March 17, 2021

HBM143: Laughing Rats and Dawn Rituals

March 17, 2021/ Jeff Emtman

Image by Jeff Emtman. Photo of sage grouse by Bob Wick of the Bureau of Land Management. Orange sky elements are the spectrogram of the sound of the mouse courtship call heard in this episode.

Animals sometimes make noises that would be impossible to place without context. In this episode, three types of animal vocalizations—described by the people who recorded them.

The monkey who lost their mother. Photo by Stephanie Foden.

Ashley Ahearn: Journalist and producer of Grouse, from Birdnote and Boise State Public Radio

Joel Balsam: Journalist and producer of the upcoming podcast Parallel Lives. Joel co-created a photo essay for ESPN about the “pororoca”, an Amazonian wave chased each year by surfers.

Kevin Coffey, Ph.D.: Co-creator of DeepSqueak and researcher at VA Puget Sound and the University of Washington. Kevin co-authored the paper DeepSqueak: a deep learning-based system for detection and analysis of ultrasonic vocalizations in Nature’s Neuropsychopharmacology journal.

Also heard: calls of the Indies Short Tailed Cricket (Anurogryllus celerinictus), which may be the perpetrator of the so-called “sonic attacks” recently reported in Cuba. Sound sent in by HBM listener Isaul in Puerto Rico.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

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November 13, 2019

HBM124: Banana Softies

November 13, 2019/ Bethany Denton

“Gene” says it started because he wanted to be a veterinarian. So he took a job as a research associate at a vivarium that studied cancer drugs. He was often alone in the lab at night with hundreds or thousands of research animals around him. The monkeys were his favorite, especially the rhesus macaques. He loved to give them treats, play movies and Celine Dion for them. And sometimes he’d lean up against the cages to let his monkey friends groom him. He knew the work would be hard, but he believed his was justified because the primate research helped people in the long run.

Content Note:
Animal euthanasia and language

In his two years at the lab, Gene radiated a lot of monkeys. He and his colleagues studied the deteriorating effects of radiation and the side effects of experimental cancer drugs seeking FDA approval. Once a monkey became too sick and lethargic, it was Gene’s job to euthanize them. He would hold them as they died and tell them he was sorry.

After one study with a particularly high radiation doses, Gene found himself alone again in a lab late at night, euthanizing more monkeys and thinking to himself, “Those were my friends... Those were my fucking friends.” These words became the screamed lyrics to the unfinished, unpublished song that Gene performs in this episode.

Gene left the job shortly after writing the song, but he still works in medical research. He no longer performs euthanizations.

Have a story to share with us? Call our voicemail line (765) 374-5263 or send us an email.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot and “Gene”

Gene says that the monkeys enjoyed watching this adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

An island in South Carolina where rhesus macaques are bred for scientific study

May 08, 2019

HBM118: Mountain Seabed

May 08, 2019/ Bethany Denton

Life on earth began in the oceans. And it used to be simpler. For the first few billion years, life consisted of microbes that didn’t really swim or hunt; they mostly floated and, if they were lucky, bumped into something they could engulf and digest. But that changed during the Cambrian period.

Over a relatively short period of time known as the Cambrian Explosion, organisms started becoming larger and more complex. For the first time they grew limbs and exoskeletons; intestines and eyes. Animals from this period developed strange body plans that look almost alien to the modern eye. It was an unprecedented surge of biodiversity. But many of the animal groups that emerged during the Cambrian Period died soon after during an extinction event, their bizarre body plans perishing along with them. To paraphrase the evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, these were “early experiments in life’s history.” Among the survivors of the Cambrian extinction event was metaspriggina, a tiny fish the size of a human thumb. This tiny fish is one of the oldest ancestors of all vertebrate life on earth - including us.

A metaspriggina fossil. Metaspriggina is an ancient relative to all vertebrate life on earth. Photo by Molly Segal

Over millions of years and tectonic shifts, Cambrian-era seabeds became modern-day mountains. Today, one of the best places in the world to study fossils from the Cambrian period is at the Burgess Shale fossil deposit, high in the Canadian Rockies. The animals fossilized in the rock were buried quickly in mud that had the right conditions to preserve the soft tissues like brains, organs, and muscles, giving paleontologists a detailed glimpse at some of the first complex life on earth. Scientists have been mulling over the Burgess Shale fossils since they were first excavated in 1909.

Stephen Jay Gould was one of those scientists fascinated by the Burgess fossils. He paid attention to the research coming out about them and started wondering what life would look like if a different set of animals had survived and our ancestors had died out. Would humans - or something like us - have ever evolved? Gould thought not. In his 1989 book Wonderful Life, he came up with the ‘tape of life’ thought experiment. Gould wrote, “Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.” This idea is called Evolutionary Contingency.

Animation of a metaspriggina swimming, via Royal Ontario Museum.

An interview with American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

Not everyone agreed with Gould. Most notably, his contemporary Simon Conway Morris, another evolutionary biologist and paleontologist. Morris spent years studying the Burgess Shale, and it was his work that Gould had cited for his book about Evolutionary Contingency. Conway Morris disagreed with Gould’s interpretation that human intelligence was a fluke. He wrote his own book in 1998 called The Crucible of Creation and posited that, while life may have looked very different after a replay of the ‘tape of life’, consciousness may still have emerged in other forms. He wrote, “There are not an unlimited number of ways of doing something. For all its exuberance, the forms of life are restricted and channeled.” (p. 13) This idea is called Evolutionary Convergence.

In August 2018, producer Molly Segal joined a group of paleontologists, including Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum for their biennial dig at the Burgess Shale. Caron believes that Contingency and Convergence both play a role in evolution, their debate has informed discussions about evolution ever since.

Producer: Molly Segal
Editors: Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

March 27, 2019

HBM115: Bound in Walton et al.

March 27, 2019/ Bethany Denton

A highway robber with many aliases lay on his deathbed after contracting a bad flu. He dictated his life story to his captors before succumbing to his illness in July of 1837. His captors published the highwayman’s story posthumously with the title: Narrative of the life of James Allen, alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the highwayman. Being his death-bed confession, to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison.

The story he tells details common robbery, horse theft, jewel trafficking, many jailbreaks, and several yellings of the phrase “Your money or your life!” with pistols drawn.

The book might have passed into obscurity if it weren’t for a dirty grey leatherbound copy that resides at The Boston Athenaeum. It bears a Latin inscription on its front cover: “HIC LIBER WALTONIS CUTE COMPACTUS EST” or (roughly), “This book is bound in Walton’s skin.”

As legend has it, the highwayman Allen (aka. Walton) requested that his memoirs be gifted to a man whom he once tried and failed to rob, Mr. John Fenno Jr. Further, the highwayman requested that the book be bound in his own skin.

Books bound in human skin are rare, though not unheard of. As of publish date, the Anthropodermic Book Project has confirmed 18 such books, and identified another 12 books previously thought to be human, but revealed to be of more customary leathers. Narrative of the life of James Allen… resides in the former category, being confirmed as human skin via a test called Peptide Mass Fingerprinting.

Dawn Walus, Chief Conservator at the Boston Athenaeum told HBM host Jeff Emtman that when they sent a sample of the book’s binding off for PMF testing, she and other athenaeum staff hoped the results would come back negative. Dawn considers the binding to be a bit of spectacle, and a distraction from the hundreds of thousands of other books in their collection, “I don’t think we want to be known as ‘the place that has the skin book.’…It seems out of place today.”

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna

April 25, 2018

HBM097: Fox Teeth

April 25, 2018/ Jeff Emtman

In the Westfjords of Iceland, people wait for birds to come ashore so that they can gather the feathers they leave behind. These birds, called Eider Ducks, are the source of eiderdown, a ridiculously expensive and rare stuffing for bedding.

This has landed the Arctic Fox in the crosshairs (quite literally). These relatively common foxes are opportunistic eaters who snack on eider ducks if they get the chance.

So the Icelandic government placed a bounty on each fox killed (if you can provide its tail as proof). Hunters of the Westfjords set up elaborate baiting ambushes for the foxes, and wait in darkened houses with rifles in the middle of blizzards.But some foxes are smart enough to outfox the hunters.

Megan Perra heard a rumor of a three legged Icelandic fox named “Tripod” that beat the odds. A fox that grew to almost twice the normal size from stealing food from traps for three full years (or so the legend goes). Megan is an illustrator/journalist from Portland, Oregon, and she’s currently working on a video documentary about the foxes’ interactions with humans.

*The taxidermied body of “Tripod”, a three-legged fox. Pictured here carrying the body of a seabird (a razorbill).*

Megan retraces the steps of Tripod, from his birthplace in the Westfjords, to the lab in southern Iceland where he was dissected, and to his current home in a glass case at the Arctic Fox Centre.

But some foxes are smart enough to outfox the hunters.

Megan Perra heard a rumor of a three legged Icelandic fox named “Tripod” that beat the odds. A fox that grew to almost twice the normal size from stealing food from traps for three full years (or so the legend goes). Megan is an illustrator/journalist from Portland, Oregon, and she’s currently working on a video documentary about the foxes’ interactions with humans.

Megan retraces the steps of Tripod, from his birthplace in the Westfjords, to the lab in southern Iceland where he was dissected, and to his current home in a glass case at the Arctic Fox Centre.

An Icelandic hunter, Jóhann Hannibalsson, at a remote cabin where he intends to shoot a fox.

She visits a rural gas station where she finds Jóhann Hannibalsson, the hunter who finally shot Tripod after years of trying. The two of them go on a snowmobile ride that brings them to a cabin where, in the dark, Megan witnesses Jóhann’s version of a fox hunt.

Along the way, Megan also speaks to Ester Unnsteinsdóttir (a fox researcher), Siggi Hjartarson (a hunter), Stephen “Midge” Midgley (Manager at the Arctic Fox Centre), and Þorvaldur “Doddi” Björnsson (the taxidermist who preserved Tripod’s body).

Producer: Megan Perra
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Serocell
Images: Feral Five Creative Co / Megan Perra

Icelandic Language documentary on the production of eiderdown.

January 17, 2018

HBM090: Two Small Creatures with Human Eyes

January 17, 2018/ Bethany Denton

Lucy and her mate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Photo by Jeff Emtman.

Natural history museums are art galleries. Scientifically focussed art galleries, but art galleries nonetheless.

Ian Tattersall, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, is a paleontologist who sometimes oversees the construction of models for the museum. Of personal interest to Here Be Monsters producer Jeff Emtman are reconstructions of very lifelike early humans, one with an arm draped over the other. Ian calls these the “Laetoli Figures”—named for the place in modern-day Tanzania where some remarkable footprints of two hominids were found preserved in volcanic ash.

As far as early humans go, Australopithecus Afarensis are well understood. There are 300+ individuals in the fossil record, including the famous ~40% complete fossil of “Lucy”.

Given the evidence, there’s a lot scientists can be pretty certain in declaring: they lived in the trees, but they could walk upright. They had small brains and big jaws, but their canine teeth looked a lot like a modern human’s.

There are other questions that are answerable through inference, through studies of modern animals and other fossils. These techniques can yield a strong degree of certainty.

But if the artist were to stop constructing at the edge of certainty, the models would never be completed. There are certain things that are essentially unknowable about these early hominids, like: “What did their skin look like?” “What color was their hair?” “Did they have the dark sclera of an ape, or the whites-of-the-eye of a modern human?”

These uncertainties are ultimately up to the artist to answer. “When you’re making a museum exhibit,” Ian (not an artist) points out, “you’re trying to create an illusion. And to work at all, the illusion has to be complete. And so you have to have all the details in there.”

Ian Tattersall, Curator Emeritus of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History and a replica of an early human colloquially named “Lucy”.

But these details are a form of artistry used as evidence by biblical creationists to lambast hominid reconstructions. They see it as part of an effort to deceive the public, to lead them to believe that these ancient hominids were more human-like than they actually were. Of particular interest to them is that question of the light sclera vs. dark sclera. One author writes:

Notice that a fossilized eyeball was not found. So how would anyone know that the sclera was white, which would cause it to look more human. [sic] The reconstruction is pure speculation about how Lucy’s eye looked.

Natural history museums are faced with a decision: create full-flesh reconstructions that by necessity contain elements of artistic license, or, present the public with mere bones. Most seem to opt for the former, and understandably so. The museum serves the public, and, like HBM producer Jeff Emtman, they want to see something relatable and remarkable, a piece of scientifically-oriented art.

And this question the artist must face, the question of the dark sclera (more ape-like eyes) and the light sclera (more human-like eyes) reveals something interesting about the artist and the process used to create the art. The choices an artist makes can speak to their worldview, their biases, and their knowledge per their location in the world and the current moment in time.

Ian recognizes this, saying,

You could not do a reliable reconstruction of an ancient human being or a dinosaur, or an extinct mammal without the science; and you certainly couldn’t do it without the art. And this is where the two really intersect in a meaningful way.

And the AMNH itself houses exhibits related to the ways in which modern assumptions about the past have affected the way the past is present, such as: Griffins in the Gobi Desert (protoceratops), Cyclops of the Mediterranean (dwarf elephants), and the infamous unicorn horns of Western Europe (narwhal).

The Griffin

The Unicorn

The Cyclops

Ian says that, in the quarter century since the construction of the Laetoli Figures, dominant scientific perception has changed to suggest that Australopithecus afarensis might have actually had dark sclera. As he puts it, “science is a work in progress.”

Jeff Emtman produced this episode and took the photos.
Voicemails from HBM listeners including Daniel Greene, Rachel Schapiro and Tony Baker.

Music: The Black Spot, The Other Stars

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Here Be Monsters

Content Note:Animal euthanasia and language

Content Note:
Animal euthanasia and language