Stuff You Should Know - How Animal Camouflage Works

Episode Date: October 23, 2014

The wild kingdom is filled with examples of animals that can camouflage themselves into their environment, but the means and the methods are also wildly varied. Learn about the ins and outs of blending in through this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation, he's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all, and now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times, it'll be funny, we'll push the envelope, we have a lot to talk about. Welcome to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. Hooray. That makes this stuff you should know. That's right, how's it going? It's going well. Great, you got your canned soda.

Canned diet soda with, unfortunately, it contains phenyl ketoneurix. Yeah. Which is a big problem, have you looked into that? Well, I mean, I don't drink that stuff as a rule because of all the junk in it. No, but have you ever looked into that condition? It's a metabolic condition where it's like you can't have protein basically, but you also have to live. Interesting.

Yeah, it sounds terrible. I know you can clean a toilet with canned soda and you can make a penny shiny overnight. Yeah, you can loosen rusted nuts and bolts. Yeah, or you can drink it. Right. That's the most delicious thing to do. It's go juice. It is go juice of a type.

Sure. I like my orange soda every now and then, though, like the Whopony Woo. That and the root beer is about all I'll take. Root beer is great. What about cream soda? Yeah. You're not a big cream soda fan. No, it's fine.

I'll have one of those every two years. I'll have... I'd say that's about right. Five root beers a year and about 10 orange sodas a year. You have them in your fridge with like a little bit of masking tape so they're numbered. No, I don't buy them and keep them in the house. You should have. They'd be cheaper by 30, 40 cents.

Yeah, and this is not a big statement on health and wellness. My family didn't buy that stuff growing up because there were teachers and we didn't have a ton of money. What did you drink? Water. Just water. A lot of water. Really?

Yeah. Especially in restaurants. We'll just have water. Yeah. That kind of deal. Gotcha. Because the other stuff costs money. But in retrospect, I'm glad, you know, because I never developed a big affinity for sodas.

Yeah. No, that's pretty great for your mom. So thanks, mom, for the milk and water. Way to go. So, Chuck. Yeah. I would say this is a perfect segue to what we're talking about today. Animal camouflage.

Yeah, we covered a little bit of this in the coolest animal ever, the Octopus podcast. Yeah. We also talked about... Iridescence, I think. Yeah, and how do butterfly wings get their color? Yeah. That was... You know, when people say like, what's an episode that everybody overlooks that you thought

was great? There's like 50 of them, at least. Sure. More like 650. Yeah. But I would say that the butterfly wings episode is a really sterling example of that, which is like, you think it's going to be boring, but it led us into all sorts of stuff, optics, color, butterflies, migration, like all sorts of really cool stuff, light, yeah.

That one turned out to be really neat. Yeah. And you know what? We should mention that we have close to 700 podcasts now. We're really close. And a lot of people that maybe find us via iTunes or another pod player, think you might... We might only have like 300. Yeah.

It's funny to see that triumphant tweet like, just listen to all 300 episodes of stuff you should know. My life is complete. You're like, oh boy, I'm so sorry. You got a long row to hoe. But you can find all those. We have an RSS. If you just Google stuff you should know, RSS, or go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

Click on their podcast. We have all 700 of them there. Yeah. You can also search stuffyoushouldknowarchive, and it should bring up the archive page on our website, which has every single episode of stuff you should know ever. And I think you can download them there too, can't you? I think so. Who knows in this day and age?

It's the 21st century. That's right. So animal camouflage, Chuckers. Yes. Also, I want to give a shout out to a board panda article. 20 amazing examples of animal camouflage. Oh, nice. It's nuts.

Yeah. These animals are doing these things. It's pretty cool. And you know why? Because they want to live. Yeah. It's natural selection at work, which is kind of like, it's happening right in front of our eyes.

We've covered natural selection at length in that episode, in the Darwin episode. But as we all know, if an animal gets munched on or stomped on, it's not going to be around. So it adapts into the world around me and says, hey, I think I might want to look like that twig, or I might want to blend in color-wise, then I won't get eaten, and I'm going to pass that down to my kids, and they won't get eaten, and all of a sudden, we're a healthy thriving species. Yeah. And through natural selection, an animal that has a trait that keeps it from being eaten

allows it to say blend in. It raises the likelihood that it'll live long enough to reproduce to pass it on. And on the other hand, an animal that's, say, brightly colored and stands out in its environment, it's probably going to get picked off early on, won't have a chance to reproduce. So whatever traits it has won't necessarily be passed along. Yeah. And that's why almost every animal that you'll see on the planet Earth has some sort of blending in capability.

Not always. You'll see a big bluebird in the middle of the woods, obviously, or a cardinal. But you'll also see a lot of deer and squirrels and ground mammals that are sort of brownie and gray. Yeah. It's not because they're just drab. No. It's because they're, again, trying to survive.

Exactly. They blend in with those earth tones. And if you look in the ocean, you will see some crazy fluorescent things, but you're also going to see a lot of blue grayish coloring in sea creatures because they'll blend into the light, that soft light under the water. Right. And one of the reasons why animal camouflage is so widespread in adaptation is because it doesn't just help you from being hunted yourself.

Yeah. It helps you to hunt. Yeah. That's a good point. And if you're prey as well as hide from predators, so it's just really versatile and great. It's fantastic stuff. It can help you kill and not be killed. Exactly.

Which is the whole key. So there's a couple of different ways where there's some factors involved in how animal camouflage will develop within a given species. First and foremost, it depends on how the animal behaves and its physiology. Yeah, like if you're a mammal, obviously, your fur is going to play a large part. If you're a fish or an amphibian, your scales, your skin might. If you're traveling big packs, you might use that to your advantage. Or if you're a solo flyer, you might find a way to work that into your routine, your

survival routine. Yeah. So I mean, the animal itself, the camouflage it develops, what type of animal it is and how it behaves, those are going to have a huge impact. So too will the environment. Probably more than anything else, the environment will predict how the animal's camouflage will develop because what you want to do is blend into the background. And so the natural habitat, the environment that the animal lives in will become the model

for the camouflage. Yeah, like if you're surrounded by green, you're probably going to be green. Or you might be dead soon. The other is the final way is the physiology and behavior of the predators and prey that seek those animals out for lunch. So for instance, if your main predator is colorblind, then you're not going to mess with changing color. You might alter over time, just like maybe the stripe pattern on your body or something.

It's about pattern, not color necessarily. So your own physiology and behavior, the behavior and I guess, physiology of your predators or your prey, and then the actual environment that you inhabit, these are the big three when it comes to determining animal camouflage. Yeah. And most of the camouflage that we see around us all falls under the banner of blending in to your surroundings. Just being casual.

Yeah. And then there's basically two ways, colors is huge. It's not the only thing, but it's one of the bigger points of animal camouflage. Sure. And then there's two ways that color is produced here on planet Earth by animals. And it's either chemically or physically. And chemically, colors are produced through pigments. That's right.

Biocromes, they're microscopic natural pigments and they produce these colors chemically. For instance, your chemical makeup might absorb some colors of light, reflect others. That's going to make you appear to be a different color or be a different color. Right. Exactly. So like I looked up human pigment or human pigmentation to see if that was an example of camouflage. Couldn't find anything.

It wasn't like one of those ones where you do a Google search and you're like, oh, this is obviously a dumb question. This was like, there just hasn't been a lot of academic study on it or whatever. For humans? Right. Like if brown skin or peach skin, interesting. I think what it is ultimately is just an adaptation to the exposure to the sun rather than trying to blend in with your environment.

That makes sense. But I wondered, I got my answer, I guess, through the fact that there wasn't an answer. All right. The other way you mentioned was actually physical structures. And these are also microscopic and they act like prisms. And one example they gave in the article was polar bears who actually have black skin, but they have translucent hairs. And the translucent hair turns all visible light into a rainbow, which is why polar bears

look like rainbow color. Well, I don't think that's true. It's like on the Pink Floyd album cover. Yeah. That's a polar bear, right? Right. That's a polar bear hair. Right.

That prism. Not true. But apparently they have black skin underneath, but their hair manages to bend and reflect all light, almost all light, so they appear white. Isn't that nuts? That is nuts. But it's almost like why not just have the darker skin evolve out just because the hair made it so it didn't need to?

Maybe. I wonder if it serves some other purpose. Yeah, maybe. Who knows? That's a good question. Polar bear experts? Yeah, but just someone's going to know. Please let us know.

Waterflies also have physical structures. Scales are also a physical structure because they do crazy things to light. And then some animals have both chemical and physical structures that create their camouflage. Apparently a lot of reptiles are green because they have physical structures that bend light and reflect light, except for, say, yellow, but then they have pigments underneath the skin that create blue, or vice versa, probably, now that I say it out loud. And then you put the two together and you have green, which helps for a snake that lives in bright green trees.

Sure. Yeah, and all of these animals have their own method, I guess, with their physiology, like obviously mammals have their fur, fish, amphibians, reptiles, they're going to use their scales, birds have their feathers, and even insects use their exoskeleton, which can actually, like the texture of the exoskeleton can be changed over time to better blend in. Yeah, right, like think about the wings on a grasshopper. They look a lot like a leaf, right? Yeah.

But one of the reasons they look like a leaf is not just because of the color, but because of the texture. It's got kind of this matte thing. They were like a high shine polish, the thing would stand out pretty clearly. So it's not just color, it's also texture as well, and patterns as we'll see, but color is probably the most widespread part of animal camouflage. Yeah, and apparently the squirrel's fur is rough and uneven to resemble the texture of tree bark.

Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I never really noticed that. I can spot a squirrel a mile away, though. Well, that's because there's like a zillion of them in Atlanta. Yeah, because I hate them. Oh, that's right. So we'll talk more about animal colors and all the neat stuff that can happen right after this message.

I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill Podcast, and I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was, whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like I already love myself enough.

Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. This is Chikis and Chill on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back, and we are talking about changing of the seasons now because animals will change themselves depending on the change of the seasons.

They can actually adapt to the seasons to blend in. Do you see how cute these foxes are? Look at how cute that fox is. That's the same type of fox. I love foxes. So the Arctic fox lives in an environment, an habitat, where some of the year it's snowy, other parts of the year it's woody and muddy. And so as a result, the Arctic fox has evolved to change its coat depending on the season.

That's a sharp adaptation. It's pretty awesome, and it's actually triggered by hormones, the animal senses, the changing of the season because of the shift in daylight, maybe shifts in temperature, and they'll release hormones and there'll be a reaction, and all of a sudden there are different biochromes being produced and that little fox can change color. Right, they're making different pigments. The thing is, and some bird species do this too, well not a lot of mammals, but some mammals will change their coat.

The thing is, is you can't, or the fox or the bird, can't do anything to change its actual coat. Once the coat is grown out, it has to shed its coat or molt its feathers and then regrow new ones that better match the new things. So that's why apparently a lot of mammals molt is to change the color of their coat. It's pretty awesome. It is pretty awesome. Have you ever seen the videos of the pet foxes on the internet?

Yeah. Oh man. They're very cute little fluffy tails wagon and like those little chirpy noises they make when they get bedded. Yes, that one in particular. Adorable. And then Chuck, have you heard about the peppered moth? I don't think so.

You have. It's this sterling example of natural selection in practice, but it's based on camouflage. So in London, during the Industrial Revolution. That's London, England? Yes. Okay. It became so sooty that the white-bodied peppered moth, which is exactly what it sounds like.

It's kind of peppery looking. It looks like if it landed on the side of a birch tree, you know, the white ones. Oh yeah, those are beautiful. It would just blend right in because of the mixture of white and black. The thing is, is there's so much soot produced during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in London that these moths that had any white to them would stand out like a sore thumb and were predicated, eaten. There was a variation on this called the black-bodied peppered moth.

Did it change because of the soot? So the thing is, is the animal itself didn't change. Different varieties of the same species, one was eaten, one thrived because of the change in the amount of soot, but it happened very quickly. How do they know they just weren't white moths covered with soot? They're pretty sure they weren't. And then now that the soot has been whipped largely in London, the white-bodied peppered moth is now predominant again, because it can blend in a lot more easily because there's

less soot. Because London cleaned up its act. Yes. In some ways. Right. What way does it not? I don't know. They like to drink a lot.

They really, they do, but don't they stop at like 11? No, I just remember the only... Everybody starts drinking at 4, and then they drink for several hours, but then they stop at 11. Oh, like the bars aren't open all night or something? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the only time I went to London, I just remember thinking, man, they really do drink a lot.

This is great. And I remember buying beer, canned beer in the store, and I was like, oh, they've got its tall boys, and they're like, what's a tall boy? Right. Like, we just call that a beer. That's a shorty. Yeah. You should see our tall boys.

You call them kegs. I can't wait to go back. We're hoping, spoiler, we're hoping to maybe come to London for a show. Fingers crossed. All right. So where were we? Oh, we were talking about biochromes. Those are the cells near to the skin surface, or in the case of the octopus or the cuttlefish,

you can have deeper cells called chromatophores, which we talked about at length in the Octopus episode. And those are amazing. Those are pigmented cells that the octopus and the cuttlefish can basically manipulate these cells and contract and expand these things. Yeah, like the surface area can expand up to 500% when they want to show that particular pigment. I don't know if we had mentioned this in the last Octopus one, but a good way to see this

in action is to take like a balloon, like a red balloon, and just blow it up a little bit and tie it off. If you squeeze that balloon, it's going to change its color. It's going to become lighter. And then when you unsqueeze it or let it go, it's going to go back to that dark red. And that's kind of the same thing that's going on with the manipulation of the chromatophore. Right. And that's different shades of the same color.

They have different chromatophores of totally different colors. And they can call up what they want, right? Yeah. So if they want like all black, they could reduce the size of everything but black and just show the black, but they can also mix and match to create colors that are basically a blend of their different colored chromatophores. So if they have blue and yellow and they're showing those equally, they'll have a nice healthy shade of green overall.

And with cuttlefish in particular, they've done some recent study and they found that not only do they have chromatophores, they have two other structures that help too. They have leukophores, which scatter light very efficiently. Then they also have erythophores, which produce iridescence. So that's why it's not just like a flat color change. It's like magic when you see an octopus quick change color or a cuttlefish. They have erythophores too, right? Yeah.

Yeah. It looks like it's just become a completely different animal, not just color-wise, but texture and all that is all just optical illusions. Yeah. The octopus can shape, texture, and color in a second. It's not like, I mean, if you've seen the video, it's not the kind of thing that's like, oh, it's changing now. Yeah.

I mean, you blink your eyes and it's an underwater plant. Exactly. What's nuts though, Chuck, is they've studied the cuttlefish and it's a color-changing maniac. Cuttlefish are colorblind. They have no idea. They know that it's visually driven because they've deprived it of visual cues before and shown that it's not quite as adept at changing its colors, so they know that it's visually driven, but they have no idea how a cuttlefish can tell what color to change to because it's

colorblind. Isn't that cool? Well, maybe. I don't know. There's no mirrors down there. Maybe they don't even know what color is. Maybe not. Maybe it's all some other sense that we've yet to discover.

Yeah. The cuttle sense. I guess we can... I know we mentioned this in another one about the chameleon. It may have been, or is that a don't be dumb episode that chameleons don't change their color to blend in. They actually change color depending on their mood. I've not done that one. I heard that, I think, for the first time a couple of years ago.

I had always thought, like a lot of people, that the chameleon lands on something green. It's going to turn green. Yeah. As far as any paint commercial I've ever seen featuring chameleon, that's the story, you know? Yeah, but they, like I said, they change when their mood changes and not necessarily depending on their surroundings. Right.

So they're basically showing, like, I'm happy, I'm florescent orange right now. Let's go to happy hour. Right. So so far we've got hormonal changes to either changes in temperature or changes in sunlight leading to molting or shedding a fur and a new coat. You've got some sort of visually driven behavior in some pretty amazing animals like the octopus or the cuttlefish. You've got chameleons changing based on their mood, which again I guess would probably be

hormonally triggered. Yeah. And then you've also got some that change their color, their camouflage based on diet, like the nudibranch. Yeah. Or as I like to call it, the nudibranch. Yeah, the nudibranch. Did you look at these?

No. Amazing. It's one of those, like, super brilliant, fluorescent, very colorful things. And they are sea creatures. And they alter their diet depending on what kind of coral they are near. They will eat that coral and deposit that pigment from the coral into their skin and their intestines and it'll just change the color to blend in with what they're eating basically.

Yeah, because what they're eating is also what they're living on. So when they eat a specific type of coral and it changes their color, they blend in with their surroundings. Pretty ingenious. Yeah. And then there aren't nudibranches, way to go. There are also fish who change color without changing their diet. And that is sort of like the molting and mammals and birds.

The fish, and this is something that happens over time. Right. It's not like I'll eat and change colors. But if the fish changes environment as a species, it's going to get new cues and look around and say, well, I might want to think about turning a little more green over time as a species. I might want to think about that. So I'm going to release some hormones and maybe over time my sons and my sunsons might

eventually really blend in well. Right. And oh, crap. Here comes a shark. Yeah. Hide. Exactly. Have you heard of the glass frog?

Uh-uh. It's neat. It's translucent so you can see its internal organs very clearly. Oh, wow. But I was like, what adaptation is that? Seriously. Like how does that figure with animal camouflage? And no one's sure, there's no definitive answer.

But it seems like the best theory I saw was that its translucent skin makes it invisible. Oh, really? Uh-huh. Which makes sense because its guts are green and I think it's a tree frog. So it's invisible, I guess, to some predators. Or maybe it just wants to be a part of the body's exhibit really badly. It looks like that. It's the frog version of the invisible man.

Man, I'll have to check that out. So we'll talk more about some other uses for camouflage right after this. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for

it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was, whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like I already love myself enough.

Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. It's just a matter of time. We talked about coloration and stuff like that, but there are also designs that animals can use to blend in. And that is the model pattern that they're using.

Like, let's say, a zebra stripes. They have those vertical stripes. Yeah. And it's black and white. And if you go on a safari, probably the first thing you would ever notice is a zebra. Yeah. Sticks out like a sore thumb. Yeah.

Look at that crazy weird looking horse. Right. That can never be domesticated because they're too wild and too mean. Yeah. The thing is, the zebra is not camouflaged for you. It doesn't care about you or your family. No. It cares about the lions that's hunting it.

And lions are colorblind. So they can't see that a zebra is black and white and the leaves and grass that it's blending in with are brown and khaki and green. Sure. It just sees the pattern, which is the whole point. Yeah. And then the other cool thing about zebra stripes is they are specific to the zebra. It's like a fingerprint.

Oh, yeah. So they help them identify each other or maybe the pack, like, oh, look at that pack. That's not my pack because those stripes are not my stripes. Right. This is pretty interesting. This is King Seraphon, king of the zebras. And I can tell it's him because of his stripes. And by the way, when I say pack, I mean herd.

Herd. You're right. Save your emails. Well, what's neat is so zebras do work in herds or live in herds and they use stripes to identify one another. Like a mom will be able to keep an eye on her kid full from a ways off because to a zebra, it's plainly obvious that that's her kid. It doesn't look like anything else to us, you know, it looks exactly the same.

But another adaptive measure of the animal camouflage of zebras is that since they do exist in herds, it makes it really hard for a lion to pick out what the heck is going on when you've got a herd of zebras because their stripes are running into each other and you can't tell which zebra's ends where or begins where. And it makes it harder for them to pick out like the weak and the injured. Yeah. And that's the same truth. A lot of striped fish, a shark might just see a big blob of stripy things and not realize

and that's why it's, you know, they travel in schools, not the only reason, but to help themselves look larger and just sort of blend in as big gelatinous, stripy fluorescent thing. Exactly. And they're like, well, there's no way that a shark's not going to see the school of fish or there's no way a lion's not going to see this herd of zebras, but we can make it really difficult for this predator to create a good attack strategy because this is very confusing. That's right. And it's called disruptive coloration.

It's a pretty neat trick that they use. Another thing they can use is what they call visual disruption. Visual? Yeah. Did I say that funny? That's typically how it's pronounced. It sounded weird coming out of my mouth. Visual?

Yeah. This is when patterns are out of line with the body's contours. So it looks like someone has thrown some sort of projection superimposed on top of that animal. Right. Or it looks like it really just blends in with the grasses or whatever that it's walking among. Right.

Rather than if it did follow the contours, it'd be like, oh, well, look at that zebra right there standing in the grass. Right. Exactly. And another cool thing that animals can do is imitation or mimicry. And this is when they say, you know what, I can't manage being ignored. I'm not that good, but at least I can be seen. I can't manage to not be seen because I'm not that good, but maybe I can manage to be

ignored. Yeah. Like I'm a walking stick insect and they're so neat. They're so cool because they look so much like twigs and sticks. And that's what they're trying to do. They're like, well, I know you see me, but hopefully you just think I'm a stick. It's fine. It looks like a stick with the head of a beaker from the Muppets.

Yeah. Um, the Katie did another one. You ever seen those? They look like leaves. Yeah. Like really. Green leaves. Yeah.

Um, did you see the Hawk moth caterpillar? Yeah. That's one of my favorites. It is awesome. I was like, what do you mean? It looks like a snake. Come on. And then I did a Google image search.

Yeah. It looks exactly like a snake. It does. I would be freaked out thinking it was a snake and I'm a smart human. Yeah. There's certain photos. I've seen that. I think maybe the one you found where it compares a snake to this thing.

No, I didn't see one compared. It was just on its face. Yeah. Prima fasci. Pretty amazing. Yeah. And that is the Hawk moth caterpillar, our favorite moth caterpillar. For sure.

Oh, another thing that they can do sometimes if they live in an ecosystem where a lot of times like super poisonous animals are really brightly colored. Oh, yeah. The non-poisonous animals will be like, you know what, everyone's ignoring that guy because if they eat it, he will die. So over time, let's ourselves evolve to have bright colors even though we're not poisonous. Yeah. So we can look like that dude that is poisonous.

False flag camouflage. Brilliant, brilliant color mimicry. So Chuck, you got anything else? I got nothing else. That was animal camouflage. One of our great animal episodes. Those are always fun. They make me feel like a kid.

Yeah, I mean, agreed. You know? Sure. If you want to learn more about animal camouflage, you should type those words into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. Don't forget the U. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Greetings from Connecticut is what I'll call this because Christina lives in Connecticut. It makes sense.

Or as I like to say, Connecticut. Okay. That's how I remember how to spell it. Why is that C in there? It's sort of weird. I don't know. Yeah. I want to thank you guys for your podcast on bipolar disorder.

I've struggled with this since I was first diagnosed at 18 with bipolar two. I always said I got the short end of the stick and disorders as I suffer from only small bouts of highs and long bouts of lows. Oh yeah. Most recently I suffered a nervous breakdown due to stress from work. I'm currently on medical leave from work and my bipolar has progressed to hallucinations which are not fun. I see something that my mind is trying to tell myself isn't really there, but the anxiety

and fear that it's really there overcomes me. My family is old school and chooses to ignore it. Old school. That's one way to say that. Sure. And act like it isn't happening. I should also add that I come from a family of medical professionals and therapists. Wow.

That doesn't make sense. No. That's very surprising. They're like absolutely honey. Clown with a knife coming at you for sure. That doesn't seem like a good strategy. No. Not at all.

I sent your podcast to my family though and it allowed us to have an open conversation about what is going on. Oh neat. I'm a little alarmed that her medical professional families needed our show. Right. But we saved the day though. We did. Your podcast truly is a wonderful tool for anyone that wants to explain to someone what

we struggle with on a day to day basis. You guys are great and often keep me company while I paint during my hypomanic episodes. So she is eternally grateful and that is Christina and Christina I wrote you back but hang in there of your family's more understanding now and I'm glad we could help. Yeah for real. Thank you very much for letting us know about that Christina. We appreciate it. If we have helped you through a tough time or fostered a conversation that panned out

well, just ones that panned out well, we want to hear about those. Yeah. I don't want to hear if you got in a fist fight because of something we said. No. It's not our fault unless you won. You can let us know about all this stuff and more by tweeting to us at syskpodcast by hanging out with us on our Facebook page at facebook.com slash stuff you should know or by sending us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and don't forget our great website or home

on the web the internet clubhouse known as stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.