The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Toxic Animal Boyfriends, Birding for Freedom, Egg Yolks Explained

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

The weirdest things we learned this week range from stage-five-clinger anglerfish to Harriet Tubman's birding expertise. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest.

That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck 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 sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Prabita Saha. And I'm Sarah Trinosh. So on the weirdest skylum this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of factor story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, birding, et cetera.

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. Sarah, would you like to start with your tease? I'm going to be talking about egg yolks today. Oh, great. Just a simple, little teaser there for you. Pervita, how about you? I'm going to go back a few centuries in birding and ornithology history

and look at some of the expert birders who are also part of the Underground Railroad. Oh, intriguing. I am going to talk about the most famous live-in boys. boyfriends in the animal kingdom and the strange evolutionary tradeoff that turned them into codependent parasites. Wow. Love that. Very on brand for both of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are you trying to say about Rachel's fiance? We're actually married now. So I, oh, no, no, it's fine. Nothing against Rachel's husband who was a lovely, lovely human being. More on brand for the dissing live-in boyfriends and becoming parasites thing.

Rachel's online brand and personal life brand are wildly different. It's true. Men are trash, except for several, including the one I am married to. But anyway, what story do we want to start with today? I mean, I feel like we have to start with the parasitic boyfriends now. Yeah, of course. All right. So this is a story that came out in scientific journals recently and got a bit of coverage around the net.

But I do want to shout out Misty, who shared it in our weirdest thing Facebook group, which all listeners should join. You just get there by searching weirdest thing on Facebook. And it's just a place for people to hang out, share in weird facts, talking about weird facts. And this is one of those weird facts. So we got to start by talking about anglerfish in a broad sense. Specifically, anglerfish broads, the ladies. So one thing I learned just this week, in fact, is that like when anglerfish were first discovered, and, you know, I could go on a long thing about like the early research of deep sea fish

because there's this whole thing where people trawled things out of the deep. and because of the pressure of the deep sea, things just are differently formed. They're like mushyer. They've got a lot of like weird air sacs in their body. So when you pull anything up from the deep, deep sea, it's like going to come out looking funny. Like the blobfish. Just Google a picture of the blobfish and know that in its home in the deep sea, it looks like not a pile of snot trying to be a Pokemon. Yeah, it turns out to study things.

you really got to see them alive. And for many of our years, being vaguely aware of things in the deep sea, that was simply not possible. So anglerfish, when people first started kind of trying to find them and study them in earnest, scientists were confused because they kept finding females, just females, and many of those females had strange parasites attached to them. Plot twist, those were the missing males. and we're going to talk about why, including some very fascinating brand new research on the subject. So in the deep sea, it's deep, it's dark, sunlight doesn't reach down as far as anglerfish live. We're talking about like a thousand feet deep or more.

And it's very empty. It's sparse. There is a lot of stuff living down there. So if you are one of the few things that's eking out a life for yourself, you have to evolve to be really, you know, require very little food because there's not much to find. And you spend a lot of your time just like hunting for what does exist down there or catching debris. And for the angler fish, that also seems to pose a problem when it comes to finding mates. There's just there's, there are a lot of fish in the sea, but not a lot of angler fish in the big deep dark ocean.

And so that created this kind of weird reproductive strategy that's just kind of of a really extreme version of the sexual dimorphism we see in a lot of species where like the female is kind of large and designed to be able to robustly create many children. And the male is designed to find and attract females. You know, we see this with birds all the time. But because interactions between individual anglerfish are probably so uncommon because of how much empty space there is and how few anglerfish there are relative to the size and darkness, basically males adapted to just be like single purpose female finding machines. And I mean that literally there are some species where this is taken to such an extreme

where the male anglerfish is like too small and immature to like get its own food. It like some of them just have trouble hunting. Some of them literally can't eat because they're digestive tracts. stunted. And so they are born tiny, sometimes 60 times smaller than the females of their species. And they just set out sniffing or looking for a female. And so, yeah, that's a really rough dating prospect. And so when they find females, they hold on and don't let go. And I mean that literally, they bite them. And then they release an enzyme that digest their own mouth. So, so that they fuse to the female.

Now, I should say that this method known as sexual parasitism is not universal among anglerfish, or at least based on what we can tell. Again, like we don't have a ton of living data on anglerfish because they're down in the depths, but there are definitely species where the males look a lot closer to the females in terms of their size and development and, you know, their teeth and their theoretical ability to fend for themselves. And so there are a lot of species where it seems like mating probably happens very similarly to how it does for other fish, where you have a little spawning session and then you go on your way. There are also species where we know that they latch on to each other, but then they,

again, go on their separate ways. It's just a brief hookup, literally. And then there are species where this is a lifelong lockdown, they are fused. And in the most extreme cases, you have females that have several males fused to them. They just pick up more and more. I think the most that have been seen is like eight, and they just carry around these shriveled males forever. Though actually, some of the male species get larger once they attach to the female because they finally have a source of nutrients.

But they do basically, they're, innards atrophy and they're basically just a big pair of testes with some gills and just a big old pair of testes. Yeah, just filled with sperm. And one researcher said there's basically no integrity at this point. And I don't know if he meant like physical integrity or like. Biologist Stephen J. Gould famously called male anglerfish at this life stage a penis with a heart. which I would like to point out is more than I can say for many men on the New York dating scene. Oh, harsh but true. Yeah, yeah, tough but fair.

And the new research was because many research have asked the question of how this can be, not just because it's kind of gross and freaky, but because think about how this kind of like tissue grafting would work. on like any other animal. If someone was like, I am, you know, going to attach myself to your body permanently because I'd really like to see where this goes, your bodies would start to reject each other. Even when we, for example, do reasonable things like conduct organ transplants, we have to dampen the recipient's immune system so that it doesn't reject the new organ. And in fact, oftentimes people have to take immunosuppressive drugs for their whole lives, which is something that researchers are really trying to figure out how to avoid because it is a huge complicating factor of what can

otherwise be a life-saving organ or tissue transplant. But yeah, so this is because of the immune system. All vertebrates have two kinds of immune systems, the innate and the adaptive system. So the innate system is like our basic defenses against general disease. You know, we have like chemicals in our mucus and things like that just to try to keep pathogens from getting an edge on you in general. But then we have the adaptive immune system, which in most animals is what does most of the really important work. It's where your body is creating antibodies to fight new infections and to recognize them when they come back again. and creating T cells and all those specialized defenses that, you know, help our bodies fight cancers and viruses and bacteria and, you know, anything that is making a concentrated attack on our system. So the immune system between the innate and adaptive, but especially the adaptive, should be keeping this kind of coupling from happening, right?

like the female and the male, their body should both be saying like, whoa, what the heck is this? And they should both be suffering very ill effects. But this new research found that at least based on 10 species of anglerfish, there are several hundred, but they did pick a good representative group of different extremes on the reproduction spectrum, which I'll explain in a minute. So these were researchers from the Max Planck Institute and the United States. University of Washington. And specifically they found that anglerfish that permanently fused to multiple males, they have lost the ability to produce T cells and antibodies entirely, at least based on the

genes that they have deleted. They weren't able to actually study living anglerfish, so they don't know exactly how this played out in the immune system. But genetically speaking, they do not seem to have any ability to launch an immune response, which is pretty wild. And what's even more fascinating is that the anglerfish that only fuse with one partner had slightly less severe genetic alteration. So it was like they gave up a little bit less of the adaptive immune system. And then anglerfish who have only like temporary latch on couplings and then go their separate ways, had the most intact genes when it came to launching an adaptive immune response.

So this is wild, and we don't know when or how it happened. We know that sexual parasitism seems to have evolved multiple times in different lineages of anglerfish, and that's why there are species that do it kind of differently in terms of how many mates latch on or how permanent the latching is, et cetera, or whether they do it at all. And the researchers suspect that the changes in immune system came first, but they say it's really like a chicken and egg situation. They don't know at all. And they want to do more research, especially to understand how these changes actually play out in the immune response. But it's so hard to study anglerfish.

they actually weren't able to trawl up any living specimens for this, even though they tried. They ended up relying on, like, museum collections and, like, pickled specimens, and it took them years just to get 30 samples to work with for these 10 species. So they definitely want to learn more, but it's going to take quite a lot of work. But, yeah, clearly, you know, for the anglerfish that are carrying around, like, eight shriveled mates at once, they said based on the immune response that their genes say they should be able to mount, you would think they would be dead. They were like, this is a bad situation. If this was a human patient, we would say they were going to die. But clearly they do just fine.

So what most experts think, based on the research I did, is that they've somehow bolstered their innate immune system. So just like the general defenses they have against pathogens, you know, maybe because things are kind of like they don't change very quickly down in the deep dark sea. Maybe they're able to just kind of use these same basic defenses to deal with most diseases or infections. But yeah, we don't know. And of course, researchers are fascinated by the prospect of an animal that survives just fine while giving up their adaptive immune response. and while living with a grafted sperm bag on their back, they would love to get some insights there for how to improve human transplants, not of sperm bags, but of life-saving organs.

And so, yeah, I just think this is so cool and freaky. And I really, I got to respect the anglerfish. I love anglerfish. I learned about them in high school for some reason, but I had no, like, I guess I'd never really stop to think about how you can just have another living being attached to you, and that's just totally chill. And like, I never related it to organ transplants at all. I guess I probably figured, well, like, you know, we have parasites that can live in our guts, and so it's probably something like that. But wow. I also wonder whether, obviously, there are plenty of bacteria and other microorganisms that live way down at the bottom of the ocean. But I also wonder whether there are, fewer pathogens down there like there's so little going on down there maybe it's just harder to get infected

as well yeah this is crazy yeah that's what I was getting at that like there are fewer kind of like interactions with other individuals than in more bustling parts of the sea and also things just kind of move slower down there that's why you know there are so many species known as like living fossils

and we've talked about why that that phrase is not sense everything is always evolving but there are certainly many things down in the deep sea that have changed much less than they would have if they were living higher up. So yeah, I mean, maybe it's just kind of a chiller place in terms of like emerging pathogens, but more research is needed. So we'll have to see. More research is needed. The classic kicker.

All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more weird facts. All right, we're back. And Perrillo, why don't you tell us about? about your fact. Yeah, so birding. It's a fun thing. For people who are wondering what it is, it is pretty interchangeable with birdwatching, although your snobbier birders will say that bird watching sounds creepy and a little too lazy. So birding is like, from a editing perspective, it's a more active term and more active verb. So, yeah, birding, it has,

has this weird history where it began with amateur naturalists and ornithologists, many of whom were, you know, white men who had time and money to go around shooting birds and studying the carcasses and writing books about it. There were some pretty knockout women in the mix. But as we learn more about, you know, the history of naturalists and think more about how we learn about wildlife in this country, specifically from people who were always outdoors, who actually worked off the land, specifically like native tribes and enslaved people, our definition of ornithology and birding and those related fields has been changing. So anyway, a bit of a long-winded intro, but it's kind of a conversation that's been

taking over the birding and ornithology sphere these days. So it's been on my mind. So the story goes back to about two years ago. I was at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad natural historical park in Maryland. And one of the rangers I was talking to was telling me that Harriet Tubman was an amazing birder. And, you know, she spent a lot of time out in the marshes and on the coast of the Chesapeake Bay being, you know, she was a laborer. She would trap muskrats and other animals and do a lot of field work all under her enslavement. But during that time in her teens she was learning so much about wildlife and one of the most you know apparent groups of wildlife are birds you know there you can see them everywhere you can hear them

and being able to recognize bird sounds that's like really what vaults you into being this kind of all-knowing wildlife person so Harriet Tubman when she turned 25 she finally made successful escape from this farm she was working at in Maryland. And we don't have a lot of, you know, specific historical notes and records about how this escape went down. But a lot of historians and people who, you know, passed on the oral stories of the work she'd done on the Underground Railroad, they've talked a lot about how she used, natural cues to make her way up to New York. So a lot of you have probably heard the story of how she and other enslaved folk used the big dipper and the constellations to just navigate.

But they were also going through some really treacherous habitats. Again, we're talking about the Chesapeake Bay here. So it's like pretty dank and thick and undeveloped salt marsh, especially back in the mid-1800s. So they would also follow signs of animals. And one of the ways they would both navigate and communicate to each other is by replicating bird calls. So two of the popular ones that the rangers there at this historical park talk about are the bard owl. And I'm going to play a clip real quick because I think some of you might recognize this call just from your backyards. They're pretty widespread owl. So I'm playing this from the National Audubon Society app. Oh yeah. I recognize that. Some people say it sounds like

who cooks for you. Birders make up all these really weird like English translations of bird calls. And it is like I have practiced that one, not around other people, just in this. solitude of my own birding expeditions. And I think I've gotten pretty good at it. But I can just imagine Harriet Tubman really crushing that call. The other one she was apparently quite adept at is the Eastern Whippoorwill. And that one's a lot harder. So I don't know how she, that just shows some skill to me. Again, I'm going to play it. Dang. Wow. Yeah. That's like some weird ab work and I don't know. Excellent diaphragm control.

Yeah, vibrato, but down in your diaphragm. Great ambitur of the lips. Yeah, so again, these are skills that like birders, these are very sought after skills in today's birding community. But 170 years ago, they were skills for survival, you know, with the underground railroad. So I'm not sure how extensive the skills were among other escapies. Harriet Tubman, of course, is the figure that everyone talks about and writes about and researches. And it would be really interesting to see, you know, if there were regional pockets of this knowledge.

Like the birds in Maryland and New York and the Atlantic seaboard are very different from the birds in the Deep South or the Gulf Coast area. But there is another historical anecdote about a birder who was involved with abolition. Very different backstory than the strong and powerful and bold woman that we know as Harriet Tubman. His name is Alexander Milton Ross, which just makes him sound like most other sciencey dudes from the 1800s. He's actually Canadian. He was born in Ontario, but his, I think he had some generations of family who were in the U.S., so he had a connection there. And he was a physician. He went to medical school.

But he also did a lot of naturalist training on his own and wrote books about birds and moths and plants up in Canada. So once the Civil War kicked off in the 1800s in the U.S., and, well, obviously before that, once abolition gained speed, even among white folks, Alexander Milton Ross came down to the States. He hooked up with William Cullen Bryant, who was also a big abolitionist. And he started visiting plantations in Alabama and Georgia, I believe. and he would go there. I mean, he had, he already had his cover. He was a white man with a pretty eminent background. So he could go and talk to these plantation owners.

But he would also go under the guise as an ornithologist. So he would roll up to these places and be like, hey, I want to study the birds on your property. Can I, you know, hang out here for a few days? Can I look around and talk to some people? And usually he would get the stamp of approval. Again, Canadian. so super friendly and probably had that under his belt as well.

But instead, maybe he did actually gather ornithological info, but he would also go around to the slave quarters and basically provide oral maps to the laborers and give them instructions on how to find different rescue points of the Underground Railroad. Once, yeah, so he, you know, kept us up. until slavery was ended. When he went back to Canada, he actually,

he was still very much for liberation and abolition, kept looking at birds. But he also became an anti-vaxxer during the smallpox outbreak. Yeah, he actually successfully lobbied the Canadian government against making smallpox vaccines mandatory because he thought that they actually successfully lobbied. actually made the virus worse rather than better. And his whole mission was to get people to be more sanitary as a way to fight pandemics,

which is kind of relatable to today's scenario, but also we need vaccines. So, yeah. So again, there's little historical record, mostly just anecdotes about both Harriet Tubman and Alexander Milton Ross, but I can just see it being such an amazing research project to learn more about how birds and other wildlife knowledge just helped propel these movements. People were so smart back then, in some ways. That's such a good summation of history. People were really smart back then, in some ways. Yes. I love the idea. of this guy just rolling up and being like, hey, I love birds. You can trust me. I'm just a bird nerd.

Yeah, and in ways you can still do that these days. Like, sometimes there will be some really good exotic birds on people's feeding on people's farms. And, you know, you could knock on a farmer's door and be like, hey, I want to see this tiny little sandpiper that you probably doesn't don't know exists but I drove a hundred miles to come see it please let me so yeah it's it's still part of like what it means to be a birder but of course the stakes are much much lower

but I don't know maybe I can use my birder cover for great things as well if you two have any ideas please let me know I'll think about what what systems we can infiltrate and get back to you. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back, and Sarah, you're going to talk to us about some eggs and some yolks. Heck, yeah, I am.

So over the winter holidays. I'm just so fired up for eggs. It's real excited. Eggs are one of my favorite foods. I think they're like the only true miracle food, if I'm being honest. But, you know, that's something for a separate podcast. So, okay, so over the past winter holidays, I was in Malawi with my partner. We were staying in the Lawande National Park at this incredible place where you can literally sleep in like your

childhood dream of a tree fort, like literally it's a house they built in a tree. Our shower had a tree in it. It was amazing. So to back up slightly, so Malawi is a country in southeastern Africa. I tell you that, not because I think you don't know, but because I don't know. But because I did not know before I went to Malawi where it was. I probably would have put it somewhere in the Pacific. It is not. It is an African nation. And depending on the source you use and the year, it's like one of the five poorest countries in the world. So 80% of the population lives in rural areas, and then many of those are subsistence farmers who grow mainly corn. So malnutrition is still a major problem in Malawi. And all of that is important as you're going to realize in a minute. So

We're sitting at breakfast one morning, and they served us up some fried eggs, and they were truly the palest eggs I have ever seen. Like, the yolk almost blended in with the whites, which was pretty astounding to me because here in the U.S., like even very cheap eggs still have pretty yellow yolks. And I made the comment that, like, are the chickens malnourished here or something? Because I had always thought, based on comments made to me by hipsters who eat only farm eggs, that the color of an egg yolk is tied to like the healthiness and happiness of the hen. Like my partner's dad raises chickens in New Zealand and he's always going on and on to me

about how vibrant the yolks are and that's how you know it's a good egg and blah, blah, blah. And I figured like the people of Malawi are malnourished. Maybe the livestock are as well. So I googled it because side note, you can get cell reception absolutely everywhere in Malawi. It's better than the cell reception in the U.S. I don't understand that, but it's incredible. So I googled it. And it turns out I was like almost entirely wrong. So the color of an egg yolk is basically dependent on the hen's diet. So inside lots of plants, there are these things called carotenoids.

They're like yellow, orange, red pigments. They're what gets revealed in the fall and is responsible for like all the beautiful autumnal colors. and eating those carotenoids tends to lead to more like orangey yellow yolks. So free-range hens who generally have like access to grass, they do generally have brighter yolks. And also when you forage in the grass as a chicken, you get to eat little grubs and insects. And apparently the protein inside bugs gives the yolks also like more of an orange hue. But if chickens are given feed that doesn't really have a lot of natural pigment, then the yolks come out really pale because there's just, there are just none of those natural pigments to color the yolk at all. And I think that was the case in Malawi.

Like I didn't ask them like, hey, what's up with your egg yolks here? These seem weird. But lots of African countries feed their chickens white corn. White corn does not have a lot of carotenoids, really any at all. And so as a result, the egg yolks look very different, even though nutritionally, like, it's basically exactly the same egg. Like, maybe there's some minor differences, but it's effectively nothing. Did it taste any different? So I think they tasted, like, a little less intense.

And, like, foodies would definitely tell you that the more vibrant, the yolk, the creamier and, like, more intense it tastes. But I could not find a blind taste test. and I am not in Malawi anymore, unfortunately. So there is some underlying correlation here between the health slash happiness of a chicken and the color of the yolk in that if you are a chicken who gets to hang out in grassy pastures all the time, you're living a pretty good life.

And also you're eating lots of crotenoids. And so you have these beautiful yellow yoked eggs. So the same is true for cows. They produce yellow or milk when they get to feed on grass. And that's actually how we ended up with orange cheese in the first place. because farmers would give the cows like a natural dye in their feed because during the winter months, the cow's milk would be really white. And even though it's not any lower quality, people just like that creamy color. And so they would give them more and more of these like natural dyes. And then over time,

it became kind of orange and like some of the cheese would look orange. And then it just became a tradition that like, well, some cheeses, we make them orange, like, either by giving the cow something or probably more commonly, like, just adding an otto directly to the milk. But, like, 100% of cheese that is orange is dyed to be orange. There is no naturally orange cheese. Orange cheddar cheese is just white cheddar cheese that has anato added to it. That really has blown some people's minds that I have told that to. I feel like a surprising number of people have a strong preference for one color of chatter. It is exactly the same chatter, folks. I hate burst your bubble. So the same thing happens with eggs. Because like if you raise chickens,

you'd probably notice that the yolks get more colorful in the summertime time when they graze outside. And people tend to like that deep color. And American chicken farmers know that. Like, by far, consumers love the deep yellow color. And so if you were a chicken farmer and you want to sell your eggs, you give your chickens food that has natural pigments. So the most common one is like marigold petals because they're organic. But some farmers use like carrots or annatto seeds, which is what they use for cheese, or orange peels, or also just alfalfa, which apparently has a lot of carotenoids. So, like, if you have ever purchased organic valley free-range eggs and admired how, like, beautiful the yolks are, it is because they add marigold petals to their chicken feed. So, like, even the free-range chickens, they still get the vast majority of their nutrition from their just regular feed ration.

And so if you just give them some marigold petals, they come out nice and yellow. So like Organic Valley says during the summer, the yolks can get a little bit darker, but year-round they're giving them supplements to make the yolks look beautiful. And even cheap eggs get the same exact treatments. Like in the U.S., 97% of eggs come from factory farms. You've probably never eaten a super pale egg before, which means that basically all of the eggs you have ever eaten were, effectively indirectly dyed to make them that beautiful yellow or orange color. So here in the U.S.,

you can't tell a lot about the health or happiness of the chicken by the color of the egg yolk. You can just tell how much the farmer cared that the egg yolk came out a nice color, which is a little unfortunate. If you get farm fresh eggs, I do think they taste better, but it's not because the color looks nicer. You can make a little. Make a little unfortunate. You can make a little like really interesting eggs by giving like more intense dyes to the chicken. So I found the story about a farmer in Santa Fe who gives little bits of red chilies to the chickens and the yokes come out like red, like fully red, which I think is so cool. Are they spicier? I don't think the Cavesacin makes it in, although that would be incredible. But apparently they taste like kind of

unusual. I don't think they necessarily taste like chili, but like, I don't know, just sort of a more complex thing. One also, color has such a, sorry. Go ahead. Oh, I was also, I was just going to say that also color has such a huge influence on our taste perception. I did a middle school science fair project where I food dyed some bread and marshmallow fluff. So I'm an expert on this.

But I also wouldn't be surprised if just like a shockingly red egg yolk, like, that your brain like cannot fathom that it tastes the same as the kind of egg you're used to, you know? Yeah, it is true. My aunt actually is like a trained chef and she teaches other young chefs about cooking and she does this thing every year in her class where she makes tuna salad and she like divides it up into bowls and like one of them she dyes like blue and she has everyone taste them and everybody talks about how gross the blue one is and at the end she's like, surprise, it's all exactly the same, but this should be a lesson to you and how the way you present your food changes the flavor. So that is actually true. Like if you have a beautiful egg yolk, even if in a blind

taste test, they might not taste different. I mean, maybe they do, but maybe they don't. The fact that it looks pretty makes it taste better to you. So that's a nice thing. That's a nice trick that our brains play on us. Also brown eggs taste. Oh, go ahead. No, no, go ahead because your thing's going to lead in the thing I was going to say. This is perfect. Oh, shoot. Brown eggs taste more flavorful to me. Is that also my brain just being my brain? I think it is because egg shell color has absolutely nothing to do with like egg quality.

Like I think there's an idea that brown eggs are somehow more natural because brown is a natural color to us and white seems like it shouldn't be natural. But that's not true at all. So like the process of egg production goes like this. I found this incredible breakdown of exactly. how a chicken makes an egg. So it starts as just the yolk in the hens ovary, which I think is kind of hilarious. And then the yolk travels through the aviduct tube, and it spends three hours, precisely, developing the white part, which is the albumin. And then it spends 75 minutes, roughly, I guess, making a shell membrane. And then it makes the actual shell. And that's like the bulk of the time.

So it takes about 20 hours for the chicken to make the shell in this, like, beautiful little internal assembly line. So the shell when they make it is white originally, like it always starts out white. But some breeds of chicken have another step where they add pigment. One expert told the Huffington Post that it was, quote, almost like you're painting a house. So some breeds have machinery inside to add pigment to like the naturally white eggs. But that's the only difference. So some breeds lay white eggs and some breeds lay brown eggs and some have like blue or greenish or speckled eggs. But what I think is most interesting is that brown eggs do cost more.

And I think people probably look at the cost and are like, oh, well, they must be better. Like they're more organic somehow. But it's because literally those breeds require more nutrients and energy to produce the pigments and to make the eggshell. And so they cost more to keep. And therefore their eggs cost more. But not because they're better.

Like it's just this association that like, well, they cost more. So they must be more natural. And they're brown. And that feels natural. And I think that's just like a beautiful thing because I definitely always looked at white eggs and thought like they were somehow inferior. And in fact, they're not. Wow. Yeah.

Eggs. I really can't. It's all a big scam. Sorry, it's also amazing that the chicken puts so much time and resources into the shell for a good reason. Obviously, that's what's protecting the delicious insides. But like that's also the part that we discard in a few seconds. And it's like, it's true. We really did those chickens wrong.

It's an incredible natural casing, too. Like in the U.S., obviously, we refrigerate our eggs because we effectively, like, wash away all of the protective membranes that are naturally on eggs, which is a little bit silly. Like, we're overly clean about it. But just everywhere else in the world, you keep your eggs out at room temperature because it's a natural storage facility for the egg. And it works really well. They just keep for ages just sitting out on their own.

Eggs are amazing. Yeah, whenever I'm in another country, remember when we used to do that? That was fun. But whenever I'm in another country and I come across the like unrefrigerated egg display, there's such a, my brain is always like, eggs on the ground. Yeah, that was a thing that took me a while to get used to in Europe. Like the eggs in the Netherlands sometimes would have little bits of feather attached to them and stuff like that. I actually liked it because I enjoy baking, and you never have to think about taking your egg yolks out in advance, not yokes, the whole egg.

You never have to think about taking your eggs out in advance to come to room temperature. They're just already at room temperature. I think it was great. I think it's superior. But if you're in the U.S., don't try this because you do actually have to keep U.S. eggs in the fridge. They will go bad if you leave them out. They have been power washed into a pale limitation of their former selves. They have, yes.

Also, if you care about getting, like, good. eggs from happy chickens. Keep in mind that the words free range and cage-free mean almost nothing on their own. It's true. Yeah, it's very sad. If you want humane eggs, you should look for the, there's a certified humane pasture-raised label that actually does ensure that they have some access to the outdoors. So if you care, buy those or better yet, buy from a local farmer, because the eggs probably will taste better and the chickens are probably happier. So, buy local. It's better for pretty much everybody. Thanks for that, Sarah.

Just a little friendly reminder. All right. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I think it was the thing about the immune systems of anglerfish personally. Yeah, agreed. Oh, my gosh. I hardly ever win this show anymore. That's so excited.

That story just went deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. I know. I thought I knew where it was going, and it just really took a left turn in a beautiful way. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsai.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman,

with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bodee. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. 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. First Citizens Bank.