Ologies with Alie Ward - Malacology (SNAILS & SLUGS) with Jann Vendetti

Episode Date: July 17, 2018

Crazy dongs! Gardening tips! Snail-based beauty products! Weather the LA heatwave and slug along with Dr. Jann Vendetti of the Natural History Museum of LA County as she gossips with Alie about some sensual slug lovemaking, Gold Rush lore, urban snails, beer bingeing and why you should stop and high five (high one?) a gastropod for evolving into such an interesting critter. Also: should you adopt a rabbit-sized pet snail?Watch Dr. Vendetti on the The Curiosity ShowS.L.I.M.E project at the NHM.org"The Snail Song" ending lullaby by Maple Leaf LearningMore episode sources & linksBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey. It's your aunt's innocent work crush, Allie Ward. Back for another episode of oligies. Okay, it's time for us to come out of our spiral shells and give snails a whorl. Now this episode is a big, drippy bag of happy surprises. I have learned so much from snails and their origin stories, their adaptability, their non-binary outlook on life. It's inspiring. I think I love them even more now. I really love snails. But first, and I'm going to say this quickly, thank you to all the patrons making the podcast happen and letting me keep it ad-free since the start on purpose so far. Patreon.com slash oligies is where you can submit your questions to oligists before I even record episodes. Also, if you want to support by having

oligies swag on your actual physical body, you can go to oligiesmerge.com. And through July, I'm having a summer sale on everything in the shop, 10% off. So browse, load up, buy some gifts, hoard some things for doomsday. The code at checkout is camp oligies. Also, thank you to everyone who rates and reviews and subscribes, keeping oligies up in the science charts so other people can find it. Now, if you listen regularly, you know Uncle Allie creeps your reviews and to prove it, I read one aloud each week. And y'all, I got my first shitty review. Two stars. I mean, it was better than one, but someone called it acute commentary track on science subjects with the occasional interesting question thrown in and didn't like that I had

asides on tangents like about rap music. So, okay, that's fine. And no, I won't stop. But thank you to all of you who always leave nice reviews like Nick Silverfangirl said that oligies is like if PBS allowed swearing. And I'm like, nice. And don't worry, I swear a lot more later. So, on to malacology, the study of mollusks. Malacology comes from the Greek word. Ready for this for soft animal. And it deals with mollusks ranging from snails and slugs and bivalves. Octopuses are so many mollusks. Malacology really is an umbrella term that covers so many. But there are subsets like the amazing toothology. There's an episode on that about squid. It's great. She's great. Now, there isn't a specific snail ology. Limecology is a study of slugs. Slugs get their own

ology, but snails don't get their own. So, for this episode, which is just a carnival of slug and snail facts, we're going to go with the curator's title of malacologist. Now, this ologist is just wonderfully charming. She's informative and passionate and frank. I was so excited to head to the Museum of Natural History in LA to hang out in her office, setting my iced latte down on a coffee table that turned out to be a slab of fossils and shells in rock millions of years old. And when she told me, I was like, and I asked if I should use a coaster, and she said very dryly, it survived a long time through a lot worse. I mean, she's got a point. So, I love the NHM in LA and volunteering there 100% changed my life. So, I'm thrilled every time

I get to walk into the marble foyer and see everyone in vests and badges and kids running around and people looking at dioramas. It's one of my favorite places. So, I got up early and I wore something comfortable but cute, and I made extra sure to be there on time, but there was one issue. Today, the forecast is 111 degrees. I'm walking three blocks from the parking garage to the museum, and I had to rest under a tree halfway there. I'm going to die. What if this is how I die? I die walking three blocks in LA to go interview a snail expert. If that's how I go, that's how I go. So, spoiler, I lived, but we got to her office and I had to decide whether to weather the weather or just keep the AC going. So, we turned it off for

sonic reasons and we made it through, but what resulted was a truly wonderful discourse about the most shocking and erotic mating rituals I have heard in quite some time. There's gardening tips, evolutionary puzzles, there's some gold rush lore, snail slime as a beauty mucus. By the way, in line with the Rhinology episode, mucus is one word I can't deal with. So, all the F words are kept in, but I'm bleeping out the M word. That's just, that's what I do. Plus, I had a grapple with your desire for a giant pest snail. So, get ready to slug around with snail expert and malacologist, Dr. Jan Vendetti. I feel like we might actually die, because I don't want to have to call a corner in the middle of this interview, for either one of us. I don't want my ghost to call the corner.

It's so, it's the hottest day. And there is no camera, so it doesn't matter where I'm sitting and what I look like and what I'm doing. Yeah, you could be, you could not even be wearing shoes or pants right now, no one would care. I oftentimes record my narration just for all of us. So, it's the best thing about podcasts. So, Jan has worked as the malacology and invertebrate paleontology collections curator at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County for three years. And I like to picture her behind the scenes as the malacology queen wearing like a stiff brown circular cape and a crown with bejeweled eye stocks. But she was just down to earth and khakis in a gray shirt. Like, imagine if Anna Kendrick were playing a really cool ass museum scientist. Now, before she landed in L.A., Jan got a bachelors in biology and geology and a PhD in integrative biology at Berkeley. Before making a glistening path into the garden of professional malacology. Sure. So I did my bachelor's degree at Colgate University in upstate New York. And that I double majored in biology and geology. So that gave me a lot of crossover with paleobiology, which is what I was very much interested in. So ecosystems, mostly marine ecosystems from the past and today. Normally, paleontology is with rocks, right? So the organization goes dead things in rocks go with rocks, not with the things that are dead in them. So they don't go into a biology department, even though you're studying the biology of these things that are dead often. So I was interested in paleontology from a more bio biology perspective, a more paleobiology perspective. So UC Berkeley was the only place that had paleontology that was being studied by people who trained as biologists. Cool. So anyway, so I went there. Got my PhD there in integrative biology and then came down to Los Angeles to do a postdoc in sea slug phylogenetics. So sea slugs and their relationships

to each other. I mean, as one does. And then, of course, came the job at the museum here in blistering, hot, scorching LA. So I stayed in LA. And so now I'm in LA. Now you're here. And if all goes well, I will stay here, which is, which is a surprise because I never thought I'd be in Los Angeles. When you think about LA, it seems so arid. It's, it's amazing. We even have snails. Right. Originally, I studied marine gastropods. But then the museum, this museum had a real push for community science or citizen science in mostly terrestrial biology. So animals that are living on land. So that shifted my research focus to terrestrial gastropods, which are mostly, which are slugs and snails. And mostly the species living in urban environments, which almost nobody's done any work on. Right. I saw that on, I saw that on the website. I was like, you deal in urban malachology, which is like so badass. Like, I love that there's like city snails on like fixed gear bikes and buy six dollar coffees. Right. They're never going to buy their houses because they spend all their money on avocado toasts. Yeah. So the, so no, almost nobody studied them. And there's this interesting phenomenon called synanthropy or synanthropy, synanthropy, synanthropy, something can be synanthropic, which means that it lives with, it lives near or in or because of human habitation. So human disturbance of an environment mix is good for these species. Right. So yeah, some species actually benefit when big stupid naked apes have gone in and torn up the land to make houses and lawns and golf courses, because there are resources that wouldn't otherwise be there. If you feel that they will come and hang out on your hands. So it's like, this is sort of the tale of, of invasive or introduced species, which aren't necessarily the same thing. But if you haven't a species that is living somewhere that it did not evolve, often those are taxa that are really good at living in multiple

different places. So they're very generalist or like generalist feeders, or they're just very good at living somewhere that wasn't exactly the environment where they evolve. And so that's, if you find a slug in Los Angeles, nine times out of 10, it is not from here. Of course not. Cause we don't, the lawns aren't natural here. We're a scrub brush. Like what are the snails going to do here? But they're like, ooh, look at this lawn in Beverly Hills. So they do really, yeah. So there's a bunch of snails to that. So we've been documenting introduced taxa, which like I said, almost nobody's been documenting USDA cares about that for reasons that we should think of as sort of obvious, given the amount of produce that comes from California. And if some of these invasive or introduced snails were to get into the Central Valley, that would become a big problem for various exports of or domestic and international. And there's some snails and slugs that are harbors of or vectors for diseases. So things that we care about from sort of a pragmatic perspective, but then also from an, an evolutionary biologists perspective, it's interesting to me how these animals, whatever they are, are living in places that they didn't evolve. So how are they interacting with the rest of the environment? Who's eating them? Who are they eating? Do they have any life history changes compared to the population that they came from? So what, what effects are there of something called genetic drift? For more on genetic drift, which is kind of like rolling a 20 sided die in terms of DNA, listen to the evolutionary biology episode and then go out and say to a snail, Hey, dude, you made it. It's crazy.

So all sorts of fun things that we can ask once we sort of know who the players are and where they are. And so that's still where we are now trying to figure out which species live here and where. And my first question is why snails? Why at all? Why? Why gastropods? Why anybody? But no, like in you, like, at what point were you like? These are the, this is the group for me.

Yes, like, because they're so cool. But yeah, they're like, yeah, I'm going to be a malacologist. It's happening. Right. Well, for any young person who's looking to become a malacologist, they should know that there are no malacology programs in the US or really anywhere as far as I know. So yeah, so it's not a, it's not a path that has been tread by by future ancestral generations of scientists. So you got to make your own slime trail future malacologists, because instead of there being programs about mollusks specifically, you kind of come at it from the side, like a side door, like, hello, when did you get here? How did I become that?

Because there was no program to study it specifically, I took courses in invertebrates, right? So paleontological focused courses. It's sort of just so happened that I ended up working with somebody who did sea slugs because they were totally awesome. So I wanted to do sea slugs. And that was also a mollusk. I thought maybe gastropods would have like a crappy fossil record because they're squishy as hell. But duh, I mean, I forgot a lot of them have shells, which big news here, not squishy. That's a whole goddamn point of a shell.

They're squishless. Also, now the way that some shells are perfectly coiled is because of math and because lopsided protein production when building their shells causes them to coil up. When one side of something is shorter than the other, it tends to twist and turn like that. But back to the shell fossil record. So they can tell you a lot about trends in evolution and rates of change and things like that, because there are lots of them. Where it's harder to do that with, say, dinosaurs, because they're, although they're much more charismatic in people's minds, right? And much more compelling in as skeletons, they're, they can be somewhat data poor in giving you lots of, there aren't that many of them. So the data points are fewer, whereas snails, you have and clams and things.

You've got millions and millions of data points in the fossil record. Right. Everyone that lives and dies is like, boop, here's Michelle. Yep. Have a look at it later. I'm going to go die, but find that later. Have a look at it. Now, did you love snails and slugs as a kid? I liked intertidal, I like tide pools as a kid.

So I spent a lot of time in tide pools, invertebrates. So I could just sit in a tide pool and that was what I was interested in. And I just stayed interested in that. So you did not grow up in like Nebraska? No, I grew up in New Jersey, but no, not really. They have the shore. I'm going to Jersey Shore, bitch. But OK, sorry, let's get to snails.

Now, so let's get to the most obvious question. And one million patrons asked this question. So I'm just going to condense it into one of my first. What is the difference between a snail and a slug? What is the difference? A snail and a slug clearly one as a shell. They're both gastropods. That's right.

Which means that they have a foot on their stomach, right? In Latin, they're belly footers kind of, right? Yes. I mean, that's that's what the term means. What's the difference between snails and slugs? Yeah, I know that seems like an obvious question. It's a good question. OK. So I get asked that question a lot and people often think or I've encountered people who thought that slugs are just snails that have kind of cast off their shell.

Like I'm done with this shell and now I'll be a slug. So like it's a goth phase. That's not how it works. I'm so sorry for the screaming that just totally that threw me because it's so cute. But I love the idea that slugs maybe go through like a break up and then just ditch their shells like people cut bangs. They have. So I've explained that that snails and slugs are both like you said,

gastropods, but there's lineages, multiple places, multiple times. So a slug is just the name for a snail whose shell is either absent or so small that the snail cannot retract into it fully. So there are things called semi slugs that have like little almost like vestigial shells, like this little dinky shell on it that it can't do anything with. I like to picture this type of shell as a tiny nonfunctional hat, like one worn at a steampunk Edwardian ball or like a Jean-Paul Gaultier runway show or a royal wedding.

And it turns out that tiny nonfunctional hats have a name. They're literally called fascinators, which, by the by, comes from the Latin word for to cast a spell on, which comes from an earlier word for a dick shaped amulet worn to do witchcraft. So semi slugs just slugging around in bewitching, tiny hats like what's this? Oh, yes, evolutionary biology is my millner. And this took several million years to craft. It's just still there.

Others have an internal shell, which is like a little disc that sometimes you can even see when you're looking down at a sort of semi translucent slug, which we have in Los Angeles from Europe. You can see like a little disc sort of in the middle of its body, and that's its tiny little remnant shell. So they so snails and slugs are both gastropods snails. Obviously what we usually call snails have shells. Slugs have a remnant shell or have completely lost their shell,

but they can't regain it like during their life and they have never lost it during their life. They were born that way. And so are slugs more evolved in some ways than snails? Because they over generations and generations are like, I don't even need the shell. Right. No, I'd say that it's not not more evolved, just differently evolved. I mean, it's hard to say more or less, right? Because everything is always evolving, like every lineage is always evolving.

Some gastropods have extremely elaborate denticles or you could call them teeth that are at the margin of their aperture. So the opening of the shell, which makes their bodies able to get out, but very difficult for other things to get in. So next time you see those insane tire knife strips near like the exit of a rental car place, just think a snail is that hardcore. They will shred you. And so one might argue that that is a highly evolved trait

that is an anti predator trait or series of traits. And slugs will evolve toxins on their body that make them unpalatable. Right. Because if you imagine a slug has nothing to. It's just slugging along. And it's just clearly something that something could just eat. Right. But like a banana slug, for example, since we're in California, like banana slugs have all kinds of compounds on their bodies.

And that has all sorts of chemicals in it that make them highly unpalatable to predators. Oh, slugs turning birds everywhere into feathery Gordon Ramsey's. Jesus, my soul is hideous. That is fucking disgusting. That's why they can do slime around without anything eating them. They could slime around. I love that. That's a verb.

And I imagine also that might have that yellow color might be a warning sign. It might. Yeah. I mean, some of them are brown. So it seems like some of them are using color for camouflage, but some of them are bright, which, yeah, might be like warning colorations and don't eat me. I'm disgusting. But there are people who have their whole research program is banana slugs because they're really weird and fascinating.

So side note, I got thirsty for some weird banana slug facts. Like maybe they like the sound of whistling or they're all Sagittarius's. But what did I find that their scientific name means big penis and their members can be the length of their entire body sprouting from their heads and they can jump off another's penis. Like, OK, you cool. You done with that? So boy, howdy. This really this convo is about to take a turn.

I can tell you the weirdest thing about slugs in general. They have highly, highly elaborate reproductive morphology. That was one of my first questions, which which is, I mean, to be like very specific about that, they have giant elaborate penises. I mean, that's what they've got. One of my first questions. My first question is why, why, why snails? My second question is.

Love making. All snails and slugs, terrestrial, almost all the very vast majority. I have both reproductive male and female reproductive parts. So we call that hermaphroditic and they when they mate, they simultaneously will simultaneously impregnate each other, which means that their giant penises or however, not always giant, but they they can have very elaborate reproductive systems, specifically penises to sort of get the job done.

And then they both leave that mating counter and go off and lay eggs, fertilized eggs. So it's a very efficient system, right? You don't have one sex that cannot lay eggs. Both sexes can do both things. It's very efficient. And for a lot of reasons, they've evolved these like very elaborate reproductive, I mean, even it's even called courtship. Like they'll different species will follow each other around in very

stereotypical ways and like touch each other and then like slime around each other. Yeah. And this is something that is somewhat new to me because I did. It's not what I originally studied, but I've become I have studied it since working here. It's fascinating and strange and wonderful. And if you wanted to find the best video ever, if there can be such a thing, David Attenborough narrating leopard slug, leopard slug sex, Lime Maximus. Lime Maximus is the species. It's called the leopard slug. More like climax, Maximus.

Oh, yeah. I was looking all this up in a Chicago coffee shop this week and I had to like angle my laptop screen because technically I was watching Slug porn in public and I won't lie, it was very sensual. Here's how it works. So one slug is DTF and leaves a saucy little trail of pheromones and another slug smells it and is like, hey, what up, baby? The pursuer to confirm that it's there and ready to mate gives the pursued a nibble.

The pair climbs a tree and then they wrap themselves around each other and they descend on a cord of thick slime that kind of drop down and hang like a Moroccan lantern at a bohemian styled Airbnb. Yes, they'll sort of intertwine themselves and make sticky and then slide down a string from a tree and wind themselves around each other and then extend their giant penises that intertwine with each other and are blue and translucent and it is wild. They fan out to form a translucent flower like globe.

And now and last sperm passes from one slug to the other. And David Attenborough does a very David Attenborough job of of describing this incredible phenomenon with like warm objectivity. Yes, yes. It sounds like if you went to electric Daisy Carnival and you had a really wicked hallucination, blue penises. And yeah, yeah, they're a yeah, they do all sorts of weird stuff. Why do they have such monster dongs?

Well, there is there's probably a better answer than I can give. But the answer that I can give, which sort of partially answers that question, is that species differences are what your your reproductive parts look like, which are on the inside most of the time. So when there's reproductive isolation, so when one group becomes isolated and then over time they accumulate differences that then make them different enough so that if they were to ever encounter that other species, they wouldn't be able to mate there for whatever reason,

their reproductive morphology evolves quickly, relatively quickly, more quickly than their body structure on the surface. If you look at what looks like one species, right, it's a black slug with an orange foot, all right, that it can look that way. And there can be a whole bunch of species that look the same way, but inside their reproductive morphology or their penis morphology is very different. So that means that they are now reproductively isolated from each other that keeps them reproductively isolated or as one distinct species

from these other species. That makes sense. That doesn't exactly answer your question. It doesn't exactly answer why. So slugs, tiny shell or no shell, but big dick energy for days, probably because you don't have the expense of making a shell. I really don't know. And now let's talk a little bit about anyone can get pregnant that it's just a knocked up free for all.

Why don't we have that in other species, please? Yeah, one to answer the first part, why are more organisms not hermaphroditic or have both male and female reproductive parts? Part of it is that there is an advantage, but a bigger disadvantage to self fertilize. So sometimes if you have both parts, you can fertilize yourself. Oh, my God, that's so narcissistic, right?

So then you can make you can make offspring that you are. You were both a mother and the father. They're not clones, but they are your offspring with no partner, right? So that can be problematic because you don't get variations. The scientific consensus generally is that if you are self fertilizing, that's not a great system in the long run for genetic diversity. And when environments change, you always need genetic diversity. Otherwise, your lineage will just go extinct.

The more genetically diverse, not in all situations, but in most, the more genetically diverse you are as a population within a species, the better you are essentially equipped to handle environmental change, right? So if things change, some individuals, your environment changes, some individuals in that group will be able to survive and then have offspring, right? So that's usually a good thing. So diversity helps make populations stronger. And if certain political powers were as intelligent as slugs,

they could comprehend this. And why not more hermaphroditic? It's just possible that it didn't evolve in some groups. And the groups that it did evolve in, sometimes it continues. It seems like sometimes hermaphroditic reproductive systems continue to be how that system evolves or that species evolves. But anytime you have any mutation that changes, that that knocks out either the female or male reproductive system, then you have one.

And then that could be after that, you're on the road to separate sexes. It could be that having separate sexes is good. It's possible that you get more variation when you have males. Possibly. And that's usually one of the sort of the go to explanations that males are. Like I give a lecture in an evolutionary biology course that is called why males. And that's for the purposes of the course.

The reason we have that lecture is because why would you ever have a sex that does not have eggs? Do you know what I mean? From an evolutionary perspective, why would you ever have a sex that can't lay eggs? No, that's funny that it's like males. What's the point? Right. So we need someone to explain.

That's right. Yeah. So from an evolutionary perspective, they're the reason that the the answer is that males provide genetic differentiation. They provide variation to the population, whereas females do too. But having males just be males. There's all sorts of then dynamics that can happen if you have males that don't. Males as males, which by definition cannot. Right. Procreate with eggs.

I mean, I guess males are just like a genetic storehouse. So yeah, like a gamete confetti gun. Yeah, you know, just get it out there. Yeah, that's I mean, that's one way to think of it. Yeah. And meanwhile, here we are toiling internally. Like I made one baby. Yes. I mean, that yeah. And that's a whole yeah, that's a very interesting.

Yeah, that's very interesting. Like males and the number of offspring a male can have versus a female, which is totally different if you're hermaphroditic, right, which is totally different, yeah, because it's much more egalitarian, sort of by definition. If you're hermaphroditic and you're a slug, because there is no light. There are no separate sexes. Everybody's everybody's reproductively the same. It sounds like socialism is the best form.

Now, let's bone up on details about the gaslighty romance of snail love making. One is in land snails and they have these structures. Not all land snails have them, but the ones that do have structures called love darts. Have you heard about this? No. OK, so so our common European garden snail, which is I call it the wet sidewalk snail, like if it rains, when it rains in Los Angeles on a sidewalk, you'll see a snail. And it's probably 99 percent of the time if you live in urban,

suburban parts of Los Angeles or Southern California, it'll be this snail. It's a European snail. It's just like a brown, brownish, light brown, dark brown, modeled sort of shell. It just looks very like boring. It just looks like a snail. And it's a helix. What is it? It's right. It used to be helix aspera.

Now it's cornu aspera. They changed this to the genus name a while ago. Really? Yeah, but that's not uncommon. Yes, that's the snail. So so that snail and others, when as they're mating, they can deploy a dart and and it's it's a calcareous or tightness. Like if you imagine a cornu aspera,

some of the common European garden snails about the size of like a half dollar, like a like one and a half times the size of a quarter in size. It's shooting a dart. The dart is probably like the length of your middle finger nail. OK, so it's it's not it's not microscopic. It's a macroscopic and they'll shoot that at each other. Sometimes to the detriment of the other snail and sometimes killing the other snail, which is not that's not the intent of it.

But what it does is it it influences the body, I think, hormonally. So I think it's this dart that's got a lot of hormone laid in around it and it influences the the receiving snail, the snail that gets the dart to impregnate its eggs with the sperm using the sperm of or fertilize its eggs using the sperm of the dart giving individual. So for obvious reasons, many scholars believe that the lore of matchmaking Cupid was based on these very love darts of our horny snail friends.

So the individual that gets the dart is more likely to digest in its body and he left over sperm it had from a recent boning. Now, can you imagine if Cupid had stayed like a little more true to form and instead of being a silky skinned human infant was actually a snail just somehow using its big slick foot to perform some really well intentioned, endearingly cock blocky archery. So the dart is like a dibs like it's almost like an aphrodisiac where they're like, I don't care about all the other sperm.

I got this is the one I'm into. That's right. It's like a it's like soul mates like a soul mate arrow. Yeah. So it's called a love dart. I mean, it's kind of an aptly named. Yeah. Is there is there oxytocin at play or does that even happen? I don't know. It's got it's a hormone. I don't know what hormones, though, and someone does someone knows about snail hormones. I do not.

So apparently the slick goo covering this little love spear has an alohormone, which is a substance that causes the female reproductive organs to not digest the dart tosser's sperm and to also keep the reproductive tract open. So it's essentially like a stabby message meant to convey, hey, I'm going to be your baby's dad in a minute. Let's put a pin in this. In terrestrial snails, slugs don't seem to do that. As far as I know, snails, a bunch of snails in the helicids,

the helicid snails will do it. And in sea slugs, there are a bunch of different species. I know of in the Sacaglassa, which are the they're the sap sucking slugs. There's sea slugs that some of them can incorporate chloroplasts from the algae that they eat and put it in their body, where it continues to photosynthesize. What that makes them one of the. Well, if not the only photosynthetic animal, right?

It's not endogenous, right? It's not that they are they've evolved photosynthesis, but they can use something that's photosynthetic. They're taking a chloroplast, right? The photosynthetic machinery of an alga and taking just that organelle and putting it in their body, which is really wild. That's resourceful as well. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So they can some of those species and other ones related to them

that don't necessarily have the ability to what's called kleptoplasty. They can't grab chloroplasts and keep them kleptoplasty. I will never not relate these sea slugs to shoplifters tucking chloroplast organelles into their pants. But in that group, Sacaglassa, they can they have a penis with a little barb on it, like a little it's called a stylet, like a little sword ending. No, thank you. And they can go around and they're homophroditic, right?

So every anyone who's acting as a male at that moment, which is anything any time you use your penis, you can poke or stab, you can stab a potential partner and inseminate them that way. So it's called hypodermic insemination. Oh, my God. Which is exactly what it sounds like. But every individual is able to do that. Hypodermic hypodermic, because it's like a. Yeah.

Like hypodermic insemination. That's like a whole new play on needle dick insoles because you're like, no, for real, though. Oh, my God. So are you ever at cocktail parties and someone's like, Hey, Jan, this conversation is boring. Get over here. I my I have two little kids, so I'm rarely at cocktail parties. But my postdoc advisor has been at cocktail parties and started telling the hypodermic insemination story,

which, as you might imagine, really gets a lot of interest. OK, moving on from slug dicks. So many people have this question. Can you give me in a nutshell the difference between terrestrial and aquatic snails and slugs? What's the deal? Why can some of them hang out on land? Yeah, right. So so terrestrial means lives on land.

And obviously, aquatic means lives in freshwater or if it's the ocean, we would normally call it marine. And then from the marine realm, different lineages have evolved. Most of them, like it was a big introduction once or a big evolutionary innovation that one lineage evolved to be terrestrial. And then once they were terrestrial, they really sort of exploded in diversity. So there's a bunch of different pathways that they've they've taken to kind of you could call it invade these different ecosystems.

And it's considered one of the biggest evolutionary innovations in the evolution of animals is and doesn't seem like it, because not that many people think or talk about gastropods. But gastropods evolving or snails evolving from the ocean to the land is considered one of the biggest evolutionary innovations in history of life. Because it's so hard to do. Yeah, I mean, your whole your physiology has to accommodate oxygen instead and air instead of water, which is a big, big difference.

Can you imagine if it just the air just had floating jellyfish in it? Just like puffing by flying. And it was like nothing like that jellyfish in the face. Now, what is it about terrestrial snails and slugs? Is it like a BYOM, like bring your own on land and then just like cover yourself in a moisture layer and you're good to go? That lets them to survive when it went in like arid conditions at all. So if you have a shell and you're a marine, then you have something

you can pull into and keep yourself safe and from drying out. So it's like it had two different functions. If the first function in the marine realm or where they're living in the ocean was for protection, its secondary function was as a to prevent desiccation. Right. Whether it was necessary for that organism when it first evolved or not. So that allowed them. This is why we call it preadapt, which, like I said, has some kind

of problematic implications. But but the idea is that they had this trade already and that trade ended up having a really important secondary function that allowed them to make this big transition onto land. Right. So if you have a shell, your shell can be where you you pull into and keep yourself from drying out. So that's what they do.

So so that's one of the reasons that that big evolutionary innovation could happen in the first place. That makes sense. But for slugs, they obviously don't have that. So you mostly see slugs in wet environments, which is why you see banana slugs in parts of the the greater Bay Area, because you've got lots of wet, foggy redwood forests where they get a lot of moisture all the time just from the air.

Right. So you have very few there are very few only probably two or three species of native slug in all of Southern California. And it's because it's dry. So you just don't find them. You only find them in little tiny habitats that are probably refuge habitats that are still wetter than on the tops of mountains and places where during the Pleistocene, there used to be a lot more water that

they're these little relics of when it used to be much wetter. Now, let's debunk some flim flam. Is are there any myths about snails or slugs that you're like, that is not the case, people? What? Um, I don't know if I'd say now that I could think of, but there used to be quite a lot of snails and slugs used convergently by different native peoples of different lands for medicinal purposes.

So people from like the Puritans, which were not native to North America, but the Puritans and Native Americans in, say, the the American West would use snails and slugs to cure things, cure like sore throats or problems, other problems that were probably physical ailments. OK, like you got a sore stick snail on it. Yeah, which is interesting and that's happened around the world. And there are some, there is some research now. This is sort of like when folk wisdom ends up having, there is some truth to it,

right? Like ethnobotany, like a lot of ethnobotany, like what do people think plants do? Like plants are full of chemicals. So yes, they do do things. And sometimes people often people have figured out how to use plants to do things medicinally. So there is some research now that slug and snail slime is can be healing for human skin in various ways. Right. Yeah.

And I because that is one of the most asked questions from Patreon is is snail goop really good for your skin? Right. Matt Clement, Lauren Egert Crow, Kabar Lee. Yep. So there's a lot of South Korea has a has a lot of snail slime products. A lot of Southeast Asia has a lot of snail slime products for yes, for everything from like curing acne scars to just general beautification. So side note, a quick Google opens the doors into the world of gleaming

slime streaks and glistening promises of self repair and faded acne scars and hydrated under eye bags. If you're up for it, there is a procedure called Escarglo that involves thousands of tiny needle pricks into your face, followed by snail foot secretions oozed into your open wounds. It costs three hundred and seventy five dollars a session, partly because we'll pay for anything, apparently, and partly because the snails are meticulously cared for and receive daily showers with fresh water and a

feast of fresh fruits and vegetables. So by the by, stay tuned for an episode on Callology, which is the study of human beauty standards and how they affect our psychology. I just recorded it this past week in Chicago. It's fascinating. It's also enraging. So more on that in a few weeks. Anywho, this snail musin may possibly be effective at hydrating, but.

And I did spend some time looking at the patents of some of these. So I am not a, I'm not a biochemist, and this is more a biochemistry question, but there does seem like there is, there could be some benefit to putting something that is water rich on your skin, right? But I don't know how that would be very different than like aloe or anything else that is like an emollient, right? Like something that has a lot of water in it or keeps water in your skin. That's generally going to make your skin look better.

So I don't, I don't really have an answer. It, it, it does look like there is some promising research that slug or mostly snail slime can improve your skin. Is it snake? It's funny though, because we talk about snake oil, but literally now if someone were like snail slime. Yeah, someone now would be like, well, I could see how snake oil could be. Right.

That's like a sheet mask and people would be like, awesome. It's part of a 10 step skincare system. I think that, I think that the problem is, well, it's not safe to just put snails on your face because they can host parasites. And I don't think that, that I think that the ick factors a little too much for most people, even if they were clean snails. So that's sort of, that's one thing. But then two, for a lot of the face masks and creams, there is no regulated.

I mean, this is the thing with like what they call pharmaceuticals, right? There, there is no regulated amount that you have to have in a product to say that it is going to be effective, but they do it with the snail that is the Los Angeles wet sidewalk snail. That's really? Yep. So the patent says, and you can look up, there's multiple patents, one of the patents has a very detailed explanation of basically

a salad spinner and the cornuous spursum, which is the species we're talking about is given various. I mean, if you look on the, on the labels of some of these products, it will say all these exotic names like Chilean earth snail, like black something. Like there's, there are, nobody is really using cornuous spursum or sometimes they are, but they'll, I think it, it maybe ups the, the, the buy-in of people. If you call it something that sounds extremely exotic, not the snail that's literally outside right now eating my pumpkin patch.

Like those snails are the snails they're talking about. And what they did was they put a bunch of them into a salad spinner and the agitation caused the snails to produce a bunch of as a probably protective measure. I mean, if they're in, I imagine that that's not something that evolution is really put a big mark on for snails because they're usually not being spun around. Right. So, so some, but you know, to protect themselves in some way, they, they produce a bunch of and then that is collected and filtered somehow and then added to

these products. And then they do, they did test it on in some various number of ways to see if it did seem to improve cell repair and things like that. So if you're looking for like a less snaily, less expensive hack, check out something else with hyaluronic acid, which if you remember from the glycobiology episode about carbs, hyaluronic acid is just a sugar that can hold up to a thousand times its weight in water. And there's a lot of it in snail slime because they got a bit of gliding to do.

So this next part is crazy. I didn't know this at all. So what is snail slime? It's mostly water. It's mostly water and it is a one way of describing it is as a liquid crystal. And this is outside my realm of expertise, but there's ways that it can be sticky and fluid very quickly and move from sticky to flu, to semi fluid. And that the ability to do that can put you in a category as a biological

product called a liquid crystal. PS liquid crystal means that the molecules follow orderly patterns like a solid, but it flows like a liquid. So another liquid crystal, soapy water. Who knew? Not me. And it just helps for mostly mobility and protection. Yeah, that's right.

So you can, as a snail or a slug, you could make multiple kinds of slime for various purposes, right? So your moving slime would be different than your protection slime, right? So the cells on your foot would make slippery slimes. You could move around or very sticky slime to stick you to something. And then your body, right? The dorsal part of your body would make maybe chemical rich, protective, unpalatable slime. It seems like risky to have essentially a trail of breadcrumbs leading to your location.

Like, hey, everyone, here is an actual map to find out where I'm hiding. So there's, yes, it does. That there's sort of maybe I could think of two reasons why that would be a good thing. One, it might advertise the chemicals that are in you. That would be so you could have anti predator slime in your foot slime, too. That says predator. This I smell disgusting or I smell extremely unpalatable or something, right? That makes them, but not all slugs are unpalatable.

Like raccoons and skunks have a field day. So some of them aren't. So I just watched a video of a raccoon eating slugs like they were a bag of stretchy, gummy candy, and it was imagery that will stay with me for life. Don't watch it. Also, side note, don't eat any raw stales or slugs because they may carry rat lung worm, which is a worm that burrows into your brain and can kill you. So serious illnesses have happened in a few countries and even in the Southern

United States, mostly in boys and young men who have been dared by friends to eat a raw slug or snail. So please don't do that. Cook them if you have to. So just like in case the taste wasn't enough to not make you want to gnaw on alive mollusks, there's the rat lung worm. And it also can tell, so if you're a snail or a slug, you might have trouble finding a mate and your slime trail may be a path to you from somebody else

who would be your potential mate. So it's like your breadcrumb trail. That's your romantic breadcrumb trail. Here I am because it's there and they have eyes on the top of tiny little eye stalks. They probably are not seeing very, very well. They're probably all influenced. Most of their senses are probably pheromones.

So what pheromones do they have? Do other snails have? And how do they, you know, navigate and find each other? Which is sometimes if you're a snail or a slug, sometimes the only time you can find someone to mate with is when it rains. Oh, right. If you think of an environment where they're estivating or they're in like snail hibernation for a while or they're underground in their slugs and they

come out at night and then they want to find somebody to mate with, they have to, they have to find them probably using these little pheromone trails. And let's talk about their Martian googly eyes because like it's so weird. I feel like we're so used to it. But it's like, yeah, weird. You have two sticks that grow out of your head from moment to moment. What the hell's going on? And they can also pull them into their head and then pop them back out.

And marine snails, most marine snails don't have that. Most marine snails, their eyes are on their face. OK. And then they have little sticking things that are sort of like their sensory tentacles. Right. But they don't have eyes on the end of them. Right. So if you ever see like cartoons, like it's easy to tell who knows their snail

biology by a cartoon because terrestrial snails almost always have two sets, an upper optical set of tentacles and a lower sensory set of tentacles. And marine snails almost always have at least one set of tentacles that have no eyes on the top. They're on their on their face, if you will, on their head. And how are these terrestrial eye stocks even working? And also, side note, don't they have crazy tongues? Yes. Yes, they do.

Yes, they do. Right. So the eye is on a muscle. And if you if you were to look at a snail and you were to poke at its eye stock, it'll pull its eye in, but its eye is dependent of its eye stock. So we can pull its eye in on a muscle first before the rest of the stock. Right. So it's like having a foot in a sock. Like you could pull your foot out of your sock and your sock is still there. So you so they can do that.

But hey, kiddos, don't poke snail eyes. OK. All right. So they have, I think, an image forming eye, but there's no reason to think that they're making a lot of sense out of what they're seeing. What about the rear tongues? Yeah, the rear tongues. So their tongues are called radula or one radula to radially. And I tell people it's like it's like a cat tongue.

So if you imagine if you have ever been licked by a cat, right, it's like that really rough tongue. So their radula is like a cat tongue and all of those little the bit that makes it extremely effective is our little like teeth, little teeth with it on the tongue. So it's like a strip that moves in and out and the the mouth kind of shoots it out and scrapes and pulls it back in and shoots it out and scrapes and pulls it back in. So a snail tongue is made up of hundreds to thousands of tiny little teeth.

That have different shapes and sizes, depending on the species. So if you watch a video of a snail licking glass, it's like a tiny, wet, sarlacc pit from the 1983 version of Return to the Jedi. It's just like a hole lined with teeth. It's a miniature nightmare. Now, on the topic of arid horrors, what happens when a snail gets dry? You had mentioned hibernation and I got this question, I feel like before, I even knew I was doing this episode, but why can they sometimes just hang out,

sealed off in their shelf for like months? Right. Well, that's one of the reasons that they're good at the snails that can do that are good at living in environments where they didn't evolve and that can be very hot and dry, that they survive because they can do that very thing. It's called estivation, so it's hibernation, essentially. And so they find a spot and they can put out a special. That will stick their shell to a surface.

So like the side of a house and then they can pull their body back in and make another layer that covers their body and has a little hole as an air hole. Oh my God. And then they can sit there and wait. I have one estimating, like I'm looking at it right now. It's sitting over there. I can show you. Yes, I see it in a jar.

It's just like gone fishing. I love that you just have a jar with a snail in it. How long has it been kicking it? These have been here for a couple of weeks. I gave them water. They're just yeah, sure. I'll baby talk a gastropod. So what?

So a snail seals itself into its shell during hot or dry periods, kind of like how you would barricade yourself indoors during the summer in Arizona. And there's like a tiny little hole and they're sealed off slime wall, kind of like a mail slot through which you would accept air or pizzas, even though snails are fasting. So they estimate for weeks to months, days to weeks to months, and they don't get hungry. Well, I guess when they do, I mean, if they if they have no resources, they

would just die eventually, right? They would just drown and die. But once they have rain, then they'll find each other and mate and find something to eat and then go back to estimating. So it's like they're, I guess, once they have enough resources, they'll just go to sleep and like they'll slow down their metabolism and stay like that for. Yeah, they can stay like that for a really long time, which also extends their their lives.

Like people have asked how long do they live? And I said, I, they could live for five plus years. I think so, because most of their, especially if a lot of their life is just estimating, right? So they're not doing anything. They're just waiting so they can kind of extend their lives and also live in a place that's really dry. So like snail's pace is kind of legit there.

Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel about the term snail's pace and how do you feel about the term snail male snail male? I don't really care. Yeah, it's all right. Yeah. Do you feel like as a malecologist who studies snails, people expect you to

get things back to them slower, just on a subconscious level? I would, I wish that that were the case. That's like, that would be great if that were the case, because that's kind of how I operate. So, you know what I mean, if it were that it was, um, that the expectation would be that it was slower, that would be a good thing. There have to be people who study cheetahs and people are disappointed that they don't return emails faster, just subconsciously.

You know what I mean? That's right. Can I hit you with some Patreon questions? Yeah. Okay. Sure. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show.

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sure where to go, those are all picked by oligists who work in those fields. And this ad break allows us to give a ton of money to them. So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. Okay. Your questions. This is a rapid fire round. You can answer as fast as you want. Sarah Preston, great question.

A few people asked this, where do all the shells come from? Are they making them? Are they finding them? What the shells going on? They're making, yeah, they're making them. So I, I say that it's like a turtle, right? So a turtle makes its shell and it lives in its shell and it's attached to its net, its shell and it can't somehow like cast it off and get another one.

A snail is in that sense, exactly the same. Okay. It makes its shell when it's a little tiny baby, it has a tiny little shell. As it grows, it adds to its shell. So it's like a turtle, like a turtle doesn't just, it's not like naked when it's born and then finds a shell. It's the same thing with snails. They make their shell.

So every shell that you've ever seen was made by a snail. And the only organisms that like thine shells and then get new shells are hermit crabs, which are naked on their, their abdomen, right? So they are these weird little crabs that have this totally naked abdomen and then grab onto a shell and hold it because they need some sort of protection. Nude hermit crabs, by the way, are one of the most sweetly revolting sites. Their butts look like a coiled, boneless finger. And then when they grow, they sometimes have to swap shells with other hermit crabs

and they line up in an orderly fashion and everyone at once moves a size up into the warm, freshly vacated shell of the one ahead. Now, this is just a side note. Whenever I'm feeling like emotionally vulnerable or scared to reveal something or if I'm about to risk rejection, I think of these naked hermit crab butts and how important it is to make that risk and switch into the larger shell to have more room to grow and live your life. Also, thanks, thanks to dead snails for growing these shells out of their

bodies in the first place. I don't know where that takes my metaphor, but whatever. Right. But snails are like, no, I made this. Yes, I made this. That's right. This is, you're looking at my butt right now. This is their house.

Like, yes, they carry their house on their back. That's as the saying goes. Yeah. Um, Dustin Mills wants to know, are there fast snails? Um, yes, fast in, in certain aspects. Yes. Cone snails, which are famous for having cone toxins, these special toxins

that they use to kill their prey. The way that they do that is they have a radula, right? The feeding structure that is that is evolved to be a spear type shape. And they can in milliseconds, um, shoot out the spear into fish, um, polykeet worms, or other mollusks. And that process of shooting it, like if there's a fish, you've got to be pretty quick to catch a fish. So a cone snail that eats fish can shoot out this barb in milliseconds and, um,

paralyze its prey almost instantaneously and then engulf it and eat it. So that's fast. That's real fast. Right. Can you imagine being like, Oh, what happened to Gary? And it's like he got taken out by a snail. It's so embarrassing. Yeah.

I feel like I was too lost. Um, Brooke Basone asked a good question. What's a humane way to discourage snails from eating the things in my garden? Is there something like an ax body spray I can use that will discuss them and get them to stop eating my plants? Oh, I wish there were. I wish there were. Um, you can pick them off by hand and put them somewhere else, but that's not

really, um, that's a very proximate solution. Not also, it's an upturnal. You got to be out there at three in the morning with a flashlight. That's right. Who's doing that? No, um, no, you can humane. No, not really, um, beer, like shallow dishes of beer. They're attracted to that.

And we'll sometimes drown themselves, not humane. Your garden is a lifetime movie about a frat house tragedy. Kyle Gross and Heather Crowther both asked, what is it about beer that attracts snails and beer traps? Why do they like it so much? And have there been any studies to see if snails enjoy craft beer over domestic? I don't know. I don't know why.

Um, it could be that fermentation, something that is fermenting is smells like something that is good to eat, right? So if you imagine you're a generalist snail and you're looking for something to eat, something that smells like it's dying or dead and sort of decomposing, which is not exactly what fermentation is, but sort of similar. Yeah. As I typed this, I was drinking this vinegary kombucha and I kept picturing snails dying into it, which if you ever wondered how to make kombucha

harder to swallow, just do that. Also, I looked it up and apparently slugs do like the yeast in the beer. So if you want to spare a beer, some sugar, water and baking yeast will do the trick. I watched this time lapse video of slugs just popping off at a beer trap. And a lot of them will take a sip and make off fine. They're like, thanks, bye. But there are others who slip right into it, like a bathtub filled with wine coolers and just blissfully surrender to the grim reaper right then and there.

Mike Monakowski, great question. Is farming helix snails for escargot an environmentally sustainable form of agriculture? And do you eat snails? Conch snails? Right. I don't. So helix. So he's talking about, um, uh, for escargot, there's a couple of species

that are, are, yeah, are good escargot snails that I have never eaten. One is our Los Angeles wet sidewalk snail. Right. So in addition to making the slime that's used in, um, snail beautification products, they also are a maybe second tier escargot snail. Okay. Um, is it environmentally sustainable as a form of protein? Um, I would say probably more than other forms of protein.

I mean, they can, they can build up a lot of body mass on very few ingredients. They could also eat like refuse from, you know, they could eat, they could be instead of your, your compost bin, you could have snails thriving and eating your compost. And then you could eat your snails. That was kind of how, uh, the Corniwis Bursam wet sidewalk snail was introduced to, um, California in the first place. Right. Wasn't it gold rush?

There was a Frenchman who in 18 somethings, I'm not sure if it was for the gold rush. Could have been fact check this story. And yes, is delightfully endearingly, bizarreingly true. A Frenchman in California who asked his someone in his family, his mother, perhaps to send him snails from France to California because he wanted to have a supply of snails to eat. And so he made, um, an enclosure for them so he could breed these snails to have them whenever he wanted.

And the little babies are just millimeters and big and crawled out of the mesh or presumably whatever structure he had for them. And then that was one of the ways that snails were first, perhaps the first way that snails were introduced to California, but they, this same snail has been introduced all around the world and lives, I mean, in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia. It's, it's, it's really good living where people live. But, um, yeah, you could, I have a colleague at the museum who collects snails at night around Los Angeles and feeds them cornmeal for a while to like clean

out their system and then, I guess, sautes them up, steams them. However, it eats them. My mom used to do that. My, my grandma, my great-grandma nun, she, she used to do that. She would send my mom and my aunt out to the graveyard with a burlap sack and they'd have to take the muni in San Francisco with this dripping, oozy sack of, and then she'd feed them cornmeal. She was at North Beach.

She was this like Italian grandma from North Beach. Yeah. Awesome. Literally lived in North Beach. And so that's where they, that's where all the Italians live. Yeah. And so my mom would cut, would have to, she said she was mortified as a teenager. You know, she'd be taking a subway with a burlap sack full of just.

And then so do you, but you don't eat gastropods. I mean, I, I, I have not, not the escargot variety, but I have on a couple occasions, but it's not like I don't seek that out to eat. Right. It's for any particular reason. It's just not really my, not really my thing. Not your jam to see chewy. Yeah.

Very chewy. Skype a scientist has a great question. Oh. Is there any good reason that I should not have a giant African land snail as a pet? Yes. Tina, Felica. Yes. There are many reasons.

Okay. There are many. The only places that those snails, they're called giant African land snails, which are nicknamed gals, G-A-L-S. Hey. So gals epitomize the haters will say it's photoshopped meme. There is a picture going around of a woman cradling a huge snail and it's so bunny like in scale and with its two eye stocks, it really looks like you woke up in a James and the

giant peach alternate universe where all rabbits were replaced by snails. And it's so cute, but also horrifying. And you'll find yourself just staring at it and questioning reality. Gals are potentially highly, highly invasive and highly destructive in environments where there isn't a cold winter that can kill them off. So yes, the short answer is you should absolutely not. And if you do have them, the answer is not, oh my gosh, I have them. I'm going to let them loose in like Echo Park and then I don't have them anymore.

The answer is call like contact me at the museum or somebody from USDA. And what is that when you when you give up, you can you can give up your snails without any. Oh, you have impunity. Yes, I believe you are just you can say I have these. I'm not supposed to have them. I'm not going to let them loose in Griffith Park or anywhere else. I'm going to give them to you, somebody who's going to deal with them. Right.

So that they do not become an agricultural pest. So it's like leaving a baby at a fire station. Yes, you are allowed. That's right. You are allowed to do that. You need to do that just for your yes, for everybody's benefit with with gals because they could become a many, many multi like tens of millions of dollars easily in eradication efforts in California if they were to become established.

Florida is dealing with populations of gals that are highly, highly destructive and can also carry certain parasites that can cause meningitis like. Yeah, that's a hell no. So so yeah, there are reasons that for health reasons, you wouldn't necessarily want to have them. I have an idea. What if you just get a hairless chihuahua and you put baby oil on it and put a hat on it and you pretend it's a gal? You could that's right.

I bet somebody has done that. I fixed it there. That's right. So even though that, hey, should I get a pet snail question? Maybe wasn't 100 percent serious. Really, though, like nobody got one. It's like a very slow paced movie about how the apocalypse started. So spray some Pam on a hairless cat and then make it a decorative fascinator hat.

Call it a day. OK, now that I fix the world's nail problems, let's wrap this up. And now what is the suckiest thing about your job? Suckiest thing. I guess I wouldn't say it's sucky, but like a lot of jobs, there's a lot of sitting at my computer and doing writing and emailing and just. Just general, like sit at your desk kind of work. There's a small part of the job that is going out and collecting or being in

collections. So that's one of the cool things about being at a museum is that if I want to go into the field, as it were, my field site might be down the hall in the in the malcology collection, right? So opening drawers in the collection. So that part is I always like that part to be more than it is. But as it ends up, there's a lot of time that's writing, revising, doing analyses, trying to figure out how to get analyses to work, trying to figure out how to do something analytical to answer a question.

It's not the times that we're out doing expeditions. That's all very exciting and but not not so much the sitting. And what is your favorite part about your job? Or do you have a favorite moment in malacology where you discovered something or you were in Hawaii on a bluff and found a species? Anything crazy like that happened? I would I would say it's it's not one moment. It's I think like a lot of scientists.

If you if you get to do the work that you like to do and this sounds sentimental and I don't mean it to sound to sound as sentimental as it's going to sound. But every day almost literally every day, there is something new that I learn that is amazing to me. And it wouldn't I understand it wouldn't be amazing to everybody, right? But I think that, you know, when you're in the right kind of job, when something that you encounter as part of your job is is awesome, like this is amazing.

And I didn't know anything about that. Like I am I've had training for for a decent number of years. I've done I've worked on a bunch of different species. And still, there are so many stories about evolution that you can see in in organisms that are just absolutely like breathtaking. So it's a really in that sense, it's a really amazing every day. There is the potential for something to be absolutely mind blowing, and that's opening a drawer.

And evolution is my absolute favorite thing to think about and and talk about and write about. So it's just amazing. Oh, that's great. Sentimental. No, I love it. Come on, get get. It's elemental. It's wonderful. And it's amazing. Oh, my God. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. So just keep asking smart people stupid questions, because how else does anyone learn anything ever really? And just being curious is like the smartest thing you can do. Now, to learn more about Jan Bandetti, you can see her in interviews with the ology's ecologist guest, Chris Thacker. We all loved her on her NHM web series, The Curiosity Show. And you can also follow along with the citizen science

malacology roll call where they go out and count snails in L.A. Just check out the hashtag snail blitz. There's also the slime project at NHM.org. Now, ologies is on Twitter and Instagram at ologies. I'm on both at Ali Ward with one L. And there's shirts, bathing suits, hats and totes and pins are at ologiesmerch.com. So sales support the making of the show.

Thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas for managing that. And you can join the ologies podcast Facebook group for Nice People and Weird Science. That's moderated by Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lipo. Thank you, admins. Thank you always to Stephen Ray Morris. Music is by Nick Thorburn of the Band Islands. And if you listen to the end of the show by now, you know that I divulge a secret.

And this week, when I go to the movies with my friend Catherine, she makes us get separate popcorn buckets because I eat so much so fast. And I just can't stop myself until I hit the end. But I won't eat her share if it's in a separate bucket. OK, bye.