Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: 5 Lazarus Species

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Lazarus species were thought to be gone, but had something else in mind. Today we talk about 5 of them. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca.

But in the Bible if you believe that stuff. And a Lazarus species is an organism that has been brought back from extinction or that we thought rather was extinct. Not one that's like threatened and we do a good job with it. But people are like, well, there's no more of those. And then years later, someone's like, oh my gosh, there's another one of those. Right. And we actually did a whole episode on one of these already, the Cela Canth. That's right. That's what I was referring to. Number one. Yeah. It has like an amazing story behind it, which we'll briefly go over again because

it has four lobes, meaning it had like kind of these proto limbs. And when they found it first in the fossil record in the 19th century, it was a 400 million year old fossil. And they're like, this is the missing link between animals in the sea and animals on the ground. And we love the Cela Canth for this reason, but it's long dead. I think the most recent fossil they'd found was from 66 million years ago. So we just thought it was another very, very interesting prehistoric fish. Right. And it was very sad to not be able to study those in modern times. And then boom, not too modern, but in 1938, they caught one or they discovered one off the coast of South Africa. And that was a big, big deal. And then since then, they've gotten quite a few more of these

live specimens on record. If I remember correctly, it was a woman scientist too, who was the one who recognized it for what it was. And it was like, this is a big deal. Yeah. Aren't they like, not bottom dwellers, but they're pretty deep guys, right? Yes. And I remember they see them enough that now that we're like, okay, these are definitely not extinct. They're still around. I think they, yeah, they just don't inhabit areas we frequent very much. And they're like, this is clearly not trying to grow arms and legs, but nice effort. Right. So we got one under our belt, Chuck. What about the Takahi? The Takahi is native to New Zealand, one of our favorite places. Hello, our Kiwi friends. And

this is a flightless bird that's a member of the rail family. It's very pretty about the size of a goose. They're kind of blue green. They're very pretty. They're really, really nice looking. And even from the beginning, they were really rare. I think they were discovered by European explorers in 1847 and they were never abundant. No, apparently after the second specimen was found, only four were found in the 19th century. And when the guy who found the second one described it, he said that these are gone. Like this, whatever I just found is maybe the last of it. He said, it's unlikely any further living specimens will be found. And that was that that closed the book on it. But 50 years later, there's another guy named Jeffrey Orbel, who was like, I, for some reason,

I cannot accept that the Takahi is just gone forever and set out searching for him. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. And I'm glad people like Jeffrey Orbel are out there because Jeffrey Orbel found one of these things on the South Island in 1948 of New Zealand. And this kind of brings up something we did mention at the beginning, like how can science be wrong about something being extinct? And it's fairly easy to happen. The world is a big place. The earth is a big place. And they do their best. But, you know, at a certain point, when something isn't around for a certain amount of time, they get together and they feel comfortable saying this thing is extinct. And, you know, if it comes back to life as a Lazarus species, and that's great. It's not like

science hangs their head in shame, like, oh, the seal can't this back. But it is sometimes tough to see, especially if it's a rare thing to begin with, that they're truly extinct. Yeah, the International Union for Conservation of Nature is the one responsible for declaring something endangered or extinct in the wild. And their definition of extinct is that when there's no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died, when exhaustive surveys in known and or expected habitat at appropriate times diurnal seasonal annual throughout its historic range have failed to record an individual. So it's not just like nobody's reported one of these things for a while. It's like they go out and really try to find it. And if they can't find it,

they're like, I guess it's extinct. Then they hang their heads in shame. That's right. I saw a great meme the other day that's very appropriate for these times here in the United States, something about science is not truth. Science is the search for truth. And basically when things, it was much more succinct than this, but when things change, science continues to search for that truth, it's not flipping and flopping on the truth. Right. Let's just leave it at that and take a commercial break. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear

about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. 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 band are 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. Okay, Chuck. So we're back with, I think my favorite. It's my favorite too. Good. We're talking about the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect. Yeah. Oh boy. Not a great name.

There's a better name for it, don't you think? Yeah, leave it to Australia to have an insect called a tree lobster. Lord Howe Island is off the coast of Australia, kind of midway between Brisbane and Sydney. And these things were very common on Lord Howe Island out there in the Pacific. And this is a really interesting story. There was a shipwreck off the, actually kind of on the island. And everybody knows that ships, especially back in the olden days, I think it was 1918. This is 1920s, but they're off by a few years. We're just full of rats. And these rats descended upon the island and really, really overtook this island in a big way. They were like tree lobsters, de-lish. Yeah. So they actually ate all the tree lobsters on the island.

Ate them all. The rats did. The rats had no natural predators on the island, so their population boomed. And they also ate to extinction all sorts of bird species, lizard species, a bunch of other ones. But in particular, this tree lobster, which you don't find elsewhere. And they thought like, this thing was just endemic only to Lord Howe Island. So shortly after the 20s, they were like, the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect is now extinct. But then they were very surprised in 1960, when they found a few corpses. They were corpses, but they weren't like obviously 40-year-old desiccated corpses. They were fairly, fairly recent corpses. So they're like, wait a minute, these things are still around. And I guess somebody thought to go look on another nearby

island. It's like Pyramid Island, I believe, something like that. And they found a new population of these things, just a handful, but a few of them perched in a tea tree on the highest point of this island nearby. That's right. And so they started breeding them in captivity and training them to be able to raise their middle finger, because they have undertaken the Lord Howe Island Rodent Eradication Project, where they are spreading 42 tons of poison cereal pellets and 28,000 bait stations across the island to rid this island of those rats. And this was a couple of years ago in 2019. And the most recent article I read said that sometime this year, they were going to reintroduce like all the rats should be gone. And if there are any

few rats left, these tree lobsters can go back and give them the finger. Very nice. They're spreading poison quisp on the island for the rats. It's just irresistible. Oh man, I'd have a hard time with that too. You'd feel like I know it's poisonous, but I just can't help myself. I know if it was Captain Crunch Peanut Butter, forget about it. I'm a dead man. Yeah. So there's another one that hats off to the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect. We're going to take our leave and wish it luck. And head on over to Peru, where the Peruvian yellow-tailed woolly monkey was thought to have been extinct. It was first described in 1812 just from a pelt. Warm, soft. I think so, yeah. A little yellowish. But then only just a few times in the century that followed had they

actually been seen and described by travelers, I guess, scientists in Peru. And then the last one was seen in 1926. And by that point, the science was like, I think these things are gonzo. That's right, but not so because in 1974, they found one in Brazil. And this was being kept as a pet. And it turns out these things were being kept as pets kind of in different places all over the world. And this is one really interesting case where the illegal pet trade kind of brought an roundabout way, something back from extinction. Yeah, they think there's maybe fewer than a thousand of them in the wild, which is still not terribly bad considering something was considered extinct for a little while. But apparently it was, and this is kind of like one of the definitions

of a Lazarus species, it was news to science that this thing was not extinct. But to the local population in Peru, who lived in the area, the same area as these monkeys, they were well aware that these things were around. They just hadn't heard the science didn't know, or else I'm sure they would have told somebody. That's right. What about, this is my second favorite, Chuck, what about you? I can't believe we're going to do five in a shorty. But here we go with a robust red horse. It's a pale pink, has pale pink fins, it's sort of stout. And it's, you know, it's not very remarkable looking. If you look at a robust red horse, you think that thing is misnamed because it's just sort of plain looking. It's an Uggfish is what they should call it.

Yeah, it's not the best looking fish. It's got a great Latin name, Moxastoma Robustum. That's a good band name. Yeah. Or maybe album title. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Prograc for sure. Or maybe like a, like a mastodon album. Yeah, exactly. This was first described by Edward Drinker Cope, a naturalist from Europe in 1870, based on just this one fish that he found in a river in North Carolina. And unfortunately, that fish was destroyed because that was the last one that anyone saw for 122 years. Yeah. So everybody's like, well, it's extinct. We're not even sure it ever exactly lived. We got to take this Cope fella's word for it. And he's popped up before. I can't put my finger on it, but we've talked about it before. But then in 1980, 1985,

and then I believe also in 1991, people started reporting this. And somebody was like, you know what? I think that that is Cope's robust red horse fish. They started finding them in the Savannah and PD rivers in Georgia and South Carolina, I think. And so they actually made a deliberate effort. They launched an effort 20 years ago to find some mating pairs of the robust red horse in the Savannah River and basically start breeding them in captivity. And I read that I think in 2015, Chuck, they released some and they recently identified the first wild juveniles that had been born to this restored population of robust red horses. Amazing. Big comeback. Huge comeback from the dead, basically. Yeah, I love it. Same here. So that's it for short stuff, everybody.

If you want to look up some more Lazarus species, then they're out there and it's thrilling. Every single one has a great story behind it. So go and use yourself with that. In the meantime, short stuff says goodbye. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.