Now you see it, now you don’t – this episode is a true trick for the senses as we uncover the hidden wonders of Camouflage! From human ingenuity (?) to animal creativity, misdirection and subterfuge abound in this episode, so keep your eyes peeled, it’s not one you’ll want to miss!
Check out this image of a trashline orbweaver spider and their stunning decoy! https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/175560721
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[This, That, or the Other: Disappearing Acts]
Stripes painted on ships and planes
Painting planes pink
Yehudi lights on planes
https://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol19/tnm_19_171-192.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1634902/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/552503/the-secret-lives-of-color-by-kassia-st-clair/
https://books.google.com/books?id=DUkl5bH6k6EC&pg=PA62#v=onepage&q&f=false
[Trivia Question]
Color combinations of Bargibant’s pygmy seahorses
https://www.fishbase.se/summary/Hippocampus-bargibanti
https://oceana.org/marine-life/pygmy-seahorse/
https://owlcation.com/stem/Camouflage-in-Animals-Pygmy-Seahorses
[Fact Off]
Trashline orb-weaver spiders that build self-portraits for camouflage https://web.archive.org/web/20160829062900/http://blog.perunature.com:80/2012/12/new-species-of-decoy-spider-likely.html
https://phys.org/news/2012-12-species-spider-fake-decoys.html
https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/trashline-orbweavers
https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article-abstract/10/4/372/2252323
Picture examples of stabilimenta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilimentum
Tricking mice with scent camouflage by adding too much wheat smell
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4164
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01127-3
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/camouflaging-wheat-smell-pest-control
[Ask the Science Couch]
Color-changing biology in invertebrates like octopuses vs. vertebrates like chameleons
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5804272/
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7368
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1039/c0pp00199f
https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/how-octopuses-and-squids-change-color
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2936158/
Patreon bonus: Non-visual-spectrum camouflage or other senses
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.860137
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2008.0228
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00049-004-0274-4
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0183
[Butt One More Thing]
Caterpillars, spiders, and moths that camouflage themselves as bird poop
https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/citrus/giantswallowtail.htm
https://nhpbs.org/natureworks/viceroy.htm
https://australian.museum/learn/animals/spiders/bird-dropping-spider/
https://boingboing.net/2019/11/14/macrocilix-maia-a-moth-that-e.html
#scishow #podcast #comedy #science #education #scishowtangents
hello and welcome to S show tangents it's the LLY competitive science knowledge showcase I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as always the science expert Siri Riley hello and also our resident Everyman Sam Schultz hello I've got an important question for
00:20:the two of you because today the day that we're recording this is not a stressful day at all that I'm trying to distract ourselves from it's election day when we're recording this so we don't know what's going to happen you do but instead what should they turn into a
01:34:Lego set oh they've turned everything into a Lego set no not everything there should be things that aren't Lego sets yet you could just say like my house or my dog or a little Hank Lego would be great yeah it couldn't be your house though because then people would figure
01:49:out where you lived well that wouldn't be a Lego set it just be a mini fig and also that would be a huge honor a YouTube collectible mini fig set I thought you meant like a full size like one of those 10 it's more than 10,000 pieces it's like at Legoland sculpures of H yeah I I I know a guy who
01:07:got one of those made of him and it was a big deal who was it the Incredible Hulk I think it was Jonathan Colton I was on a cruise I was on the Joko Cruise uh and and there was a Lego artist and I believe he made a full-size Joko when your hair changed the guy who made it
01:22:would have been like a come on and then he want to go make your new hair they just make new hair that'd be very easy to click it off click it back on yeah there is a a cat Lego set there's famously a cat Lego set the tuxedo cat Lego set but yes that's a that's a good
02:37:cat I wanted to be my cat though yeah the the set name is my cat and don't buy someone else's this is just Hank's cat yeah please don't buy this I know too much about Legos this is my issue I know too many so I think so you know they came out with that Mario Lego set with a
02:56:rotating background cowards play oh wow what you should have is a full scale Rainbow Road Lego set complete with small cars that you can then structurally build soundly and then it is infringing on Hot Wheels territory where you build the track and then get to play and race on it and I think that
02:19:would be a very cool Lego set this year they're doing Mario Kart Legos so are they might get your wish yeah that's the next that's the next thing see I know too much about Legos are they really heck all right I got it Babylon five take that Sam they haven't made that cuz
03:37:nobody buy it I want I want weird space stuff I'm tired of all this Star Wars nonsense less weird I would buy an infinite amount of Star Trek Legos I would love to have Little Star Trek Legos Star Trek Legos they're they're in the domain of Playmobile which I don't with Playmobile are they really
03:56:they Playmobile licensed is that why you can't make Star Trek Legos that's why you can't make make a Star Trek Lego playmo huge mistake Paramount yeah that's so embarrassing for you yeah I always think that when people do like a mega blocks partnership it's like what are you
03:12:thinking I'm so sorry this happened to you CU feel about your your deal makes me think less of SpongeBob SquarePants frankly that he has the mega block you do know a lot about this Sam I do Hank I'm secretly quite a toy collector I'm not supposed to tell anybody that but I am
04:32:there's a YouTube video called how to make a Lego Hank Green minifigurine oh wow I think that's when you know you've made it Wikipedia article old hat it's got 300,000 views how many 300,000 oh my God when's it from two years ago oh wow hey what the world next time somebody
04:57:gives me a hard time on Twitter I'm going to be like do you do you have a Lego mini figurine tutorial video that has 300,000 views I think not you say I'm a nobody just because wow it's very short it's 22 seconds long oh that does look like you Hank that's really good I love it well that's not how I
04:20:expected this to go at all anyway I'd like a Battlestar Galactica Lego moving on every week here on sow tangents we get together to try to one up amaz and Delight each other with science factful also trying to stay on topic our panelists are playing for Glory and for
05:34:Hank butts Hank butts Hank butts Hank butts all right we're getting those Lego minig bottoms just jangling around in a pouch uh which I will be awarding at the end of the episode and one of them will be Crown the winner now as always we're going to introduce this week's topic
05:54:with the traditional science poem this week thankfully it's not me cuz I didn't make one it's from Sam today we're talking about camouflage which helps a thing remain unseen and I know the first question on everyone's lips is why can't fur be green there's lots of green stuff
05:10:in the world for example grass and trees and if only squirrels could match with those they'd be hidden as they please but instead most mammals are gray and brown or orange if they're bold but never green I'm sad to say like Moss or leaves or mold and lots of guys out
05:25:there are green think lizards frogs and snakes which makes me wonder if Furs even tried to be green for heaven's sakes and I hear you saying tree bark is brown in the winter and the spring but there's that rabbit that's white in the winter so your argument doesn't mean a
06:39:thing picture a squirrel verdant Green in summer that turns to Brown and fall he'd never be caught while scampering around he'd be the most powerful squirrel of all so turn green all you mammals out there you know it's the right thing to do my next advice is for
06:56:the birds you guys should really all be blue Sam you got to put that one in the in the Hall of fame's got to be in the book that's so good okay thank you that's that's straight kidsbook territory it's got to be yeah you're right that was adorable and the topic for the day is
06:15:camouflage but before we talk about what that is we're going to take a quick break and then be back to Define camouflage welcome back everybody camouflage which gotta be French but I guess we'll find out about that in a second Siri what is it uh it is French it's a French word
07:45:that means disguise we don't get a lot of French words I feel like they're all German Germanic right yeah Proto indoeuropean languages yeah we're not doing any saot tangents Deja Vu or Quant so camouflage and it it goes back in French probably to cam flare which meant disguise like an older Parisian
07:13:slang and from before that we're kind of unsure there's an Italian word Kare K I don't know how to say it which also means to disguise that is also of Uncertain origin which might be a contraction of the phrase Capo mafair which means to muffle the head uh kind
08:33:of sinister but that sounds bad yeah put like that put a sack over somebody's head or it could be from the word the French word camlet which meant a puff of smoke or blowing smoke into someone's face so kind of push to escape yeah how Team Rocket always to have a word for
08:55:you well what is the word again camlet yeah that's my English addiction yeah and then we just kind of stole it from them because we were trying to use a lot of words to describe the concept of disguises especially during military inventions yeah I'm looking at the the world use of the word
08:20:camouflage and it does not exist until World War I like and then it just shoots up because it's like we need a word a word for this thing that we are doing now before when we did war we just like we didn't need to hide because he couldn't kill anybody without being
09:36:close up to them why are there so many French wordss in war is it because of Napoleon there was lots of I mean I I imagine there's lots of like uh there was lots of English people and French people being closer to each other during Wars because that's when there would
09:51:be be close to each other yeah okay I don't know not a historian I'm the science expert of the podcast I don't uh pretend to know anything about diplomatic relations M I love that it this is a this is a word that like didn't exist we like needed a word for it for human War use and then
09:12:we were like all right moths you get that too it is really hard to describe what it is without saying a billion words like you like blend in it's like blending in with like a thing that you're against to hide looking looking like the around yeah we got like with fun colors that
10:36:were painted on you or a thing that you've put on top of you yeah yeah right and so yeah I guess it they're the engineered materials and then we started using it to describe animals because that was a good they're kind of always doing it yeah they used of the time yeah
10:53:what did we call that before did we just not have a word for what animals tried to hide could they're very well good at hiding color exactly yeah a good at Heidi color is what is what that guy is I imagine we just used we just described it and said it was a behavioral thing or
10:12:an aspect of it you can say that in pretty few words that MO is good at hiding on trees he's tree colored that chameleon changes color that would be a hard one to describe before you had the word camouflage frankly yeah I'm glad we they came into their own with the
10:27:invention of the word camouflage thanks War that's us what would we do without you we'd say color changing little guy and there' be way fewer deaths which so and have way through your desk so tradeoff the tradeoff yeah yeah so so do we I feel like there's a pretty cut and
11:46:dry definition I'm sure that there are times when it's like not entirely clear whether or not they're doing it but it's it that they're doing is pretty clear the it that they're doing is some sort of visual hiding strategy and there's color matching visual can I can I scent
11:03:camouflage myself can I okay yes you can acoustic camouflage you can scent camouflage you can do other forms of you can hide a flavor with another flavor you can taste camouflage is that camouflage if you wrap a gusher in a piece of ham like parents will blend up
11:21:a bunch of of like spinach in a food you know and hide it so the kids will eat the spinach green juice the concept of green juice green juice yes yes what if I like sneeze but I go C too yep you know I think we can say whatever we want I think there are other words
12:44:that scientists use for that any sort of like hiding Behavior crypsis I think is one of them which means an organism can sealing themselves and so I think a lot of the times that we dive deeper into camouflage unless you add on an extra word like if you're just talking about
12:02:camouflage no modifier you're assuming it's a visual color matching strategy counter shading strategy something to do with the appear the visual appearance of the cloak that you're wrapping yourself in or the moth that's sitting on the tree that makes a lot of sense Siri
12:18:you're right and if War if we didn't have War we'd probably just call it like concealing coloration yeah or that word you just said crypsis yeah that one was good visual crypsis visual crypsis what how is spell crypsis for me c r y p s i s like Crypt that's what I'm going to name my
13:39:Winery it actually sounds kind of gross now that I think like people be like it's that a disease well it works with the Celler kind of if you had a haunted Winery you could absolutely call it crypsis c yeah haunted we're the sisters and welcome to CS Vineyard all right I feel like I know
13:00:what it is camouflage and now that means we're going to move on to the quiz portion of our show our game this week is called Disappearing Acts in the hunt for perfect camouflage militaries around the world have come up with some pretty wild paint jobs and modifications for
13:16:their vehicles and while these camos have come and gone for some good reasons there was science behind some of them and I'm going to introduce you to three of the weirdest forms of camouflage of all time while asking you some trivia questions so number one during World War
14:32:I the US and the UK would paint their ships in a bizarre pattern of black and white stripes intended to confuse potential attackers by breaking up the outline of the boats we still use this today when we're uh when they like have to sh like put a a test model of a new
14:49:car that they don't want to release the body shape of but they still have to like put it on the test track and so journalists are going to take pictures of it so they make them all stripy what was the name though in continues to be the name of that camouflage Dazzle da or bamboozle or Dave
14:06:oh Dave the secret fourth you know like Dave the zebra this is a this is a call back to an ancient episode of holy science where my very well was it my wife my wife was on the episode I can't remember if she talked about this or not but I'm pretty sure it's called
14:26:Dazzle that's my guess I'm also pretty sure it's called Dazzle that's good for you guys cuz I definitely did not know but it is dazzle dazzle camouflage does not at all look subtle but it isn't to hide the thing it's to obscure the distance the Direction and their speed
15:44:so that enemies would struggle to fire correctly on them you can't tell which direction the ship's pointed you don't know where it's going the idea was inspired by a characteristic called uh disruptive coloration and yes zebras and skunks do this essentially instead of
15:60:evolving camouflaging visuals the animals evolved high contrast patterns intended to confuse the predators in a 2006 study using moths found that disruptive coloration did effectively reduce predation for the moths especially on backgrounds that did not visually match as looks cool as hell I
15:16:don't want my battleship to be this this colored if I got to pick if I was Captain it could be pretty disorienting to look at it's like a thing that they can do like fun houses sometimes uh like meow I think meow wolf has a room like this where you go in and you're like I can't tell where the edge
16:31:of the room is I think this would be my wartime job I would go paint a ship some Stripes I don't want to do anything else I just nice that would be a great war time job I like sit on a little wooden platform with a news boy cap and some overalls and go Hey sir need your ship painted Riley yeah
16:51:painted all the stripes straight what the heck are you thinking that just looks like a cool boat yeah that good question in the early 19 40s the British royal Navy experimented with painting their planes in ships a color called Mount Batten pink why would they choose
16:07:this seemingly pretty conspicuous color a b a ship sorry planes and ships and there are three an there are three things that they could be okay one to confuse the radar that was used at the time two uh to disguise the vehicles at dawn and Dusk and C because light pink
16:28:is very hard hard to see at distance one two see wow the radar doesn't that doesn't make sense to me because that doesn't matter what color it is I don't think does it yeah does pink mess with radio waves in some way I feel like no feel like it's separate in the spectrum
17:49:of waves bouncing around what I like about this game is that it is kind of also got Dazzle camouflage I can't quite tell what the hell this game is it's a lot of different games all combined uh but the other two like the other two almost seem like the same thing where
17:06:it's like pink would be hard to see at dawn and dusk but also I guess hard to see far away I'm gonna guess disguise at dawn and dusk because like sunrise sunset kind of in that if you're on the horizon if you're coming on a plane then it's kind of hard to see I guess I just
17:25:think for a plane that makes sense but how fast does a boat go does it go too slow for it to time it out right to get to be Dawn and dusk I don't know how fast the boat goes so I'm going to guess the last one the pink is harder to see that's one of them right oh pink is
18:38:harder to see yeah pink is harder to see at dawn and dusk or pink is harder to see at a distance at a distance oh there's too hard at a distance too hard to see too hard to see hard to see with radar hard to see at DK hard to see a I'm gonna go with that a distance and
18:53:Sarah you were Dawn and dusk I was Dawn and dusk I think s is correct so this is named after a guy named Lord mount baton who first used it for his Fleet he was actually it was kind of a more of a light purple color when he first did it and you can see how that might blend
18:08:into a sunset it's not necessarily super intimidating to see the pink Destroyer on the horizon but many British ships and planes were painted this color but studies on the effectiveness of Mount bat and pink as a camouflage are scarce one factor involved could be What's
18:28:called the Kya effect which I've always called the pinji effect so I'm really learning something here today but apparently according to the guide here that's pinia but this is uh in lowl light conditions human eyes perceive more uh light on the blue end of the spectrum as they they perceive that as
19:48:brighter compared to red or green lights so anything with too much red in it like pink warships would be darker and higher contrast and thus actually easier to see in dim light oh so that's a thing to keep in your mind ultimately this was replaced only a few years into its use
19:05:with gray because that's better it's just a better camouflage I think if a pink airplane was flying at me I'd be like what does this guy know that I don't know I would be intimidated what does l Lord mount Batton know yes I guess I guess he had a bad bad day one day when some planes
19:24:flew in at dawn and dusk he mixed up his paint colors he wanted the gray one and then spilled some red inside and then it's war time resources going to fun of me at the war then he just leaned in he said this shit's hard to see so you guys I'm well there was a period of time where
20:46:pink was a very masculine color too so instead of the baby blue baby pink be like this is the manliest figh or jet ever seen in war they will cower before my pink planet looks like now we have to do everything in matte black CU that's apparently the manly color boo that or
20:05:whatever the Cyber trck Chrome is well they make like those dude wipes with camo packaging you know so camo is also a manly color only the packaging is camo that's disappointing I think so I don't know yeah that is disappointing you're right I didn't think of that I'm sure
20:19:they're trying to CRA over there at dude we could be like big dude wipes and could be camo all the way through yeah if I'm wiping my butt with a white thing it's like I'm surrendering I'll Never Surrender you don't want to acknowledge that your poop is smearing on it you got
21:36:to like I gotta dominate this number two yeah yeah very weird everyone number three during World War II the you I'm almost said World War I which let's hope War we're all doing great as we're recording this very fun podcast during World War II the US fitted some air aircraft with a form of
21:59:camouflage called yundi lights on the front of ples what was the purpose of these lights a to look like stars when flying at night B to raise the brightness of the plane to match the sky or C to cast Shadows on the plane that distorted the plane's outline I feel like the name doesn't help much it
21:20:doesn't but the light to match the sky that's pretty ingenious I think but there's such well there well cuz the sky cuz you know you see a plane at night a little darker than the sky but I guess maybe you could turn it up and down to match like how dark it was but I guess how would you know you'd
22:39:have to look behind you and be like that looks like about this bright you need a buddy plane in front of you to be like turn down your light please Jim Jim light down yeah a buddy plane and then he needs a buddy plane and then where does it end the Stars thing is so stupid
22:55:there's no way You' look see it look at it and say that's a shooting star that's two shooting stars that moves that's a car in the sky uh must very suspicious and then casting Shadows on the plane this seems like you still got a light on your plane that still doesn't seem very
22:10:helpful I feel like it it falls in the realm of camouflage and the way that it is a visual trick that I don't quite understand I think I'm going to go with the distorting the outline thing because I know that is a technique for camouflage is if you just can't quite
22:25:focus on something then then just hidden I'm going to go with the match the sky behind the night sky brightness well the answer is to raise the brightness of the plane to match the sky I told you is so cool because because planes that can be a little bit like the the sky has a
23:42:little bit of light in it a little light up there it's got a little light in there so it's actually the yahoodi lights and not yundi I just looked it up and I was like I got to figure out why they're called you hoodie lights and y'all it was a meme it was a weird meme
23:58:that that has something to do with a radio show with with Bob Hope and his sidekick Jerry Colona uh it's an ancient Meme and it's in reference to a violinist whose last name was yahoodi but apparently they just kept making fun of this guy's name and they kept like the guy kept saying
23:17:who's your hoodie who's your hoodie and it was funny enough that it caught on and everybody couldn't shut up about it and it became like a slang term for a guy who wasn't there for some reason and I really would love to get deeper into it but doesn't seem like it'd be useful
24:34:to do since it's not a word that we use for anything anymore but there was a time when Bob Hope had all of America in his grasp what I'm hearing is Bob Hope and his sidekick Jerry were the mroy brothers of their day and yood was Matt Doyle and they just done it they did it
24:55:first nothing is original content that's a bit of a deep cut but some people came along with us s um uh yeah so they they did it to reduce the contrast between the planes and the sky uh more advanced radar made this obsolete in the late 1940s but some military contractors have
24:14:experimented with them to supplement other kinds of camouflage since then for example the McDonald Douglas added y hoodie lights to the underside of its F4 Phantom jet in the 70s to complement its radar evading shape how would it know what how Sprite the sky was though they
24:30:just did their best they did their best okay squids do this too oh they like will light themselves up a little bit so when you're looking up at them they're basically the color of the top of the ocean yeah counter illumination of a lot of deep sea animals do is otherwise you're just an
25:51:imposing Shadow and the things that you want to eat will see you they had to add a bunch of lights so that they will be spread out all over the like a bunch of dimmer lights to be spread out all over the airplane yeah they're doing this back in time they didn't have the light
25:05:technology we have now just a bunch of LEDs now so easy and that means that it's a tie game congratulations to both of you next up we're going to take a short break and then it will be time for the fact off Sao tangent is brought to you by the allnew PBS eons trilobit and ammonite
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26:17:them both get several it's the holiday season for Pete's sake hang that history test you or that PBS eons fan art you drew on the fridge with pride get your ammonite and try magnets today at complex. stons and check out lots of other great complexly merch while you're there that's complexly
27:44:dotons welcome back everybody get ready for the fact off our panelists have brought in science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind and after they've finished their facts I will judge them and award Hank bucks however I see fit but to decide who goes
27:58:first I have a trivia question barab bants pygm seahorses I think I did that right are tiny and they're shy and they're adorable and they are camouflage Geniuses they live in a type of coral called gorgonian Coral or sea fans which have brightly colored branches covered
27:17:in distinct contrastingly colored poops pop off the tip of one of those branches give it a curly q tail and a snubnose and you've got yourself a pygmy seahorse they perfect match the base and pop colors of their Coral homes they're so indistinguishable their Discovery was an accident a
28:35:researcher in 1969 fished up a sea fan to examine it and didn't notice its tiny inhabitants until he was back at the Museum studying it question is were dead they were fine everybody they did fine it was fine they were happy they were healthy they were I don't know how it
28:51:went but all I could say they're still alive to this day okay thank you thank you you see them with your own eyes I'd feel so bad if that was me and be like I killed are these the only ones so the question though is how many different color combinations do you think these aquatic introverts come in
28:12:how many colors of coral are there about a million about a million Sam's gonna Sam's gonna say these things mathematically they really stack up so I think it could be about six zeros say Sam's Sam's call you're laughing now Siri but you're GNA see you're gonna win
29:32:yeah well I'm mostly laughing because my strategy was about the number of different trolly right crawler combos there are oh that's great that's three nice there must be they're small somewhere between a million three I bet you it's it's in between I bet you it's
29:48:not two or a million in one it's exactly in between that would be a real that would be yeah if it was exactly 500,000 yeah um the answer oh my God you guys is it a million in one oh it really made it sound like it was going to be a bunch the funniest possible number wait
29:16:I didn't hear what it was what was it it's two it's two there wow Sam's having our experience but delayed by 30 seconds so there's two there's purple with pink bum pink pink bumps which are called tubercles by the way because the same as the root for tuberculosis or there's yellow with
30:37:orange tubercles depending on the coloration of their host gorgonian Coral okay I bet there is a blue with green tues to match the trolly bright crawlers we just haven't found it yet wow just haven't found it yet this the best question ever it did make me say gorgonian Barb
30:58:big bar gig bar barab barab barab and it made me it made me say to burle several times well that means that Siri gets to go first okay cannot top the trivia question unfortunately with my fact so there are around 3,000 species of orb weaver spiders which have a wide variety
30:20:of Web building strategies but they're all kind of generally circular those yellow and black garden spiders that you see or that I would like run my face into accidentally across North and Central America our type of orb weaver but some of them get a little fancier and weave nonsticky web decorations
31:38:which are more formally called a stabil stabilimentum I think because there was a theory way back that it caused some stability and now we've thrown that out the window some of these web decorations look really beautiful and elaborate like zigzags or Spirals and some of them are
31:55:trash and specifically uh the spiderwebs of the genus cyclosa which have the common name trashline orb weavers integrate all kinds of trash into their decorations including dry husks of insects or Leaf litter or other just kind of dirt junk that they find or gets trapped in their web and we are still
31:15:sort of guessing what these web decorations could be for but some researchers think that this trash collecting behavior is for camouflage since the tannish brown spider can hunker down and hide from predators in its trash line fine and instead of seeing a spider sitting in the center of
32:31:a web it sort of looks like a streak of bird poop just kind of splattered it they leave it alone so that is cool but some trash line orb weavers take this camouflage to an even bigger extreme they arrange that debris into a self-portrait of sorts a big body with
32:48:anywhere from four to eight spindly legs sticking off of it in a December 2012 blog post researchers reported what they thought was a new species of trash flying orb weavers when they found 25 of these self-portrait creating spiders and they talked with other experts and I
32:08:don't think they gathered enough evidence to formally publish and name the discovery or at least I am not entrenched enough interacted literature to find it but the little orb weavers are around a quarter of an inch big while the decoys are almost a full inch big and the spiders kind of hide in the
32:23:corner and wiggle the web a little bit of the fake decoy so it looks like a giant monster spider is wiggling around in this whole performance art and the researchers think that the Predator they're hiding from are paper wasps who then attack the bigger trash Effigy
33:41:assuming it's the real deal and that is just the plain weirdest form of camouflage I think I've gotten better at rationalizing that camouflage is a result of natural selection and gradual Complex Evolution so all these patterns are random and just get selected for but
33:57:this is like a little spider without a mirror learned what it looks like and then made a big version of himself in the middle of the web and that is so wild yeah he he doesn't know what it looks like it's just it's the shape that worked best and so somehow the Instinct
33:15:picked out like the Instinct developed over generations to make a thing that looked most spider likee what but that's an insane then the WASP destroys the net the the web which seems bad but I guess it's better than dying D okay so does it spend its whole life doing this or when
34:33:it knows that something around is going to eat it or what like I think it just does I I think that's what they're trying to weigh of like when does it make sense to invest all this energy building a big fake spider they found like egg cases scattered among the trash
34:48:line or I don't know if they've found it within these spider mimics or whatever but it could be I assume it's a survival strategy like the trade-off is it takes a bunch of energy and time to make this thing but you don't die and you get a pass on your jeans and that's usually
34:06:sure how natural selection works and yes like Hank said it's just I don't know the instinct to to put trash in a in a shape in a certain shape in a certain shape and then your babies are safer I've I've seen this before but it I don't know if it sunk in how freaking
34:23:weird it is I love it I mean it it's not really camouflaged cuz the spider isn't camouflaging itself and make a scarecrow so you lose Siri the epod it's hiding in the corner of its of its trash larger self but yes it is less like it's not I don't know putting the Le it's weird
35:45:there's not a word for it self-portrait mimicry bait we need another War come on give me a new word all right Sam what do you got hey we wheat people love growing wheat they I love wheat it's so versatile you can make it into bread you can feed it to other animals you can
35:06:probably do lots of other things with it too that I didn't look up but you know what else loves to eat wheat mice the battle between man and mouse over wheat has probably been going on forever we go to all that work to sew it and grow it and those nasty little freeloaders get
35:22:to eat their fill of planted grain doing billions of dollars of damage to our precious wheat industry in the process so what do we do well we poison them mostly but spreading poison around a field has some issues too like you might just poison some endangered native
36:37:species that are in your field too and there's only so much poison to spread every time you spread poison and basically an endless number of mice so once a round of poison is eaten there's always more mice to keep eating your wheat and then you have to spread more
36:51:poison and back and forth so poisoning isn't a perfect solution but it's sort of the only one we got until 2023 when scientists in Australia had an idea inspired by a conservation technique using smell-based camouflage so New Zealand has several types of ground nesting birds and it
36:10:also has lots of invasive Predators like house cats which ground nesting birds are super vulnerable to so conservationists in New Zealand started to apply bird odors to places where there were not birds and then Predators would like hunt down these dummy syns where there were no birds and then those
36:28:Predators started to associate the smell of birds with the smell of not there not is a bird here so no bird is what they thought a bird smelled like so the birds were camouflaged basically by smelling like birds the cat smelled it thought not a bird and it seemed to work the
37:46:current model shows that flightless bird populations are on track to increase 127% over the next 25 years so back to Australia and the wheat uh the scientists knew that the mice were identifying grains of Wheat by the scent of the wheat germ oil inside of them so
37:01:they divided up a field into plots that were sewn and unsown basically like planted and unplanted Fields and they would spray wheat germ oil on the unsown plots with the hope that the mice would smell the the wheat germ go to the unplanted field and then start to think
37:20:when I smell this smell it means there is no seeds to be had but it didn't work so what work though that's that's the first strategy you try and convince mice that the thing that smells like food doesn't actually mean food and mice are like that's not no it might it's
38:39:probably worth Che checking yeah the mice kept checking but what did work was actually kind of even easier so in some of the plots that they were testing they planted grain and sprayed the field with the wheat germ oil and in those fields they saw a 63% reduction in seed loss
38:55:because there is just too much information so the mice didn't know where to look for the grain so they would dig the whole they would just like Tire themselves out looking for the Grain and they couldn't find as much of it so what they discovered could be an ecological solution to pest damage but
38:10:more importantly because of the way the world works this solution is also I think more cost effective than spreading and respreading poison so probably maybe something people will actually start using what do we do in the US about mice with wheat do we just let them eat it
38:29:I don't know we probably put poison down if I had to guess but I don't know I feel I have yeah I I I don't know I feel like we just I feel like we just like solved that problem at some point but I guess not no I don't know when they're when they're in the field I don't know
39:43:but it does seem like you don't hear about that problem a lot well when you do it is always like Australia so maybe we know and we're not telling anybody else we've already been spraying the wheat smell maybe and America's like oh cool idea guys never thought of it no I
39:01:don't know you should totally do that we only live in Montana where the most weed in the whole entire universe is grown so we can go ask somebody I guess sounds honestly like I'm glad it's not my job is is how I feel it trying to control Mice from eating your wheat sounds real
39:16:miserable but I guess if you I don't know mice they're you can't get rid of mice they're mice too little they're too little they're everywhere they're the most everywhere thing ever I think bacteria would have something to say about that what the mice are the most everywhere thing everywhere bacteria
40:33:give them a run for but like big things that's true there's bacteria in mice and in me but there's no mice in me yeah well I hope not I hope not and there's no mice in mice either and a bacteria only needs to eat such a little amount of grain we can let them have a little
40:47:bit yes I agree we can also let them eat the mice and the people and everything um I think that I love them both and also they're both very non-traditional camouflages but s is just it's so weird to be a spider making a giant self-portrait without knowing without a
40:10:thought in your head it's tragic that they don't know I don't like that some of them are better than others which really frustrates me like Why can I look at spider self-portraits and be like that one sucks that one's good yeah the jured art show of these spider self-portraits
40:28:congratulations Siri Riley and now thank you now for science we ask a question to our couch of finally H scientific Minds the freak on patreon and I'm so glad we finally got a question from the freak yeah we're waiting and Moody Bookworm 7856 on YouTube asked how did octopus
41:55:cuttlefish and chameleons both end up evolving very similar methods of being able to change their color to match the environment is it because stuff can only do so much stuff is that why also hair can't be green because stuff can only do so much stuff I that's a I I don't have
41:11:a good answer for you about the green hair Sam except that like melanin has only figured out how to be a few different colors stuff can only do so much stuff yeah and the this I'm I feel like there are some parts of it where it's similar but also some parts where
41:27:it's pretty different between cuttlefish and chameleons yeah it's like a similar thing they do but a different not a similar method of doing it I think that there might be part of it that is similar but there's also part of it that's not there's a bunch of different
42:40:ways like there isn't just one way that they change color which is cool and weird but I am I hunting I made a video about this like eight years ago so yeah I mean you're hunting in the right direction and that's basically it all of what you have said collectively I think is correct okay so
42:58:this is the the like biological term if you want to learn about things like this it's called convergent evolution yeah that's when you have animals or any any sort of like living thing that evolved in similar ways despite not being closely genetically related to each
42:16:other so like broad picture birds and bats both have wings even though bats are mammals and birds are birds Sicilians the like uh what are they amphibian like the slimy amphibians lost their legs snakes lost their legs they both kind of Slither they're not really super closely related why didn't why
43:37:didn't mammals ever lose their legs why isn't there a little mammal snake we could have slithered there still time someone's got to have their legs on the way out already got to be pretty close that's what I'm trying to think of like who's the mammal with the littlest legs
43:49:like an armadillo's got pretty tiny legs pretty tiny legs they're just rolling around Sonic the Hedgehog style eventually and they just got a stretch out long now like an ante eater has to lose its legs and then it'll be extra long but spilop pods are just particularly weird so like invertebrates
43:05:vertebrates having convergent evolution has also happened with eyes so octopuses and vertebrates both have similar eyes despite not being super closely related in that we have like an iris that can let in more or less light a circular lens uh a retina with photo receptors on
43:23:it and Hank was saying even though it's at a big picture similar if you look at a squid eye if you look at a human eye it's like wow those are shockingly close if you actually go in at a cellular level and it's like okay they're they're pretty different and the most
44:39:logical solution to how these two things came to be is not that they evolved from a common ancestor that had a lens containing eye it is that these mechanisms evolve twice by chance and selective pressure and the fact that we both exist in this world and need to see things to
44:58:so that's kind of whated with these cells called chromator that many different shapes Andes but are basically cells within the skin of different animals from arthropods to chameleons to like reptiles like chameleons to invertebrates like cephalopods that help them change colors and they just like
44:23:they have different pigments in various sub chambers of these cells and various sacks and they're controlled by different muscles and they're all like slightly different and then those are how um these animals change their colors in different like sometimes in an
45:38:emotional way sometimes to match their background and and like the mechanisms by which they do that is slightly different but they are they don't both use chromatophores they both use chromatophores yes they convergently evolved on chromatophores because it's just a way to like a good way to do
45:52:things where you have like a cell that like gets big or small and that lets you control color yeah or cell that holds pigment kind of I think my sense is that in a chameleon it is not big or small so it is there is an upper cell layer that has aridor cells so specifically like crystallin
45:13:structures in their top cell level layer and then when the skin is relaxed versus like muscles are contracted then those crystals are distributed differently and so they reflect different amounts of light around wild and and that is what allows our eyes to perceive them
46:32:differently whereas in a spilop pod so like in an octopus their chromatophores contain sacs filled with pigment and then they have muscles more like you were describing muscles that contract or relax to change the size and shape of those pigment filled sacks I don't know
46:50:kind of like mixing paint if you have more dark brown mixed in with like your you're red then it will look darker um versus if there's less dark paint less black almost like a like a TV screen where there's like they'll have different cators of different color and
46:11:if you want to get green you got to do the yellow and the blue yeah wild that is a better way of describing it than mixing was was an interesting choice well I was trying to be realistic cuz they're either brown or orange or red or yellow they're all like in this warm
46:29:hued thing but not good for not good for the science communication visualization you know it's it's it's always a game of compromises with communication isn't it uh cool well I mean that makes that makes sense it like the thing where we do where it happens over and over again
47:49:i' but but then you when you look close you're like actually this is a totally different thing but then sometimes you look close and it's like oh my God they evolved the same protein like it was just which can actually happen because it evolved from the same protein that
47:04:that their common ancestor had which I think is very cool and weird the way that like a bunch of different plants separately evolved caffeine which is just a molecule has a pesticide uh which is why tea and coffee both have caffeine even though they are not closely related
47:20:plants W I never thought about that before and a bunch of others like the other ones Guana also independently evolved caffeine I haven't thought about Gana remember that drink balls like an energy drink an energy drink called balls I've had tun in those that I'm talking about B LS B A WLS I
48:40:think is oh B A WLS okay and it had Guana in it okay well we should we should get some balls maybe they only had it in be I don't know according to Wikipedia The soda's name has an unclear provenance it's like camouflage all right and now for our listeners on patreon we're gonna answer
48:09:a bonus science couch question Sam what's our second question okay bur Burk Ator on YouTube good enough asked a question similarly to their name a confusing question what about camoufl that's not in the visual Spectrum like radar or or lasers like liar or thermal vision sonar oo if you
49:38:want to hear that question as well as enjoy all new episodes totally adree head over to patreon that's patreon.com tangents at our $8 a month tier you get new episodes adree and extended Shenanigans as we answer a bonus science couch question every episode thank you to all of our patrons we're very
49:53:grateful for your support if you want to ask the science couch your question you can follow us on Twitter atso tangents or check out our YouTube Community tab where we send out the topics for upcoming episodes every week or join us on our scow tangents patreon thank you to K on YouTube Cody
49:10:Smiley I do Cody smiley on patreon and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode if you like this show and you want to help us out it's so easy to do that first you can go to patreon.com show tangents to become a patreon and get access to our extended
49:24:adree episodes shout out to Patron Les acre for their support Second you can leave us a review wherever you listen so that we can read them and feel good about ourselves or bad whichever way you want us to feel and finally if you want to show your love for Sao tangents you
50:38:can just tell people about us thank you for joining us I've been Hank Green I've been Siri Riley and I've been Sam Schultz Sao tangents is created by all of us and produced by J steert our associate producer is Eve Schmidt our editor is Seth Glickman our social media organizer is Julia Buzz bazo our
50:55:editorial assistant is joki travar today's game was written by Daniel kamsky our sound design is by Joseph Tunes our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me Hank Green and of course we could not make any of this without our patrons on patreon thank you and
50:09:remember the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lighted but one more thing lots of Little Critters camouflage themselves as bird poop to avoid Predators for example the visory caterpillar and giant swallow tail caterpillar both look like slimy brown
51:41:and white logs there are several species with a common name bird dung spider because they curl up to look and sometimes even smell like a poop Splat and the moth macro cyx Maya takes it to the next level because its wings look like two flies eating bird poop no no that wouldn't help you in all
51:03:situations cuz it's still like there's bugs yeah yeah but I guess it must work they're like that's a nasty bug I wouldn't eat that bug if you paid me now moth on the other hand yum yum that's so weird you guys that's such a strange thing it's so it's so weird I can't
51:21:believe not like everyone doesn't know it especially with the little red and the zigzag that looks like a little leg sticking out it's got little legs eyes it's got the red eyes the perfect color of the red eyes a little shine like a little counter shading that like it's three-dimensional this is
52:39:the scariest episode we've ever done
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