Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes for a second,
just for a moment, picture a boxing match. Okay, but
I want you to erase the image of a ring
in Vegas. Forget the lights, the announcer, of the gloves,
all of it right. Instead, I want you to transport
yourself into the middle of a steaming, dense, equatorial jungle.
The mud is thick, the air is just buzzing with insects.
Speaker 2: I can feel the humidity.
Speaker 1: And the contenders they aren't men. They're pigs. Pigs, wild
naked pigs, standing upright on their hind legs, balancing and
throwing jabs and hooks at each other like they're heavyweight champions.
Speaker 2: That is a completely absurd image. It sounds like something
from a cartoon, really it does.
Speaker 1: But then if you look up, I mean way up,
maybe fifty or sixty feet into the canopy, it gets
even weirder.
Speaker 2: How could it get weirder than boxing pig.
Speaker 1: There's a kangaroo up there, a kangaroo, an animal that
evolution designs specifically to hop across the flat, red, baking
deserts of Australia. But here in this jungle, it's just
swaying on a thin brand and looking down trying its
absolute hardest.
Speaker 2: To be a monkey, and just to cap off this
fever dream as you put it, look at the ground.
Speaker 1: Oh, this is the best part.
Speaker 2: There's a bird there, and this bird has decided that
the whole concept of parenting is just, you know, too
much work.
Speaker 1: It's opted out completely.
Speaker 2: It doesn't build a nest, it doesn't sit on its eggs. Instead,
it finds an active volcano, digs a hole in the
side of it, buries its egg in the hot ash,
and just walks away.
Speaker 1: Let's the magma do the babysitting.
Speaker 2: It sounds like we're world building for a fantasy novel,
or maybe describing an alien biosphere in a sci fi
movie exactly, but we aren't.
Speaker 1: This is Earth specifically. It's a very specific, very chaotic
slice of Earth where nature seems to have thrown the
rule book into a shredder.
Speaker 2: And that's what we're getting into today.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and I
am honestly buzzing to get into this stack of research.
We're looking at a collection of articles, research notes, and
a few transcripts from a documentary titled World's Strangest islands,
and we are zooming in on that jagged puzzle piece
mess of islands sandwich right between Southeast Asia and Australia.
And we're talking New Guinea, Borneo, Java, Silawac, and it is.
Speaker 2: Good to be here. You are right to be excited.
This region is and I'd argue this, it's arguably the
biological richest and certainly the most biologically confused place on
the entire planet.
Speaker 1: Biologically confused. I love that.
Speaker 2: But what makes the material we have today so compelling
is that we aren't just going to list the freaks,
you know, We're not just going to say look at
the weird pig. We're going to dig into the y.
Speaker 1: That's the key, right. The source material frames this whole
discussion around a central idea. It argues that this biological
chaos isn't random at all. Next the result of three specific,
really fundamental forces.
Speaker 2: Exactly, It identifies three threads, if you will, that weave
this whole tapestry. First you have the Earth that means
the violent geology, the fire, the tectonic. Then you have
the Moon, which is all about the gravitational pull that
rolls the tides and the coasts. And finally, you have
the Sun, the relentless solar engine of the equator.
Speaker 1: So our mission for this episode of Thrilling Threads is
to trace those three forces. We want to understand how
a tectonic collision leads to a kangaroo and a tree,
and how the moon leads to a fish that understands ballistics.
Speaker 2: It's a journey into the extreme. Look. Evolution is essentially
a problem solving exercise. And when the Earth, Moon and
Sun throw these really extreme problems at life, well life
comes up with some pretty extreme solutions.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the big one. Then the heavyweight champion
of forces, Let's start with the Earth the fire.
Speaker 2: To understand this region, you absolutely have to understand that
it was born in violence. This is a geological battleground.
If we rewind the clock about say twenty five million years,
the map looked completely different. You had the Australian continental
plate and it was just drifting north.
Speaker 1: Australia was on a road trip, a very.
Speaker 2: Very slow road trip. It was carrying a very specific cargo.
Speaker 1: Of passengers, marsupials.
Speaker 2: Marsupials animals adapted to the dry flat Australian bush. But
then the road trip ended in a crash. The Australian
plate slammed right into the Asian plate.
Speaker 1: The source material calls this a slow motion car crash.
Speaker 2: That's the perfect analogy. And like any car crash, the metal,
or in this case of the land, it just buckled.
This collision didn't just merge the land, It thrusted upwards violently.
Speaker 1: And this is how New Guinea was created exactly. And
I think people really underestimate New Guinea. We think tropical island,
we think beaches and palm tree.
Speaker 2: Right, but New Guinea is the tallest island on Earth.
Because of that tectonic smashup, you have peaks rising nearly
five thousand meters.
Speaker 1: That's over sixteen thousand feet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are glaciers on the equator because of this.
So you have this massive vertical wall of rock appearing
out of seemingly nowhere.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the first huge problem for
the animals. Yeah, these Australian passengers, the kangaro who, the wallabies,
who are used to hopping on flat ground, right and
suddenly they are shoved into a vertical, dense, humid Asian
style rainforest.
Speaker 2: I mean, just imagine the confusion you are built for
speed on the planes. You have giant feet, massive tendons
for that bouncy energy return, or rigid tail for balance,
and suddenly the floor is gone and all the food
is fifty feet up in a tree.
Speaker 1: It's adapter Die.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and this is where we get the tree kangaroo.
I love the description in the notes because it doesn't
try to make them sound majestic or graceful. It describes
them as works in progress.
Speaker 1: They're clumsy, that's what it says. They're just clumsy.
Speaker 2: They are. I mean, if you watch a monkey move
through trees, it flows, it's like water, just seamless. A
tree kangaroo is, well, it's hesitant.
Speaker 1: So how have they adapted? They must have done something.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure, their forelimbs are shorter and much stronger
for gripping. Their claws are curved now to hook onto bark.
But they still have those giant, almost comical hopping feet.
Speaker 1: So they can't run along a branch like a squirrel
or a monkey.
Speaker 2: No, no, they have to hop on a branch. It's
incredibly precarious. The source material mentions that they fall all
the time. Really, Oh yeah, they take tumbles that would
break a human's neck, but they're just built tough. They land,
shake it off and climb back up.
Speaker 1: It really highlights that evolution isn't always about perfection, is it.
It's just about being good enough to survive.
Speaker 2: That's a great point. The tree kangaroo is not the
perfect tree climber, not by a long shot, but it's
the only large mammal in New Guinea that could fill
that niche. There were no monkeys there, so.
Speaker 1: The kangaroo just looked up, saw all those leaves and said, well,
I guess I'll give it a shot. Pretty much now.
While the mammals were struggling to learn how to climb,
the birds were having an absolute field day. The collision
created these massive mountain ranges which acted like walls isolation.
Speaker 2: That is the engine of speciation right there. The mountains
cut populations off from one another completely, so.
Speaker 1: A bird in one valley might never meete a bird
in the next valley, even if it's just five miles.
Speaker 2: Away exactly, and over millions of years they just drift
apart genetically they become different species.
Speaker 1: And New Guinea's famous for this. It's known as the
Island of birds, specifically the birds of Paradise.
Speaker 2: The birds of Paradise. We have thirty nine distinct species
there and they all descended from one single crow like
ancestor that came over from Australia. That's incredible, and the
variety is staggering. You have birds with long wires coming
out of their heads, birds with iridescent breasts, shields that
change color in the light.
Speaker 1: The ones that can shape shift into a black oval
with a blue smiley face on it.
Speaker 2: That's the one. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: But why, I mean, why do they become so fancy?
The notes mentioned something called the abundance factor.
Speaker 2: This is crucial to understanding them. In most of the world,
life is hard. If you're a bird in say Europe
or North America, you spend almost all your waking hours
just looking for food.
Speaker 1: Right, it's a calorie deficit game.
Speaker 2: And if you have babies, the male has to help.
If he doesn't bring worms back to the nest, the
chicks die, simple as that.
Speaker 1: So he doesn't have time to practice a dance routine exactly.
Speaker 2: He's a working dad. He's got bills to pay. But
in New Guinea, because of the tropical climate and the
rich volcanic soils. Fruit is everywhere. It's a two hundred
and forty seven buffet.
Speaker 1: So a female bird of paradise can feed herself in
her chicks easily. She doesn't need the male's help.
Speaker 2: Which means the males are well. They're biologically unemployed.
Speaker 1: They have no dad duties none.
Speaker 2: They have unlimited calories and unlimited free time. So where
does all that excess energy go?
Speaker 1: In?
Speaker 2: Competition goes into competition, into sexual selection. The females hold
all the cards.
Speaker 1: They become the ultimate gatekeepers of the gene.
Speaker 2: Pool totally because they don't need a provider. They can
select purely for esthetics. They become incredibly picky. The notes
say they inspect the males for minutes, even hours. If
a single feather is out of place, if the dance
move is slightly offbeats rejected instantly. It's the most brutal
talent show on Earth.
Speaker 1: And over millions of years, this female choice has driven
the males to these incredible extremes.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, they have evolved plumage that actually makes it harder
for them to fly. They've evolved dances that take them
years to practice and perfect. It's an evolutionary arms race
of beauty, and it's all fueled by the fact that
they just don't have to worry about starving.
Speaker 1: That's a fascinating idea. The luxury of the environment allows
for the luxury of art.
Speaker 2: That's a beautiful way to put it. It really is.
Speaker 1: But the Earth force isn't always so generous, is it.
We've talked about the collision, but we also have to
talk about the fire the volcanoes.
Speaker 2: Right the ring of fire runs right through this region.
And while mountains isolate, volcanoes, well, they incinerate, but life
finds a way. And this brings us to the volo,
the volcano bird.
Speaker 1: This was the part of the research that I kept
rereading because I genuinely couldn't believe it was real. Bird
uses the volcano as a tool.
Speaker 2: It's a story of outsourcing. Incubation is expensive. Sitting on
an egg requires body heat, which requires calories. It makes
you vulnerable to predators.
Speaker 1: So the Malayo just decided to opt out of that
whole system. It did.
Speaker 2: They live on sulues, which is highly volcanic. They come
down from the hills to these specific nesting drounds. But
the ground isn't just dirk.
Speaker 1: It's volcanic ash or.
Speaker 2: Sand near thermal fence. It is heated from below by
the magma of the earth.
Speaker 1: But heat is tricky, right. You can't just bury an
egg anywhere too hot, it cooks, too cold, it dies.
There has to be a sweet spot.
Speaker 2: That is the genius of the malayo. The female has
a specialized sensory organ, not in her feet.
Speaker 1: But in her throat, in her throat.
Speaker 2: In her throat, she digs a massive pit, sometimes a
meter deep. Then she leans her head in and tests
the temperature with her tongue and throat. It can sense
changes of half a degree celsius.
Speaker 1: She's checking the thermostat for the planet.
Speaker 2: She is looking for a very specific window thirty three
degrees celsius two, not thirty four, exactly thirty three. She
might dig five or six different test holes before she
finds the perfect spot.
Speaker 1: And once she finds it.
Speaker 2: She lays the egg. Her mate helps her cover it
up with sand, and then they leave. They go back
to the forest.
Speaker 1: They never see the egg again. Never that feels cold.
No pun intended.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly efficient. But think about the consequence for the baby.
That egg incubates for about sixty to eighty days. That's
a long time.
Speaker 1: So when the chick hatches, it's completely alone.
Speaker 2: It's alone, it's in the pitch dark, and it's buried
under a meter of heavy wet sand.
Speaker 1: It wakes up in a coffin.
Speaker 2: Effectively, yes, and it has to dig its way out.
This is its first experience of existence, clawing through the
earth for up to forty eight hours just to reach
the surface.
Speaker 1: That's insane. And when it finally pops out.
Speaker 2: It is fully formed because of that long incubation. It
has feathers, it has strength, It can run immediately, it
can fly within hours of emerging.
Speaker 1: That is the ultimate sink or swim parenting style. It's
just welcome to the world, kid, dig yourself out, good luck.
Speaker 2: It sounds harsh to us mammals, who you know, we
cuddle our young, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it's brilliant.
The mother saves huge amounts of energy, which allows her
to lay larger, more nutrient rich eggs.
Speaker 1: But the trade off is that the chick has to
be a super soldier from minute one.
Speaker 2: From day one, it's on its own.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that's the collision zone and the volcanic belt
of the east. But I want to shift our gaze
west now to the islands of Borneo, Sumatra and Java.
The notes make a really important distinction here. These islands
have a different origin story.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is really crucial for the listener to visualize.
New Guinea is for all intents and purposes Australian. But
the western ailes Borneo, Sumatra, Java, they sit on what's
called the Sunda Shelf.
Speaker 1: They're part of the Asian Continental Tlake exactly.
Speaker 2: And this matters because of the ice ages. When the
world freezes, sea level drop a lot. The water gets
locked up in the ice caps. So the shallow seas
that are now between these islands and main land Asia
just disappeared. It became a giant land bridge. So it
was a highway, a super highway. Animals could literally walk
from what is now Thailand or Vietnam straight into Borneo.
This is why you find elephants and tigers and leopards
on these islands. They aren't island animals, They're continental refugees.
Speaker 1: And this leads to a perfect counterpoint to our clumsy
tree kangaroo. In the west, the trees are ruled by
the given.
Speaker 2: The given is the master class If the tree kangaroo
is an amateur fumbling around, the given is an olympian
at the top of its game. These animals have had
millions of years in the Asian rainforests to perfect their anatomy.
Speaker 1: The descriptions of their movement are incredible. They call it bruciation.
Speaker 2: Swinging, but just look at the mechanics of it. Their
fingers are elongated into permanent hooks. Their wrists have a
ball and socket joint that allows a kind of rotation
that you and I can't even dream of. They just
act like pendulums and speed.
Speaker 1: The notes said something like fifty kilometers an hour.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fifty k an hour through dense trees. Imagine driving
your car through a city at thirty miles per hour,
but you are on on a road. You're grabbing lampposts
to propel yourself forward, and.
Speaker 1: If you miss one lamp post, you die.
Speaker 2: The processing speed of their brain must be extraordinary. They're
calculating distance, trajectory, and branch strength in milliseconds. It just
shows a difference between an animal adapted to an environment
over deep time versus one thrust into it.
Speaker 1: Recently, speaking of animals that walked over from the mainland.
We have to talk about the hairy rhino, the Sumatra
and rhinoceros.
Speaker 2: A tragic, beautiful and very confusing creature. There are what
fewer than one hundred of them left in the wild,
so few and physically they're an anomaly. They are covered
in this coarse, reddish brown hair, which.
Speaker 1: Again in the tropics, seems like a major design flaw.
I mean, I sweat just thinking about wearing a wool
sweater and a rainforest.
Speaker 2: It's a relic, it's a throwback. They are the closest
living relatives to the wooly rhino that roamed the frozen
tundra during the last ice.
Speaker 1: Age, so they kept the family coat.
Speaker 2: They did, but to survive the heat, they had to
basically hack their own biology with mud. With mud the wallow,
we see pigs rolling in mud, but for the Sumatran rhino,
the wallow is life support. They don't just find a puddle,
They engineer it. They dig it out, maintain the pit,
keep it clear of debris, and make sure it collects rainwater.
Speaker 1: They're building their own personal spa.
Speaker 2: They will soak in there for hours a day. The
mud plasters the hair down to the skin, which traps
moisture and cools them through evaporation. It also protects them
from biting flies.
Speaker 1: So it's an ice age adaptation that's been hacked for
the tropics.
Speaker 2: I love that phrasing. I'm wearing a winter coat, so
I'm gonna live in a mud bath. It's a perfect summary.
Speaker 1: Now, staying with the earth force in the West, we
talked about volcanoes as nurseries, but here they're also destroyers
on a massive scale.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The documentary highlights two specific sites. First, you have
Kawa Eyegen on the island of Java, and this place
is visually stunning, has blue flames.
Speaker 1: Yeah, explain that. How does a volcano burn blue? I
didn't even know that it was possible.
Speaker 2: It's pure chemistry. The volcano sits on a massive deposit
of sulfur. The crater itself is a lake of sulfuric acid.
It's actually the largest acid lake in the world. Whoa
high pressure sulfur gases bellow out of cracks in the
rock at six hundred degrees celsius, and when that superheated
gas hits the oxygen in the air, it ignites.
Speaker 1: And sulfur burns blue.
Speaker 2: A vivid electric blue at night, it looks like rivers
of blue neon lava are flowing down the mountain. It's
incredibly toxic, incredibly dangerous, and somehow incredibly beautiful.
Speaker 1: And then there's the Big One Lake Toba on Simatra, Toba.
Speaker 2: Today, it's this serene, massive lake you'd never guess, but
it's actually the caldera of a supervolcano about seventy five
thousand years ago. It didn't just erupt, it exploded.
Speaker 1: This wasn't the local event. This was a global event.
Speaker 2: It was the largest volcanic eruption in the last twenty
five million years. It ejected so much ash and sulfo
dioxide into the atmosphere that it blocked out the sun.
Global temperatures plummeted, and.
Speaker 1: There's a theory that it almost wiped out humanity.
Speaker 2: Right the Toba catastrophe theory. It suggests that our species
might have been reduced to just a few thousand reading pairs.
We were pushed to the brink of extinction.
Speaker 1: So we're all here today because our ancient ancestors managed
to survive the Toba Winter. But the real twist in
the research is what happened after the explosion.
Speaker 2: Destruction leads to creation. That is the great paradox of
this earth force. Volcanic ash is unbelievably rich in minerals, magnesium, potassium, calcium.
It is the ultimate fertilizer.
Speaker 1: So Coba killed everything, but in its wake it created
a garden of Eden.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. The forests on Sumatra today are spectacularly
productive because of that ancient ashfall, and this abundance has
had a fascinating effect on the animals living there, specifically
the orangutans.
Speaker 1: This was the section about culture which blew my mind.
Speaker 2: Yes, usually animals are opportunity. They eat whatever they can find.
If there are figs available, everyone eats figs. But around
Toba the biodiversity of plants is so high thousands of
different fruit species, that the orangutans can afford to be picky.
Speaker 1: The notes call it individual diets. Right.
Speaker 2: One mother might decide she absolutely loves the seeds of
the sat toor tree. She becomes an expert in finding them,
cracking them open, processing them, and she teaches her baby
how to do it.
Speaker 1: But another family might ignore that trade completely.
Speaker 2: Just a mile away, another mother might ignore the sat
tour tree completely and focus all her energy on rambutan fruit.
It's like human families. Some are pasta families, some are
potato families.
Speaker 1: That is exactly what it's like. It's cultural transmission of knowledge.
Speaker 2: It is the baby learns a specific mental map of
the forest from its mother. This level of dietary individuality
is almost unique among great apes. And it's only possible
because the ecosystem is so incredibly rich.
Speaker 1: And the ecosystem is so rich because a super volcano
blew up seventy five thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: Connecting those dots is just it's amazing. A global catastrophe
creates a gourmet culture for apes.
Speaker 1: I love that, but not everywhere in this region is
so lucky. We have to talk about Borneo.
Speaker 2: Borneo is the counter example. Borneo is ancient rock. It
hasn't had active volcanoes for millions of years. It hasn't
had that fresh dusting of mineral rich.
Speaker 1: Ash, so the soil is old.
Speaker 2: It's exhausted. The heavy tropical rains day after day for
millions of years, have just washed all the nutrients away.
The source material calls it a wet desert.
Speaker 1: The forest looks lush and green, but the soil is
basically bankrupt exactly.
Speaker 2: So if you're a plant and you can't get your
food from the ground, what do you do?
Speaker 1: You turn into a predator, you do.
Speaker 2: This is why Borneo is the world capital of carnivorous plants.
The picture plants.
Speaker 1: We've all seen the cartoons, the classic plant that eats bugs.
Speaker 2: They're marvels of engineering. The leaf curls into a cup
or a pitcher, and it fills with digestive fluid. The
rim is slippery. Insects come for the nectar. They fall in,
drown and are slowly dissolved, and.
Speaker 1: The plant gets its nitrogen from the bug's body bypassing
the poor soil entirely.
Speaker 2: It's a brilliant workaround.
Speaker 1: But there is one story in here that just stands
out above all the others. The hems Leanna pitcher plant.
This is my favorite thrilling thread in the whole stack
of notes.
Speaker 2: Ah, the bat toilet.
Speaker 1: I still can't see it with a straight face. Please
explain the bad toilet.
Speaker 2: Okay, So, nepenthe Umsliana is a large pitcher plant. But
scientists noticed it wasn't catching very many insects. It seemed
like a pretty bad predator.
Speaker 1: It was failing at its one job.
Speaker 2: It was then they looked at the shape of the
back wall of the pitcher and they realized it's a
perfect parabolic.
Speaker 1: Dish like a satellite dish.
Speaker 2: Exactly like a satellite dish, but it's not for TV.
It's shaped to reflect ultrasound sonar. Yes, there's a specific
tiny bat, the Hardworks wooly bat that flies through these forests.
It uses sonar to navigate. When it pings this particular plant,
the plant reflects. It's a very distinct acoustic signature.
Speaker 1: So it lights up on the bat's radar.
Speaker 2: It's an acoustic beacon. It's basically shouting vacancy here. So
the bat flies in and it roosts inside the picture.
The plant is tapered perfectly, so the bat gets stuck
just above the digestive fluid. For the bat, it's a safe, cool,
parasite free sleeping bag.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the bat gets a five star hotel room.
What does the plant get in return?
Speaker 2: The rent is paid in guano.
Speaker 1: The bat poops in the plant.
Speaker 2: It does and backuano is incredibly rich in nitrogen. Its
premium fertilizer delivered directly to the plant.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Research shows These plants get almost one hundred percent of
their nitrogen from these bats.
Speaker 1: That is symbiosis at its absolute finest. All provide the bed,
you provide the fertilizer.
Speaker 2: It really connects back to the theme. The problem was
poor soil. The solution wasn't to grow deeper roots. The
solution was evolve the sonar dish to attract a flying
mammal to use you as a bathroom.
Speaker 1: Evolution has no dignity, only results.
Speaker 2: That is the perfect to put it.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's move on before we get to the moon,
our second big force, we need to bridge a gap.
We've talked about islands that crash together in islands that
were connected by land bridges, but what about the islands
that just popped up out of the sea. How does
life get to a sterile rock.
Speaker 2: In the middle of the ocean colonization. This forces us
to look at the air and the water differently. We
think of the air as empty, but it's a highway.
Speaker 1: The notes call it the aerial army.
Speaker 2: You have the obvious things like seeds, spores, pollen, all
blowing on the wind, but you also have baby spiders ballooning. Yes,
young spiders climb to the tip of a leaf. They
stick their abdomens in the air and they release these
long strands of silk. But they aren't just catching the
wind like a kite. It's more complex than that.
Speaker 1: What do you mean.
Speaker 2: The silk actually picks up electrostatic charges from the Earth's
natural electric field.
Speaker 1: Wait, they're flying on electricity.
Speaker 2: They are using the potential difference in the atmosphere to
generate lyft. They can travel hundreds even thousands of kilometers
across the open ocean at altitudes of thousands of meters.
Speaker 1: So there are just millions of spiders raining down on
these islands every day.
Speaker 2: That's nightmare fuel for some people, but it's amazing for biology.
And then after spiders come the.
Speaker 1: Gardeners, the fruit bats.
Speaker 2: The fruit bats, they can fly between islands. They eat
fruit on the mainland, fly to a barren volcanic rock
to roost, and while.
Speaker 1: Nature calls droppings.
Speaker 2: Again, it's a theme, it's a recurring theme. They drop
the seeds prepackaged in a little packet of fertilizer. They
can turn a sterile rock into a fledgling forest in
just a few decades.
Speaker 1: Now, in this mix of islands, there is this weird
in between zone.
Speaker 2: The notes called Walaysia, right, it's named after Alfred Russel Wallace,
the other father of evolution. Walaysia is the in between.
These are islands like Sulaweseed that were never connected to
Asia and never connected to Australia.
Speaker 1: They're surrounded by deep ocean trenches.
Speaker 2: You can't walk there. You have to swim or fly
or drift on a raft of vegetation for months because it's.
Speaker 1: So hard to get to. The mix of animals is
just bizarre. It's a mashup, a total mashup. Let's talk
about the Barbarusa, the pig gear. This animal looks like
a Glish in the simulation.
Speaker 2: It really really does. It's a pig that has been
isolated on the island of Siluesi for maybe twenty million years.
And when you leave a pig alone for that long,
strange things start to happen.
Speaker 1: The tusks. Let's start with the tusks.
Speaker 2: In a normal wild boar, the tusks grow from the
lower jaw and curve up and out. In the barbarusa,
the upper canine teeth grow upward, but they don't come.
Speaker 1: Out of the mouth, no, they pierce right through the
flesh of the snout. They come out at the top
of the nose and curve back towards the forehead.
Speaker 2: It looks painful, and if they grow too long, they
can actually grow back into the skull and kill the animal.
Speaker 1: So what are they for. They can't be for fighting,
they're pointing the wrong way.
Speaker 2: They're not. They're actually quite brittle. If you hit them hard,
they snap. They're purely for display for attracting mates.
Speaker 1: But the males still need to fight for dominance.
Speaker 2: They do, and this brings us back to your opening image.
Speaker 1: The boxing boxing pigs.
Speaker 2: Because they can't slash at each other with their tusks
like normal pigs, they've evolved a completely new fighting style.
They stand up on their hind legs and they wrestle
and shove with their front hoofs. They box, They box,
they try to knock each other over. It's a completely
unique behavior born out of this weird anatomical constraint.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. And right next to this boxing pig you
might see a bear.
Speaker 2: Kuskis, which is a marsupial. It's a relative of the
possum with a prehensile tail. So on one single island
you have an Asian derived pig and an Australian derived
marsupial hanging out in the same tree. It's the meeting
point of two completely different worlds.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've covered the Earth, the fire in the collisions.
Now let's shift to the second great force, the moon,
the force of gravity, the tides.
Speaker 2: The source material takes us to the coast for this one, specifically,
to the mangroves. This is a world that completely shape shifts.
Speaker 1: It does. Twice a day the moon drags the ocean in,
flooding the entire forest, and twice a day it drags
it back out, leaving behind these endless miles of thick,
sticky mud.
Speaker 2: It sounds unpleasant.
Speaker 1: It's a brutal environment. It's salty, it's hot, and the
mud is anoxic. It has no oxygen, so it smells
like rotten eggs. And yet nature fills the vacuum. We
find monkeys here. The pis monkey.
Speaker 2: Another top contender for Nature's most unfortunate looking animal.
Speaker 1: The nose is undeniable. It's huge, bulbous, fleshy on the
old males that hangs down over the mouth.
Speaker 2: What on earth is the point of it?
Speaker 1: Sex? The females prefer males with bigger, droopier noses. It
also acts as an echo chamber to amplify their loud,
honking calls across the forest.
Speaker 2: Okay, but looking past the note, look at their bellies.
They have these massive pot bellies. They look like they've
had a few too many beers, but that belly is
a survival tool. Mangrove leaves are tough, they're waxy, and
they're full of toxins. Most animals can't eat them as
monkey can. It has a complex, multi chambered stomach, just
like a cow. It's a fermentation tank filled with bacteria
that break down the leaves. They're constantly full of gas
because they are literally digesting the undigestible.
Speaker 1: But the notes say they have a sweet tooth threat.
They do.
Speaker 2: Inland there are sea high biscus trees with these big
sweet flowers. But to get there they have to cross
the open mudflats at low.
Speaker 1: Tide, which is incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 2: Extremely when the tide is out there completely exposed. There
are clouded leopards, huge pythons, massive monitor lizards out there.
But the monkeys take that risk every day for the
sugar hit.
Speaker 1: It's a daily commute of terror just to get dessert. Basically,
speaking of terear, let's look closer at that mud. The
real drama is happening on a microscale. We have fish
living inside trees, the gobies.
Speaker 2: This is a story of extreme almost claustrophobic adaptation. On
the mudflats you find these fallen logs. Shipworms and sea
snails bore tunnels into these logs, turning them into Swiss cheese.
Speaker 1: So the log is a maze.
Speaker 2: It's a labyrinth. When the tide goes out, the mud
dries up and gets baked by the sun. Most fish
would die in minutes, but the gobi swims into the
tunnels inside the log. The wet wood holds moisture, but
it's pitch black in there. It is a dark, twisting labyrinth.
The gobe has to navigate these tunnels to find tiny
pockets of trapped water. If it takes a wrong turn,
it hits a dead end and desiccates. And they aren't
alone in there. There are predatory worms and even small
octopuses living inside the log too.
Speaker 1: It's like a dungeon coller video game level one. The
rotten log, it really is.
Speaker 2: They have to hide in the dungeon until the tide
returns and they can escape.
Speaker 1: And just outside the log you have the fiddler crabs.
Speaker 2: The fiddler crab is a study in asymmetry. The male
has one tiny little claw for feeding and one absolutely
massive claw that can weigh as much as the rest
of his body combined.
Speaker 1: It's like a human walking around with a tennis racket
made of solid lead permanently strapped to arm.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy. It is a massive handicap. He
can't eat with the big claw, so he feeds at
half the speed of the female. He is constantly on
the verge of starvation because he has to drag this
giant weapon around all day.
Speaker 1: So why you do it? Why have it?
Speaker 2: To wave? He stands by his burrow and he waves
that giant claw in the air to attract females. It's
a signal, Look how big my claw is. Look how
strong I must be to lift it.
Speaker 1: It's the handicap principle. I am so fit, I can
survive despite this ridiculous burden.
Speaker 2: Exactly. And if the waving doesn't impress another male, they fight.
They lock those giant claws and just sumo rustle the
goal is to flip your opponent onto his back.
Speaker 1: And then the baking sun. Getting flipped can be a
death sentence.
Speaker 2: It can be fatal if you can't write yourself quickly.
Speaker 1: All this drama is driven by the moon. But when
the water comes back high tide breaks the hunters.
Speaker 2: The archer fish. This is my absolute favorite example of
physics in nature. It's just brilliant.
Speaker 1: The sniper the archer.
Speaker 2: Fish hunts insects that are sitting on leaves above the water,
and it shoots them down.
Speaker 1: But it's not just spitting, is it. It's more sophisticated
than that.
Speaker 2: No spitting implies a messy spray. This is a projectile weapon.
They press their tongue against a groove in the roof
of their mouth to form a tube like the barrel
of a gun. Then they compress their gill covers to
create a blast of pressure, and.
Speaker 1: They fire a jet of water. But the physics are
the really hard part.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. First you have to account for refraction. Light
bends when it passes from air to water. If you
look at a straw and a glass of water, it.
Speaker 1: Looks bent right.
Speaker 2: The fish looks up at the bug, but the bug
isn't visually where it seems to be. The fish has
to calculate the angle of refraction and aim for the
real bug, not the ghost image of the bug.
Speaker 1: It's doing trigonometry in its head and ballistics.
Speaker 2: It has to account for gravity which will pull the
water stream down. It has to arc the shot perfectly.
But the most mind blowing detail in the source material
is something they call hydrodynamic bunching.
Speaker 1: Explain that that sounds like something out of Star Trek.
Speaker 2: Okay. So if you just shoot a stream of water,
it naturally breaks up into mist. A mist isn't going
to knock a big an off a leaf. So the
archer fish changes the velocity of the water during the spit.
It shoots the tail end of the stream faster than
the head of.
Speaker 1: The stream, so the back of the water jet catches
up to the front.
Speaker 2: Exactly the water collides with itself in midair to form
a single solid bullet or slug of liquid right at
the moment of impact. It maximizes the kinetic energy transfer
to punch the bug off the leaf.
Speaker 1: That is weaponized fluid dynamics. That is unbelievable.
Speaker 2: It effectively brings the danger of the ocean up into
the air. The moon brings the tide, the tide brings
the fish, and the fish brings the physics.
Speaker 1: Moving a bit deeper into the water. The lunar fores
powers the reefs too.
Speaker 2: Tides mean currents. Currents churn up nutrients from the deep ocean.
Nutrients mean a bloom of plankton, and a bloom of
plankton attracts.
Speaker 1: The giants, whale, sharks and manta rays.
Speaker 2: The documentary describes a wonderful scene they call a mantray
car wash.
Speaker 1: I love this bit.
Speaker 2: Reef mantis are huge five six meter wingspans, but they
can't clean themselves. They get covered in tiny parasites on
their skin, so they go to specific coral heads. These
are known as cleaning stations.
Speaker 1: They just hover in the current and the staff comes
out to work.
Speaker 2: The cleaning crew. The moon rass these are small, brightly
colored reef fish. They swim right up to the manta
and they pick the parasites off its skin. It's a
perfect mutualism. The ray gets clean, the little fish gets
a free meal.
Speaker 1: They even clean inside the gills.
Speaker 2: In the mouth, right right up inside. The manta just
holds perfectly still and lets them do their job, and
then we have.
Speaker 1: The synchronization events, the moon acting as a conductor for
the whole ecosystem's orchestra.
Speaker 2: The fireflies in the mangroves, there are these trees that
are just full of fireflies, and usually fireflies flash randomly,
but here they all flash in perfect unison.
Speaker 1: The whole tree blinks on and off at once, like
a giant biological neon sign.
Speaker 2: For a long time, scientists thought it was a cooperative thing,
you know, hey, let's all flash together to be brighter
and attract more females. But the transcript says it's actually
the complete opposite. It's driven by competition.
Speaker 1: How is synchrony competitive? That seems counterintuitive.
Speaker 2: The female, as it turns out, prefer the male who
flashes first. They are drawn to the leader of the pack.
So every single male in that true is trying to
flash just a millisecond before his neighbor.
Speaker 1: It's a race to the start.
Speaker 2: It's an arms race to be first, and because they
are all trying so desperately to be first, the gap
between them just disappears. They end up flashing at the
exact same moment. It's perfect order created by pure selfish competition.
Speaker 1: That is a profound insight, and it happens in the
new moon, right when it's darkest Yes, and on the flip.
Speaker 2: Side of the lunar cycle, the full moon triggers the Bohar.
Speaker 1: Snappers, the spawning orgy.
Speaker 2: Thousands and thousands of these red snappers gather from all
over the reef at dusk on the full moon. They
spiral up to the surface in the moon light. They
release these massive clouds of eggs.
Speaker 1: And sperm into the water and they time it with
the tides.
Speaker 2: They time it with the strongest lunar tides to flush
the fertilized eggs out into the deep ocean, away from
all the predators waiting on the reef to eat them.
Speaker 1: It really emphasizes that these animals are living on a clock,
a celestial clock, which brings us to our final great force, the.
Speaker 2: Sun, the masterclock, the engine of the rainforest.
Speaker 1: Because we're on the equator, the sun is different here.
It's not about seasons, no summer, no winter. It's just
twelve hours of blistering sun, twelve hours of pitch black dark.
Speaker 2: Every single day of the year. That consistency allows the
forest to become a colossal solar power plant, and.
Speaker 1: At the top are the giants, the dipterocarp trees.
Speaker 2: These are the tallest rainforest trees in the world. They
can reach ninety meters high, almost three hundred feet. They
hold up the sky. But the real store here is
the struggle for light.
Speaker 1: The forest floor is incredibly dark.
Speaker 2: Two percent of the sunlight that hits the canopy actually
makes it to the ground, So if you're a little seedling,
you are in deep trouble. A dipterocarp seedling can sit
in that gloom for fifty years.
Speaker 1: Fifty years, it barely grows.
Speaker 2: It just enters a state of suspended animation, waiting, waiting
for a death, waiting for one of the giants to fall.
When an old tree finally crashes down, a light gap
opens up in the canopy, and then the race is on.
The seedlings that were waiting just sprint upwards towards the light.
If they don't reach the canopy before the gap closes,
they die.
Speaker 1: Now these trees have an nemesis. The seeds they produce
are really tasty.
Speaker 2: The bearded pigs love them. If the trees drop fruit
every year on a predictable schedule, the pig population would
explode and they'd eat every single seed. The trees would
never reproduce.
Speaker 1: So the trees have a strategy to outsmart the pigs
mass fruiting.
Speaker 2: It is a collective, coordinated strategy. The trees in an
entire region communicate, we think, through chemical signals in the soil.
They wait for years, sometimes a decade, producing nothing. The
pig population starves or moves on, and then then all
at once, millions of trees fruit simultaneously. They drop billions
of seas in the space of a few mets.
Speaker 1: They're flooding the market.
Speaker 2: It's a strategy called predator satiation. Even if every single
pig on the island eats until it bursts, there are
still millions of seeds left over to germinate. It's a
boom and bust cycle controlled by the trees to manipulate
the animal population below.
Speaker 1: But this unpredictability must be a nightmare for the animals
that live there. If you don't know when the fruit
is coming, how do you possibly survive?
Speaker 2: You need a big brain. This is why the orangutan
is the genius of the forests. Orangutans have the longest
childhood of any animal except for us humans. A baby
will stay with its mother for up to nine years.
Speaker 1: Nine years. Why so long.
Speaker 2: Because it has to learn the map, the mental map
of the forest. It's not just climb tree, eat fruit. No,
it's the fig tree in the Southern Valley fruits in May,
but only if it rained heavily in March. The Durian
tree on the high Ridge fruits every four years, but
the fruit is only good for two recks. They have
to memorize the location and the fruiting cycle of hundreds
of different tree species.
Speaker 1: They're building a mental database of food resources.
Speaker 2: If they forget or if they don't learn that map
from their mother, they will starve during the lean times.
Their incredible intelligence is a direct response to the erratic
rhythm of the forest.
Speaker 1: And speaking of trees and survival, we have to talk
about the strangler fig. The name alone is a horror
movie title.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate killer and the savior. It starts
as a tiny seed, maybe dropped by a bird or
a bat, in the upper branches of a giant host tree.
Speaker 1: So it starts the top and grows down.
Speaker 2: That's backwards, completely backwards. It sends these long, thin roots
descending from the sky. They dangle down, sometimes for one
hundred feet until they hit the soil. Then they anchor
in and thicken, they become woody. They wrap around the host.
Speaker 1: Trees trunk and they fuse together.
Speaker 2: They fuse together to form a latticework cage, and they
are literally scrangling the host.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: They squeeze the trunk, cutting off the flow of water
and nutrients, and their leaves grow over the top of
the host canopy, stealing all the sunlight. Eventually, the host
tree inside dies and rots away.
Speaker 1: So when we see a big hollow strangler fig, the
hollow space inside is the ghost of its victim exactly.
Speaker 2: It is a ghost shape, a perfect mold of the
tree it killed.
Speaker 1: That's the killer part. That's pretty brutal. Why is it
also a savior because.
Speaker 2: Of the wasp? The relationship between the fig and the
fig wasp is arguably the most complex and intimate symbiosis
on Earth.
Speaker 1: Okay, walk us through this. The notes on this were intricate, right,
So a.
Speaker 2: Fig isn't a fruit in the normal sense. It's actually
an inverted flower garden. All the tiny flowers are on
the inside of that ball.
Speaker 1: So to get pollinated something has to get inside.
Speaker 2: A tiny wasp has to get inside. We're talking two
millimeters long. A female wasp finds a fig. She has
to crawl through a tiny opening called the ostele. It
is so tight that she usually rips her own wings
and antenna off to get in. She is on a
one way mission, that is dedication. She gets inside, she
lays her eggs in some of the flowers, she pollinates
the other flowers, and then she dies. Her body is
just digested by the fig.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a grim start.
Speaker 2: Then her eggs hatch the male's hatch. First. They're blind,
their wingless, pale little things. They live their entire short
lives inside that one.
Speaker 1: Dark fig, and their only purpose.
Speaker 2: Their only purpose is to find a female, one of
their sister's mate with her and then use their strong
jaws to chew an escape tunnel through the thick wall
of the fig for her and then the male's diy.
They die inside. They never see the sun, but the females,
now pregnant and covered in pollen, crawl out through the
tunnels the male's made. They fly out into the forest
to find a new fig and start the whole cycle again.
Speaker 1: It's a cycle of absolute total sacrifice. It is.
Speaker 2: But here's the savior part. Because the wasps live such
short lives, only a couple of days outside the fig,
the fig trees have to fruit constantly year round to
keep their specific wasp population alive. They can't wait for seasons.
Speaker 1: So even when the rest of the forest is shut
down during a dry.
Speaker 2: Spell, even during a drought, even when the dipterocarps are
dormant and there's no other fruit, the strangler figs are producing.
They are the keystone species. The orangutans, the hornbills, the gibbons.
The entire forest community relies on the fig to survive
the bad times.
Speaker 1: The tree that kills its host keeps the rest of
the forest alive.
Speaker 2: It's nature's mind bending complexity in a nutshell.
Speaker 1: We're reaching the end of the daily cycle here. The
sun also brings the rain, the classic afternoon downpour.
Speaker 2: The intense equatorial heat causes massive evaporation. Clouds build up
all morning, and then by two PM, the heavens just
open its violent torrential rain, and.
Speaker 1: Animals have hacked this too. The gricilla's pitcher plant.
Speaker 2: The rain driven trap. Most pitcher plants rely on slippery
wax or sweet nectar to trap insects. This one relies
on physics. It has a lid that acts as a springboard.
Speaker 1: What sprain board.
Speaker 2: The nectar is on the underside of the lid, so
ants have to climb underneath to drink it, hanging upside down,
and when the rain hits a single rain drop strikes
the top of the lid. The impact vibrates the lid violently.
The ant loses its grip and is literally catapulted down
into the digestive fluid below.
Speaker 1: It's using the weather as a hammer to catch its
food precisely, and finally the sun goes down, the night
shift begins.
Speaker 2: The transition is marked by sound, the six point of
pm cicada. It calls at dusk with such incredible precision
you could set your watch by it.
Speaker 1: And outcome the night hunters. The ned casting spider.
Speaker 2: The dynopsis or ogre faced spider. This thing is pure
Sci fi. It hunts at night in the darkest part
of the forest, so it needs to see in the dark.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't just have night vision. It builds it
from scratch.
Speaker 2: Every single evening it grows a new massive light sensitive
membrane inside its two huge eyes. It becomes two thousand
times more sensitive than a human eye. It can see
clearly in near total darkness.
Speaker 1: But that sensitivity would be destroyed by sunlight.
Speaker 2: It would burn out instantly, So when the sun starts
to rise, the spider's body dissolves the membrane. It destroys
its own night vision every morning and rebuilds it every
single night.
Speaker 1: The metabolic cost of that must be astronomical.
Speaker 2: It's immense, but it allows the spider to hunt in
the way no one else can. It hangs upside down
holding a square net of web between its front legs.
When an insect walks in the leaf below, it lunges
down and wraps it up like a gladiator.
Speaker 1: Incredible. And up in the trees we have the Tarsia.
Speaker 2: The Yoda of the forest. It has these massive eyes.
In fact, each one of its eyeballs is as big
as its entire brain.
Speaker 1: That seems like a design flock. There's no room for
anything else.
Speaker 2: It means there's no room for muscles in the eye sockets,
so they can't move their eyes to look left. They
have to turn their entire head left.
Speaker 1: So they've evolved a special neck they have.
Speaker 2: They have neck vertebrae that allow for a one hundred
and eighty degree rotation, just like an owl.
Speaker 1: And one final creature to close out the night, the Kolugo.
Speaker 2: The so called flying lemur, which is neither a lemer
nor does it actually fly.
Speaker 1: A completely misleading name.
Speaker 2: It's a glider, but it has the most extensive gliding
membrane of any mammal on Earth. It's a sheet of
skin that stretches from its jaw to its fingertips, to
its toes and right to the tip of its tail
when it spreads out. It is a living kite.
Speaker 1: And why glide? Why not just climb down it up
like a squirrel energetics.
Speaker 2: The trees are huge and they're far apart. Climbing all
the way down to the ground and all the way
back up the next tree takes huge amounts of calories.
Gliding is free transportation, it's gravity powered travel.
Speaker 1: So bringing it all together, now, we've looked at this
one incredible region through three different lenses, Earth, Moon, and Sun.
Speaker 2: The violence of the Earth created the stage, It built
the mountains, It isolated the islands, It created the nutrient
poor soil. In one place, and the rich volcanic ash.
In another right, the moon provides. It's the constant rhythm
for the coastal life, driving the tides, the currents, and
the reef cycles, and the sun, and the sun drives
the engine of the forest itself, and the daily, relentless
struggle for light and energy.
Speaker 1: And the result of these three forces converging is this
one pocket of the world where evolution has just gone
completely wild.
Speaker 2: It's the biologically richest place on Earth for a reason,
and that reason is adversity. Diversity comes from adversity, the toxins,
the isolation, the competition, the weird problems. It forces life
to innovate in ways you just don't see anywhere else.
Speaker 1: So it brings us to the big thrilling thread takeaway.
You mentioned earlier that evolution is really just a problem
solving exercise.
Speaker 2: It is, we look at a bird burying an egg
in a volcano, and we think it's weird, but it's
not weird. It's a solution. The problem was incubation is
energy expensive and dangerous. The solution was use geothermal energy.
Speaker 1: The problem for the picture plant was there's no food in.
Speaker 2: The soil, and the solution was of all the sonar
and get a bat to use you as a toilet,
or use rain drops as a catapult.
Speaker 1: It makes you look at nature completely differently. It's not
just animals doing random things. It's a world of engineers
solving problems with the only.
Speaker 2: Tools they have precisely. And sometimes those tools are a
giant claw, or a reflective leaf, or a nose that
acts as an echo chamber.
Speaker 1: So here's my question for you listening right now. We've
covered some really extreme niches today. If you had to
evolve to survive in one of these spots, which one
would you pick?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a tough one.
Speaker 1: Would you be the volcano bird, trusting the earth itself
to raise your kids? Would you be the gobie living
in a dark, wet tunnel inside a log, playing high
stakes mazes every single day, or maybe the strangler fig
playing the long, slow game of Killer and Savior.
Speaker 2: I think I'd go with the gibbon. Hitting fifty kph
through the pre tops seems like a pretty good life.
It's basically flying without needing a license.
Speaker 1: It's hard to argue with that one though. Being a
male bird a pair with literally no responsibilities except to
dance sounds pretty good too.
Speaker 2: That's a fair point, a very fair point.
Speaker 1: Listeners, let us know what you think in the comments.
What would your evolutionary strategy be, and maybe consider what
forces are shaping your own environment right now. Maybe it's
not volcanoes and tides, but the principles of adaptation remain.
Speaker 2: Adaptation is the game.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on this journey through the world's
strangest islands. This has been thrilling threads until next time.