Wild Times: Wildlife Education - TWT #87 - Bradley Trevor Greive Talks Top 12 Animal Moments of 2021

Episode Date: December 25, 2021

Bradley Trevor Grieve join Forrest Galant and Retep to talk about the Nat Geo top 12 animal moments of 2021. That plus a bunch of other ridiculous nonsense. Love you mofo's! Patreon @ https://patreon.com/wildtimespod All the links @ https://thewildtimespodcast.com/info P.S. Pat is meager.

I live to dance. Wild times. Here we are. It is episode number 87 of the Wild Times, the greatest podcast in the world. It's a very special podcast because joining us tonight is myself, the broologist, the host, the guy who's usually here. Retep, the man behind the scenes, the broducer, PhD in podcasting. He is the glue that holds this thing altogether. No questions there.

a regular Brozner, you actually know that. I'm not trying to do whatever he's doing on video right now. What I am trying to do is say that without him, the podcast wouldn't exist because he harasses us relentlessly to be here. That being said, our regular third party, Papa P himself, the producer, has the Rona. He will not be joining us tonight. True story. Brosner, send him your love, send him your prayers, any of that good stuff. Send him some Christmas cheer because he is quite miserable. So instead... Instead, we have the upgrade, the better brother, the professional himself, Mr. BTG, long-time friend of the pod. What's up, BTG?

Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be here. I am, look, I like the fact you've identified that Retef is criminally liable for this podcast. Yes. The source, the singularity that makes it happen. We have a contract now, sir. Yep. Yeah. It means anything that I say, Retepp can be blamed for.

So when I start, you know, saying all these slurs and these awful, I don't even know what bad things are. When I start saying bad non-PC things, it's Retep's fault. That's the point. That's okay. Got you on camera. I have hundreds of hours of you on the edit cutting room floor man. Does it make a nice montage for the short of the judge? Blackmail at its finest.

I love it. Bradley, what are you up to this Christmas? What's going on with you? Well, look, first things first, kick off the right stuff. I'm going to do the first ever Wild Times unboxing for this bottle of scotch. I say scotch, it's a lie. I normally drink scotch.

This is something different. It's a rye whiskey. And I only got it because of the story behind it. Tell us. It's Templeton, which, as you recall, back during Prohibition was like the top. It's got a very sweet bouquet. it's like

I kind of like sort of it's honey orchids a little bit of bat semen bat semen that's the missing flavor I always miss out in my good whiskeys

Fruit bat fruit bat having been inseminated in the face twice by the giant fruit bat I can tell you there is a fruitiness to it got a little background music

for you how is it tell us about it tell us what you're getting you know what it's not bad it's kind of on the way in.

Okay. And then it kind of hits you. I gotta tell you, there's a little bit of copsyrip in there. It's not ideal. But there's a secondary warmth to it and just a little bit of a growl. I'm not going to say like a wolvering growl. More like a hamster growl, but it's nice. It's a nice warm finish.

I tell you, that is easy drinking. So this was, according to legend, the most popular high and rye whiskey during Prohibition. Huh. Run by Retep's friends from Chicago, Al Capone. My best buddy. The interesting part of the story is the connection to wildlife is that his number one bar, I think it's called the stockyard, which has been reinvented. It still exists.

The tavern room in Chicago. You can go enjoy a great steak there. That's cool. And Chicago is one of my favorite cities. Mine too. Love Chicago. In the summer. In the winter, it is God-awful.

There's about 10 days of perfection. Yeah. And then it's just a great sweltering armpit, and then it's the Arctic. Yep. So anyway, but the point was the connection to wildlife is this. When the original stockyard bar was torn down, because of its historic significance, many pieces were bought up by collectors. Now, the current version of the Stockyard and Tavern Roon bought the old actual physical bars. You can go there and enjoy a drink there. But one of the most exclusive and successful wildlife conservation breeding programs on earth is the White Oak Conservation Center on the border of Florida and Georgia in Uli.

And Uli. So I've been there many times. I was a resident, writer and resident there. They bought the original Tiffany Glass window from Al Capone's bar. And you can now go to the bar at White Oak and you can only be invited. You can't just walk in there. Can you invite us? No. I can't. Seriously, if you guys want to go and you're over in Florida, once the producer recovers, I will get you in. But you can look up and there is this enormous oval Tiffany glass window in the roof. It's incredible. So that's the connection. That's why I got it.

Can you show us the bottle to the brosters that are watching? Because a lot of people, if you're listening to this, we do this on YouTube. Templeton Rye, the good stuff. I mean, it's hard to argue with a label that says. it is literally the good stuff. It's a four-year-old rye. I got to tell you, it's very easy drinking. Nice. So you're going to enjoy it. The ladies will enjoy it. What I will tell you in this is this is the other part of the story that I love.

Oh, there's more. It's a complete fraud because it's meant to be this small batch, rye whiskey from Templeton, Iowa, hence the name. Okay. It's actually brewed in their main distillery in Indiana, and it was part of the class action, but it's still delicious. They've taken off some references on the label. I like it.

And for 30, 40 bucks a bottle, it's great value. Cheers. That's the thing. So I've done a couple, like, live whiskey tastings with Uprox. I got a great relationship with the Uprox magazine, and they're super fun people. We do oyster eatings and whiskey tasting. I know nothing, by the way. I'm not pretending to be a connoisseur at all.

I know literally nothing. And the difference to me between a $30 or $40 bottle of whiskey and a $3. or $400 bottle of whiskey is, I can't tell the difference. I mean, I'm like, this is good, a little bit Bernie, kind of some nice oak taste. And then I taste the $300 bottle. I'm like, this is good, a little bit Bernie, some nice like oak taste. And I just don't like. It's definitely, I mean, once you get up into that $30, $50 range of whiskeys or scotches,

it all to me becomes about the smoothness, right? It's when it's smooth, it goes up to like very smooth between like a $20 and a $50. And then it's just like incremental. And then I mean, it's like tasting wine. You know, you can't tell. If you gave me a blind wine taste test, I couldn't tell the difference between a $10 bottle and a $100 bottle. It's just that alcohol weird like taste. When you get that weird gross like kind of rubbing alcohol taste.

Right. Do you get the spiciness or not? But that's cool. I am going hard in the other direction because I've just spent a week. I bet you are. Yeah, I'm drinking water out of a hydro flask like an adult because I have just spent a week drinking so much. We did our annual farging trip. I just literally just got back this morning.

Oh, yeah, you've been posting about it. Social media. Yeah. You guys should be arrested for crimes against mushrooms. We should. Yeah, we committed mushroom genocide. Pillage like Vikings. I can't believe that.

You've got so many mushrooms out of one forest. That is now a mushroomless void. And if you realize the... So there's a couple things that are kind of interesting. One is this is a once-in-a-one-a-degade mushroom year up here in Northern California. It was absolutely... I mean, if you were in the right habitat and you do have to know the habitat, you would look up like an embankment and the floor is just carpeted and mushrooms. Those little yellow ones, the hedgehog mushrooms, it's like these little golden puffs of life just out of this brown duff.

It's absolutely incredible. And then we'd hike through these ravines and find these bouquets of these black trumpets that were outrageous. And black trumpets are probably my favorite eating mushroom. In three days with families and kids and everything else, we did like 150 pounds of mushrooms. Wow. And what's crazy is we covered like less than three square miles. Like it just went on and on and on and on. And we were just in like this pocket where it was just the fruiting was so good.

We were very rarely off of our like hands and knees picking. Let me ask you something. Yeah. Does it take away from the enjoyment of the mushroom hunt because it was so easy to get so much or does it make it that much better because you get such a big haul? Because it's a once in a decade fruiting, you just suck it all in. You're just like, this is so good because I know I'll now go another 10ish years where I'll do, I'll be stoked if I get like one basket or two baskets of mushrooms. Wow. You know, and so you.

Oh, huge. Yeah. This is the first year since 2016 that I've been up here and even seen a black trumpet or seen a hedgehog mushroom. And one of the most, I look, two things that come to mind. First is an observation that your behavior is exactly what we've described in carnivores as surplus killing. Yep, henhouse syndrome, baby. Secondly, I just want to ask you, you've identified your favorite wild mushroom, but what is the most valuable mushroom that you found?

Because, I mean, go to get chanterelles up there as well? Yeah, we found, I probably found, so the golden shants are, they're really early, but I still probably found about 10 pounds of them in total. Yeah, which, I mean, I can show you guys. I can go grab some baskets out of them there outside. What is the street value, the street value of those golden shantlems? rails. The golden shants are probably going for about 25 bucks a pound right now. But the black trumpets, the ones you see in our baskets there that we're tilting up, which are the really

valuable ones, those are around $40 a pound right now. And we did about 110 pounds at black trumpets. That's the lobster of mushrooms then. At the moment, for sure. And there are times, you know, it's supply and demand. So when they're fruiting like this, the cost is about to drop off because all the other pickers, the commercial pickers, are about to figure this out, and they're about, because this is legal, by the way, obviously, or I wouldn't be posting about it. But people go out and they commercially pick these mushrooms and they sell them to restaurants. But we're on the very cusp of the season, or rather the very beginning of the season.

And so the price is still really high. 10 days from now, two weeks from now, people are going to be going out getting baskets like that all day long. It's going to fruit like crazy and the price is going to drop. But my buddy, the guy says, from the right in the blue hat, he just sold all of his black trumpets at 3699 a pound in San Francisco today. So that's, you know, we don't do it for commercial. I don't do it for commercial value. I do it to dehydrate and pickle and everything else. And I save them all year and eat them because I love them. But yeah, my, two of those guys are commercial and they'll, they'll get,

they'll fetch really nice prices for them at the moment. So if you're a mushroom smuggler, now is the time because otherwise you'd be shoving a pound of Chantrails up your us, reason if you wait like two weeks. Exactly. Unfortunately, you don't even have to smuggle them. I can get into that. It's probably a fetish somewhere. It's been, it's been, I mean, I came up here about a month ago and did Porcini

when, and managed to hit that right. We got huge poles of black trumpets, hedgehogs. I got some good chantrails. And I think chantriles are going to get really good down where I live in Santa Santa Barbara soon. It's been a very fungal year indeed. A fungal year. Can I, where's my invite?

I want to come. I want to learn about mushroom hunting. Well, just so you know, I'm currently 11 hours north of my home, which would be 13 hours north of your home. But you just said in Santa Barbara, there's going to be good season for a certain type of mushroom. If you want to come up, either of you guys. I'll wear a blindfold. I know how serious you are. No, I don't care about that.

No, no, no, no, no. I don't care about that. What I care about is being like, hey, do you want to drive 13 hours to pick mushrooms to which most people would say, no, not if your life depended on it. That said, I kind of do. Santa Barbara is going to get good soon. Come up to Santa Barbara. I have a buddy who owns a big chunk of, well, he works for a ranch. He doesn't own it.

And it's a huge private property area on the foothills of Santa Barbara. And two years ago, the last time we had similar weather conditions to this, we did 35 pounds of chantrells in a day, him and I. And so I think the golden chants, and the golden chants we get in Santa Barbara are huge. The bouquets are like the size of, you know, they're like the diameter of basketball. So yeah, if you guys want to come pick mushrooms, it's like adult eastern. egg hunting. It's super fun. I love it. Yeah. I was going to ask a quick question. The reason for this super bloom of mushroom, so to speak, is it because, is it because we had these unusually dry conditions and then a tiny bit of water and they just kind of panicked and sporulated?

Pretty much, yeah. So it always depends on a couple different factors. Rain is the most critical. But if you get rain and then you get a freeze, that basically, it's just like fruit. It freezes and kills it all. So if you get rain and then it stays warm enough, but wet enough, that induces growth. And so what happened up here in Northern California is in October, there was like a four inch dumping, which was crazy. And because it was four inches so rapidly, it just saturated the ground. And then it was always warm, but it was never hot and it was never windy and it never froze. So you had this perfect, it was never hot enough to dry it out and it never froze enough to kill the mycelium for the mushrooms growing.

And so you just had this fruiting that continued and continued. And then right now it's dumping outside. I mean, you can't tell, but it's dumping where I am right now. And it has been for a while. Oh, there you go. And so it's just, it's like mushrooms act like sponges. They're just soaking it up and just growing out of control. And, you know, a couple freezes will slow them down.

But at this point, so much, like, they're mature enough that they're going to just keep replicating as long as we have moisture. I don't know how much. how much mushroom content is too much. But I'm going to say that I'm excited about all things fungi because I watched that documentary with Paul Stammetz, you know, fantastic fungi. You can watch it on Netflix.

I've heard about it. It's Netflix, right? I haven't seen it yet. I like Paul. I like everything he does. So I do want to watch it. It's really, it's like three documentaries in one. One part of it's a little bit fruity, but the other parts are like just, wow,

this is amazing the potential of fungi as a pesticide. that I talk about using fungi to destroy plastics, but that's a real thing that's happening now in a very exciting way. And I was giving, I think I mentioned to you, last time I was on, and two interesting things happened. One, I, Mr. Indestructible said that the one thing that creased me out are baboons, the white trash of primates. And you said, I love baboons.

I used to spoon with them as a baby. And I'm like, what? It's like I said, yeah, the one thing I'll never do is rim out of line. You go, oh, I was, when I was a kid, I was always giving rim drops to lines. What? But after that, I went on to give that lecture in Kyoto about breeding landmines from Cambodia. And I served back in the day. Anyway, one of the things I brought up is the possibility that, because there's literally 30,000 distinct species of mushroom just in Cambodia alone, which isn't a huge surprise because it's a tropical area and gets a monsoon.

So it's warm and moist. It's mushroom heaven. But I said it's possible down the road that genetically trained fungal species may end up being able to be used to help detect and consume explosives in the ground. Really? You know, how would that work? Did they explain that at all? That's really interesting. Yeah, it is.

They didn't address it directly. And I actually, you know, basically sent out a friendly challenge to Paul Stammetz and his esteemed colleagues to work it out because they're already genetically altering. some fungus to become effective pesticides. And they discussed this in the documentary, Fantastic Fungi, which, as I said, you can watch on Netflix any way you want, also home of Adventure Beast.

Might want to check that out just quietly. But he's already got a number of patents on Paul Samitz, has these patterns on modified fungus that tricks various pestiferous insects, specifically certain types of ants and especially termites, that come into, and now they're working with bedbugs, that come into your home. And so basically it delays their perception of the spores,

so the time they realize that they're already dying. Hey, finally the guest was just came walking in. Say hi. Oh, Rose. Say hi. Hi. Hi. You're not supposed to be here.

Dad's supposed to be working. Go with Mommy. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Later, buddy. Later. Sorry, brosters. You never about.

I never apologize for your offspring. Never apologize. You didn't see him clubbing. Not until they're teenagers. Well, you didn't see him clubbing his little friend over the head at Friendsgiving with a mushroom brush the other day. So I had to apologize for him then. Well, what's the friend an asshole? No, she's a sweetheart.

She's like the cutest little girl ever. And Rhodes is just like, bash, bash, bash. She thought it was funny. Back. Anyway, sorry. Do I ask you a question, how it would work is that the way mushrooms are connected with a whole far is through the equivalent of their roots, which is called mycelium, right? And mycelium is one of the most dense natural things in the world.

By every few square feet, you've got something like 300 miles of mycelium beneath your feet. And in almost every part of the world, except for pure desert and pure ice and snow. So the mycelium not only connect the mushrooms to the other, in this living network, they actually connect the entire ecosystem and all the plants. So if you're a fan of Avatar, and you wanted to know how a mammal somehow reproduced by connecting tails, I don't understand how that works. But if you liked Avatar and there was that the tree of souls or whatever it is thing

that was the mother tree, the home tree, that thing, that principle is based upon mushrooms and then mycelium because plants can actually trade nutrients and information via the mushrooms mycelium. So it makes sense then. We already have plants like tobacco plants, other plants that we can use to detect landmine, in fields and when they detect the explosive materials, the leaves turn red over a period of days. Now, it's theoretically possible

that genetically trained mycelia fungus can have this mycelium that could respond with fruiting bodies to landmines under the earth and could also be trained to literally just consume the explosive itself rendering them inert. So when you consider how difficult

the demining process is, particularly in a rainforest or a tropical area, it's so difficult because the land shifts every monsoon. This could be a way to use the natural ecosystem with some tweaking, not going to lie, to actually help us do something that physically is proving almost impossible. That is fat. That is totally fascinating.

We've talked about sort of mushroom mycelium networks on the pod before and how they act like, basically the neurons in a giant brain, right? Like these mycelium are like a brain around the globe or around the ecosystem. And the mycelium are the neurological. pathways that signals travel through. So there's a couple things. One, and I don't want this to get back to Paul Stampton, and be like, fuck that guy, because I think he's great, by the way.

But from the stuff that I've listened to and seen, he sort of has like a mushroom answer for everything. And I'll be honest, I am nowhere near intelligent enough to understand whether or not fungus can cure everything. But he does believe it can. He, Paul totally believes, in my opinion, and maybe you have a different understanding from watching his stuff. No, no, no, no. That's why I said to you. This documentary, everyone should watch it if you're interested in natural processes and natural flora and fauna. But as I said, it's three different, it's really three different documentaries in one. It's the part about the science of mushrooms that I just found mind blowing the potential. And then there was the kind of fruity parts of evolutionary history and giving them credit for everything. And then finally, the cure-all for everything.

Now, I do believe that there's enormous potential, not just in mushrooms, but in all manner of plant and animal species and all manner of weird natural secretions to create medicines of value. I do. But yeah, he is a true believer. But where I get excited is, as I said, and it only gets like five minutes of mention, these patents for natural mushroom pesticides. I'm not like, holy shit, this is mind-blowing the applications.

And as I said, it wasn't mentioned here. but the consumption of plastic, and now guys are doing this commercially, that gets me really excited because we've got a big plastic problem. Now, I think, look, on a day-to-day basis, I'm not typically worried about landmines, and that's because I live in California

and where I travel to, even though I've been in Mozambique a lot, and I've seen a lot of blown off arms and limbs, and in Cambodia, actually, it's not something that worries me on a day-to-day. Maybe that makes me insensitive. Plastic pollution worries me on a day-to-day. It does.

Every single day. And the idea that we could train certain fungal bodies to eat plastic, now that's exciting. I don't know how that works, though. Can they break it down? This is already happening. They've noticed in high concentrations of plastic landfill that microorganisms are now evolving to eat plastic anyway. So a little bit.

So it's a selective breeding process once again. Someone had an enzyme that started breaking. it down. These are novel enzymes. These are enzymes that didn't exist until fairly recently, and they are proving successful. So we're going to end up possibly with a situation whereby pollution is going to be certain types of

waste pollution, particularly plastic products, are going to prove useful to certain organisms who will then out-compete existing organisms that we also need, and then there'll be a boom-bust cycle. And we saw this similarly in a Numbat Habitat Restoration Project in in South Australia. For those that don't know,

A numbat is a marsupial ant-eat, have very long tongue. It's a cute kind of rust-colored thing. Adorable creature. With sort of tan stripes. And by the way, can I interrupt you for one second? No, please. For anybody listening, BTG's show on Netflix, Adventure Beast, has one of the funniest, well, undeniably, and I don't care who fights me on this, it's the funniest numbat humor you will ever see,

because nobody else has ever attempted to make a numbat joke in history. But secondly, the animation, and maybe I don't know if BTG wants to go into it exactly what happens or not, but the animation of what happens and the nuzzling numbats is phenomenal. So I just wanted to hype that up for a second because if you haven't seen it, it is a treat. Well, you definitely got to watch Adventure Beast. It's available worldwide on Netflix. There's no excuse for not watching it, really. If you don't have an account, get your mom's account.

If your mom has to come to COVID, then she can't stop you from using her account. That's true. Yeah, good point. Give your parents COVID. Give your parents COVID. That's the takeaway. I'll give you forest password. There you go.

I will tell you one true story behind the Numbet thing, other than my love of Numbet. And to finish my previous point, there was a habitat rewilding restoration project in South Australia. And Numbats now these days are only really found in South Australia and Western Australia. And they wanted to clear up this garbage dump that was in the middle of this habitat zone. And they cleared it up. And Numbat numbers. dropped because they were actually living in the dump. And remember they're eating termites and ants

that also congregated in the dump. So it was one of those interesting problems. And we might have that down the road with plastic eating enzymes, insects, fungus that might outcompete other species that we need. And then when we solve aspects of the plastic problem in certain regions, there'll be a little mini collapse. But that's a long-term problem. Now, the Numbat joke that I love that's based on a true story, there's a moment in the show where you see the numbat lowering his testicles via his elastic peduncle, which is this little

connection between the scrotum and the body. There's like four words in that sentence that Peter didn't understand, by the way. Testicles being the first one, but please continue. So marsupials, it's interesting, particularly arid country marsupils, because of course some marsupials are aquatic

and their testes, of course, are internal. they don't hang out in the water. But marsupials, what they do is, in the same way, we have a scrotum that contracts to stay warm and relaxes to stay cool, so that your junk is kept at optimum breeding temperature. With marsupials, who are dragging their nuts over barbed, arid country thorns all the time and so forth,

it's very tough skin. It doesn't have any elastic quality at all. But instead, they have a thing called a peduncle. This piece of muskirized skin that attaches it to the body. And if they get hot, they relax it down like a yo-yo. And if they get cold, they pull it back up. And they can control it as they want. So what happened was many, many years ago, I was doing an event, a meteor event at Tarongu Zoo in Australia, where I'm the governor. And I was doing this media event about Tasmanian devils, which, of course, I'm from Tasmania

and I care very deeply about their recovery following devil-facial tumor disease, which we've discussed on the show previously. Yep. And while we're talking about how important this critical work is, behind us in the exhibit is this big male Tasamanian devil. And for reasons known only the him, he did the ultimate photo bomb. He just yo-yoed his nutsette with his peduncle for the entire media. Like 20 minutes, 20 minutes lowering his peduncle, tapping his nuts on the ground,

bringing him up, hitting the belly, tap on the ground the entire time. And I was biting my cheeks on the inside, bleeding into my own mouth and throat to just not stop laughing out loud. And everyone was trying to be respectful. But it was one of the funniest media moments of my life. Fantastic. And that moment makes it into the show with a numbat so everyone will go away knowing what a peduncle is. Yep. Love it.

There are certain animals that I feel like are just kind of grumpy assholes. You know, like you're at a zoo. There was that one video we posted. posted at a zoo where like a monkey or something I can't remember but he basically like some guy was just like hey let me get a picture literally just slowly

takes his shit and throws it at the guy it's like it's legit an intelligent just like grumpy old man yells at clouds type of situation he's like I'm sick of these fucking people leave me the fuck alone and it's just hilarious you gotta have an outlet you gotta have an outlet You've got to have an outlet for these intelligent animals.

And the best conservation zoos in the world have extraordinary behavioral enrichment. One of the funniest ones is it in New York Forest. Do you remember the one where the chimps get to press this water spray from their exhibit to squirt the people staring at them? Do you remember that one? No, I don't. But please, yeah, please explain it. I love the sound of that, though. Apart from my many head injuries and bottles of scotch, I just visited, you know, hundreds, if not in the low thousands of facilities.

around the world. So I get a bit of a blur. But I remember visiting one and I feel like it was New York. I feel like it was Bronx. But it could have been it could have been Brookfield in Chicago, Richard. I don't remember. But anyway, the chimps have these buttons they can press and they'll squirt water onto the people behind the glass staring at them. And there was another one I think was a blast of air and a noise. Love that. And it gave them something to do to stimulate action in somebody else. And it was proved to be a great success. But it was a good. But of course, then you get some malicious chimp, and you know my views on chimps. And they're just doing it constantly.

But it's a great idea. And I've been involved in many different programs, not just for higher-water mammals like primates, but also bears and things like that. Where we develop these quite complex activities for them to keep them stimulated. And quite frankly, for all of us during the pandemic, that's us. We need to think. We need that B. 100%. Yeah, totally.

What do we need to stay sane and not go mental? because there's a lot of people who are not using technology enough like we're doing here to keep their brain and their emotions on a happy level. So I'm very, sorry, Peter, go ahead. Just real quick, sometimes I think about, like, my dog at the house and when I'm either, when we're both working or not there for five, six hours, and the dog's just sitting around. And I just want your professional scientific opinions on this because I feel bad about it regularly. I'm just like, is the dog bored a shit? Because I couldn't imagine just sitting around all day. It's like, so what do you do?

How do you stimulate the dog other than taking him for a couple walks a day? What kind of dog is it? What kind of dog is it, Rete? He's a real piece of shit. He's a chihuahua and a terrier. He's 11. But the terrier should tell you everything you need to know there, BTG. Well, I mean, that's, wow, that's fascinating because the terrier is,

very rare to get a slackened idle fat bastard terrier. Right. I mean, they are just highly motivated foraging, hunting type, aggressive, high-energy animals. He is. He is. He is. He was, I mean, so wildly inbred. Right.

They're made for bridleness. They are made by trials. But he's... How old is he's 11 now. I don't want to interrupt BTG as he thinks about it. I'll say. Go, go, go, go. I'll say this.

It so depends, right? And this is, I preach this to like every one of my friends. Don't buy a dog based on fucking looks. Don't do it. And if you're listening to this podcast, do not buy it. Don't go out there and be like, hey, I live in a sweet one-bedroom studio. I need a fucking, in like Arizona. I need a husky.

No, you fucking don't, okay? Because you like huskies. Yeah, no, wrong, wrong. And I've said this so many times. I think dog ownership is wonderful. I love my dog. And I make sure that he's never bored for more than a few hours. He's always got somebody to walk him or I take him on a walk.

He climbs mountains, everything. I am not cut out to have my favorite breed of dog anymore, which is a Rhodesian Ridgeback. Because when we had Rhodesian Ridgebacks, I was living on a giant farm and the Ridgebacks ran around all day long. You know, get a dog that suits your lifestyle. Nothing to do with looks. If you live on a ranch, get a working dog. If you live on a farm, get a working dog. If you live in an apartment, get something that has been bred for companionship that wants to lie around and sleep 15 hours a day.

And so I'll let BTG weigh in as well. But our dog's bored? Absolutely. If you get the wrong kind of dog, a working dog, a hunting dog, and he's stuck inside for 12 hours a day, that dog is going to be miserable. And that's when you get neurotic dogs that are tearing up your furniture and destroying your throat pillows and pissing inside and all that stuff because they don't have an outlet. They don't have anything to do. And you come home from your 9 to 5 and you're like, I'm tired. I don't feel like walking the dog today.

and all your dog wants is to get outside and run and work and do what they've been bred to do because keep in mind all dogs have been bred for a purpose and they want to do what they're bred to do what they're genetically predisposed to do and then you're like oh you know fluffy the husky doesn't want i don't want to take them outside of my one bedroom apartment in 110 degree heat in downtown you know phoenix and it's like it's wrong don't do it just get a dog that's right for your lifestyle I always say we can, you know, again, we've got a lot of mushroom content on this episode. And now we're launching into proselytizing about dogs. But you say that first of all, read my book, why dogs are better than cats.

That'll answer a lot of your questions about that. Secondly, as far as has pointed out, you know, we often choose, if you're smart and you choose a dog that suits your personality. One can only assume, you know, that Retepp's dog likes to guzzle a lot and watch porn. Right. And so he's happy. You don't want to them. Because I didn't pick a dog that suited my personality. I was bestowed this dog from the mean streets of L.A.

So I would say to you is that the problem is there are different types of behavioral enrichment. But some small dogs and Chihuahua was at the top of this list suffer from stress and easily stressed out. So you don't want it to be doing too dramatic to change their environment or it might really upset them. But one of the simple things you can do is put them on a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of. a diet and then hide food around the house and in like little plates and so forth. And now he's hungry and motivated and he can start using his little doggy senses and he's half Terry. He should be able to find anything.

And then he'll stop running around the house, looking for food, looking for treats. And that might be a way to awaken his creativity and problem solving. Love that. And also give him a little bit of stimulating exercise. Don't ramp it up with new toys and loud things unless he loves that because certain animals start getting stressed very quickly. you'll see them pull out their fur and scratching their ears. So start gently, a little bit of a diet.

We do this with animals on late night shows. What I do is in the morning, we feed them a half feed, and then I bring their favorite stuff, whatever it is, to feed on the show, and then I don't pay attention to the lights and the people in the audience. So that time that I got my nipple torn off by a reindeer, I was giving him gram crackers, and then I think I told you this before,

and then I took him away just for a second, and he reached forward, and I made the stupid mistake of putting my hand on his head and going, hey, settle down, big guy. And this is in November, December. Right. When he's holding ready to go take Santa around the globe?

It's fuck, fight, and feed. The three Fs in that order. And so he just, he just, you know, 450 pounds of bull reindeer just drilled me. But the point was that tactic of offering them treats in addition to reduced diet will help give them more active behaviors without putting them under stress. I like that, yeah.

That's good advice. I'm going to legit start that today with his... No, that's great. That's great. BTG just gave everybody listening a very good bit of behavioral enrichment for your dog at home if you're out working and your dog doesn't have stuff to do. So, listen, it's near the end of the year. Every single year, Nat Geo puts out a most interesting animal's discovery article.

Okay? We're coming up on Christmas here. So this episode for In the News, BTG, you sent it to me. I thought after Peter plays the jingle, we'll dissect. Here it goes. The best of Matti Elton. The Air News from the Underground. What's in the news?

BTG, you are our lead on this. Tell us about the 12 most intriguing animal discoveries of 2021. All right. So I want to preface this by saying that if you listen to, to the Wild Times podcast. You know most of this before it's been announced. So I'm calling Fowl. I love Natchio.

We love me some golden rectangle. Everyone knows that. Of course. We all love it. So anyway, so here are the 12, top 12 animal discoveries of 2021. The first that I put up there is the virgin birth in a California condor.

It's been discussed on the show. We're talking about pathogenesis, when a female animal is able to produce a clone or a half clon of themselves. There was a time when we thought this was just lizards, particularly the whip-tail lizards of Nevada and California. And then we kept looking, and we started finding it in insects. We found it in copperhead snakes.

We found it in bonnet head sharks. There have been very rare occurrences in birds that were successful. This is not actually the first one that's happened in the California Condor program, which I've been close to now for many years. This is the first successful one. Often there are genetic problems like with Dolly the sheep who was the first, you know, artificial clone. Clone sheep. And died young.

And you find that a lot. But this one actually worked. Two females kept together ended up producing a clone of each other. And boom, very exciting. And I would point out because it's Christmas that even though we virtually never see this in mammals, technically the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord, was a perfect example of mammal pathogenesis. Boom. That's right. That is a good point.

The one and only mammal parthenogenesis, the immaculate concept that we know of. You know, based on the nerd-inous level of many of our brosners, it may be the only way they're successfully going to reproduce. So take notes here, Brosner's. I have always insulting you, Brosners. It's funny. They insult us all the time. It's funny, and it's all meant in good faith. I think to point out that there are Brosness and Sistons, and if we can somehow bring the brosters and Sinses together,

Or brosters who like brosters and sisters who like snisters, I think there's potential a lot of love in the room. That was such a... Say brosters and cisterers 10 times fast. Yeah, that was such a tongue quistners. Okay, the next thing was interesting, an alarm to us all, and that was that COVID-19 was found in wild deer and a number of other captive animals,

including big cats, gorillas should be a surprise at basically us. Ferrets, minks. Yeah, parents. And this is the scary one. Ferrets and domestic dogs and cats. Yep. So let's hope that Retap's dog is not listless on the floor because he's bored. Let's hope he doesn't have COVID.

Wait, wait. The producer has COVID, but the point is the transmission disease between animals and humans is both common and rare at the same time. Let me explain. There are sometimes it's very easy. Like, for example, Launceston was gifted from a sister city in Japan a bunch of snow monkeys. Have I told you this before? I don't believe sober. No, uh-uh.

Okay. So you get this sister city program, which is a bunch of bullshit. But occasionally there's a cultural exchange of note. In this case, we won massively because there's sister city in Japan, which I don't even remember, even though I love Japan, gifted the city of Launceston in northern Tasmania, an entire snow monkey exhibit in the park, like a really nice facility. Oh, cool. Wow.

And then, and then just remember how the time I got chlamidal conjunctobitis from koala urine in my eyes. You remember that? I do know that story very well, yes. Which is also featured in an episode of Adventure Beast available worldwide Netflix now. But we started getting reports of monkeys and particularly macaques with herpes bee. And very easy for people to catch it from a monkey, spittle, air, flatulence, anything with particles, you can get it. Touch their shit, put the finger on your mouth. The kind of stuff we do every day. Anyway, they had to euthanase every captive macaque, not just in our facility in Tasmania,

but in every facility in Australia because they had this disease. So in some cases, very easy to get the disease. That's terrible. But in most cases, very hard. You can't get it. Some animal can be very, very sick and die, and you can't catch it, or the reverse is true. But in this instance, we're finding that COVID has already appeared in,

in, you know, survey, and uncensored. in deer, in primates, in dogs, in cats. I'd like to jump in and make... Sorry, go ahead, BT. Sorry about that. And also in musterlids. I mean, that's crazy. When was the last time you heard of a human disease

that had affected such a broad spectrum of animals? That's it. No, that's interesting. So there's a couple things I want to say on that. One is just my own personal thoughts. Every single time I see a dog out walking around in the streets, I bend down and let it lick me in the face every single time without question. It could be like somebody's Rottweiler that's trying to rip my throat out.

And I'll be like, come here, buddy. And I do it five times a day. So I'm glad I'm vaccinated, but I just realize now that maybe that's not the best thing to be doing during COVID. And it's funny because I already knew that domestic house dogs could carry COVID, but it's the first time right now I've had that little light bulb moment going, wait, maybe I shouldn't let every city dog lick me in the mouth. So that's point number one. Point number two, and this is going to get a little heavy here for a second.

Oh, boy. We're going to the Peraanam. Do it. No, and I'm not, mark my words on this. Tell me if I'm wrong. The next great global pandemic will come from our relationships with dogs and the fact that in some places we torture and eat them, specifically speaking China and Indonesia. And I can explain baby birds because here's what happens. We have been co-evolving and co-existing with dogs for a very long time. Most of our diseases are not transmittable to them because they run at a higher body temperature than we do.

They have a higher core temperature and viruses survive in a very specific temperature range. Now, all that being said... That is interesting. It is. All that being said, man's best friend in a certain places in the world and as food scarcity continues, used to rise, which it does, whether we like to admit it or not, people are torturing and eating dogs. Now, in Indonesia, that's seen like a Thanksgiving holiday where you eat a tortured dog. In China, there's a festival every year in Yulon China called the Dog Meat Festival.

I strongly believe, having been to wet markets in Indonesia and seen how some of these animals are treated, I strongly believe the next global pandemic will come from our mistreatment of man's best friend mixing with some of these festering conditions. where there are bats and snakes and all these other things, basically the same way we originally thought COVID was concocted. But I believe the next major global pandemic will come out of, and I could even say the specific place, but it will come out of our relationship with dogs

and mistreating them in a wet market. I believe that very strongly. Go ahead, Retap. What do you mean they torture them? Just their conditions they live in? No. Yeah, they're kept in tiny cages. They're not sometimes fettered.

But further to that. But wide up before they even get butchered. They're not killed without paying. You know, they're often butchered. And they're killed by butchering, not but not killed before butchering. Oh my God. In the Tomahon extreme market, which is where, in my opinion, the next global pandemic will arise, which is in Tomahon, Indonesia.

They, every year there is a Thanksgiving-like tradition. I say Thanksgiving like because it's like us eating turkey in the United States, where the meal that you choose to consume, and it's a very small percentage, it's not like here where everyone has a turkey in the United States. It's something like 6% of the population of Indonesia does this. It's a very small number. But their meal of choice is tortured dog.

It's not dog at a market. It means they take dogs and they torture them because it releases a certain, you know, it releases adrenaline in their system, it changes the flavor of the meat. Interesting. That's horrible. I know that, I know the reverses to in Georgia or I've gone barehanded hog hunting before,

which is a funny story in itself. But you capture these hogs alive. You take them home and you, you know, you tether them with rope in the boat, but then you're all marshes and then you take them home. And they pen them and then they feed them nice food for the next six months, calm them down, fatten them up. Fatten them up. calm them down and they actually castrate most of the boars because the testosterone makes the meat

super gaming and gross. Right. So it's a reverse taking the taste out. The torturing of something for extra flavor is a next level of evil. I will meet you three quarters of the way there. I don't know that it's going to be specifically dogs, but I don't disagree with your thinking. Okay. I think what you're really saying is certain domestic animals that we've lived beside for so long

and we're easy to handle are going to become the new bushmeat because we've wiped out most of the bush mean. Right. You know, we're running out of turtles in Asia. We're running out of, everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere.

We're running out of, yeah. So, all that kind of stuff. I think that's highly possible. And I think, I think the consumption of disease meat and the cross-pollination of pathogens is certainly a very scary area. And if you think back to the previous scary diseases to SARS and Ebola, where did they came from? They came from animals.

We didn't think we can get diseases from. And in some rare cases, a la. the bats, the bat guano eaten by pigs, pigs eaten by people. I mean, who could have imagined that? And that's exactly what happened, and it'll happen again. So I think it's scary. I tell you what's going to hit first, it's going to hit Santa Barbara. And I'll tell you why.

Because Santa Barbara, people who haven't been there, it's this beautiful luxe jewel by the sea in Sconson, these stone mountains, and it's massively overresorts. There's a bunch of billionaires that live there. And it's on the main transport lines. between LA and San Francisco. And so it gets supplied with quantities and quality of goods. It doesn't deserve by virtue of population except for the wealth and the fact that there's

no incremental cost by dropping off on the way to San Francisco. And it's a beautiful place. And it also is one of the most profoundly dog-friendly cities in America. Oh, no question. And you can take a dog with you anywhere. Anywhere. If you're going in for anal bleaching, you can take your dog in there. You go into a restaurant, you go into anything you can bring your dog.

Am I wrong? No. And there's a dog parade. Every year where you walk down the streets and everyone sniffs. Everyone's butts. The dogs do the same. It's a big thing. So I think Santa Barbara, I think these jaded billionaires looking for something in exotic,

are going to be the first to eat that tortured dog meat. And then they're going to turn on their own. But anyway, let's get back to that. Wait, wait. Go, Retep. Go. One more quick question. because I want to prevent Forrest from leaving for very long time

because I know he's got to go. No, I want to go through the rest of the list, by the way. I know, I know. But continue. But so I've had this question now for like the past month because I read an article that said SARS-1, they basically discovered the animal that it was caused by within a month. Very quickly, a couple months.

They were able to trace and track where it came from. yet with SARS with COVID it's been two years nearly two years and they still don't know where it came from so I want to get your guys's opinion now after all this time you know the theory that it came originally from like a pangolin that a bat shit on or whatever is that is that still valid wouldn't they know that by now or is it like something completely different because everything I'm reading is like, oh yeah, it still came from an animal and then there's like the lab leak theory. But how do they still not know

two years later with when SARS won they knew in just a couple months? I can answer the first part very quickly. Go ahead. The first part was that was because it wasn't a strictly controlled media blackout

on people asking questions in sensitive areas. Are you familiar with the case of the Chinese tennis player Peng Shui? Yeah, the recent one that she accused someone of sexual assault? She posted about sexual assault, the vice premier of China and she's got millions of followers.

She's one of the top doubles players in the world and within days all her social media accounts was scrubbed. Now there's all these fictional buildups. I'm not saying the Chinese government is deliberately responsible for the release of COVID they developed as a weapon. I discount that. But the point was

that there is high political tension between China and the West right now. Some people believe the economy is growing too quickly is about to collapse, which means that there's going to be a certain degree of political desperation to pertain power. And so you've got people

with the resources to wipe out, for example, a celebrity social media accounts to protect the identity and the reputation of one person. Imagine what could happen if they wanted to protect the integrity of an entire scientific system that stumbled upon this,

whether it was through investigation into new materials, whether it was examining an infection, we don't know. But how you can prevent an investigation in that sort of conditions very easily, whereas in SARS one, it was much more open. Everyone was trying to find a cure very quickly. Right. The same with Ebola.

So I think you've got a political factor in there, which I'm not a conspiracy person. I'm just saying, there are some places that really welcome, you know, people helping them out with their investigation and getting different opinions. And there are some places where they do not want it, and they can stop it. And they do. I mean, we see that in wildlife science all the time, by the way, because it becomes political. It's like what happened with the tortoise and a few other things. It becomes political and people try and shut it down so that they can control the narrative.

We had our visas canceled to China. And I grew up in Hong Kong. Love China. Love Chinese wildlife. Love Chinese zoologists. But we had to get three different permissions to go and film wildlife in certain parts of China. The first one was easy, like any other visa, the media passed. But we couldn't get the wildlife permit and the accident.

to certain areas because of tensions between America and China at that time. Right. And remember they were arguing about soy beans and then retaliated with like Harley Davidson and whiskey and jeans. Oh, yeah. It was crazy. I'm just saying. So I'm not blaming anyone in particular. I'm just saying it's very easy to shut down an investigation if you don't want it.

Yep. Yeah. Let's go back to the, let's go back to our top 12. Yeah. All right. Here we go. Okay. The next one was very interesting for conservation breeding programs.

the team successfully cloned a black-footed ferret from an animal that had died a long time before. So using DNA Jurassic Park style. Now keep in mind there's only there's like four or five hundred black-footed ferrets on the planet. And they're all closely related to a single colony in Wyoming after we thought they were extinct. And now as a result of the frozen zoo, they've started to this cloning program. and there is now a viable ferret, a female, called Elizabeth Ann. And so, now, just because it works for a ferret, doesn't mean it will work for other endangered species.

It takes a long time to develop these protocols. But this is an exciting new tool in conservation breeding and bringing species either back from the brink of extinction or for those Tasmanians who yearn to see a thylacine again, possibly back from extinction. Yep, totally. I love this one. I love anything.

I've talked about this many times. I fully believe that cloning animals that we have wiped out in the last 100 years is a great thing if we can do it right. And so I'm excited by it. How far off do you think we are from that? Like how long? Well, it's happening now, but just the process of doing each individual speech. So for example, in conservation breeding programs, like you're using IVF because you can't get animals together. So I spent, there was the top lab over in Seizak is the group.

and again over one of the main labs is Dr. Linda Penfold, who's America's leading reproductive biologist, she works out also of white oak conservation center, which I mentioned earlier, and it's also home to Mikhail Beresnikov's White Oak Dance Project Studio, in case you're interested in ballet.

The point is that she was making the point to me that just because we have the protocols for some eggs and some sperm of some species, it doesn't correlate. The protocols and the mediums in which you store these materials are often very, very, very, different. And so just because I can breed one antelope doesn't mean another antelope

which lives in the same area will actually work. It's just this, it's incredibly difficult and tedious process. So the answer is it is happening now. But it will be a long time before every threatened species will have this sort of help. And in some cases, it would be too late unless what we've learned from the blackfooted ferret will be something that we can translate to other mammals. But of course, what about

what about extinct birds and herps and all the rest of it? Can we ever bring dinosaurs back like in Jurassic Park? One day, for sure. Maybe, but we've never found, unlike what they said in Jurassic Park, we've never found really effective DNA from all the

stuff we've got. Even in that movie, hello, this is your other son. That's right. They find fragmented DNA. Now Michael Crichton solved that in the novel by pairing it with a frog. And then, of course, the argument

was that the frog DNA was what enabled the animal to have parthenogenesis and lay its own eggs. Now, there's only like two different species of frog, specifically the common reed frog. It's only happened in, it's an African frog, only happened once in captivity that's had parthenogenesis.

And that frog had also bred before we don't know how it all works. But frog pathogenesis is actually really, really rare, but it worked in Jurassic Park. But contrary to what was in Jurassic Park, park. We've never really found effective DNA strands for this kind of genetic work for genetic resurrection. Okay, the next thing was exciting was they found here we, as you know, we're going through a global, a bee, you know, just drought, bees dying everywhere. The San Bernardino Valley,

which is a small area of Lassano, Arizona and Mexico, not too far. They found this little wetlands there and I'm sorry it's this very interesting area with these unusual plants and flowers and they have found that it is basically um the Atlantis of bees just this unbelievable explosion of bee species. Get this. 497 species of bees that's wow living in just over six square miles and they're endemic to that region right? I believe so but they might I mean I mean, I'm sure they might also have spread out into other areas. But the point is that if we can protect this, this might be the planet's emergency reserve of bees. Bees.

I love that. Because, you know, because that's something that we're struggling to deal with is how do we replace bees? And I won't get into all the projects that are happening now. But I promise you in America and Europe specifically, and even internationally with Asia, including China, the whole bee crisis is a major investment. of people trying to help each other out to save the planet. And by the way, and this is important for people to know, just to spread a little doom and gloom for your holiday. If we run out of bees, we all die.

I just want everybody to know that. Without bees, we are effed. Well, I think all our major, just about all our major food plants are pollinated by bees. Now, a lot of good work is done by beetles and other things, but we would have to, if we didn't die, we would have to adapt to a very different diet, Immediately.

And be very creative in how we... Your mushrooms are going to just... The value. The street value of your mushroom hole. That's why I'm dehydrating and stockpiling. I'm just waiting for that bee collapse. Because most mushrooms are not pollinated by bees. Just sporadic.

This one, I didn't feel like this was... This isn't new news to Wild Times listeners, but it's pointing out that some elephants in Mozambique are evolving to lose. This one's such a crock of shit. This one's such a crock of shit. Let it go for us. Let it out. Let it out. There elephants aren't evolving to do anything.

We have put so much selective pressure on that. They are evolving to do things. I shouldn't say that. But they are not evolving or devolving giant tusks. We have put so much selective pressure on them by hammering every single bull elephant with a hundred pound or tusks that those genetics are disappearing. It's the same thing as if you decided to hunt. every guy over six foot five.

Well, guess what? In a couple of years, you're not having babies that are six foot five that are growing up to be six foot five. It's all guys that are 511, and, you know, that's just what happens. It's selective pressure. And that's what we've... We see it here in Nevada with big horn sheep. Right.

And now the alpha Rams, the dominant Rams, are not massive horns anymore because the genetics for those massive Rams is largely shot out by permanent hunting. Yeah. And yeah. No, it's kind of sad. So to me, that was kind of a...

Who the fuck is hunting Rams? Wouldn't that be super easy? They're not like evasive, are they? You're wrong on, like, many fronts there, Peter. They're very hard to get close to, and they're a huge trophy animal. Yeah, and I would just also say that that kind of... It's just such intellectually constipated thought. It's like you're fitted by Andre the Giant trying to pass that ossified stool.

Listen, Andre the Giant could drink an entire 24 pack of beer on a plane and not have to pee. It's true. He passed out on the floors of numerous hotels after drinking six packs of wine bottles. Do you think the whole hotel shook? Probably. Rest in peace, Andre. But yeah, no, they're very hard to get close to. If you get a chance, I think it's, what's the big horn conservation project is out on the border of Nevada?

Yeah. And it's, I visited it. It's great. And even those animals, and they heli-lif, they heli-lifted. those guys in slings into conservation. It's incredible to watch. They don't get a lot of support. Go out there, visit it, give them some money, go and see the animals. I got to tell you, they're incredibly hard to spot their fleece absorbs the reddish dust of the mountains, and you've got to have a good set of binoculars to spot them. I can see why hunters love hunting them,

but I would just like to change the rules a bit, and it's like we do with the grizzly with giant bears in Alaska and say, don't take an alpha breeding bear, take an old bear that's clearly out to, I think you just change the rules that you can absolutely hunt big horn sheep, but you have to do it on foot with a buoy knife and see how that shakes out. You know what? I'm going to go with that one step further and just say, we fill a sack with random things and whatever you pull out, whether it's a crossbow or a knife or a stapler, that's what you have.

That's it. And you got to make it work. There you go. I love that. That would be a mess. What else we got? Here's some good news to counter Forest. doom and gloom is that jaguas, so specifically Mexican jaguas, are moving back into the U.S.

Yes, I love this. Very exciting. I hope they are. Are they? I hope they are. I don't be. I do. I mean, just amazing.

Very strong bike course. For those who, brosters who follow me on Instagram or whatever, you'll see pictures in my face being rearranged by a Mexican Jaguar Cub and a captive breeding program in Fort Worth Zoo. They're incredibly gorgeous cats, incredibly powerful, and they become instantly the most powerful cat in the U.S., completely eclipsing the mountain lion. These are a big, big animal with a powerful bite. This is very exciting news and potentially can drastically change the ecosystem in the same way of wolves into Yellowstone. And it's about time, because we shot out the Jaguars.

They should be here. islands that range through the Sierra Madres, I believe it is, the mountain range that goes all the way down through Sonora and into the jungle. And these little sky islands act as these pockets for these jaguars. And they should be coming all the way up into southeastern Arizona. And instead, you know, we shot him out. And so the near, the top jaguars are a couple isolated animals in northern Mexico. But it's about time they came back. And it's very exciting.

I'm stoked on it. Well, my two things on that. one, we are opening a bar called Sky Islands. And two, the next story is, this is interesting. We talk about, you know, various invasive, you know, hoof stock, particularly horses and donkeys to be a menace. But it turns out that these animals during dry conditions use their hooves to dig up to six feet deep wells to get groundwater.

No. And these artificial oases then become important. resources for endemic wildlife. That's the first I've heard. That's cool. That's cool. Fucking nuts. Digging six foot deep holes? Yeah.

Do you know how difficult that is? It's hugely difficult. And you think about the animals, you know, you know, your rhino and your elephant who can plow up the soil and do stuff. And then down to these African, giant African bullfrogs and the males are these exquisite water engineers and they dig these little channels to create little dams for the eggs they look after.

You hear about stuff like that. But this is news to me. I'm excited by that. That's cool. That's news to me. That's a new one. You know I'm a big fan of sea slugs on the show before we talked about these slugs that can inculcate, you know, cells in their bodies from plants so they can have, you know, create sugars in their body and so forth through photosynthesis, these chloroplasts. Anyway, they found another species you can rip its head off if you wanted to. It's something Retep would do in a drunken binge.

Bataireel fodder. There you get. go, these sea slugs can rip their heads off and then grow an entire new body from the next down. They're new to branks. I remember seeing this, nudibrancs that were capable of reproducing their body from just the head. That is amazing. And that's news to me because I don't know, I mean, you see this similar thing of regeneration of organs and tissues in accelotal, certain amphibians, yeah, salamanders. And they can regenerate eyes, part of their brain, their lungs, obviously their limbs and tail. But I've never heard, I don't know of any species until now.

that you could just, all you need is a head, you can grow the body. That's very cool. It's amazing. It's amazing. There's a new record for whale migration, white migration. A gray whale has set of records traveling more than 16,700 miles, about 20,000 kilometers. Yeah, but come on. That's not top news.

Now you're scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Yeah, but for a layman's like me, it's pretty crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. And it's fascinating. but it's not that it's, oh my God, what a discovery, it's that, hey, we never really looked how far whales could migrate before. Now we're impressed.

That's the difference. I would go one step further than this. I would say that not only is it an observation anomaly rather than an actual fact that we just changed everything the way we saw things. Like you said, oh, climate change and water temperatures have resulted in this animal traveling twice as far, that would be groundbreaking. No, this is us just seeing something for the first time. And I put it to you that there are a number of groups of sea turtles moving back and forth from Japan.

Right. That I would say that they would come very close to the 20,000 mile mark. For sure. But we haven't tracked them that far yet. So I don't know. I don't know. But it's interesting. It is.

This is a very cool story. Indian jumping ants have been found to shrink their brain as they need to. And what happens is a little bit like with female naked mole rats, how they grow those extraverted. animal. They grow the extra vertebra and they get bigger and bigger and therefore capable of giving birth to more and more babies. In this particular case, the winning female who becomes the queen, after winning this competition to become the new queen of the colony, she has to massively expand her ovaries. And in order to have the energy to do that, she shrinks her brain up to 25%. We talked about this on one of the pods.

We touched on it briefly. I think that to me that was a fascinating discovery. Imagine reallocating, you know, physical energy from like your thought process to reproduction. So in other words, imagine if you knocked up your girl and she was just like, she couldn't speak for nine months because she got so dumb because she was just like, I got to grow a baby in my stomach. And she was just like in a vegetative state and you had to like shovel food in her mouth. That's what these ants are doing, which is wild. It's just like, oh, need to make a baby. babies go stupid. I mean,

that's incredible. Yeah. Also, the most fascinating thing for me about this is that if I was ever to start a band, ant ovaries would be a great name for the band. Ant ovaries. Would they be playing at

Sky Islands on Saturday nights? Of course. Everyone's playing at Sky Islands, for sure. I was going to say that you see aspects of this in nature before with sea squirts. and they, once they have found a place to anchor, so they start off life as a little Zoya,

and then they lock down, once they no longer have to find a place to locate, they consume much of their brain to have the energy to flourish because they don't need it. But it doesn't make them stupider, and they weren't geniuses to begin. It's just that they no longer need the aspect of their brain that pertains to relocation and movement

because they'll never move again, that's it. Right. But the other comparison is the Desert Gazelle or Rim Gazelle in the Middle East. Because as you know, when times get really tough and it's super dry even by their standards, they stay alive by harvesting

energy by degrading their own heart and their heart gets smaller and smaller and they survive until the next rain and then they can eat again and then it restores itself over time. Now, I didn't know that. That's fascinating. Oh, it's one of the great stories of survival. And of course

it's all about, it's like it's like the Northern Woodford freezing in the winter, right? Then begin animating. You can't do it. You can't just put one in the freezer and say good luck. And the same way of the Rim Gazelle, you can't just stop feeding it and giving it water. It'll die.

But if they do this gradually, if they sacrifice their own heart muscle, which is a huge muscle gradually, they will get enough energy to survive. Anyway, that's the top 12 animal discoveries, according to National Geographic. I think we would agree that most of those, we already knew that shit. but there are a few in there that are very exciting and certainly as a conservation leader who's committed to a number of wildlife conservation breeding programs for species on the brink of extinction

and certainly speaking for forest, a fellow beardy of note who tries to find animals that are already declared extinct and make us aware that we can bring them back. I vote that the cloning program with the blackfooted ferret first time from musterlid is probably the most exciting news this year.

I think that's my favorite one as well. I'm on board with you there. I love that one. Definitely not elephants losing tusks. That's nonsense. What's your favorite story of 2021, animal story? News, rather. Just the ant ovaries.

It's related to the naked mole rat, which I love. And then the fact that the ant, they battle, they have this interesting battle to become the queen. And then all they do is shut the fuck up and decrease the size of their brains. It sounds fantastic. Speaking as relatively new dads, on behalf of myself, the producer, and the broologist. It's not, it's all about mama brain, you know,

you mother brain and they get old to a loopie. No, it's everybody. It's parent brain. You are so frigging tired all the time. And I, so, you know, if I could blame that on my enlarged ovaries and my reduced brain size. Why wouldn't you? I would.

I remember once, I was so tired. My phone went off by the bed. I reached over the bed to get my phone and fell asleep. like half on the floor and half on the bed. And my wife came in and thought I had a heart attack and died. Welcome to the fog, ladies and gentlemen. That is what happens when you have kids. Any excuse to be able to get away with acting stupid

or not having to put effort into thought is a nice break from society. It is. Look, it has been a tremendous year for wildlife. It's been a tremendous year for this podcast. This has been a wonderful episode. We've had BTG, the professional himself here. Listen, if you're sitting around these holidays, you're getting driven nuts by the family like I am.

I'm at my end laws right now. Do yourself. So what he hasn't smiled the entire time. No, no, I can't. I haven't smiled in a week. You get a dimple crant when you finally do. You get a full-out-frammed. I'm going to DM them a clip.

Hey, you're stepping on my thing. Do yourselves a favor. Okay. Go and watch. adventure beast on Netflix. I've watched the whole thing. It's such a treat. BTG is the voice.

He's the star. Well, the animal's the star, but he's the co-star. It is such a treat. It's a fun thing to watch with your family over the holidays. You will laugh. If you don't,

you get a full refund on this free podcast. That's a guarantee. Yeah, and that's all I got to say. I'm glad BTG was here. Merry Christmas, everybody. I am so stoked on the new year and the new things to come. And about leaving your

in-laws hopefully soon. BTG, thank you so much for joining us. At least you smiled and made me smile. Unfortunately, Forrest's mouth looked like a puckered asshole the whole time. But it is. It's like, it's like, it's like a sphincter with dentches in it. It's terrible. It's terrible. I think his teeth are real. I think his teeth are fake. They're not real. I think he got his teeth in his hair as a set. They're magnificent. Oh, you too. Yeah, the Dollar General. So if you want to follow BTG on Instagram, that's at Tasmanian underscore Grizzly, right? That's me. That's it.

That's it. And then-it-and-score-Grisley on Instagram. Come on over. It's always weird and wonderful stuff. I'm old. And therefore, I go into too much detail about extraneous subject that interests no one but you, Bros. It works.

It works. It's beautiful. It's just like the podcast in visual format. Exactly. No, it really is a visual. form of the podcast. I just want to say thanks again for having me on. I always love catching out with you guys. I wanted to come on one more time before the end of the year and just share my best wishes with everybody. The COVID-Arma Crom thing is real. We've all lost

friends now. And I just want to say to you, one of the keys to success as a military operator and certainly as a creative professional is to understand the parameters of your mission. understand what it is you have to work within. And I would say to you, the current environment is such that the COVID is a binding parameter. Now, one of us now has COVID, and I hope Pat's well and his wife and his child, it's a scary thing. Just accept the parameters of your mission,

which is to avoid COVID and then go fucking nuts within that parameter. I love that. You know what you have to do to stay safe from COVID, get your shot, get your booster, wear your mask, social distance, and then know the parameters, and then go fucking nuts.

Love that. Love that. Merry Christmas, everybody. This is the Wild Times podcast. Do the thing, Retap. Merry Christmas, because now you've both said it. Live within your parameters of COVID. Hopefully this is all over soon.

But if it's not, go to the Wild Timespodcast.com forward slash info to find all the links to the podcast. We have like 80 episodes. The Patreon has another 20 plus a bunch of extra content. Go there, too. That's the Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash wild times pod. All the socials are at Wild TimesPod.

And do not forget to go to Instagram and follow BTG. His Instagram's amazing. He's really been putting out some good shit. That is at Tasmanian underscore Grizzly on Instagram. Love you guys. It's a golden chanterell shit. Yeah. Peter, where are you going?

You just, you just. Just digging down for some paranoia in action Oh yeah Uh-oh That's it Forest is getting dragged I'm good, I'm good That was pretty fine

I don't know if you saw she crawled behind To try and stay out of the camera And you can just totally see her crawling by Everybody's gonna see it online It's hilarious I just assume that all of us have women crawling around behind us on the ground That's just how we live

At all times Peter you're still recording Stop this recording I have to go I'm already late So I'm getting, I'm in trouble Yeah, you got the Kohl's woman, well. Good night, everybody.

Oh, my God, it's still recording. Oh, my God. Ha, ha, ha.