The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Detachable Sex Organs, Human Skin Artwork, 17th Century Thought Experiment Solved

Episode Date: August 1, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from animals that detach their sex organs during or after sex to artwork you can hang in your home on a human skin canvas. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Stan Horaczek: www.twitter.com/stanhoraczek Anna Brooks: www.twitter.com/Anna_Brooksie Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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my lawyer here. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I am not Rachel Feltman, but I am Sarah Trodosh. I'm Stan Horacek.

I'm Anna Brooks. So our lovely host, Rachel, is on vacation this week, and we are so happy that she's enjoying herself on a beautiful beach somewhere. But we are here recording the podcast in Hirstead. Here on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we spin some little science yarns about a weird Wikipedia rabbit hole we went down or a strange thing we read on Reddit or something we came across in our reporting. And then we share them with you.

And at the end, we vote on them. We have a small battle royale to determine who is the winner. And then you also get to vote on it on Twitter and Facebook because we're very democratic that way. Anna, give us your tease. Okay, so I'm going to keep my tea short and sweet. I will be discussing animals that dispose of their sex organs after and sometimes during sex. Wow.

That seems inconsiderate. Well, you don't know what sexy. I mean, I don't need a penis. It's mostly penises. I don't need a penis, so why does anyone else? Okay, Stan, you're up next. Mine is, decorate your home with artwork made of human flesh. Wow, okay. So we're just off to a really gross start here.

Yeah. Is yours less gross, Sarah? Mine is so much less gross. Mine is about a 17th century philosopher's riddle and the experiment that answered that riddle in 2011. Ooh. It's spooky, but it's not gross. Wow. I already know facts about animal penises, so I'm more curious about putting skin on my wall.

Yeah, you can. Of course you are, because it's fascinating. Who doesn't want at least part of their home covered in human skin? Yeah, that's a question I ask myself daily. Yeah. So in 2016, a father and son team of funeral director started a company called Save My Ink Forever. And what this company does is when someone dies who has a tattoo, you can make arrangement with this company. And then within 48 to 72 hours of their death, you can get in touch with the funeral director.

and the company will provide directions for them to harvest the tattoo off of the dead person. And then the company will take it and preserve it. They will sort of stretch it out and flatten it out and make it look as nice as a splotch of human skin possibly can in a frame. Like a canvas, like an animal skin canvas, almost literally. And then within three months they will send you. They have... It takes three months? Well, I think they give you a three month time.

I think they give you a three month time. Like I'm sure there's like a bunch of... of manila folders full of flapping skin. Man, I just picture a guy behind a desk with like an inbox with a big stack of skin on it and he's just putting them in the outbox. Does it get crispy or is it stay? Does it get crispy? That's such a good question.

So when you get the final product, it's already under glass. It's pressed into a mat. So you don't have to touch your loved ones. No. And it's under UV resistant glass. They treat it like literally like it's fine art. And they're very cagey about what the process is. because these guys are like, the father is like a surgeon and a funeral director and a lawyer,

and the son was a funeral director as well. So they had the exact right skill set to sort of navigate the really complicated both paperwork and logistics of screwing around with the dead body to sort of get this done. The final outcome is sort of beautiful. They do this really nice treatment where the skin is sort of bleached almost. It looks lighter than usual. and the artwork is actually preserved in a really nice way. And they have these really elaborate frame options.

When you send in your tattoo, they pick a nice frame for you. So some of them are gold and adorned and stuff like that. And the final presentation looks really nice. If you were just scrolling past it and someone posted a picture of one, you would think it might be like a sketch on a piece of paper that's torn off. So it doesn't look viscerally like skin anymore. It doesn't. And when I started looking into this, I was wondering, like,

how do people preserve skin? Even after I learned about it, I'm still not sure which one they're using because there's, the two techniques are called wet and dry preservation. Okay. Okay. Is it like when you go to the barber shop and that blue fluid that keeps the comb? So that's a lot of what wet is. Oh, God. And I had a friend who is a tattoo artist, and some tattoo artists, when they're learning,

they practice on dead pigs because dead pig skin is very similar to human skin. So he had a piece of pig skin that he had done a tattoo that he really liked. and then he had cut it out and they had saved it in formaldehyde. So that's what the wet preservation is like. So that saves it, but it's also not very practical in terms of fine art. The dry process is when you take it and you scrape all the yucky stuff off the back. And then you stretch it out with pins and then you let it dry. But the way that usually works is that generally the edges get very curly.

So they've figured out like a practical way to do this. And while I was researching this, I was like, this sounds honestly kind of cool. Like, my tattoos are all bad. So, like, and I... Show us, show us. You're welcome to look at it. Like, I have... One of my tattoos is from, like, a reality TV show that I was on.

Oh, damn. What? What reality show? Was it Jersey Shore? No, it was called inked. It was a long time ago. Oh, I remember ink. I used to watch that show.

The short version of that story is that no one's preserving my tattoos. You're not going to do the service? No. Because they're not good enough? Well, it costs about $1,000. Wow. Per tattoo. The sizing really sort of depends.

Like, if you have a small. tattoo if you have like a dad tattoo like on your shoulder like that's going to cost you about a thousand bucks and then if you add an extra one it's about 750 bucks but like if you have a really big one it obviously costs a lot more but my tattoos are just

not particularly good but I got into I know a lot of people who are really into tattoos so I started researching this and I was talking to a friend a long time ago who wrote several books about tattooing and he told me about a guy in Japan named Fukushi Masaichi, and I apologize profusely if I murdered that name. But he was a Japanese doctor who was born in the late 1800s, and he sort of practiced,

and he was fascinated by tattoos. He was like a pathology doctor, and he got interested in tattoos when he found that the ink, when you went over a lesion caused by syphilis, it would kill the lesions. So he got really fascinated with it. So over the course of his work... Why... Sorry. Why were people tattooing over syphilisphilis?

I don't know. Okay. I couldn't tell you. He was specifically studied syphilis. That was like his specialty. So I guess it's just a thing. It was the weirdest thing he learned that week. It was like, hey, tattoos fixed it.

Japanese bodysuit tattoo is sort of an art form, an amazing art form. And that's what you should Google for. Don't Google for any of the other things that I'm talking about today. Just look at a lot of really beautiful Japanese body suit tattoos. Unless you want to preserve your tattoo, in which case, do Google. He collected skins. So he worked with people who were in the hospital. and they had these beautiful tattoos and he wanted to preserve them.

So he would help pay for them to finish all their tattoos. And in exchange for that, he would get to keep their pelts once they die. So he had this huge collection of full of skins that were literally. And it sounds crazy, but it's true. And there are a bunch of other museums that have examples of skin samples of tattoos. And, you know, this guy had, so they reported something like 2,000 pelts. and partial pelts and 3,000 photographs. The use of the word,

pelt, is so upsetting. Is that what they're really called? I always thought a pelt was like a, like a fur. It is, I mean, it is, it's essentially like the,

like you're skinning a person. So they call them, they could, I would have called it a hide. I've seen them refer to as hides to. Okay. Peltch was more upsetting. Congratulations on that word choice.

Good. I helped you be more upset. So, and unfortunately, a lot of his collection was destroyed in World War II. But some of it still persists. Through all these museums, you can go and look at these skins that are tattoos. And I think it's a pretty fascinating idea that someone would ever want my skin.

The one modern example I could find is that model Kate Moss, you know, Kate Moss is one of the most photographed women in the world. She has a tattoo, it's literally a prison style tattoo done with a scalpel and pen ink. on her back by a very famous artist named Lucian Freud. And it's two very small sparrows, which is a really common tattoo subject. And an art expert sort of said, you know, if she were willing to part with that part of her skin, it would be an original Freud

and it would be worth a million British pounds that she could sell it. Wow. Imagine... Because her whole body is already worth so much money as a model. Yeah. Imagine just a small section of your skin being worth that much. Yeah, and so even the last example I'll give you is that there's a guy in Australia named Jeff Osting. I think that's how you say his name.

He's a retired school teacher. And he has a full body suit of tattoos and some rather impressive pierced nipples, by the way. What do you mean? Impressive. Everything you'd imagine about impressive pierce nipples. Oh, boy. And he has made a deal with the National Museum of Australia to have his skin go on display after he dies. because his tattoos are done by a famous artist named X. Day Medici,

who is apparently not doing tattoos anymore. He retired because he's a famous artist. Medici, like the very famous European family. I have no idea. That would be really interesting. Fine art. Because they funded, like, an enormous portion of all European art. I mean, it's entirely possible. Wow.

I mean, outside of photography, I don't know a lot about fine art, but if more of it was made of human skin. You would be more interesting. more interested in it? Yeah. That's crazy. I mean, it is interesting because the, you know, tattoos, there's tons of cultures historically that have given all kinds of tattoos. Like a lot of the Pacific Islands have very distinctive, specific patterns of tattooing

and traditions around, you know, when you get it and what exactly you get. I mean, I do, I started out thinking this is gross and there is still something a little bit gross about flying a person and displaying their skin forever. But I mean, if you're investing sort of that much, like it's clearly meaningful, especially, you know, if you've tattooed your entire body, I do see why you would want to have that live on. One of the tricky things about it is that they only work with good tattoos. I don't know if you guys know anything about like the mechanics of tattooing, but it's possible for something called blowout when you do tattoo. and someone, that means does someone push too hard?

Or they like pushed at the wrong angle while they were doing it and the ink will see lower than it should in the skin and it sort of clouds. Interesting. Like that's, it happens with, you know, sometimes it happens in big tattoos. It happens with good tattooists too. It's like certain parts of the body, like your elbow,

you know, any joint that moves a lot, it tends to blow out, but it doesn't really preserve very well. So like they're very clear on the website that you have to have good tattoos. It's not, it has to be good, like they have to judge it artistically to be good, as in technically it has to be a good tattoo. Yeah, I'm an artist, right? I write, and I'm a photographer. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of pressure in like, okay, I want to make this thing for someone who's good.

I'm taking their portrait. I want to be good. Like, I imagine putting myself in the situation where I'm like, I'm farting around with your dead mom's corpse, and I get one chance at it. And that's a lot of pressure to make it good. Well, it seems like a lot of pressure to be a tattoo artist. as well. Because, I mean, we make fun. There's a lot of really terrible tattoos

and probably a lot of terrible tattoo artists. But there's a lot of phenomenal ones and a lot of people who just have genuinely beautiful, meaningful art just on their bodies. Yeah, you should. And now this is why if you're thinking about getting that spring break, 2018 tattoo, you shouldn't because when your kids

want to save your tattoos, they're not going to want to save that picture of Drake that you got on your leg. Wow. Anna, you have tattoos. Would you save your tattoos? I'm like Stan. I have some real bad tattoos.

She has three Drake tattoos. That's where I got that idea from. Drake tattoos. I have heard from friends that, like, you have a lot of tattoos, that the strategy should not be to get super meaningful tattoos. The strategy is like, because whatever you think is meaningful at, like, you know, 16, you're probably going to think is cringy at 26. Oh, yeah.

So, like, go for something that you just, like, think is. funny. My wife has my name tattooed on her and it's big. It's like worryingly big. Wait, how big? Like too big. Like if she were here now when you saw it, I'd be like, yeah, sorry. Where is it? It's on her back. It's going to make a great wall hanging one day. Stan. Is it like across her shoulders like a jersey? Because that would be incredible. I should make it a competition. I'll get hers even bigger. Yeah. That would be amazing because you guys can't sea stand, but he's a big guy. So like, just like him, just like

his shoulders are like twice as wide as mine. And so like that would be amazing. You would just look like. That's going to be a very expensive preservation process. Well, this was wild. I think we're going to take a break so that we can go figure out what my first tattoo's going to be. And then we'll be right back.

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That's popsai.threadless.com. P-O-P-S-C-I.threadless.com. And we are back. Go buy some threadless shirts. They're great and super soft. I'm going to go next to spread the grossness a little more diffusely throughout this podcast. I'm going to talk about some neuroscience.

Our story begins with William. Molinu. I don't speak any French. Actually, he wasn't French. It just looks French. He was an Irish philosopher. Who lived in the 17th century, and he proposed a thought experiment that went something like this. I'm paraphrasing. Actually, I'm taking Oliver Sacks as paraphrasing. Suppose a man born blind and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere be made to see. Could he now, by his sight, before he touched them, distinguish and tell which was the glitone,

and which the cube, to translate into modern English, if someone who is born blind, you know, knows the difference by touch between a cube and a sphere, and then that person were magically cured of their blindness, would they, without being able to talk to the shapes, be able to tell which one is the cube and which one is the sphere? Ah. This was a fairly famous thought experiment for a long time. It was, they were, he was friends, William Molinu, was friends with John Locke, who was a considerably more famous philosopher than he was.

And in an essay concerning human understanding, Locke brings up this thought experiment and says he tries to answer it basically with logic by saying he thinks that the answer is no, that someone who's blind won't have any idea what a cube and what a sphere look like in a visual space. This was basically, you know, it was a thought experiment.

It was impossible to test because... I disagree that this is untestable because I test this every single time. I look for a iPhone charger in my backpack, and I'm digging around in there. And you don't know what it feels like? Yeah, I'm like, which one is this? Is it a USB?

I don't know. And then I pull out a big wad of cables. That's the opposite of the thought I was right. Isn't it? No. Yours is about a seeing person who doesn't know what things feel like by including what they feel like.

I got a new one. Yeah. So this is the horror check thought experiment. Yes, the horror check thought experiment. But we've already answered it. Well, well, done. It was a good ride. Well, yeah, well, that was a great five seconds of mystery.

This one was impossible to test. Like, you could, you know, it's a thought experiment, so you're supposed to think about it. But generally, back then, and for most of human history, we did not cure blindness. People just went blind, often prematurely. I was sort of looking back to see, like, how many cases of restored site there might have been historically. So there was a paper I found from 1971 that basically estimated there were, like, massed. 15 cases where people had had their site somehow restored generally surgically.

From total blindness? So I think I didn't look into all 15 case reports, but I think generally it was people who had like cataracts or something like that, like something where maybe they weren't necessarily born blind, but they went blind at a very early age, or they weren't born blind. They were born like just with very severely depleted vision. and then you were able to somehow restore that vision surgically. But also for most of history, we were, you know, our surgical techniques weren't very good.

So if you did restore vision, it wasn't exactly great vision because we've been able to repair cataracts for some time, just not very well. So the reason I think that this thought experiment is really interesting is because we're very, like those of us born with normal vision are very visual. Like we think of the world, like at a basic level as, visual space that we move around.

But if you are born without vision, you just fundamentally don't approach the world that way. And I think it's very hard to put yourself into the head space of someone who has just never been able to see the world. That's one of those things you do when you're a little kid. How do you describe the color blue to a person who can't see the color blue and has never seen it before? Yeah. I just can't do it.

And I think it's just like I talked to a researcher once who does research with blind subjects who said that there's even like significant problems in studying blind people because all of the tests that we have to sort of understand how brains work so many of them rely on vision like a lot of them ask blind people to like point to something like in order to indicate a direction you point but like a lot of blind people don't point because that's that's not at all a useful thing if you're blind it's pointless oh boy sorry that was beautiful It's so hard to imagine. And there's, for a long time, the only way that we could really understand, like, how vision worked,

I mean, babies, obviously babies have to develop vision. So you spend, like, the first year of your life as a baby developing normal vision. But it's very hard to interview a baby about what they see and what they understand. Do they have a sense of, like, how far away things are? So you do it in animals. And unfortunately, a lot of the experiments were done on kittens. Oh. God.

So there's this idea in neuroscience of critical periods. I don't know if you guys have heard of critical periods, but the idea is that there are sort of some things that when you're a child, especially when you're a baby before probably age two, you sort of learn how to learn things. You acquire all these skills and you acquire just basic abilities like being able to see, being able to talk. So the most famous one that a lot of people learn about in like intro site classes

is a critical period for language because the very. very few examples. We have like Jeannie is the famous one who was the little girl who was basically kept by herself in a room by her parents and never spoken to. It was awful. I mean, she was abused in an enormous number of ways, but when she was finally rescued, she couldn't speak and she couldn't ever learn to speak. Like no one was ever able to give her any facility with language. And there have been a couple other, like, isolated cases like that that led people to basically hypothesize that there's some period in which you learn how to speak, and if you miss the window, that's it. You can't ever really learn how to speak a language fluently. And there's an idea that that same principle is true

for vision. If you can't see for the first, you know, a couple years of your life, and then you had your vision restored, you just wouldn't ever be able to understand the world that way. You would never gain normal vision. So there were experiments like sewing one eye shut on some kittens to see if they could develop normal site afterwards. They were bad. They were bad experiments, and you can't interview a cat either, so not super helpful. So a lot of what we know about restoring site has come relatively recently when we have been able to restore revision reasonably well in people who had cataracts.

There's one group in particular that runs a project called Project Procash, which I'm sure is not the way you say it. It's a Sanskrit word, so really definitely not saying it correctly. But it restores sight in a lot of teenagers and young kids in India because there's a widespread cataracts problem, and it's a reversible problem. So this project has given many, many kids the ability to see for the first time at, like, age 15. And because of that ability in 2011, this project, Prakash, did an experiment to see whether Molinu's problem was actually, like, whether the answer was yes or no. So the answer is, John Locke was right.

If you give a blind person's sight and you give them a sphere and a cube and they know what a sphere and a cube feel like, they cannot differentiate them on site alone. Because that's fundamentally not how you approach the world. But it is also that people who have their site restored that late in life, or even after a few years, like, you know, kids who are like eight, there's no like aha moment. The most famous case was described by Oliver Sacks and a guy named Virgil who I'm guessing is not really named Virgil. But when he had his sight restored, what he described was that he like opened his eyes

and he felt like what he was seeing was a blur and he didn't sort of understand what he was seeing until his surgeon said his name and then he realized that what he was looking at was his surgeon's face because he just didn't understand what a face was. Sure. And that's an interesting thing.

Like that goes, that's tied so much into Oliver Sacks. Like, where you're just like, we don't see eyes and nose and mouth. We see a face, you know? And like, that's the stuff you learn. Because if you consider all the stimuli that your brain's getting all at once when you're just looking into a random room, it's absurd that our brains can make any sense of it at all.

Yeah. Yeah. And if you have no practice just grouping those things together and just all of a sudden there's like a big face. And like movement too, not even just an object, but like moving mouth and stuff. Okay, so what's really interesting is that, I mean, I don't know about a moving mouth, but moving objects make much more sense

to people who have just had their site restored than still images. Because movement, I think, my impression is that movement, you know, if a ball is moving, it's clear which bits the ball are because they're all moving together. Because a lot of the problem seems to come from the fact that, like, you can see colors,

like if I'm looking at you, Anna, like you're wearing a black shirt and you're wearing kind of like a teal dress. And I can understand like how all those parts fit together. But to a person who has just had their site restored, they look like entirely different objects. So like if you imagine a cow with like the classic like black and white splotches, you can put that together as one cow. But someone looking at a picture of a cow has just had their site restored, look at it and they see every splotch as an individual item. And this is how, there are neurological disorders too, right? There's like a famous, isn't there like a famous case where a guy couldn't tell his wife's face from like a set of car keys or something? There's a very famous Oliver Sacks.

The man who must take his wife for a hat. For a hat. That's right. It was a hat. Yeah. Because just all of the pieces are like these individual separate things. Like this is, there's a New Yorker. I think it was also in one of Oliver Sacks's books, but he wrote it also as a New Yorker essay about this guy Virgil.

And he talks about this guy Virgil had a dog and a cat, and the dog and the cat just both happened to be black and white animals. And he can't tell the dog and the cat apart unless he touches them, because to him they are just like, there's a paw, and then there's like a tail and then a head and ears. And like, but those are all distinct. And so his wife talks about she would come into a room and she would just find him like touching parts of the cat

and just like looking really, really carefully at the cat, just like trying to understand how they all fit into one animal. Is that why cats hate us? Like, go my body part. We'd just stare at them. He would get confused by his own shadow because his shadow seemed like a different object. He was terrible going up and on stairs

because if you look at stairs, like it basically looked like a flat image to him. Like he couldn't project that into three dimensions. Like you understand that they go up. He was just like, this doesn't look like any three-dimensional. object. Once you try to take apart how depth perception works and the very complicated parallax angle math that your brain has to do on the fly all the time, it's absurd that we can do it at all.

It's wild. Yeah. My wife, she had like a thing where she couldn't use one of her eyes and lost a lot of her depth perception for a while. And it's funny because she had what they call depth memory for a while. So she could remember how far away, like familiar things she could get it. But if she put her in a new place and she only had one eye, she wouldn't have it. any real memory of how far apart things were.

So it was really hard for her to navigate because she didn't have that actual, the brain doing the calculations. So, you know, she could be like, I have a general idea of how big that desk is and how big it's supposed to be so I can figure out sort of how far away if I am from it. But if you put her in a room full of random shapes and what, if you put anybody in a room full of random shapes and gave them only one eye, like they'd probably bang into everything because your brain just couldn't figure out the distance anymore. We should explain maybe a little more explicitly that the way you know how far away things are,

the way you see in three dimensions is that you have two separate eyes and the light reaches your eyes at slightly different angles and slightly different times. And your brain does just amazing computations to put them into a single image almost instantaneously and tell you how far away everything is from you. Yeah, that's how 3D works. That's amazing. Show each eye a slightly different picture and you can trick your brain into thinking that it's three dimensions. That's how the 3D movies work.

Yep. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're not going to be talking about 3D movies. We're going to talk about some detachable genitalia. So stay tuned for that. It's really easy to get confused by all of the tech news flying around the internet. On last week in tech, the popular science tech team explains everything and tells you how all of these stories affect your daily life. New episodes post every Monday on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, and pretty much anywhere else you can listen to podcasts. We'll talk to you then.

That was such a beautiful last week in tech ad, and it's so weird that Stan is just here. Stan is here and there. You can listen to Stan everywhere. Yeah, I'm selling myself just wonderfully on this podcast here. I think you are. You came on to talk about human skin preservation, and I mean, I think you fit right in. Considerably less human skin talk on last week in tech. Well, that's their loss, isn't it? Yes. All right, we're going to go to Anna now to talk about some penises.

Tell us about the penises, Anna. I will tell you about the penises. Our penis correspondent. I've been dying for like 14 years I've been working and finally I can talk about penises in the workplace. That's like how I tell when people are like, is it amazing to work at popular science? I'm like, yeah, I write about animal penises sometimes and I know lots of weird animal sex facts and I get paid to do that.

Someone pays me to learn about animal penises. Not all the time, but sometimes. It's great. I discovered my weird thing this week while I was working on a story about animals. who self-amputate body parts to escape danger. So I was in the midst of interviewing the scientist who specializes in this field of work, and he mentioned that animals also self-amputate

for reasons other than escape. The scientist casually mentions the phrase copulatory plug. And then keeps like talking, and I was like, hold the phone here, Zach, what is a copulatory plug? And he proceeds to tell me this horror story that I'm about to share with you. We should mention that you can read more about this on popside.com

because Anna wrote a lovely story about it. Yes, you can. You can read that. It's not penis exclusive, but there's lots of other interesting facts. I'm biting down hard on a leather strap. You're getting ready for this. Oh, yeah, it's real gross. There are some species of spiders, like the golden silk orb weaver.

These are the same spiders that eat birds and snakes. Like they're nasty. They have beautiful coloring, but they're terrifying. So while these spiders are making love, the male spiders will amputate their copulatory organs in order to plug up a female. Oh, God. That phrasing was awful. Can I ask how? We're getting there.

Great question, Stan. So we're going to take a step back and talk about how spiders have sex. Male spiders secrete sperm out of their abdomen. So they don't actually have a penis. So they just have a tummy full of sperm cooking away. Wow. So they secrete sperm out of their stomachs. Very awkward on the subway.

They secrete it like just like out of their, they have an exoskeleton. Does it come out of, how does it come out? That's a good question. There must be like a little hole or something. Spirm hope got it. Well, maybe because I don't know, like, Maybe it has to with how they create their webs because they secrete the sperm onto their webs. What?

Yeah. Yeah. So I have a- That's like a very specific Craigslist ad I saw one time. What? Is this why they got rid of the personal section? They secrete the sperm. On to the web.

Then they use their petty pelps. So a petipelps, I have a picture. Sarah, explain what a petty pelt is. It's those black things. I'm going to be honest. This looks like. Uh, picture a spider very close. And then if you sort of gave it like black pom-poms.

Yeah. But like with some stragglers, like some big old hairs in addition to the pom-poms. It's like the back of Joe Pesci's head. That's what I imagine that looks like. You know what? That's not at all about a comparison. If you imagine two, two of the back of Joe Pesci's head, but mounted, on a tiny spider arms. That's what that looks like.

So yeah, these are like organs on other like arachnids and insects. It's kind of like where the pinchers are. Like they're extra legs, sort of, like kind of under their jaw. Like female spiders use this to help hold on to like struggling prey. Are these like their hands? Kind of. Like they already have eight arms. These are like little extra.

The males use them for reproductive purposes, which I'm going to explain. But I think the females just use them to like maybe. Is it a female spider or a male spider? You know what? I don't know. We're going to have to flip it upside down and check, but unfortunately. All right. So the petty palps.

Okay. So there's semen all over the spider web. And then the men take their petty pelps and just do a little dunk, get them all coated in semen. Oh, no. So they pick up the sperm and then they put their petty pelps into a female's epigenum, which I thought was pronounced epiginum. Well, yeah. It's not. Not correct.

So he puts those in the spider's equivalent of a vagina. And then he just snaps them off. Some of them, though, some of them, their petty palps don't break off. And they use, like, once the second petty, I don't know what the singular version of it. But once they're both in, sometimes the spider spontaneously dies. So its entire body is used as a pluck. I have no words. And this is so that the other spiders.

can't come along and like impregnate the female? Yes, that's a reason. Keep sperm in, keep other males out. And this is a bit of a side note because it's not a penis, but spiders, penises aren't the only body parts. They'll give up during lovemaking. Some scientists studied spiders that will actually self-amputate a leg and present it to the female as a nuptial gift.

In one study, a male dwarf spider even jazzed up a little bit and he, He amputated his leg and tied it to a dead fly with a little bit of silk and gave it to the female. No, stop. What? Are there non-peness ones that like... Wait. Are there non-penes animals that break other stuff off? Yeah.

Give me a palate cleanser. Like, give me a... What's that crab? Oh, that crab that broke off of that video where it breaks off its claw or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I mean... Why did you do that?

Well, you have to read Anna's article, Stan. We're not going to give it all away. Yeah, I wrote an article, but it's... Most of it's not penises. Most of it's like arms and legs, and that one about the scorpion was wild. This one's like a... Should I say it or no? It was great. Let's say it.

Let's talk about it. This one's a little sad. This is the only time I will feel sorry for a scorpion because I've been stung by one when I was trying to help it. So I don't like scorpion spiders. Get away from me. Anyway, so there's like a rare species of scorpion in South America who will self-amputate their tail if they're trying to escape a predator, if they're in danger. But the thing with scorpions

is their anuses are in their tails. So if their tail falls off, they can never poop again. And they die from the buildup of the poop. Really? Yeah. I thought it would just sort of fluff off, like it would just flop out. The wound heals so quickly, like these animals that atotomize, which is the scientific term for self-amputation, the injury heals super quick. So it heals up. And there was like a super close-up picture of a scorpion abdomen, and it was like full of white goop, and it was just getting, it was just swelling and swelling,

and I assume like they would crack or I don't know what happens, but they die. There's a section in a Chuck Palinock book that's a lot like this that I can't recommend. I got to say I like the scorpion one a lot because it's the most spiteful thing I've ever heard of. I will. Where it's like, big predators, like,

I got you. I'm going to eat now. gonna, I'm gonna fulfill my evolutionary, like, mandate, and I'm gonna eat and survive. And the scorpion's like, no, here's my poison thing and then runs away and dies somewhere else out of spite. Full of poop. Yeah. Full of, literally.

This is killing me, but you don't get to have lunch, so I win. Well, the tail keeps moving and, like tries to sting after it's off. It will keep moving. So it might even end up, like, getting an advantage. Yeah. That is a very sassy scorpion. Don't eat scorpions. It's just not a good idea.

But enjoy your poison stings. Go over here and explode to death. God. Sorry, you're hungry. It takes up to eight months for them to die too because they can still reproduce. So they can like have sex and then just for up to eight months or just slowly building up with excrement. Oh my God. What a way to go.

Wow. Imagine. That honestly doesn't even sound like the most violent animal sex though. Do you guys know anything about duck? reproduction? No. Pretty much all of duck sex is like violent, violent. We would call it rape, probably.

Evolutionarily, in order to sort of be able, like, be more in control of which male maids with them, the female ducks have evolved these, like, very complicated vaginas, so they have, like, little, like, dead ends and, like, loops. and spirals, all to, like, make it harder for a male to meet with them and, like, actually, or to make it harder to actually impregnate them. And in response, the males have evolved penises to go around, like, loops and spirals and stuff like that. And so duck penises are, like, kind of basically, like, helical. They're little spirals, and they, like, explode out, like, they expand.

I can't even describe it to you. If you go on YouTube and you search for probably just duck penis, it will come up. And it is this wild video against a black background of just a slow motion duck penis expanding. And it is wild. That's disgusting. But I really want to watch it at the same time. So the penises win? Yeah, who wins?

What's the weirdest thing you learned? Is it the penises, Dan? I learned so many weird penis facts that I can't, I can't even. So the penises have it. Congratulations, Anna. Oh, thank you. You win. I knew my creepy internet research had to count for something.

Yes, while you were in here, I saw the IT guys carrying your computer away in a hazmat bags. It's confiscated now. All right, well, thank you both for being here on this very weird episode of weirdest thing. Thanks for having us. It was lovely. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening now. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes.

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