TED Radio Hour - Animal Enigmas

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

From the bugs in our backyards to prehistoric reptiles, animal biology and behavior are full of puzzles and conundrums. On this episode, we hear from experts solving the mysteries of the animal kingdom. Guests include paleontologist Dean Lomax, biochemical engineer Saad Bhamla, herpetologist Gowri Shankar and conservation biologist Patrícia Medici. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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From TED and NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and we're going to start today's show by going back in time. To meet a girl named Mary Anning. Where do I begin with Mary Anning? Let me tell you. So Mary Aning, this is way back in 1811, 1812. This is Dean Lomax. She was just 11, 12 years.

and walking on the beach with her older brother, Joseph, at a seaside town called Lime Regis here in the UK. Lime Regis is known for its harbour, its fishing, its shipbuilding, and its craggy beachside cliffs. And that is where Mary grew up. You imagine these really tall, what today we would consider Jurassic cliffs that were just constantly crumbling away, being eroded and smashed by the... the waves, and as a result of that constant erosion, you'd have rocks falling down that would contain fossils. And not only would you have the fossils preserved in the cliff face itself, you'd get them on the foreshore. So you'd have young Mary Arning and her family looking for these

things. Often they'd find the remains of shellfish-like animals like ammonites and bullet-shaped bellumites. And it kind of was a case that was kind of come rain or shine, whatever, weather, they would be out there collecting these things. It became, for the family, it became massively important for their survival. Important because their father, Richard, had recently died. They were already quite a poverty-stricken family, but the fact that Richard passed away when she was so young and left them in so much debt, they had to find another way to survive.

And so, to make ends meet, Mary and her brother would dig out, carefully clean, and sell fossils to gentlemen scientists visiting the coast. Because at this time, paleontology was really in its infancy. And people had began to question kind of what came before, you know, question the story, the Bible and things like that. And people had began to try to work out if animals were on the planet before, you know, was the age of the Earth a lot older than they thought. And one day...

Mary and her old brother Joseph, they made a remarkable discovery that would change the world of paleontology. And to a large extent, the world, as we know it today, they found the remains,

they found this gigantic skull over a meter long with a massive, what we call sclerotic ring, this giant ring of bone inside the eye socket of this animal, which we call an Ictheosaur. Icyosaur, Greek, for fish lizard.

Now, ectheosaurs are a cute, curious group of animals. For one thing, they look somewhere between a dolphin and a shark, but kind of reptilian. Some of them were the top of the food chain predators in the oceans. They had these giant jaws, massive teeth easily. Some of them up to about 8 centimeters, 10 centimeters long. They're often misidentified as swimming dinosaurs.

But they're not dinosaurs. They're an entirely different group. They lived entirely in the ocean whilst the dinosaurs were walking on land. Prior to this discovery, people didn't know what ichthyosaurs were. There wasn't even an official name for them yet, which is what made Mary's finding so important. That skull, four feet long, was attached to a much, much longer skeleton that Mary discovered months later. It was the very first complete ectheosaur skeleton ever unearthed. This discovery was that important and that it complete and so different.

to anything else, that it caught the attention of the gentlemanly scientists of the day who were really eager to study this fossil. Mary Anning spent the rest of her life uncovering fossils. She discovered the first ever pleasiosaur remains, the first terosaur fossil found in England. She even pioneered the study of coprolites, basically fossilized poop. You know, today she's considered the mother of paleontosal. And, you know, it's quite amazing because in her lifetime, often many people, usually men, would never give her the credit, you know, for what she discovered and the science that she was doing at the time.

You know, she really was a scientist. People traveled from far and wide to come and see her. And as one person put it, her little dirty shop in limelringes filled with fossils. centuries later, there are still so many biological mysteries yet to be solved, from better understanding those ancient reptiles that swim in prehistoric seas, to the anatomy of bugs living in our own backyards right now. So on this episode, animal enigmas, the chance findings, near-death experiences, and long hours of observation that it takes to piece together, nature's puzzles.

For paleontologist Dean Lomax, Mary's discoveries had an especially significant impact. So Mary Anning was my real childhood hero growing up. I remember quoting that she'd found the ichthyosaurs and the pleasiosaurs and really sparked the imagination of so many people at the time. And that's really what it did for me. Today, Dean is maybe the go-to-ythiosaur expert, sometimes studying the very very very fossils that Mary Anning first unearthed. And in 2021, Dean had his own big discovery.

But it didn't happen in a museum or while walking on the beach. It started with an email. All right, Dean, so what was so special about this email? Yeah. So in 2021, I was sitting at my desk, typing away. And I thought, oh, what could this be? Because I got to be honest, Manush. I get lots of emails and messages on social media from people who say,

hey, we found this dinosaur, we found this fossil. And often it just turns out to be an odd-shaped rock. And so I was like, okay, I had a quick reader this email. I was like, okay, interesting. And then scroll down. And then I was like, oh, okay, this changes things. So in the attachment was a couple of images of some fairly large sort of dinnerplate-sized vertebrates, so parts of the spine of what I immediately.

recognized as ichthyosol vertebrae. Dean Lomax continues his story from the TED stage. After speaking to fellow marine reptile expert, Dr. Mark Evans, we decided to visit the site in February, where the ground was literally frozen right beneath our feet. After spending so much time meticulously removing the Jurassic Clay from around the skeleton, we were blown away because we revealed what appeared to be

a gigantic skeleton, unlike anything ever. ever found in Britain before. Clearly, this was a big deal. But we had to be very quick to contain our excitement because due to the damp, wintry conditions and the fact that this was a super fragile skeleton, it meant it wasn't the right time to collect this ecteosaur. So unfortunately, might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but we had to re-burry the ichthyosaur. And then waiting for what felt like millions of years, In six months, we were back on site, but this time with a superb team of paleontologists. We spent 14 and a half days altogether, and this was also working very long hours from sunrise to sunset to remove the skeleton out of the ground.

Oh my gosh, waiting for six months, then digging for two weeks. After all that, what did you and your team uncover? What did this ichthyosaur look like? Well, what we managed to do at this point was revealed the entire thing. We have pretty much probably 98, 99%, maybe even 100% when we can analyze it fully of the entire skeleton. And this animal is, you're talking 10 metres long, so over 34. It represents the largest, most complete skeleton of any prehistoric reptile ever found here in the UK. Of course, now, fully uncovered, it's time.

to literally get this Jurassic giant out of the ground. Much easier said than done when you're dealing with such a complete and very heavy fossil weighing several tons. The first port of call was to create a trench all the way around the skeleton. And the reason for that is that we needed to get right on underneath the skeleton so that we could begin the process of plaster jacketing. We use these protective plaster jackets that essentially care for and secure the bones and the surrounding matrix

so that we can take them out of the field and into the lab so that we can analyze the fossil and the matrix and work out what's going on. After various challenges on site, we finally managed to remove the entire skeleton after dissecting it into several more manageable blocks. And this was an interesting moment for the team because it's quite an emotional moment

because we'd spent and invested so much time and energy into this Xeosaur excavation that this moment captured that final piece where we're removing this from its final resting place, 180 million years ago. So what happens next? What do you do with a fossil like this? But once you got it out of the ground, the next thing then was for the entire skeleton to go to our colleague, Nigel Lark, into his lap. He'll be the person who will be cleaning the entire skeleton now. So, but what he'll have to do is flip the entire thing over and then we'll see the underside, because the underside should be, in theory,

the best preserved side because that's what was laying down in the seabed. So no animals could scavenge that, you know? And I really hope we're going to have an impressive, beautiful set of teeth with maybe a big eye sitting there staring back at us. I can't wait for that moment. Yeah, when is that going to happen? We're hoping that the cleaning phase should be completed in somewhere between 18 to 24 months. So once it's fully cleaned, it'll allow me and my team to do all the, if you like, the CSI of this animal.

Why did it die? How old was it? Do we have something in there in the stomach contents? Is there its last meal? Is there any embryos in there? And things like that is what we're trying to work out. But above all, once it's fully cleaned, it's all been agreed that it will return to Rutland. And we should say Rutland is nowhere near the coast. It is in the middle of England.

Right, exactly. We know 100% not only because of our giant Rutland Sea Dragon, but we also have the remains of shellfish-like animals called ammonites and bits of corals and sea creatures called cryoids. All these types of animals, we know that we're living in a marine environment. And so this indicates that roughly 180 million years ago, this area was deep underwater. What do you think Mary Anning would have made of this incredible find? I think Mary would have been quite thrilled to a, quite thrilled to a,

have seen that a discovery of these creatures that she'd been collecting for so long had been made in somewhere quite unusual for Jurassic fossils like this in Landlock Rutland. For Mary, knowing full well that her kind of legacy that's so intertwined with Xeosaurs continues right to this day and we still can make such remarkable discoveries, she would be overwhelmed with that. That's Dean Lomax. He's a paleontologist and visiting scientist at the the University of Manchester. You can see his full talk at ted.com.

On the show today, Animal Enigmas. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Friends, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about TED Radio Hour Plus. When you become a plus listener, you get bonus episodes made just for you, with more ideas from TED speakers. and you'll go behind the scenes with our producers. What you won't get, though, are those sponsor messages interrupting the show. And that's because you are directly supporting our work at NPR.

So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED, or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minouche Zamorodi. And on the show today, animal enigmas, the quest to solve some of today's biological mysteries, including how insects pee. I have a beautiful backyard. You know, we could finally have like a nice house with the backyard for the kids and the dogs to play.

And of course, the southeast, because of its nice weather, has so many, so many different types of bugs basically all year around. Saad Bamla is a professor at Georgia Tech, and he researches all kinds of insects, including those in his backyard. We have an old water fountain feature, and every day as I walk out, my three-year-old son and I will kind of peek into it. We'll see tiny flies that are both flying in the air,

but then they land on the water surface and skim and glide. we walk amongst the grass and see lots and lots of tiny insects that are hopping. And now it's spring. So we'll observe these carpenter bees. And you can see these fine shavings of wood as these bees are digging in. I don't know. It just goes on and on. We should point out, Saad is not your typical bug and animal researcher.

Yeah, I'm trained as a chemical engineer on paper. all my degrees are in chemical engineering. I didn't even know I love bugs till my young adult life, and I slowly started to look at them through this lens of physics and mathematics and engineering. I just realized there are so many puzzles. It sounds like you see the world very differently than most of us who would be worried about finding a tick between our toes or swatting at mosquitoes. It's a wonderland.

that's a lab for you, just waiting for experimentation. Just what you said, isn't I feel so lucky because I had like wool in front of my eyes? And one day, it struck me that the entire world is your lab. Like the Amazon rainforest is your lab. The backyard is a lab. That's where science happens. And all you need is this perspective. And it changes everything.

And you can do science 24-7. Saad Bama continues from the TED stage. I love bugs. I think of them as nature's tiny engineers because they come up with the most extraordinary and incredible solutions to life's problems. And I just love observing them because they're so full of surprises and curiosities. Today, I'm going to tell you a story about one of nature's most extraordinary engineers that pushes the limits of fluid mechanics and bioengineers. and arguably solves their number one problem. How insects pee? Sit back and relax,

urine for a treat. A few years ago, my student, Elio Chilida and I observed this tiny insect having a private moment in our own backyards in Atlanta. And we couldn't believe our eyes. This insect was peeing for hours, and we were blown away. We had never seen anything like this.

So I observed this bug and it was, you know, flicking droplets. It was very fast, so you could hardly see it. But you could feel it on your hands and it would make you kind of question yourself whether it was just raining under a tree, if that makes sense. So you were standing there in your yard looking at a tree and you could see, like, even though it was really quick and really small, you could see it flicking something. Right, because we all carry a beautiful scientific. instrument in our pocket. So I just had pulled up my iPhone and you can do two great things.

I can buy a $5 magnifying lens and put it in front of my camera. And so now you've got essentially a pretty decent microscope, especially for bugs. And the second feature is you can switch to slow motion. And this is remarkable, right? So I recorded a video and I was like, hey, there's something happening. There's a droplet at its butt and it's flicking it. And, you know, I said, all right. Challenge accepted, bug. Sade needed to figure out how the insect peed. Right, so this was a glossy winged sharpshooter, homilodiscata vitrepanis. And these are sap feeders.

And it's, you know, a system. You have to think about feeding and excretion. What goes in must come out. Hence the pee, which, of course, plenty of insects do. Lots of insects pee, and they do it in so many different forms. they do it on the fly, they do it while sitting. And most of them pee more or less like us, you know, in streams. Yeah, it's amazing.

But the glassy-winged sharpshooter is the only one that flings little pea missiles. And Saad had a hunch that complex physics were involved. So he and his student, Elio, brought these sharpshooters into the lab. So we take our high-speed cameras and we measure them. And then I tell Elio, just ask a simple question, is how fast are these droplets moving? We realize that this insect forms a droplet of P, and then it flings them at extreme accelerations of 40G forces. That's 40 times faster than the sprint of a cheetah. These insects are really packing a punch from their butts.

And we wanted to take a closer look at this flicker, so we took a look under a microscope at its business end, and this beautiful structure has a scientific name. It's called a butt flicker. And this is what we discovered. We realized that this insect had evolved springs and latches just like a catapult so that it could efficiently hurl its droplets of p repeatedly at these high accelerations. Now, we wanted to measure the speed at which this flicker was moving

and the droplets. So we measured the speed of both. the droplets and the flicker. And this is where we made a puzzling observation. The speed of the droplets in air was faster than the flicker. So if you take a ratio of that, we were expecting it to be 100%, but turns out that the speed of the droplets are about 150 to 200 percentage faster than the flicker itself. Wait, wait, wait, why didn't it make any sense? What was puzzling you? Like, personally, I would have said, wow, he has a butt flicker, as you call it, on his body, that's amazing enough. But then what was it that made you think, like, huh, there is a

mystery to be solved here? Right. So as a scientist, we're greedy because the butt flicker was great. Okay, so we know something about the anatomy. And it's flicking it, okay, that's great. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could unravel much more interesting physics. And so the speed mismatch was bothering us because if a Yankee's pitcher throws a baseball and they'll say, oh, it's going at 100 miles an hour. At some point, the pitcher's fingers had to be traveling at 100 miles an hour because if I throw a baseball at, say, 30 or 40 miles an hour, and in midair, this baseball is now moving at 100 miles an hour faster than my fingers or arm, that doesn't make sense because where does that extra energy come from?

And we expect that energy balance to match. Things cannot move faster than the object that propels them. Unless, like it would say, has an extra bit of force added. Precisely. Or some storage of energy somewhere in that process that was unclear to the eye at first glance. So to solve this puzzle, we went back and looked at our videos. And we realized that unlike a baseball that's rigid, these tiny droplets are squishy,

and we had an aha moment. We were wondering if this insect is storing energy due to the surface tension just before launch. And to test this, we did naturally what any of us would do. We converted our kitchen tables into a lab. So now we're going to place droplets on a speaker to squish them at high speeds, and this is what we discovered.

We realized that water that flows in our faucets like a liquid at these tiny scales due to surface tension with the right timing can get a kick, store energy, and if you time it just right, you can launch these off at extremely high speeds, just like a child on a trampoline. Okay, so kids on a trampoline, and they're jumping,

and if they get their timing, just so they can catch a bigger bounce. And so with your analogy, the butt flicker is like a trampoline, and the kid is like the droplet of people, getting a turbocharge. Right, and so the droplets were actually acting like a liquid spring, and so maximizing this can allow us to really fly far off.

So explain how that's happening here, Sott. I think you need to walk us through the butt flick, as it were. Sure. So the droplet is rested and cradled in this gorgeous butt flicker. It's about 100 microns in diameter. It's the most beautiful. the B you've seen, right? It's this gorgeous drop, perfectly spherical.

And then it cocks its butt flicker because it's got this tiny, resilient spring and like a catapult, maybe by 10 or 15 degrees more, it'll cock it. And then it starts to rotate. And as it rotates, you can observe the droplet squish because of surface tension

and the flicker will reach the end of its trajectory. And then the droplet takes off just like a tiny, tiny, tiny, spherical elastic rocket. And this whole thing happens in 100 milliseconds. Oh, wow. Your blink of an eye is like maybe 200 milliseconds, so it's faster than the blink of an eye.

The fact that it's doing all of this is baffling. Yeah, but you solve the mystery. I guess the question is, though, what does this tell you about the evolution of this bug? That nature has had far more time to tinker than us. Oh, goodness. Yeah. But there are two reasons. So these are Xylem sap feeders. You know, that's what this particular shop shooter feeds on. And Zylam is just 95% water. It just has a few minerals. So they have to glug, you know, 300 times their body weight. So the reason they're drinking so much is because they need energy, right? But they have to come up with an energy efficient way to excrete this. And it. If they made jets, it would be four to eight times more expensive energetically.

And because they're living on this frugal diet, every part of their energy extraction weighs is trying to minimize how much energy they waste. These things are tiny. They're smaller than my pinky. In fact, surface tension that enables them to store energy in these droplets to launch is actually an impediment because gravity doesn't matter. and surface engine sticks these droplets to their bodies. So they actually have to flick these droplets away. It's actually very difficult for these tiny bugs to pee.

And that's why I just love studying bugs. This tiny engineer has figured out to survive on barely just water through the xylem fluid, and it's figured out to do so. It has to drink a lot and pee a lot. In that sense, it's not so different from other engineers I know on a Friday night at a bar. But to do so,

it's figured out it has to evolve this catapulting structure and fling these droplets at high speeds. I'm just trying to get in the head of the listener here, Sod, but there will be people who think that's so great. Sond, thank you so much for this illumination of how these bugs pee, but really, in the grand scheme of things, why should we care? Yeah, why should we care? So this is how I live my life. and maybe I'll change it in the future. But I have two halves to my life. And one is all about organisms.

And the other half, I actually put on my engineer's hat and we build $1 hearing aids. We built a 20-cent paper centrifuge for malaria diagnostics. We've just spun out a company using barbecue lighters for MRNA vaccine delivery to make it accessible to 4 billion people who still don't have access to it. And that's the engineering part. I love it too, right?

I think it's important, and I use taxpayer money and try to do good, and we train students how to do frugal science. But there is a joy, and the other half, where we just study bugs, and the application there is it just makes, it's the joy of discovering things. The application is making other people be able to appreciate nature. You know, holy smokes, you can look at insects and study fluid dynamics. to me, we need more of that. That's a good enough application for me

because if you solve a puzzle, it's just such a great advance for humanity. That's Saad Bamla. He's an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His student, Elio Chilida, just officially got his Ph.D. on the sharpshooter. To watch Saad's full talk, go to ted.com.

On the show today, animal enigmas. Stories about elusive, mysterious, and even dangerous species. Like the king cobra. I've caught king cobras from the roof. You know, I climbed up the roof. I've carried like two meters, three meters, king cobra. I've caught king cobras from the wells. This is Gowrie Shanker.

From trees, climbed up the tree, balancing. I mean, are you crazy, Gowrie? This is what's going through my mind right now. What's going through yours? I'm calm. I'm very calm in front of King Corpus. Gowry is calm because he's a herpetologist. He lives and works outside of Bangalore, India, and clearly loves his job.

I live in the forest, my field station in an Agumbe, so the internet is really bad. And if you haven't guessed, his obsession is the majestic king. King cobra. King cobra, for me, it's a beautiful animal. One of the longest venomous snake in the world. King cobras can grow up to five meters. The maximum record is six meters, 10 kilo snake with speed and an attitude.

The king-like size, packed with venom. And the special thing about the king cobra, they specialize in eating other snakes. They don't eat rodents, they don't eat frogs, no mammals, nothing. They just specialize eating other reptiles, particularly snakes. Meaning king cobra's act as exterminators, which is especially important in India because...

About 60,000 people die every year in India due to snake bites. Compared with these other venomous snakes, king cobra bites are very, very, very low. They are not dangerous. They are as gentle as a puppy or a cat in your home, because they don't want to bite you. Given a chance, they just move away from you. But not everyone knows this. In many places, the king cobra sparks deep fear.

They just kill them with the spears or even the knife or sometimes people have guns. They shoot them. So Gowry has made it his mission to study the behavior of king cobras and educate as many people as possible about when to leave the snake alone or to call someone like him to take it away. Whenever there's a snake, when people call,

we check with them where exactly the snake is within the house or outside the house. If even about 100 meters from the house, we don't capture it. If he's in the kitchen, bathroom, sometimes there, snake will be twice the size of the room. So it's very dangerous for me. I need to gently bring him out, put him in a king cobra bag. You don't pick up the snake by the end of its tail and shove it in.

in there. I do that. Oh, do you? Yes. Yes. That's how I do. Just hold a snake by tail and I have a hook. So I need to direct him towards a pipe or the bag where I place the bag and bag him. Gotcha. And then you take your cobra in a bag out into where it usually lives. Exactly. Yeah. From the village, we take them away about two kilometers or three kilometers and release the snake back into the white. So they are able to live peacefully with the king cobra. Very peacefully, very peacefully, with this huge, so-called dangerous snake in the world. Amazing. They coexist.

Gowry has successfully rescued about 400 king cobras. About 400 times, I think no one in this world has done so many king cobra rescues. But there was this one time when things went horribly wrong. So I was shocked. How did I get bitten? How a near-death experience upended what people have assumed about the king cobra for 185 years. On the show today, Animal Enigmas. I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Stick with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoos Zamoroti. Today on the show, Animal Enigmas. We were just talking to herpetologist Gauri Shankar about his. his mission to study and rescue king copras. You'll find very few people like me where there's a combination of both the scientific mentality and at the same time be a good snake handler.

Mostly a good snake handler. About 15 years ago, there was an incident when Gowry was called to a village to remove several snakes. I had three king cobras in one place. This was happening right in the middle of the village. I wasn't prepared. Like, I had one king cobra bag. The first two snakes, I managed to put them in the bag.

And the third one was in a small bag, which is very, very tiny. So I tried to squeeze him in. That's when he bit me. Through the bag. Through the bag. Through the bag, he bit me. Wait, so there is no, like, if you are bitten by a king cobra, that's that, pretty much. That's it.

King Cobras have neurotoxic, so they will shut down all your nervous system. your heart will eventually stop pumping blood and the whole system is shut down. The only hope Gowrie thought he might have was a vial of anti-venom from Thailand that had never been known to work in India. But he thought, why not try? With that hope, I carried the Thai anti-venom, went to the hospital. As a scientist, I just wanted to record everything. I have that data with me every five minutes.

I was telling what was happening in my body. I said, look, no one has this kind of data of a king cobra bite in India. Please, in case if I die, try to publish this. You know, this is our witness, this is how it is. And I was writing it down. That's what I was thinking as a scientist. If I'm alive. Oh my gosh.

So you were excited, actually, despite the terrible situation that you were in. Yes. Yes. Yes. The anti-venom from Thailand seemed to do nothing. Gowry could feel the venom from the snake bite seeping throughout his body. Complete swelling and a lot of allergic reaction. Painful.

When I say painful, so it was like that kind of a burning pain. But despite being in agony, Gowry didn't die. It turns out that the cobra bag had sort of protective. him by stopping the king cobra's fangs from completely sinking into his flesh. He didn't inject enough venom to kill me. There's whatever venom was there. That got into my body, which put me off for three days in the hospital, but I survived. In the haze of his pain, Gowry started thinking, why didn't the anti-venom from Thailand work?

And why was developing an anti-venom for king cobra's in India so hard? For over 185 years, it was assumed that there was only one king cobra species. But maybe not. The entire Southeast Asia from India all the way to Philippines, it's one species. But the antivenom doesn't work. So that means there should be different species. So that's when I came up with this thing, okay, let me work on their genetic part. I need to figure out whether they're different species or one species.

Herpetologists had suspected there were different kinds of different kinds of different kinds of, there were different kinds of king cobra species, because some have different stripes. But no one proved it. So I took that as my PhD project and then started working on it, collected over 200 samples across their distribution from India all the way to Philippines. What did you do next? To put it in a very simple way, I wanted to figure out how different these populations are. For the general public to understand what is this genetic variation.

After eight years of researching the genetic, variation of king cobra's, Gowry proved there are four king cobra species. So that's the difference we found. But I declare to the world that it's four species, it's not one. So you set the snake world, snake studying scientist world on fire. But why do you think that people living in your community throughout India, throughout Southeast Asia, need to know about this, that there are four distinct species of king cobra? That's a very good Good question. See, if people knew the different species, they could have come up with anti-venom. Just imagine number of people in Southeast Asia, every small island, people are

coexisting and living with these dangerous snakes. They work in the paddy fields or the agriculture land. They do get bitten. So what if they think, okay, Thailand, king cobra, antivenom will work for us? No, it doesn't work in Borneo. It might not work in Sumatra. It might not work in Luzon. Right? So to mitigate human-animal conflict, we have to understand whether they're different species. Or even if you want to conserve them or protect them, you have to know which species you're protecting. It's really important to understand how different these populations are. Why do you think that the king cobra has remained such a mystery for so long? It's a huge size snake and people have so many stories or myths.

They just want to keep away from the snake. Even the scientists, for example, the researchers, nobody wants to work on them because it's quite dangerous to work with them. Even the people who handle cobras and crates and other snakes, they are afraid of the species because of the sheer size and the venom and the attitude. But for me, I love them. I love the species. I love the way they behave and the way he moves.

majestic animal. I don't know. If you should come and see the king cobra in the wild, then you will fall in love with this animal. That was herpetologist, Gauri Shankar. You can watch his talk at TED.com. For our last story, we're heading to Brazil and the world's largest tropical wetlands

known as the pantanao. Why do I keep coming back to the pantanao? Wow, this is a wonderful question. First of all, because I love it here, it's a phenomenal place that everybody should get to see at least once in their lifetime. This is Patricia Medici. She's a conservation biologist. You have to see this place. It's wildlife everywhere. You can probably hear the birds around me here. Hyacin macaws all over the place, Jabiru storks, and four species of deer. There are two species of peccaries.

We have puma in this part of the Pantanau. And there's another animal that keeps Patricia coming back to this region. It roams the floodplains at night, covering vast distances, munching on leaves and fruit. It's a large animal, the largest terrestrial mammal in South America. It can weigh up to 250, 300 kilos. It's half the size of a horse. Looks a little bit like a rhino with probosis. A bit of a flexible trunk.

So they're big. They're big, big, big. This big brown fuzzy mammal with a short trunk and long forehead is a taper. Specifically, the South American lowland taper. And if you don't know what a taper is, you're not alone. So some people think that they're related to elephants. Some people get confused when they see tapers.

They think they're giant anteditors. Some people think that they're pigs, that they're capybars. So lots of people who still don't know what a taper is. Even the noises the taper makes can be mistaken for other animals. Yes, they have a very large repertoire of vocalizations. But it's funny, I always laugh because if you listen to their vocalizations, they sound almost like a bird. So it's little whistles and little clicks that the babies do if they want to make sure that they can locate their mom. It's just weird that such a large animal sounds almost like a little bird.

This is taper paradise. This is tapers as they should be. The Pantanal is an open lab for us. Patricia has dedicated her life to studying and protecting tapers. But tapers can be tricky to track down and weather can make getting to the Pantanol difficult. So when Patricia had an opportunity to head back into the field recently, she was not available for an interview. But she recorded some audio postcards for us instead, because she really, really loves tapers.

The moment that made me feel like tapers were amazing was when I found out how important they are for the maintenance of biodiversity. They're herbivores and 50% of their diet consists of fruit. And they eat the fruit, they swallow the seeds and they're wide-ranging animals. They move a lot. And when they do that, they defecate, of course, and they disperse those seeds through the habitat. So tapirs are known as the gardeners of the forest. And I think that's just really, really special. That's just incredible that an animal can have that kind of a role in shaping and maintaining diversity.

Tapers are mostly found in tropical forests, such as the Amazon. And they absolutely need large patches of having. in order to find all the resources they need to reproduce and survive. But their habitat is being destroyed, and they have been hunted out of several parts of their geographic distribution. Here's Patricia Mejisi on the TED stage. If you think about it, the extinction of tapirs would seriously affect biodiversity as a whole. I started my paperwork in 1996, still very young,

out of college, and it was a pioneer research and conservation program. At that point, we had nearly zero information about tapirs, mostly because they're so difficult to study. They're nocturnal, solitary, very, very elusive animals. And we got started getting very basic data about these animals. But what is it that a conservationist does? Well, first, we need data. We need field research.

We need those long-term data sets to support conservation action. And I told you, tapirs are very hard to study. So we have to rely on indirect methods to study them. We have to capture and anesthetize them so that we can install GPS colors around their necks and follow their movements, which is a technique used by many other conservationists around the world. And then we can gather information about how they use space,

how they move through the landscape, what are their priority habitats, and so much more. Ultimately, we conservationists, we must be able to apply our data, to apply our accumulated knowledge to support actual conservation action. Right now, 2015, we expanded our tapered conservation efforts

to the Brazilian Cerrado, the open grasslands and shrub forests in the central part of Brazil. Today, this region is the very epicenter of economic development in my country, where natural habitat and wildlife populations are rapidly being eradicated by several different threats, including cattle ranching, large sugar cane and soybean plantations, poaching, roll kill, just to name a few. And somehow, tapers are still there, which gives me a lot of hope. But I have to say that when you drive around and you find that tapers along the highways

and signs of tapers wandering around in the middle of sugar cane plantations where they shouldn't be, and you talk to kids and they tell you that they know how taper meat tastes because their families poach and eat them, it really breaks your heart. The situation in the Cerrado gave me the sense of urgency. I am swimming against the tide. It may be realized that despite two decades of hard work trying to save these animals, we still have so much work to do

if we are to prevent them from disappearing. We have to find ways to solve all these problems. What changed between 2015 and now is that instead of putting a lot, a lot of energy into studying the ecology of Taper in all these different sites, we decided to shift the focus and start applying that information into really, really trying to solve those problems. I talked a lot about tapered rockel in the highways in the state of Matagrosso-Dosu, here in Brazil.

And since then, we have been using all the data we collected during the monitoring of the highways to develop roadkill mitigation plans for the most critical. highways in the state of Matagroso de So. If we think hunting, which is another threat, we have been focusing on spreading the word about, you know, that hunting

is illegal, it's a crime, you can go to jail, and so on and so on for the different threats. But Patricia says she'll never stop studying tapers. She's still gathering data, still has so many questions about them, which is why she

keeps going back into the field. This is it. This is where we're going to get the data we're still missing. I like to say this is the place where we come to think. You know, we check trucks in the morning, we collect samples, we monitor the animals. But we also spend quite a bit of time sitting in our lab, you know, crunching data and thinking and discussing and organizing what we have and what we're still missing. And so this is where we actually, we do good science. This is it, this year in the Pantanal.

I have a pact with tapirs. I know in my heart that taper conservation is my cause. This is my passion. I'm not alone. I have this huge network of supporters behind me, and there's no way I'm ever going to stop. I will continue doing this, most probably for the rest of my life.

And I'll keep doing this for Patricia, my namesake. One of the first tapers we captured and monitored in the Atlantic Forest many, many years ago, for Rita and her baby Vincent in the Pantanal. And I will keep doing this for the hundreds of tapirs I've had the pleasure to meet over the years and many others I know I will encounter in the future. This animals deserve to be cared for. They need me. They need us. And you know, we human beings deserve to live in a world where we can get out there and see and benefit from not only tapers, but all the other beautiful species now and in the future.

Thank you so much. That was Patricia Medici. She is a conservation biologist and founder of the Lowland Taper Conservation Initiative. You can see her full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our episode on Animal Enigmas. This episode was produced by James Delahousie, Matthew Cloutier, Fiona Girin, Harsha Najada, and Andrea Gutierrez. It was edited by Sanaz Meskampur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Montalione, and Lane Kaplan Levinson.

Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Neil Tivolt, Quasi Lee, and Gilly Moon. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Danielle Ballerzzo. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.