Speaker 1: It's time for strange science. I'm asking you too much.
Speaker 1: I know that's it's like weird science, but strange. So
Speaker 1: some animals get a bad rap, don't they. The vulture
Speaker 1: is one of them. Has to be one of the
Speaker 1: most reviled creatures on Earth. The very word vulture is
Speaker 1: an insult, greedy exploiter. And I understand the bad reputation.
Speaker 1: They're not cute, they're not cuddly. They've got that stooped posture,
Speaker 1: should sit up straight, beady eyes. And then there's the
Speaker 1: whole dead animal thing. I mean, they spend their days
Speaker 1: eating dead animals, and they do so in a not
Speaker 1: so appetizing way. They enter the corpse at its soft parts,
Speaker 1: the mouth, the nose, the anus. According to National Geographic
Speaker 1: Explorer Darcio Ganda, vultures definitely have an image problem because
Speaker 1: here is the thing, there are real world consequences that
Speaker 1: come with not having them. The vultures play a vital
Speaker 1: role in our ecosystem, and this is the whole point
Speaker 1: behind the National Geographics deep dive here on the superpowers
Speaker 1: of nature's most unloved animals. They really are superpowers. Without vultures,
Speaker 1: bad things happen vultures act as nature's cleaners. They hover
Speaker 1: up those rotting carcasses. They prevent the spread of disease.
Speaker 1: Just look at India alone. About thirty years ago, vultures
Speaker 1: nearly disappeared. Many of them were accidentally poisoned by the
Speaker 1: medicine that they were using on cows and as a result,
Speaker 1: the countryside was just littered with these rotting, germ filled
Speaker 1: animal corpses. They were infecting the rivers, the drinking water.
Speaker 1: They amplified the population of feral dogs carrying rabies. It
Speaker 1: was a disaster. The decline in vultures correlated with more
Speaker 1: than half a million excess human deaths in India between
Speaker 1: two thousand and two thousand and five. And that is
Speaker 1: the thing. Cuteness a powerful draw because of our brains programming,
Speaker 1: Like why we want to feed babies when they act
Speaker 1: like they do, It's because they're cute. But you know,
Speaker 1: some of our animal kingdom's outcasts need our attention, They
Speaker 1: need the conservation dollars. You're not gonna give a bunch
Speaker 1: of money to the vulture society, are you. The three
Speaker 1: toad sloth is another one. Slow moving animals got a
Speaker 1: bad wrap from the get go. One nineteenth century account
Speaker 1: labeled them imperfect monsters of creation, adding equally remarkable for
Speaker 1: their disgusting appearance and helpless condition. My god, slots can't
Speaker 1: help that. Several species of algae grow and the grooves
Speaker 1: of their course matted fur, giving that giving them that
Speaker 1: green sheen. But this is a secret weapon, a superpower.
Speaker 1: The algae helps camouflage all of the creatures that live
Speaker 1: in those canopies. The leopard slug. This is an animal
Speaker 1: that doesn't have a spine, and that's hard to get behind,
Speaker 1: isn't it. But they have a surprisingly useful set of adaptations.
Speaker 1: A crown of four wriggling feelers atop the leopard slug's
Speaker 1: head allow them to sense their surroundings, and their gooey
Speaker 1: ooze helps them mate. The slug mucus. By the way,
Speaker 1: here's where you come in. It's made from water, proteins, enzymes,
Speaker 1: other compounds. It is where we came up with how
Speaker 1: to develop workable surgical adhesive. Is from the leopard slug.
Speaker 1: It's quite the your superpower. There's a bunch of them.
Speaker 1: We'll post a picture. I'm running out of time. But
Speaker 1: the Probuscus monkey, the African bullfrog, honey badgers. They all
Speaker 1: play a role in keeping us alive, and so maybe
Speaker 1: we start some sort of ugly animal charity around here.
Speaker 1: My favorite is the hairy frog fish m a toadlike creature,
Speaker 1: the most grotesque of all the fish. According to one
Speaker 1: nineteenth century naturalist. They're covered in a web of stringy
Speaker 1: spineles that help them blend in among algae coated rocks
Speaker 1: and coral while hunting prey. They're very cool and very ugly,
Speaker 1: all right. Coming up next the story that Mason Deborah
Speaker 1: Mark home early one hundred foot megasunami that could hit
Speaker 1: the United States at any moment, and as the headline says,
Speaker 1: that is only the beginning. What fact a strange science? Okay,
Speaker 1: the tsunami that's going to hit at any time. What
Speaker 1: if the tsunami hits before Biver's album drops. I'm just
Speaker 1: putting it out there. I know I hate it too.
Speaker 1: I hate it, and I don't think it's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: The Cascadia Subduction Zone is what we're worried about. This
Speaker 1: is a massive fault line stretching from northern California to
Speaker 1: British Columbia, and it has been This is Deborah's least
Speaker 1: favorite thing, eerily quiet for three hundred years. When it
Speaker 1: finally ruptures, the Cascadia subduction zone is expected to trigger
Speaker 1: a colossal earthquake that could rattle the Pacific Northwest for minutes.
Speaker 1: Think about the earthquakes you've felt have only really been
Speaker 1: seconds long, and they felt like minutes, didn't They. Even
Speaker 1: worse than that earthquake that would last for minutes is
Speaker 1: the tsunami wave. Nay, Tsunami waves Z up to one
Speaker 1: hundred feet would crash ashore, unleashing devastation along the coast.
Speaker 1: But according to a new study published in the Proceedings
Speaker 1: of the National Academy of Sciences, that would only mark
Speaker 1: the beginning of Cascadia's cataclysm. The new analysis reveals that
Speaker 1: land along the coast could drop by more than eight
Speaker 1: feet in a matter of minutes. Eight feet. That's two DeBras.
Speaker 1: That's true. I measure I measure things by how many deborahs.
Speaker 1: The lead author of the study is Professor Tina Dora,
Speaker 1: and she says, we talk about climate driven sea level rise,
Speaker 1: which is occurring at three to four millimeters a year,
Speaker 1: and that does eventually add up. But here we have
Speaker 1: two meters of sea level rise in minutes. She wonders
Speaker 1: why we're not talking about this more well, Professor Tina.
Speaker 1: Probably because we can't do jack s about it, Tina.
Speaker 1: Probably because it makes Deborah worried for four to six days. Tina, Yeah, Tina, Yeah,
Speaker 1: What the hell are we supposed to do, Tina? Build
Speaker 1: up some sort of massive fence, Like, how do you
Speaker 1: prepare for an earthquake? You cannot in an earthquake this
Speaker 1: size at last minutes, in a tsunami that's one hundred
Speaker 1: feet high. You're just screwed, Tina. You're screwed at that point.
Speaker 1: You know, we all know that there's a chance that
Speaker 1: an asteroid could fly into the system and just take
Speaker 1: us all out. But why would we spend more time
Speaker 1: thinking about that? We have no control over it. The
Speaker 1: Cascadia subduction Zone marks the boundary where the oceanic Juan
Speaker 1: Dai Fuca Plate is slipping beneath the North American plate,
Speaker 1: and as they lock together, because they don't move slowly,
Speaker 1: these plates, they tend to get stuck, and when they
Speaker 1: locked together, the strain accumulates over centuries, and then when
Speaker 1: it finally releases, boom. There goes the earthquake. You're not
Speaker 1: going to want to listen to this part. It's produced,
Speaker 1: it's capable. Cascadia is producing quakes of multitude nine or more,
Speaker 1: major events thought to strike every four hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: to five hundred years. The last one occurred on January
Speaker 1: twenty sixth, seventeen hundred. Its magnitude was between an eight
Speaker 1: seven and a nine to two terrifying. So we're new.
Speaker 1: I've told you that, you have said over and over
Speaker 1: again you have we are due. Yes, and it's not
Speaker 1: going to be pretty. It's not. No, no, we will
Speaker 1: not be here to talk about it. We will not.
Speaker 1: I mean John Cobelt gets excited about well it's a
Speaker 1: dark person. Oh I know, but he'll be smashed. It's
Speaker 1: a broken soul, which is not true, by the way, John,
Speaker 1: That's it's all an act. He's such a great he's
Speaker 1: a very good person and very soft inside. He is.
Speaker 1: You know, he's like one of those hardshelled. I don't know.
Speaker 1: You know, he's sitting right here and he has this look.
Speaker 1: He's going to end it. He's going to end it all.
Speaker 1: This will be my last show. He's getting a kick
Speaker 1: out Shannon is singing your praises, John, Yes, she is