Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Cassowary

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Australia is home to a kind of bird that is the second largest in the world and can kill a human being, making it the closest living version of a velociraptor? Of course it is! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, 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. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm flightless Josh. There's flightless Chuck,

flightless Jerry's with us. And we're speaking about the cassowary, a type of bird that is, you guessed it, flightless. There's no less flight in a bird than the cassowary. I am a fly. Right. Flightless and dangerous. The most dangerous bird in the world. So where does it live, of course? Australia. That's right. In this sucker, if you want to look up a picture, if you're not driving or something, you should check it out. They are sort of known as one of the closest relatives to dinosaurs bird-wise that we have, specifically the Velociraptor. Yeah. I love Jurassic Park, Chuck. I do too. So, you know, what's funny is I hadn't actually looked up a picture of the cassowary until you said you should look it up. I was like, oh yeah, I've never seen one

of these. Now that I see it, I'm like, okay, I've seen this, but they're amazing. You gotta see videos. They look like a cross, not a cross, but you can tell they're definitely akin to emus, ostriches, and they're huge. They're really big. There's three types, and one of the types, I think the southern is the second biggest bird in the world next to the ostrich or heaviest, I should say, at least. Yes. They are super big and super dangerous. They're listed as a class two animal in Florida, along with alligators and cats. If you're asking why would they be in Florida if they're native to Southeast Asian Australia, it's because people can, if they jump through hoops, keep them as pets, but they can kill you, which is what happened to a 75-year-old

man in Florida whose pet cassowary killed him dead. And all this, Chuck, by the way, is a demonstration of why those in the know call Florida Western Australia. Is that true? No, but it really, it does line up. There's a lot of stuff that wants to kill you in Florida, too. All right. And a lot of people who like to keep that stuff that wants to kill you as pets, both places. Yes, that's a bad combo. Yeah. And I believe Crocodile Dundee retired to Naples, Florida. Oh, really? In the last one. Okay. It would have been pretty awesome, though. Back to the cassowary, though, it has these sort of bristly feathers that look like hair. If you see a video of them, if you're kind of from a distance, it looks like kind of a hairy thing. They have this blue face, a couple of red waddles

on the neck, and then this big cask, a helmet on top of its head made of keratin that's really, like, a literal helmet. Yeah, that's probably what makes them seem the most dinosaur-like, although they got a lot of dinosaur-ish features. That helmet, like the hard helmet, it's made of the same stuff, like you said, keratin, that's what their beak's made of, too, and same with their feathers, too, but it's really tough structural skin. I think there's dinosaurs that had that same exact thing. Yeah, it looks like a fin of a triceratops. Yes, just one of them, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it was just the seratops. Right. Well, no, no, no, not the horns. I'm talking about the on the back. Are you okay? I've been better. All right. The thing

that's so deadly about the cassowary, though, is you're not going to get head butted by that cask, is you're going to get clawed by a three to five inch, this is where the velociraptor thing comes in, this three to five inch claw that is super sharp, and all you have to do is look at a video of the guy on YouTube with basically a big shield and this cassowary coming at him and jumping and kicking both of his legs with these claws at the sky and literally knocking his grown man backwards to know how scary this thing can be. Yeah, it's like, I mean, those claws are super sharp, but their legs are also super powerful, too. Oh, yeah. So they pack a really big punch that's also a really sharp punch that's been known to basically gut people,

like not only can it make you bleed pretty bad, it can reach your internal organs sometimes, too. And the reason they're flightless is even though they're big, their little wings only extend, fully extend about a foot from their body, so they have no chance of flying. They don't. One of the other things, too, about their feathers, you said it looks like hair, it's really good to protect them because they live in the forests with a lot of dense underbrush, a lot of thorns, a lot of branches and stuff. And one of the theories behind why they think they have that horn on their head, what's it called again? I want to say a cask. One of the reasons they think they have the cask is so that it can kind of run headlong through the forest

without hurting its head, but then also those thick, heavy feathers also protect the body, too, from getting stabbed by thorns and things like that. That's right. So should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll talk more about the deadly cassowary right after this. 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.

Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, 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. I'm Mangesha Tickler 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 can crash 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So we're talking about the deadly cassowary, which, I mean, it is deadly,

but I don't think it's any more deadly. It's much less deadly even, or you're much less likely to die by a cassowary than you are from saying, like, get an infection from a dog bite or something like that, right? Statistically speaking? Yeah. I mean, we shouldn't disparage the cassowary as deadly. Like, they can kill and they have those sharp claws, but they're not aggressive generally. They're not after you generally. If you come upon them while they have laid their eggs or something, you may be in trouble, but they generally want to stay away from people. There is another video that's pretty, a little frightening. If they would have put like

scary music to it, it would have helped, but there was a woman on the beach in Australia, I guess, and she filmed the whole thing, but this cassowary was just walking toward her and she's walking backwards and it keeps coming and it's pecking at the phone. But after having seen that other video, I'm just like on edge waiting for this thing to jump up and slice her stomach open. It's intimidating and it's a very large bird. And when it's coming at you with those kind of crazy eyes and its heads ducking back and forth and it's kind of pecking at you, it seems like a velociraptor in that moment. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. So yeah, I think it's more just like it's remarkable that a bird can kill you and has before that then it is

like actually like a super deadly bird. What's the deal with that waddle? They're not 100% sure, but one of the theories is that it's basically like a current mood indicator, like current mood, effervescent, like a mood ring, it changes color brightness with their mood. Yeah, that's not too bad. Or to maybe say like I'm robust and maybe like sexually perhaps. Sure, like check on my waddle baby. Exactly. They're also known as a keystone species because what they do is they fruit tons of fruit and they walk around and cover a great area and poop that seed out. It goes right through their digestive tracts and they deposit those seeds all over the place. So you get a much more diverse fruit habitat in areas where they are popular.

Yeah, because yeah, I mean they're not only spreading the seeds around when they poop it out, it's got all sorts of nutrients to grow within. It's just a great commensalist setup, I guess. They also are pretty stealth. They have this, apparently their call is so low, it's just on the edge of human hearing. So you may not even hear them coming at you. Yeah, and apparently though, like you can feel it in your chest if you happen to be near one when they call, like it rumbles in your chest. That's pretty scary. The sound waves too. I love it. These things are great. Did we ever say how big they get, Chuck? Yeah, he said 6'6 and 135 or so. Yeah, that's just so enormous. But what I thought was really

interesting is, and at the very least the southern cassowary species, the female is about 170 pounds. The males are 125 pounds. And even more interesting, the males are the ones that actually raise the hatchlings. Yeah. Did you know that? Well, I didn't until, I mean, I knew nothing about this thing until I looked into it. But yeah, the female basically lays the eggs and is like, my work here is done. It's on you, scrawny. Yeah, raise the kids. And the males do, they raise these kids and the female goes off and mates with more males, other males. And it makes total sense from a natural selection standpoint, because that just means that more cassowary chicks can be born. The more female cassowary can go off and mate with more male

cassowaries, as long as the males are the ones raising the chicks. That's pretty great. It's a great idea. Yeah, and it's great because their numbers are dwindling. All three species are vulnerable or near threatened. Of course, humans have a lot to do with this, loss of habitat, because we're growing into their territory or they're getting hit by cars, stuff like that. Dogs, apparently, if it's a young dog or a small dog, the cassowary, like there are dog attacks on record, but if the dog gets bigger, they can be a threat to the cassowary. Yeah, especially young cassowaries. Yeah, it's all size. It's like whoever's the pup is the one threatened. The law of nature. That's right. So there are people working to keep the cassowaries around,

make sure they don't go extinct. Like you said, it's typically human encroachment, so people are buying back some of their native habitats and just trying to set them off as preserves and building ways around roadways, which is another big thing. We should do a short stuff on that sometime, basically like nature highways that are overpasses in the woods over roads that go through the woods. Yeah, I've seen that. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and maybe we just did the short stuff on it just now. I don't know if there's much more to say about it, but I think it's amazing looking. I've seen pictures of them. They just look like grass-covered overpasses, almost like what our overpasses are going to look like in 2079 when there's no more people left.

That's right. They look like the last of us or Station 11. Sure. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, since we got nothing else, everybody, this ode to cassowaries is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.