks like he's a D haircut. Or C. Did you say a D haircut? Yeah, so we actually... Cut their hair? Yeah, we do. What? Yeah.

And you have different hairstyles? Yeah, it's the best way to go. This is another student, Maisie Mers, who tells us it's more of a tiny snip. And haircuts are not for style. They are not an extension of the animal's personality. They help researchers identify particular animals at a glance. Maisie also kindly informs us that we are being way too loud and scaring the animals. We'll have to whisper once the personality tests begin, which is now.

Okay, we've got to go. What's going to happen are a set of tests. to determine whether the animal was bold or shy. For the first test, Ivy leads us through the trees up to the top of a hill, to this tiny clearing. There's a two-foot-tall box without a top in front of us. She moves the mouse that was put into the bag for data collection back into the Ferrari trap, also called an emergence trap.

And then the emergence trap is put inside the box, and Ivy opens the trap door. If a mouse takes a long time to leave the trap, Alessio says that mouse is likely shy, but... A more curious, bold individual will just get out. What if it's a lazy individual who wants to sleep longer? This is not a moment in their life to be lazy. It's more like they're really freaking scared.

Turns out this first mouse isn't lazy or scared. He's bold. The mouse is already out of the trap. And if you watch a few rounds of this test, you can really get to see the difference. Some mice rocket out of the traps. Others edge out ever so slightly, looking kind of nervous. Still, others never leave. Hugging the walls of the trap.

But how do we know an animal is displaying a personality trait versus a fleeting emotion or a random action? That question is why, Alessio's team does multiple tests, different settings, different challenges. They also repeat these tests once a month. And they found that each animal tends to behave the same every time, which is important because it's those repeated actions that show personality, wallflower this month, wallflower next month. We can be loud now. We can be loud. Okay, we can talk again. This still leaves a few questions. First, why do personalities exist at all?

among people, mice, voles, chipmunks? Personality exists because it's the result of evolution. So natural selection has favored this existence of personality. Whether we say bold or shy, or given the right test, even lazy, personalities don't exist in spite of survival of the fittest. They exist because of it. A lot of times fortune does favor the bold. But if everyone is bold, that's not good.

for a species that can get scooped up at any moment. So sometimes shy is the fittest. And if you think about it, that could apply to Lazy Jeff too. If it was convenient for every individual to behave in exactly the same way, evolution would have made sure that happened. It didn't. But Alessio's team isn't just testing personalities. They're showing that those different personalities

affect other living things in different ways. What's really fascinating is we tend to see animals, as all the same, they will have the same role in the ecosystem, we're finding out that actually some individuals are disproportionately more important than others from the perspective of the plant, for example. Imagine an acorn falling from a tree. It lands in the parent tree's giant shadow, where it can't grow. Now, let's say a shy mouse takes it and saves it for winter.

That shy mouse won't venture far. It'll just keep it in the shade of the tree. and that acorn will never get the light or nutrients it needs to grow. But a bold mouse is more likely to cash its acorn farther away, perhaps in a sunny clearing where it might more easily grow. Often it happens to be a great place for the plant to germinate, and if the seed is forgotten or the small mammal dies, that plant has a chance to germinate.

This is happening all the time. It's how forests grow and survive. Small, bold mammals moving tree seeds far enough away to survive and thrive. This isn't to say that only bold rodents benefit a forest. Early evidence suggests that healthier, more resilient forests have a diversity of personalities, which means shy or active or even lazy mice may also have their own unique roles to play. It's Alessio's mission to figure out what those. roles are. PhD student Ivy N tells us there's one more part of this, which has to do with the way

trees and animals are responding to our human-caused climate crisis. So basically, with climate change, lots of things are happening. But one of the big things is that, like, the habitable range of some plants is shifting. But things like oaks where the seeds are so big and so fat, they're not going to be dispersed by, like, the wind or, like, bombastically or whatever. It's going to be animal-mediated. This was a big revelation for me. Forests move. They migrate in slow motion over generations of trees.

Except without small birds and mammals, certain tree species can't move at all, which is important because, depending on where you are, the forests near you are likely going to look a lot different in the coming decades, if they survive at all. Some forests in New England, for example,

are sick. Certain trees prefer colder climates, and yet the area is warming. Others are facing down more droughts, new pests, new disease, all fueled by climate change. To survive, forests may need to move north to colder areas. Which means we may also need certain animal personalities to help. You need boulder? Yes, more exploratory, more likely to try new foods, you know, like the foodie animals, like they're going to be the ones that are going to bring it and continue like these oak species that might not be able to survive anymore. So they'll be the ones that bring them in is our, that's our hypothesis. That's cool.

So we need to. Not the lazy Jeffs. Not the lazy Jeffs will not save us, it turns out. But acknowledging them might. Alessia and his team are kind of pushing back against this inconsistent application of personality in our minds. This compartmentalization when we think about animal personalities. And I have to admit, hanging out with Alessio and his grad students in this experimental forest

made me see forests in a whole new way. It's not just a place where there's an animal here or there. This place is literally bursting with small mammals. Alessian and his team say there's a mouse every 13 steps. And what's wild is that these researchers are trying to help humanity team up with these tiny animals in the future, to help forests move into more habitable zones for the trees that make them up, so that those trees can support fragile, complex ecosystems and give us all oxygen. This also isn't just a bunch of scientists slapping peanut butter into tiny animal Ferraris to do weird experiments.

This is a bunch of people on a solemn and powerful mission. They are trying to help save the planet by calling for the conservation of personalities. It's not just about protecting the bold, it's about recognizing that these personalities, every personality, exists for a reason. Maybe a reason we don't know yet. For Alessio's team,

this is about protecting a form of diversity that a few decades ago, we didn't even really know existed. But they also say there's a ways to go before this unique need for personality is recognized by the wider public. This is us doing this, but we're definitely so far from having our findings taken into account into policy. But I believe in 10, 20, 30 years, what my students are doing is going to become policy.

But it's just the world is not aware about what's about to happen. As for the lazy Jeffs, we don't know why they're. exist. We can't even firmly say that they're lazy. But that's just because no one has looked into it yet. Perhaps they will as this kind of personality research becomes more accepted and common. Either way, lazy Jeff lives on. But in a world where we are being hit by endless waves of bad news about the climate and real feelings of helplessness, imagining a future where we are better stewards and better partners for our fellow creatures great and small, our acknowledgement of the lazy Jeffs in the animal world.

And the bold Bridget's. That acknowledgement might help us face the future together. That's a hopeful thing. Something to keep thinking about as we move through the world and try to understand it and treat it as well as we can. Okay, so what do I do? You can just take the fluff out. I should believe this is pretty clear.

Dean, don't mess it up. Yeah. Oh, he's so cute. You can just dump him out. All right. Goodbye, little friend. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content,

Dean's personal bug spray fragrance. Which you stole. It said Ben's on it. My Nature documentary voiceover is you can join our email list. and you'll find it at wbUR.org slash endless thread, where you can also see pictures, by the way, of our adventures with small rodents. Thanks to scientists, Marianne Lee,

Warren Curry, and Jonathan Colby, who you heard earlier in the episode. This episode was written, reported, and produced by me, Dean Russell. And me, Ben Brock Johnson. Mostly Dean, though. Mix and sound designed by Emily Jenkowski. Our web producer is Megan Kattel.

The rest of the team is Amory Severson, Norris Sack, Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, Matt Reed, and Paul Vicus. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and a tiny Ferrari filled with peanut butter and seeds. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email Endlessthread at WBUR.org.org.