SciShow Tangents - Marsupials

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

G'day, mate! This week, we’re taking a trip Down Under (and to South, Central, and North America) to meet our weird mammalian cousins with built-in cargo pockets, the marsupials! Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsA big thank you to Patreon subscriber Eclectic Bunny for helping to make the show possible!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: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:Antechinus matinghttps://www.wired.com/story/antechinus-climate-change/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-a-little-mammal-has-so-much-sex-that-it-disintegrateshttps://www.livescience.com/51083-photos-antechinus-new-species.htmlhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-17/search-for-endangered-antechinus-after-bushfires-on-gold-coast/12564958Alaskan marsupial fossilhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-02/uoaf-ndm021819.phphttps://phys.org/news/2019-02-ancient-night-marsupial-months-winter.htmlhttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14772019.2018.1560369https://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app52-217.html  https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/documents/files/PublicRoom_AK_Dinosaurs-on-NorthSlope_booklet_2018.pdfhttps://www.npca.org/articles/1822-the-only-marsupial-in-u-s-national-parks[Ask the Science Couch]Pouch cleaning https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/science/how-do-female-kangaroos-keep-their-pouches-clean.htmlhttps://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/08/05/1168902.htmhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5339227/[Butt One More Thing]Opossums and smelling deadhttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544902/facts-about-opossumshttps://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/opossums-so-darn-ugly-theyre-adorable.htm

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me as as always, this week is science expert, Sari Riley. Sari, did you know that a cup of coffee has as much caffeine as four Coca-Colas? No, I did not know that. That feels like quite a bit of caffeine. Yeah, which tracks for me, because sometimes people will be like, well, so you can't drink coffee. You drink Cokes all the time. You don't drink four Cokes at once. Who drinks four Cokes? Anyway, I'm trying to stop drinking Cokes because it's a ridiculous amount of pure table sugar to be putting into my body.

But the problem with that is that I need the equivalent amount of caffeine, which is difficult to get other places. That's just a me problem. How are you doing, Sari? Oh, I'm doing okay. I think I've thought more about caffeine in the past one minute than I have in the past year. I don't use caffeine in any way. I just, I'm tired all the time. I would love to see caffeinated, Sari. That seems like it would be a trip. I got this unsweetened tea at the store, and that's twice as much caffeine as in a Coke, so I've drunk half of it.

And I'm going to try my very hardest, just pure mental strength to not have the rest of it. We're also joined by Sam Schultz. Hello, Sam, our resident everyman. Hello. Here on SciShow Tangents, we get together and we try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts. And we try to stay on topic while we're doing it. But sometimes I'll just rant about caffeine instead.

Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which we will be awarding as we play. And at the end of each episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from sam there once was a kangaroo from perth who had quite a strange way to give birth the baby crawled out and up to her pouch and once there grew in length and in girth there once was a wombat from brisbane whose poop shape you might think would cause pain.

He put his butt in the air and pooped out a square and said, now I have extra dice for my board game. Wow. Because they're cubes, isn't it? There once was a koala from Brisbane. Shit. I used Brisbane twice. You just realized. Amazing.

Oh, no. Who didn't have a very good brain? I can't even change it. He hung out in trees and ate poisonous leaves, but everyone loved him anyway. Hopefully everybody loves me anyway. Everybody loves you anyway. Okay, my last one. Okay.

Is it from birth? No, this one's really different. Okay, I'm sorry. Is it from birth? No, this one's really different. Okay, I'm sorry. In Kentucky, a possum did consider why she had to use a pouch to grow her litter. Her friend's kids all came out ready to run about, but hers looked like beans, so she was bitter.

And our topic for the week is marsupials. And if I was a possum, I would be like, how on earth did I get stuck giving birth this very old-fashioned way? Yeah. When all of the people, all the squirrels and skunks and foxes and everything else just do a birth totally normal. Mine's a lot of bubble gum. Well, Sam, if you could write just 30 marsupial poems we could bind them up into a children's book and okay well i'll have to tweak a couple of them yeah maybe

that one koala one so uh sari what is a marsupial well i feel like i don't really need to do my job because you already did it they're They're a type of mammals. It's their taxonomic grouping that's pretty well-defined of animals. We realized after we sorted mammals into groups that we couldn't just use the class, order, phylum, et cetera. We needed to invent new layers to group them together because there were too many differences between them. So they're in the inf class marsupialia and they do what you said in your poem they give birth to

basically what we would consider premature babies but in marsupials they're normal because their placenta doesn't last through the term of like a other male. So they do have a placenta. It just doesn't do the whole thing. Mm-hmm. Oh. I guess it's not a true placenta. That's what biologists like to put before.

They like to put true before a word if it means that it serves the full function that we've observed. But they have like a placenta-like organ, but doesn't allow for a long developmental period in the womb. So marsupials give birth and then their little bean babies, not to be confused with beanie babies, crawl up or around or through their fur to the pouch where they latch on and are protected while they develop a little bit more. Oh, life is so weird and wonderful and gooey and pink. But we do know why they're called marsupials.

It just means having a pouch from Latin marsupium, which means pouch or purse, from the Greek marsipion, which also means pouch or bag or purse. So they were like, look at those animals. They got a little pouch. And then they're called bag animals. Not very imaginative, but. Is there anything else that comes from that same root? I'm so, I so want to know, but no, and I'm not finding anything.

So this, this word held on to do exactly one thing. Like we remembered marsipium or marsupium just long enough to be like, I found a bag animal. Now, I'm sure as you all know, it is time for our first game. I am going to be subjecting you to a round of truth or fail. I have three science facts for you, and only one of them is true. They're all about marsupials, and you have to decide which one is the true fact. Not only are they all about marsupials, but they are all about marsupials evading parasites.

So there are behaviors that are either innate or taught that can help animals avoid parasites, such as one of the following strategies employed by the rednecked wallaby. Which of these strategies is the one? Number one, wallabies have big feet, and those feet help them jump and thump around. And those big feet are also big targets for worms. And while many animals turn to grooming to get rid of potential parasites, wallabies take things one step further by combining their grooming habits with the art of dance. Wallabies groove their feet by hopping into mud and then jumping out and thumping around on rocky ground. The combined mud and movement helps to clean and protect the wallaby feet from potential invaders. Or fact number two. Now, a good way to avoid gastrointestinal parasites is to try and

steer clear of poop getting on you and then eventually from being on you into you. So that's especially important when you're eating. But that is hard for many herbivores and wallabies are no exception. You eat stuff that is on the ground. You have to eat a lot of it and there's always poop all over the place. So instead, wallabies are selective

about the poop they will eat near. Wallabies have been observed preferentially eating near kangaroo poop over the poop of other wallabies, a strategy that allows them to avoid eating other wallaby-infected parasite species. So they're thinking, I guess, the kangaroo poop is less likely to have wallaby-infectious agents in it. Or fact number three, just like we all learn behaviors to avoid getting sick, wallabies pass on certain lessons to their young.

One important lesson is to avoid the berry of the B. r. d. a. r. e. a. longifora, which is, I have no idea if I've done that right, which would be a wonderful treat for wallabies, except for the parasite that often infects them through the berry. Wallabies have a tool for helping newly independent youngsters avoid that plant.

And that tool is vomit. Adult wallabies will vomit near the berry plant making it unappealing to their younger counterparts training them

to stay away. Mom. Yeah, I need somebody to puke in my Coca-Cola so I stop wanting it all the time. I can do it. I just ate a lot of goldfish crackers, so I'll be real orange. So we have dance out the parasites, picky poop evasion, or vomit training. Which is the fact that you think is the true fact. Here's my logic on this one.

Foot parasite, I would think it would get inside your foot pretty fast, so you'd always have to be dancing in the mud. False. Number one, false. Number two. Well, we can't dance that much. That's ridiculous. Number two, if a wallopie can get it,

then a kangaroo can get it and vice versa. So I think they could get sick with the same stuff. False. Ow! That one's right out too. Yeah.

The last one, it's funny. So I think it's true. Puke on those berries, mama. But I don't know. I'm going to listen to what Sari says first before I really decide.

Oh, I thought you were just going to go for it. I think we have to adjust our feelings of gross to animal feelings of gross. Oh, shoot, you're right. Because I guess I don't know about mammals, but birds puke up food for their babies. Yeah, but that's food. But it's still like pukey a little bit. I guess it doesn't have gastric acid or whatever in it, but.

I think you're right though. I feel like mammals aren't too put off by other mammals puke or their own puke. Yeah. They might be like, oh, there's some extra food over there. I'm going to go eat my mom's puke and then eat the berries. A berry seasoned with my mother's puke. The finest delight. A delicacy.

Uh-huh. Like dogs eat their own puke all the time. They like puke it up or like cats do. And then they look at it and they're like, oh, food. They're so dumb. Oh, shit. They're all wrong then. Yeah, so they're all false. That's all I wanted to prove is that they're all dumb.

Safe poop. I guess I don't know enough about interspecies parasites to logic my way through that one scientifically. As far as the dancy, the happy feet, I think they could probably create a protection with the mud, like a layer, like a shoe.

That's what I imagine at least is like they get the good stuff on there and then they pat it around and then you're good. You're like set for a couple of weeks. So you don't need it all the time. Yeah. I'm going to go with,

God, I'm going to go with the poop-eating one. You convinced me. Poopy, poopy, poop. Yeah. I hope I didn't convince us both out of the correct one, which is, but I'm going to go with the mud dancing. Sam Schultz is a winner! Scientists from the University of Melbourne published a whole study to go with the mud dancing. Sam Schultz is a winner! Scientists

from the University of Melbourne published a whole study, and it did a bunch of research on wallabies' fecal aversion dining choices. One of the things that they did is they put, you know,

wallaby poop around a bunch of food, and they put kangaroo poop and they were five times more likely to choose the kangaroo poop food than the wallaby poop food. Another thing they did is that they fed wallaby meat to dogs and then scattered that poop around

and the wallabies would also avoid that poop, the poop that contained their own, the flesh of their loved ones. What a horrible experiment they did. Whereas dancing, Sari, I'm sorry, they do thump their feet on the ground to warn each other about predators, and it's cute. But they do not, as far as we know, dance at all. And if they do, it has nothing to do with parasites. And finally, the vomit one is based on a really interesting fact.

Some carnivorous marsupials would eat these cane toads and that was very bad for them. And so they had to teach them to not eat these cane toads. And they did that by making sausage out of- Wait, who's they?

Humans? Humans, yes, scientists. So, and they did that by making a toad sausage laced with nausea-inducing chemicals. And the sausages were successful in getting some of these, they're called quolls,

to stop eating the toads. But I don't know if that helped them avoid the toad population overall. And scientists have been exploring other strategies to get quolls to stop eating cane toads, including breeding quolls that don't like eating the toads. Wait, are cane toads invasive?

Did you say that? I think that they are invasive, but they are just not healthy for them to eat. That makes more sense why they'd be so concerned about these guys that they were making them sausages. But otherwise, it seems like a lot of trouble to go to. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It's like, just let it eat.

Just let it, it's going to learn somehow. The dogs are bad. But I guess if we're, if we helped introduce the invasive species somehow, then yeah, probably fix that and give them their sausages. Yeah, so the cane toads are poisonous to the quolls. And I have to say, I don't know if I'm saying quoll right, but if you just Google Q-U-O-L-L, you will find an animal that maybe you have never seen before, but you should because they're cute. So now we are headed into our break with Sam leading Sari 1.29. After we're back, it back. Sam and Sari have both prepared a science fact in an

attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge and award Hank bucks any way I see fit. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. Here it is. The wombat is a nocturnal Australian marsupial. We've just talked about them.

It's famous for being adorable and for producing cubic poops. An adult wombat can defecate between 80 to 100 boxy turds in a single night. What is the high end of how many poop dice a wombat will roll out in a single bowel movement? I think five. A clean Yahtzee of poop. That seems like a lot of pooping.

Just think about like your bowel movements. You don't get a lot of pieces of poop with one maybe i don't know you don't actually know anything about me so no i don't but also just think about your bowel movements don't you poop 40 times a day or whatever not that many but well i'm not a wombat but but just like thinking about, I guess there's no comparison. That was my logic to get to five. Sarah's logic was how many times a day do I poop? About 20. Yeah. Now that I work from home, no one has to know. I could be pooping and podcasting at the same time.

Oh, no. So they're either pooping slowly all day or a few times at once. I think they probably, maybe they do like some weird thing and they do like one every time. And they poop 100 times a day. That's too much. No, no, no. They do two every time and they poop 50 times a day. They're just walking around.

Poop, poop. That's my guess. Two. The answer is, and I'm sorry that I gave everybody such a hard time about this, eight is the upper range for the number of boxy turds, but it's four to eight boxes per bowel movement. That's a lot of poop in. That's right in that perfect poop zone. Well, okay, I'll go first.

All this episode, we've been talking about existing species of marsupials. There are hundreds scattered across South America and Australia, and then there's the lone Virginia opossum in North America. But 69-ish million years ago, it was a whole different story. A lot of late Cretaceous North American mammals were pediomyids, which are small to medium marsupials that have just kind of been lumped together in this category because we don't have much fossil evidence to work from, mostly their teeth. And according to paleobiologists, the little cusps or pointy bits on mammalian teeth are pretty unique in size and shape and number for different species. So that's how we can tell that we're probably digging up marsupials.

And in February 2019, a paper was published that announced the discovery of the northernmost marsupial species ever documented named Unua Komis Hutchisoni. And I think before that point, we assumed Virginia opossums were the most cold-hearty marsupial of past or present. They trekked up to southern Canada, but not much further because it's too chilly and the food is too scarce. And the reason that marsupials ended up in Australia is because South America, Antarctica, and Australia continentally were close enough together and joined even. So they just moved that way, moved south toward the warm. And then when the continents split apart, then they ended up where they are. But anyway, in the 1980s or so, we started flushing out the Arctic ecosystem that lived on what is now Alaska's North Slope with dinosaur fossil discoveries from unique duck-billed

dinosaurs to Tyrannosaurids that haven't been found anywhere else in the world. And now we're adding mammals to that Arctic picture book. Very small mammals because Euh hutchisoni was probably like a mouse-sized opossum kind of according to the tiny like sand-sized teeth and jawbones that paleobiologists painstakingly sifted out of river sediment and inspected under a microscope. They think that this marsupial probably ate insects, may have lived underground, but most curiously it was adapted to survive through dark winters, like four months of darkness at temperatures of around 42 degrees Fahrenheit or six degrees Celsius or below. And these are all speculations from the researchers, but they're important biologically because somehow a bunch of small marsupials survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and we don't know how they did it. So did they burrow to stay cozy and then that helped them survive the meteorite crash somehow

before they migrated south? Or what other behavioral secrets might they hold? So even though dinosaurs are the flashy discoveries, we still have so much to learn about mammalian ancestors too. Boy, they were grain of sand size because they were that small? Yeah, that's like how small their teeth were. How do you even know to look for that? sand size because they were that small? Yeah, that's like how small their teeth were. How do you even know to look for that?

That's what, that's a lot of sifting, Sam. They do a lot of sifting. That's the main thing paleontologists do, is sift. So I look and see a pile of sand and they look and see a pile of teeth, perhaps? Well, they see a pile of sand with maybe one tooth in there and then they have to look closely under a microscope to tell whether it's rock or tooth that's wild you gotta get some algorithms to do that for you

they just got undergrads and grad students i think for this paper that's what it said it seemed like very tedious and a lot of people came together same what's what you got for me hey so marsupials are already pretty weird but there's one particular species in australia that seems to be engaged in an evolutionary arms race that could be described as sexually assured destruction this is the horny one i saw it and i was like no i don't want to talk about this but sam no such thing the antikinus is a little marsupial approximately the size and appearance of a mouse it basically just picture a mouse and that's what you're what you're looking at uh it lives mostly in eastern australia and it basically screwed up royally while evolving

and also has terrible luck so antikinus populations that live in the same area have synchronized mating seasons of just like two weeks, basically. So the mating seasons coincide with the availability of the insects that they eat, which are really plentiful just during like a very short amount of time where they live, but are super scarce otherwise. And each female can only have one litter per mating season because their babies have to be in their pouches for four months. mating season because their babies have to be in their pouches for four months. So basically, the females need to have their babies at exactly the right time to have enough food to feed them for the four months. So they're working with like a very strict timeline. So what this means, though, for the males is that they have to run around for a few weeks every mating season and find as many females to mate with as they possibly can to up their chances of actually

having offspring. And each mating session can take up to 14 hours, but I couldn't figure out why it took so long. It just does. And also on top of that, since females mate with lots of males every mating season, males with more testosterone had a big advantage. So over the course of time, antikinus with really high testosterone levels got selected for. So the testosterone level across the whole species went up and up and up until they all basically had too much testosterone. The heightened testosterone messes with the off switch for cortisol in their brain. So while they're in mating season and really excited, their system just gets flooded with it and never stops going into their body basically. And cortisol is a stress hormone that I think has something to do

with your fight or flight response and adrenaline. So too much of it surging through your body is really stressful and bad for you. And by the end of mating season, after tons of 14-hour sessions of sex, male antikinists have stress-poisoned blood and internal bleeding. They start losing their hair, they go blind,

and they metabolize their own muscles so that they can keep running around and finding more females to mate with. bleeding they start losing their hair they go blind and they metabolize their own muscles so they can keep running around and finding more females to mate with and then at the end of all that they all die like literally every single male antikinus dies after living for one single year from birth to mating season i mean right now that doesn't sound too bad like it sounds bad for the individual but it doesn't sound like it's like a species-wide like kill switch no but there is kind of a like a problem to their lifestyle which is that they are extremely inflexible like they they can't respond to environmental stresses very well so they are currently getting their asses kicked by climate change like i think a lot of species disappeared in the brush fires because they live in really small areas. And there's a new study from last

year that showed that as temperatures have gotten warmer in Australia, they are not going into hibernation anymore, but there also aren't the bugs that they eat. So they're basically just like starving to death on mass or like will eventually in the very near future. So pour one out for the Antikinus because I think they have like one of the worst lives I've ever heard of any animal having. I die of horny. It's not great. It's not what you want, but there are definitely these sort of like evolutionary roads that are just dead ends. Like you head down and

it's like at the end of this process your species will go extinct but the evolutionary pressure is to continue going down the process and so once they get that far down the road they can't come back and then they go extinct and that's sort of like uh that is just a bad side effect of of natural selection i guess bad is a value judgment. It is a thing that can happen with natural selection. It's a little glitch in the system. Yeah. And so I now have to choose between

Sari with scientists recently discovering marsupials once lived in the Arctic, which is amazing, and Sam with just like stress-induced horny deaths of a tiny, tiny tiny very cute little mouse marsupial and I don't know if anyone will be shocked to hear that

Sam is the winner of the episode Sam hasn't won in a while and so he's like where's the horniest fact where's the weird sex fact I know how to win, Hankover. I don't usually like to besmirch myself by talking about carnal pleasure, but...

Yeah, you really locked in the victory with that fact. I didn't dare go to those steps. All right, and that means it's time to ask the science couch. So we've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds, by which I mean a virtual couch that has not been a real couch in over a year now. It's from at Matt Neo 27, who asks, do they have to keep their pouches clean? And if so, how do they clean them? This is a good question. I have seen a tick tock of a man who has a kangaroo and he's like, here's what a nice clean pouch looks like.

And then he like yanks it down and puts his cell phone in there. And I'm like, OK. No. Did you ask permission first? Yeah. He seemed to think that there were clean and dirty pouches so that they can definitely be dirty and they can definitely be clean. According to this Australian I saw on a app i will confirm that they do get dirty because babies are gross there's just like a lot of like a lot of crud

that comes off of babies are they pooping in there yeah they're pooping they're they're peeing they're just like shedding skin they're like maybe they're puking i don't know babies do a lot of like ejection of of stuff yeah so they they do need to clean their pouches and they're actually two different strategies so you might be able to guess one of them there are pouches that face upward like kangaroos so babies have to climb up and then in but there are also pouches that face downward like koalas and wombats they have pouches where they if you just imagine like an upside down kangaroo pouch, they like crawl in from the bottom. Why don't they just build a little tunnel inside of themselves? This is so ponderous.

Yeah, if you can do the pouch either way, it feels like you should be able to figure out how to just connect it on the inside. But look, I'm not evolution. So things are hard. Look, I'm not evolution. So things are hard. So kangaroos clean their pouches kind of like that man invasively did, except for instead of sticking a phone in there, they stick their own heads in there and they just lick it.

In classic mom behavior, it's like, oh, my baby made a mess. I'm just going to lick it. Put my head into my Balenciaga and just lick it out. Yeah, I guess that's the equivalent is if you like have your fanny pack and you just open it and like ah there are some crumbs down there and i'm just gonna lick it wait what's a balenciaga it's a brand oh i thought it was part of the body okay yes kangaroo pouches also known as balenciagas it's a beautiful word for them it is look who's to say that like language is fluid can we call them balenciagas from now on yeah and someday sari in the future will be like the word balenciaga for kangaroo pouch came from

this podcast so so that's like upward pouches uh Sorry, excuse me, Balenciagas. Those are upward Balenciagas get cleaned just by licking. And then the backward facing ones are a little bit trickier to figure out. We just haven't studied them as closely. I think also kangaroos just have really large Balenciagas. So it's easy to watch them clean it as opposed to things that live underground. So for wombats, for example, facing backwards is an advantage because when they dig with their front paws, they don't like kick dirt into their pouch and like suffocate their baby or just like accumulate dirt in there. But koalas are usually dry and crusty, but during breeding season, they like secrete some sort of like clear cleaning fluid that just like dissolves the grime. And I imagine it kind of like an OxyClean commercial kind of, except it's just made from their own body where they secrete something.

And then all of a sudden, all the crusty stuff just washes away and researchers as of 2004 were trying to study and wash out koala pouches to see what was in that fluid and identified some proteins but not any like key antimicrobial ones that they found but then in a more recent review paper they they, I don't know, apparently have been looking into other pouches in both wallabies and wombat pouches. Looking into. And have found antimicrobial ones. But it seems like a pretty big question mark. There's some secretions involved to counter the baby growth secretions and maybe mimic some of that placental nutrient exchange protein exchange that goes on

in placental mammals but just like within the pouch you know i always get really worried when scientists are like looking into fluids of animals because i i'm afraid gwyneth paltrow is going to hear about it and because like the you know there's like royal jelly is like a special like the special secretion and like and now there's like you jelly is like a special like the special secretion and like and now there's like you can get royal jelly it's very expensive and i don't know what it's supposed to do but like it sounds really cool and it like helps a bee become a queen bee so like i guess it's probably good for my nasal health so and i'm worried that like someone will find out about like the special secretion of koala pouches and be like, I know what we can do.

Turn this into a health drink. Why do I have to worry about this? I mean, you already had the idea, so you could do it first. It's true. Then people have to worry about you. And I won't have to drink Coca-Cola anymore. No, you can drink the koala goo. And your insides will be clean as a whistle.

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That helps us know what you like about the show and also helps other people know what you like about the show. Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto.

Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish and we couldn't make any of this, of course, without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, But one more thing. Opossums are well known for playing dead when faced with a predator. And if their flopping over and staring lifelessly weren't enough to sell the ruse, they also secrete a smelly, greenish-colored mucus from their anal glands to smell extra dead.

Cool. Put it in my new health drink. Yeah, mix it. It's a mix-in. Maybe it tastes good, kind of like beaver anal gland secretion. Yeah, mix it with some gin. It's called a Virginia Creeper if you mix opossum butt stink with gin. It looks like you're looking this up.

You're not, are you? This isn't real? No. Okay. Who knows what you did in Florida, Hank? Yeah. To convince you, you know, it's what the teens in Florida used to drink.