In this episode, we talk about the yellow caiman, a creature that was thought to be extinct in the wild. Joe and a Colombian scientist named Sergio Riena managed to find it and bring it back to life. They talk about what it's like to be a caiman and what it means to be one of their kind, and what they do to keep them alive. We also talk about their diet and how they can survive without food for a long period of time, and how much they like to eat other animals, like jaguars, snakes, and other animals that are bigger than they should be. And we talk a little bit about a new addition to the Nature is Metal crew, the Jaguar! This episode is brought to you by Jamboree, a South American reptile park in Colombia. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/OurAdvertisers/Become a supporter of our Sponsorships and get 10% off your first month with discount code "Advertiser" at checkout! We'll see you in the Badger Box! Subscribe to our new ad-free version of Advertisers Only on AdSense! Subscribe to AdSense Subscribe on Podcoin Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on PODCO Connect with Spare Cash App Subscribe on Spare Card - use the promo code: "Spare Cash" for 10% Off Your First Month and receive 5% off of your first purchase when you become a Member of a Member Rate or Associate Member? Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on a Friendship & Become a Friendless Member Subscribe On Spare Rate & Review On Spay & Review on Spay and Review Subscribe On Itunes Subscribe on Itunes Learn more About Meals & Shout Out? Subscribe On A Podcoin Learn More About This Podcast - Subscribe On The Same Day - Get a Freebie? - Subscribe To Our Podcast - Learn More about This Week's Newbie & Subscribe On All That Will We'll Be Getting A Freebie & Learn More Learn About Itunes Shoutout To Watch Out For a Newbie & More! Learn How To Reach Your Best Bites & Support Our Sponsored On Social Outro - Get Exclusive Discounts & Support On A Friendless -
00:00:18.000Yeah, so this one, it's a little confusing.
00:00:21.000It's a species that was last seen when the last one died in a zoo in the 80s, and because of the region that it occupies in Colombia, which has always been controlled by FARC rebels, nobody had been back down there to look for it.
00:00:33.000And myself, and there's actually this amazing Colombian scientist named Sergio Riena, we're both kind of going and prodding and trying to see if we could get in, and we both found it within a month of each other.
00:01:15.000Are they similar to regular crocodiles with alligators in that they don't have to eat for like a year?
00:01:21.000Yeah, so caiman, I mean, caiman don't have as slow of metabolism as certain other species, but they're a member of the alligator family, so to speak, and they can go very long times without food.
00:01:37.000I mean, look at the teeth on that thing.
00:01:39.000Swallows things basically whole, just spins to take chunks off of things, swallows them whole, doesn't have to eat for a year, can go underwater for how long without holding its breath?
00:02:52.000Like if you're locked into those eyes, like there's no forgiveness, there's no emotions, there's just ferocity and aggression and death.
00:03:02.000It seems like nothing but testosterone is behind that.
00:03:05.000You know, I mean, testosterone is probably the wrong chemical, but it just seems so focused and motivated, and like you say, it looks like death.
00:03:13.000Yeah, I'm sure there's some testosterone involved in that equation, too, but there's a bunch of other cat shit in there.
00:03:19.000And they have, apparently, the thing in the caption was saying that the caiman has one of the greatest bites per pound of any of the big cats, and they regularly eat these...
00:03:37.000And, you know, back to the one that we found, it's so great because, like, I'm the hide-and-seek guy, right?
00:03:42.000Like, I look for them, and now there's this scientist, Sergio Riena, down in Colombia, who's going to manage that species' ongoing existence.
00:03:53.000I mean, you know, it's wildlife management, so it's getting proper population dynamics, trying to understand them genetically, figure out what their food source is, figure out how much hunting pressure they can take or cannot take, those kind of things.
00:04:04.000And that's not my department, you know.
00:04:41.000And they'd bring these people in, they would speak their native tongue, and they'd have this discussion of this thing that they saw two years ago, big like a bear.
00:05:13.000I'd have to look it up probably 10 years ago now.
00:05:15.000Not that long ago, but if an academic institution is putting resources behind an expedition like that, there's a lot of faith and maybe even intel that they're not releasing publicly to say this animal's still here.
00:06:37.000People love to try to find that thing.
00:06:39.000Like, the idea that it's out there, it's like, what is it about people where it's so compelling to find a species that we thought didn't exist or we thought was extinct, like, whether it's Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or the thylacine, which we know used to be real.
00:06:58.000I think that people, you know, they long for the unknown and there's this big question mark surrounding cryptids or surrounding extinct animals as to whether it's still out there and that's so much more inviting to the general perspective.
00:07:11.000To the general populace to get an answer to than knowing, oh, you know, there's 700 of them left and we're trying to get them up to 1,400 or whatever the species dynamic is for some other animal as opposed to being like, there could be one out there.
00:07:29.000I did one in northern Australia, up north of Cairns, and then one I spent a couple weeks in Tasmania with an amazing biologist, Nick Mooney, who, he's adamant that he's seen thylacine.
00:07:53.000If you're scared to tell people because of your reputation, as opposed to going out there going, I saw it, I saw it, I saw it, that becomes more credible than the people who are just waving their arms in the air going, I told you it's here.
00:08:04.000When did he come out of the thylacine closet?
00:08:47.000So, my next expedition for that animal, because I'm like all those other people that are kind of obsessed with it, my next expedition for that animal is to Papua New Guinea.
00:08:59.000This species used to range all the way from Papua New Guinea down through mainland Australia and into Tasmania.
00:09:06.000When people came over and settled that area, they brought with them dogs, dingoes, and dingoes out-competed them in mainland Australia and possibly in Papua New Guinea 4,000 years ago, but the thylacine remained in Tasmania where there are no dingoes to out-compete them.
00:09:21.000But in mainland Australia, you've got a diversity of habitats, so there are places the thylacine could still hide.
00:09:27.000But in Papua New Guinea, the terrain is so crazy that the idea is that in certain regions, dingoes could have never made it there.
00:09:34.000So perhaps there's these isolated regions where very small thylacine populations continued for the past 4,000 years.
00:12:57.000And then the real concern is that this bear is going to have a real hard time hunting because they're going to be able to see it much better because of the fact that it has the spray paint on the side of it.
00:14:58.000I mean, you know, how many pages on Instagram are there where people are chugging vodka and jumping off roofs and slamming tables and all this other stuff?
00:15:28.000Just this year, I mean, it's pretty minor, but just this year I took a single tooth from a lemon shark while I was working in the field with one.
00:15:59.000I was moving the boiling water with the spaghetti in it to the sink, you know, to put it in the strainer, and I spilled it on the top of my foot.
00:16:07.000And I had to keep my shit together because I was holding the pot.
00:18:34.000Well, because we used to hunt them, first of all, and we used to hunt seals and sea lions as well.
00:18:38.000And that's all been banned for a long time.
00:18:41.000So there's way more seals and sea lions now, and there's more sharks reproducing.
00:18:44.000And I think there's something to be said for them, the water being consistently warmer, And them staying further north than they used to as well.
00:18:53.000Or south, depending on which way they're going.
00:18:56.000But, like, where I live in Santa Barbara, there's this single bay where my buddy and I have been going for the last four years, and it's only for, like, three, four weeks in the summertime that there's, like...
00:19:09.000Six to eight juvenile great white sharks around.
00:19:11.000And when we started going there four years ago, they were like six feet long.
00:19:14.000And then the next year, they were like eight feet long.
00:19:16.000This year, I didn't go because I was traveling, but my buddy went and filmed them.
00:19:20.000He's like, dude, they're getting up to like 10 feet.
00:19:22.000And it's the same animals in the same spot.
00:19:25.000What happens when those are like 14 foot animals?
00:20:19.000It's such a beautiful creature, and it's so cool that they're there, but it's also, you're like, this thing can kill people, and it's right there, and we go in the water, and we swim around, and we're like, yay!
00:23:18.000I believe there has never been an attack on a human being by an orca in the wild, period.
00:23:24.000There have been multiple in aquariums, you know, while there's been shows going on, that kind of stuff, but I believe there's never actually been a recorded case of a death by orca in the wild.
00:23:33.000That's kind of crazy when you think about it.
00:23:35.000It just shows their intelligence, right?
00:23:37.000It shows they look at you and go, nope, that's not on the menu.
00:23:39.000Like, that's not something I need to eat.
00:23:43.000Well, what's interesting about orcas is there's really two sects of their diet.
00:23:47.000There's orcas that only eat marine mammals, and there's orcas that only eat stingrays and some other fish species.
00:23:54.000And so I think, you know, for those people, you see some of those incredible photographers like Paul Nicklin and stuff like that that get those images of them underwater.
00:24:01.000They're diving with the fish-eating orcas.
00:24:03.000I think a few people have been successful in diving with the mammal-eating ones, but that's, I feel like that's a dice roll.
00:24:12.000Well, you're a mammal and you're not, you're a seal size, you know.
00:24:15.000Jamie, who are we talking to about orcas and the population that lives in the Pacific Northwest, like around Seattle, that only eats the Chinook salmon?
00:24:28.000Remember we were having this conversation the other day with somebody?
00:24:37.000You have a population of orcas that only eats Chinook salmon, and then there's a decline in the population of Chinook salmon, so they're trying to figure out how to get them to eat seals.
00:25:36.000You'd think they would get to this kind of tipping point where they're like, there's not enough to eat, we need to make a transition, and then are they unsuccessful in that transition because they can't figure out how to do it?
00:25:49.000It's a real bummer, man, when you hear that they're almost starving to death out there, and they're trying to actually bring Chinook salmon to them.
00:28:02.000The only thing that keeps me from killing a ton of them is that I use a bow and arrow, and it's really hard to do with a bow and arrow because they're so fast.
00:28:08.000And they evolved in Asia to get away from tigers.
00:28:31.000And I don't think this is the case, but if someone said, look, I know these pigs are culturally significant to you, but if we leave them here, the whole island's ecosystem will collapse.
00:28:39.000There'll be no birds, no fish, no lizards, nothing.
00:29:24.000They're destroying shit because they're...
00:29:26.000If you don't kill them, they just breed and [...
00:29:31.000And they're dealing with them now even in the northern part of the United States.
00:29:35.000They're dealing with them in the northeast.
00:29:36.000There was a New York Times article about it, see if you can find that, from two days ago about the expansion of wild pigs is that they're starting to make their way into the northeastern states.
00:30:19.000So the entire 200 million or whatever it is across the US, I don't know the number, it was like six or eight or ten original pigs that were brought in by Christopher Columbus and dropped in Florida.
00:31:18.000Actually, I got a pretty funny story about a warthog.
00:31:20.000My uncle, my mom's brother, we were out on safari one time, and he was young.
00:31:28.000He was much younger than my mother, so he was maybe a teenager or something.
00:31:31.000And he grabbed this plum and started going for a walk across camp.
00:31:35.000And anyway, this warthog decided it wanted this plum.
00:31:38.000And so it came trotting after my uncle and started chasing him in circles around this tree, but my uncle was so panicked by this thing chasing him around this big baobab tree that he wouldn't drop the plum.
00:31:49.000So he's just in this perpetual cycle of being chased around this tree until he eventually threw the plum and the warthog just veered off and went for the plum.
00:33:46.000Maybe like a peacock's tail, you know, for showmanship.
00:33:50.000But what's really crazy about them evolving those two teeth or tusks out of the bridge of their snout is if they're not broken in fights and rooting around, they can grow long enough that they will puncture the animal in the head and kill it.
00:35:12.000So there's an extinct subspecies of those called the Molokan Barbarusa, which in the single island near Sulawesi used to be, and then they think people have hunted them, you know, to extinction, localized extinction within that island and that subspecies.
00:35:26.000But some people I know that worked over there ate one.
00:35:30.000So they're like, yeah, no, we ate this wild pig with these crazy horns.
00:35:33.000And I was like, yeah, this was like two years ago.
00:35:36.000You know, and they have no proof and they don't have the skull and they don't have the picture.
00:35:39.000They were like, they were traveling and they're like, yeah, yeah, we got back and we ate this pig with these wild horns on this particular island.
00:35:44.000And I was like, wait, is that possibly a Malucan Barbarossa?
00:35:48.000And you look where they were and what they said and what they ate and it's like, oh, that could be an extinct subspecies that you guys consumed.
00:35:56.000Well, how many biologists are actually actively out there looking for these creatures?
00:36:00.000Those, I would say zero currently, that species.
00:36:03.000But with regards to this field of presumed extinct animals, it seems to be a movement that's expanding, you know, and I think one of the reasons for that is we have a rate of something like 2,000 species a year being deemed extinct, right?
00:36:14.000So when you have that many animals being deemed extinct every year, there's flags being put up.
00:36:23.000You know, I don't want to say I was the first, but I feel like I was in that wave of first people to start looking into extinction as far as ongoing animals wrongfully deemed extinct.
00:36:31.000And now it's like mainstream in the biology world.
00:36:34.000It's like there's a lot of people that are like, I'm going to go see if I can find this thing.
00:36:37.000Is it because it's a romantic sort of thing?
00:37:14.000It's not in my wheelhouse, you know, like the cryptids, the Loch Ness monsters.
00:37:18.000I think that one they think is in Vietnam.
00:37:20.000I think it's in Vietnam and maybe some other parts of Southeast Asia.
00:37:26.000Most people thought it was nonsense until the Homo floriensis, until they found out about that hobbit person that lives in the island of Flores.
00:39:43.000But what's amazing is about two-thirds of the way through the system, you can see what you're looking at is areas where the cave roof has collapsed, and there's isolated pockets of ecosystem, right?
00:39:53.000So we were talking about the pygmy people that could live in the forests of Vietnam.
00:39:57.000My point is, this giant six-mile-long cave with these huge openings wasn't even discovered until, I think, 1995. Whew!
00:40:06.000So, what's to say a tribe of small people couldn't hide in something like that and move in and out and never be seen?
00:40:26.000So my whole team watched, we spent like, when we were going, like, leading up to this expedition, we're like, alright, let's watch a bunch of bad horror cave movies before we go.
00:40:34.000The first one's bad, the second one is so bad, it's funny.
00:42:24.000And keep in mind, and again, I'm not like a huge cryptid guy, but keep in mind, you know, as a homo sapien, they have a higher intellect, which means they're better at avoiding people, right?
00:42:33.000So, it's, you know, it's not unreasonable to say if there was a group of small humanoids out there that didn't want to be discovered, they could stay hidden.
00:42:41.000Yeah, and if it's really small, you know, and also some sort of a hominid that has intelligence, it's probably got a pretty decent food source in the jungle.
00:46:27.000This is the reality of human beings is that we have not been alive that long and we have not been civilized in terms of how we view the world today with inclusivity and objectivity and care and, you know, kindness towards others,
00:47:32.000And the boat crashed into the shore, and most of the animals escaped, including the two breeding pair of thylacine.
00:47:39.000Fast forward 10-15 years, you start having these chubacabra sightings pop up in the Northeast.
00:47:45.000And these animals were adapted to living in Tasmania, which is a pretty similar climate to the Northeast.
00:47:51.000And so there's people that have kind of drawn these parallels and said, oh, the chupacabra that we've reported running around, you know, the United States is actually a tiny remnant population of these thylacine that were brought here for the Bronx Zoo that escaped.
00:48:29.000If you want to find a thylacine, go to Bubba's house.
00:48:33.000But especially back then, there were no import-export laws about wildlife.
00:48:37.000You could just bring in whatever you liked if you had money.
00:48:40.000Everybody was in a race to collect stuff for zoos and museums.
00:48:43.000What's to say somebody didn't bring some in?
00:48:45.000Texas and their exotics, it's so strange.
00:48:48.000I mean, I had a bit about it in my act in 2016, my Netflix special, that there's more tigers in captivity in Texas in private collections than there are in all of the wild of the world.
00:49:37.000And what's really interesting is I've been reading a lot about, over the last two to three months, I've been obsessed with Wild West stories.
00:49:48.000Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynn, wrote this fantastic book about the Comanches and the battle with people in Texas and the Texas Rangers in the 1800s and trying to take over that land from the Comanches.
00:50:06.000It's Crazy that this stuff happened just, you know, 150 years ago.
00:50:15.000Really sad because there's something incredibly romantic about their lifestyle that was just 150 years ago when all of Europe, they were, you know, having...
00:50:25.000Horse-driven carriages, and people were living in these fancy buildings, but right here in North America, people were living like they were in the Stone Age.
00:50:34.000And they had this incredible nomadic life where they were following around the buffalo and killing the buffalo, and they were all just about war.
00:50:44.000There was this wild, ferocious tribe that was about war and hunting buffaloes.
00:52:09.000This whole country, this whole continent used to be this wild ecosystem of human beings riding horses, chasing buffalo, all these animals all over the place.
00:52:22.000I mean, during the 150 plus years or 250 plus years...
00:52:42.000Pre-human settlement, they say that the North American continent had more biomass, like larger game and more abundant megafauna than the plains of Africa.
00:54:28.000Nowadays, not that I'm pro-wiping out anything, but nowadays, you have a small population of whatever the animal is, and most people are utilizing every part of it, right?
00:54:37.000Because we don't have that crazy abundance.
00:54:40.000Like, imagine if you just went out, like you, for instance, imagine if you just went out to shoot elk for the tongue.
00:55:32.000Get the audio version, if you're into audiobooks, because he reads it and he does an amazing job, and it's his book.
00:55:37.000He actually had sold it, and then someone else had got the rights, you know, whatever, the book company had decided to have an actor read it.
00:57:26.000This is about a young boy growing up in Africa during apartheid.
00:57:31.000He's very, like, ostracized from his peers because he's not—I believe I'd have to listen to it again—because he's not, you know, Boorah, he's not a Dutch-African, he's English-African, and— It's his journey through life, basically, and it's really good.
00:57:46.000But what reminded me of it is we're talking about all the wildlife, and he grows up very much so in the bush in Africa and around wildlife, and he's juggling that and a kind of defunct social system, and it's really good.
00:58:12.000I mean, we have some nutty things here.
00:58:14.000We have mountain lions and grizzlies and stuff like that.
00:58:16.000But it ain't shit compared to what they have in Africa.
00:58:19.000Having walked kind of through the wilds in a lot of different places, there's nowhere I've been like Africa where you're so like, okay, I'm just a part of the food system now.
00:58:37.000You're just, like, you just fit into the food web.
00:58:39.000You're not at the top of it any longer.
00:58:41.000Yeah, it's such a weird place, too, when it comes to wildlife, when, you know, they brought so many animals back from the brink of extinction only because they have value for hunting.
00:58:53.000It's so, it's so, everyone's so torn on that because it's, On one hand, you would love it if people had donated enough money to keep these animals healthy and keep them in good populations because we appreciate them.
01:01:50.000And the drugs that they put them on, the other thing is when you're on antibiotics, One of the side effects of some antibiotics, like Cipro, is that your ligaments get weak.
01:02:20.000Apparently, I mean, I really don't know what I'm talking about, but apparently our whole system is fueled sort of, it's one gigantic unit.
01:02:30.000And so when you do something like you introduce antibiotics and you crush all these invading diseases or these invading bacteria or whatever the fuck, staph or whatever is fucking with you.
01:04:43.000Big Galapagos tortoise on this crazy active volcano on far remote Galapagos.
01:04:48.000We had gnarly sunstroke, heatstroke, I mean everything.
01:04:52.000And after a few days of hiking up and down this volcano, we found scat and then we found a dig like a tortoise had been digging and 15 minutes later we found the animal.
01:05:00.000I mean, how many of them are in the wild?
01:05:49.000So because tortoises can't swim, at least not across the ocean, so because of where they were, if we had found a tortoise, it was going to be the Fernandina tortoise.
01:06:00.000Now that being said, the unique shell ridging, the shape...
01:06:40.000And such, you know, the tortoise, like Lonesome George, is an icon of conservation.
01:06:43.000So to find the species that the world had lost for 114 years was pretty great.
01:06:48.000Imagine being a tortoise, just chilling on this fucking island, hanging out, and some famous biologist flies from all the way around the world to find you.
01:08:03.000And even more interesting than that is tortoises can retain viable sperm.
01:08:08.000So, what we had hoped when we found her was that, you know, maybe she had copulated with a male 10 years prior and had been under such tough environmental stress that she hadn't had the biological energy to lay eggs.
01:08:19.000And we're thinking, oh, let's get her some food, get her some water, who knows?
01:08:44.000So if they find a viable male and then they bring him to the facility and introduce him to all the food and water, do they have success in taking these wild tortoises and getting them to breed?
01:09:47.000And sit there for two days, and we kind of had to twiddle our thumbs just waiting, and then we got all our stuff back, got on the boats, and went out to that island.
01:09:53.000So the giant freezer supposedly kills any sort of spores or anything?
01:09:58.000It gets really cold, if I remember correctly, and you go through everything.
01:10:02.000They go through your boots, you look for any seeds, you go through your underwear, like literally everything to see if you're bringing any contaminants in.
01:10:57.000So when you do have a discovery like this, I mean, that's got to, like, open up the door for more funding, more research possibilities, more trips.
01:11:22.000Extinct means vanished, like no longer in existence.
01:11:25.000So when you find it back, that opens up the dollars for return efforts, management, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:11:30.000And that's what's going on currently for that particular species.
01:11:33.000It's great for me in the sense that it's like, oh, this guy is furthering his reputation of being able to find these things that other people aren't, which really just boils down to me being willing to embrace shittier conditions than I think a lot of other people are.
01:12:00.000There's four species that in the wild coast, which is like from Durban up to Mozambique on the east, southeastern Africa, that haven't been seen in 30 years or more.
01:12:10.000And it's not necessarily that they're extinct so much as nobody looks for them.
01:12:15.000And, you know, it's like it's a very gray area of are these animals still there or not?
01:12:20.000And so myself, this guy named Dave Ebert, he's the president of the North American Elastomer Brank Society, like big shark guy, you know, big other bio nerd like myself.
01:12:28.000We're teaming up and we're going down there to try and find some of these animals.
01:12:32.000I was reading something recently about great whites in South Africa, that there's a massive decline.
01:13:08.000And it gives them lots of minerals that otherwise they can't get from flesh.
01:13:11.000I was watching a documentary on wolves and that was one of the ways that the alpha establishes itself that when there's a kill, it's the first to eat the liver.
01:13:19.000And there's a guy who was living with these wolves and he was like tricking them that he was a wolf and one of the ways he would do it was he would eat a liver in front of them.
01:13:27.000And so they're like, wow, this guy might be the shit.
01:13:30.000And then the guy went away because he's a wolf expert.
01:13:32.000And he went away because there was a farmer that was having issues with wolves.
01:13:38.000And they were trying to figure out a way to get the wolves to leave his livestock alone.
01:13:41.000So what they did was they set up a speaker system.
01:13:43.000So they put these gigantic speakers up, and they started broadcasting these aggressive wolf howls to let this other wolf pack know that a new wolf pack had moved into the area.
01:13:54.000So this guy was on this project for several months, came back to the original wolf pack that he was, like, conning into thinking that he was, and a new alpha had taken over.
01:14:57.000I gotta ask you this, and don't answer it if it's uncomfortable, but in my field, working with specialized experts, a lot like him, obviously that's a whole other level, they start to take on characteristics of these animals, I've noticed.
01:15:09.000So, like, I worked with a guy who was a bear expert, right?
01:15:13.000And he spent his whole life with bears, and this man was basically a bear.
01:16:24.000Like, bro, you're made out of Jell-O. You are literally a water balloon filled with Jell-O and you're hanging around these super predators.
01:16:34.000They're one of my favorite animals on the planet.
01:16:35.000I just think they're so fascinating and now that they've been reintroduced into the West, you know, I know, look at that, like, it's growling, the thing's kissing him to show the submissive, so he's eating the liver in front of it.
01:16:49.000Have you ever been to the wolf sanctuary out here in Palmdale?
01:16:55.000They don't do it for the general public, but they rescue wolves and wolf dogs and rehabilitate them, and a lot of times they've been in fights, and they've come out of terrible places, and they've got a few animals that they're very closely related to full-blood wild wolves,
01:17:11.000and you can go in and interact with them.
01:17:13.000You're not petting them, it's not a puppy, you know what I mean?
01:17:31.000What I was saying is that, you know, since they've reintroduced them into the West, there's been a lot of controversy behind that, and there's talks about doing that in Colorado, and people are really freaking out, like ranchers are freaking out, like, hey, there's a reason why everybody killed these things off.
01:18:08.000So it's basically like when a fox gets into the henhouse, They get in this killing frenzy state.
01:18:14.000It's not like they're going to eat 30 different chickens, but they're going to kill everyone because they're in this state.
01:18:20.000I don't know that's necessarily the case for that, but it is scary to think of an apex predator like a wolf getting into that hen house type syndrome, killing 30 elk just because they can.
01:18:32.000But you know what's really interesting, Joe, is...
01:18:59.000I have a friend who actually shot an elk in BC, in British Columbia, and they didn't know it, but the elk expired right next to a wolf den.
01:20:44.000Like, he's got video footage of this and photographic footage of this, where he's living in this little tiny shack that's right next to a lake, and these wolves had killed a moose.
01:20:55.000And they were in the middle of this frozen lake.
01:21:34.000So he had one arrow that he killed the elk, two arrows that he killed wolves, one arrow left, and he's got his back to a tree, and the guy he's with had three bullets.
01:22:32.000He really understands the woods and nature as good as anybody.
01:22:36.000But I think he was one of those situations where he knew he could get back to the cabin, and if he didn't get back to the cabin, the way they were approaching him, they were getting closer and closer.
01:23:07.000I've really loved the podcast with him because, you know, he had just decided, like, I want to try to live, like, as close to nature as possible.
01:25:20.000I've done these seven day hunts, like the one where I got this mule deer right here with my friend Steve Rinella, but he introduced us to hunting.
01:25:30.000And this was in Montana, and it was October, and it got down to, you know, like nine degrees outside, and we're sleeping in these tents, and it was wonderful.
01:25:39.000I mean, it was a fantastic experience.
01:25:41.000It really opened my eyes to real wild and wilderness, what it's like to hunt, and then at the end of this week, we went back to Billings, and we got a hotel room, and I got a shower, and I was like, oh my god.
01:25:55.000A hot shower after a week in the woods.
01:25:58.000I was with Brian Callen and me and Callen was like, how good was that shower?
01:26:17.000So being outside, freezing your ass off, but also having the reward of actually shooting a deer, and then we ate a lot of it that night, and we were cooking it over the fire, and then the whole trip was done on the Missouri breaks.
01:26:32.000So we're on the Missouri River, and so we took the river 40 miles.
01:27:46.000But it comes, you know, like your buddy, you know, who got the diseases from the Congo, it comes with its costs.
01:27:51.000Like, you know, we were in Borneo this year, and we were at a research station in the middle of the jungle, and I don't know enough about bee ecology, but it was like bee season.
01:28:01.000And I mean, you should see some of our videos on Instagram.
01:29:21.000That's from his, he owns a vineyard, and he's got a farm in Arizona, and he was telling me about these things, and he got a dead one and sent it to me.
01:29:36.000Yeah, so I mean, the tarantula hawk, it's a parasitic wasp, right?
01:29:40.000So it comes out, it hunts for tarantulas, it lays its eggs, I believe, in the abdomen of the tarantula, and then the eggs hatch and explode out of the tarantula, and that's the life cycle.
01:30:34.000So they fly in and there's this slow motion video of these enormous hornets flying in and decapitating thousands and thousands of honeybees.
01:30:47.000So what's interesting is the honeybees, they're so outsized.
01:30:52.000I mean, the hornets are literally like 50, 60 times larger than them.
01:32:09.000I mean, it's just so weird that nature devises these sort of strategies to prevent overpopulation and that there's this balance that takes place where the bees are threatened by something that's very bee-like.
01:32:26.000So you see how they're getting on top of them?
01:33:24.000You know, there was one with a mouse, and the mouse is so much bigger than the praying mantis, but the praying mantis just jacks this mouse.
01:35:44.000Like if there's tons of prey and something gets there, it gets bigger and bigger.
01:35:46.000If there's not enough resources, it gets smaller and smaller.
01:35:49.000Do you know about the lions that are in a very specific part of Africa where the river branched off and left them on an island with only buffalo?
01:36:23.000And they just, all they do, and what's weird, this is what's really weird about the documentary, there's several packs that live on this island, but one pack has these enormous super lions, and then there's another pack of regular-sized lions.
01:37:59.000There's a documentary from the BBC about the Congo that gets into that, and they talk about how quickly the rainforest had grown, and what used to be grasslands became this enormous, dense rainforest, and a lot of these animals that were plains animals had to figure out a way to survive,
01:38:18.000and so they adapted, and they were talking about the diker.
01:38:21.000That little tiny little antelope that swims underwater for as much as 100 yards and eats fish.
01:39:54.000What's the pollen that they're getting it from?
01:39:58.000What are they getting it that's causing it to be psychedelic?
01:40:00.000All I know is what you just said, which is it's the pollen that they're creating the honey out of that is making it psychedelic, but I don't know what it is.
01:41:25.000We have rhododendrons, probably a different family here, you know, as pretty plants around California.
01:41:31.000Oh, that's just a descriptive of the actual plant.
01:41:33.000It might be that specific one in the altitude because it stays up there.
01:41:38.000So, it's exported from Nepal to Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong.
01:41:44.000The red honey is prized for its purported medicinal value and intoxicating qualities and are attributed to this gray nanotoxin present in the nectar collected from white rhododendrons.
01:43:39.000It says you have to be 18 to order it.
01:43:40.000I'm 18. It says their mad honey does contain the gray anotoxins, or otherwise it would just be regular honey, and it is laboratory tested to assure consistent quality, and it is safe and effective, it says.
01:45:23.000Yeah, it looks like you should probably leave that thing alone.
01:45:26.000They think that that might be one of the, you know, there's a lot of those North American things that they think are monsters, like Nessie, you know, like the Loch Ness Monster.
01:45:36.000They also have, like, ones in Lake Michigan.
01:46:21.000They can get the salt out or in, whatever they need, and then go into the rivers, spend time in the rivers, go back into the ocean to hunt.
01:46:28.000The inspiration for the movie Jaws was apparently Bull Sharks in New Jersey, a series of attacks in fresh water on a river system.
01:46:35.000Right, but near an ocean, I believe, right?
01:48:11.000You know, whenever I look at those videos of bears catching salmon as they're jumping up the river, like, what was the first salmon thinking when it decided, hey, I'm going to go up these rocks back to the place where I was born and spawn there?
01:49:30.000We put salmon ladders in and yada yada.
01:49:32.000But it's interesting that everything seems so tough as you just said and at the same time it's so fragile because we do one thing like put in a hydroelectric dam and it ruins the entire ecosystem.
01:49:44.000Yeah, we were in Seattle, and in Seattle there's a place where you can go, and it's like underneath this bridge, and there's these clear plexiglass walls, and you can actually see the salmon making their way through and up the river, and they were explaining how they had put dams in and didn't really understand the consequences of putting these dams back when they did,
01:50:04.000and then all these salmon would go to the mouth of the river where they thought they were going to go upriver, and it would be blocked.
01:50:21.000And that supports, you know, like, that food source, that protein supports...
01:50:25.000Not just like the bears and the birds, but like the whole river's ecology, right?
01:50:29.000Like the river, the algaes that live in the river, the little bugs that live in the algae depend on those salmon dying up that river and fertilizing the river.
01:50:38.000So it's like the whole thing is so interconnected and then, you know, one little thing and poof.
01:50:56.000The octopus had captured an eagle and was trying to eat the eagle, and these fishermen saw the struggle and released the eagle from the grasp of the octopus, which to me is like, that is a...
01:52:32.000The way they change their texture and their color and the way they do it instantaneously to adapt to their environment and how well they blend in, they're so interesting.
01:52:42.000I think they're the most alien creature that exists on planet Earth.
01:53:11.000It's just like it can open jars, it can close them, it can come out of the aquarium, go back into it, it'll swim over if it knows you, it knows if it doesn't like you.
01:53:33.000Yeah, well, apparently as the octopus is asleep and dreaming, it's changing the outside color and texture of its skin in relation to whatever the fuck is going on in its head.
01:54:53.000And the proof and the pudding in that one, so to speak, is the fact that you can take mushroom spores into the vacuum of space and bring them back to Earth and they still fruit.
01:55:38.000And so they're developing those intelligent chromatophores, that thing that basically the skin picks up the color and changes to match, right there in the embryo.
01:59:03.000Well, the ocean is so bizarre in and of itself.
01:59:06.000There's just so many weird creatures in the ocean.
01:59:08.000It's such an alien environment to us as terrestrial mammals.
01:59:12.000Do you remember when the tsunami hit Thailand and then there was all these animals that they were finding that they had never really seen before?
01:59:20.000Washed up on the shores, I remember that, yeah.
02:00:06.000I guess it depends how you define weirdness, but look at an octopus, look at a cuttlefish, look at those deep sea creatures, crabs, and all the way into the marine mammals and all the way down to the tiny little insects or isopods that live in the ocean.
02:00:19.000I think the ocean creatures are very bizarre.
02:00:22.000How about those giant squid that they found on that oil tanker?
02:00:25.000Yeah, and they saw that one come through.
02:05:35.000Like you said, those stories always get embellished.
02:05:37.000So even if it was a 60-foot squid on the surface, say it was injured or dying, and it was alive, and the boat hit it, and it starts slapping the boat with its tentacles.
02:05:48.000Like, that's not going to turn into a crazy sea fable.
02:05:51.000Can you imagine, though, if you were one of those dudes that was, like, making your way across the ocean and you, you know, in the 1100s or some shit, and you jump in the water to wash off and you get eaten by a giant octopus in front of your friends?
02:06:46.000So, around the same time period, so to speak, and I'm not one of these people, so I'm probably going to get the details wrong a little bit.
02:06:52.000It's like a Matthew McConaughey movie right now.
02:06:54.000So, around the same time period in China, South America, Africa, Rome, all these places, images depicted people fighting dragons, right?
02:07:04.000And every dragon was slightly different, but it was all a giant, scaly animal that could fly.
02:07:10.000So, when you break that down, you think about the fact that large birds had a hard time being fossilized because their bones are so porous, right?
02:07:18.000So, because bones, they have like hollowish bones, they break down very easily and they don't fossilize.
02:07:26.000Basically, they're saying the evidence is the reason there's no fossils of dragons is because they had bird bones and they were actually very delicate animals.
02:07:33.000But a handful of these small population of these giant flying lizards existed and basically encompassed all these different countries where they all depicted fighting dragons in their own way and they were all killed off by knights or whatever it is and then didn't fossilize.
02:07:53.000So it's like the science is saying that if there were lizards big enough to fly around and eat people, they didn't have bones that could fossilize.
02:08:02.000And that's why all these human populations around the world have depictions of them, because they did actually exist.
02:08:10.000Now, are there any stories of dragons, like, written, like, in the times of people that actually had the written word, or is it just depictions?
02:08:19.000That would be interesting, because, like, are these depictions, like, ancient accounts told by generation after generation, like, passed down?
02:08:29.000I don't know anything about dragons or whether it's real, but I think it's interesting to think...
02:08:33.000Oh, well, the science supports that if there were flying lizards, their bones wouldn't have fossilized, and these have been stories that have been exaggerated and passed down from generation to generation.
02:08:43.000And some of them breathe fire, but some of them don't, depending upon which culture it was significant to.
02:08:50.000I wonder what the fire is supposed to represent.
02:09:35.000It's like, I would be, I would, I mean, people would dedicate giant chunks of their life trying to find out if pterodactyls did coexist with human beings at one point in time.
02:10:55.000But they were hunted by people, because they posed a threat.
02:10:59.000And because people hunted the moa to extinction, that giant bird that the host eagle primarily preyed on, and so the two-fold kind of made them collapse.
02:12:08.000The wolf's like, trying to get away, and they're just killing them.
02:12:10.000And I believe, maybe it's not Mongolian culture, but one of those, you know, falconry cultures, you have to, like, as a teenage boy or something like that, your rite of passage is to go climb the cliff and take the chick out of the nest.
02:12:23.000And it's like this crazy process where, you know, a number of kids die trying to get to the eagle chick, and the ones that come back, that's their bird for however long the bird lives.
02:12:33.000I don't really know the whole process.
02:13:06.000Bro, you can't have a bird do the hunting.
02:13:09.000When I was in Venice this summer, there was a guy that had a hawk.
02:13:13.000That he had trained that was sitting on his arm, that he would stand there to keep the pigeons from disturbing all the customers that were eating in this restaurant.
02:13:22.000Yeah, because the pigeons in Venice were so aggressive that this place we were staying at called the Gritty Palace, which is this beautiful old hotel in Rome, or in Venice, rather.
02:13:33.000And now, up until really recently, I think the water subsided, but it was under four feet of water in the lobby.
02:14:57.000Yeah, there's a couple different primates that have basically had pets.
02:15:00.000They steal dogs and then bring the dogs and feed them and put them in the camp because the dogs will bark when things are coming so they can sleep.
02:15:14.000But they steal them and they literally know that if they get this dog and bring it over here and then feed it, the dog will be like their guard dog.
02:15:48.000I found out about Sapolsky initially because I became obsessed with toxoplasmosis.
02:15:54.000That's that cat parasite that alters the behavior of rodents and makes them attracted to cat urine.
02:16:00.000It actually makes the rodents erect their testicles and their scrotum enlarges and engorges with blood when they smell Cat urine.
02:16:13.000They become sexually aroused by the smell of cat urine.
02:16:16.000So this makes them get eaten by cats because the only place where this parasite can grow and breed and reproduce is inside the gut of a cat.
02:16:27.000so it's crazy so it rewires the rodents sexual reward system and makes them lose all their fear of cats not just all their fear but they become sexually aroused by cat urine so they run around and actually chase cats like you see cats they're just like trying to get the away from these rats that have toxo that's insane right so then it gets in the cat and then it gets in the people And Sapolsky,
02:16:53.000when he was studying, he found, I think he was doing his residency, one of the doctors he was working with was telling them when they get a motorcycle patient in, check them for toxo.
02:17:04.000Because there's a giant percentage of the population on Earth is infected with toxoplasmosis.
02:17:10.000And this toxoplasmosis gandhi apparently...
02:17:13.000It changes human behavior, and it makes people more reckless.
02:17:17.000And there's a direct correlation between motorcycle accidents and infection with toxoplasmosis.
02:17:24.000And they think that what happens is, look at this rat.
02:17:26.000This rat is sexually attracted to this cat.
02:17:59.000And they think that that's related to the disproportionate number of motorcycle accidents that are connected to people that are toxoplasmosis positive.
02:18:08.000So they have this infection and they just take risks.
02:18:35.000Yes, cat owners or people who live in rural populations where there's feral cats and they step in the shit and then the shit gets in their skin or they eat something that has eaten this cat shit or the cat shit infects the cows.
02:18:52.000There's all sorts of different methods of infection, but the thing about it is it's not fatal.
02:18:56.000But it does have these marked behavioral changes in human hosts.
02:22:35.000My partner in production and I have this ongoing joke where we say we're going to make a show called Monkeys are Assholes, and it's just a show traveling the world where monkeys pickpocket and bully people and jump on trains and steal stuff.
02:22:49.000Well, they exhibit some of the worst aspects of human behavior.
02:23:15.000I mean, they're like a step backwards from human beings.
02:23:19.000You look at how they behave and you're like, oh, if we had no social order, no structure, no laws, nothing, this is kind of what we'd be like.
02:23:27.000But what's amazing is that we coexist.
02:23:30.000What's amazing is that we get to see, oh, this is probably our past.
02:24:50.000And everything in between, like you said, these crocodiles reaching their pinnacle of evolution tens of millions of years ago and us constantly evolving.
02:26:29.000So during World War II, when the Japanese were holding Ramri Island in Burma, Myanmar, the Allies came in and started making the Japanese retreat.
02:26:39.000In the course of like two days, a thousand Japanese soldiers were eaten by crocodiles, by saltwater crocodiles.
02:26:49.000I mean, some reports say it was over a couple weeks, but the general consensus is a thousand soldiers were eaten by crocodiles in a very short amount of time.
02:26:57.000And it was this kind of perfect storm of situations where, because there were all these soldiers, they were eating all the prey, all the crocodiles were particularly hungry because of that.
02:27:09.000When the Allies pushed all the Japanese back into the swamps, you know, they started screaming, and one scream would trigger all the others, like all the crocodiles, to get into a frenzy, and it just wiped out this entire populace of people that ran through the swamp.
02:27:56.000So he fought off the crocodile, basically, and then the buddy he was with fishing pulled him into the boat and got him back to the village.
02:28:08.000We were so focused on saving the kid because myself and one other guy had medical training, so we were stopping the bleeding and bandaging him up, and we had the only speedboat.
02:28:16.000Because we had to get to this island, and this is very, very remote.
02:28:20.000So we got this kid on the speedboat and got him back to a hospital, and he lived.
02:28:23.000I think he lost the arm, but, you know, he was just going to bleed out and die right there in the village.
02:29:31.000They will lock in outside of a small village or an area that someone's collecting water.
02:29:35.000They'll spend weeks watching, studying the pattern, learning the behavior, and just wait for the perfect time where they can sink under, sit right there waiting for someone to gather water.
02:29:45.000In my opinion, they're not distinguishing that from another prey animal.
02:29:49.000They just know this thing's coming to water here at this pattern, and they will absolutely target people.
02:30:49.000I did a bit about that in my act as well, back in 2009, my Comedy Central special, where over a period of 200 years, I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 people have been killed by tigers in the Sundarbans.
02:31:03.000I mean, it's just like that number, it's unfathomable.
02:31:06.000There was a story that I talked about in that set where there was a boat filled with five guys and one tiger swam out to the boat, killed a guy, dragged his body to the shore, jumped back in the water, swam out to the boat, killed another guy.
02:31:20.000Did it with three different guys until he got tired of killing people.
02:32:17.000I find that those non-conflict mitigations are going to be the wave of the future, right?
02:32:23.000Using technology to come up with biocontrols, like a wolf growl to other wolves, or an alarming sound, or a smell that animals don't want to interfere because of territories, I think that stuff's fascinating.
02:32:39.000And I think one of the cool things about all this wildlife is that if we handle it correctly, we can make sure that these things are sustainable and they stay around and we can still just marvel at their presence.
02:33:12.000To be able to see some of these animals that you only see depictions of or you see skulls of, you know, that were caught in the La Brea tar pits or something like...
02:34:27.000So the same species that would have been here, right, that hung out in the Sierras, traveling all the way down into the Sierra Madres of Mexico, and then in these, what they call sky islands, if you're familiar with that term.
02:34:39.000These islands of isolated habitat up in the sky where they get more rainfall and everything else.
02:34:45.000There's big tracts of private land down there in Mexico where a couple of these farmers are like, something's killing my cattle and it's not a mountain lion.
02:34:53.000And it could potentially be like half a dozen Mexican grizzly bears.
02:35:49.000But take a look at when the last one was killed, and then if you can find it, see where it says they were extinct, and it's many, many years later.
02:35:58.000We took this one on a parade of some sort.
02:36:13.000And I mean, the 60s, that's not long ago, right?
02:36:15.000So, you know, there's reports that on these giant tracts of private land up in these mountains, there's potentially a very small population of Mexican grizzly bears.
02:36:43.000Like who's gone to investigate up in the high mountain peak areas of this million acre ranch?
02:36:48.000Well, there's not supposed to be grizzly bears in Colorado, but my friend Adam Greentree, who's a very experienced outdoorsman, he was hunting in the San Juan Mountains, and he got a grizzly bear flying No way.
02:38:11.000Late last year, I was tracking this giant lion that this friend of mine had told me that he'd seen in this Limpopo Valley of Zimbabwe, like just north of the South African border.
02:38:22.000And we surmised that there was a potential that this animal, because it was so big, it had such unique behavior in the fact that it was hunting buffalo and even juvenile elephants, might have remnant cape lion DNA in it.
02:38:34.000Because the cape lion is this extinct subspecies of African lion, it was bigger than your regular lion, and they would follow the elephant migrations north and then back south, but generally they hung out in South Africa.
02:38:44.000Anyway, long story short, we wanted to test the DNA of this lion to see if it had any cape lion DNA in it, and it was this one individual animal.
02:38:51.000So we tracked it for over a week, hung bait every night, did the collars, did everything that you do to get a lion in.
02:38:57.000And then finally, this massive black-maned lion came in, and I darted it from about 30 feet away from a blind.
02:41:06.000And the latest is, you know, I'm not a geneticist, but the latest is that sample has been sent down to South Africa to run against cape lion DNA to try and figure out what the discrepancy is.