Quirks and Quarks - Why this biologist loves unpopular animals, and more…

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

We tend to think of animals like snakes, rats and even cockroaches as pests, but in her new book, biologist Marlene Zuk says there's a lot we can learn from these less than desirable creatures, if we just give them a chance.PLUS:A case of mistaken identity: The truth about the world's 'oldest' octopus fossilFrom the archives: Carl Sagan on the worlds beyond our solar systemThe evolutionary cost of our relationship with fireWe're not speaking as much as we used to — and scientists are concerned

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.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, our technological times mean we're speaking fewer words out loud every day. That adds up to over 3,000 words that we have lost in the estimate of how many words we speak in a day. And how our ancestors dealt with fire shaped our ability to tolerate burns today. We are likely all descended from human beings.

who burnt themselves, probably, survived and passed their genes onto the next generation. Plus, a Guinness World Record Holding ancient octopus isn't an octopus at all. A trip through our archives with Carl Sagan. And a scientist makes the case for us to love and appreciate outsider animals. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. 26 years ago in Illinois, scientists discovered a fossil that created quite a splash. About the size of a human palm, the 300 million-year-old rock slab was believed by some to contain the oldest octopus fossil ever discovered. This specimen called Fulcipia even made its way into the Guinness Book of World Records.

But others weren't so convinced on what it actually was, and the debate has gone back and forth ever since. Paleontologist and octopus enthusiast, Dr. Thomas Clements, decided he wanted to definitive. figure out the true identity of what exactly was contained in this controversial piece of rock. Well, now he's finally cracked the case. And it turns out this fossil isn't an octopus at all. It's another creature altogether. Dr. Clements is a lecturer of invertebrate zoology and paleontology at the University of Reading in the UK. He led the research.

Dr. Clemens, welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hello, and thank you for having me. First of all, tell me about this fossil. What's it look like? When you look at it, it looks kind of like a flattened, round-ish, orange-shaped rock. And then the fossil is this sort of white stain or blob on the surface. It looks kind of like the shape of a balloon. It has these two dark eye spots, some things that look a little bit like arms,

and then these pair of fins at the top. So, yeah, it's quite an unimpressive fossil if you actually look at it. A blob, a stain. I mean, why was it initially thought to be a 300 million-year-old octopus? So superficially, it does look very much like a deep water octopus that live today. The common octopus that we all think about, their ancestors actually had these fins on top of their head. And they have arms like octopuses do, but in between their arms is a web. and Falsipia looks very superficially like one of these octopuses.

So why was this fossil such a big deal? So it was really important because it was the oldest octopus that had been described. It's a 300 million-year-old fossil, and it predates all of the other fossil octopus that we know about. So the next oldest fossil octopus is about 90 million years old. So that's a huge gap. And when investigating the, or when investigating the evolution of octopuses, this creature was such an interesting outlier. Because when you're looking at fossils, often when we look that far into the past, we're

looking for animals that are the relatives of octopuses. So octopus ancestors or octopus-like animals. and to have a fully formed modern octopus, 300 million years ago, was mind-blowing, to be honest, when it was first discovered. And really interesting for cephalopod researchers who want to try to understand the evolution of this really important animal group. Well, how did you go about taking a closer look at this fossil and find out what it actually was? About eight years ago, I was working on a completely different project. and a colleague of mine mentioned that they were loaning this fossil from America, from Chicago, because it lives in the field museum.

So I was really interested in just seeing this fossil. For me, it was so exciting to see this almost celebrity of a fossil. And it arrived. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, no, what is that? and that's when I started to really think about what could we do to re-examine this fossil. So what I did is I tried to scan it with a scanning electron microscope. So that's a very, very powerful microscope. It can see almost the individual minerals that the rock is made of that the fossil is in.

Then we scanned it with some very fancy machines that look at the chemistry of the fossil. and the rock itself. And it wasn't until a colleague of mine, Pierre, who at the time was working in the Paris synchrotron, he basically said, why don't you bring it over to Paris and we'll zap it? And so we took it and we basically zapped it with this really powerful x-ray. And that's how we found these new hidden anatomical characters that were hidden inside the rock. So what did you see when you looked inside? We saw these hidden. teeth inside the rock. So it's really important to explain that cephalopods don't have teeth like you or I have teeth. They have this long tongue-like structure. It's like a ribbon called a radula.

And on the radula are hundreds of teeth in little tiny rows. And those teeth basically are used by the cephalopod to scrape away at whatever they're eating. And inside the rock of Foscipia was one of these radulars, beautifully preserved. No one has ever seen it before, but we were able to identify it. And not only that, but we were able to count the number of teeth in the rows. This is really important because octopus have a very specific number of teeth, normally between seven and nine. Whereas nautiluses, which is a relative of octopuses, they have more teeth. So normally around 13. And what we were able to count was about 11 teeth. So that tells us that it was not an octopus, probably a nautilus. Now the nautilus, that's that beautiful creature that lives in a spiral shell

with its tentacles sticking out one end of the opening and it swims backwards. That's correct, yes. So nautiluses are still around today and they are particularly endangered at the moment. They're under threat from overfishing and from habitat destruction. But nautiluses are really cool for paleontologists because they have a really long fossil record because their shells preserve so well. So if this fossil that you describe as a blob is not an octopus but it's an otolus, it doesn't have a shell. What happened to a shell? Yeah, that was one of the big questions. So when we discovered these teeth, we were a bit confused.

We sat in the lab scratching our heads, basically trying to work out what's gone on here. And this is where my specialty comes in. So I am a tophonomist. And a tophonomist is someone who studies how animals become fossils. And much of my early work was looking at how cephalopods decay and how, why basically animals that have no hard parts, how do they turn into fossils? And so this kind of work informed us that when we were looking at for sepia, what you're looking at is an animal that had decayed for quite a substantial amount of time.

before it fossilized. And during that decay, it's lost its shell. Its shell has become separated. The reason why it was so difficult to interpret 25 years ago is because they weren't looking at an octopus. They were looking at a very rotten nautilus. Well, how does this change our understanding of octopuses and their origins? So we can confidently say now that our understanding of the evolution of octopuses fits with the current fossil record. and that we have beautiful transitional fossils that show certain anatomical characters like the shell being reduced through time. The other big aspect is that despite having 400 million years of being on the planet, we have almost no soft tissue nautiluses. And Falsipia is really special because not only does it preserve the soft tissues of a nautilus, so we can start to investigate that, but also during our investigation, we found more.

more examples of falsipia-like animals that were in museum collections. And so we now know that this isn't a one-off. There are quite a few of these, and we can start to do more analysis on these to see if we can understand more about the evolution of Nautilus. Just one last thing. What's been the reaction by your colleagues who've been embroiled in this debate for 26 years? Do you know, it's actually been amazing. I didn't expect it to go quite as viral as it has.

Like, you know, I wasn't expecting, for instance, the Guinness Book of Records to put out a statement saying that they would, you know, look back into reexamining the title. My colleagues, the reaction has been great. I've had emails from cephalopod researchers who are really happy that someone has re-examined this fossil. I work in a biology department, and I think they're slightly shocked by the sort of the press that a fossil octopus has got. Dr. Clements, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for having me. Dr. Thomas Clements is a lecturer in invertebrate zoology at the University of Reading in the UK. This year, we are celebrating our 50th season on the air.

So for the next 10 weeks, we'll be digging through our archives to bring you some of our favorite interviews from over the years. One contributor who made frequent appearances on Quirks and Quarks was the legendary astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan. And 31 years ago this week, he made his final appearance on our show before taking time off to receive treatment for bone marrow disease, which would eventually lead to his death the following year. Here is my final interview with Dr. Sagan from our episode that aired on April 22, 1995. In our conversation, we spoke about the possibilities of planets orbiting stars other than our Sun and what that means in the search for alien life. In the last 15 years, two amazing things have happened.

One is that we now have found around many stars, flat orbiting disks of gas and dust of exactly the sort that we deduce must have been going around our sun at the time of the origin of the planets. and to find that young stars like the sun, but just younger, that well over half of all the nearby ones we can find have these disks. And since the stars are easier to find than the disks, it may be that every single star has such disks. Planets are suddenly a dime a dozen. And this is the time when the first bona fidee,

unambiguously discovered, extrasolar planetary system has been found by a method that no one had guessed around a star that no one would have predicted planets were around a pulsar called B-1257 plus 12. A pulsar is the remnant of a massive supernova explosion in which the star has become the size of downtown Toronto. at 10,000 revolutions per minute.

Now, that is hardly the environment you would expect to find planets around, and yet there are three of them, two roughly Earth-like, one roughly moon-like, and probably others further out have not been found yet. It says that planets arise in the most unlikely environments. So there is an excellent chance that planets will be found throughout. out the nearby stars, and that in another decade or two, we will have an inventory of which of the nearby stars have which kinds of planets, not just restricted to the massive, large, Jupiter-like planets,

but down to Earth-like planets. We will know where there are other Earths. Well, when we look at our own solar system, though, we see a variety of planets and only one Earth. So if we find planets, as you say, there are a dime a dozen around the other stars, then what are the odds or the possibilities of there being other Earths out there? Best estimates these days are one or two per planetary system. And how many planetary systems could there be in our galaxy?

Oh, 400 billion? So then you're saying, Dr. Sagan, that we are definitely not alone. If by we you mean the planet Earth, yes. Now what about the chances of life? Okay, now there we have not found life elsewhere. We have looked for life in two different ways. One, by dropping spacecraft down on nearby planet Mars, as Viking did, and sticking out a scoop and examining the soil for microbes

and looking around to see if a giraffe walks by. I mean, we've done that. And no giraffe has walked by. No microbes, although there are strangely enigmatic findings from Viking on Mars, There's nothing that you could really be reasonably certain. And also, we have used large radio telescopes to see if anybody, an advanced civilization on a planet of another star is sending us a message. And there, too, there have been some enigmatic findings.

I mean, really interesting findings, but non-repeatable. And I would say in the traditional spirit of science, let's not make up our minds before the evidence is in. just keep an open mind, the data is going to be flowing, and we're going to find out amazing things. One way or another, if there's no life, that's very interesting also. When you were young, did you have any idea that this expansion of the human awareness of planets, that we would go as far as we did in your lifetime? Well, I was hopelessly romantic.

Still am, I guess. I read the John Carter Mars series of Edgar Ice Burroughs in which in which this guy John Carter, gentleman adventurer from Virginia, stood in an open field, spread his arms, wished at the planet Mars, and poof, he was there. Being an advocate of the experimental method, I tried it at age 8 or something. And at least I thought it was Mars. And nothing happened, and I figured I wasn't wishing in the right way. But I read, heard about rockets, and then came at time in 1948 when the United States launched a two-stage rocket, a V2, which had a little rocket on top of it called a whack corporal.

And it got up to 250 miles. And I was beginning high school, and it was immediately clear to me that we were going on the planets. And it actually happened, a dream fulfilled. And so it's almost absurdly pleasant to have your childhood fantasies fulfilled. That was a re-airing of an interview I did with cosmologist Dr. Carl Sagan, which aired on April 22, 1995. Of course, over the past 30 years, we've learned a lot more about so-called exoplanets. In fact, astronomers have now tallied more than 6,000 such planets orbiting stars far beyond our own solar system. system with thousands more awaiting confirmation. As for life, well, we still haven't found any

clear signs of life beyond Earth yet, but the search continues. Fire. It's an unruly beast, capable of burning at hundreds or even thousands of degrees, and when it's out of control, the flames can destroy everything in their path. But fire is also a type of technology. When our ancestors learned to manipulate it a million years ago, the benefits were so enormous it ignited a new era for the human species. Well, now researchers are proposing another way fire may have shaped human evolution in how our skin responds to burn injuries. They suggest that our ancestors' contact with open fires have shaped the way our bodies respond to major and minor burn wounds today, for better or worse.

Dr. Josh Cuddehy led the study. He's an anesthesia and intensive care doctor with a special interest in burn injury, as well as an honorary clinical lecturer at Imperial College London. Hello and welcome to our program. Oh, thank you so much for having me on, Bob. First of all, what kind of burns have you seen as a doctor that made you want to look into how fire might have shaped human evolution? So I've actually had a career before medicine.

I actually was a physiotherapist, and by chance, I worked on a burns unit, and that was my first introduction to the challenges faced by burn patients. And it's everything from relatively mild burns that affect a small part of the body to major burns that can be immediately life-threatening in need many, many months of hospital care. But burns affect all of us. The vast majority of human beings will burn themselves repeatedly throughout their lifetime, usually minor, but occasionally very severe. But other than just the severity of the wounds, were there patterns or something that you saw that you thought might lead to the evolution of humans?

Absolutely. So we know that some burns can significantly increase your risk of getting severe infections. But it's not clear exactly who are going to get those infections. Some people might have what seems like a relatively minor burn, but then that doesn't heal properly and it becomes infected and causes lots of complications. other patients may have a very severe burn, and actually it heals relatively quickly with fewer complications and needs less surgical intervention. And that was one of the things that prompted me to think about the genetics behind burn injury and burn injury responses. How then did you study how different people are affected by burns in different ways? We developed this theory, this idea that burns are a unique evolutionary selective pressure in humans, different from non-humans.

And to investigate that, we looked at genes that were particularly associated with burn healing responses in mammals. And we looked at the genes that are upregulated and downregulated in a particular pattern in both humans and rats after a burn injury. And then we looked for evidence of those genes being differently selected for in humans compared with primates, specifically chimpanzees, macaques, gorillas, and orangutans. And what we found was these genes that are associated with burn healing responses had an increased evidence of natural selection and adaptation and change in the human lineage greater than we would expect by chance compared with these primates. So walk us through then how those genetic changes would have helped us to deal with fire. So smaller, potentially survivable burns would have a far greater impact on, natural selection than the very severe major burns that are nearly always fatal, particularly in the area before modern medicine. We propose that traits that helped you heal faster from a smaller burn

would have been heavily selected for in the human lineage. These are the sorts of traits that would be associated with rapid wound closure, with very strong inflammatory responses, with very strong infection fighting responses. Now, these traits enormously benefit. for survival in a slightly smaller burn is actually likely to cause severe problems in a major burn where we see very intense and aggressive scarring in survivors, or we see systemic inflammation leading to multi-organ failure and actually increasing your likelihood of dying. So we think, and this theory suggests, that natural selection prioritised strategies to help us heal from smaller burns, but at the cost of complications in the same.

the larger burns. Why would the genetic changes enable us to deal with minor burns at the cost of major burns? Isn't there a benefit there too? Major burns, even in the modern age, are associated with high risk of dying of mortality. And in the era before antibiotics, before modern surgery and modern intensive care, they almost certainly would have been universally fatal. Therefore, they haven't contributed so much to the genes that are getting passed on from generation. to generation. For a trait to be inherited and passed on to the next generation, it needs to be associated with a chance of survival. And it's these smaller burns that up, but still potentially serious, that are likely to be driving the selection of burn injury associated genes that we're passed on.

When it gets magnified over a much larger percentage of the total body surface area that's been burnt, we start to see these major complications. Possibly a different way of looking at. this is thinking about us today, we are likely all descended from human beings who burnt themselves probably survived and passed their genes onto the next generation. Those who sustained very serious burns would have died and not contributed to further generations. Oh, I see. Okay. So you just burned yourself a bit, but you're okay. But Harry over there got burned in a forest fire. He's dead. He's not going to pass on his genes. Precisely, yes. Wow. Now, would this be because we were using fire for things like cooking so that we were manipulating it more and there was a greater chance of getting a small burn than being burned and, say, a forest fire?

Absolutely. So burn injury isn't impossible in the animal world. Of course, any animal can potentially burn itself. But humans are unique. We live alongside fire. We cook our food. We heat and power our homes. We even prefer to eat and drink. recently boiling liquids and hot foods. This is a very unusual behavior in the rest of the animal world. And as a consequence, we are living in very close proximity with extreme temperature, capable of causing significant damage. But other animals, it is a very rare event. And if anything, the vast majority of species will go through their lives without ever encountering fire, or if they do, it calls in the end of their life. Well, how far do you think the genetic changes that you found in humans go towards explaining the difference you see and how your patients

respond to burns. So that remains to be seen, but what we hope is that describing burn injury from an evolutionary perspective will allow us to further investigate the genetic differences between us that may be contributing to why some people heal very well after a seemingly major injury and others heal less well and need lots of intervention. We hope that it would lead to greater understanding about burn healing processes may help us develop more novel, specific treatments for burn patients and help to also predict those who may do well after a burn injury or those who may need more medical treatments. Dr. Catea He, thank you so much for your time. Bob, thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Dr. Josh Cuddehy is an anesthesia and intensive care doctor and an honorary clinical lecturer at Imperial College, London. I'm Bob McDonald. When you're listening to Quarks and Quarks on CBC Radio One 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, Unpopular Animals get a rebrand in a new book. They like having their bellies rubbed, kind of like they're being tickled, and they'll come over and seek that out.

And when they do, they produce this ultrasonic sound that the scientists have said, well, it's the rats laughing. 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. If you walk into a coffee shop these days on your way to work in the morning, you're likely to see two types of customers. There are the line waiters, people who walk up to the counter to order and pay for their coffee. And then there are the mobile orderers. These are folks who order their coffee through their phone app ahead of time so they can just walk in and grab it without saying boo to anyone. Whether it's ordering through your phone or on a touchscreen kiosk or the widespread proliferation of self-checkouts, it's never been so easy to avoid having to actually speak with another person.

Well, now new research collected from 2,179 individuals over a 14-year period has put a number on this loss of spoken language. Every year, from 2005 to 2019, people lost in a number of people lost in. average of 338 words spoken on a daily basis. Dr. Valeria Pfeiffer led the research. She's an assistant professor of psychology and counseling at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Hello and welcome to our program. Hello. Thanks for having me. What made you want to look into this decline in the number of words people speak on a daily basis? So this was actually sort of an accidental finding. We were originally looking just that gender differences in the amount of words that people speak in a given day. But when we were doing the statistics for this

study, I noticed that the estimate that we got for the more recent studies from 2019 was a lot lower than that from the studies that we did earlier in 2005. So first I thought I made a mistake, but then I went back and looked at whether or not the year that a study was being recorded actually predicted a lower amount of daily spoken words. And that was indeed true. Wow. Well, Well, how many words do we speak on average in a day, and how much has that gone down? So back in 2005, we spoke probably between 15 and 16,000 words, and our current estimate for 2019 is closer to 12 or 11,000 words. So we've lost more than 3,000 words in those 14 years.

Wow. So it's not like we're losing 338 words per day. That's over the period of a year. That's what the decline. is, correct? So the decline is 338 words, daily words per year. So that means that each day you speak 338 words less on average than one year prior. But if we look at it over the course of a decade, that adds up to those over 3,000 words that we have lost in the estimate of how many words we speak in a day. Wow. How significant is that shift? So if you imagine that how many words we speak in a day

as a little bookshelf. And then each year we lose about one book from that bookshelf. We've probably about 40 books that were there in maybe 2005. And now we're a lot lower with, say, more closer to 30 books. So you can see that there's kind of a bottom end that we're facing if we don't reverse this trend in some capacity. Sounds like it's leading to a society that doesn't talk at all. I mean, it's possible, but I hope that's not what's going to happen, because I think talking is great for us. So how did you come up with these numbers in your study? So we're relying on a data set that was collected over the course of 14 years in 22 separate studies, and we assembled it basically from different research groups.

And these are data that are recorded by participants wearing a little device that's kind of like a microphone called the electronically activated recorder. and this will record them as they go through their daily lives and random snippets throughout the day. It records between 30 and 50 seconds. And from that, we can sort of calculate back over the amount of time that was in between recordings. And from that, we can extrapolate how many words they were speaking. They wear that device for several days. So we feel like it reflects pretty well on not just a certain amount of time, but instead their entire day, how they use language, what kinds of things they're doing,

and so on. So how concerned are you that people are speaking fewer words now than they used to? I'm very concerned about that. So as a psychologist and as somebody who also has a background in linguistics, I know that there are a lot of differences between having spoken conversations in real time that are synchronized and that happen in sort of this immediate fashion compared to having non-spoken conversations. Well, how important is speaking for developing our cognitive?

skills? I think it's very important. We know that language acquisition and acquiring the ability to not just use language, but also use it socially appropriate, is something that takes a lot of time. While initially children are very much able to pick up on words and sentences and so on, after that there's still a prolonged period of time where children learn sort of the social rules of how to speak, when to speak, how to understand, say, non-literal language and so on. And so that's a really fundamental piece or ability that we need to learn in order to be, you know, social, successful humans. So how might this loss in spoken word affect things like memory or our ability to pay attention? I think that there are some relationships between that, specifically thinking about having those spoken conversations and how it engages different aspects of your brain.

So you need to pay a lot of attention to what the other person is saying, but also keeping track of what it. is that they're saying all simultaneously while you're thinking about, okay, how am I going to respond to that? And if we have fewer of those conversations, even if we start having those conversations, say, typed on your phone or so, we don't have that necessity to use and train these skills. So what do you think is driving this decline in the spoken word? So a lot of people think that those spoken conversations may be turning into typed conversations for that study period that we had 2005 to 2019 that coincides with the rise in social media, texting, and so on. So to test that, we kind of ran another analysis where we looked at those who are below the age of 25 and those

who are above the age of 25 to see if those younger adults or younger individuals may be experiencing more decline because we think they're more likely to use technology. And what we found is that Indeed, younger adults tend to lose more words. They lose 450 words, as our estimate per year, compared to those 25 and above who lose about 300 words. But that kind of technology gap cannot explain the whole effect. So we think that it's broader societal changes in how people congregate. You mentioned in the beginning,

the classical ordering your coffee on an app as opposed to talking to a person, you know, using that self-checkout at the store, not asking for directions, but instead using a navigation app. So all of these technological facilitations of our daily life are costing us that social connection and social interaction that we're no longer having with others. Now I could counter that by saying, okay, maybe I'm not speaking as much face to face, but I'm texting, so I'm still using words. I'm just communicating in a different way. I mean, that is a fair thing to say if we only look at the number of words that you're producing spoken or typed,

but there are a lot of additional considerations that we need to have for how we use spoken language and how spoken language and type language differ. So if I'm having a conversation with you via text message, I can just do something else on the side. I don't need to pay attention to you as you're replying to me. I can be doing something else. And if I don't like what you sent to me,

I can just put my phone aside and not get back to you or have some time in between. I also can go in and, you know, type a message and then go back and correct what I said or change it to make it sound better or to make it sound more like something I want to be saying. The same thing is not truthful when we're speaking. You can hear like I'm taking these little breaks, I'm adding in those little filler words or arms and a sounds and you're giving me some feedback as we're speaking. So all of these small behaviors add up to differences in what our brain does while we're engaged in conversation. conversation. And how we're engaged in spoken conversation is very different from how we're engaged in non-spoken conversations, such as typed ones or digital ones.

Now, your data goes until 2019, which is before the pandemic. So how do you think the pandemic factored into this? That's a really interesting question. I do think that the pandemic probably accelerated that effect, since it not only changed how we're socializing and how we were congregating at the time, but those effects are. still lasting until the current day. I do also think that it encouraged a lot of behaviors that may have contributed to do this, for example, remote work, contactless payments, picking up food from the restaurant as opposed to going there and sitting there. Each small thing has probably added up to accelerate that loss even more. So what might this mean for our overall happiness

and our well-being that we're not speaking as much as we used to? There is data showing that speaking more generally is associated with higher psychological well-being. That's true for both introverts and extroverts. And so if we have fewer spoken conversations, it's likely that this will also impact our well-being. And we know that, you know, in 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared that epidemic of loneliness that's currently prevalent. And we think that there may be relationships that may be linked to those larger overall changes in society. Dr. Pfeiffer, thank you so much for your time. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Valeria Pfeiffer is an assistant professor of psychology and counseling at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Humans have always lived with animals, whether it's for practical reasons like farming with cattle and chickens, or for hunting with horses and dogs. Sometimes it's just for companionship, like a cat curled up on your lap. But what about the animals that are always hanging around just out of sight, whether we like it or not. Animals we tend to shun, like rats, cockroaches, and snakes. Biologist and author Dr. Marlene Zuck calls these less desirable creatures outsider animals

and says that instead of labeling them as pests, we should appreciate them, as they can be very important neighbors. Dr. Zuck is an evolutionary biologist and professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota and of Memphis. member of the National Academy of Sciences. She's also the author of Outsider Animals, how the creatures in the margins of our lives have the most to teach us. Hello and welcome back to Quarks and Quarks. Thanks. I'm delighted to be here. Why did you want to look at outsider animals like this?

Sometimes I think we overlook the common animals that are with us or we'll dismiss them as pests or decide that they're just something that we ought to try and get rid of. And I thought there was so much more to these animals than we tended to give them credit for that I wanted to pay some more attention to them. Well, what makes an animal an outsider? I think it's those animals that we end up seeing that live with us. Sometimes people will talk about urban wildlife or people will just talk about, honestly, about pests. They're the animals where when you see them, you think, what are you doing hair. And some of them that you've mentioned in your book, I kind of make your skin crawl like cockroaches or snakes or things like that. I mean, why do you think they're feared and loathed so

much by humans? Oh, we could spend a lot of time talking about that, although first of all, I will point out that the cockroach chapter is my favorite chapter in the book. I love cockroaches. As with all the animals in the book, with cockroaches and with snakes, there's just a lot more to them than the mythology or the, I don't know, the way we treat them. There are thousands and thousands of species of cockroaches. They live all over the world. Only a small handful of them are pests. They have a lot of extraordinary abilities.

There are cockroaches that are monogamous where the male and female live together and raise babies together. Like, how amazing is that? And there are cockroaches that are really beautiful. They're this sort of elegant kind of greenish-blue color. There are cockroaches that show us how better to design robots. I think cockroaches are incredible. Well, you've also pointed out in the book that they've been around for 130 million years. So they're obviously adaptable.

Well, they are, although this gives me the opportunity to disabuse everybody of a very common myth, which is that cockroaches are uniquely resistant to a nuclear holocaust. I mean, they can withstand a lot. You know, they can be underwater for a certain amount of time. And, you know, their bodies because their exoskeletons are resistant to, stuff, but there's nothing that makes them particularly survivors, particularly of nuclear disasters. I'm not quite sure where that one came from. You might find them beautiful, but when they're crawling around in your kitchen cupboards, it's not something people like. So again, we loat these animals

rather than appreciate them. Absolutely. And I'm not trying to tell people that they have to absolutely love every animal that they see. I mean, I don't want cockroaches in my house either. but the book was more about, hey, take another look at some of these species. And so almost all of these animals that I talk about open up a lot of questions that allow you to think more about what the world is like. So, yes, they may be pests, but there's so much more than that. Well, let's choose another animal that's in your book, and it's one that's very familiar to people who live in cities, especially Toronto, and that's the raccoon. Tell me about that. Oh, yes.

So Toronto, I discovered when I was doing the research for the book, bills itself as the raccoon capital of North America. Congratulations for that. What is it about raccoons that impresses you? They're very good at using their paws to manipulate objects, and I think people identify with that. And in fact, they seem so clever. And, you know, Native Americans have lots and lots of stories about raccoons.

The name raccoon comes from an Algonquin word, our raccoon. And so we have a long human. history with these animals. You talk in the book about what happened when Japan imported raccoons in the 1970s. Tell me about that. So again, raccoons are adorable and people think, oh, they might make cute pets. And unfortunately, when you import animals or plants, for that matter, into someplace where they didn't occur originally, a lot of times they can create a lot of problems.

Raccoons like running water, they'll eat up all the crayfish, for instance, in streams. They can eat a lot of other foods that other animals need. They can destroy bird nests and things like that. So they can actually become quite a pest. It also points to the fact that people try to make them pets, but it just doesn't generally end well. The problem is that raccoons, they can be tamed, but they're not domesticated.

So there's a difference between taking a baby raccoon and keeping it and getting a puppy, because a puppy is from a species that humans have been domesticating for thousands of years. And their genes have changed to make them more able to live with people. Raccoons, not so much. And when they get to be adults, they're very difficult to handle and they can be aggressive. And plus, they kind of want to be out in the wilderness with their fellow raccoons. But the remarkable thing about them, as you point out in your book, is that they're, almost totally adapted to the urban environment that we created.

They're quite happy living there. And this is what's interesting to me about a number of animals that there's just some species. They just seem good at getting used to different kinds of environments. And raccoons are an example. Rats are a good example. Gulls are a good example. They can cope with eating your sandwich as well as they can cope with eating fish. And scientists are really interested in what character.

characteristics make for an animal that can be that adaptable because they're not all that adaptable. And from that, we can then hopefully learn how other animals can adapt more easily to human influence because, of course, humans aren't going anywhere. And it's not that we want our world to only have the animals that can get used to our cities, but understanding how animals can get used to our cities might be very useful. Well, another animal famously or rather infamously associated with the city are the rats of New York. And you point out that there are three million rats in New York City alone, and there's a long list of reasons not to like rats. So what are some of the good things you want people to know about them?

It's not that I'm trying to tell people that they're good things. It's more that, wait a minute, there's a lot to think about when you consider rats. the fact that it is incredibly hard to eradicate them helps us understand, again, what animals use, what resources they want. And the people who are truly experts on city rats in New York just throw up their hands at how boneheaded some of the projected solutions have been. Let's see. So for a while, the idea was, okay, well, let's have all the restaurants and places that are generating a lot of, of garbage, which the rats are using. Let's have them put out their garbage late at night. Rats don't care. They're nocturnal. They're fine with it. It doesn't matter. I mean, that does mean that people don't have to walk past garbage as much, but that wasn't the point. I tell people that

both the lab rat and the street rat that you would see in the alleys in New York are both versions of the rat that humans created. We took rats that were originally wild that came here on, you know, on board ships and, you know, got to ports in all over the country and then spread from there. And by inadvertently giving them garbage and building buildings and having pipes that they could drink water out of and all of that, we selected for animals that could cope with that. And so a rat that can live in the alleys of New York is genetically different than a rat that would have been, as it were, fresh off the boat. Because their offspring that could survive in these different environments are the ones that were successful. The other animal that we created quite deliberately is the lab rat.

For one thing, we created lab rats that are much more docile and less likely to be aggressive and bite you than the average rat. that would have either been fresh off the boat or that's living in the alleys, because, of course, who wants to work on an animal that's going to try to tear you apart every time you reach a hand in its cage? One of the surprising things you point out in your book is that rats can teach us about laughter and joy? Rats like interacting with people. And somebody discovered a little while ago that they like having their bellies rubbed, kind of like they're being tickled, and they'll come over and seek that out.

And when they do, they produce this ultrasonic sound that the scientists have said, well, it's the rats laughing. And so the circumstance that leads to that and the way that laughter happens is a, it's extraordinary to think that that that's such a universal experience. And so where does that come from? And as I do point out in the book, it's probably, you can't hear this. So like, you know, don't like walk down the alleyway where there's a lot of rats thinking that you're going to hear the loud guffaws of like rats as they charge. over their garbage. I mean, that's not it. That will not happen. It's ultrasonic. You need special microphones to translate the sound. Now, you do point out some examples of communities trying to cohabitate with these outsider animals rather than get rid of them. And I'm thinking about the

example of Cape Breton, the Sharing Space Program. Tell me about that. Yeah. So coyotes are another outsider animal that I talk about. And they're a really interesting case. because, of course, they're native to North America. They, too, live very well with humans, but they inspire a lot of fear and concern and hatred for different reasons in different places in a lot of the western parts of North America where there's ranchers, people are concerned about them

killing sheep or going after, you know, whatever animals they're keeping. In urban areas where they also occur, people are very worried about, you know, their pets, or sometimes their children. One of the things that people are trying to do is educate the public about coyotes. And, yeah, the Cape Breton program was very interesting because they tried to have people learn about coyotes, how they moved, how they interacted with the environment, how far they could go. They asked people to imagine what they would do if they encountered a coyote.

It was a much more immersive and interactive program. And at the end of it, the participant said that they had a really different attitude than people who'd been polled after they'd just like heard some informative stuff. And so I think it does give some, you know, it gives us hope that I think people can change their minds about wildlife because people will slaughter coyotes. Even now, tens of thousands of coyotes are being killed every year because they're being deemed as pests. And much of that is undeserved. It's not that they never kill animals that you don't want them to kill, but it's way rarer than people think. And the dog thing is particularly interesting. People are very worried about their dogs.

And again, coyotes have killed dogs. But we have what's called the Twin Cities Coyotein Fox Project here in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. And I interviewed one of the people involved in it, Jeff Miller, for the book. And he says, people often call them up and say, oh, You need to get rid of this coyote because I was walking through a park in the city with my dog. And I noticed a coyote just kind of on, you know, the edge of my vision. And it kept walking and it was following us. And I was really scared.

And I, you know, I got tried, got my dog out of there as fast as I could and so forth. And Jeff says, you need to understand that from the coyote's perspective, first of all, the coyote doesn't really care about you very much. The dog, it will view as a competitor. It doesn't really want the dog in its territory. And so what it's doing, as Jeff says, is it's providing an escort service. It's walking you and your dog to the edge of its territory. And then once you pass that, it's like, bye, bye, okay, thanks.

See you later. They're not stalking your dog thinking about attacking it. But there's a fear that coyotes can attack humans. How much of a threat do they actually pose to us? Very, very low. I want to try and be sympathetic because I get it that when, you know, even when rare events happen, it really scares people. Most of the time, and there are relatively few occasions when coyotes have attacked people,

it's mostly when people have been feeding coyotes. They're out camping and they're trying to feed, you know, a coyote that they see because they think that would be cool. One of the things I got interested in writing the book is how bad people are at risk assessment. We over-exaggerate very, very uncommon or unlikely events, and we underestimate, made common ones. So why is it important that we cohabitate with these outsider animals rather than fear them and try to get rid of them? I guess there's a couple of reasons. One of them is that one of them's a practical reason, which is that we're not going to get rid of them. It's just not possible. And I'm not saying, oh, well, we should just give up and, you know, have rats infesting our

buildings. But if we understand a little bit more about these animals, then I think we're going to be able to navigate the space with them a little bit better. So one of the reasons why we need to live with them is that it's impossible not to. You know, we have to live with them. And the other one is that I just don't see that humans have a right to say that, oh, we should be the only creatures here. It's, it's a, you know, kind of a matter of allowing our fellow beings to live with us. And the third one is, they're just so cool. Just one last question. Are there any animals or insects you actually don't like?

Sure. The one animal that I thought briefly about putting into the book and decided no, the Virginia possum, which, you know, it does get in people's house, you know, I mean, I've had them around my house and so forth. I have a hard time working up enthusiasm for possums. Really possums? They just seem like, I don't know, now I'm going to get hate mail from people who love possums. They just don't have that cute factor, right? Not to me, other people like them.

Anyway, all right, there we go. Dr. Zook, thank you for the book, and thank you so much for your time. Thanks so much for having me. It's always a pleasure. Dr. Marlene Zuck is an evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Her latest book is called Outsider Animals,

how the creatures at the margins of our lives have the most to teach us. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. Our webpage is cbc.ca.ca slash quirks, where you can listen to our audio archives, read my latest blog,

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