The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Eating Bog Butter, Disappearing Eels, Urinal Splashback Science

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

This week, Rachel gets into delicious, delectable butter made in a bog, Ryan F. Mandelbaum explains that we know almost nothing about eels, and Purbita describes the details of pee splashback at the urinal. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of 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'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Perbita Saha. And I'm Ryan Mandelbaum. Ryan, Pervita, welcome to the show. Hi. It's been a while. How are you? Oh, I'm okay. I'm still doing the Popsie thing. But yeah, it has been a while on weirdest thing. I missed, I missed this crew and the podcast. We are psyched to have you back on. And Ryan, you have joined us for several live shows, but I believe this is your

first just regular recorded episode. And now you all must receive my voice mainlined through your head. No eyes loud. Exactly. Listeners, for those of you who do not know or don't remember, Ryan Mandelbaum is just some person that we found around at some point and decided to bring out the show. But Ryan, why don't you tell people who you are and what you do and what you like to talk about weirdly? It does. It does. It's. does feel like I am just some rando off the street. I sometimes feel that way about myself. I'm a science writer and naturalist based in Brooklyn. My full-time job is to write about physics, but most of my brain time job is written about birds and nature more generally. I lead nature

walks around New York City for New York City Audubon and other organizations. I write for a nonprofit called the Finch Research Network, and I am annoying on the internet. And you have now a newsletter where people can opt in to you being annoying. Write in their inbox periodically. I write a newsletter. I guess you can just find it at Ryan Mandelberder.substack.com. So it's Ryan M-A-N-D-E-L-Birder, spelled B-I-R-D-E-R. The title is A, I'm walking here, too wise, if you're wondering.

And it's a newsletter about cities, mainly New York, nature, mainly birds, and the interaction between the two. And you're working on a book about that, if I remember correctly. I am working on a book. I'm actually going to be writing a field guide for New York City called Wild NYC for Timber Press coming out at some point in the future. And it'll be a fun romp through the various things that a walker of New York City might encounter. They were looking at things other than the people in the buildings. Amazing. Well, I am really looking forward to it.

And we're psyched to have you on the show. So let's get into it. Hey. Hey. I'm talking here. So on the weirdest thing I learn this week, we started by each offering up a little tease we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, looking at birds, etc. and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene

and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Perbita, what's your tease? I will be talking about how it's almost impossible to avoid splashback when you pee. Gross. But relatable. But you're saying there's a chance. Okay, cool. Ryan, what's your tease?

all of the eels in America and Europe migrate to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to spawn, or do they? You know, I had the two of you on the same episode thinking like, they'll have so much fun talking about birds stuff together. And here you are, pee and eels, which is also great. I thought Ryan was going to talk about birds or insects, so I was like, I can't talk about them. What are, you know, what are eels but the birds of the water? Yeah, I think I probably learned about this fact while looking at a bird or something. So it's got birds to it. Excellent. Great. Okay.

My tease is that I am going to talk about, unfortunately, bog butter and what it is. I unfortunately Oh just because it's Bog Butter I'm so excited to hear about bog butter It's actually great based on what I've just heard Well I'm happy to start And we can

Roll around in bog butter and get it over with Before moving on to better things Or not Maybe bog butter is the best thing Maybe it's the best thing I kind of, I'm really up to your minds about it. So in 1859, this pair of archaeologists named Edward Clyburn and James O'Levarty published a paper in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology titled, simply Bog Butter, like Madonna. What else is there to say?

And there's this quote in it, for many years past, there have been found from time. to time in the bogs of Ireland, and especially in those of the north, wooden vessels filled with butter in a hardened state and quite free from putrification. Specimens of these vessels, generally very much broken, are to be seen in all our museums, but until now we have never met one in nearly a perfect state. But good news, in the county of dairy, they said, they'd found a bog butter vessel in excellent shape. I love that this is in dairy, one of the only parts of Ireland I know or care about because of dairy girls. But, so imagine the cast of dairy girls as we move forward. In whatever scenario you want to imagine people interacting with this butter,

please think of them. So in the county of dairy, they had found this bog butter vessel in excellent shape. And based on this and other specimens, they wrote, along with what they knew about the history of like Irish dairy prep in general, they now felt confident that the substances and pot had to do with butter, turning it and and making cheese. They, they were like, the bog butter is definitely butter-ish. So yeah, they were counted drilling into the substance to try to get a spike through it so that they could stand it upright in a museum. And actually, you can still find bog butter specimens prepared in such a way in some European museums. And when they did this, when they like took a core sample of the butter, basically, they found it like clogged up with

red cow hairs, which made sense given that you can make cheese inside a cow stomach, which is something that they knew was still being done in Syria and North Africa at this time. during the 19th century. And then when they consulted with other researchers, they learned that nearby archaeology sites had found like the heads of old Irish cattle preserved in the bog and that their heads and hairs were red. And this was actually all very important because in the 1800s, there was no way to suss out the molecular makeup of butter-like substances you might find buried in bogs. That didn't stop people from trying, including like literally trying the bog butter,

which was usually like a yellowish-white kind of waxy, hardened substance. Folks tended to say it tasted sort of like cheese. It's not clear whether all of the tasting notes come from people actually eating like old, mysterious bog butter or from like doing experiments where they made their own, which is definitely something people did. According to modern scientists, the flavors and smells are cheese, baby vomit, and rancid milk. So, yummy. Yeah. Dairy adjacent for sure. And yeah, you know, it makes me think back to my episode of Weirdest Thing on the Kentucky Meat Shower where mysterious meat rained out of the sky. And people definitely did walk around tasting it being like,

can we identify this meat? So I am pretty confident that at least one scientist probably tasted some bog butter before we even had the means of being sure that it was in fact butter. But good news, now we know it's butter. I can't believe it's bog butter. And it's not. And it's considered actually one of the more common historical relics one might find in a bog, especially in Ireland. There have been nearly 500 reported specimens found to date, and the oldest known example is from 3,500 years ago. The most recent dates to as late as the 1800s, so researchers suspect that the preservation method actually persisted for quite a long time in some, like, rural pockets. Because, you know, if the bog butter ain't broke, don't fix it.

Wait, so let me just make sure I understand. So it's real butter. It's real butter from a cow's utter, turned and put into a pot and then put in a bog. Yeah. I get, yeah, I'm going to explain more. But you're not wrong. That's what it is. It is simply butter in a bog.

So back when those 19th century archaeologists were like sampling mystery goo, and until a few years there was actually a lot of uncertainty about the makeup of bog butter. Like I said, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that it was butter. And by the late 20th century, it was pretty certain that bog butter was either dairy or like some animal fat like tallow. But yeah, until like pretty recently, analyzing bog butter was very imprecise because you can tell that butter has an animal origin or the bog butter rather, but techniques until like a decade or so ago were not able to actually distinguish between like adipose tissue or like milk fats. So it was especially when it was like from thousands of years ago.

So they really like hit a wall in terms of saying, you know, is this actually butter or is it some other kind of animal product? But in 2019, researchers were like, we must know. And they used stable carbon isotope analysis on the individual fatty acids in 50 different bog butter samples. Wow. That's a good spread. Yeah, yeah. And they found that 26 of the 32 Irish bog butter samples, I guess they had some from Scotland as well, where they're also found the less commonly.

So 26 of those 32 were found to derive from a ruminant dairy origin. And another three were also likely to be derived from a dairy source, and the remaining bog butters could not be classified, which probably just means they had degraded, but, you know, they still were either tallow, like beef fat that had been rendered down into a buttery substance, or they were butter. So, yeah, why did people put butter into bogs? The answer is probably lots of reasons. Like, the better question is, why not put a butter into a bog?

Because there are so many reasons you might do it. Shout out to this 2010 study, a link to on popside.com slash weird, titled a survey of published reasons for burying butter in box. So researchers point out that it's like a common and misguided trope for archaeologists to try to come up with a single explanation for a practice that spanned thousands of years, like saying, you know, oh, they did this to honor this God. And that's always what this like little collection of materials means, which is absurd given like, you know, we know that the reasons people

have for doing things changes really rapidly. And obviously they did not have TikTok inspiring new bog butter trends every day, but they're, you know, it's still silly to assume that people only had one reason to do a thing for thousands of years at a time. Also, not every bog butter is the same. Some are in like really elaborate wooden vessels that predate the butter found inside them by centuries. So they're like heirloom bog butter vessels. And others were seemingly dumped in without any protection, which is not a way to make good bog butter. You don't want to actually just throw the love of butter straight into the bog for reasons that I hope are obvious. But researchers' best guesses for why people put their butter into bogs. One reason would be protecting or hiding

precious resources from enemies and authority figures. Keep in mind that at times in Ireland, you would literally pay your taxes with butter. So you wanted to keep. that on lock. You might be offering up your precious dairy to gods or spirits. A lot of times researchers think that's what was going on when you find one that's like not stored in a wooden vessel because like they wouldn't have cared about someone being able to eat the butter once it was fished out. It was just being, you know, kind of metaphorically eaten by the bog. You might be storing the butter to preserve it or even using the bog as a way of creating distinct drinks flavors. And to get a little bit deeper into those last two explanations, I will explain

how freakishly good bogs are at preserving butter and how that bog butter tastes, because unfortunately, we know. So as I explained in our episode about bog bodies a while back, bogs are basically nature's stinky refrigerators. Ryan, I know you love bogs for burning reasons. I love bog so much. In fact, the stinky refrigerator bit isn't necessarily why I like them. Yeah, no, but it's a bonus. But I mean, now that I know, I'll appreciate the next bog that I go to. Why do you like bogs? Bogs form a pretty amazing ecosystem of unique plants, like, because of their, so bogs are essentially these systems where water can come in, but can't go out. And so they end up developing these really, these thick layers of, like, peat that

creates these environments that only like certain plants can grow. It's where you see like cranberries and pitcher plants and all these like kind of weird sundews and stuff. But also they, because they're just pools of water in the boreal region, they often accumulate enormous amounts of insects. Like if you watch, if you go to one of these bogs, it is truly nightmarish amounts of insects. And obviously birds who eat insects are pretty pumped about that. So you'll often see like a ton of birds migrating specifically to spend some time hanging out in these bugful bogs. But maybe they're just after the butter.

Maybe the birds just after the butter, yeah. Perbita and I have visited bogs together. Bloomingdale Bog, New York State, right? Oh, yes. It's very much covered in snow, though, at that time. Yes. And any butter would have to be imagined there because it's quite cold. It's in the refrigerator.

in the deep freeze rather yeah so peep marshes generally there's like a layer of wetland vegetation on top or around them and that tends to create an oxygen-free environment and they're also cold and acidic so all of this means that they preserve organic material really well in our bog bodies episode i talked about how you know this is one of the sort of one of two easy ways to like make a mummy without much fuss. You can either be in a place that's so arid that things dry out faster than they rot. Or you can dump them in a bog. And it's a whole process. Things happen chemically. It gets pretty gnarly. I have seen bog bodies and they sure look like people who melted. But listen, they have skin on them. And when it comes to making a mummy, that's the key.

So, yeah, you can make a bog body. You can also make a bog butter. And what's interesting is that often when bog butter is found, it's not because archaeologists are going like, we got to get into the bog and find the butter. It's because, like, the peat marshes are being drained for, like, natural gas reasons. Or there's some of their. kind of construction going on. So it seems like there's just kind of a whole, at this point, like Irish contractors kind of like expect to find bog butter. That's sort of the impression

I got from reading some news stories on it. And actually, just to underline how good bogs are at preserving things, in 1995, there was a researcher who was looking to study how paleo-americans in North America, or what is now North America, had used bogs to preserve food. So he sunk various meats into both a frozen pond and a peat bog, and he found that after one year, bacterial counts on the submerged meats were comparable to control samples kept in a freezer for the same amount of time. So put your meat in a bog. It'll be fine. really incredible. And yeah, so then there's there's one other thing here that's interesting

about the potential taste. So bog butter has like never been found containing salt and butter was often definitely made with salt during these periods. So one possible explanation is that it was used as a way to preserve butter when salt was scarce. So, you know, salt. salt would have made the butter have a longer shelf life out of the bog, but without it, you could put it in the bog. And there may have been a taste component as well. It's possible that when salt wasn't available, you would put it in the bog to give it nice bog butter funk, which was not the same as a salted, cultured butter, but different

and also interesting in a time when so many foods were not interesting or different. Would it be like smoky? like I'm thinking of pee and like scotch almost. Yeah, so that's not how it's been described. I think that would be great. There's the words that are usually brought up are like gamey and mossy. Gamey butter. Yeah.

So here's why we know how it tastes. In 2013, this guy named Ben Reed, who is, from the Nordic Food Lab, met up with a Swedish artisanal buttermaker named Patrick Johansson. And Johansen had a peat bog on his property. He knew how to make butter. So they were like, this is what we're going to do. Johansson's in charge, but we're not using any technology that wasn't available before the Industrial Revolution. And we are just going to make butter the way he thinks it like people probably would have made this butter and put it in his bog and see what happens so they made barrels out of birch bark pine bark and an old willow basket they made a basic

butter they wrapped it in moss or linen which had been seen in some specimens and they made sure that each butter lump had a convex top which is always seen in bog butter presumably to keep water from like pooling on top um then they buried that in a bog and they dug one up three months later and left the other to age for seven years as this was referenced as the ideal age of bog butter in an old text talking about how delicious it was. So you really want that seven year bog butter taste. So the three-monther, they were like, it didn't go bad. It was definitely an acquired taste, but like some of the people who tasted it loved it.

Some of them definitely hated it. And again, they were like, it really seemed to absorb some bog flavors. Gamy and mossy, like very green. Some people said it was like salami. So maybe that was a reference to kind of a smoky flavor or just a very kind of like cured flavor. And they said like, you know, the pungency was similar to like an aged ghee, which is, of course, delicious in certain contexts. And of course, there are many cultures that, like, go really hard on fermenting food. So the researchers were suggesting, you know, the fact that this butter has a

distinct funk doesn't mean it wouldn't have been, like, a desired sought-after flavor. and you know this was often probably the most interesting flavor that like an Irish farmer got in their diet. The butter expert involved in the experiment actually would just like eat just lumps of butter for his whole sustenance like on days they were working on the butter, which was apparently very common in like dairy centric cultures during that sort of butter period, which makes sense. It's very high fat, high calorie. So why would you like bring extra food along with you on your bog butter making day? And the researchers were like, well, so maybe we should think of it more as kind of like

eating a hunk of interesting cheese rather than like why would people have put this on top of their oat cakes, which totally makes sense to me. Would I eat it? Probably not. But like, yeah. I mean, there are some very familiar flavors there, like feet, baby vomit. Like, I've had cheeses that taste like that. And you're eating it and you're like, you know, this is like the worst thing I've ever eaten. But like somehow also the best thing I've ever eaten.

Like I can imagine feeling the same way about eating some of that double B. Yeah. I think you got to think of it more as like a butter-based cheese than a funky butter. And so, yeah, I have looked for an update since theoretically they should have had their seven-year butter tasting by now. I have not found anything about it. If you're listening, please let me know what happened with the butter. They did update the article when the butter was about a year and a half old because they were visiting the area and decided to dig some up. And they said it was mossy, green, earthy, and delicious.

and, you know, of course, they kind of knew what to expect, so maybe they were a little more primed to say it tasted good. But they even said in their blog post about it, like, it was this rainy day and we were kind of like crouching in the moss, like covered in mud. And it like, maybe it was kind of just like the perfect setting to enjoy the flavors of this like mossy dank butter. Which, yeah, like, listen, context is important.

Sorry, did they bury, do you know, if they buried it in some sort of vessel or container? Yes. So they made barrels out of birch bark, pine bark, and an old willow basket. Oh, yes, you said that. Sorry. Yeah, no worries. And actually, salted fermented butter is still made in Yemeni cuisine, though it's actually

aged in caves like cheese, which I think is like a little less of a hurdle to get over. but Funky Butter is not unique to historical Ireland. It's funny because I think of, like, I hear the story and like I don't really think of it as being gross at all. Like bogs are such like, if you've got like like, like bogs obviously have, everybody hears it. The first thing they think is the labyrinth bog of eternal stench. And bogs are like so. Yeah, that's definitely my issue. Yeah.

But bogs are like these like, it's like the most verdant, beautiful green spaces. is like when you go to a bog, it's like a grassland with flowers. And like it's one of them, it's like I would love to eat something that came. Like I just imagine it being like a cave age or dirt age. Like I don't think of it as being like a poop aged thing. I imagine being more like a beautiful like really connecting with the earth kind of situation. I love that. And I think you are spot on.

And probably the big issue for me is that there are so many photos of like 2,000 year old bog butter. that honestly looks like a hunk of earwax and is being held up by a spike in a museum. And that I really don't want to eat. But I think you're absolutely right that the idea of something aged for a few years, like wrapped lovingly in moss and linen in this verdant, rich, totally antimicrobial little little bog pit. Like, yeah, you can definitely you can flip a switch

and it becomes very romantic and exciting. But then also you can look at a picture of it and be like, oh, no. It sounds like something the elves would eat in Middle Earth. Oh, for sure.

For sure. Yeah, and not something the orcs would eat. I mean, it also sounds like something orcs would eat, but I'm definitely on Team Elf enjoying a bog butter. They would eat the works would eat the 2000-year-old earwax. Yes, exactly.

Bog butter. Anyway, yeah, that's all I have to say about bog butter. And maybe I would try it if given the opportunity, if it was, like, made deliberately by someone who knew how to make good butter. Basically, what I'm saying is Patrick Johansson. Invite me to your bog, please. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company? that ships federally legal THC right to your door.

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Hilton, for the stay. Okay, we're back. And Ryan, I want to talk about eels. I also want to talk about eels. So you probably don't think a whole lot about eels aside from the fact that they're slippery. Speak for yours. They are slippery and they're weird. Maybe you like eel sushi.

But their eels are very weird, not just an idea. And I think it's important that you learn about them because eels are also endangered. So a lot of you probably understand how salmon migrate, but if not, you know, they live most of their lives at sea. And then they take one final, like, mega run upstream to spawn. They kind of turn into these like hormone-filled beast monsters that, like, you know, can against all odds just take one final like imperfect run. Yeah, don't they like they're like digesting themselves as they go, right? It's like it gets really gruesome at the end.

Oh yeah. Like an ocean salmon kind of just looks like a cute default fish. And then a river salmon is like the most haggard, horrible creature with this like weird beak and like just like rotting as they go. But for this like one, yeah, final, you know, mild, perfect run up the stream to spawn. So eels actually do the opposite of that. So American eels and the American conjure eels in the United States, as well as the European eels in Europe. So they actually spend most of their lives in these river systems.

And then right when it's time to go, they actually take sort of a similar mega run. And then they all disappear. No one knows where they all go. So in the United States, these eels are all in our river systems sort of east of the Great Plains. And then in Europe, it's basically just all of the rivers. But then we have figured out that actually all these eels are going to the same place, which is called the Sargasso Sea. So what is the Sargasso Sea?

It is the only sea that we know of that has no land boundaries. It is only bounded by oceans on all sides. So what's going on is actually the Atlantic Ocean has currents that are making a big counterclockwise circle around it. So you've probably heard of the Gulf Stream on the west side of it. And this big rotating current creates this calm, totally different patch of blue water right in the middle of it. This is kind of like almost east of where you imagine like the Bermuda Triangle is. And there is this huge patch of these floating mats of this yellow brown sargassum seaweed. And if you think about it, if you're like a fish and you wanted to go breed someplace,

like a big, beautiful, calm patch of like lovingly floating seaweed. is like the perfect place to do it. Yeah. And yeah, it's actually important for a lot of different animals because it provides cover. And, you know, the babies can sort of live there without getting eaten. And then obviously birds that can go eat the babies that aren't hiding. So it's a pretty good space for any animal trying to take a little vacation. Yeah, exactly.

But it's a good place to retire if you're an eel, for example. But it actually took a super long time for people to figure this out. And we really are only still figuring it out. In fact, eels were only, adult eels were only just discovered in the Sargasso Sea literally in the past 10 years. American eels in 2015 and, yeah, American eels in 2015 and European eels in 2022, like literally months ago, they found this out. And so for a long time, biologists were catching these really small eels that we would call glass eels. And they actually thought that they were a completely separate species than the regular eels. eels. But then when they actually caught the eels and put them in roads, you know, raised them in

tanks, it turned out that these little eels turned into these adult eels. So, okay, cool. A Danish professor was like, okay, well, where do these eels all go then? And he was just like going further and further out into the ocean being like, where are the eels at? Where the eels at? Like nobody's finding any of these eels. And then finally in 1922, he ends up finding these larval eels in the Sargasso Sea. This guy, Yars was going to. Oh, Hannah Schmidt. So it just turns out that these glass eels are these small kind of cryptic larva, and they don't have pigmentation, so they would be hard to see.

And they begin as these small eels because as like these little wormy guys, it's kind of easy for them to migrate upstream. So then once they're in these river systems, they'll slowly mature and turn sort of a yellow brown. And then, oh, and they even will migrate across wet grasslands as they're doing that. But then like a salmon, when it comes, Time, duty calls, life's over, time to have your sort of one last vanity run and spawn. Eels too kind of turn into these mega salmon-like creatures.

They're just not as hideous. Damn. So they actually just, yeah, I know. So they dissolve their guts in order to take this journey. Ooh. I know. It's also like they still haven't found like eggs or anything. So we're still, there's still a lot of speculation here.

But in the mid-2010s, they sent out. So scientists have been able to actually begin tracking the eels by putting things like acoustic detectors on there or radio transmitters, other things like that. But of course, it's like hard to keep a radio transmitter on like a slimy guy. And so it took like they just like weren't getting any info. Like they didn't know the eels were losing it. But then finally in the mid-2010s for the first time, an adult eel was detected in the Sargasso Sea, which was super exciting. I mean, they didn't detect it, like, giving birth or anything, but they were like, all right, so the eels are really migrating to Sargas O.C. And that study was led by Professor, I don't know how to pronounce this to the French accent, but Julian Dodson of the Universite Laval and Martin Castengue of the Fisheries and Oceans, Canada.

And then, yeah, it wasn't until 2022 that Rosalind Wright and a team of other scientists performed a similar study in Europe with the European eels. And now all of this is really important, really, because eels are pretty endangered. I mean, an animal that lives in the river systems of Europe and of the eastern United States is dealing with pollution. They're dealing with over-harvesting. They're dealing with dams and stuff like that. So eels are really having a rough time. And so anything that we can learn about how eels are spawning, how they're migrating, and how we can keep them from going extinct would be really important. I mean, they are critically endangered in Europe.

So it's really exciting that we're learning more about eels every single day. And I will say that other eel species, such as the Japanese eel, they were able to find and document the breeding of those eels. I believe it was the Marianas Trench. We'll have to Google that. Whoa. It's government-funded research that was able to do that. So the U.S. government, if you want to learn about where the eels go, we need some funding to learn about the eels. I actually participated in catching some eels for research when I was in college.

This would have been like fall of 2011. And a classmate of mine, Ian, was like going to do his senior thesis on eels. And I went to help catch them. And I was like, so what's your thesis about? And he was like, we don't know what he's a child? literally like anything like we don't know where they come from and I was like no and it was like yeah there's literally no idea um and uh yeah I put on waiters and we had this thing that looked like the ghostbusters um little backpack and so it would send a little electric current into the water

which would stun them very briefly and then uh you had to be very careful not to have any part of your body except the leaders in the water when they were being stunned because my ecology professor Bob Schmidt was like, you will face plant into the water and I will laugh at you. And I was very nervous about that happening because I did have a real habit of tumbling into ponds and rivers with my waiters on. But yeah, once they were stunned, then you would just like grab them. I mean, we had nets, but it was really just like, you know, bucket, net, like, however you can get an eel, get one. And then once we had them in a bucket, you know, then they would perk back up because they really stunned for a second. And, you know, Bob was like, try to grab one.

He was like, you can't, their pure muscle. It was just a whole, it was a great day. And, you know, I hope that those eels enjoyed their time spent in a very, ample tank at Bard College at Sabin's Rock. And I'm glad that we eventually learned where they come from. And I will say that like, okay, even if we did find out that, you know, even if somebody really was able to map this journey that the adult eel takes and watch and follow an adult eel the whole way and get to the Sargasso Sea and figure out how they even like, you know,

made and raised these kids, which I don't think they raise. I think all the adults just die after they have the edge. But there's still like so little that we know. I mean, I actually, I was just like looking it up and there's a Popsie article that says, as Ryan Mandelbaum extensively reports, so clearly I was an eel expert once. But apparently it's even controversial, like how eels actually navigate around. Like, do they use a magnetic sense in order to do that? How, when does that magnetic sense actually develop?

One thing that we do know is that it's probably that current. around the Sargasso Sea that allows them to get there. So an eel would be able to enter the current from the United States and then kind of follow the swirl into the sea on one side. And then the little babies would be able to kind of, you know, leave at the bottom and then ride the current back north into the river system, the U.S. While the European Eagle would be able to do the opposite, it would kind of, you know, do its mega journey straight into the Sargasso Sea

and then the babies could ride the current back around all the way to Europe. But, yeah, they just don't know how they, I mean, that story came out like six years ago, so I'm sure there's major updates that have happened since then. But yeah, go get a time machine and talk to me six years ago because I knew everything there was to know about eel navigation. One thing I would expect more if the American and European eels are going in the same place is some of them transplanting, like going the opposite ways. I mean, maybe that's part of the mystery of how they know to navigate and how, you know, finesse. that skill is. But yeah, I would, if they're, if they're both entering that same system and just riding the currents, I almost expect, you know, some of the grown-up European eels stand up

here and the American ones to head out. Yeah. Head out the opposite way. I will say that the studies I found, you know, that the eels are, the sargassos is huge. I'm Googling as we go, because these are stats that I should have known, but didn't write down. It is some amount of miles across, I don't know, like 1,000, 100. Oh, wow. It is approximately 2,000 miles long and 680 miles wide. So it is a big old sea. And so the eels can live on, you know,

they could live on other's opposite sides of the sea and be okay. But the other thing is that these eels have to go like thousands of miles to get from Europe to the sea. Like, I mean, the American eels, it's like, okay, you like get offshore, go 150 miles. or a thousand miles, whatever you got to do. Casual. Sounds good. Casual. But these European eels, some of them are going more than 3,000 miles across the ocean.

And like as these, again, like turbo mode, like, I don't know what, I don't play video games. Jessica could help me with this one. Like, what would you call like the mega invincible, like run that people do where all the mods are on and the eels are just going? I don't know, the eel run. The eel run. So the eels are just going. They're totally modded, stats up to 1,000, but they only get one life to do it. And they're just like 3,000 miles across the ocean, not eating anything, digesting their own digestive tracks just to like lay eggs and die in a random patch of seaweed in the middle of Atlantic Ocean.

Beautiful. And the last thing I'll add is that if the Sargasso sees formation sounds familiar, a big calm patch of ocean in the middle of the Atlantic, it is also a place that accumulates garbage. as happens. Yeah. And so we do have an Atlantic garbage patch, and that's where it ends up. So it's another, you know, it's important that we are taking care of the ocean, and it's important that, you know, we're keeping our microplastics and everything out of the ocean. But, you know, it's sad that you'll not only have to go through this mega journey to the Sargasso Sea,

but, you know, then they got to deal with freaking a microplastics. They went so far to find such a nice little spot, and we've f***ed it up. Yeah, and it's a lot of microplastics in there. I mean, it's really something. Do they get caught in the seaweed? The microplastic gets caught in the seaweed or this. I think the eels aren't eating, so I'm not sure if that's, that's not as much the problem. It's like the young little baby eels who would be eating it.

So the adult eels aren't the issue. It's the little baby eels that are trying to be raised in this area with 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer. So it would be tight if we stopped throwing trash into the oceans and making it follow these gyres all the way to the Sargasso Sea, where the eels who are already endangered have to, you know, then deal with our nonsense. That would be tight, right? That would be tight. Yeah, it would be tight. So everybody save the oceans, save the eels, long-linked the targasso sea. And I wish only the best for the eel researchers still try to figure out the slipperiest guy. Amazing. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

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A kind of splashback that we probably all experience in the day to day. So like a lot of the facts I share on weirdest thing, this one comes from years of personal experience and arguments with friends. But before I start, I want to ask, when you pee, either sitting down or standing up, how messy does it get? That can be a rhetorical question. Okay, Rachel wants to answer that. Well, I just don't have any basis for comparison. Also, I will say that this is reminding me of the time that I went to the Charmin Research Labs, which I talked about on an episode of weird thing. And they were like, describe how you grasp the implement, meaning the tissue, the toilet paper and show us your wiping motion.

And I was like, ah. I'm not a, you know, I'm, I don't think bodies should be taboo. I don't think poop should be taboo. But that really, I was like, that's between me and the Lord. So anyway, I have never really thought about how messy the process is, Perita. Yeah. I mean, I prefer to keep my bathroom behavior between me and the toilet as well. But I will say that, like, I don't associate urinating with,

being like a 100% clean activity. Like I definitely, I mean, I don't think of it as being an activity where like pee gets everywhere, but I'm like, you know, like in my head, like, you know, you're keeping an eye out. Yeah, there's pee particles in the air. Like, I don't know, like, it's gross. It's urine in the, in a toilet. Yeah. And I mean, toilets are gross in general. There's been a lot of recent research about how many like fecal particles get sent up into the air if you flush your toilet without putting the lid down. That's for a different episode. But the reason I'm asking about pee, not because I have fetish, but because this is a really big head scratcher in fluid dynamics

science. For a long time, researchers and people who, I mean, specifically experts in physics, have been, well, I should say a specific group of experts in physics have been trying to figure out, A, how much splashback occurs when someone pees. Generally, I will say, most of this research is geared toward peeing through a penis, not a vagina. And, um, and, um, and, um, um, and, um, How do we prevent all that splashback from happening? And it seems like, you know, a weird, weird research rabbit hole to go down. But of course, there's a pretty big, like, public health component here. And it would just be nice to have, you know, much, much cleaner bathrooms or cleaner portopotties when you're going to that really gross music festival all summer long.

So I will say no matter how and where you pee, you're bound to get a bit of splashback on yourself and on your surroundings. But that's amplified if you're peeing standing up. That's because the amount of droplets of pee you create depends on the trajectory of your stream and the receptacle that you're peeing into. So I was talking to a few male friends and they were completely. that no matter how strategically or carefully they pee into a toilet, it never goes all that well. To them, you know, there's no shot at redemption or peeing cleanly. And I didn't quite buy that, so I had to look into it a little more. And lucky for me, there's a entire lab that has done more than a decade of experimenting on this topic.

It's called the Splash Lab, and it's run by an engineer named Tad Trusket, formerly at Brigham Young University and now at Utah State University. And basically this lab has just been looking at the behavior of pee once it rushes out of the urethra and hits, you know, whether it be a toilet bowl or a urinal. So there are a lot of videos out of this lab that I will embed at least one of them on this article. But you can even check out their YouTube channel to see some of these tests that they've done in the lab using high-speed cameras and such. But essentially, they would have these giant tanks and spray jets to mimic the act of peeing over a much bigger scale. and then they would trace the splatter pattern of almost every single drop in that stream. Sometimes they would dye the water different colors. So imagine like not golden showers, but like bright blue and bright purple showers.

And again, just to make it easier to trace exactly how the drops were separating. And I should note that the splash lab doesn't just look at how people pee and how gross it is. They also look at fluid dynamics from a number of different ways. So I don't want to pigeonhole them in that way. But I am focusing on that research. So their takeaway from many years of studying these patterns is that once pee is airborne, it has a mind of its own. After traveling out of the human body, after a few inches, the stream begins to break up. So once it hits an actual toilet or the back of a urinal, it hits the hard surface as many,

I mean, thousands, hundreds of thousands of individual droplets. So now that it's no longer a uniform stream, it's many, many drops. Those drops can kind of go wherever they want. It's, you know, hell breaks loose. So there are two key components here. Distance, because, of course, the further the pee has to travel, the more it's going to separate, but also the angle at which you pee. There are a couple other things, you know, it depends on how much pee you are releasing, how quickly you need to pee. Lots of, you know, the basic elements of physics force, velocity that go into the behavior of these pee droplets. So the researchers for, you know, they wanted to come up with a couple solutions or a couple best practices for people.

And so they modeled, you know, many, many, different scenarios. You know, they changed the angle where people were peeing, the distance, the shape of, you know, the urinal. The best answer they came up with in terms of preventing splashback was just get as close as possible to where you're landing your pee. Sure. Make sense. Yes. I'm sorry to say that more than a decade of research came up with a very obvious answer there. but, you know, not so obvious in terms that not, I mean, the closest distance you could get is by sitting down on the toilet and peeing. Or, you know, if you're camping sitting on the ground and peeing. But not everyone wants to do that.

People enjoy peeing standing up. That's why urinals even exist. So, some, you know, even if you have to stand up and pee, again, like just closing the distance. Don't try and make this, you know, like target practice here. You'll, you know, even if you're just a couple inches back, you'll probably get some pee, you know, just directly on yourself. But you'll protect your clothes. You'll protect the floor and maybe even the ceiling. Yeah, definitely. Definitely the ceiling.

Yes. So the best angle, angle is also important, like I said. This was an interesting, I think this was a different team of researchers, not at the Splash Lab, but at the University of Waterloo, ironically. They modeled what is the best angle if you're urinating while standing up. And what they figured out was nature has the best answers. So they actually looked at how dogs achieve this, specifically male dogs, who have to kind of lift their legs and angle their pee. And once they kind of replicated the stance of a dog on a human, again, in a computerized simulation, not in real life, they found that the best way a person can angle their pee, is at a 30 degree downward sloping angle.

So keep that in mind as well in addition to closing in the distance. Another tip is think about where your pee is hitting. If there's, you know, if you're using a toilet bowl and there's water at the bottom or there's a urinal cake, if there's anything else outside of porcelain, adding another element or another substance gives the piece something else to splatter off of and causes more splashback, more droplets. So the more, the less barriers you can put between yourself and where your pee is trying to go, the better. Okay, so I've given like three best practices there, right, for paying.

Another, I mean, kind of one of the best ways for us to come up with a splashback solution could be technology. One, the University of Waterloo, again, a team there has been actually taking some of the findings from the splash lab and trying to use them to develop more aerodynamic is maybe the wrong word, but urine dynamic urinals. And there was a pretty cool article in Ars Technica about this late last year where they actually showed some of the different conceptual designs. And they look very like spaceshipy. They do not look like something that would work in terms of getting your pee as far away from you as possible. But the one that actually worked the best, and again, only conceptual has not been, you know, installed in any public restroom or anything. It's designed after a mollusk shell, and they

actually nicknamed it the Nautilu, which is very cute. So it has a kind of a nautilus. narrow, long channel at the top with raised edges. And then the bottom is a curved, more like a traditional urinal. So what this does is once the pea hits the receptacle, it kind of forces it down in a stream rather than causing it to break up into the droplets. The other pro to this was they tested the urinal on people of many different heights, which is something important to keep in mind because, again, if you're changing your height, you're changing the angle and you want a urinal that will accommodate many, many people. Other groups have experimented with, like, putting actual filters and inserts into toilets

In one test, they tried something that kind of mimicked a desert moss from Mongolia, so it was super absorbant. And this worked kind of until it just couldn't absorb anymore, and then there was flashback again. So no perfect design yet. The Nautilu seems like it had the best shot of keeping our streets clean. but yeah, it's really just about how you choose to pee and keeping some fluid dynamics in mind the next time you head to the bathroom. But really, popping a squat that is your best bet.

And then maybe cleaning up after with a bidet attachment. I feel like this sort of... Wow. I'm so glad that science is, is almost. the case. Yes. I feel sort of like maybe with this one, you know, back in the olden days, like if you dig a really deep hole that was like way deep and you peed in it, like you probably wouldn't be having this problem. Or if you like peed into like a hole in a bridge and it went directly into a river, you know, it's far away. Or like less gross than that. Yeah, of course. I mean, I get it. Like with solutions comes more problems, which is what's so amazing about society. But

with, you know, have you ever been to like a national park and they just have those toilets that's just like a toilet bowl and then a super deep hole? Like the composting toilets? Yeah. What about that? That seems like a good idea that everybody should just do everywhere. That's a good point. Yeah. If you're peeing like straight, straight down and yeah, the puddle is very far away, it's probably fine.

Yeah. And I didn't get into like there's like a whole different line of research with like standing peacups, which I. I know some friends who have braved those. I have not just yet for camping purposes. But those also have like a similar problem in terms of splashback and such. But they have been innovating to make them more, you know, to work more smoothly. Wow. Amazing.

I have to go to the bathroom just thinking about this. So what was the weirdest thing we learned? sweet. Beebe, Bog better. Yeah, bog butter was I mean, bog butter was pretty weird. Such a rich culture. I do think it's also just

I, like I knew that we know almost nothing about eels, but I hope that many listeners learned that for the first time today and appreciate it. Yeah, I feel like among science writers, we know basically nothing about eels. It's just like

a thing that we all sort of joke about. Like we know that Like every time somebody's like, oh, I learned about eels, it's just like a really basic thing. It's like, oh, we didn't know that eels, you know, literally where they are from. But it's always fun to like just remember that we literally don't know how eel. How do they work? What their, how their life is like. It's just like the eels just for a long time, people literally thought that baby eels and adult eels were totally different. And then until recently, literally at one point, all the eels just disappeared.

all this all so suddenly there were no eels left and then a bunch of new eels just like came back like maybe you'll inspire some rabid eel trackers like they'll they'll launch like little starlink satellites just to track the eels yeah or maybe we'll develop a new kind of waterproof slimy computer just for eels to calculate on but out of all three i mean i will say that bog butter sounds delicious. I'd love to try it. Eels, I don't want to eat them as much anymore because they're sad and endangered. And peeing, you know, I don't know, I definitely learned a lot about fluid dynamics,

but did I, I don't know if it's going to change very much for me. It's not changing how much you do or don't want to consume urine, is what you're saying based on the. I just feel like I've learned, like maybe now I want to wash the bathroom. I was not trying to change the world with that story. Well, my expectations at a limit. Amazing. Ryan, thanks so much for coming on. And listeners, definitely check out Ryan's newsletter.

Hey, I'm walking here. On sub-sab. Hey, thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share,

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