SciShow Tangents - The North & South Poles

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

The Tangents crew gets lightly festive as they talk about the increasingly-less-cold tippity-top and bippity-bottom of good old planet Earth!Head to https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents 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!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscriber Garth Riley 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: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]Plant species in Arctichttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21988606/[Fact Off]Old Seeds!https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/120221-oldest-seeds-regenerated-plants-science?loggedin=truehttps://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/4008Camel ancestors living in Arctichttps://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/the-camel-an-arctic-animalhttps://www.sciencenews.org/article/camel-ancestors-lived-arctichttps://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2516https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379111001661#https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/animal-health-literacy/fun-facts-about-reindeer-and-caribou[Ask the Science Couch]Animals/plants in polar night https://www.popsci.com/how-do-animals-survive-polar-night/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/arctic-marine-life-polar-night/474870/https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110526064627.htmhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-are-reindeer-eyes-golden-in-summer-but-blue-in-winterhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982215014323Animals/plants in midnight sunhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2921307/https://www.livescience.com/62870-summer-solstice-animals.htmlhttps://uphere.ca/articles/what-does-24-hours-light-do-animalshttps://www.alaskacenters.gov/explore/attractions/midnight-sun/effectshttps://beyondpenguins.ehe.osu.edu/issue/polar-plants/plants-of-the-arctic-and-antarctic[Butt One More Thing]Poop bacteria in Antarcticahttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25451839/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4908950/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me today this week, as always, is science expert Sari Reilly. Hi. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. And also joining you is, what did you call me, Sam, just now? Spilly coffee boy, Hank Green. Spilly coffee boy, Hank Green. He spilled coffee all over himself in a shoot today and he just spilled it on the floor. I did. You're a big goof.

Well, there's solutions to this problem. Tumblers. Is that what you're talking about? Sippy cups. No, I was thinking about decreasing the number of almost entirely drunk coffee cups on my desk. That would be good. Oh, this is an old coffee cup, is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. May I suggest garbage can?

Yeah. Is that one? Yeah, there's one. It's pretty close, but it's not close enough. But anyway, I was wondering which one of us would be the best grandparent. I think I have too much weird aunt energy rather than grandparent energy. Yeah, you'd be a great grand aunt. Yeah.

Yeah. I drift in every once in a while but i am not good at the the regular things that grandparents are good at like remembering holidays remembering your birthday yeah you gotta be like the like the weird aunt that lives in a hotel like in manhattan like a cabin or a cabin yeah either either the top floor of a building in manhattan that she somehow was gifted to you by by your weird rich aunt you're you're the new weird rich aunt there must always be one moving yeah yeah exactly these sort of like like the weirdest aunt gets this hotel room that's the deal that they have cool i think that i'd like to have sam as a granddad. I think I'd be okay at it. Yeah. This might be foolish.

I feel like I still might be kind of cool by the time I'm grandparent age. So I might give good presents and stuff, which I'm looking forward to giving presents to children because I buy a lot of toys for myself. Buying toys for children, that's even better. It's less weird. Yeah. Yeah.

It's less weird. More socially acceptable. I'm not saying it's weird. I can go up to the cashier at Target, buy something for myself, but camouflage it in a bunch of toys for children, and then they'll never be the wiser. Uh-huh. This sounds like part of your pitch that you should be Santa, really, is what I'm hearing from you.

Yeah. This is all about gifts. You're saying I would be a good grandparent, but I'm hearing- I would be a good Santa. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Well, what about good Santa. Yeah. Huh. Well, what about you?

I don't know. I feel like I'm going to be out somewhere else. My parents are interesting grandparents because they're so active. Yeah. And so it's like, we should go hang out with the grand. And it's like, oh, no, they're in Nova Scotia. Oh, okay. Oh, dad's sailing in New York.

Oh, what the heck? It's like, where? He's hiking in New Zealand. I'm like, oh my God. Will that be you someday or no? I don't know. This is my hope. I hope that I'm like weird like my parents and the grandkids are like, where's, you know, nanny and papa?

And it's like, oh, they're at a painting retreat in the Appalachian Mountains. That's, wow. That's what I want. All right. retreat in the Appalachian Mountains. That's, wow. That's what I want. All right.

Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which we will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner.

Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week, it's from me. It would be pretty weird if you found out one day that floating magnets all line up the same way, some invisible force just tugging on them so the needle won't move while the compass spins.

That'd be pretty weird. But it is how it is. You really can't make up this shiz. And if you follow that needle, you'll get a pole in your eye, a North Pole. Why? Because we said so, that's why. I should say the current magnetic

north pole because the north pole is no longer where it once was and there's the geographic north pole the point around which spins the whole world and correspondingly south poles on the opposite side why because we said so that's why the earth is a sphere so it never stops but it still has a bippity bottom and a tippity top was that last line the first thing you thought of because that's perfect yeah i was like bippity bottom i was like why is like we got a tippity top why is that okay but we don't get but bottom doesn't get a bippity bottom i think this is an important contribution to the english language that you've just made hank i like that yeah i think this is a Shakespearean level contribution

where we will trace Bippity Bottom back to this episode of SciShow Tangents and be like, this dude, really? Okay. Anyway, the topic

for today's episode is not Bippity Bottoms. It's the North and South Pole, which exists? Is there some question about that? I don't know. many versions of them yeah did you listen to hank's poem sam i sure did but also i now hate the north and south pole because researching it was a giant pain in my ass so i don't want to learn anything more about it they're weird. It's a super weird thing. One of the questions I hope Sari will answer is why, is there a necessary correlation between the geographic North Pole

and the magnetic North Pole? Are those things related for a reason? Or could the North Pole, like the magnetic North Pole, just be on the equator? What the heck? I just thought I assumed the spinning had something to do with it. Because it moves around. I mean, I assume, but I'm just hoping that Sarah answers that question for me.

I'll try to answer that question for you. So I'll start with the basics. The geographic North and South Poles are where the Earth's longitude lines converge and at 90 degrees South latitude and 90 degrees north latitude. So they're like on the axis. If you were to draw a line through the earth. Where it spins. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Specifically where it spins. The spinny axis, yeah. Those are the geographic north and south poles. And those are the easiest ones to wrap your head around because it kind of makes sense. Where if you like stuck a stick through a ball. Yeah, like while the axis wobbles. Like we don't suddenly start spinning around a different axis. That doesn't happen. Doesn't ever happen. That one stays the same. Yeah.

The axis can wobble, but the axis is in the same point. So those ones stay the same. And I think are where we got the word pole. Okay. Sure. It's just like we imagined a pole that was going through the whole planet. Yep. All the Greek philosophers and scientists were trying to figure out what the Earth was. And so I think they just drew a picture. Once they figured out it was spherical, they drew a circle. And they were like, okay, how do we divide up this circle? And they were like, well, it spins.

So let's put a line through it. And that'll be its axis. It could have been the tippity top and the bippity bottom if they were a little more creative. Goddamn Greeks. But instead they were like, ah, we have a word polos, which means pivot or axis of a sphere. Oh, all right. So I think more of like it is the point on which the end of the axis on this line that we drew through a circle that we deemed to be the world. circle that we deemed to be the world. But then, as you said, the magnetic North and South poles, as we call them colloquially, which I will get into in a second, are the points in the Northern

Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere where the magnetic field converges. So there's always on a magnet a place where the magnetic field points straight vertically out of the magnet and straight vertically into the magnet. So in the case of the Earth, it's like pointing directly down into the Earth or directly up out of the Earth. And the magnetic north pole is where the magnetic field points down into the Earth. magnetic north pole is where the magnetic field points down into the earth and the magnetic south pole is where the magnetic field points straight up out of the earth and these move around because the magnetic field is caused by molten stuff sloshing around in the earth's outer core and it's not a completely symmetric magnetic field like it is not a perfect sphere encasing our sphere it's like a little wonky so you can't put a stick through the center of the earth connecting the magnetic north pole and the magnetic south pole because they're not directly opposite each other oh okay so i kind

of lied in my poem yeah a little bit i think i said opposite but look it was a poem it's just yeah yeah it's opposite in that they're in different hemispheres and it's opposite in that they are the opposite of the of the magnet i don't think they could migrate all the way to the equator yeah i actually looked this up while you were talking yeah that the the uh because i think i figured the way that the all the stuff sloshes around is heavily influenced by the spinning of the earth. So not entirely, but heavily. So they're influenced by the geographic North and South Poles, but not in any very precise

way that we can predict or calculate. Like we just have to measure where the magnetic North and South Poles are and they move around. And so then every couple of years, a new guy has to go out with a compass and is like, okay, where is it now? And then this is where people like to get pedantic. And I don't like that because it confused me for a lot of early geography. Magnetism. So the way that if you had like a bar magnet in front of you, like I was describing with any magnetic field, there's where the lines of magnetic flux point outward, like vertically outward

and vertically inward. And the direction of that magnetic field defines what the poles are. So like if you have like any shaped magnet, if you just like create a magnet out of your imagination,

by convention, the lines are supposed to point outward from the magnet's north pole and enter into the magnet's south pole okay which is opposite from what i said happens on colloquial on the earth so technically because the magnetic field points straight down into the earth on the magnetic north pole it is by magnetism definitions a south pole what oh boy the north pole is a south pole sarah this should have been your fact i'm definitely gonna make a tiktok about that oh it's just so confusing and not fun okay you can make a tiktok about it i'm perfectly happy

to never say that it's the south pole but it's pretty funny that the North Pole is the South Pole. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, God. If you turn the Earth into the basic principles of magnetisms, it's the South Pole. Great. We just call it the North Pole because it's already north. It's up in there. Well, then why didn't we do it the other way when we made up the magnet convention?

That I don't know. Oh. So we already found out where the word pole comes from. So that's great. You worked it out. I feel like we'd be remiss not to mention Santa, though. What about Santa? He lives up there.

Yeah, he lives at what they call Tippity Top House. Oh, that's a cute name for his house. An evil Santa lives in Bippity Bottom House. Ah. And that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing a game of this or that. So, one of the great things

about the Poles is that they have a lot of great critters on them, and they both are home to blackbirds with white bellies that are popular on the internet and with me. Up at the north, we got puffins that nest on along seacoasts that line the Arctic. And down in the south, you got the penguins waddling across

Antarctica. And never shall the twain meet because there's too much hot stuff in between. So they're isolated, but they converged on this same basic body plan. So today, to honor these two similar but different birds, we're going to play a game of this or that adorable blackbird edition. I'm going to be telling you a fun fact about one of these birds, and it's up to you to decide if I'm describing a penguin or a puffin. Number one, this bird has become an unwitting research assistant by providing scientists with fish samples to study. After hunting, the birds will bring back large amounts of fish for their young, giving scientists an opportunity to take a few to quickly measure hunting, the birds will bring back large amounts of fish for their young, giving scientists

an opportunity to take a few to quickly measure before returning the fish to the birds. They steal them? They give them back. I think puffins

live like up high. I feel like it'd be hard to sneak up on a puffin and steal its fish. Penguins are just like, what's going on around here? So slow.

You could wipe one right away. I'm going with penguin. He's going with pangolin. I'm going to go with penguin too, I think, because they got bigger tummies to carry a fish in. Bigger beaks, more generally. You can walk right up to them.

I don't think you can walk right up to a puffin. They can fly, can't they? Yeah, puffins can fly. Puffins can fly super fast. Puffins can fly, and maybe they would fly away, but the answer is puffins. What? Oh. You both got it wrong.

See, the thing about puffins is that they use their beaks to carry a bunch of fish and like rows of fish in their beaks. And they don't swallow the fish or regurgitate them. They just carry them full on fish. They keep it intact. And when they get home, they store the fish in burrows. So they like have a little fish cache. And then scientists in Alaska's Aleutian Islands decided to see if they could burrow into a few of those for fish science.

And to do that, they set up a little cloth screen in the burrows so that the fish wouldn't go all the way down. And that made it possible for the science to just reach in and grab some fish so they could measure them and see what species they were and the characteristics of the fish. Without the puffins, the scientists would have to go out and catch all those fish the old fashioned way. Instead, puffins do the hard work. And I guess they just scare them away. And they're like, get away, get away, get away. Move off, puffin. And the puffins like, oh, my fish.

Turns out okay in the long term. That'd be so sad. turns out okay in the long term. And puffins can hunt for up to 100 miles from their homes so this can give them a really sort of broad census of fish populations around. As far as penguins go,

this would be much harder to do, especially with something like a king penguin, which can store undigested food in their stomach for up to three weeks. Oh, gross. And you're just looking

at penguin vomit. You can still tell the fish. Yeah, I mean, you do some DNA sequencing, but you're not going to be able to be like, it was this big. That makes sense. All right, well, it's time to give you a chance

to redeem yourselves. This next fact. This bird can be found clearing out the snow in their rocky breeding sites using nature's most versatile tool, poop. As these birds begin to congregate in their nesting site, the combined action of all of them walking around and their poop absorbing the heat helps to melt the snow, turning the area into a welcome home.

So this animal poops on the snow to make it warmer so that it's not so snowy, I guess. My first strategy was to copy Sam because that worked out so well for him last week. It's a flaw in your plan. I don't know anything. I trusted you. You seemed really excited about this. I feel like I see more pictures of puffins on non-snowy rocks. I know some type of penguin poops in a circle around its nest. So there is something to do with that, but I don't think they walk around and poop. So I'm going to go with puffins just based on my personal bias. I think I'm going to go with puffins as well

because I feel like I would have heard that about penguins at this point. And puffins you don't hear as much about. So that's why. Well, in footage collected by a citizen science project called Penguin Watch, which is run by the University of Oxford, you can see Gentoo penguins in Antarctica expanding into a snowy area that over time becomes much less snowy as the penguins and the poop accumulate.

The penguins are probably not doing this super deliberately as they're not exactly like planning to use their poop. It is a thing that just happens. But Gentoo penguins need exposed rocky areas for their poop. It is a thing that just happens. But Gentoo penguins need exposed rocky areas for their breeding. And the poop does seem to help them with that. They got hot poop. Yeah. So do you. I didn't mean for that to be like a commentary on you as a person. It sounded like a compliment. Thank you. Yeah. So poop in your yard and start walking around in those Montana winters. I'll never have to shovel the walk again.

Oh my God. All right. Final this or that. Most birds are already limited to being able to taste only four flavors, bitter, sour, salty, and umami. But scientists studying this bird have found that its palate is even more limited and it can only taste sour and salty. Is it a puffin or a penguin?

I'm going to guess penguin because you can taste, oh, look at this good salty fish or yucko, that's a sour fish. That's all I need to know. Why wouldn't puffins be exactly the same way? I don't know. Maybe they eat berries or something like that. So they want a little sweet. Occasional berry. I'm going to agree with Sari on penguins. They aren't eating berries. Well, the thing you know is that no matter what, y'all are tied. But you also did get it correct.

In 2015, scientists at the University of Michigan studying penguin genes reported that the penguin genome still had the genes for encoding receptors for sour and salty, but they couldn't find any genetic evidence that the penguins could taste sweet, bitter, or umami flavors. Now, this is molecular evidence, not behavioral. It's not clear what drove the loss of these receptors, but one factor could be that the receptor for

bitter and umami flavors don't work very well in the cold. So maybe they wouldn't have done much for the penguins anyway. Plus, penguins swallow their food whole, so maybe there's just not a lot of purpose for the tasting process at all. They don't swallow their food whole, so maybe there's just not a lot of purpose for the tasting process at all. They don't give a heck. You're missing out on a lot with fish if you can't taste umami, though. Isn't that almost all what a fish is?

Well, I mean, you're missing out on taste a lot if you swallow your food like it's a pill. That's true. So that means that you guys have come out of this or that in a tie, dead heat with one point each. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody.

It's time for the Fact Off. It's Sari versus Sam. They've each brought in science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge which one is the best one to turn into a TikTok and award Hank Bucks based on that any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, we have a trivia question. fit. But to decide who goes first, we have a trivia question. It can be hard for plants to live in the North Pole because of the glacial cycles that happen in that cold environment. Most northern flora have been covered in ice sheets and had to repopulate after glacial periods. But some taxa, like the flower Saxofriga cernua, maybe, have done a good job at

recolonization and can be found on up to 60 of the 66 Arctic islands. So as far as we know, how many species and subspecies of Arctic flora are there? I have no freaking clue. I'm going to guess 150. It's basically the question how many different types of plants are there over there. Correct. Yeah. Okay.

Gosh, I'm going to say 500. All right. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Gosh, I'm going to say 500. All right. Samuel is the winner because there are over 2,000, 2,775 described species and subspecies of Arctic flora.

It's a big circle. Yeah. And plants will do anything. They're crazy. That's right. And they're always differentiating. And also scientists are like, I'm going to call that a subspecies. I feel good about that. I'm going to go that a subspecies. I feel good about that. I'm going to go first, I guess.

Okay. Refrigerators. They sure are cold, aren't they, folks? Pretty helpful, those old refrigerators. We want to preserve food for longer than that food would last just sitting out in the non-cold. And I know a little place on planet Earth called the Arctic that's pretty cold, too. You might even call it nature's refrigerator after you hear this story.

In 2012, scientists studying the permafrost in Siberia, not the North or South Pole, pretty damn close, found a cache of seeds 38 meters underground, which they concluded must have been hidden by a squirrel in the late Pleistocene era. Many of the seeds were damaged,

probably by the squirrel, since modern squirrels still like crack open nuts and like break them somehow to stop them from germinating. But upon further inspection, a few of them still contained what appeared to be viable tissue. So scientists successfully germinated the seeds

and grew some beautiful little white flowers, which turned out to be identical to the modern day narrow leafed campion, which is still found in the area. Though the shape of the petals of the old flowers was a little bit different than the new flowers. So in growing these 32,000-ish year old plants, the researchers beat the old record for the oldest still viable seed ever found by 30,000 years. Because the next oldest one was 2,000 years old.

It was a date palm seed found near the Dead Sea. So they kind of smashed that one. I bet that other person was embarrassed. My old seeds is spring chicken. Yeah. Oh, man. The researchers think that permafrost has some special properties that make it extra good at preserving genetic information. Like it has a pretty high and constant concentration of solid ice, which renders

permafrost effectively very dry and very cold at the same time. So you probably couldn't just go burying things in non-permafrosty but still cold places and expect seeds to last for 30,000 years. But scientists think we could replicate those conditions now that we found them to improve cold storage technology, especially in places like seed vaults, which from the way the papers I was looking at were talking, maybe can't save seeds for tens of thousands of years. We're just not sure if they can. The discovery has also led researchers to speculate that there's probably a whole bunch of ancient viable DNA hiding out in the permafrost of the Arctic waiting to be found and cloned into new plants and saber-toothed tigers and whatever else you do with that kind of stuff. Though they recognize that it is a race against time because the world is the way that it is. I like how you disguised climate change, bummers.

Yeah, well, I can say it because everything's melting because of us. Oh, boy. Looking at these Arctic islands right now, and I feel like there's more than 66, but I don't know. When do you stop counting? And also here's Siberia over here trying to understand where the Arctic Circle is. Is it in the Arctic Circle? I hope so. Because Sari told me about this fact, so she's wrong.

Oh, yeah. Seems like it. She's fired for sure were they able to do any like tests to see if like how similar it was like this like identical is it just like from the place to scene to now this plan sure hasn't changed much i think that was the case it seemed like from the place to scene to now the petal shape was like the biggest change that they found. So it's doing something right. Sari, what do you have for us?

So I'm going very festive. So these days, you can't really think about Santa without his reindeer, but that's a fairly recent cultural phenomenon. They were first mentioned in an 1821 booklet and then more prominently featured in the classic poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, aka Twas the Night Before Christmas, and the rest is history. Reindeer are probably holiday season icons because they're large mammals who trot around in snowy northern climates, including the cold, flat shrubland of Arctic tundra and the boreal forests just south of the Arctic Circle. So they just became part of human feasts and traditions. But Rangifer terandus, which is the scientific name for caribou and reindeer, have been around for millions of years, at least since the tail end of the Pliocene, which is not the same as

the epic that Sam mentioned. It's slightly before it, around 2.6 or 3 million years ago. And reindeer weren't the only large mammals in the Arctic throughout the Pliocene. There were also ancestors of other animals like wolves, bears, and camels. According to paleontological evidence, the ancestor of camels and llamas originated on the North American continent in the middle of the Eocene period more than 40 million years ago, before splitting into different species. Over time, some camel subspecies migrated to other continents and the deserts in northern Africa and Asia, where they make their homes nowadays, but we have biological evidence from the mid-Pliocene of Arctic camels. Back then,

the Arctic still experienced cold, snowy darkness, but instead of being all tundra, a lot of it was slightly warmer and could sustain boreal forests much more northward than we see them now. And in a 2013 paper, researchers used a technique called collagen fingerprinting to determine that bone fragments of a tibia that they found in what's now Canada's Arctic tundra were related to modern dromedary camels who only have one hump, and were nearly identical to another bone fragment found in the Yukon identified as paracamelis, which we currently think is an early camel ancestor. So it's possible that a lot of camel features, like long legs and wide feet for easier walking on surfaces like sand, big eyes,

and humps to store fat when food is scarce first evolved as adaptations to arctic environments where challenges like cold snow and sparse food made life tough even in the boreal forest days. Oh, that's awesome. Later, paracamelists wandered across the world, speciated, and found different ecological niches to fill. There's evidence that a North American camel species, Camelops, didn't go extinct until around 13,000 years ago, probably in part due to hunting by humans. And some lived in the Arctic regions of what is now Canada, though maybe not quite in the tundra. But still, this means that there is a slightly alternate version of history where camels,

instead of reindeer, became the abundant, large, hoofed mammal that was well adapted to the sparse Arctic climate. So just for fun, you can imagine Santa's sleigh being pulled by eight graceful camels through the snowy night. Well, Sam, I have terrible news. That's horrible. I hated it. That fact sucked. I wish we had swamp camels. I wish we had forest camels.

We need all the different types of camels. Where did they all go? I mean, they just went to the niches that needed filling, which was desert. Yeah. They were like, we can hang out here. You can do this. We can just live in tundra. Let's stay over here for some reason.

You know, it's interesting why an arctic camel would be outcompeted by a caribou but i but nothing is gonna make my day more than imagining santa's sleigh being pulled by freaking huge long-legged humpbacked big-nosed camel boys yep rudolph the red-nosed camel if sam if you pulled out an early lead there in the in the this or that you would have had a chance because i. Because I do love an ancient seed that is far more ancient than its next of kin ancient seed. But boy. You can make this into a special Christmas episode of your TikTok. It's going to do really well.

And we're going to get a lot of new listeners to the podcast. So that is the important thing. We all win when we have more listeners. Sam, if you do a drawing, you have so much better art skills than me. So if you do a drawing of Santa's sleigh being pulled by camels and tweeting it to be like, this is actually a scientific possibility, everyone will forget that I gave the fact and just be like, oh man, Sam had this really cool drawing that made me remember that camels were in the arctic yeah and then you're using the the white male strategy throughout history of just

like ah i've made the idea slightly better i mean that you were very encouraging there until the end yeah so you slept in a couple insults i'd like to talk about well let me know if you're gonna draw some camels pulling a sleigh you don't know how to draw a camel what me that was the biggest insult in the last

two minutes that's how you actually get him to do it you can't draw a camel and then he's gonna draw so many camels I can draw

eight camels in fact I could draw eight do it right now are there eight reindeer there's nine right yes well nine if you count Rudolph I could draw eight. Do it right now. Are there eight reindeer? There's nine, right? Yes.

Well, nine if you count Rudolph, which sometimes you're not legally allowed to. What is happening? Rudolph's copywritten. You can't just throw Rudolph in no matter how, wherever you want. Yeah, Donner and Blitzen, no problem. But Rudolph, hmm.

Yeah. In fact, you've had to bleep his name every time we've said it, right? Please, it's very expensive. Well, that leaves us with what Tuna has written in the show notes. Episode final Hank Buck scores. Sari, winner, winner. Sam, chicken dinner. And now it's time to ask the science couch, where we ask listener questions to our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds.

This one is from At I May Be Human. Questions to our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. This one is from at I may be human. How do animals adapt to the month long days and nights of the Arctic? Gosh, I don't know, but I know that they do because there's a lot of them up there doing it. Do they can they see extra good? Do they just like hide and cuddle up and not do much? What happens?

Both of those things. So like if you think of like big, fluffy animals, so like musk ox, polar bears, arctic wolves, reindeer, they all just kind of exist around. They still lumber around. They have really good senses like sniffing out either plants under the snow or sniffing out prey that they eat. It's not like pitch black out and the snow is really reflective. So the moonlight still does quite a bit to show them through the tundra. And reindeer have the most exciting adaptation of these

that we know of, which is their eyes change physiology, which is very weird. So in the summer, reindeer eyes are like goldish. And in the winter, they're like a very deep blue. Whoa. Because of the way that they're like the fluid levels in their eyes change. So in the dark, muscles in your irises contract to dilate pupils and allow more light into your eyes.

And so basically the winter forces reindeer pupils to dilate for months at a time instead of just like a little bit because they're walking around during the dark. And that changes the spacing of collagen fibers in the back of their eyeball, and that affects the type of light they reflect. So with normal eyeball space collagen gaps, then it's yellow wavelengths. They reflect yellow wavelengths on this reflective back part of the eye. But when they're constricted together, when the pupil is dilated, they reflect blue wavelengths. Whoa. And like bounce around light differently so that they can see better and specifically see UV more acutely, which you don't want generally. Like you don't want to let in a bunch of UV light bouncing around that can cause DNA damage and cell damage. the wintertime, it's really useful to tell the difference between something that's really UV reflective, like snow, and something that absorbs UV better, like fur or lichen, which they can eat

or like pee to tell where other animals have been. And then, like you said, or like you guessed, some of the furry stuff, like either just burrow underground, like rodents, like voles and shrews, rodents like voles and shrews ground squirrels hibernate under there so they just like eat a lot fatten up sleep and all of these small species that that overwinter um beneath the snow try and minimize their energy usage as much as possible but one of the weird things about the ocean that I thought was worth mentioning also is that light affects the ocean biology so, so much. And we're still figuring out how and why, but we have discovered that zooplankton, so not the photosynthetic plankton, but the stuff that eats other stuff, have biological migration that's triggered by amounts of moonlight during these month-long periods of darkness. So when the moon comes out and it's brighter, they will migrate more towards

the surface of the ocean and presumably be eating, but the researchers aren't sure what. They are also extremely sensitive to artificial light, where even the light of research boats scares them away from the surface because it's too much. It's like not what they're used to during a natural, like really dark winter. And they'll go down deeper into the ocean to avoid it. And then the flip side of that with like the long, full light days is that as the nights are ending and you're getting back into normal day-night cycles, that's where plants start flourishing the most, where they're like, oh yeah, time to photosynthesize, time to grow again. But there hits a point, especially when you look at human circadian rhythms,

where we don't do so well if we don't have light-dark cycles. Like if we're just exposed to light 24 hours a day, then that becomes really hard. So some species burrow down. So like the Arctic ground squirrels, they burrow down to create their own darkness. Like we would draw shades over a window when we're ready to sleep or use artificial lights inside. But then there are other animals that just seem to throw away circadian rhythms altogether and just don't go on day and night cycles. So we've seen like birds do this, bats do this, even like reindeer when it's bright out.

Then instead of following circadian rhythms, they follow another kind of rhythm called an ultradian rhythm, which I think is just a bucket for anything that happens in less than a 24-hour period. So like, you get a little hungry, you get a little thirsty, and they just nap whenever they feel like it during the rise and falls of various chemicals in their body. And we don't understand it quite well, but they create their own sleep, wake, hunt, et cetera cycle when it's light all the time because they need rest, but there isn't

a natural light-dark rhythm to create that for themselves. So they got to create it on their own. What's weird about this question and not something that I thought about is the importance of light cycles. Where I feel like everyone talks about the adaptations to the cold and even we did in our facts. And you're interested in how do they survive cold ocean waters or adapt to cold temperatures. But really, it seems like the weirder adaptations are to the fact that the light cycles are all off. Yeah, you have to like deal with tremendously varying light cycles and also live for long periods of time with no sunlight, which is how all of life happens. Not all, but almost all.

And so like, how do you have an ecosystem when nothing is literally nothing is growing? Yeah. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at MightBeJoe, at SpaceHikes, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show

and you want to help us out, yeah, it's really easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShowTangents where you can become a patron and get access to things

like our newsletter and our bonus episodes, which are a lot of fun. We always have a little bit of poop and a little bit of pee. You always have a little bit of poop.

I work really hard. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you pee. You always have a little bit of poop. I work really hard. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful, and it also helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Forgot this time. 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 Paolo Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti,

Emma Douster, and Alex Billow. 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. Humans weren't necessarily made to live in the South Pole, but people do anyway, at least temporarily, mostly for science reasons.

Like, for instance, six Japanese men who lived there for three months in 2013 investigating meteorites. And during their stay, they saved a sample of their own poop for every month that they were there for analysis. for every month that they were there for analysis. Their poop showed that after one month in Antarctica, five of the six men had lost bifidobacteria from their gut microbiota. Bifidobacteria have been associated with health benefits from reducing constipation to fighting cancer, so those results don't sound great.

But after returning home, the men's numbers got back to normal eventually. Ultimately, their lives were really different in Antarctica compared to Japan, so the poop differences could have been due to any eventually. Ultimately, their lives were really different in Antarctica compared to Japan. So the poop differences could have been due to any number of factors, from cold to psychological stress. But that's just another reason to be glad

you're not listening from Antarctica, unless you are listening from Antarctica. In which case, what's up? Hey, how's it going? I hope your poops are okay. Eat some yogurt, guys. I gotta stress you. I love that it was like one of them held onto him.

Five of the six. But one guy was like, of them held on to him five of the six but one guy was like I will have the good bacteria