Quirks and Quarks - A stinky planet full of magma, and more...

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

An unusual hellscape of a planet found 34 light years from Earth has a deep ocean of molten magma surrounded by noxious, hot, rotten egg-type fumes. It just may be the most uninhabitable alien landscape we've ever come across.PLUS:Neanderthal DNA can help explain how human faces formNearly indestructible teeny tiny tardigrades struggle to survive in Martian dirtTiny tags on monarch butterflies allow scientists to track their exact migration routeA weird fish has a big hole in its head. Scientists finally have an idea why.

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, revealing a hot and stinky planet like no other. I think it's extremely exciting and also quite humbling because it goes to show how much we really have to learn about the exoplanet population

that's out there. And adding Neanderthal... DNA to fish to see why Neanderthal's jaws are so different. In the fish, we saw that the progenitor cells that form the lower jaw, there was more of them, and the region was larger. Plus, trouble for tardigrades in Martian soil, a fish with a hole in its head, and tracking individual migrating monarchs. All is today on Quarks and Quarks.

An unusual hellscape of a planet, 34 light years from Earth is defying all expectations, and may represent an entirely new type of planet unlike anything we've seen before. And we've seen some real oddballs, like the super-Earth planet made out of diamonds, or the hot Jupiter planet where glass rains sideways. But these are planets we can understand because they're essentially variations of planets in our own solar system. While not this hellish world, that may well be the most uninhabitable alien landscape we've ever come across. with a deep ocean of molten magma, surrounded with noxious burning hot, rotten egg-type fumes. Talk about a hot, stinky planet.

Dr. Harrison Nichols led this research at the University of Oxford. He's now a postdoctoral research associate in the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University in the UK. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, Bob, thanks for having me. How did you first come to learn about this unusual planet? Yeah, so the system of planets actually represents a really great opportunity, and it was observed in 2019, and then following this, we wanted to write a proposal to re-observe it. Well, what was the first clue that this planet might be strange and unlike anything we'd seen before? As far as a few properties which are really exciting. I think one is that it's a super-Earth exoplanet, which means it's larger than Earth, but it's a size which doesn't have any analogs in the solar system.

So this presents a really great opportunity for learning about how completely new environments might arise outside anything we can directly visit with space probes. Additionally, there was this detection of sulfur, and there's really raised a lot of questions that we wanted to try and answer. So why is sulfur important? So it's important for a few reasons, and it's a great element. So firstly, it's important because it traces how planets form. So when plants form within the protoponetary disk, the amount of sulfur that the planet has. has, can tell us where I form in the disk. Additionally, sulfur has some interesting chemistry. So under certain conditions, it dissolves into planetary interiors in the same way that carbon

dioxide dissolves into water. So by using this property, we can learn about planetary interiors by observing their atmosphere. So is this planet a rocky planet like the Earth? What we believe is from the modeling and from the observations together is that this planet has a rocky interior, which is molten, unlike the Earth, which is solid. And then on top of that, it has a massive hydrogen and sulfur atmosphere. And this makes it entirely different to anything that we can see in the solar system. Well, tell me what puts it into a class of its own. Yeah. So super Earth and sub-neptune planet populations are types of exoplanet which have been discovered in the last 10 years or so. And again, these have no analogs in the solar system, so it's really unclear what they are. And

Because of this, people have been proposing categories to try and explain them. So maybe they have hydrogen atmospheres and a rocky interiors. Or maybe they are more like Jupiter, for example. Or maybe they have steamy atmospheres and ice layers in their interiors. And these are potential explanations for the exoplanet population. But then this planet came along. And detection of sulfur sort of suggested it didn't fit into either of these categories. Oh, I see.

So you used the computer model to analyze and figure out what type. of what this planet might be like, its character. Exactly. And more than just that, not just its character today, but because of the way the model is constructed, we can actually trace its evolutionary history from when it formed over 5 billion years up to the present day to unpick the different pathways which could potentially explain how this planet's what the way it is. How old is it? This planet's about 5 billion years old.

Okay, so it's just a little bit older than the Earth. Now, if I was to go there today and go down to the surface, what would I see? That's a great question. So one thing we can be pretty confident about from the modelling and from the data is that this planet's interior is molten. It's actually semi-multant. So it's got a viscosity between that of water and between that of rock. And in this case, it's something more like molasses. So you could potentially stand on the surface if you want to melt first.

We might potentially have waves occurring, like waves on the magma ocean. but really it would not be very hospitable at all. And also the atmosphere is very thick and it's sulfur-dominated. So maybe there'd be like a yellow hue or something like that. Wow, a magma ocean. So I'm thinking of lava, like what we see oozing out of Hawaiian volcanoes, like this undulating molten rock. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

Yeah, yeah. This connection with the Hawaiian volcanoes, I think, is important, actually, because it's worth noting that most planets are thought to start with macam oceans. But here we're getting sort of for the first time. insight into a planet which has a permanent magma ocean, despite the fact that it is actually a fairly temperate distance from its host star. Well, if it's a magma ocean, it must be thousands of degrees at the surface. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's probably, yeah, so it's above the melting point of rock. Well, as I understand it, the Earth started out that way. We were a molten

ball of magma, but then the Earth cooled and made a nice solid crust that we can all run around on today. Why hasn't this planet done that? Yeah, it's a great question. And that is one of the key insects in our discovery here, because all planets are molten. And then the question is which solidify and which stay molten. And if they solidify, that's really exciting, for example, with the Earth, because then we can get things like life and we can run around on the surface. But this planet has stayed molten for a variety of reasons. It has this massive hydrogen and sulfur atmosphere. And what this means is that it cannot cool. The atmosphere effectively blankets the interior through a type of greenhouse effect.

And this means it stays molten for 5 billion years, even though it is not super close to its host. Although, of course, the stellar radiation also helped keep it warm as well. Wow. Okay. So if the atmosphere is insulating the planet and keeping its surface into molten magma that's thousands of degrees, that must mean that the atmosphere is thousands of degrees. So why doesn't it just burn off or evaporate?

How can the planet hold on to an atmosphere when it's so hot? Yeah. When a planet's mantle is molten, you can dissolve light elements like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and carbon into the molten rock. And because they dissolve into the molten rock, this allows the planet to keep these elements for very long periods of time. While instead, if they had been outgast into the atmosphere, they'd be exposed to these escape processes due to stellar radiation, and then they would be stripped away.

So actually, the macamotion is part of the reason it has kept the atmosphere, and then the atmosphere is part of the reason it's kept the magmoration. So it's a highly coupled system. Boy, what went through your mind when you realized that you had an entirely new class of planet on your hands? I think it's extremely exciting and also quite humbling because it goes to show how much we really have to learn about the exoplanet population that's out there. This doesn't fit in these, everything's moving very quickly, and this does not fit into the existing categories. reason. I think it's exciting to see that maybe we could get completely unthought of groups of planets. People have suggested helium worlds or oxygen worlds and now we have sulfur worlds. So this final frontier

that these ex-plants are representing is quite multifaceted. I think we're just beginning to unpick that. I guess one lesson we can take from this is when we see how different other planets are, it makes us appreciate the uniqueness of the Earth. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, there's this idea of the habitable zone, the Goldilocks zone, and it's suggested that planets within the habitable zone would be habitable, but then the fact that the Magna Ocean is quite common sort of undermines this concept a little bit and suggests that we need to be really careful about interpreting so-called habitable planets because maybe in reality they have these oceans of magma,

and maybe suggests the Earth is more unique than we previously appreciated. There's no place like home. Absolutely. Dr. Nichols, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much. Dr. Harrison Nichols is a research associate in the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University in the UK.

If we were able to stand beside a Neanderthal and compare our facial features, there would be a few noticeable differences. Their noses are larger. Their brows more pronounced and their lower jaws, well, you can say they're a lot more rural. bust. And now scientists who are trying to figure out how our facial features evolved to be so

different discovered a kind of genetic enhancer in the Neanderthal DNA that can, at least, explain why their lower jaws became a lot more pronounced than ours. Dr. Hannah Long is a group leader at the Medical Research Council's Human Genetics Unit in the Institute of Genetics and Cancer at the University of Edinburgh. She led this research. Hello and welcome to our program. Hello, it's fantastic to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Now, when you're looking at Neanderthal fossils, how obvious are the differences in their facial features compared to ours? Well, the Neanderthal face was very distinctive from that of modern day humans, so humans that are alive today. And this is likely to, due to adaptations to their climate and their environment.

And the Neanderthal face includes a number of distinctive features, such as larger nose, projecting midface. but we've really focused on the structure of the lower jaw. Modern humans have this pointy chin, whereas Neanderthals lack this feature. Neanderthals also had a gap behind their third molar and other structural features. Generally, the jaw was much more robust in Neanderthals. So they had a stronger bite than we do. Presumably so. What were you hoping to find in your study? We know that Neanderthals look different from us from the fossil record. We can see that

if we look at bones that have been found across Europe in Siberia, that our features are very different. But something very exciting about Neanderthals is that we also have a clue about their genetics. And so there are three very high-quality genome sequences that have been generated from three Neanderthal individuals. And so we can really get a clue as to how our DNA shapes our appearance from comparing our ancient cousins to.

modern-day humans. Wow. Well, it's really remarkable that you have Neanderthal DNA in the first place. So how did you know where to look in that DNA to see the differences between what they have and what we have? When we look in the Neanderthal DNA, we can see that there are around tens of thousands, perhaps around 30,000 differences in our DNA sequence between Neanderthals and modern-day humans. And so it's likely that some of these genetic changes are what is defining the differences between Neanderthal, jaw shape, and modern-day jaw shape. But it's really a needle in the haystack problem. This is still a very large number of genetic differences.

And so in my lab, we really also are interested in understanding the genetic causes of rare craniofacial conditions. We've been studying one gene in particular. This gene is called Sox-9. And there are a group of patients that have a craniofacial condition called Piero Band sequence. And these individuals have deletions or altered DNA structure near to this gene. And so in our previous work, we were really interested in understanding how these large, deleted portions of DNA might be affecting this gene and leading to the facial appearance of

these individuals. I see. So this SOX-9 gene is responsible for jaw developments in some way. So take through your study then. How did you try to find this or how it works in Neanderthal DNA compared to humans? These patients have a small underdeveloped lower jaw. And so we really rationalized that if these patients have a small lower jaw, perhaps if we look in this region in the Neanderthals, if there are any genetic differences, then that might help us to understand the jaw morphology differences in Neanderthals versus humans. And we were really pleased to see or excited to see that there were three single DNA-based changes at this human disease region in the Neanderthals. Wow. And this was not in the gene itself. This was in a non-coding part of our DNA. And so genes only account for

one to two percent of our DNA sequence. The rest does not encode for genes. And it used to be thought that this was not an important part of our genome, but we really now understand that there's really important functions for this 99% of our DNA, and it's been re-termed the dark genome. We're really excited to understand how this dark genome is playing an important role in facial formation. Well, take me through that.

So we've got two things here. We got the Sox-9 gene and the dark genome. How are they related? Yes. Genes play a really important role in development and how we go from a single cell to a complex organism. But all of our cells in our body have 20,000 genes. And so the really important thing is where and when these genes get turned on during development.

And so in the dark genome, there's 99% of our DNA. There are regulatory sequences or regulatory switches called transcriptional enhancers. And these transcriptional enhances act to turn on. on genes at specific times and places during development. And so the link is that these patient deletions remove important regulatory switches or enhancers important for Sox-9. And that's exactly where our Neanderthal variants or DNA changes were found. And so we hypothesized that these Neanderthal DNA sequences might be altering this regulatory switch and altering when and where during development Sox 9 was being turned on.

Oh, I see. So it's the switch that you're after that turns the gene on or off. That's the difference that you're looking at in the Neanderthals. Exactly, exactly. So we're interested in understanding that regulatory switch. How did you test that? So the approach that we took was to use zebrafish. Zebrafish's jaws developed very similar to humans, which is quite surprising, but there are shared mechanisms. What's also fantastic about zebrafish is that the embryos, as they're developing,

they're transparent. And so we can watch the jaw developing using microscopes. We took the human version of this regulatory switch or this enhancer, and we linked it to a red fluorescent protein, which we can visualize as the embryo is developing. We then took the Neanderthal version of this regulatory switch and linked it to a green fluorescent protein. And then we were able to look as the embryo was forming where and when they were active.

And what we saw was that amazingly, both in the human and Neanderthal version of this regulatory switch, were active in the forming region of the lower jaw, which was beautiful to see. But what was even more striking was that the Neanderthal version of this regulatory switch was stronger, gave more fluorescent protein. We could see this under the microscope. which was extremely exciting. Okay, so the Neanderthal switch was turned on. Did the fish develop larger jaws?

In the fish, we saw that the progenitor cells that form the lower jaw, there was more of them, and the region was larger. So does this explain why Neanderthals had larger jaws? We think that our experiments and results are very exciting, and they give us some insight into how genetic changes in these enhancers can impact their activity and, potentially, impact morphology. But we don't think we've got the whole story. We think that there are likely lots of genetic differences between Neanderthals and humans that are impacting jaw formation. And we want to explore more of this. We think there may be more of these DNA changes,

even impacting the expression or the activity of Sox 9, and also other genes which have play an important role in jaw formation. Well, what does this say to you, about the role of this dark region of our genome that doesn't actually contain genes but can affect genes that give rise to different facial features? Yes, I think the dark genome is such an exciting frontier for our research, and there's still so much we don't understand. From human genetics, from looking in the population,

we can see that when we look between individuals, most of the genetic differences that are associated with certain features, for example, height or facial features. These variants are found in the non-coding regions of the genome, this dark genome. And so if you have a mutation in a gene, it will have likely a very strong impact on development. And so if you have a gene that's important for your face, but it's also important for your liver or your pancreas, if you have a genetic change in that gene, you will have many defects during development. Whereas Enhancers, they're very specific, very specific to a place or a time during development.

And so genetic changes with Enhancers really act as the levers for evolutionary change because they drive more subtle changes in our appearance and target one tissue or one forming organ. And so that's really one of the exciting features about enhancers is that they can drive variation within the population and also drive change across evolutionary time. Sort of like turning up or down the dial, not just in music, but for a jutting jaw. Yes. Dr. Long, thank you so much for your time.

It's been such a pleasure. Thank you very much. Dr. Hannah Long is a group leader in the MRC human genetics unit at the University of Edinburgh. Tarda grades are fascinating and incredibly hardy little creatures. These micro-animals,

less than a millimeter in size, are also known as water bears for how they look as they lumber around aquatic environments like gummy bears with eight legs. They've been around since the time of the dinosaurs and can live in almost any ecosystem on Earth, from the deepest oceans to the top of volcanoes and even in sub-zero polar temperatures. They're nearly indestructible. Boil them in acid? No problem. Expose them to the vacuum of space, piece of cake. But with plans to send humans to the moon and then Mars, scientists wondered, could Tardigrades, one of the world's toughest animals, survive on Mars? Well, scientists are one step closer to finding out. In a recent study, they put these seemingly unkillable creatures into simulated Martian soil

and found that, to their surprise, the Tardigrades struggled to survive. Dr. Corrine Bachermans is a professor of microbiology at Pennsylvania State University's Al-Tuna campus, she led the work. Hello and welcome to our program. Hello, thank you for having me today. Now, given what we know about tardigrade's nearly indestructible nature, what kind of thinking did you have about how they might do in simulated marsh and soil? So, tardigrades are indestructible in their dormant form. When they're active, they are more susceptible to damage. And so we wanted to understand how they might behave on. on Mars in not just the current conditions of the Martian environment, but also imagining that

as we send people to Mars, we will be potentially wanting to produce food. We would be collecting that Regulith, bringing it into the habitat, and using it as a resource for growing food in. Now, when you say Regulith, that's just the stuff that's on the surface. Yes. So Regalith is the term for the loose minerals on the surface of the planet. Here we would call it soil, but technically soil should have organic compounds in it, and Mars doesn't have any organic compounds. Well, let's start with the tardigrades first. Where did you get them? So these tardigrades were collected in the northern Apennines. Those are the mountains in Italy. Tardigrades from higher altitudes are experiencing some tougher conditions here on Earth.

they are experiencing colder temperatures in the winter, they're going through frequent wet and dry cycles, and because they have to adapt to those conditions, they are pretty hardy in their dormant phase. And so that is where we expected to find tardigrade species on Earth that are the hardiest of the tardigrades that we have on Earth. Because there is a range of susceptibility among different species of tardigrades. Now you talk about their dormant phase. What do you mean by that? So when conditions start to get tough for these tardigrades, their little pool of water starts to dry out, they will form what is called a ton where they contract themselves up, basically kind of become a dried out little husk of themselves that is much hardier and much more capable of surviving high radiation. the vacuum of space, very dry conditions, all these extremes that we know that they can handle. Oh, I see. So that's how they're hearty is that they dry themselves out and become dormant. Then what do they do? They become wet again and become active? Yes. And then when it becomes wet enough for them to be active, they rehydrate and they go about living their lives, eating, reproducing, and spreading around their environment.

Okay. Now, what about the... simulated Martian soil or dirt? Where did that come from? So we used two simulated Martian soils that we obtained from a commercial lab and a university lab. One is called MGS1. The other is called OUCM1. And they actually both simulate the environment at Gale Crater on Mars. So from all the rover data and the satellite data, we know a lot about the mineral compositions there, and we have on earth taken the minerals that we can use to best represent that location, and these are two recipes for that. So what happened when you put the tardigrades into the simulated Martian reguleth? So we took these active tardigrades, not their

dormant form, and mixed them with a little bit of water and a little bit of the Martian soil simulant, and gave them a little bit of food. And also just in our lab, at a sort of earth temperature and atmosphere monitored their activity for a few days. And how did they do? Well, depending on what kind of soil they were in, they either survived or they did not survive very well. And we did controls with earth's sand, and they survived very well in those. When we put them in the simulant MGS1, they did not survive very well. So within about two days, most had stopped being active, possibly dead at that point.

Wow. Why do you think they did not survive? What was it in the soil and the Martian soil that was giving them a hard time? It's likely that the Martian soil, when it comes into contact with water, that some components of the soil are dissolving into the water. And those components are potentially harmful to the tardigrates. So there could be some salts and they could be some other. ions as well that are causing some damage to the tardigrades. It's also possible that the Martian regolith, it's very pointy particles, unlike on Earth, where a lot of our particles through weathering

are much more rounded. And so it is possible that just kind of the sharpness of the particles could be causing some damage to the tardigrates. Why do you think there would be a difference in their survival in the two different types of Martian soil? We have not done the analysis yet, but I am guessing that the Martian simulant in which the tardigrades survived better had fewer toxic or potentially harmful chemicals in it that could dissolve into the water. So we could test this by actually washing our MGS1 simulant and then seeing how the tardigrades behaved in that. And when after washing that simulant, we did find that they survived very well. You wash the dirt? Yes.

Wow. So what's that say to you? So that tells me that, yeah, if there are hazardous chemicals in that soil that can dissolve in the water, that, well, we could still potentially use it as a resource, but we might have to wash it first. And water's going to be limited on Mars, so that is a concern that we will have to deal with as we continue to plan missions there. Well, if tardigrage are one of the toughest creatures on Earth and they were struggling to survive in the Martian Regulith, I mean, what about things like plants, animals that we want to grow on Mars? So I think it's important to remember that washing was helpful and that we had two simulants, one which was more damaging than the other. So we don't know for sure which of these best represents the Martian Regalith. So I do think that we see definite potential of the regolith to be used as a resource for growing plants and that if it is somewhat damaging, then we should make sure that we have plants that can tolerate those kind of conditions.

And so that kind of consideration is going to come into play, I think. So is this a good news or a bad news story? I think it's both. It's good news in the sense that we have a better understanding now of. the regolith, and this is, of course, going to be one component of what's going on on Mars. It's bad news in the sense that it could potentially as well indicate that if tardigrades are damaged, that there could be some risks to the plants, to people that are there, and that we need to be a little bit more careful about the exposure of organisms to this regalith.

It's almost like Mars has a self-defense system against earthly organisms. Yes. Dr. Bacherman, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Dr. Corrine Bachermans is a professor of microbiology at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona campus. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quarks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, a fish that communicates through a hole in its head.

Considering how loud where this animal lives is, I bet that essentially it would have evolved in a sequence, and that's how you end up with this bizarre headhole serving this crazy Maraca function. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves, I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead.

This season, I take you inside the business of suicide. And the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Every year, the massive movement of monarch butterflies from Canada through the United States all the way down to Mexico is the longest insect migration on the planet. It's a nearly 3,000-kilometer journey by an insect that only weighs as much as a couple of paperclips. It's impressive no matter how you look at it.

For many years, scientists have been trying to track the monarchs as they make this track to understand more about the paths they take and the risks they face along the way. But it was a tricky task to keep tabs on where our fluttering friends were going. Well, now scientists have a new tool in their toolbox, tiny tags that can track the monarchs using Bluetooth. So for the first time, they're getting a full picture of the monarch butterfly's perilous journey across the continent. Our producer Amanda Bukowitz spoke with the researchers involved to get the scoop. To me, it's that sense of wonder.

It's the same sense of wonder I get thinking about, you know, the vastness of space or, you know, the origins of life or dinosaurs. I get the same sense of wonder from migration for any species, really, but especially for the monarch butterfly. It's incredible to think about, you know, the thousands of roads that it's flown over, the thousands of households that it's flown over, the backyards that it stopped in, the farm fields that it's stopped in, the storms that it's avoided, the high winds that it's avoided, you know, all the various risks along the way that it must face,

and it's still able to survive and make it all the way down to Mexico. My name's Greg Mitchell. I'm a research scientist with environment and climate change Canada. We're really happy because a lot of the habitat that monarchs use during migration, we refer to them as staging sites or these sites where there's large congregations of thousands of monarchs kind of hanging off the trees along the Great Lakes. They're on these peninsulas like Long Point and Rondo and Pointe Peeley and they're already protected. But we don't know what the monarchs do when they're at these locations,

do they fly across the water and that's it, or do they move off these peninsulas and fly around the lakes, like along the north shore? And then once they get across the lake, or once they go around the lake, how do they get down to Mexico? So Long Point is this giant sandy peninsula that jets out into Lake Erie,

and where we tagged the monarchs at Long Point, those monarchs, they might, all the way from Canada down to central Mexico. So just west of Mexico City. And they spend the winter high up in the mountains where the air temperature is consistently cool. So that allows them to survive without having to expend a lot of energy because the cooler temperatures keep their metabolisms down. The only way we used to get information on monarch migration was one was through these

surveys basically that took place. And one of the longest occurring surveys in North America actually has taken place at the tip of Longpoint. And then the other way that people used to track monarch migration was through sticker tags. And so they would put these little stickers with a unique number on the underside of the wing. And then those monarchs would be subsequently captured somewhere further south on their migration or even on the wintering grounds in Mexico.

And so we were able to piece together where the majority of monarchs coming from. My name is Lily Charles. I'm a second year master's student, co-supervised by Heather Karuba at the University of Ottawa and by Greg here. And my first experience tagging the monarchs was sort of testing out this earlier generation of the tags. But it was really a struggle to be able to track them far. And we were wondering how long they stayed in these restored patches. And we really wanted to know that, but it was really challenging. So about three months before we went to the field, we were contacted by the company that makes the tags, and they said,

we know we're using this previous generation, but we have this brand new tag, and it's a game changer. It gets picked up passively by people's cell phones, the same way that air tags work with Apple phones. And so we thought, oh, this is incredible. I had some extra research money, so we bought 30 tags,

and we went out and we deployed them. There's a monarch here that I will tag later today. So an average day would be we wake up in the morning on the beach in these amazing tents at the best field lodging I've ever stayed at. It was very, very amazing. And then we would go out and we would start to catch monarchs. So it seems silly, but that's the main part of it is walking around with a butterfly net and trying to go to these patches of flowers where you'd expect the monarchs to be. and it is a skill that you have to develop. Initially it was tricky to capture them.

They were so fast. Beautiful. But over time, you know, you learn how to catch them. Usually it was while they were foraging. And then we would bring them back in an enclosure to our tagging station that we had set up and sort of we'd trade roles throughout the day of who was catching the monarchs and then who was tagging. There's a wildlife research technician I work with Anna Diaz that was out there with us So next with a cue tip and a little bit of water but just a little bit to wet it

We're going to clean the exoskeleton where looking the torax where we're going to stick the tag Anna spent a lot of time developing the tagging method and talking to other researchers that do butterfly tracking so that we'd have like a safe method for putting these tags out. It has little hair, so we want it to be as clean as possible. It looks shiny now. It was a learning curve, but I would say it took between five to ten minutes per butterfly, and then we keep them in an enclosure afterwards for ten minutes

to make sure that nothing is wrong with the tag and that their wings are okay. I can let it dry for another to three minutes And then we are going to move this morning To an enclosure Where she can stay there In a more natural position And the glue can dry Before we release it

Forever So after we put the tags On the monarchs and we let them go She's off How could I go Look at her go. We saw them literally fly off to the west, and I thought to myself, okay, they're flying around the lake.

This must be what's happening, because they're flying back towards the mainland. But what was really cool about these tags is the data comes in almost instantaneously. And so by the second day, when we opened the portal, we could literally see them getting, picked up by people's boats that were out on the water, like people that had their Apple iPhones on their boats, and then we could see them making landfall along the South Shore Lake Erie in

Cleveland, for example. Most people have heard about the monarch migration, but then to see it in real time and knowing that we have interacted with these butterflies and just cheering them on as they go was really incredible. So it was real time, and it was shocking. Like, I had to had never, I don't know, it's hard to describe, I would have never expected the technology to work this well, not because I had any doubt in the company that makes the technology, but because I couldn't have imagined this even the year before that we would have a technology like this. A couple things really surprised me. So first thing, almost every monarch except two of them flew across the water. And I was shocked by that. I just would have thought that's a

risky flight across one of the Great Lakes. So I was surprised by that. But we had some partners at Birds Canada that put out some additional tags later in the season around the same locations. And a lot of those monarchs actually flew around the lake. And so I was also equally amazed at that. I said, okay, well, there's definitely a strategy here. And it probably has to do with the wind conditions, I'm sure, but we haven't looked at

that yet, but there's not one singular flight trajectory that these monarchs are taking. It was amazing to me to see that they were just going right through cities, going across all these patches of different land cover, and I just couldn't stop thinking about, like, they're being picked up in these locations, but where are they actually landing here? We had some monarchs that made landfall in Cleveland. like super urban area, and they just flew right through the heart of the city. You can see when they're slowing down, and possibly when they're doing some exploratory movements within the urban centers.

And so I think what we're going to be able to do going forward is, I think we'll be able to infer the types of habitats that are available to these butterflies in different urban environments, for example, or different rural environments based on both their exploratory behavior, but also how quickly they're moving. So we know now, we have concrete evidence, and we've known this,

but we have direct tracks of monarchs through urban centers, and so this speaks to the value of people having nectar flower gardens on their balconies of their apartments or in their gardens, because this will help the monarchs. There's some animations of all of

the butterflies, their points, you can track them sort of like a, it's kind of a gift, basically, of their movement across the continent and being able to see there's points where, you know, they're not all moving at the same time, but they all shift a bit northward, kind of almost in unison. And like, it's interesting to think about whether that's related to wind or something else. That's the other thing that struck me was, wow, they are really, really moving. They pick a direction they want to fly in, and it's probably influenced by wind and things. And we know they have this really incredible sun compass that they use, and we know that they can sense the earth's magnetic field that helps them, you know, choose the direction they're flying in.

But once they're on a trajectory, they just bombed it in that direction. They went so fast, and it didn't seem like their movement trajectory was necessarily influenced by what was in front of them or what they were flying over. One of the monarchs that traveled over 3,000 kilometers as in a straight line from Long Point down to Mexico, when you look at the actual path that it took, it's actually quite tortuous in a way that they're not taking a straight line. They're getting blown around a little bit by the wind

and having to make adjustments constantly. And that distance is closer to 4,500 kilometers. And this is the difference between the sticker tags and the technology that we're used. using is we knew approximately when we recovered a sticker tag how far the monarch had moved from its origin. But with these new tracking technology, we can actually understand that, yeah, it had come from a location that was 3,000 kilometers away, but it's taken it at a minimum 4,500 kilometers to get there. So this is a 0.5 gram butterfly. That's about the fifth of the mass of

penny or a couple paper clips for example and something that small has traveled from lake erie and ontario has traveled 4,500 kilometers to reach mexico it's pretty amazing and then another thing that i found really really interesting is one of the monarchs that we were tracking made it all the way down to the wintering grounds west of mexico city and i was really excited for it. And then it just kept going. It didn't stop. It flew 250 kilometers east, southeast of where it, in theory, should have stopped to be with, you know, the majority of the other monarch. So for me, this is an open question, you know, was that a mistake that these monarchs make? Because, you know, wildlife, just like humans, we make lots of mistakes. So maybe it just got

off track and it needs to correct. Or there's always the possibility that it's going to another wintering location that we didn't know about. So these are some of the really exciting questions that we're going to start to be able to dive into with the broader collaboration. Yeah, everyone kind of had the same reaction that I did initially. Like, I can't believe that this is something that I can do with my life. This is incredible. Just watching along on this app, like Greg said, I was glued to my phone. I would love to see my screen time. I would love to see my screen time hours for this Project Monarch app. Anyone who would listen to me, my friends, my family, anyone I interact with that I think would be interested. I'm telling them about this app and how you

can watch them and telling them like, watch our butterflies that we've tagged. Like, it's so cool. So yeah, I think everyone's had pretty much the same reaction that I did of just amazement. This sounds a little bit corny, but it's like kind of our shared natural heritage between the three countries. Like it's something simple that physically connects. our three countries. And there's other examples of other migratory birds and such. But the butterfly, the monarch butterfly in particular, it's easily recognized by the public.

And it represents something beautiful that moves between our three countries. And it also reminds me of how connected our three countries are and how we have a shared responsibility for its conservation. We spoke with Dr. Greg Mitchell, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Lily Charles, a master student in the Department of Biology at the University of Ottawa. To find out more about how you can join in and track the monarchs from your phone, visit our website at cbc.ca.ca.c.c.c.slure evolution can sometimes lead to strange body parts.

One example is the ratfish from the northeastern Pacific, where the males have a fleshy, bulbous appendage on their foreheads. And that's not the weird part. Their appendage is made of rows of actual teeth that it uses to hold onto the female during mating. But for another fish, the rockhead poacher from the same general region, it's pretty much the reverse. It has a hole in the top of its head. Now, having a hole in the head doesn't seem like it'd have an evolutionary advantage. But now new research suggests these rockhead poachers use the hole in their head like a drum or a Maraca for communication. Daniel Geldof is a functional morphologist who conducted the research for his master's thesis that he successfully defended at Louisiana State University in

Baton Rouge. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hello, thank you so much for having me. Well, let's get the lowdown on the rockhead poacher. What does this fish actually look like? This fish, it has a very, very unique shape to it. So the best way to think of it for someone who has never seen one before, and I would strongly encourage anyone interested to Google it because it's just a bizarre looking creature. But imagine a tiny, tiny sturgeon that has super heavy armor, and it looks like a tiny ice cream scoop has been taken to the top of its head.

It looks like it's got a little bowl in its head. How big is it? A really big one would be five or six centimeters, More often I see them in the 1 to 2 centimeter 3-4 range. Boy, that's pretty small. That's less than the length of my finger. Yes. So how large is this hole in their head compared to the size of their head?

The hole in their head occupies roughly the same volume as their entire brain. So you can imagine that converted to a human, that'd look really strange. Well, what made you suspect that this hole or cavity in the top of their head might have something to do with communication? So originally, I actually thought that it might have more to do with listening than creating sound. And that had to do with microstructures inside. Essentially, the pit itself is laid out like a sphere, and it has these neat little flexible spines running all along this dish that makes up the pit. And that's super useful as a sensor for direction. But the big thing that's going on is instead this working in reverse based on this really, really dense, bony bass on this pit that's used kind of like a drum surfing.

So instead of a receiver, you're saying it's actually more like a speaker to produce sound? Yes. Underwater acoustics are enormously complicated. And one of the things that's really interesting is that you would sort of think, based on the shape of like speaker code, that the sound is going outwards and upwards. But in fact, it's going through the ground and it has to do with a lot of different things,

but one of them is that this fish is super, super tiny and it lives in a place that is unbelievably loud. Tide pools and the rocky intertidal zones are incredibly loud. And because this fish is so tiny, if it was doing the fish equivalent of shouting at the top of its lungs into the water column, it'd still be completely useless.

When you think about it, dirt and rocks are way thicker, or they're way denser than water. So they can transmit these quiet sounds phenomenally efficiently, basically by using first this pit as percussion, but then also this fish is covered in armor. It's basically a rock in itself. So its whole body kind of turns into a percussion instrument. Well, how did you figure all this out?

How did you study it? So the majority of what I got to do with this thing was a technology called micro-CT scanning. And the results there are pretty dramatic in that a lot of the scans that I've put together are of animals that are one or two centimeters long. Their brain and their nerves are incredibly tiny. The brain is maybe half the size of a grain of rice. The nerves are much thinner than human hairs. And I can basically trace them all out.

So what did you see when you look into this pit in the fish's head? What ended up being super dramatic here is that the base of this pit, is partially made of your C1 vertebra, and I say you're, because humans have it too. It's your first vertebra. In this fish, that vertebra makes up part of the base of this pit, and it's reduced to almost nothing. And your vertebra column, your again being, because we have them, fish has them, it's paired with your ribs. And we would expect for this first vertebra in fish that if this first vertebra barely exists anymore, we would expect the ribs to be gone, but they're not.

Not only are they not gone, they're gigantic, and they're budding right up against the back of this pit, and the other side of them is connected to the strongest muscles in this fish's body. And because they're connected to these muscles and can rub up against the base of this, then this is a phenomenal way to generate sound. Okay, so I'm just trying to picture this. There's a hollow in the top of the fish's head.

you've got these ribs that are sticking up and they gather together at the base of the hollow and these muscles attached to the ribs. So how do you put all of that together to make sound? So what these fish do is they essentially vibrate these muscles against, and when they vibrate the muscles, then it causes the ribs to strike against the base of this pit. It doesn't take a lot of work for this fish to actually get an initial sound. The trick is. buzzing very quickly, or for its size, producing a lot of force. So this fish isn't in the absolute sense very loud, but relative to its size, it's unbelievably loud. Well, if they're using their whole body to make the sound, why do they need the hole in their head? So that's another

really good question, because there are other fish, even in the same family, that produce lots of sounds, and they don't have a hole in their head. And the reason, The reason basically seems to have to do with a sequence of things that have evolved. And it appears that the first function to evolve was simply camouflage. So, for instance, these guys, they spend a lot of time in very shallow water around encrusting sponges and things like that. They are incredibly difficult to see. And part of it is because they have this cap in their head that makes their head just look like a sponge. But the crazy contraption of striking your ribs repeatedly against the remnant of your skull base and C1 vertebra is very novel.

And that seems to have probably come up at the very end because this fish would have already been trying to vocalize. But animals that had this really, really close-in dish relative to their ribs would have been phenomenally better at. And considering how loud where this animal lives is, I bet that essentially it would have evolved in a sequence. And that's how you end up with this bizarre headhole serving this crazy Maraca function. Mr. Gelladoff, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Daniel Geldorf is a functional morphologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. And that's it for Quarks and Quarks this week.

If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is. is Quirx at CBC.ca. You can find our web page at cbc.ca.ca slash quirks, where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archives. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app.

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