Ologies with Alie Ward - Teuthology (SQUIDS) Encore with Dr. Sarah McAnulty

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

THE SQUIDMOBILE HAS ARRIVED. Get in losers; we’re talking cephalopods. Yes, she drives a vehicle with squid all over it and encourages people to text her, and we have this encore episode to prove it. The world's most impassioned squid nerd, Sarah McAnulty, gets locked in a basement with Alie to talk about cephalopods, alien DNA, camouflage, invisibility cloaks, why cute things make us bonkers, terrible mating strategies, cute and clever ones and why she is so charmed by squid. Also addressed: Philly accents and the Kraken. And why I am putting out an encore episode from a parking garage.The squid facts hotline can be reached at 1-833-SCI-TEXT aka 1-833-724-8398Follow Dr. Sarah McAnulty on Twitter & Instagram @SarahMackAttackSarah's Atlas Obscura classes, science trivia, book + moreA donation was made this week to SkypeAScientist.comFollow Skype A Scientist on Twitter & InstagramSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, what a treat. Wow. Okay, first off, my nickname was squid in high school. And I don't really have a good reason. I think I used to wear my hair and like a lot of braids. Maybe that was it. And I did a squid dance for my friends. But squidly is my nickname from high school. The reason why you're hearing motorcycles go by is because I am recording this in my parents' car in a parking garage at UC Davis Medical Center. So that was just some atmosphere for you. This is an encore episode from the before times. It's from February 2018. Today is April 20th. And yes, I am in a parking garage. So your grandpa is being taken care of here after sit down and emergency brain surgery on Sunday. So I thought what better time than to just indulge in an

encore episode. I'm taking time to be bedside with him and my family. And so I am dishing you up a hot serving of a great episode from the past. Thank you to all theologists in this building at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. You make me want to change the spelling to all a gist because all because you're the best, you're saving lives and I'm just a big fan of your work. So thank you also to everyone who's sending good cosmic vibes our way. I know we've been getting a lot of that. So thank you for that. So this week, let's get to this episode. A tweet went super dang viral of thisologist's car. So much so that her squid hotline at 1-833-SYTEXT 1-833-724-8398. She had 16,000 requests for squid facts because of an internet tweet that blew up.

And stay tuned until the very end of the episode to hear an update on if we ever saw each other again after we recorded this in 2018, as well as a fresh secret. So here we go. An encore episode. It's literally one of my favorites and everyone is talking about this guest. It's finally time. It's the moment you've been waiting months for. A cephalopod cast. Okay. Tuthology comes from tooth, which is Greek for cuttlefish or squid. What's a cephalopod mean? Well, that comes from cephala, which means head and pod feet because they essentially look like a giant long brain with a mop of feet glued on. So this week's episode is all about squids and squids and squids and octopuses and cuttlefish. They are adorable,

shape-shifting, possibly alien, creepy, alive cartoons. I love them even more after recording this. I would hug every one of them if I could. But first, I want to say thank you and give you all an audio hug to everyone who's bought merch at oligysmerch.com. There's pins and hats and all kinds of things and totes and to all of the folks supporting for even 25 cents an episode on patreon.com slash oligies. Thank you for supporting the show. Also, you can give back for no money, zero dollars, just a little bit of effort. When you rate and review and subscribe, that keeps oligies up in the iTunes chart. So more people see it and say, what's this shit? And then listen to it. And then there are more of us out there to delight in primate butts and laughter science,

etc. So I read each and every review every week. I creep on them so hard. They mean so much to me just the fact that I get to make this podcast and you guys listen is like, Peej CWS says, fantastic podcast. I recently had a dream that I was an Uber driver rolling around and listening to oligies. I stopped and Ally Ward got in my car. I got really embarrassed and her show was streaming while she was in the car. So I tried to slightly change it without her noticing. I just want to let Peej know that that wasn't a dream. What if we actually did that in another astral plane? Anyway, thanks for the reviews. Okay, back to Squid. Who's Squid? They look like swimming dicks with parrot beaks and they are alive, invisibility cloaks. But

are they aliens? How do they change color? Can they kill you? What's a Kraken? I very excitedly met with a squid scientist that I've been fawning over on Twitter for months after a post of hers about Squid went viral. What happened was multiple Jibronys tried to tell her that her squid were cuttlefish and she's like, I'm a squid scientist. They're squid. So I've become a huge fan girl of her general knowledge and passion about squid so much that I took a train two hours from New York to Connecticut and back in one day just to spend an hour with her. She picked me up from the train station and told me I'd recognize her car because it had her Twitter handle and email plus the words ever wonder about squid ask me anything octopus to written on the back window.

Her license plate reads simply squids. It's 39 degrees. I can see my breath. I'm outside New Haven, Connecticut. First time in Connecticut. I'm looking for a squid car. I'm so nervous. I've been trying to be her friend so hardcore for months online. What if she doesn't like me? Oh my gosh. I think I see her. This is so exciting. Squids. Oh my gosh. Hi. Oh my gosh. It's me. Hi. I'm getting in your car. Oh my gosh. Your license plate really says squids. It does. So we drove around New Haven a little and at the time she was a PhD candidate and a scientist at the University of Connecticut. But now she has a PhD indeed. She runs the non-profit organization Skype a Scientist and that connects science folks with

all manner of people who have good questions for them from classrooms to book clubs and also runs a weekly trivia night through Skype a Scientist which are always such a blast and you can find out more at skypescientist.com. There's a link in the show notes. But she also wrote a squid coloring book. I'll link that on my website and she teaches classes through Atlas Obscura and she's got one coming up in June on animal reproduction that is going to be a hoot. I suggest you sign up for it before the slots are out. She also is teaching a squid class in September. You can love her. Head to the link in my webpage where we will do link up all of that. But anyway, she picked me up. We drove around complete strangers in Connecticut on a winter day

and we convinced a library to let us record in their basement and we talked about iridescent bioluminescent sea creatures crafty cuttlefish costuming octopus brains because they're shaped so weird alien DNA weird dating stories both human our own and cephalopod related and what happens when you blindfold a creature who is all head and arms so please get ready to become obsessed with quite possibly the world's most charming and impassioned squid nerd ever toothologist Dr. Sarah Mackenalty do you know that I for some reason every time I want to say your name I want to say McNulty most people do yeah why do I do that I don't know genetics Irish phonetics make no sense okay you are a toothologist I'm a toothologist yes

so glad you know that word yeah te u thologist do people do you ever say that would do you ever drop that cash uh no one knows what I'm talking about uh one time someone asked me if I was a toothologist and then again I got very excited but uh it rarely comes up normally I just say I'm a squid biologist okay you're kind of boned by phonetics because it sounds like you're an orthodontist yeah it does sound like you study teeth and squid don't even have teeth so uh the poor things they just have beaks so uh yeah we're hoes there so you are a squid scientist yes um how long you've been into squid so I have been interested in squid and so I was a little kid but I started actually working with cephalopods when I was in right after my sophomore year of

college I uh found out about this lab in Woods Hole in Massachusetts that was working on a cuttlefish camouflage and I thought that was like so insane that you could have a career working on the coolest animal there is so um I like basically followed the scientist around to places that I knew who was giving talks and I was like hi I'm Sarah uh please let me work for you and he was like you're too young and I was like please though I would really like to work for you Sarah sent the lab a very passionate letter where she basically said look if you don't hire me this year you're just gonna hear from me next year and the year after that and he was like okay crazy uh and gave me an internship Sarah has worked with cephalopods ever since octopuses octopi more on that later

in college and now she works with little critters called bobtail squid which are an evolutionary in between octopuses and cuttlefish bobtail squid are little they have a shorter rounded mantle and they can be these beautiful iridescent colors they're also called dumpling squid or stubby squid because of their shape and the general consensus is that they are the cutest things on planet earth so I'm sorry sloths you've been replaced super side note if you look at a photo of a bobtail squid and simply cannot even or you need to scream or punch yourself in the face this is something that Yale researchers have dubbed cute aggression one hypothesis is that the brain simply cannot deal with that much positive stimulation at once and turn some of it into

the opposite just some negative emotion which for most people ends up being aggression or screaming or squealing or slapping themselves so google bobtail squid and then bury your face into a couch cushion and shriek with abandon it's fine it's okay it'll be helpful what's the timeline between octopus and squid and bobtail squid I know that's a stupid stupid question but like what did one come first and then another what happened so okay first we had like ammonites and those are those things that look like nautiluses those like spiral shells I think a common ancestor of those we had belemnites and those are basically squid with shells like long skinny cone shells and then they brought the shells inside their body instead of outside their body and then they most of them

lost the shells completely and some keep them inside so there's like squid like the kind of squid that you eat in calamari still has something called a pen which is like a clear bendy version of a shell and cuttlefish have cuttlebones which are these actually birds eat them for like calcium but they have their little buoyancy devices right in the back of the animal and then our bobtail squid have absolutely nothing at all but yeah so octopuses diverge from squid and cuttlefish a long time ago I don't remember exactly how many millions of years ago so they're off on their own branch with vampire squid which are not either they're more like octopuses than squid what is a vampire squid vampire squid are dope so vampire squid are these deep sea cephalopods

that look kind of like a dumbbell octopus if you've seen those but they're dark maroon red and at the each at the end of each of their arms they have a little organ that has a bioluminescence so each of the tips of their arms are bioluminescent and then they have these big spots on either side of their head they're bioluminescent to give the impression that they have huge eyes to make other animals think they're way bigger than they actually are okay I just look these things up whoo boy they're this deep crimson color and their arms are more webbed kind of like a a bloody umbrella with a head and their latin genus and species name is vampire toothus infernalis and it translates to something that sounds like a title to a grindhouse film vampire squid from hell

that is what their latin name means vampire squid from hell do they have knives and lengthy rap sheets of criminal offenses not so much and they're nonviolent little animals that basically just eat dead shit that falls from above because they live so deep that when things die above it just sinks down that's called marine snow and they have god which is um quite a euphemism that's disgusting it's just like dead stuff and they're just called vampire squids because they're maroon they look really scary so like each of their arms has these little spikes sticking off of it so they look really intimidating you would think I wouldn't want to run into one of those but they're just eating dead stuff and floating around so it's not too bad I think it's more they got more

bark and bite there's when we when you talk about marine snow there's poo in there too right oh totally okay yeah big time okay why squid I mean obviously squid are the coolest but like what illuminated you to how cool squid were so when I was uh when I first realized that squid were awesome I was about eight and I was watching this natural natural uh geographic like video that I got from the library it was all about the ocean fish coral reefs reefs reefs not sure dolphins and what have you but there was this segment about halfway through where they play twilight zone music and then they introduced the cuttlefish and I was just like what the fuck is that you are entering another dimension a watery world between time and space where strange creatures

use bizarre powers the alien zone and I was like I need to know more about that animal and so in the video it's doing this like passing cloud maneuver so cuttlefish can change color as quickly as they think about it because each little color changing cell is controlled by neurons so it's as if you think that you can change which is really cool so they're called chromatophores and there's little sacks of pigment little circles spheres of pigment that are surrounded by little cellular muscles that can stretch the pigment out like a pancake and then let it release and go back to a little teeny tiny beach ball so they can turn these on in pattern so I saw that and was like this is bananas and yeah so I had been into dinosaurs but then I switched

over to cephalopods pretty much right then and there and I check that video out all the time you're like sorry dino's sorry yeah we don't even know what color you were let alone if you could change like an led screen yeah that nat geo video which sarah posted on her tumblr squidscientistas.tumblr.com shows cuttlefish flitting about doing what's called dynamic displays so they're blinking and changing colors there's like bands of black flashing over their body like if clouds were overhead zooming past you and through bands of shadow across you so it looks like hypnotic and it confuses their prey it's bananas they're like living squishy disco lights I get why this video was life changing when you're obsessed with squid I think that makes other people obsessed with

your obsession with squid that's make sense that makes sense yeah when people are kind of obsessed with cephalopods do you think it's their huge brains or their dexterity or their instant camouflage that people are drawn to it's probably different for everybody but I think one thing that's really drawing and interesting about cephalopods is that they're really complex animals that diverged so long ago from us that they've come up with all these really wacky cool ways to get around the same problems that any other organism has to get around but in a super different way like you know camouflage is the most crazy different one but nuts I mean I can't even you watch videos and you're like okay it's so fast it's crazy are we ever gonna develop technology

to like give us invisibility cloaks in case we see like someone we don't want to see at Costco or something yeah one thing that is really really hard to figure out is how cephalopods look at their environment and then pick what to do because it's not as though they're saying okay I bet I could do a pretty good rendition of that rock they take the whole like environment and then they kind of like say okay I bet this would fit it's like looking for a new piece of furniture in a room not to match what you've got but to kind of go with the flow of the room but there are scientists working on that um in Woods Hole in that lab that I used to work for understanding what cues they're using from the environment to pick what to look like and getting back to that

stretching the pigments out like a pancake and then smushing them like a beach ball does that change the way that the light reflects on the pigment or how does that change the color so in okay so we've got multiple layers of cephalopods skin on the bottom base layer for some cephalopods like cuttlefish um there's this really really white uh cell type called leukophores and these cells never change color it's just whatever color you shoot on them is the color that they give back to you and it's like the purest white in the animal kingdom so there are grants working to study this to um make e-readers better um so that the back of the like page is the whitest version so your eyes have more pigment or more uh contrast to pick up

on words which is cool okay so that's that's base and then above that we have eridophores and eridophores really are the ones that change color but they change color the slowest so they can go from like red to uh blue purple sort of and those are changing hormonally so they change a lot slower um but they're the kind of sparkly iridescent cells and then on top of those those are where your chromatophores are and chromatophores are one color all the time but you have many different colors of chromatophores all in your kind of palette so there are like brown ones and yellow ones and reddish ones um so which they choose to turn on will determine the pattern that you see so you're using all of these different uh cell types to amalgamate a pattern is it like a like

a tv screen or led screen like is it similar to that or that would require me to understand how led screens work and i have no idea i tried to check to see if this tv screen analogy was whack i was like maybe that was embarrassing to say and then i went on a rabbit hole of lcd liquid crystal display backlit by led light emitting diodes but also jumbotrons which is actually a trademark name and sony no longer makes them but led jumbotrons if those were like chromatophores and then i found a published paper called dynamic skin patterns in cephalopods published last year which said in the opening graph quote with parallels to the pixels on a television screen cephalopod chromatophores so boom i'm sticking with it don't at me scientists agree now we have

more important squid gossip to address so i have two pieces of flimflam i need you to okay wonderful like straight away i had amazing uh dr christak heron ecologist and she told me that giant squid live like five years is that true that squid have really short lifespans oh yeah so some squid live even shorter lifespans than that so our bob tail squid we think live about nine months in the wild so really short and then we think at the long end of things is like about five years if they could live to a hundred years would they take over the world would we be screwed one would have to assume yes yeah the other flimflam i have to debunk is um our octopus in squid possibly alien dna and that's why they're so cool let's talk about that one so yeah um

no cephalopods are not aliens so here's what happened so the octopus genome came out and there's a lot of weird cool stuff in that genome and they were saying okay there's like all this weird stuff going on like it's weight really different it's like it's an alien they said casually to a journalist and then journalist cephalopods are aliens we're like oh shit good no that's it's not we're saying like alien like squid did not come from space so talk to me a little bit about your work with bacteria interactions i know you work with bob tail squid which are these cute cute little guys and you study bioluminescent bacteria that lives on their underside right so the bob tail squid has this like symbiosis with the bacterium

right it's bioluminescent it's called vibrio fissurei so they have this organ that is appropriately called a light organ and that's where the bacteria live it's really cool yeah what a rig it's it's an evolutionary like i shouldn't use the word mindfuck but it's evolutionarily really really complex and cool so bob tail squid have these two little crypts where they house one species one single species of bioluminescent bacteria like a bunch of glowing purse chihuahuas but the purse is your skin and the chihuahuas help you live now because it's just one species of bacteria that they have this relationship with it's way easier to study and isolate than a microbiome with a bunch of different species and in sarah's lab they're looking at the communication between

the animal and the bacterium and how the immune cells influence it like how they recognize their so-called good bacteria so remember the glycobiology episode with michelle de qua where cells use carbohydrate flags to kind of check each other out and we think it's sort of like when the immune cell and the bacterium first stick to each other the immune cell is kind of like asking the bacterium a couple questions like okay when it comes to lipopolysaccharide what do you have going on okay it looks like that okay what do you have going on for this protein over here okay and and let me look at this one other thing on your surface and with this information combined i can identify who you are talk to me a little bit about bobtail squid because

they do look like a hybrid between a squid and an octopus and a cuttlefish which is actually how i got to know and gently stalk you is i saw i saw you tweeted this adorable photo of when you go check on your squids and like some of them are totally okay with the checkup and others pretend to be rocks and it was like one bobtail squid that was covered herself in rocks and was like now that i see her and and then some people tweeted back at you like uh pretty sure it's cuttlefish everyone's like a fuck off right she's a squid scientist yeah this happens to me like maybe once a week that someone tries to tell me that my bobtail squid is a cuttlefish that particular day i had like 30 people tell me my bobtail squid was a cuttlefish but i've just like

accepted that this is gonna be part of my life like having men tell me that my squid is not my squid and to be fair like so there are true squid and like i keep calling them calamari squid but like i think that's where you encounter them the most like these long skinny squid so you know when i just say like look at my squid doing something stupid some people will be like well actually it's not a true squid it's a you should really be using the term bobtail squid i'm like yeah i guess i should when i have this many followers and this many people like getting all up in my business i guess i should always use bobtail squid and they're definitely not cuttlefish they're definitely just definitely not cuttlefish so to be a cuttlefish you need to

have a cuttlebone and the cuttlebone is that buoyant um aragonite is what it's made of uh it's kind of chel chalky right chalky thing yeah and it helps them maintain neutral buoyancy so they don't have to actually put an effort um staying up in the water in the water in the water every time sarah says water i die i die i texted her afterwards to ask where she's from out of pure linguistic curiosity and it's philly i love it so much so this accent is called philadelphia english it's the proper name for it and it's heavily influenced by immigrants from northern ireland and scotland so how you pronounce water is said to be like the defining characteristic of philadelphia english i find it so charming so please when you hear her say water take a sip

of your beverage rejoice it's so endearing it's like sloth baby squid level cute okay back to cuttlebones and if you don't have that you are not a cuttlefish um that's basic like cuttlefish 101 so if anyone's out there that's like i'm pretty sure i'm a cuttlefish like check yourself like check your back like are you do you have stiff yeah and yeah then you're a cuttlefish that's probably true you're a cuttlefish once you have ascertained if you were a cuttlefish how do you know if you're being a dick on the internet okay sarah has not only a lot of forgiveness and total compassion but also kind of an easy test for this for anyone ask yourself before you correct someone if you're right and if you are proceed and say it in a way that's like not hey

you're wrong just say like i'm not sure but i think you're wrong and that goes over better and also if if you get caught out for mansplaining like say sorry right and also if people apologize for mansplaining like let them go like they apologize like everybody has a douchey moment in their life things get so overblown so fast online i know and like yeah things can really snowball so just try to be nice to everybody they can marine snowball they can marine snowball that would be the grossest snowball you've ever seen ever um your position on eating cephalopods what is it okay so um toothoid squid i eat um those are like your calamar squid and um bobtail squid are so small that you'd have to they would be like eating stuffed mushrooms like

they're so little and so i don't eat those partially because it would take a lot of work and partially because i've raised them from like eggs like from day one i'm like a little weird they're squid mom like i can't eat them um i don't eat cuttlefish because i think they're so stinking cute that like i couldn't do it and i've i've raised those two um and they're like clever and cute and friendly and like when you feed them they like know you and they'll normally like snuggle next to the seaweed and then if someone that they know comes in that like they know will feed them they'll like come out of the seaweed and like say hi hi this one cuttlefish um it was like cuttlefish number three or whatever that anytime i came in the room he wouldn't just

like come out of his seaweed he would like bob his head out of the water and it like it was the cutest it was like the highlight of my day every day getting greeted by cuttlefish number three and when cuttlefish three got sick and died i like cried in the bathroom for 15 minutes i was so sad because he was just like so cute and so friendly and so i kind of think like having cuttlefish around it's like having a dog around like they're wagging their tail and they're happy to see you and they're just like wow you're just the best and then octopuses are like the jerk cats that are like some of them are nice some of them are friendly but a lot of them are just like you know i couldn't give a shit if you live or died and that was i've only worked with

octopus bimaculoides the two spot the california two spot octopus so um maybe it's just them that are sometimes jerks so i had eight of them in college and i not like in my dorm room like in the lab um that would be a cool side project but not uh safe so uh yeah when i would like feed them so you feed them crabs or whatever you feed them i fed them crabs and um they stack their little crab shells in a little pile which is like really cute because they want to keep things neat and clean so i would like come in to clean their tank and sometimes they would like play with my hands or whatever that i gave them rubber ducky so they might like pull the rubber ducky to the bottom of the tank let go some of them would like squirt me in the face every single day and i don't know if

they were just like playing like hey girl let me squirt you in the face you look a little dry but that's uncomfortable let me help you um and others would just cower in their tanks when i was around i was like i feed you i don't touch you i don't hurt you like why are you afraid of me but maybe a human uh out in california before they were caught was mean to them or maybe they just have good survival instincts i don't know maybe they're plotting a takeover of the world maybe they're plotting a takeover that's true there are a lot of stories of octopuses really wreaking havoc in aquaria it didn't strike me until i was editing this wait wait what okay the plural of aquarium is aquaria what what okay aquariums is still considered fine but aquaria is more correct

also jumbotrons are typically located in sports stadia sit with that okay back to how and why an octopus can gtfo your aquarium aquaria you basically need to like make sure the tank is completely locked down and has no areas that they can escape um that are way smaller than you think they can escape from because they can squeeze through anything the size of their beak and their beak is way smaller than their head um so you gotta watch out for that how do their brain squish so squid and octopus brains are bizarre they so they're okay so you've got a beak in the middle surrounded by arms and tentacles if you're a squid so two tentacles and eight arms everybody's got eight arms and um then they're digestive like their esophagus goes through

their brain their brain is like donut shaped what um and goes around their esophagus so things are just like squish in all the time so some cephalopods you can't squish them like you can't squish a cuttlefish because its cuttle bone is big and and you can't squish it um but octopuses can squish through all kinds of stuff uh i don't know if it's like uncomfortable because like we can do things that are uncomfortable like right hard yoga positions that we can do but like right flying coach sure flying coach that's really unpleasant but you can do it you know it'll get you from a to b which is probably what the octopus is trying to do um but yeah i don't know they it doesn't hurt a long term i guess and why do some of the squid say they're totally fine with the checkup and why

are others like nothing to see i think this is just like a personality thing so um just like there are cats that when people come to the house they hide under the bed and others that are like yeah what up my name's rupert like please pet me like i think some of them just are anxious little anchors and other of others of them are like i've been here the whole time you haven't killed me yet like let's just do this whatever um and when i'm raising the squid they see me every day my hands are in their tanks every day like they get used to the blue nail polish and whatever that comes along with me um although i think they're colorblind so they probably don't know that my nail polish is blue they're colorblind but they have chromatophores yeah how wacky is that so i don't know i think

octopus are colorblind but i would like wouldn't bet my life on that i'm sure that cuttlefish are so they can only see like tones of green we think um which how the hell do they figure out what to do we don't know there was this proposed experiment where they're they're thinking okay maybe there's like another way for them to see color that we aren't aware of so we'll just blind them and see if they can uh change color and match their surroundings but the scientists didn't want to blind a little baby cuttlefish because that would make you really sad so it never got done um because the next time people are like scientists are just cold hearted they'll kill at it like no sometimes we feel so bad that we just won't do it uh and won't get the answer but uh anyway i digress um you couldn't

blindfold them just be like close your eyes close your eyes we thought about doing that um but as we mentioned cephalopods are real squishy so we were like what would happen if we like took those goggles that you put on when people go tanning yeah and just like stick them on a cuttlefish so we like tried they basically reached their arms back and like pulled off their face so if you think it's hard to like blindfold a dog like this is a squishy headed dog that has opposable everything so like they can just yoink stuff right out in multiples of arms yeah like eight of them side note arms versus tentacles it's a thing octopuses have eight arms but squid and cuttlefish have eight arms plus two tentacles the tentacles are the two longer stretchy ones with the grippy clubs on the end

of them and the clubs have these circular serrated rings kind of like teeth so they can whip out and catch stuff which would be so handy if you were like sitting on a couch and your bag of cheetos was across the room and you were like okay if you wanted to make sensual love to someone but didn't want to walk over to them tentacles also helpful and now what about for sexing i heard that an octopus will just use the end of an arm like a paddle covered in sperms and then be like hey uh sent you something and like send it swimming over to a lady like use this use this and make some babies yeah so uh their cephalopod sex is varied and wacky so yeah let's just like talk about it because there's a lot to talk about here so in i don't even know where to begin so in

deep sea squid not all deep sea squid but this one deep sea squid whose genus and species name obviously is not coming to me right now googled and it's octopatuthis de letron for those taking notes they see each other so rarely that when they see another squid like they don't care if it's male squid they don't care if it's female squid when the male squid see another squid they will punch through the body cavity and just like stick sperm somewhere in there what so like if you think you've had a bad date i'm sure you have but at least no one literally punched sperm through your abs like no and they don't even verify they don't even verify no there's like oh that could be a squid and then it's like oh so there are just like male squid getting sperm

stuck on the inside female squid getting sperm that just sounds like a terrible approach but do they survive it yeah yeah so i would i would change myself into an invisibility cloak all the time no wonder i'd be like yeah there's no squid here i gotta get out of here and this is the pits yeah the dating scene in the deep sea is is no good uh okay let's talk about something better um so we've got the giant australian cuttlefish and this is like my favorite cephalopod tail out there so these these uh cuttlefish are like a meter long they're huge and beautiful so the males are like okay if you can picture a cuttlefish if you've never seen a cuttlefish before picture a rugby ball with like a bed skirt around the outside and then like a little stupid face with

eight arms so so you're there we're there and now the males have these two big arms that kind of were like flopping down on either side they're really big and kind of billowy um and they kind of look like someone put on a shirt that's way too big for them and that's their skin and they're purple and blue and beautiful and ruffly honestly with their arms like right in front of their eyes they look like heavily mustachioed like ron swanson types or like a bristle lipped cop from an old movie and now the female of the species is much smaller and they tend to put on more maroon splotchy patterns so they're easily distinguished from the males by the size and the color well most males and there are a lot of males in the breeding frenzies which i propose

i think they should call them cuttle parties hey it's quite a battle because there's like 10 males to every one female out there so yeah it's a tough it's a tough uh sausage party it's a sausage fest yeah uh so the big males will basically battle each other they'll wrestle um and the winner of the wrestling match which is like hilarious because like watching two like comforters battle is like pretty funny so there yeah there's like floofy tentacles everywhere and arms rather everywhere and um the winner gets access to the female for at least a bit of time mates with her and then the females meanwhile mating with many males throughout this time period and storing the sperm from each male in these little pockets that she's got in her arms and

she's like just keeping her rolodex of sperm ready to go and then when she actually um lays her egg she gets to kind of pick who she liked and who she didn't like does she remember because i can't that sounds like uh the season premiere of the bachelor basically i guess she does how does she do it i don't know they're they're very organized so okay that's already pretty cool but then you have these little males and they know they don't stand a chance against the big males if they get in a battle they're gonna lose so they gotta think of something else to do so they will cross dress basically they take those two big billy arms on the side and they just tuck them i love rube paul's drag race and no they do and then they put on this like the bodily pattern of the female

and then they just like swim on over to the female and they're like hey girl and then when the male's like i'm killing it i got two ladies this is the best day ever yo joe and then while he goes to talk to his friend the little male is like ps i'm a dude mates with the female leaves really fast so that he doesn't get his ass kicked by the big male and then when the female goes to lay her egg so she's got her eggs like all back up in the mantle and she fertilizes them one by one and puts them in a little egg clutch on the bottom of the ocean so um when she goes to do that like i said before she can choose who she liked and those males the little males that cross dress they get a bigger proportion what of the eggs than the big males um why i guess they want to

like maybe the females liked intelligence like hey that was pretty smart so if we're ever like how did those cephalopods get so smart it's like well here's one way um they're choosing for it so it sounds like the like the worst rom-com plot ever so they're able to to change their pattern to look like a lady yeah yeah so it's all like so we talk about like and i might get yelled at for this but like we talk about gender being obviously different from sex and you you only have gender when there's society you know so like we normally were only like well gender's only true in humans because only humans have society and it's like and yet if you can cross dress and put on different like cultural patterns and signals of being a male or female like do cuttlefish kind of have

gender like maybe i don't know i'm not a gender and sexuality scientist i'm a squid scientist but food for thought for us to all think about as we go about our day i mean it's kind of like how us ladies like funny ugly guys you know i mean totally you're like you've got a good brain yeah i don't need a jawline you know that's so fascinating i always like to ask is there a movie about cephalopods that you hate or love all right with the whale leagues under the sea has a giant squid um there are certainly no movies about squid biologists that i'm aware of are there any sea creatures like giant squid in any of the pirates like yeah there is the kraken um the kraken isn't one of them but yeah we can talk about that because that kraken upsets me okay so like

we've said uh cephalopods have beaks and this kraken when it comes out now of course like the kraken is a mythological creature but the kraken that was the mythological creature we've shown is probably a giant squid so i uh denounced the fact that it's mythological it's real uh uh so whatever so it's like stick with what's real and so the kraken in that movie has like of rings of teeth like a shark sort of but like there's no beak in there it's just rings of teeth and i'm like come on man you we have access to what those animals look like beaks are scary enough but you don't need rings of teeth what are the beaks what do the beaks look like and where did those come from from an evolutionary standpoint who i don't know where they came from from an

evolutionary standpoint um but they look like sharp parrot beaks kind of they're like brown parrot beaks i should have brought them because i have a collection of squid beaks um which is something that we don't mention on the first date which uh i'm going to tell you a story that i've never told on a podcast before so once upon a time i was going on a date with a dude whose name i shouldn't mention we were hanging out and talking about raccoons and stuff as as you do on a first day and and then we things were going pretty well so we were back in my apartment and then we like went in my room to hang out and then he found a box under my bed was like what it was like pretty close to that to like the he wasn't like deep under my bed it was like pretty close to the

outside of my bed and he was like what's in the box thinking it would be something that like would be fun for him but i knew that that box had like squid beaks in it like squid beaks octopus beaks cuddle bones like dried flowers and like snake skins and stuff and i was like oh no yeah you don't want to go in there like that's it's maybe not the best idea so he was like oh that means i should definitely go in there so he opens it up and like okay maybe recently i had gotten some squid and maybe i was like still working on getting some of the squid chunks off of them so i like had soaked them in this like ethanol so like i so he was like wait what is this and was like already like the look on his face went from like this is gonna be a great night to like what

the fuck did i get myself into and i was like oh well i mean those are just like um squid beaks and i also have some octopus and uh cuttlefish too and ur and then and he opened it he opened it and and then he just closed the jar put it back in the box put the box under my bed walked out and never talked to me no again oh i was gonna hope i was hoping to say that you're like engaged or something not even after hanging out in a basement with this chick for one hour i can very much say his loss are you ready for some rapid fire i'm so ready for some rapid fire okay all right okay but before we zip zap lightning round let's toss some money at a worthy cause and this week hello shaboom it's skype a scientist skype a scientist has a database of thousands of scientists

and it helps connect them with classrooms and families and libraries and scout troops and more all over the globe and skype a scientist gives students the opportunity that's the parking garage skype a scientist gives students the opportunity to get to know a real scientist and get the answers to their questions straight from the source so you can learn more at skype scientist dot com and you can also join their patreon you get tickets to trivia every week if you do that um if the twenty five dollar level seriously trivia night's great so fun anyway the donation was made possible by sponsors of the show okay questions yours let's have them lily masa wants to know what's the deal with squid ink what's the deal with squid ink so

squid okay yeah this is this is a good question because i can go anywhere i want with it so squid ink is it's a pigment that they store in their ink sack and they primarily use it to get away from predators so they have two options they could either make this poofy cloud that they just like like a smoke bomb and then they disappear and confuse everybody and potentially uh it tastes bad to some fish so the inky like ah you can't see me leave is one tactic another approach is um what's called a pseudomorph so that's a blob that they incorporate mucus into the uh but no it's great it's okay i've had it all over my face before because i was working with the squid and it woke up in the middle of me trying to wake it up really violently and just inked me

right in the face and it was just like dripping off my face and i was like man i deserved it they'll shoot the pseudomorph where they were jet away from where they are leave the blob where they were so the the shark or the big fish is like oh there it is and then attacks the blob and just gets a mouth full of mucusy ink how pissed would you be if you were eating a sandwich you blink for a second you put the sandwich in your mouth it's an inky inky blob of mucus that'll be a real bummer have some cold bummer your sandwich is like and it's hiding behind a bush yeah they'll be pissed pissed uh oh so that's the deal was i didn't know that that's what they used them for i thought they were they only produced it for pasta that's

true they also used it for pasta um el martinez wants to know how many giant squids are there and is there any truth to the old tales of giant squids attacking ships okay no that's that's the question i've answered so uh there are most likely a shit ton of giant squid because we find a lot of giant squid beaks in sperm whales so we've like tried to back of the envelope calculate how many giant squid there are and um i don't have that exact number in my head but they live pretty much everywhere in the deep ocean now the reason there's this myth about them attacking ships is that um these animals are full of ammonia which is uh part of dealing with buoyancy basically and when they die instead of sinking like other squid and cuttlefish and octopus do

they float and so when they're starting to feel uh like crap and start to die they tend to just sort of like go near the top of the water yeah we think there are a lot a lot a lot of giant squid ooh okay oh and they get to the top of the water when they're sick and ships like maybe they'll just like touch the side of the ship because they're like what what year is it like who are you like are you gonna help me and then they're like the the sailors like oh my god it's attacking meanwhile it's just like on its death bed and feeling like garbage so it's not gonna hurt you tell my family i love you exactly exactly um john worst wants to know how intelligent is an octopus would its intelligence level compare it to like a four five-year-old child or is it more intelligent than

that the short answer is like lord knows how smart any given animal is you really it's like a harder question than you think it is so when you are assessing how smart an animal is uh and you're not like an animal uh intelligence scientist you might think like okay you're kind of judging the animal based on how you judge human intelligence how smart is an octopus compared to like an age of human i don't know maybe like a dog i don't know i mean i guess it also kind of depends on how sharp your kids are i don't know that's very true i i've never had a child or watched one develop uh i mean so as a four-year-old i got my whole arm stuck in an escalator and they had to invent the emergency stop button for me and another kid whose foot got eaten off so it's really depends on

yeah who's that definitely wouldn't happen to an octopus i know so even if it did it's like i have seven extra arms i'm just gonna eat this off we're good okay krista avampado says are squid likely to be more impacted by climate change than other sea animals or they or will they be one of the species that's best able to adapt so squid are doing really well right now um but we think that's more to do with the fact that we don't overfish them so we have overfished the hell out of most fish populations we started with the biggest fish and then we've been working our way down ever since so the really small prey fish are doing the best um the one thing that uh cephalopods generally have to worry about with climate change is ocean acidification so um basically when the ocean

is acidic it's harder to build a shell so that's going to be a problem for all crustaceans and clams bivalves whatever now when they're looking at populations in the last like five ten years all of the cephalopods that i know of are doing really well but we don't have really good records of fisheries information for squid because back then you wouldn't need to eat a squid because you had cod coming out your ears right so we think they're doing all right we don't think they're endangered the other nice thing is that they have really short lifespans for the purposes of of adapting quickly that's great when you produce a lot of your species um it leads it gives you more opportunity to adapt quickly and evolve quickly um compared to an animal that you know needs to live

50 years before it reproduces right um so i have more iterations to kind of play with yeah exactly oh that's interesting i had never thought about that yeah okay jennifer overby wants to know our squid social creatures i think we just talked about how they were loners um she said i've only ever seen them alone but they must get busy every once in a while so with how intelligent they are do they have a complicated social structure so it depends on this on the species so some like sepia toothus which are these like uh really really beautiful squid that have the bed skirt that goes all the way around the fin that goes all the way around um they will generally travel in groups of like i don't know three to seven ish and so they're always hanging out together

humble squid travel in huge packs now humble squid are up there with some of the coolest cephalopods they're like human sized lengthwise they're like sick and big and scary and they've they're like some people have said that they kill people swimming um which i wouldn't put past them but i don't know if there are like recorded deaths from humble squid um but i would believe it humble squid fyi also called red devils and they're known to be very intelligent very curious and aggressive so those beaks they have that look like bird beaks have more bite force than an african lion which is a fact i did not need to know and i kind of wish i didn't i'm sorry so and they live off bahá california and uh i think in 2010 they were coming up through like

up to san francisco um they're huge travel impacts they flash red and white um to communicate with each other we think and they will pack hunt which is so scary like as if one humble squid isn't scary enough like i people who will sometimes dive with them and literally wear like chain mail oh because they don't want to get bit could they eat a human sure why not yeah and then the bummer about getting eaten by a squid is that they don't care if you're living or dead while they're eating you they will like they have such so many arms to grab on to you that they'll grab on and like start chomping away while you're still alive oh boy oh god so um it seems like very scary it seems like with a humble squid if they're the size of a human it would

just be like getting into a big skin sleeping bag like you would just fill their whole guts yeah so they might like eat part of you and then drop you oh cool yeah to share the wealth yeah absolutely like anyone want some of this yeah well you're gonna become marine snow mic ramsey wants to know every once in a while a strange creature washes up on a beach somewhere and may often be described as like but of unknown classification is anyone maintaining a database of unknown sea creatures if there's no immediate obvious classification and no easy way to find living specimens does anyone research these things so i think a lot of times when things wash up that could be cephalopods but that we don't really know like cephalopods degrade really fast they don't have um they're

like okay so for example if one of my squid dies um in the tank the next morning it'll already start to come apart if i leave it till the afternoon like its body parts will start falling off and this is like this is like just in like a tank where there's not a lot of like wave action by the next morning if i pick it up it will fall through my fingers liquid so like identifying positively a lot of this stuff is really hard to do so that's probably why they're saying like unidentified yeah it was a cephalopod but like what was it lord knows brian edge wants to know how threatened are the nautiloid populations they've always been one of my favorite cephalopods great choice um the nautilids are in bad shape right now because we keep collecting them for

their shells um their shells are gorgeous and if you cut them in half that you see like these different chambers that the animal used to live in but they reproduce pretty slowly um and they don't produce as much as many offspring per nautilus as um the squid do so um but go online and look up uh the nautilus breeding program at uh the moderate bay aquarium because you have these like little baby nautilus videos and they're so cute like cuttlefish look like just tiny fully formed cuttlefish which are so cute that it hurts a little bit and nautilus is the same way they come out pretty big um and they just look like fully formed nautilus but small um with a shell with a shell oh little babies it's really just so cute but yeah so don't buy nautilus shells because

you're depleting the population and we gotta cool it yeah let's 3d print some yeah sure are there enough people studying the squid and octopus and cuttle cuttlefish there's not enough government money to fund people studying cephalopods there should be more because they're so dope and we can learn so much from like understanding how they're doing this stuff is really important for like engineering purposes down the line um what my work is doing is really more about understanding how your microbiome stays healthy um but yeah there's a lot to learn from these animals it's super cool um also octopuses octopuses i know you want it to be octopi we all do we all do octopi sounds nice okay octopuses you have to say pusses man i know i don't want to say it's a stone called

bummer but it's it's it's a fact of life so you just gotta just get up in the mirror look at yourself and just say octopuses and keep a straight face and then when you can do it you've made it then then you can apply to be a cephalopod biologist if you can say octopuses i got a way to go okay so what about your job sucks the most what do you hate is um cleaning tanks is it probably so probably like dead shrimp is the worst part of my job because they turn like pink and get goopy and like that's and they smell pretty bad so that's the one of the worst parts of my job um and that's normally what i what i say but also like the worst part maybe of being a squid biologist specifically is people and you can cut this if you want but um people will like no joke send me

tentacle porn on the internet and i'm like but like people will no joke be like oh you're into tentacle porn like in college i'd be like i'm really not like that really upsets me because these square these nice lovely little animals like why but also don't send it to someone unless they request it yeah especially someone that really cares about the welfare of cephalopods like god so that happens to me more than i that's probably the worst part like i can i can like pick up 30 dead shrimp and be like i had a really good day today but like any day that somebody sends me squid porn is a bad day at least a bad afternoon i'm like report like no please don't what is the best thing about your job the best thing about my job right now is watching a baby baby squid so

so when they first hatch they're like the size of the head of a pen and they'll take down these shrimp called mycids they're about like four times as big as them and it's that's very cute but when they transition from little shrimp to big shrimp it's hilarious because these little squid there may be like a quarter of a marble in size will tackle these big shrimp and it's like hilarious because they've got this huge shrimp in their mouth and they're like trying to swim and like control where this big shrimp goes and that means that i can now pay a little less money to feed them which is great and it means that they're gonna make it because that's the hardest part of raising a squid getting it to transition to bigger shrimp and if they make that transition it's like i've done it like

that's like sending your kid to college like you did it you didn't screw it up everything's good and it's all it's just like so stupid cute i can't handle it it reminds me of one of my like a tiny poodle is carrying a huge stick right no it's exactly like that it's just like that but with more arms yeah and they'll like stretch all their stupid little arms around the shrimp body and it cracks me up i forgot to ask you entirely and then how can people get involved with skype a scientist basically it's a program where we match up scientists and either classrooms or groups of adults that like learning so that they can have these like 30 to 60 minute question and answer sessions with a scientist so skype a scientist isn't just for school kids they just

expanded to just adults so if you're a book club or a library group you can sign up and you can gather and you can chat with one of over 1500 scientists who have already signed up you can go to skypeascientist.com and you can click for more info if you're a scientist or if you're someone who wants to talk to one click the teacher button so it's also not just for skype you can FaceTime or video hang out but it was like i mean let's be honest google plus hang out a scientist just does not have a ring to it so they just call it skype a scientist every scientist loves answering questions about their work they're spending their whole life working on it so just tweet at them probably they're gonna be happy that somebody talks to them and cares about their science

that's such solid advice i think so many people figure that like if you were to tap the shoulder of a working scientist they would rear back in a lab and say how the hell you right it's nice to know that they're like oh no sweet i'm just like walking through them all and i can totally answer that right now waiting for a smoothie right yeah totally i think yeah the the movies and tv give scientists such a bad rep like we're friendly and like talking to other people most of the time um there's no reason to not talk to us and a lot of times like if you're studying some weird thing like bob tail squids in biosis or whatever like you probably don't think people care some of the time so like when people do care it's like awesome like yeah let's do my favorite thing like of course

i want to talk about this so yeah don't be afraid of us okay thank you so so much for being on i'm so excited i mean it was only like several months of like mildly stalking you that's fine where you're gonna be around it's me again it's such a creep so it should be noted that during this interview we also paused for a moment and we both did our best impressions of squid and cuttlefish dances for each other hers was amazing and if you ever see her or the squid mobile out in philly and say hello she says you have to buy her a beer to see her squid dance performed which is fair also we got locked in this library basement for like five or ten minutes after the interview we couldn't get out which was scary but honestly i wouldn't have changed it for the world it was a good time

so internet befriend dr sarah mackindolte you can follow her on twitter or instagram at sarah mack attack or at skype a scientist we will link those in the show notes you can sign up for squid facts that are texted right to your phone 1833 side text 18337248398 i hope we don't break her text robot also her atlas obscure class on animals doing the nasties in june and the squidly one is in september i will link those on my website she also gives advice to anyone wanting to get involved with squid on a professional level she says just start working with animals in general as soon as you can in any capacity and don't be afraid to do disgusting work also since this episode aired dr mackindolte and i did keep in touch in 2019 i joined her in hawaii with atlas obscure to

help her collect a few bob tail squid for her studies out there at midnight looking for squid with flashlights in the ocean with her she came to la she stays at my place when she's in la we gave a talk in a park about science we text pretty much every day she's become a really really close friend of mine and i love her she came all the way out from philly for our wedding right jaret that is correct that is correct she was at our wedding so 12 out of 10 would climb into a cephalopod car with a stranger four years ago again in a second what a gem so thank you to her for being on the show and thanks to erin talbert who admins the oligies podcast facebook group with help from bonnie dutch and shannon feltas thank you to all the patrons for financially

making this podcast possible you really are the engine behind this that is at patreon.com slash oligies thank you to emily white the wordery for making our professional transcripts kaleb patent bleeps them those are up at alley word.com slash oligies dash extras for free susan hail handles so much business stuff noelle dillworth is amazing and does our scheduling kelly arduyre updates our website she can also design yours every few weeks we have a kid friendly version drop we call those smologies and zeke rodriguez thomas of mind jam media makes those of us and the shimmer in my chromatophores which i don't think that that makes sense biologically uh and lead editor is refreshing this episode we are in a car again parked in a hospital parking

lot this has been probably the hardest couple of days of my life if i talk about it i will start crying so i'm not gonna get into it but um but thank you jared sleeper you've been here for days as i'm up in the icu with my grandpa so shit you guys um yeah so thank you jared sleeper for you nick thorber another band islands did the music i'm not crying at all that's a rumor um it's been really tough you guys duh but um but i just anyone who goes into medicine and takes care of people just fuck you're awesome so if you're out there and you're listening and you're wearing scrubs even if you just bought them because they look cool i appreciate you so much and um yeah thank you for all the good cosmic vibes it's really knowing that i can put this out

as an encore episode and that even that there are five people listening to the end of this um is really makes my life so much easier so i get that's part of my secret the secret i was going to tell you is that sometimes i feed my dogs boogers to her because she loves them but maybe that's a better secret it's so gross she loves to eat them and i didn't even know dogs like doing that until my friend Simone told me and i was like i wonder grammy would like and she loves them sort of like fritos to her and it's so gross but i don't want to deprive her anyway thanks for listening to this um hopefully back with a fresh episode next week all right please hug everyone okay bye