Ologies with Alie Ward - Thermophysiology (BODY HEAT) with Shane Campbell-Staton

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

This episode, and Dr. Shane Campbell-Staton, are a true joy. The UCLA professor, host of the Biology of Superheroes Podcast and Thermophysiologist talks about big animals vs. little ones, lizard storms, dinosaur blood, hibernating bears, why you sweat in your sleep, antifreeze frogs, miracle hamsters, why different people run at very different temperatures, how comic books influence the way he sees science, learning how his brain works and some time management hacks that he uses as a professor and host of an amazing podcast. Get ready to have a new science buddy.Listen to The Biology of Super HeroesFollow Dr. Campbell-Staton on Twitter, as well as his podcastSponsor links: TheGreatCourses.com/ologies, Kiwico.com/ologies, and podsurvey.com/ologiesThis week's donation was made to the Environmental Defense Fund More links at alieward.com/ologiesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's your boyfriend's old roommate who always put pepsis in the freezer and then forgot about them until they exploded alleyward. Back with another episode of oligies. So check in with your bod right now. Are you cold? Are you hot? How do you feel? Are you sweating? Is this too many personal questions? Okay, let's change the subject. To me, well actually to you. Thank you so much as always to the patrons who support oligies at patreon.com slash oligies. For everyone who gets themselves some oligies merch to put on their warm or their cold bodies. And of course, everyone who subscribes, rates especially, who reviews the podcast, you know I read your reviews each week. And it's creepy proof. Here's a fresh one. Barrowbird77 wrote, I drive into work two days

a week. Some days I thought of getting out of the house with a bra and mascara seem too much. Until I remember that a new episode awaits. I can't wait to hear what old that ward has in store for my commute tomorrow. P.S. Stay with me when you come to Philly. Open invitation. I'm mostly normal. How can I say no to that? Also, cake and cola cook room left a sweet review that asked been listening for a while and I'm still not sure why Ali refers to herself as dadward. It's a great question. It started in a podcast Facebook group because I like hot dogs and bad puns. And I'm just very likely to lecture you about tire pressure safety because I love you. I just want you to be safe. Okay, so thermophysiology. Let's get into it. Let's get it into us rather. So thermo in ancient

Greek means hot. Physio derives from the word for nature. So everything from hotness and nature to coldness in a lab as we will soon discuss. So thisologist is amazing. I met him over Thanksgiving at a dinner held by our mutual bud, Cara Santa Maria of the Talk Nerdy podcast. And new to LA having just taken on the role of professor at UCLA, he mentioned some of the courses he teaches and his podcast, the biology of superheroes. And from there, I gently begged him to be on ologies. Then I found out we had more mutual friends such as the Aaron's Welsh and Almond Updike of the epidemiology episode. And this podcast will kill you. Essentially, I was like, hello, sir, I regret to inform you that you will be my friend forever. So what a better time to

talk about body heat issues than February when it's cold, heaters are cranked, nary a daffodil bulb has sprung from the slush. So we scheduled a time to record. I reached out to ask for a few more days though, because I was so behind working on the aging episode that I literally cried that day. So thisologist kindly let me reschedule for a few days. Then I headed over to his brand new office at UCLA where he was wearing normal person clothes. And I was wearing four layers and a scarf because I'm a chihuahua. So he showed me some fancy chambers in his lab. And we settled in to have an absolutely wonderful and informative chat about how critters adapt to temperature changes, lizard storms, dinosaur blood, hibernating bears, why you sweat in your sleep, maybe you

specifically, antifreeze frogs, miracle hamsters, why different people run at different temperatures, how comic books influence the way he sees science, learning how his brain works, and some time management hacks that he uses as a professor and host of the Biology of Superheroes podcast. So get ready to warm up to your new biology hero, thermophysiologist Dr. Shane Campbell Staten. I get every once in a while or sometimes Staten Camboy. It's a hyphenated names. It's a difficult life to live. Now, this is your first harsh Southern California winter. Oh, so harsh. Yes. The, yeah, I've noticed. So I've spent my life sort of bumping around a bunch of different places.

And before I moved here, I was in Montana. Before Montana, I was in Illinois. And then before that, I was in Boston, all of which have pretty harsh winters. And before that, I was in Rochester, New York, which may actually be the snowiest place in the entire country. So quick aside, I look this up and Rochester is the fourth snowiest of the lower 48 states, clocking in about 99 inches of snow per year, which is just an inch or two less than Anchorage, Alaska typically gets. Now, if you're listening in Syracuse, New York right now, you are screaming in your car or at your phone, you are saying, yes, bitch, Rochester is Florida compared to our 123 inches of snow. So yes, Syracuse, New York, you win for most snow related winter suffering.

Also on the sunny side, if you're doing all that shoveling, you probably have pretty good core strength, pretty good abs. I don't know. That's all I got. And for the longest time, I remember moving up from South Carolina, I was like, what is this lake effect that people keep talking about? And because it was the first time I'd ever heard of it. And then I realized the first winter came, I was like, oh, it's like a hurricane, but cold, basically. It was a harsh reality to live. So luckily, I bumped it over here to LA. Good work on that. Okay. Now, what was it about your upbringing that you thought I want to study biology? I want to study science and particularly temperatures and cold? Oh, man. So those things did not come along intentionally,

by any means. So when I was a kid, I got really obsessed with reptiles. I don't know what it was about the scalies that got me, but it was just a thing. And, you know, and my mother, like bless her heart, she was super supportive, but she, you know, she was, she just doesn't do that sort of stuff. I hate snakes. Yeah, but she was really supportive. I remember in high school, I had, you know, all sorts of creatures for a senior project I did. You know, I had like a python and several different lizards, a giant green iguana, a breeding pair of corn snakes, like all this sort of stuff. I was obsessed with it. So Shane wound up getting his PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. But before that, as a young herp

nerd, he figured biology would be the best course if he wanted to study his beloved reptiles. And he got his Bachelor's of Science in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the very snowy, but yes, not as snowy as Syracuse, Syracuse, University of Rochester. And so that's what I did. And I got this when I got introduced to anoles. Oh, I love those. Yeah, they're amazing. They're so cool. And actually, so the one species of anole that is native to the United States, it's like the only, there's like the very first animal I ever interacted with as a kid, because in South Carolina, they're just like all over the sides of houses and stuff. And an anole is just a type of lizard, right? Yeah. Yeah. So an anole, it's like this

small lizard, typically small, that has like this little throat fan and they do a bunch of push-ups and they like wave that little throat fan. But there are about 400 species of anole that are distributed across the Neotropic, so like Central, South America, the islands of the Greater Antilles, and then our one special North American anole that's native to the US. There's a bunch of other species now that are invasive, but that's the one that's native. So that's the, and that's also the species I ended up studying for my dissertation. Oh, wait, so you started liking them when you were a kid, when you studied them to get your PhD. Yeah, I know, right? You're like me again. Oh, that's amazing. Did you ever think when you were a kid with studying lizards and having

corn snakes and having pythons that you would get to do this for a living? I did not realize that this was a thing to do for a living, generally speaking. It is interesting that, you know, so for me, you know, I was, I think, you know, when you ask most biologists how they got into science, they typically have this like, oh, when I was a kid, I was like, walking through the woods, splashing in a tidal pool, and I just knew from that point on. And that wasn't my life, you know, because my mom worked really long hours. I was like a latchkey kid. I spent a lot of my time, you know, indoors. So my introduction to the outside world to like nature and wildlife was through television, like Jeff Corwin and Steve Irwin and these guys. And

then the little green lizards that, you know, were around my house. And so to go from there to being able to do things like this, right, communicating science, you know, to people who, you know, don't spend most of their lives doing this sort of stuff. I mean, it's sort of a really special circle for me. Right. Yeah. How great is that for real? And so when you got your PhD, what exactly were you studying about these anoles? Yeah, so I was studying the evolution of cold tolerance in anoles. So trying to understand, you know, how geographic variation in temperature influences patterns of like gene flow across space. And then how it influences physiology, you know, which ended up being a big question of mine, because the green anole came from Cuba originally.

So sometime during like the Myocene or Pliocene, it was transported from Cuba, most likely by storm. That's typically the way these sort of small things jump from island to island. So just FYI, yes, I did have to look up how long ago was somewhere between the Myocene and Pliocene. And the Myocene was anywhere from 23 to 5 million years ago. And the Pliocene was 2 to 5 million years ago. So I think, I think he's talking like 5-ish million years ago, these adorable little green lizards came over from Cuba, making things more enjoyable, kind of like leaving daiquiris. Big, big, all stupid question. I'm just so glad that I asked. Do they go in the air? Yeah. Really? Yeah, they can fly through the air. Sometimes, you know, it's like flocks them,

like drift, like wood or leaves, sometimes get, you know, get blown across the water. But yeah. Like a frog storm? Yes. Oh, yeah, it gets real biblical real fast. You shall see hail fall from a clear sky and burn his fire upon the ground. So they can just rain down Cuban anoles in a different part of the world? Yeah, more or less. Oh, that's awesome. More or less, yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, I've never, I don't, I have never heard of any reports that have actually, you know, firsthand reports of people like experiencing lizard rain. PS, allow me to read you an excerpt from the Sunbury American newspaper dated November 21st, 1857. Headline, shower of lizards.

The Leroy New York Gazette says that during the heavy rain of Sunday night last, live lizards, some of the measuring four inches in length came from the clouds like manna, though neither is plenty nor half as welcome. They were found crawling on the sidewalks and in the streets like fugitive infantile alligators in places far removed from localities where they inhabit nature. Just when you think it's not a hallucination, it rains anoles. Actually, I have a photo. I remember there's a scientist at UT Knoxville, whose work actually inspired the work that I did with the green anole. And he showed me this photo when I went and visited him of this male green anole outside in the winter. And there's this huge icicle on the side of

the picture. And that's just such a really, it's just a weird environment for like this tiny little cold-blooded subtropical animal to live in. And I just thought it was fascinating. So yeah, I got obsessed with how these animals were dealing with these novel cold temperatures. How were they? So yeah, so that's a, it's actually, it's kind of a complicated question. But one of the things that we've found is that the farther north you go, essentially the more cold hardy the animals become. So we do these tests when we're looking at the limits of thermal tolerance. So for for ectotherms like cold-blooded animals, their internal body temperature is really tightly correlated with the external body temperature. And that means that their performance

is really tightly tied to the external body temperature. How much beach volleyball would do you play in the snow? None, because the answer is none. So what we would do is, you know, we'd go to a site and we take, go into a population, catch animals and we bring them into the laboratory. And then we do these trials where we, we goose them. So we put like a little thermometer in their cloaca. And, and then we cool them down very slowly by like one degree Celsius per minute. And then we test for their ability to maintain a writing response. So we'll like flip them onto their backs. And then we try to get them to flip themselves back over because Elizabeth always wants to be on its feet. And the temperature at which they can't do that anymore,

like that, we call that their lower thermal limit, what's called the critical thermal minimum. And so when we measured this across the, the geographic range, we found that animals where the winter temperature or populations where the winter temperatures were coldest had the animals that were the most cold hearted. Hello, if you're new to allergies, a cloaca is a butt and reptiles and birds enjoy the convenience of a one stop shop for poo, pee, sex and scientific spa treatments involving thermometers. So Shane says there's a lot of local adaptation. The lizards that can survive that cold have offspring, they can also survive it, but they also just become heartier because they're like been there, done that, walked two miles in

the snow uphill. Unlike your friend's cranky grandpa, these lizards are doing it all of this in the nude. Don't picture your friend's grandpa in the nude. Don't do it. Don't. Anyway, in the wild, natural selection, right? But. But we bring my gravate females into the lab and they lay eggs and those babies are born. We raise those babies under common laboratory conditions, so they've never seen a winter anywhere outside and we do the same cold tolerance experiments. We find that the offspring have the same level of cold tolerance as their parents did, which suggests that there's some heritable genetically based component to, to cold tolerance. And then you and I are endotherms. Yes, we are. How difficult was it not to apply

some of your knowledge that you gained through studying anoles to like yourself as an endotherm walking around freezing in Montana? PS, I got his timeline wrong and Shane was studying anoles at Harvard and did his postdoc on very cold mice in Montana. But anyway, in those cold places, was he thinking about his own reactions to cold? I'm asking this as a person wearing a scarf in Los Angeles. I think it's pretty, it was pretty easy for me because reptiles are just really different from, from mammals. The way that they experience temperature is, is very different from the way that mammals experience temperature. How do mammals experience temperature? Okay, so it's exciting. Yeah, so, so we're gonna go, we're gonna go in right now. Okay, I'm going in. When

we're thinking about like the physiology, when we think about like thermal physiology, how animals experience temperature and how that temperature influences their function, they're four major categories. And, you know, they can sort of, you can like sort of pick and choose the combination they're in and you can find pretty much an organism that fits that, that description. Okay, here we go into a matrix of different combinations of body heat you can have. If you weren't already a hairy human, maybe you shave none of my business onward. So the first difference is being ectothermic or endothermic. Okay, so being endothermic, you can, endothermic organisms can produce their own internal body heat. Ectothermic organisms cannot. And then we have basically

homeothermic versus poichelothermic. Whoa, that's a good word. I know it is a good word. That is a scrabble word. It's a good podcast word. Poichelothermic. I know what that means. I'm not going to be looking that up and defining it in this side at all. That's gonna happen. Yeah, I did not know this word poichelothermic and yeah, I got you covered with the def. So a poichelotherm is an animal whose internal temperature varies considerably. It's all over the place as opposed to a homeotherm which maintains homeostasis and keeps the temperature pretty constant like you and me. So Shane explains how this is not just ectothermic and endothermic. There's difference and thus a matrix. So homeotherms are able to maintain a constant body temperature and poichelotherms have a

fluctuating body temperature with respect to their external environment. So as that external environment fluctuates, they're internal. And so you have a tendency, I think generally speaking, to group endotherm and homeotherm together and ectotherm and poichelotherm together. That's what I would think. Yeah, but it's not always the case. So for instance, you can have an endothermic poichelotherm. These are like mammals that hibernate. For animals that hibernate for really long periods of time like weeks or months, their internal body temperature can actually drop to within about one degree Celsius of ambient temperature even though they have these internal mechanisms of producing heat. And this is an energy saving mechanism. So these endopoics,

if you will, generate their own heat, but it can vary kind of like a house with a furnace, but they set the dial depending on what they need. Now in case you're on a first date or a job interview that's going badly, the only thing they can save it is naming some hibernating endothermic poichelotherms here is a list. Bears, gophers, bats, groundhogs, just to name a few. Now let's say an ectotherm is like a house without a thermos. So the temperature could vary widely, but it doesn't mean it has to. On the flip side, you can have an ectotherm that is actually homeothermic. And this can happen by a couple of different ways. So the first way is just by being really large. All right. So this is what we call gigantothermy. Oh, no, that's not a word. Oh, it

is a word. Oh my God. Gigantothermy. Yeah. So for instance, like the dinosaurs. Okay. But also things like saltwater crocodiles, which are massive animals, the largest lizard on the planet, the Komodo dragon. Oh, I was going to ask about them. Yeah. And this is essentially a byproduct of surface to volume. Right. So if you are really large, right, your volume and with proportion to your surface area is very large. That means that you lose heat relatively slowly to the external environment. So for instance, if you went to Australia or if you went to the Nile, you would see these really large crocodiles early in the morning basking just sitting in the sun with their mouths open, completely lifeless for hours. Oh, God. And then by the heat of the day, they're

up and moving and they're swimming around in pretty cold water and they can maintain that function because they're so big. Okay. So that's an endothermic homeotherm like us. Endothermic poculotherm bears, groundhogs at all. And then we were talking about ectotherms that maintain constant body temperature just by being huge. But that's not the only way to be an ectothermic home, homeotherm. Did I say that right? Ectothermic homeotherm is through behavioral thermal regulation. And basically this means paying really close attention to the micro environments, like the micro thermal environments that are available to you. So if you are a small lizard, for instance, and it gets really hot outside, again, because you're so small, you're

going to gain heat really quickly because of that same volume to surface area issue, except if you move into the shade, right? So if you move into the shade at the right time and you stay there for long enough, you can actually maintain a steady body temperature, even though you're not producing internal body heat. Oh, okay. Exactly. And then insects do it a whole different way. So things like bees are technically ectothermic homeotherms because they can actually use their flight muscles, they can decouple their flight muscles and vibrate them without moving their wings to generate heat. And why do some animals and humans have set body temperatures that they need to maintain in order to live? Like why do humans have to be 98.6 and why do and are dogs a different temperature

and do mice in Montana have to be a different temperature than the ones in New Mexico? That's a great question. So generally speaking, you know, it's all about strategy, like evolutionary strategy and life history strategy. So mammals benefit from being warm all the time in the sense that, you know, I can get up and move regardless of, you know, what time of day it is, which means because I have that high metabolism, you know, I can, you know, go run and, you know, and do like really high intensity activities for a pretty sustained period of time, much more so than if I was an ectotherm. But also on the flip side of that, it also means that I have to take in much more energy in order to fuel that internal furnace that defines endotherms.

So we have to be out grazing and hunting and finding food in order to have this like 24-hour open supermarket of body heat kind of. Yes, basically. So I do know that we've undergone like humans as a lineage. As we sort of, as we migrated out of Africa into the rest of the world, temperature played a huge part in that process. And we can actually see it in the diversity of body shapes that we see around the planet. So as we moved, so if we look within Africa, for instance, there are populations like right around the equator is very, it's very warm and gets like extremely hot during the day. And in response, right, the body changes proportions again to sort of manipulate this volume to surface area. This is what we call Allen's rule.

And Allen's rule states that in these warmer environments, animals, mammals specifically have a tendency to grow longer, narrower limbs. And by growing longer, narrower limbs, you sort of manipulate that volume. It's like having a little pipe instead of like a big, thick appendage. By decreasing the volume with respect to that surface area, you can then dump heat really quickly to the environment. So that's one strategy. So if you look at a lot of a lot of Sub-Saharan African populations that occur right around the the equator, very tall, very thin phenotypes. Okay. But then as you move north into really high latitude environments, you know, look at populations like the Inuits, very different bill, right,

they're sort of very sort of compact. So it prevents them from dumping heat, allows them to retain heat in the face of the cold much more efficiently. Is there something from a physics standpoint, like a magic formula in the ratio of an animal's bow day to their metabolism or heart rate? Like at some point in time, did someone just frantically crunch these numbers on a chalkboard and start weeping? It's complicated because it is not just a function of size. Behavior plays a really large role in this as well. Right. So we can say things like, you know, Allen's rule or Bergman's rule, which states that as you move farther north, you get generally larger animals. Oh, right. Because larger animals are able to maintain internal temperatures better. Oh, I never would have

thought about that. Like woolly mammoths were in Siberia and not just kicking it in Panama. Exactly. I never ever thought about that. Yeah. But the largest mammal on the planet, the elephant is like smack dab right at the equator. Well, what the hell's up with that? Yeah. And you know, so, but it's, you know, so size is one parameter. But in order to get around the fact that they have so much volume to surface area, they've evolved the very special features that allow them to cool. Right. So if you're out on the savannah, or if you're in India, a lot of times in the heat of the day, you'll see, well, one, you'll see the elephants are typically in the shade, but you'll also see them constantly fanning their ears back and forth.

And if you look at their ears, they have these massive blood vessels that go out into their ears. And essentially it acts as a personalized air conditioner. So as they fan their ears, that blood cools and then that cool blood circulates back into their body and it helps them to stay cooler. What are some other crazy adaptations that you've seen to deal with extreme heat? Ooh, or cold. Okay. Okay. So I will, I will, I will go in on both. So on the cold side of things, there are a lot of animals who have developed extreme adaptations and the field, like the sort of subfield of thermal biology that specializes in those cold adaptations is called cryobiology. Oh, okay. And amongst the most extreme, for instance, if you were in North

Carolina, I'm not sure if you've seen the recent pictures, but people were freaking out because you know, the lakes were freezing solid in North Carolina. And when you look at the lakes every once in a while, you see like a little snout, right? That stuck in, you know, like kind of poking up in the ice. Who's snoot was it? And that snout was connected, connected to an American alligator. And the alligator, you know, it's stuck in the ice and, but they're able to deal with that really cold situation for a pretty long period of time. Right. And, but if you took an animal that would like, for instance, like a saltwater crocodile is not an ancestral selection pressure, but even more extreme, if you take ectotherms like reptiles and amphibians that occur at really high latitudes

or even insects that occur at really high latitudes, like close to the Arctic Circle, there are some species that can actually freeze solid for months at a time and then thaw out and go on about their business. So animals like the wood frog, for instance. Okay. If you like badass frog stories that are bananas, and I know you do, here is a badass frog story. So wood frogs are like, Oh, hibernation. Yeah. Hold my beer. My very, very, very cold beer. So wood frogs, when they begin to freeze, they undergo a lot of significant physiological changes. Right. So they begin to pump glycogen out of their livers into their bloodstream. So it's like basically sugar. And they also dump urea into their bloodstream, which we typically try to get rid of through peeing.

Yeah. Usually that's something you don't, you want to off board there. Exactly. But this combination of, you know, sugar and urea essentially acts as, as an antifreeze, right? Oh my God. So they can super cool without the formation of ice crystals. Ice crystals are typically, like that is the thing that is most dangerous about cold temperatures, because when water crystallizes, essentially, it turns into little daggers that start stabbing and ripping apart cells. And, you know, so when you, you know, when you get like, like severe frostbite, or you're in your, you know, toes turn black and fall off, it's because in large part because of crystal damage. If you just spaced out wondering how snow crystals form, do check out the snow hydrology episode after this. And also it expands,

right? So yes. Yeah. It's like basically having like little, little ice fortresses forming inside of your body, which you generally want to avoid. For hot temperatures, obviously there are animals all around the planet that have, that have evolved to live in extremely hot environments. So for instance, in desert environments, right? And there's some, you know, behaviors that evolve that are, you know, kind of, kind of funny. There are, there's a lizard species, for instance, that lives in deserts that, you know, at the heat of the day in order for them to survive, they essentially rotate picking up their, their feet. You know, they pick up two at a time and they just keep, you know, it's like, if you were to walk out on asphalt barefoot and you do that thing where you hop back

and forth, it's essentially what, like how they get by. Oh, God, that's so fancy. Yeah, I know. They're like very like prancy little, I think they're adorable. It's like a dressage lizard. Yeah, exactly. Um, and, but also if we can, we can think of even more extreme temperatures like hydrothermal vents in, in the deep sea, which can have, can have gradients, like temperature gradients that are like hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit, right? So over a very short distance. And I mean, the most heat tolerant animals that we know of on this entire planet live around those hydrothermal vents. So there are, these, I'm sure you've seen like these, these like really large tube worms, right? That make this sort of tube forests around

hydrothermal vents. Like they can take temperatures up to about 80 degrees Celsius, how many Fahrenheit? Which is like 176 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh my God. Yeah. That's so hot. That's hot. It is really hot, but they're not the most heat tolerant organisms on the planet. Which ones are? So there are these small microorganisms and they're, they're called pyrolobis fumarai. Oh my God, wait, okay. So something with smoke and fire? Yes. What? Exactly. What? Exactly. And I, I think still to this date, they are the most heat tolerant organisms that we have found. And they can take temperatures of 122 degrees Celsius. Why? Yeah. So that's about 250, a little more than 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

Where do they live? So they also live around hydrothermal vents. Oh my God. PS, their name translates literally to fire lobe of the chimney. And I pictured like a tiny fireball or maybe like a deep blue shiny creature with flames painted on the side of it, like a late 1980s Camaro. But these single celled heat lovin microorganisms kind of look like a fuzzy brain. Hydrothermal vents hotter than like name a thing. It's probably hotter than that. Like any, like for example, I was thinking the hottest place on earth would be like a roller skate after you used it. You know, sometimes you're like, it's hot and muggy in there, but no, it's a hydrothermal vent. Yeah. Oh my God. Okay. So they're just, they're like, I'm here, no one else can deal with it, but I can.

So I can take as many resources as I need because I have adapted to just be able to deal with this. Precisely. Oh my God. Yeah. It's like, you know, extreme, extreme performance typically evolves under extreme conditions. And I think one of the coolest ways that animals use heat, that every time, every time I think about this, I kind of freak out a little bit. So in order for me to tell you this, I kind of have to give you the background. Yeah. Bring it on. Okay. Oh, buckle up for a science saga. You'll never forget, my friends. In 1877, in Japan, people imported European honeybees for apriculture, right? Because European, there is a Japanese honeybee, but it does not produce nearly as much honey as a European honeybee.

So they brought in European honeybees for apriculture and they quickly found that European honeybee colonies would be destroyed by the Japanese giant hornet. Oh, no. It's like a really large, voracious hornet. And it could, a group of like 30 hornets could wipe out thousands of European honeybees. I mean, they would just go in and they're like decapitating things and chewing them up because they're, they're bringing like those husks and bodies back to feed their larvae. Oh my God. So they would just have these rating parties where they go in and completely just destroy, you know, these, these European honeybee colonies, which brought up the question, well, how come there's this Japanese honeybee that's been here

for so long? Like how do they survive in the face of this predator? Right. And what they found was fascinating. Oh my God. So the Japanese giant hornet has an upper thermal tolerance of about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay. Oh, that's a lot. It's a lot. The Japanese honeybee has an upper thermal tolerance of about 118 degrees Fahrenheit. And so that difference in their thermal tolerance, the Japanese honeybees figured out how to use it as a weapon. So remember we were talking about before like bees have this ability to decouple their muscles from their wings in order to generate heat. So what they would do is they'd use their numbers and you know, when a Japanese giant hornet would come into the hive, they would sort of back off a ways and like let it come into the hive.

And then they would form, they would swarm it and form a ball around the hornet. And then they would start vibrating and generating heat. And they would essentially cook and kill the hornet. They would cook it? Yeah. And it's this so it's this combination of the heat that's generated and the carbon dioxide that's produced, right, which it would heat up the temperature. And it would also the but the excess carbon dioxide would also lower the thermal tolerance. Oh my God. The hornet. So it'd be like a one two punch. Exactly. Oh my God. What about the European honeybees? Did they get did they get wise to this? No. Oh, no. They're still, you know, even now, if a Japanese hornet raiding party finds European honeybees like they're, they can completely decimate a colony.

So that three degrees is enough to kill off something that's probably like 10 times their size. Yes. Oh my God. That's so badass. Yeah. Oh my God. It's like one of my my favorite stories about thermal physiology. Bring it on. These are the sorts of things that evolve in in extreme environments. So yeah, it's crazy. I get I why am I getting chills thinking about cooking hornets? That doesn't make any sense. That's wrong. Because it's dope. I know. But now why am I cold? Why does it give me chills? And so, okay, tell me a little bit about being a professor because you are a professor. I am. You teach here at UCLA. I do. So what kinds of courses do you teach? And what is the response been? Oh, man. Okay. So being a professor at UCLA is some kind of special. Okay.

I really love being here. And so the thing is, like when you're moving up through academia, there's always this veil, right? That you just like you kind of see other people moving back there. But you're not really sure what's going on back there. Yeah. So, you know, as an undergraduate, you know, you might see graduate students, you're like, Oh, they look so stressed. I wonder what that's about. Then you become a graduate student, like, Oh, that's what that was about. And then you see postdocs, you're like, Oh my God, I'm gonna get a job. And you're like, why there's they're like so stressed, they're postdocs. And then you become a postdoc, you're like, Oh, yeah, this is really stressful. But then as a postdoc, you see, you know, you see a professor, you're

like, Yeah, how come like their hair was like always crazy, and they can never remember anything. And then you become a professor, you're like, Oh, yeah, because there are so many things that I had no idea people were going to ask me to do. Oh my God, what's it been like? It's been fun. It's been fun. And I've had to learn a lot really quickly. The biggest thing I've had to learn is how to multitask. So I've actually very recently found out I have pretty severe ADD. Really? Yeah, really late in life. And I got through it by because I could focus on one thing, like I would wake up and my goal would be to accomplish this one thing. And regardless of how long it took, you know, sometimes I go to bed at 10, sometimes I go to bed at 3am. But I could get that one thing

done. And I was a specialist like that's how I made my way through academia. And then I got here and I literally could not focus on one thing for more than like 45 minutes. And I realized like that situation, like things really started to disintegrate for me like really quickly. And so I went and, you know, talked to a doctor and they ran some tests and they're like, Yeah, you've really like really intense right now. Did that track for your past too? Did you realize like, Oh, yeah, yeah, that kind of track. Oh, yeah, like looking back, I could, I can definitely see it now. And it kind of makes me a little upset because I'm like, how much easier could I have made life for myself if I had known about and could deal with this before. Yeah. I mean,

and you went to Harvard and you got a PhD and you're a professor. So I mean, you, you must have found, speaking of adaptability, you must have found really great ways to adapt to focus on what you needed to focus because you've accomplished so much. Yeah. I mean, I found a way to do it for sure. Um, you know, but I've had, you know, here in this position, you know, I've had to learn different ways of, of doing things. And I've had to learn those, those ways pretty, pretty quickly. Do you have any tips for the rest of us? Oh man. So I think the thing that helps me the most is to make a concrete list the night before, like before I go to bed. That's the last thing I do before I close my eyes. And it's the first thing I see when I wake up and get in, not just like,

Oh, here are a list of things to do. But literally from this time to this time, I need to accomplish this goal because I have this meeting at this time, which means I only have this 45 minutes. And it's best if I do this particular thing then all the way through the day. And those are the sometimes it doesn't work for me. Like sometimes I sit down and things immediately fall apart. But the days where I can actually stick to that game plan are by far the most productive days for me. That's so, so good to know. I mean, as someone who had to reschedule this because I was crying about missing a deadline, I'm like, what else have you got? It happens to the best of us. Shane is such a boss. I want all of his time management strategies forever, please. And thank

you. Also, listen, just listen to the name of this course he teaches at UCLA. So, so my first course here at UCLA is called the biology of superheroes, exploring the limits of form and function. Let's hear that again, just because it's that wonderful. So my first course here at UCLA is called the biology of superheroes. Yeah, it's it's been a really fun class. And it's sort of been a slow build. So I actually started thinking about this in graduate school as well, like during my dissertation, I got to a point where I was writing my dissertation where I was just burnt out. I was like, I just can't do I love science, but you can miss me with it right now because I can't stand this. And I remember one night I was in the the Museum of Comparative Zoology at

Harvard. That's where my my office was. And it's probably maybe 830 or nine at night. And I just had to get up and leave. And I walked off of campus into Harvard Square. I was like walking around the square. And I passed this comic book store that's like sort of in the basement of a building. And as I was passing the window, I saw this this large like hardbound comic book Superman versus Muhammad Ali. Oh, you made a comic book about that? Oh, yeah. Well, they made a comic book about it. And you know, I was like literally one of those double take situations. I'm sorry, what? And right on the cover, you can Superman and Muhammad Ali both in their boxing gloves in the middle of a ring going at it. I was like, I have to figure out who

wins in this scenario. And so I went and that was like the very first comic book I ever bought. How old were you? I was 26, I think. So it skipped your childhood and you started getting into it in your 20s. Yeah, yeah, I was late to the game. That's so cool. I mean, I had always been into like science fiction. And I remember watching like the X-Men TV show as a kid and like the Spider-Man TV show on Fox kids. You know, but my first comic book I bought, you know, what five years into my PhD. Oh, my God. So did you go back for more after you read that? Yeah, it was I unlocked the beast. Yes, I went back and you know, and I bought several like, you know, over the next few weeks, it ended up being like sort of a guilty pleasure. You know, like I would, you know, it's funny

because I would like spend hours during the day, you know, going reading the scientific literature, trying to figure out how to formulate, you know, my own dissertation. And then I would go home and read like Green Lantern or the X-Men, you know, as a way to just, you know, kind of escape from the vigors of academia. But then when I would go to sleep, I'd have these really weird messed up dreams that would fuse the two together. And, you know, all these questions of like how the physiology and biology dealt with the science fiction. Yeah. And it got so intense that I actually decided to teach a short course as a graduate student for like two weeks in like this small group of undergraduates. And we, you know, just explored all these different questions or like

where the science meets the fiction. Science fiction, right? And, you know, that turned into this course. And I also started, you know, my own podcast that deals with the biology of superheroes. And, but I found that it's actually a really fun thought experiment, you know. So, you know, in science, like there's these thought experiments or like gedonkin experiments that, you know, like Schrodinger's cat, you know, for instance, right? That really, it's an abstract way to help you understand concrete ideas. And I found that science fiction actually is a really interesting thought experiment to understand the limits of performance and where those limits stop, why they stop, where they stop. And then theoretically what would need to be accomplished

in order for those limits to be pushed beyond. So, yeah, so that's what we do in the class. That's why we try to do in the podcast. How quickly did that course fill up? Almost immediately. Yeah. Yeah. Almost immediately. That's, I mean, and also perfect for Los Angeles too. This hub of academia and art in the same kind of campus. Yeah. So which superheroes could withstand the most extreme temperatures? Oh, um, well, I mean, obviously you have characters like the human torch, for instance. Well, there you go. I mean, that's pretty, pretty spot on. I'm a human torch! You know, also a ghost rider with his flaming skull. You're the rider. The ghost rider. But you also have like other characters that just generally have like high endurance. So,

like Wolverine, for instance. I can give you the tools to defeat him. Yeah. There's adamantium, skeleton of his, plus his general ability to regenerate. I imagine he'd be able to take some some pretty hot temperatures. And if I'm not mistaken, I think the incredible Hulk has been thrown into the sun at least once and survived. Like raging fire. What kind of adaptation would you need just like skin and organ wise to even deal with that? I don't think there is an adaptation that would allow for any organism to do it. So if even like if we think about early earth, for instance, right? So I mean, earth itself is four and a half billion years old, more or less. And it took a half a billion years for life to even show up in the first place. And a big part

of that was because that epic before it's like the Hadean, which is literally hell on earth. It was really, really hot. So surface temperatures, you're talking about surface temperatures that are approaching like 600 degrees. All right. So, you know, life had to had to kind of wait for things to cool down before it was even before it even had a chance to proliferate. The Hadean, I didn't realize that that was what that was called. Yeah. Oh, because it's just hell literal hell on earth. Yes. Just too damn hot. Call me when you've cooled off. I'm not I'm not coming out of the primordial soup. Exactly. Oh my god. Okay, now what about climate change? How are we doing? Yeah, climate change man this so this is actually

the major one of the major aspects of my research now is trying to understand how thermal physiology evolves in response to these rapid changes. And so typically when we think about evolution, we think about it as this kind of slow gradual process, especially when it comes to complex traits. Shane says that, for example, coat color is controlled by a couple of genes, relatively simple, but a lot of the aspects of form and functions that he studies are in his words, the byproduct of the interaction of hundreds of genes that interact in these complex regulatory networks, which means there's a lot of complicated shit happening to make an organism efficient and well adapted to its environment. So you tinker with one part. Well, you know,

there's a saying that there's a lot of ways to break a clock. Right. So if we think about an organism as a clock, tinkering with something, you're most likely going to break it. All right. So trying to understand how these complex systems can actually adaptively evolve in the face of rapid change is one of the major, one of the major research goals that that I'm pursuing right now in my lab. How do you think humans will do with it? I mean, I want to say who cares about us because it's our fault. But for the other humans out there. So the thing about humans that makes us special is that we have this remarkable ability to buffer ourselves against extremes. Right. So if it gets too hot outside, we turn on the air conditioner.

If it gets too cold, you know, we turn on the heater or put on a coat and we're perfectly fine. Bundle up warm, of course, but I think you can leave your galoshes at home. And when we're thinking about like climate change in that framework, you know, like, well, maybe we will, as our technology develops, as environments get more extreme, maybe technically we'll have the ability to buffer ourselves against it. But in reality, we have to think about how those resources are petitioned and so on and so forth. So if you think about the recent pool of vortex, you know, that passed through the Midwest, homeless populations in Chicago are not buffering themselves against that sort of extreme, you know, here in Los Angeles,

if you think about things like urban heat island effect, you know, especially in the middle of the in the middle of the city in the middle of the summer, where you can have temperatures, you know, approach 100 degrees, maybe even more. I mean, those are populations that can't buffer themselves against those sorts of extremes. And even the political situation now, you know, all of this, all the debate going on about, you know, building the border wall, one of the things that we forget are the biological consequences of these political actions. Right. So this was a prevention by deterrence is typically what it's called, right? This is like Clinton era, you know, border protection philosophy. But essentially what that means is that

you're intentionally funneling human beings out into the most extreme thermal climates on the planet, right, into deserts. And so the Arizona desert, the Sonoran, the Chihuahuan deserts, these are really extreme environments, both in terms of temperature and in terms of water availability. So one of the ways that, you know, we as mammals cool ourselves is through what we call a Vapo transpiration sweating and sweat gets wicked away and it cools us. But that costs us water. And if you live in, if you're trying to make your way through a place that's really hot and you don't have any water, it makes for this, this sort of double jeopardy. You know, so one of the things, one of the most recent projects that I've picked up with some collaborators of mine at

University of Idaho, and another lab who will soon be here at UCLA is actually doing physiological modeling of energy expenditure of undocumented migrants trying to cross the desert, trying to understand exactly how stressful this is and how much energy is needed to, to perform these sort of extreme migration events. Shane says that this research he's doing is one of the more unique applications of thermophysiology that he's attempted to undertake in his career. And that a border between, say, Mexico and the US is a corridor for many species to move and that migration is extremely important. So there's one thing to think about this in evolutionary terms, but one thing that we know about evolution, evolution by natural selection is that it comes

at a cost, right? And that cost is death. So, you know, if we can't really, you know, so if you think about, you know, surviving these sort of extreme migration events in terms of humans, right, I'd like to think that we've gotten to a point as a contemporary society where, you know, human life is paramount. Exactly. And, you know, so if human, if human life is, is paramount, then this idea of evolution by natural selection, right, it doesn't, it doesn't really apply because the cost of that evolution is should be too high. Exactly. Is there anything anyone can do to assist that? I've seen pictures of people pouring water out in the desert. Like, is there, is there anything like a layperson could do?

Vote? Yeah. I mean, that, I mean, honestly, I think that's the, I think that that's the most important tool any of us, you know, has when we're talking about making like this level change, right? So yes, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote. Shoot, I forgot to ask him about those little moss piglet water bears that are more tough than like all the Harley riding leather clad tattoo dudes combined. Sorry, dudes. Tardigrades, kick your ass. Oh, how do tardigrades survive? I actually do not know. They are extrema files. And I do know what they can survive, which is crazy. So they can survive temperatures near absolute zero through extreme desiccation. And they can stay desiccated for a very long time. They can survive

the vacuum of space. They're found naturally in all the way from hot springs to the top of the Himalayas. They can survive extreme UV radiation exposure. They are they're just their nature's badass. Are they Martians? They might be. Oh, God, that'd be great. Yeah. I mean, well, you know, technically, like phylogenetically speaking, we know they nest within life on Earth. Okay, all right. But I'd like to think that they could be Martians if we put them there. That's true. I'm sure they'd be like, I love it. Yeah, they'd be fine. They I feel like they're the kind of person you could take to any party and they'll make friends. Oh, yeah, definitely. That's my cousin, Tardigrade. He's fine. You already made a friend. Okay, cool. You're gonna hang out by the hydrothermal

vent? Yeah, do you think? I'm gonna go over here to the Himalayas real quick, hang out. I'll be right back. I love so adaptable. Yeah. Lightning round. Are you ready? Oh, lightning round. Let's do it. Okay, here's the deal. Number one, laser printers. So much more effective than an inkjet. Okay. I got a laser printer, which is helpful because this was 22 pages of questions. You have a Bible worth of questions. I know. Right now. It's like full new and old testament. Okay, so on to Patreon questions. But before those, I do share a few words from our sponsors. And also a portion of the ad revenue goes to a cause of theologists choosing. This week, Shane picked the Environmental Defense Fund, which is a nonprofit that tackles urgent threats

with practical solutions. So thanks, Shane for choosing that. That's the Environmental Defense Fund. Now, usually I call a few listeners, but I just found out I'm supposed to do fresh recordings and per episode, but I spent a few hours doing each one. So instead, I'm just going to tell you about some stuff I've been using by companies that I like that supportologies. But BFF tier patrons, don't worry, I've still randomly been calling you just to chat and leave you weird voicemails. They're just not ads. Just saying hi. Okay, some ads in which I've hidden some weird factoids. All right, your questions. So many people asked the same questions that I'm just going to read through their names because I kind of categorize them. Okay. Okay, Megan Yance,

Sarah Clark, Anna Thompson, and Ashley Kelly, all kind of want to know, can people have different set body temperatures or is it total BS when someone says that they run hot and someone else runs cold? No, there is variation in average body temperatures. Oh, yeah. So when we say a human being should be 98.6 degrees, that means that there's just like any bell curve that's at the top of the bell curve. Yeah. Yeah, I think most humans typically fluctuate between like 97 and 98.5 or 99. Okay. All right. Yeah. So I feel like I always think thermometers are broken because mine are show that I'm just a corpse. Am I dead? Did I die? No, no, it's I mean, there's there's variation. And also, you know, there are, you know, all

sorts of different things that can, you know, that can influence your therm, what we call thermogenesis, how much heat you're you're producing. You know, so like when we get sick, we get fevers, right? And that obviously elevates our body temperature. But, you know, conditions like, you know, for instance, like anemia or other situations can can actually lead to depressed thermogenesis, right? Because you actually have a depressed, you can have a depressed metabolic rate. Oh, that leads me to a question by a few different readers or a few different listeners had that question. Areologists who studies Mars, who was on the show Jennifer Booze and Suki Holly both wants to know, what's the point of fevers? Oh, what's the point of fevers? Why

do we get them? So again, so the point of fevers is more or less the same point of the Japanese be heat balls. Right. So we have things that are attacking our body. And by generating a fever, we're, we're hedge betting, we're betting that we are more heat tolerant than the things that are invading our body. Man, so if you have a fever, you should keep it up? No, not necessarily. Okay. First of all, you should see a doctor is what you should do. And not a PhD, you should see a medical doctor, not a thermal physiologist. Do not just tweet at Shane. No, don't, don't tweet at me, go see a doctor. I don't have anything for you over here. Don't at me. But that's why you're getting it is just cooking the bugs. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, at the same time, if you have,

you know, if you maintain a fever for a really long time, it can actually have extremely detrimental effects. Cook your own brain. Yes, precisely. And cells, generally speaking. Oh, don't poach yourself. Okay. Don't do that. But at least you know why it happens. And then a few people had a question about their partners having different heat tolerances than them. Bethany G says, why are women so much colder in office buildings than men? She says, generally speaking, Cassie Flint asked the same question, disclaimer, sorry for the sweeping gender generalization. But why do men seem to be walking heaters? Kelly Meeker also asked this. So did Bethany G and Anna Thompson? So if I had to make a guess at this, I would say

it has to do with, with body size, on average, on average, men have a tendency to be larger than women. It's like sexual size, dimorphism. What that means is that they have more volume to surface area, which then means that they can retain heat more efficiently than smaller bodied individuals. Of course, this is regardless of gender. It is just a property of size. But because, you know, there are sort of different distributions of size for men and women, like on average, it can create that shift. So tinier people are not just bigger winers. They're actually colder. Yes. So listen to us. Sometimes if you're short and cold, they physiologically have to work harder to keep their heat. Yes. Because as a person who is shorter and has been freezing and worn

fingerless gloves in an office building in August, I understand that very much. Erica Smith, Margaret Abakarini, Bob White, and Christine Thompson, all kind of want to know, does genealogy play any part in our preferences for hot or cold weather? Does genealogy play? So that's actually a complicated question because genealogy has both a genetic and a cultural component. And I think the answer in either case can be yes. So, you know, thermogenesis, like just like, or like thermal preferences, I mean, just like any trait can have a distribution, like very few traits are, are fixed, right? Or like, you know, every where, you know, every individual has the exact same value. All right. So there's typically

a distribution, a bell curve, and these sorts of things can be, they can be heritable. I mean, we, so I spend most of my life studying lizards, right? And we know that, you know, thermal tolerance and also thermal preference changes between species and even between populations. And that is a function of genealogy. There's no reason to think that we would behave any, any differently. It's interesting, though, if you live in a climate you hate, and you hate where you live, go to a climate you like, if you have kids, chances are they'll take the climate too. You know what I mean? You love Florida, go have some babies in Florida. You know what I mean? They're gonna be like, I love this mom. And you're like, I know, right? Or maybe they'll

hate it. And that's the best. Thanks, mom. I mean, my whole family is still in California. And I feel like if you took anyone in my family and put us in Boston, we would just be like, no, no, could not deal. Okay. Many people have this question, including the wonderful Skype a scientist, Todd McLaren, Jocelyn Vincent, Ivy Crutchfield, Chris Hubbard, Alina Pritchett, Jamie Katnitch, Jesse Cole, Charity, Abby Harrison, and Kitty Halverson all had the same question. Why do I turn into a human furnace when I sleep? Why can't we regulate our body temperature when we sleep? Why do we wake up with a stick of foot out? What's happening when animals sleep? What happens with their body temperature? Yeah, I actually don't know if

I know the answer to this question. Neither would I. Neither do I. Why? Why? Because I also, like, I get super sweaty in the middle of the night. It's kind of absurd. Sleeping on it's a huge kitchen sponge. Yeah, basically. Man sized kitchen sponge. That's some kind of, that's a special kind of nasty right there. But I talked to the sleep expert, the somnologist, and he said that we sleep better in colder temperatures. And it might be because we just evolved to be out of doors more. So we know that the temperature dips, we sleep better. But a lot of times you have fitful sleep. If you are sleeping too hot of a room, which guilty is charged. Yeah. So I'll look into it. Yeah. I mean, I think

insulation might play a role because I, you know, people still like to sleep with blankets, like just as sort of a comfort thing, but that adds a lot of insulation. So that's a good point. I know even in the summer, if I don't even have like a light sheet on me, I'm like, I need a cover of some sort. I need a wisp of gauze over me. Yeah. But even like that thin layer, right? I mean, it creates, you know, a pocket of, you know, your people air, right? You know, it's like you're, you sort of basking in your own juices, so to speak. Your human cloud, if you will. So side note, if your temperature feels all wonky, you can thank your glands. So the hypothalamus acts as a thermostat. It helps your body adjust to whatever your heat needs are. And typically,

when you're asleep, your temperature drops to its lowest point a few hours before you wake up, which kind of keeps you comfortably snoozing. Now, if you're sweating a bunch, it could be hormonal changes that are messing with your hypothalamus or a sudden plummet in blood sugar, if you kind of went a little hard on the desserts. Also, if you're always freezing and you feel tired and sluggish, you may want to have your own one-on-one oligies episode with an endocrinologist to chat about thyroid levels. Another symptom of that, having freezing hands and feet, which I know for a fact some of you do. A lot of people had questions about extremities and parts of the body, like Jocelyn Vincent, Marisa Brewer, Mariko Shin, Miig, Megan Yance, Heather Hutchinson,

Radha Vakarya, Heather Wills, Azrael King, and Moritz Latuske all kind of asked, why are feet freezing while the rest of our body is warm? Why are our hands cold? What is happening with different parts of bodies? So this phenomenon is called regional heterothermia. Oh, these are great terms. Yes. So thermal physiology has some awesome terms. I do like that part about being a thermophysiologist. And essentially, what happens is your body has priorities, right? And your core is the top priority. So if you're in a cold environment and you need to preserve heat, the first thing that your body or one of the first things that your body does is it shunts blood away from your extremities in order to preserve it at

your core, because the same thing would happen as I talked about with the elephants, right? When they're, as they pump blood out, it cools and then it returns. But if you're in a cold environment and you're pumping blood to your extremities and it cools and comes back, then your internal body temperature begins to plummet much quicker. So your feet get cold and your hands get cold so that your heart and lungs and liver and all that good stuff can stay warm. Because we've got to keep that, that all those organs pumping. Oh, yeah. But we can lose a hand, we'll be fine. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But also at the same time, you notice that, you know, if you're out in the cold, like your head is always steaming, even though it's technically an extremity. That's because

that's where the moneymaker is at the brain. Do we lose a lot of heat from our heads? Yes. Oh, my God. Okay. Let me find who asked this again. Claudius and others asked, I've heard it's an urban myth that we lose most of our body heat in your head. Time to have an expert be the judge, they say. Yeah. So it's not an urban legend for multiple reasons. One, because typically when we wear clothes, our head is least likely to be covered. Yeah. So, you know, just as a product, right, we would lose most of the heat by way of our head because the rest of us is insulated. So this is another great time to not imagine your friend's grandpa walking around in a ski hat and no pants. The other thing is that, you know, this regional heterothermia doesn't really apply

to your head because, you know, your body will do pretty much anything to keep your brain functioning. And so you will continue to pump, you know, blood to your head, which means that it will, you're continually supplying like warm warmth, you know, to, you know, to your entire head and your face, you know, except for your like your lips and all the cartilaginous places, right, your, you know, in the cold, your lips and nose and ears get really purple. Yeah, exactly. Well, they get purple on you, not so much on me because of the melanin. I drank one iced tea and I'm Rose, floating on wreckage. I'm Jack Nicholson in a dead end hedge maze. Jack, there's a boat. Jack. So many people. Carla Fiacco, Todd McLaren, Michael Pascura, Josh Wakoon, Alina Tanabe,

and Kitty Boyd all want to know about acclimation. Over time, does the body adapt to climate? And as a person who lives in Southern California, that gets very cold everywhere else. And as you've just moved here, just wait till it happens to you, you'll start getting weaker and weaker. Do we adapt that quickly? So yeah, so individuals can acclimate to temperatures. So again, I study this mostly in reptiles. Right. But in reptiles and ectotherms, like this is, we call it heat hardening. Okay. So essentially, when you're exposed to a hot temperature for an extended period of time, you become more adept at functioning at high temperatures and vice versa. So this is called, this is acclimation or phenotypic plasticity, right? Where you have like one

genome that can produce multiple phenotypes, depending on its interaction with the environment. Oh, really? So you can kind of switch off what you need? Yeah. So for instance, you know, if we, you know, if you or I were to go up to high altitude, you know, we, our bodies would, would physiologically change, right? We begin to like produce like more red blood cells, or we call it rethropoiesis. And it's the same genome, right? But genetically, we haven't changed. But, you know, the way that our body is sensing the environment induces a change. And the same is true in, in, in response to temperature. Oh my God, that's crazy. I didn't realize that. So I am getting weaker by living in Southern California. Probably. Yes. It's 100

sure. I go anywhere else. And I'm like, you know, Azam and Armando Trujillo and May Merrill, all kind of asked about adipose tissue. Like Azam asked, how significant is the activation of brown beige at dipocyte thermogenesis, as far as raising total body temperature is concerned. And then Armando and May both said that they recently lost a lot of weight and they're constantly cold. Does wing less affect body heat? Wing less does affect body heat. Again, because of this volume to surface area. Right. And but also, you know, fat, generally speaking, does also acts as an insulator. So if you take, I think a lot of mammals that occur in polar, in polar climates. So things like, you know, polar bears, walruses, seals that, you know,

can live in, in really, really cold waters. They all, they're, they have blubber, right, which is, which is fat, right? That's their, yeah, more cushion for the pushing. Arctic chunks. Yeah. The cutest. They are, they are scientifically cuter. Scientifically speaking. Yeah. I'm just saying an Arctic chubble-lubber is going to be cuter than like a seal with a six pack. Chubby things do have a tendency to, to be cute. They're so cute. Yeah. But if you've lost a lot of weight, you might be a little cold. Yeah. Get a sweater. Yeah, true. Yeah. One of them asked, is there any way to alleviate that without getting the weight back lol? I think Armando,

just get a sweater. Yeah. Get a hoodie. You deserve it. Yeah. This ability to, to buffer, to buffer ourselves. Yeah. It's one of the reasons why we're still here. That's called the Bogert effect. The Bogert effect. Yeah. This ability to, to thermally buffer yourself. That means get a sweater. Yeah. The, there should be a, but like a Bogert sweater company. Yeah. A Bogert sweater market child. Sam F wants to know, okay, frogs or are they totes? That basically suspend all their bodily functions into the external observer appear dead to deal with cold. And then when you thaw them out, they're just alive. All of a sudden, what the hell is up with that? How do we get that? Yeah, those are the wood frogs. Those are

the wood frogs. Those are the wood frogs. There you go, Sam. So yes, those are the frogs with the antifreeze blood. And I was actually able to track down audio of their meeting call, which is really cool. Sounds like this. JK, it's actually this. Also, I'm sorry, but I had to share an important life experience with Shane because he's a professional in the matter. I'll tell you a quick story. My dad is from Montana. Love Montana. And I had a hamster and the hamster lived for some reason. The hamster was outside and I got very cold and I woke up and the hamster was frozen solids, like a chicken cutlet. And my dad is like, don't worry, rodents like this, they do this and they

hibernate. I'm from Montana. Come on. And I was like, really? He's like, yeah, they just warm up. And I was like, okay, got back from school. My hamster bacon was fine. And I was like, oh, my God, that is crazy that rodents can do that. Anyway, cut to 20 years later, and Thanksgiving when I mentioned it, and my dad is like, oh, he had gone out on his lunch break and just got a new hamster. I was hoping I didn't have to break that to you here on this microphone. Two decades. I was like, bacon bounce back. My dad just went, I don't live for 47 years. Best hamster ever. His spots kept changing. They do that. It's acclimation effect. I know, my dad never used his face though. I looked over and I was like, oh, no. Okay, cryogenics,

Sonia Karolepavik and Azrael King want to know, is cryogenic freezing in any way realistic or possible? So it depends on what you mean in terms of Walt Disney style, cryogenics. So side note, a few of Walt Disney's biographers say he was keenly interested in the future. See Tomorrowland and that he knew about cryogenics. But Disney's daughter denies that he is in suspended animation awaiting a thaw. Also, his cremation report is on file. But hear me out, that could have been for his body without his moneymaker, you know what I'm saying? But Walt, either way, I trust you did whatever it was that you wanted to do. Also, I will never think of the show Disney on Ice quite the same. I'm always reluctant to say anything is impossible, but it's

highly improbable. Okay. But if you're talking about cryogenic freezing, so this is actually a really active area of research when it comes to things like organ transplants. Oh, right. Okay. You know, extending the longevity of transplants and how long they can survive outside of the body. So actually, a lot of this work that is being done on animals like the wood frog, right, if you have an animal that is able to do this for an extended period of time, right, and have properly functioning organs, yeah, it's a good place to go to find solutions to being able to freeze an organ solid and then revive it and still have it be able to function. So I think I do think that is a possibility. And essentially, we just need to really know more about the physiology of this

process and how it plays out in nature. But in terms of like freezing heads and reviving people, improbable, I will say highly improbable. But I mean, most questions ever had 191. Wow. That's amazing. I feel special. You should feel special. We were excited. Okay. What sucks the most about your job? Or about your pursuit or like the cold or the heat? What sucks the most about being a thermophysiologist? That is a good question. What sucks the most? When people come to your office and ask you stupid questions for a podcast. That's one of the best parts, especially because a lot of times I'm that person that's bothering a scientist about their work. You get a lot less slack when you are also a scientist, I would say.

But again, he, a scientist, interviews other scientists for his incredible podcast, The Biology of Superheroes. Okay. So what sucks? Yeah, I think, see, one of, so two things. One is like the sort of mundane everyday stuff. All right. So no, I have yet to meet the biologists where you asked them, like, why did you get into biology and like, oh man, I just love like answering emails and, and, and typing up memos and responding to administrative stuff. That's just the best. No one says that, you know, but that has become like such a huge part of my life. Yeah, not the, not the best. And in the field, actually as a thermal physiologist, the thing you have to put yourself under some extreme thermal conditions as well. You know,

so I spent summers driving around the South and, you know, in like Florida and the Southern tip of Texas, Louisiana, it gets really hot and really muggy in the heat of the day. But if the lizards are out doing their thing, you got to be out there doing your thing. And sometimes it's just a miserable existence. So every once in a while, I will take my research team to just like go see a movie in an air conditioned theater, like right at the heat of the day when even when it's even too hot for the lizards. Are you teaching them about bow guards effect? The bow guard effect. Yeah, exactly. We call it a lesson. Okay, we're going to experience a 62 degree movie theater right now. Is it worse when it's muggy because your sweat can't evaporate much? Yeah, so evapotranspiration

is not efficient in in really highly humid environments. It says why, you know, I when you go into the desert, like people who live in like Tucson or other places in Arizona, they're like, oh, yeah, it's like 150, but it's a dry heat. Yeah. And for I'm like, it's 100. And I don't, what does a dry heat have to do with anything? It's still heat. But in actuality, because it's so dry, evapotranspiration, you know, does help to more efficiently cool the body. I still think it's horrible though. What is the best thing about being a thermophysiologist? Oh, oh my god, how much time do you have? Lizards? Yeah, so it's definitely the animals, right? So I mean, certainly being a thermophysiologist, I mean, I think this applies to pretty much any scientist,

but the idea of like waking up in the morning, and you know that your day is going to be spent trying to answer questions that have never been answered before and may have never been asked before. There's like just something so deeply satisfying about that. Yeah. And going out, obviously like being in the field, there's something like those WTF moments, right, where you're going out and like maybe it's super hot outside and you're kind of tired. And then you see something that you've never seen or thought about before and it just sparks something like WTF. What in the good hell was that? And it just, you know, just being there, right, being just putting yourself in, in that environment, it's a whole different frame of

mind. We spend our entire lives making all kinds of decisions that don't have any real consequences in terms of in terms of like life and death. So to be able to go and like put yourself in an environment and observe organisms where the decisions that they're making, right, aren't, you know, oh, what pair of converses should I put on? But, you know, do I move here or there? Do I do this or that? And that that decision can literally be the difference between finding food and being food, right, and how that plays out in populations over time, like being able to see this grand story of evolution played out on its sort of thermohydric stage, right, and how it's played out over millennia, right, and seeing all of the different ways, all the different solutions that

life has come up with to like solve those problems. Like what Darwin called his endless forms most beautiful, right, being able to partake in that process in such a tangible way as a scientist. It's the thing that really just drives me. Plus the toys. What kind of toys is that? Oh my god. So like running, like running lizards on race tracks. And oh, I'll take you, I'll take you up there. I just have these, these two beautiful, amazing environmental chambers built that allows us to like manipulate temperature like every half hour and manipulate humidity. I call them the twins Chuck D and Alfie. Okay, so side note, these environmental chambers you just got, Chuck D and Alfie,

are named after Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, who are two naturalists who conceived the theory of evolution. So if you haven't heard evolutionary biology yet, also now would be a good time. Are there lizards in them? They're not lizards in them yet. Okay. But there will be lizards in them very soon. Are you going to have grad students manning the lizard chambers? Yes. It's going to be the best. I'm so excited. Of course, being a professor isn't all he's working on. And your podcast. Yeah. Which is amazing. It is, it is nerd-gasmic. It's, it's definitely, it's like, it's one of those guilty pleasures, you know, to be able to, to bring like merging, merging the nerd multiverse, right? Bringing in the comic books and the science. It's,

it's awesome. It's been a lot of fun. What episodes do you have coming up? Ooh. So we just put out a Star Trek episode looking at evolution and genetics in Star Trek. We interviewed Dr. Mohamed Noor, who's an evolutionary geneticist at Duke. And the next episode will be about the immortal iron fist, like talking about the biology of a living weapon. So I interview someone who studies biomechanics. She studies this amazing, amazing creature, the mantis shrimp, that has one of its punch is one of the fastest motions recorded in the animal world. And yeah, so there is just like a lot of science, a lot of really cool stuff that we talk about there. Oh my God, it's so good. So excited. Thank you so much for letting me barge

into your office with 22 pages of questions. Oh my goodness. I love you and your Bible full of questions. Thank you so much. Of course. This is a lot of fun. So ask the smartest people, your stupidest questions, because all of that smartness only makes the world better. So to find Dr. Shane Campbell Staten, go listen to the biology of superheroes like right now. Go do that. On Twitter, that's super bio podcast. And he's at S Campbell Staten on Twitter as well. I'll link those in the show notes. More links are always up at alleyward.com slash allergies, allergies is allergies. On Twitter and Instagram, I'm alleyward with one L on both. And thank you to everyone on patreon.com slash allergies for supporting the show. I couldn't make without you for everyone

getting merch at allergiesmerch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. Thank you, Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lipo Esquire for managing the Facebook Allergies podcast group. Thank you to interns Harry Kim and Caleb Patton for this extra research help this week. Editing was done by Jared Sleeper of Mind Jam Media. In case you need any podcast editing done, they're great. And by superhero endotherm, Steven Ray Morris of the Cat podcast, the Percast and the Dino podcast, see Jurassic right. It would be a cold and lonely place without you, Steven. Thank you. Now at the end of each episode, I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is I was supposed to fly somewhere today, but all the flights got canceled because it was snowing. And though I'm

sad to miss the trip, I was also like, yes, that sounded very cold anyway. Also, I fell asleep working and I still technically am in yesterday's clothes because I got to get this episode up, but I'm fine. I'm going to be fine. There's no one here even to smell me. So what's the problem? Okay, stay warm. Bye bye. Feeling hot hot hot.