The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Secrets in a Silk Dress, Mice Afraid of Men, Crawfish Clone Overlords

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Andy "River" Peterson joins the show to talk about our future crustacean matriarchal overlords. Plus, Amanda discusses mice afraid of men, and Rachel unravels secret codes hidden in a silk dress. 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  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/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 Thanks to our Sponsors! Make switching seasons a breeze with Quince's high-quality closet essentials. Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored. job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Beneful. Mornings are when the grind starts. Stretches immaculate, cardio, crushed it, territory marked. Sorry, geraniums. The dog routine is on point, but it can't get a little wolf. That's why I feel up with high protein, Benifle, freshly prepared meals. I'm eating clean with real meat and veggies served fresh from the pantry kick boring in the ball with benefil freshly prepared meals visit purina.com slash benefil to shop now at popular science we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week 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 I'm Amanda Reed. I'm River Peterson. River, welcome to the show. So great to have you. Thanks so much for having me. It's so great to see you again here virtually. I know everyone else is just going to be hearing this, but I get to see you and that's a real bonus for me. Likewise. And would you tell our listeners about the amazing stuff you do at Midmountain and the very exciting special event you have coming up, which is my excuse for having you on the show. though I'll come up with another one sometimes soon. Well, fingers crossed for many, many excuses.

But this time, the excuse is that I am one of the curators at Mid Mountain. It's an arts and agricultural retreat space and nonprofit out in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. We were so lucky to have Rachel out earlier this year to come hang out with us. And we are having our first intersectional arts and music festival on October 12th. It is Mid-Mountain Fest, and we are going to be reclaiming Appalachian murder ballads, doing a lot of really spooky, extremely weird things. There's going to be a sound installation where you lie down and listen to the scientific process of bodily decay, interspers with a narrative about Appalachian death rituals. We'll have a Black Lutheran making a Gorge banjo on site and capping off the program.

program with debuting it. I'm really super overwhelmed and will also be singing murder ballads as part of the program. Incredible. I have so much FOMO. I was going to go and then I decided to be a responsible adult and not overload my October with the eight-hour train ride to Mid-Mountain. But next year, next year. I don't know you out here again. Yes, absolutely. Like a siren calls. It's so true. The siren calls.

No, count me in. Listen, you had me a murder ballad. Great, because I can talk about those for a really stupidly long amount of time. I'm not sure exactly how long it's got a good time. But it's true. Amazing. Well, we'll definitely remind folks in the show notes and at the end of the episode where they can find more info about, as I was calling it several months ago,

the Miss Murder Fest, but AIFI will not be present. Very different vibe. Yeah. That's just how my brain works. But it's gone for a few different iterations. Feminist Murder Ballad Fest was the working title for a very long time. And we're super grateful to have some support from Mid-Atlantic Arts and the Central Appalachian Living Tradition's program there that's helping fund one of our main productions, as well as a cool weird zine that we'll have on there. And if you want to find out more about the whole thing, Midmountain.org slash fest. We tried to keep it very simple. Tickets are on sale now, and there are early e-bird,

murder-of-crow discounts available through at least the end of the month. Very exciting. Okay, well, listeners, if you are at all within spit and distance of the Blue Tremont. Yeah, the National Bridge Station, Virginia. I guess I should actually say where that was. Well, they could have figured it. out, but I'm glad that you said it. Can't wait to talk more about that at the end of the show,

but right now, let's get into some weird stuff. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we offer up a little tease about a fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, singing murder ballots, et cetera, 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. It's a little bit of Is sort of. Amanda, what's your tease? Yeah.

So my tease is if you took honors English classes, you'll get it. And if you are just a little bookworm, maybe you'll get it. Maybe you'll just know this tease because of the zeitgeist of this book. So my tease is of misandrous lab mice and hating men. Wow. Wonderful. Perfect. River, what's your tease?

Come round yonder mid-mountain campfire to learn about a creature from the deep, a creature which may be coming to take over a lake or stream or other waterway near you soon and has the amazing power of matriarchal cloning. Oh, wonderful. Okay, I love that. Okay, a compelling tease. I want to talk about a vintage, that got the internet all in a tizzy about breaking a secret code.

Love it. Let's see. Where shall we begin? I hate it when guests have really good teasies because I promise that guests won't go first. I'll be honest. I want to know what the secret code's about. I can not resist a puzzle. I'm really easy to please.

I love a puzzle. I love a puzzle and I'm nosy. Like, please tell me the secret. Tell me the gods. I'll tell you the gosh. So this all starts in 2013 when an archaeologist named Sarah Rivers Cofield was at an antique mall in. Yeah, great name for an archaeologist. Yeah.

She was at an antique mall in Maine looking at dresses, not just casual, like vintage dresses. She collected old, like truly antique dresses and handbags as a hobby, which is a great hobby for an archaeologist. I love that. She came across this dress that she clocked as being from the mid-1880s, bought it for $100. Apparently, on her blog, she was like, I almost wrote a whole blog post about how I didn't need this dress, but I got it anyway. And then I deleted it because that's silly. But now I'm here to write this other blog post about it, which I'll get to in a second. So she said it was like sort of like the business casual of the day.

To our eyes, it looks pretty ornate. but it actually was more just something that a middle class or well-off but not super rich woman would wear for like a nice everyday look, not a house dress, but not actually very fancy. It had some interesting things about it. She wrote about, you know, how well-designed the bustle was. It had a name tag, which she was very excited about. It just said Bennett sewn into the bodice. And she was like, you know, Bennett's such a common name.

I almost certainly won't be able to identify this person, but it's just such a nice touch. It connects me. Is this how a Jane Austen cost me? Listen. This is important to me personally. Unfortunately, there is no Jane Austen connection here, except for vibes, I guess. So yeah, she bought this dress for $100, took it home, was looking at all the details. One other thing that really excited her about it was that it had a bustle pin in place.

And she was like, as an archaeologist, this is very exciting to me. because what she thought it was there to do was just to strategically pull up a layer of the overskirt to expose a little bit of a ruffled hem for like a little bit of a cheeky peekaboo moment, a little fashion moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very just show a little.

Yeah. Yeah. Very, very demure and mindful, but still, you know, playful fashion moment for the 1880s. But she was saying from an archaeological standpoint, she knew that there was this one. Baltimore laundry site in particular where the drainage pipes were, in her words, absolutely clogged with pins, buttons, and other clothing attachments, basically as if the people who were laundering the clothes would put them through this like rough mass washing process, however they were delivered, even if there were removable pins on them, relatable for anyone

who has ever, you know, brought anything to the dry cleaner. And so she was like, this is like those pins. So now I know what some of those pins were used for. A lot of those were probably bustle pins that unfortunately careless ladies left in the bustle when they sent their dresses to be laundered. I hate when I leave something in yonder bustle. Yeah, exactly, right? What will future archaeologists learn from things I've left in my bustle? Only time will tell. Yeah, they're like another Bertby's chapstick. So true. Crumbs. Crumbs from all the snack foods. No, literally. But that wasn't the most interesting thing that she found in this dress. She and her mother were examining the inside seams, like really looking at the construction

of the dress. And when it was turned inside out, she found a hidden pocket. Now, pockets very common in dresses of this era, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. But usually a pocket would be like very easily accessible through a very inconspicuous slit in the overskirt, because of course that would make the pocket functional. But she said this particular pocket, it was totally concealed by the overskirt. You actually would have had to hike up the silk to expose the underskirt. She says, quote, generally disrupt the whole look to get at the pocket. So this seemed like a very hidden pocket.

And that, of course, is intriguing. She pointed out that it was possible this had been like a normal pocket, but then someone altering the dress just hadn't taken into account and had like kind of tucked it in and sewn it up. Dresses at this time were frequently remade and taken in. Actually, fun fact, the reason that it's so hard to find plus size vintage clothing is not because people didn't used to be fat. It's because people would remake clothes so they would get smaller and smaller as they were remade. So the clothes that are left behind today are the tiny ones because people would be like, this is the end of the line. We can't make a new thing out of this.

This is nobody's tinier than this. So actually, I actually love that fact about. Yeah. At Brickson, thinking about tailoring through time. It also makes me think also about how many articles of clothing we all sort of collect now through mass consumer culture. I've really tried to switch over entirely to thrifting. and my, it's definitely a thing I did in like high school and college.

And then I sort of was like, do, do, do, do, don't really feel like I have the time for energy to making my values. But now I'm back to it. I'm very excited about it, doing weird line of cuts on, thrifted clothing for like art market stuff. It's going to be so much fun. I'm like, do I love that there is a sheen top here at this here, Goodwell? No. but is it in a landfill? Also no.

So I maybe someone's donated sheen shirt is someone else's treasure, I'm sure. Well, sometimes listen, like she and other those like super, super mass fast fashion places are like actually evil on so many levels. Yeah, no totally. But then also they because they're so evil, they get to be so on trend. and also they have better plus-sized stuff than so many brands who should know better. So anyway, sometimes I'm actually really excited when I find a piece of She and Garbage in a thrift store. Because I'm like, listen, the cat's already on the back. This can't be a dud.

And now I'm going to wear this cute dress until it falls off my body and tatters. Exactly. The cats come home with me. So true. Well, and that's also one of the reasons, like, I love. Katie, our fellow mid-mountaineer, or used their time at Mid-Mountain to create a really free market that still exists. And we have open during our programming.

We're just like, stuff, take it. We're not even going to, like, ask for money. We're just giving it away. Also bring what you can, but sort of mutual aid, general vibe of, like, letting things exist within an ecosystem of gratitude and sharing slightly outside of a normal capitalism. Totally. Hell yeah.

And this is not just like a mid-mountain, really free market plug. Also, your local buy-nothing. So true. I'm so... We love a buy-nothing group. The stories of some of those objects. Yes. And that's really what I want is my new item to me to come with a narrative.

Yeah. Well, this dress sure did. because when they started looking in that secret little pocket, she found crumpled bits of paper inside. She said it was like paper that had been through the wash, and this was very like thin, translucent old paper. And she smoothed it out. And she's like, this is nonsense. It's just, I can't, what are these words? At first she thought maybe it was like a writing exercise.

Like someone was just practicing their penmanship or some kind of to-do list. But then she started to notice some patterns. There were numbers between each line. Lines were marked off with different colors. And there were like weird timestamps. Cryptos for Katana. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So she was like, okay, this does seem like it's some kind of code. That's not my jam. I don't decode codes for a living or for fun. I do all this other cool stuff. So she put it up on her blog and was like, listen, what does this mean? Turns out that was not a simple question to answer. And it took a decade for people to figure out what was going on. It actually ended up on some like lists from like amateur crypto bloggers being the

it was on lists of like the most uncrackable codes. It became known as the silk dress cryptogram. And yeah, several theories emerged quickly and were then dismissed. People were like, was this? a war message, but no, the dress was from the 1880s, so it was not from the Civil War. Understandable, people seeing a dress with a bustle and a code being like, war, for sure. Definitely, that's what was going on. And there were also some theories about one that went around was that it had something to do

with the orphan train that brought orphans out west. And, like, people really like show. I love how many sort of like specific historical narratives. Yeah, totally. together through series. And people like showed their work. You can find blog posts from, you know, between 2013 and 2023 of people being like, here are all of my points of evidence.

But nobody claimed to have cracked it because this code just really defied identification. Just to give you an example, I mean, I'll definitely post this on Popsat.com slash weird and on my Patreon. You can actually like look at some of the text from the original paper. But like there would be these numbers and timestamps and then like a series of seemingly random words like Bismarck omit, leafage, buck, bank, Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagin, spring, wilderness, lining, one, reading, novice. And yeah, so people tried to identify it as a cipher. And a cipher is where you're actually swapping out letters, like the Enigma machine imitation game. I was about to say the enigma game.

I was like, that's not a thing. But other folks were like, I don't think this is a cipher. There are too many real words in it. So it's probably more of a code. And in fact, a lot of people very reasonably thought it was a telegraph code. No code unlike a cipher is like there are words that mean other words as opposed to you're swapping out the letters. And as we've talked about previously on the weirdest thing I learned this week, the invention of the telegraph was like wild for people. It was huge, huge leap in just how

everything worked. And suddenly you could share messages, you know, faster than a speeding man on horseback, which really changed the game in so many fields. And it also was very expensive to send messages via telegraph. And the length of the message would determine the cost. And the cost. So to keep costs low, lots of people develop shorthand. But what's really interesting here is that this was not a case of there being one general shorthand. There were hundreds, if not thousands of codes. And basically, whatever your niche industry or community was, you would have a telegraph

codebook that you agreed on using. And that is what you would use to compose your messages. So people had kind of come around to the idea that this was almost certainly a telegraph code, but like which one? There were so many. And a lot of people tried to figure out which and it wasn't working out. And then Wayne Chan from the University of Manitoba started exploring. He was, you know, trying to narrow it down. He was searching through a bunch of known telegraph codebooks. To give you an example of how wild some of these were, one of the ones he shared is that a phrase such as the crew are all drunk could be substituted with a code word such as crimping. Crimping, bad.

And there- Sounds like a dance crate. Yeah, it really does. Yeah. And yeah, there were so many reasons why somebody could create a new telegraphic code. Law enforcement agencies use them for privacy. But like so did grocers, seed companies, people making movies. And I have a couple of examples to share. of just that there's so share us your esoteric cuneiforms yeah so uh one of the some of the ones i was looking at are like too esoteric they're not ciphers because they are like relating phrases to a particular word but a lot of them just use combinations of random letters to make that word so it's just sort of

like you look up the prefix of the suffix to learn what this person is saying to you about your delivery of onions from Ontario or something. But luckily. Which I always went updates about. Yeah, exactly. There are a bunch for laymen, including ones that are specifically for travelers. People would sell like a travelers telegraph code handbook so that while you were traveling, you could send cheap messages to people.

So for example, the word heartburn in one. book means forward letters, including telegrams and cables, for me here, care of your correspondence. Or you could say, glorify Wednesday Brown Hotel. That would mean engage two double bed rooms for Wednesday in Brown's Hotel London. And then like the individual words when you look through the same book, like are just so weird. Averis is short for Are You? Avericious is are you any better? avenged is, are you coming and when? Like, just completely random. There's so many words in the English language and you could write so many things that those words could mean. And then just as long as you knew that other people had the same book as you, you could write a whole essay in your

telegram in like five words. So long story short, like 10 years have gone by since this archaeologist. posted about her beautiful dress. And then Chan from the University of Manitoba decided, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dig into which telegraph code it is. And at some point, he realized that the style and the structure reminded him of other messages he'd seen that were about the weather. So that gave him a lead. And he called up the archives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and was able to get his hands on the 1892 US Signals Service Weather Code, which was not quite right, because remember, this was addressed from the 1880s. And it didn't exactly match, but he could tell

he was onto something because like 90% of it fit, but they hadn't totally changed all the words they used by 1892. And then he was eventually able to get a hold of an 1887 version, and that matched perfectly. So this dress message was, in fact, a weather report. Maybe not as sexy as some of the other things that people had imagined. But basically, like so many other things, the telegraph had radicalized weather forecasting, because this was the first time you could actually share news of the weather faster than the weather could move. So, yeah, it made sense that people would be telegraphing around a lot of shorthand about the weather. And like other telegraph codes, they encoded so much information

into this. So I'll give you an example. One of those strings of words was Bismarck omit, leafage, buck, bank. So in this case, Bismarck, straightforward. It's a station name for Bismarck, Dakota, territory in present-day North Dakota. Omit doesn't just refer to the air temperature being 56 degrees Fahrenheit, but also tells you that the barometric pressure was 0.08. And leafage tells you both that the dew point was 32 degrees Fahrenheit and that the observation time was 10 p.m. Buck tells you that the weather is clear with no precipitation and that the wind direction is north. And Bank tells you that the current wind velocity is 12 miles per hour and the sunset is clear. So yeah, they did a lot of work. Those few words. That is very specific. Yeah. Well, because

all of these code books, they would be huge and have just so many variations. And And when you look at the weather codebooks in particular, they would have just like a hundred words starting with the letter F that are all variations on, you know, the temperature reading you might get a particular time of night, for example. So we do know that there were lots of weather stations sending around information by Telegraph at this time. We also know that it was very unlikely that a woman would be in one of these positions. We do know that there were lots of civilian volunteers working at like other smaller weather stations, basically. But they sent their stuff in by mail, the people doing those like volunteer station work. That wasn't the like up to the minute sending by telegraph. So trying to figure out who this person was and why they had these codes has still proved a

tricky aspect of the mystery. The 1888 signal service annual report does list several volunteer women, and one of them was a Miss Mary C. Bennett, who was in Illinois at the time. But again, she would have been sending in her reports by mail. So one potential explanation is that she also worked as a telegraph operator, which was an acceptable job for women at the time. No one's been able to confirm this, but it's possible that this woman who owned this dress was both a volunteer weather person and a professional telegraph operator and maybe, like, you know, wanted to play around with the telegraph codes for the weather. But all of that is totally speculative because we don't even know that the Bennett who owned this dress was the Bennett who volunteered with the weather

service. Again, it was a very common name and a tag being in a handmade dress doesn't mean. that a person named Bennett even was wearing it at the time that these codes were put in. We also don't know why they would be hidden since they were basically just throw away scraps. I do like the point that the archaeologist made that it's totally possible, that an accessible pocket was turned inaccessible by an alteration at some point. That makes a lot of sense to me. The guy who did the research figuring out that these were weather codes did point out, interestingly that the date of her weather observations corresponds with Mary Bennett's birthday,

which like to me, again, this is all just like totally storytelling. It's totally speculative. But to me, I can imagine, you know, a girl who's interested in the weather, who does this volunteer work, who maybe also is interested in this new telegraph technology, whether she works as a telegraph operator, maybe one of her friends does, being like, oh, how fun. I'm going to learn how to write these codes and then being like, it's my birthday. I'm writing the weather for my birthday. Oh, that's really cute. Yeah, yeah.

It's just, listen, girls learning skills, girls having hobbies, let them live, you know? Yeah, it's like, all women care about are the moon and the weather. And dresses. And dresses. When they have pockets. Yeah. They have pockets. They keep secrets in them.

a dangerous slippery slope. So yeah, that's everything we know right now about the mysterious silk addressed cryptograph. I love how much this stumped people and how simple the explanation was at the end of the day when the right person came along to suss it out. And I love that it's still mysterious. Like people, you know, if it had turned out to be like war secrets, people would be like mystery solved. She was a spy, but they're like, the weather, what was she doing? Not her girl hobby. Yeah. But yeah, that's the story for today. And I bet the archaeologist being an archaeologist, like all of like the bustlepin and this note, I'm sure, again, this is just speculation. I'm sure all of those are in like pristine condition. Oh, I'm sure. Still, thanks to her own, her own girl hobby.

So true. And preserving potentially. Artifacts. Yes. Girls love their trinkets. And that also includes dresses from the late 1800s. So true. Again, only if they include pockets.

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. I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know,

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So for context, Popular Science recently published a mouse story that kind of went semi-viral. It was about the die-induced. Doritos making mice transparent. So I already had mice on the mind and this particular study came up on my TikTok for you page and I called it serendipity. So this particular TikTok was about a 2014 study that was published in nature methods called olfactory exposures to males, including men, causes stress and related analgesia in rodents, which translated to regular person speak is rodents think men are smelly and stressful.

So the stress that men cause these mice while simply existing can dampen pain responses and affects the rodent's behavior and thus can potentially mess up the result of animal studies. When 59% of the animals used for experience are mice, that's kind of a big deal. Right. But Amanda, does this mean these lab mice are in pain? They are very much in pain, but they are not showing it, which is bad. The lab rats are not expressing their pain, which can skew results because there is something called the mice grimace scale, which is similar to like my resty-trace scale. Yeah. They use it for babies. If you, you,

have a pet and you sort of see them hiding a lot, like that's very similar. So the mice grimace scale, it's from zero to two. And zero means that they are not showing this particular sign of stress, which can be related to where the ears are positioned to what the cheeks are doing, to what the nose is doing, to what the whiskers is doing. One, is they're kind of doing it and then two is they're doing it. Those cheeks bulging. Those whiskers flat against their face. The eyes, they're closed. The mice are miserable, which you report and then you go, the mice are miserable after doing this. But this study found that the men working with the mice would stress them out and they wouldn't show pain, which affects the results of whatever they're studying

on the mice. So the lore of this study is also really interesting. The authors decided to test something that had previously been sort of anecdotally reported, sort of like a little open secret amongst lab researchers themselves. So people in labs were in meetings talking to each other saying that rodent pain response was smaller when their handler was in the room. So to test this, this group of researchers measured the response of mice and rats to an injection in their ankle, either in the presence of different experimenters or while alone in an empty room. So in the empty room case, the experimenters gave the little injection and then left the room. The mice and the rats showed a decrease in pain response of about 40% when a man remained in the room.

And a 40% decrease is a big number. It's a big portion of not accurate results happening. And it wasn't just the presence of men that bothered the mice. Like someone wearing a t-shirt previously worn by a man bothered them, being near bedding from a man's bed, male armpit secretion samples also had the same effect. And it also- So it's really sounded like a musk situation. Yeah, it was a- it was a- they were like, man-musk, hate it.

Male rats, cats, dogs, and guinea pigs also caused the same response. Which is just all the mice were like, no men, minus my male cage mates. They're my friends. And they do not stress me out. So the exposure to men caused the mice to secrete a stress hormone called corticosterone. And because of that, they were so stressed about being around men. that they hid their pain. They found that the presence of a woman did not cause the mice distress and actually

countered the effect of a male presence like an antidote to a poison, which is like, all right, I'm with my girlies. We're good. Yeah. What all layers to the messaging coming out of this study. Yeah. You know, when the space is full of she's days and gays, is just different. It's going to be a good time.

We're going to make friendship bracelets. So this also wasn't like a once-and-done sort of phenomena. The researchers themselves replicated their results in an open field test, where they just sort of like put the mice in a box and see how they wander. Some Swedes collaborating on the study replicated the experiments in their own lab and got the same results. The researchers also reanalyzed data from past studies, and they found that the mice tested by men showed lower pain sensitivity by those tested by women. So, for example, they did a very similar test where instead of injecting the mice in the ankle,

they tested pain sensitivity to hot water. And the mice were also very stress and also didn't show pain. So what do we do with this crazy phenomena, right? Like, mice are like the animal that people do experiments on. And if a large portion of these little babies aren't showing accurate results, how is that going to then apply to humans? Right. So this is a study from 2014. So I'm sure a decade later, we have maybe changed our practices.

Maybe we've banned men from the lab. But the research overall should have encouraged scientists to include gender as a variable when working with rodents in an experiment or at least, you know, do some deeper study on the relationship between experimenter and lab animal. Yeah, I remember when this came out and it was like in the midst of a bunch of studies, about various problems caused by imbalance in research in terms of like, you know, the lab animals are more likely to be male because like female lab animals are too complicated. And, you know, the researchers skewing white and male and how that changes research. And I remember this coming out

and being like, oh, yet another thing. Great. Even just the bad funk is messing with her. It's almost as if things would just be better across the board if a more diverse group of people were doing the research so that we were less likely to get skewed results. Exactly. And we would have just happier little mice. That's true. Doing Ring Around the Rosie playing hopscotch because they're not stressed out by some guys talking about sports. Some guy. I'm not specifically just guys in general. Just any guy. Even if the mice are talking about sports, they're like, this guy stinks, literally.

We cannot tell him our mice sports score. I don't know enough about sports ball to contribute to this part of the conversation. I know that that's not part of my personal repertoire of. But also just imagine like the little mice and the rodents who like are scurrying around a stadium and then they just all convened together to talk about the game and the refs making a bad call just warms my heart. All right, we're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

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And River, talk to me about our new, patriarchal overlords. Yeah. So I think this is a really good pivot from our last conversational topic about how just the presence of men makes things wonky sometimes. So imagine you are in Germany. It is 1995. You pick up some crawfish for your aquarium. And you keep saying that you keep getting like more and more crawfish over and over and over again. Turns out you have begun the epicenter of the marbled crayfish expansion, which I believe are going to be our crustacean overlords. And let me tell you why.

I'm going to be reading here from a 2015 article, the marbled crayfish as a peridem for sultational speciation by autoploidy and pathogenesis in animals. The parthogenic all-female marbled crayfish is a novel research model and potent invader of freshwater ecosystems. It is a triploid descendant of the sexually reproducing slaw crawfish procamborous phallics, but its taxonomic status remained unsettled. By cross-breeding experiments in parentage analysis, we show here that marbled crayfish and pea phallics are reproductively separated. both crayfish copulate readily, suggesting that the reproductive barrier is set at the cytogenic rather than the behavioral level. But analysis of complete mitochondrial genomes of the marbled crayfish from laboratory lineages and wild populations demonstrates genetic identity and indicates a single origin.

All of these crayfish are the same. They are all a clone coven from the deep. And by the deep, I mean, like, a mystery pet store in Germany, which I also love is the orchid story of like... That is perfect. Our future crustacean overlords. She overlords, lordesses. But so excited about these folks.

They are fully being banned across. seen as a pet store thing across the United States, many states already out lava. But they've kind of taken over in a lot of freshwater ecosystems in Germany, other parts of mainland Europe, as well as Madagascar. And there's like these movements not like to take advantage of that and use them as a dietary supplement for protein, like both in Germany and Madagascar. So they're not only like these in like they're these clones and because of the way that they work, they outcompete and sometimes carry infections that the local crop dad or crawfish populations are like vulnerable to. They will replace them.

And then you've just got like what some restaurants were calling the Berlin lobster, which is like just this giant. cloned matriarchal cradads who once again, I believe, will take over. Wow. That is so funny. I wonder, so how did they get from pet store to lake? So a thing that you're not supposed to do with your aquarium critters is dump them into your local ecosystems. And yet, that is a thing that people do all of it. time. And that seems to be the likely situation here is that. And perhaps especially if they're

multiplying in exponential rate. Yeah. Even though they seem to be in single-sex tanks, just like creating enough grayfish to take over the world. Wow. B aquarium by aquarium. That's incredible. Aquarium by aquarium. So even, even though they're in a same-sex aquarium. It's like a bunny situation where it's like oh, so, like, that is my understanding. Surprise. Suddenly there will just be more of them because they're just

laying cloned eggs of themselves that like over and over again. And I think it's kind of a fun, weird, spooky thing to think about that like we're having these like biological clones that are being so aggressive and good at taking

know where new spaces that humans have just decided to like live with them and try to figure out how to harvest them for their protein. It's like spotted lanternflies, but instead of people telling you what to step on them, it's like, no, actually eat them. Yeah, pretty much. I've lived in in places where crawfish are, you eat them. They are just little lobster guys, really. But they are also giant bugs. As a wise man once said, shrimps is bugs. It's a very fine line. It's a very fine line. Actually, and speaking of Germany, my husband's from basically Denmark so far north Germany. And in that part of the great north, they're very into these tiny, tiny shrimp. They really like making soup out of

them and it's a very rich like almost lobster bisque-esque soup and it's delicious but that they also will eat the shrimp in like a cold salad a lot of cold salads for breakfast and the issue is that they really they're very they're very bug-looking um just their the their size and and plumpness is very does not look like a shrimp to me it looks like something else and um i think that is really that that is the issue. when it comes to eating a crowd at, they dance so nimbly on that line between. They're like a chimneys creature and bug. Close to bugs.

Yeah. And I've eaten insects before, so I don't fundamentally have a problem with that. But it is, you know, it's something that you got to wrap your head around before you go to the seafood boil. So, but listen, if you can't beat them. The seafood oil appears to be in Germany a place. known as Holy Crab, which does them. And like, I'm definitely looking at one of the scientific studies. It includes pictures of options of how to serve the crayfish.

Yeah, that's so good. Or utilization of marbled crayfish as a source for dietary protein in and chitlin. Example A. Marbled crayfish tails with herbs fried in butter. Marbled crayfish tail meat on avocado moose. I'm also a vegetarian, so I'm not the target audience for this. I don't eat any of the bugs, but that's in line with my other. I don't eat any of the moving things, really standard for my own personal diet. It's reasonable.

Yeah. Yeah. My point, in fact, is if you're going to eat one kind of crawly thing, why not another? You know? Why not another? And if you're not going to eat any crawly things, that's fair. Look, as a pescatarian, I'm like, the windows are open. The only way for us to defeat our future matriarchal cloning overlords is through consumption, it seems.

So there are some people already working on it, as I said, including in Germany and Madagascar, assuredly more people will be working on it in the United States soon. When they eventually swim over. Well, and like they're already being or have been previously sold as like aquarium pets. So I'm just thinking it's going to happen somewhere or somehow. I remember reading a while back about a case of folks being persecuted for like just maintaining a because they're invasive, maintaining a tank of them because they were using them as like the feeders for all of their other aquarium pets. because it's sort of like, you know, a continuous supply of a little juicy bug things.

Yeah, which, you know, in theory it's fine as long as they're staying in their tank. But as you and I have discussed, they're wily. You have some crayfish at Midmountain and they get out. And I did ecology fieldwork as an undergrad involving basically. catching and counting crayfish. And those, they're a little trickster demons. They will find a thing if you give them the thing. Recommend lids.

They're all up in Yonder River near us. We love hanging out and sort of like seeing them underneath rocks when we go swimming from the space. But yeah, hubris to think that you can keep an invasive crawfish from exiting your home and getting into the waterways, pure humor. Yeah, no. We're, I estimate 500 years away from them enslaved us. From full crawfish saturation.

I'm trying to get on their good side now. That's why I'm singing their praises and or suggesting that people aren't me, eat them. Wise. Well, speaking of Yonder River, River. Would you remind our listeners where they can find more information about Midmountain and the incredible murder ballad festival you have coming up? Yeah. So you can find us at midmountain.org.

If you go to midmountain.org slash fest, you can find out way more about it. We've got so many cool things happening. We have more than a dozen musical performances across two stages, printmaking and workshops, weird art installations and just an opportunity to hang out and experience a kind of collaborative community. It reflects on a lot of the weird stuff we've all done together here at Mid Mountain, but also while specifically reclaiming murder ballads because we're all about spooky Appalachia, it turns out.

And we've got some great folks. We've got Clover Lynn, who's a really fabulous regional, queer Gothic bluegrass musician, the band South for Winter. We've got Dr. Dina Jennings, who's going to be doing the Borg Bandjo Creation Workshop on site, which I was so pumped about. I'm exhausted a little bit just thinking about it, but also so excited. It's coming up on October 12th, and it's an all-day thing. grounds are going to open to the public at 10 a.m. and close at 9 p.m. It's such a weird,

fun, spooky place. And I'm excited to have so many people kind of engaging in creative reclamation across the space with us. Amazing. Well, I definitely hope that some of our listeners make it out because I sure wish I could. 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, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.