Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's your boyfriend's old roommate who always put
Speaker 1: pepsi's in the freezer and then forgot about them until
Speaker 1: they exploded. Ali would back with another episode of Ologies,
Speaker 1: So check in with your bod right now. Are you cold?
Speaker 1: Are you hot? How do you feel? Are you sweating?
Speaker 1: Is this too many personal questions? Okay, let's change the
Speaker 1: subject to me. Well, actually, te you. Thank you so much,
Speaker 1: as always to the patrons who support ologies at patrion
Speaker 1: dot com slash Ologies for everyone who gets themselves some
Speaker 1: ologies merch to put on their warm or their cold bodies,
Speaker 1: and of course everyone who subscribes rates, especially who reviews
Speaker 1: the podcast. You know, I read your reviews each week
Speaker 1: and it's creepy proof. Here's a fresh one. Baruerbird seventy
Speaker 1: seven wrote, I drive into work two days a week.
Speaker 1: Some days the thought of getting out of the house
Speaker 1: with a bra and mascara seem too much until I
Speaker 1: remember that a new episode awaits. I can't wait to
Speaker 1: hear what Old dow Ward has in store for my
Speaker 1: commute tomorrow. PS stay with me when you come to Philly.
Speaker 1: Open invitation. I'm mostly normal. How can I say no
Speaker 1: to that? Also? Keke and Colakookram left a sweet review
Speaker 1: that asked been listening for a while and I'm still
Speaker 1: not sure why Ali refers to herself as dad word.
Speaker 1: It's a great question. It started in a podcast Facebook
Speaker 1: group because i like hot dogs and bad puns, and
Speaker 1: I'm just very likely to lecture you about tire pressure
Speaker 1: safety because I love you. I just want you to
Speaker 1: be safe. Okay, So thermo physiology, let's get into it.
Speaker 1: Let's get it into us. Rather so thermo in ancient
Speaker 1: Greek means hot. Physio derives from the word for nature,
Speaker 1: so everything from hotness and nature to coldness in a
Speaker 1: lab as we will soon discuss. So this ologist is amazing.
Speaker 1: I met him over Thanksgiving at a dinner held by
Speaker 1: our mutual bud Karasanna Maria of the Tough Nerdy podcast
Speaker 1: and new to LA having just taken on the role
Speaker 1: of professor at UCLA. He mentioned some of the courses
Speaker 1: he teaches and his podcast, The Biology of Superheroes, and
Speaker 1: from there I gently begged him him to be on ologies.
Speaker 1: Then I found out we had more mutual friends, such
Speaker 1: as the Aaron's Welsh and Almond Updyke of the Epidemiology episode,
Speaker 1: and this podcast will kill you. Essentially, I was like, hello, sir,
Speaker 1: I regret to inform you that you will be my
Speaker 1: friend forever. So what a better time to talk about
Speaker 1: body heat issues than February when it's cold, heaters are cranked,
Speaker 1: nary a daffodil bulb has sprung from the slush, So
Speaker 1: we scheduled the time to record. I reached out to
Speaker 1: ask for a few more days, though, because I was
Speaker 1: so behind working on the aging episode that I literally
Speaker 1: cried that day. So this ologist kindly let me reschedule
Speaker 1: for a few days. Then I headed over to his
Speaker 1: brand new office at UCLA, where he was wearing normal
Speaker 1: person clothes and I was wearing four layers and a
Speaker 1: scarf because I'm at Chihuahua. So he showed me some
Speaker 1: fancy chambers in his lab and we settled in to
Speaker 1: have an absolutely wonderful and informative chat about how critters
Speaker 1: adapt to temperature changes, lizards, storms, dinosaur blood, hibernating bears,
Speaker 1: why you sweat in your sleep, maybe you specifically anti
Speaker 1: phrase frogs, miracle hamsters, why different people run at different temperatures,
Speaker 1: How comic books influence the way he sees science, learning
Speaker 1: how his brain works and sometime management hacks that he
Speaker 1: uses as a professor and host of the Biology of
Speaker 1: Superheroes podcast. So get ready to warm up to your
Speaker 1: new biology hero thermo physiologist doctor Shane Campbell Staton.
Speaker 2: And get every once in a while, or sometimes Stayton Camboy.
Speaker 2: It's a hyphenated names. It's a difficult life to live.
Speaker 1: Now, this is your first harsh Southern California winter.
Speaker 2: Oh so harsh? Yes, the yeah, I've notned. So I've
Speaker 2: spent my life sort of bumping around a bunch of
Speaker 2: different places. And before I moved here, I was in Montana.
Speaker 2: Before Montana, I was in Illinois, and then before that
Speaker 2: I was in Boston, all of which have pretty harsh winters.
Speaker 2: Before that, I was in Rochester, New York, which may
Speaker 2: actually be the snowiest place in the entire country.
Speaker 1: Oh so quick, aside. I look this up and Rochester
Speaker 1: is the fourth snowiest of the lower forty eight states,
Speaker 1: clocking in in about ninety nine inches of snow per year,
Speaker 1: which is just an injure to less than Anchorage, Alaska
Speaker 1: typically gets. Now, if you're listening in Syracuse, New York
Speaker 1: right now, you are screaming in your car or at
Speaker 1: your phone. You were saying, yes, bitch, Rochester is Florida
Speaker 1: compared to our one hundred and twenty three inches of snow,
Speaker 1: So yes, Syracuse, New York, you win for most snow
Speaker 1: related winter suffering. Also on the sunny side, if you're
Speaker 1: doing all that shoveling, you probably have pretty good core strength,
Speaker 1: pretty good abs. I don't know. That's all I got.
Speaker 2: And for the longest time I remember moving up from
Speaker 2: South Carolina, I was like, what is this lake effect
Speaker 2: that people keep talking about? And because the first time
Speaker 2: I'd ever heard of it, and then I realized the
Speaker 2: first winter came, I was like, Oh, it's like a
Speaker 2: hurricane but cold. Basically, it was a harsh reality to live.
Speaker 2: So luckily I bumped it over here to La.
Speaker 1: Good work on that. Okay, Now, what was it about
Speaker 1: your upbringing that you thought, I want to study biology.
Speaker 1: I want to study science, and particularly temperatures and cold.
Speaker 2: Oh man. So those things did not come along intentionally
Speaker 2: by any means. So when I was a kid, I
Speaker 2: got really obsessed with reptiles. I don't know what it
Speaker 2: was about the scalies that got me, but it was
Speaker 2: just a thing, and you know, and my mother, like
Speaker 2: blessed her heart. She was super supportive, but she you know,
Speaker 2: she was she just doesn't do that sort of stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but she was really supportive. I remember in high school
Speaker 2: I had, you know, all sorts of creatures for a
Speaker 2: senior project I did, and you know, I had like
Speaker 2: a python and several different lizards, a giant green iguana,
Speaker 2: a breeding pair of corn snakes, like all this sort
Speaker 2: of stuff. I was obsessed with it.
Speaker 1: So Shane wound up getting his pH d in Organismic
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. But before that, as
Speaker 1: a young herp nerd, he figured biology would be the
Speaker 1: best course if he wanted to study his beloved reptiles,
Speaker 1: and he got his Bachelors of Science in ecology and
Speaker 1: evolutionary biology at the very snowy but yes, not as
Speaker 1: snowy as Syracuse, Syracuse University of Rochester.
Speaker 2: And so that's what I did. And I got this
Speaker 2: when I got introduced to anoles, because I love it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're so cool and actually so the one species of
Speaker 2: a knoll that is native to the United States. It's
Speaker 2: like the only there's like the very first animal I
Speaker 2: ever interacted with as a kid, because in South Carolina
Speaker 2: they're just like all over like the sides of houses
Speaker 2: and stuff.
Speaker 1: And aol is just a type of lizard, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So in AOL it's it's like this small lizard,
Speaker 2: typically small, that has like this little throat fan and
Speaker 2: they do a bunch of push ups and they like
Speaker 2: wave that little throat fan. But there are about four
Speaker 2: hundred species of aknole that are distributed across the neotropics,
Speaker 2: so like central South America, the islands of the Greater Antilles,
Speaker 2: and then our one special North American anol that's native
Speaker 2: to the US. There's a bunch of other species now
Speaker 2: that are invasive, but that's the one that's native. So
Speaker 2: that's and that's also the species I ended up studying
Speaker 2: for my dissertation.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, so you started liking them when you were
Speaker 1: a kid. You started them to get your beach?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, right, You're like, oh, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: Did you ever think when you were a kid with
Speaker 1: studying lizards and having corn stakes and having pythons, that
Speaker 1: you would get to do this for a living.
Speaker 2: I did not realize that this was a thing to
Speaker 2: do for a living. Generally speaking, it is interesting that,
Speaker 2: you know. So for me, you know, I was certain
Speaker 2: I think you know, when you asked most biologists how
Speaker 2: they got into science, they typically how it's like, Oh,
Speaker 2: when I was a kid, I was like walking through
Speaker 2: the woods, splashing in a tidal pool, and I just
Speaker 2: knew from that point on and that wasn't my life
Speaker 2: or you know, because my mom worked really long hours,
Speaker 2: I was like a latch key kid. I spent a
Speaker 2: lot of my time, you know, indoors. So my introduction
Speaker 2: to the outside world, to like nature and wildlife was
Speaker 2: through television like Jeff Corwin and Steve r and these
Speaker 2: these guys and then the little green lizards that you know,
Speaker 2: were around my house. And so to go from there
Speaker 2: to being able to do things like this, right, communicating science,
Speaker 2: you know, to people who you don't spend most of
Speaker 2: their lives doing this sort of stuff, I mean, it's
Speaker 2: sort of really special circle for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how great is that? For real? And so when
Speaker 1: you got your PhD, what exactly were you studying about
Speaker 1: these inoles?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I was studying the evolution of cold tolerance
Speaker 2: in anoles, so trying to understand how geographic variation in temperature,
Speaker 2: influences patterns of like gene flow across space, and then
Speaker 2: how it influences physiology, you know, which ended up being
Speaker 2: a big question of mine because the green and ole
Speaker 2: came from Cuba originally, so sometime during the Miocene or Pliocene,
Speaker 2: it was transported from Cuba, most likely by storm. That's
Speaker 2: typically the way these sort of small things jumped from
Speaker 2: island to island.
Speaker 1: So just fay, yes, did have to look up how
Speaker 1: long ago was somewhere between the Miocene and Pliocene, and
Speaker 1: the Miocene was anywhere from twenty three to five million
Speaker 1: years ago. The Pliocene was two to five million years ago,
Speaker 1: so I think I think he's talking like five ish
Speaker 1: million years ago. These adorable little green lizards came over
Speaker 1: from Cuba, making things more enjoyable, kind of like living dackeries. Big, big,
Speaker 1: old stupid question. I'm just so glad that I asked.
Speaker 1: Do they go in the air?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Really, yeah, they can fly through the air sometimes,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like flocks. Them like drift like wood
Speaker 2: or leaves sometimes get you know, get blown across the water.
Speaker 2: But yeah, like a frog storm, yes, oh yeah, it
Speaker 2: gets it and get real biblical real fast you show
Speaker 2: see hail fall from a clear sky and burn his
Speaker 2: fire up on the ground.
Speaker 1: So they can just rain down Cuban and knoles in
Speaker 1: a different part of the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, more or less.
Speaker 1: Oh that's awesome.
Speaker 2: More or less. Yeah, that's so cool. Yeah, I've never
Speaker 2: I don't. I have never heard of any reports that
Speaker 2: have actually, like you know, first hand reports of people
Speaker 2: like experiencing lizard rain ps.
Speaker 1: Allow me to read you an excerpt from the Sunbury
Speaker 1: American newspaper dated November twenty first, eighteen fifty seven, headline
Speaker 1: shower of lizards. The Leroy New York Gazette says that
Speaker 1: during the heavy rain of Sunday night last live lizards,
Speaker 1: some of them measuring four inches in length, came from
Speaker 1: the clouds like manna, though neither as plenty nor half
Speaker 1: as welcome. They were found crawling on the sidewalks and
Speaker 1: in the streets like fugitive infantile alligators, in places far
Speaker 1: removed from localities where they inhabit nature. Just when you
Speaker 1: think it's not a hallucination, it rains and knolls.
Speaker 2: Actually, I had a photo. I remember there's a sign
Speaker 2: test at ut Knoxville whose work actually inspired the work
Speaker 2: that I did with the green and ole. And he
Speaker 2: showed me this photo when I went and visited him
Speaker 2: of this male green and ole outside in the winter
Speaker 2: and there's this huge icicle on the side of the picture,
Speaker 2: and that's just such a really it's just a weird
Speaker 2: environment for like this tiny, little cold blooded subtropical animal
Speaker 2: to live in, and I just thought it was fascinating.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I got obsessed with how these animals were
Speaker 2: dealing with these these novel cold temperatures. How were they
Speaker 2: So yeah, so that's a it's actually it's a kind
Speaker 2: of a complicated question. But one of the things that
Speaker 2: we've found is that the farther north you go, essentially
Speaker 2: the more cold hardy the animals become. So we do
Speaker 2: these tests when we're looking at the limits of thermal tolerance.
Speaker 2: So for ectotherms like cold blooded animals, their internal body
Speaker 2: temperature is really tightly correlated with the external body temperature,
Speaker 2: and that means that their performance is really tightly tied
Speaker 2: to the external body temperature.
Speaker 1: How much beach volleyball would do you play in the snow? None?
Speaker 1: Because the answer is none.
Speaker 2: So what we would do is, you know, we go
Speaker 2: to a site and we take go into a population
Speaker 2: catch animals and we bring them into the laboratory and
Speaker 2: then we do these trials where we we goose them,
Speaker 2: so we put like a little thermometer in their cloaca,
Speaker 2: and then we cool them down very slowly by like
Speaker 2: one degree celsius per minute, and then we test for
Speaker 2: their ability to maintain a writing response, will like flip
Speaker 2: them onto their backs, and then we try to get
Speaker 2: them to flip themselves back over because a lizard always
Speaker 2: wants to be on its feet. And the temperature at
Speaker 2: which they can't do that anymore like that, we call
Speaker 2: that their lower thermal limit was called the critical thermal minimum.
Speaker 2: And so when we measured this across the the geographic range,
Speaker 2: we found that animals where the winter temperature or populations
Speaker 2: where the winter temperatures were coldest, had the animals that
Speaker 2: were the most cold hearted.
Speaker 1: Hello if your neutologies. A cloaca is a butt and
Speaker 1: reptiles and birds enjoy the convenience of a one stop
Speaker 1: shop for pooh pe sex and scientific spa treatments involving thermometers.
Speaker 1: So Shane says there's a lot of local adaptation. The
Speaker 1: lizards that can survive that cold have offspring they can
Speaker 1: also survive it, but they also just become heartier because
Speaker 1: they're like, been there, done that, walked two miles in
Speaker 1: the snow uphill. But unlike your friend's cranky grandpa, these
Speaker 1: lizards are doing it all this in the nude. Don't
Speaker 1: picture your friend's grandpa in the nude. Don't do it.
Speaker 1: Don't anyway in the wild. Natural selection, right.
Speaker 2: But but when we bring like gravid females into the
Speaker 2: lab and they lay eggs and those babies are born,
Speaker 2: we raise those babies under common laboratory conditions, so they've
Speaker 2: never seen a winter anywhere outside, and we do these
Speaker 2: same cold tolerance experiments. We find that the offspring have
Speaker 2: the same level of cold tolerance as their parents did.
Speaker 2: Would suggest that there's some heritable, genetically based component to
Speaker 2: cold tolerance.
Speaker 1: And then you and I are endotherms, Yes we are.
Speaker 1: How difficult was it not to apply some of your
Speaker 1: knowledge that you gained through studying nols to like yourself
Speaker 1: as an endotherm walking around freezing in Montana? Ps I
Speaker 1: got his timeline wrong, and Shane was studying anoles at
Speaker 1: Harvard and did his postdoc on very cold mice in Montana.
Speaker 1: But anyway, in those cold places, was he thinking about
Speaker 1: his own reactions to cold. I'm asking this as a
Speaker 1: person wearing a scarf in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: I think it's pretty It was pretty easy for me
Speaker 2: because reptiles are just really different from mammals. The way
Speaker 2: that they experience temperature is very different from the way
Speaker 2: that mammals experience temperature.
Speaker 1: How do mammals experience temperature?
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's exciting. Yeah, so we're going to go
Speaker 2: We're going to go in right now. I'm going in
Speaker 2: when we're thinking about like the physiology, when we're talking
Speaker 2: about like thermal physiology, how animals experience temperature and how
Speaker 2: that temperature influences their function. There are four major categories,
Speaker 2: and yeah, they can sort of you can like sort
Speaker 2: of pick and choose the combination they're in, and you
Speaker 2: can find pretty much an organism that fits that that descriptions.
Speaker 1: Okay, here we go into a matrix of different combinations
Speaker 1: of body heat. You can have if you weren't already
Speaker 1: a hairy human, maybe you shave none of my business onward.
Speaker 2: So the first difference is being ectothermic or endothermic okay, right,
Speaker 2: So being endothermic, you can endothermic organisms can produce their
Speaker 2: own internal body heat. Ectothermic organisms cannot, and then we
Speaker 2: have basically homeothermic versus poikilothermic. WHOA, yeah, that's a good word.
Speaker 2: A word that is a scrabble word. It's a good
Speaker 2: podcast word. Yeah, poikilothermic.
Speaker 1: I know what that means. I'm not going to be
Speaker 1: looking that up and defining it in this side at all.
Speaker 1: That's gonna happen. Yeah, I did not know this word, pokilothermic,
Speaker 1: And yeah I got you covered with the death. So
Speaker 1: a pekuilotherm is an animal whose internal temperature varies considerably.
Speaker 1: It's all over the place, as opposed to homeotherm, which
Speaker 1: maintains homeostasis and keeps a temperature pretty constant like you
Speaker 1: and me. So Shane explains how this is not just
Speaker 1: ectothermic and endothermic. There's difference and thus a matrix.
Speaker 2: So homeotherms are able to maintain a constant body temperature
Speaker 2: and poikilotherms have fluctuating body temperature with respect to their
Speaker 2: external environment. So as their external environment fluctuates their internal
Speaker 2: and so you have a tendency I think generally speaking
Speaker 2: to group endotherm and homeotherm together, right, and ectotherm and
Speaker 2: poikilo therm.
Speaker 1: Together, That's what I would think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's not always the case. Right. So for instance,
Speaker 2: you can have an endothermic poikilotherm. These are like mammals
Speaker 2: that hibernate. For animals that hibernate for really long periods
Speaker 2: of time, like weeks or months, their internal body temperature
Speaker 2: can actually drop to within about one degree celsius of
Speaker 2: ambient temperature. What even though they have these internal mechanisms
Speaker 2: of producing heat, and this is an energy saving mechanism.
Speaker 1: So these endo points, if you will, generate their own heat,
Speaker 1: but it can vary, kind of like a house with
Speaker 1: a furnace. But they set the dial depending on what
Speaker 1: they need. Now, in case you are on a first
Speaker 1: date or a job interview that's going badly, the only
Speaker 1: thing they can save it is naming some hibernating endothermic
Speaker 1: pekilo therms. Here is a list bears, gophers, bats, groundhogs,
Speaker 1: just to name a few. Now, let's say an ectotherm
Speaker 1: is like a house without a thermos, So the temperature
Speaker 1: could vary widely, but it doesn't mean it has to.
Speaker 2: On the flip side, you can have an ectotherm that
Speaker 2: is actually homeothermic. And this can happen by a couple
Speaker 2: of different ways. So the first way is just by
Speaker 2: being really large, all right. So this is what we
Speaker 2: call gigantothermy no.
Speaker 1: Word word gigantothermy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So for instance, like the dinosaurs, okay, but also
Speaker 2: things like saltwater crocodiles, which are massive animals. The largest
Speaker 2: lizard on the planet, the Komodo dragon.
Speaker 1: Oh I was going to ask about them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And this is essentially a byproduct of surface to volume, right,
Speaker 2: So if you are really large, your volume and with
Speaker 2: proportion to your surface area is very large, that means
Speaker 2: that you lose heat relatively slowly to the external environment.
Speaker 2: So for instance, if you went to Australia or if
Speaker 2: you went to the Nile, you would see really large
Speaker 2: crocodile early in the morning basking, just sitting in the
Speaker 2: sun with their mouths open, completely lifeless for hours. And
Speaker 2: then by the heat of the day they're up and
Speaker 2: moving and they're swimming around in pretty cold water. And
Speaker 2: they can maintain that function because they're so big.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that's an endothermic homeotherm like us endothermic pokeotherm
Speaker 1: bears groundhogs at all. And then we were talking about
Speaker 1: ectotherms that maintain constant body to but you're just by
Speaker 1: being huge. But that's not the only way to be
Speaker 1: an ecdothermic homeotherm. Did I say that right?
Speaker 2: Ectothermic homeotherm is through behavioral thermal regulation, all right, And
Speaker 2: you know, and basically this means, you know, paying really
Speaker 2: close attention to the micro environments, like the micro thermal
Speaker 2: environments that are available to you. Right, So if you
Speaker 2: are a small lizard, for instance, and it gets really
Speaker 2: hot outside, again, because you're so small, you're going to
Speaker 2: gain heat really quickly because of that same volume the
Speaker 2: surface area issue, except if you move into the shade, right,
Speaker 2: So if you move into the shade at the right
Speaker 2: time and you stay there for long enough, you can
Speaker 2: actually maintain a steady body temperature even though you're not
Speaker 2: producing internal body heat.
Speaker 1: Oh okay exactly.
Speaker 2: And then insects do it a whole different way. So
Speaker 2: things like bees are technically ectothermic homeotherms because they can
Speaker 2: actually use their flight muscles. They can decouple their flight
Speaker 2: muscles and vibrate them without moving their wings to generate heat.
Speaker 1: And why do some animals and humans have set body
Speaker 1: temperatures that they need to maintain in order to live,
Speaker 1: Like why why do humans have to be ninety eight
Speaker 1: point six? And why do and our dogs a different temperature?
Speaker 1: And do mice in Montana have to be a different
Speaker 1: temperature than the ones in New Mexico.
Speaker 2: That's a great question. So generally speaking, you know, it's
Speaker 2: all about strategy, like evolutionary strategy and life history strategy.
Speaker 2: So mammals benefit from being warm all the time in
Speaker 2: the sense that you know, I can get up and
Speaker 2: move regardless of you know what time of day it is,
Speaker 2: which means because I have that high metabolism, you know,
Speaker 2: I can you know, go run and you know, and
Speaker 2: do like really high intensity activities for a pretty sustained
Speaker 2: period of time, much more so than if I was
Speaker 2: an ectotherm. But also on the flip side of that,
Speaker 2: it also means that I have to take in much
Speaker 2: more energy in order to fuel that that internal furnace,
Speaker 2: right that defines that defines endo therms.
Speaker 1: So we have to be out grazing and hunting and
Speaker 1: finding food in order to have this like twenty four
Speaker 1: hour open supermarket of body heat.
Speaker 2: Kind of, yes, basically, So I do know that we've
Speaker 2: undergone like humans as a lineage, right, as we've sort
Speaker 2: of as we migrated out of Africa into the rest
Speaker 2: of the world. Temperature will played a huge part in
Speaker 2: that process, right, And we can actually see it in
Speaker 2: the diversity of body shapes that we see around the planet.
Speaker 2: So as we moved, So if we look within Africa,
Speaker 2: for instance, right, there are populations around the equator, it's
Speaker 2: very it's very warm and gets like extremely hot during
Speaker 2: the day, and in response, right, the body changes proportions
Speaker 2: again to sort of manipulate this volume to surface area.
Speaker 2: This is what we call Allen's rule, right, And Allen's
Speaker 2: rule states that in these warmer environments animals, mammals specifically
Speaker 2: have a tendency to grow longer, narrower limbs, right, And
Speaker 2: by growing longer narrower limbs, you sort of manipulate that
Speaker 2: volume dessert, It's like having a little pipe, right instead
Speaker 2: of like a big thick appendage. By decreasing the volume
Speaker 2: with respect to that surface area, you can then dump
Speaker 2: heat really quickly to the environment. Right. So that's one strategy.
Speaker 2: So if you look at you know, a lot of
Speaker 2: a lot of sub Saharan African populations that occur right
Speaker 2: around the equator, the very tall, very thin phenotypes. But
Speaker 2: then as you move north into really high latitude environments,
Speaker 2: you know, look at populations like the Inuits, very different, Bill, Right,
Speaker 2: they're sort of very sort of compact, so it prevents
Speaker 2: them from dumping heat. It allows them to retain heat
Speaker 2: in the face of the cold much more efficiently.
Speaker 1: Is there something from a physics standpoint, like a magic
Speaker 1: formula in the ratio of an animal's baudet to their
Speaker 1: metabolism or heart rate, Like, at some point in time,
Speaker 1: did someone just frantically crunch these numbers on a chalkbard
Speaker 1: and start weeping.
Speaker 2: It's complicated because it is not just a function of size.
Speaker 2: Behavior plays a really large role in this as well.
Speaker 2: So we can say things like, you know Allen's rule
Speaker 2: or Bergmann's rule, which states that as you move farther
Speaker 2: north you get generally larger animals. Oh right, because larger
Speaker 2: animals are able to maintain internal temperatures better.
Speaker 1: Oh. I never would have thought about that, Like Willie
Speaker 1: mammoths were in Siberia and not just kicking it in
Speaker 1: Panama exactly. I never ever ever thought about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the largest mammal on the planet, the elephant,
Speaker 2: is like smack dab right at the equator.
Speaker 1: The he's up with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know so, but it's you know so, size
Speaker 2: is one parameter. But in order to get around the
Speaker 2: fact that they have so much volume to surface area,
Speaker 2: they've evolved very special features that allow them to cool. Right, So,
Speaker 2: if you're out on the savannah or if you're in India,
Speaker 2: a lot of times in the heat of the day,
Speaker 2: you'll see, well, one, you'll see the elephants are typically
Speaker 2: in the shade, but you'll also see them constantly fanning
Speaker 2: their ears right back and forth. And if you look
Speaker 2: at their ears, they have these massive blood vessels that
Speaker 2: go out into their ears and essentially it acts as
Speaker 2: a personalized air conditioner. So as they fan their their
Speaker 2: their ears, that blood cools and then that cool blood
Speaker 2: circulates back into their body and it helps them to
Speaker 2: stay cooler.
Speaker 1: What are some other crazy adaptations that you've seen to
Speaker 1: deal with extreme heat?
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, so I will, I will, I will go
Speaker 2: in on both. So on the cold side of things,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of animals who have developed extreme adaptations,
Speaker 2: and the field, like the sort of sub field of
Speaker 2: thermal biology that specializes in those cold adaptations. It's called cryobiology.
Speaker 2: And amongst the most extreme. For instance, if you were
Speaker 2: in North Carolina, I'm not sure if you've seen the
Speaker 2: recent pictures, but people were freaking out because, you know,
Speaker 2: the lakes were freezing solid in North Carolina. And when
Speaker 2: you look at the lakes every once in a while,
Speaker 2: you see like a little snout right that's stuck in
Speaker 2: you know, that kind of poking up in the ice.
Speaker 2: And that snout was connected connected to an American alligator,
Speaker 2: and the alligator, you know, it's stuck in the eye.
Speaker 2: But they're able to deal with that really cold situation
Speaker 2: for a pretty long period of time. Right. But if
Speaker 2: you took an animal that would like, for instance, like
Speaker 2: a saltwater crocodile, is not an ancestral selection pressure, but
Speaker 2: even more extreme if you take ectotherms like reptiles and
Speaker 2: amphibians that occur at really high latitudes, or even insects
Speaker 2: that occur at really high latitudes like close to the
Speaker 2: Arctic circle, there are some species that can actually freeze
Speaker 2: solid for months at a time and then though out
Speaker 2: and go on about their business. So animals like the
Speaker 2: wood frog, for.
Speaker 1: Instance, Okay, if you like badass frog stories that are bananas,
Speaker 1: and I know you do, here is a badass frog story.
Speaker 1: So wood frogs are like, oh, hibernation, Yeah, home, my
Speaker 1: beer a very very very cold beer.
Speaker 2: So wood frogs, when they begin to freeze, they undergo
Speaker 2: a lot of significant physiological change. So they begin to
Speaker 2: pump glycogen out of their livers into their bloodstream, so
Speaker 2: it's like basically sugar. And they also dump ureea into
Speaker 2: their bloodstream, which we typically try to get rid of
Speaker 2: through peeing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, usually that's something you don't you want to off
Speaker 1: board there exactly.
Speaker 2: But this combination of you know, sugar and urea essentially
Speaker 2: acts as as an anti freeze, right, oh my god.
Speaker 2: So they can super cool without the formation of ice crystals.
Speaker 2: Ice crystals are typically like that is the thing that
Speaker 2: is most dangerous about cold temperatures because when water crystallizes,
Speaker 2: essentially it turns into little daggers that start stabbing and
Speaker 2: ripping apart cells. And you know, so when you you know,
Speaker 2: when you get like like severe frostbite or you're in
Speaker 2: your toes turned black and fall off. It's because in
Speaker 2: large part because of crystal damage.
Speaker 1: If you just spaced out wondering how snow crystals form,
Speaker 1: do check out the snow high Trology episode after this,
Speaker 1: and also it expands right, So.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, it's like basically having like little little ice
Speaker 2: fortresses forming inside of your body, which you generally want
Speaker 2: to avoid for hot temperatures. Obviously, there are animals all
Speaker 2: around the planet that have that have evolved to live
Speaker 2: in extremely hot environments. So for instance, in desert environments, right,
Speaker 2: and there's some behaviors that evolve that are kind of
Speaker 2: kind of funny, right. There are there's a lizard species,
Speaker 2: for instance, that lives in deserts that you know, at
Speaker 2: the heat of the day, in order for them to survive,
Speaker 2: they essentially rotate picking up their their feet and they
Speaker 2: pick up two at a time and they just keep
Speaker 2: you know, it's like if you were to walk out
Speaker 2: on asphalt barefoot and you do that thing where you
Speaker 2: hop back and forth. It's essentially like how they get
Speaker 2: by so fancy. Yeah, I know, they're like very like
Speaker 2: prancy little Yeah, I think they're adorable.
Speaker 1: It's like lizards, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2: And but also if we can think of even more
Speaker 2: extreme temperatures, like hydro thermal vents in the deep sea,
Speaker 2: which can have can have gradients, like temperature gradients that
Speaker 2: are like hundreds of degrees fahrenheit right over a very
Speaker 2: short distance. And I mean, the most heat tolerant animals
Speaker 2: that we know of on this entire planet live around
Speaker 2: those hydro thermal vents. So there are these I'm sure
Speaker 2: you've seen like these, these like really large tube worms, yes,
Speaker 2: that make these sort of tube forests around hydro thermal vents.
Speaker 2: Like they can take temperatures up to about eighty degrees
Speaker 2: celsius fahe, which is like one hundred and seventy six
Speaker 2: degrees fair and.
Speaker 1: Him, Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so hot. That's hot. It is really hot.
Speaker 2: But they're not the most heat tolerant organisms on the planet,
Speaker 2: which ones are. So there are these small microorganisms and
Speaker 2: they're called pyro Loobus fumeri.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, wait, okay, so something with smoke and fire.
Speaker 2: Yes, what exactly? What exactly? And I think still to
Speaker 2: this date, they are the most heat holerant organisms that
Speaker 2: we have found, and they can take temperatures of one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty two degrees celsius. Why yeah, so that's
Speaker 2: about two hundred and fifty a little more than two
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: Where do they live?
Speaker 2: So they also live around hydrothermal vents.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Ps. Their name translates literally to fire
Speaker 1: lobe of the chimney, and I pictured like a tiny
Speaker 1: fireball or maybe like a deep blue, shiny creature with
Speaker 1: flames painted on the side of it, like a late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties Camaro. But these single celled heat lovin microorganisms
Speaker 1: kind of look like a fuzzy brain. Hydrothermal vents hotter
Speaker 1: than like name a thing, it's probably hotter than that
Speaker 1: any Like, for example, I was thinking the hottest place
Speaker 1: on Earth would be like a roller skate after you
Speaker 1: used it, you know, sometimes you're like, it's hot monkey
Speaker 1: in there, but no, it's a hydrothermal bent. Yeah, oh
Speaker 1: my god. Okay, So they're just they're like, I'm here.
Speaker 1: No one else can deal with it, but I can.
Speaker 1: So I can take as many resources as I need
Speaker 1: because I have adapted to just be able to deal
Speaker 1: with this precisely.
Speaker 2: Oh my god god, It's like, you know, extreme extreme
Speaker 2: performance typically evolves under extreme conditions, and I think one
Speaker 2: of the coolest ways that animals use heat that every
Speaker 2: time every time I think about this, I kind of
Speaker 2: freak out a little bit. So in order for me
Speaker 2: to tell you this story, I kind of have to
Speaker 2: give you the background.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bring it on, okay, Oh, buckle up for a
Speaker 1: science saga. You'll never forget, my friends.
Speaker 2: In eighteen seventy seven, huh in Japan, people imported European
Speaker 2: honeybees for apaculture because European there is a Japanese honeybee,
Speaker 2: but it does not produce nearly as much honey as
Speaker 2: a European honey bee. So they brought in European honey
Speaker 2: bees for apriculture, and they quickly found that European honeybee
Speaker 2: colonies would be destroyed by the Japanese giant hornet. It's
Speaker 2: really large, voracious hornet, and it could a group of
Speaker 2: like thirty hornets could wipe out thousands of European honeybees.
Speaker 2: I mean they would just go in and there like
Speaker 2: decapitate and things and chewing them up because they're they're
Speaker 2: bringing like those husks and bodies back to feed their larvae.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: They would just have these raiding parties where they go
Speaker 2: in and completely just destroy you know, these these European
Speaker 2: honeybee colonies, which brought up the question, well, how come
Speaker 2: there's this Japanese honeybee that's been here for so long,
Speaker 2: Like how do they survive in the face of this predator?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And what they found was fascinating. So, the Japanese giant
Speaker 2: hornet has an upper thermal tolerance of about one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifteen degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a lot.
Speaker 2: It's a lot. The Japanese honeybee has an upper thermal
Speaker 2: tolerance of about one hundred and eighteen degrees fahrenheit. And
Speaker 2: so that difference in their thermal tolerance, the Japanese honey
Speaker 2: bees figured out how to use it as a weapon.
Speaker 2: So remember we were talking about before, like bees have
Speaker 2: this ability to decouple their muscles from their wings in
Speaker 2: order to generate heat. So what they would do is
Speaker 2: they'd use their numbers and you know, when Japanese giant
Speaker 2: hornet would come into the hive, they would sort of
Speaker 2: back off ways and like let it come into the hive,
Speaker 2: and then they would form they would swarm it and
Speaker 2: form a ball around ther and then they would start vibrating,
Speaker 2: generating heat and they would essentially cook.
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 2: The hornet?
Speaker 1: They would cook it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's so it's this combination of the heat
Speaker 2: that's generated and the carbon dioxide that's produced, right, which
Speaker 2: it would heat up the temperature and it would also
Speaker 2: but the excess carbon dioxide would also lower the thermal tolerance.
Speaker 2: Oh the hornet.
Speaker 1: It would be like a one two punch exactly. Oh
Speaker 1: my god. What about the European honeybees did they get
Speaker 1: did they get wise to this?
Speaker 2: No? Oh no, they're still You know, even now, if
Speaker 2: if a Japanese hornet raiding party finds European honeybees like there,
Speaker 2: they can completely decimate a colony.
Speaker 1: So that three degrees is enough to kill off something
Speaker 1: that's probably like ten times their size. Yes, oh my god,
Speaker 1: that's so badass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh my god, it's like one of my favorite
Speaker 2: stories about thermal physiology. All these are the sorts of
Speaker 2: things that evolve in extreme environments. So yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 1: I get Why am I getting chills thinking about cooking hornets?
Speaker 1: That doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2: That's wrong because it's dope.
Speaker 1: But now why am I cold? Why does it give
Speaker 1: me chills? And so, okay, tell me a little bit
Speaker 1: about being a professor. Because you are a professor, I
Speaker 1: am you teach here at UCLA?
Speaker 2: I do?
Speaker 1: So what kinds of courses do you teach? And what
Speaker 1: has a response mean?
Speaker 2: Oh? Man, okay, So being a professor at UCLA is
Speaker 2: some kind of special I really love being here. And
Speaker 2: so the thing is like, when you're moving up through academia,
Speaker 2: there's always this veil, right that you just like you
Speaker 2: kind of see other people moving back there, but you're
Speaker 2: not really sure what's going on back there. So you know,
Speaker 2: as an undergraduate, you know, you might see graduate students
Speaker 2: You're like, oh, they look so stressed. I wonder what
Speaker 2: that's about. That you become a graduate student, you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's what that was about. And then you see postdocs.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I'm never going to get a job,
Speaker 2: and you're like, why they're like so stress they're postdocs.
Speaker 2: And then you become a post doc you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is really stressful. But then as a post doc,
Speaker 2: you see, you know, you see a professor. You're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: how come like their hair was like always crazy and
Speaker 2: they can never remember anything. And then you become a
Speaker 2: professor and you're like, oh, yeah, because there are so
Speaker 2: many things that I had no idea people were going
Speaker 2: to ask me to do.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, what's it been, Like, Oh.
Speaker 2: It's been fun. It's been fun. And I've had to
Speaker 2: learn a lot really quickly. The biggest thing I've had
Speaker 2: to learn is how to multitask. So I've actually very
Speaker 2: recently found out I have pretty severe add really yeah,
Speaker 2: really late in life, really, And I got through it
Speaker 2: by because I could focus on one thing, Like I
Speaker 2: would wake up and my goal would be to accomplish
Speaker 2: this one thing, and regardless of how long it took,
Speaker 2: you know, sometimes I go to bed at ten, sometimes
Speaker 2: I go to bed at three am. But I could
Speaker 2: get that one thing done. And I was a specialist.
Speaker 2: Like that's how I made my way through academia. And
Speaker 2: then I got here and I literally could not focus
Speaker 2: on one thing for more than like forty five minutes.
Speaker 2: And I realized like that situation, like things really started
Speaker 2: to disintegrate for me, like really quickly. And so I
Speaker 2: went and you know, talked to a doctor and they
Speaker 2: ran some tests and they're like, yeah, you've really like
Speaker 2: really intense right now.
Speaker 1: Did that track for your past too, did you realize like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, that kind of tried.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, like looking back, I could, I can definitely
Speaker 2: definitely see it now, And it kind of makes me
Speaker 2: a little upset because I'm like, how much easier could
Speaker 2: I have made life for myself if I had known
Speaker 2: about and could deal with this before? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean, and you went to Harvard and you got
Speaker 1: a PhD and you're a professor, So I mean you
Speaker 1: must have found speaking of adaptability, you must have found
Speaker 1: really great ways to adapt to focus on what you
Speaker 1: needed to focus because you've accomplished so much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I found a way to do it,
Speaker 2: for sure, you know, but I've had, you know, here
Speaker 2: in this position. You know, I've had to learn different
Speaker 2: ways of doing things, and I've had to learn those
Speaker 2: those ways pretty pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: Do you have any tips for the rest of us?
Speaker 2: Oh? Man, So, I think the thing that helps me
Speaker 2: the most is to make a concrete list the night before,
Speaker 2: like before I go to bed. That's the last thing
Speaker 2: I do before I close my eyes, and it's the
Speaker 2: first thing I see when I wake up and get
Speaker 2: in not just like, oh, here are a list of
Speaker 2: things to do, but literally, from this time to this time,
Speaker 2: I need to accomplish this goal because I have this
Speaker 2: meeting at this time, which means I only have this
Speaker 2: forty five minutes and its best if I do this
Speaker 2: particular thing then all the way through the day. And
Speaker 2: those are the days. Sometimes it doesn't work for me,
Speaker 2: like sometimes I sit down and things immediately fall apart.
Speaker 2: But the days where I can actually stick to that
Speaker 2: game plan are by far the most productive days for me.
Speaker 1: That's so so good to know. I mean, as someone
Speaker 1: who had to reschedule this because I was crying about
Speaker 1: missing a deadline, I'm like, what else have you got there?
Speaker 2: It happens to the best of.
Speaker 1: Its Shane is such a boss. I want all of
Speaker 1: his time management strategies forever, please and thank you. Also listen,
Speaker 1: just listen to the name of this course he teaches
Speaker 1: at UCLA.
Speaker 2: So my first course here at UCLA is called the
Speaker 2: Biology of Superheroes Exploring the limits of Form and Function.
Speaker 1: Let's hear that again, just because it's that wonderful.
Speaker 2: So my first course here at UCLA is called the
Speaker 2: Biology of Superheroes. Yeah, it's been a really fun class,
Speaker 2: and it's sort of been a slow build. So I
Speaker 2: actually started thinking about this in graduate school as well,
Speaker 2: Like during my dissertation. I got to a point where
Speaker 2: I was writing my dissertation where I was just burnt out.
Speaker 2: I was like, I just can't do it. I love science,
Speaker 2: but you can miss me with it right now, yeah,
Speaker 2: because I can't stand this. And I remember one night
Speaker 2: I was in the Museum of Compared to Zoology at
Speaker 2: Harvard that's where my office was, and it's probably maybe
Speaker 2: eight thirty or nine at night, and I just had
Speaker 2: to get up and leave, and I walked off of
Speaker 2: campus into Harvard Square. I was like walking around the
Speaker 2: square and I passed this comic book store that's like
Speaker 2: sort of in the basement of a building. And as
Speaker 2: I was passing the window, I saw this large, like
Speaker 2: hard bound comic book Superman Versus Muhammad Ali.
Speaker 1: Oh and we made a comic book about that.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well they made a comic book about it,
Speaker 2: and you know, and it was like literally one of
Speaker 2: those double take situations. I'm sorry what And right on
Speaker 2: the cover you could Superman and Muhamma Ali both in
Speaker 2: their boxing gloves in the middle of a ring going
Speaker 2: at it. I was like, I have to figure out
Speaker 2: who wins in this scenario. And so I went and
Speaker 2: that was like the very first comic book I ever bought.
Speaker 1: How old were you?
Speaker 2: I was twenty six, I think.
Speaker 1: So it skipped your childhood and you started getting into
Speaker 1: it in your twenties.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I was late to the game.
Speaker 1: That's so cool.
Speaker 2: I mean I had always been into like science fiction,
Speaker 2: and I remember watching like the X Men TV show
Speaker 2: as a kid, and like the Spider Man TV show
Speaker 2: on Fox Kids, you know. But my first comic book
Speaker 2: I bought, you know what five years into my PhD
Speaker 2: Oh my god. So did you go back for more
Speaker 2: after you read good it? Yeah? It was I Unlocked
Speaker 2: the Beast. Yeah, so I went back and you know,
Speaker 2: and I bought several, like you know, over the next
Speaker 2: few weeks, and it ended up being like sort of
Speaker 2: a guilty pleasure, you know, like I would. It was
Speaker 2: funny because I would like spend hours during the day,
Speaker 2: you know, going like reading the scientific literature trying to
Speaker 2: figure out how to formulate, you know, my own certation,
Speaker 2: and then I would go home and read like Green
Speaker 2: Lantern or the X men, you know, as a way
Speaker 2: to just you know, kind of escape from the vigors
Speaker 2: of academia. But then when I would go to sleep,
Speaker 2: I'd have these really weird, messed up dreams that would
Speaker 2: fuse the two together, and you know, all these questions
Speaker 2: of like how the physiology and biology dealt with the
Speaker 2: science fiction. And it got so intense that I actually
Speaker 2: decided to teach like a short course as a graduate
Speaker 2: student for like two weeks and like this small group
Speaker 2: of undergraduates and we you know, just explored all these
Speaker 2: different questions or like where the science meets the fiction
Speaker 2: science fiction, right, And you know that turned into this
Speaker 2: course and I also started, you know, my own podcast
Speaker 2: that deals with the biology as superheroes. And but I
Speaker 2: found that it's actually a really fun thought experiment, you know.
Speaker 2: So you know, in science, like there's these thought experiments
Speaker 2: or like Godonkin experiments that you know, like Schrodinger's cat
Speaker 2: for instance, right, that really is an abstract way to
Speaker 2: help you understand concrete ideas. And I found that science
Speaker 2: fiction actually is a really interesting thought experiment to understand
Speaker 2: the limits of performance and where those limits stop, why
Speaker 2: they stop where they stop. And then theoretically what would
Speaker 2: need to be accomplished in order for those limits to
Speaker 2: be pushed beyond. So yeah, so that's what we do
Speaker 2: in the class, That's what we try to do in
Speaker 2: the podcast.
Speaker 1: How quickly did that course fill up?
Speaker 2: Almost immediately? Yeah, yeah, almost immediately, that's.
Speaker 1: I mean, and also perfect for Los Angeles to this
Speaker 1: hub of academia and art in the same kind of campus.
Speaker 1: So which superheroes could withstand the most extreme temperatures?
Speaker 2: Ooh well, I mean obviously you have characters like the
Speaker 2: Human Torch for instance, I mean that's pretty spot on.
Speaker 2: You also ghost Rider with his flaming skull ghost Rider.
Speaker 2: But you also have like other characters that just generally
Speaker 2: have like a high endurance, So like Wolverine for instance,
Speaker 2: can give you the tools to defeat Yeah, this adamantium
Speaker 2: skeleton of his, plus his general ability to regenerate, I
Speaker 2: imagine he'd be able to take some some pretty hot temperatures.
Speaker 2: And if I'm not mistaken, I think the Incredible Hulk
Speaker 2: has been thrown into the sun at least once and
Speaker 2: survive like raging.
Speaker 1: What kind of adaptation would you need, just like skin
Speaker 1: and organ wise to even deal with that?
Speaker 2: I don't think there is an adaptation that would allow
Speaker 2: for any organism to do so, even like if we
Speaker 2: think about early Earth for instance, right, So, I mean
Speaker 2: Earth itself is four and a half billion years old
Speaker 2: more or less, and it took half a billion years
Speaker 2: for life to even show up in the first place.
Speaker 2: And a big part of that was because that epic
Speaker 2: before it's like the Haydian, which is literally hell on Earth,
Speaker 2: it was really really hot, so surface temperatures you're talking
Speaker 2: about surface temperatures that are approaching like six hundred degrees
Speaker 2: all right, so you know, life had to had to
Speaker 2: kind of wait for things to cool down before it
Speaker 2: was even before it even had a chance to proliferate.
Speaker 1: The Haitian. I didn't realize that that was what that
Speaker 1: was called.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, because it's just.
Speaker 1: Hell, literal hell on Earth. Yes, just too damn hot.
Speaker 1: Call me when you've cooled off. I'm not coming out
Speaker 1: of the primordial soup exactly. Oh my god. Okay, Now
Speaker 1: what about climate change? How we're we doing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, climate change, man. This so this is actually the
Speaker 2: major one of the major aspects of my research now
Speaker 2: is trying to understand how thermal physiology evolves in response
Speaker 2: to these rapid changes, and so typically when we think
Speaker 2: about evolution, we think about it as this kind of slow,
Speaker 2: gradual process, especially when it comes to complex traits.
Speaker 1: Shane says that, for example, coat color is controlled by
Speaker 1: a couple of genes, relatively simple, but a lot of
Speaker 1: the aspects of form and functions that he studies are,
Speaker 1: in his words, the byproduct of the interaction of hundreds
Speaker 1: of genes that interact in these complex regulatory networks, which
Speaker 1: means there's a lot of complicated shit happening to make
Speaker 1: an organism efficient and well adapted to its environment. So
Speaker 1: you tinker with one part.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there's a saying that there's a lot
Speaker 2: of ways to break a clock, right, So if we
Speaker 2: think about an organism as a clock, tinkering with something,
Speaker 2: you're most likely going to break it all right. So
Speaker 2: trying to understand how these complex systems can actually adaptively
Speaker 2: evolve in the face of rapid change is one of
Speaker 2: the major one of the major research goals that I'm
Speaker 2: pursuing right now in my lab.
Speaker 1: How do you think humans will do with it? I mean,
Speaker 1: I want to say, who cares about us? Because it's
Speaker 1: our fault, But for the other humans out there there.
Speaker 2: So the thing about humans that makes us special is
Speaker 2: that we have this remarkable ability to buffer ourselves against extremes. Right, so,
Speaker 2: if it gets too hot outside, we turn on the
Speaker 2: air conditioner. If it gets too cold, you know, we
Speaker 2: turn on the heater or put on a coat, and
Speaker 2: we're perfectly fine, bundle up warm, of course, but I
Speaker 2: think you can leave all And when we're thinking about
Speaker 2: like climate change, in that framework, you know, like, well,
Speaker 2: maybe we will as our technology develops, as environments get
Speaker 2: more extreme, maybe technically will have the ability to buffer
Speaker 2: ourselves against it. But in reality we have to think
Speaker 2: about how those resources are partitioned and so on and so
Speaker 2: on and so forth. So if you think about the
Speaker 2: recent polar vortex, you know that pass through the Midwest,
Speaker 2: Homeless populations in Chicago are not buffering themselves against that
Speaker 2: sort of extreme you know, here in Los Angeles, if
Speaker 2: you think about things like urban heat island effect, you know,
Speaker 2: especially in the middle of the city, in the middle
Speaker 2: of the city, in the middle the summer, where you
Speaker 2: can have temperatures you know, approach one hundred degrees maybe
Speaker 2: even more. I mean, those are populations that can't buffer
Speaker 2: themselves against those sorts of extremes. And even the political situation.
Speaker 2: Now you know all of this, all the debate going
Speaker 2: on about you know, building the border wall, one of
Speaker 2: the things that we forget are the biological consequences of
Speaker 2: these political actions, right, So this was prevention by deterrence
Speaker 2: is typically what it's called, right this like Clinton era,
Speaker 2: you know, border protection philosophy. But essentially what that means
Speaker 2: is that you're intentionally funneling human beings out into the
Speaker 2: most extreme thermal climates on the planet, right into deserts.
Speaker 2: So the Arizona Desert, the Sonora and the Chihuahuan deserts.
Speaker 2: These are really extreme environments, both in terms of temperature
Speaker 2: in terms of water availability. Right. So one of the
Speaker 2: ways that you know, we as mammals ourselves is through
Speaker 2: what we call a apple transporation sweating, right, and sweat
Speaker 2: gets whicked away and it cools us, but that costs
Speaker 2: us water. And if if you're trying to make your
Speaker 2: way through a place that's really hot and you don't
Speaker 2: have any water, it makes for this this sort of
Speaker 2: double jeopardy. You know. So one of the things one
Speaker 2: of the most recent projects that I've picked up with
Speaker 2: some collaborators of mine at University of Idaho and another
Speaker 2: lab who will soon be here at UCLA is actually
Speaker 2: doing physiological modeling of energy expenditure of undocumented migrants trying
Speaker 2: to cross the desert, trying to understand exactly how stressful
Speaker 2: this is and how much energy is needed to perform
Speaker 2: these sort of extreme migration events.
Speaker 1: Shane says that this research he's doing is one of
Speaker 1: the more unique applications of thermophysiology that he's attempted to
Speaker 1: undertake in his career, and that a border between say
Speaker 1: Mexico and the US is a corridor for many species
Speaker 1: to move, and that migration is extra xremely important.
Speaker 2: So it's one thing to think about this in evolutionary terms.
Speaker 2: But one thing that we know about evolution, evolution by
Speaker 2: natural selection, is that it comes out of cost, right,
Speaker 2: and that cost is death. So you know, if we
Speaker 2: can't really so if you think about, you know, surviving
Speaker 2: these sort of extreme migration events in terms of humans, right,
Speaker 2: I'd like to think that we've gotten to a point
Speaker 2: as a contemporary society where human life is paramount exactly,
Speaker 2: And you know, so if human if human life is paramount,
Speaker 2: then this idea of evolution by natural selection, right, it doesn't,
Speaker 2: It doesn't really apply because the cost of that evolution
Speaker 2: is should be too high.
Speaker 1: Exactly is there anything anyone can do to assist that?
Speaker 1: I've seen pictures of people pouring water out in the desert,
Speaker 1: Like there is there anything like a lay person could do?
Speaker 2: Vote? Yeah, I mean that, I mean honestly, I think
Speaker 2: that's the I think that that's the most important tool
Speaker 2: any of us has when we're talking about making like
Speaker 2: this level change.
Speaker 1: Right, So yes, vote, vote, vote, vote vote. Shoot. I
Speaker 1: forgot to ask him about those little moss piglet water
Speaker 1: bears that are more tough than like all the Harley
Speaker 1: writing leather clad tattoo dudes combined. Sorry, dudes, Tartar grades
Speaker 1: kick your ass.
Speaker 2: Oh how do tartar grades survive? I actually do not know.
Speaker 2: They are extremophiles, and I do know what they can survive,
Speaker 2: which is crazy. They can survive temperatures near absolute zero
Speaker 2: through extreme desiccation, and they can stay desiccated for a
Speaker 2: very long time. They can survive the vacuum of space.
Speaker 2: They're found naturally in all the way from hot springs
Speaker 2: to the top of the Himalayas. They can survive extreme
Speaker 2: UV radiation exposure. They are, they're just their nature's badass.
Speaker 1: Are they Martians?
Speaker 2: They might be.
Speaker 1: That'd be great.
Speaker 2: I mean, well, you know, technically, like phylogenetically speaking, we
Speaker 2: know they nest within life on Earth. Okay, all right,
Speaker 2: but I'd like to think that they could be Martians
Speaker 2: if we put them there.
Speaker 1: That's true. I'm sure they'd come.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they'd be fine.
Speaker 1: I feel like they're the kind of person you could
Speaker 1: take to any party and they'll make friends.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you know what I mean. Definitely.
Speaker 1: So that's my cousin Tar. He's fine. The Aldy made
Speaker 1: a friend. Okay, cool?
Speaker 2: Hang out by the hydrothermal vent. Yea, what do you
Speaker 2: think I'm gonna go over here to the to the
Speaker 2: Himalayas real quick? Hang out. I'll be right back.
Speaker 1: I love so adaptable. Lightning round. Are you ready? Oh?
Speaker 2: Lightning round, Let's do it.
Speaker 1: Okay, here's the deal. Number one. Laser printers so much
Speaker 1: more effective than an ink jet. Okay, I got a
Speaker 1: laser printer. Which is helpful because this was twenty two
Speaker 1: pages of questions.
Speaker 2: You have a bible worth of questions right now, it's
Speaker 2: like full new and Old Testament.
Speaker 1: Okay, so on to Patreon questions, but before those, I
Speaker 1: do share a few words from our sponsors, and also
Speaker 1: a portion of the ad revenue goes to a cause
Speaker 1: of the ologists choosing this week, Shane picked the Environmental
Speaker 1: Defense Fund, which is a nonprofit that tackles urgent threats
Speaker 1: with practical solutions. So thanks Shane for choosing that. That's
Speaker 1: the Environmental Defense Fund. Now, usually I call a few listeners,
Speaker 1: but I just found out I'm supposed to do fresh
Speaker 1: recordings and per episode, but I spend a few hours
Speaker 1: doing each one. So instead, I'm just going to tell
Speaker 1: you about some stuff I've been using by companies that
Speaker 1: I like that supportologies. But bff t her patrons, don't worry.
Speaker 1: I've still randomly been calling you just to chat and
Speaker 1: leave you weird voicemails. They're just not ads, just saying hi, okay,
Speaker 1: some ads in which I've hidden some weird factoids. All right,
Speaker 1: your questions. So many people asked the same questions that
Speaker 1: I'm just going to read through their names because I
Speaker 1: kind of categorize them. Okay, Okay, Megan, Yoonce, Sarah Clark,
Speaker 1: Anna Thompson, and Ashley Kelly all kind of want to know.
Speaker 1: Can people have different set body temperatures or is it
Speaker 1: total bs when someone says that they run hot and
Speaker 1: someone else runs cold.
Speaker 2: No, individual, there is variation in average body temperatures.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So when we say a human beings should
Speaker 1: be ninety eight point six degrees, that means that there's
Speaker 1: just like any bell curve that's at the top of
Speaker 1: the bell curve.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think most humans typically fluctuate between like
Speaker 2: ninety seven and ninety eight point five or ninety nine.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, Yeah, so I feel like I always
Speaker 1: think thermometers are broken because minors show that I'm just
Speaker 1: a corpse. Am I dead? Did I die?
Speaker 2: No? No, it's I mean there's there's variation and also
Speaker 2: you know, there are you know, all sorts of different
Speaker 2: things that can you know, that can influence your what
Speaker 2: we call thermogenesis, how much heat you're you're producing. You know,
Speaker 2: so like when we get sick, we get fevers, right,
Speaker 2: and that obviously elevates our body temperature. But you cannis
Speaker 2: like you know, for ins like anema or other situations
Speaker 2: can can actually lead to depressed thermogenesis, right, because you
Speaker 2: actually have a depressed you can have a depressed metabolic rate.
Speaker 1: Oh. That leads me to a question by a few
Speaker 1: different readers or fuge listeners had that question. Areologist who
Speaker 1: studies mars who was on the show, Jennifer Booze and
Speaker 1: Suki Holli both wants to know what's the point of fevers?
Speaker 2: Oh, what's the point of fevers?
Speaker 1: Why do we get them?
Speaker 2: So again, so the point of fevers is more or
Speaker 2: less the same point of the Japanese be heat balls.
Speaker 2: All right, So we have things that are attacking our body,
Speaker 2: and by generating a fever, we're hedge betting. We're betting
Speaker 2: that we are more heat tolerant than the things that
Speaker 2: are invading our body.
Speaker 1: Man, So if you have a fever, you should keep
Speaker 1: it up.
Speaker 2: No, not necessarily, Okay. First of all, you should see
Speaker 2: a doctor is what you should do, and not a PhD.
Speaker 2: You should see a medical doctor, not a thermal physiologist.
Speaker 1: Do not just tweet it, shamee.
Speaker 2: No, don't tweet at me, Go see a doctor. I
Speaker 2: don't have anything for you over here. Don't at me.
Speaker 1: But that's why you're getting it is just cooking the bugs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but you know, at the same time, if
Speaker 2: you have you know, if you maintain a fever for
Speaker 2: a really long time, it can actually have extremely detrimental effects.
Speaker 2: Cook your own brain, yes, precisely, and cells. Generally speaking,
Speaker 2: don't poach yourself.
Speaker 1: Don't do that, but at least you know why it happens.
Speaker 1: And then a few people had a question about their
Speaker 1: partners having different heat tolerances than them. Bethany G says,
Speaker 1: why are women so much colder in office buildings than men?
Speaker 1: She says, generally speaking, Cassie Flint asked the same question. Disclaimer,
Speaker 1: sorry for the sweeping gender generalization, but why do men
Speaker 1: seem to be walking heaters? Kelly Meeker also asked this,
Speaker 1: so did Bethany G and Anna Thompson.
Speaker 2: So if I had to make a guess at this,
Speaker 2: I would say it has to do with body size.
Speaker 2: On average. On average, men have a tendency to be
Speaker 2: larger than women. It's like sexual size dimorphism. What that
Speaker 2: means is that they have more volume to surface area,
Speaker 2: which then means that they can retain heat more efficiently
Speaker 2: than smaller bodied individuals. Of course, this is regardless of gender.
Speaker 2: It's just a property of size, but because you know,
Speaker 2: there are sort of different distributions of size for men
Speaker 2: and women, like on average, it can create that shift.
Speaker 1: So tinier people are not just bigger whiners, they're actually colder. Yes,
Speaker 1: so listen to us. Sometimes if you're short and cold.
Speaker 2: They physiologically have to work harder to keep their heat.
Speaker 1: Yes, because as a person who is shorter and has
Speaker 1: been freezing and worn fingerless gloves in an office building
Speaker 1: in August, I understand that very much. Erica Smith, Margaret Abacha, Rennie,
Speaker 1: Bob White, and and does Christine Thompson all kind of
Speaker 1: want to know, does genealogy play any part in our
Speaker 1: preferences for hot or cold weather?
Speaker 2: Does genealogy play So that's actually a complicated question because
Speaker 2: genealogy has both a genetic and a cultural component. And yeah,
Speaker 2: I think the answer in either case can be yes.
Speaker 2: All right, So you know, thermogenesis like just like or
Speaker 2: like thermal preferences, I mean, just like any trait can
Speaker 2: have a distribution, like very few traits are are fixed,
Speaker 2: right or like you know everywhere you know, every individual
Speaker 2: has the exact same value, all right, So there's typically
Speaker 2: a distribution of Bell curve and these sorts of things
Speaker 2: can be they can be heritable. I mean we so
Speaker 2: I spend most of my life studying lizards, right, we
Speaker 2: know that, you know, thermal tolerance and also thermal preference
Speaker 2: changes between species and even between populations. Uh, and that
Speaker 2: is a function of genealogy. There's no reason to think
Speaker 2: that we would behave any any different.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, though. If you live in a climate you hate,
Speaker 1: and you hate where you live, go to a climate
Speaker 1: you like. If you have kids' chances are they'll take
Speaker 1: the climate too. You know what I mean. You love Florida,
Speaker 1: Go have some babies in Florida.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: They're gonna be like I love this, mom, And you're like,
Speaker 1: I know, right, or maybe they'll hate it, thanks mom.
Speaker 1: I mean, my whole family's still in California, and I
Speaker 1: feel like if you took anyone in my family and
Speaker 1: put us in Boston, we would just be like no, no,
Speaker 1: could not deal. Okay. Many people have this question, including
Speaker 1: the wonderful skype of scientist Todd McLaren, Jocelyn vincent Ivy Crutchfield,
Speaker 1: Chris Hubbard, Alena Pritchett, Jamie Catnetch, Jesse cole Charity, Abby Harrison,
Speaker 1: and Kitty Halverson all had the same question. Why do
Speaker 1: I turn into a human furnace when I sleep? Why
Speaker 1: can't we regulate our body temperature when we sleep? Why
Speaker 1: do we wake up we stick a foot out? What's
Speaker 1: happening when animals sleep? What happens with their body temperature?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I actually don't know if I know the answer
Speaker 2: to this question.
Speaker 1: Neither would I Neither do I?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Why why? Because I also, like I get super
Speaker 2: sweaty in the middle of it. It's kind of it's
Speaker 2: kind of absurd.
Speaker 1: Sleeping on it is a huge kitchen sponge. Yeah, basically
Speaker 1: man sized kitchen sponge.
Speaker 2: That's some kind of that's a special kind of nasty
Speaker 2: right there.
Speaker 1: When I talked to the sleep experts Amnologous and he
Speaker 1: said that we sleep better in colder temperatures, and it
Speaker 1: might be because we just evolved to be out of
Speaker 1: doors more so we know that the temperature tips we
Speaker 1: sleep better. But a lot of times you have full
Speaker 1: sleep if you are sleeping too hot of a room,
Speaker 1: which guilty is charged. Yeah, so I'll look into it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think insulation might play a role,
Speaker 2: because you know, people still like to sleep with blankets,
Speaker 2: like just as sort of a comfort thing. But that
Speaker 2: adds a lot of insulation.
Speaker 1: So that's a good point. I know, even in the summer,
Speaker 1: if I don't even have like a light sheet on me,
Speaker 1: I'm like, I need a cover of some sort. I
Speaker 1: need a wisp of gauze over me.
Speaker 2: But even like that thin layer, right, I mean, it
Speaker 2: creates a pocket of you know, your people air, right.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like you're sort of basketing your own juices,
Speaker 2: so to speak.
Speaker 1: You're human cloud if you will. So side note, if
Speaker 1: your temperature feels all wonky, you can thank your glands.
Speaker 1: So the hypothalmis acts as a thermostat. It helps your
Speaker 1: body adjust to whatever your heat needs are. And typically
Speaker 1: when you're asleep, your temperature drops to its lowest point
Speaker 1: a few hours before you wake up, which kind of
Speaker 1: keeps you comfortably snoozing. You know, if you're sweating a bunch,
Speaker 1: it could be hormonal changes they're messing with your hypothalmis,
Speaker 1: or a sudden plummet in blood sugar if you kind
Speaker 1: of went a little hard on the desserts. Also, if
Speaker 1: you're always freezing and you feel tired and sluggish, you
Speaker 1: may want to have your own one on one ologies
Speaker 1: episode with an endocrinologist to chat about thyroid levels. Another
Speaker 1: symptom of that having freezing hands and feet, which I
Speaker 1: know for a fact some of you do. A lot
Speaker 1: of people had questions about extremities and parts of the body,
Speaker 1: like Jocelyn Vincent, Marisa Brewer, Marie Oshin, Meg Megan Jounce,
Speaker 1: Heather Hutchinson, Rodavakaria, Heather Wills, Asrael King, and more. It's
Speaker 1: Lachuski all kind of asked why our feet freezing? Well,
Speaker 1: the rest of our body is warm. Why are our
Speaker 1: hands cold? What is happening with different parts of bodies?
Speaker 2: So this phenomenon is called regional heterothermy ooh these are
Speaker 2: great yes. So thermal physiology has some awesome terms. I
Speaker 2: do like that part about being a thermal physiologists. And
Speaker 2: essentially what happens is your body has priorities, right, and
Speaker 2: your core is the top priority. So if you're in
Speaker 2: a cold environment and you need to preserve heat, the
Speaker 2: first thing that your body or one of the first
Speaker 2: things that your body does is it shunts blood away
Speaker 2: from your extremities in order to preserve it at your core.
Speaker 2: Because the same thing would happen as I talked about
Speaker 2: with the elephants right when they're you know, as they
Speaker 2: you know, pump blood out, it cools and then it returns.
Speaker 2: And if you're in a cold environment and you're pumping
Speaker 2: blood to your extremities and it cools and comes back,
Speaker 2: then your internal body temperature begins to plummet much quicker,
Speaker 2: so your feet get cold and your hands get cold,
Speaker 2: so that your heart and lungs and liver and all
Speaker 2: that good stuff can stay warm because we've got to.
Speaker 1: Keep that all those organs pumping. Oh yeah, but we
Speaker 1: can lose a hand will be fine, yeah right, yeah.
Speaker 2: But also at the same time, you notice that, you know,
Speaker 2: if you're out in the cold, like your head is
Speaker 2: always steaming, even though it's technically an extremity. That's because
Speaker 2: that's where the money maker is at, the brain.
Speaker 1: Do we lose a lot of heat from our heads?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Okay, let me find who asks this again.
Speaker 1: Claudius and others asked, I've heard it's an urban myth
Speaker 1: that we lose most of our body heat in your head.
Speaker 1: Time to have an ex for be the.
Speaker 2: Judge, They say, So it's so it's it's not an
Speaker 2: urban legend for multiple reasons. One because typically when we
Speaker 2: wear clothes, our head is least likely to be covered. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you know, just as a product, right, we would
Speaker 2: lose most of the heat by way of our head
Speaker 2: because the rest of us is insulated.
Speaker 1: So that's another great time to not imagine your friend's
Speaker 1: grandpa walking around in a ski hat and no pants.
Speaker 2: The other thing is that you know, this regional heterotherrmy
Speaker 2: doesn't really apply to your head because you know, your
Speaker 2: body will do pretty much anything to keep your brain functioning,
Speaker 2: and so you will continue to pump, you know, blood
Speaker 2: to your head, which means that it will you're continually
Speaker 2: supplying like warm warmth you know, to you know, to
Speaker 2: your entire head and your face, you know, except for you,
Speaker 2: like your lips and all the cartilagenous places r at
Speaker 2: your you know, and the coal your lips and nose
Speaker 2: gears get really uh get yeah exactly, Well, you get
Speaker 2: purple on you. Not so much from me because of
Speaker 2: the melton.
Speaker 1: I drank one iced tea and I'm rose floating on wreckage.
Speaker 1: I'm Jack Nicholson in a dead end hedge maze. Jack,
Speaker 1: there's a boat Jack. So many people Carla Fiaco, Todd McLaren,
Speaker 1: Michael Pascora, Joshua kun, Elina Tanabe, and Katie Boyd all
Speaker 1: want to know about acclamation over time? Does the body
Speaker 1: adapt to climate? And as a person who lives in
Speaker 1: southern California that gets very cold everywhere else and as
Speaker 1: you've just moved here, just wait till it happens to you.
Speaker 1: Chols are getting weaker and weaker. Do we adapt that quickly? So?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so individuals can acclimate to temperatures. So again, I
Speaker 2: study this mostly in reptiles, right, but in reptiles and
Speaker 2: ecdotherms like this is we call it heat hardening. Okay,
Speaker 2: So essentially, when you're exposed to a hot temperature for
Speaker 2: an extended period of time, you become more adept at
Speaker 2: functioning at high temperatures and vice versa. So this is
Speaker 2: this is called this is acclamation or or phenotypic plasticity.
Speaker 2: Right where you have like one genome that can produce
Speaker 2: multiple phenotypes depending on its interaction with the environment.
Speaker 1: Oh really, so you can kind of switch off what
Speaker 1: you need.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So for instance, you know, if we you know,
Speaker 2: if you or I were to go up to high altitude.
Speaker 2: You know, we our bodies would would physiologically change, right,
Speaker 2: we begin to like produce like more red blood cells
Speaker 2: what we call a reethropoesis And it's the same genome
Speaker 2: right where genetically we haven't changed. But you know the
Speaker 2: way that our body is sensing the environment induces a
Speaker 2: change and the same is true. And in response to
Speaker 2: to temperature.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's crazy. I can realize that. So
Speaker 1: I am getting weaker by living in southern California probably yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: one on a presumsure I go anywhere else. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, azamb and Armando Tjulio and May Marrill all
Speaker 1: kind of asked about autopose to shoot, like Asam asked,
Speaker 1: how significant is the activation of brown beige a dip
Speaker 1: of site the remo genesis as far as raising total
Speaker 1: body temperature is concerned. And then Armando and May both
Speaker 1: said that they recently lost a lot of weight and
Speaker 1: they're constantly cold. It does weighing less effect body heat.
Speaker 2: Weighing less does affect body heat again because of this
Speaker 2: volume the surface area, right, but also you know, fat
Speaker 2: generally speaking does also act as an insulator. So if
Speaker 2: you take I think a lot of mammals that occur
Speaker 2: in polar in polar climates, so things like you know,
Speaker 2: polar bears, walruses, uh, seals that you know can live
Speaker 2: in in really really cold waters. They all they have blubber, right,
Speaker 2: which is which is fat? Right, that's there more cushion
Speaker 2: for the pushing.
Speaker 1: Arctic chunks. The cutest they are, they are scientifically.
Speaker 2: Cuter, scientifically speaking, Yeah, I'm.
Speaker 1: Just saying an arctic shobble lubber is going to be
Speaker 1: cuter than like a seal with a six pack.
Speaker 2: Chubby things do have a tendency to be cute.
Speaker 1: Cute, but if you've lost a lot of weight, you
Speaker 1: might be a little cold. Yeah, guessweter, thank you. Yeah
Speaker 1: that one of them asked, is there any way to
Speaker 1: alleviate that without getting the weight back? Lo o L
Speaker 1: I think Armando just guess whatter Yeah, hood you deserve it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This ability to buffer, to buffer ourselves, that's one
Speaker 2: of the reasons why we're still here. That's called the
Speaker 2: Bogert effect effect, This ability to to thermally buffer yourself.
Speaker 1: That means get a sweater. Yeah, there should be a
Speaker 1: but like a Bogert sweater company yeah, bogert sweater bargan child.
Speaker 1: Sam Math wants to know. Okay, frogs or are they
Speaker 1: toad's that basically suspend all their bodily functions into the
Speaker 1: external observer, appeared dead to deal with cold, and then
Speaker 1: when you thaw them out, they're just alive all of
Speaker 1: a sudden. What the hell is up with that?
Speaker 2: How do we get that? Yeah? Those are the wood frogs.
Speaker 1: Those are the wood There you go, Sam, so, yes,
Speaker 1: those are the froggers with the anti freeze blood. And
Speaker 1: I was actually able to track down audio of their
Speaker 1: mating call, which is really cool. Sounds like that's the
Speaker 1: cole never bothered me any willing JK. It's actually this also.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but I had to share an important life
Speaker 1: experience with Shane because he's a professional in the matter.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a quick story. My dad is from Montana,
Speaker 1: Love Montana, and I had a hamster and the hamster lived.
Speaker 1: For some reason, the hamster was outside and I got
Speaker 1: very cold and I woke up and the hamster was frozen.
Speaker 1: Solid's like, oh, chicken cutlet. And my dad is like,
Speaker 1: don't worry. Rodents like this they do this and they
Speaker 1: hybrid I'm from Montana, come on, and I was like really.
Speaker 1: He's like yeah, they just warm up, and I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: got back from school. My hamster Bacon was fine, and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, that is crazy that
Speaker 1: Rodents can do that. Anyway, got you twenty years later
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving when I mentioned it, and my dad is like, oh,
Speaker 1: he had gone out on his lunch break and just
Speaker 1: got a new heir. Yes. Start.
Speaker 2: I was hoping I didn't have to break that to
Speaker 2: you here on this microphone.
Speaker 1: Two decades.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, Bacon bounce back. My dad just went
Speaker 2: on for forty seven years, best hamster ever.
Speaker 1: His spots kept changing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they do that acclamation effect.
Speaker 1: I know. My dad never to his face though I
Speaker 1: looked over and I was like, oh no, okay. Cryogenics, Sonya,
Speaker 1: Karl Leipovic and Asrael King want to know. Is cryogenic
Speaker 1: freezing in any way realistic or possible?
Speaker 2: So it depends on what you mean in terms of,
Speaker 2: you know, like like Walt Disney style cryogenics.
Speaker 1: So side note. A few of Walt Disney's biographers say
Speaker 1: he was keenly interested in the future see Tomorrowland, and
Speaker 1: that he knew about cryogenics, but Disney's daughter denies that
Speaker 1: he is in suspended animation awaiting a thaw. Also, his
Speaker 1: cremation report is on file, but hear me out that
Speaker 1: could have been for his body without his money maker,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. But Walt, either way, I
Speaker 1: trust you did whatever it was that you wanted to do. Also,
Speaker 1: I will never think of the show Disney on Ice
Speaker 1: quite the same.
Speaker 2: I'm always reluctant to say anything is impossible, but it's
Speaker 2: highly improbable. Okay, but if you're talking about cryogenic freezing,
Speaker 2: So this is actually a really active area of research
Speaker 2: when it comes to things like organ transplants. Oh okay,
Speaker 2: you know, extending the longevity of transplants and how they
Speaker 2: can how long they can survive outside of the body.
Speaker 2: So actually a lot of this work that is being
Speaker 2: done on animals like the wood frog. If you have
Speaker 2: an animal that is able to do this for an
Speaker 2: extended period of time, right and have properly function funk organs. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a good place to go to find solutions to
Speaker 2: being able to freeze an organ solid and then revive
Speaker 2: it and still have it be able to function. So
Speaker 2: I think I do think that is a possibility, and
Speaker 2: essentially we just need to really know more about the
Speaker 2: physiology of this process and how it plays out in nature.
Speaker 2: But in terms of like freezing heads and reviving people improbable.
Speaker 2: I will say highly improbable.
Speaker 1: But I mean most questions of her head one hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety one.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's amazing. I feel special.
Speaker 1: You should feel special. We were excited. Okay, What sucks
Speaker 1: the most about your job? More about your pursuit or
Speaker 1: like the cold or the heat. What sucks the most
Speaker 1: about being a thermal physiologist?
Speaker 2: M that's a good question. What sucks the most.
Speaker 1: When people come to your office and ask you stupid
Speaker 1: questions for a podcast?
Speaker 2: That's one of the best parts, especially because a lot
Speaker 2: of times I'm that person bothering a scientist about their work.
Speaker 2: You got a lot less slack when when you are
Speaker 2: also a scientist. I would say.
Speaker 1: Again, he a scientist interviews other scientists for his incredible podcast,
Speaker 1: The Biology of Superheroes. Okay, so what sucks?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think see one of so two things. One
Speaker 2: is like the sort of mundane everyday stuff. All right,
Speaker 2: So no, I have yet to meet the biologists where
Speaker 2: you ask them it's like, why did you get into
Speaker 2: the biology, and like, oh man, I just love like
Speaker 2: answering emails and and and typing up memos and responding
Speaker 2: to administrative stuff. That's just the best. No one says that,
Speaker 2: you know, but that has become like such a huge
Speaker 2: part of my life. Yeah, not that, not the best.
Speaker 2: And in the field actually, as a thermal physiologist that
Speaker 2: you have to put yourself under some extreme thermal conditions
Speaker 2: as well, you know. So I spent summers driving around
Speaker 2: the South, and you know, in like Florida and southern
Speaker 2: tip of Texas, Louisiana, it gets really hot and really
Speaker 2: muggy in the heat of the day. But if the
Speaker 2: lizards are out doing their thing, you got to be
Speaker 2: out there doing your thing, and sometimes it's just a
Speaker 2: miserable existence. So every once in a while I will
Speaker 2: take my research team to just like go see a
Speaker 2: movie in an air conditioning the theater, like right at
Speaker 2: the heat of the day, when even when it's even
Speaker 2: too hot for the lizards.
Speaker 1: Are you teaching them about boguards effect?
Speaker 2: The effect? Yeah, exactly, who call it a lesson?
Speaker 1: Okay, We're going to experience a sixty two degree movie
Speaker 1: with there right now. Is it worse when it's muggy
Speaker 1: because you're sweat can't evaporate as much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so vapor transporation is not efficient in really highly
Speaker 2: humid environments, it says. Why you know, when you go
Speaker 2: into the desert, like people who live in like Tucson
Speaker 2: or other places in Arizona, you're like, oh, yeah, it's
Speaker 2: like one hundred and fifty, but it's a dry heat. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I'm like, it's one hundred and I don't know
Speaker 2: what does a dry heat have to do with anything.
Speaker 2: It's still heat, but in actuality, because it's so dry,
Speaker 2: a vapor transporation does help them more efficiently cool the body.
Speaker 2: I still think it's horrible though.
Speaker 1: What is the best thing about being a thermal physiologist?
Speaker 2: Oh, oh my god, how much time do you have?
Speaker 1: Wizards?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's definitely the animals, right, So I mean,
Speaker 2: certainly being a thermal physiologist. I mean, I think this
Speaker 2: applies to pretty much any scientist. But the idea of
Speaker 2: like waking up in the morning and you know that
Speaker 2: your day is going to be spent trying to answer
Speaker 2: questions that have never been answered before and may have
Speaker 2: never been asked before. There's like just something so deeply
Speaker 2: satisfying about that, you know, and going out obviously, like
Speaker 2: being in the field, there's something like those WTF moments
Speaker 2: right where you're going out and like maybe it's super
Speaker 2: hot outside and you're kind of tired, and then you
Speaker 2: see something that you've never seen or thought about before,
Speaker 2: and it just sparks something like WTF, what in the
Speaker 2: good hell was that? And it just you know, just
Speaker 2: being there, right, being putting yourself in in that environment.
Speaker 2: It's a whole different frame of mind. Like we spend
Speaker 2: our entire lives making all kinds of decisions that don't
Speaker 2: have any real consequences in terms of like in terms
Speaker 2: of like life and death. So to be able to
Speaker 2: go and like put yourself in an environment and observe
Speaker 2: organisms where the decisions that they're making right, aren't you know,
Speaker 2: oh what pair of converses should I put on? But
Speaker 2: you know, do I move here or there? Do I
Speaker 2: do this or that? And that that decision can literally
Speaker 2: be the difference between finding food and being food and
Speaker 2: how that plays out in populations over time. Like being
Speaker 2: able to see this grand story of evolution played out
Speaker 2: on its sort of thermo hydric stage, right, and how
Speaker 2: it's played out over millennia, right, and seeing all of
Speaker 2: the different ways, all the different solutions that life has
Speaker 2: come up with to like solve those problems. Right, what
Speaker 2: Darwin called is endless forms most beautiful, Right, Being able
Speaker 2: to partake in that process in such a tangible way
Speaker 2: as a scientist, it's it's the thing that really just
Speaker 2: drives me. Plus the toys. Yeah, oh my god, so
Speaker 2: like running like running lizards on race tracks and oh,
Speaker 2: I'll take you, I'll take you up there. I just
Speaker 2: have these these two beautiful, amazing environmental chambers built that
Speaker 2: allows us to manipulate temperature like every half hour and
Speaker 2: manipulate humidity. Call them the twins Chuck D and Alfie.
Speaker 1: Okay, so side note, these environmental chambers you just got,
Speaker 1: Chuck D and Alfie are named after Charles Darwin and
Speaker 1: Alfred Wallace, who are too naturalists who conceived the theory
Speaker 1: of evolution. So if you haven't heard evolutionary biology yet,
Speaker 1: also now would be a good time. Are there wizards
Speaker 1: in them?
Speaker 2: They're not lizards in them yet, okay, but there will
Speaker 2: be lizards in them very soon.
Speaker 1: Are you going to have grad students manning the Lizard Chambers.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's going to be the best. I'm so excited.
Speaker 1: Of course, being a professor isn't all he's working on.
Speaker 1: And your podcast, yeah, which is amazing.
Speaker 2: It is. It is nerd gasmic. It's it's definitely. It's
Speaker 2: like it's one of those guilty pleasures, you know, to
Speaker 2: be able to to bring like merging, merging the nerd multiverse, right,
Speaker 2: bringing in the comic books and the science. It's it's awesome.
Speaker 2: It's been a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: What episodes do you have coming up?
Speaker 2: Oh, so, we just put out a Star Trek episode
Speaker 2: looking at evolution and genetics. In Star Trek, we interviewed
Speaker 2: doctor Mohammed Nor who's an evolutionary geneticist at Duke, And
Speaker 2: the next episode will be about the Immortal Iron Fist,
Speaker 2: like talking about the biology of a living weapon. So
Speaker 2: I interview someone who studies biomechanics. She studies this amazing,
Speaker 2: amazing creature, the mantis shrimp that has one of its
Speaker 2: punch is one of the fastest motions recorded in the
Speaker 2: animal world. And yeah, so there is just like a
Speaker 2: lot of science, a lot of really cool stuff that
Speaker 2: we talked about there.
Speaker 1: God, it's so good.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm excited.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for letting me barge into your
Speaker 1: office with twenty two pages of questions.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, I love you and your bible full
Speaker 2: of questions. Thank you so much for of course, this
Speaker 2: is a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: So ask the smartest people your stupidest questions, because all
Speaker 1: of that smartness only makes the world better. So to
Speaker 1: doctor Shane Campbell, stateon go listen to the Biology of Superheroes,
Speaker 1: like right now, go do that on Twitter. That's super
Speaker 1: Bio podcast and he's at s Campbell's Stayton on Twitter
Speaker 1: as well. I'll link those in the show notes. More
Speaker 1: links are always up at aliward dot com, slash ologies,
Speaker 1: ologies is ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward
Speaker 1: with one L on both. And thank you to everyone
Speaker 1: on patreon dot com slash ologies for supporting the show.
Speaker 1: I couldn't make without you for everyone getting merch at
Speaker 1: ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Shannon Feldts and Bonnie Dutch
Speaker 1: for managing that. Thank you Aaron Talbert and Hannahlippo Esquire
Speaker 1: for managing the Facebook Ologies podcast group. Thank you to
Speaker 1: interns Harry Kim and Caleb Patton for this extra research help.
Speaker 1: This week editing was done by Jared Sleeper of mind
Speaker 1: Jam Media in case you need any podcast editing done,
Speaker 1: They're great, and by superhero endotherm Stephen Ray Morris of
Speaker 1: the Cat Podcast, the per Cast, and the Dino Podcast
Speaker 1: See Jurassic Right. It would be a cold and lonely
Speaker 1: place without you. Stephen. Thank you now. At the end
Speaker 1: of each episode, I tell you a secret, and this
Speaker 1: week's secret is I was supposed to fly somewhere today
Speaker 1: but all the flights got canceled because it was snowing,
Speaker 1: And though I'm sad to miss the trip, I was
Speaker 1: also like, yes, that sounded very cold anyway. Also, I
Speaker 1: fell asleep working and I still technically am, and yesterday's
Speaker 1: close because I got to get this episode up. But
Speaker 1: I'm fine. I'm gonna be fine. There's no one here
Speaker 1: even to smell me, so what's the problem. Okay, stay warm, byebye, pacadermatology,
Speaker 1: hobbiology or do zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, pertology, apology, zeriology, elinology.
Speaker 2: Then