The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 180: Teeth, Horns, and Claws

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Doug Emlen, Sam Lungren, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Character above all else; good shit for a tombstone; fighting WW4 with sticks and stones; saber tooth cats and supination; a simple definition of evolution; a third generation biologist; GMO mosquitos; do does really go for big antlers?; animal arms races; Janis’ love for a good shirker; a fish that starts as a female and switches to a male; beetle battles; and Doug’s Animal Weapons. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. All right. Can I call you Professor Doug Emlin? That's right. It works. Okay. Tell people what you do. I'm a biologist. I'm an evolutionary biologist and I study animal weapons. At? University of Montana. Is the ITD up there? Yep. See how quickly I forgot? I got that taken care of. No, I'm a biologist at the University of Montana. And most of my time I work on rhinoceros beetles with horns. But more generally, I'm interested in how and why animal weapons get really big. Including deer, teeth, saber-tooths.

Yeah, including all of those things. We can talk about any of them that you want to. One of the things I stumbled on a few years ago while trying to write a book was realizing that all these things that we'd learned about insects and about beetles applied to things like deer. And then the more I looked and the more I dug into the sort of nitty gritty of the biology, the more convinced I became that the same logic, the same rules apply to all these cases of really extreme weapons, including, to my astonishment, military technologies. Yeah, that's where this gets interesting. I guess even though my sort of day-to-day research is on rhinoceros beetles, the fact is the concepts I study, the things I think about, apply just as much to military technologies as they do to animal weapons.

Okay, a couple quick things. Do you know that you know my sister-in-law? I just figured this out two days ago. Juanita. Yes. Who is now, she's a county. I know, she just got elected. You're one of her constituents.

All right. You remember when Clinton was being impeached and there was this debate about whether or not character matters? I do. Yeah, she has character. I think I could have told you that. I remember Rush Limbaugh said, character is above all else. At the time, he felt that. And yeah, she fits that.

Point two. You're comparing her to Rush Limbaugh. No, no. I'm saying that. He's comparing her to Bill Clinton. No, I'm saying that. He can't win. There was a debate.

You're saying she's that character. I did. Okay, there was a debate at the time in the 90s. There was this debate where people were saying that, oh, you know, a president does what he does and character doesn't matter. Right? It's like it's nice that they have good character, but good character is not essential for the job. And so at the time, people that were voicing the opposite opinion were understandably from the opposite side of the aisle and so they were like oh my god does character ever matter

like that's character limbaugh like characters above all else and then you know later in subsequent administrations the people who voiced the of the importance of character have dramatically shifted but uh i want to get to another point. Now, I think I told you this before, Doug, that one of the best lines in your book isn't your line. The Einstein quote. Yeah. What do you call it when you put a quote at the beginning of a book? I don't know.

I've only ever written one book. Epigraph? But doesn't epa mean later? You want to look it up really quick? I should know. Yeah, what's it called when you die and they write something about you? Epitaph.

Yeah, that's not that. It's not that. Anyway, there's a quote. I don't have, do you have it in front of you? Can I hit him with the quote? Yeah, but I can't, I don't have it memorized. It's like, I've opened books with quotes. Oh, you got it right?

Yeah, so what is it? Speak up for yourself, Sam. Epigraph. All right. Sam Lungard coming in. Epigraph. So epigraph is before a book and epitaph is on your tombstone after you die. After you die.

So epigraph is before your book and epitaph is after you die. All right. So I know not what I, that's not what he said. Let me try again i know not with what weapons world war three will be fought but world war four will be fought with sticks and stones it's good it is good and and i guess i can speak to it for a minute about why i chose to put it at the front of the book please it felt prescient somehow for a book on extreme weapons. And one of the things I hinted at is that I learned along the way while writing this book, that all these things that we'd stumbled

on as a biologist applied to military technologies. And part of the exercise of writing this book was really digging into the military literature and reading about historical arms races in the deep past and looking at these parallels and really trying to unpack the parallels between the animal and the military weapons. And that meant, to do that right, that meant coming full forward and taking a really hard look at modern times like the Cold War and post-Cold War situations. And Einstein wrote that during the Cold War very much in that mindset and speaking to the, I mean, I guess the spectacular devastating capabilities of modern weapons of mass destruction. And I think his point is it doesn't really matter what the next world, you know, what the third world war is going to be fought with because pretty much anything they

use these days is going to be so destructive that everything will be rubble. And the people that managed to stagger past that are going to be hitting each other on the head with sticks and stones because it's the only thing that will be left there's a so kind of sobering but it is a reflection of the reality of where modern weapons of mass destruction are there's a 30 or 40 000 one of those 30 or 40 000 year old skull from europe that they had it was a pretty well preserved like intact skull they had and it had a peculiar concave cracking on it it suggested the person had been studied they pondered over it like whether it was post-mortem or not like they thought maybe just soil compaction or something

had happened and then they wound up they worked up some kind of technology where they can make these uh like a something that's a facsimile of human bone and fill it with uh what do you call that stuff you shoot guns at ballistic gel fill it with a ballistic gel see what kind of and that yeah and then give it various injuries and um oh yeah they determined that 30,000 years ago he had likely been killed

by someone who was left handed and facing him they could tell that's pretty awesome okay uh okay

that's my favorite line from the book and not just because I'm not pointing out that you didn't write it but it's a great it's a perfect I hadn't taken it that way.

It's a really good deal. The best line in the book was written by somebody else. It's okay. My favorite new word that I learned in your book, which is called animal weapons. The title gets right to it. The title doesn't leave you guessing. I don't know. I mean, it does.

It's not like Blood Meridian. You're like, oh, what the hell is that about? It's actually a great book, though. That is a brutal, great book. But the title doesn't tell you what the book is about. Okay. A lot of people bleed in it. But in all fairness, animal weapons doesn't necessarily speak to the fact that half the book is about the military.

So we struggled with titles. My kids would point out to you that we are animals. We are. That is correct. But that might not be how the average person in the bookstore looking at the shelves would think about it so okay one more quick comment and then i'm gonna have you dig in on something um my favorite word that i learned in this book is supinate supinate that was a new one for me too. You didn't know that word? No, I do now. Explain to folks who can supinate and why it matters. Cats can supinate their forelimbs. And it refers to the way that they can articulate and twist the way that we can with our wrist too,

but most other carnivores like dogs or wolves cannot. They can articulate and twist their forelimbs. And it is relevant. And I talked about it in the book in the context of the evolution of the extreme canines and things like saber-toothed cats. And the idea there is that those weapons are so big. I mean, they're phenomenal for piercing and for killing really big prey, but they're also really vulnerable to breakage and snapping. And so the cats need to be able to plunge the teeth in and pull them right back out again you can't just lock them in and hang or you'll snap your teeth well maybe they could but the only way they could do that is if they can hold on to the animal and position themselves you know if otherwise you sink your teeth in the animal

runs away it snaps your teeth off yeah so being able to hold on to that animal with these supinated forelimbs while it's trying to run like hell away from you is part of how we think or the paleontologists think these cats are able to not snap their teeth. But they did. You know, you look at the La Brea Tar Pit fossils. They had snapped teeth all the time. I went there on my first date with my wife. Did you? Yeah.

That's a good first date. Yeah. But so they snapped their teeth all the time. I mean, that was definitely the big price tag of having teeth like that. Well, one of the price tags. Because you think about, like, you look at a wolf dragging an elk down. He can't supinate, so he has to do it all with his teeth, just hanging on for dear life.

But they also do it as a group. So wolves tend to hunt as a pack, and they can bring down prey by pulling on them from different sides. I think there's a debate, about saber tooths for a long time. It was assumed that they were solitary hunters and now there's people arguing that they might've been social to you. No, really? I don't know. Not my forte. I work on beetles, but no, there's been a bunch of stuff that's come out on saber tooths. I mean, I, they were a real catalyst for me. We can get, we can get into this in whatever order you want, but most of the kinds of weapons that I, okayooth. I mean, they were a real catalyst for me. We can get into this

in whatever order you want, but most of the kinds of weapons that I... Okay, then we'll come back to that. I feel like I want you to start out by talking, if you're comfortable with this,

about the white and brown mice on the white sand. Okay. Because unless you think that's a bad... Am I messing my job up or am I doing my job good? We can do this

in whatever order you want. The logic. I got one that I might be able to wedge in ahead of that. Can I try? Please. Go for it. I just want to know maybe what your definition of a weapon is. Damn it, Yanni.

That's the first question and I skipped it. Look. Look. Look. What are animal weapons? Is it on there, Sam? What are animal weapons? All right, all right.

Sam? That's number one back me up so this is one i struggled with when i was trying to research the book too there isn't a simple definition i mean if you think about it teeth claws anything that you stab or claw slash with clearly that's a weapon you think of tusks and antlers that you lock and spar with those are weapons but chemical things that animals produce as a toxin to spray or inject, those are weapons of a sort. And if you start looking at military arsenals and you start looking at what soldiers carry into battle, they carry a lot more than the firearms. They've got communication equipment, they've got camo that helps them blend with their backgrounds,

they've got Kevlar that protects them. From certain vantages, all of that stuff could be considered part of the arsenal of an individual soldier. And so you can start to subdivide it into things that mostly function for protection and defense, things that function for attack and offense. I don't actually want to go down that path of what is a weapon because there's a million things that could fit under that. What I will say is I focus on a particular subset of animal weapons and those are the things that get really big. And so sort of from my perspective as an evolutionary biologist, I'm constantly stumped by the fact that there are species out there with these things sticking off of them that are ridiculous. I mean, any hunter loves a good

rack of antlers and we love looking at caribou or elk, but you step back and look at them like you're an alien from another planet looking at these things for the first time. It's absurd. It's absolutely insane that these animals would have that much stuff sticking off their heads. And as a biologist, I want to make sense of that. We know it's awkward. We know it's expensive. Under what kinds of circumstances will the benefits of a weapon like that be so profound that animals with these huge weapons do better than other individuals out there with weapons that are smaller or less extreme? And so that's my sort of thing as a biologist. Under what kinds of social or physical environments or circumstances will sort of the stars align so that the really big weapons win? And so it comes

back. I'm not giving you an easy answer to what is a weapon. There's a lot of things that qualify as a weapon, but I'm kind of hoping today we're going to focus on things that are unquestionably weapons. And they're the big stuff, the tusks and the horns and the antlers and the, you know, the saber tooth cat canines. Okay. So here's, here's what I want you to talk about. Here's what I wanted to get into the white and brown mice. Yep. Okay, because you have a, I'm going to switch up. You have a page on page six.

Nice to know you made it to page six. Yeah, buddy, I made it all the way through this book, man. So on page six, you have a quote where you say, Whenever individuals differ in how successful they are at propagating their kind, evolution occurs. So keeping that in mind and knowing that this is something that you chose to bring up early on in your book, tell the story about the white mice and the brown mice in the white sand. And that's the reason I told that story was to try to provide sort of a really simple, intuitive, real-world example to hang that

logic on. So the essence of evolutionary biology, people feel threatened by it, people misunderstand it, people run with it in all kinds of crazy directions, but it is basic. It really is a simple process. It rests on the fact that if you look at any population of anything out there, you pick your favorite species, but in this case, we'll start with old field mice. And you go out and you start looking at the individuals. You look at the mice. You're not just saying, hey, there's 682 of them, or there's more this year than last year. You're actually looking at the mice. What you're going to find is they're not the same. Some of them are heavier. Some of them are lighter. Some of them are darker. Some of them have, I don't

know, longer legs, bigger teeth. If you go out there as a biologist and you start measuring things, you're going to find that there's variation, that some of the mice are faster. Some of them age more quickly. Some of them digest things better. Some of them smell better. There's tons of things about the mice that are different from each other. And evolution is about turnover. It's how some types do better. It's winners and losers. Some types do better than others. And the ones that do better end up living when others die and they end up reproducing when others don't. And those are the ones that end up producing offspring that carry with them these same characteristics. And if you look at that population over time, from one generation to

the next generation to the next generation, you follow that, you'll find that the average characteristics shift. They get darker, they get faster, they get better at smelling a certain thing. Populations are always changing as they sort of adapt to the environments around them. That's evolution. That's the process that I'm looking at. So the light and dark mice is a really clear example. I can tell the story if you want. I want to, I got to like, I want to, a couple of things that that brings up is, is, uh, so many, so often in biology, you talk to people who are looking at population, like the general sense, and you're talking about looking at the individual differences. And I think a good way for people to understand that in a way that struck me when I was reading your book is

that when we, when we humans look at other humans we completely gloss over we're not like oh they all look the same you're right we are really good at looking at the differences right all you see is his nose is too long your eyes are blue on the walk over here I saw a man I'm like that man has an extraordinarily long neck it wasn't 30 minutes ago I thought that we because you just like you have a trained eye so you just like the same way you can go you can recognize a person and pick them out of hundreds of people. And so to talk about how mice, we can't see it because all we see is its mouseness. That's a great analogy, though, because people ought to recognize that we're really good at seeing those differences in ourselves.

But what you have to accept then is those kinds of differences exist in everything from, you know, from plants to snails to mice. Every population out there has sort of standing genetic variation. It has differences among individuals in the traits that you might look at and measure. And sometimes those differences matter. Sometimes individuals that run faster actually do better at getting away from predators and they live longer. Or, you know, who knows what the traits are? In my case, in today's interview case, you know, we're going to be sort of playing around with what kinds of conditions cause the individuals with the really big weapons to win, to do better than the other individuals, because those are the conditions that will lead to the evolution of big

weapons. But the light and dark mice, it's a simple example of a real world population that's been studied really well, all the way down to people have figured out the genomes. They know the individual genes. They know the mutations to the genes that contributed to the trait. So from a biology standpoint, it's a beautifully complete story. But it's basic. It's really simple. Mice are dark.

They're brown. They usually go forage at night because there's predators that can spot them and eat them. Owls are still really good at seeing contrast in the dark. So their main predators when they're out at night are owls. And if you're a mouse running around on dark soils in most of their habitat and you're too light, the contrast makes you stand out and you get nailed by the owls. And so owls have historically kept mouse populations pretty dark brown because any that were too light got nailed. And the ones, they got culled from the

population because they stood out. And then a few thousand years ago, mice colonized, they expanded their range and they colonized the coastal sand dunes around the Gulf of, you know, the Gulf in the Southern United States, around the coast of Florida. And you get out onto these dunes and all of a sudden the dirt's not rich and dark and brown anymore. You're out on sand dunes. It's like piles of salt. I mean, some places it's really white. And so what happened is the mice are still being mice. They're doing all the same things, but now they're running around at night on white. And all of a sudden the dark mice stood out really badly and they got hammered by the owls because they kept seeing these dark

mice and nailing them. And by pure dumb luck chance, a small number of these mice carried mutations in their genome that screwed around with the pathway that makes the dark melanin pigment in the fur. And they happened by chance to be lighter. More of their fur was white and less of it was dark. And normally in the main areas, they get hammered because they look bad. They're too light. They stand out. But out here on these outer fringes, those individuals did better because they were lighter in color and they were more likely to hide than the dark mice. And so out on these coastal populations, you know, owls are still being owls. They're just going for whatever they find. But in those populations,

they're eating all the dark mice. And it was the ones that carried these random genetic mutations that made them lighter. Those mice survived. They had all the kids. And then over time, these mice populations got whiter and whiter. And now we have two sort of side-by-side areas

with white mice and dark mice. And we think it was driven by selection from these predators. And so the experiment I talk about in the book was a classic they set up in the 70s where they had captive owls. It's great because it's so obvious. They trucked in truckloads of sand and they created arenas with white soil like from the coast

and then they had other arenas with dark soil. And then they just released mice and let the owls do what the owls did. And they showed really cleanly that on the dark soil, it's the white mice that get nailed. And on the light soil, it's the dark mice that get nailed. And they were able to show that the owls were sort of, to use the technical language, acting as agents of selection. They were selecting for dark or light mice on these different backgrounds. So it's a nice example of a process of winners and losers.

The color of the mouse differed from mouse to mouse. And in each environment, it mattered. The ones that had the right color combinations lived, the ones that had the bad combination stood out, like a hunter wearing the wrong camo. You stand out, you get noticed. And in that case, because they were getting eaten, it ended up that some mice were being more successful at surviving and reproducing in each area. They passed on their inherited characteristics and the population changed over time. It evolved. So that now several thousand years later, you know, a couple thousand mouse generations

later, those two populations are totally different from each other. I mean, they look like different species. One's white and one's dark. And that was a very recent sort of gradual evolutionary shift in the color. Do they have different Linnaean? It's a simple example of the process, but that process is happening all the time in just about anything out there. It's on us as the scientists to figure out, okay, what are the things, the differences among individuals? What are the variations in this species that,

excuse me, that matter? Why do they matter? Why are these ones the ones that are winning and these ones are the ones that are losing? And we can go out and sort of study the process of evolution in the wild, in real populations. And again, that's, it's just a conceptual backdrop to turn around and then say, why do weapons get big? What I like, what strikes me about that, that quote that Steve just read and what you're saying, I know that happened over whatever thousand generations. Might have even been less, but it was fast. Yeah, but posing evolution that way, I think, gives it a little bit more of an immediacy.

I think to a lot of people, it's kind of an abstraction. It's something that is working on macro population levels, but it really really does come down to the individual and it can change very rapidly. I'm really glad you brought that up. Actually, if you forgive me for a digression, I'm really glad you brought that up because I run into this in my classes. People have this antiquated notion of the evolutionary biologist is this old white haired geezer with a big beard arguing about apes. And that's not what modern, I mean, truly my major professor was a white haired guy with a really long beard. Did he argue about apes?

No. Wasn't that your dad? No, no. He'll take issue with that. He's a biologist too. I didn't mean it that way, but wasn't your father an evolutionary biologist as well? Both my father and my grandfather. That's what I thought. Evolutionary biologist.

Seriously? Yeah. It's like the family business. Yeah, he's a third generation. But coming back to the same point. His father was one of the founders of the field of animal behavior. Really? Yeah. I broke away. I don't work on birds. I work on beetles.

That was my radical... You're like, I'll show you. I'll show you, dad. Yeah, exactly, man. Bigger sample sizes, cooler weapons. Mom and dad, you're not going to like this. But back to the reality. What is an evolutionary biologist? Evolutionary biology today is incredibly relevant to things that everybody cares about. It's not a bunch of old-timers arguing about apes.

It's about genomes and genetics and medicine. So huge, just to list a couple, issues that matter to people every day. People on farms have to deal with the fact that they go out there and try to control pest populations on their crops by spraying pesticides. And very quickly, the insect pests evolve resistance and they stop being susceptible. That is evolution. No matter what people want to call it, it's turnover. You're killing a bunch of the pests. Some of the pests happen by chance to have variants in their genomes that allow them to detoxify the chemicals that you're spraying. Everybody else is dead. Those ones survive. They have lots of kids. All of a

sudden, your pest population explodes with all these animals. Yeah, no competition. No competition. They're all dead, right? And yet, suddenly, you can detoxify this chemical that nobody else can. That's the winner, winners and losers. They start reproducing and the population evolves fast within it. You know, most of the pesticides are obsolete within five to 10 years because insect populations adapt so quickly. Herbicides, same story. You see the same thing with antibiotics. We're running into huge problems now where you go to the hospital and things that used to be standard can kill you because the antibiotics that we have available to us don't work. And again, people don't like to use the E word, but the fact is that's evolution. When you apply a dose of

antibiotics, you are trying to kill a population of bacteria. And if you kill them all, you win. Population goes extinct, your infection is cured. But if there's any genetic variation among individuals within that bacteria population that allow a few of them to survive the drug, just what you said, Janice, you kill all the competition, they're all dead. And the few survivors have, yeah, they got gravy. It's awesome. There's no competition. There's all these resources. They explode. And now your population has shifted from one generation to the next or over a couple dozen bacterial generations. It has shifted from susceptible to resistant. And you, as a doctor applying a drug, have driven that you've acted as an agent of selection and you've driven the

evolution of that population. So modern evolutionary biology is about drug design. It's about trying to figure out ways to combat antibiotic resistant disease strains. It's about public health, trying to engineer mosquitoes so that they can't carry Zika or dengue and trying to figure out how to produce these engineered mosquitoes and get them in the field to spread enough that the wild populations become resistant. So people are looking at GMO mosquitoes? It's not what? GMO mosquitoes? That's wild. Yes. It's a huge industry right now. Yeah. Genetically modified mosquitoes. The problem is if you genetically modify a mosquito,

you can engineer one that can no longer carry malaria or Zika or dengue. And I've had dengue. It sucks. I mean, this is a big deal. If you can figure out how to make a mosquito that normally is a vector that carries the disease, incapable of harboring the pathogen, you've done a lot, but you've just engineered this, you know, screwed up genetically modified mosquito. You introduced it into the wild and it's not going to out-compete all the other normal mosquitoes. So you could spend a fortune building it in the lab, but trying to implement it in the field is a problem. And that's where evolutionary biology comes in. How can we figure out what kind of selective, how can you figure out ways to let something that is otherwise deleterious spread within a population so that

it gets abundant enough that the mosquito population writ large stops being capable of sustaining the infections and involves a lot of theory, involves a lot of evolutionary biology. So that was a big tangent, but yeah, I'm glad you brought it up. Evolutionary biology is a vibrant, thriving field that's not arguing about apes. It's about molecular biology, genetics, genomics. It all comes back to the white mice, the light and dark mice turnover. When are there winners and losers? When individuals do better than other individuals and the traits that make them do better are heritable or passed on, you've got the raw material for evolution.

You watch that population over time and it's going to change. Okay. Let me hit you with this one. Is it still in your circle? Yep. Do we still talk, we meaning you, do you guys still talk about there being a difference between natural selection and sexual selection? That's not where I thought you're going to go between biological evolution and cultural evolution, but we can get there later.

Between natural selection and sexual selection. Like, yeah. Do you still view these as these like distinct- Do you think your audience is going to know what sexual selection is? Well, go ahead and explain it. Should I step back and define it? So- Do it through deer antlers.

All right. So natural selection tends, really a good way to think about it is survival. It's which are the individuals that are going to grow the fastest, are going to, you know, get access to the best territories, outcompete other individuals for access to food, they're going to be the most resistant to pathogens. Who are the healthiest animals in the population and the ones most likely to survive a winter cold snap or to get through, you know, a reproductive season. It's all about sort of living and dying. Sexual selection is almost like a subset. It's also winners and losers,

and it's very much an agent of selection that can cause populations to evolve, but it really focuses on reproduction. It's recognizing that even if everybody survives, they're not all going to reproduce. You have winners and losers when it comes to reproduction too. And that means that you've got individuals with traits like big antlers who are more likely to win access to the harems or to the territories that are more likely to breed with the females in the population and transmit their genetic material to the next generation than other individuals in the population that might be more sickly, smaller antlers,

not as good a condition, younger, less dominant, all those things. You've got, it's the same raw material variation. You go out into a deer population or an elk population, measure a hundred bulls, they're not the same. Some of them are bigger than others. Some of them are stronger, some are more aggressive. Some of them have a lot bigger antlers than others. Those traits matter and the weapons matter a lot. And in that case, sexual selection is the process by which,

you know, individuals with big antlers reproduce more than individuals with small antlers. And since ultimately the currency for evolution isn't whether you live or die, it's whether you reproduce. What matters is who are the individuals in the population now that are contributing offspring, their genetic material, to the next generation. That's the end game. It doesn't matter if you're the healthiest, strongest animal out there. It doesn't matter if you're resistant to every disease in the book and you live forever. If you fail in the game of producing offspring in a biological population of something like a deer, it's over. It's a genetic dead end. And so the real end game is reproduction. And sexual selection is all the stuff, the crazy sperm competition, battles, female choice, male

competition, all the things that happen in real world animal populations that cause some animals to win and other animals to lose in the game of reproduction. Okay, man, that was a bunch of things I want to ask you about. Am I going off too far? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can shut me up if you need to. No, no, that's good. Sam, help me keep track, Yanni.

Okay, I want you to explain a couple things. I want you to talk about the idea that the way in which differentiated landscapes, okay? No, it's not okay. Corinne sent me that on your, I meant to ask you, and I have no idea what you mean by this. You were talking, okay. Here we go. Okay, so I want to do differentiated landscapes. I don't know what that is. I'll tell you. Oh, okay. And I want to do, I'm not using your word. I'm using my do differentiated landscapes. I don't know what that is. I'll tell you. And I

want to do. I'm not using your word. I'm using my word. I don't know. You'll know what I'm talking about. You'll know what I'm talking about when I explain it. You learn to donate. I'm learning differentiated landscapes. And I want and I want you to talk about the diff like you mentioned earlier, like you could have like six bull elk, right? Yeah, that the difference in size but the how they can develop the difference in size of their bodies which are like relatively homogenous versus the difference in size of their antlers yes this i

can talk about what does that have to do with differentiated two different ideas but now explain differentiate landscapes okay that one I got. You talk in your book about what happens with an animal population where there's little pockets of good habitat or little bottlenecks,

like a water source, a certain food source, rather than this, rather than a landscape where all the resources are equally distributed and omnipresent. Okay. So that there's no sort of like cool spot to hang out.

Yes. Which one of those do you want to do first? Well, let's start with the second one, the landscape idea. That was the first one. That was the first one? Yeah, differentiated landscapes. I'm with Doug. I think that one came second.

Whichever. Let's start with that one. It's a lie. So in principle, you're going to have potential for individuals, say elk, to be competing with each other over access to, say, females. But you can do beetles too because I think you explain it like there's a wound on a tree. Let's do beetles. Let's do beetles because actually it's a better tool for this. It's just fewer people are used to thinking about beetles the

way I'm used to thinking about beetles. So in any situation, if the landscape is uniform, and what I mean by that, I don't mean Kansas, Courtfield, I mean the resources that the animals depend on, if they're distributed uniformly in space, then where are you going to guard? What the hell are you going to fight over? I mean, I could be a bull and I could, or beetle and I, there's my spot and I'm going to guard that.

And I stand over that and I beat the crap out of any other beetle that comes near. And if I've got big enough weapons and I might pay a price to have big weapons, but you know, I got big weapons and I fight and I fight and I fight and I'm holding that ground and nobody else, no other males get into I fight and I fight and I fight and I'm holding that ground and nobody else, no other males get into my territory and there's food in my territory,

but you know, there's food over there and food over there and there and there and there. If the food resources are everywhere, then what have I gained? Where are the females going to go? They could go anywhere. They could feed on any spot on that landscape. And I spent all this money, not money, all these energetic resources and this cost of producing this weapon. And I fight and I fight and I fight to guard my spot, but my spot isn't any more valuable than anybody else's spots. And there's all these other beetles out there that don't bother fighting at all. And they get just as good access to food. So what in this situation where the resources are uniform, there's no benefit to fighting to guard a territory. You don't win anything because everywhere is equally good. But when you have a landscape that's, I think you

meant differentiated, I would think of it as patchy, where the key resources are very rare and they're localized, they're clustered or clumped in space, like a waterhole you said, or the beetles that we work on, they feed on wounds on the side of a tree that ooze sap. These beetles fly in and they feed on the sap, like syrup on the side of a tree that ooze sap. These beetles fly in and they feed on the sap, like syrup, on the side of the tree. In most places where these beetles live, they've got wimpy little mouth parts. They can't drill into the trees like a woodpecker or something can. They're stuck finding a place where a branch struck the tree or where some other animal's already created a wound and it's oozing.

That's a hotspot. But those things aren't everywhere. They're rare. I mean, there's only a couple hotspots within a mile radius, say, and that's oozing. That's a hotspot, but those things aren't everywhere. They're rare. I mean, there's only a couple of hotspots within a mile radius say, and that's where you got to be. That's the only place where the food is. That is not a uniform landscape. That's, I guess you're saying differentiated. There are good places to be in bad places to be. And now if I'm a male and I've got a weapon and I fight the crap out of all the opponents and I hold my ground and I happen to be guarding the food spot, I win. I'm the only one in town that's got it.

All the other males can't get it because I'm keeping them away. And where are the females going to go? They're coming to me because I'm sitting on the only spot that's good. So when you have landscapes that are patchy and there are sort of hotspots of value interspersed with large areas that aren't very good, that's the sort of physical environment that sets the stage for all this kind of stuff because it creates opportunities for winning and losing. It creates a situation where the dominant individuals can guard something that matters. And if you win those fights and you get that resource, you win because the females come to you, you're the male that mates with those females

when they come in to feed, all the other males lose. Like 90% of the males in the population might get nothing because there's nowhere else to go and they're not strong enough to get it. That's sexual selection. It's competition about access, in this case to a food resource, but it's a food resource that attracts all the females.

So that's access to reproduction. The males that win in those fights mate with lots of females, produce lots of offspring, sire the next generation of the population. And the 90% of males that fail get nothing. It's over. They're done. So do you see less fighting in landscapes that all look the same? Or do they just figure out something else to fight about? Yeah. So that's why beetles are better than elk, because it's hard for people to picture that in something like an ungulate or a deer. In insects, it happens all the time. A lot of times the food resources are so dispersed that what happens is it's not the animals that are built like tanks

with big horns that win. It's the animals that are really agile and that are lightweight and have good wing ratios and store energy and they fly really far. It's the ones that can search. And so you find insects where they're really good at traveling long distances looking. The animals are so spread out and the landscape is so sort of uniform, there's no obvious place to be, that the ones who win are the ones that search, that can find members of the other sex the fastest. So there's some moths where the males have these antennae that are unbelievably good at detecting the other sex the fastest. So there's some moths where the males have these antennae that are unbelievably good at detecting the smells of the females.

And they're out there cruising along for wind currents, trying to pick up the scent. I mean, the military has looked into these things. They're the most sensitive chemosensors known. They can actually detect individual molecules of these pheromones. And we've never come up with anything that's even within several orders of magnitude and being that sensitive to a chemical that we might want to detect. But these moths are really good at it because their resources are sort of uniformly or randomly

distributed. And the only way to win in that game is to be better at smelling a female or better at finding a female than other males. And so competition plays out in a different way. They have huge antennae. They're really good at flying. They search, but they don't have weapons. They don't fight. Different kind of system. So they fall outside of your interests. Well, they're cool systems.

But yeah, I like the situations, your differentiated landscapes where there really is a hotspot that matters. And if you can be the male that wins access to that resource, then you win in the evolutionary game because you're the one that gets access to the reproduction. You mentioned a couple of times so far, I feel like you should pause and explain it in greater detail, is the costs. You keep talking about the enormous cost or the expenditure of growing big horns or big teeth or big antlers. And I'm glad you bring that up because it gives me a chance to come full circle

back to the other half of the question, the fact that antlers are more variable than the other traits because it actually ties into the costs. So in a system like this, where imagine you're differentiated landscape and imagine you're a rhinoceros beetle and there's very occasionally rare wounds

on the side of a tree that's your oasis. That's like it. That's where the food is. That's where all the females are going to come flying from miles around to go feed at that spot. And if you can be the male that wins that, you win everything. And it really is winning everything. I mean, in some of these populations, a very small percentage of the males do all the reproducing and 90, 95% of the males lose. Every generation, 95% of the males are gone, dead end, they fail. And in a system like that, it really pays to win. And imagine in that case, then if I'm a beetle and I've got a bump sticking off me that allows me to reach under and flip an opponent,

it's going to be worth it. No matter what that costs, if I've got that and the other males don't, I've got an edge and I'm going to win in these fights. And therefore I'm the one that's reproducing. And my kids and grandkids and great grandkids are the ones that populate the population. The beetles are going to start getting this horn or this thing sticking off their body that's used as a weapon. But over time, it's sort of a relative landscape. If everybody's got horns the same size, and then another beetle comes out with an even bigger weapon and allows him to reach and flip his opponent before the other opponent can even reach him then that male's going to have an edge so the weapons are going to get bigger and then when everybody's got weapons that big then it's the one with even bigger weapons that

wins and this process sort of cycles and ratchets and the weapons get bigger and bigger and bigger and as they get bigger they get more expensive i know it seemed like i forgot your question i thought you forgot it but you're still doing good caught in what we call an arms race and these things start ratcheting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and along the way they get more and more and more expensive and so when you start looking at costs and animal weapons we can talk about costs and military weapons too they're very expensive but the costs get really staggering. So, so a rhinoceros beetle that the ones that we work on, a male puts 30% of his body weight

into a weapon. I mean, I think about it. I weigh probably one 80. That's like, that's like a 60 pound thing on top of my head. It'd be like this table glued to the top of my head. That's what these beetles are carrying around on their heads all day. That's a huge investment. It costs in terms of resources that they need to grow that structure because all the material that goes into that coffee table isn't going into my heart or my lungs or my brain or anything else. I'm putting it all into the coffee table. I'm putting it into the weapon. So there's an allocation cost. Then you got to carry this thing around everywhere you go. It's awkward and heavy, makes it harder to fly, makes it harder to run. So there's sort of production and maintenance costs that go with it. Weapons can get really expensive. In the beetles, putting a horn

together for a male is so expensive that it forces these animals to shunt resources away from other things. So the beetles with the biggest horns have tiny eyes. And some of the species we studied have males where they've stunted genitalia and tiny testes. Really? They're really reallocating in the most absurd way to get these weapons. It costs them. And you talk about deer will actually get a form of osteoporosis from their antlers robbing their minerals. Yeah, because the antlers, because they regrow them every year, they have to produce these

enormous expensive structures and they've got to grow fast. And as far as I know, antler bone is the fastest growing bone that's ever been described for any vertebrate ever. It's growing at record speeds. And they're pulling, they need calcium and phosphorus and all these minerals to produce the bone. And they don't get that much of that from the leaves and the things that they feed on. And so the people that have looked into this and studied it found that there's no way that these bulls and bucks can get enough from their food

alone. They're growing it too fast. And there's just not enough of these minerals in the food that they're eating. And that's when they figured out that they're actually siphoning these things off the other bones in their body. They're leaching calcium and phosphorus out of their ribs and their spine and their femurs and all the rest of the bones and reallocating it to the antlers. So that forces them to go through a period of osteoporosis during the rut before they have an opportunity to replenish those resources. Which is a shitty time to have osteoporosis. Really bad time because you're smacking into all these other bulls.

So right when you need to fight and throw down with all these other 800-pound rivals, you've got brittle bones like an old person. It's a bad formula. And then they throw the antlers away and you've got to start all over again. It's like you're not even recouping that loss. It's gone. Well, at least everybody has osteoporosis, right? All your opponents.

There you go. Yeah. But you can imagine how that would place a premium on any individuals that were in good enough condition or had access to the best foraging spots. They might have less osteoporosis. Again, it comes back to variation. Those bulls might pay a lower cost. They might have less osteoporosis than a medium or poor quality bull that's in really crap quality territory that's also trying to produce antlers.

And so it may not be equal. But yeah, they're all going through the same problem. They're all facing the same dilemma. These things are expensive. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

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slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. And when it goes back to cost, a great comparison, I think I remember this from your class back in the day, was that, like, I think you said for a bull elk to,

like a mature bull to create the antlers he needs for that year, it's a similar caloric cost as a cow birthing a calf. Yeah, good memory. This was a really clever. Is that right? Are we okay in time if I explain some of these? That was a really clever study. Point out that Sam Lundgren, our very own special Sam Lundgren,

took special Doug Emlin's class. Yes, he did. I did. My animal behavior class university montana yeah i got an a i went back and checked this last time i was like how'd i do yes one of the one of the greatest classes i i ever i ever took i did not pay him to say that fascinating fascinating well you're just you just take it so seriously it's fun stuff lots of lots of great video clips of animals beating the shit out of

each other. Imagine that. Elephant seals and stuff. But you bring up this point about, you know, that the energetic expense of doing this. And, and this was a really clever set of studies and, and I didn't do them. I mean, this is from the literature, but these people, they took advantage of the agriculture industry. So, so if you have cattle and you're a cattle farmer, you know, everything is about weight gain. I So if you have cattle and you're a cattle farmer, you know, everything is about weight gain. I mean, you manage your herd, you manage the feed that you're feeding them, the timing of things, everything is coming down to how quickly your animals can gain and what rate they can gain weight. You want to buy them low, fatten them up, sell them high. There's a huge industry trying to understand the way that things like livestock

put on and gain muscle mass and weight. And so they'd actually broken this down in these really complicated models where they were looking at all nitrogen, phosphorus, put all the different nutrients in, paying attention to the diets. They had input bone mass, the skeletal weights, the muscle mass, the metabolic physiology, the weight, the sizes, all these parameters on these animals, and they could predict really, really accurately how subtle changes to this or that piece of the diet would translate into the rate at which these animals were putting on muscle mass. And so because people cared a lot about that, they put a ton of time and effort into parametrizing these

really complicated models. And they did a really good job describing growth and weight gain in vertebrates like that. So these biologists took the models and said, hey, let's look at moose. Let's look at something we care about. And they reset all the parameters based on the bone densities and the leg lengths and all the height and all the weights of the things like moose or caribou and turned around and said, all right, given the model now parametrized for a moose, how expensive are antlers? They could burn antlers and figure out how many calories they knew what was in it. They could basically figure out what it costs in terms of nutrients and energy to make an antler and then put that into the energy budget of the animal and say, how expensive is it? And that's when they were stunned. They're like, I mean, they basically

found, I think it was two calves, the male bull. I can't remember if it was moose. Producing a full rack of antlers expended as much energy as it took a female to raise two calves all the way to weaning. Stunned everybody. Nobody expected it to be that expensive, but it's a clever approach, isn't it? It's a neat way to do that. And then these guys went one step further and they took the Irish elk, the extinct Irish elk, which had these huge antlers. Yeah, that's a real bad mofo. They had to make some guesses because we don't have any living Irish elk. But they did a pretty good job setting the models for them to try to figure out just how expensive the antlers were.

And they were pretty expensive. You can see why they might have gone extinct. Yeah. Well, I have a hard time with it. Well, sure, sure. I mean, one could suggest, I'm not trying to say that that's why. Well, let's add the caveat

because I think about these kinds of things. And one of the things we may get to when we talk about arms races today is that they cycle. There's a very predictable sequence of stages and eventually arms races collapse. The whole thing ends, the antlers or the weapons are so expensive that they're not worth it anymore and they're gone. Normally in

an animal when that happens, we're not arguing that they go extinct. What it means is some males come along and don't bother producing the weapons and those males win. They're not paying the price and the weapons really aren't doing what they used to do anymore. And all of a sudden individuals that ditch the weapons are the winners and the population loses the weapons and very quickly evolves to a state where they no longer have the big weapons. That's the normal way. The Irish elk are the one exception where they really might have actually gone extinct because of the weapons. It's hard to say because we weren't there. But what they found with these models is that the antlers were so expensive that these bulls would have been sort of right on the metabolic edge. And they would have had barely enough time after the rut to recoup the energetic losses before the next cycle.

And then what happened is not only were those antlers getting bigger and bigger, but they have evidence from the pollen in the climate records that the climate changed. Like pulling the carpet out from under these animals, all of a sudden they went through, I think it was called the Younger Dryas. The climate changed rather abruptly. And they can tell from the pollen records that all the things that they used to feed on were gone. And they were forced to switch from herbs and things to grasses,

things that were a lot less nutritious. And so it was the double punch. Really expensive antlers that are sort of pushing the limit of what's possible and then all of a sudden your food's gone and you're forced to switch to something that's really crap quality and that combo might have been too much left you ill prepared so that's the reason some people argue that the irish elk actually went extinct because of the weapons but usually what happens is they get caught on an arms race they get bigger and bigger and bigger and then the whole thing collapses and they ditch the weapons and go off on another path uh oh i never came back to you no you never did but but okay don't do this one next do the thing you're supposed to do now but

there's a funny story you talk about with the beatles where's this beetle and there's like a female that goes down in a hole and hangs out in the hole yeah there's this beetle he grows this big badass horn and he guards guys when he guards the hole yeah but then a beetle he grows this big badass horn and he guards the hole yeah but then there's some little snaky dude with no horn who just burrows down and comes in from under beneath a little sneak attack and gets it on with the female and the dude with the big horn just hanging out has no idea that it even happened so these are these are dung beetles that live in panama a lot of the dung beetles have this problem but the ones that i was looking at live down in panama and the males have a nice big rack of horns on their head.

So they're big tank. Well, they're little beetles, but I mean, the horns are big relative to the tank. Pair of horns on their head. And it's important because again, it depends on where we want to go with this. One of the catalysts, one of the things- You're behind on one question.

Keep that in mind. One of the things that we think, I think precipitates an arms race in animals that sort of aligns the last star into place. So all of a sudden the population shoots off on this trajectory of bigger and bigger and bigger weapons is a situation where the fight dynamics change from being something that is sort of a chaotic scramble to something that is much more consistently one-on-one. Something about the biology, the habitat, the structure, something about the way these animals are confronting each other changes. And then all of a sudden, what had been really chaotic becomes very consistent and predictable and repeatable,

one-on-one duels. And that's this thing that I learned actually from the military literature can spark an arms race and start the whole process. So in the dung beetles, most of the time we think of dung beetles who, you know, for those of us that actually think about dung beetles, but if you've ever been to Africa, you picture these things, they've got the, they carve these balls, they push the balls around on the ground. Those beetles fight all the time. They scramble. None

of them have weapons. Never. They do not have horns on those kinds of beetles. And the fights are all sort of pandemonium and scrambles, lots of animals all piling in. But there's subsets, some lineages of dung beetles where they started digging the tunnels. And you mentioned the hole. And that was the behavior change that rewrote the rules. Because all of a sudden, the females are down in a hole. They're in a tunnel. It's a tube. And so the males plant themselves at the entrance and they guard the tunnel. And all of a sudden, it's not a scramble anymore because you can't get attacked by 10 rivals at once. It's a tube. Only one beetle can fit in the tunnel at a time. And so it's not like they consciously decided to fight duels because it's more honorable or anything like that. Suddenly they're in a tunnel and because they're in a tube,

they only ever fight one rival at a time. Boom. Just like that. That's the catalyst. As simple as that, all of a sudden, the males are fighting consistent, repeatable, pushing matches of strength. And in that kind of a fight, the bigger, stronger male wins, the male with the weapons wins. And boom, those lineages start evolving horns. It could be big curved things on the thorax. It could be horns coming off the head. I mean, there's hundreds of configurations of these weapons. They've popped up again and again and again. Every single time these beetles switched from fighting in a scramble on the surface to fighting in a tube in a tunnel, just like that on an arms race, they started getting weapons and the weapons got bigger and bigger and bigger.

So the ones I was studying, these males have big horns, they're guarding the tunnel, they're fighting these duels with rivals at the entrance. And that's when the little sneaky guys break the rules. The little males are never going to win. They're smaller body size. They're not as strong. They've got, they don't even have horns. I mean, little nubbins where the weapons would be. So they got no weapons. They're never going to win a fair fight, but they, they don't fight fair. They break the rules. And so they act like a female. They dig their own tunnel. They mine down in there and then they cut over and they intercept the guarded tunnel so you're the big guy at the entrance fighting the little sneaky buggers are are basically mining their way in beneath you getting into your tunnel going down finding the female meeting with the female and sneaking out again the big guys at the entrance

are oblivious that that thing same thing exists with salmon uh absolutely chinook salmon have a an alternate life history called precocious males where they're jack. Exactly but there's ones there's ones that um unlike jacks don't even go to the ocean so they'll they'll become sexually mature at like six months. Oh really? Yeah so so they're like. I didn't know jack didn't go to the ocean. Well jacks do jacks do go to the ocean so so jacks there's there's multiple life histories in a lot of these salmon species. So, you know, you've got everything from the big 40-pound males that spent four years in the ocean to the jacks that just spent one year to the precocious males that never even go out. And so they'll be sexually mature at like three inches long.

And they'll hide in the rocks with like, you know, two 50-pound chinook. And then the hen goes to lay her eggs. And I've seen videos of this. Actually, my buddy, John McMillan. And he's in there jizzing on them. Yeah, he'll go in and jizz on them before the big buck can and never even know it. And he doesn't have to go to all the expense

of going to the ocean and all the dangers that that entails. And he can be reproductive after six months. Exactly. Whereas the other ones takes four years. Yeah. And we talk about an opportunity. Sometimes, if there's only a couple females who make it back to a stream to spawn, they're able to keep the line going, keep the population alive. Sleeper agents. Exactly.

In college, you think about it, too. It's like the dude who... I can't wait to see this one. The dude that girls are like, oh, he's funny. That's like your guy that burrows in. Exactly. I can't wait to see this one. No, no. The dude that girls are like, oh, he's funny, right? That's like your guy that burrows in, right? Exactly. He's playing a totally different trip, you know?

Yeah, the friend zone. Yeah, oh, he's funny. I like it. He's funny. It works. He's the little digger digging in. You can tell me anything. Everybody else is all fighting. So in beetles and things like this, we call it an alternative reproductive tactic or an

alternative mating tactic and lots of i mean bighorn sheep they've got coursers that goes what when a big male is fighting and distracted in a battle a little guy's running and chase the females off and corner him what do you call those coursers aren't they called coursers and bighorn sheep well yanni's got a favorite thing are you gonna bring up your shirkers yanni shirkers okay i thought about it but then i decided not to thing. Are you going to bring up your shirkers, Yanni? Shirkers? Okay. I thought about it, but then I decided not to. Do you want to go down that? Yanni will now hit you. Bahamut, because he's

backed up as it is. He's backed up by one question. He's playing it safe. He's backed up by one question, but zapping with the shirkers. We just want to know Dog's opinion on it yeah get his opinion on shirkers uh you heard of valgeist yeah yeah um what was that he's not like our uncle or anything no i mean that was a loaded yeah well he's a loaded character i mean i never actually met him but i've read a ton of his work.

Because he did a lot of the early conceptual work on the evolution of crazy structures. Conceptual, yeah. Yeah, that's the big problem is it was mostly ideas and not a lot of data. But, you know, every now and then people get it right. And a surprising number of his ideas that he just threw out there and never actually backed up. A lot of those ideas are turning out to be right. Yeah, we've had this conversation a lot of times where a lot of researchers such as yourself will talk about his practice of being like, you know what might have happened, right?

You do that enough times and one of them is going to be right, right? It's like probability. Keep throwing stuff at the wall. So he had the idea of shirkers, which were bucks or bulls that would remove themselves from the breeding game or the rut. And for four or five years, just hang out at the top of the hill where the grass is thick and green and lush. Waiting their time. And load up and load up and load up until the point where they were 30% bigger body-wise, 30% bigger antler-wise. And they could stroll in and they could breed everybody and pass their genes.

In one season, they could own the breeding rights. So I don't know whether those animals exist because I don't study ungulate populations, but it wouldn't surprise me. Really? I know. So let me give you an extreme example. Rass. Yanni.

A fish on a coral reef. Sounds like it's Val. So there are fish that go even one step further. So wrasse actually change sex. So they start out life as a female because most females are able to reproduce. The variance in reproductive success, the difference between winners and losers for females is pretty small.

And then it's the males where the competition is really stark and 90% of them get nothing and a very small percentage of them get all the reproduction. And so they'll start out as females and play it safe and breed literally as females while the breeding is good. And then, and only if they get big enough and strong enough or the alpha male gets killed and he's suddenly removed and there's a vacancy, then the sort of next biggest in line switches from female to male takes on the male status and steps into that role.

And so in a way, it's like your shirker, except that you're not just sitting there eating on the greener pasture. You're actually reproducing as a female that whole time. But you only flip and take on the really risky, you know, high reward, high, whatever you want to say, that risky strategy, if and when you're big enough to tell

me again what species was that wr a sse it's grass it's called the uh it's a coral reef kobudai there's a napoleon grass too right there is i think a bunch it looks a lot like a napoleon grass and i was just i just saw this on the ultimate shirker the new blue planet um from from bbc which is on netflix they have a really cool segment on that and and how it goes away and the body goes undergoes that incredible change and it grows that huge bump on its head and yeah changes uh its sex yeah there's man you know what that program needs is uh two versions one with david attenborough and one without him i cannot listen to that dude oh my god i could listen to that dude all hi i think he's awesome the guy's like it makes it that i

can't it makes it that i can't watch the high-end nature documentaries wow really i feel like i feel like i feel like everybody loves david attenborough's voice because that's like we tried. Didn't we try? Didn't Morgan Freeman and... I would so much prefer that. The way he dramatized... I heard one where... A bird will show up. A bird. And then the bird joins the thing.

Just kills me, man. It's like, would you please just say the lines? No, Sir Daniels writes the lines. Anyway. All right, anyways. So you're...'re okay shirkers are real shirkers real another example bullfrogs or fry a lot of frog populations not bullfrogs but like tangara frogs and chorus frogs they sing and the call that they sing is an honest signal of the size of the male i mean again their their larynx size tracks with their body oh yeah man you can tell

the big bullfrogs are deeper the The females can tell. The females orient towards the big guys. But singing like that is dangerous. They're out there calling, calling, calling, calling. They get hammered by bats that cue in on the same properties of the song and eat them all. No, really? And so when you're out there singing, it's dangerous. You're risking death. And if you're a medium quality, mediocre, puny little male, why would you go risk death if you're not going to win anyway because there's a big guy over there and all the females are going to go over there and so when you find these populations you find first of all a lot of the smaller males

shut up they play it safe so they are the ultimate shirkers they sneak they hang out quiet acting like a female they're not singing singing singing they look and act like a female they creep up to the territories of the big stud males and they hang out on the edges and they try to intercept females and mate with them as they come into the big male. Like satellite. And then when they get big enough and only when they get big enough,

they switch over and start calling. And you can show that. You can go in and take out the big guys. Just pull them out, remove them. All of a sudden there's this pond and the big studs are gone. The next male, it's like the males in line can figure it out.'s like holy shit he's not there anymore boom they stop sneaking and they start calling and they step into so so shirking is real whether it happens in deer i don't know but it

happens in frogs it happens in a lot of things how you feeling yanni good because the last time you last time you brought up shirkers you got shot down bad yeah those boys the mule deer biologist didn't agree he all but came over and hit yanni when Yanni brought up shirkers. But let's come back to the one that I'm behind on. Can I do that now? Yeah, well, you tell me what you're behind on. So what I'm behind on, you mentioned that body size is pretty much the same, but antlers differ a lot. Yeah, this is interesting. And we sort of flirted with this topic from different angles. It comes back to the signal. It's like, what is the thing that's sort of advertising the status or the size or the quality of a male? And in the frogs, we just talked about, you know, the big guys have a deeper call. They sound different. The females

can tell. It's an honest signal. You can't fake it. The only way to have a low song is to be huge. And if you're a little wimpy guy, there's just nothing you can do. You're stuck. It is an intrinsically honest signal because it's difficult. You can't fake it. You can't be a puny little male and just suddenly say, I'm going to sing the sexy song today. If you don't have the body to do it, you can't fake it. And signals like that are more stable evolutionarily. They're less susceptible to cheaters to collapse. Those signaling systems last a long time. And females that happen to pay attention to honest signals do better. They make better decisions than females that might be females that happen to pay attention to honest signals do better. They make better decisions than females that might be more fickle or pay attention to other

things that don't matter. And over time, female preferences evolve and track in on the things that are the most expensive, the most difficult for males to do, the most honest signals that you really can't fake. And that's a part of biology that we know a lot about for big bird displays and song bird calls, all these things, they tend to be very expensive. They tend to be almost impossible to fake. They tend to be extravagant, charismatic, obvious things that a female can see really easily from a long way away. And they tend to be super variable. So if you took 10, I don't want, let's go back to the,

you took a whole bunch of males and lined them up and you looked at things like body size, they differ a little bit. You know, the little guys might be about half as big as the big guys, but you look at the ornaments or the songs or whatever the signal is that they're focusing on and it's wildly variable. It'd be 10 fold, 20fold, fiftyfold difference in size or quality between the puny guys and the big guys. And that's not an accident. That's sort of how these signaling systems evolve in these animals. And it makes them a really important sort of differentiator of winners and losers. Back to sexual selection. It's the males with the best calls or the sexiest signals or the most charismatic, colorful displays, those are the ones that win.

You can't fake it. The only way to do that is to be a rock star. And the females cue in on that, and they pick the rock stars. Talk about the percentage differences. Like imagine that you have a year-and-a-half-old whitetail deer. Okay, whatever, he's 120 pounds. He's got little spike antlers. But then the next year the deer could be

whatever pounds and how what magnitude larger so so you you're asking antler questions i work on beetles i can only give you you gotta tell me the way that i you gotta tell me the way that i can appreciate if i took a hundred rhinoceros beetles do the damn beetles well so beetles are a little simpler in the sense that i don't have the age cohorts confounding things. I got you. Because the biggest bucks and bulls are also the oldest. It's not an accident, and it's part of the same equation. At the end of the day, the males with the biggest antlers are also the oldest and the most dominant and in the best physiological condition.

It's not a coincidence that your boon and crocket bull has the antlers that it has. That's not an accident. But age is part of that. With the beetles, it's simpler because they're all sort of the same age. That's a point I never thought of. That's a good point with insects. They're all the same age. They're all adults. A little teeny guy is never going to, once he comes out of metamorphosis, goes from a grub to a beetle, he's stuck. It's like a suit of armor. It's not going to change. A little guy has a little horn and he's going to have a little horn until the day he dies. So you take age out of the equation,

but it's the same process. I never thought about how much that kind of simplifies things by looking at them. Just in terms of explaining it, the biology is the same for the antlers too. But say I took a hundred males, line them up. I showed you a box before we started today, a box with like a hundred beetles all lined up in a row. And if I took that sample and I measured body size and I compared the smallest guy all the way to the biggest, I'd find a nice sort of even gradient from little to big. And it'd be about a twofold, one and a half to twofold difference. The biggest beetle's probably twice as long or twice as wide as the littlest beetle. But if I look at the horns, I'm looking at about

a 60 fold difference. I mean, a much bigger, not 60%. How do I say that? Two times different. I'm getting confused on air here. It's more like a 15 to 20-fold, sorry, difference between antler size. So two-fold difference in body size and a 15 to 20-fold difference in the antler size or the horn size. So it comes back to what you mentioned a minute ago. The antlers are more variable. The horns in these beetles are more variable. You look at tusks, you look at any of these big weapon systems, fiddler crab claws, all these kinds of weapons are big, they're expensive, and they're wildly variable from male to male. And that's all part of the same thing. The reason they're variable is they're expensive. The little guys can't afford it. Only the best conditioned animals

can afford to produce the really big weapons. Everybody else is stuck with a compromise. And so you end up having this huge sort of spectrum from the wimps with the little tiny things to the superstar best conditioned studs with the massive weapons. And it's not an accident. It's not random at all. For the beetles, who's best at being a grub? It has a lot to do with that. It has to do with access to food. But it's more complicated than that because who gets the best food? In the field, in the lab, I can manipulate it.

I give them a lot of food and I get huge beetles with massive horns. I give them very little food. They all grow up stunted and tiny and none of them have any big weapons at all. So I can manipulate it. But in the wild, it's not an accident. Same with elk and deer. It's not a coincidence. The best dominant individuals have the best territories and they're the ones that are able to keep everybody else away. So their kids have the least amount of competition. They're the ones that are most resistant to pathogens and

parasites, the healthiest, the least likely to get sick. So everything sort of lines up in their favor and those individuals have the most resources available to them. Other individuals are forced to more peripheral habitats. They're dealing with more crowded conditions. They're stressed out because they're losing the competition for access to resources all the time. The stress interacts with their immune system, so they're sick a lot more often. They have access to less food, poor quality food, more competition, more disease, more parasites.

All that stuff plays out and separates the winners from the losers. And none of it's an accident. I mean, it's compounding and sort of self-reinforcing, but the best conditioned animals are the ones that tend to win. And the insects, it even gets into the parents' behavior. The females that are the best at picking the right spots to lay their eggs, their kids hatch and they just eat what's there. But there's some individuals that are in really good places and other individuals that are in lousy places. And so right from the day they're born, it's, it isn't a fair world. There's winners and losers, but it's not random. It has a lot to do with the behavior of the parents.

We had a guy on who deals with nutrition and ungulates. Yeah. I would love to have heard that. And I guess I can find it, can't I? And he talks about this idea that people talk about an area having good genetics for bucks, right? And so some area grows big bucks because of genetics. And he

refutes that and talks about nutrition being the driver, and not that animal's nutrition, but in some ways a deer's eventual rack.'s gonna depend on both it's it's mother's in utero nutrition I buy it totally we see this with people you can take these animals you can take these animals from places with quote shitty genetics and put them in a situation on a certain a certain

places with shitty genetics and I would mean habitats that are marginal with poor quality individuals. Well, I know, but in our lingo, in like hunter lingo. Because genetics has to do with the animals, not the landscape. Yes, but I'm talking about what hunters talk about. Okay. Hunters would be like, why, you know,

like why are all these big bucks coming out of Iowa, right? And be like, oh, you know, the Iowa, they got the genetics. So it's the population that they're referring to. I'm talking about how people use it. People use it like that. They're like, oh, it's got the feed and got the genetics, right? And they take animals from these places that supposedly, like out of the mule deer from

the Black Hills, supposedly have bad genetics. So there's nothing you can do that's going to be small. But you take mule deer from the Black Hills and move them to a place where you're not changing the genetics. You take males and females, move them to a place with different nutrition, and all of a sudden they're giants. So in general, weapons and ornaments and all those other traits, but weapons, this kind, the sexually selected weapons tend to be exquisitely sensitive to nutrition. So we did experiments in the beetles. We'll manipulate nutrition. Same kind of thing I just talked about. If I give them a little food or a

lot of food, body size, about a twofold difference. Wing size, about a twofold difference. Eye size, about a twofold difference. Horn size, about twofold difference, horn size about a 15-fold difference. And so same animal, same experiment, same difference in nutrition and legs and eyes and wings, all those things are sensitive to nutrition. They're all responding, but the weapons are responding more. So weapons are exquisitely sensitive to nutrition. It doesn't mean it's not genetic because it's not an accident in the wild. It's the best quality animals that usually end up succeeding in defending the best quality nutrition and the best resources. So you get this interaction between the quality of the genetics, the genotypes of those animals and the environments that those animals are in.

But all of that comes together and is expressed in these traits, these weapons. And if you vary nutrition, I guarantee you, you're going to have an enormous effect on antler size. So let me follow the logic here. I want to step back because I know we've been going off on all these directions. What I've been trying to talk about is the kinds of ecological situations that can spark an arms race, that can take a population that doesn't have big weapons, that's going about its business, something changes. And all of a sudden, from that point forward, it's the bigger, stronger males with the weapons that win. They're able to monopolize access to some kind of resource, something that gives them an edge in the way that they come into contact with females.

Something changed and all of a sudden, bigger is better. And the males with the biggest weapons win. I talked in the dung beetle example about how suddenly starting to fight over tunnels, a simple change in behavior aligns the fights so that they're not scrambles anymore. Now they're duels. That change in behavior all of a sudden bigger is better because in a duel, the stronger male wins. And if a male has a longer horn and he can pry better and get rid of the opponent better with the weapon, then the male with the longer weapon wins. And so all of a sudden that population gets tipped into this trajectory that we're talking about as an arms race. And from that point forward, bigger is better. And so very quickly, the population across generations is

going to ratchet up to bigger and bigger weapons. So that kind of a phenomenon happens with elephant tusks. It happens with elephant tusks. It happens with caribou. It happens with fiddler crabs. It happens with all these animals with these crazy weapons. The particular trigger might be different, but they all fight in duels, one-on-one contests. And once they start on this path, the arms race plays out the same way every single time. And that's a point I kind of want to take a second to make. Once that button gets pushed, go, that beetle's on the trajectory. It's in an arms race. The weapons get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And a very set of things happens. As they get big, they get expensive. We talked about cost. So they get more and more expensive. What that means is fewer and

fewer males are up to the muster. Most of the males now can't pay that price because it's getting more and more and more expensive. Very quickly, 80, 90% of the males are out of the game. They just don't have the resources to produce the really big weapons. And so they're pretty much gone. Collateral, they lose. The population becomes more and more concentrated around a smaller and smaller subset of victorious males.

And the benefits of these big weapons get stronger and bigger victorious males. And the benefits of these big weapons get stronger and bigger and bigger. And the whole process ratchets up. But you reach a point, a tipping point, where the winners and losers are so starkly different from each other. And so many males are getting nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, that some of them somewhere stumble on a way to break the rules. They cheat. Oh, I forgot one more step. So the weapons get big, they get expensive. The fact that only a few males can do it, that's what gives us that variability we were talking about. That's the point where antlers are more variable than legs or ears or body size or fiddler crab claws are more variable than body size. All of a sudden now, those weapons are so expensive that only a

few Boone and Crockett quality individuals can do it. The rest of them are stuck with suboptimal versions. The variation in the traits is pronounced. That tip, that means that you suddenly got a signal. You've got a thing out there that is an honest indicator of fighting ability. It's not an accident that the biggest males have the biggest, they're the studs. So if I'm a mediocre male with a medium rack and I look and I size up my opponent and he's got a massive rack, do I want to escalate in that fight? No, because really he's going to beat me because it's an honest signal. And that male with bigger antlers is really the better fighter. And so in these animal populations, whether it's beetles, crabs, I mean, caribou, elephants, all these systems, once the arms race is at that point and these weapons are big,

they're expensive, they're variable, they're an honest signal of fighting ability, the next step kicks in and the weapons start acting as a deterrent. They're a signal. You don't actually have to fight with it because all I need to do is look at that antler and I know I'm going to lose. And so more and more in these populations, the small guys back down. They size each other up. They spar a little bit. They look at each other. You see these great examples of antelopes sort of strutting side

by side or fallow deer. There's beautiful pictures of these males. They run side by side and they turn around and they run back. They're like looking at each other. Whose antlers are bigger? And then the smaller ones usually leave. And so you reach this point in the cycle where the weapons are big, they're expensive, they're a signal. And all of a sudden they're a deterrent. You don't even have to fight anymore because most of your competition walks away because you're the stud and you've got the weapons and it's honest. And that's the point where you start. That's where there's tons of military parallels, by the way, if we go there. And then at the end, you reach this point where you start that's where there's tons of military parallels by the way if we go there and then i'm looking to get there next you reach this point where the weapons are huge only a tiny fraction of individuals can afford it nobody else is even in the game they can't even

not only can they not fight i mean they don't even bother trying to fight and that's the point where usually somebody breaks the rules the asymmetric warfare the guerrilla equivalent somebody cheats and figures out a way to screw that man. I'm not playing by those rules anymore. The sneaky dumb. It's like, I'm not going to fight at the entrance. I'm not going to win. So they dig a side tunnel and find another way. And that's the beginning of the end. Once the sneakers or the cheaters start doing too well, the whole thing collapses, the weapons disappear. And the whole process starts again, that cycle, something aligns like a star. So all of a sudden, bigger is better. Population starts launching onto this trajectory.

Bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. They get bigger. They get expensive. They become exaggerated as a signal. They become a deterrent. Cheaters invade, collapse. That sort of process repeats itself over and over again. And I would argue that just about any animal you can imagine, with the exception of the saber-toothed cats, that has huge weapons like that, has gone through

exactly that cycle. And that's the parallel with the military. Military technologies go through the same cycle. They get triggered for the same reasons. Once they get triggered, the weapons get bigger and bigger and bigger. As they get bigger, they get more and more and more expensive. As they get more and more expensive, fewer countries or nations can afford to play the game. And then you reach a point where they're a deterrent because you got the weapons and nobody else does. And then the cheaters invade and the whole thing collapses. And along comes some guys with airplane tickets and box cutters

and brings you to your knees. Exactly. Or cyber hackers. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

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All throughout your book, you talk about military parallels. Yeah, sorry, thanks for letting me go off on that, but I wanted to try to tie the pieces together while we had a chance. Throughout your book, you talk about military parallels parallels so you get into armaments um the arms race but there's one there's one that doesn't go toward bigger bigger bigger and you talk about uh projectile points yeah can you tell everyone about so i can't remember where it's it's it's

i can't i'm losing myself now like i can't remember what example it's, it's, it's, I'm losing myself now. Like, I can't remember what example you brought up that got you to write about Clovis points and Folsom points. I am a sucker for history. I love the past. I love the past when I find a fossil and I realize I'm looking at something that's a snapshot from something way in the past. We just got back from taking our kids two weeks in Europe. I mean, I was blown away by Pompeii, the whole idea of walking around and looking at the mosaics in a bathroom of somebody's house from a thousand years ago. I mean, I get a rush.

It's a palpable endorphin rush. I love that feeling. And for me growing up, I used to find arrowheads in my neighbor's tobacco field in Tennessee. And after the rains, I would go walk through these fields and just look at the slopes of the dirt at the bases of the plants, look for the little glisten of pieces of flint or obsidian that were coming out of the dirt. And there's this feeling, I don't know how, some people get it, some people don't. I don't know how to describe it. But if I pick up an arrowhead and hold it, I'm the first person to touch that since the person that made it.

And those things can be three, four, five, 10,000 years old, depending on where you are and what they are. If it's Clovis, it could be 15,000 years old. That's this priceless moment of touching the past. And I used to get a kick out of that from, I mean, basically from when I could walk onward. I love that history. And so for me, when I had a chance to look at all these weapons, to go back and look at arrowheads and really think about what kinds of processes, agents of selection sort of shaped the evolution of the form of these arrowheads. It was a fun, fun digression. But you brought it up in the context of them evolving to be smaller rather than larger. And I think it's a really good parallel.

I've tried to say it already in this interview. Most of the time, animal weapons aren't big. Most animals don't have an enormous rack sticking on the top or coffee table fused to the top of their head. Most species, it's not worth it. It's too expensive. It's too awkward. Why the hell would you do something like that? And so most of the time, it's not worth it. We've talked today about the rare circumstances where the stars line up and all of a sudden in one population of one species it is worth it and you go off on this trajectory. But the arrowheads are a really nice clear illustration of a more typical situation where it's not worth it to get really big. And it illustrates the point that weapons are shaped by costs and benefits. And so with a projectile point, where do I start? So what I did is I picked

up a literature that had looked at the so-called evolution of projectile points in North America from the earliest people that we think came across the Bering Strait. These were the Clovis people and the Folsom peoples, all the way through to effectively the colonization from Western Europeans and sort of the end of that era. And they have beautiful sequences of these projectile points through time. Even from within the same areas, you can look sort of over time at how the technology changed, the flaking patterns, the shapes, the sizes. And what they found is that the points got smaller.

So if you go way back to the Clovis time period, they were using these primarily to hunt things like Colombian mammoths. And so they found the points almost always in association with mammoth kills. They were pretty confident that that was a major source of calories for these people. And if you're going to try to puncture through the hide of something that thick and that big, you need a big point. And there's some pretty tight physical constraints. I brought one that we can hold and look at. Pretty tight physical constraints on a napped stone projectile point that you have to have a point that's tailored to the size of the shaft

of the spear. It has to be about one and a half times the diameter of the shaft of the spear. If the point's too narrow, then when it pierces the hide, it doesn't create a slit that's big enough to allow the shaft of the spear to go in. So it hits, it goes in like an inch and it stops. So a longer, wider blade cuts a bigger gash slice and it creates an opening that lets the shaft of the spear go into the animal. But if you make them too wide, it's brittle and they snap. So you have this sort of, you know, this sort of tension between points that are too small

for your shaft of your spear and points that are too wide and they break. And the happy medium is about one and a half times. So we know with the early Clovis, this isn't Clovis, but they were big, big points with really thick shafted spears that they needed to puncture through the hide of the

mammoth. But those were very expensive points to make. It was hard to find pieces of obsidian without imperfections in it that would allow you to nap a point that was like, you know, some of them were like six, 10 inches long. And it took a spectacular amount of skill to be able to pull that off without breaking these things. And then you had to carry the spears and the points with you everywhere you went. These were nomadic people. They're carrying everything with them everywhere they go. By some estimates, they'd move 200 miles in a year. You're carrying everything with you. So big spears are heavy. As long as you're getting things like mammoths, it's worth it. The benefits of the big weapons are you can take down the huge

prey, feed your people. It's a great thing. But the mammoths went extinct and they had to shift from mammoths to smaller species. The next one was that bison antiquus, which I think you've talked about in some of yours, a big bison, but smaller than a mammoth. And so the shafts were overkill. Suddenly it wasn't worth it to carry these huge heavy spears and to make these really, really hard to make points. So they started making smaller points that were better fit to the shaft sizes that they needed on the spears for the bison. And then when the bison antiquus went extinct, they shifted down again to bighorn sheep and to the modern American bison. And each time they shifted to smaller prey, they immediately got rid of the big stuff because it was too expensive to

make, too expensive to carry. And they scaled down and got smaller and smaller until they had shaft sizes and point sizes that worked for the current prey. And then all that ended when they invented the bow and arrow, because suddenly you had a fundamentally different sort of projectile propulsion system and you could get by with really tiny points. And from that point forward, nobody wanted to carry the big stuff. It was too expensive, too heavy. They all switched to really lightweight, portable bow and arrow technologies. So is that what you want? Did I go off too far? No, no, not at all.

That was exactly. But it's a nice illustration of costs and benefits that the big weapons were worth the price when the prey was really big and you could use them on bison. But when that prey was gone, it wasn't worth the price to make a big weapon. So you downsized it to something that was cheaper. And then you downsize it again to something that was even cheaper. There's this sort of tension, tug of war between costs and benefits. And once the big prey were gone, the benefits weren't as big. So it ratcheted down to a smaller size.

Explain your view on, or not your view, but your insights, however you want to put it, into where we've looked like in recent decades with our military and how we imagined military might and how we would exercise military might and where currently, who is the- The sneak strategy. Yeah. Who's the beetle who tunnels in and comes up through the floor? That one I can answer. So step back a second.

Are we okay on time? Oh, yeah. I want to go out. Okay. So, step back a second. I want to make one thing clear. We've been talking about evolution of animal populations and winners and losers and sexual selection. In something like caribou or elk, it's all about reproduction because the males that win, which presumably are the studs with the best antlers, the best condition, they win the harems, they get access to the most females. They win because they sire more offspring and they produce more of the kids in the next generation. And those kids carry the antlers because the way that the antlers are copied is through producing more elk. The winners have more kids and the currency of success is numbers of offspring.

When you talk about military weapons is different. We're not talking about who has kids, whether you have a better machine gun and more. We're not talking about reproduction anymore. We're talking about a manufactured technology. Yeah, but historically, there's a lot of instances where it does control reproduction. There are.

The Middle Ages is a good one. Yeah. And weapons are used to kill people. So they definitely affect reproduction. But oftentimes. The Middle Ages is a good one. Yeah. And weapons are used to kill people. So they definitely affect reproduction. But oftentimes people find where like, it seems like the male, there'll be a population and it'll seem like there's a sudden, very radical shift in the population in the area from, and you can see markers from a conquering invasion. Yep.

Where it seems like the men that were there The men that were there seemed to vanish. associated with conquest. And there's no question that military leaders and political leaders tend, especially if you're including illegitimate offspring, to sire an awful lot of offspring. So reproduction

is relevant to humans. I'm not trying to say what you're saying. It is still the ultimate currency for success in humans too. That'll piss everybody off. But at the end of the day, you know, when you look a thousand generations from now, the people that are going to be out there are going to be offspring from people that were here today. So, so yes, reproduction still matters. But what I'm trying to say is if I want to understand this arrowhead or I want to look at airplane technology or a tank technology or missile technology, it really doesn't matter how many kids the person that designed it has or how many kids the person that flew it has. That's a separate question.

So, yes, military issues are associated with dying and with breeding, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the missile or the tank or the arrowhead. And when you're talking about a weapon or take a machine gun, you know, an AK-47, that is a thing. There are copies made in a factory. They're cranking out AK-47s. The factory is making more AK-47s. That's not me having kids. That's the factory making more AK-47s.

But if I look at the population of submachine guns out there or assault rifles out there, I could go out there. Just like I could say how many dark mice and white mice are out there in my population. I could say how many M16s, how many AK-47s. If I want to characterize the population of assault rifles on this planet right now, I could probably find 50, 100 different models out there. A few of them are going to be really rare. Some of them, like the AK-47, are going to be ridiculously common. I could talk about variation in the weapon out there now. And realistically, that's going to change. Some models are going to get picked up and spread, and they're going to become more common, and they're going to get adjusted and developed and get better and better over time. Others are going to disappear. They're too clunky. They jam under,

you know, the sand gets in them. They don't work. Nobody wants them. They're too expensive. Nobody wants to produce them for their militaries. So the weapons are going to change over time. And it's a turnover process, winners and losers. It's exactly the same as what we're talking about with antlers or beetles, but it's not tied to reproduction. It's tied to who wants this, you know, which models are being picked up, manufactured and spreading and which models are being discontinued because they suck or they're not cost effective or nobody wants them. And so you still have winners and losers. You can talk about the technology. It will change over time. If you look at the assault rifle over the last 50 years, it's changed. It's better now. It's more efficient now. People have been playing around with it, trying to change the design. Sometimes it's by accident. Sometimes they're engineers trying to make it more efficient,

make the cartridges work better, make it more cost effective, make it more portable. People are tweaking it and playing around. It's still an AK-47, but they're playing with it to try to make it better. That's variation. That's just like mutations cropping up in a mouse population, making them a little faster, a little thicker, a little lighter. You know, there's variation and some of it sucks. It doesn't work at all. It's gone. Some of it works really well. People grab it and run with it. That's evolution. So with that as a backdrop for weapons, now we can come back full circle and say, well, when would weapons, particular technologies, get caught up in an arms race where all of

a sudden you need bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger? And historically, there's really good sort of accounts of early weapons technologies and where this happened. So if you go back to the Romans and the Greeks and the Syrian time periods, Mediterranean, there were galleys that were these oared, you know, the triremes. There were these ships that were rowing soldiers back and forth. For many, many years, like a thousand years, these ships were called pentaconters. They had 50 rowers.

And there was nothing special about them. They just carried troops from place to place. They scrambled about on the ocean. They weren't actually weapons. They were just boats that took people along the shorelines to transport troops. For a thousand years, nothing changed. All the countries had the same basic ship. The design was pretty much indistinguishable. And then somebody invents a battering ram. Boom. Just like that. New technology. It's like a beetle horn. It's a thing that ram. Boom, just like that. New technology. It's like a beetle horn. It's a thing that sticks off the front of the boat,

but oh my God, from that point forward, all the rules were rewritten because now you could take your ship, smash it into somebody else and sink his ship. And so overnight, they went from shuttling people like a scramble to hitting another opponent ship one-on-one in a duel. That's the same trigger that works in animals. That's the spark.

All of a sudden, whoever's got the fastest ship wins. Now you've got an arms race because a bigger ship, a faster ship wins in that kind of one-on-one encounter. And just like that, after nothing happening for a thousand years, overnight these technologies exploded as people started making bigger and bigger and bigger ships. They started getting longer until they buckled. They started adding another row of rowers. So bi-reams came along, then tri-reams, then fives, sixes. They got bigger and bigger and bigger until these ships were

monstrosities that were effectively useless. But the point is a change in technology caused the weapons, the ships, to line up one-on-one in a duel, exactly like the dung beetles in a tunnel. Suddenly they're facing each other one-on-one and that was it. You can look at various periods throughout military history and the same kind of a process has happened. The Cold War was the most prescient and sort of alarming of those. And in that case, it happened at the level of nation states and political landscapes. But you effectively had the U.S. and the USSR, the superpowers that were still standing after the Second World War, going toe-to-toe in the sand. That's a one-on-one duel.

And that sparked an arms race that led to unbelievably rapid development of missiles, aircraft, tanks, nuclear weapons, everything. I mean, all the weapons technologies that we had sort of got folded into that race. And if you want to go into that, it turns out the behavior of the nations during that time period was exactly like elk or fiddler crabs or beetles. Those two nations didn't go nuclear in an all doubt full on battle. They sparred. They had little conflagrations in Afghanistan and Korea and Vietnam where they sort of pushed each other a little bit. They use conventional weapons.

They didn't use the nuclear or the weapons of mass destruction. They sized each other up and then back down again. That's exactly what animals do in that kind of situation. You know, what's interesting about when we think about the parallels and then the things that don't line up would be like in World War war ii that the u.s becoming the people who developed that were first to develop the atomic bomb would be as though i mean we started that war not a superpower you're right but absolutely by the time we came out we were emerging as it would be like if a giant it wouldn't be that the hornless beetle suddenly

came up dug a hole up from underneath it'd be like the hornless beetle suddenly came up dug a hole up from underneath it'd be like the horned beetle the one with the big bad horn was like oh and guess what else i also have fangs you know it's a little bit like we we upset our we upped our we trumped our own action by developing the atomic weapon yeah and then thereby, in some degrees, made Japan this naval superpower. It made that naval might irrelevant because we had the atomic bomb. It rewrote the rules, completely changed the game. But that's, again, the arms races ratchet up. They escalate.

So the simplest way to think of it is Beatles again. Or an antelope. Picture you've got seven-inch horns out there, and suddenly somebody comes along with eight-inch horns, and they start winning. Pretty soon, all their kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, pretty soon everybody's got eight-inch horns, and that's not enough. And now somebody pops up with a nine-inch horn. And so in a sense, the sizes of these weapons ratchet in steps. But you can also have sort of fundamentally new technologies that pop up on the scene that just completely ratchet in steps. But you can also have sort of fundamentally new technologies that pop up on the scene that just completely rewrite the rules.

And so arms races can go in lots of directions, and usually they're additive. So you still need the first weapon, but now you need the second one too. And now you need tanks and submarines and bombers and nuclear weapons. You know, it got more and more expensive because all these things were sort of compounded. But the nuclear weapon game, that was like a spontaneous mutation that completely rewrote the rules because the ones that couldn't afford it. Yeah especially like intercontinental

because like the atomic bomb you had to like deliver it with a ship it was like the Indianapolis you had to like deliver it to the pacific theater in a ship you had to have a powerful air force yep to to get the thing afield and put it where you want it. And so, like you said, it's like a ratcheting up because you're relying on all these capabilities. Someone doesn't just block that thing over there. And you're locked in a race because really you're assessing your capabilities against your opponent and they're constantly trying to do better at their capabilities. So, every time they get a new technology, then they're up, then they're ahead of you.

The race is on to surpass them. It really ratchets into this vicious cycle that can lead out of control. So, so where are we? You're going to tell us like where we're at. So where we are today, that the cold war obviously has cooled down. Who the digging beetle is right now. But the technologies are still out there. And one interesting sort of twist on that system is during the cold war,

the most expensive state-of-the-art weapons, the ones that were the equivalent of the antlers in your elk or your caribou or the horns in my beetles were the nuclear weapons. That was the new technology. That was the one that was the most sophisticated, the most difficult to actually generate. And then you had to have, like you said, the delivery, you had to have the infrastructure to be able to deliver that, which took all the sensor nets, it took all the guidance systems, it took the whole space race was basically a cloak and a facade for developing missile technology that could deliver nuclear weapons to an opponent. And so all of that stuff had to be there. Today, we're in a very different

world. Now we've got stockpiles of these nuclear weapons cached away in places that I hate to think about that are sort of rotting away. And they're a dime a dozen because we produced a shitload of them during the Cold War. So there's tons of nuclear warheads out there. That's not that expensive. In fact, it's not that inconceivable that just about anybody could get their hands on them. I can't remember how many, seven or eight countries now, maybe more? A couple more on the horizon?

There are a couple more on the horizon. There are a couple more on the horizon. The really expensive weapons, the ones that are the equivalent of antlers now are conventional weapons. There are things like the F-35 strike fighter and the new Gerald IV class aircraft carrier. These things cost billions and billions of dollars to produce. And only a very small number of nations have the technology, the sophistication, the infrastructure, the trained personnel, all the stuff you need to produce and maintain and use these weapons. So, I mean, I had a chance to visit one of our nuclear aircraft

carriers a couple months ago. Astounding experience looking at our operations in action in the Pacific as we cycled through. They had the F-35 strike fighters landing on a carrier for one of the first times ever on a carrier. I got to stand like as close as I am to you and watch these things come screaming down and catch the tail hook. These technologies are incredible. A helmet on an F-35 costs half a million dollars. Every single bomb that they put on these things is a million dollars out of the gates. I mean, we're spending billions of dollars. The nuclear triad, the infrastructure that we have is trillions of dollars a year. And so these are the state-of-the-art weapons now. And you asked about

the sneaky beetles. What's the cheater that we have to worry about? It's cyber hackers. I mean, it seems crazy, but we're spending billions of dollars on some astoundingly good tech. I mean, these fighters are amazing, absolutely amazing. I don't know if any of you have had a chance to see them, if you know much about the F-35. It is a supersonic, super maneuverable stealth fighter. The reason the helmets cost half a million dollars on these things is they're completely integrated with sensor systems so that the movements of the pilots are tracked within the cockpit of the plane. So any direction the pilot looks,

the direction they're looking is automatically integrated with sensors that are built into the skin of the aircraft in that direction. They're tracking the pupils of the pilot. And so they've got infrared sensors. They've got all the GPS stuff. They've got the topographic maps, everything all overlaid. It's not even like there's a screen. The old ones had a heads-up display screen. It's just there. They can look straight through their legs, their crotch, down the bottom of the plane. It's gone. It's nothing. They see all the way to the ground because it completely integrates. They have unobstructed 360-degree view all the time. Heat sensor, everything, all sort of overlaid into an

integrative picture. It's amazing. But all of these technologies depend on software. So we're spending a fortune on these incredible technologies. And they, you know, we're the Boone and Crockett Bull right now. Those are the state of the art weapons and we really are safer because of them. They're amazing. But the sneaky little beetle sort of worming away from the sidelines are the hackers. Because if they can get past, we can't, a pilot can't fly these things without software. You can't land these planes without software. They literally can't handle the planes without the software because the planes can do maneuvers that are fast enough that the pilot would black out from the G-forces. So they have to integrate whatever the pilot

does with the stick with sort of built-in sensor systems that interpret the pilot's movement in a way that doesn't cause the plane to do something that blacks out the pilot. So you literally can't even go old-fashioned and fly these things without the software. The aircraft carrier was awesome. I got to talk to the captain. I got to talk to the first officer. I got to talk to the captain i got to talk to the first officer i got to talk to the master chief the cooks i got to talk to people running the nuclear reactors i mean i got to meet anybody and everybody they were awesome about letting us as a civilian go in and just look at what was happening but every single step of that operation is critically dependent on software they can't control the nuclear reactor on the ship without software they can't navigate

without software they can't control the positions of the planes without software they can't control the nuclear reactor on the ship without software. They can't navigate without software. They can't control the positions of the planes without software. They can't orchestrate the landings and the takeoffs of the planes without software. The way that they communicate with all the rest of NORAD and everything is all software. So our vulnerability, the flanks that we've got exposed right now, is the firewalls on our software. And they know it. I mean, I'm not teaching, telling them anything. Yes, I did get a chance to go to DC and give a talk in front of the former director of the NSA and the CIA and all these top brass from the military about sneaky dung beetles and sneaky bighorn

sheep and salmon actually telling them the parallels. But you know, I'm not teaching them anything they don't know. They're totally aware of this. And that's the new arms race. So when I was at this conference talking to these guys, they said, yeah, yeah, the Chinese have buildings full of people that are trying 24-7 to hack into our systems. And we've got buildings full of people that are hacking into theirs. And the idea is each side is trying to insert code. It's not just stealing trade secrets so they could go build their own F-35. That would cost them a fortune. Why go build your own jet if you can insert code that renders ours useless?

So the idea, they're called zero-day attacks, is if they can insert code that sits, then we can't find it because it's not doing anything. It's just sitting there. So it's harder for us to tell that it's there until zero day. When they need it, they turn it on and they can take over our technologies and use it against us. That's the fear. We spend all the money. We produce the technologies. They hijack those technologies and use them against us. That is the ultimate game changer sneak strategy that we got to worry about. But the military is on it. And their argument is they have so much infiltrating all their technologies that we can damn sure shut them down too.

So the general actually said this is the new arms race. It's like we're all sort of racing each other to who can hijack and control the software of the other side. That's our new Cold War. Crazy stuff, huh? It's a long way from dung beetles and rhinoceros beetles, I'll tell you that. No, it's great though, man. You do a great job of bringing it all together thanks i like the parts about deer i do too no it's phenomenal is it possible to tell where you are in within an arms race in a particular species oh i thought

you mean us it's like it's a little scary when you try to do that i really don't want to be the guy that says our aircraft carriers are absolutely i don't think we're there i've got all kinds of human comparison questions coming through my head and i've passed it all yeah in a hundred thousand years will elk have bigger antlers or will they have like uh very possibly yeah yeah i think that arms race is still well it's hard to say so first of all with animal populations you know we talked sam brought up the fact that evolution can happen really fast. And when you're dealing with antibiotics applied to a population of bacteria, you're talking hours. You know, and that population is going to adapt within 24 hours fast.

Yeah, because they're hatching new generations constantly. You're looking at influenza. People want to know why they got to get a flu shot every single year. It's because the flu virus is evolving so fast that six months, eight months out, it's such a genetically different beast that the vaccinations we just produced don't match it anymore. And so those are situations where it's happening really fast. I mean, hours to days to weeks, you got to stay on top of it. Elk, rhinoceros beetles, probably a little bit slower. Still fast in the grand scheme of things because these kinds of arms races are quicker than normal background evolution. But we're talking decades to hundreds of years. No, but I can flip that back,

getting smaller. We've got really good evidence. This will be a hot button topic for your audience, but I know some of the scientists, we have very compelling evidence that things like bighorn sheep populations have been selected on by trophy hunting and have actually evolved in response to have smaller and smaller horns. So we've actually driven the evolution of smaller weapons in contemporary populations of an ungulate, bighorn sheep. And they've got data where they stopped the trophy hunting and the horns rebounded and evolved to be really, really big again.

So we can see weapon evolution, even on the scale of things like deer or bighorn sheep happening over over you know two decades three decades it's not hours like flu and it's not millennia it's it's still pretty fast with that you know like a doll sheep for instance in most of alaska a doll sheep becomes legal when he develops the 360 degree horn if i was a doll sheep you'd be better off i would really rather as possible yeah if that didn't you're still vulnerable because of other things but that's like the key indicator and one that gets there fast one that gets a full curl fast is you know and i don't know how long it takes actually to and if if there's tens of thousands of doll sheep

and a relatively light hunting pressure so only a couple dozen trophy animals get yanked, maybe that's not really that big an effect. And the benefits in the local populations are still going to be so great that it keeps going. But if you're talking about hunting pressure where you're really taking a sizable proportion of the top animals, then yeah, that would apply very strong selection to the males to not have that last curl. We do that with fisheries. One of the problems we have with things like Atlantic cod populations is gill nets catch the big animals. The small ones slip through.

So we tend to selectively harvest the older, big fish keep growing as they get, you know this better than me, Sam, they keep growing as they get older. So big fish are also older fish. So we're selectively harvesting the biggest and the oldest fish on a very large scale when you consider the scope of the Atlantic cod fisheries and the numbers of ships and the numbers of fish that they're taking.

And there's really good evidence over the last 30, 50 years that the animals have both evolved to grow more slowly. So they stay smaller and they've started reproducing at a smaller size and a younger age. So they're beginning to reproduce smaller than they used to because all the big guys are being pulled out. It's the small ones that stumbled on a way to reproduce early that are now winning. They're small enough to get through the gill nets and they're breeding. Those are the ones producing the offspring. So the population's evolving, you know, in a direction that's not so great for the fisheries industry, but it makes a lot of biological sense.

We're applying selection by taking the big ones. The smaller ones start doing better. The population evolves towards a smaller size. What else you got, Yanni? On animal weapons? No, yeah, like any, like, concluders, man. I saw you typing away over there. No, that was my question there was about, man. I thought you were typing away over there. No. That was

my question there was about if we knew where the arms race was. Oh, you asked about where we were in animals. You can see in a lot of animals that the sneak tactics are already there. You study their behavior and you can find the sneaky males or the what you call them? Precocious males. Precocious males in the salmon.

So in a way, you know you're already partway into that cycle. And by definition, if you picked it because it's got a huge weapon, it's probably already pretty far in. But there is a fun twist there. We've known about sneaky males for 40, 50 years. I mean, it's not a new aspect of animal behavior, but nobody had ever connected it to an arms race before. Seeing the sneaky males as the beginning of the end, the sort of beginning of the collapse was totally new. And I got that idea from the military. And the reason is because these things you brought, it's because it takes a long time. We can see arms races there. We see species with huge antlers. That's why I try to study these things in the first place. It's like,

what the hell is happening in that beetle or this fly or that ungulate. We picked them because they've got the structures. We know something's going on. And we can infer from that that they're partway into this cycle. But we never actually get to see it collapse. But the military does. They've got really good records all the way through. They know why arms races collapse. They know why the arms race with the Napoleon era sailing galleons collapsed.

It was fire ships. Once that, you know, you could set these things on fire, it was over. It was game over. They were done. We know about ironclad battleships. They know what started the arms race. They know how they got bigger and bigger and bigger. They know how nations sort of exploded in their attempts to build bigger and more of these battleships. And then they know why they became obsolete. It was submarines. It was a sneaky beetle. Little beetle goes underground, mines his way into the tunnel. Submarines sneak under the surface and they can sink even the biggest, best battleships from underwater. It's cheating. The admirals hate submarines. It's anathema to them. It's dishonorable. It's like breaking the rules. It's exactly what it is.

It's breaking the rules. But once you've got submarines out there, you change the game and suddenly the really big battleships are obsolete. And so today it's not an accident. Then you have to have battleships and submarines. Well, so what we have are strike groups. We have our own submarines and we surround our carriers now, which are the focus instead of the battleships, it's the carriers now. We have to surround them with a strike group. We would never send a carrier anywhere by itself. It only exists in a bubble that is created by the cruisers and the destroyers and the submarines. And the reason we need all that other stuff is because of submarines from the other side. So the military figured out that changes in technology that broke the rules, that cheated, were the things that collapsed an arms race. And they had studied it over and over again

from the ancient Mediterranean through the saline warships, the ironclad battleships, aircraft, all these systems had been worked out by military scholars. And over and over again, it's the sneaky, the cheaters that collapsed the system. And so what was fun for me, here I am a biologist reading all this military stuff,

was to turn around and say, hey, we've got cheaters. We've known that forever. Oh, they're sneaky. I even found them as a grad student in my dung beetles, the sneaky males. But putting the two pieces together and saying, wait a minute, maybe the sneakers are the collapse of the arms race in the animal systems too. That's new. We don't have a good way to test it yet because animal systems take long enough that we rarely ever get to catch it in action. So it's sort of a leap of faith at this point. It's an hypothesis that needs to be tested. But it's one of the ideas I put forward in that book. And it came from crossover between the military literature and the animal

literature. And again, it's fun and it's only possible because these extreme weapons are so similar. The animal weapon story, pretty much everything you could say about elk antlers or caribou antlers, you could apply verbatim to aircraft carriers or f-35 strike fighters today i mean the parallels are so deep at every level that now we can go back and forth between the literatures and each side can learn from the other sam what do you got oh you got a good grade when you took his class you don't can't bring that up i really feel like i deserved a good grade when you took his class you don't you can't bring that up i really feel like i deserved a better grade um man so many so many things one one thing i was i

was curious about uh perusing the book and you know thinking about animal animal weapons um was and you know obviously my my mind gravitates towards the ungulates and the, the antlers and everything. I was curious about non-typical antler configurations and if, if that is adaptive in some way. And, and I'm wondering if, if perhaps that is, is some form of, of cheating that it's a different configuration that might be able to defeat the standard. I wouldn't call it cheating because they're still paying the price. They're still producing antlers. I'm just thinking out loud here.

But I'm going to take your idea and run with it. What I would call it is variation. So, again, all these populations start out with differences among individuals. Mutations pop up here and there. And if they happen to affect the way the antlers are developing, then you get a variance on the theme. The antler's a little bit different. The tines bend. Who knows what it is that's different? You've all seen crazy mutant antlers. Sometimes it's a genetic change. It's literally a heritable mutation in the genomes of these animals that affects the way they grow. And there's pretty good evidence of that. I don't know how many of you collect sheds, but

probably all of you do. There's some neat places where you can show that the same bull produces the same mutant form of the antler year after year. And often you can find kids and grandkids in the same area that have the same variant. So some of these sort of defective antlers are heritable. They're produced somehow by something in the genome that's passed on. Other times, who knows, it could be an injury to the cells or a burn or something that's not passed on. But either way, they're perturbations. They're variations on the theme.

That's the raw material that evolution works on. I would expect most of the time they're not going to work that well. You know, thousands to millions of years of honing antler shape and you go off in some wonky direction and probably it's not going to function as well most of the time, they're not going to work that well. You know, thousands to millions of years of honing antler shape, and you go off in some wonky direction, and probably it's not going to function as well most of the time. But every now and then, it might. And all of a sudden, you've got something that's better. And you might have an edge, because now you've got a twist that nobody else has. And that can really take off.

And now your kids and grandkids. And so what will happen is you'll start doing better because you've got that twist or the new tine or whatever it is. And over time across generations, if you're doing well enough, the population's going to evolve towards the point where everybody's got that new thing. And this may be the kind of process that Geist would talk about, but none of us ever get to actually see of how you go. Like why does a whitetail deer and a mule deer have, you know, antlers with the same number of tines, but they branch differently? Who knows? But it might've been something like that ancestrally that sent one population off on a direction where they had a slightly different configuration than before. And so what you're

talking about is the raw material that I would argue sets the stage for evolution of new shapes or new types of weapons. When we look across beetles, or you look across cervids, or you look across antelope, it's really clear to us that the weapons change a lot. They don't just get big, they change in form. So there's all kinds of crazy differences in weapons. And that's sort of the big unknown mystery we're still trying to figure out. We don't have a good reason to explain why there's a thousand different kinds of beetle horns. If beetle horns are good and bigger is better, why don't they all have the same kind of horn? I can't tell you. I spent years trying to answer this stupid question. I can't tell you

why two sister species of beetles have totally different shapes of horns. They're in tunnels. They're doing the same thing. They're fighting the same kinds of fights. Everything else about their biology is the same. So why the hell does one of them have horns coming off the thorax and another one have a bent set of horns coming off the head? We don't know. But these kinds of things have to start with what you're talking about. Differences, those crazy variants that pop up. And in some set of circumstances, in some population, it just works. Whatever it is about it, it's better. And that spreads. Here's my last question for you. Okay. What's the explanation of, like, how did it come to be that-

It's a bad start. Yeah, it's a real bad start. All right. It's a real bad start. Here we go. How would it come to be? What is the advantage of losing your antlers? You know what I mean?

Yeah. Cost. Think of the price. Why drop them? Oh, I thought you meant like evolutionarily. Why would I get rid of them? No, no, no. Why?

So if Corinne warned me, you might ask me that. And I was like, oh shit, I don't know the answer to that. What's the advantage? How did it come to be that they shed their antlers and regrow them and things with horns don't? I don't know. And I quick, because we've got some really good biologists here at university of montana and so i instantly as soon as i got that last night it's like oh my god i don't know the answer to that i quick wrote mark

hevelwhite who's a phenomenal ungiven biologist here really good biologist it's like he'll know i don't think anybody knows i gotta think he flipped it around he said tell me why why don't you know why don't the bovids shed their antlers every year? Six of one, half dozen of the other. Why are you asking the question one way and not the other? But the fact is we don't know. I did a quick search on the literature. We know a lot about the mechanisms, sort of how they do it. So I could say, oh, they shed their antlers because these animals are queuing into photoperiod and the hormones are changing. And when the steroid hormones levels drop, the cells senesce and it all falls fine. We know a lot about the cellular machinery. There was a beautiful new paper that just came out in

science like last week, where they sequenced the genomes of like 20 cervid species. And they're able to look, and a bunch of antelope and bovid species, and they're able to look at the cellular level of how these horns grow and figure out the genes and the pathways, a beautiful set of studies. So we know a lot about how antlers grow and about how they fall off and start regrowing again, but nobody has a clue sort of for the adaptive significance or ultimate evolutionary explanation of why at some point in the past, in the ancestor of the cervids some idiot that shed its antlers and had to go through the whole process and grow it back again why those individuals did better and persisted when the other individuals don't we don't know

well let me tell you how the people that write into us like to throw out there all right this comes up all i will take a stab but let me hear what they say um and again you don't know like we don't know the answer but people like to say like, well, I could, you know, imagine this, right? So one is you could imagine this isn't the cause of why it happened. You could imagine that it's a more, it's a constantly changing and much more responsive marker of your fitness. That is a great answer. So whoever called that one in is on the money. That's a good one because we talked about honest signals. So in the Beatles, I told you it's like a suit of armor. Once you emerge as an adult, you're stuck. So the horn size is a really good signal of what kind of a stud you were as a grub, as a larva. But once you go through metamorphosis and you're an adult and you got your suit of armor, that's it. That's how you're doing right now. And so I could come out out of, you know, development with a huge horn because I'm a stud and another guy has a little horn

because he's a wimp. But two months, three months later, I could have been fighting, fighting, fighting and not eating at all. I could be starved. I could be a shell. I could be riddled with disease. I've still got a huge horn. Yeah. You know, you can't tell. So over time it becomes uncoupled with sort of instantaneous condition and dominance and status of the male. And so redoing it each year makes a lot of sense as a way to keep the signal honest. The other thing is they're expensive to carry around. So you look at birds with bright colors, they get rid of them. As soon as the breeding season's done, they molt all those bright feathers out.

They go drab. Why stand out like a sore thumb and carry all this crap around behind you when you don't have to? So the other possible argument is you only use it when you need it. You only produce it when you need it, and then you get rid of it. Oh, I got you. You know, during the rut, you've got it. Then you throw it away, and you don't have to carry it around. And going into winter, when it's hard to carry it around.

Yep. And a twist on that that would be consistent with that is a study that I got to be a peripheral part of that Mark Hebelwhite was also part of. And one of his students, a beautiful study that came out looking at the Yellowstone elk and wolf population dynamics. And they showed that the elk actually keep their antlers longer than most of the other cervids. So they're not getting rid of them and being hornless or antlerless all winter. They're holding onto them all the way through until March. You know, people who collect sheds know this until the end of March, early April, that's when the elk shed. So then what, right? Why are you carrying this thing around all winter? If you can get rid of it, why not get rid of it as soon

as you're done with it? In this case, the secondary benefit of having the antlers is that it protects these bulls from wolves. And so they have a beautiful study showing that the bulls that drop their antlers early, even just a couple days earlier than other bulls in the population, get targeted and hammered by the wolves because they can't defend themselves the same way. Really? And so, again, it comes back to costs and benefits, but here's this expensive thing. And you actually keep it all winter if you're an elk because it helps protect you against wolves. And then you got to turn around and use it during the rut. So now we're stuck with that question of why get rid of it and grow the whole thing again. And that may be a legacy.

It might have been early on that it made a lot of sense. And early on, they were getting rid of the cost, and then they were regrowing it and keeping the signal honest. And then only sort of secondarily in places where the major predators or things like wolves did some lineages like elk, secondarily essentially hold on to it for longer and longer, in which case they're stuck. It would make more sense if you could design an elk from scratch to have them hold on to the antlers like a bighorn sheep would. But that's part of evolution is you get the legacy, you get to carry over the baggage that comes with you and your genome. They're carrying with them a legacy of having to throw it away and regrow it each year. So they put it off, put it off, put it off, ditch it, turn around and regrow it fast. And that's the best they can do. I don't

know. Good question. A couple of other guys threw this one out where they're talking about, um, you know, they break. And so it allows you to regenerate all the time instead of snapping it off and being screwed for the rest of your life. I'm liking your audience. That's another good one. Yeah, because a beetle breaks his horn and it's gone. And it's broken for the rest of his life. Yeah, shark teeth.

Yeah, constantly regrowing. Because we were talking about, like, how come nothing else? We were trying to think of other stuff besides cervids, right, that develop a weapon and lose the weapon and someone's like well you kind of look at just the constant replacing of teeth in a shark yeah you get the same thing in insects so nymphal stage grasshoppers are all chewing away on leaves and the leaves are often like sandpaper and it grinds down the edges on their mouth parts but then they molt and they throw away the old they start with a new clean

set then they can chew chew chew chew and there's sort of this race for time. If the plants get more and more sand in their, in their leaf tissues, then they can grind down the mouth parts. And if they can grind down the grasshopper mouth parts fast enough, they starve to death before they make it to the next molt. So it's like this race, but if they make it to the molt, they got a clean set, new set of mannibals, sharp blades, they're at it again. So yeah, that would be an insect analogy to the shark's teeth that's fun that's it hey this is fun it's hot in here but this is great yeah thank you very much um and you got like so animal wait wait i get to plug it don't i i'm plugging i'm gonna plug this to tee

you up all right so you can plug your next one go Go for it. It's plug time. Doug Emlin, author of Animal Weapons. The Evolution of Battle is the subtitle for the book. And you got a new version. I do. I have a version of it that's the backstory. That's sort of the adventures doing research on animal weapons and how does somebody who starts out with muddy boots biology in a rainforest on dung beetles end up visiting an aircraft carrier or given a talk in Washington, DC to top brass from the military. It's sort of a why basic science is relevant

in surprising ways kind of story. And it's aimed at teenagers, sort of 10 to 12, 12 to 14 year old kids. And so it's narrative nonfiction, it's called Beetle Battles, one scientist's journey of adventure and discovery and it comes out in december beetle battles beetle battles if you got kids look for it i think it's orange on the cover it is we just saw it yeah and you love it you love the color i don't love the

color but i love the book i had a really good time getting to unpack that story and i had a really good editor to work with me it's fun it. It was really fun telling that story. Okay. Thanks, you guys. Yeah. Thank you. Oh, we got a couple quick things. Oh, yeah. Ready?

I'm ready. Do us a favor. We bring you all this free stuff, the show, right? You get to listen. You got to do us a favor and go subscribe to our newsletter you need to go to www.themeateater.com and there you'll be you'll see how to sign up for the newsletter that's real important for us then you can kind of track everything that's going on with articles podcasts recipes all kinds of stuff

like that yeah then once a week you get a newsletter. How often, Sam, would they get to read something that you wrote? About every two weeks, typically. Sam tears it up. Yeah, we spend a lot of time on those newsletters, man. It's not just slapped together. We're trying to bring really good, high-quality stuff to everybody, and we're tinkering with it all the time to make it even better. I think most folks who follow it really enjoy it.

Yeah. So get the newsletter. And that's like everything that goes on. New products, everything that goes on in our space. And also, we haven't asked for it in a long time. Do us a favor, too, and go on iTunes and click the rightmost star. Give us a five-star review. Need that.

And then you can follow us on social media. You can find me on Instagram at Stephen Ranella. You can find find yanni on there he used to be the latvian hunter on instagram and now he's just regular yanni yeah i didn't want to make it confusing i went to yannis patellis he's at janice poodless i think there's an underscore in there oh really why do you gotta confuse it because i it was early in Instagram, I guess, when I started messing around with it. And I saw a lot of other people that seemed to have to have that underscored for a space in their name. Like, yours is just all straight through, right? No spaces at all?

Yeah, because I nabbed mine up early. What probably happened is you went to get Janice Poodalus and it had been taken. No. So you had to do the real. That's when you do the real. Yeah. Authentico. Anywho. So. So you had to do the real. That's when you do the real. Yeah. Authentico. Anywho.

So that didn't happen to you? You just did an underscore for the hell of it? I thought that's what you did. Yeah. No way, man. Try to look hip. Just make it clean.

Sam, how do they find you on Instagram? It's Sam Lundgren Media. No underscores, no nothing. Dog, you mess around on social media, you're too busy being a scientist. Apparently not enough. I don't care. I think better of you if you don't.

I don't. Oh, I like you more now. I have an author page, but I don't do much with it. All right. Professor Emlin. Thank you. University of Montana, my alma mater. Yeah, me too.

Yeah, Sam's too. Thank you very much for joining us. My pleasure. Okay, everyone. Thanks for listening again. And if I said it once, I said it a thousand times. Please go check out our feature-length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars in the Sky.

You can find it at starsintheskyfilm.com. It is available for streaming and download. Again, do yourself a good turn. Do us a good turn. Stars in the Sky. Find it at starsintheskyfilm. stars in the sky film.com you can stream it you can download it and you can watch it again and again thank you hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada you might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all

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