Stuff You Should Know - Narwhals: Unicorns of the Sea

Episode Date: June 28, 2018

Narwhals are the unicorns of the sea. They're also whales with tusks. The tusks are really long tooths. Are you confused? Let us guide you!  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everyone, we're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah in Phoenix, Arizona this fall. Yeah, October 23rd, we're gonna be at Salt Lake City's Grand Theater, and then the next night, October 24th, we'll be in Phoenix, and we added a second show

to our Melbourne show, right? That's right, a second earlier show in Melbourne, so you can get all the information for all of these shows at S-Y-S-K-Live.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,

and we're alone again, naturally. But we're talking about narwhals, so things aren't all that bad, because they're pretty interesting. Yeah, I think I wanted to do this a long time ago, and it just sort of fell off my radar, and then it popped back up on my radar. That is a heck of a story, Chuck.

And this was written, I wanna shout out former colleague, Katie Lambert, and Katie, even though you do not listen, perhaps a friend of yours might, congratulations, because Katie just got married. Oh, hey, congratulations, Katie, pretty good. Marry to, looks like a really good guy, and they're now traveling, and wish Katie all the best. Yep, congratulations, dudes.

And thank you for writing this article, which was seemingly intended for elementary school students. I knew you were gonna say something. I was not gonna say anything. It's adorably written, let's just say that. Well, if I remember correctly, she really liked narwhals. I think so, I think she lobbied to write this one, in fact. So, narwhals is defined as fallows.

I'm kidding, narwhals. Whale with a horn. Pretty much, actually. And there are a lot of similarities here between walruses, which we did, and narwhals, but they're not very closely related, if at all. Am I correct? Like, walruses have nothing to do with whales.

No. And a narwhal is a type of whale, much the same as like a beluga whale, right? I believe so, yeah. They're small, they're pretty fast, well, comparatively small, I should say. Pretty fast, they live in extremely cold waters. But the thing about the narwhal,

the thing that everybody knows about the narwhal, the thing that makes the narwhal so unique is that it has a tusk, a unicorn horn, basically, that is frequently well over half the length of its body. Yeah, I mean, some of those, it's so they can grow up to nine feet, that's crazy. Yeah, because a male narwhal gets up to 15 feet.

Yeah, that's nuts. So you got the 15 feet of the small, fast whale, and then another nine feet of unicorn tusk sticking out. And it's a pretty interesting appendage, frankly. Yeah, which, you know, we'll save that for the third act. Fine. You know what they say, you introduce a unicorn horn in the first act, it has to kill somebody in the third.

Is that right? Well, that's the old saying about a gun in a movie. Oh, okay. If you see a gun in the first act, it'll kill someone in the third. I always thought things just appeared randomly in movies. Is that not the case? Just materialized, with no thought behind it.

Right, no reason, no rhyme. So the narwhal throughout history has been a very, I guess not misunderstood, but fascinating to people because it just looks so strange if you've seen regular seafaring creatures, which already a lot of them look very strange. But imagine back in the Vikings days, when they see a narwhal stick that thing out,

it really would get people's attention. And so it was written about in literature, at some point that people thought that there was a land equivalent to every marine animal. So like if there was something at sea, there was a land version. Do you remember we did like a sea monsters episode when we talked about that?

Yeah, so the idea here is that there may be a unicorn, a horse unicorn, because there is one in the sea. Yeah, and even if you found the narwhal in the sea, it wouldn't disprove unicorns. It would actually probably back it up at the time. Yes. So there was this widespread belief that there was such a thing as unicorn.

And then the fact that the Vikings were going around trading with the Inuit up north around Greenland, and getting narwhal tusks and bringing them back. And people were buying them as unicorn horns. It definitely, it was like evidence. Like there you go. There's such thing as unicorns.

We've never seen one, but I've got the tusk right here in my chalice to counteract any poison somebody may have tried to give me. Right. That was one of the things that was used for. Interesting. Yeah, and let's see, I got two more. You ready for these?

Yeah. Hold your socks on, cause I'm about to knock them off. I'm holding. The Habsburg dynasty, their scepter had a narwhal tusk handle. Oh, wow. Ivan the Terrible's staff, I guess he had a walking stick made of narwhal tusk. And if you look on the Royal Code of Arms

for Pharmacists in England, you will see a unicorn. All of those are narwhal tusks or references to narwhal tusks and how magical they were thought at the time because people bought and sold and used them as unicorn horns. Wow. Yeah.

The more you know, right? Is half the battle. So let's talk about this funny, fascinating creature. Okay. You'd want to go to Canada, perhaps, to view them. Maybe Greenland, maybe Svalbard. Throw some seeds in there while you're at it. And they mainly try and navigate what are called,

how do you pronounce that? Polynia. Polynias? Polynias? I think so. I like nias. I actually prefer that too, to tell you the truth. Polynias, which Katie described as the equivalent

of an oasis in the Arctic. There are these open water pools where otherwise there is ice. And there is a lot of good feeding, just like a buffet table in those things. Yeah, because we're talking like little oases in ice. And when we say ice, we mean ice forever and ever and ever. Because narwhals live in some of the coldest waters

imaginable on planet Earth. So when one of the, and they're whales, which means they have to breathe air, like we humans, right? So they have to travel from these things to these things and they do so under ice. So they basically just navigate Polynias or Polynias from place to place, follow their food that way. Yeah, another name that you might have heard is corpse whale.

And this came from their, the adults have this kind of modeled black or dark gray and white coloring. And some people might say it looks like they're dead. Right, like liver mortis. You remember that? Uh-huh. Where like, you know, the blood just pools and collects in the skin of the corpse.

Yeah, so corpse whale is a nickname. Kind of a very nice one. Well, no, actually the word narwhal means corpse whale in Dutch and Danish. Oh, really? Yeah, nar is like the old Norse term for corpse and wall or vol is whale. So corpse, like narwhal literally means corpse whale

because up close they look like a dead body. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and kind of gross. So they don't have a dorsal fin, but they do have a dorsal ridge. Dorsal fin would be, they may have had one at one point, but it bumps into that ice.

Yeah. So now it's a dorsal, well, I say now, it might've always been, but I'm just speculating. No, I think you're right. That natural selection might have taken care of that. Yeah, because not only does it allow them to swim under ice and follow their food, it keeps them from being attacked by orcas.

Orcas have a full dorsal fin, so they can't get under ice or as close to ice as or as narwhals can, so they can escape their predators and chase their food, which is like two things that natural selection would definitely be all about. All right, well, I'll stay and buy it then. Yeah, I think you should.

They hang out in groups, a lot of times 20 to 30, but when they migrate, there can be hundreds or even thousands of them together. And the ladies are a little bit smaller, about 2,200 pounds and 10 to 13 feet. The dudes get up to about 3,500 pounds and up to 15 feet. Yeah, but I mean, that's not small, but for a whale, that's not big at all.

No. And they are fast, man. They're fast. And I also read, I read this really great article in Smithsonian, let me see if I can find the name of it. In search of the mysterious narwhal, and they talk about these two biologists who are dedicated to like tracking and trapping

and tagging and keeping up with narwhals to try to estimate the population. Cause no one has any idea how many narwhals there are. And so you don't know if they're dying off quickly or if there's a lot more than we know, who knows. But it was, they were talking about how hard it is to capture these whales, to tag them and how hard it is even to hunt them too.

Cause they're so fast. They're fast and they're real skittish. Like they'll take off at the drop of a hat. They're fast and furious. Too fast, too furious. They're Tokyo drift. So this is one of the interesting creatures that's scientific, whose scientific name is all wrong.

The scientific name is Manoden Montseros, which means one tooth, one horn. Yes. And if you're gonna come up with like a cleric for your D&D game, you could do worse than that. One tooth, one horn. I like that, Manoden Montseros. I take your bag of plenty.

Is that Jerry Lewis? No, that's literally the only thing I remember from like the two times I played D&D. Take your bag of plenty. Which you probably can't even do. People are gonna say, you can't take a bag of plenty. Oh yeah, we'll get some mail on that. But that's actually not true.

One tooth, one horn is not true at all. They have no horns and they have two teeth. That tusk, which we'll talk about later again in the third act, that is a tooth. It is, which we can't say anything more about it apparently, but just believe us, it's a tooth. And what do these guys eat? Oh, what do they eat?

They eat cold, cold loving fish. Sounds pretty delicious to me. So these are some of my favorite fish. Prepare for this cod, salmon, which I mean like. It doesn't even have to be dead yet and I'll eat the salmon. God. Herring, dude, raw salmon is about as good as it gets.

Yeah, but you're gonna bite into a live fish? Yes, I would. Herring, which is great, especially pickled. Halibut, wonderful anyway. Shrimp and squid. I'm not huge on squid these days, but all the other ones I'd be very happy with. Why don't you pick on squid?

Cause it's a squid and awesome. I'm just not big on squid. I don't know the last time I had it, but I remember, I think I've just had too much rubbery squid is what it is. Yeah, it's tough, or it can be tough. Yeah. Yeah, I hear you.

So the problem is this, Chuck. Well, it's not really a problem. It's a problem for you and me if we're trying to track narwhals, but a lot of those fish, especially depending on the season, they live on the bottom of the ocean, right? So that means that if you are a narwhal, you got to get down to those fish.

Yeah. And these things have actually been tracked diving a mile down. Yeah, that's a long way. A mile down. So some of the early trackers that they put on these narwhals before they realized how deep they dove, the tracking device would break.

It just smashed under the pressure. Wow. But then narwhals is going down, eating some cod and coming back up and then going down and eating some cod a mile under the surface. It's just, it's just, it's crazy to me. I'm impressed by that.

Yeah, and Katie talked a lot about the diving patterns not being understood. It sounds to me when reading through them is that they're like, not random, but there are so many different reasons to dive. And depending on the time of year and where the fish are, like, I don't know that there is a pattern.

Well, we, yeah, we just don't know yet. Yeah, exactly. So you want to take a break? Yes. All right. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to resume speaking about narwhals.

Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. On the podcast, paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, 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. What about you? Like a rock band. Like a rock band. Like a rock band. Like a rock band. Like a rock band.

Like a rock band. Like a rock band. Like a rock band. Like a rock band. All right, Chuck. So you said like there doesn't seem to be a pattern or we don't understand the pattern with diving. There's a lot we don't understand about in our walls.

But what's interesting is that it seems like it might not just be because we have so little access to them because they live in these extraordinarily remote climes that are really hard for humans to survive in. It's not just that. It's that they are also supposedly very, very smart as well. Like dolphin level smart. Yeah, they said that they do some things

that only apes do like recognize themselves in a mirror. And she said, understand abstract ideas. Yes. What does that mean? So the closest thing I could see is that with understanding abstract ideas, so how we encapsulate two in the written number two. Yeah.

That two is an abstract concept. It doesn't actually mean two, but it does to us because we've all agreed on it. Apparently Odonto Cetes, which is the toothed whale that they belong to, they've been shown to understand abstract concepts like that. They've been also found to be able to pass this stuff along from one generation to the next,

which means that they have actual culture. Their culture survives. They have an actual culture. It's not just their genes driving them to find more fish, go have sex with that other Narwhal. Nothing like that. They're actually thinking and passing on like the stuff and the tricks that they learned

to the younger generation. So they're exceedingly smart too. Yeah. And Odonto Cete, that is a toothed whale with Donto, I guess, being the tooth part, right? Like orthodontist? Is it a Donto Cete? I said a Donto Cete, like machete.

I think it's a Donto Cete, but... Yeah, you're probably right. If you're wrong, who knows? They echolocate, which is interesting like bats do. So what they do is they, you know, it's very dark down there where they swim the mile down and they still need to find these fish. So they produce the sound.

They don't have vocal chords like we do. They think, although they don't know, like you said, there's been so little study because they're hard to catch and track and trace, but they think they might make sounds through their nasal passages. And then focus that in in this fatty structure called the melon, and then beam it out.

And then of course, because echolocation, it travels as a sound wave, bounces back after it hits like a salmon back to their skull. They think the lower jaw are directly into the skull, depending on the frequency. And then they go, that's a salmon. Let me go spirit. Yes.

Injust spirit? No, they don't. They just eat it. Yeah, they go after it with their mouths and save it for me. Cause I picture nine feet of a big sushi shish kebab. Right, but think about it. Like if they just spear a salmon on the end of this thing, they're like, oh, I hadn't thought this through.

I can't really actually get to this now. Let me scrape it off on the ice and then hop up there with my mouth and there you go. Seems like a lot of problems, you know? Yeah, like they'd find a dead narwhal with like 12 fish speared. It's like the saddest thing ever. So you talked about the echolocation.

Did you say that that fatty deposit's called the melon? Yeah, the melon. It's so weird. Isn't that great? But it's understandable that they would echolocate because they're diving down into some areas where there's like no light whatsoever. But they think that in addition to finding food,

like salmon or whatever, they use echolocation for communication to just basically simply to move through the water. And either depending on the species or species are capable of multiple frequencies, if they're trying to reach something from a long distance, they'll use a low wavelength echo. If they're trying to find something nearby,

they'll use a high frequency echo. It's pretty interesting. And supposedly their brains started to grow from based on the fossil record around the time they would have started to echolocate. Well, that makes sense. Yeah, it does because they're getting that much more information

and they need to handle it, process it. Hence they need a bigger brain. Supposedly their brain is second only to ours. Oh, wow. In size relative to body mass. Huh. Okay, relative to body mass. Right.

All right, that makes sense. Yeah. Because when I first read that, yeah, that makes total sense. So they think that they don't know how long they can live but there are some studies that indicate that they could live to be over a hundred years old. There's one study on the eyes, on narwhal eyes, which is sort of a creepy way to figure this out.

But 115 years old and they aren't sure how many there are, but in Baffin Bay, apparently they found over 30,000 of them in Baffin Bay alone, which sounds like a lot, but when you look at the scope of animal populations, it's not. No, I mean, they honestly have no idea. That's what these marine biologists are doing,

is trying to figure out how many there are so that they can say, well, this is how many you should hunt. This is the maximum number that should be hunted a year because there are, and we'll talk about it later, but there is legal narwhal hunting. But it's from the work of these people who are trying to track them to make sure that the population,

that we're not inadvertently ruining this population. That's one of the main reasons that they're doing it, in addition to just studying them. And they found a lot of stuff out already, like they mate, remember those Polynias? Another way to put it is their cracks in extensive sea ice, right? Yeah, and that's where they mate.

Another way to put it is their sex pools. They are, they're sex pools, Polynias. And so they'll mate in there, but they'll also frequently die in there too, because the areas that they inhabit are so cold, Chuck. Like negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas, right? That's the wind temperature of the surface. So it is really cold.

Yeah, that ice will form quickly. And if you're a narwhal and you get stuck in there, you're toast, you're dead. Or if the ice, these Polynias ice over, and there's not another one nearby, again, you're dead because you have to breathe. So you can't, you're gonna drown before you make it to the next Polynia.

So they actually live in a really dangerous, like right on the edge of survivability in a lot of ways. And they think that they're very genetically homogenous. And they think that the reason why is that back in- Inbred? Yes, basically, which is surprising for how smart they are. But they think they're genetically homogenous. And they think that the reason why

is that there were multiple die-offs of narwhals getting trapped in these frozen over Polynias. So much so that it had like a major impact on the diversity of their population. They faced an evolutionary bottleneck at one point. And then once the ice age ended, they started to expand again, but there were a little dim as a result.

That should be a new T-shirt. I'm not inbred, I'm genetically homogenous. Right, nice. Oh, should we take another break? Sure, let's, man. Because I think if I'm not mistaken, we're gonna come back and talk about the tusk, right? The tusk in Act 3 is going to kill somebody.

Will it be you? Tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak. On the podcast, Paydude the 90's called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. 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. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Josh, everyone has been speared by Tusk. It was me.

I'm going to have to carry on alone for the next 10 years. It's really just a fushwood. No, no, no, you're dead. I feel better. So Katie makes a point to talk about human teeth for a second. We won't go down that rabbit hole too much, except to say that human teeth are hard on the outside

to protect the soft pulp and nerves and blood on the inside. And that is very important distinction because the narwhal is the opposite of that, which is really interesting. Was that a rabbit hole with the teeth? No, not Chuck's version. OK, oh, I see what you're saying. I think I just sort of truncated it. I think you did a great job.

Thanks. But yeah, you said it up perfectly, Chuck. The narwhal has the opposite of that. Like this sensitive part is on the outside and the hard part is on the inside, which is insane. Yeah, it's really interesting. There are 10 million tiny little holes on the surface of that tusk.

And even though human teeth have these same holes, they're covered with enamel. But there are different theories on why the tusk would need to be sensitive. And they sound pretty good to me, like that it's a sensor. Yeah, that basically it's detecting things like salinity, water temperature, currents maybe.

Sure. Or it might be able to detect atmospheric pressure above, or barometric pressure, above the water, see where the weather is changing. There's all sorts of things that it could be or it could do. And maybe it does multiple things. However, Katie points out rightfully that very few females have these tusks at all.

So how important could it be to their survival if most of the females don't even have them? Right, so that led Darwin, and apparently his hypothesis is still the most widely held one, that it's a secondary sex characteristic, like moose antlers or something like that. Or how male deer have horns. Like check out the size of my tusk, ladies.

But also, it's like, hey, I'm a dude. You don't have these, you're a lady kind of thing, right? Why would the females have them at all then? I don't know. That's the weird thing, because something like 15% of female narwhals have these tusks. Yeah, I mean, some people have said that they use them to duel with one another.

But there hasn't been a lot of evidence to point to that? No, and plus now that we know that they're actually sensitive on the outside, that just undermines that even more. Yeah, but sometimes, just still say they might use it as a way to establish dominance, at least. Maybe. That's different than fighting. Right, and they do touch tusks, but supposedly it's gently,

and it's a behavior called tusking. It's not hostile or aggressive. It's something else, and we're not quite sure what it is, but they don't think it's fighting. Sometimes they've said, and there's no evidence for this, that they use the tusk for breaking through ice or spearing prey, like I said earlier. But I don't know if those hold water.

No, I think it's probably most likely that it has developed into some sort of antenna, basically. But we didn't even talk about what the tusk actually is. Yeah, well, I said it's a tooth early on, but it's a little bit more than it's a super tooth. It is a super tooth. Again, it's like a nine foot long tooth that starts out in the narwhal's mouth and just grows upward

and punctures its lip and just starts growing out. Yeah, cork screws out. Yeah, it does. It corks screws out. It's a spiral. It's one of the only spiral teeth in the animal kingdom. Yeah, and the only straight one, which is really interesting, because when you think of walruses or elephants,

and all that ivory has got that curved tusk, and this one is straight like a unicorn, which is what makes it look so interesting, I think. For sure. Yeah, it's straight and spiraled. That's a unicorn right there. And there can be two of them too, right? Yeah, so remember you said the name of the Latin name

of the narwhal is incorrect because they don't just have one tooth. They actually have two teeth. It's just one of them turns into a tusk. Well, sometimes I guess their genes can get all messed up, because again, remember they have that evolutionary bottleneck. And the other tooth can start growing too. So they might have two tusks that are actually,

they're not symmetrical. They're actually just basically two versions of the same thing. Yeah. But it's pretty rare when that happens allegedly. Yeah, and here's the fact of the show for me that we haven't done a fact of the show in a while, actually. No, we haven't.

You drink. The tusk is flexible. When I see that thing, it looks like a broadsword, but this thing can actually bend up to a foot in any direction without breaking. And goes, boing, boing, boing. Isn't that crazy? Did you think they were stiff?

No, I didn't really give much thought to it. Yes, I think I did. I think I did assume they were stiff, but then once I heard that they were flexible, I'm like, yeah, of course they'd have to be. That would hurt to just have that thing brittle and break off at the drop of a hat. So you mean you haven't been going around in life wondering

about the narwhal tusk and the rigidity? But think about that, man. If you bend it almost a foot back, I'll bet that would feel like bending your fingernail back into the nth degree, you know? You think? I would be at worse even if that thing's as sensitive as it is.

Is it supposed to be? Well, and it can break. So that's just like, oh, man. Yeah, but I wonder if the thing is not essential for survival, is a narwhal without a tusk fine after it's broken off? Or maybe they're like, thank God. Right, now I can eat like a normal whale.

That thing's getting in the way. I felt so self-conscious about it. The narwhal is under threat because, like you mentioned, Inuit hunters are allowed to hunt them because it's something that they've done since time immemorial. And so they are allowed to still hunt them in certain numbers. Sometimes they do this with the old fashioned way with harpoons, and sometimes they have rifles.

And I'm not sure how often this happens, but Katie does say sometimes they will shoot a narwhal only to have it sink dead to the ocean floor or escape wounded. I'm sure that, with all hunting, that is a possibility. Yeah. And I think they found, very recently, there was like a bunch of slaughtered narwhal who had just had their tusks carved out, but the rest was just left to rot.

So it's just a total waste by poachers. And they've done a pretty good job of cutting down the illegal narwhal trade. Yeah, it's ivory, right? Ivory trade, yeah, it's considered that. But I guess in the United States, you can still sell it if it was in the country prior to the ban. And I'm sure that probably extends to all ivory.

I think some like a narwhal tusk sold for like $1,200. It was like a double tusk or something. It's actually down a lot, because it used to be a lot more back, especially in the medieval age. Yeah, well, if you meet someone at a party and they brag about their brooch made of narwhal ivory, punch them in the face. You get them.

Tell them Chuck sent you. Tell them Chuck sent you. The Inuits, though, they do actually eat that top layer of skin and blubber. They're not the poachers that we're talking about. No, no, that stuff is called muktuk or maktak. And it's extraordinarily essential for the native Inuits survival up there, because they don't get a lot of sunlight,

not a lot of limes growing around. And it's an excellent source of vitamin C. And they actually are able to survive up there by eating this stuff. So yeah, there's a lot of good reason for them to hunt, let alone just the cultural stuff. But yeah, the poaching is unjustifiable no matter who's doing it.

Yeah, and then that's the human side of things. There's also polar bears, walruses, orcas. They will all try, if they can catch those fast dudes and ladies swimming under the water, they will definitely dine on them if given the opportunity. Right, which again, that orca has that dorsal ridge, not a fin, so they can conceivably get away from orcas. Here's the thing.

What happens when the climate changes and the sea ice starts to melt a little bit? And all of a sudden, those orcas have been waiting. They're like, I've been waiting 1,000 years for this minute. And they go get you, and you're in narwhal, and you're in trouble. And it's actually a big threat against narwhals right now. They were voted the mammal, you know,

yeah, the marine mammal least likely to survive melting ice flows. Wow. Because they're just so dependent on them. Wherever the ice is, that's where the narwhals are at any given point in the year. That's where their food is. That's where they procreate.

That's where they live. And if there's not ice flows, they're in trouble. Sad. Well, it wouldn't be a stuff you know episode if we didn't end it on a bummer. That's right. If you want to know more about narwhals, you can type that word into the searchbar

at housestuffworks.com. And since I said narwhals, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, oh, interesting followup from a long time ago. Hey, guys, I'm from a Don Caster, England, which who knows. Maybe that's pronounced doncher as far as I know. Denny's. He's from Denny's.

It's in the north of the country. He says, I work for my local council as a repair and maintenance man. I do a lot of driving around, so your show really breaks up my day. In the folk lore episode, you spoke about swearing in the English who's sticking two fingers up like we shoot the bird and they stick the two fingers up,

like an inverted peace sign or a backwards peace sign. And he says, I have the reason for you right here. This salute dates back to the English longbowman who fought the French during the Hundred Years War, which is not 100 years, by the way. The French hated the English archers who used the longbow with such devastating effect. Any English archers who were caught by the French

had their index and middle finger chopped off from their right hand. A terrible penalty for an archer. Yes, Daniel surely is. Yeah, I love how he put that. It's the worst penalty for an archer. This led to the practice of the English archers, especially in siege situations, taunting the French enemy

with their continued presence by raising two fingers in the two-fingered salute, meaning you haven't cut off my fingers. Ha ha. Fingers. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, I love that one. I hadn't heard that one before.

That's what he says. And he says, by the way, guys, have a son. I'm to have a son on the 10th of September. Oh, nice. He's got it all scheduled out, I guess. So if you read it on the air, shout out to unborn Reggie Joshua Halifax. Great middle name, by the way.

Actually, great name all around. And that's from Daniel Blue Halifax. Nice. Thanks a lot, Daniel. That was a great letter. It was not from Halifax. No, but his last name is Halifax. So he probably could get a free house there.

Right? Yeah, that's a good. I think that's how it works. That's a good dumb joke. If you, thank you, if you want to get in touch with us, like Daniel did, you can tweet to us. I'm at JoshClarke. There's also S-Y-S-K podcast.

Chuck's at Movie Crush Pod on Twitter too. I'm on Instagram at Josh on Clark as well. There's Facebook aplenty. Chuck's at Movie Crush Pod on Facebook, right? Yeah, Snapchat us to do whatever. I'm not done. There's facebook.com slash stuff you should know. There's facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

It's a Facebook bonanza. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcastathousetofworks.com. It is always sure to set our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, 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.