SciShow Tangents - Monster Month: Ghosts!

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

It’s ba-ack! Fear Month is back from the dead in a hideous new form: Monster Month! This week we’re busting out the Ouija board and summoning forth some Ghostly science knowledge from beyond this earthly plane! 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: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Bioluminescent/reflective animalshttps://www.owlpages.com/owls/articles.php?a=18https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.0206https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/07/150724-fireflies-glow-bugs-summer-nation-science/Marsh gaseshttps://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i38/George-Washington-Scientist.htmlhttps://www.popsci.com/jack-o-lanterns-marsh-lights/https://discovernjhistory.org/magical-mud-microbes-and-methane/https://www.nj.gov/state/historical/it-happened-here/ihhnj-er-first-science-ex.pdfhttps://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/rocky-hill-experiment/Pepper's ghost illusionhttps://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/the-science-behind-the-pepper-s-ghost-illusion/http://www.theatrecrafts.com/pages/home/glossary-of-technical-theatre-terms/more-about-peppers-ghost/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aekye5/the-science-behind-the-worlds-most-convincing-ghost-effect[Fact Off]Feeling of presence ghost robothttps://www.wired.com/2014/11/robot-ghost/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-robot-messes-with-your-brain-until-you-feel-a-ghostly-presence/Ghost fleas and mercuryhttps://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/ghost-fleas-bring-toxic-mercury-depths-prairie-lakeshttps://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/26294/20200701/ghost-fleas-act-mercury-elevators-bring-toxin-up-depths-lake.htm[Ask the Science Couch]EMF readershttps://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-broken-technology-of-ghost-hunting/506627/https://www.livescience.com/4261-shady-science-ghost-hunting.htmlhttps://io9.gizmodo.com/meet-the-emf-meter-the-little-tool-that-ghost-hunters-5875212 

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly horrifying knowledge scream case, sawing some of the ghoulish geniuses that bring the YouTube series SciShow to life. This week, as always, I'm joined by spine-tingling Stefan Chin. Hello. How many vertebrae are there in the human spine? Ooh, 33. Yeah, that was right.

Oh, really? Stefan, how the hell did you know that? I don't know. That was pulled out of my brain. Maybe I've watched enough ASMR chiropractor videos that I somehow absorbed that information somewhere. Wow. That's the spookiest thing I'm going to hear today.

Stefan, what's your tagline? Rosebud. Screaming Sam Schultz is also here today. Hello, Sam. Hello. And what's your tagline, Sam? Old bowl of cereal. And the scary Sari Riley

is also here with us today. Sari, what's the best gourd? I'm growing a butternut squash in my yard right now and it's very thrilling to see it grow bigger and bigger. So I think that's my favorite gourd right now. I don't know if it's the best, but.

Sari, what's your tagline? A bucket of slime. And I'm Hank Green and my tagline is lips. All lips. Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to freak out and frighten and terrify each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We try to stay on topic, but we're not always great at that.

So if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care. And for this most horrifying month of them all, we're doing things a little differently each week in October. We will be talking about the science related to, inspired by, or just sort of vaguely reminiscent of classic horror monsters. And now, as always, we will summon this week's monster with the traditional science incantation. This week, from Stefan. If you're a Pac-Man without a power pellet, it's time to run away. But if you're the spirit of Patrick Swayze, you can go ahead and touch that clay. We were texting a lot, but then it was unexpectedly done. And a pepper of this type will definitely haunt your tongue. Who are you going to

call if you can't do it yourself? Well, a ghostwriter might be the one who could help. Some sharks below the surface are deep ocean geists, and above are empty ships or towns with none left alive. And if it's you, it might be fun to apparate for your friend, because every appearance is a surprise when you're dead. A story for the children to prickle their hair or an old faint galaxy that might not even seem to be there. If you appear a bit whitish and or a bit see-through, it's likely you'll be described in terms of the things that say boo. The topic for the day is ghosts. We're going all in on the most scientific topic we could think of. Sari, what is a ghost? So in folklore, a ghost is the soul or spirit or some manifestation of someone or something that has died.

I feel like I've seen animal ghosts in stories and media, but not plant ghosts. So there's some line there where like your dog can be a ghost, but your pet fern can't. They're usually something creepy about them. They're portentous. They foretell evil events, perhaps, or guard some kind of secret. Yeah, continue the definition. What is a ghost? They probably have unfinished business.

They probably have unfinished business. They could just be extra dimensional, you know, people up against the boundaries of their universe and our universe, possibly. Right. That's what they are. That seems like honestly the most likely thing, if they were real, that that's what they would be. To bring it back to science and maybe the things that we're going to talk about. So there's the paranormal-ish pseudoscience of ghost hunting and things like that, which we will at least touch on in the Ask the Science Couch section. But also humans describe pretty much anything white or pale or translucent in nature as a ghost. So if it's like a plant that doesn't have chlorophyll and it's

white, then they're like a ghost plant. Or if it's an animal that's kind of translucent because of the environment that it lives in. So a lot of cave-dwelling animals are kind of weird looking to us. And so we're like ghost fish. Did you look up the etymology of ghost? I did. It seems to be pretty much consistent throughout time. seems to be pretty much consistent throughout time. It's from German geist and Dutch geest and Middle Dutch geest with an H.

And they all mean like spirit or ghost and are calculated to be back from a Proto-Indo-European root geist, which is used in forming words involving excitement or amazement or fear. So it's like a combination of spirit-y things and amazement. And now it is time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts with which to torment us, but only one of them is real.

The other three panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact. If they do, they get a sandbuck. If they are tricked, the fact presenter gets a sandbuck. You can play along at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents where we've put up a survey so that you can tell us which you think is the true fact. And now, Sari, it's time for your facts. Tell me about them. In folklore from around the world, people have described floating lights above rivers or bogs

as spirits that are hailing wanderers or trying to lure them to their doom. And they have many names depending on the stories told about them. They're called things like Will-o'-the-Wisps or Boy-ta-ta or Onibi and so on. But among the ghostly myths are scientific hypotheses. And one of these hypotheses came from a science experiment

conducted by George Washington when he was still a general and based in Rockingham, New Jersey in the U.S. and Thomas Paine, who is known for writing political pamphlets in support of the American Revolution. In November 1783, some people, and it seems like mostly New Jersey, like to say it's the first scientific experiment in the newly formed USA. So what did they do to test a natural explanation for these ghostly lights? So number one, Washington had some men capture lots of different animals and release them at a distance while Washington and Payne stood on the banks of the river about 100 meters away. They discovered that animals like barn owls, which have white reflective faces, and clusters of fireflies obscured by some brush seemed to spontaneously glow like descriptions of the Will-o'-the-Wisp.

And of course, they couldn't see other animals like foxes or frogs or chickens that got released into the forest. Number two, they took a boat out and stirred up the mud at the bottom of a river with a stick while holding a lit torch just above the surface. The stirring released gases that burst into flame with the heat source, thus showing that small amounts of these gases could potentially cause the glowing will-o'-the-wisp if they got ignited by something. Or, number three, they splashed water on trees and rocks to mimic freezing rain or snow or frost and create naturally reflective surfaces. reflective surfaces. After many nights of this and going out with lanterns, they found that some arrangements of icy objects would reflect the light in such a way that there seemed to be a ghostly glowing from the distance. Inadvertently, they had recreated a natural form of the pepper's

ghost illusion. So our three potential facts are one, they captured and released animals to see if they glowed from a distance. Two, they used a stick and a torch and searched for trapped gas at the bottom of a lake, which then ignited upon being released. Or three, they splashed water on trees and bushes to create reflective patterns that turned into a basic form of a cool ghost illusion. What is the Pepper's Ghost Illusion? Will you tell me? Yeah. So it's in non-super physics-y terms. It is a way that stage plays got a ghostly apparition onto the stage by using a trick of light and mirrors and a glass sheet, essentially. Okay. You can look up diagrams of it.

I don't want to get into too many specifics. You ever been in a haunted mansion? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you're in the room where all the ghosts are dancing below you? That's a big Pepper's ghost because it's recreated underneath you and then reflected as like a ghostly image in front of you. And there's a big sheet of glass that you're looking through that you're like, that captures the image somehow.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, I know that Will of the Wisps, as far as I know, are like swamp gas created. But I don't know that George Washington figured that out.

That's also like the classic like government agents tell you that whatever alien you saw was swamp gas. So the first government guy was the guy who was like, swamp gas, this will come in handy. Not ghosts.

The US government has discovered that there are no ghosts. The original conspiracy. When did we learn about gases? Did we know that? Oh yeah, we knew about gases. Throwing the animals into the woods one, that one seems too dopey for him.

No, that makes sense. That's like the Noah's Ark approach. I agree. This one does make sense to me. This seems like exactly the kind of thing that some enlightenment guys would be like, hey, we can figure out what Will of the Wisps are. They must be the animals.

So let's just release a bunch of animals so we can watch them. But a chicken? And see if they glow. Who's going to think a chicken is going to be the thing that glows? I don't know. In a swamp? That's how you do science. I guess you got to find out.

A swamp chicken though. The splashing water on the trees does seem like something Sari would make up. I don't know why, but that one feels fake. I'm going to go with the swamp gas one. I'm going to go with releasing a bunch of freaking foxes and chickens into the woods.

I like that one too. Animals. Oh my gosh. All right. Go vote at scishowtangents.org and then we find out. Come back.

Listen to what Sari's about to tell us. What is the true fact? The true fact is the swamp gas on Duggan. How did George Washington figure out Will-o'-the-Wisps and I didn't know that? I was surprised that I didn't know it either. And like a bunch of blogs were talking about of like, oh, yeah, I learned about this in elementary school. I did not.

I didn't grow up in New Jersey. But yeah, there were these myths about flaming water and willow wists. And they just kind of went out to the creek nearby. And Washington and other people thought that the water caught fire or something near the water caught fire because of bituminous matter. And so they just like stirred it around to try and knock up whatever this matter is. And then it caught on fire. They had no idea it was methane gas, like it was methane gas. And we can see this in other lakes. There's bacteria at the bottom that generate it. There was a reenactment on some anniversary,

like a few years ago, where a bunch of people dressed in revolutionary war garb went out to a river and had a torch. And like, there's a picture of them next to some fire. It's very funny. Did it work? Yeah, it worked. They stirred up the methane at the bottom of the river. Why did he care?

Why did he need to figure this out? Thomas Paine came to visit and they were talking about it. And he was like, I don't know, I guess we can try it. Wow. They were just a couple of guys being dudes. Yep. And they were definitely drunk i would imagine how safe is this and can i duplicate the experiment probably like medium safe like not the most dangerous thing you could do well anytime you're in a in a boat you're outside of true safety i agree with this there are youtube videos

of people doing it, mostly scientists, where you just like knock a hole in the ice of a lake where you know there's methanogenic bacteria and stir them up

a little bit and then have fire over it. You would probably want to have some distance between you and the gas, but it's not like you would catch fire.

Like the methane ignites so quickly that it's kind of like a burst of fire. What ignites the will-o'-the-wisp? Like I see like methane bubbles up, but like why does it catch on fire? We think it's methane in combination

with other swamp gases. And that's the key to it. Do they spontaneously combust? Basically. So there's a gas called phosphine. And when it reacts with oxygen, it forms phosphoric acid. And that is an exothermic reaction to my understanding that produces enough heat for it to ignite. So it can spontaneously

combust because there's like chemistry going on in the air. So it just like the microbes are producing a cocktail of gases, basically, some of which can produce a little bit of heat, which can then ignite the more flammable gases. So is there any truth to the obviously very fake throwing animals into the woods? No, like I made it up. That's what the no was. The hesitance in the no was some people have theorized that like there's probably bioluminescence at play in what some people think are will-o'-the-wisps, but they don't appear as spontaneously. And if you like point out a firefly, then people are like, no, that's not the glowing ghost that I saw. It's like plausible,

but they didn't go and throw animals into the woods. I just thought that would be funny. Was the water, the splashing water on trees and bushes just a natural explanation for Pepper's ghost that you thought of? Yeah, I just made it up too. And I read a lot about Pepper's ghost illusions because they're cool. Next up, we shall crawl into our coffins for a short nap. And then

the fact of... Welcome back, everybody. Sam Buck totals. I have nothing. Sari has two. Sam has one. And Stefan has one. But it's time for Sam and me to attempt to get some points because we are going to compete in the fact-off. We've each brought a science fact to present to the others

in an attempt to scare their pants off. The presentees each have a science buck to award the fact that they like the most, and we're going to decide who's going to go first with a trivia question. Okay, the question is, according to a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center, what percentage of Americans report having seen or been in the presence of a ghost?

I'm going to say like 60. Yeah. Just something obnoxiously high like that. I'm going to say 73. Whoa. Yeah, now I feel like I should have gone higher. Oh, interesting. It's 18%.

That's it? Oh! It was also much lower than I was expecting. Yeah, and now I feel like I should have gone higher. Oh, interesting. It's 18%. That's it? It was also much lower than I was expecting. But I guess there's a difference between people who believe in ghosts versus who have reported seeing one. I've seen three ghosts and I don't believe in them. Well, he was right. We were both so wrong.

Hank was closer. All were both so wrong. Hank was closer. All right, you guys. I want to tell you about a spine-tingling tale of that feeling you get when somebody is in the room with you, but then you turn around and they're not there. Because that's the thing that people get. And it's even a thing. It has a name. It's called a feeling of presence. a feeling of presence. And it's a thing that researchers have studied because it is more common in patients with epilepsy or other conditions that have lesions on three specific

different regions of the brain. I would tell you what they are, but like who knows what the difference between these different cortexes are? I don't. So, but the regions we're discussing here combine internal and external signals to help us understand our own positioning in space. So the researchers hypothesized that feeling of presence is our body mixing up these signals, the internal and external signals

that are giving us like an understanding of where we are. So they decided that they wanted to test that. And to do it, they turned to a robot, a ghost robot, if you will. So the researchers got a bunch of participants, and they were not told the goal of the experiment or what they were trying to do. They were blindfolded, and they placed their index finger on a robot arm in front of them. And they could move their hand around, which would move the robot arm. And as the robot moved around, it sent a signal to a robot that was behind them. And that robot behind them would touch their back. And so if they moved their hand from side to side,

you would feel the robot arm sliding across your back. they move their hand from side to side you would feel the robot arm sliding across your back and like it was just as you moved your arm the robot arm moved behind you the sensation was that you are moving a thing and you're basically touching your own back and there was no feeling of presence but if you introduce a delay between when you move the lever and when the thing moves across your back, they suddenly started to feel uncomfortable and creepy. And several subjects described feeling a presence behind them, even though they knew that they were doing this to themselves, basically. Two of the subjects became so uncomfortable, they asked for the experiment to stop. In another experiment, the blindfolded participants were asked to estimate how many people were close to them throughout the experiment, and the people who experienced

delayed touch thought there were more people around than the people who did not experience the delayed touch. So they think that the delayed feedback, there's this disconnect between what your brain thinks is going to happen and when it happens. So in this case, when the brain thinks that the tactile feedback should happen at the same time, it needs to reconcile the mismatch and it like invents a person. Even though

you know what's happening, your brain invents this other person and they are able to induce feeling of presence. This was not just to freak people out. It was also to help understand how hallucinations and sensory motor mismatches that happen with schizophrenia occur. But it is a induction of a kind of hallucination really easily and effectively.

And it makes me want to do it. Because I feel like there's no way to understand what the sensation is actually like unless you do it. I don't know. I'd be curious to know if you like told people to really think about the fact that they were poking themselves and like told them to focus on that. And if your brain was processing that as an idea, if you'd still feel this or if it's just like you're not thinking about anything and then with that little delay you're not really sure what's happening and you're like not putting the pieces together right away and then your brain is like weird things weird things i i think that they that they basically knew i think that the participants knew that like the the patterns that they were

tracing were their own input this the sensation, it appeared from what I was reading, that the sensation occurs whether you know you're doing it or not. And it's just like a thing that your brain does. But I don't know. Like I feel like I need to do it. I need to like get one of these robots to touch my back. I need to set this up. Okay, who's next?

Me. So Hank used the only scientific study relating to ghosts on the entire internet. So I had to make up my own ghost story based on something mildly related to ghosts. So bear with me. So ghosts, unfortunately, ain't real. Probably. They might be. They don't visit people at night for telling death and harboring secrets in the human

world at least but fish in some lakes are visited at night by transparent beings with a malevolent presence and these beings also hold the key to a deadly mystery it's a little fish ghost story for you in 1997 researchers at the university of reg Regina were studying mercury levels in fish in a lake in Saskatchewan. So mercury pollution is a byproduct of gold mining. And when it gets into the water, microorganisms like different planktons and stuff eat it. And then the things that eat those microorganisms get the mercury in their muscles and stuff. And then people can eat those fish and get the mercury inside of them, which is a big problem or can be a big problem.

So anyway, the scientists take samples of fish from lakes to get an idea of the mercury contamination in like a body of water or kind of an area in general. So that's what the University of Regina researchers were doing when they noticed something weird. Fish that were caught at night had almost twice the levels of mercury than fish that were caught during the day. And at the time, in 1997, the researchers didn't ever figure out why that was happening. Oh, wait, let me read what I wrote.

The researchers couldn't figure out the answer to this spooky night mystery. Flash forward to 2020, this year, when another researcher at the University of Regina was looking at the research and the lake and a different organism in the lake besides fish, ghost fleas. So they're 1.5 centimeter long, one-eyed zooplankton, and they're basically completely see-through. And they only travel up from the murky depths of the lake at night.

So during the day they live in the muddy lake bed and they eat other plankton and they basically like eat things and swim around in stuff that is full of mercury. So they suck in all the mercury that managed to get all the way to the bottom of the lake. Then at night they rise from the muddy depths and get eaten by fish that are active at night. And that leads to what this person discovered, the way higher mercury content in those fish. So then since then, I think this phenomenon has been found in other lakes across North America where there are ghost fleas and ecological researchers think that this is like a totally huge mist thing that will like redefine how much mercury we're finding in environments just because we didn't ever think to look at this before so there you go as close to a ghost story as exists in real life a deadly mystery solved

at night by transparent creepies rising from the ground how fast do fish poop like do they poop out the mercury in between night and day no i think they were just different sets of fish like there's night fish and there's day fish because the fish can't see. So some fish can't see well at night. So they don't go out eating these things. And I guess they go to bed or something. I don't know what fish do. But then there's fish that are more active hunters at night.

And they were eating the only nighttime ghost lice. Should I never eat ghost fleas or just these specific ghost fleas? I think if you raised your own in a clean environment, you could probably eat them. Because 1.5 centimeters, that's big enough for you to have as a snack, right? Might be a little too big, honestly. Yeah, you could fry them up. So we've got my fact where a robot can induce the feeling of an outside presence by replicating and delaying a person's own movement? Or is Sam's fact where ghost fleas have helped researchers figure out that nocturnal fish in a Canadian lake had higher mercury levels because of the way

that the mercury settles down in the lake? Three, two, one. Hank? Sam? Wow, I'm shocked. Mine wasn't even about ghosts at all. You told it like such a good ghost story, so I wanted to give you like the A for effort.

And they are actually called ghost fleas. You didn't just make that up. Well, it's time to ask the science couch. We've got some listener questions for our crypt of finely owned scientific minds. Yep, that's me, dead. This is from at questionable. Ken's, what is an EMF reader actually for?

And what is it supposed to do with ghosts? Also got another one from at a list myers who said when did we start associating electromagnetism with ghosts and why who decided ghosts are magnets i think like here's the thing magnetism like electromagnetic fields like it's weird right you know insane compassie are, like it's weird, right? You know, insane compassy are correct. Like it doesn't make, it doesn't make it immediate sense that there's this like weird other force deep in my soul. I'm like gravity, that makes sense. Cause it's, I've experienced it the whole time. Electromagnetism, like it happens in weird places

where I'm not looking and don't understand. Whereas my body experiences gravity it does not experience electromagnetism so i think it's just like it's kind of spooky all the forces except gravity are spooky oh and the only and the strong and weak force like you do actually never experience so this is just like the one force that like is like tangible like we can it's really easy to like see it moving around but also like not something that we directly experience our whole lives with our bodies and so it's a spooky force so it makes sense to me that ghost people are like let's look at this spooky force and then they can be like look a spooky thing happened with my dial like

to me that's all there is to it is like i can measure a thing that's not visible and that means i can correlate it with some other thing is it more likely that there will be like rampant electromagnetic fields in like an abandoned building versus like my house uh probably not i don't know why there would be electromagnetic fields anywhere oh they're in a lot of places electromagnetic field readers measure alternating current specifically and they are supposed to be used for finding radiation from household appliances that shouldn't be emitting them. So a broken power line or a cable that is, for some reason, spewing photons into the air instead. And so I think if there's a broken down house with electricity still running to it, then it'll probably have more sources

of electromagnetic fields than like a perfectly in repair house. But the difference is pretty minor. And some of the models that are most popular in ghost hunting are some of the worst EMF readers out there. And so like you have to wave it around and they can be set off by even

like normally functioning TVs or microwaves or things like that because any pretty much any electronic device can give off electromagnetic waves. And that is possibly why it became part of ghost hunting lore too. Like in addition to it being something we can't see, it's something that is also pretty abundant around us. So if you're trying to look for it and you're trying to look for an unseen thing and you're trying to say that ghosts are everywhere around us, then you can look for something that will be around us a lot. I didn't want to dig into the wire ghost magnetic too much, but there's a guy who sells scientific, in quotes, paranormal kits. And he says that energy fields have some definite connection to the presence of ghosts

and the exact nature of that connection is a mystery. So basically, he wants you to buy his kits and doesn't have an explanation for why electromagnetic energy specifically is connected to ghosts. We didn't have an explanation for a lot of things for a long time, and then we did. So, you know. That's great, Sam.

Great fallacy for a science podcast. If you want to ask a question to the science crypt, you can follow us on Twitter, at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Andrew Zero, at LG Phoenix 99, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode.

Final scores! Sari and Sam are tied for first and Hank and Stefan we came in last with one. And that means that Sari is now in the lead with 68 points. That's close.

One point ahead of Stephen. Still close. And seven, seven points ahead of me. And I'm in there somewhere too. I could still catch Sam. You probably will because you're much smarter than me. First of all, I don't believe that that's true. Second, this game does not test how smart people are.

Oh, okay. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. It helps us know what you like about the show, and maybe somebody somewhere will see it and be like, I want to listen to that. That sounds great.

Second, you could tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and a 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 social media organizer is Paola Garcia-Vieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki 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 coffin to be filled, but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted. But one more thing. So there's a dog in the Amazon that is so elusive that it is called the ghost dog. They're also known as the short-eared dogs, and they're hard to find because they're shy and tend to hunt alone or in very small groups.

So researchers turned to whatever they could find to learn more, including sifting through these dogs' poop to figure out their diet. But one researcher ended up with an opportunity to work with a ghost dog up close and realized the other secret to their elusive nature, tiny testicles. It turned out that the dogs didn't reach sexual maturity until they were three years old, whereas most dogs reproduce at about a year old. And that probably makes survival a bit tougher since more of them die before they're able to reproduce. I guess testicles are pretty close physically to butts, so sure. They were looking through the poop because they were so ghostly. They had to find the droppings but then the extra fun

fact is that they have small ears and small balls that's just extra