Science Friday - Dinosaurs, Celebrating Cephalopods. June 15, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: June 15, 2018

Like a kraken rising from the depths (or a cuttlefish emerging from the sand), Cephalopod Week is back! Every year, Science Friday spends a week honoring the mighty, clever, mysterious cephalopod. This year, Field Museum curator Janet Voight joins Ira and SciFri’s chief cephalopod cheerleader Brandon Echter to talk about the unusual and brainy behaviors of these creatures—including a squid that uses bioluminescent bacteria to camouflage itself—and whether cephalopods could someday become a model organism as ubiquitous in labs as mice and fruit flies.  The story of the dinosaurs is one that’s been told over millennia. But within the last few decades, what we thought we knew about their rise and fall is being rewritten.  Plus: A look at the latest science stories of the week, and a look at why Chicago Park District may shut down half of its outdoor drinking fountains.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato coming to you today from the studios of WBEZ in Chicago. It's been an emotional week for fans of a certain persistent explorer, and no, I am not talking about that raccoon that scaled a tower in Minnesota earlier this week. I'm talking about Opportunity, the longest running rover on Mars. Opportunity has been on the red planet since 2004. survived years longer than its 90-day design lifetime, but a mammoth dust storm on Mars now threatens its continued existence. Here with an opportunity update plus other short subjects in science, is Rachel Feldman, Senior Editor for Popular Science and host of their new podcast, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.

She joins us from our studios in New York. Good to have you back, Rachel. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ira. This rover is not the weirdest thing this week, but a very sad thing. Why is it in jeopardy? Yeah, so it could have been very sad news, but for now we're being cautiously optimistic. As you said, Opportunity has lived a very long and productive life, so it has a lot of fans, not just in NASA, but around the world. And this duststorm is covering a quarter of the planet.

It's one of the biggest dust storms they've ever seen on Mars in the time that we've been able to observe the red planet. And the problem is that Opportunity is that Opportunity, is solar powered and the dust is blocking out enough of the sunlight that it's getting basically no power. Now the dust storm has reached where curiosity is on the other side of the planet, but curiosity is totally fine. It has a nuclear reactor. The issue, again, for opportunity is that power.

So right now it's kind of powered down and there was some concern because it missed a scheduled check-in last week or in this past week and NASA announced a press conference and a lot of people thought that they were going to have very bad news. In fact, they said that there's no reason to be overly concerned. They think that everything is going as it should, that the rover is hunkered down, and that it should survive. The primary concern is that it might get cold. Its sister rover spirit died of cold because she wasn't getting enough power many years ago. and opportunity, luckily, is in a dust storm in the start of the Martian summer, so it's already pretty warm, and also the dust itself is acting as a sort of insulator. So NASA can't know exactly when opportunity is going to wake back up and sink back with communications with Earth, but they are hoping that it's all going to be okay.

Yeah, we're all keeping our fingers crossed. Back to back to the bad news story. The giant baobab trees of Africa are suddenly in decline? Tell us about those trees and why we're worried about them. Yeah, so researchers were studying the baobab trees because the oldest ones are 1,000, 2,000, 2,500 years old. And they're all over sub-Saharan Africa, you know, in Madagascar, Zimbabwe, lots of different countries on the continent. And they're just really not just important pieces of the ecosystem because of how long they are part of the ecosystem, but they're also just really iconic. They have a lot of cultural significance.

And researchers were interested in figuring out how they grow so big. They get like 100 feet tall and how they live so long. Again, they're trees that have lived for 2,500 years. And in studying them over the course of like 12 years or so, they saw an unexpected number of them start to deteriorate and die. And so they've come away thinking that they have actually witnessed the start of an uptick in kind of the decline of the oldest and biggest of these trees. The one bright side is that younger trees seem to be as robust as ever. It's just a question of whether trees that historically have lived for thousands of years are going to be able to continue doing so. Dare I ask you to conjecture why this is happening?

So, you know, the researchers are very open about the fact that climate change is the most obvious culprit. They're not able to say for sure, but they think that some combination of drought and just contributions to extreme weather events, you know, rains coming at the wrong time of year. and then not for very, you know, no rains coming for a long time after, that this might just be messing with a tree that historically has been incredibly robust and resilient. Speaking of robust and resilient, I know there's now some good news about the best way to get stronger muscles. Tell us, we can all use that. Great news. So a lot of people are familiar with HIT or H-I-I-T, high-intensity interval training in cardio.

You know, it's short bursts of activity instead of more sustained moderate activity. And there's been a lot of research that using this method gives you a lot of the same, if not more, of the cardiovascular benefits, weight loss benefits, et cetera, of your standard cardio routine. So it's become very popular. And a new study came out about the same concept in weightlifting or resistance training. And it really just amounts to what you would call lifting. heavy, you know, choosing the weight that is the heaviest you can lift, even if you can only do it for fewer reps. And according to this kind of meta-analysis of the studies out there, that is the

best way to gain more muscle, is to, you know, be pushing as hard as you can, even if you can't get as many reps in. The caveat there is that it doesn't increase your endurance. So, you know, you might be able to pick up a bear, but you wouldn't be able to carry. at home from the store. And there's also the worry that people who are really excited about, you know, this kind of lifting heavy are going to put themselves at a greater risk of rhabdo, which is a potentially deadly kidney failure. Badness.

Yeah. So you got to, you have to do this with someone, some trainer or somebody knows what they're doing if you're going to get some advice on this. Right, right. Working with a trainer is great. And if you can't work with a trainer, then just being reasonable about easing yourself in is important. You know, just because intensity is good doesn't mean you should jump right into intensity that's wildly above what you're used to. You know, you still need to kind of get there incrementally.

Well, I'm in no risk of doing that. No thing. Rachel Feldman's Science Editor at Popular Science. Thanks for taking time to be with it again this week. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ira. She's also a host of her new podcast, the weirdest thing I learned this week. Now, it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO.

New York, Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. You know, summer is the time when people head out to the city parks. But Chicagoans here might notice some things missing from the parks, the drinking fountains. And why? It's due to lead in some of these fountains. The city has over 1,200 outdoor drinking fountains. and more of half of those fountains have detectable levels of lead in the drinking water.

So the city shutting them down. My next guest has been covering this story. She's here to fill us in on the details. Monica Eng is a reporter for WBEZ here in Chicago. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Sarah. So why they shut them down? Because there's lead hazard in the water?

Yeah, I mean, I guess to really understand it, you need to go to prehistoric times. And I mean, my childhood as a kid in Chicago Parks. That's when all the fountains were running continuously. They just bubbled during the whole summer season. And, you know, it seemed like maybe it was a waste of water. But as we listen to this story, you'll see it might have actually been a good thing. Because fast forward to, let's say, about 20 years ago, they said, hey, why don't we take these and turn them into push-button fountains? Let's stop wasting the water.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Let's go to 2016. Flint happens. I and a bunch of other journalists say to the city, you know, what? don't you check the water that the kids are drinking in Chicago? Let's check the schools. Let's check the park district. What do they find? About a fourth of them are exceeding EPA limits. And those are 15 parts per billion. That's not a safety standard. That's what they thought municipalities could possibly get to. Bottled water, for instance, is five parts per billion. And no level of lead is safe for kids developing brains. So they find about one-fourth of these are exceeding the limits. So they're like, okay, let's shut them down for the summer. Spring 2017, I get a whole bunch of emails and letters, and I notice as I'm writing down the lake, the fountains are running continuously. It's like I'm back to my childhood again. People write to us and say, what's happening? The city's fountains are running continuously outside. So what it turns out is they were

flushing. They thought if we flush them for a month, maybe we can get all that sediment that's built up during the dormant period out. It worked for a lot of them, about three-fourths it worked for. Another 100-plus fountains, they found when you put those back on push-button use, they had high levels of lead again. So they kept those on continuous the entire summer. All right, spring 2018, we're here. And I said, what are you guys up to this year? They said, okay, this year we've decided to just shut down more than one half of all outdoor fountains and remove some. It saves a lot of water, though. It does it save a lot of water? But those that they've decided to keep on in high traffic areas that have previously had led, those will be running continuously

until the city can do a longer term sorting out of the problem. And of course, you know, know, as you hear about Flint or other cities, it's all in the system. You'd have to replace the system, right? The infrastructure. Yes, therein lies the rub. So you're either going to have to shut them off, which, you know, decreases access for homeless and people who need them. You're going to have to run them continuously, which weighs water,

or you're going to have to do the hard work of actually replacing the lead service lines that are under Chicago en masse. The estimate is about 380,000 lead service lines, more than any other city in the nation. So you're talking then not just about the drinking fountains. We're talking about people's homes with the lead line. That's right. That's public and in private homes. And the part in your home that hooks up to the city service line that hooks up to the main is your issue.

So it's a huge issue. And as long as we have these lead service lines, we are going to have trades to high levels of lead in our water. And to replace them is just an enormous expense, right? In a home, it can cost the estimate about $2,000 to $15,000. And multiply that by $380,000 plus the public ones. It's a lot of money. And I think cities across the nation, Madison, Wisconsin dealt with it. They said, okay, over 11 years, we're going to do this.

We're going to get federal funds. We're going to get other funds. And we're going to do the hard grown-up work of facing the issue. So you think, will Chicago do that? Well, you know, with all the journalists out there that are encouraging them to do this kind of, you know, big infrastructure work, maybe it'll happen. And what kind of reaction have you gotten to your stories? Well, when they shut down half of the fountains, some who were advocates for the homeless, said, hey, you know what? How are people supposed to get water?

And other people say, you know what, that water that was going all summer, that was a waste, you know, millions of gallons of treated filtered drinking water. All right. Very interesting. Monica Anger reporter for WBZ here in Chicago. We're going to take a break on when we come back. We'll talk about new discoveries that tell the story of how the dinosaurs got lucky before they're, fortune slipped. So stay with us. We're going to talk with Steve Brousotti, who is author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, A New History of Lost World. He's a young dinosaur expert.

We'll talk about a whole new generation of dinosaurs, paleontologists. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You may think you know the story of dinosaurs. You know, we've all grown up listening to the stories, but I assure you you do not know the whole thing because parts of that story remain a mystery even to paleontologists. And what we thought we knew is being rewritten. For example, in the last decade, scientists have discovered that dinosaurs were not the dominant species we thought they were the moment they arrived on the scene. It took millions of years before a stroke of luck allowed them to conquer the globe. And my next guest says we're living in a golden age for discoveries like this, with new fossils being found every week.

giving us a new and more detailed account of the era of the dinosaurs. Steve Broussati is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, and if there is a definitive story of the dinosaurs, as things stand right now anyways, then it can be found in Steve's new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a New History of a Lost World. Steve, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, and hello to everybody back home in Chicago, and I just want to say, again, thank you very much for that very kind review of the book

you did for the New York Times and for having me on here. Well, it is a great, I learned so much and especially about, well, let's get into all the kinds of things I learned in the book. Let's first talk about the story of the dinosaurs, how it has changed since I grew up learning about them in school. And what we have done a 180 on the last decade or so with new discoveries? Tell me about them. Right now, we are in the golden age. This is the most exciting time ever for new dinosaur discoveries and for learning about dinosaurs. And it's a fact that still blows my mind, but right now, somewhere, somebody around the world is discovering a new species of dinosaur, on average, once a week.

So that's 50-some new species a year. And, of course, we're using a lot of new technologies to study these dinosaurs, cat scans to look inside of their heads to see what their brains and senses were like, computer animation software to study how they moved and how they fed. and we even can tell the colors of some dinosaurs right now. So the image of dinosaurs today, very different from those dim-witted, drab-colored, slow-moving, evolutionary failures that were still in the books that I read in school in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. You know, the profiling wisdom before this was that dinosaurs were special. They out-competed all the other triassic animals with superior speed and intelligence. How did you discover that that was not true?

My favorite part of the dinosaur story is that first bit, the rise of the dinosaurs, before their eventual fall. And I think a lot of people know the story of the fall. Maybe we'll talk about it. It was a very sudden fall when that asteroid came down. But the rise of dinosaurs, the origin story, that was a big mystery for a long time. And people used to think, generally, that dinosaurs were so big and, and, and, you know, and so successful T-Rexes, brontasauruses, these kinds of fantastic animals, that they must have just spread across the world soon after they originated,

like some kind of infectious virus, just out-competing everything. But there weren't really that many fossils of the first dinosaurs that were known until quite recently, the last 10 or 15 years. There's been an explosion of new discoveries of dinosaurs that lived back in the Triassic period. That's the first part of the reign of dinosaurs. And these were the dinosaurs that were getting their start on a supercontinent, Pangea, right after a mass extinction. And not only any mass extinction, but the worst mass extinction

in Earth history, about 252 million years ago, when these super volcanoes erupted in Russia and led up to 95% of species to go extinct. And the very first dinosaurs got their start after that. But the immediate ancestors of dinosaurs didn't look like. T-Rex, didn't look like Brontosaurus. In fact, you could have held one in your hand. They were just about the size of a house cat. It was a humble start for animals that would eventually become these massive iconic animals that we all know and love. And speaking of that start, you write in your book, why did early dinosaurs survive the hell of the Triassic extinction, leaving them free of competitors? I wish I had a good answer. Do we not know why they were able to survive? It's a mystery. I wish I could tell you that part of the story.

I wish I had a good answer. But what we know more or less right now is those first dinosaurs, their immediate ancestors, living after that super volcano extinction. These were small animals. They were living in the shadows. Size of house cats running around on all fours. Now they diversified during the rest of the Triassic period. More species evolved.

They spread to certain parts of the world, but not all parts of the world. And some of them got up to be about the size of geranium. rafts or so. But during that entire Triassic period, about 50 million years, it was not the dinosaurs that were on top of the food chain. It was the crocodiles and their cousins. And back then, these crocodiles were a whole lot different. We have this image of crocodiles today. There's not too many of them. There's only about 25 species. They all kind of look the same. They all live in these near-shore environments, a little bit in the water, a little bit on the land, green and scally, and you know, a little bit boring in a lot of ways, although they can be quite scary. But in the Triassic period, there were crocs that were almost the size of buses.

There were crocs that ate plants. There were crocs with horns and spikes. There were crocs that looked like greyhounds. There were crocs that only walked on their hind legs. There were even crocs that lost all of their teeth and replaced them with beaks. And they were on top. But then, at the end of the Triassic period, about 200 million years ago, the supercontinent of Pangaea, this evolutionary,

laboratory that all these animals were living on, it started to break apart. And that happened basically along the Atlantic coast. You can see the remnants of it in New York City, the palisades across the Hudson River in New Jersey and parts of New York. Big volcanic eruptions happened, filling those cracks in between the drifting continents. And that led to another mass extinction, and the crocks were decimated. Almost all of those species I just talked about, that great diversity, they died out, whereas the dinosaurs sailed through. We know that's the pattern, but we don't have a good explanation, and that's why I really think we're waiting for somebody from the new generation of paleontologists, some young, brilliant scientist to figure that one out.

Wow. Our number 844-8255, you can also tweet us at Cyfry, talking with Steve Broussadi, who is author of the really good book. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a New History of a lost world. I want to get into the new generation in the minute, but I want to go through some of the really interesting questions that you raise in your book, and you say that one of the questions that has fascinated paleontologists for years

is how did this sorropod? You know, there's long-neck dinosaurs, like the brontosaurus, get so large. I mean, we don't have anything like them. Today, why did they get so large and we don't have something that big anymore? These were astounding animals. I think they are maybe the most fantastic creatures that evolution has ever produced.

Some of these long-neck dinosaurs got to be the size of Boeing 737 aircraft. So think about that. These things were 100 feet long. Some of these things got to be 60 or 70 tons in mass. Their necks could reach up several stories into the sky. And in Chicago, where you are right now, there's an amazing new one that's going to be put display in the field museum, the museum that inspired me so much when I was growing up in Ottawa, Illinois, close by to Chicago. So people can see this thing. You can go and just gawk at the

stupendousness of an animal like this. So how did evolution produce something that big? It has been a real mystery because there's nothing alive like that today on the land. Sure, some whales get huge, but they're living in water. There's the buoyancy issue. They don't have to support them, their bodies. But animals are not to be. land do. And so the emerging evidence is telling us that it's not just one thing. It wasn't one sort of trump card that these dinosaurs had that allowed them to get so big, but they happen to evolve piece by piece a number of different important characteristics that working together permitted them to become so big. And just two of those things to mention, first of all,

those long necks, they could reach high into the trees. That gave them a source of food that no other dinosaurs could get to. They basically had their own buffet that they could just eat at all day and eat and eat and eat. And the second thing is, they had lungs that were very different than our lungs.

They had lungs that were very efficient. They could take in a lot of oxygen. That would have powered their really fast metabolism. But those lungs also had air sacks that connected to them. And these are just like the lungs of birds today. These air sacks store oxygen, some oxygen-rich air that comes in with each breath,

and it keeps that kind of like a bellows or a bagpipe, I see all the time here in Scotland. And some of that oxygen-rich-air then will be delivered back across the lung when the dinosaur or the bird today breathes out. Now, that makes it very efficient. But the other thing those air sacks do is those air sacks are free to roam around the body. And in birds today, they invade any kind of crack or crevice in between the organs or even into the bones.

And that's also what they did in these big dinosaurs. These air sacks, these balloons hollowed out the bones. So the bones were strong, but they were lightweight. And that allowed these dinosaurs to grow to these biblical proportions, but still be able to move around. So it was a combination of those kind of things that allowed an animal, basically, that started as one of these house cat-sized creatures living in the Triassic to evolve into something the size of a jet plane.

It's amazing. Let's go to the phones because we have. have, as you can imagine, interest. Let's go to David in New York City. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Yes, hi. I know someone who's something of a dinosaur obsessive, and so I really can't contradict him

because he keeps up with things much better than I do. But maybe because he's something of a contrarian, he claims that there have been recent high discoveries to contraindicate the presence of feathers in dinosaurs. He's, in fact, skeptical of the whole bird dinosaur connection. He also doesn't really think that homeothermia was necessary because of the climate and the difficulty of dissipating heat from such a large organism. Okay. What do you think, Steve?

Okay, David. In New York, thanks for those questions. I did my PhD in New York, and the American Museum is a wonderful place, so hopefully you get a chance to visit. Good question. So the feather thing, I want to address that, because that's really important. The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs, this isn't some new idea from the young generation of paleontologists. This is something that actually goes back to the time of Darwin.

And it was Darwin's great disciple, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog, that came up with this idea because he noted uncanny similarities in the skeletons of Archaeopteryx, this first fossilized bird that was found in Jurassic Rocks, about 150 million years old in Germany in the 1860s and the skeletons of small meat-eating dinosaurs that were found at the same time. And so he proposed this idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs. There wasn't a whole lot of other evidence at that time, and debate went back and forth until the 60s. And the 60s, evidence started to crystallize.

There were the discovery of a lot of new dinosaurs, a lot of these raptor dinosaurs that were so bird-like. But what really sealed the deal was the discovery in the late 90s. It was only 20 years ago, the discovery of the first bona fide dinosaur skeletons covered in feathers. And those come from China. And I still remember when the first one came out. I remember reading about it in the Times newspaper in Ottawa, Illinois. I was just in seventh or eighth grade at the time.

I wasn't really into dinosaurs yet, but it blew my mind that dinosaurs had feathers. That first discovery was made by a farmer. And since then, over the last 20 years, there have been thousands of other dinosaurs. found with feathers in China. These were dinosaurs that were living in a jungle, but that jungle periodically got buried by volcanoes, almost Pompeii style, and that locked in the feathers. It didn't allow them to decay.

So we do know for certain that lots of dinosaurs did have feathers. So perhaps you could explain that to your friend, and it's something that, of course, I cover in the book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. There's a chapter in there all about the origin of birds, and we learned so much about that recently. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Coming you from WBEZ in Chicago, we're talking with Steve Broussati, author of The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park, the movie, is the 25th anniversary this year. Did that film have an influence on you becoming a paleontologist? It did in a roundabout way. I still remember. I was nine years old. My dad took us to the cinema, me and my brothers, Mike and Chris. And I remember the spectacle of seeing those dinosaurs on the big screen, especially that first scene when Sam Neal's character, the paleontologist, is being driven around on that Jeep, and they stop and they see these brachiosaurus dinosaurs. So that did really awe me, but it didn't immediately make me want to become a paleontologist. But for Chris, my youngest brother, it did. And it led him to become obsessed with dinosaurs. And he turned his bedroom into a dinosaur museum. and that's really what eventually, through osmosis, won me over.

So I'm really partial to Jurassic Park. I'm not one of those scientists that's going to sit here, like comic book guy, and nitpick every little inaccuracy because that was a great thing for our field. It led to an explosion of interest in dinosaurs, a lot of new museums, a lot of new universities putting on courses, a lot more funding. And many people of my generation would tell you, people all over the world, that Jurassic Park was the big influence. when they were young.

You know, one of the things I wrote about, one of the things I love about your book are the incredible number of personalities who over the years have become paleontologists. You have the tragic genius spy whose World War I fossil hunter adventures in Transylvania. Like the, you know,

tell us about a little bit about him. In the book, I of course tell the story of the rise of all the dinosaurs and where dinosaurs came from and how they rose up and then went extinct. I also weave in a lot of stories, some of my own stories, and a lot of stories, though, of my colleagues of this new generation, this very diverse generation of women and men all over the world. That's really what's driven this explosion, this golden age, is because there are people everywhere now looking for dinosaurs. A lot of young people, for instance, in China, in Brazil, in Argentina, in these enormous countries that are opening up, and they're going out finding their own dinosaurs.

And it includes a lot of women as well. Like a lot of sciences, of course, I hate to say it, but it used to be that paleontology was a pretty narrow subject. It was only a few people at, let's face it, pretty posh universities, mostly in parts of the U.S. or Canada or the UK, that could study dinosaurs, but now it's opened up to people around the world. But that means we shouldn't forget about some of the heroes that came before us. And this character, you mentioned, Franz Nobcha, the dinosaur baron of Transylvania is probably the most common. colorful person that's ever studied dinosaurs. He was an aristocrat. He was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat who had a big estate in Transylvania.

And he was a spy during World War I. He tried to mount an armed resurrection against the Turks, which failed. He tried to install himself as king of Albania. That also failed. But he was very good at finding dinosaurs. All across his stately grounds, there were dinosaur bones. But these were the bones of weird dinosaurs. They were small dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs living in other parts of the world at the same time were monstrous. Some of these Boeing 737-sized species. But in Romania, Transylvania, they were only the size of cows. And so he noticed that, and he figured out why. They lived on an ancient island. I'm going to have to let that go, because you want to know the rest. You have to read Steve Broussardy's new book, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs. It's a terrific book.

Thank you, Steve, for writing the book. And thank you for coming on and talking to us on Science Friday. And hello to everybody in Chicago. Steve Rusadi, paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland. And you can read an excerpt from his new book on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash dinosaur. When we come back, we're going to go to the famed field museum and kick off Cephalopod Week.

Every year, we wait for this week, and it's here now. This is Science Friday. I am I, Iraflato, and since the... SciFrike team was in Chicago this week. We paid a visit to the famous Field Museum. Boy, did we get a great behind-the-scenes tour. But to get there, we had to descend flight after flight of stairs, deep into the basement vaults where specimens are kept,

and there in a library-like room smelling of preservation and alcohol. Our guide wheeled open a set of shelves and welcomed us to the Cephalopod collection, because, yes, it is that time of the year, Cephalopod Week, and what better way to kick it off than geeking out in the basement of the Field Museum? I can't think of anything better admiring the vampire squids, the cuttlefish, and a magnificent giant Pacific octopus. And our guide who showed us all this stuff was Dr. Janet Voight, associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the Field Museum,

and she's here with us. Welcome. Oh, thank you for coming. It was so much fun yesterday. Wasn't that fun? It was. And also with us here, who's also on the tour, is Science Friday's chief cephalopod cheerleader

and digital manager, managing editor, Brandon Ector. Welcome back, Brandon. Thank you, Ira. Happy Cephalopods. It's your favorite time of the year. It is my favorite time of the year. It is the best time of the year. Kick it up for us. So, as you know, every June, the third week of June,

we dedicate eight days, of course, to celebrate cephalopods. And that's that class of species that includes octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, nautiluses, and all sorts of ancient creatures as well. And we usually do that on social media, with finding really cool stories to share with you. And we celebrate it. We want to make sure that we celebrate these amazing and fascinating creatures. So what do you have in store?

Oh, we have so much ready coming up for you this week. So right now we have a bunch of new stories that are going to be coming out throughout the week. We have two new videos up about cephalopods, about the bobtail squid, about a bunch of species up in Woods Hole. We have cephalopod movie nights in cities around the country where we're going to be showing some cephalopod movies, cities like Denver, New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, where you could see, in addition to those movies, a psychedelic underwater music show, a marionette show, a talk that is called octopuses. They're not aliens, but they're still awesome. Talks with experts, things like that. We're going to be showing stuff on social media all week long. And we want to, you know, of course, celebrate cephalpods with you. So we want to know, you know, show us your favorite cephalpods. Let's celebrate these creatures together.

And we've already posted some of the tour. I know I took videos of the tour that you gave us yesterday. If I had known you were going to post video on Twitter, I would have combed my hair. Me too. And I've got to say, yeah, eight days for the Sepulipide Week is great. But couldn't you make it 10 for the Squids? Oh, yeah. Are they your favorite? Are they your favorite?

Cephalopods? Squids, oh, cephalopons in total are just fascinating creatures. I actually am more partial to octopuses where I've spent most of my work. Squids, though, there's something about them. They're so diverse. There's like 26, 28 families. And each, you know, you look at it and you go, that's over there and this is over there. And somehow they all came together.

They started from one branch, or was it two? I mean, you don't have to be alien to be awesome, and they prove it. And you showed us down in the basement. You opened up this big, I don't know what it was made at it, but it was a big tin of inside was a 112-year-old octopus? Yes. But sitting there in the museum for 112 years? The way I think of it, it's a 112-year-old specimen. A specimen.

We don't know how old it was when it was preserved. The note when I came that was with it sent purchased at a fish market in Seattle, 1906. And I think at one point it must have been on exhibit because where it should have eyeballs, it has really pretty blue marbles. But I also showed you guys our paper mache life-size giant Pacific octopus. The arm span is 18 feet. It hangs over our one as an animal exhibit. And it just shows you how much effort we've met at the Field Museum of made to show the people in Chicago cool animals from the seeds.

Speaking of cool animals, you were telling us, and you showed us a glass model of the paper nautilus, which has a very unique talent, doesn't it? It's something about its arms break off. When they're males. When they're males. Tell us about that. Yeah, well, it's actually paper.

The upper nautilus is somewhat of a problematic common name, because they're not really nautilus, although the shell the female secretes, is curved like that. This is one of a group of four families that have extreme sexual-sized dimorphism. Males are maybe at most as long as an index finger, and females can get so large or pick them up with both hands. The males, however, regardless of how small, have one arm that's really elaborate, really a long, pointy thing, and that's the hector-codilus. It was first described from inside a female. It was thought to be a parasitic worm. So it was like, what's that doing in there?

She must have worms. But in fact, it was found later that that arm is the male copulatory organ, and it breaks off, or in fact has been hypothesized to break from the male and actively swim into the female's ovaduct carrying sperm. Well, you can't top that story. That's a great story. Oh, let's try. 844-7248255 is our number.

We want to talk to Janet Voigt, who was a curator of inverteauology in the famous Chicago Field Museum. And Brandon Ector is our digital managing editor here. Stories like that, you've got to love cephalopause. Oh, man, Ira. I've got, you know, people ask me sometimes, like, what's my favorite Sepulvod? And it's a little bit like asking, what's my favorite child? You know, you definitely have favorites, but you don't want to say. But one of the ones, the samples that we actually saw that Jenna showed us yesterday was one of my favorites, the vampire squid, which is actually neither a vampire nor a squid.

In fact, it's actually, Janet talked a little bit earlier about how squid and octopuses split off into two different branches. And vampertuthis is actually the last remaining species or part of that? It's kind of a missing link. It has characters who are totally unique to the octopards. It's suckers. They're all muscles. Squids have suckers that are muscular, but they also have teeth. Cightness rings around them.

It has an internal difference in digestive organs that's really unique. And it has eight arms like octopuses do, but it has two extra long grabby things, we always thought. But they're not like the two extra long grabby things that squids have. They're in the wrong position. They're opposite. it. So what's like, how can this be? Wow. And Grace Pickford, like 1949, did a monograph on these things, using only trailed specimens.

And Vampirututus live in the midwater. They're neutrally buoyant. They're soft body. They're prone to damage in the troll net. And she pieced together this beautiful ontogeny of how the fins, there's juvenile fins that are absorbed and the mature fins come out and all these different things. occur. She did it with trial specimens without ever seeing like the beautiful Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute videos, which are just stunning. How did you get involved? You mentioned yesterday that you have what six or eight species named after you? Well, not of cephalopods. Not cephalopods, but marine creatures. Well, you know, when I was in college, I got involved with terrestrial vertebrate research

through an internship. And I love, love, loved research, just being the first to discover something and write it up and get it published and they'd give it away for free. It was so cool. And I had to work for a few years after college. And I did the routine job.

I was a lab tech and I just hated it. So I decided I'd go back to grad school at the ripe old age of 27. Nobody did that back then. Absolutely. I was told, why'd you happen? through a bad divorce. So I figured I'd go and I'd keep doing terrestrial vertebrates like I had. Only it didn't, it wasn't magic. So the guy who had taken me on his temporary advisor needed

one more person to sign up for his marine course to meet quota and have it go. So I signed up, started working on octopus, and life's been really good ever since. What is the most misunderstood thing that people have about octopus? There's a lot of them. One of which, is that octopus is like the word dog. It's like you could talk about a chihuahua or a St. Bernard, and it's still a dog. When we talk octopus, we're talking about up to 300 named species that are valid, as different as any species anywhere. The other thing is that they're like us in a lot of ways, even though their DNA is different.

They're mollus. They're not chordates. But their whole life cycle is entirely different. When they hatch out of the egg, some are very small. They go into the plankton for a month or two and then settle. Look like miniature octopuses. Others hatch out like miniature octopuses, weighing four-hundredths or seven-hundredths of a gram. Over the course of their lives, the ones that are 40 milligrams when they hatch grow to 40 grams in six and a half months.

Now, you said that you were telling us that they're, they're going to be. They gain 6% of their body weight a day? A day. They have a 40% growth efficiency. The species that was sequenced, its DNA, it's a genome, I mean. You can tell them a traditional type genome, Janet. It hatches out at 7 tenths of a gram. It grows to an average 620 grams over the course of six and a half months.

That's a 9,000-fold increase. Think about that. Think about if you're an animal and you grow that fast, how do you interact with your environment where one day you're this big? The next week, you're twice as big. Maybe that's why they're so smart. Maybe that's why. Brandon, you know we love to talk about the microbiome on this show.

And one of our videos for Cephalopod Week this year is about the squid microbiome. Yes, actually, we combined our two loves, cephalopods and the microbiome for the story. So we actually interviewed Sarah McAnulty, who works with Hawaiian bobtail squid, which is a very relatable species of squid. She calls them the couch potatoes of the sea. They just kind of hang out in Hawaii on the sand. What a line.

I know, right? I wish I had it. But like all sefs, you know, they're very easy to eat. She basically calls them a floating protein bar. So she has, like a lot of cephalopods have, you know, very great, interesting adaptations. for trying to escape predators. And in this case, they actually have an unusual BFF, which is this bioluminescent bacteria.

So the Hawaiian bobtel squid likes to go hunting at night. And when your predators are coming up from below, you can see a squid-shaped shadow against the moon. So it uses this bioluminescent bacteria to match the moon glow of the water around it. So basically it uses this beneficial bacteria to survive in the world. Tricie, tricky, tricky.

I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking shop here, actually, about cephalopods. On Cephalopod Week with Janet Voight from the Chicago Field Museum, and Brandon Ector are a digital managing editor. And there are so many stories you were telling. Where do we go with? I mean, how cunning the cephalopods are, how tricky they can be when they were hunting.

And you tell us one story that was really interesting about, an octopus that are venomous that can play tricks on crabs? Tell our audience, that's it. Well, there was this study by this guy named Grizzly, and he was studying, how come with these crabs, which are octopus's favorite food, there weren't any puncture wounds. We know they envenomated them. The venom paralyzes the crab and makes it safe for the octopus to eat. They're very delicate, you know.

So he did this careful study, and he realized the octopus actually punctured the crab, preferentially in the eyeball. So the last thing the crab saw was the octopus beak coming at them. After that puncture was done, it's a direct shot into the crab's brain and paralysis, except for its heart. The heart keeps beating to spread the venom around. That venom not only paralyzes the crab, but it dissolves the connections between the crab meat and the exoskeleton.

Sounds like a harm. movie. Pop it open. Pops it right open. Well, that's how you grow so fast. You don't do a lot of work. You're a really efficient killer. And then, you know, when your belly's bow, you sit back, couch potato. Relax on the sand. Are they as smart as they, you know, aractopus is very smart. Where would you put them in smartness? You know, conversationalally, they're not great. I've heard them compared to three-year-olds, I've heard them compared to house cats, which to which I say my cat's smarter than that. But they recognize people when you have them in captivity, and they get bored. I mean, if you've had fish tanks, you know, the fish really don't care

whether you're there or not. The octopus want to play with you. They want to follow you around. They recognize by maybe height, maybe hair color, who's got the chow? And if they're really hungry, they'll suspend themselves with all their suckers up to the water surface, because that's where the chow comes down. Wow, wow. There's so many stories. Before we conclude running out of time, Brandon, tell our listeners how they can all get involved in Cephalopod Week.

So, first of all, you know, you should check out all of the really cool Cephalopod stories we're working on at ScienceFriiday.com Cephalopod Week. You can see the video I just talked about featuring Sarah McAnulty. Which is really cool. Which is a really cool video. And then also about Cephalopod, English. which is about the search for America's next top model organism, possibly cephalopods, including the flamboy and cuddlfish,

which is one of my favorites. You can, as always, join us on our hashtag. We're using the hashtag Cephalopod Week. We have a Facebook group, so just search for Science Friday Cephalopod Week on Facebook. We're going to be where you can send submissions of all your cool stuff. And actually, we're trying something new this year. We're doing a Cephalopod of the Day text line. So if you text the word cephalopod,

to 9172424070. We'll send you a cool cephalopod, a fact about a cephalopod and a new cephalopod species every day during cephalopod. What's that number again? That number is 9172424070. And, you know, we're going to be sharing stuff about the vampire squid

and some of the other species we talked about today. And, of course, come to our movie nights. Now, Brandon, is that a news undescribed cephalopod species? The one that can text. Is it a different cephalopod species? It is a different cephalopod species. Sorry. Systematics and taxonomy.

It's like new species. Shame on me. I want to thank both of you for taking it down to be able to say, Genovoid, Associate Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Field Museum. I'm Brandon, who is our Cephalopod Week, coordinator and digital managing editor. Thank you both. I had a tour yesterday and for efforts on Cephalopod Week. And one last thing before we go.

Chicago, we've got a very special show plan for tomorrow night, Saturday night, at the beautiful Harris Theater. We're going to perform a radio play about the night meteorites rain down on a Chicago suburb. We're going to hunt for urban wildlife and baby coyotes with WBEZ's own Curious City. We'll talk about what cow urine has to do with fine art. It's worth coming to that just to learn about that. And we'll round it off by talking about math, abstraction. and weird geometry. Tickets are going fast, Science Friday.com slash Chicago.

That's tomorrow night at the beautiful Harris Theater, science Friday.com slash Chicago. Our thanks to our digital producers, Lauren Young and Johanna Meyer for giving us an extra hand today, our technical help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, Jack Harowitz, in New York, and Colin Ashmet Bobbitt and Shelley Steffens

here in Chicago. Thanks to everyone at WBEZ for making our stay so comfortable. I'm I Refleado in Chicago.