Stuff You Should Know - Animal Migration: Where's that gnu gnoing?

Episode Date: November 2, 2010

When you think of animal migrations, you probably picture thousands of animals thundering across the savannah. But where are they going, and why? Josh and Chuck explain why and how animals migrate in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast edition of the podcast.

Man, we should change the name of the show to like stuff you might want to know if you're, you know, if you care about being an enlightened individual. We need a colon in there. We've been using colons a lot lately. Yeah. Let's not change the name. We should change the name to just try and find a pulse. That's good. Thank you. Chuck. Yes. Have you ever seen an animal migrate? I see my dogs migrating to the food bowl at five o'clock every day. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that is kind of migration. Yeah.

Yeah. Actually, I see them migrate to me at like 430 and start staring at me like, you know, you got to feed us right. Yeah, we talked about that and can dogs perceive time? Oh, that's right. Sure. I have seen animals migrate on the YouTubes. Oh, yeah, it's gorgeous. It is. I mean, it's unbelievable. It is, especially depending like the moderate butterflies to everyone's like, that's the money migration. Man, not to me. Have you seen the bats, the fruit bats in Zambia? That's pretty amazing. It is amazing and like horrific if you don't like bats.

I like them. The mammalian ones like the elk to thousands and thousands of them steaming across the tundra. And the caribou is another one. Wildebeests also called Gnu's. The Gnu? No Gnu's is good Gnu's, but Gary, Gnu. Did you know that? I did know that. The wildebeest aka the Gnu is also known for its huge migration. And that doesn't always go very well. Did you know that? What with the Gnu? Uh-huh. 2007? No, what happened?

In a river in Kenya in 2007, 10,000 wildebeests drowned at this one spot in this river. It's awful. Because one of them went in and got swept away and the rest of them were like, oh, we went in. Well, I guess we're all just crossed. But that's really sad. Yeah. One percent of the population of the African wildebeest population died in that river that day. Quite a mess too. I imagine so. I mean, that would probably dam up the river, I would think. I would think so. 10,000 Gnu wildebeests, I mean, they're about four and a half feet

tall at the shoulder. They're big. And yeah, 10,000 of them, that's a lot of biomass. It's like when a whale gets beached. Do you remember the one in Oregon in the 70s? Yeah. That they blew up with dynamite? Yeah. Yeah. They're footage of that on YouTube as well. Is it really?

Yeah. Wow. So that's migration, Chuck. You got anything else? Listener mail. It just blacked out. Josh, migration. We should define it for a foreign friend. Exactly. It is a large-scale movement of an animal species. Mm-hmm. And typically it's because of a few things like weather or mating or food trying

to find resources. Yeah. So when you said that you see your dogs migrate to their food bowl every day, that does technically count as migration because most of the reason things migrate is food. And then the other ones are generally secondary. Josh, what are the three types of migration? There is irreversive migration. No. Now, eruptive migration? Yes.

I just made up a word. Irreversive. And not eruptive as in a volcano, but IRR, repeative. That's right. And that doesn't follow a pattern. Usually it kind of, basically the species is making it up as it goes along. Right. The wildebeests are known for eruptive migration because they follow water. And wherever the water is, they're going to it and apparently drowning in it.

And they said too in this article, which is crazy that they will, their migration patterns can be based on like thunder clouds. Well, yeah, if they hear thunder. That's so awesome. They're going to go to the thunder because that's where the rain is meaning that's where the water is. That's just so cool how smart the stupid looking canoe is. Big dummies. Didn't Gary Ghanou wear a turtleneck and a jacket?

I think it was a dickie. Josh, another one is complete and partial migration. Obviously complete is when the entire species migrates. Partial usually happens when you have such a range in your species that some of you live where it's nice and warm. You don't have to go anywhere and some of you live where it's cold. And the barn owl is a good example of that one. Partial migration is basically just a species showing off how much range it has.

Right, right. Like some of us don't even need to migrate. Exactly. There's also altitude, altitudinal migration where you're a billy goat up in the Alps and it starts to snow and get a little cold for you. So you move a little further down the mountain. Yeah. Bing bang boom migration done.

And the final one, I think I said three. This is more like five is the saddest one of all. And that's removal migration. And that is when wherever you're living for one reason or another, whether it's deforestation or drain swamp land, swamp land or climate is just not the place to live anymore. And you just pack your bags as a species and leave never to come back. It is the saddest migration.

I think so. So Chuck, that's the types of migration, the three slash five types. Three to five. Yeah. And what we're finding is from the outside, it looks like people who study migration, before we studied migration, it was just like, oh, like the animals are moving again. But people have given it a lot more evaluation over the last decade, century, year two. And they're finding that there's pretty much, well, like we said, food, breeding and mating. And climate, climate.

Those are the reasons. Yes. And they all equal survival. Yes, that's the whole point. Yes. Right. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs.

America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that.

The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?

They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. That you call a civil asset for. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, y'all. This is Dr. Joy Horton Bradford, host of the award winning weekly podcast, Therapy for Black Girls. Our incredible community of sisters has been building the Therapy for Black Girls podcast for five years running. And over that time, we've published over 250 episodes and gained over 18 million podcast downloads.

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Five years down and many more years of work to be done. Join us now by checking out the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You said that partial migration is based on range. Yeah. What animals need is food. You got to have food to survive. And for the most part, that's why animals migrate is for food.

Yeah. And what's interesting too is it's not always a migration to like, oh, let's go find, because there's tons of food over here. Sometimes they're smart enough to know we'll deplete all the food here if we don't move around some. And we want to survive as a species. So we're not going to take all the food here. We're going to migrate over and kind of spread it around so we can all live. Right.

That's pretty cool. Water also falls into that category of survival as well, like the wildebeest which we were talking about, right? Yes. And then there's breeding and mating as reasons for migration. Whales are very, very famous for migration for both actually, for feeding and for breeding, right? Right. So they migrate to the poles in the summertime.

Thousands of miles. Yeah. They migrate to the poles in the summertime to go feast on krill, but their calves, when they're born, don't have enough blubber to survive in the polar climate. That's adorable. So they go toward the equator, the tropical climates to mate and reproduce. Do you ever look at animals and think they figured it all out and humans are just messing it all up? Yes, frequently.

I say that all the time to myself. The Chinook salmon, Josh, is one in relation to mating and breeding, and they are famous for heading out to sea as adults after they're born in the river. And then later in life, they swim back upriver and they lay their eggs at the same hospital where they were born, the same little river spot. Right. Because they're going to be eaten in the open sea, right? So they go back to where they were born because it worked for them.

Well, that's exactly why they do it. That's amazing. Yeah. Because they know that this spot is because I'm alive. It's safe. I know this is a safe spot for me. Plus, I haven't been by there for a while. I need to say hey to the old neighborhood.

Exactly. See what's going on. Check your talk about removal migration. There's a good example of what happens as a result of removal migration in the whooping crane, right? This is the best story. Do you like this one? It's really awesome. So the whooping crane in the United States went down to 20 birds in the wild for a little while.

That's not the good part, by the way. Right. That's the sad part. That's the funny part. Here's the good part. The eastern population of the species was completely wiped out. And the western population was pretty much keeping the species alive. So I guess to oppose removal migration, is it ruckers?

I believe it was. Ruckers. Ruckers or anthologists really started to take a real shine to the whooping crane and wanted to get the population back up. And so they started breeding them in captivity. The problem is the annual migration of the whooping crane is about 1200 miles. They go from the north down to Florida. They learn that.

That's intergenerational knowledge, right? Yeah. So the ones in the east, they have no idea how to get from where they live during the summertime down south in the winter. Yeah, they don't know the route. Because those people who used to, or those cranes that used to have that knowledge, died out, right? I know.

It's so sad. So tell them what they're doing, Chuck. Well, this is the cool thing. As sad as that is and as down on humans as I am, there are humans that do amazing things like this. They basically dressed up in whooping crane costumes from the time these little chickies were born to acclimate them to the adults and the sound of an ultra-light aircraft from the time they were little ones.

They got them used to that sound. Then when the time came to migrate, Josh, the birds, a guy got into an ultra-light aircraft. Dressed as a whooping crane. Dressed as a whooping crane and flew from Wisconsin to Florida and led these birds and basically said, this is the way to go. This is how you're going to survive. How awesome is that? It's pretty awesome.

And it worked. So far. So far. What they're hoping is obviously in generations to come that they have learned this. And they'll be able to pass it down. Yeah, exactly. That's so awesome. That's pretty rare, actually, that we understand why or how a species migrates.

For the most part, how and when or how they know to migrate is still relatively a mystery. There's different ways that we think an animal species can say, okay, it's time to go to Florida. And one of the big ones is called the photoperiod based on the circadian rhythm or the circulean rhythm. Sunlight. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. Cops.

Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Langston Kermit. Sometimes I'm on TV.

I'm David Borey and I'm probably on TV right now. David and I are going to take a deep dive every week into the most exciting groundbreaking and sometimes problematic black conspiracy theories. We've had amazing past notable guests like Brandon Kyle Goodman, Sam J. Quinta Brunson and so many more. New episodes around every Tuesday. Many episodes out on Thursdays where we answer you, the listeners conspiracy theories. Listen to my mama told me on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.