SciShow Tangents - Ducks

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

Ducks! Basically a joke of an animal, if we're being perfectly honest. They make silly noises, they waddle around, they are extremely cute and goofy looking, and they love to swim around in big piles of money! And look, you might see the title and think 'a duck isn't science.' Well i've learned a thing or two from those eggheads on the science couch and I can definitely say that you are wrong! It turns out, everything is science! Seems like a cop out, but it's true.Anyway, we sincerely hope everyone out there is doing well and staying safe! Love you guys! Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!  While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreen If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Definition] Duck matinghttps://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2009.2139https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000418https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2009.1159[Truth or Fail]Spermhttps://www.livescience.com/1279-rival-sperm-hook-cooperate.htmlMallard Billshttps://www.livescience.com/13681-duck-ejaculate-sperm-antibiotic-beaks-110412.html[Fact Off]Duck Imprintinghttp://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/getting-ducklings-row-look-inside-animal-mind-2/http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/getting-ducklings-row-look-inside-animal-mind-2/Duck hearinghttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-09/uod-wdd092518.phphttps://www.udel.edu/udaily/2018/august/graduate-student-works-on-training-ducks-hearing-fishing-nets/https://www.usgs.gov/centers/pwrc/science/air-and-underwater-hearing-abilities-seabirds?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects[Ask the Science Couch]Quackssounds: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Mallard/soundshttps://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/local/2019/03/04/ask-scientist-ducks-quack-several-different-reasons/3009779002/https://www.ducks.org/conservation/waterfowl-research-science/waterfowl-vocalizationsSyrinxhttps://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/bird-voice-box-one-kind-animal-kingdomhttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/12/oldest-fossil-of-birds-voicebox-gives-new-hint-at-soundscape-of-the-cretaceous-syrinxDuck quack echoessounds: http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/acoustics_info/duck/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3086890.stm[Butt One More Thing]Fly that only breeds in duck poophttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-species-fly-found-breeding-central-park-duck-droppings-180965118/https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/13411/element/2/12/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week I am virtually joined by Stefan Jay. Hello, I have joined you from my own home. I can see you on my computer screen. Normally, you get to see me in person. Now you have to be satisfied with pixels. What's your tagline?

A whiff of elderberries. Sam Schultz is also here. Hello from the virtual realm. What's your tagline? Feeling normal. Sari Reilly also is joining us right now the virtual realm. What's your tagline? Feeling normal. Sari Riley also is joining us right now. Sari, what's your tagline? Blanket forts ahoy.

I saw your blanket fort on Twitter today and I was extremely excited. And I know that it doesn't look professional, but to my audio brain, it looks extremely professional. I'm like, yes, that's exactly what you should do. And none of the rest of us are doing. So if I got a bunch of room noise, I apologize, but I couldn't be bothered. Everybody, welcome to SciShow Tangents, where every week we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging from previous conversations, we won't be great at that. So if the rest of the team deems

the tangent unworthy, we'll force you to give up one of your Sam bucks. Tangent with care. And now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from Sari. On Donald, on Daffy, on Howard and Ketchup, on Darkwing, on Plucky, on Peckle, you betcha, floating on water to dig through the muck, looking for grasses or small worms to pluck. There are so many species of the humble duck. What they have in common beyond body and neck is aquatic behavior and a bill to peck. With your epigel gland, they dab oil and preen, coating their feathers with a waterproof sheen. Strong muscles they have to flap wings and take flight,

and nictitating membranes act like goggles for sight. A comb-like mouth thing helps them filter feed, and curly Q phalluses affect how they breed. So we can love a pond with ducklings or a good Twitter thread, but for their safety and ours, don't just feed them bread. Oh, be careful. Feeding bread ducks Twitter can really get angry. Oh, really? Yeah. There's a bunch of people who like to feed bread to ducks and other birds and then get really mad at people who tell them that they are villains for feeding them bread.

But Sari was correct. Don't just feed them bread. It's okay for them to have some bread. It's not great if they just have bread, which can happen if a duck finds a source of bread that is everlasting. They will choose to eat just bread if you allow them to. I guess ducks are just like us. What's a ketchup duck? Oh, yeah, that's a great point. You did say ketchup, and I did for a moment think,

that's not a duck. You did say ketchup and I did for a moment think, that's not a duck. It is a duck. It's a duck in Animal Crossing that's red and has a little tomato stem. Her head looked like a tomato. We love ketchup and Animal Crossing is coming out in three days. So we've got to get ready. It'll be out by the time the episode's up. Yes.

You will never be able to find me again. I'll be on this island. Me and Sarah will have quit our jobs in three days. So, sorry. Good. Well, it's time for video games, you guys. There's no doubt about that. So, obviously, we are not in the same physical location because we are social distancing, as we all should be right now, if we're in a place with active, novel coronavirus. And what a wild moment. But I am very glad to talk about ducks today. So, Sari, what is a duck? Well, it turns out a duck is a lot of different things.

There is a family of water birds called the Anatidae, which includes ducks and geese and swans. And there are a bunch of species within that family that are ducks. But not all of them. Because geese aren't ducks. Are geese ducks? Geese are not ducks. Swans are not ducks. But they're pretty close. They are close. Is it one of those things where they're just not

true ducks? But you can call them a duck? Or is it the other way where you wouldn't call them a duck, but they kind of are. Like a lot of moths are actually butterflies, but they just like look like moths. So we don't call them butterflies. I think there's enough functional differences between these birds and anatomical difference that they are separated into different taxa. I think there are things that we call ducks because we see them sticking their butts up in water and they're like eating the ground stuff that are not ducks so like loons or other birds that look dalinules coots yeah

those kind of things that sound fake but they're real birds not ducks okay do geese and swan have the corkscrew dicks they have dicks so okay okay a lot of birds which is not something all birds have yeah yeah cloacal kissing so they kind of like smush their holes together and then smooch and then exchange genetic information but certain birds like ducks have evolved actual penises to penetrate and have in a penetrative sex and it's mostly because of an evolutionary arms race. I don't know. I feel like everyone on Twitter asked us about duck sex, but everyone asking about it means that they've read about it already. But yeah, ducks have a very intense, like 40 centimeter long corkscrew phallus. And then females have a like a vaginal chamber that's corkscrewed the other way

or has dead ends in it to make it harder for uh full erection and ejaculation and scientists have studied this by like going to duck mating farms and having ducks get really aroused and then basically mate with a plastic tube of different shapes, like a straight plastic tube and a curly Q plastic tube and a other direction curly Q plastic tube and be like, oh, it's harder. And so they just think it's a way to prevent female ducks from having unwanted sex. So with a male that they don't seem fit to have eggs with. Boy, it sounds complicated to be a duck, but it also sounds complicated to be a duck scientist. You just have to get your plastic tubes ready, I guess. Yeah, you have to have a lot of different kinds of plastic tubes. You also

have to go home to your family at night and they'll, what'd you do at work today? Well, you know, same as usual. Let's dinner. So a goose is not just a big duck, which I did Google, is a goose a big duck? And Google did Google, is a goose a big duck. And Google agrees that a goose is not a big duck. There are definitely things that are ducks, and we know what they are. There are species that fit into that. There's a clear classification, which is nice. A clear delineation between duck and duck.

Yeah, that's true. Do you know where the word duck comes from? Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. It comes from Old English deuce. Like drop a deuce. D-U-C-E. Yeah, which is literally a ducker, which comes from Old English dukan,

which is to duck or dive. So the duck was named after the action. And they were like, oh, what's that bird doing? It's ducking. And then they were like, ah, it's a duck. What the heck? Yeah, I don't really think of what ducks do as ducking, but I can definitely see the connection between a dive and a duck.

And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists, it's me, has brought three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The rest of you have to figure out, either by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. If you get it right, then you get the Sam Buck. If you are tricked, then I get the Sam Buck. Everybody, are you ready for my duck facts? Sam?

Yes. I'm ready. I didn't know I had that audio confirmed. We already talked a little bit about duck sex. So don't worry, there's more. We have for you today the duck microcosmos crossover that nobody asked for. Duck sex is infamous. It's got corkscrew penises.

It's even got occasional necrophilia. I don't know if you guys have read that scientific paper, but how could you avoid it? And sometimes the real concern isn't the duck you see, it is the microbe you don't. Which of the following is a real story of ducks and sex and microbes? Fact number one, many birds, including ducks, use smell to attract their mates. A smell that is driven in part by the residence of their microbiome. But female ducks also have a way to discourage unwanted male suitors. The northern pintail duck has devised

its own unique strategy, mimicking the smell of imminent death. After mating with their selected partner, the one that they liked, the female northern pintail will then rub their tail against the pickerel weed plant, and then prospective suitors who smelled them would then be turned off and not interested. And that confused scientists until they discovered that the scent of the pickerel weed plant mixed with the female duck's natural oils created a body odor that resembles that of a duck who has been infected with a potentially deadly bacteria. Fact number two. The spirochete bacteria is a spiral-shaped bacteria often found in mud and in water, but they've also been found hitchhiking their way from male to female ducks via the sperm.

Scientists have observed the spirochete Brachyspira pilosicoli hooking to an individual sperm cell. And while many spirochetes are pathogenic, B. pilosicoli has taken a different path. It aims instead to help its hosts, kind of, though, of course, for its own benefit. course, for its own benefit. After latching onto the sperm, the spirochete uses its flagella to propel the sperm, helping that individual sperm move more quickly to the egg and out-compete other sperms so it can land that bacteria in a new host, which it can then colonize. Or, fact number three, female birds have a tendency to pick mates with more lively ornamentation. Mallards, of course, are no exception. Female mallards tend to select male mallards with more richly colored bills.

But this is not simply a matter of female ducks picking out the most handsome duck on the block. Many animals produce sperm with antimicrobial properties, with antimicrobial properties, and it turns out that a well-colored bill is a handy marker for just how capable the male mallard's sperm is at killing bacteria. So male mallards with less colorful bills produced sperm that was less able to kill E. coli, making their sperm potentially more damaged. So fact number one, the northern pintail duck can discourage male suitors by mimicking the smell of imminent death by rubbing up against a pickerel weed plant. Fact number two, scientists have seen a spirochete that hooks on to a sperm and then propels

it to outcompete other sperm. Or a well-colored bill is a handy marker of how bactericidal a mallard's sperm is. Are bacteria spiral-shaped? Yeah, spirochetes are. That's realistic. But then maybe Hank just picked this one because it's like the duck that's a spiral, so then it's a spiral bacteria,

then we're like, oh yeah. They have nothing to do with each other. You don't need to have a spiral bacteria to fit into a duck vagina. Just for clarity, they're very small. They can go into any vagina they wish. I have built duck puppets in my life. You have built duck puppets?

For SciShow Kids. And I feel like I remember researching what color Mallard's bills were and that being important somehow. But I cannot remember how so I'm gonna guess that one is a lie just because I can't remember how but I don't think that was it

I feel like that one also has some elements of truth in it I know that their feet change color throughout seasons like duck feet because they can like cut off circulation to it which is how they can walk on such cold ground, and that changes their feet's color.

But that has nothing to do with bacteria and nothing to do with the bill. But the first one also sounds fake to me, because I feel like I've heard ants that do that or something that smells dead. There's also corpse flowers and stuff. I like it, though. It just says like a,

like an easy thing to do. Rub your butt with a plant and then people will leave you alone because they think you're sick. Are there animals that use plants like that? So we've seen in some primates them like using something as a mosquito repellent, like squishing beetles or something like that. I don't know about other animals brushing up against plants. It makes sense, though, because they could smell it out. Yeah. But maybe that's too many steps of logic to be like, when I rub my butt on this specific plant, people avoid me.

Are ducks smart? Yeah. I mean, ducks are pretty smart. Most birds are fairly smart in terms of animals. But also, it tends to be when animals are using plants, they're not thinking about how the plant is useful. They might be. Primates, certainly.

Dolphins, yes. Some animals, yes. But usually, it is like this strategy has worked, and so this instinct has been developed. I've looked into the eye of a duck and it seemed to understand me. So I think it's pretty smart. It's a good gut level reaction. They just get such a bad rap in cartoons.

I feel like they're pretty clever in cartoons. There's no way Scrooge McDuck could collect all that money by being a duck. Oh, I forgot about him. Ducks are generally fools, I feel like, though. Yeah, they could be generally fools, but still financially literate. Which, you know, compared to me okay i'm gonna go with the the pickerel weed plant i'm gonna go with the spiral sperm one but the spirochete bacteria hook it up to the sperm i'll go with the the colored bill equals killer sperm okay we're spreading them out you're're giving me no chance to get three points is what happened.

And the actual answer is the colored bill makes more bacteria-killing sperm. So apparently, lots of semen has antibacterial properties. And I guess for obvious reasons, the bacteria can cause potential mutations to the sperm they can also of course kill the sperm and then that those mutations might be passed on to the next generation so it's good to not have that and some scientists and to do this they like they had to use what's called cloacal massage to gather a bunch of samples of duck sperm and then they just compared the brightness of the bill to the ability of it to kill E. coli and found that there was a correlation to those two things. And there's not like a direct link.

It's not like one means the other. It's that like a healthy bird is both able to have a brighter bill and produce more spermicide in its semen. So there's a number of other things that will probably also be appealing and high quality about that potential mate. It's a hell of a duck. Just more scientists studying duck sex. We can't get enough of it. As for the other facts, birds do sniff each other to choose their mates, but this thing

was made up. And then, no, spirochetes are spiral-shaped bacteria. They do not hook up to sperm and probably wouldn't be able to help a sperm. They just sort of like go off to the left more than they would go straight. But this was based on the fact that mouse sperms do sometimes hook together to move faster as one. So, if there's like 20 million sperm and like 20 of them are like let's work together you know one in 20 is a better chance than one in 20 million.

That's how lottery pools work. That's right yeah everybody hooked together. Are some sperm just more predisposed to be like selfless? I don't know I did not look deeply into that I was just like oh that's interesting and then I was like ducks ducks ducks. So yeah I don't know how,

why they apparently hook together, but they do seem to move faster when they do. Alright, so I got two sandbox and Stefan got one. Next, we're going to take a short break. Then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back. Sam Buck totals. I've got two. Sari and Stefan are tied with one.

And Sam has nothing. But it's time for Sam to try and make his way back in the Fact Off. Two panelists have brought science facts to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. The presentees each have a Sam Buck to award at the fact that they like the most. And here's how we're going to decide who goes first. I have a question for you. Give me an answer. How many days is the incubation period for mallard duck eggs?

Okay. I think I actually know this one oh wow sam thinks he knows this one does that mean i should go first or that you don't know what does game theory say in this situation let's have stefan go first two weeks 14 days one month 30 days 30 or 31 sam is it february or march it depends on which month it is, I guess. 29 days sometimes. Well, Sam is closer. It was 27 to 28 days.

Oh, so February. So Stefan was farther off. Why do you know how many? Hey, I can tell you right now how I know that. Yeah. There is a pretty common trope in cartoons where a duckling will hatch and then think the first thing that it sees is its mom. And you might think that this is cartoon logic, but because real ducks are ridiculous cartoon

animals, it is a real phenomenon. It's called imprinting and it happens to some degree with lots of animals, but it's really pronounced with baby ducks, geese, and chickens. And so the way it works is during the first two or so days after a baby bird hatches, after it's been incubated for 27 days, it fixates on moving things in its environment and those objects kind of etch themselves on the bird's brain. So if everything goes according to plan, it'll be looking mostly at its mom and its siblings walking around. So then it'll be able to tell its family apart from other duck families

and follow them around and stay out of trouble. But these kinds of baby birds, like in cartoons, can pretty much imprint on anything, and scientists have been using that to explore just how capable of abstract thought animals might be. So in the 70s, Conrad Lorenz was the first person to figure out that imprinting was mostly a visual thing and not just instinctual, and that you could kind of trick the bird to imprint on pretty much any moving object.

And this discovery actually won him the Nobel Prize for tricking a bunch of goslings into following him around. Then in the 90s, a test was conducted where chicks, like baby chickens, imprinted on a red cube. And then following that... Did it move or was it just sitting there? I think somebody was like holding it and moving it around or something. Oh, no! So then after that, they showed them other shapes and cubes of different colors and let them pick which one they wanted to follow.

And they would always follow the cube no matter what color it was. So this showed that chicks were capable of generalization and they could make small leaps of logic about who the best person to follow was. So this discovery was apparently a big deal in the world of bird cognition. And researchers are still trying to figure out, find the limits of how capable they are of abstract thought. So in 2016, they took a bunch of newly hatched ducks

and they showed them pairs of moving shapes. And the shapes were either exactly the same, different colors or two different shapes and so they imprinted them on the moving shapes and then they showed them two other sets of shapes and gave them the choice of which one to follow and neither of the two new sets was identical to the set that the ducklings imprinted on but one of the pairs had the same relationship to each other as the pair that they bonded with. Right. So, if the ducks imprinted on two red circles, then they were shown two purple circles and

then a blue circle and a yellow circle, they would always follow the purple circle, for instance. Or if they were shown a square and a triangle, and then they were shown a matching set of two different shapes, and then a non-matching set of like a diamond and a rectangle, they would follow the diamond and the rectangle because they were different. So researchers figured out that this meant that ducklings didn't just see like two red circles or a square and a triangle, but they could understand what same and different meant. And they could use those like distinctions to make decisions about stuff. So there are examples of primates and other types of birds that can do same and different, but they have to be trained a lot.

And ducklings are even better at understanding same and different than human babies are. Ducks are so smart. I love that. So ducks are very smart. The smartest of all babies, at least. It makes me very sad for these ducks, though. It is a little sad. My mommy is the concept of different.

It's just an idea. Just a lot of orphan ducks wandering around out there. It's okay. They grow up and then they don't need it anymore. Do we know anything about whether imprinting on other animals that are not ducks or other objects, is there like an evolutionary advantage to that? Like do ducks often get adopted by other animals or something?

I think it's just like an accidental side effect of the general imprinting process. I don't think they get adopted. They do. There's those geese that got adopted by that plane. Oh, I forgot about that. Is that far from home? Is that what that one's called?

Yeah. Plane bomb. That's true. But I would imagine a lot of other things that would adopt a baby duck that wasn't their own would eat the baby duck. Yeah. Or be like, you're not my my baby even though i'm a duck yeah there's like there's a pretty small list of things that could be a baby duck's mom that isn't a duck that wouldn't eat

the duck and it's like plain red cube and that's it yeah or a no Nobel Prize winning scientist. Yeah. All right. I love that fact. Good one. A duck's best friend is his concept of sameness and differentness. Stefan, what do you have for us? So in commercial fishing, there's a thing called bycatch, which is like anything that you catch that's alive that you weren't intending to catch. And that could even be like juveniles of a species that you're actually fishing for, but you don't want the juveniles, you just want the adults. Right, it's like when you get curly fries at Arby's,

but there's accidentally like one real regular fry in there. It's like, okay, but it's not what I ordered. Like it's a pretty big problem with fishing. I was reading about like shrimp trawling, I guess is the worst offender. And on average, you catch almost six kilograms of not shrimp for every kilogram of shrimp. Wow. That's so much stuff. Which is ridiculous. And so different fishing methods will require different solutions to

like mitigate that. So gill net fishing is a method where they just have this wall of netting that hangs out in the water and like the holes are designed so that a fish can get its head in but then gets stuck and can't get back out but a lot of marine mammals get stuck in those nets also and so one of the ways that they've developed to deal with that are things called pingers which one fish one fisherman called oversized hot dogs because that's kind of what they look like. They're just these, they're not that big, but they're bigger than a hot dog, I guess. But they're just little devices that have a speaker, basically, that pings different frequencies to try to deter certain animals. Like they're super loud, and they play different tones. And so like with

cetaceans, like their range of hearing is very high, like much higher than humans. And so these pingers can play really high frequencies. And that seems to be very effective at deterring them from getting in the nets. And so we've been using those for the past couple of decades, and they've been really effective at deterring marine mammals. But people also want to see if these can be used to deter seabirds like diving ducks, because seabirds are also threatened by fishing. They estimate hundreds of thousands of birds get caught every year in fishing equipment. The gillnet fishing in particular seems particularly bad for like diving sea ducks.

And so some people are wondering if we can use these pingers that are on these nets already to also deter birds. But we don't have a good sense of like what ducks underwater hearing abilities are, like what frequencies they hear. And so researchers at the University of Delaware in collaboration with the USGS and the US Fish and Wildlife Service are trying to figure that out. They're testing this on several different species of ducks, and they take them from birth, and they have them imprint on the researchers so that they can study them without stressing them out too much.

Okay, good. And they're basically doing what is very similar to when you do a human hearing test and you play a bunch of different notes, and then it's like, okay, I can hear that one, I can hear that one. But in order to tell what the duck is hearing, they have to go through a whole process of training them.

They have to get them to a point where when a light turns on, they will dive. And then while they're underwater, they hit a button that indicates, okay, the duck is underwater. And then they play a sound. And if the duck hears a sound then it's trained to go back to the surface and hit a different button and then it gets a reward so it's a very like complex this is wild why don't you just play them a sound see if they run away that's what you

want to scare the duck well you can drop that in their suggestion box but i think in this case like we're getting a sense of like the over like we're mapping out their overall like hearing it's not just like okay these things are making them run away so that whole process takes a long time and the master student who's like heading up that research was saying that it does take a long time but the birds are surprisingly trainable so i think we think we've confirmed that ducks are super smart. But they found that between these different species of ducks, they seem to share a common range of auditory sensitivity from about one kilohertz to three kilohertz, which is not as good as... So like, apparently fish have terrible hearing. They can only hear, most fish can only hear up to one or two kilohertz, which I did not realize.

Just for reference, I guess humans hear up to about 20 kilohertz. And so like whales and dolphins go way above that. And so they have a lot of like frequencies there that they can play with for these pinger devices. But here, because ducks range sort of overlaps with the top of fish's range it's like a little bit trickier to figure out if they can use the pingers but this is sort of like first steps in exploring like mapping out ducks ear abilities and then seeing if they can help reduce all the birds that are dying in fishing nets and stuff. Yes, it's the ducky here gnome project. Okay.

Was that like a human genome project? Yeah, that was supposed to be like a human genome project. Oh, that was very bad. You got to get out of your house, Hank. You got to take a little walk. So the facts we have to choose from are ducklings can imprint on anything, so scientists use that to study whether ducks

could understand concepts like same and different and they can and they found that their mommy is is a concept or stefan's fact scientists use the ability of duck imprintation to study the duck ability to hear of different ranges so we can try to develop duck pingers. And we're still in the mapping phase of the ducky hair gnome project. It's got to be a better, something better than that. I don't think there is.

It has nothing to do with the genome. Like there's so many other science projects. It's like the microbiome and the collectome and the connectome. Like we just make up words. Yeah, I kind of like it now. The second time you said it, I liked it.

Okay. I'm on board. Sari and I now have to choose between the Ducky Here Gnome Project and My Mommy is a Concept. Three, two, one, Sam. Sam. Stefan, I'm glad to know what pingers are. And you have enriched my world with that knowledge.

I did not know about those until today. But the fact that an idea can be imprinted on rather than an actual object is freaking wild. All right, everybody. It's time for Ask the Science Couch, except that it's mostly Ask the Science Blanket Fort today. We've got some listener questions for our blanket fort of finely honed scientific minds the question comes from at andrew t her how do ducks quack also do duck quacks echo i slightly modified that question just because i like it that way better how do ducks i had never thought about this uh obviously lots of lots of birds weird noises, so it's just another noise, but it is a pretty specific noise.

Sari, I have no idea what's up with duck quacks. Did you figure anything out? Sort of. So, I listen to a lot of duck quacks, so much so that the cat that I'm co-working with kept looking over at me as I was listening to duck quacks. So the quintessential duck quack is made by female mallard ducks. Okay. And it sounds like this. Okay, yeah. That's a quack.

Solid. That is a silly noise. Pretty standard quack. That's like your bread and butter quacks. And they'll quack for a whole bunch of reasons, like when they're separated from their partner. But male mallards make like a raspier sound and like other ducks don't even make quacks at all. They make like clicking sounds or like weird honks or other things. So this is a male mallard duck.

Oh, yeah, that sounds smoky. Sensual. It sounds kind of like grumbling old men. Well, it sounds way more like Donald Duck. They sound pissed. Yeah, they usually are. So I guess the question is, is like, would you call it a quack still? Like people who listen to bird calls seem to think it's like slightly less of a pure quack than the female mallard. The reason for these quacks I think is the reason for any bird sounds. I couldn't find any specifics like what is vibrating. But instead of a larynx like mammals or reptiles or other things, birds like ducks, in addition to a larynx, have an organ called a syrinx, which is lower down in their chest, like closer to the lungs. So they still have a larynx with hard membranes that are the vocal folds, which make vibrations, and they can make sounds with those.

But they can also make sounds with a syrinx, which is closer to the lungs, and it's like a bony structure surrounded by an air sac and it's like a resonating chamber, which is how I think birds can make so many different noises because they have these two different vocal boxes that can make sounds. So it's not just mallards that quack. I don't have this like totally wrong in my head. Other ducks quack, but it sounds further away from like the pure quack that you think of as like duck sound. And do they echo what is that

all about so i don't know if any of you have ever heard this myth but apparently there's a myth that duck quacks don't echo no they do echo they're made of sound yes um and so they echo yeah i feel like it's something cowboys were like telling each other around the campfire billing yeah no honestly it sounds like something that somebody credible said on the radio in 1955, and then it's just become a thing. Right, mm-hmm. So, like, sonically speaking, people have studied this and found that, yes, duck quacks do echo,

and they think it might have something to do with, like, the length of the sound. So, like, the way that a duck quacks with a long, like like at the end of it can mask echoes that are bouncing back because echo is just a sound reflection. But a researcher named Trevor Cox at Salford University Acoustics Research Center, who normally studies like auditoriums and things like that, did an experiment with a duck named Daisy. He made Daisy quack in an anechoic chamber, which is one that doesn't echo.

And it sounded like this. Okay, good. Very short and sweet. But then they made Daisy quack in an echoey chamber and it sounded like this. That sounds like a freaking echo to me. Just like very spooky, like the duck has come to claim your soul. So there is audio online to prove that a duck quack does in fact echo. And then the sad ending to the story is that at the bottom of this article,

it said Daisy was kindly lent to us by Stockley Farm in Cheshire. This is a working farm open to public. Unfortunately, Daisy has been eaten by a fox, but her daughter lives on. Oh, no. Which is just so sad, but also really funny that they included this at the bottom of their sounds. Just in case you were wondering.

Yeah, I mean, that sounds like something that they would say, those people who are trying to convince us that duck quacks echo. And they're like, ah, but Daisy actually never existed, it's but Daisy actually never existed. It's all lies. How suspicious.

If you want to ask the science couch, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Sarah Mies, at Flux Filter, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode.

Final, Sam Buck scores! Sari and Stefan tied with one. Hank and Sam tied in the lead with two. Oh. Yeah. For the season, Sari is still in the lead, but only by one point. It's very close.

In fact, I think that it goes 34, 33, 32, 31. I am last, then Sam, and then Stefan, and then Sari. So, it's anybody's game at this point. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. First, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show and it helps us get the word out about the show.

You can also tweet us your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. That's going to be a mess. It doesn't work quite as well over the internet. Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. Sajotangents is a co-production of Complexly and the Wonderful Team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. And we couldn't make any of this

without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Turns out duck poop is a breeding ground for a previously unclassified species of fly, first described in 2007 but with a full genetic analysis done in 2017. It's called Thamira lomani after an entomologist at City College of New York because it was first found in Central Park on duck poop. And it's probably pretty rare in natural environments but thrives in public parks where people feed ducks and there is a ton of poop.