Quirks and Quarks - Monkeys swallow soil to eat more junk food, and other summery science

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

From the science of how we sweat to solving golf's greatest mystery, we revisit some of our favourite summery segments from the past season.

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even taped the debaters there once, so I guess we're world-class next. This is a CBC podcast.

Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to the best of Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, we start with a story about the physics of sweating. We also hear how some especially gifted dogs can learn words by eavesdropping on their owners. We'll look at how ice cream-eating monkeys treat their indigestion, deconstruct the golfer's curse, the dreaded lip out of the hole, and Let's Go Gru Jays. And we'll track the Monarch butterfly migration

from Canada to Mexico using Bluetooth. All this today on the best of Quarks and Quarks. No matter where you live in Canada, chances are you've already experienced some sweltering heat this summer. It was a scorcher across a lot of British Columbia in late June, and climatologists warned those living in southern Ontario to expect a warmer than usual summer this year. It's something that we might all start to feel as climate change causes summer to stretch further into spring and fall and feel more intense.

With all that heat comes a lot of sweat. Humans sweat is our primary way of cooling down, more so than any other primate. But little is known about the actual dynamics of sweating. Which is why Dr. Conrad Rickachewski decided to take a very close look at how humans sweat and how it all works. Dr. Rickicchevsky is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Arizona State University in Phoenix, Arizona. Hello and welcome to our program. Glad to be here. What made you want to study sweat?

Well, whether you're in Canada and even more living in Phoenix, sweat is our primary defense against overheating. In fact, as you mentioned, compared to other primates, we sweat a lot of. more were known as the sweaty apes and that is thought to have helped us, you know, run through the savannah longer back in the day, but these days it helps me, let's say, go for a run in Phoenix without getting a heat stroke. Well, it's so common. I mean, everybody sweats. How is it that we know so little about how it works? There's really a gap in knowledge on how the sweat comes out of, you can think of single sweat pores, which are roughly the diameter of your hair,

and then how those little droplets spread out and start evaporating. And there's an entire industry trying to optimize how your shirt wicks away the sweat. So we try to bring this perspective of this kind of microscale to try to understand what physical processes matter, are dominant, with the thought of, How could we then manipulate it as engineers to interact better with, let's say, a textile to make us feel better and cool better in hot climates? Well, take me through your work. How did you study sweat?

Absolutely. So first, we partner with a physiology professor at Stavriss Kavoras at ASU, who has been studying sweat and hydration for decades. And we started combining microscale imaging techniques to observe. sweat or microscale droplets with very high resolution. And we coupled that with macroscopic measurements that have been done before. And we have conducted a series of studies combining the measurement of, let's say, electrical properties of skin at different depths, which sounds fancy, but it's basically a light detector. And then we added other gizmos to it. And we even created a small wind tunnel that you attached to a forehead to be a able to combine the imaging and quantitative measurements.

Okay, so you have all these instruments to study sweat. What did you have your volunteers do to produce the sweat? So to be clear, I don't only observe, but I actively participate. So I've experienced this process, oh, about 15 times myself. So because these microscopes that we use, unfortunately, they have very narrow depth field. So we couldn't have people exercised to sweat. So instead, what we did is we took a liquid profuse suit, which, for example,

astronauts wear under their space suits to keep cool. And it's just a body suit that has about 120 feet of tubing sun into it. And instead of passing cold water to it, we passed pretty warm water through that. And we also put heated blankets on top and bottom. And at the beginning, you lay down and the water gets about 46 degrees Celsius. Passes, it feels nice.

And then, you know, then two hours later, you're pouring out about one to two liters of sweat an hour. And I think I started getting uncomfortable at the point where sweat was drooping from top of my ear to the bottom. But through this experience, right, of course we stop if you feel uncomfortable. Through this experience, we were able to observe this entire sequence of going from no sweat baseline to really profuse sweating. And then we also cool the person off, evaporate the sweat, and repeat it to understand are there any differences between kind of clean and sweaty skin, so to say. Okay, so you've got these people, including yourself, lying down, perfectly still, wearing this body suit with hot water running through it and covered in a blanket, just lying there sweating to death. So what did you see when you looked at their skin in close-up detail? Number one, fairly often you'll see this image of a hemispherical sweat droplets coming out of a single pore.

And that, well, we never observed that. A droplet size is flat and then they might pull up, but it's kind of a shallow pool. Oh, really? Because we always talk about dripping sweat. Dripping sweat, yeah, on a bigger scale, right? If you look at a few millimeters, you might see kind of a trail of sweat with what looks like a droplet at that beginning. But that's really, you're already talking about contribution of sweat from tens, if not hundreds,

of sweat pores. If you look at individual sweat pores, hemispherical droplets don't exist on that scale. So you're saying that the individual sweat glands are sort of like cups that get overfilled and then just spill out over the edges. They don't form drops at first. it's more like a pool that spills over the edge. Is that right? Yes, and that depends on whether you already sweated that day or not.

So your outer layer of skin is called the stratum cornea, and it's also been known as the dead skin layered, and it can absorb about 50% by volume of water. And you know that if you spend too much time in a bathroom pool, your fingertips wrinkle. And that's that stratum corneum expanding, but having no room to expand, so it wrinkles. on the rest of your skin, that outer barrier layer is a lot thinner,

but it still can absorb the sweat. And in the initial phase where people have taken the shower, right? So their faces were clean. It took a while for the droplets to spread out. And the rate at which the droplets were spreading corresponded to the rate at which this outer thin layer was hydrating or absorbing the water. So if you had a lot of sweat coming out faster than the skin could hydrate, it would build up into a kind of big puddle.

On the second time where people have sweated and the sweat evaporated, the big difference is, of course, if you ever lick your skin after sweating, is it's salty. So during the second phase, we never saw buildup of any puddles. So for the same volume of sweat coming out of sweat pore, it much quicker spread in a very thin film over the same. surface, meaning it covered more surface quickly, which is good for evaporation because it's proportional to the area that the sweat covers. The larger the area you have that sweat, the more you're going

to evaporate and quickly cool. So the salt is acting like a wick in a way. Exactly. Spread the sweat across the skin. So how does this all come together to keep us cool? So I don't have a gizmo that I made yet to help us cool better, but I think we're driving the fundamental understanding that can help us enable that. And ironically, one of it might be that showers aren't that great. It's a funny conclusion, right? But 100,000 years ago, we weren't taking showers every day. And it looks like that salt on the skin might have been helping us,

at least in the initial phase of sweating, have the same volume of sweat contribute to more cooling of us than we have before we have the salts on the skin. Dr. Rikachevsky, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Dr. Conrad Rickachevsky is an associate professor of mechanical engineering and a senior global future scientist at Arizona State University. Sky, who's a good girl? If you have a dog that knows baseball,

commands like sit or stay, you likely think it's pretty smart. Or if you've trained it to recognize its favorite toy, you probably think your dog is really smart. But if your dog knows each of its toys by name, even if you've only mentioned it in passing, well, then your dog just might be a gifted word-learning dog. Next one is Armadillo. Scientists studying these special dogs discovered that that, like kids, the smart, furry canine companions can pick up words just by eavesdropping on their owner's conversations. Yes, good girl, yes. Dr. Jor led this research.

She's a postdoctoral researcher at ELTE University in Budapest and the Veterinary University of Vienna. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, thank you for having me. First of all, what classifies a dog as a gifted word learner? So as he said, we know that the majority of dogs have no problem learning action labels like Sitra Downer State. In our previous studies, we found that there's only very few dogs that are able to pick up names of objects. And basically, once we see that a dog can learn the names of objects, we classify this dog as a gifted word learner. So how many words can these dogs learn?

Seems to be endless, only bound by their owners' patients and how much space they have in their house for toys. We've seen in previous studies a dog that learned the name of over a thousand toys. And in our studies, we have many dogs that have somewhere between two to 300 or even more toys. Wow. So when you say identify their toys, you say you just say the name of the toy like dog bone and they go get it. Exactly. So what we find is dogs in general are very good in picking up any visual cues that humans are giving them. And often if we're sitting with a dog in the same room, you know, we, Before we think we're going to go for a walk, our dog is already jumping and getting to the door because they're so attuned to us. Does breed have anything to do with it?

We see this in many different breeds, but it is true that among the gifted dogs, there are many border collies. This is still a very rare trait even among border collies. So it's not like if you have a border collie, this dog would be able to learn the names of toys. And we've also seen dogs that we would not expect. So we've seen breeds that were not bred to work with humans. for example, piccines, Shih Tzu, we've seen a few Yorkshire Terriers, that are able to do this. So it's not a breed-specific trait. Well, take me through how you tested this in the dogs,

and see if they could identify toys just by words. So the basic setup that we do is that we have the toys placed in one room, and we have several toys on the floor to make sure that the dog is not just by chance picking up the right toy, and the owner is sitting in a different room. That's how we test it. But we also want to check. are the dogs able to learn from overhearing? So in this condition, what we had is the two owners speak to each other.

One owner would talk about the toy and explain about the toy, and both owners were not allowed to interact with the dog. The dog would be sitting close to them and would only be allowed to follow the interaction, but not to take an active role in it. And after a few exposures to this, then we tested the dogs again to see if they learned the names of the toys. Oh, I see. So instead of showing the dog, the toy and say, hi, here's your doll, or whatever the toy is, the two adults were talking about it just among themselves and the dog's listening. Exactly. The interesting thing here is that we know that infants, when they're already 18 months old, they can already pick up words by overhearing other people speak.

And I'm sure that a lot of parents know this embarrassing situation when you realize that your kid has picked up on words that are not supposed. posed to. And what we found in our study is that not only the dogs were able to pick up the words the names of the toys this way, so just by overhearing the owners speaking, but also their performance was equal to their performance in the control condition. This means that they were equally good in learning from overheard speech and from direct interactions. Wow. How does this ability to learn language, basically, compared to what humans do? So, that's That's a very good distinction. This is not language, right?

They're only picking up here these labels of the toys, but the labels of the toys, they are very specific to the toys that they see. We cannot generalize from this very specific ability to learning language, because language is a very complex mechanism. It's not only the ability to understand that certain things have names. It's also the way that these things interact with each other, so how we combine words together. and how we generalize certain words to other things.

So the fact that the dogs are performing the same way as the children does not mean that they're thinking the same thoughts as the children. What went through your mind when you realized that the dogs were just as good at identifying their toys by eavesdropping? To be honest, I wasn't surprised by the fact that they learned, but I was surprised by how good they were learning. Because many of them were what we call at ceiling level, So they had 100% correct choices, and they were really confident in what they were doing.

They really knew which toy they're supposed to bring, and they just went into the room and immediately bought it. Now, if someone has a dog, how could they tell if their dog is one of these gifted learners? So if you think your dog knows the names of toys, all you need to do is put the toys somewhere that you do not see them. So either in a different room or behind your back and put a bunch of toys on the floor, and then there's, ask your dog a few times to get the toys one by one. And if you notice that your dog does know the names of the toys, then please contact me. I would love to hear from you. We're always searching for more dogs that know names of toys.

Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. is a postdoctoral researcher at ELTE University in Budapest and the Veterinary University of Vienna. Now, if you think your dog may be a gifted word learner and want to connect with this study, we have the information on our website at cbc.ca.ca.c.c.c.c. If you've ever eaten too many potato chips in one sitting or had a bit too much ice cream and then regretted it, then you have something in common with the macaque monkeys that live in Gibraltar. Now, junk food isn't something that these monkeys would normally be eating if they live by themselves, but they live among humans, in particular, tourist.

who flock to the small British territory at the southern tip of Spain, especially in the summertime. And those tourists eat lots of junk food. Sometimes they even feed those snacks to the monkeys, or the monkeys will steal junk food from unsuspecting visitors. Now those sweet and salty snacks aren't great for the monkey's digestion. And while we humans might reach for a bottle of ant acid, researchers have discovered that these monkeys have a different strategy for dealing with their upset stomachs. They eat dirt. Scientists actually have a name for this. It's called geophagy, the practice of intentionally ingesting soil. And while it's not entirely rare in the animal kingdom, in this case, it's surprising, because it seems to reflect how this species is adapting to life

alongside humans. Dr. Silvan Lemoine is an assistant professor of biological anthropology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He led the research. Hello and welcome to Quirks and Quarks. Thank you. Hi. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. And I've been to Gibraltar, especially to the top of the rock of Gibraltar and seen these monkeys. And they're really quite bold.

I mean, they climb over vehicles and they come right up to you as though they're expecting to be fed. What are you finding that they're actually eating? What most of people are going to Gibraltar experience is exactly what you described. they go to the top of the rock and they have a bunch of monkeys around, they jump on cars and jumping people. And that's the main spot where they actually take food from people and they get all sorts of junk food in this location. Well, how much junk food are the monkeys actually eating?

Well, from our study, we quantified in comparison to the amount of food provided by the local management. And then the junk food accounts for 20% of the total diet, while the rest of the fruit is composed by what's provided by local management, so seeds and fruits and vegetables, and also some natural food. When was it discovered that the monkeys were eating soil as well? In animals, it is a relatively common behavior. It's observed in many animals, from birds to many mammals.

But this behavior was not known scientifically to occur in the species of barbary macaques that not only occur, of course, in Gibraltar, but also in natural population in North Africa. So that was kind of the first observation in that species. What we brought, I think, is a scientific eye on the behavior, and so we quantified it. So you're saying that eating dirt is common in primates, but not these particular macaques.

So when you look at the monkeys and Gibraltar, what were you hoping to find? In Gibraltar, the specific diet that is called, composed in large portion of human food. We looked at the relationship between the diet, including junk food, and we found a strong relationship between the amount of ingested junk food and the occurrence of geophagy. So in other words, there is more soil eating in the macaques

that are more in contact with people and that ingest more food coming from the tourists and visitors, and especially with a peak in the summer, which is quite relevant also, the finding. I'm just curious, when the monkeys are eating junk food, do they have any preferences? Oh, yeah. There's one specific location of a small restaurant where people can also buy ice cream and they often get out of this restaurant with ice cream in their hands. So this troop, there's one troop only, I would say they specialize in ice cream and really like ice cream. Yeah. Otherwise, it's hard to tell. It's very opportunistic. So you know, you could just have like what seemed to happen, and that's something we want to quantify better in the future,

is that they seem to be attracted by wrapping the wrappers. So like the noise and the color of wrappers. So if they see something like this, looking like this in a backpack, they would just like try to get access to it. So if they're eating things like ice cream, what are they getting out of the soil that's helping them deal with it? Yeah, so very good question. So to go back to the protection and supplementation,

In both cases, we could predict a relationship with junk food in a sense that they eat a lot of junk food that contains elements that they cannot digest, which would be the case for dairy, so milk products that are especially fond in ice cream, that could cause them upset stomachs or digestive issues, and the soil could buffer by acting on the gut pH or by absorbing some of the elements. but we are more proposing that it brings microbes and micro fungi that kind of like regulate the digestive system. Are you suggesting that the monkeys may be lactose intolerant? Yeah, I mean, they are lactose intolerance. That's the case. I mean, humans are the only primates that are truly adapted to consuming milk, dairy, after winning.

How do you think this behavior came about? How do the monkeys learn? that they can eat soil to calm their stomachs from eating junk food. Yeah, that's a very difficult question. How the macaques makes the association between the soil and the junk food could be that they associate a form of goods feeling after ingesting the soil. So it's a learned behavior. They're passing this knowledge on from one to the other, from one generation to another.

Exactly. So this is a behavior that can be qualified as a local tradition. or a socially learned skills or a behavior that is learned by observing copying the behavior of other macaques. Dr. Lemoine, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. Dr. Silvan Limouin is an assistant professor

of biological anthropology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to the best of 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. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada.

Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even take the debaters there once, so I guess we're world-class now. The news can be hard to keep up with, but sometimes I want to spend a bit more time with a story that's made headlines. That's why I produce CBC's Understood podcast. We've covered the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the scandals surrounding Canada's very own porn hub, the controversial leader of India. Each season of Understood is a short,

four-episode immersive experience with a host who knows the story best. so you never miss a season. Unbelievable. How did that not drop? That is the sound of utter disappointment. That lip-out caused professional golfer Wyndham Clark the player's championship last year with over $4 million in prize money. A lip-out is something that can happen

to both amateur and professional golfers alike. It's where a ball gets putted towards the hole, except instead of going in, it skims around the edge before popping out and continuing along its way. Look how far down the ball got. It is long being called Gulf's greatest mystery, because there was no telling what could cause a put to go, oh, so wrong,

when a similar one could sink the ball into the hole perfectly. In a new study, a group of scientists who specialize in mechanics think they've solved this mystery once and for all, and figured out that it's not just bad luck that can cause a lip-out, but precise physics involving speed and spin. Dr. John Hogan is a professor emeritus in the School of Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology at the University of Bristol in the UK. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, and thanks for having me on.

For all the non-golfers out there, what exactly is a lip-out? Okay, so you are a golfer, you've got a three-foot putt to make, and all the crowd is watching you, and you gently put the ball towards the hole. It looks as if it's going into the hole and it races around the rim of the hole and it refuses to go in and it comes out in some other direction, maybe 180 degrees, 270 degrees from its original direction. Occasionally, even, it can go partly into the hole and pop back out again. And unfortunately, that is not a putt of the ball. You have to try again. Why did you want to try your hand at solving this mystery from an engineering point of view? Are you a golfer? No, I'm not a golfer at all.

It's one of these things which you see a lot. And my colleague and I were thinking, well, could we explain this using mechanics rather than just think of it as a kind of random event. And so we got together having done some work on basketball and we decided to use mechanics, which is the study of the motion of bodies under the action forces. And off we went. So tell me then, how did you investigate it? Okay. So basically, you start out with Newton's Laws of Motion, and you have them from the point of view of the ball rolling along the ground, rolling along the rim of the hole, and rolling into the hole itself. And we managed to put those equations all in terms of the same variables, like the speed and the spin and so forth of the ball, which meant we could connect up the different types of motion. And after several months of doing this, we were able to discover the basis of the about. Okay, well, let's talk about the rim up where the ball doesn't go down into the hole. It just

goes around the rim and out again. What's going on there? Okay, so you think about it the following way. Imagine you're balancing a pencil on the end of your finger. Okay. Now, you can kind of do it if you're lucky, but usually what happens is it falls one way or the other. Now imagine that you've got your pencil balanced on your finger and you're rotating your finger in a circle. So the point, point of the pencil represents the point of the ball on the rim, and the circle is the hole of the golf hole. That's more or less what we discovered is what we call the golf balls of death. These are the motions which exist but are never really obtained because you have to hit the rim of the golf hole with exactly the right speed in exactly the right place.

And of course, you never actually do that to get that sort of motion. And so it just goes around the rim of the hole and then pops back out again. So it could go either way. As it approaches the rim, it could fall in or out. Exactly. It determines that. Okay, so imagine you're hitting the ball right into the center of the hole. It will just creep up to the hole and pitch into the hole.

So its momentum going forward, its speed going into the hole is turned into pitching into the hole. Now, imagine you don't quite hit it directly into the center of the hole. hit it to the side. You've still got a bit of forward momentum, but you've also got a bit of pitching momentum into the hole. And it's a competition between these two. If the competition is exactly equal between the momentum going forward and the momentum going into the hole, you get this motion around the rim. If you slightly get the balance out, and most golfers will do that, it either scoots past the hole, zooming along the rim, or it goes into the hole. And it's this balance between the two

momentum that's deciding this unfortunate turn of events. Okay, so the momentum wants to keep the ball going in a straight line. The pitch, as you say, is when it leans over to go downwards into the hole. That's exactly it. And whichever one wins, that determines where the ball goes. But if the momentum wins, it keeps going. Exactly right. It's simply a competition between the two.

And if the momentum of the putt is more enough, it'll just scoot around the side of the hole and disappear off out, away, back on to the two. the green. If on the other hand it's not hit so hard, then the pitch into the hole is sufficient to get you a successful put. Oh, okay. So a softer putt, don't, if it's slower coming in, it has a better chance of falling in the hole. Absolutely, absolutely. That's one of our, I mean, I'm not a golfer, so you've got to ask golfers whether this is true, but it would seem to me that you don't want to hit it too hard. Okay. Now, what about this other case where the ball goes down into the cup, then pops back out again?

How can that happen? Okay, so that's a weird one. So, and I imagine you've got your ball off the rim and it's going into the hole. There are sets of circumstances where it goes along the side of the hole and starts to spin. Okay. And that means it's spinning about an axis which is perpendicular to the side of the hole. Then the process was reversed where the spinning stops, the ball comes back up again and pops out again. So it's a bit like a skateboarder.

If you watch a skateboarder standing on the lip of about to start their run, they dive down and they come back up again the other side of the ramp. It's a bit like that. Oh, I see. So the ball is riding the walls of the hall. It's riding the wall. It's a bit like the wall of death, but it's kind of starting at the top of the wall of death

and going down a little bit and coming back out again. Wall of death. That's where they do it with motorcycles. They ride around the walls. They're with motorcycles. Yeah. It's a funny set of circumstances, but it does happen. It must be so frustrating to actually see the ball go in, think you made the shot, and then it pops back out again.

Well, if you go onto YouTube, you can see the reactions of several golfers doing it. And, you know, I think a lot of it's bleaked out. I do have an awful lot of sympathy for them because, you know, golfers are so professional. They're so, they spend an awful lot of time practicing. And sitting at the last moment is this, is this. physics waiting to jump on them and ruin their day. So what can golfers do if they want to avoid this ball of death, as you call it? It's obviously to aim for the dead center of the hole.

And then at the second need to make sure you arrive at the edge of the hole with as little speed as possible. You don't want this momentum going forward to dominate the dynamics. You just want to arrive there and the golf ball just sits at the edge of the rim of the hole and just falls in, and then you're done. Just one last thing, now that you've figured out the physics of the golf putt, are you going to take up golf yourself now? I think it told me that the decision not to take up golf was a very good one.

Dr. Hogan, thank you so much for your time. Okay, nice to talk to you, and good luck with your program. Dr. John Hogan is a professor emeritus in the School of Engineering, mathematics, and technology at the University of Bristol in the UK. Ornithologist Brian Stokes didn't think he'd make a new discovery scrolling through Facebook, but he came across a picture of a bird that looked familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, like a Blue Jay, but not exactly. In fact, it was part Blue Jay crossed with a bird with whom it had its last common ancestor

seven million years ago. Brian Stokes is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hey, Bob. How are you doing? Doing well. So tell me about this bird you saw on Facebook. What's it look like? Yeah, so it's overall quite a blue bird. The color is pretty similar to what you'd see in blue jays, although it has a little bit less of the iridescence you might see in the feathers if you're looking at a blue jay in the right light. But what really stuck out to me when I saw it was it has kind of this black face mask that's really similar to a species we see in Texas called a green jay. Well, we have blue jays here in Canada. Tell me about the green jays. What's it look like?

Yeah, it's a really pretty bird. It looks extremely tropical. It's got green and yellow and blue. It's a really brightly colored bird. Behaviorally, they're pretty similar to Blue Jays. They're noisy. You know, if you're going to put some human characteristics on it, you might call it a mean bird or annoying bird, something like that.

But they have a really, really sharp yellow and green coloration that really sticks out among birds in the area. So when you saw this unusual-looking Jay on Facebook, who had posted it? Yes, there was a homoer named Donna Curry, who's just a backyard bird or citizen scientist. And I think she had been thinking it was something wrong with the Blue Jay, like a genetic mutation or something,

which was definitely one of the things I thought was possible when seeing it at first, too, because it was just so so wacky looking, and these two birds were so unexpected to have the potential to hybridize, that, you know, coming into seeing this bird, we sort of agreed with what Donna had said, that maybe it was just a genetic mutation, of something like a blue jay or another jay in the area, which is called a woodhouse scrub jay, which is a similar blue jay as well.

So how did you determine exactly what it was? Visually, we had a good hint, but we wanted to take a scientific approach to it. So we did a genetic study. We took a blood sample of the individual after catching it, and then compared its DNA with that of potential parent species. So we used a host of possible parent species that are jays found in Texas, that we just considered candidate parent species. As you might know, we inherit half of our DNA from our mother and our father, and the same is true of birds.

And then uniquely among eukaryotic cells, we inherit the mitochondria specifically from the mother. And so we can actually compare the mitochondrial DNA of B. HyperJ to that mitochondrial DNA of potential parent species and see exactly which parent species mitochondria is most similar to that of Bhyp. the hybrid species. We found that to be a green jay, whereas the autosomes, the non-sexual chromosomes, were split pretty evenly in identity between both green and blue jay. So it is a hybrid? That's correct, yeah. Now, we have blue jays up here in the north, and you said the green jays are in the tropics. So how did these two birds get together? Yeah, that's a great question. So blue jays in the United States have been expanding their range westward since probably about the 1950s or 1960s.

There's some evidence linking this to climate change, but one of the really, really impactful factors is land use changes. People are planting more ornamental, deciduous foliage in their yards and in cities. And Blue Jays are, of course, really well associated with human settlement and human habitat. They really like, you know, your bird feeders, your human food subsidies. Whereas Green Jays were historically found at the southern border of Texas and Mexico. It's an area called the Lower Rio Grande Valley. and it would have been a relatively common species in that area back in about the 1950s or 60s. Since that time, they can be found outside of San Antonio to there's a small border town called Del Rio.

So it's a really significant range expansion over a fairly short time. And this can be pretty closely linked to changes in climate in the area. There's less extreme winter freezes, although we get some publicity in Texas for these really intense winter freezes that affect our power grid. overall, the hours below freezing during each winter has decreased over time. And so a tropical species like a Green Jay might actually be able to survive fairly well in this newer, more mild climate, even though the summers have gotten much hotter in Texas. So have you named this new Blue Jay Green Jay hybrid? I have not. I saw there was a kind of popular name going around, a Gruja. You know, we don't really name individuals that aren't a new species.

I mean, this would not classify as a new species. Do you know where this particular hybrid is now? Yeah, so it was actually recited by the original home, by the original homeowner outside of San Antonio earlier this summer back in June of 2025. So it had gone away after the year we captured it. That was back in June of 2023. So who knows where it went during that time. but it's a relatively populated area.

This is just outside of the city of San Antonio, which is quite a large city. It's hard to say exactly how it's avoided detection for so long. This is another great example of citizen science helping real science. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, this would have never been noticed without, you know, someone keeping an eye on just the nature that's in their backyard. So that's, I think as the climate and land changes globally,

citizen scientists are going to be a key part of monitoring what's happening and finding new discoveries. Mr. Stokes, thank you very much for your time. Of course. Thank you so much, Bob. Brian Stokes is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Every year, the massive movement of monarch butterflies from Canada through the United States,

all the way down to Mexico, is one of the longest insect migrations on the planet. It's a 3,000-kilometer journey by an insect that only weighs as much as a couple of paper clips. It's impressive no matter how you look at it. For so many years, scientists have been trying to track the monarchs as they make this trek 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 Buckowitz, 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 origin 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's 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 is 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, and Rondo and Point 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 we're we tagged the monarchs at Longpoint. Those monarchs, they migrate 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 of 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 were 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 you'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, same way that air tags work with Apple phones. And so we thought, oh, this is a good.

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. 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 are 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. an enclosure to our tagging station that we had set up and sort of read 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, like in the torax where we are going to stick the tag. Anna bent 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 interesting. enclosure afterwards for 10 minutes to make sure that nothing is wrong with the tag and that their wings are okay. We 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. Look at her 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 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. There are 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 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 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 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 a 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 slash quirks. And that's it for the best of quarks and quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is quarks at cbc.ca. Our webpage is cbc.ca.ca slash quirks, where you can check out our past episodes and find more information on the research we covered in the show.

You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quarks and Quarks was produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Bukowitz, Sonia Biting, and Dan Falk. Our senior producer is Hannah Hoag. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.com.