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Terrestrials is Radiolab's spin-off nature show for families and  for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. Each episode feels like a fairytale that is 100% true. Host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) leads you on a nature walk to encounter incredible creatures, wild storytellers, and original songs from "The Songbud" Alan Goffinski. That's right! We sing on this show; don't worry, good voices not required. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

This season, we are tackling the overlooked – the treasures, secrets, and wildness waiting right underneath our noses. From tree stumps, to lichen, to humble squirrels that fade into the background so easily. When you look close at the creatures we usually ignore, you’ll find all kinds of secrets hidden inside.

Terrestrials welcomes entomologist Dr. Sammy Ramsey  as the show’s official “Bug Correspondent.” The show’s “Songbud,” composer Alan Goffinski, returns with new songs featuring guest performances from Laura Jane Grace, Tasha, Timbre and Mike Kinsella of American Football. Over the course of the season, Lulu Miller talks to poets, painters, NASA scientists, Indigenous bee hunters, 11-year old skaters, arctic biologists, and “The Badgers” — a panel of kids who badger experts with their pressing questions.

The seven-episode season begins on Sept. 19 in the Radiolab for Kids podcast feed. Episodes come out every Thursday.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos and games that educators, parents and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Listen to just the songs from Terrestrials.

Sign up for Radiolab’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X and Facebook @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.show-tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.series[].about.body
Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.series[].logo-image.alt-text
Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.tease
Terrestrials is Radiolab's spin-off nature show for families and  for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. Each episode feels like a fairy...

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New Episodes of Terrestrials Coming in September!

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LULU MILLER: Did you know Radiolab has a new podcast all about nature? Well, now you do! It's called Terrestrials. It's family friendly, occasionally musical. And for our brand new season, we scoured the globe.

MAN: Underwater.

WOMAN: In the desert.

LULU: Braving wild beasts.

WOMAN: It bit me several times.

LULU: And our own confusion.

LULU: So honey doesn't come out of bees?

MAN: No!

LULU: To uncover ...

MAN: Look at them!

LULU: ... overlooked creatures.

MAN: They're beautiful.

LULU: And overlooked storytellers.

WOMAN: I didn't really speak much—or really at all.

LULU: Who have life-changing secrets to share.

LULU: Join us for a nature walk that just might get you to fall in love with this planet again.

SONGBUD: Woo!

LULU: Come hang out with us.

SONGBUD: [singing] Oh, oh! Grow together better than alone.

LULU: Terrestrials, out now in the Radiolab for Kids feed wherever you listen to podcasts.

SONGBUD: [singing] Together better than alone!

-30-

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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New Episodes of Terrestrials Coming in September!

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Soren Wheeler is the Executive Editor at Radiolab, where he plays a variety of roles, including producer, editor, and reporter. He also oversees the development of future content. Before coming to radio, Soren spent 10 years working with science teachers and writing about how kids learn science. He was a project coordinator at the Association for the Advancement of Science, where he co-authored the book Atlas of Science Literacy. He then went on to get a Master’s degree in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Soren has won awards for production on radio pieces about coincidence and statistics, the periodic table, and the story of a woman waking up from a coma.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Soren Wheeler is the Executive Editor at Radiolab, where he plays a variety of roles, including producer, editor, and reporter. He also oversees the development of future content. Before coming to radio, Soren spent 10 years working with science teachers and writing about how kids learn science. He was a project coordinator at the Association for the Advancement of Science, where he co-authored the book Atlas of Science Literacy. He then went on to get a Master’s degree in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Soren has won awards for production on radio pieces about coincidence and statistics, the periodic table, and the story of a woman waking up from a coma.

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Think about the sounds you hear on a daily basis. Air conditioners whirring, keyboards clicking, cars honking, mosquitos buzzing, dishes clanking. Now picture yourself in a jungle. What do you hear? How do you make sense of it?

Today on Radiolab for Kids, we eavesdrop on the world of animals. We bring you a story of two humans decoding animal sounds in nature. Science journalist Ari Daniel Shapiro tells us about Klaus Zuberbuehler and his time in the Tai forest of Africa, where he worked to uncover what a Diana monkey is trying to say. We then head to a prairie, where Con Slobodchikoff dives into the world of prairie dogs chirps. Both researchers decipher the “words” these animals are using to communicate to figure out what they talk about.

See more:

Klaus Zuberbuelher and his work in the Tai Forest of West Africa.

Con Slobodchikoff and his work on prairie dogs.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos and games that educators, parents and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Listen to just the songs from Terrestrials.

Sign up for Radiolab’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X and Facebook @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.headers.links[].title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.show-tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.tease
Think about the sounds you hear on a daily basis. Air conditioners whirring, keyboards clicking, cars honking, mosquitos buzzing, dishes clanking. Now picture yourself in a jungle. Wh...

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Hey there. Lulu here. It is the end of the summer, and here in North America we are just beginning to leave behind arguably the loudest season for animal noises. Just mosquitoes buzzing and crickets chirping and birds singing.

LULU: And today, we have a story that is about that wall of noise that you can encounter when you walk into the grassland or forest or jungle. Only we have a story about two very clever humans who began to decode that wall of noise down into actual language. They began to understand and decipher the words, so to speak, that the animals were saying. And that allowed them to eavesdrop and learn the sort of surprising things that animals are actually talking about.

LULU: Yes, this is all real science, this is all real stuff. It's a very fun story, and I'm gonna just kick it off, hand it over to Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Here we go!

ROBERT KRULWICH: So we're gonna tell you two tales here.

JAD ABUMRAD: Two different places. The first, a jungle. And the second ...

ROBERT: A prairie.

JAD: Right. Jungle gets us started, and then the prairie later. This is a story, this first one, that we heard about ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, yeah. I'm ...

JAD: ... from Ari.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: I'm Ari Daniel Shapiro. I'm a public radio producer in Boston.

JAD: And Ari recently met a guy. I think a German guy.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He's Swiss.

JAD: Oh, okay. Sorry.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: His name is Klaus Zuberbuehler.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Hey Ari, it's Klaus.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he's a professor of psychology ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: At the University of St. Andrews.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which is in Scotland.

JAD: And where does this story actually take place? Because ...

ROBERT: Where's the jungle?

JAD: Yeah.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, maybe the best place to start is to kind of describe the scene where we are.

JAD: Okay.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which is in the Tai forest.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Tai forest.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which is in the Ivory Coast in Africa.

ROBERT: So it's not in Thailand?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: No, it's not. It's T-A-I.

ROBERT: T-A-I. Okay.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. And Klaus describes the jungle as this thick, sensory world.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Very dark, very moist, and very, very green.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And you can't really see for more than 15 to 20 feet.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And I mean, sometimes you feel like you walk through a big cathedral of dark trees, and you don't see very much because all the animals, obviously very shy and run away.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: I mean, is it still?

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: [laughs] No, it's—it is very, very noisy.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It's a din. It's just this kind of sonic chaos.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Chaos. All these insects and birds and bats and mammals. It's almost as if they compete for acoustic space. So it is very, very loud. I mean, the main sensation you have in the beginning really is that you're just completely lost.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So it's 1991.

JAD: All right.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he figured he had to start somewhere, so he focused his attention on a kind of monkey.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: A very beautiful monkey, I think.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Called the Diana monkey.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: This mix of black, white, and sort of reddish.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Diana monkeys live up in the treetops, which can be as high as a hundred feet off the ground.

JAD: Wow!

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They eat fruits and they eat insects, and they're chattering.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: A cacophony of calls.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which to him, of course ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: You know, as a newcomer to the forest ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... was all just noise.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Just a little bit imagine, like, a child trying to learn a language, which initially must just sound like a string of sounds that you can't really understand, and then, you know ...

JAD: So what did he do?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, he started provoking the monkeys into making different kinds of noises. For instance, he'd walk out into the forest with a boombox ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: A speaker.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... and play the sound of the Diana monkey's most feared predator: the leopard.

JAD: He would just play the sound into the trees?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yep.

JAD: Whoa!

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And all of a sudden ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Suddenly ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... they start leaping around the branches, hopping around.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: ... you know, you see all this motion, and ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And they make this one particular call.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: You know, these very loud alarm calls.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: This one here.

ROBERT: Meaning what?

JAD: Yeah, are they just saying, like, run, or is it something more specific?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, here's where it gets a little bit more interesting. Next step, he brought that same cassette player out.

JAD: Pointed it at the trees, hit play, all that?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yep. But this time he plays ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: The shrieks of a crowned eagle.

JAD: Eagles eat monkeys?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, they do.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: They attack from above.

ROBERT: I've heard about them. They're very scary. They come flying in with their talons or their beaks, and they hit you in the head sharply and kill you instantly.

JAD: Oof!

ROBERT: And then you fall to the ground.

JAD: Yeah. And so what do the monkeys do when they hear this?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They make that sound.

JAD: Same one?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, that's what he thought, but when he went back to the lab and started looking at the sounds on the computer, comparing one to the other: eagle, leopard, eagle, leopard, he realized that they're actually slightly different.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: In the acoustic details of the calls. And it's something that is very difficult to hear when you really only see it in the spectrogram, which is kind of a visual representation of these calls.

JAD: This is on the computer?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: But interestingly, once you've seen that, and once you know what to pay attention to, you go out into the forest and suddenly you do hear these differences, which you haven't heard before.

ROBERT: So you're saying when they hear a call "Leopard coming!" they go up the tree, but when they hear "Eagle coming!" they run down the tree?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Exactly. Exactly.

ROBERT: So it's really kind of like a word. They—like a word. Well, that's kind of amazing.

JAD: Let's pull out for a second, because this guy actually got us thinking, honestly. How much language actually is out there in the wild? Like, what do we know? What's the state of what we know right now? And that question led us out of the forest just for a second, and to a place and a creature that we just didn't think would be a part of this conversation at all. And that creature is ...

ROBERT: The prairie dog!

JAD: Whoo! Prairie dogs.

ROBERT: So here's the thing: prairie dogs are these little rodent-like animals. They live under the ground in burrows, and when their community is invaded, they pop out of the burrow and they go, "Oh, oh! Here comes the—whatever."

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Sounds kind of like, "Chee, chee, chee, chee. Chee, chee, chee, chee."

JAD: So we spoke with this guy.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: My name is Con Slobodchikoff, professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University.

JAD: Who's spent a whole lot of time ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Sitting out in the colonies.

JAD: ... recording prairie dog calls. And he now believes that these simple little rodents are like nature's wordsmiths.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Well, the thing is that, initially I recorded ...

JAD: For instance, he began by telling us that the prairie dogs have different kinds of chees ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: For different kinds of predators.

JAD: For example ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Humans, coyotes ...

ROBERT: And dogs.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Right.

JAD: Is this the kind of thing that we would actually be able to hear the difference between the calls?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: I'm guessing that you could hear the difference.

ROBERT: You want to try it, Jad?

JAD: Yeah. Soren, Could you just play those samples?

SOREN WHEELER: All right. So here's one.

[prairie dog chirping]

SOREN: This is another one.

[prairie dog chirping]

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Okay.

SOREN: Here we go. This is a third.

[prairie dog chirping]

JAD: Those represent different predators?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Yep.

ROBERT: Huh. I can't tell the difference.

JAD: Can you? I mean, do you know what they are?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: My guess is: human, dog, coyote.

SOREN: Con was right.

ROBERT: Con was right?

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: Well naturally, we wondered how ...

JAD: How did he do that?

ROBERT: Yeah. He told us that at first, just like you and I, he couldn't figure out how to distinguish between these sounds, but he took the sound back to the lab ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Where we had a machine that allowed us to measure a series of frequency and time elements in the call.

ROBERT: And what this computer does is it takes the sound that the prairie dogs make and it essentially looks inside for the ingredients inside the sound.

JAD: Yeah, like a—well, it's kind of hard to hear with a chirp because—it's just hard. So let me demonstrate crudely with this other sound. I plucked this at random from my library. So this is kind of like a buzz.

[low-pitch buzzing]

ROBERT: Okay.

[low-pitch buzzing]

JAD: Okay? Let me just loop it so we can hear it better.

[looped buzzing]

JAD: So here you've got this buzz, which sounds to us like a solid piece of noise, but get an EQ and take away all the highs. So now you've got just the base.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Now you'll notice if you add the highs back in real slowly, these little hidden overtones will pop out like a—there's one.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: There's another.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Third.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Fourth.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: So in other words, this sound is filled with little ghost notes that we can't hear. And certainly the same is true of this sound.

[prairie dog chirping]

JAD: Except in the case of the prairie dogs, it seems their ears are tuned to hear all the different sounds within the chirp. Probably sounds to them like this whole layer cake of tones.

ROBERT: And Con's computer noticed that the noise they made when a human walked through their village was different in tone from the noise they made when a coyote walked through their village. It was consistently different.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: But there was a problem.

ROBERT: When he zoomed in on the "Uh oh, here come the human" calls ...

[prairie dog chirping]

ROBERT: You can hear?

JAD: And he looked at them really closely. He saw that from one human call to the next, there was a lot of subtle variation.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Much, much more than I would expect.

ROBERT: And that's when it hit him.

JAD: What if ...

ROBERT: What if ...

JAD: What if!

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: What if they could be describing the individual humans?

ROBERT: Oh!

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Now at that time, no one suspected that this might even be a possibility, but I thought, "Well, let's try it and see what happens."

JAD: So Con recruited four humans.

ROBERT: And he had them dress exactly the same: same boots, same blue jeans, same sunglasses. Everything the same except the color of their shirts.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: We had a person in a blue t-shirt, person in a green t-shirt, person in a yellow shirt, person in a gray shirt.

JAD: Then he asked each of them to walk through the prairie dog village ...

ROBERT: One by one.

JAD: Prairie dogs made their chirps.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: And when we analyzed the results, there were significant differences.

JAD: Like what kind?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: They essentially clustered around the colors.

ROBERT: Does that mean you think you can hear them saying, "Here comes the human in blue?"

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Right.

ROBERT: Versus "Here comes the human in yellow?"

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Right.

JAD: Really?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Oh, I was astounded. I was astounded.

ROBERT: And he was like, "Well, wait a second. These humans, they're not just different in their shirt colors. They're different in all kinds of ways."

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Some of the humans were taller, some of the humans were shorter.

JAD: So he went back, reanalyzed the chirps, looked a little more closely ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: And ...

JAD: ... he realized ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: ... we could tease out ...

JAD: That the prairie dogs were also commenting about ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: ... the general size of the human. Essentially, they were saying, "Here comes the tall human in the blue" versus "Here comes the short human in the yellow."

ROBERT: Wow!

JAD: And then he made another leap.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: And it was just ...

JAD: You know, since he was on a roll.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: ... off the wall idea at that time ...

ROBERT: He went back into the prairie dog field and he built two large wooden boxes.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Sitting on stilts.

JAD: A good distance from each other.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: 150 feet. And we strung wires between the two towers.

ROBERT: His team then made cardboard cutouts of three different shapes.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: A circle, a square and a triangle.

ROBERT: And then they ran them out along the wire, kind of like laundry fluttering above you in the breeze.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Each shape would emerge from one of the tower blinds and fly something like about three feet over the prairie dog town.

JAD: So literally, you would just kind of go—squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak—and out would come a triangle or a circle or a square?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Correct. And what we found was that the prairie dogs could tell the triangle from the circle very easily, but they could not seem to tell the difference between a square and a circle.

JAD: Huh. Why not?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Well, my guess is that triangles kind of look like hawks.

JAD: Hmm.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Circles and squares kind of look like terrestrial predators.

JAD: Nonetheless, what you've got here is a little rodent with a remarkably big vocabulary, including but probably not limited to: short, fat, skinny, tall, blue, green, yellow, gray, coyote, human, hawk, triangle, and/or square.

ROBERT: Yay!

JAD: That's not bad!

ROBERT: Is the next step that you're going to perform a scene from The Winter's Tale and see whether the prairie dogs laugh at the right moments? What do you do next?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Well, we just are scratching the surface of looking at this. For example, prairie dogs have a lot of calls which we call social chatters. One prairie dog will be feeding, and suddenly lift up its head and go, chitter chatter chitter chitter. And another prairie dog somewhere across the colony will lift up its head and go chatter chatter chitter chitter. But what does it mean? We have no way of getting at it. It could be just simply chatter chitter chitter, or it could be, "Do you know where Sam was last night?"

ROBERT: [laughs]

LULU: We'll be back in a moment.

LULU: All right, we're back. On with the story.

ROBERT: Now here's an interesting question: I mean, if a French couple were sitting next to me on the subway and they were saying, "Do you know where Sam was last night?" in French, if I don't speak French, I'm outside of that conversation. But a lot of people do speak French, and they can listen to French people talking. The question's then raised: if you live in the forest and you speak chimp or you speak eagle or you speak snake, would you ever be able to overhear or learn something from a neighborly species? In other words, is there an equivalent of listening to the other person talking French in the wild?

JAD: Hmm, good question.

ROBERT: And that brings us back to Klaus. You remember Klaus?

JAD: Yeah, the monkey guy.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, the monkey guy. Well, Klaus was wondering the same thing.

JAD: And that's Ari Daniel Shapiro again, who introduced us to Klaus.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So take those alarm calls, for instance. He wanted to know whether different species of monkeys could understand each other.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Right, so ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And luckily for Klaus, there's, like, at least 10 different primate species living inside that Tai Forest.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: So there's ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: One, colobus monkeys. Two ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Spot-nosed monkeys.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Three, chimpanzees. Four ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Galagos.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Five ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Colobines.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Six, putty-nosed monkeys. Seven ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Mangabey species.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Eight ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Prosimians.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Nine ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Campbell's monkey.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And then the Dianas, 10.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Yeah, so it's a very rich primate fauna.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So Klaus's question was: could Diana monkeys understand the alarm calls of another one of these monkeys, the Campbell's monkey?

JAD: Oh, could they go across monkey lines, so to speak?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Exactly.

ROBERT: Hmm.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So he used that same setup from before.

JAD: The speaker thing where he plays the sound into the trees?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. And he played the eagle and leopard alarm calls from the Campbell's monkeys to the Dianas to see if they'd react.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And what we found there to our great surprise was that the Diana monkeys ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They understand it.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Really?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yep.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: They take that very, very seriously and respond to it very strongly.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So a Diana monkey hearing a Campbell's eagle alarm call will respond as though there were an eagle, and will respond to the leopard alarm call as though there were a leopard. And vice versa.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And it doesn't stop there.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Klaus started playing the monkey calls to birds.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Such as hornbills.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yellow-casqued hornbill.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: It turns out that ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They understand it.

JAD: The birds?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. These hornbills ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Are capable of discriminating these different monkey alarm calls.

ROBERT: Wow!

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: So it's a pretty substantial web species basically eavesdropping on each other's calls in these forests.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But Klaus himself, he was still on the outside of it all.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: It is that general sense of perhaps not really belonging there. But then ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He told me about this one day.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: I was working in the forest.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He had gone out for the day, and he'd gone out alone.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And I was very far away from camp.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And it was in the late afternoon, and he realized that he should probably be heading back to camp.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Because I still had to walk for something like 15, 20 kilometers back to camp.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he was walking past a kind of valley.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And then I heard on the other side of the valley a monkey group giving leopard alarm calls, which doesn't happen that often.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It was the first time that he wasn't actively listening, but he heard these monkeys make this call and recognized it.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: It was absolutely striking.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he was actually quite excited by this.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Because I was suddenly able to understand what the monkey's trying to say, so to speak.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Those monkeys had picked up a leopard.

ROBERT: Right beneath that sound, there the leopard would be.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Right. But, you know, those monkeys were way across the valley.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: So I didn't really think that much and walked on perhaps, you know, half a mile further down the road.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And the next group of Diana monkeys, still across the valley ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Start giving leopard alarm codes as well.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he kind of took notice of that. And then it happened a third time a few minutes later.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: What became clear to me very rapidly is that a leopard was ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Tracking him.

ROBERT: Oh!

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Of course, I couldn't see it because it was, you know, dense forest, but I assumed that the leopard saw me. And of course that—it's just one of these moments where you're totally alone, far, far away from camp.

ROBERT: What does he do?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He kept walking. It happened a fourth group called leopard, and fifth group called leopard. And then the groups stopped calling.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: The only thing I could think of is to pick up a large branch.

JAD: [laughs] I shouldn't laugh. That's just terrifying.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Klaus, would that stick have done anything for you?

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: I doubt I really would have been able to do very much with a stick.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But as he's standing there, stick in hand, he realizes he's just entered the forest. He's become ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: The 11th primate.

JAD: The 11th primate.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Because there are those 10 other species of primate, and now ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Me. Suddenly I shifted from being the objective observer to being a sort of part of that whole crowd in there. Even though we're separated by 20, 30 millions of years of evolutionary history, you know, these humble creatures were able to teach me something about what was going on in the forest. And I mean, of course it wasn't intentional. They weren't trying to inform me or anything like that, but it was a very emotional experience.

JAD: So what happened? I mean, obviously he didn't get eaten. What happened?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, he made it back to camp. And he's not sure what happened to the leopard. The leopard must've slinked off into the forest. In the end, it became ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Just another story to tell each other in the evening, I suppose.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Yeah.

LULU: And that's it. Thanks so much for this story to Ari Daniel Shapiro. Thanks so much to you for listening to the noise and the words. And I am now so very excited to let you know that the next story that we will be dropping is a brand new Terrestrials! Terrestrials, if you haven't listened, is our show about the strangeness right here on Earth, hosted by me, specially made to be family friendly. Every episode has an incredible, almost fantastical-sounding story about an animal or plant or earthly phenomenon—but it's entirely true. We add lots of music, we even add original songs. It's kind of like Radiolab plus a musical. School of Rock, science style. I don't know. Come check it out. See if it's for you. That's starting in just two weeks, a whole new season of Terrestrials episodes headed your way.

LULU: Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the tail-end of summer. See you in a couple spins of this noisy old planet of ours. Bye!

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Emma, and I live in Portland, Maine. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

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Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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Today’s episode asks how scientists see the world. We bring you two stories: one about a math guy and a bug guy. First, how the math guy—or one of our country's greatest mathematicians—Steven Strogatz, first became enchanted with math as a kid. Then a story about a human developing a soft corner (literally) for a fly that lived in his scalp—the botfly. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne went on a research trip to Costa Rica and returned home with a botfly feeding on his flesh. His friend Sarah Rogerson was a little less charmed, and they both were surprised by the creature that ultimately emerged from his head.

Read more:

Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True
This episode was produced by Amanda Aronczyk and Jad Abumrad.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team,  listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos, and games that educators, parents, and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Go here for  ‘just the songs”

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Today’s episode asks how scientists see the world. We bring you two stories: one about a math guy and one about a bug guy.

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Why Do I Love the Fly That’s Eating My Brain?

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Hey there. Lulu here. It is the dog days of summer. The—the air is hot, the mosquitoes are biting. And in honor of that, we are gonna play a story about a fly with an even gnarlier bite than the mosquito—the botfly. It's a pretty wild, kind of funny, a little bit gross story, but not that gross. I believe in you. You can handle it. And this was from part of a show that we did just about scientists and how weird and lovely they are, and how they often see the world differently than the rest of us. I have found this to be true. It's why I love to interview scientists. They can see beauty in gross places or fascination in boring places. And so our—for our story today, we're gonna hear two stories, one about a math guy and one about a bug guy. And I hope you enjoy. I'm gonna kick it off to Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, who begin with the story of how one of our country's greatest mathematicians first became entranced with math as a kid.

JAD ABUMRAD: For Steve Strogetz, a mathematician who we sometimes have on the show, it all started with a pendulum. He was sitting in math class.

STEVE STROGATZ: Our teacher handed us a little toy pendulum.

JAD: Basically just a little device with a ball on the end of a string.

STEVE STROGATZ: That was retractable. That is, you could ...

JAD: Change the length of the string.

STEVE STROGATZ: Like an old telescope, you know, that the pirate stretches out a spyglass—click, click, click. You could make it longer in discrete clicks. And then the teacher gave us a stopwatch and said, "I want you to time how long it takes for this pendulum to swing back and forth 10 times." Okay, so I do the experiment. Ten swings. I record how many seconds it took. Then he says, "Now make the pendulum a little bit longer. One click longer." Click, do it again.

JAD: And as you might expect, since now the string is longer, takes a bit more time.

STEVE STROGATZ: To make the 10 swings. And I write down the number. Click, do it again. Click, do it again. And I do this five or six times, dutifully plotting the—the results on graph paper, which is what the experiment was really supposed to teach us, how to use graph paper.

JAD: So he's clicking, measuring, making a little dot.

STEVE STROGATZ: Click ...

JAD: Measure, dot.

STEVE STROGATZ: Click ...

JAD: Measure, dot. Soon the thing is filled with dots, and that is when he noticed something.

STEVE STROGATZ: This spooky thing was happening, which is that the dots were falling on an arc, on a curve. They weren't on a straight line. They fell on a particular curve. And I noticed that this curve was a curve I had seen before because I had just learned about it in algebra class. And it's called a parabola. And this really gave me the creeps. I had a sort of feeling of the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, because it was as if this inanimate thing, this pendulum, knew algebra. [laughs] My 13-year-old mind couldn't understand that. How could this thing swinging back and forth know something about parabolas? Or how could that be built in?

JAD: Then an even creepier thought occurred to him. Wait a second, this parabola on my paper, which is the same one as the math book, is also out in the world.

STEVE STROGATZ: It's the shape that water makes coming out of a water fountain.

JAD: It's also the shape of, you know, when you shoot a rocket into the sky and it slowly descends. It's that.

STEVE STROGATZ: It was in that moment that I suddenly understood what people mean when they say there's a law of nature.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Do you remember what it was that made your hair stand on end? Was it that you had peeked in and discovered a secret? Or that you just simply found the right answer?

STEVE STROGATZ: Much closer to the first thing you said, that there was this sort of veil over reality, a hidden universe that you couldn't see unless you knew math. It really felt like being let into some sort of secret society. And that wasn't so much the point. I mean, it's not like I cared about being in this priesthood. It was—it's a very intimate, personal thing, this feeling of wonder, of a sense of living in an incomprehensible and beautiful universe.

STEVE STROGATZ: But partly comprehensible. That's the beauty of it. I mean, if you're a lobster, you don't have this thought, right? A lobster doesn't get to think about the laws of nature. And so I've often thought to myself that it's a blessing that we live in a certain window of intelligence, that if we were infinitely smart, godlike, we'd have such powerful brains, we could see every implication of everything. So math wouldn't be fun for a being that's too smart. And of course, for the lobster, that's not smart enough. Math is no fun for them either. It's in this intermediate window where math and science become something to rejoice in.

JAD: Today's program is about a kind of search—a search for order.

ROBERT: For patterns.

JAD: Hidden truths?

ROBERT: Hidden truths.

JAD: And it's about the scientists who go out looking for those things and sometimes find them. [ARCHIVE CLIP, scientist: Whoa, what's that?]

ROBERT: And sometimes don't.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, scientist: I felt humiliated. I felt stupid.]

JAD: Question is, what makes these people tick? And we're calling this show ...

ROBERT: Why Do I Love the Fly That's Eating My Brain?

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Okay, you ready?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Off we go.

LULU: Indeed. Going off for a very short break. See you in a moment.

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we're talking about how scientists think about the world.

JAD: And appreciate.

ROBERT: Yeah. Except appreciation, this is something that scientists do differently from the rest of us. And I think this next story is an act of appreciation so different from the rest of us that it makes me want to ...

JAD: Barf?

ROBERT: Gag.

JAD: Bring it!

ROBERT: Once upon a time, in a rainforest in Costa Rica in Central America, there was a little botfly.

JAD: What's a botfly?

ROBERT: Botflies are hairy flies that live in moist tropical areas on Earth.

JAD: So they're not like New York City flies?

ROBERT: No, no, no. What a botfly does is when a botfly is pregnant—and our botfly was a pregnant female botfly—she has her baby, flies up into the air carrying her baby. She sees a nice, hairy mosquito, actually grabs onto the mosquito.

JAD: Mid flight?

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. And drops her baby onto the mosquito.

JAD: Why the mosquito?

ROBERT: Well, because the mosquito's gonna do something very important for the baby. But the mosquito, of course, is a mosquito, so it's looking to bite somebody.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: When the mosquito lands on a nice, warm, palpitating mammal so she can have some blood, the botfly baby is programmed to fall off into the mosquito bite and make a little home.

JAD: Wow, that's impressive!

ROBERT: Completely. Yeah.

JAD: That mosquito probably has no idea of any of this.

ROBERT: No idea at all. You got all that?

JAD: Got it.

ROBERT: Okay, so now I want to introduce you to a particular palpitating mammal who happened to be in Costa Rica on our very day.

JERRY COYNE: I guess I was about 24. It was 1973.

ROBERT: His name is Jerry Coyne.

JERRY COYNE: 30-some years, I guess. 35 years. But I remember it like it was yesterday. This isn't an experience that you forget easily.

ROBERT: You were working at Harvard as a grad student at the time?

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, I was. I was doing a laboratory experiment on flies, ironically. And there was a program for Harvard graduate students to go to the tropics for two months during the summer so they could get some experience in the field and learn something about the diversity of tropical nature.

ROBERT: So now we've got Jerry Coyne in Costa Rica walking through a forest.

JAD: Doing some research or something?

ROBERT: Doing some research. And through the air, you hear the distant sound of a mosquito getting closer and closer and closer 'til it bites Jerry right on the head.

JERRY COYNE: Not too far from the crown. And I scratched it. But, you know, it didn't go away. When it got to be about the size of a pea, I consulted one of my fellow students.

ROBERT: This friend of his happened to be an entomologist. She climbed up onto a bunk bed.

JERRY COYNE: And she looked in my head, pulled the hairs back, and she said, "Oh my God, there's something moving in there!" That's when I freaked out completely. I started running around the field station, just physically running in circles.

ROBERT: In his mosquito bite, there was a little hose or something protruding ...

JERRY COYNE: Through the top of the mosquito bite. And it was sort of wiggling around.

ROBERT: A breathing tube like a little straw.

JERRY COYNE: I was really completely freaked out. I mean, I had a worm in my body. Nobody knew how to extract it.

ROBERT: Why couldn't you just grab onto the periscope part and pull?

JERRY COYNE: Because like all marvels of evolution, the botfly maggot has devices to keep you from pulling it out because it makes its living in your body. So it has a pair of hooks on the anal end, the other end, that are dug into your flesh. So if you try to pull the thing out, it just digs in and you'll break it in two. That is the thing you want to avoid, because it can cause a serious infection.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: No, you don't want to do that.

ROBERT: No, you don't. But what you could do, however, is you could try what they call the "meat cure."

JERRY COYNE: Put a slab of meat over the wound, strap it to you. I would have to have strapped, for example, a steak to my head, which is not practical.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JERRY COYNE: And then the worm thinks that, you know, the worm's breathing tube, which is through the mosquito bite, gets cut off and it's deprived of air. So it thinks that the steak is part of your flesh, and it burrows up through the steak. And when it comes out almost all the way, you can just remove the steak with a worm in it.

ROBERT: What a clever idea!

JERRY COYNE: Yeah. The idea of toiling in the tropical heat every day with a t-bone strapped to my head was not something that I wanted to do.

ROBERT: Meantime, it's causing problems, this thing.

JERRY COYNE: It was a terrible itch. And from time to time, it would, like, move or twitch, and you'd feel this sort of sharp pain in your skull. Or you could feel it grinding up against there. And when I went swimming or took a shower, it would get sort of freaked out because its air hole would be cut off, and then it would really go nuts, you know, make a lot of pain. So I tried to avoid getting my head underwater. Meanwhile, the lump was getting bigger and bigger until it sort of got noticeable.

JAD: Wait, how does it—what is it eating in order to get bigger and bigger?

ROBERT: Well, it's, uh—um ...

JAD: Yes?

ROBERT: Um ...

JERRY COYNE: It's eating my muscles and tissue and my scalp.

ROBERT: It's eating your flesh, then?

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, it is.

JAD: Oh!

JERRY COYNE: It's turning human flesh into fly flesh.

ROBERT: This fly, it's eating Jerry. So it's more and more—well, it is Jerry.

JERRY COYNE: It is. And that's the part that made me like it.

ROBERT: So Jerry and the part of Jerry that is now the botfly leave Costa Rica, and it's time to head back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University, where Jerry's the grad student. And, you know, he has to check things out.

JERRY COYNE: So I went to the health clinic and, you know, in about 10 minutes, there was 20 doctors around me. Nobody had ever seen anything like this at Harvard. They were all curious and poking and prodding and looking at it and oohing and ah-ing but, of course, none of them knew what to do about it. And I just decided, you know, I'm gonna let it come out, make the best of it, you know, enjoy it as much as I could, and marvel at it. I mean, when you really think about it, it is amazing that an animal can take human flesh and turn it, using its own genes, into a fly. I mean, you have to marvel.

ROBERT: This is so weird of you, actually.

JERRY COYNE: You think this behavior might seem weird to the layperson, but to a biologist, it's sort of absolutely normal to be very curious about something. I make my living on flies. I work with fruit flies. I'm a geneticist. And here was a fly making its living on me. You know, I was getting more and more curious. I wanted to see what it looked like when it came out. I didn't want to kill it.

ROBERT: What about girls? I mean, assuming you're dating. So, like, wasn't this, like, a total turn off to say, "Hi, this is me and my maggot?"

JERRY COYNE: Well, I was—you know, I was dating a nurse at the time, and this is the good thing about it. The nurse was actually quite fascinated with this.

SARAH ROGERSON: I thought it was disgusting. [laughs]

ROBERT: Sarah Rogerson was Jerry's friend. She inspected the fly.

ROBERT: Did you give it a name?

SARAH ROGERSON: No.

ROBERT: [laughs]

SARAH ROGERSON: No. Jerry may have felt that way about it, but no, I didn't. This was more of a scientific experience.

ROBERT: Is this something that was okay with you?

SARAH ROGERSON: Well, I don't remember being informed that there were any other options. I thought, this is just what had to happen.

ROBERT: So a couple of weeks pass, and the botfly is just getting ...

JERRY COYNE: Bigger and bigger and bigger.

ROBERT: It goes from jelly bean size to something like ...

JERRY COYNE: The size of an egg.

JAD: An egg?

SARAH ROGERSON: Yeah, it was pretty big.

ROBERT: Like a quail egg.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: He's covering it now with a baseball cap, which is maybe one reason why they decided to go to Fenway Park one particular evening.

SARAH ROGERSON: That is correct.

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, it was a Red Sox-Yankees game. I wasn't gonna miss that. And every once in a while I would rub my head, I mean, throughout this whole gestation of this thing just to check on it. And during the game, when I rubbed my head, I felt something coming out of the lump.

SARAH ROGERSON: Jerry kept saying, "Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh, it's coming out! I can feel it!"

ROBERT: So was this a little distracting?

SARAH ROGERSON: Yeah. A foul ball came up where we were sitting, and it hit in one of those wooden seats at Fenway. And we narrowly escaped getting hit because we really weren't paying much attention to the game at all.

JERRY COYNE: But it took a long time. I mean ...

ROBERT: It started at the game, and then it went on?

JERRY COYNE: It started at the game and then continued on until the evening.

SARAH ROGERSON: We went back to Jerry's apartment, and he kept reaching up and checking to feel the lump. We were just hanging out, and ...

JERRY COYNE: And I said ...

SARAH ROGERSON: ... he reached up and said, "It's gone! It's out."

JERRY COYNE: We gotta find it. [laughs] I turned on the light, and there it was on the pillow. And it was horrifying.

ROBERT: What did it look like? Is it a wiggly little wormy thing?

SARAH ROGERSON: It's sort of bulbous on one end, and then it tapers down to a little tail. It's white.

JERRY COYNE: Big, fat, white grub worm.

SARAH ROGERSON: An inch and a half long.

ROBERT: Wow!

SARAH ROGERSON: And it has little black teeth.

JERRY COYNE: You know, I thought, "Oh, my God. That's what was in my head. Had I known that, I might have been more freaked out."

ROBERT: When you are greeting your baby there, did you have a feeling of pride or just ...?

JERRY COYNE: Well, no. Extreme curiosity. The one thing that was extremely striking to me was that its exit was completely painless. You know, it's painful when it's in there, but when it comes out, it does so very painlessly. And that's another evolutionary phenomenon. Of course, if the worm did it painfully and exited, then the horse or the monkey or whoever it's infecting would just slap it and kill it.

ROBERT: So what did you do once you had the baby there on the pillow?

JERRY COYNE: Well, then I decided I was going to try to rear it into an adult fly. You know, I'm a scientist. That's what you do. So I had prepared a jar of sterile sand, and I took the worm and I dropped it into the sand and put the top on with air holes and hoped that it would pupate, but unfortunately it died.

ROBERT: Did you get sad?

JERRY COYNE: I was extremely sad. You know, in the temperate zone in Boston, a botfly is not gonna make it. It just can't live. And so it was doomed from the start. But I wanted to see it complete its life cycle. And unfortunately, it didn't quite make it. So I did the best I could with what I knew. You know, I think it's—it added some richness to my life. It really did. People still get completely horrified when I tell them the story, even though to me it's—you know, it's sort of a nice story. [laughs]

JAD: Jerry Coyne works at the University of Chicago, and his forthcoming book is called Why Evolution is True.

LULU: That'll do it for today. Thank you so much for listening. More stories about this lumpy old planet of ours coming up in two weeks, with brand new Terrestrials episodes coming in September!

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message three.]

[JERRY COYNE: Hi, this is Jerry Coyne, the botfly man. Radiolab is produced by Amanda Aronczyk and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Soren Wheeler, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horne, and Jessica Benko, none of whom were afflicted with botflies. Other help from Ike Shruskinderaza, Ji Chang Lin. Special thanks to Pauline Davies and Kate Edgar.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Emma, and I live in Portland, Maine. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

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Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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Why Do I Love the Fly That’s Eating My Brain?

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Matt started at Radiolab as an intern. Now he works here as a Senior Producer. Around and in-between those two things, he lived in Minnesota, attended school in Arizona, tried to find himself, lived in Washington D.C., learned radio from Rob Rosenthal at the Salt Institute for Documentaries Studies, hung around This American Life, was awarded the Above the Fray fellowship to report in Uganda, and had a metal plate screwed into his wrist.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].lede
Rachael is a producer for Radiolab. She started on the show’s Special Projects Unit, where she worked on Radiolab Presents: Gonads and Radiolab Presents: G. Now she mostly spends her time writing about herself in the third person, or trying to craft a masterful pun that makes everyone roll their eyes. Before joining Radiolab, she studied food science and worked as a cheese curd flipper, pastry chef, and egg scrambler. She also spent some time hanging out at NPR, Politico, and Slate.

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If my memory serves me, the first time I was asked the proverbial What do you want to be when you grow up? The answer was, “An astronaut.” Later it became a drawer. Then a guy who makes television commercials. By middle school I decided I wanted to be an environmental engineer, before stints hoping to be a photographer and then filmmaker. In high school, after dreaming of being a teacher, I was certain I’d be a professional jazz saxophone player. In college, I jumped from humanitarian aid worker, to psychotherapist, to indie rock musician. After graduating I wanted to be a writer. Now, I make radio. Email me at sadler@wnyc.org

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Matt started at Radiolab as an intern. Now he works here as a Senior Producer. Around and in-between those two things, he lived in Minnesota, attended school in Arizona, tried to find himself, lived in Washington D.C., learned radio from Rob Rosenthal at the Salt Institute for Documentaries Studies, hung around This American Life, was awarded the Above the Fray fellowship to report in Uganda, and had a metal plate screwed into his wrist.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Rachael is a producer for Radiolab. She started on the show’s Special Projects Unit, where she worked on Radiolab Presents: Gonads and Radiolab Presents: G. Now she mostly spends her time writing about herself in the third person, or trying to craft a masterful pun that makes everyone roll their eyes. Before joining Radiolab, she studied food science and worked as a cheese curd flipper, pastry chef, and egg scrambler. She also spent some time hanging out at NPR, Politico, and Slate.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
If my memory serves me, the first time I was asked the proverbial What do you want to be when you grow up? The answer was, “An astronaut.” Later it became a drawer. Then a guy who makes television commercials. By middle school I decided I wanted to be an environmental engineer, before stints hoping to be a photographer and then filmmaker. In high school, after dreaming of being a teacher, I was certain I’d be a professional jazz saxophone player. In college, I jumped from humanitarian aid worker, to psychotherapist, to indie rock musician. After graduating I wanted to be a writer. Now, I make radio. Email me at sadler@wnyc.org

# included[].attributes.body
The Summer Olympics are in full swing. Humans are racing against other humans from all across the globe. But you know the one race they don’t have? The one where a human competes against a horse. Radiolab for Kids is back with one of our favorite Radiolab animal episodes of all time where we head to that race in the desert of Arizona. Turns out it has everything to do with what gives us humans … our humanity. Also our butts.

In this episode, Reporter Heather Radke and Producer Matt Kielty talk to researchers who followed the butt from our ancient beginnings through millions of years of evolution, all the way to today, out to a valley in Arizona, where our butts are put to the ultimate test.

Check out Heather's book Butts - A Backstory
Special thanks to Michelle Legro.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team,  listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos, and games that educators, parents, and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Go here for  ‘just the songs”

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.tease
The Summer Olympics are in full swing. Humans are racing against other humans from all across the globe. But you know the one race they don’t have? The one where a human competes agai...

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: [singing] Do do do do. That's not the Olympics song. But the summer Olympics are in full swing, and I am feeling sporty. You know, the Olympics, they've got so much! They've got gymnastics, they've got swimming, they've got archery and so much running. Relays, sprints, marathons.

LULU: But you know what race they don't have? The wildest running race I have ever heard of in which a human competes against a horse. Yep, it's a real race. It happens every year in Arizona. Humans race horses. The course is 50 miles long. And today we are gonna go. We are sending reporters to witness the race with all its snuffling, sweaty beasts and horses to learn why this bizarre-sounding race may actually give us a clue about how we became humans, and sort of the qualities that give us our humanity.

LULU: I am a human named Lulu Miller, and new Terrestrials episodes are coming out really soon in September, and all summer long we're warming up the feed with some of our favorite Radiolab animal stories of all time. Which brings me to this one, "Human vs Horse." It is quite a ride, and it comes to us from producer Matt Kielty and reporter Heather Radke. Here we go. Giddy up!

MATT: I have no idea where we should start. I was—like, is it like, with the dawn of human civilization?

HEATHER: Uh, maybe?

MATT: Okay, so this story comes to us from Heather, who is a fantastic writer who brought us this story that, if I were to boil it down, is about a horse, a lone man running through the desert, and what it fundamentally means to be a human being. And weirdly, butts. I didn't see this coming, but it's about butts. Just butts. Your butt. It's about your butt.

HEATHER: You gotta say it a few times. Butts. Okay, so let's back up.

MATT: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: I am writing a book about the cultural history of the female butt.

MATT: Oh, interesting!

HEATHER: I know. I thought I'd save that one for on tape.

MATT: But before she could really dive into all those things, she realized she had, like, just a more fundamental question.

HEATHER: Why do we even have a butt at all?

MATT: Which led her to this guy ...

HEATHER: Sorry, sorry. I just missed you for a second. Say that again?

MATT: ... Daniel Lieberman.

HEATHER: This evolutionary biologist at Harvard.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You want to talk about the gluteus maximus, if I recall.

HEATHER: I do. I do, I do.

MATT: So you called him up ...

HEATHER: You're sort of the pre-eminent ...

MATT: ... a while back for your book.

HEATHER: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: ... butt muscle scientist, as far as I can tell. [laughs]

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That's an interesting distinction, but that's possibly true.

MATT: And we called him up not too long ago.

HEATHER: Hello, everybody.

MATT: Because what was the thing you'd learned from him?

HEATHER: The butt maybe made us human. So to get to the butt stuff with Lieberman, we have to go back.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: So, many years ago ...

HEATHER: Around 1992.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: I was—I guess I must've been a postdoc or a grad student.

HEATHER: At Harvard.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Doing research on—actually it was about pigs. The story—the story starts with a pig on a treadmill.

MATT: So Daniel said every day he would come into the lab where he had these pigs.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Mini-pigs.

MATT: Oh, mini-pigs on a treadmill?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Yeah!

HEATHER: Cute!

MATT: He'd put one of them on a treadmill.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Mini pigs are just the right size, let me tell you.

MATT: And to keep the pig on the treadmill ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You put a box—and you put a box and turn the treadmill on and, you know, the pig doesn't like having its butt hit the back. And also the animals like it if you put a mirror in front of them, so ...

MATT: Weird.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: So if there's a mirror in front of them, it thinks there's another pig there, and they're kind of much more happy running.

MATT: Forever chasing towards their other pig.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Yeah.

HEATHER: That's sad.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: It works.

MATT: But then one day it got exciting.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: A fellow named Dennis Bramble who's a professor at the University of Utah, now retired ...

DENNIS BRAMBLE: [clears throat]

HEATHER: That's Bramble.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: ... he was on sabbatical at Harvard.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Yeah, I was there for the whole year.

HEATHER: To do his own research, coincidentally right next door to Lieberman.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: And I heard this sound, and ...

MATT: Turned to his co-researcher.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: And I said, "What—is somebody doing something there?" And they said, "Yeah, and this guy Dan Lieberman is running pigs over there." I said, "Oh, I gotta—I've gotta see this!"

MATT: Eventually, he goes next door to Lieberman's lab. Lieberman's in there.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: With yet another pig on a treadmill.

HEATHER: Popped his head in, looked at the pig.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: And cocked his head to the side, and said to me, "You know Dan, that pig can't hold its head still when it's running." It's funny I'd, you know, spent hours watching pigs run on treadmills, but I never really thought about it. But ...

MATT: Oh! There it goes.

MATT: We looked up pigs running on YouTube.

MATT: Oh, wow!

HEATHER: So is his head still or not?

MATT: Their heads do kind of flop.

HEATHER: So it's a floppy head.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Right.

MATT: So anyways, the two of them are staring at this mini-pig on a treadmill.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Its head bobbing up and down.

MATT: And Bramble said, "You know Dan, I bet that pig's head is flopping all around because it doesn't have this thing ..."

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Called the nuchal ligament.

MATT: Nuka ligament?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Yeah the nuchal ligament. N-U-C-H-A-L.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: And I explained to him that, you know, it provides support for the head and neck.

HEATHER: Okay, so the nuchal ligament, it's like a rubber band that attaches to the back of the animal's skull and then runs down its spine and keeps the head straight as it runs.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Right. And then I went on to point out that all mammals that are specialized and have evolved as runners ...

HEATHER: Everything from cheetahs to leopards to antelopes ...

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Big grazing animals like horses.

HEATHER: Down to the teeniest, tiniest runners.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Jackrabbits among other things. Dogs too.

HEATHER: They've all got a nuchal ligament.

MATT: All these animals that evolved to run got this ligament to keep their head from flopping around. And the animals that suck at running, they don't have one.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Right.

MATT: Pigs don't.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Apes don't.

HEATHER: Chimps.

MATT: Gorillas.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: They have no nuchal ligament.

HEATHER: Nothing.

MATT: They don't really need one, because running's not a big part of who they are. But then the weird thing is that humans, well ...

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Humans have one.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Humans have one of these too.

MATT: We have this ligament. And this is sort of like a—like a, Dan says, a "Eureka!" moment, because from the neck up essentially what we're talking about is—is the brain. The thing that really sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: And when homo erectus first appears, you know, their brains are about half the size of the brains that we have today.

MATT: What Dan and Dennis realize, like, looking through the fossil record, doing all sorts of laboratory research is that from the neck down, two million years ago we got all these—these adaptations that we still have, adaptations that seem to be explicitly designed for running.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: So for example ...

MATT: Take the foot.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Almost all animals that run have short toes.

HEATHER: If you have long toes and you're running, you—your toes break.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: And sometime around two million years ago, our toes got shorter.

MATT: Or also, like four million years ago, our feet were flat.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You can have a flat foot and walk very well, but once you have a flat foot it's very hard to run.

MATT: Two million years ago, our feet start to arch.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That arch is a spring. And in fact, there are plenty of other springs.

HEATHER: Like the Achilles tendon.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Which is like a centimeter long in a chimpanzee or a gorilla.

HEATHER: With homo erectus, it becomes ...

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Really long.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: A huge spring in your leg.

MATT: Also, our hips become ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Twisty, tall.

HEATHER: Narrow.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That help us stay stable.

MATT: Arms ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That are really useful for climbing.

HEATHER: Shorter. Legs ...

MATT: Longer ...

HEATHER: The inner ear ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: The semicircular canals ...

MATT: Larger.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: More sensitive to pitching forces.

HEATHER: So you can balance better.

MATT: Our joints in our knees and our hips get bigger, which are supposed to be able to bear the load of running.

HEATHER: And maybe the most important adaptation: the butt.

MATT: Butts!

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: So the gluteus maximus plays a very important role when you're—when you're running, and turns out to barely be active when you're walking. And, you know, you don't need the fancy equipment in my lab to figure this out. You can just do this yourself at home. Just walk around the room and hold your butt and, you know, clench your kind of butt. And—and when you're walking your butt will just stay kind of normal, right? It'll stay kind of, you know ...

MATT: Saggy.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: It won't really clench up very much. But when you run, you'll feel it clench up with every step.

MATT: But then so, like, why ...

HEATHER: Why did this happen? Like, why did we start running?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Well, there was climate change. So the Ice Age began, starting—you know, starting around 2.8 million years ago the Earth's climate started changing substantially and Africa started to dry out.

MATT: And Dan says what happened is forests and jungles turned into ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Grassland habitats and more open habitats.

HEATHER: Which quickly filled up with large grass-eating mammals.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Herbivores.

HEATHER: Like kudu and antelope.

MATT: And other large mammals.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Saber-tooth tiger or something like that.

MATT: That ate those mammals.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: But unlike other carnivores ...

HEATHER: Your lions, tigers, cheetahs ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: ... we don't have any natural weapons. We don't have claws and fangs. But natural selection often comes up with really interesting solutions.

MATT: Dan says, imagine you're back two million years ago.

MATT: Where are we?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Well, we might be in a woodland. Or we might be a savanna. You know, there's a variety of habitats.

MATT: We'll stick with the savanna.

HEATHER: You're out there with your family, friends, clan.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: We don't really know the group sizes, but probably, you know, 15 to 20 maybe is not an unreasonable guess. But who knows?

HEATHER: You and your group are walking through the tall grasses of the savanna.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You're hungry.

MATT: And off in the distance ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You see some wildebeests. And you run after them. But the wildebeests run away faster than you can possibly run. And the wildebeest will run far away, right? And go hide. But that's okay.

MATT: You're just gonna keep chasing them.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Tracking.

MATT: Looking for any signs of their trail.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: And you're not chasing them at a sprint. You're kind of running along at a nice, relaxed endurance pace. Like, 10-minute miles.

MATT: And you do this for mile after mile after mile.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: But the trick is you find that animal before it's cooled down, because of course the animal would have run away, and when it runs away it gets hot. Like, when you—running generates a lot of heat. And these animals aren't very good at dumping heat.

MATT: And why can't it dump heat?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Because they can't sweat.

MATT: Unlike us ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Most animals are unable to sweat.

MATT: So ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: The way they lose heat is by panting.

MATT: The thing about four-legged animals, though, is every stride they take when they're running ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: ... the guts slam into the diaphragm like a piston. And so when an animal starts galloping, it has to train each breath with each stride. And that prevents it from doing the short little shallow breaths, you know, that animals do when they pant.

MATT: Huh.

MATT: And so Dan says what you do is you try to keep this wildebeest sprinting. So you stay slow and steady, keep moving. Just slowly chasing this thing. And slowly over time, you're making it get hotter and hotter and hotter, until at a certain point after tons of miles, it could be 20, could be 30, you push this animal to the point of exhaustion.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: At that point the animal is basically collapsing, right? Its—its defenses are gone, and they just find a rock and dispatch the animal with a rock.

MATT: And when you say 'dispatch,' you mean, like, it—we beat its brains in?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That might be what they might do, yeah.

MATT: Huh. This is so horrifying.

HEATHER: I know. It's a terrible way to die, right?

MATT: Yeah.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: But once we are able to do this, we become—we were able to become hunters. And of course, hunting gives us access to incredible number of calories. You also have access to important nutrients. It's not just meat, it's also liver and brain and marrow. These are very rich, important and rare resources that enabled our ancestors to overcome the constraints of—that so many animals face. And—and of course to hunt, you can't really hunt without running. And so—so running helped us become hunters, and hunting and gathering helped us become the smart, intelligent cooperative creatures that we are today.

MATT: Yeah, but I gotta say, the idea of humans running down animals over these, like, huge distances, like it just—it just seems ...

HEATHER: Well, and it kind of boggles the mind, right? Like, it seems impossible. So I'd been, you know, preparing for this conversation with Lieberman and I had heard this theory, and I had said to a few different people, you know ...

HEATHER: Oh yeah, this guy thinks that you can outrun a horse or something. And everyone's like, "No, it's not possible."

HEATHER: And he was like, "Well ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: I have. People do it all the time. Even I've done it.

HEATHER: ... I've actually done it."

HEATHER: You've outrun a horse?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Absolutely. There's a course—there's a race called Man Against Horse, it's every year in Prescott, Arizona. And two years ago, I ran the race. And I ran—outran almost all the horses, and I'm just a middle-aged professor. I'm not particularly fast.

MATT: It's kind of like he was saying, "You can see this whole theory play out in the desert of Arizona."

HEATHER: Right.

MATT: And you and I talked about this. And we were like, okay.

HEATHER: We're going.

MATT: We're going.

HEATHER: [laughs]

LULU: When we come back, it's off to the races.

LULU: Lulu here. We are back with our story about the man versus horse race. And I'm handing it off to reporters Matt Kielty and Heather Radke, who have just landed in Arizona.

HEATHER: So a while back, you and I flew to Phoenix. We rented a car and drove up to ...

MATT: Prescott.

HEATHER: Prescott.

MATT: We went to Prescott.

HEATHER: Don't say "Prescott."

MATT: No. It's kind of like just high desert country.

HEATHER: Cactuses and scrub and red rocks.

MATT: Big blue sky.

HEATHER: It's, like, super cinematic. It's like, this is the west.

MATT: Ah, man-horse sign. Arrow to the right.

MATT: And we were there to see this race.

HEATHER: Nicely homemade, too.

MATT: Yeah, it's just a piece of wood. It says "man-horse" in red paint.

MATT: And the race, it's a 50-mile race through the desert.

HEATHER: Up this mountain, man against horse. Winner take all.

MATT: All right. Okay. So I mean, we're essentially what, just standing in, like, an open desert plain.

HEATHER: Everything's super flat.

MATT: A little bit of a valley.

HEATHER: Kind of right out ahead of you is this big mountain that is the mountain that they're gonna climb during the race.

MATT: We got there for day one.

HEATHER: It turns out ...

MATT: Some humans can beat some horses, but no human ever in this race has outrun the fastest horse.

RON BARRETT: This guy here, he's been the one to come the closest.

HEATHER: So in the 36 years that this race has been going, a horse has won every time.

MATT: And to be honest, it sort of makes sense.

[horse neighs]

MATT: Once you see ...

HEATHER: ... the horses.

[horse neighs]

MATT: What is that? Why do they do that? And we got horses just kind of hanging out in these tiny makeshift enclosures.

HEATHER: And it's not just like pony down at the fair or something. They're big, they're muscular.

MATT: I could never stand that close behind a horse.

HEATHER: It's like evolution has made this animal to be, like, the best running beast on the planet.

MATT: So we talked to some of the riders.

HEATHER: The horses don't run by themselves.

MATT: I'm Matt, by the way.

TROY: Hi Matt. Troy.

MATT: Troy?

TROY: Nice to meet you.

HEATHER: So one of the guys we ended up talking to for a while was this guy Troy.

MATT: Barrel-chested, cowboy hat on. And Troy looked determined.

TROY: I think of this ride—I don't even worry about who else shows up here to race on the horse race, I just want to beat the runner, you know?

MATT: We haven't met any of the runners yet. Are they—do they, like, congregate in some other spot? Or ...

TROY: That's them over there.

MATT: Troy pointed a couple hundred yards over to the other side of this dried-out riverbed.

TROY: The wash, that little wash right there? Those'll be all ultra-runners. But hey, they're little skinny people, all right?

MATT: So here's what we got for the re-enactment of the origins of running in humanity. On one side of this wash, standing in for the ancient antelope of the Serengeti [horse neighs], masses of muscle.

HEATHER: Bred and trained to run. And then on the other side, small group of maybe eight people wearing microfiber whatever. I mean, at this point it pretty much seems like the horses have got it.

MATT: Yeah. Like a blowout.

HEATHER: But then we heard about this one guy.

WOMAN: Nick.

WOMAN #2: Nick.

MATT: Nick.

RON BARRETT: Now this kid says he's coming, Nick Coury.

MATT: We actually also heard about him from Ron.

RON BARRETT: He says he wants to come tomorrow and beat the course record.

MATT: But there was no sign of him yet. Day two. Wake up super early.

MATT: Oh, the sun's coming up. Whoops, sorry.

HEATHER: The race starts at 6:30 in the morning.

MATT: It's just after six. Race day, race day, race day!

MATT: And back across the divide ...

HEATHER: .. the runners ...

HEATHER: Sun's finally up.

MATT: ... are sort of like ...

HEATHER: You're ready to go. So did ...

WOMAN: Yeah.

MATT: ... anxiously moving about, stretching.

HEATHER: So ...

HEATHER: But we are immediately looking for Nick. I'm like, "Where is he?" One of the runners was like ...

MAN: Right there. That guy.

HEATHER: In that red?

MAN: Exactly.

HEATHER: And pointed at this little hatchback. And so I went over there with my microphone and my little headphones and he ...

HEATHER: All right.

HEATHER: ... sort of like, popped open the hatchback.

HEATHER: Hi.

NICK COURY: Good morning.

HEATHER: What's your name?

NICK COURY: Nick Coury.

HEATHER: Nick. We've been hearing about you.

NICK COURY: So I hear. [laughs]

MATT: He's a young guy, early 30s.

HEATHER: A little bit bleary-eyed.

MATT: Did you just get up?

NICK COURY: Kind of. I slept out here last night. So this is—this is my place to get ready.

MATT: He slept in the back of his Honda Fit in a sleeping bag.

NICK COURY: It's easiest to just wake up and be here and not have to worry about driving.

MATT: And right away we were like ...

MATT: So are you—are you going for a course record?

NICK COURY: I'd say it's a possibility. Like, I don't like to get ahead of myself. I know ...

HEATHER: So he sort of hedged a little bit. But we didn't actually have that much time to talk to him because the race was about to start.

HEATHER: We're gonna let you go. But ...

MATT: Yeah.

HEATHER: Thanks for talking to us.

MATT: Yeah, thanks Nick.

MATT: And so about 10 minutes later ...

RON BARRETT: 50-milers, runners check in over here!

MATT: ... Ron starts calling people together.

RON BARRETT: 50 mile horse race!

MATT: Horses start arriving.

RON BARRETT: Listen up! Hey, everybody respect everybody. Everybody take their time going through this wash. I don't want no accidents on the other side of that hill.

MATT: I'd asked Ron if I could run with everybody at the beginning and he was like, "Sure."

RON BARRETT: You guys all have a good day, huh?

MATT: There's probably about 20 runners standing there. About a dozen horses behind us. And then right about 6:30, Ron shouts ...

RON BARRETT: All right, Man Against Horse Race! Start right now! Here we go!

MATT: ... go. So all the runners get down into this wash first, come up into this barren desert. And pretty quick ...

WOMAN: On your right.

MATT: ... come the horses.

MATT: Meanwhile ...

MATT: Troy is, like, galloping out there. He's, like, a hundred yards ahead of anybody.

TROY: As quickly as we could.

MATT: You can see dust coming up behind his horse.

MATT: Good luck, y'all!

MATT: And then Troy, at Mile 16, trots into Vet Check 1.

TROY: And we actually got into the vet check exactly when I had planned to get in, which was right around 8:15-8:30 in the morning. So ...

MATT: He hopped off his horse.

TROY: Took his saddle off, taking the heat load off from the saddle pad.

MATT: Got his horse some water, the vet came over. When pretty much out of nowhere, Nick came running through.

NICK COURY: I could see horses that are being, you know, examined by the vets. I didn't see a whole lot more than that because I was in and out of it really quick.

TROY: He looked good too.

NICK COURY: I'm finally warming up, trying to more or less push it.

TROY: I hadn't seen a guy in that race anything close to as fast as he was.

MATT: So Nick takes off. And then after a 20-minute hold, Troy comes flying out of the vet check.

TROY: Marking the miles as they go by.

MATT: 17, 18. Until he gets to ...

TROY: The backside of Mingus Mountain.

HEATHER: The big climb.

MATT: And Nick ...

NICK COURY: My legs are burning.

MATT: Nick's only a few miles ahead, hitting the steep part of the climb.

NICK COURY: My hands are on my knees, kind of using them almost like hiking poles to push off every footstep.

HEATHER: You know, climbing like it's a boulder.

NICK COURY: I was really—like, I expected a horse to pass me at any moment.

MATT: And while all of this was going on ...

MATT: I can't even see anything.

MATT: ... we were lost on the mountain.

HEATHER: I don't love that.

MATT: What is—oh my God!

MATT: That's us almost driving off a cliff.

HEATHER: My hands are sweating in remembering it.

MATT: Yeah, so we had gone to look for the first vet check. We had gotten totally turned around, and we were on this mountain that was just treacherous. Like, awful. And I just remember thinking, like, how do you run up this thing?

HEATHER: Or with a horse? I mean, both—both of them.

MATT: Yeah. But then so we finally find our way off the mountain, circle all the way back around the mountain, go back up the top and we go to a different checkpoint. Ron told us, he's like, "You can get to this checkpoint and you'll be there in time. Nobody should be up there."

HEATHER: Oh, yeah. This is it.

HEATHER: And this is the checkpoint that's at the top of the climb.

MATT: It's at the peak of the mountain.

HEATHER: Mile 32.

MATT: And then you ...

HEATHER: [whispers] It's crazy.

MATT: Is it?

MATT: ... grabbed me and were like, "You should come look at this view."

HEATHER: I mean, you're gonna see.

WOMAN: Go look.

MATT: Oh! Oh my God!

HEATHER: Isn't it the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?

MATT: That's incredible!

MATT: It's just this huge, green valley that runs all the way to these, like, beautiful red cliffs.

HEATHER: This is crazy. Like, they come up there?

HEATHER: These horses and humans climb up this, essentially like a sheer face of a mountain.

HEATHER: I can't believe they come up this way.

MAN: I guess they're gonna be a little further. You'll see 'em trucking their way up here, and you'll hear 'em coming.

HEATHER: It's, like, very steep.

MATT: I just have no idea where the trail is. I mean ...

MATT: So we kinda just were sitting around waiting for, like, a sign. When all of a sudden, one of the volunteers just shouted out ...

MAN: Runner coming!

MATT: Runner coming?

MAN: Yes. Runner!

MATT: Runner before a horse?

MAN: Runner in the lead. They do it.

MATT: Out of nowhere, coming from this tiny little trail into this parking lot ...

WOMAN: You got it! Woo!

MATT: ... Nick just appears.

WOMAN: Good job, Nick!

MATT: And he looked like—he looked good.

MATT: I'll try to keep pace with you for a minute.

NICK COURY: All right.

MATT: Hey, you're out—you're out ahead.

NICK COURY: Yeah, that's a good sign, I suppose. I'm feeling pretty good about that.

MATT: How do you feel so far in general?

NICK COURY: Not too bad. I mean, that was the toughest part. I had to hike quite a bit of that climb.

MATT: Oh, really? Just straight up hiking?

NICK COURY: Yeah. It's like 1,500 feet of climbing in, I don't know, like a mile, mile and a half. So it's a steep, steep climb.

MATT: Yeah.

NICK COURY: But yeah, now it's all pretty much downhill from here, so that should be good.

MATT: How are you doing for pace?

NICK COURY: I'm not—I'm happy with where I'm at. I'm just running hard but comfortable.

MATT: Okay.

NICK COURY: I don't know where that compares to the record or anything.

MATT: We ran together for four minutes?

MATT: I'll leave you to it.

NICK COURY: Awesome.

MATT: Good luck.

NICK COURY: Later. Thanks.

MATT: Oh my God, he's been doing that for 32 miles. That's insane.

HEATHER: What happened?

MATT: Yeah, I ran with him for a little bit. I'm so dead. Not a horse?

HEATHER: No horse yet.

MATT: Huh.

MATT: There still wasn't a horse. 20 minutes go by ...

HEATHER: So then finally, there's a horse. In fact, there's two horses. There's these two women riders who kind of emerge out of the trail.

MATT: But there's no Troy.

HEATHER: Yeah, there's no sign of Troy. And this is how I remember it. Like, we'd heard something had happened.

MAN ON WALKIE-TALKIE: Somewhere back down the trail his horse stumbled and fell.

HEATHER: That a rider had gone down.

MATT: Did I hear a name?

MATT: But no one knew who. And then we ended up finding out that in fact ...

TROY: We caught a rock and went down and ...

MATT: ... Troy, around Mile 26 or so, he and his horse caught a rock, toe-catcher as he called it.

HEATHER: He and the horse both fell, yeah.

TROY: Which sort of, you know, to a large extent ended my day.

HEATHER: And they were okay.

MATT: But the idea of winning was—was completely gone. But there were these riders, Susie and MJ, who we'd also heard actually I think were, like, top riders.

HEATHER: Who have won lots of races. And so they had a pretty good shot of winning too.

MATT: And then we're like, okay, we'll follow—we'll follow them.

HEATHER: So we drove a mile down the road to Vet Check 2. We knew Nick was ahead, but the question was was he ahead enough?

MATT: And you go and you start talking to people, and then when we were coming in, I asked ...

MAN: Hi there.

MATT: ... one of the volunteers ...

MAN: We're doing good. How are you doing?

MATT: Not bad. Did the front-runner come through?

MATT: ... if Nick had come through. And he was just like, "Oh, yeah."

MAN: Oh, he—he is really moving.

MATT: Because we want to make sure we don't miss him at the finish line. Do you know what he—do you know when he might get in, you think?

MATT: We look at a map and we realize that Nick is running a seven-minute mile.

MAN: So if you're trying to get there to catch him, you're not gonna have a lot of time.

HEATHER: We decided that I'd stay behind and talk to the horse people, and you'd go ahead and try to get to the finish line.

HEATHER: Okay.

MATT: All right. I'll be in touch.

MATT: So I drove very fast down the mountain trying to catch Nick.

HEATHER: Who was just getting to the bottom of the mountain.

NICK COURY: I'm winding down the trail.

HEATHER: It's steep, it's rocky.

NICK COURY: Making sure I'm picking up my feet, not gonna catch a toe on a rock or anything like that. Do whatever it takes to keep my body upright.

HEATHER: For the whole first part of this race, Nick's mindset is like, only live in this moment, don't let yourself think about the end. Don't let yourself have a lot of feeling or emotion. But then here at the end, after 40 miles ...

NICK COURY: I—I almost start to let a panic take over me.

HEATHER: ... for the first time in the whole race, all the emotions that he's been repressing and pushing down ...

NICK COURY: I let it all come in on me. You let that hit you, and you let that excitement hit you and you let that adrenaline and, you know, fear and, you know, everything else, kind of a huge mix of emotions all rush in. And you let yourself experience, like, the fullness of every single emotion all at once and you hit that height. I was—I just started running basically as hard as I could. Faster and faster. And, like, I almost build this momentum of, like, nothing can stop me from getting to that finish line. Like, I—I hit that last half mile where I can see the finish banner, I can see the finish line. Like, tears started welling up as I'm running in and like, the—the emotions just completely overcome me as I cross the finish line.

MATT: So I got back down to, like, the base camp. Got out of the car and started making my way over to the finish line. And then I just saw him ...

MATT: Ha ha! You already beat me here.

MATT: ... standing there.

MATT: How'd it go?

NICK COURY: Good!

MATT: He was surrounded by a bunch of people.

MATT: Did you do it?

NICK COURY: Yeah!

RON BARRETT: 6:14. I go, "He's not in yet. I don't have to go up there." 6:14. Way to go, man. I just can't believe. You're my favorite runner. I ever tell you that?

MATT: But really, what everybody wanted to know ...

WOMAN: Oh my God. So did Nick beat the horse?

MATT: ... was did Nick win-win? Like, for the first time in the history of this race, did a human beat the horse? And so what they do is they—they have this banquet later where they actually give out the awards and announce everybody's time.

RON BARRETT: They get a nice big fat winner's buckle ...

MATT: The winner gets a really cool belt buckle.

HEATHER: So the way it works is that Ron announces the winners by category.

RON BARRETT: So in third place, we got the one and only ...

HEATHER: Starting with the top three runners.

RON BARRETT: Pete Mortimer!

HEATHER: He announces third place and then second place, and then he gets to ...

RON BARRETT: All right. Here we go. Here's the big one. Really big. Really big.

HEATHER: ... Nick.

RON BARRETT: Really big show here. Nick Coury! Nick Coury won this course, won the race in time of 6:14. He won—he won the course outright by beating the horse by over an hour and 15 minutes.

MATT: Nick walks up, Ron hands him this sterling silver belt buckle ...

RON BARRETT: 6:14.

MATT: ... with the Man Against Horse logo on it.

RON BARRETT: Unbelievable. It's never been done before where a runner has actually beat the horse with—with the hold times. Yeah.

MATT: In the story of ancient man, you—this would be the moment where you ...

HEATHER: Get to eat your ...

MATT: Yeah.

HEATHER: ... your bone marrow.

MATT: You catch up to the gazelle and you ...

HEATHER: Bash it over the head ...

MATT: Bash its brains in ...

HEATHER: ... and break open its bones.

MATT: ... while it's, like, just slowly breathing on the ground in front of you.

HEATHER: He's like, "That's not my bag. That's your guys' thing." [laughs]

NICK COURY: Yeah. I guess it's maybe like the—the old adage comes to mind: It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. It's—I want it to be something like that.

HEATHER: I guess I always found it fascinating how it seems so obvious that a race is about the end.

MATT: Right.

HEATHER: But everybody we talked to was like, it's not about the end. And maybe they were just sort of—maybe that's, like, the good sportsman thing to say, maybe that's kind of like how you get yourself through it. But I guess that's sort of to the point is, like, the only way you can run a race like this, the only way you can really run 50 miles is to think about it mile by mile instead of imagining that the end is the goal.

MATT: Right. You have to go just step by step. You have to keep steady.

HEATHER: It's like we're not just evolved to get to the end, we evolved to endure the whole process.

MATT: But I guess the beautiful thing about it is like, either way, no matter what?

HEATHER: We got there because of our butts.

MATT: [laughs]

HEATHER: Is that where you were going?

MATT: [laughs] Yeah. No matter what, it's all about the butt.

LULU: Reporters Matt Kielty and Heather Radke. That'll do it for today. Thanks so much for listening. More stories about this lumpy old planet of ours coming in two weeks. Bye!

MATT: Hey, this is producer Matt Kielty, running near my mom's house in Arizona. And just very quickly, this episode was produced by me with Rachael Cusick and Simon Adler. We had original, awesome music, sound design and mixing from Jeremy Bloom. This episode was fact-checked by Dorie Chevlen. Special thanks to Tammy Gagnon, Abbie Swift and everybody at Man Against Horse. And also really quickly want to say both Dennis and Daniel made a point of the fact that a lot of their early theories about humans and endurance running were informed by one of Dennis's students, the guy who wrote that paper. His name is Dave Carrier. And coincidentally, Dave's brother is a man named Scott Carrier who, if you listen to public radio, you might recognize the name. Has been—has had great work on This American Life, also a wonderful podcast called Home of the Brave. Anyways, back in 1998, Scott did this sort of like seminal story about his brother's work, trying to chase down an antelope and a whole lot of things. Anyways, it just felt important to acknowledge the both of them. And yeah, that's about it. This is terrible. Oh, wait. Oh, there's the horse.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Sachi Kitajima Mulkey. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Beth from San Francisco. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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Radiolab for Kids is back!

Is there such a thing as a good cage? Happy gorillas, deft landscape architects and neurologists show us that there just might be. We go back to the late 1970s to relive the moment when zoos began to change—literally the moment that the modern zoo was born, as embodied by a few tentative steps of a gorilla named Kiki. That story, told by zoo director David Hancocks, architect Grant Jones, and gorilla keeper Violet Sunde.

Also check out:

Marina Belozerskaya's book

The Medici Giraffe

Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Ellen Horne, senior producer. Lulu Miller assistant producer. Production executive Dean Cappello, Production support by Sarah Pellegrini, Bret Baier, Scott Goldberg, Alaska Keyville, Sam Leviander, Avir Mitra, Ryan Scamole and Jacob Weinberg. Also, very special thanks to Tamar Llewellyn, and Amy Bush's class at Northstar Academy for their musical contributions.

Visit the Radiolab for Kids/Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos, and games that educators, parents, and families might enjoy together.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.tease
Radiolab for Kids is back! Is there such a thing as a good cage? Happy gorillas, deft landscape architects and neurologists show us that there just might be.

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Three, two, one! Imagine the Terrestrials feed suddenly—roop!—comes back to life! [laughs] Well, it just did. It is happening right now before your very ears. I am so pleased to announce that as of this moment, this podcast feed, Radiolab for Kids, home of Terrestrials, will always be on. We are gonna be dropping episodes about nature, about animals, about plants every other week. Sometimes these will be brand new Terrestrials episodes full of songs and silliness. Sometimes they will be our very best, shiniest, furriest, family-friendliest Radiolab episodes about animals or plants or nature. You'll always get a little hello from me, and we hope that this feed will sort of start to feel like a nature walk—a place where you can show up and explore and always encounter something unexpected out there in the wilderness.

LULU: Which brings me to today's story. Today, we have a story about a gorilla. A gorilla who was kind of sad because he was stuck in a zoo. But things will not stay that way thanks to some very inventive humans. That's all I'm gonna say. I will let hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad take it from here. All you need to know is that Jad does not like the zoo, finds it kind of icky and sad. And Robert? Well, he ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: I love the zoo. What about you?

JAD ABUMRAD: I don't know about the zoo, kind—of icky.

ROBERT: Why?

JAD: I just—I want the animals to not be there in the cage.

ROBERT: Be someplace, what, prettier, safer?

JAD: Safer, prettier. I'd rather watch them on TV frankly, and let them run around on their own.

ROBERT: [laughs] Well the guy—this is interesting—the guy who made the big move in modern zoo history ...

DAVID HANCOCKS: Hello? Hello?

ROBERT: That's him. His name is David Hancocks. We got him into a studio, and he's sort of a little bit like you. He was very ambivalent about zoos.

DAVID HANCOCKS: I'd actually for a while toyed with the idea of do I want to go and work in zoos and try to change them, or do I want to stay outside zoos and work to close them down? And I came to the conclusion that there's no way you're gonna close zoos down. The fascination of wanting to be close to wild animals cuts across every strata of society.

ROBERT: You know—this is my case, by the way—I love being close to them. Anyway, David Hancocks decided if you can't beat them you join them. And it was in the mid 1970s and David was working actually as an architect. He was between jobs when he got a call. A friend recommended him for a job at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yes. Yes.

ROBERT: And he gets hired.

DAVID HANCOCKS: I was in an unusually fortunate situation in that just after I was hired and got there the zoo director left.

ROBERT: And so there was nobody to run the place—well, except for David. So he decided to take a look at the entire philosophy of the zoo and change everything, starting with the gorillas. They lived in awful cages.

DAVID HANCOCKS: The—the gorillas were living in a small, concrete building.

ROBERT: It was a spare, empty concrete box with a glass window.

DAVID HANCOCKS: The gorillas of course were bored, and slowly going out of their mind.

ROBERT: Occasionally you'd find a gorilla who'd take his feces and smear it on the wall.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yes. I mean, they had nothing else to interact with. The only natural components in his life that he ever came into contact with would have been the food that he ate and the feces he produced.

ROBERT: So cages were the problem. The solution, he decided—well, he wanted to rip up the cages, yank them out completely and replace them with—with something, a natural setting of some sort. But when he looked around for a model no zoo in the world had gorillas in what you would call a natural setting, and he wasn't even sure what is natural for, say, a gorilla.

DAVID HANCOCKS: There—there was very, very little known about gorillas and their wild behavior. In fact, all the books said that gorillas don't climb.

ROBERT: This was early in the '70s, remember, so David invited a person who did know.

DAVID HANCOCKS: I heard about Dian Fossey—Dian Fossey's work was beginning to be carried in National Geographic.

ROBERT: You know Dian Fossey.

JAD: Yeah, right. Right.

ROBERT: She lived with a group of gorillas, wrote down everything she saw, their social interactions and all, and was the gorilla expert at that time.

DAVID HANCOCKS: And I heard that she was coming to the US, and she agreed to come to Seattle and spend a couple of days with us. We were trying to get images from her of the sort of environment we could create. And the breakthrough came after the couple of days that she'd spent with us. I was driving her back to the airport and I said, "Is there anything you've seen around here or anywhere in this part of the world that in any way resembles the sort of places where you've seen gorillas in the wild?" And she just pointed to this verge on the freeway.

ROBERT: I don't know what a verge is. What's a verge?

DAVID HANCOCKS: A ver—oh sorry, you—what—the—the landscape on the side of the freeway, the sloping, what—what would you call it?

ROBERT: I would call it—if it were President Kennedy I would call it a—what do they call it?
DAVID HANCOCKS: A knoll?

ROBERT: Yes, a knoll. But I wouldn't call it that because only President Kennedy gets that.

DAVID HANCOCKS: No.

ROBERT: I would call it the green stuff on the side of the road.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Okay, yeah. It was a banked area that had once been cleared, and then this verdant growth that you get in Seattle was springing back. And she said, "That right there, that's where I would expect to see—to be observing gorillas in the wild." So I dropped her at the airport, came back, and on the way back illegally parked on the side of the freeway and took photographs and then said, "Here. This is what Dian Fossey said we should be designing." [laughs]

ROBERT: So as you can tell, they had absolutely no idea what they were doing, but they also didn't have a boss, and within a few months, with help from a landscape architect ...

GRANT JONES: Hi, I'm Grant Jones from Seattle, Washington.

ROBERT: ... they drew up a plan and out came the bulldozers.

GRANT JONES: Exactly. And we were creating huge mounds and hills about 10 or 15 feet high. Some rocky cliffs along one side, some creek—trees. Shrubs about three or four feet high, big herbs and vegetables and tangles of vines, undergrowth. Lots of laurel bushes. Hawthorne trees, some big humphrey leaves that we planted that have long berries and pointed drip tips, tropical-like leaves, fast-growing pioneer plants.

DAVID HANCOCKS: We just let it grow wild.

ROBERT: Now nobody was watching you.

DAVID HANCOCKS: And nobody was watching us and that was the critical factor, I think, yes. Because if a traditional zoo director had seen or heard what we were doing they would—he would have stopped it.

JAD: And—and why—why would a traditional zookeeper have stopped this?

ROBERT: Well, because they were worried about what—like, suppose you had been a gorilla and you'd spent your whole life living in a cage, in a concrete cage.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: Now I'm gonna take you, little Jad, my baby gorilla, and stick him into a completely new place with sky and jagged things. I mean, I would be worried that you'd hurt yourself.

VIOLET SUNDE: In the zoo world, generally I think people were very nervous about it.

ROBERT: That's Violet Sunde, she was the gorilla keeper at the Seattle Zoo.

VIOLET SUNDE: Yes, I was their primary keeper at that time, and the zoo was advised by a lot of zoo experts that it wouldn't work.

DAVID HANCOCKS: I had zoo directors tell me it was stupid, irresponsible, and it was unnecessary.

VIOLET SUNDE: That, you know, the gorillas would fall out of the trees and hurt themselves.

DAVID HANCOCKS: If the gorillas climbed they would fall and break their necks.

GRANT JONES: Fall and break their bones or they would get ...

DAVID HANCOCKS: We were putting their health at risk.

GRANT JONES: ... diseases.

VIOLET SUNDE: They would get sick because it wasn't a sterile environment where you could, you know, disinfect concrete.

GRANT JONES: And that they'd get psychologically deranged from all this space.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yes.

GRANT JONES: Sometimes I'd go to David Hancocks and say, "What are we gonna do about these people?" And he'd say, "Ignore them."

ROBERT: A bold statement. But as the clock ticked down to the day that these five animals would walk from their iron cage through a door into this field, it was a real open question at the time what will happen.

VIOLET SUNDE: I think—I think we were all somewhat nervous.

GRANT JONES: Oh we were—we were nervous, oh sure. How will they react? What will they do?

ROBERT: The truth is nobody knew.

LULU: We'll be back in a moment.

LULU: Radiolab for Kids is back. On with the story.

ROBERT: And so after five years getting ready, after 16,000 square feet of gorilla display area were prepared, finally it was time.

DAVID HANCOCKS: And this sunny July, I think—sorry, I remember it was a July morning.

GRANT JONES: I can't remember the exact year, I think it's '76.

VIOLET SUNDE: Actually, I just looked it up. July 31, 1979.

DAVID HANCOCKS: We let them out. Kiki was the first to—to come to that doorway and look out.

ROBERT: Kiki was the dominant gorilla of this group. There were six gorillas, he was the star.

VIOLET SUNDE: Kiki was my favorite, I have to confess. [laughs] He was so smart.

ROBERT: And he was big, he was six feet tall, 460 pounds.

V IOLET SUNDE: Kiki came in to view first.

DAVID HANCOCKS: And of course, he's never seen anything remotely like this before.

ROBERT: So here he is, this huge creature standing at the doorway just looking at this unknown world.

GRANT JONES: He stood in the doorway for many minutes, and finally Kiki starts to slowly step forward.

ROBERT: First a step, then another.

GRANT JONES: And he went as far as a creek and sat down. And then he looked up. We noticed he looked up for a long time, and we looked up also. Clouds were blowing by at fairly low altitude, swallows flying overhead. There were crows in the trees, there was a wind blowing, the trees were rustling, the grass was moving, you could see the hair on his face moving. He looked up for a long time and took all this in, and then he looked down into the—into the water, in a little eddy there and you could see that he was looking at his face in the water, which he'd never seen. And then he just starts looking all around, and then all of a sudden he sees us.

ROBERT: Grant, Violet and David and a few others were standing behind some glass at an observation point. They were about a hundred yards away from the doorway.

GRANT JONES: And he came right up to the glass where we were ...
ROBERT: And they knew that Kiki had been a pretty angry gorilla before.

GRANT JONES: ... and then he did something that we in a million years hoped he never would, which was to reach down into the sand, screwed his arm down deep into the sand, and he pulled out this big chunk of broken concrete about six, eight inches wide, and then he held it up over his head. We thought "Oh, this is it. He's gonna break the windows." We'd spent weeks raking and telling the contractor to remove all debris and begging them to check and recheck, to look for such things as this piece of concrete and there it was. So Kiki held it over his head and sort of waved it around a little bit and looked with an angry look at us ...

ROBERT: And he just held it there.

GRANT JONES: ... and then he just dropped it. He—he almost threw it down, he just sort of dropped it down. We all breathed a sigh of relief, and then he laid down on his back and his mate Nina came over and sat beside him and a little—a little baby came over and laid on his chest and they just proceeded to enjoy themselves like—like we weren't there.

VIOLET SUNDE: It was magic. It was just—it was magic. They looked like different animals.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Totally different animals.

VIOLET SUNDE: It felt like we were seeing a gorilla in the wild.

GRANT JONES: Needless to say we all cried after he came over.

DAVID HANCOCKS: I didn't cry, no. But I had a lump in my throat.

VIOLET SUNDE: I—I felt like finally, this is right. This is really what's right for them.

DAVID HANCOCKS: I remember there was this strange feeling afterwards, it was almost like we'd been to a wedding where there was this mixture of happiness and sadness, and I think more than anything else there was just a great sense of relief.

GRANT JONES: We thought well, when will he produce this angry behavior and pound on the glass? And, you know, he never, ever did it. The old Kiki never returned, never filled his body again.

JAD: He was never angry anymore?

ROBERT: Well, I think he—what he's saying is that Kiki had really changed. The change in cages truly changed the animal.

LULU: The outside can change the in. That will do it for today. Thank you so much for listening. More stories about this lumpy old planet of ours coming up in two weeks with brand new Terrestrials episodes coming in September. See ya!

[ANSWERING MACHINE VOICE: First message.]

[DAVID HANCOCKS: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Ellen Horne, senior producer. Lulu Miller assistant producer. Production executive Dean Cappello, Production support by Sarah Pellegrini, Bret Baier, Scott Goldberg, Alaska Keyville, Sam Leviander, Avir Mitra, Ryan Scamole and Jacob Weinberg. Also, very special thanks to Tamar Llewellyn, and Amy Bush's class at Northstar Academy for their musical contributions.]

-30-

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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The Terrestrials team is delighted to announce we’re coming back to the Radiolab for Kids feed! We’ve been traveling the globe in search of the strangeness right here on Earth. And we’ll be sharing a whole new batch of stories – and songs – in September.

In the meantime:

-catch up on past episodes!

-bop your head to songbud Alan’s songs!

-check out our brand new teaching resources!

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the Kalliopeia Foundation.

# included[].attributes.headers.brand.logo-image.alt-text
Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.headers.links[].title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.show-tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.series[].about.body
Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

# included[].attributes.series[].tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.series[].logo-image.alt-text
Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.tease
The Terrestrials team is delighted to announce we’re coming back to the Radiolab for Kids feed! We’ve been traveling the globe in search of the strangeness right here on Earth. 

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Ana is an audio producer and host who came to WNYC in 2021 to work on Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials. Before that, she produced and hosted Mosaic, a show about immigration experiences from Rhode Island Public Radio. In a former life, she played jazz bass and thinks about everything in terms of rhythm, conversation, and harmony.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Alan Goffinski (he/him), is an arts administrator, songwriter, and producer from Charlottesville VA. He is the former Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project—two city-wide organizations that utilize art and culture as a way for people to better understand themselves, each other, and the world around them. He is also a founding member of the Indianapolis-based whimsical performing arts collective Know No Stranger which has been described as “Sesame Street but for adults... but also for kids.” He produced the experimental music radio program Telemetry in partnership with the University of Virginia. Early in his career, Alan spent years making music in a nationally touring indie-punk band (signed to Victory Records) prior to becoming a social worker specializing in early childhood development. He began making kid’s music under the moniker Little Skunks as a fun way to be a part of the day-to-day lives of his nieces and nephew.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.body
In the game of life, every species is like an action figure. You got your dogs and your dung beetles, your bald eagles and your blueberries. And for a long time scientists believed it was pretty much impossible for those action figures to mix and make a new kind of action figure that was able to have its own babies (dog beetles? Baldberries? Nah). But, today we tell the story of a four-legged beast in Kentucky whose existence is upending scientific beliefs. If you want a big fat SPOILER, here it is: the creature in question is a mule! After almost 20 years of living her life as a hybrid (a mix between a horse and a donkey), believed to be incapable of having babies, Peanut the mule shocked the world by doing the impossible. Peanut’s owners, Teresa and Jerry Smothers, tell us the story of her life. Evolutionary biologist Dr. Molly Schumer explains how scientists’ understanding of hybrids has changed dramatically over the course of Peanut’s lifetime. And no mule episode would be complete without a cowboy-hatted mule packer leading us deep into the rocky trails of the American West on muleback to explain why mules are the best of both worlds of their parents.

Learn about the storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Watch a hybrid gameshow and find even MORE original Terrestrials fun on our Youtube.

Badger us on Social Media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

More from Terrestrials

The Shovels: Dig Deeper

For each episode of Terrestrials, we provide a selection of activity sheets, drawing prompts, musical lessons, and more. We call them “shovels” because we hope they will help you (and your friends, family, students, neighbors, etc) dig more deeply into the world! You can do them at home, in the classroom, outside, or in the privacy of your own mind. We hope you enjoy!

If you want to share what you’ve made, ask an adult share it on social media using #TerrestrialsPodcast and make sure to tag @Radiolab

Draw -  Get creative with a special listen from our friends from DrawTogether

Do - We've put a bunch of concrete - and even kinda fun - things we can all do to help protect the nonhuman life on this planet IN BINGO form!

This week’s storytellers are Jerry and Teresa Smothers, Dr. Molly Schumer and mule packer James Reeves.

Want to keep learning? Check out these resources to learn about the sure-footed, stubborn hybrid helper that is the MULE:

Watch a TV news report about Peanut and Miracle
Ligers and Zonkeys and Narlugas, Oh my! Read an article about hybrids in nature and whether being a hybrid helps or hurts your genetic success.
Learn the story of the first narluga (narwhal and beluga) spotting.
Learn more about James Reeves, Mule Packer to the stars! Or, rather, to the mountains.
Follow Mule Packer James Reeves’ instagram, full of videos of him and mules!
Is breeding hybrids (like Ligers) unethical?
Did you know mules are STILL used in the military? Check out Susan Orlean’s wonderful article about that.
A video about the myth of Pegasus vs. The Chimera
“Mules and More” Magazine
Detailed list of reports of fertile mules over history

Terrestrials is a production of WNYC Studios, created by Lulu Miller. This episode is produced by Ana González, Alan Goffinski and Lulu Miller. Original Music by Alan Goffinski. Help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, and Sarita Bhatt. Fact-check by Natalie Meade. Sound design by Phoebe Wang with additional engineering by Joe Plourde and Andrew Dunn. Our storytellers this week are Jerry and Teresa Smothers, Dr. Molly Schumer, and mulepacker James Reeves. Special thanks to the punks at the Music Resource Center in Charlottesville, Virginia: Riles, Susie, Jack, Tate, Tiny, Cheyenne, Zina, Bray, Jordan and Orion

Our advisors are Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Steinberg-Demby, and Tara Welty.

Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

Have questions for us, badgers? Badger us away! Your parent/guardian should write to us along with you, so we know you have their permission, and for maybe even having your ideas mentioned on the show. Email terrestrials@wnyc.org

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A track of hoofprints snakes through a vast, lush meadow. At the horizon the silhouette of a mule rears triumphantly against the blazing sunset.   

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.show-tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.series[].about.body
Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

# included[].attributes.series[].tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.series[].logo-image.alt-text
Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.tease
A fantastical mix of two beasts comes together, thrives, and does something scientists thought it could never do

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Terrestrials 06. The Hybrid: A Miracle Mule

# included[].attributes.transcript
LULU MILLER: [whispers] Three, two one!

MOLLY SCHUMER: Imagine your parents, they're like aliens to each other.

LULU: Your mom is ...

MOLLY SCHUMER: ... super, super strong.

LULU: She's over six feet tall with long, flowing hair that ruffles in the wind. Tra la la! And your dad is, uh ...

MOLLY SCHUMER: Very, very cute.

LULU: Hoo hoo! He's got short, stumpy legs, huge ears, buck teeth, and some say a kind of jerky personality. And as these two different species of animals come together to form you, the genes inside your cells ...

MOLLY SCHUMER: They're basically speaking two different languages. So you have two separate sets of directions of how to make you, how you're going to operate in the world.

LULU: Your legs bulge long and strong like your mom's. And your feet scrunch into tiny hooves like your dad's. And when you finally come out into the world, you open your eyes and see ...

MOLLY SCHUMER: How you don't really fit into either species or either world.

LULU: Some people say a mashup of species like you is ...

TERESA SMOTHERS: Impossible.

LULU: And yet here you are.

MOLLY SCHUMER: You're a mule.

LULU: All right. Now is the part where I make you sing the theme song with me.

MOLLY SCHUMER: [laughs] Okay.

LULU: [singing] "Terrestrials. Terrestrials. We are not the worst, we are the ..."

MOLLY SCHUMER: Best?

LULU: "-rials." Yup! Correct!

MOLLY SCHUMER: Okay!

LULU: Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth, and sometimes break out into song.

[Theme song: There's so much to discover if you're super cool. Terrestrials. Terrestrials. This last episode is about a mule. Terrestrials. Terrestrials.]

LULU: Good voices not required. I'm your host Lulu Miller joined as always by my Songbud ...

ALAN GOFFINSKI: Howdy, partner!

LULU: Alan.

ALAN: Giddy up!

LULU: Today, we are telling the story of a humble mule named Peanut, who one summer day did something so rare that it shattered one of the most sacred laws of nature.

LULU: What was that blasphemous thing you were saying?

ALAN: What, about carrots?

LULU: Yeah.

ALAN: No thanks!

LULU: Don't like 'em?

ALAN: Don't like carrots.

LULU: So to understand this story, the Songbud and I grabbed a bunch of carrots, hopped in a car and headed down to Kentucky ...

LULU: Ooh, horses!

LULU: ... to hear how it happened straight from the horse's—or, uh, mule's—mouth.

LULU: Pulling up to a gorgeous farm with purple balloons. I don't know if those are for the guest of honor or somebody else.

LULU: So first, we met Peanut's owners, Jerry and Teresa Smothers.

JERRY SMOTHERS: I'm Jerry.

ALAN: Great to see ya.

TERESA SMOTHERS: I'm Teresa.

LULU: I'm Lulu!

LULU: Then we met their mothers.

TERESA SMOTHERS: This is my mother-in-law, Lily.

LULU: The Smothers mothers.

TERESA SMOTHERS: This is my mother, Susie.

LULU: That there sniffing the mic is their dog Ginger.

LULU: Hi!

ALAN: Hi, Ginger!

LULU: Next, we met their cat, Tony, their son, Justin, their grand niece ...

TERESA SMOTHERS: Carly Ann.

LULU: And finally ...

LULU: So this is Peanut?

TERESA SMOTHERS: That's Peanut.

LULU: ... Peanut herself.

LULU: You have anything to say, Peanut?

[crunching sound]

LULU: [laughs] Yeah, that's not a carrot.

LULU: [whispers] That was my microphone she was trying to eat.

LULU: It's a really expensive carrot. [laughs]

LULU: So our story starts when Peanut starts. She was born in 1999, and she came out with chocolatey-brown fur and a punk rock blonde mohawk of a mane.

TERESA SMOTHERS: And we fell in love with her.

LULU: Teresa and Jerry had been in the market for a new farm animal, and so they brought little Peanut back to their farm, and thought they knew what they were getting themselves into. Things started off nor-mule-y enough. They made a home for her in their stable, they introduced her to their little three-year-old niece, Hannah.

TERESA SMOTHERS: So we would set Hannah on her, and Jerry would hold Hannah and I would lead Peanut. Well, Peanut would do that for a little while ...

LULU: Walking peacefully. Until suddenly ...

TERESA SMOTHERS: She'd start bucking! Well, the more she bucked, the more Hannah loved it.

LULU: No!

TERESA SMOTHERS: Yes.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: As time went on, the Smothers added more and more animals to their farm.

JERRY SMOTHERS: Cows and ...

TERESA SMOTHERS: ... big horses.

LULU: And little Peanut ...

JERRY SMOTHERS: She would try to manipulate the horses to do what she wanted them to do. She'd turn her back end and kick ...

LULU: And buck and nudge her way to the front of the line.

JERRY SMOTHERS: ... and get in there where she can eat or get a treat or whatever it is.

LULU: It turned out Peanut was ...

JERRY SMOTHERS: Bossy.

TERESA SMOTHERS: Bossy.

LULU: Bossy?

JERRY SMOTHERS: That's a good word, "Bossy."

LULU: And that part didn't surprise the Smothers.

TERESA SMOTHERS: You know, mules are stubborn.

LULU: This stubbornness is probably what mules are most famous for. Ever heard the expression "stubborn as a mule?" If someone's calling you "muleish," they mean you should probably give up on the thing that you won't stop trying to do. It's a diss. And this obstinance is why mules don't have the greatest reputation. On a recent poll of over a thousand farm-y type people, mules came in dead last for favorite of the horse-like creatures: horses, donkeys and mules.

JAMES REEVES: All right. I'm down in the Pate Valley with five loaded mules.

LULU: But for the small subset of people who do love mules, like James Reeves here, a mule packer who spends spends his days riding mules over massive mountains to bring food and supplies to remote trail workers, he says mules are not the worst but literally the best parts of both of their parents. He says they've got the strength of a horse in the compact size of a donkey, meaning they can lug heavy gear just as long and far as a horse while eating way less food.

JAMES REEVES: The t rail is really rugged going down here. Lotta rocks.

LULU: Plus, their little hooves make them far better at navigating treacherous, narrow mountain trails than horses. They're also less prone to injury and illness, they're less likely to spook and run off if something surprises them. And they can withstand the blazing sun for hours longer than horses or donkeys.

JAMES REEVES: We're at about 4,000 feet elevation, which here in California can get pretty hot in the summer.

LULU: And their superpowers do not stop when the sun goes down.

[coyote howling]

TERESA SMOTHERS: They keep coyotes out of the field.

LULU: No, really?

TERESA SMOTHERS: So farmers use them for their cattle. That way these coyotes can't, you know, get the babies. So they will kill a coyote.

LULU: Okay, I'm picturing, like, a pack of coyotes, fangs, and then, like, a sweet little mule? The mule's gonna win?

TERESA SMOTHERS: Yeah, every time.

LULU: How? How?

TERESA SMOTHERS: Kicking.

JAMES REEVES: Yeah. Probably the single biggest benefit is their stubbornness.

LULU: Yup. That muleish stubbornness that so many people love to hate? James over the years has come to see as mules' very best feature. He told me about one time he was riding a mule, and it suddenly stopped. And no matter how much he kicked or pulled at it, it would not move. And finally, James saw why.

JAMES REEVES: There was a rattlesnake there on the trail.

LULU: [gasps]

JAMES REEVES: And the mule had heard the snake, I think, and I hadn't. And it was trying to tell me, "No, I'm not gonna do that because it's dangerous." And that's kind of a typical thing that happens with people a lot, they mistake higher intelligence for stubbornness.

LULU: James is not alone in this interpretation. A 2008 study found that mules perform better than horses and donkeys on tests for visual awareness and learning, suggesting they might be quantifiably the smartest of all the equids.

JAMES REEVES: Yeah.

LULU: And this trifecta of strength: fuel, efficiency and intelligence, is why mules are more deeply a part of human history than you may realize. Humans have been breeding mules since ancient times. They've carried turquoise and gold and silver out of mines, they've carried the supplies that have allowed us to build train tracks all over the globe. They're gentle enough to safely carry schoolchildren over treacherous peaks, and tough enough to lug cannon-like weapons into battle. They've even changed the flow of the ocean by helping to dig canals, and helped us to build temples so high they sometimes touch the clouds. But these ultra-strong, cognitively-supercharged, coyote-kicking animorph superheroes do have one glitch ...

TERESA SMOTHERS: Mules don't have babies.

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yep. They're not going to have children of their own, which we call "infertile."

LULU: This is evolutionary biologist Dr. Molly Schumer. We heard her voice at the very beginning describing what it's like to be a mule.

MOLLY SCHUMER: Your parents, they're like aliens to each other.

LULU: And she says the reason mules can't have babies all goes back to their parents. Quick refresher: a mule's parents are two different species: a horse and a donkey. And for a long time, scientists thought that a mashup of creatures like this was not supposed to happen in nature. Hybrid beasts like a horse with eagle wings or a human with a fishtail were thought to belong in the realm of fantasy or myths or fairy tales or, you know, lies. And while you might be able to "artificially" engineer a mashup like a mule or a liger—a lion and a tiger—or a zonkey—a zebra and a donkey—all those things can exist by forcing their parents to breed, nature had barriers in place that should never allow a man-made creation like that to carry on. And those rules, those hard-and-fast barriers between species became visible—or so scientists thought—when they first glimpsed these structures inside the cell called ...

MOLLY SCHUMER: Chromosomes.

LULU: All right. Now before you shut off this here program, we are gonna explain chromosomes as a line dance with sub par country accents. Yee haw!

ALAN: [singing] Well now, DNA makes up your genes, genes make up your chromosomes. Chromosomes are inside your cells and cells make up your body.

LULU: Now hold your horses, Songbud! What did you just say?

ALAN: Come on, Lulu, keep up! I said, [singing] DNA makes up your genes and genes make up your chromosomes.

LULU: All right.

ALAN: Chromosomes are inside your cells, and cells make up your body.

LULU: Huh.

ALAN: "Genetic code" is a fancy way to say the DNA inside your genes.

LULU: So it's the reason why my eyes are blue and maybe yours are brown or green.

ALAN: Yup! Critters, plants and all things alive have chromosomes with genes inside. But here's where things start getting strange. Tell us, Lulu, what'd Molly say?

LULU: Well, Dr. Molly let us know how every species has its own special number of chromosomes that hold their cell's genetic code. Corn on the cob, what's the number again?

ALAN: 20, my friend. Two sets of 10.

LULU: What about dolphins?

ALAN: 44!

LULU: Red foxies?

ALAN: They have 34.

LULU: Duck-billed platypus, how about them?

ALAN: 52 for our duck-billed friend.

LULU: And purty little donkeys, how do they do?

ALAN: Hee haw, they have 62!

LULU: But now tell me: horsies, they have more?

ALAN: They got exactly 64! In order to make a baby, the chromosomes inside each parent have to do a little line dance. It's just got two parts. First you gotta split your chromosomes in half—half on the right, half on the left.

LULU: Well, the next part, that's a little bit harder.

ALAN: What do they have to do, Dr. Molly?

MOLLY SCHUMER: All the chromosomes have to line up with their partner.

ALAN and LULU: [singing] Partner, partner, partner, partner! It's the chromosome do-si-do. How to make an embryo: get into a nice, straight line and swing your partner to recombine.

ALAN: When parents are the same species, the dance is smooth, but when the numbers don't match,things can get confused. And most of time, that just can't be, but a horse and a donkey found a way to agree. They found the sweet spot right between 62 and 64—63! So a mule's got 63 inside. When it grows up and tries to make more life, it lines right up with that same line dance, its chromosomes all ready to prance.

ALAN and LULU: The chromosome do-si-do, how to make an embryo: get into a nice, straight line and swing your partner to recombine.

ALAN: So 63 chromosomes split in half—half on the right ...

LULU: ... half on the left. Uh, wait. Half of 63 is—uh oh!

MOLLY SCHUMER: What happens in the case of a mule that has 63 chromosomes is it ends up with this sort of problem where not all the chromosomes are matched to a partner and it can't split in half properly.

LULU: Wait. So it's just as simple as, like, you have to have an even number so it can be divided by two?

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yeah.

LULU: And so since 63 divided by two is 31 and a half ...

MOLLY SCHUMER: Exactly. That's the problem.

LULU: Does that—what's so bad about having 31 and a half chromosomes? What makes that such a problem?

MOLLY SCHUMER: So in a lot of cases, what happens is the cell is lining up the chromosomes to divide, and it's, like, checking. Is everything ready? Is it okay to divide? And then it can see that things aren't lined up properly.

LULU: [singing] It's the chromosome do-si-do, how to make an embryo. If you can't divide in two, well, there's nothing left to do. Head on home, folks. Show's over. No babies being made tonight.

LULU: Who knew, like, life was such a stickler for clean math?

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yeah, I know. Right? [laughs]

LULU: And this scientific certainty has clomped its way out to farm country. Jerry and Teresa said that growing up, this was just a thing you knew about mules.

TERESA SMOTHERS: They have odd chromosomes. And so if you have odd chromosomes, you can't have a baby.

JERRY SMOTHERS: Yep. That's what we've always heard.

LULU: There's even an expression, "When a mule has a baby." It's like, "When pigs fly." Never gonna happen.

JERRY SMOTHERS: Hey, Peanut! Hey, Peanut!

LULU: And so, back to Peanut.

LULU: Is nose petting cool?

TERESA SMOTHERS: Yes.

LULU: Hi!

LULU: For years, she roamed the fields of the Smothers' farm.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: Live-laugh-hoofin' it up, her chocolatey brown fur slowly starting to gray.

JERRY SMOTHERS: You can kinda see the white and the gray around her eyes and nose.

LULU: That spunky spirit starting to slow down.

JERRY SMOTHERS: We kind of noticed that, you know, she's—she's starting to show her age a little bit.

LULU: And as she nears 20 years old, Jerry and Teresa are sure that because those 63 chromosomes inside her will never be able to divide neatly in half, that'll be it for Peanut in their lives. No babies coming to carry on her memories or spirit.

JERRY SMOTHERS: You always think about that.

TERESA SMOTHERS: Of course, yes.

LULU: And that should be how the story ends. But it's not. More in a moment.

***

LULU: You're listening to Terrestrials. We are telling the story of a mule named ...

JERRY SMOTHERS: Peanut!

LULU: ... whose life was pretty uneventful for 17 years.

TERESA SMOTHERS: Yeah, it was just here on the farm, eating, bossing the other animals around.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: Until one morning in July of 2018, Jerry gets a call from his neighbor Sam, a guy who has a bunch of donkeys that Peanut sometimes goes over to boss around.

JERRY SMOTHERS: Sam called and he said, "Well, your mule's had a baby." And I said, "Sam, you're mistaken and getting old, because mules can't have babies." And he said, "Well, you should have told her that before she got pregnant."

LULU: Jerry says there's no way. But Sam insists.

JERRY SMOTHERS: "Jerry, it's here. I'm here looking at it." [laughs]

LULU: Jerry tells Teresa what Sam has just told him.

TERESA SMOTHERS: And I said, "Oh, he don't know what he's talking about."

JERRY SMOTHERS: He's old and senile. [laughs]

TERESA SMOTHERS: I said, "There's no way."

LULU: But they head on over to Sam's farm just to check it out.

TERESA SMOTHERS: And I'll never forget it.

LULU: There was their Peanut ...

TERESA SMOTHERS: In the corner of the field, in a fenceline with the baby.

LULU: This light gray mule-looking thing with a funny puff of blonde hair on top of its head.

TERESA SMOTHERS: Everybody was running, and she just tumbled over because she had this big head up here, you know, and this little bitty body.

LULU: Like the weight was all off balance?

TERESA SMOTHERS: Yes!

LULU: And even though no one saw the birth ...

JERRY SMOTHERS: You just knew.

TERESA SMOTHERS: You just knew because when Peanut moved, that baby moved.

JERRY SMOTHERS: Mm-hmm.

LULU: And stranger still, while Peanut couldn't make any milk, because, you know, not a thing mules should ever need to do.

TERESA SMOTHERS: She had clear liquid coming from her teets.

LULU: [gasps]

DESTINY: I mean, it was a shock.

LULU: Hmm.

DESTINY: Like, "Wow, this isn't supposed to happen."

LULU: This is the Smothers' neighbor, Destiny, who was 14 years old when the little filly was born.

DESTINY: Yes.

TERESA SMOTHERS: And we did say—we said, "Oh my gosh. This is a miracle." And I'm like, "Well, that's a perfect name."

LULU: Miracle. That's what they named her.

DESTINY: It just fit so perfectly. So ...

LULU: And the Smothers asked Destiny to help them keep little Miracle fed.

DESTINY: I got to bottle-feed her, I think, three times a day.

LULU: What?

DESTINY: Yes. It was amazing.

LULU: What was bottle feeding like? Like, what milk were you using, and would you go sit down with her? Would you stand?

DESTINY: Well, we either put it between our legs.

LULU: A plastic bottle full of a baby formula made from cow's milk.

DESTINY: So it was kind of like a real thing of what she would actually do with her mom.

LULU: Oh yeah.

DESTINY: Or you'd put it in the armpit so that she could nuzzle a little bit.

LULU: Oh! Was that like the coziest thing in the planet?

DESTINY: It was. I loved it. It was—it was hard not to smile the whole time and just laugh 'cause it was just so cute.

LULU: I interrupt the cutest scene in Kentucky to ask a very pressing question: what about the chromosomes? How did this mule have a baby? Molly, what the hoof is going on?

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yeah. So it's really uncomfortable as a scientist to speculate. One thing to know about evolution is that the mistakes are important.

LULU: Molly says if you'd asked her about 15 years ago when she was in college, she would have told us what her professors were telling her, which is that this baby was a mistake. Somehow, nature let a little bad math slide through. And indeed, over the centuries there have been a tiny number of confirmed cases of mules giving birth. But according to the scientific rules, those quote-unquote "mistakes" with their mismatched chromosomes inside should have such serious problems trying to grow that they'd be ...

MOLLY SCHUMER: Unable to survive, which we call "inviable."

LULU: And sure enough ...

JERRY SMOTHERS: It was probably four—four or five days.

LULU: ... after Miracle was born ...

TERESA SMOTHERS: She stopped eating. And she just laid around and she couldn't walk.

LULU: Their neighbor Sam stopped by one day and found Miracle lying down, lifeless.

JERRY SMOTHERS: He thought she was dead.

LULU: And he slunked home to get a shovel to dig a hole for Miracle. To bury her. But when Teresa and Jerry came back later that day, they saw Miracle was still breathing, though she was struggling. So they rushed her to the animal hospital.

TERESA SMOTHERS: Yes. So they shaved her neck and they put IVs in her, and they gave her all of this medicine. And it was very costly. And each day we were like, "You know, what are we gonna do? We can't ..."

JERRY SMOTHERS: So here—here they are.

LULU: Jerry pulls out a photo on his phone from that time.

LULU: Wow. So it's like this little mule in hay, surrounded by all these surgeon-looking folks.

JERRY SMOTHERS: Yeah. And see, there they are working on her.

LULU: Yeah. Oh, there's Peanut. Did they bring Peanut in to, like, comfort her?

JERRY SMOTHERS: She stayed with her the whole time.

TERESA SMOTHERS: Mm-hmm.

DESTINY: We all prayed in the church.

LULU: They wait a fifth day.

JERRY SMOTHERS: The vet said that, you know, she wasn't gonna live.

LULU: A sixth day.

TERESA SMOTHERS: We were sitting up there in the hay, and sitting there and boohooing, and—and I said, "Let's just give her one more day." Remember that?

JERRY SMOTHERS: Mm-hmm.

TERESA SMOTHERS: I said, "Let's give her one more day."

LULU: And then one of the doctors had the idea of giving Peanut—sweet, old, graying Peanut—some medicine.

TERESA SMOTHERS: Called domperidone.

LULU: Okay.

TERESA SMOTHERS: And it made that liquid turn into milk for Miracle.

LULU: [gasps]

LULU: And little Miracle begins suckling milk from Peanut, and almost immediately gains weight, strength. She loses her cough.

TERESA SMOTHERS: She turned around just like that. And she came home on the seventh day.

LULU: And as for how long this fragile little mistake lasted after she came home? Well ...

LULU: Wow. Pulling up to a gorgeous farm with purple balloons. I don't know if those are for the guest of honor. [laughs]

LULU: ... that's why we went out there to Kentucky on that hot July day: to meet Miracle for her fourth birthday.

TERESA SMOTHERS: She'll be four. Yes.

JERRY SMOTHERS: Miracle will be four.

LULU: Wow. Well, can we—can we go meet the birthday girl?

TERESA SMOTHERS: Yes.

LULU: Teresa and Jerry and their moms and son and grand niece led us outside, trailed by their dog and cat into the hot July afternoon. We crossed a big field of grass, and then Jerry unlocked a gate and led out a hefty, gray creature with donkey ears and a horse tail—which I swear she was wagging.

SMOTHERS MOTHERS: [laughs] Look at her waggle her tail!

LULU: She was no longer wobbly ...

LULU: Hi, Miracle!

LULU: ... and in fact, was so strong, she let a fully-grown radio lady climb onto her back without flinching.

LULU: Okay, that might be—that might be [laughs]. Thank you!

LULU: And that wasn't all. When we busted out the piñata we were so proud to have brought to her birthday party—a piñata not in the shape of a mule like so many piñatas are, but in the shape of a human—true to her nature ...

LULU: She's wisely not trusting it.

LULU: She stubbornly ignored it.

LULU: Oh, we're seeing mule obstiance in—in action. She like, "There's wires sticking out of that thing. I don't want it."

MOLLY SCHUMER: The mistakes are important.

LULU: Molly said she'd love to get a peek at Miracle's blood to better understand what exactly is going on with her chromosomes. And the Smothers have sent samples out to labs, but she also said in the decade and a half since she's been in college, biologists have gotten new tools that have allowed them to see something inside species' secret genetic codes that they hadn't been able to see before.

MOLLY SCHUMER: What we learn, first in plants, but then later in animals, that actually hybrids were being formed all the time.

LULU: ... that's right. It turns out the wilderness is a fantasia of hybrids: butterflies and crocodiles and grasses and trees that on the inside have been revealed to be wild mixes of species.

MOLLY SCHUMER: There's been hybridization between grizzly bears and polar bears.

LULU: Pizzly bears!

MOLLY SCHUMER: Between coyotes and wolves.

LULU: Coy-wolves!

MOLLY SCHUMER: Rainbow trout and cutthroat trout. Those species hybridize.

LULU: Is a cut-rainbow called a Skittlefish?

MOLLY SCHUMER: Skittle! Love it!

LULU: Okay. Sorry.

MOLLY SCHUMER: I will propose that.

LULU: Tell all the scientists.

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yes. I will tell them. [laughs]

LULU: There are narlugas—narwhal-belugas. And camas—camel-llamas. And some people even guess that we are hybrids with a now-extinct creature called Neanderthals. And perhaps wildest of all is that these naturally-occurring mash-ups can have babies and carry on their beautifully blended chromosomes into the future.

MOLLY SCHUMER: This is why this has been kind of such a fun field to be in now is that it's an area where I think it has changed dramatically over the past 10 or 15 years.

LULU: Molly explained that these days, scientists no longer think of hybrids as mistakes, flukes or man-made anomalies. Instead, they seem to be one of the main ways that nature species.

LULU: Hey, Miracle. Could you say goodbye?

LULU: And so the existence of Miracle isn't necessarily a case of the rules getting broken, so much as it's us having had the rules wrong.

[ALAN: [singing] Heads up! Heads up! Mind open. We will never stop searching, 'cause the world keeps changing. Heads up! Heads up! Mind open. Ears open, keep your eyes open.]

[LULU: [singing] You don’t have to tell me how easy it is to stay stuck in a box with the things you believe.]

[ALAN: [singing] I wanna break it down, wake up and reach out beyond impossibility.]

[LULU: [singing] You don't have to tell me how hard it can be to find the magic when everything feels static.]

[ALAN: [singing] But there is so much to discover if you look real close. It can seem like a miracle.]

[ALAN and LULU: [singing] Heads up! Heads up! Mind open. We will never stop searching, 'cause the world keeps changing. Heads up! Heads up! Mind open. Ears open, keep your eyes open.]

[ALAN: [singing] No one better tell us they have all the answers when nobody even knows all the questions.]

[ANA GONZÁLEZ: And we're all still learning how we should ask them.]

[ALAN: [singing] We change the rules that need to change, embrace the way mistakes are made. We break away, we're not afraid. Won't hesitate to question everything.]

[ALAN, LULU, ANA and the kids from the Music Resource Center in Charlottesville, VA: [singing] Heads up! Heads up! Mind open. Ears open, keep your eyes open.]

LULU: Alan Goffinski!

LULU: Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. It is produced by the a-mule-zing Ana González and Alan Goffinski plus me. With help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, Natalie Meade, Miriam Bernard, David Gebel, Joe Plourde and Sarita Bhatt. Sound design and additional editorial guidance by Phoebe Wang. Clumpety-clump!

LULU: Our advisors are Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Steinberg-Demby and Tara Welty.

LULU: Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

LULU: Special thanks to Boomer Geis, Amy Pearl, Daniel Alarcón, The Szumylo Family, Julie Abodeely and the Wheeler School, Charlottesville's Music Resource Center, Canelo Joaquin, Briana Gutierrez and the Park Equine Hospital. And that'll do it. Nothing else cool about to ... what's that?

BADGER: Excuse me, I have a question.

BADGER: Me too.

BADGER: Me three.

BADGER: Me four.

LULU: The badgers! Listeners with badgering questions for the expert. Are you ready?

JAMES REEVES: Yeah.

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yeah.

ODESSA: Hee-haw! My name is Odessa. I'm eight. Do mules say "hee-haw," or only donkeys?

JAMES REEVES: It's actually called braying. So a horse neighs and a mule brays. They've all got their own voices, same as us.

LULU: Hmm. I would have thought it would have been "nee-haw," a little hybrid of "neigh" plus "hee-haw?" But I guess that's a neigh-gative.

ERIN: Hi. I'm Erin, and I'm 35. I hear that there are more pizzly bears due to climate change. Is this true? And is this new animal here to stay?

MOLLY SCHUMER: That is a fantastic question. So it is actually true, and we're seeing this a lot in a lot of different species. And this is because with climate change, species are having to move around to find the right environments for them. So for example, you might see grizzly bears moving further north because it's less harsh in the winter. And then you can get contact between species that previously didn't have contact, and new opportunities for hybridization.

LULU: Hmm. Do you think that these polar bear/grizzly bear hybrids are here to stay?

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yeah. I mean, I think humans have been changing the environment so much that I do think that we are gonna see a lot of new hybridization events, and some of those will stick around. I—I hope the pizzly bears make it.

LULU: Do you think humans are accelerating the rate of hybrids?

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yeah. I've seen a couple of papers start to come out saying that hybridization might be increasing in frequency right now.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY SCHUMER: Mainly because we're just changing everything really fast.

LULU: Hmm. Oh, interesting. That's cool! But I guess the sad note on that is like, one hand I'm like, "Ooh, more zonkeys and pizzlies and ligers and a world of blends!" But is it out of this kind of desperate necessity?

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yeah.

LULU: Are sort of species leaving their ranks and coming together to combine because humans are stealing so much habitat that they have to come together to just survive? Like, is there a bittersweetness in that beauty of novelty?

MOLLY SCHUMER: Yeah, I definitely think that's bittersweet. You know, it's a result of massive changes that—that humans have—have made.

LULU: So I'll leave it there. Two roads diverging, and you can walk either one. Do nothing, and let more and more animals hybridize, making wild beasts beyond the imagination! Or do your part to try to conserve what's here, and notice all the variety that already exists alongside you.

LULU: But the weight of the world is not on your shoulders alone. Our best hope of making change is by coming together, so we've put a bunch of concrete—and even kind of fun—things we can all do to help protect the non-human life on this planet. You can find that on our website, TerrestrialsPodcast.org. We also have a very silly animation of a game show we played with Dr. Molly called "Will They Hybridize?"

LULU: That'll do it for this season of Terrestrials. If you would like this series to continue, have your adult text TIGER to 70101 for details on how to become a Lab member and support Terrestrials. The number again is 70101. Just text the word TIGER!

LULU: I cannot shut down this dance party without saying the deepest thank you to Ana González and Alan Goffinski. This show, this little world, would not exist without your immense talents. Thank you also to Chuck Cheeseman, Latif Nasser, Ellen Horne, Jad Abumrad, Soren Wheeler and the whole Radiolab crew for your support of this thing in various flavors along the way. And finally, bedazzled in rhinestone hearts thanks to Alida Goffinski, Jeff "The Earther" Matayus and Grace Miller. Y'all helped make this too.

LULU: To all two of you left still listening, if anyone tells you that they've got it all figured out, I've got news for you ...

[ALAN: [singing] They don't. Your brain weighs just three pounds and the earth would weigh Thirteen Thousand One Hundred Seventy Billion Trillion Pounds, with too many surprises to wrap my little head around.]

[ALAN: [singing] I'll take my chances that there are still surprises. This world changes suddenly and clumsily/With every discovery, every discovery.]

[CHORUS: Thirteen Thousand One Hundred Seventy Billion Trillion Pounds. Heads up! Heads up! Minds open.]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

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Terrestrials 06. The Hybrid: A Miracle Mule

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Ana is an audio producer and host who came to WNYC in 2021 to work on Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials. Before that, she produced and hosted Mosaic, a show about immigration experiences from Rhode Island Public Radio. In a former life, she played jazz bass and thinks about everything in terms of rhythm, conversation, and harmony.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Alan Goffinski (he/him), is an arts administrator, songwriter, and producer from Charlottesville VA. He is the former Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project—two city-wide organizations that utilize art and culture as a way for people to better understand themselves, each other, and the world around them. He is also a founding member of the Indianapolis-based whimsical performing arts collective Know No Stranger which has been described as “Sesame Street but for adults... but also for kids.” He produced the experimental music radio program Telemetry in partnership with the University of Virginia. Early in his career, Alan spent years making music in a nationally touring indie-punk band (signed to Victory Records) prior to becoming a social worker specializing in early childhood development. He began making kid’s music under the moniker Little Skunks as a fun way to be a part of the day-to-day lives of his nieces and nephew.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

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Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

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About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

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About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Investigating a strange world.

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The ocean can be a scary place: the waves are so strong, the water so deep. But surfer and illustrator AJ Dungo tells the story of an earthling who figured out how to walk on water and literally defy the rules of gravity. If you want a big SPOILER, here it is: It’s only human for the season, the grandfather of modern-day surfing, Duke Kahanamoku. Duke’s great grandniece, Heather Kina’u Paoa tells us about what Duke’s life was really like. We learn about the physics of surfing, and how surfing is an escape, not just on a spiritual level, but a physical one too. Finally, we learn how Duke’s story of learning to conquer the waves while remaining true to his Hawaiian heritage inspired AJ to get through one of the hardest times of his life.

TW: this episode deals with the loss of a loved one and grief.

Learn about the storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Watch a music video for “It Comes in Waves” and find even MORE original Terrestrials fun on our Youtube.

Badger us on Social Media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

More from Terrestrials

The Shovels: Dig Deeper

For each episode of Terrestrials, we provide a selection of activity sheets, drawing prompts, musical lessons, and more. We call them “shovels” because we hope they will help you (and your friends, family, students, neighbors, etc) dig more deeply into the world! You can do them at home, in the classroom, outside, or in the privacy of your own mind. We hope you enjoy!

If you want to share what you’ve made, ask an adult share it on social media using #TerrestrialsPodcast and make sure to tag @Radiolab

Draw -  Got the big feelings? Drawing can help. This week's drawing prompt from Wendy Mac at the DrawTogether podcast is a three part series called Emotional Doodles all about how to translate feelings into art (and, in turn, maybe even help you move through the hard feelings).

Play 🎶 - Learn how to play the chords to the song “IT COMES IN WAVES”

Do - Get crafty with a fun activity sheet!

This week’s storytellers are AJ Dungo and Heather Kina’u Paoa.

Want to keep learning? Check out these resources to learn about the gravity-defying history-maker, Duke Kahanamoku:

Check out Makani Tabura's Culturised podcast (about Hawaiian culture and history!)
Check out AJ Dungo’s comic book (aka graphic novel), In Waves
Watch the new documentary about Duke, Waterman

Resources on Grief:

Guide to Helping Children Cope with Grief from the Child Mind Institute is a resource available for families navigating the loss of a loved one.
When a Loved One Dies: How to Help Your Child  (for Parents) - Nemours KidsHealth
I Cannot Heal My Children’s Grief, but I Can Help Them Name It
“Do Animals Experience Grief?” from Smithsonian Magazine
A Guide for Grown-Ups Helping Children Through the Toughest Times from Sesame Street in Communities

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, self-harm, or harm to others, please get help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988. If you’re outside the U.S., you can visit findahelpline.com to find resources for your country.

Terrestrials is a production of WNYC Studios, created by Lulu Miller. This episode is produced by Ana González, Alan Goffinski and Lulu Miller. Original Music by Alan Goffinski. Help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, and Sarita Bhatt. Fact-check by Natalie Meade. Sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Our storytellers this week are AJ Dungo and Heather Kina’u Paoa. Transcription by Russell Gragg.

Our advisors are Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Dominique Shabazz, John Green, Liza Steinberg-Demby, and Tara Welty.

Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

Have questions for us, badgers? Badger us away! Your parent/guardian should write to us along with you, so we know you have their permission, and for maybe even having your ideas mentioned on the show. Email terrestrials@wnyc.org

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A framing of tropical plants give way to a view of a surfer with outstretched arms as if walking on water. Behind them, a golden sunrise becomes one with the waves, painting the ocean with brilliance.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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A muscly earthling figures out a way to stand on the waves.

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Terrestrials 05. The Water Walker: One Surfer’s Epic Escape

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LULU MILLER: Three, two, one!

AJ DUNGO: Imagine that you are surrounded by a tropical landscape.

LULU: And you're waist deep in the ocean.

AJ DUNGO: You dive, and you paddle through some extremely warm water.

LULU: And as you do, your biceps grow massive, and your legs start doing a kick that almost no one on the planet knows how to do. And when you come up for air ...

AJ DUNGO: In the distance, you start to see a lump form. It starts to grow bigger and bigger.

LULU: It's a huge wave!

AJ DUNGO: And you're not afraid. So you kick hard.

LULU: And you hoist yourself up onto a huge wooden board and begin paddling toward the massive wave. And at the right moment, you rise out of the water and stand.

AJ DUNGO: It's very surprising. Like, you're sort of harnessing this energy that's been sent out through a storm, like, hundreds of miles away, and you meet it at the perfect moment. And instantly you feel weightless.

LULU: There's wind in your face.

AJ DUNGO: You're just sort of flying.

LULU: You have become ...

AJ DUNGO: Duke Kahanamoku! The father of modern surfing.

LULU: Okay, now is the part where I make you sing the theme song with me.

AJ DUNGO: [laughs]

LULU: You ready?

AJ DUNGO: Okay.

LULU: [singing] "Terrestrials. Terrestrials. We are not the worst we are the ...

AJ DUNGO: Best?

LULU: "Bestrials." Yeah!

AJ DUNGO: [laughs] Perfect!

LULU: Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth, and sometimes break out into song.

[Theme song: There's so much to discover when you listen close. Terrestrials. Terrestrials. So drop in and surf the crest-rials! Terrestrials. Terrestrials!]

LULU: Good voices not required. I am your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my Songbud ...

ALAN GOFFINSKI: What's up?

LULU: ... Alan.

ALAN: What is up?

LULU: [laughs] And today we are telling the story of our only human for this season, Duke Kahanamoku, the man who about a hundred years ago introduced surfing to the world, and in the process gave millions of people stuck on land a new way to escape.

LULU: And I do want to mention that there are parts of today's story that deal with something sad—including someone who died and the feelings of grief that come afterwards. If that isn't something you want to listen to today, just hang on 'til next week for our season finale. And if you are still here, let's meet today's storyteller: AJ Dungo!

AJ DUNGO: That's me.

LULU: He is a skateboarder.

AJ DUNGO: A surfer.

LULU: An illustrator. And he recently wrote a whole comic book.

AJ DUNGO: I did a ton of research.

LULU: A totally true comic book all about Duke.

LULU: Well, before we get going on Duke's story, can I just ask have you ever had any cool animal encounters while surfing?

AJ DUNGO: Oh my goodness. Every time I go out, we see something special. I've seen seals, stingrays, a baby whale.

LULU: Wow!

AJ DUNGO: Dolphins are a huge one. They will ride a wave.

LULU: Hmm.

AJ DUNGO: I've been in situations where I see a whole pod coming straight towards me. The times that it's happened I've ridden with them. And it's so cool ...

LULU: No!

AJ DUNGO: ... they, like ...

LULU: No. No. What?

AJ DUNGO: Yeah!

LULU: Wait. So, like, you're riding, and are they—I'm picturing you, like, in a posse and they're, like, on either side and you're all riding. Is it kind of like that?

AJ DUNGO: It's more like fear driven. Like, I'm trying to get away from them. Like, I don't—I'm just scared that I'll be attacked, or ...

LULU: Okay, I'll change the musical moment there. I was thinking it was like "Ahhhh," but it's like, "Uh, uh, uh, uh."

AJ DUNGO: Yeah.

LULU: Wait, and so—and are they—what do you mean they're riding?

AJ DUNGO: You see their shadow beneath the water, and they come towards you. They'll turn really quickly and exit through the back of the wave. You see them get air. And, you know, as a surfer we're thinking, like, you guys are missing the best part of the wave, and maybe they're thinking you guys are missing the best part of the wave!

LULU: [laughs] Did you grow up loving the water?

AJ DUNGO: No. No, no, not at all. I was terrified. I would just sort of sink. The feeling of starting to swallow water and trying to open your eyes in chlorinated water, and it just burns. It wasn't fun to get out of your comfort zone.

LULU: I mean, How did you finally get past that?

AJ DUNGO: That would be my late partner, Kristen.

LULU: "Late" meaning she got sick and passed away.

AJ DUNGO: We were high school sweethearts. And she was this fearless, confident, beautiful surfer.

LULU: And she didn't stop surfing, even after she had a surgery that made her lose her leg.

AJ DUNGO: I think it was seeing her pick up a board and go out and charge with a smile on her face, and ruin her prosthetic leg in the process. I was like, "Man!" When you're in the presence of someone like that you want to impress them, obviously.

LULU: So he finally put his fear of water aside, hopped onto a surfboard and wobbly tried to stand so that Kristen would think he was cool.

AJ DUNGO: Yeah! [laughs]

LULU: It worked. And when AJ thinks about how they were able to fall in love while standing on surfboards, and then later, how he was later able to get through the worst hurt of his life in losing her, he sees Duke.

AJ DUNGO: Despite time and space there is a connection.

LULU: To understand what he means, we need to go way back over a hundred years ago, to a time when there probably weren't any surfboards in Southern California. We're gonna zoom thousands of miles over the ocean to the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The year is 1890, and the island is a lot quieter than it is now. And a little baby named Duke is born into a big family.

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: In the morning through the windows, they'd say "Whooeee!"

LULU: [laughs]

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: "Anybody home? "Whooeeee!"

LULU: This ...

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: Let's go to the beach!

LULU: ... is Heather ...

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: Kin au'u Paoa. Duke Kahanamoku is a great grand uncle to me.

LULU: She grew up with a big framed portrait of Duke hanging on the wall, and hearing stories about him from people who knew him well.

LULU: Do you think Duke was ever afraid of the water?

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: [laughs, Ah, no!

LULU: She tells me that from the time Duke was tiny ...

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: They lived right on the beach.

LULU: ... his dad and uncle would paddle him out in a canoe and toss him into the waves.

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: You know, their playground was the ocean.

AJ DUNGO: I want to read you this passage.

LULU: AJ pulls out something that Duke himself had written.

MAKANI TABURA: "I hardly remember whether I learned how to walk or swim first."

LULU: Reading Duke's words for the rest of this episode is Hawaiian radio host, Makani Tabura.

MAKANI TABURA: "Out of the water, I am nothing."

AJ DUNGO: It's like someone who's so much more comfortable in water than land.

LULU: As a little boy, Duke would bodyboard on flattened kerosene cans.

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: Whooeeee! You're always gonna figure out something to do to ride the waves.

LULU: And as he got older, he started using tools to shape massive planks of wood that would help him harness the power of the wave to ride for even longer—and faster!

AJ DUNGO: He had to gather the wood and then he smoothed it out.

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: Whooeeee!

LULU: Now Duke by no means invented surfing—it had been around for hundreds of years in Hawaii and in other places.

AJ DUNGO: It could have originated in South America, where people would ride the waves on these little reed boats called caballitos.

LULU: Others say it started in Polynesia or Africa. It's impossible to know for sure when or where the first human realized that by slipping a board beneath them they could stand on water. But by the time Duke appeared, even though surfing was still unknown in most parts of the world, it had become a significant and even spiritual part of Hawaiian culture.

MAKANI TABURA: "Surfing is the greatest thrill of my life. Every day of the year, the water is 70 degrees, day and night. The waves roll high. I take my sled, coast down the face of the big waves that are rolled in at Waikiki."

LULU: But as Duke turned 11 and 12, this sacred part of his life came under threat. Around that time, more and more settlers and tourists were coming to the island, grabbing up land and building strange new hotels and schools. And with them came new laws and rules about how native Hawaiians should live their lives. Some of the people taking power looked down on surfing and tried to discourage it.

AJ DUNGO: They're being told their way of life is incorrect. There has to be an activity for someone to escape, and for him it was surfing and returning to the water.

MAKANI TABURA: "On a board I felt like the boss man."

LULU: Duke himself, put it this way ...

MAKANI TABURA: "I'm in charge when I make the big wave do what I want."

LULU: No one could take surfing from him. And the more he paddled away from life on the island, the bigger his muscles grew, 'til by the time he was 18 ...

AJ DUNGO: He is like six foot, super burly. Like, very athletic looking, muscular.

LULU: And one day he notices a swim race set up in Honolulu Harbor, and figures just for kicks [laughs] that he'll compete. So he hops in line next to a bunch of super burly swim team types, and ...

AJ DUNGO: He blows them away!

LULU: His time breaks a world record!

AJ DUNGO: He blew people away so much so that, like, the governing bodies on the mainland in the States wouldn't accept the record times.

LULU: Why not?

AJ DUNGO: I mean, there was a lot of racism.

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: Yes, they didn't believe him.

LULU: Heather and AJ explain that sports officials on the mainland doubted the ability of Hawaiian people to properly keep score. So Duke's friends and family rallied behind him and raised enough money to send him on a boat and on a train out to Pittsburgh where those sports officials could see with their own eyes what he could do.

AJ DUNGO: At first it was a disaster. They actually had to pull him out of the water. His legs cramped up and he almost drowned.

LULU: Oh my gosh!

AJ DUNGO: He was extremely jetlagged. And also, if you picture an indoor pool with everyone around smoking cigars so it's completely filled with smoke.

LULU: Eww!

AJ DUNGO: Duke said that he could taste the smoke in the water.

LULU: How gross! [laughs] What happens next?

AJ DUNGO: His friends, they started playing ukuleles that night and it sort of like lightened his spirits and sort of brought him back to a solid, stable mental state where he could sort of refocus.

LULU: So the next day, all rested up, he gives it another shot. And ...

AJ DUNGO: He wins!

LULU: He beats everyone in that pool. And then he does it in the next race and the next one and the next one, until he makes it all the way to the Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, where ...

[Announcer: På ditt märke. Få så gå!]

LULU: He wins the gold.

[Announcer: Hurrah! Hurrah!]

LULU: It turned out that all the while he'd been surfing, escaping the crummy parts of life on the island, he had invented a new way of kicking.

AJ DUNGO: The Kahanamoku kick!

LULU: Michael Phelps uses it.

AJ DUNGO: It's like a burst.

LULU: And so he keeps swimming professionally. He goes to the next Olympics and the next one. He wins gold after gold after gold!

AJ DUNGO: Yup.

LULU: It feels to me like you don't super care about his Olympic swimming so much.

AJ DUNGO: Yeah, I mean ... [laughs]

LULU: So, like, we'll just know that's happening—splash, woo! Splash, woo! Splash, woo!

LULU: The thing that AJ cares about, the reason why Duke's story begins to have a direct effect on his life is because of what Duke does outside of that Olympic arena. What that was, after this short break.

***

LULU: Terrestrials is back. Duke Kahanamoku is starting to sound like a one-man percussion section. He's got so many gold medals hanging around his neck, clankety-clank—eh. Anyway, as he's competing as a professional swimmer, he's traveling to all these new places: San Francisco, Australia. Places with …

AJ DUNGO: Waves.

LULU: New waves. New watery hills to sled.

MAKANI TABURA: "I was fired up with a mania for improving my boards, getting the most out of the surf."

LULU: And so as soon as he was done competing, he'd run out into the ocean in front of beachgoers who'd never seen surfing.

AJ DUNGO: In Australia, I think a lot of people had seen surfing for the first time from him. There was like a story about him not having a surfboard, but someone brought him, like, an ironing board.

LULU: [laughs] Really?

AJ DUNGO: Yeah.

LULU: And word spread.

AJ DUNGO: You know, thousands of people would come to the beach to see him.

LULU: To watch this human disappear into the waves, and then suddenly start hovering above them.

AJ DUNGO: If you read the way that they describe what they're seeing, it's like seeing someone walk on the moon.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, spectator: What a picture he presented as he stood upright, the breakers curling beneath him, a smile on his face. So lightning-like was the movement that it might have been flying through space."]

LULU: Okay. And now I'm gonna turn to my scary page in my notebook where I've been scribbling things about the physics of surfing.

AJ DUNGO: Mm-hmm.

LULU: Because I'm trying to understand what's going on that allows humans to stand on water. Do you have any understanding of how the heck it is possible scientifically or how it works?

AJ DUNGO: There's a few important things to have a rideable wave. The first thing would be swell.

LULU: Swell!

AJ DUNGO: [laughs]

LULU: AJ explains there are so many factors at play: the swell of the wave, the speed of the wave, the slope of the ocean floor, the size of your surfboard.

AJ DUNGO: Your height, your weight, your body type.

LULU: How gravity is pushing down and buoyancy is pushing up and thrust is pushing forward and drag is going back.

AJ DUNGO: Another factor is wind. So if there's wind blowing out to sea, that's the sort of condition that you really hope for.

LULU: That's weird! Wouldn't wind coming from the sand slow the wave down and kill its mojo?

AJ DUNGO: Well that's kind of like what you want because if you have onshore winds, which is the wind blowing toward you, there's nothing to hold up the water to make it into that perfect curl, that crest.

LULU: And if you zoom into the crest, this is where things get really wild. Because it turns out in a wave, most of the water particles aren't really moving that much.

AJ DUNGO: The particles in the water are kind of staying in place, and this mysterious orb of energy is just passing through.

LULU: Hmm.

AJ DUNGO: Making it seem like it's undulating.

LULU: Except, AJ explains, at the crest.

AJ DUNGO: The little white part that you see, that's where the water particles are undergoing their greatest acceleration. And that makes them faster than the underlying wave. So they're shooting, like, they're flying off the top of the wave before falling under gravity's influence.

LULU: So they just get a momentary break from gravity?

AJ DUNGO: Yeah, they—they're sort of in their own moment.

LULU: That is thrilling to think that for a moment, that tip of the water, that crest, the white part where it's breaking, there is an escape—not just in a spiritual way. Not just in an emotional way but, like, physically.

AJ DUNGO: Yeah. You can see it. Like, you can visually see them rushing ahead of the rest of the wave.

LULU: So back to Duke, sea spray on his face, hurtling toward the Australian shore, looking like a wizard hovering over those waves, that knowledge, this complicated set of physics that scientists are just barely able to figure out but Duke had mastered, instead of hoarding it to himself and probably earning fame for looking like he had some magic trick, he shared it.

LULU: So many of the photos of Duke's later life show him teaching people how to surf, bringing others onto his board, sometimes onto his shoulders.

LULU: Do you have any mixed emotions about him sharing surfing?

AJ DUNGO: No, no!

HEATHER KINA'U' PAOA: Absolutely not! You can't help but to share it.

AJ DUNGO: If you can spread some happiness, that's so much more fun than trying to keep it all to yourself. So I really respect what Duke did, taking something that was sacred to his people and sharing with the world.

LULU: And fun wasn't the only thing he spread. One day at Newport Beach, Duke saw a ship go down in a storm, and he got on his surfboard, paddled out, and ended up saving eight people's lives who were drowning. He's the reason why lifeguards now use surfboards today. And AJ, even though they never walked the Earth at the same time, kind of knows what it feels like to be saved by Duke.

AJ DUNGO: He kind of changed my life, and it's all from surfing.

LULU: Without Duke, AJ may have never gotten over his fear of water, may have never been able to step on a surfboard and make Kristen fall in love with him. And then later, find a way through the pain after she died. AJ says that after losing Kristen, surfing was one of the only things he could do to feel okay.

AJ DUNGO: I think of Kristen often when I'm surfing. She's very much integrated and a part of the places that I visit.

LULU: Hmm.

AJ DUNGO: Memories sort of flood in and come bubbling up.

LULU: A song, he says, a special song that the two of them shared together, sometimes comes bubbling up too.

AJ DUNGO: It goes, "I love you for sentimental reasons. I hope you do believe me. I'll give you my heart." [laughs] It's a song that brings me a lot of comfort.

LULU: And out there, surrounded by the music of the waves, he says it's like he escapes for just an instant the world in which she isn't here.

AJ DUNGO: Yeah. It's sort of time spent together.

LULU: And he can imagine an alternate universe where Duke didn't share surfing, and he's stuck on the shore with no way to heal. But thankfully, that wasn't the choice Duke made. And today out at Waikiki Beach, there stands a larger-than-life bronze statue of Duke and his surfboard, welcoming people out into the water, out toward his true ...

MAKANI TABURA: "Home."

[ALAN: [singing] A deep breath, the swell begins to curl and crest. I am surrounded by the sunset but I'm alone in my own head. And churning like the ocean, there's an ache I can't let it go. 'Cause I've got sentimental reasons to hold on, oh.]

[ALAN: [singing] Hold on now. Sometimes I need this escape. I need this escape. Yeah, it comes in waves.]

[ALAN: [singing] A deep breath, the swell begins to curl and crest. I could sink just like a stone inside the ocean of my chest. And I'm floating in this moment, my mind swimming in the past. And I hold a deep connection to all that's lost and all that's left.]

[ALAN: [singing] For a moment I feel weightless like I'm walking on water, with the ocean there beneath me and the wind against my face. Every memory flows through me as the crest begins to break. I am plunged under the weight. Yeah, it comes in waves.]

[ALAN: [singing] Hold on now. Sometimes I need this escape, I need this escape. Yeah, it comes in waves. Hold on now. Sometimes I need this escape. Yeah it comes in waves.]

LULU: Alan "Making us feel the feels" Goffinski.

LULU: Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. It is produced by the super gnar gnar excellent radical, Ana González and Alan Goffinski—plus me. With help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, Miriam Bernard, Natalie Meade, Joe Plourde and Sarita Bhatt. With sound design and additional editorial guidance from Mira Burt-Wintonick.

LULU: Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation. Our advisors are: Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Tara Welty, Liza Steinberg Demby and Dominique Shabazz.

LULU: Special thanks this episode to Siya Sharma-Gaines, Isabella Leonardo, Jacklyn Kim, Alex Neason, Makani Tabura, and the good folks at the Child Mind Institute, especially Amani Monsour and Joanna R. Stern.

LULU: And biggest cowabunga to AJ Dungo! His graphic novel about surfing and grief and Duke is one of the most gorgeous things I have ever read. It's called "In Waves." Run, don't walk, to get it. And that'll do it. Grab your boards, get outside, stop listening to radio, there's nothing else cool about to happen.

LULU: What's that?

BADGER: Excuse me, I have a question.

BADGER: Me too.

BADGER: Me three.

BADGER: Me four.

LULU: The badgers! They're listeners with badgering questions for the expert.

AJ DUNGO: Sounds excellent.

LULU: Okay, here we go.

FRANNY: My name is Franny. I'm six years old. Are the shark's teeth long?

AJ DUNGO: I think it depends on the shark. But the shark teeth that I've seen, they're pretty small. And I guess they replace them often, so ...

LULU: Really?

AJ DUNGO: You could find them in the water. Yeah, they sort of shed their teeth all the time.

LULU: Huh! I wonder if there's a shark tooth fairy.

AJ DUNGO: [laughs]

FIVEL: Hi, my name is Fivel. I'm five years old, and my question is: what's your weirdest thought you've had in the water by yourself?

AJ DUNGO: Kind of a gross side note, but ...

LULU: Yes, please. That's what we're here for.

AJ DUNGO: I would think—traveling when I was young, like, we'd go to Niagara Falls or we'd go to Yosemite and, like, I would just spit in the water and be like, it's traveling all over the world now. Like, I'm all over the world.

LULU: [laughs] Like, through the waterways because it's going out to the ocean, and then some waves will pull it over there to the continent of Africa, and some will go up to the Arctic, and AJ is now connected with everyone?

AJ DUNGO: [laughs] Yeah.

LULU: What a deep thought! You really thought that? You weren't just like "Hah! Here's a loogie!"

AJ DUNGO: No, I was an introspective four year old. I would think about where it would travel, and eventually maybe it'll come back to me after it's gone around the entire world.

LULU: You'll be taking a shower someday and you're like, "Four-year-old me is saying 'Hi!'"

AJ DUNGO: Yeah, exactly.

TERESA: Hi! My name is Teresa. Next month I will be 107 years old.

LULU: [gasps] That's over a hundred spins around the sun!

TERESA: Does the moon have an effect on surfing?

AJ DUNGO: Yeah, definitely. So the moon affects the tides, and people can go surf on a full moon out at night.

LULU: Oh!

AJ DUNGO: Like, there's enough light out there you can go surf in the moonlight, literally.

LULU: Oh, that sounds like so relaxing and surreal and incredible.

AJ DUNGO: People love it because there's no one else out. It's just you and the waves.

FYNN: Hi, my name is Fynn, and I'm 12. And I have a question: will my life be worse because I lost my dad?

AJ DUNGO: I'm really sorry to hear about that, Fynn. It'll be difficult. I think it's important to surround yourself with people that love you and you know that you can trust and share things with. So be sure to ask for help when you need it. Man, it's hard. I—I had a teacher that had lost his wife, and when I—when Kristen passed away, he said something that really—it stuck with me. He said that you may never experience closure. You just become familiar with the absence." There's gonna be a lot of good that will come in your life and, you know, you have memories you made with your father that stay with you forever. So you can kind of have some solace with that.

LULU: That'll do it for today. If you are struggling with sad feelings, don't forget to ask for help to the friends and family in your life. You can also call this 1-800-273-8255 to talk to a friendly voice at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline free of charge. Any time. We've put that number as well as some other resources for talking about and living with grief, as well as some fun stuff: drawing prompts and animations that can get you thinking more deeply about surfing and escape. All that is on our website: TerrestrialsPodcast.org.

LULU: Thank you so much for listening. Join us next week for the grand finale of this season of Terrestrials when the Songbud and I drive down to Kentucky to come face to snout with a creature that scientists thought belonged only in the realm of fantasy.

LULU: Catch you in a couple spins of this watery old planet of ours.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

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Terrestrials 05. The Water Walker: One Surfer’s Epic Escape

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Ana is an audio producer and host who came to WNYC in 2021 to work on Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials. Before that, she produced and hosted Mosaic, a show about immigration experiences from Rhode Island Public Radio. In a former life, she played jazz bass and thinks about everything in terms of rhythm, conversation, and harmony.

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Alan Goffinski (he/him), is an arts administrator, songwriter, and producer from Charlottesville VA. He is the former Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project—two city-wide organizations that utilize art and culture as a way for people to better understand themselves, each other, and the world around them. He is also a founding member of the Indianapolis-based whimsical performing arts collective Know No Stranger which has been described as “Sesame Street but for adults... but also for kids.” He produced the experimental music radio program Telemetry in partnership with the University of Virginia. Early in his career, Alan spent years making music in a nationally touring indie-punk band (signed to Victory Records) prior to becoming a social worker specializing in early childhood development. He began making kid’s music under the moniker Little Skunks as a fun way to be a part of the day-to-day lives of his nieces and nephew.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

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Over a billion lightyears ago, in the darkness of outer space, a collision of black holes sent out a fleet of invisible waves that were headed right toward planet Earth. The waves were so powerful they could ripple spacetime but most people on Earth didn't believe the waves were real. SPOILER ALERT: The waves are called gravitational waves and…they are real! Astrophysicist Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced tells the story of what happened when they hit Earth in 2015 and how scientists came to learn to use senses beyond eyesight to detect the waves. We also learn from Dr. Stavros Katsanevas about the building of a giant gravitational wave catcher called “The Interferometer.” This episode also explores how to persist in the face of doubt as we learn Wanda's tale of going blind and learning how to listen to the stars.

Learn about the storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Watch the interferometer come to life, disco style, and find even MORE original Terrestrials fun on our Youtube.

Badger us on Social Media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

More from Terrestrials

The Shovels: Dig Deeper

For each episode of Terrestrials, we provide a selection of activity sheets, drawing prompts, musical lessons, and more. We call them “shovels” because we hope they will help you (and your friends, family, students, neighbors, etc) dig more deeply into the world! You can do them at home, in the classroom, outside, or in the privacy of your own mind. We hope you enjoy!
If you want to share what you’ve made, ask an adult share it on social media using #TerrestrialsPodcast and make sure to tag @Radiolab

Draw -  Use your ears to draw! In this very special drawing prompt, Wendy Mac and the DrawTogether team pull in an actual rockstar to play you various favorite sounds to draw. It's a feast for the mind, ears, and hands. Grab a pencil, pen, crayon, marker, anything, and check it out here!

Play 🎶 - Learn how to play the chords to the song “UNIMAGINABLE”

Do - Get crafty with a fun activity sheet!

This week’s storyteller is Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced.

Want to keep learning? Check out these resources to learn about the time-bending power that is the gravitational wave:

Get to Wanda a little better; watch her TED talk!
Take a tour of the world’s first interferometer! (Free monthly tours in person in Richland, WA)
Train yourself to use sound for signal detection in astronomy.
Learn more about asteroseismology with the wonderful Hank Green!
Spooked by the idea of the infinite universe? Listen to John Green’s “Against Nihilism” (probably best for 13 and up)!

Terrestrials is a production of WNYC Studios, created by Lulu Miller. This episode is produced by Ana González, Alan Goffinski and Lulu Miller. Original Music by Alan Goffinski. Help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, and Sarita Bhatt. Fact-check by Natalie Meade. Sound design by Phoebe Wang with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Our storytellers this week are Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced and Dr. Stavros Katsanevas. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Our advisors are Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Dominique Shabazz, John Green, Liza Steinberg-Demby, Alice Wong, and Tara Welty.

Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

Have questions for us, badgers? Badger us away! Your parent/guardian should write to us along with you, so we know you have their permission, and for maybe even having your ideas mentioned on the show. Email terrestrials@wnyc.org

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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As waves cascade upon the sand, a figure tows the line between land and sea. The brilliant night sky bleeds from the vast universe into the waves and onto their toes.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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An invisible entity journeys to Planet Earth and literally rocks our world.

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Terrestrials 04. The Unimaginable: How Gravitational Waves (Literally) Rocked Our World

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LULU MILLER: Three, two, one.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Let's imagine that you are invisible.

LULU: And you're soaring through outer space.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Moving at the speed of light.

LULU: And you fly, you dip up and down ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Bending ...

LULU: Up and down.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Like a—like a wave.

LULU: And you are ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Powerful!

LULU: When you hit nearby planets, you stretch and squeeze them like play-doh, sending ripples through space and even ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Having an effect on time. Mm-hmm.

LULU: And as rocks and stars and time itself apparently, tremble in your wake ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: You became a gravitational wave.

LULU: How do you say that in Spanish, by the way, gravitational wave?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Onda gravitacional.

LULU: Onda. Onda gravitacional?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Very good! Perfecto!

LULU: [laughs] Gracias! All right, well now is the time when I try to make you sing the theme song with me.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Sí, cómo es—how is the song?

LULU: Okay. "Terrestrials. Terrestrials. We are not the worst, we are the ..."

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: And what do I say?

LULU: [sings] "Bestrials!"

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: [laughs]

LULU: Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth, and sometimes break out into song.

[Theme song: There's so much to discover when you listen close. Terrestrials. Terrestrials. This time we get celestial.]

ALAN GOFFINSKI: Meaning the stuff up there in the sky, like stars, moons, suns and, you know, outer space stuff.

[Theme song: Terrestrials. Terrestrials!]

LULU: Good voices not required. I am your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my Songbud ...

ALAN: Hello, hello!

LULU: Alan.

ALAN: Y hola a todos!

LULU: And ...

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Hola, Wanda. ¿Cómo estás?

LULU: Producer Ana, here to help me occasionally translate our very special guest, Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Ciao!

LULU: Ciao!

LULU: Dr. Wanda is an astrophysicist, and she's joining us today from her high security space observatory to tell us this story about a pack of gravitational waves that were headed right for planet Earth, only very few people on Earth believed the waves were actually coming because we couldn't see them.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: So let's—let's do this. I'm ready.

LULU: Okay. So our story begins in the dark—the darkness of outer space, 1.3 billion light years ago, when suddenly ...

[crash sound]

LULU: ... there's a crash!

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Oof! It was very powerful.

LULU: Two giant black holes collided. And out of that collision came gravitational waves. Picture them like the ripples that come after you drop a pebble in a pond, only these waves can ripple space-time, meaning they stretch and squeeze anything in their path be it stars, planets or even time itself. And some of these incredibly powerful and fast waves were headed right for planet Earth.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Yes. Sorry.

LULU: [laughs] Uh oh!

LULU: Now no one on Earth knew the waves were coming for them because there was no one on Earth yet. But even once humans appeared, they still had no idea that even a single wave was headed our way because ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: It doesn't fall into what we can perceive with—como se dice—with the thing I have on my face. Como ...

ANA: Eye?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: The eyes!

ANA: [laughs]

LULU: Thanks, Ana.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: The human eyes, sí. Forgive me!

LULU: And so we all walked around with our human eyes not seeing these waves headed our way, until one dude, instead of using his eyes to look for what was out there, used ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: His imagination.

ALAN: Hmm ...

LULU: This guy's name, by the way, was ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Albert Einstein.

LULU: Maybe you've heard of him? Big hair, a little bowtie. He conjured up this idea of spooky, invisible waves that could bend both space and time.

ALAN: [imitating Einstein] What should I call them?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Gravitational waves!

LULU: But very few people believed the waves were actually real. And then his time on Earth ran out. But in his wake, every so often someone would read his work and believe.

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Yes, yes.

LULU: Like this guy, Dr. Stavros Katsanevas ...

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Because I've seen the equations.

LULU: ... a scientist from Greece who believed in Einstein's idea so deeply, he began standing up in front of meetings of fancy government officials ...

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: In front of the unbelievers.

LULU: ... saying that he could prove the waves were out there if they would just give him millions of dollars to build a machine that was the size of a shopping mall and filled with ...

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Lasers.

LULU: And while Stavros joined the frontlines of scientists saying that with the right machine they could prove the waves were real ...

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: For 40 years, we were fighting.

LULU: ... a girl was born in Puerto Rico.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: I was born long, long after Albert Einstein.

LULU: [laughs]

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: In 1974.

LULU: In a little town called Gurabo, that was alive with things she couldn't see.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: During the nighttime, we would hear the coquís making the sound [coquí, coquí].

LULU: Little tree frogs.

[coquí, coquí]

LULU: And she began to wonder about the things that existed beyond the coquís.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: I do remember we went to the island of Culebra.

LULU: The things above the coquís.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: There is no light pollution at all.

LULU: And one night on the beach ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: I looked up, and I saw so many stars. So many! It was—it was like someone took a brush, dipped it in white paint, and then just splashed the brush on dark.

LULU: Huh.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: On a very black background.

LULU: Like, just a big splatter all across the night sky? Like, it was just more stars than you'd ever seen?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Sí! And for some reason, I felt closer to them.

LULU: But as Wanda was looking at those bright stars, dark spots were closing in. She didn't tell anyone at first that she was going blind. And the less she could see the world around her, the more she felt ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Lost.

LULU: But she didn't want to give up on those stars and thinking about the questions they brought alive inside her, so when she got to college she took physics classes. And while she couldn't see the words in her textbooks anymore, she figured could record audio of her professors teaching. Only when she got home to play the tapes back and study, she just heard ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Today we are discussing ... [sound of chalk on a blackboard] ... Gauss's equation.

[sound of chalk on a blackboard]

LULU: She could hear the chalk writing on the blackboard, but had no way of knowing what the writing said.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Like, I'm thinking "What equation?" Because Gauss had a number of equations. And then you hear the chalk circling, "Shhhh."

LULU: Was there ever a moment where you started to worry you would not be able to do science?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Sí. That feeling of impossibility really kept me—kept me searching and searching and searching and trying and trying and trying and repeating class after class after class, regardless how much my lecturers would laugh at me.

LULU: Hmm. They'd laugh?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Yes, they did.

LULU: "You should change your major," they'd say. "You'll never be a blind astrophysicist."

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: But I remember that my mentor, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, that he said, "Let them say what they will. Whatever they're saying, it tells more about them than about you."

LULU: So Wanda kept ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Searching and searching and searching. And searching and searching and searching. Trying and trying and trying.

LULU: And then one day, she meets up with her really good friend.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Emilio, who knew that I was losing my sight.

LULU: And he was holding in his hand this really old device that he wanted to give to her called a radio.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: It's a radio receiver that receives the waves that are emitted by an antenna, like the radio station.

LULU: Only this radio wasn't picking up the hottest Puerto Rican tracks of the '90s coming from radio stations. It was able to hear things beyond the Earth.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: It was capable of detecting things like, for example, emissions from the sun, and also the galactic background.

LULU: Wait. So like, you're hearing that in real time?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Yes.

LULU: [gasps]

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: I was hearing it!

LULU: Wanda played us the sound of a bit of energy leaving Jupiter.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: And when I heard that, I thought there is a space for me in this science.

LULU: So Wanda keeps listening to the night sky. She learns that she can hear the swooshes of comets and bangs of faraway collisions and rumbles of star earthquakes.

LULU: Which are a thing, and I guess should be called starquakes?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: [laughs] Sí!

LULU: And while other astronomers are straining through telescopes and computer screens to make out little pinpricks of light, Wanda is grooving out in her headphones, listening to the chorus of information coming from space, earning her PhD, landing at a lab at Harvard's Smithsonian Center.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Mm-hmm.

LULU: And at some point, she comes across the idea of gravitational waves. And the thought that there might be invisible ripples whooshing through space affecting reality even if we can't see them immediately made sense to her.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Yes!

LULU: Uh, speaking of which, those gravitational waves from the long ago collision were by this point—the year 2011—getting very—like, very, very, very, very, very close to our planet. What was going to happen when they hit? Find out after this short break!

***

LULU: Terrestrials is back. A fleet of invisible gravitational waves are headed toward our planet, where finally believers like Stavros and Wanda and a bunch of folks at MIT, Caltech and beyond, have convinced governments to let them build this massive machine with two arms that are each over a mile long and filled with ...

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Lasers.

LULU: That should, using a complicated set of physics and mirrors, be able detect if a gravitational wave actually passes through.

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: That was my glory. [laughs]

LULU: And since the machine detects the presence of gravitational waves by picking up interference in space-time, the machine is obviously called the inf ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Interferometer.

LULU: Interferometer.

[ALAN: [singing] What's that new machine with those funky laser beams? (It's the interferometer.) Right on! And how will these astronomers detect data from the universe? (The interferometer.) That's right! Laser beams so strong, shoot three kilometers long, oh yeah! (Interferometer.) That's 1.86 miles, my friend. These beams of light are gonna expand our understanding of the universe. (We hope! We think!] It's a complicated machine, but nobody believes in it like Stavros. (And Wanda) Maybe everyone will believe something no one ever could see when an invisible wave riding through space hits the Earth.]

LULU: So ...

[ALAN: [singing] Let's fire this machine up, see if this thing works!]

LULU: ... one day in 2015, scientists set the interferometer in motion, and the lasers start searching.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Searching and searching and searching. And searching and searching and searching. Trying and trying and trying.]

LULU: And then early in the morning on September 14, 2015, suddenly ...

[blip]

LULU: Did you hear it? Okay, one more time.

[blip]

LULU: Interference!

LULU: And that little bloop is actually a gravitational wave hitting the Earth in real time?

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Exactly. Exactly.

LULU: Oh!

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: That's how we've heard the universe.

LULU: You have a big smile on your face.

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Yeah, of course.

LULU: Do you remember where you were that day?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Sí claro. Of course I remember!

LULU: Wanda's working in the Harvard lab at the time.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: We heard the news. Everyone is in their office. Everyone is excited. But also everyone is—everybody's working.

LULU: So, like, you're whispering? Like, "A gravitational wave has been detected!"

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: [laughs] Oh, we've been waiting—[whispers] we've been waiting for decades for this to happen! Oh, my God! Finally! You get excited.

LULU: And as for those waves, they didn’t hurt anyone or anything, but they did knock things around a little bit. They jiggled buildings, they shook the lasers and mirrors of the interferometer, which is how we knew they hit. They changed the distance between cities. For just a moment, they messed with time.

[ALAN: [singing] Which I still don't really understand, but I gotta keep moving on with the story.]

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Even in our bodies we didn't notice, right? But our bodies may have vibrated.

LULU: Like a little ripple? Like, as it passed through, we all kind of jiggled ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Sí!

LULU: ... a tiny bit?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Like a wiggle. Like a wiggle.

LULU: [laughs]

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: But we didn't—we didn't notice, right?

LULU: Wow!

LULU: We couldn't feel it. We couldn't see the waves, but the reason the scientists knew they had hit was again because of ...

[blip]

LULU: ... sound.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: There is much more than what the eye alone can perceive.

LULU: Space, Wanda says, is noisy with information that we can use our sense of hearing to understand.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: But we are trained not to use it. So what I want to bring is that we kind of detach ourselves from using all my senses in the process of learning.

LULU: She worries in particular about astronomers and astrophysicists.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Their training is strictly visual.

LULU: Hmm.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: They are fine men and women, right?

LULU: Mm-hmm.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Great researchers. But what is visible is just an itty bitty tiny region, tiny region of the electromagnetic—so limited.

LULU: Are you saying that by only focusing on the tiny region of light that we can see, astronomers ...

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: They may be—they may be missing discoveries.

LULU: Hmm.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Yes. That is what I'm saying.

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: We have passed all these years in light and shadow. We did not use sound as a discovery instrument. We did not use all the senses.

LULU: When Stavros heard about Wanda's work, he reached out to her. And now they work together at the interferometer in Pisa, Italy, where she's teaching him to recognize more and more sounds coming from space.

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Each one of them is a cosmic piano.

LULU: Wanda is training him and other scientists how to recognize the rattling of space dust in the tail of a comet, and the sound of shooting stars and dying stars and stars being born, and even the sounds of things we'll never be able to see like Martian wind, interstellar turbulence, and the echoes from long ago explosions.

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Each one of them has its own frequencies.

LULU: And the symphony of all those different frequencies raining down from space can give humanoid scientists new clues about the evolution of the universe, and even the potential for life on faraway planets.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: We did experiments simulating astronomy information. When professional astronomers used audio, their sensitivity to events that were hidden in the data increased.

LULU: Wait. Meaning they could understand more about what was happening in space when they used their ears?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Uh-huh.

STAVROS KATSANEVAS: Exactly. That's the fantastic thing.

LULU: Wild!

LULU: Now as for the end of the story of what happened to those gravitational waves from those two black holes that collided long ago? Well, after they literally rocked our world—[laughs] because they, like, rocked the planet when they hit—well, they just kept rippling out into the universe, passing by stars and moons.

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: What I imagine is the amount of unimaginable—unimaginable things those ripples may find on their way as they are traveling to—into infinity, right? The wonderful things that they will find.

LULU: Like what? Like planets and comets and suns?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Beyond! Unimaginable.

[ALAN: [singing] A collision sends a shockwave. I will shake anything that's in my way. And as I rattle space and time I leave it all behind. Everything we've ever known, unimaginable. Wandering the dark night sky, towards infinity I fly. Beyond the planets and the stars, the asteroids and meteors. Beyond the galaxies we've named and all the ones we've yet to tame, I go, I go and go and go. Unimaginable.]

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: They remain a mystery because we do not know about it. And the fact that we do not know about it, doesn't mean they do not exist. And the fact that we do not know about it, doesn't mean they do not exist. It does not mean that they do not exist.

[ALAN: [singing] And I don't care if I'm alone in this and nobody believes. I will swim this sky forever. I will always feel the breeze. When everything that is familiar fades to black and turns to cold, I will listen on in wonder, unimaginable.]

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Unimaginable.

LULU: Songbud! Bringing the ballad this week. Putting his heart on the line. Where's your heart? Is it on the line? Or is it in a cage? Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. It is produced by the time- and mind-bendingly amazing Ana Gonzalez and Alan Goffinski—along with me. With help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramiez, Miriam Bernard, Natalie Meade, Joe Plourde and Sarita Bhatt. With sound design this episode by Phoebe Wang!

LULU: Our advisors are: Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Tare Welty, Liza Steinberg Demby, Dominique Shabazz and Alice Wong.

LULU: Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation. Special thanks this episode to Bryn Bliska for original cosmic keyboard, and to J.D. Voyek, Sam Schultz, Vincenzo Napolitano, Emilio and Jeremy Bloom. Now you should stop listening to this wonky collection of sound waves because there is nothing else cool about to happen.

LULU: Huh. What's that?

BADGER: Excuse me, I have a question.

BADGER: Me too.

BADGER: Me three.

BADGER: Me four.

LULU: The badgers!

LULU: Listeners with badgering questions for the expert. Are you ready?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Sí.

BERIT: Hi. My name is Berit, and I'm eight years old. I was wondering, would the gravitational pull of a black hole stretch you as thin as a piece of spaghetti if you got sucked into it?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: [laughs] Sí! If I'm approaching the black hole head first, my head will be pulled towards the black hole.

LULU: Ow!

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: As my feet are being pulled away from me. I'm becoming a piece of spaghetti, yes. Yes.

LULU: Pasta luego!

REX: Hi, I'm Rex. I'm eight years old. My question is: once a star dies, can it come back to life?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Ah, que pregunta. What a beautiful question. Hmm, as far as we know, once that object dies, elements that are vital for the generation of life as we know it here on Earth, are spreaded all over the universe.

LULU: Hmm, so the star doesn't come back to life, but we do?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: Yes. The star corpses is the seeds of life.

EMILY: My name is Emily Silverman, and I'm 34 years old. My question is: could we ever use gravitational waves to propel ourselves through space at faster than the speed of light?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: I do not believe in impossibles, right? Very, way unlikely. Way unlikely.

RUSE: Hello. My name is Ruse Nichols. I'm 10, and my question is: is there an end to the universe?

WANDA DÍAZ MERCED: I don't know. I don't think so. No.

LULU: All right. We'll leave it there. Infinite possibility ahead—and behind—and I definitely won't tell you the thing that Wanda told me that's still bothering me at night, which is that apparently we are all on our way to turning into black holes. I'm nice, so I won't curse you with that knowledge. Don't worry. It's not gonna happen for, like, millions of years. If you would like to badger an expert or suggest a topic for the show, head on over to our website, TerrestrialsPodcast.org. There, we also have special drawing prompts that were made for every episode by the incredible Wendy Mac of the DrawTogether podcast. For this one, she has you draw different sounds. And it's just this neat podcast that you can listen to, so she's like, encouraging you and coaching you in your ear while you draw. It's so much fun. You can find that again, along with other activities and videos on our website, TerrestrialsPodcast.org.

LULU: If you are liking the show, please rate and review us. It helps our chance of continuing on. Thanks much you for listening. Catch you in a couple spins of this star-dusted old planet of ours. Bye!

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

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Terrestrials 04. The Unimaginable: How Gravitational Waves (Literally) Rocked Our World

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Ana is an audio producer and host who came to WNYC in 2021 to work on Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials. Before that, she produced and hosted Mosaic, a show about immigration experiences from Rhode Island Public Radio. In a former life, she played jazz bass and thinks about everything in terms of rhythm, conversation, and harmony.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Alan Goffinski (he/him), is an arts administrator, songwriter, and producer from Charlottesville VA. He is the former Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project—two city-wide organizations that utilize art and culture as a way for people to better understand themselves, each other, and the world around them. He is also a founding member of the Indianapolis-based whimsical performing arts collective Know No Stranger which has been described as “Sesame Street but for adults... but also for kids.” He produced the experimental music radio program Telemetry in partnership with the University of Virginia. Early in his career, Alan spent years making music in a nationally touring indie-punk band (signed to Victory Records) prior to becoming a social worker specializing in early childhood development. He began making kid’s music under the moniker Little Skunks as a fun way to be a part of the day-to-day lives of his nieces and nephew.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

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High above the banks of the Mississippi river, a nest holds the secret life of one of America’s most patriotic creatures. Their story puzzles scientists, reinforces indigenous wisdom, and wows audiences, all thanks to a park ranger named Ed, and a well-placed webcam. If you want to spoil the mystery, here ya go: it’s a bald eagle. Actually, it’s three bald eagles. A mama bird and daddies make a home together for over a decade and give new meaning to our national symbol.

Learn about the storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Watch “I Wanna Hear the Eagle” and find even MORE original Terrestrials fun on our Youtube.

And badger us on Social Media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

More from Terrestrials

The Shovels: Dig Deeper

For each episode of Terrestrials, we provide a selection of activity sheets, drawing prompts, musical lessons, and more. We call them “shovels” because we hope they will help you (and your friends, family, students, neighbors, etc) dig more deeply into the world! You can do them at home, in the classroom, outside, or in the privacy of your own mind. We hope you enjoy!

If you want to share what you’ve made, ask an adult share it on social media using #TerrestrialsPodcast and make sure to tag @Radiolab

Draw -  Journey up into the clouds like an eagle with a special drawing prompt made by artist Wendy Mac and the DrawTogether team that will get you thinking about the weather (both inside and out).

Play 🎶 - Le arn how to play the chords to the song “I WANT TO HEAR THE EAGLE.”

Do - Get crafty with a fun activity sheet!

This week’s storytellers are Ed Britton and Nataanii Means.

Want to keep learning? Check out these resources to learn about the complex lives of the bald eagle:

Check out The Trio Bald Eagle Nest Cam yourself!
An interview with Nataanii Means in Native Maxx Magazine
The funny history of how the bald eagle became America’s national symbol
An article called “Dirty Birds” about what it’s actually like to live with America’s national symbol.
Did you know it’s illegal to keep a bald eagle feather? Learn more in this AWESOME short video about the National Eagle Repository.

Terrestrials is a production of WNYC Studios, created by Lulu Miller. This episode is produced by Ana González, Alan Goffinski and Lulu Miller. Original Music by Alan Goffinski. Help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, and Sarita Bhatt. Fact-check by Diane Kelley. Sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Our storytellers this week are Ed Britton and Nataanii Means. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Our advisors are Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Steinberg-Demby, and Tara Welty.

Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

Have questions for us, badgers? Badger us away! Your parent/guardian should write to us along with you, so we know you have their permission, and for maybe even having your ideas mentioned on the show. Email terrestrials@wnyc.org

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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With their back towards us, a human figure holds themselves on a giant tree branch. Their hair blows in the wild as they behold a trio of eagles flying through a sunburst sky. 

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Look up in the sky! It is something that scientists thought could never happen.

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Terrestrials 03. The Trio: A Bald Eagle Love Story

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Lulu Miller: 3, 2, 1!

(Individually plunked-out light little notes of music pogo-stick their way around a breathy wind instrument.)

Nataanii Means: Imagine your skin turned to feathers ...

(Fwoo!)

Lulu: Long, dark brown feathers ...

Crystal Slusher: Over 7,000 feathers!

(The wind begins to ripple through each individual feather.)

Lulu: And your arms stretch to over twice the size of your body and catch the wind

Nataanii: And you're higher than the airplanes.

Lulu: You're soaring through the clouds.

Nataanii: You feeling the cold go through your feathers.

Lulu: And now your eyes bulge to bigger than your brain—

(A bulging sound. Fwip!)

Lulu: —Letting you see tiny things from miles away.

Ed Britton: If a rabbit’s running along the shoreline, you can see that rabbit.

Lulu: Suddenly, a dark spot in the blue lake beneath you catches your eye and you start [A dive-bombing sound as the wind rushes around you.] dive-bombing down, down!

Nataanii: And you drag your wings along the water of the lake.

(Wind chimes shimmer around you now.)

Lulu: Your feet curl and grow talons. And you [Fwoop! A bubble on the water.] catch a fish, which you then devour with your …

Ed: … Very sharp beak.

Lulu: On your very white head.

Ed: You are a bald eagle now!

Nataanii: In our language, we say “wambli.”

(The music fades out.)

Lulu: Alright! Now is the time when I make you sing the theme song with me.

Ed: Now! Let’s do it!

(Lulu and Alan Goffinski sing together—“Terrestrials, Terrestrials! We are not the worst we’re the …”—before pausing for Ed to finish.)

Ed: Oh, the best!

Lulu: (Adding on.) —Best-rials! Yeah, you got it! (Lulu claps as Ed laughs.)

Lulu: Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here and on Earth—and, sometimes, break out into song.

(A bird-infused version of the theme song begins to play up:

“There’s so much to discover when you fly real high!”

Lulu joins in: “Terrestrials, Terrestrials!

So, reach out your wings and ride the sky! Terrestrials, Terrestrials!”

As the song ends, an eagle cry chirps down and then out, further and further away.)

Lulu: Good voices not required!

I am your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my Songbud—

Alan Goffinski: (Autotuned.) Tweet tweet!

Lulu: —Alan!

Alan: (Still autotuned, of course!) Hello!

Lulu: And today we are talkin’ about the bald eagle!

(Electric guitar plays over a drumroll, a rock version of America The Beautiful that feels particularly patriotic.)

Lulu: That’s right! America’s national symbol. You’ll find on quarters [Clink.] and dollar bills [Cha-ching.] and presidential flags and military insignias!

This glowering bird of prey with an intimidating brow bone, razor-sharp beak, and terrifying talons meant to convey to the world a ferocious fight to the death: independence.

(One more moment of the national anthem, rock-style, before Lulu chimes back in and the music starts to go quiet.)

Lulu: But, uh, today we’ve got a story about a man who looked up into the trees and saw something that suggests …

(The rock guitar ends abruptly. Something is not as it seems.)

Lulu: We may have this big birdie [A breath.] kinda wrong.

Ed: Yeah! Well, glad to connect! (Laughs.)

Lulu: This is our guy in question, Ed.

Ed: Ed Britton!

(Outdoor sounds play up: Water, wind, rustling grass.)

Lulu: He is a wildlife biologist who works for the government, helping to protect a stretch of forest alongside the Mississippi River in Illinois. And one chilly day in January of 2013, he was patrolling the banks near this part of the river where the water rushes over huge dam.

(Waterfall. A drumbeat hits just as the music takes on a fantastical sound.)

Lulu: Almost like a waterfall.

Ed: That water is busting over that dam.

Lulu: And so are fish. [An imaginary fish says, “Wee!” as it jumps.] Which means, at the bottom of that waterfall … (Three splats follow in quick succession, closer and closer, until you can almost feel the smack of the fish against the rocks.)

Lulu: Uh …

Ed: All the fish—they’re either stunned or they're dead.

Lulu: Ugh!

Ed: And that attracts hundreds of bald eagles.

Lulu: Huh!

Ed: There’s so much food there. It's all-you-can-eat.

(A person whistles as they walk through nature.)

Lulu: And that January day, Ed looks up into the trees above the dam and sees something …

(The background noise becomes two whistled notes, fighting back and forth.)

Ed: Strange!

Lulu: It looks like there are three bald eagles sitting together near one nest.

Ed: Yes.

Lulu: And, to Ed’s eye, it appears to be one female and …

Ed: Two males!

Lulu: But he thought there was no way that could be, because everything he’d learned in his scientific training said that if you were to put two males nearby each other …

Ed: There’s gonna be trouble.

Lulu: They were said to squawk and claw so viciously, it sometimes resulted in death.

(One note, whistled, drops like a bomb—or maybe a bird hitting the ground.)

Ed: That’s how territorial they are.

Lulu: Wow!

Lulu: And this reputation for do-or-die aggression is one of the main reasons the Founding Fathers chose the bald eagle as America’s national symbol, back in 1782.

Nataanii: I think maybe the first Europeans that came here seen the power of eagles.

Lulu: That’s Nataanii Means, a hip-hop artist who’s Indigenous—native to this land. And he said that his ancestors from the Oglala Lakota and Dine tribes had admired the bald eagle long before the Founding Fathers showed up.

Nataanii: The eagle, to us, is very sacred.

(A wind instrument plays up, wistful, over soft music.)

Lulu: —Though for slightly different reasons.

Nataanii: It's the highest in the sky. It’s the closest to Creator.

Lulu: It was seen as a messenger between worlds—and a healer.

Nataanii: We carry eagle feathers that help in healing ceremonies. They take a lot of our illnesses away.

(A long beat of music as the wind instrument breathes life, history, mystery into the moment.)

Lulu: Now the Founding Fathers weren’t as focused on the potential healing in the feathers as they were in the potential fight in the talons. So they began carving images of the bird on [Sching, a sword!] swords and [A battleship fires a canon.] battleships to warn the world that they were not afraid to fight to the death to protect their (newly claimed) territory.

(Dramatic, triumphant music, like from the opening credits of a movie, plays—grandiose and a little bit overdramatic.)

Ed: So they were up in a tree about 100 feet high.

Lulu: So back to Ed, squinting up at what seemed to be two male bald eagles and a female cozying up together—he just couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

Ed: It’s so difficult because that nest is so high up.

Lulu: And then the nesting season ends, the birds fly away, and he figures that's probably it.

Ed: Mhm.

Lulu: Except the next year, he swears he sees the trio again. And the next year?

Ed: Again!

Lulu: (Whispering.) Now, people didn’t always believe Ed when he told them what he was seeing. But then, in 2016, this trio of bald eagles happened to flutter down and begin nesting in a tree [A beat.] that was next to [Another beat. Suspense!] a webcam.

(Funky little guitar music twangs around with a little swing to it.)

Nell: I just thought that cam was so unique!

Lulu: This is Nell, a webcam watcher from Jacksonville, Florida.

Nell: You know, because eagles don't usually … Three’s company. (Lulu laughs.)

Lulu: And in an instant there was no more doubt. The three ferocious birds of prey were living peacefully as a trio!

Christine: I think people were just coming together over that fact that it was something different.

Lulu: Another cam watcher, Christine, from New Hampshire.

Christine: It was great to be able to look in on it and say, “Wow, what the heck's going on now?,” you know?

Lulu: It was quickly confirmed that it was, indeed, two males and a female.

Ed: The female’s bigger.

Lulu: Hmm.

Ed: You know, she’s several pounds bigger. Uh, I call her the Boss. (Chuckles.)

Lulu: Webcam viewers named her …

Nell: Hope.

Lulu: And they called the males:

Ed: Valor 1.

Lulu: And …

Ed: Valor 2.

Lulu: “Valor,” meaning, like, courage?

Ed: Yes. Uh-huh.

Lulu: How do you tell the males apart?

Ed: You know, we don't like to body shame ‘em, but they call Valor 1 “Skinny Legs.” And … (Lulu cracks up.)

Lulu: Okay! Does Valor II have any look?

Ed: He has a dark spot in his eye and it’s very unique.

Lulu: Ooh!

Lulu: Thousands of people started tuning in …

Nell: I had them on my computer from the time I turned the computer on to the time I turned the computer off.

Lulu: … Watching in crystal-clear detail this thing that scientists—and patriots!—thought could never happen.

Lulu: I mean, did you ever see it where all three of them were, like, snuggled into the nest together at the same time?

Ed: Oh, yes! Yes! Absolutely.

Lulu: Yeah?

Ed: Oh yes. Yep!

Lulu: Wow!

Lulu: By day they took turns tidying the nest, bringing one another food …

Ed: Mostly fish, but we also saw ducks.

Lulu: Whole ducks?

Ed: Yup! [A duck quacks.] We saw parts of deer.

Lulu: Mmm!

(The music winds down. Up comes a blustery winter wind.)

Lulu: And after many cold winter nights keeping each other warm in that nest …

(Gentle music starts, handbells circling in and out around a serious wind instrument.)

Lulu: Come February, three white eggs appeared. [Lulu softly says, “Doot, doot, doot,” counting each of the eggs.]

Would they hatch? Find out after this short break.

(The wind continues for a moment with a few solemn, solitary notes, before going to quiet and the break.)

Lulu: Terrestrials is back! It is now early spring in Illinois, and up about a hundred feet in a nest, three bald eagles parents have just welcomed [Eggs begin to hatch.]—on-camera, for all the world to see—[Crack! Crack! Crack!] three baby eaglets! (Tweet, tweet, tweet!)

Christine: You know, they were so tiny. Oh my. And so adorable!

Ed: Yes indeed! (Chuckling lightly.)

Lulu: And, as biologist Ed watches these three parents caring for their babies—two of them standing guard while one goes off to hunt, all six of the birds nuzzling down in the nest at night—

Ed: They were the happiest family.

(The gentlest music whirrs up, softly, to the stratosphere.)

Lulu: —He starts thinking about why this unusual trio actually makes sense. Because, see, Hope had been trying to make a family for years before she linked up with the two daddies. And, this is a little sad, but she had a hard time. Her babies sometimes got cold, or fell out of the nest when she was away hunting and they didn't always make it.

Ed: Yeah. It was awfully sad.

Lulu: And those losses were huge, because bald eagles had been endangered—almost extinct—so every birth mattered.

Ed: Where I grew up in Southern Illinois, we never saw bald eagles. That was back in the ‘40s and the ‘50s. I’m—I’m elderly. (Laughs.)

Lulu: Humans had almost wiped out bald eagles from hunting them, cutting down their forests, using chemicals. But, as Ed grew up, he was a part of the group of people who tried everything they could think of to save bald eagles: They protected forests and banned hunting of bald eagles and stopped using chemicals that harmed them. But, looking up at the trees, he realized it was like this trio of eagles had come up with a brilliant technique all of their own.

Christine: To be able to witness it, that's the miracle. You know, it doesn't have to be a traditional family for it to work!

Lulu: And by June, as the forest turned soft with green leaves, one by one, each of the three eaglets, with newly lanky wings, tested the air and leapt away.

(A new song begins to play, starting slow and building, with scritch-scratching of records and a rock guitar coming in over time:

“So long mom and dad and dad

I’ve had a blast now I’m leaving this nest.

So long mom and dad and dad!

It’s been real, it’s been fun, but now I gotta run!

And by run I mean fly!

So I’m saying goodbye!

Gonna start a new life full of wild and excitement and danger!”)

Lulu: (Echoing the song as it ends.) Danger!

Year after year, those three parents stay together, fledging more and more eaglets, and in the process challenging scientists’ notions about what a natural family looks like.

(The wind is back. It sounds weirdly quiet now—too quiet.)

Lulu: Until … [A beat.] One cold evening in March, Hope screams out.

(An eagle cry echoes out into the wind.)

Nell: Eagles, when they alert, they have a certain call to one another.

Lulu: That's webcam-watcher Nell again.

(Music begins, ominous and heavy.)

Nell: I saw Hope looking up into the sky and you could see she was tracking. And then she started doing her alert call to her partners to come, you know—to come see what's goin’ on.

Lulu: And what’s going on is that two stranger eagles were dive-bombing the nest, attacking Hope and her two newest babies.

(Thunder rumbles and a frantic flute line quivers up and down, beautiful but tense.)

Ed: Our phone lines light up …

Lulu: With people saying:

Ed: “Oh my gosh, something terrible has just happened! You've got to get out there and do something.”

Lulu: Ed flips on his live feed of the cam and sees …

Ed: A very large bird, which we believed to be a female, was on the back of Hope.

Lulu: Her talons were digging into Hope’s shoulders.

Christine: There's no dads on the nest.

Lulu: The dads are both down on the ground, fighting off the other invading eagle.

Christine: The two babies, they didn't look good.

Lulu: They looked scared—of this huge eagle attacking their mom.

Nell: I wanted to reach through the computer monitor and grab [Chuckling a little at how silly it sounds.] that other eagle, is what I wanted to do.

Ed: And they struggled for over an hour.

Nell: The last thing I saw was Hope and her going off the nest. They just—they basically dragged one another off one side of the nest and went down to the ground.

Lulu: Ed and his team rush out into the forest to search around on the ground for Hope. But, meanwhile, up in that nest, those babies are all alone.

Christine: It looked like they hadn't been fed for a while. They were ragged, they were weak.

Lulu: And then, suddenly …

(The music changes tone. It becomes a little more driven, a little more hopeful, a little lighter.)

Nell: I saw the dads taking over! Valor 1 and Valor 2, like little troopers!

Lulu: The dads fly back up into the nest to defend their babies.

Christine: It was such a relief that they were there.

Lulu: But right on their tails are the two invading eagles. They return and they keep attacking.

Ed: They wanted to kill everything up there and take the nest over.

(A peal of thunder.)

Lulu: The sun rises. And the attackers keep at it for days—weeks! But those dads?

Christine: They just defended that nest with their lives, not caring what happened to them, but caring for those little baby eaglets.

Lulu: Oh!

Ed: And the two dads, Valor I and Valor II, valiantly—very valiantly—fought off this pair of eagles.

Lulu: Wow!

Ed: And after about three weeks, the attacks finally ended.

(Silence.)

Lulu: Hope was never seen again.

Nobody’s sure exactly what happened to her, but those two dads stayed with their babies as the air grew warm …

(Warmth: Birds twitter in an open space, the sounds of spring.)

Lulu: … As yellow and purple flowers began poking their way up through the dirt, and kids began fishing on the Mississippi River.

The dads kept watch over their chicks, bringing them food and keeping them warm at night. Until finally, come June …

(Magical music blossoms, a harp playing the notes of hope and excitement at the love these two eagle dads showed for their chicks.)

Ed: The two chicks ended up, uh, growing and leaving the nest.

It was extremely happy. Yes, indeed. We gave them the Greatest Dads Award of the Year.

Lulu: Ed says he was totally shocked by how things unfolded—by how caring and collaborative the two dads were together.

Ed: And this is just one incredible survival story that, uh, I would've never fathomed in my career.

(With a few more strums of the harp, the song ends.)

Nataanii: There's a lot that people don't know about eagles.

Lulu: This is Nataanii again.

Nataanii: They’re very compassionate.

Lulu: And what Ed learned from watching the trio, Nataanii learned from his family and culture.

Nataanii: The first time I saw an eagle, he was huge, man, huge! I went home and I told my dad, you know, “Hey, I seen an eagle today.” And then he—he sat me down and he said, “When an eagle chooses a mate, they're together for life. They’re always taking care of the family.”

(Gradually, a soft, contemplative series of chords play in the background.)

Lulu: It was then that Nataanii first learned about the bald eagle’s softer side—how the creature isn’t only about fighting.

Nataanii: But it’s also a symbol of love and relationship.

Lulu: And that’s why, in the Lakota Tradition, you can earn a bald eagle feather if you do something particularly caring.

Nataanii: It could be a lot of things, you know, it could be, you know, being a social worker or—

Lulu: Hmm.

Nataanii: —Um, a nurse that saves lives. Just anything—anything you do that’s selfless, not for yourself, but for the people, so the people may live.

Lulu: Nataanii gets some eagle feathers out—

(Eagle feathers rustle their way out of a crinkly wrapping with Nataanii’s gentle guidance.)

Lulu: —that he got from different ceremonies and begins brushing them over his face.

Nataanii: (Laughing a little goofily, gently.) Feels good. Gives me ch-chills. (Lulu laughs sweetly.)

Lulu: And he tells me me about a really bad day a few years back when he just felt lonely, like no one cared about him.

Nataanii: I was sitting right here in this spot. There was a bunch of eagle feathers sitting right here. I was like, “I got eagle feathers protecting me. These eagle feathers, protecting me, protecting …”

Lulu: A song started coming to him.

Nataanii: So then I just started writing, and it just came out.

(The chorus of Nataanii’s song begins to play, a hip-hop beat winding around and up and down the call-and-response of the lyrics: “I got these eagle feathers!” “Protectin’ me.” The exchange continues—“Yeah, I got these eagle feathers,” “Protecting me!”—as the song fades out.)

Lulu: He said that when he thinks about how these creatures behave in myths and the wild …

Nataanii: When I fan myself off—when I—when I bring these over my face, you know, it's like, I feel a connection to these birds. And this might sound funny, it might sound off, but I feel a connection to my ancestors. I do!

Like I don't have to be lost because I feel love.

(Nataanii’s song picks right back up at the chorus’ call-and-response before fading back down.)

Lulu: When I tell him the story of how caring those dads in the trio were observed to be, he’s not surprised.

Nataanii: Oh no, yeah. Science—science is catching up to Indigenous philosophy for sure. (A gentle chuckle.)

(One last line of the song before a whirling string line marks the end of the song.)

Lulu: Now, as for the end of our eagle story: When a trio loses one of its members, that’s it for the trio, right?

Ed: Oh no! No. (Laughs.)

Lulu: Because it turned out that the next fall, the two dads returned … With a new female!

(Ethereal music, like clouds floating through a sunset sky, plays up in gentle bursts.)

Ed: And we—we were just going, “How did you do that?” (Both hold a tender laugh together.)

Lulu: So if I went right now, like, could I—could I peek?

Ed: You sure could. Yup.

Lulu: I pull up the live feed of the nest.

Lulu: So I'm looking at it right now. So I see this … It's winter, so it's a tree without leaves and there are all these … (Fades under.)

Lulu: And some 4 years later, that new trio is still together. As Ed and I talked, we could see them up there, in the nest together.

Lulu: (Fading back up.) And I see the white head and the yellow beak of an eagle.

Ed: She—she’s just laying eggs.

Lulu: Wow!

Lulu: All told, the two dads have lived together in a trio for about a decade, fledged about 20 eaglets, and been a part of the story that—along with some human help—brought the number of bald eagles back from near-extinction and got them off the endangered species list.

Ed: (Laughing.) Yeah. I look at this as probably one of the greatest wildlife success stories that we've ever had in the United States.

(A deep breath of a synthesizer shimmers up, like light reflecting off a pool of water, reaching back up to the heavens.)

Lulu: And as for that trio being an outlier? Is that the only trio of bald eagles there is?

Crystal Slusher: It is not.

Lulu: That’s Crystal Slusher. She works for the American Eagle Foundation. And, in her spare time, she’s an amateur birder.

Lulu: Do you have a pair of binoculars around your neck?

Crystal: I carry a pair of binoculars in my car!

(Water sloshes against the side of a boat. Softly, underneath, you might hear a fishing pole clicking as it reels in, maybe even birds cawing out in the distance.)

Lulu: Well, one day, about four years ago, Crystal was out fishing with her husband.

Crystal: In Dandridge, Tennessee.

Lulu: On a lake.

Crystal: I knew about a nest there prior to going fishing and I—I’ve checked it out a couple of times and I never really saw anything abnormal. But the day that I was out there, I saw three eagles perched together.

(The fishing sounds give way to one long, suspended chord—a held breath of music.)

Lulu: And they seemed calm, almost familiar with each other. And when she got a better look through her binocs, it looked to her like …

Crystal: Two males and one female.

Lulu: Another trio!

(Plucky strings bounce up and down, full of playfulness and hope, over castanets and a shaken percussion line as it moves back and forth.)

Lulu: And while Crystal says …

Crystal: They’re not really famous. You know, they're certainly not a Valor One, Valor Two—

Lulu: —Level of celebrity? (Laughing lightly at the idea of bird celebrity levels.)

Crystal: Right!

Lulu: She says they do have their own local fans who have photographed them and named the female “Bandit.” And she hopes one day they, too, can get a webcam!

Lulu: And so, those two trios—that’s it, though, right, that we know about?

Crystal: Oh, definitely not. There were some observed in Alaska in 1977, in Minnesota in 1983.

Ed: There is a trio in New York.

Crystal: And then California in 1992.

Ed: There’s one in Arkansas.

Lulu: Both Crystal and Ed, after first learning about their trios, started geeking out on research about bald eagle trios and found, buried in the footnotes of science books and history books, these occasional sightings of other bald eagle trios.

And they realized that maybe this quote-unquote ‘cooperative nesting,’ as the scientists call it, was not as uncommon as they thought.

Ed: I think we'd probably be amazed if we really knew all of the unique things that happened with wildlife, because we just don't know the secrets in their life.

(The music fades down and out.)

Lulu: Ed says this whole experience really flipped his understanding of bald eagles. Helped him to see that, in a certain way, he had been blinded by the eagle on the quarter—blinded by the story of the bird as a ferocious and independent being.

Lulu: Would you ever call what—what’s happening between these birds “love”?

Ed: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lulu: Oh, you would?

Ed: Oh, absolutely.

Lulu: (Shocked.) You would?

Ed: Yes indeed.

Lulu: You don't shy away from that—[Stuttering a little in surprise.] that word?

Ed: Not whatsoever.

Lulu: Between animals?

Ed: No, no. It's family bonding and that happens … You know, love is family. I see nothing wrong with saying “loving animals.”

(Delicate music drifts down, cherry blossoms or maybe auburn leaves floating on a soft breeze.)

Lulu: Alright. Thanks so much, Ed.

(A new song begins. The tone is very … different.)

Lulu: Oh no. Songbud’s got a mohawk and an electric guitar.

(Alan’s next song plays, heavy electric guitar and a hard-rock attitude:

“I wanna hear the eagle!”

An eagle cries, a solitary cry.

“Now multiply that by three-gle!”

Another cry! This one comes three times.

“Yeah, I wanna hear the eagle!”

One more cry, more of a chirp.

“Now I wanna hear all three-gle!”

Several eagles chirp and chitter together.

“I know it’s not only me-gle!

I’m sure you agree-gle

Would be awesome to see-gle

All that up in a tree-gle,

Or in the sky flying free-gle.

So I’m down on my knee-gle

I’m begging them plea-gle.

I wanna hear the eagles

Not a hunting beagle

Not a manatee-gle!

Yeah, I wanna hear the eaglessssss!”

Back to the chorus:

“I wanna hear the eagle!”

A cry like the first!

“Now multiply that by three-gle.”

Three cries together!

“I wanna hear the eagle!”

An eagle chirp.

“And now I wanna hear all three-gle!”

One last collection of eagle cries as the song ends.)

Lulu: Alan Goffinski, everyone!

(New music here, bouncy and a little jazzy.)

Lulu: Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. It is produced by the very talon-ted (Like talons? Talons?) Ana Gonzalez and Alan Goffinski (and me), with help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, Miriam Barnard, Joe Plourde, Diane Kelley and Sarita Bhatt. Sound design and additional editorial guidance by—[Lulu tweets a few times here.]—Mira Burt-Wintonic.

Our advisors are: Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Liza Steinberg-Demby, Tara Welty, and Dominique Shabazz.

Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation. Special thanks this episode to Abigail Miller, Laurel Braitman, Stan Bousson, Molly Webster, and Maria Poz Gutierrez.

(A beat.)

Lulu: And that’s it! You should stop listening. Why are you still listening? Who listens to …

(Interrupting Lulu, a big horn flair plays, then …)

Lulu: Oh! What’s that?

(The badgers are back! Speaking in silly voices, they overlap one another: “Excuse me! I have a question.” “Me too!” “Me three.” “Me four!” One last whispered word signals the start of the segment: “The badgerssss!” Then, jazzy music plays.)

Lulu: Listeners with badgering questions for the expert!

Lulu: Are you ready?

Ed: Yep!

Huxley: Hi! My name is Huxley and I’m seven years old. And my question is: Why don't bald eagles have butts?

Ed: Well, they—they do have butts. I've seen many bald eagle butts. (Laughs.)

Lulu: Okay.

Ed: I’m not proud of that, but I have seen many bald eagle butts.

Cyan: Hi! My name is Cyan, and I’m twelve. My question is: What is an average wingspan of an eagle?

Ed: Eight feet!

Lulu: Whew! That’s like a person and a half.

Ed: Yeah.

Woody: My name is Woody, and I am 6 years old. Can I have a pet bald eagle?

Ed: Only if it’s, uh, a stuffed animal! (Laughing at his own joke before Lulu joins.)

Jamie Lee Curtis: Hi, it’s Jamie Lee Curtis! What is the strangest thing you’ve ever seen on the webcam?

Ed: We got these little mice that run around.

Lulu: Okay?

Ed: And they just aggravate the heck out of the eagles. (Laughs.)

Lulu: Wait. [Ed punctuates Lulu’s shock with one last laugh.]There’s actual mice—are up there?

Ed: There's mice in the nest. Yes.

Lulu: But why don't the eagles eat them?

Ed: They're too fast!

Lulu: Why would a mouse live up there? Of all places, that feels so dangerous!

Ed: There's lots of food up there. It’s kinda like a hide-and-seek game, I think, for the mice.

Lulu: Man!

Ed: I think they enjoy it.

Lulu: You—You’ve buried the lede, maybe the story here to tell is about these mice!

(Dreamlike music plays, sparkling and spiraling a syncopated synthesizer melody that lands in pillows around Lulu as she narrates the end of the episode.)

Lulu: Gonna leave it there, with the world's most brazen mice that choose to live inside a bald eagle nest and not tell you the super gross thing that, because eagles don't have teeth, they [Slurping sound.] slurp down the creatures they eat whole and then [A hacking sound.] spit out the bones, hair, and scales in a lovely pellet. And some people even theorize they swallow rocks to use as gross rock teeth inside their gizzards.

Not gonna tell you that, [Whispered.] ’cause I’m nice!

If you wanna badger our next expert, visit our website at terrestrialspodcast.org! We also have activity sheets there and drawing prompts and funny videos of the Songbud and we’d love if you stopped by! Thanks so much for listening.

Catch you in a couple of spins of this lumpy ol’ planet of ours. [Whooshing, Lulu spins the world around a few times before saying …] Bye!

(The music keeps playing for just a little bit longer before it fades to nothing.)

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Terrestrials 03. The Trio: A Bald Eagle Love Story