Instant Genius - Surprising facts about weird animal abilities

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

Animals can do some pretty cool things, but the world is full of bizarre adaptations you’ve probably never heard of or not given much thought to. In this episode, we speak to vet and TV presenter Dr Jess French, whose new book The Animal Body explains some of the everyday magic of animal anatomy to children. From slug teeth to self-healing abilities, Jess gives us her most surprising facts and busts some common myths – and even does a special impression of a white-handed gibbon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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of bizarre adaptations you've either never heard of or not given much thought to. You'll hear us speak to TV presenter and vet Dr Jess French, whose new book The Animal Body explains some of the everyday magic of animal anatomy to children. From slug teeth to self-healing abilities, Jess busts some common myths and also gives us a special impression of a white-handed gibbon. So Jess, your book covers tons of crazy animal facts and I was just one. wondering maybe during writing it or from your job as a vet, what the weirdest animal fact is that you've ever learned. And this might be something that you encounter on a daily basis or something that has just stuck in your head and you've never quite been able to shake it off. Gosh, you know,

it's really hard to pinpoint one fact because animals in general are just so bonkers. And I feel like the more I learn, the more it leads me to question further and I just learn that animals in general are weirder than we can ever imagine. I think one of the animals that has most of the weird facts attached to it is a sloth. Sloths are just quite strange-looking animals, but then the fact that they spend all this time up in the trees and they're such slow, sedentary creatures and put minimal effort it would seem into everything. And yet they make this gargantuan effort to come down from the canopies of these such high trees to go. to the toilet to do a poo once a week. Like, why? Why make that huge, giant effort? And then

in the process, lose up to a third of their body weight because they've stored it all up. Why are they not just going every day from the canopy? Why are they putting all this effort in? I just, I find it crazy. So why does that happen? I think it's still one of these paradoxical things that we're not entirely sure, but it probably has lots to do with communication. So loads and loads of animals leave messages. through their urine and through their poo and their send of pheromones and communicating to other members of their species. And if we just let the feces fall from the canopy to the ground, some of that messaging may be lost. And it's really important to animals to communicate between

themselves. So probably something to do with that. But still, it seems such a huge effort, doesn't it? Just to say hi to your mate down the road. So there are new cool facts about animals all the time. And as science journalists, we see these come through and our minds are constantly blown. One of these that we covered recently that you have probably seen is about how hippos can kind of fly. I mean, they can't, but they technically become airborne when they trot so fast that there is a point at which all four feet leave the ground. I was just wondering how normal this is as a phenomenon. And also what your reaction is yourself as a vet when you see new facts come out that might surprise you. Oh, I find it so excited.

when there's a new animal factor. And to be honest, it happens so often. There is so much we don't know about the animal world that there's still so much to learn. And that's one of my favorite things about being a biologist is that we're constantly learning new things. We're still finding new species. I mean, come on, there are animals out there we don't even know about yet. It's absolutely mind-blowing. And of course, with all the different animals that are out there, there are going to be things that we don't know about them yet. And yes, it's amazing that a hippo, animal that large can be airborne when it's running. But actually having spent time with elephants and other large mammals, it is quite shocking how rapidly they can move when they want to.

I've been chased by elephants through the forest before. And it was absolutely terrifying, you know, these huge creatures. And it makes you think about, you know, the prehistoric mammals and reptiles that existed and how large they were and the fact that they possibly, you know, could have been running this fast too and just how terrifying they would have been. And as creatures that live these dual lives in water and on land, I find amphibians just really weird in themselves. They've adapted in these kind of mirrored ways. And I was also reading in your book about why frogs don't drink water. They have some kind of absorbing patch.

Could you tell me more about that? Yeah, so they have a drinking patch on their belly. And actually in general, frog and amphibian skin is extraordinary. It's very, very thin. It has glands in it that produce sort of a thick slime, which allows them to absorb gases into their body so they can breathe through their skin. They can also absorb water and drink through their skin. And they also have glands, some of them, which allow them to produce poison. So poison dark frogs and things like that have these incredible glands in their skin which produce a poison.

And some of them are beautifully brightly coloured as well. In mammals, we don't see a great variation in the colour of skin. know, it's sort of brown or black or white or, you know, it's a small range of colours, but we have poison dark frogs that are bright blue, bright yellow, bright red. I feel like I could write an entire book on amphibian skin. I probably don't have the knowledge yet, but I would love to do that deep dive into their skin and just learn more about it because it's absolutely fascinating. It really is, and while you were talking, I was reminded of another story that we covered recently about ants performing amputations on their ant mates.

when the limbs are infected. And you were talking there about all of these things that we just can't do with us and our fellow mammals are actually maybe not that good at. I was just wondering whether there's another thing that comes to mind that any animal other than humans are just way better than humans at doing. I mean, I think animals are better adapted to the world than us in almost every way.

The thing about humans is that we have these huge brains And so we can use our brains to solve problems and to build things. But animals have adapted to some extraordinary environments, and they've had to do that sort of using their body plan. They maybe don't have the cognitive ability to build the things that we could to solve that problem. But evolution has given them incredible answers in the form of the way they breathe or the way they eat or the way they digest food.

So, you know, I think our brains are brilliant, but they've also, made our bodies stay pretty average, you know, we haven't had to do any of these incredible methods of evolution. There are so many ways in which animals are better adapted. Take eyesight, for example, so we can build some night vision goggles and we can see at night. But cats, for example, and some other mammals, have a special membrane at the back of their eye called a Piedum lucidum, which will reflect light back into their eyes. They can see in really low-level light. Some animals are adapted. For example, take some sea turtles, some marine turtles. There's a real limited amount of food that they can eat, but they specialize some of them on feeding on jellies, jellyfish.

And, you know, this might not seem like a very nutritious thing to eat, but they've absolutely specialized and honed it on this, and they have this incredible esophagus with backwards pointing spikes, because obviously if you're going to eat a jellyfish, it's quite a slippery customer. You don't want it slipping back out of your mouth, especially with all that water that's going on. So they have these spines that guide the jellyfish down into their digestive system so that they can't pop back out and they can all be digested. And we are constantly learning more and more about animal communication. I mean, you and I have spoken about dogs and how we've kind of co-evolved with them.

So obviously that's one really interesting element that we're all always fascinated about, is how we communicate with our pets. But can you tell us a bit more about this? I mean, what do we know about animal communication? And what are we already able to do in terms of kind of talking, quote, unquote, to animals? Yeah, so many species have a huge range of nonverbal communication. So certainly in cats and dogs, ear position, tail position, even the way their fur, whether it's laying flat or bristled up.

All of these things have huge importance in the communication of animals. But they also have a wide range of vocal cues as well. Cats, for example, have their own language that they use just for speaking to their kittens. So the meows that they just use for their young, which they also use to speak to us, which maybe says something about what they think about us. There are a huge range of incredible ways that animals communicate. with one another, I think cetaceans are one of the most extraordinary. We're at the very beginning of our journey into learning how whales and dolphins speak to one another. We know that they

have a rich communication. We know that they have names for one another. They have names that they use to refer to themselves and to refer to others. And they have an extremely, extremely sophisticated repertoire of communication and I feel like understanding that, which we're beginning to do and there are incredible scientists that have been working on this for decades. But I feel like we are at the beginning of a wave of new information. You know, as we were talking before about new facts coming in all the time. I feel like cetacean, whale and dolphin communication is something that we are going to learn masses about, you know, these are animals that have been communicating for way longer than humans have. They've been having these sophisticated conversations. They've been living

in these sophisticated social groups for much, much longer than humans have. What wisdom have they acquired over those years? What stories do they have to tell? I mean, if we can tap into that and begin to understand some of what they're talking about, I think it's just going to be mind-blowing. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt,

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that we consume from Dr. Doolittle to episodes of Rick and Morty. I mean, we are fascinated with what would happen if we could understand. And you have some theories about how we might get there and how close that could be. Could you talk about AI and animal communication a bit more? Sure. So I think, you know, AI is going to play a huge part in us beginning to decode this language that we haven't been able to tap into so far. There are, as I said before, for decades, people have been studying this communication. So we have huge banks of recordings, of whale calls, dolphin calls, interactions between these different creatures.

But previously we've been limited by sort of the sound around them. There's often lots of calls going on at the same time. The ocean can be quite a noisy place. So isolating those calls has previously been quite difficult. That's something that AI can help with. It can pick up the individual calls and isolate them so that we can better analyze them. But then, of course, you know, we can use AI now to translate between human languages. We can communicate with someone who doesn't speak our language by inputting it into some kind of, I don't know, some kind of computer program.

I'm not a, I don't profess to be very good at technology. But eventually, I believe this is something we're going to be able to do with animals. We're a long way from that at the moment. We're sort of at the receiving stage where we're receiving the sounds and we're banking them and we're starting to analyze them. And the problem at the moment is we could take those sounds and play them back into the ocean. But what we don't know is what we're saying at the moment. So we have to be really careful because whales will pick up things that they've heard and they will. It's kind of like Chinese whispers through the ocean.

They'll tell it to another pod of whales. And before you know it, it's spread the entire world through the oceans. And we might have sent, you know, an alarm message without knowing. And we could cause panic within the whales. or, you know, it could be anything. So at the moment, we need to focus, I think, just on listening and analysing and not getting ahead of ourselves trying to speak back. We will get to that point eventually.

I really do believe that. But yeah, the listening stage at the moment, which is super exciting. That's really fascinating and, yeah, scary to think that we could cause so much trouble by essentially spreading whale gossip. We don't want to do that. But what are some of the fake whale news? Yeah, fake whale news. What do you think that we would hear from the animal world?

What would the impact be if we could break that? that barrier and decipher that code from different animals. Well, I mean, it makes me sad to think too much about what animals might be saying about what we're doing to the world, you know, that I think there would be a lot of messages requesting help and requesting us to stop the things that we're doing. So, you know, I try not to get too bogged down and think about that because it's quite sad. But in terms of communication between themselves, I mean, communication is used for reproduction.

It's used for alerting other members of your species of things. there's some danger coming, but I really think there's probably some chatting going on as well. You know, we tend to underestimate animals at every corner. So, you know, we always think animals can't use tools and then, oh, actually, they can use tools. So we need to redefine what a human is. You know, we're constantly underestimating animals. And we know from having pets that animals do just do things to play. They sometimes do interact with you just for the joy of it. And I have no doubt that they probably, you know, some of their communication is just a joyful thing. And another fact that I read about in your book is that elephants can actually hear through their feet. I mean,

what is that about? Can you tell us more about how that works and why they do that? Yeah, so it's mad. I mean, animals experience the world in so many different ways. We are quite visually driven creatures and we experience the world in a really visual way. And for some animals, really the sense of sight isn't that important. And it's the sense of sound or the sense of smell that they rely on so heavily. And as a human, I find that really quite difficult to imagine how that would feel to experience the world primarily through one of the other senses. Elephants, for example, they're not hugely visual creatures, but they have a great sense of smell, they have a great sense of hearing, and also they can feel the vibrations. They have these special senses in their

feet called Pucinian corpuscles, and they can sense vibrations through those from miles around, and that's their main way of experiencing the world through sound and through smell, and they're really not that visual at all. So I find I'd love to be able to experience the world in the way that some of these animals do, but the fact is those areas of our brain that are analyzing sound and smell, they just wouldn't be up to the task of processing all that information that, say a dog, for example, you know, it has an incredible sense of smell. If you gave us that information and put it into our brains, we just would not be capable. Our olfactory area of our brain just isn't big enough, isn't well-wired enough to understand what that feels like. So I'm not sure

we'll ever know what it feels like to experience the world fully as a dog or an elephant, but it's incredible to know that there are all these different ways of experiencing the world. You know, some animals can see parts of the UV spectrum that we can't even see. You know, there might be all these beautiful. They definitely are all these beautiful colours that we might never get to experience. Flowers might look completely different to a bee and we might never know about it. That impacts how they're adapted to the world as well, doesn't it? The kind of flowers that they can see are the ones that they're attracted to,

whereas we're more attracted to pizza. Absolutely. So they have pollen guides which direct them where they need to go, telling them where the food is. You know, it's almost like our neon signs for our drive-thrues that light up and say, you know, pizza here or whatever. They've got their nectar guides, their UV nectar guides, direction them right to where the sweet stuff is. But we just see maybe, you know, a pink petal or a yellow petal. Yeah, interesting. Meaning aside, what is the strangest sound that an animal makes? Any animal that you've heard you've come across.

Oh, that is a difficult one. The screaming hairy armadillo makes quite an extraordinary sound. How does that go? Any chance you can... Oh, gosh. My screaming hairy armadillo impression isn't great. I'll tell you, I will do you an animal impression. One of my favourite animal sounds, it's maybe not weird, but it's one of my favourites when I was working in the Thai jungle.

I used to wake up every morning to a sound that went like this. Ooh. and that's the white-handed gibbon call. And that's how they would talk to each other in the morning. That's what I'd wake up to every day. So that's one of my favorite sounds. But screaming hairy armadillo is certainly in there for weirdest. And frogs and toads as well, they make some extraordinary, extraordinary sounds.

And so loud some of them. I mean, unbelievable. They have these vocal sacks which amplify the sound. And, oh, it's just, it's mind-blowing that something often the size of, you know, your little finger can make a sound that reverberates around the jungle. It's just, yeah, it's extraordinary. And as you say, there, a lot of what we perceive about the animal world comes down to size and volume. And we're just quite impressed by all of these things that are very different from, you know, the projection of our voice or the size that we are, how small things are.

And I remember you talking at the Science Festival about Blue Whale Hearts. Could you tell us more about that? I mean, how big actually are they for the biggest creature on the planet? So Blue Whale Heart is about one and a half meters in height and sort of heart shapes. You can imagine the other dimensions. So, yeah, I reckon you could easily, I mean, wouldn't even necessarily need to curl up that much to get inside a Blue Whale Heart, maybe inside one of the chambers because like all mammals, it has four chambers.

And it's quite muscular as well. So even though, you know, that's the dimension of the height, You've probably got some pretty chunky walls on there as well to pump the blood around this huge, huge body. But yes, extraordinarily large hearts, which blue whales are extraordinarily large animals. So I guess it's not entirely unsurprising that they have these huge hearts. But when I think about large animals, I just, it's amazing to think that animals can function on that scale, you know. and it's often ocean creatures that are so vast and so enormous. And the enormity of the ocean in general is something that absolutely blows my mind.

I mean, there's so much for us still to learn about the ocean. There are parts of the ocean that are less explored than the moon, for example. You know, there's huge, huge bits of the ocean that we just haven't really visited. We haven't done our research there. And I can't wait to see what other ocean creatures are discovered in the next decade or so. think that's going to be another huge area of upcoming research. Well, it's obviously been discovered, but another one of those ocean creatures, the narwhal, is something that you talk about in your book as well. I mean, I had no idea that a narwhal's tusk isn't actually a tusk. So what is it instead if it's not a tusk?

Well, it's a tooth. And actually quite a lot of the big projections from animals' mouths that we think of as tusks are just teeth, large teeth that project from the mouth and I find animal teeth absolutely fascinating. There's such a wide spectrum of weird and wonderful ways that animals have adapted to chew their food and you know they have these things that have projected out of their mouth as well. I just yeah, teeth absolutely extraordinary and as I was writing the book I think I hadn't quite grasped the enormity of the range of ways that animals have adapted their teeth. but ours just seem so boring. So are elephant tasks, are they actually teeth as well?

Yes, yeah, exactly. Oh, wow, fascinating. And as you say, our teeth are really boring because I found out that beaver's teeth are orange. Can you tell us what's in them, what's making them orange, and why that is? Amazing, isn't it? They're reinforced. Obviously, beavers teeth have a really important job.

You know, they're chomping all day, and they're chomping through wood, which is pretty hard to get through. So they have these amazing, reinforced. teeth which contain iron, which is the same thing that turns our blood red. And yeah, the iron and their teeth makes their teeth look orange. And actually, this is something I've known for a while. I wrote about it. Maybe I didn't write about it, but I discovered it while writing a previous book. And prior to that, I can remember looking at them and thinking, gosh, you know, as a vet, they really need to come in for a dental, their teeth. They look absolutely awful. They're so dirty. But, no,

it's just the way they naturally look. That is crazy. And my first. And my first thing, final tooth question, I promise, but really, really interested to know. Obviously, slugs eat everything. We see the trace of slugs eating the plants all around us. How can something so squishy and that doesn't look like it has a face far as eyes on sticks for lack of more veterinarally accurate term? How does slugs teeth work? I mean, how are they managing to do that? So firstly, eyes on sticks, those sticks are actually tentacles. Tentacles, because they come from the same family, the mollusks, the same family as squid and octopuses. So tentacles out the front of its body, amazing. I mean, who knew? It's bizarre to think of slugs as so closely related to

ocean creatures like that. But secondly, teeth. So they have these amazing rings of very sharp teeth called radula. And if you were so inclined, you could make up a bit of a cabbage or a lettuce soup, so just basically mush it up until it becomes like a paste and paint it onto either a window or you could get sort of a Perspex box with clear sides, paint it on and then put a snail or a slug on there. And as they go over the glass or the plastic or the perspex chomping the cabbage lettuce soup that you've created, you can actually see the radula moving and chomping the food as they go across. So there's your homework. So Jess, what's the weirdest thing an animal eats other than cabbage soup that you put out for them.

I'm not sure anything is particularly weird to eat. What's more weird is the way animals are adapted to cope with the vast range of things that they eat. So actually, I find, you know, things like grass and leaves are pretty standard things for animals to eat, right? That doesn't seem like a particularly weird thing. There's herb of wars the world over that are gobbling leaves and grass. But there's actually not much energy in that food.

And so you have to go to great lengths to digest that kind of food. So some animals like ruminants, cows and things like that, cows sheep, they will chew their food once, swallow it, and then they'll bring it back up again, chew it again. And then they have a multi-chambered, sometimes three or four-chambered stomach, full of microbes that will digest it and break it down. They have one area that breaks it down in sort of muscular contractions, another area that has small bacteria that can break it down.

And they are basically, you know, doing the best they can to double chew to get the most they can out of this. Actually, energy poor food. And then other animals, such as rabbits, for example, they'll digest their food once. They have a ceacom, a huge ceacom where they sort of digest it as much as possible in there. But then once the poo comes out, oh, sorry, we're back to poo again, but it's fascinating. Once the poo comes out the first time, we call that a sea cacotrof, and actually there's still loads of the goodness left from the grass. And so the natural thing to do, of course, if you're a rabbit, is to eat it again.

So they eat those sea cotrophs directly from their bottoms and digest it again to make sure they get all of the goodness out of the grass. And I find that extraordinary because plant material, not a weird thing to eat at all. It's everywhere and so many herbivores do it. And yet the extreme lengths that herbivores have to go to in order to get the most out of that food and to get enough energy to survive, it's actually quite extraordinary. So we've spoken a lot about food, which is obviously one of the main reasons that animals are so well adapted to their environments. But there are many other ways that we and other creatures are well put together for our environments.

One of these is navigation. Wales obviously, we spoke before about how they move through the oceans. and birds obviously navigate across the planet. Could you talk a bit more about some of these way-finding adaptations? Yeah, absolutely. Again, we rely so heavily on our eyesight to navigate our environment and we're so used to looking with our eyes. You know, there's something in the way there

or there's a path that turns left. We rely very heavily on eyesight for navigating. But for animals, for example, that come out at night, when there's low light, nocturnal animals like bats, They rely, of course, on ultrasound, so they're sending out pings. They're using sound to navigate, and they will send out a sound, they will listen for the echoes, and they will be able to find their way through an environment entirely using sound. Cetaceans do this too. They have an incredible organ on the front of their head called a melon. That's what sort of the bulbous bit on the top of their head is, and they use that to direct pings and sounds through the ocean. And then the sounds come back. They receive them, I think, with their jawbone.

And then they can build up a picture of their surroundings using sound. So an extraordinary way of navigating a murky, dark ocean. And something again, it's so hard for us to imagine a totally different way of seeing the world and finding your way about. That's fascinating. And talking there about ultrasound and these kind of low-level frequencies that we're not accustomed to, I remember learning that cats purr as a kind of healing mechanism. Is that true? I mean, how does that work?

Absolutely. I don't think we 100% know the science behind it, but absolutely we know that the frequencies associated with the vibrations of a cat's purr are strongly associated with the healing of both bones and soft tissue. And sometimes we do use ultrasound as a tool in medicine to help with healing. and the frequency that we use for that healing is exactly the same frequency that a cat purrs at. So I don't particularly know the exact science between those vibrations healing, but I just find it amazing. And also cat purrs just so calming, aren't they?

I mean, we know that having a cat can reduce anxiety and stress, and that's probably something to do with the purring sound as well. I mean, I don't think there's much better than a cat purr. I love a cat purr. Yeah, so if you could take any animal superpower, let's include cat purrs in that because, let's face it, being able to heal bones is pretty cool. Which one would you choose? Which one's the best one out there? Oh, wow. It's a bit of a cop-out, but because so many animals do it, it's not very niche. But flight, I mean, to be able to just take off. And to be honest, if I was going to have flight and I could take it from any animals,

I'd probably go for the insect version of flight. Like I feel like there's more control. I mean, birds also, you know, they're really good, but you have to be really light, and then I'd have to have really light bones. I don't know. I think I would go for insect flight. What are some of the ways that insect flight is different from bird flight?

How are they so well adapted to taking off with their tiny little bodies? I mean, yeah, and it's a cheat, because, of course, it wouldn't work scaled up to a human, a human-sized body. But if you've ever seen a dragonfly flying through the air, I mean the control that they have, the ability to fly forwards and backwards and to hover and to dart.

I mean, I love birds, but I don't think there's any bird that can fly with such precision. And, you know, a lot of birds are often relying on thermals. And, you know, it seems so effortless when a dragonfly darts through the air. And so it's probably not even based on science. It's just based on a feeling. But that's how I would love to be able to fly.

I'd love to be able to fly like a dragon fly. Yeah, I mean, you talk there about birds. And it's sometimes looking like quite a bit of effort. I always think about albatross landings. The contrast between the amazing fact that I think their resting heart rate is lower in air than on ground. So it's more effortless for them to fly. But then when they land, it's just always this crazy crash landing that just looks so painful.

And a dragonfly, in contrast, beautiful landing. Yeah, like a helicopter. Very controlled. Amazing. Oh, and the brilliant thing also about being a dragonfly is at the beginning of their life, they're aquatic. So you'd get a bit of life underwater, you'd get to experience a bit of pond life. Then you would undergo your incredible metamorphosis and then be able to fly. Definitely, definitely, I'd be a dragonfly.

That's just sealed the deal for me. That is amazing. So, Jess, there's a whole world of oddities in the animal world out there. and we haven't even had a chance to come on to glowing rabbits and marsupials being born jelly bean size. But I was just wondering if you could share anything else, maybe from your book or from your career, that you just think people should know about that they can't walk out into the world after this podcast, not knowing that. Okay, I'm going to tell you about hagfish. Hagfish is a very bizarre fish that lives in the depths of the ocean.

Its skin is too big for it. It fits like a very loose fitting sock. It sort of slips over its whole body. And when it feels frightened, it can produce bucketfuls of slime in a split second to prevent a shark from attacking it. You see sharks come up to hagfish. They try and take a big bite out of them. And there's this moment where there's like an explosion of slime.

And the shark, I mean, sharks don't have very expressive faces. and yet I feel you can still see the disgust on these shark's mouths that this creature that they thought was going to be an absolutely delicious snack has turned into a wriggly loose-fitting sock covered in slime in their very mouths. That was Dr Jess French on her new book, The Animal Body, which is out in bookshops now. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. by the latest issue of science focus in your favourite shop or find us online at sciencefocus.com This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with, with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month

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