Ologies with Alie Ward - Pinnipedology (SEALS & WALRUSES) with Luis A. Hückstädt

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

Seals. Sea lions. Walruses. Walrus dongs. Classic Ologies. We sit down with Luis A Hückstädt, PhD and talk about blubber, ocean currents, psychedelic teeth, whisker tech, receding ice, boops, snoots, barks, butt nubbins and whether or not that one seal from the video actually felt bashful about getting that fish cake? Or was it a sea lion? Which is which? Spoiler: you’ll find out in this episode of Ologies: Pinnipedology. Follow Luis on Twitter: https://twitter.com/luishuckstadt And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lahuckst/ A donation from this episode went to https://www.feedingnunavut.com/ and also to www.alaskasealife.org Sponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/pinnipedology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick Thorburn Transcripts by Emily White of https://www.thewordary.com/ Support the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's the first three alarms that you turned off in your sleep. It's Alleyboard Ologies. We're doing it. Pinna-Pedology, Frickin' Seals, Sea Lions, Walrus Dongs. Let's talk. First, though, thank you to patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for submitting questions. It costs just a buck a month to join that club. Come on over. Also, thank you to anyone who has hit subscribe or who's told a friend, texted, tweeted, left reviews. I read all your reviews like a gentle creep. And this week's fresh review is from someone named M. Fox, who says, oh, geez, it's a life-changingly good podcast. Did I get a snail tattoo after listening to the malacology episode? Yes. As your internet dad, I approve. Also,

congrats to a hopeful scientist for heading back to school to get a PhD. Hell yeah. Go get it. Okay. Pinnipedology. It comes from the Latin for having fins for feet. And it wasn't until maybe 15 minutes ago that I knew that it wasn't related to pinna, meaning ear, even though ears play a very important role in triumphantly explaining the difference between a seal and a sea lion. More on that later. But this ologist studied marine biology for his bachelor's, got a master's in oceanography in Chile, and a PhD in ocean studies from UC Santa Cruz, and is now an assistant researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He's studied marine

mammals for years and years. And his name comes up in over 100 published papers on seals and sea lions. And I have had him on my sonar for at least six months. I was so excited to talk to him. And after his land seal, aka his dog, went for a potty outside, we met up, we hopped on the horn. I asked him about everything from blubber to ocean currents, psychedelic teeth, receding ice, whisker technology, belly scooting, snoot poops, octopus smacking, walrus tusks, and other bony structures, Antarctic expeditions, button ovens, and more with world explorer, sea mammal enthusiast, marine ecologist, seal and sea lion physiologist, and pinn, I guess, since I'm Chilean.

Good to know. Oh, that's right. L, because you're since I'm Chilean. Good to know. Oh, that's right. L, because you're in... Now, where are you right now? Where in the world are you? I'm in Wilmington, North Carolina. Which is not Chile. It's not Chile.

No, I've lived in the States for the last 16 years almost. Oh, you have? And what are you doing in Wilmington? Right now, I'm a visiting researcher. So I got a fellowship to come here for a semester. And I've been working here, giving a grad student class and doing research with a couple of collaborators here at UNCW. What do I always say? Ask smart people, not smart questions. Are there seals in North Carolina?

No, there's no seals in here. I mean, it looks like every now and then they get some random stranded seals that come this part down from the Arctic, but they don't live here. Okay. I wasn't sure. Actually, this brings us to a great question. What is a seal? What is a seal?

What is a pinniped? So a pinniped is a suborder. So if you know something about how animals are put into categories, there's the class mammalia. So all mammals basically are together. And within that class, there's orders, right? So subcategories within mammals. And one of the main ones is carnivores.

And so pinnipeds are related to bears and dogs and cats and all that. But it's sort of like the aquatic branch of those guys. Got it. Seals are carnivores? Yeah. So seals are carnivores. So they're together with the closest relative on land will be bears, basically. But they are, they come from that branch of animals, basically. So they're related to cats and dogs and bears, and otters and all those guys. The otters, I'm totally like, yeah, of course, but the bears?

Yeah. That's really flipping my shit right now. Yeah, so bears and pinnipeds share a common ancestor. Okay, and bears have cute tiny little ears. Seals and sea lions and walruses, cute tiny little ears also? No, just sea lions. So sea lions actually includes both sea lions and fur seals.

And those guys have ears, external ears, basically, what we call the pina so true seals those guys don't have an external ear like like our ear that we can see but they do have of course everything internal they can hear you basically so don't talk smack about them. Exactly. Can you list off for me what are pinnipeds? Yeah, so there's three families within the pinnipeds. The first one is the walrus, which is just a species. I am the walrus. The other one are the true seals.

And the third family includes sea lions and fur seals. Got it. And elephant seals are included in that? Yeah, sea lions and fur seals. Got it. And elephant seals are included in that? Yeah, elephant seals are true seals. Elephant seals actually are the biggest of the seals. So huge. Yeah, they're massive. So giant.

Okay, so families of pinnipeds include the walrus. There's just one species of walrus, the walrus. Then there are some fake ass, just kidding, they're not fake. They're just not true seals called otaridae. And these are seals with ears and sea lions and fur seals. And then there are the true seals, which are earless, sort of, earlobeless. And there are 33 species of pinnipeds total, all of which you want to stare lovingly at. And what's their range? Where do pinnipeds live? When did they kind of like waddle off of land and start bobbing around in the water? Yeah, so they're pretty much everywhere.

They tend to hang out more in colder environments. So you have the highest diversity of seals in the Arctic and the Antarctic, but there's seals, well, pedipeds basically in the equator. There's sea lions and furze that live in the Galapagos Islands. But most of them actually do live in sort of colder environments, colder waters. So the West Coast of North America is where waters. So the West Coast of North America is where the ancestor of the seals sort of recolonized water. So around, I think the area of British Columbia or something like that, 25 million years ago, there was about the size of a sea otter. It's called Pujila. And that's the first sort of ancestor of a seal. And then along the coastline of Northern California, Oregon, that's where we see the first fossil of a real pinnacle. So the ancestors of modern seals and sea lions

slipped off the terrain of earth and back into the water off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, they think. That makes me feel so homesick and validated because I'm from the Bay Area where the waters... You go to the beach in the Bay Area where the waters, like you don't, you go to the beach in the Bay Area and you go out there with a windbreaker and you're like, ah, it's nice. Let's get back in the car. It's so, the Pacific is so cold and people obviously like don't think about that when they think about California. And so why do you think, or why do scientists think that they evolved to dig colder waters? It's probably related to the fact that colder waters are more productive biologically.

What does more productive biologically mean exactly? So because they're more productive, there's more food. And these animals, they're big animals. They also have high metabolic rates because they're mammals, right? So they have to keep constant temperature. So they eat a lot of food. So in order to support their populations, they need a lot of food. And the environments where you have a lot of food in the ocean tend to be the colder water. So abueling areas like the California Current or colder waters in the Arctic or the Antarctic.

So he says that the Humboldt currents and South American currents bring Antarctic water to the coast of Chile and Peru, bringing a pretty sweet ecosystem for seals. How cold are the waters off of Chile? And at what point did you set your sights on seals or walruses or elephant seals or sea lions or fur seals or leopard seals and say hot dang those things are cool so uh let me think about this first of all chile is sort of the mirror image of california so if you just imagine putting a mirror in the equator chile is the exact same opposite of the california current system so we have very similar water temperature similar kind of environments etc so that sort of explains why there are so many pinnipeds in Chile. Well, there's not that

many species, but there's a lot of individuals. However, my story is a little bit more convoluted than that because I was actually born and raised in Venezuela, not in Chile, Chilean parents though. And every time, ever since I was a little kid, I was about nine or 10, I wanted to be a marine biologist and I wanted to study marine mammals. And I think it has to do with the fact that I grew up in the 80s and I remember the commercials of SeaWorld where they have Shamu flying among clouds and Come see how I knew baby Shamu. And the sea lion like playing with a ball. Come see how I knew baby Shamu.

And the sea lion like playing with the ball. And I guess as a kid, I saw that and I was sort of mesmerized by the Smiley Mammals and I wanted to just do that. So by the time that my parents decided to move back to Chile, I was 16 years old. And one of the arguments that they used to convince me to move was that there are Smiley Mammals in Chile. And they bought it. So I decided, yeah, that's that.

Even though I was a 16 year old, I of course didn't want to move to a new country when I was a teenager. They told me that and yeah, I automatically was like, yeah, I'll move to Chile. Ever since I was 10 years old, something like that, I knew that I wanted to work with marine mammals. So yeah, that's basically how I ended up choosing this career. That's amazing. Essentially, the pinnipeds sealed the deal. Wow, that's awful.

Exactly. So sorry. And what's your take now on aquaria that have marine mammals versus being a marine mammal biologist and a phenopedologist? Why did you, at what point in your studies did you decide I want to study wild animals rather than work with them in captivity? Well, I think that most of us actually work with marine mammals. We want to work with them in the wild, right? That's the ideal. But we also acknowledge that it's impossible to know a lot of things about these animals unless we have them in a controlled environment.

So we have to do a lot of experiments with these animals. We have to come up with protocols to then apply them to wild animals. So even though I know there's a hot topic and a lot of people are against that, particularly because they're marine mammals and people think they're charismatic and they're fluffy and you want to hug them, right? So a lot of people are against captivity. However, in the community of scientists that work with marine mammals, we do acknowledge that there's a benefit, that there's a plus side to have animals in captivity. Luis says that in order to help

wild populations, it's necessary for the mammal scientists who devote their lives to them to be able to study these critters in a controlled environment, to know what their blood volume is and their chemistry with certain diets, etc. But all of that depends largely on the conditions that they're kept under. So you have to be very conscientious about the ethics of the aquaria, for example, that you're working with, making sure that there's enough space, etc. And there's also the fact that a lot of these animals have lived in captivity for generations. You kind of just bring them back into the wild and release them. That's impossible.

Ideally, in my mind, I wouldn't have animals in captivity, but I acknowledge that they have a huge potential. Tell me a little bit about what your life as a pinnipedologist looks like. How often are you on expeditions versus being, say, in North Carolina, where you might be looking at data more or animals in captivity, like how many parkas do you own? Does your work smell like fish? Like, tell me about it. So it depends. So I've been very lucky.

Ever since I was a grad student, a PhD, I came to UC Santa Cruz in California to do my PhD in the Costa Lab with Dan Costa, which is sort of one of the biggest names in marine mammal research in the world. That's right. It's the Costa Lab, not the Costa Lab. It's Dan Costa, whose last name means coast, and is one of the world's leading researchers in coastal animals. And I looked him up and in one photo online, Dan Costa is kind of kneeling on a field of ice and he's wearing one of those big red parkas that people in the Antarctic wear. And his salt and pepper beard is just level with a seal sporting a six-inch head antenna, kind of like a modest narwhal. Anyway, Lewis worked in the coastal lab and got lucky.

He had this project and he didn't have any students working on that. So he offered it to me and I was like, of course, I'll work with that. And it was in Antarctica. It's not only I get to go to Antarctica, I get to go to Antarctica through Chile. So it's a free ticket home. Nice. But also, I've been very lucky in the fact that I've been invited to work all over the place. So I work in California.

So there's a small colony of elephant seals. It's about 30 minutes north of Santa Cruz in California. So there's a small colony of elephant seals. It's about 30 minutes north of Santa Cruz in California. And that's where we do a lot of the research with northern elephant seals. He's worked in Mexico and California with California sea lions, which can measure up to nine feet long, weighing 800 pounds. And remember, they are the ones with the little tiny earsies. And he's worked in the Galapagos with the endangered Galapagos sea lions and fur seals. He's worked in Uruguay and Chile with South American sea lions. The dude has had adventures.

Anywhere else notable? Yeah. And I've been to Antarctica about 10 times, working with southern elephant seals, crag eater seals, Antarctic Fur Seals, Leopard Seals. And when you're doing the work, what are you doing? Are you hiding out in a tent and recording every move?

Are you hugging them? Are you taking blood samples? What does that field work look like? A lot of that. So it depends on where you are. So I never actually had the experience of like the hardcore biologist that lives in a tent for weeks at a time. I've done that for like two weeks and that's it. I've got to more sort of a

spoil campsites and field sites. So the worst condition and this is quote unquote worse, when I was working on my dissertation, I went to work with Southern Elephant Citizen and we have a camp, well, NOAA has a camp where we were staying, but they have absolutely everything there you have. The only thing you don't have is basically internet, but you have a satellite phone, you have a generator for electricity, you have a cabin, you have beds. So it's nothing but you have a shower even. Oh, fancy. And when Luis says the NOAA camp, he doesn't mean rustic bunkers with his friend NOAA.

NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is a United States scientific agency within the Department of Commerce. And their field lodgings, more like summer camp housing from what I gather. And life as a SEAL researcher ranges from that all the way up to the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica, which by comparison, pretty plush. Where you have three bars, you have ATMs, you have Wi-Fi, you have a coffee shop. You're super spoiling there. So those have been some of my experiences in the field. Is there a type of field work that you really love doing? How close to the

pinnifeds do you get to be? Yeah, so that's a good thing because I didn't finish. I forgot about the second part of your previous question. I work with animals. Basically, I define myself as an ecologist, but I also do a little bit of physiology. So basically looking into how the animals feed within their ecosystem and how they operate. And in order for us to do that, I basically use two different methodologies. One of them is what we call biologging, which means basically putting tags on animal, any instruments that you can put in an animal to measure things like where they go, how did they dive, how fast they move, even thinking about their bodies, for example, their temperature, et cetera. So I use a lot of that. Okay, this bio-logging equipment,

remember the seal hat with the antenna? It's like that, or tagging or collars, and it helps pinnipedologists figure out where these animals are headed and how they eat so they can make sure to protect their food sources and thus them. And right on cue, by the way, Luis's dog demonstrated a blinged out mammal by shaking her own collar. To make sure. So yeah, kind of like that. Now, researchers like Luis will also take blood samples to figure out what seals eat because when a pinniped is half a kilometer underwater, it's kind of hard to see what they're munching on. half a kilometer underwater, it's kind of hard to see what they're munching on.

So to analyze this, penipinologists use stable isotopes, which are non-radioactive forms of nucleotides that don't spontaneously undergo radioactive decay. They're stable. Basically sort of markers that tell me something about their diet and where they go, etc. So I can measure that on their tissues, their blood, their fur, their whiskers, et cetera. So I can collect those samples from these animals when they're under anesthesia. We can glue the instruments on them and then let them go and do their thing and then retrieve the information later. So you get to straight up touch seals under permitted conditions. Under a lot of permits, yeah. So many questions about getting to touch a seal,

which 99.9% of people will not get to do, but 100% of people want to do. Yeah. Are they silky? Are they soft? Is it like petting a chocolate Labrador or is it more like a cat or, and are they muscly or are they like what texture of a seal tell me everything so it depends on the species right so have you ever pet a gray thing yes so that's sort of what it feels like okay for a true seal true seals don't have're not very furry, they don't have the nice under, under fur like, like the fur seals. So they just have sort of the guard hair. So their hair is sort of more rigid, it's kind of coarse. So they're not very, very, very fluffy when you touch them. Okay. They feel very muscly, but they actually, when you're touching them, you're basically

touching the skin that lies over the blubber and the blubber is not blubbery it's not like jello it's actually sort of rigid so they're they're like little like compact little balls of fat actually what's the difference between blubber and fat uh is Blubber is more of a complicated fat that has an added structure to it. So it has some proteins in there. It makes the fat a little bit more rigid. Oh, okay. If you're moving through the water, you're going to make sure that you are just as tight as possible because anything that you have that moves with you, that wiggles, you're basically adding drag.

And that's bad when you're moving through the water. For example, the shape of a dolphin is that perfect sort of torpedo-like shape, right? With very tight skin. And they also have a layer of blubber. So that should be the ideal shape that all these animals should sort of converge towards. So seal is sort of trying to get into that direction. It hasn't quite gotten there yet. They're not rubbery. They're not jello-y. They're not wiggly. They're sort of tight, tight skin. So it's like you putting yourself on a wetsuit. Why is Luis comparing them to dolphins?

Like dolphins are the cheerleader stepsister and pinnipeds are a girl in a teen rom-com who is beautiful but just still wearing glasses. Well, cetaceans, he says, have just had more time evolving in the water. Now, pinnipeds, despite being shaped like the world's most ambitious blunt and having feet that look like tube socks are falling off, they still kill it in the face area. And they're huge, beautiful blinking eyes with eyelashes. Is there a reason that they are so cute? What evolutionary purpose do those serve other than being adorable? So humans somehow are tuned to find things that have big eyes as adorable. But that's not necessarily the case. That's not the reason why their eyes are so big.

So if you think about when these animals are eating, when they're finding prey, they're doing this in the deep ocean and there's virtually no light in the deep ocean. So if you're going to maximize your chance of finding food, especially if you were trying to go for this sort of bioluminescent prey, you got to have big eyes so you can catch every tiny little bit of light possible. So that's the reason why they have such big eyes because they're basically are diving

or trying to find food in the twilight zone. There's no light in there. And then what happens when they're just basking on the beach? How come all of that blubber doesn't make them overheat or all of that light doesn't make them want to dive into a cave which is what I want to do sometimes on the beach without sunglasses it does actually so when you see them on land that they're basking they probably are cold after they were diving for a whole night or even longer than that so they might be just warming up a little bit,

but when it gets too hot, they have to get in the water again. So if you go right now, for example, if you go to the Channel Islands in California. So the Channel Islands are off the coast of Santa Barbara and are home to a staggering array of pinnipeds, including California sea lions and harbor seals, northern elephant seals, northern fur seals, rare Guadalupe fur seals, and even more rare stellar sea lions. What? Really? Just hiding off the coast of Oprah's house, truly living their best lives. Now, a few hours north of that near San Luis Obispo lies a colony of around 17,000 elephant seals. Now, this rookery of breeding pinnipeds, it's free to look at.

It's open year round. You don't need reservations. It's just off Highway 1. But you want to head to elephantseal.org to make sure that they're open and to check out road conditions up there, which can get a little wacky with giant falling boulders. So maybe bring a good camera and spinoculars too, because what might you witness midday? A lot of beach lounging. You'll see that during around noon, basically, when it gets too warm, they have to get in the water to sort of cool down a little bit because blobberries are really good insulator and their temperature is going to go up no matter what. Aha, what about yearly cycles? Do they migrate like cetaceans or do they stay in one place all the time? So it depends on the species.

Most animals, most pinniped species are sort of residents. They don't move that much. Some of them, just part of the population moves. For example, California sea lions, they're breeding colonies are in the Channel Islands in Southern California. But when the breeding season ends, the males take off. And that's why you see males in San Francisco, in Oregon, in Washington State, in British Columbia. So those are sea lions that move all the way there from the Channel Islands.

The females sort of stay, stick around the Channel Islands. So sea lions, the ladies stay put and the dudes jet. When this happens in the species human, my Montana relatives call this honky tonkin. So sea lions, bye dudes. What about elephant seals? So elephant seals from California and Mexico go all over the North Pacific as far as the Gulf of Alaska, the Lushan Islands. We have animals from Central California that have crossed the international Bayline going west towards Japan basically and come back. And when they're at sea, they're spent, so we're talking about thousands of kilometers

away from the coast. That's crazy. Where are they sleeping? Are they just like bobbing in the ocean? They're sleeping while they're diving. so it's actually been pretty cool there's a grad student in sanicos that is looking at that exactly elephant seals are basically we just published a paper where we showed that elephants are just little well not little they're big vacuums they're constantly eating a small fish they're diving they're they they're eating the small fish. And once they reach a

point, I guess, when they're full, they have what we call a drift dive. A drift dive? Like drifting off? So Luis worked on a recently published paper in the journal Science Advances, and it was titled, Forced into an Ecological Corner, Round the Clock Deep Foraging on Small Prey by Elephant Seals, that talks about these aquatic naps. And what they do is that they dive, they swim actively to about 50 to 100 meters, and then they turn on their backs and they just fall like a leaf. So imagine the leaf of a tree falling off. And the reason why we know that

is because we put instruments on the animals and we can describe the three-dimensional movement of the animal. So they do that. And we think that that's when they're resting, they're diving, they're sleeping, and they're also digesting. What?

That is bonkers. Yeah, so when they're at sea, elephant seals are just amazing. They're just diving constantly for about 20 minutes on average, coming back up to the surface for just three minutes and then keep diving and keep diving. So 90% of their time at sea, they're diving. What kind of lungs do they have? diving. What kind of lungs do they have? The lungs are big, but the lungs are actually not very good at holding the oxygen. As a matter of fact, they exhale before they go on a dive. Most of their oxygen is carried in their blood and their muscles. Oh my gosh. So they don't get

the bends because they empty their lungs? Exactly. These are amazing adaptations to dive because they're diving to two kilometers. I don't know how much that's in miles, but someone can- Like a mile or so, like around a mile? Yeah. And for up to two hours. Oh my gosh.

That's like 10, is that 10,000 meters around? Yeah, I guess. Oh my God, For hours. Okay. This is weird. Question wise, but underneath their blubber, are they ripped? Like, do they have abs underneath their like foot of blubber? They actually have very big muscles. It's one of the reasons why as i was saying they hold a lot of their oxygen or most of their oxygen in their blood and in their muscles so their muscles are very big very well developed because basically they're swimming it will be like as running

non-stop for eight months at a time and just sleeping for like five minutes every couple of days or something like that. It's just a ridiculous kind of lifestyle. It's like someone who's shredded wearing baggy clothes. Exactly. What? Okay. You mentioned males and I have some questions about dimorphism because walruses, they have these giant tusks, right? And elephant seals have a dong on their face and they rip each other apart. What is going on with their sex lives? Why do they have face weapons? It goes, again, it depends on the species. Walruses have a little bit of what we call sexual dimorphism, but it's not that much.

Directly, females with tusks, they're just not as big, I guess. In the case of sea lions and elephant seals, they're probably one of the best examples of sexual dimorphism. Males can be two, three, or four times as big as females. So you have that, and that has a lot to do with the reproductive system. And in the case of elephant seals that big trunk like thing that they have in their face is called a proboscis and it's just a secondary sexual character so we don't really i mean there's a lot of hypotheses why they have it one of the likely explanations is that it helps with the resonance when they're making their calls. So they have this system where elephant seals, I should probably say too, that they have the loudest call. They're louder than lions on them. And not a lot of people know that. Okay. I double checked this. And yes,

a lion's roar can reach 114 decibels, about the level of a live concert back when there were live concerts. But an elephant seal can just honk in the face of that and can broadcast his horniness up to 130 decibels, which is louder than a thunderclap, a chainsaw, and right about the noise of a military jet from 50 feet away. So the proboscis amplifies the male's sexual eagerness, which is the most literal use of the term bullhorn, just bull horny with the face. And one of the things that they use to sort of avoid conflict is males remember the calls from individuals.

So if there's a fight at the very beginning of the season all males arrive sort of before females arrive they all hang out together and they start having fights with each other and the winner of the fight you're going to recognize who beat you basically you're going to be able to tell that i fought that guy. That didn't go so well for me. I'm not going to get into that fight again. So they recognize each other based on their calls. And one of the things that probably the strong helps with them is just making their call louder. Oh, my God.

So they're able to make this really loud calls. So people know, don't mess with me. I kicked your ass last season. Exactly. And then I stole your girl. So you might not want to get in a fight and bite my neck again. Yeah. There's a series of really cool experiments that a friend of mine did where she went to

different colonies of elephant seals along the coast of California. And she recorded elephant seals from one colony and played those calls on a different colony. And you can see that the guys that didn't know this particular male that was very aggressive in one colony, they didn't react to him at all to that call. But if they play the same call in the colony where that animal lives, everybody would be like, oh, freak out because they knew who that guy was. Oh, my God. And I hate to ask this, but I mean mean they have what looks to be a dong on their

face do they have like matching nethers like if i if you have an elephant seal with a giant proboscis like is he packing or what i don't know because their fins are internal, which is a good thing. What? They've got inner dicks? How does that work? So they, again, when you are an animal that swims in the water, you want to reduce the drag. So you don't want to have any extra appendages or anything like that that are hanging out. So just like a dolphin or a cetacean, elephant seals and, well, seals pinnipeds in general have evolved in a way that their penis is internal. And the only way they're going to have sex is if they expose their penis.

Oh my gosh. So you don't know what you're getting into until it's gotten into you. Exactly. Oh, wow. But you're like, I guess I'm going to go by this call. He's really loud. Exactly. They do all have baculums, though.

What in the ding-dong heck is a baculum? Well, it's a dong bone. It's a bone in your dong, if you're a walrus. They do? Yeah. So they have a, most mammals actually have a bone in their penises. So humans, we're sort of deception. But I think Native Americans in Alaska use the baculum of walruses and they carve it.

So they use it as a little piece of art, I guess. Little piece of art? I looked it up. A walrus baculum can measure two feet in length. And doing some deeper digging on this, I found an anthropological article that traced the origins of Usyk art to pretty much the 20th century with native Alaska artists doing the carvings, not out of their own traditions, but to meet the demands of tourists looking for a kind of lewd souvenir carving from their wild travels. So that being said, pinnipeds, of course, have a rich history of subsistence living and tradition in Alaska Native, Arctic, Inuit, and First Nations cultures and other climates where these animals are endemic. And their populations were stable until the last century or so when settler economies meant widespread,

irresponsible hunting. And there's a really amazing documentary called Angry Inuk that highlights the conflict between seal hunting bans that should just target a certain type of commercial hunting versus those bans that harm indigenous communities. And on that note, we donate to a charity each week. And this week, I'm throwing in an extra one, we're going to do two. One donation will go to feedingnunavut.com and that promotes civic improvement by raising awareness about food insecurity and the challenging living conditions in Nunavut, which is up, up in the north in Canada. They also work whenever possible with national, regional, and local organizations to support and evaluate programs addressing issues of hunger, poverty, housing, education, and health, particularly mental health. And Feeding

Nunavut is a 100% volunteer-run organization. So one donation will go there. And this week, the next one, of course, will go to one of the ologists choosing. And this week, Louise chose a donation to go to the nonprofit Alaska Sea Life Center, which is the only facility in Alaska that combines a public aquarium with marine research and education and wildlife response. So you can learn more about them at alaskasealife.org. You can also check the link in the show note to feedingnunavut.com. Those donations will be possible by patrons and by the sponsors of the show who you're going to hear about now. Okay, baculum to your questions, including a common topic, barking. Asked by patrons, Leah Ludovico, Katie Fetterman,

Eric Gerard, Bethany Lizette, Ruby Johnstone. In particular, Ruby asked, why, why do seals always sound like they were calling out to a mysterious man named Brad? Every seal I have encountered in recent memory has screamed, Brad, Brad. This is something I think about a lot, says Ruby. Okay, a lot of patrons had questions about, obviously about dogs and seals.

And are they dogs of the sea? And also what's up with their barks? Why do they bark as opposed to making other noises? So they are part of that branch of carnivores that dogs and bears belong to. So I guess in that sense they are kind of dogs of the sea. They're very trainable as you can see, animals in Ocarina, they're very smart. There are however wild animals, so I will highly discourage anyone to get close to these animals they actually move faster than you think and they might not like you being close to them so that's one thing that i guess is

one of the most important messages that i like to convey is the fact that if you see a seal at the beach stay away from the from the seal don't the seal, especially if they're pups. There's a lot of people along the west coast of the United States that if they see a pup, a harborseed pup, they think that the animal is abandoned and they go and try to rescue the animal. And mom is usually looking at her pup from the water. And then what you're doing basically is separating the mom from their pup. and then what you're doing basically is separating the mom from their pup. So if you see a pinniped pup on the beach, do not cradle it. Do not abscond with it.

Seal moms will be like, dude, I left to get one fish and you took my baby. It's not enough to warm the whole planet and invent polka music. Humans have to go stealing babies too. So what do you do? Ooh. Yeah. So don't do it. Don't do it. So you can call their organizations like the Environmental Center, for example, that you can call if you think that the animal is in distress, that don't get close to animals. Leah Lodovico had a great question,

wanted to know, have scientists analyzed a range of seal barks? And if so, can they tell which barks are associated with certain behaviors like defensive barking versus protective barking? So a lot of people when they when they think of a seal barking what they actually are visualizing is a California's lion barking which are the ones that you see of the pier in San Francisco out in the middle of the coast of California and whatnot. So they do have different meanings so males usually do that as a warning sign. But the world about acoustic communication in pinnipeds is just fascinating. And I will highly encourage everyone to go and look for what the L-seals call.

Because they sound like a spaceship. Really? Yeah, they have the most amazing sound. And one of my most treasured experiences is just walking on the sea ice and you're just walking on the water, basically on the frozen ocean. And underneath you, you have Weddell seals swimming around in Antarctica and you can hear them through the ice. And they have these sort of incredible sort of Star Wars robots slash spaceships calls are amazing.

Excuse me, you need to hear these Weddell seals right now. So that video was uploaded by the YouTube account Weddell Seal Science, and apparently researchers in Antarctica would sometimes fall asleep to these seals vocalizations, which sound beautiful to our ears and also can be super, super high frequency captured by a broadband digital hydrophone device. Their calls can go up to 200 kilohertz, so high that a bat would be like, what am I listening for people? I don't hear anything. Even without slowing it down, above ice, again, all kinds of

trills and chirps. They make wookie purrs and whistles that according to one researcher, Dr. Paul Zico, a lead author of a recent study on the matter, went on record as saying, quote, it really sounds like you're in the middle of a space battle in Star Wars, laser beams and all, quote. So why do they do it? Why do the SEALs do it? Nobody knows. But some scientists have floated the idea that it could be echolocation as they can dive up to 600 meters, which is deeper than one Empire State Building stacked on top of another Empire State Building. And they may be hunting in that watery blackness of the deep and using those calls. They really have no idea. Either way, honestly, I've dated guys at bands who even with a basement full of guitar center items couldn't produce the kind of beats that these fish-eating blubber

loafs can. Stone cold silver. It's a beautiful thing to behold. Have you ever had a moment where you're walking on the sea ice and you're listening to these spaceship calls from essentially aquatic bears underwater and just felt like, what is my life? Yeah, several times. Every time that I go to Antarctica, that's sort of my experience. I'm not very good about showing, like, I'm not jumpy. I'm not going to be screaming or yelling or anything like that. So I'm sort of an introvert in that sense. But it's one of the things that, to me, it's one of the reasons why I go back so much.

It's just an incredible experience. And just being so lucky. Every now and then like every five minutes or so it hits you like wow i'm so lucky i've been here in this environment working with these animals too because working with that with the else is just one of the most incredible experiences ever would you say that wetl seal is your favorite yeah they're they're just adorable they're they don't have any predators from land, right? If you heard the recent Ersonology episode about bears,

you may remember that the Antarctic pretty much means no bears here. So you can approach it with a little seal, and they just look at you like, what are you? And they roll on their backs and expose their bellies, which is what you're not supposed to do if you're at risk, right? Yeah. So work with them is just incredible. But they don't understand anything bad is going to happen to them that comes from land or from the ice.

Rob Harbert's first time question asker, coming in hot with a good one, just literally just wrote in, ever booped a snoot? Ever booped a snoot? Have you ever gotten to touch a seal nose and just gone? Yeah. As a matter of fact, I have several times. And one of the reasons why I do this, well, it is adorable. But when we have animals under anesthesia to work with them, we have to get them sedated, right?

Because these guys have big teeth. And you want to make sure that everyone is safe. And one of the things that is kind of tricky about anesthetizing seals is that they tend to hold their breath. It's a bad thing to hold your breath when you are under anesthesia. So one of the things that we do to make sure that they're breathing and they're okay is actually stimulating their nose. So playing with their nose makes them breathe a lot so there's several times several pictures of me actually the feel when you see you see me pooping a seal every two minutes or so to make sure that they take a breath oh my god you just you don't understand how many

people just decided to become pinnipedologists i think on your, one of the special skills is like, I boob snoots from living. I have to. I keep them alive. I must boob their snoots. It's a pretty good job. The mission of my life. Stephanie Broaches had a really great question. How do they deal with water pressure in their ears?

Also, are their whiskers useful? So yeah, their whiskers are amazingly useful going back to their ears they usually sort of full of fluid so by being full of fluid you sort of avoid those changes in pressure that we have so that basically they lost the the chamber that is full of air that we have seals don't really have that anymore so they can they can dive and they don't have that that much air in their ears so that's not a problem for them and their whiskers if you ever heard about echolocation of dolphins the same thing uh this the equivalent of the echolocation will be the whiskers the whiskers are super

super sensitive organs that they use to track prey in the twilight zone where they actually are hunting. They're able to chase fish within several feet. So if a fish is passing, they can feel the wake of that fish, the turbulence that it causes in the water and follow that path. And as a matter of fact, we have colleagues from Japan that have put these tiny little cameras on seals and you can see how when they're diving their whiskers are sort of glued to their cheeks to their face and when

they hit this the depth at which they want to find prey they open their whisker like a parabolic antenna and they use that to find prey. What? Yeah so about 80 80% of their food that they actually consume, they probably find it using their whiskers. They can find clams buried in sand with just their whiskers. Imagine having a metal detector on your face or x-ray glasses to detect buried candy bars. Such is the power of the whisker. Now, how powerful are these whiskers? Another patron had a question.

Emily Stewart, first time question asker, wanted to know, I heard on Octonauts, is it true that harbor seals whiskers are so sensitive they can sense an individual fish from 100 miles away? My whiskers are detecting more ripples. I'd say these ripples were made by a big fish. Is that accurate? The 100 miles away is not accurate, but it's basically what I was trying to say. That experiment was done with captive animals. So again, it goes back to say why we need animals in captivity, but they did that. So they basically covered their eyes and they have a little mechanic fish

in a pool, and the seal was able to follow the fish exactly. But it wasn't 100 miles away. It was just a couple feet away. It wasn't that bad. 100 miles away? No. 100 meters?

Yes. So see the 2010 Journal of Experimental Biology paper entitled Hydrodynamic Determination moving direction of an artificial fin by a harbor seal or the appetizing 2017 follow-up research study entitled seal whiskers may sense fish breath pj had a great question they said i'm obsessed with seal locomotion how did their ridiculous movement evolve and why is it perfect dogggins, first time question asker, says, hello, I have questions about how they get around on land. They just flop. What is the land speed of a seal? And does it hurt their little stomachs if they flop onto something other than ice? So when we're talking about locomotion of seals, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is how they move in the water.

And you have two different kinds of locomotion in there. You have the sea lions and fur seals. So the aurorites, that's what we call them. Otarid means ears. So the eared ones, how do they move? And they use the foreflippers. So imagine like a penguin, basically. The same thing. That's how sea lions and fur seals sort of swim. And then you have the true seals and they use their hind flippers, like a fish, basically. They go side to side. So those are the two different motions that they have when they're swimming in the water.

And you can sort of see how true seals are sort of better adapted to the water than sea lions are. When it comes to land, of course, they have to go through so many adaptations to being able to be successful at sea that they've lost their grace when they're walking so they have to move in a clumsy way true seals have lost the ability to have lost the joint that basically um connects your femur to your hip. So they have to move like a snake, basically.

And that's the only way that they have to move. Sea lions, they actually still have the ability to walk on all four. If you're not sure whether it's a seal or a sea lion, if it's walking on all four, that's a sea lion. Oh, that's how you tell the difference? Yeah. So you can see a sea lion perfectly walking on all four that's a sea lion. Oh that's how you tell the difference? Yeah so you can see sea lion perfectly walking on all four and they sort of project their hind flippers forward and they can move on all four that's a sea lion. So it's that and the ear that you can see the external ear on sea lions. I feel like that's such a good life hack. Somehow in a trivia game that's going

to come up important or someone's going to time travel and be like, wait, I know this. The other part about how fast they move, they move faster than you think they move. I have had a male adult elephant's heel, which is something like three tons of blubber and muscle, chasing me up a dune that was about 20 feet high and had to run i was basically playing bait so that the male would let us do the work that we needed to do with females and i have this male

following me and he will keep up with me so i have to run try to run as fast as i could up a dune and this animal was still chasing me and i did that like 10 times in an hour and he was still able to keep up with me. So that's one of the reasons why I keep telling people do not get close to a seal. They move way faster than you think they move. Never cock block a seal. Just leave it to the professionals who signed up for this life. They could kill you.

A male elephant seal can kill a human for sure. Really? Would they do it with their teeth essentially? Yeah. Or just if they catch you, they're going to try to fight you. Three tons of animal that are usually very frustrated, especially during breeding season, elephants just have the highest testosterone concentration of any mammal. So you can imagine with all that testosterone going through their system, how frustrated they are if they're not getting any female attention. So you don't want to be there. So beware the horny, angry in-cell pinnipeds,

in-cell elephant seals, really. Oh man. Yeah. So leave them alone. Yeah, absolutely. And you know what? I have a personal question in terms of videos that we've seen. Do you know that one video of the walrus who looks really shy getting a birthday cake? Yeah. The birthday cake, by the way, is just an elegant affair, kind of crowned in a row of fresh herring. And the birthday walrus is doubled over bashfully covering its face with its flippers. Just imagine an alive, coffee-colored sleeping bag with mittens for hands who is touched beyond words. Is there an emotion like aw shucks that pindapeds feel, or is that just trained into a captive walrus? I'm sorry to say that that's probably just training.

Okay, okay, okay. Just making sure. Yeah, I don't think, I mean, after working with them for so many years, I can assure you that they don't feel any shame whatsoever. They will fart in your face. They will vomit. They don't have any inhibitions. They're not like a cake for me. Yeah. Okay. They will fart, fish fart right in your face yeah and not have a second thought about it oh my gosh ann hardkey wants to know do they have tails i met a sea lion and it had a small finger-sized tail and it was so weird and cute yeah they do have tail it's about

the size of your thumb a little bit wider and they move it. There's a fun fact just so you know, Southern Elephant Seals stick their tongue out when they're under the anesthesia and we have no idea why. Do you ever go floopy floopy floopy? With gloves in my hands. Gloves, yeah that makes sense. Andrewageman, first time question asker, wants to know when do baby seals lose their white fur and do they have like an ugly, tufty teenage phase like the rest of us or are they just cute forever? Yeah, so they're talking about seals

that live up in the Arctic and most of them are what we call capital breeder, which means that they sort of optimize their time. They just want to be moms for a short period of time after birth they give their pups a meal that has a lot of fat and their lactation periods are very short as a matter of fact the shortest lactation period for any mammal is four days for the hooded seal are you you serious? Yeah. And after four days, mom takes off. Bye bye baby. You're on your own.

She's got shit to do. So pups, when they're born, they don't have that much blubber, right? So they depend on this fur to keep warm. But with milk that is that fatty, they're going to put in a lot of blubber very, very fast. And after they do that, they mold their coat. And they do look very ridiculous when that happens. But it's usually a couple of weeks to months after mom leaves, they're going to mold their baby coat

and they're going to grow their baby coat and they're going to grow their adult coat until the next year. So all seals and sea lions, they mold once a year. P.S. I looked up pictures of their molting and they kind of resemble like a fake fur bench you left outside for a decade. Patchy, worn, awkward, or like if you fell asleep midway through drunkenly shaving your head. We had a couple questions about teeth. Kayla Smith, Ira Gray, Rich Flight, Clara Meyer, Julia Spindorf, and Manette Eaton. First time question, Oscar. People want to know about crab eater seal teeth. Oh, that's awesome. I did my dissertation on crab eater seals, and I'm working with them right now. So I love crab eater seals. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. Try to

describe what their teeth look like. Because I saw them for the first time. And I was like, this is like a fractal. I feel like I'm on acid. Yeah. Looking at a skull. What are they doing? So it's a very complicated teeth structure. And if you look at them, they fit perfectly. And when they're closer just, it kind of looks like a cage, right? Imagine triangular molars that have almost fractally swirls on all sides. They look like a Van Gogh painting made of teeth. Horrifying. Gorgeous.

These Antarctic seal teeth. And they're eating krill so they effectively are using their teeth as sieves so if you think of a baiting whale as filtering out salt plankton of the water crab eater seals are the same thing but with krill and they haven't evolved these complicated bailing structures like the whales have. But you can actually see how the structure of their teeth are similar to that. So we've seen that in the evolution of cetaceans as well. Yeah.

So they look like they are absolute bone grinders, but really they're just for filter feeding tiny things? Cravia de Sils, their diet is over 90% krill. Krill, side note, are these two inch long, shrimpy looking crustaceans. And they're using just tea that's basically seeds to filter out krill. Are they eating any crabs? No, they don't eat crabs.

I think- Wait, what? They're called crab eater seals. I think the reason for that is that it's a mistranslation from the German word for crustacean. Someone assumed that when they were calling them crustacean eating seals, and someone translated that as crab eating seals. Oh my god, I because I saw those teeth and I was like, they must just be grinding. Yeah, crazy crabs. Oh my god. Leopard seals have similar teeth as well. Leopard seals actually eat crib as well.

I'm so glad you mentioned leopard seals because Jennifer Tran wants to know, was a leopard seal depicted somewhat accurately in Happy Feet? And Scotty D, Kimberly Cooley, Ellen Skelton, Helen Moore, and Rich Flight all had similar leopard seal questions. I'm going to read Rich Flight's question verbatim. Are leopard seals just the most badass fucking seal in the world?

And do they actually have any predators? And Kimberly Cooley asked, do leopard seals only get a bad rap in movies because they eat penguins? Anytime a seal is a bad guy, it's a leopard seal. And yeah. Other folks who wanted to know this include Jennifer Tran, Scotty D, longtime listener, first time asker, Helen Moore, Lee Guyverson, and Ellen Skelton, who asked, are they like the pit bulls of the sea? People have made them out to be bad, but they're cuddly and adorable. So leopard seals, are they vicious?

Louis says, it's not really an applicable question. I mean, they're animals, right? So they're just making a living and they have to do whatever they have to do to survive. making a living and they have to do what to do whatever they have to do to survive they do have a bad rep it's somehow fair they do eat out of uh puppies and penguin chicks and adults and that that's true they also eat fish they also eat krill some leopard seals hide fish that they hunted and they put on the rocks in the water and some other animals hide fish that they hunted and they put it on the rocks in the water and some other animals that sees where they're hiding they go and steal their fish so they're very smart like that um but i've seen i've seen a lot of leopard seals um they do get a bad reputation but i think it's just not fair. They are super aggressive predators.

So a diver died because a leprosy killed her. I think it was a woman. Basically, it bit her head. So I will never get in the water if there's a leprosy in the water. And a lot of divers in Antarctica, they know that if there's a leprosy in the water, you don't get in the water. Wow then a lot of divers in Antarctica, they know that if there's a leper in the water, you don't get in the water. Wow. Okay. Have you ever been chomped on by a seal? No. I'm one of the few of my colleagues that have never been bitten.

Oh, good job. I also tend to be very careful. I do get a ton of vision, but I'm somehow been lucky. One question a lot of folks had. I'll list them all on a side. Sarah Rosero, Anthony Willis Jr., Becky the Sassy Seagrass Scientist, Kathleen Sachs, Jennifer Tran, Diane Shuckman, Shayla Zink, first-time question asker,

Alexandre Couture, and... Holly Spencer, first-time question asker. I want to know how badly is climate change currently affecting pinnipeds? And are there any species which are in particular danger of extinction? Yeah, we're predicting that some species are actually going to be able to exploit new habitats. So southern elephants, for example, they don't really like the ice.

With the ice retreating in Antarctica, they're now able to exploit new resources that weren't available to them back in the day. A lot of the seals actually live in Arctic and Antarctic latitudes, and they depend on ice. So with the reduction of ice, you're basically losing your habitat. So if there's no ice, there's going to be a lot of negative consequences for all these populations and species of seals. And Luis says that the smaller inland seals are at the highest risk of extinction when the climate continues to warm. I was like, wait, inland seals?

So yes, patrons Andrea Levinson, Ethan Patone, and first timer Olivia Goldsmith, and also Little Stumbo. All of you asked about the Baikal seal, the only freshwater pinniped species. And there are a few other species like these spotty ringed seals and some freshwater colonies or freshwater subspecies of other types of pinnipeds that are in lakes or brackish water of the Caspian Sea. But these Baikal seals are the only ones that are just straight up living in freshwater. How did they get so far inland? I pictured them just hopping along on their guts to get there, or maybe boarding a smoky greyhound bus decades ago. But Louise says that at some point,

there was a channel that connected these bodies to the sea, way less romantic than a bunch of individual seals just saying, screw this to the ocean after a breakup. But either way, they got there. And many, many moons ago, the channels kind of let them float there like a log flume ride. But clearly when climates change, survival changes, sometimes too rapidly for them to adapt. Now on that note, Heather and Kate, both first time question askers, want to know what do pinnipeds need from humans?

Like, is there a start, stop, continue list that you can share on their behalf? Is there a start, stop, continue list that you can share on their behalf? I think that depends on where you are. One thing that is becoming more and more common, and maybe it's because of social media and the access of people to cell phones, is harassment. So what I was talking about earlier about not getting close to animals, let them be, I mean, enjoy nature and you can take pictures of animals without actually having to disturb them. That's probably the best thing to do. You can use a zoom to take a picture of the seals instead of

getting too close to them. And then the other thing by far, I think that as a society, the biggest challenge that we're all facing is climate change. So anything that we can do about climate change just to solve that problem is going to obviously help protecting these animals. Well, on that note, we had a lot of folks who were kayakers write in. Rather than approaching seals on land, a lot of people wrote in about seals approaching them.

Kathleen Sachs wants to know, why did the seal slap a kayaker with an octopus? And Terry Goss wrote in, I love this because Terry Goss wrote in a little story time, I'm going to read you. While on a leisurely shore dive, I had a young harbor seal follow me around and came up to chew on my fins a bit. Not unusual, I i've had that before but he started getting more and more touchy and started grabbing my leg i swam ahead to shore but he became more aggressive with my legs was his play activity or was he being sexual didn't feel aggressive per se terry says but he could have definitely ruined my dry suit and um and grace ann reed wrote in why would a seal be motivated to somewhat aggressively

boop my kayak? This happened to me while in a red kayak. And then the seal just stared at me a minute. I would like to know what it was trying to tell me. Um, and Kathleen Sacks says, why are there so many videos of seals climbing into kayaks? Ratatatnat, newbie and enthusiast here. They wanted to know why are seals so gloriously curious i had one swim under my kayak last week unannounced and lost my actual bananas what would so um yeah if you're kayaking um what should you do if one comes close to you so the first one i'm pretty sure that was uh i want to say it was a starting first and the one that slapped that that kayaker with the with the octopus and that's just basically the kayaking was in the bad place at a bad time because seals sea lions in particular do that a lot they they bring this

the prey up to the surface and then they shake their face their head violently and to sort of rip apart their prey and this guy was probably just in the bad place at the bad time so that's that's what happened all of these seals i mean i don't really have a straight answer i don't these are my hypotheses i think basically seals are seeing all these kayaks as potential holdouts sites so if they're tired they just want to rest a little bit usually what seals do is they just go and haul out on a platform or a buoy or land or whatever or a rock or whatever it is. So we're offering them that in their environment so they can come up to the surface, see a platform that is available to them, why not, right? And someone could think also maybe there's a shark in the water, they just want to get out of the

water. That could also be an alternative uh explanation so the best thing to do is just stay calm not try to touch the animal just let it be and at some point it's going to go back to the water there's lots of animals that do that on boats for example that are being chased by orcas oh there's videos of sea otters and seals and i've actually seen sea lions also that are under attack by orcas. Oh. There's videos of sea otters and seals, and I've actually seen sea lions also that are under attack by orcas, and they get super close to the boat or a ship or try to climb up to not be in the water. So if you see a seal trying to stow away on your canoe,

it might just need a break, or it's evading a bloodthirsty predator. Just don't go bananas with speculation. Oh, speaking of which, Morgan Jennison, Anna M, Madeline Lewis, Jade Pollard, Andrea Levinson, and First Eye Masker, Ness had one question that was bananas. Several people wrote in a question. I had no idea what they were talking about, but Vespa said, what makes them go into banana pose? Are they expecting me to draw them like one of my French girls? And I looked it up and they really do look like a banana.

How are they doing? I can't do that yoga move. But now that we know that they're ripped, that makes more sense. But yeah, why are they bananating? So we also call it the donut. Sometimes they touch their flippers with their head and they look like a little donut. The most liked explanation is that happens because they're trying to keep their flippers out of the water. If you think about that when we're talking about their blubber and how well insulated they are,

their blubber is covering their entire body. So their entire body is really, really well insulated except for their flippers. So if for whatever reason they're too cold or too warm, they use their flipper to sort of regulate their temperature. So if you're too cold, you want to keep your flippers out of the water and exposed to the sun so they warm up. If you are too hot, you can put your flippers in the water and that will help you cool down a little bit faster. Because the rest of your body, you don't sweat. You don't have, you don't have the ability to dump heat as we do easily. Do they not sweat? No. Wow. Cool. So the only way to dump heat or warm up is through their flippers. And they have, they have other, other spots in their body that are highly vascularized. So a lot of blood flow through those areas. And that's one of the reasons why they do the banana pose. Oh my gosh. One last question from a listener,

Lizzy Carr, summed it up for a lot of us, wants to know, are seals mean or nice? I read something recently that said they're really mean, but they look so sweet. My heart can't handle if they're dicks i wonder if i say that i'm i'm kind of whenever i teach my grandma class something like that i try to apply a little bit of shock therapy to my students and tell them seals even though they look adorable and you want to hug them they are wild animals and they can be mean animals but i don't mean it like like like that i just basically mean that we have to sort of we sort of idealize seals and think that they're these cuddly animals and they're not they're wild animals they can bite they can transmit diseases to humans so and we can transmit diseases to them so it's one there's a way i would tell everyone to stay away from the

seals they're just animals i don't think there's i think humans are tell everyone to stay away from the seals. They're just animals. I don't think there's, I think humans are mean. I don't think animals are mean. Well said. Agreed. Agreed. On the topic of things that do or do not suck, what is the worst part about being a professional penipidologist who gets to travel to distant parts of the globe

and gets to boop snoots and gets to walk on the ice. Like there's gotta be something that sucks. It's not really about being a pedologist, but it's more about, I guess it goes back to being human, I guess. But in science, I guess that because of the competition is so fierce. And so there's so few resources. Sometimes people forget about their ethics and the fact that they're humans and they do things that are not very nice. Let's just put it like that.

So it's a very minority, very, very minor minority. There's not that many cases where that happens, but it does happen. And that's, that's a big bummer to me. The fact that you recognize that means you're probably not doing that, which is good. What about the best thing about your life as a pinnipedologist? There's a lot of good, really good things. I mean, I was very negative about humans in the past answer,

the previous answer, but my colleagues are by far one of the best human beings that I've ever met. I have my best friends who are pedagogies. My whole circle of colleagues is just amazing. So that part is incredible. Travel is a really good thing. I've been to every continent on the planet for either meetings or field work.

But by far, I got to say, working with the animals is just beyond what anyone can imagine. The fact that you can be so close to these animals in Antarctica, for example, I never imagined in my wildest dream that I would be sedating a wood ale seal, which are by far the most adorable seals on the planet, and working with them and taking care of a pup while we're working with the mom, for example. And just, yeah, all that experience working with animals is by far the most incredible part of my career. And I wouldn't change it for the world.

I will keep doing this until basically I can't move anymore. But yeah, there's so many opportunities to enjoy being in the wild. But having that close contact with animals, yeah, there's no other thing like that. Just make sure to keep outrunning them. Yeah. I keep booping them. Yeah, keep booping and outrunning them.

This has been such a joy. I just can't thank you enough. You have been on my list for so long. Oh, thank you. It's been a pleasure. So ask Arctic explorers adventurous questions, sometimes embarrassing ones, because our time on the planet goes by fast. You might as well fill your skull with wonder. So cut bangs, text your crush, leave your hair dye lifter on twice

as long, and make the buttery jack reverse ombre a summer Trend. If you have no idea what words I'm using, you can see my Instagram at Allie Ward. I had a hair mishap and we're calling it the buttery jack. It's what we're doing. Summer, buttery jack. It's happening. Now to follow Luis, which of course you want to do, you can find him at Luis Huxtat on Twitter or LA Huxt on Instagram. Those handles and his website are linked in the show notes below. Very easy. Click follow as well as on my website at alibor.com slash ologies slash pinnipinology. There are links to a ton of things we talked about and videos. There are also bleeped episodes and transcripts on my website. Those are transcribed by Emily White of thewordery.com. Thank you,

Caleb Patton for bleeping the episodes. Thank you to every patron who submitted questions and who supports the show. You can join them for as little as a dollar a month. You could submit questions to ologists. That's at patreon.com slash ologies. Thank you, Aaron Talbert, for moderating the ologies podcast Facebook group. You're all so nice there. Thank you to everyone on the Discord and the subreddit for ologies. Hello out there. Thanks to everyone who came to the live show, by the way. Super fun. Ologiesmerch.com has t-shirts and hats and socks and stickers and face masks and more. Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch of the Comedy Podcast. You were that for managing that, as well as help from Susan Hale and Noel Dilworth, who helps schedule the

interviews as well. Kelly Dwyer designed and maintains Alleyward.com. Thank you to a duo of recently shorn editors, Jared Sleeper, who has agreed to marry me, and Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the Percast and See Jurassic Right and has never agreed to marry me. But both are top-notch dudes. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music, and he is in a very good band called Islands. They have a new album coming out soon. If you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. This week, it is 7.48 PM on Monday, May 24th. Hours before this comes out, I'm in Cincinnati. I'm in a hotel. I have seen one alive cicada from 200 feet away. I am so thrilled. I can see their shells on the tree trunks from afar. I'm finishing this episode and then I'm heading out to get dinner with thanatologist Cole and Perry and Victor and Perry. And I'm

seeing the cicadas at their house. I've waited over 30 years to meet a periodical brood 10 cicada. And when I saw the shells, the exuviai on the tree trunks this morning, I legit got teary eyed. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to see Cole and Victor. I'm going to hug them so much. Everyone's vaccinated. Man, decades of wanting to see Rude 10. It's about to happen. I'm just very excited.

So I'm going to send this. I'm going to send it off. I'd say I have butterflies, but I don't. I have billions of squirming, fluttering cicadas in my belly. Very stoked. Okay, bye-bye.