Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Bioluminescence: A Bright and Shiny Fish

Episode Date: January 26, 2019

Science has a handle on fireflies and glowworms, but most bioluminescent animals live in the ocean and are tough to study. Today, researchers are still figuring out why some animals produce light. Dive with Josh and Chuck into this illuminating topic. 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.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, your dear friend. And for this week's SYS Case Selects, I've chosen how bioluminescence works. We released it originally in September of 2012, and it's a straight ahead,

super interesting, sciency episode, the best kind. And for some reason, I sound so low key that it seems like I'm going to melt into the floor at any moment. No idea why. I hope you enjoy listening to it again as much as I did. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And you put us together, and you get a little something called Stuff You Should Know. And that's what this is, whether you like it or not. And you have to listen to it, that's right. Actually, no one has to listen to this.

No, it's me and David. Oh, okay. It's part of both Obama's and Romney's platforms. Yeah, it's a part of Obamacare. You got to listen to Stuff You Should Know, and you got to get an RFD chip in your hand. And you have to give poor people all your money. None of that is true,

except that you have to listen to the podcast. And the poor people part. Yeah. Chuck. Yes. How's it going? It's great. Are you feeling sick?

Do you need any kind of care, Obama or otherwise? No, are you feeling sick? I'm fine. Oh, no. I'm tense, like my shoulder muscles are gonna pop right out of my skin. Boy, I went to that foot massage place on Beaufort Highway the other day.

You ever been there? Treat your feet. Is that what it's called? Yeah. That's a great name. They'll do an hour on your feet for 25 bucks, if that's what you desire. Oh, yeah?

No, about a little bit into it, they'll ask you like, would you want to go half and half, like half body, half foot? Cause basically they get you in there, they're going at your feet, and you're like, you know, I don't know if I could do an hour on my feet.

Gotcha. Each toe has gotten their own massage at this point. Right. Like they're just jelly. Cracked your toes. Yeah. So they think, yeah, you know, I'll pay another 20 bucks for the body.

Right. They give you tea. It's really nice. You should go. It does sound nice. But it's not like private. Like you're in a big room with like 15 recliners. Yeah.

Everyone's just sitting around. Well, we've gotten back rubs at the mall before. Yeah, that's true. You remember? I don't know how I got on this. Treat your feet, Beeford Highway. Go eat some pho, and then go get your foot massaged. Where's good pho around here?

We were trying to figure that out the other day. Beeford Highway. Yeah, where? Which one? If you, are we going to do this now? Yeah. Okay. I like pho number two,

which is past Claremont. It's in a little shopping center. Okay. Just look it up. Okay. All good. Okay. All good pho.

Good. Yeah, I don't know how we got on there, but some places on Beeford Highway, you'll use some money. Seriously. At least some free pho. This has nothing to do with bioliminescence. No, it doesn't.

Although sometimes if you stir your pho around Chuck, you're going to see some fungus possibly rise to the top. Yeah. Or maybe shrimp. A couple of times. Right? Yeah, that's a good one too. Yeah.

Were those things still alive and not cooked, they possibly might glow. And were they to glow, you would say, look at those things, they're bioluminescing. That's right. Because that's what they do. Yeah.

It is a life form that generates their own glow inside their body. Their own light. Yeah. Pretty awesome. Yeah. And I read a different study. It was like, what's the deal with this?

Because this is still very much a mystery. We have an idea of how this goes down, but not in every case. We also don't understand why in a lot of cases. And in some cases, we don't understand how. Yeah. And the thing is, I don't think it's that it's out of the grasp of science to understand it.

I think that when researchers are looking into this, they become so transfixed on the beautiful glow that they forget what they're doing and waste tons of time. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, I got to publish or perish. And then it's just like, they just write why on a piece of paper and send it in.

As Tracy Wilson of Pop Stuff, great podcast, points out. And Tracy's articles are always awesome. Yeah. Oh man, they're comprehensive. You know, I never have to worry about it. Sadly, sometimes scientists can either harm the light making magic when they try to study them.

This makes it hard to study. Or the animal will exhaust it's light making glow capabilities out of like fear or defense. Or spite. Or spite, which will also make it hard to study. Right. So those are a couple of reasons. And the whole just, why?

Right. So we do have a pretty good handle to some extent, but let's talk about what luminescence itself is, right? With this light bulb right here in this Ikea brand lamp. Yes. It's incandescent. It's an incandescent light bulb, Chuck. I think this is an Edison bulb too.

Is it? Yeah. Oh, is it like the real old timey looking one? No, sort of. So that is pretty simple. It has electricity that passes through a filament, just a thin metal piece of something, metal. And that heats up and it heats up so much

that it gives off light, which is incredibly inefficient. And if say a jellyfish were to do this, it would catch fire even though it's underwater. Right. So what living organisms do when they want to give off light is something called cold light or bioluminescence, which is the combination of chemicals that produce light. It's like a glow stick.

But no heat, but it is just like a glow stick. You're combining two things that will make a glow. Exactly. If you don't have to shake up the jellyfish and throw it at your sister. They do not like that. Or it's like the glow sticks that I used to sell very often at Stone Mountain Laser Show.

It's like the glow sticks that I used to dance with at Raves. You were at Raves and I was selling these things during Lee Greenwood's, Lee Greenwood? Lee Greenwood, yeah. Proud to be an American? Sure. Boy, I heard that song 5,000 times. I'll bet.

Anyone who's never been to Stone Mountain, Georgia, they have a big rock there and they have a laser show on it during the summer. It's a big rock that has basically the Confederate heroes carved into the side of it by the guy who did Mount Rushmore. Oh, is that the same guy? Uh-huh. Yeah, and they show a very corny laser show every summer

since like the early 1980s. And not just once this summer, like every night during the summer. Every night, yeah. That's why I've heard it 10,000 times. It's something. And Chuck used to work there. I think he left that out.

Selling glow sticks. I sold the glow sticks. Full circle. Yes. All right, let's quit stalling. Let's talk about bioluminescence, okay? That's all over the place. Well, like you said, we don't know exactly

how it works in all cases, but we do know that these animals do mix together different substances just like a glow stick would. Right. And to turn their little glow on and off. Right. Here on the planet, not in the ocean, because that's where most of this stuff takes place.

Right. And on the planet or from the dry land, you can have things glowing like Foxfire, which is this fungus that feeds on rotting wood. You look at pictures of Foxfire, pretty cool. Yeah, it's eerie. It doesn't look real, but it's real. It's very real.

The jack-o'-lantern mushroom, you can Google that as well. I love it. It's also kind of cool. That's my favorite bioluminescent organism. Why? Just because it's the single thing. On land, on terra firma. Because it's a perfectly named thing,

the jack-o'-lantern mushroom. Like it has that glow coming through the gills. Yeah. And just the gills. So it looks like there's this glow coming inside and there's holes where it's coming out of. It's so neat. My favorite on terra firma is the lightning bug,

a.k.a. the Firefly, here in the south. And I guess I'm not sure where else I call them lightning bugs, but definitely in the south. You'll see them come out every summer. And if you're a little kid, you can go around and catch them and put them in a jar. And then release them. And then release them.

And in fact, you may be harming them just by catching them. But what you don't wanna do if you're a kid is like, smash these things. Right. Because that's just, you know, that means you're gonna end up being a serial killer one day. Probably. So the Firefly is, you know,

you generally think of them as the adults flying around, but their little larva can glow as well on the ground. Right. And a lot of people call Firefly lava glow worms. But glow worms are apparently another kind of fly larva. Yeah. Fireflies are fireflies or lightning bugs.

That's right. Cinnopedes, millipedes, there's all kinds of little things that can glow. Worms. Yeah. There's some worms that give off a bioluminescent sludge. And no one has any idea why. Is it their poop?

And they poop it out? I don't think so. Remember the secretion they produce when they're mating and all that? Oh yeah. It's probably like that. It probably comes from the ring. I can't remember the name of the ring.

So that's on earth, but if you really want to get down to some cool glowing creatures, you need to dive down into the ocean, to the twilight zone, which I think we've talked about that, haven't we? No, we talked about it in biospeilology. Oh, in caves?

Yeah, there's different zones of light penetration in caves and in the ocean too. That's right. The twilight zone is generally about 660 to 3,300 feet deep. 201 to 1,006 meters. It depends because obviously different kinds of ocean water are gonna allow different amounts of light in. It depends on what the ocean floor looks like.

But it is this photic or poorly lit zone, deeper than the euphotic sunlit zone. Or good lit zone. Or shallower than the aphotic midnight zone, which is like scary. No light. That's a scary time down there. Those are the things down there that have no eyes.

Right, because it just doesn't matter. Same like with the caves. So, yeah, remember what was the Prometheus Salamander? Yeah. Which is three feet long and doesn't have eyes. The scariest thing ever except for the cigar shark, which we'll actually get to in here. Okay, so is that the cookie cutter shark?

Yeah, man, this thing's frightening. So in this twilight zone, the dysphotic zone or mesopelagic zone, mesopelagic zone, stop laughing at me. This is where most of the bioluminescent organisms on earth can be found. And the light that penetrates this area is a blue-green color.

Because the red, yellow, orange, yeah, the red, yellow, and orange are absorbed by the seawater above. And the violet is scattered. So the blue and the green are the ones that get through. So everything's just kind of color blue-green. That's what the sunlight is.

So most of the bioluminescent organisms in this dysphotic zone, dysphotic zone, have evolved to produce light at that same wavelength from something like 440 to 479 nanometers, which is like the blue-green spectrum. That's right. So. Matches that sunlight.

Yeah, which is pretty cool. Yeah, well, we'll get to it, but it can lead to some cool things like camouflage. Yeah, but it also means that it travels farther. Light travels, that type of light travels the farthest in water, because it has a shorter wavelength than the other types. So an animal producing this

could really cook down there, basically. Yeah. We're talking jellyfish, shrimp, krill, squid, other kinds of fish, marine worms, whatever the heck that is. They're exactly what you think. It is? Oh, what are those one worms called

that come up out of the little tubes? Tube worms. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I believe that's what they're called. Either that or I just made some terrible sixth grade joke, but they are on the ocean bottom, and they just come out of these tubes. Wow.

And grab stuff and go back in, they're like three feet long. You've not seen this? Sea snake to me, no. Yeah, but they're, I think they're attached, they may be attached to their tubes, or they just never come all the way out. I'm gonna have to look into that. So you talked about the blue-green light

is what they generally produce. There is something called the loose jawfish, which actually can make red light very deep in the ocean, but that's really unusual that can make red light. And it's, a lot of species can't even see the color red down there, because I don't know if their brains aren't used to it, because they never see it.

So the loose jaw uses this thing to basically sneak up on people. It's like James Gumm at the end of Silence of the Lambs. Yeah, exactly. And like the fish are like, Jodie Foster, like, and James Gumm is the loose jawfish coming up behind her, like, I can see you, but you can't see me.

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

So we're gonna have to look into that. And we're gonna have to look into that. And we're gonna have 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 and 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. 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. 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, 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. So, like we said earlier, we don't know for sure why all these bioluminescent forms of life are down there doing their thing. Um, you did mention the earthworm

that has the secretion. They don't know why they do that. Uh, the mushroom spores. They think that maybe it's to attract insect to spread these spores. That's why the mushroom glows. Makes sense. Um, sometimes, and this one's kind of cute,

sometimes animals will light up when something nearby them lights up, which I think might just be a little like, hey, how you doing? I can glow too. Well, that's what fireflies are doing. Yeah, they're attracting mates, right? Yeah.

With like a very specific pattern of lighting. Right, they use it to communicate. Like, hey, you're looking pretty good. Meet you by the fence post. Right. Yeah. Um, let's go get some foo. So, should we talk about the dinoflagellates,

the dinoflagellates? Dinoflagellates. Am I pronouncing it wrong? No, I think I was wrong. Okay. Uh, well, yeah, so have you ever seen Apollo 13? Yeah. You remember the part where, um,

they had a problem, Houston? Is it Tom level? Jim level. Yeah. Where Jim level and, uh, is hanging out with Bill Paxton and they're talking about how they're just shooting the breeze while they're trying to stay alive. And, um, he talks about how he was flying a mission,

um, coming in on an aircraft carrier and there was a blackout and he couldn't see where he was going. He couldn't find the aircraft carrier to land and he was running low on fuel and all of a sudden he looks and he notices that there's a bunch of, um, he calls it like glowing algae or whatever.

Yeah. But what he's talking about were dinoflagellates that were kicked up by the wake of the, um, aircraft carrier and he used them as like a runway. Wow. To guide them in. I don't remember that part. That's a great part.

That whole movie from like start to finish was awesome. Run Howard. But these dinoflagellates create what's called a milky sea and all of them together. When they're disturbed physically, they start to glow. And if you have a bunch of them, you can see them from space actually in this article.

There's a picture of a pretty substantial milky sea off the coast of Africa. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah. And if you Google milky sea too, you can see some like that's cool looking, but I like the shots from like low flying planes.

Yeah. Helicopters. Very cool looking. Yeah. And a little eerie. Yeah. If I may say so. Yeah.

Again, why dinoflagellates would glow when they're disturbed. Obviously they're like trying to register their complaint. They can't talk. Yeah. Can't flip anyone off. Do they glow? Yeah.

Out of anger apparently. There's a theory called the burglar alarm theory. I like this one. Or basically they think that when dinoflagellates start to glow, it's because there's little fish eating on them, right? Which is disturbing. They think that maybe they glow to basically alert larger fish that will come eat the smaller fish.

So they'll stop eating the dinoflagellates, though there's little fish in the area. Pretty awesome. Like, hey, help. Come eat this guy because you're bigger. Right. Here's some other, and you know, these are the ones that are the most understood

because there is a lot of uncertainty, like we said, like 10 times. But here's some of the reasons that they think they're doing this. Communication, which we've mentioned with the firefly. Right. Or the lightning bug. Right. To locate food, maybe to use it as an actual light to see in the dark.

Right. Pretty cool. Or a spotlight to catch prey. Sure. Oh, like temporarily blind something. Oh, gotcha. Or no, to like go find it. Or just to find it.

It's very dark in here. I need to see what fish are around. To attract prey, like the angler fish, like, ooh, look at this bright glow. Come here. Chomp. Yeah, I love that one. What was that in Finding Nemo?

Man, that thing was scary. I didn't see that one. Oh, it was a good one. Yeah. Camouflage. I don't watch any of those anymore because Emily doesn't like them. Oh, yes, she doesn't like Disney movies. She doesn't like any of those Pixar movies because it's always like some tragedy.

Like someone dies in its heartbreak. Man, keep her away from Toy Story 3. Oh, dude, I can't even watch that movie. I made her watch Up and she was just like a little blob of plank on the floor. Oh, yeah. The first 10 minutes are just so sad. Yeah. My God.

I always explain to her, like, this is why they make these movies. So kids can learn how to cope with death and then they see, like, it's all happy afterward. Right. You know? All right. Camouflage. This is the coolest one. Yeah.

And it's pretty, it makes sense, too. If you're in the ocean and if you've ever, like, swum down 10 or 15 feet and looked up, open your eyes in the ocean. I've done it. It's hard to see stuff below you, but it's easy to look up because, you know, the sunlight's penetrating down and see, like, the silhouette, or in the case of Jaws, you see, like, the silhouette of the lady's legs on the raft. Right.

You know, that's good eating. If you have, like, in the case of what's it called, counter-illumination, you can actually produce spots on your underside to make it more difficult for a fish beneath you, a predator beneath you, to look up and, like, make out what's going on. Like, you won't have the perfect little silhouette outline of a yummy fish. It'll confuse it, basically. Right. Right, because you're cutting down on the contrast.

Pretty cool. Like, you're creating light that blends in with that same blue-green light and all of a sudden you disappear. Well, or it just breaks up your shape so you don't look like you should. Right. And then there's the opposite, the cookie cutter or cigar shark, which is the name I think you made up. No, no, that's real.

Which basically has the reverse of that, where the bottom, the underside of the cookie cutter shark glows, except for this one spot in the middle that is dark, that looks like a small fish. Yeah. So a shark or some other animal looking up will be like, I'm going to go eat that fish. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, God, it's a cookie cutter slash cigar shark. And then the cookie cutter shark takes a bite out of them. A round bite.

Yeah, that's why they call it the cookie cutter. It's like a little plug of flesh. And if you've ever seen Google these dudes in their face, it's like the most frightening little thing you've ever seen in your life. Yeah, they're pretty terrifying. And you'll see pictures of like a shark or a whale washed up on the shore with like hundreds of these little bite plugs taken out of them. Man.

Yeah, it's pretty awful. That's a terrible way to go. Yeah. But good for you, cigar shark, because you're small and you're doing what you can. It's a tough world down there. It's wily. You know? It's diphotic.

And then self-defense is the last reason. And basically like a squid may release ink to cloud your vision. Some of these things can release a cloud of a glowing cloud to basically make you sit back and put on Pink Floyd and like chill out for a little while. Yeah, I looked it up. There's a shrimp. There's a type of shrimp that releases a bioluminescent cloud. And I couldn't get the name.

I saw both fire breathing and vomiting shrimp for the common names. But yeah, it just spits it out. That's not what you would want to order on a menu. The fried vomiting shrimp. Right. And make sure there's extra poop in the vein vein. So what's going on here? How is this magic happening?

Well, just like we mentioned with the light stick, it involves two different substances mixed together to produce this reaction. Right. And there can be all different kinds of chemicals, but depending on the fish or the being, the being, the life form. Being works, yeah. The God's gift. One is a luciferin.

And that's the light producer. And the other is a luciferase. And that is the enzyme that catalyzes it. And those aren't specific things. Like you wouldn't look at the chemical composition or something and be like, oh, that's a luciferin. Something can be a luciferin. It's a generic term for something that produces light or something that catalyzes the production of light. The luciferase.

That is correct. Okay. And they will mix together. And a lot of times the luciferin is something called a photoprotein. And it needs an ion, a charged ion to get things going. That would be the luciferase. That's right. But in all cases, there is some sort of trigger.

Could be mechanical, could be chemical, could be neurological. Startle. Yeah. Could be something they don't understand yet. But something triggers these two things to get together and make this reaction. And one thing that I didn't realize was the word lucifer means light bringer. Yeah. I never knew that.

You mean I went on a little side tear last night trying to figure out why the devil would be named the light bringer. Yeah. Did you find out? No. It's a mystery. And it came years, like centuries after the Old Testament was originally written. And I can't remember what version, but it was basically like added on by the, I guess the Romans maybe? Added it on, but it's because it's Latin and the original version was not written in Latin.

Light bringer. The light bringer. Yeah. The morning star. That's another way to put it. Really? Maybe it had to do with Venus because Venus is like a false star. Yeah.

And so maybe Lucifer is a false angel is what they're saying. That makes sense because the devil would always come into skies. Maybe. Yeah. I think that's weak. Light bringer. That's pretty specific. Like what is that?

I bet there's some theologian that has the answer here. I want to hear it. Yeah. I would love to find out about that one. Yeah. 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. 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 friends 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. 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. Yeah, 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.

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 podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. So you've got Luciferin. You've got Luciferase. Some of these chemical reactions require another substance and a lot of times it's oxygen. Right. So Luciferin will come in in contact with an oxygen molecule and then the Luciferase comes along and then you've got a bioluminescent glow, which is pretty cool. Yeah.

But they also think that that's one of the reasons I should say that's one of the reasons why they think that bioluminescence is an accidental byproduct of regular old evolution. Oh, yeah. And originally, like there's a Luciferin called Cylenterazine, I believe is how you pronounce it, and it's an antioxidant. It goes around and tries to find like rogue harmful free radicals, oxygen derivatives, right? Yeah. And get rid of them. And they think that this happened, this was a process that was way, way older than bioluminescence and then along came some substance that became a Luciferase and then light was created. And then it was just a byproduct, like heat's a byproduct of metabolism, right? Right.

But they think also that over time this happened in, like maybe it's going on inside of us right now. Right. We're producing light, but we just don't know it, or it's just so weak that we wouldn't even possibly be able to detect it. But this happened enough times in animals in the ocean where suddenly ones could catch prey more easily because they could see better than other animals that weren't bioluminescing. Huh. So it was selected in these skies and now bioluminescence is its own trait rather than a byproduct of the antioxidant process. I bet you're right. Oh, that's not me, man. No, I think you just cooked this up.

I wish. That's better than why as far as research papers go. Yeah, throw a theory out there, see if it sticks, that's what I say. So the deal with these animals is they either have all this stuff like in their body as part of them or they have a little relationship with a bacteria, a light producing bacteria that live in a light organ. And this is pretty cool. Like some of these animals can pull this organ back into their body like it's always on. Right. Sometimes they don't want the light to be on, so they'll pull it back in the body or they have a little something like a light, an eyelid that they can just kind of close over the light.

Which is pretty amazing. Yeah. But it's always going. Yeah, and the other thing with evolution is they think that because they don't see this as often in lakes because lakes are younger, then they think it maybe happened independently at different parts in the ocean. So I talked to Tracy about this and it was a little hinky because she wrote this a long time ago. She couldn't quite remember what the point was, but the point was that they think that because the process of anti-oxidation is a normal thing. The conditions were right for bioluminescence to be selected naturally in some places, but it wouldn't in like a lake. So the idea that this happened independently and spontaneously when needed through evolution is kind of backed up by the idea that you don't really see bioluminescence at the bottom of the lakes because you don't need it.

Yeah. It all makes sense when you just peel the little curtain back, doesn't it? Yep. When you peel the glowing skin back. What else? You got anything else? You seen glowing cats? No, are there cats that glow?

Yeah. The Mayo Clinic likes to put jellyfish genes in animals. The biggest one so far is a cat and make it glow because they're tracking disease. They're using it to mark the progression of diseases, but they made a glowing cat. It's pretty cool. Now, I got to look this up. It glows under a blue light, but it glows green, and it's like the cat glows green. I guess it's the hair.

The keratin it produces has some sort of fluorescent property to it, but it's not bioluminescent and it's fluorescent. And fluorescent is where you take light of one color and reflect it back, absorb it and reflect it back as a different color. You're not actually producing light. All right. I just looked it up. Wow. It's a glowing cat. And I double checked the date.

Sweet kiddies. I double checked the day. I'm like, this better not be an April Fool's article, but it's not. Wow. Yeah. I want one of those. Disphotic. Yeah.

Okay. So if you're done. I'm done. Yeah. There's glowing rats too. No, these are baby cats, I think. Are you sure? Which are called kittens in some countries.

If you want to learn more about bioluminescence, you should type that in to the search bar and you want to type B-I-O-L-U-M-I-N-E-S-C-E-N-C-E. It's mouthful. In the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and it'll bring up this very cool article with some pretty glowing pictures. And I said search bar somewhere in there, which means it's time for listener mail. No, it's not, Josh. Today is part two of... Oh, yeah. You want to say it?

Administrative details. For those of you who don't know, this is the point at the show where we thank people for little tokens and gifts and tchotchkes and things that they have sent us. Food sometimes. Foods. And it's a good chance to hear your name on the show as a thank you and it's a good chance for some of you to find out where you can get some of these things. A lot of times they're like really great, creative, crafty things. Books. People write books.

Yeah, like we want to support the crafters and writers and bakers of cookies. And we want to support Bill Wagner, who sent us a bumper sticker on how to pronounce Nevada. Nevada? I'll never get used to that. It's not right. It is right, but I tell everyone that writes in, only people from Nevada say it that way. Nevada. Everyone else says Nevada.

Nevada. Nevada. All right. Lilly, her sister Toby and brother-in-law Danny started a company called Please Be Good Humans. Oh yeah. Remember these guys? They sent us some shirts. I think they sent some to Kristen.

They sent us stickers. They've got them. No, everybody has stickers. We passed them out. Oh, well Kristen Conger, I think, got a shirt too though. Oh, she did? I think so. Oh, that's great.

And basically everything has the PBGH logo on it, which is like be good to each other. And 15% of everything they sell goes to the charity of your choice. So, if you go there, please be good humans on the internet. You can actually get some of the stuff and choose your own charity that 15% will go to. Very nice message. Very nice. How about some Randy Carbononi action? Yeah.

He sent us his Pirate Gags booklet, which is a tailor made for Pirate Day, National Catholic of Pirate Day. If you want to learn more about that, you could go to pirateday.blogspot.com and hook up with Randy Carbononi action. Christopher M. Roth with an E at the end, sent us a Kindle version of his book, Dirk Danger Loves Life. I don't have a Kindle yet and I'm dying to read this thing. Just sitting there.

Just sitting there waiting. They're tormenting you. Um, Susanna from Archie, the Archie comics. Yay. Um, she sent us a bunch of stuff. She sends us stuff in like waves, I guess you could put it, but most recently she sent us a Archie Meets Kiss Hardcover book, a Kevin Keller book, that's the first gay character. That's right.

The first gay comic book character, this whole Green Lantern hubbub. I haven't heard that. Oh yeah. There's apparently two Green Lanterns and one of them came out as gay. And it's just a man in the comic that he came out in. That's forward thinking. Yeah. But Archie's got him beat because of Kevin Keller, the first gay character in the Jinx

comics that Susanna, does she draw, write, produce those? Yeah. I mean, that's her baby. So, um, support the Jinx comics and Archie's a whole, she sent us shirts and we were supposed to meet at Comic-Con, but she said they were slammed in the booth and she was unable to get away. I met the Uncle John's reader people, bathroom reader people, they gave us shirts and t-shirts, hats.

Very nice. So thank you to them as well. That's so cool. Yeah. We heard from Mad Magazine too. Yeah. Which was like floored me. Yeah.

Did you write that guy back? I totally did. Did you? Yeah, I finally did. Um, Daniel McKenzie from Oakland, California, Sinneson LP from his band, Shadai Unison, awesome music, Indy Rock, a little noisy, a little melodic, right at my alley. Yes. Shadai Unison.

I didn't see that one. Yeah, it's good stuff. Um, Andy Parr, Sinneson edition of Games, Magazines, World of Puzzles. Is that the one that had us as a clue? I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. Stuff you should know was a clue in a word search, I believe.

Nobody got it. No. I don't get this one. That's cool, but it was very nice that he, uh, he went to that trouble. Uh, Suki, S-U-K-I, Design Laboratory, Sinneson Hankies, and this was the lady who designed the baby, uh, head T-shirt. With the fly. Yeah.

Our favorite T-shirt of the submissions. Yeah. The most disturbing one. It was one of my five favorites. It was my favorite, I think. Was it? Yeah. But, um, she designed that and she Sinneson Hankies with like, these Hankies have, uh,

like sleeping sickness and hepatitis and like the chemical combinations of these. Right. On the hanky. Yeah. It's pretty funny. That's what's contained within. Yeah. That's pretty awesome.

Um, yeah, thank you for those. Uh, Duffman, Sinneson Springfield Isotopes Coozie. Yeah. From Duffman himself. Yeah. Uh, we appreciate that, sir. Uh, Silver Fox Broadband, Sinnes Silver Fox T-shirts, and at first I was all, what is this, Broadband Company sending his shirts.

Then I looked up, they supply internet for senior homes. Yeah. And so I was all of a sudden, wore it with pride. Everyone at my gym thinks that I'm a Silver Fox because I wear that shirt a lot. Awesome. It's very comfortable. Uh, let's see. The guys from Rock Tail Hour send us a T-shirt.

They podcast about rock music, um, that's rock and then tail, T-A-L-E, hour. Check them out. BikeRappers.com, uh, with W-R-A-P-B-E-R, not rapping like music. Right. They send us some reflective bike rappers and dog collars, basically, just these little Velcro things, such an easy invention, but, but necessary. And you wrap them on the, um, the frame of your bike to make your bike more reflective. Yeah.

And they have little reflective dog collars too. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Um, we've got Christmas cards from a bunch of people. Thank you very much for them. This is how far behind we are. I know. Uh, it's Christmas in July, everybody, uh, Nick and Lindsay, Devin B, Becca Evans, Andrew,

and Janelle Thomas. So thank you very much. Merry Christmas, all you people. And happy Halloween, M. Oh, and I've got one more. M sent us a Halloween card. Oh, thanks. Happy Halloween, M. And then again from Nick and Lindsay, they sent us Valentine's Day cards.

Yeah, they're, they're pretty sweet. They sent us stuff. Are you done? Cause I got two more on this one. Go ahead. Let's go for it, dude. Uh, David Beaver's family has been making a magnetic calendar for 50 years. Yeah.

And not just one, they've been making the magnetic calendars for 50 years. Yeah. They've been making the magnetic calendar.com owned, operated, made, and sourced in the Midwest. It's a selling point. Family business. They've been doing this for how long? 50 years?

50 years. Awesome. Uh, and then Jill Swing sent us a Twinkie the Kid t-shirt. So thank you very much. Yeah. I believe it was homemade design too, right? Uh, I don't know. I think it is.

Was it? Yeah. Well, thank you, everybody. That was very kind of you. Yeah. We have one more installment that you will hear soon. And then I have to do it because these are all the ones that Chuck compiled. I think it's most of them though.

Do you have a lot? I've got a decent amount. All right. Well, then they'll be a part four. Good. And then we'll start all over. All right. All right.

If you want to send us something, even something as innocuous as just a hello, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.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 band or each week to guide you through life. 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.